If you want to know why Trump keeps getting away with it, he's probably a high level federal snitch
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Barbarians at the (Pizza) Gate
Barbarians at the (Pizza) Gate
The kooky QAnon narrative of Donald Trump fighting a secret cabal of rich & famous pedophiles may have originated with...Donald Trump.
ON DECEMBER 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch burst into Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in the tony D.C. neighborhood of Chevy Chase, armed with an assault rifle and a handgun. Patrons of the restaurant, many of them kids, fled, fearing for their lives—but Maddison Welch was not there to hurt children. He was there to save them.
Welch, the father of two small girls, had heard tell of a massive child sex trafficking ring involving the Clintons, whom he was convinced were terrible people. Maybe he watched a YouTube video posted by Alex Jones that November 4, in which the InfoWars provocateur said, “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her. Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”
The hub of this heinous child sex ring, Welch read, probably on Reddit, was the basement of Comet Ping Pong. The pizzeria was frequented by the brother of Clinton crony John Podesta, and owned by the ex of the head of Media Matters—the same Media Matters head who had once paid his ex-lover almost $1 million in a fishy blackmail scheme. It was all incestuous and weird. Not only that, but when an influential rightwing provocateur, Jack Posobiec, had dined at the restaurant to scope it out, he’d been asked to leave (he’d been asked to leave because he was live-streaming a children’s birthday party going on in one of the back rooms, which the managers rightly found inappropriate, but whatever). Naturally, the police wouldn’t touch the case—the crooked Clintons had seen to that. So Welch, picking up where Posobiec left off, took it upon himself to conduct an investigation of his own.
As the patrons streamed out of the restaurant, Welch had a look around. He moved some furniture, hunting for secret entrances. He shot his way through a locked door, which he assumed was the entrance to the basement dungeon he expected to find, similar to what police discovered in the Cleveland home of kidnapper Ariel Castro. Instead he found a small room containing the computer server, which his bullet damaged. By the time the police arrived, Welch had concluded that not only was there no child sex ring operating in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, but Comet Ping Pong didn’t even have a basement. The whole thing was a bust. He’d been had.
His intelligence was bad, but his intentions were good. “I came to D.C. with the intent of helping people I believed were in dire need of assistance, and to bring an end to a corruption that I truly felt was harming innocent lives,” he wrote in a defense sentencing memo a few months later. “I felt very passionate about the possibility of human suffering, especially the suffering of a child, and was prompted to act without taking the time to consider the repercussions of my actions, or the possible harm that might come from them. I’m truly sorry….”
Maddison Welch was sentenced to four years in prison. He’s scheduled for release this summer.
“Pizzagate,” as this sad tale is colloquially known, was a prototype for the QAnon conspiracy theories that took hold later in Trump’s term of office. While it is easy to mock Maddison Welch for being so gullible, the reality is that the story he believed is not as fantastical as it first appears. Indeed, in the four years since Pizzagate, the narrative has gotten more, not less, believable.
The underlying conspiracy that lures well-intentioned people like Welch into the Q rabbit hole is that there exists a network of rich and powerful pedophiles engaged in the sex trafficking of children—and that network is so ruthless, its reach so absolute, that it can only be fought covertly. There is ample evidence to support this claim, at least on a surface level.
Jeffrey Epstein—arms dealer, spy, money launderer, kompromat creator—along with his partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, really did run a child sex trafficking operation, in which they sourced, groomed, and trained underage girls to provide sexual service to rich and powerful men, for purposes of acquiring kompromat. Among the men alleged to have been involved: Leslie Wexner, owner of Victoria’s Secret and other “sexy” brands; criminal defense attorney to the stars Alan Dershowitz; Prince Andrew of Great Britain, aka “Randy Andy,” favorite son of Queen Elizabeth II and longtime friend of Ghislaine Maxwell; Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel; former president Bill Clinton, who famously lied under oath about hooking up with his intern, and who probably lied about his presence on Little St. James, Epstein’s sex island; the billionaire chairman of Hyatt Hotels, Thomas Pritzker; ex-president and serial rapist Donald John Trump; and an alarming number of billionaires, scientists, politicians, entertainers, and modeling industry bigwigs. Those are some powerful, powerful people. Epstein committed his crimes for decades, and appears to have been protected by the authorities. And his death while in federal custody—on the watch of Attorney General Bill Barr, whose father gave Epstein his first job at the Dalton School—will be conspiracy-theory fodder until the end of time.
In Washington, meanwhile, former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, a Republican, is a “serial child molester,” in the words of the federal judge who sentenced him. His perverted predilections and history of pedophilia did not stop him from being second in line to the presidency for eight years. Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, was the assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State during a period when the team’s doctor was molesting the student athletes; according to witness testimony, Jordan was well aware of this and did nothing. The garrulous former governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards, once quipped, “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Given the ample rumors and off-the-record accusations, one does not have to have a conspiratorial mind to wonder if this maxim might apply to another Southern politician, whose sudden ardor for Trump is only surpassed by his thirst for dry martinis.
It is not just conspiracy theorists asking why this odious stuff went on as long as it did, why so many prominent people were involved, and why law enforcement turned a blind eye. In the case of Epstein, while we might guess at the source of his power and his funding, there is still not an adequate public explanation. So it is no great mystery why men like Maddison Welch, perhaps imagining their own daughters being trafficked by these monsters, take it upon themselves to, as the popular hashtag has it, #SaveTheChildren.
The stickiest conspiracy theories take hold because they are grounded in truth. In the Q narrative, the kernel of truth is the trafficking and rape of underage girls by rich and powerful men. As Epstein showed, that was not fiction. What has never made sense is the second part of the Q narrative: that Donald John Trump, of all people, was secretly working to expose and destroy the secret child sex ring. This is a man who has been credibly accused of four dozen sexual assaults or rapes. This is a man who bragged on tape about grabbing women by the you-know-what. This is a man who sent his own teenage daughter to a modeling agency run by a notorious abuser of underage women . This is a man who, when he discovered that his pal Jeffrey Epstein had a thing for very young women, was like, “Great, when can we party?” (Seriously: In 1992, he and Jeffrey went to a bash teeming with underage women, and they were the only men there). Thiswas the savior of the children? Donald Trump? Really? Where, I wondered, did Q come up with that big idea?
As it happens, the Trump-as-white-hat narrative may have originated with Donald Trump himself—with his fractious relationship with Epstein after the two had a falling out in 2004 over a piece of real estate in Palm Beach. As the indefatigable Craig Unger reports in the Vanity Fair excerpt of his new book, American Kompromat, Epstein asked Trump for advice on how to modify the property—and Trump, snake that he is, went behind his friend’s back and outbid him! It got worse, as Unger reports:
Epstein was apoplectic and became even more enraged when Trump soon thereafter put the house up for sale for $125 million. Finally, Trump sold the house to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for a reported $96 million in 2008—never having lived there—and Epstein threatened to sue him. The two men never spoke again.
From then on, whenever Epstein’s name was mentioned to Trump, the whole tenor of the conversation instantly changed. And that wasn’t the end of it. In 2005, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein’s relationship to the young women around him. According to someone who knew him, Epstein believed Trump got the police to investigate him in retaliation for threatening to sue.
Basically, as Unger tells it, Trump fukked over Epstein, and when Epstein called him out for it, Trump narc’d him out to the police! While we can’t say for sure if this is the case, Epstein certainly believed it. If true, it means that, yes, serial rapist Donald Trump really was the prime mover in the downfall of Jeffrey Epstein—but for revenge, and not for the altruistic reasons Q would have us believe.
What’s that, you ask? How would Donald John Trump, a mere businessman, know how to covertly rat out his associate? As Lincoln’s Bible has been patiently explaining for some time, Trump, a top echelon Confidential Informant, had done likewise for decades, to criminals just as odious as Epstein.
The same information terrorists who radicalized Maddison Welch in 2016 radicalized many thousands of people four years later, as Pizzagate mutated into QAnon. Alex Jones was prominently involved in both ops, and he is hardly unique in that regard. The result? The besieging of the Capitol on January 6. It is telling how statements made by the indicted insurrectionists echo the letter Welch wrote at his sentencing. Here is what the attorney for the so-called “Q Shaman” told a local radio station: the Shaman “regrets very, very much having not just been duped by the president, but by being in a position where he allowed that duping to put him in a position to make decisions he should not have made.”
They thought they were fighting for a just cause! They thought they were there at the invitation of the president!
Winning the war against the information terrorists—the Steve Bannons and Rogers Stones and Alex Joneses and Jack Posobiacs and Mike Flynn père et fils—depends on Q adherents waking up and smelling the proverbial coffee. Here, alas, we are also fighting against human nature. No one wants to feel the humiliation that comes with being fooled by such an obvious scam; it is easier, psychologically, to double down.
But as Q prophets push back the date of the Second Trump Inaugural (now scheduled for March 4, as January 20 didn’t work out so hot), as duped besiegers come to grips with the criminal charges filed against them, as even the Proud Boys realize that Trump sold them a bill of goods, the story becomes less and less plausible. The narrator is unreliable.
When Maddison Welch went to Comet Ping Pong a month after the 2016 election, he was looking for captured children. He was also looking for the truth. He found the one, but not the other. Welch went about it the wrong way, obviously. But his impulse to actively get to the bottom of a Reddit rumor, rather than just share it on social media, was a good thing. Now he knows the truth, just as the Q Shaman knows, just as the Proud Boys know.
Churchill once quipped that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. That is even more true in the age of social media. But here’s the rub: the truth always prevails.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...b53b80-5029-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html
Piling up incriminating information about Trump’s Russian connections
A protester dons a mask depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin during a demonstration outside Donald Trump’s Washington hotel in October. In his book, Craig Unger makes a detailed case that Trump is a Kremlin asset. (Reuters/Carlos Barria)
By John Sipher
John Sipher worked for the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment.
Jan. 29, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. UTC
One of the standard warnings attached to U.S. intelligence reports is that the source of a report intends “to influence as well as inform.” The caveat does not mean that the source’s reporting is wrong or should be discounted, but that the source also has an agenda. Craig Unger’s new book, “American Kompromat,” should be read with a similar understanding, for it opens with the presumption that former president Donald Trump is, as former CIA director Michael Hayden described him, “a clear and present danger.” Unger starts from the premise that Trump is a Kremlin asset and proceeds to advance the argument with great detail.
Unger is a veteran investigative journalist and writer, and “American Kompromat” is a follow-up to his 2018 book, “House of Trump, House of Putin,” in which he made the case for Russian collusion. “American Kompromat” can be read alongside others that examine Trump’s weak spot for Russia — including Greg Miller’s “The Apprentice,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s “Russian Roulette,” Luke Harding’s “Shadow State,” Tim Weiner’s “The Folly and the Glory,” and Seth Abramson’s “Proof of Collusion” — as well as books by insiders such as Peter Strzok, former FBI deputy assistant director of counterintelligence; Josh Campbell, a former FBI special agent and special assistant to then-Director James Comey; and Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI.
(Dutton)
As the Trump administration came to a spectacular end, Unger must have felt the need to update his book continually. Day by day, Trump took actions that added to Unger’s thesis. In the closing weeks of his term, Trump sought to divert attention from a damaging Russian cyberhack, refused to concede Russian President Vladimir Putin’s poisoning of his leading political challenger and brazenly pardoned cronies who refused to testify in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. (Not to mention allegedly inciting the mob that violently overtook the Capitol.)
Unger outlines Trump’s decades-long relationships with Russian criminals and his willingness to abet the laundering of dirty money flowing from Moscow, and explains why Russian intelligence would find him an easy mark. The web of Trump’s damning connections and his actions as president suggest some sort of affinity for Putin.
According to Unger, there are indications that Trump was used as a conduit for Soviet covert messaging campaigns in the late 1980s. He made numerous visits to Russia where he was certainly watched, feted and cultivated. At the time, he publicly expressed thoughts that were far outside of mainstream Western opinion. For example, he complained that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was destroying the Soviet Union — suggesting perhaps relations with KGB elements that shared such a view. Unger cites former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, who served in Washington at the time, saying of Trump: “The guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
By compiling decades of Trump’s seedy ties, disturbing and consistent patterns of behavior, and unexplained contacts with Russian officials and criminals, Unger makes a strong case that Trump is probably a compromised trusted contact of Kremlin interests.
That said, it is not an argument meant to stand up to the scrutiny of a criminal court (that would require evidence hidden in Russian intelligence files). Instead, it is a counterintelligence case, a circumstantial compilation of patterns, relationships and logical inferences. Even though counterintelligence probes often do not lead to arrests, the stakes of such investigations may be of far more serious consequence. We have learned over the past several years that many of the most important firewalls in our democracy are not necessarily written in the legal code. It may not be a crime for a presidential candidate to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power and lie about it, but it is potentially a far more serious challenge to our system.
In short, Unger alleges that Trump’s long-standing ties to Russian organized crime, his lifestyle and his business practices made him uniquely vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by the country that is unarguably the best in the world at those dark arts. His campaign team — with its own unusual shady ties to Russia — was willing to work with a hostile foreign power and eager to accept material stolen from Americans. None went to the authorities to report the illicit contacts, and many of them were subsequently arrested. When the issue of Russian involvement surfaced publicly, every single one of them lied and covered up their actions. Trump then attacked the very institutions that could hold him to account and sought to obstruct investigations, eventually pardoning anyone who could provide evidence of wrongdoing. Even Trump’s most fervent supporters have been unable to provide an innocent explanation for why a domestic political campaign would need such deep engagement with a hostile foreign power.
Unger’s narrative of collusion relies on piling up any and all damning information he can muster. However, in some cases, the very volume of information undercuts the strength of his argument. Trump’s presidency was such a ruinous fiasco, it is tempting to keep adding inexplicable actions to the pile. However, the tangential material often confuses more than clarifies. Chapters on William Barr, the Catholic Opus Dei sect, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein are interesting but do little to illuminate Trump’s perfidy. For example, Unger ties Barr to FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, suggesting that Hanssen was promoted while Barr was the attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. Anyone with experience in government would be hard-pressed to explain how a mid-level FBI promotion of someone not yet suspected of a crime would be of interest to the attorney general.
Further, Unger relies on relatively few sources, and none with direct access to Trump or present-day Russia. Shvets and Oleg Kalugin, his sources on Russian intelligence methodology, were celebrated KGB officers but left Russia in the late 1980s and have no direct knowledge of Trump’s contacts with Russian officials. They provide interesting context and color, but Unger would have benefited from a wider variety of sources.
Trump’s election exposed a previously undetected flaw in our system of protecting national security secrets. A duly elected president cannot be denied a security clearance, yet the Republican Party nominated a candidate whose greed, lack of morals and relationship with criminal elements should have disqualified him for the lowest-level clearance, much less the highest office in the land. What Unger’s books have shown us is that the evidence was there for anyone willing to look. “American Kompromat” uncovers no secrets, nor does it reveal much that is new, but it reminds us that there is still much left to learn. We know that Trump was compromised, but we’re not sure exactly how.
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“He’s a Lot of Fun to Be With”: Inside Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump’s Epic Bromance
“He’s a Lot of Fun to Be With”: Inside Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump’s Epic Bromance
Craig UngerJanuary 21, 2021
Beginning in the late ’80s, the infamous sex trafficker and the future president (and their mutual friend Ghislaine Maxwell) palled around for almost two decades. In an excerpt from his new book, American Kompromat, the author exposes their shared tastes for private planes, shady money, and foreign-born models—many of them “on the younger side.”
Donald and Melania Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago in 2000. From Davidoff Studios/Getty Images.
Ghislaine Maxwell saw Donald Trump as a vital connection for her then boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein early on. In the late ’80s, she had worked for her father, British media mogul Robert Maxwell, in London, first at Pergamon Press, then in another division that specialized in corporate gifts. Thinking Trump would be a great catch as a client for her venture, she realized she had a terrific connection through her father, who knew Trump fairly well as a rival, bidding unsuccessfully to buy the New York Post, inviting him to party aboard the Lady Ghislaine, and attending extravagant society soirees.
Naively assuming that her father would appreciate her initiative, Ghislaine Maxwell asked him to call Trump. However, according to Nicholas Davies’s Death of a Tyc00n, even though she was his favorite daughter, Robert Maxwell erupted. “Have you got your bum in your head?” he said. “Why the fukk would Donald Trump want to waste his time seeing you with your crappy gifts when he has a multimillion-dollar business to run?”
But her father was wrong. In the end, Trump spent plenty of time with Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein. In fact, he fit in quite well with them. Arrivistes all—be it Epstein’s Coney Island, Trump’s Queens, or Robert Maxwell’s Eastern European shtetl—they had all come from the wrong side of the tracks. And at some point in their lives, Robert Maxwell, Trump, and Epstein all had ties to foreign intelligence agencies, arms dealers, and the sex trade.
It was a world of unimaginable decadence. The epicenter of the operation was Epstein’s enormously opulent Upper East Side townhouse. As a dwelling, it was less a home than a deliberately, extravagantly staged showcase, a calculated spectacle that declared to the world that Epstein, a college dropout from a middle-class Brooklyn family, had been embraced securely in the bosom of the powers that be.
Epstein’s notorious “black book” of contacts, compiled largely by Ghislaine Maxwell, shows the rarefied circles in which he traveled—Nobel laureates, heads of states, British royals, Wall Street power brokers, and A-listers in every glamour profession. Trump had no fewer than 16 phone numbers beside his name in Epstein’s black book.
Trump later recalled Epstein in those days. “Terrific guy,” he famously told New York magazine. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
No one was more dazzled by the glamour of the Trump–Maxwell–Epstein axis than former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who was so hypnotized by its lavishness that he professed not to see anything wrong with it. In fact, it was something you aspired to. “In those days, if you didn’t know Trump and you didn’t know Epstein, you were a nobody,” Dershowitz, who later served on Epstein’s defense team, told The New York Times.
Within the context of their highly transactional relationships, Trump’s friendship with Epstein struck onlookers as a significant mutually beneficial connection. In the ’90s, Trump needed friends. He had just gone belly-up in Atlantic City. In addition to helping Trump get back on his feet, Epstein seemed to be a latter-day Hugh Hefner—surrounded by gorgeous young women, bespoke private planes, and spectacular residences, all while Ghislaine Maxwell orchestrated a never-ending series of movable feasts at which Epstein would entertain and play courtier to presidents, movie stars, brutal dictators, world-class scientists, Wall Street billionaires, and the like. And he’d have sex with two, three, or more young girls almost every day.
Trump fit right in. Epstein and Maxwell invited him everywhere—and Trump reciprocated. At one highly selective party in 1992 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, The New York Times reported, no fewer than 28 attractive young women were flown in to participate in a calendar-girl competition as entertainment. The organizer, George Houraney, who ran American Dream Enterprise, a small Florida company that staged a calendar-girl contest and other events, was appalled to learn that there were only two male guests—Trump and Epstein.
“Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs,” Houraney told Trump, according to the Times. “You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein? … I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls.”
But Trump ignored Houraney’s warning and plowed ahead anyway. Houraney’s longtime girlfriend Jill Harth later told The New York Times that Trump groped her nonstop at a business meeting around the same time. “He was relentless,” Harth said, describing how Trump took the couple to dinner, sat beside Harth, and put his hands up her skirt all the way to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”
Trump was often the center of Maxwell’s attention, and women who entered Trump’s orbit sometimes ended up being associated with both Trump and Epstein, spending part of their time living in a Trump Tower condo and part in Florida, at Mar-a-Lago or one of Epstein’s homes.
Among them was Russian model and beauty-pageant contestant Anna Malova,whose journey from the world of beauty pageants and modeling to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and Epstein’s island retreat is highly suggestive in terms of how Epstein and his associates began manipulating young women.
In the early ’90s, before coming to the United States, Malova had placed well in a number of beauty pageants—coming in second in Miss Russia 1993 and winning the 1994 Miss Baltic Sea title later that year. In 1995 she left Moscow, spent six weeks learning English in St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia), and was profiled in The Tampa Tribune as “reigning Miss Russia.” And before long, she met Donald Trump. Notwithstanding the fact that Trump was still married to his second wife, Marla Maples, Anna moved into a 30th-floor condo in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
There, according to an item in the New York Post, her lavish accommodations were taken care of “courtesy of an unidentified sugar daddy.” Not long afterward, in October 1996, Trump bought three beauty pageants from ITT Corp.: Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA.
A little more than a year later, in 1998, Malova competed in the Miss Universe pageant representing Russia. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Malova “faltered badly” when she was asked to compare Russia’s television and culture with Ghana’s. Malova was stumped. “She pulled a Chernobyl,” one observer told the outlet. “She’s history.”
Malova made the finals anyway, but, as New York magazine noticed, there was an anomaly in the very fact she had even entered the pageant. “Oddly, Anna Malova was allowed to compete in this year’s Miss Universe pageant [1998] even though she was Miss Russia in 1995,” the magazine reported. “According to beauty-world sources, it’s not a coincidence that the stunning Slav, who wound up a finalist in last month’s event, is a friend of Donald Trump, co-owner of the event. Did the Donald pull a few strings on an old friend’s behalf? … While the Miss Universe camp insists Malova won the Russian event honestly, Malova’s agent says, ‘I don’t think she was Miss Russia this year. She was Miss Russia several years ago.’”
When the magazine asked for documentation that Malova had won the title a second time, the Miss Universe pageant headquarters declined to furnish it. Trump could not be reached for comment, but a spokesperson told New York, “I haven’t heard about Trump giving any preferential treatment to Malova.”
In the meantime, however, she spent time with both Trump and Epstein. Flight logs released by a federal judge in New York in 2019 showed that in February 1999, Malova, then 27, flew on board Epstein’s Gulfstream, the so-called Lolita Express, with Maxwell and Prince Andrew, from Epstein’s Little St. James (a.k.a. “Pedophile Island”) back to Florida.
Over the next two decades, Malova cut an erratic figure. She was arrested in 2010 on charges of criminal possession of narcotics, forgery, and criminal impersonation of a physician. She also appeared in gossip columns as the love interest of men ranging from comedian Garry Shandling to hedge fund billionaire George Soros, more than 40 years her senior.
“He’s a Lot of Fun to Be With”: Inside Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump’s Epic Bromance
Craig UngerJanuary 21, 2021
Beginning in the late ’80s, the infamous sex trafficker and the future president (and their mutual friend Ghislaine Maxwell) palled around for almost two decades. In an excerpt from his new book, American Kompromat, the author exposes their shared tastes for private planes, shady money, and foreign-born models—many of them “on the younger side.”
Donald and Melania Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago in 2000. From Davidoff Studios/Getty Images.
Ghislaine Maxwell saw Donald Trump as a vital connection for her then boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein early on. In the late ’80s, she had worked for her father, British media mogul Robert Maxwell, in London, first at Pergamon Press, then in another division that specialized in corporate gifts. Thinking Trump would be a great catch as a client for her venture, she realized she had a terrific connection through her father, who knew Trump fairly well as a rival, bidding unsuccessfully to buy the New York Post, inviting him to party aboard the Lady Ghislaine, and attending extravagant society soirees.
Naively assuming that her father would appreciate her initiative, Ghislaine Maxwell asked him to call Trump. However, according to Nicholas Davies’s Death of a Tyc00n, even though she was his favorite daughter, Robert Maxwell erupted. “Have you got your bum in your head?” he said. “Why the fukk would Donald Trump want to waste his time seeing you with your crappy gifts when he has a multimillion-dollar business to run?”
But her father was wrong. In the end, Trump spent plenty of time with Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein. In fact, he fit in quite well with them. Arrivistes all—be it Epstein’s Coney Island, Trump’s Queens, or Robert Maxwell’s Eastern European shtetl—they had all come from the wrong side of the tracks. And at some point in their lives, Robert Maxwell, Trump, and Epstein all had ties to foreign intelligence agencies, arms dealers, and the sex trade.
It was a world of unimaginable decadence. The epicenter of the operation was Epstein’s enormously opulent Upper East Side townhouse. As a dwelling, it was less a home than a deliberately, extravagantly staged showcase, a calculated spectacle that declared to the world that Epstein, a college dropout from a middle-class Brooklyn family, had been embraced securely in the bosom of the powers that be.
Epstein’s notorious “black book” of contacts, compiled largely by Ghislaine Maxwell, shows the rarefied circles in which he traveled—Nobel laureates, heads of states, British royals, Wall Street power brokers, and A-listers in every glamour profession. Trump had no fewer than 16 phone numbers beside his name in Epstein’s black book.
Trump later recalled Epstein in those days. “Terrific guy,” he famously told New York magazine. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
No one was more dazzled by the glamour of the Trump–Maxwell–Epstein axis than former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who was so hypnotized by its lavishness that he professed not to see anything wrong with it. In fact, it was something you aspired to. “In those days, if you didn’t know Trump and you didn’t know Epstein, you were a nobody,” Dershowitz, who later served on Epstein’s defense team, told The New York Times.
Within the context of their highly transactional relationships, Trump’s friendship with Epstein struck onlookers as a significant mutually beneficial connection. In the ’90s, Trump needed friends. He had just gone belly-up in Atlantic City. In addition to helping Trump get back on his feet, Epstein seemed to be a latter-day Hugh Hefner—surrounded by gorgeous young women, bespoke private planes, and spectacular residences, all while Ghislaine Maxwell orchestrated a never-ending series of movable feasts at which Epstein would entertain and play courtier to presidents, movie stars, brutal dictators, world-class scientists, Wall Street billionaires, and the like. And he’d have sex with two, three, or more young girls almost every day.
Trump fit right in. Epstein and Maxwell invited him everywhere—and Trump reciprocated. At one highly selective party in 1992 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, The New York Times reported, no fewer than 28 attractive young women were flown in to participate in a calendar-girl competition as entertainment. The organizer, George Houraney, who ran American Dream Enterprise, a small Florida company that staged a calendar-girl contest and other events, was appalled to learn that there were only two male guests—Trump and Epstein.
“Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs,” Houraney told Trump, according to the Times. “You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein? … I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls.”
But Trump ignored Houraney’s warning and plowed ahead anyway. Houraney’s longtime girlfriend Jill Harth later told The New York Times that Trump groped her nonstop at a business meeting around the same time. “He was relentless,” Harth said, describing how Trump took the couple to dinner, sat beside Harth, and put his hands up her skirt all the way to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”
Trump was often the center of Maxwell’s attention, and women who entered Trump’s orbit sometimes ended up being associated with both Trump and Epstein, spending part of their time living in a Trump Tower condo and part in Florida, at Mar-a-Lago or one of Epstein’s homes.
Among them was Russian model and beauty-pageant contestant Anna Malova,whose journey from the world of beauty pageants and modeling to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and Epstein’s island retreat is highly suggestive in terms of how Epstein and his associates began manipulating young women.
In the early ’90s, before coming to the United States, Malova had placed well in a number of beauty pageants—coming in second in Miss Russia 1993 and winning the 1994 Miss Baltic Sea title later that year. In 1995 she left Moscow, spent six weeks learning English in St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia), and was profiled in The Tampa Tribune as “reigning Miss Russia.” And before long, she met Donald Trump. Notwithstanding the fact that Trump was still married to his second wife, Marla Maples, Anna moved into a 30th-floor condo in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
There, according to an item in the New York Post, her lavish accommodations were taken care of “courtesy of an unidentified sugar daddy.” Not long afterward, in October 1996, Trump bought three beauty pageants from ITT Corp.: Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA.
A little more than a year later, in 1998, Malova competed in the Miss Universe pageant representing Russia. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Malova “faltered badly” when she was asked to compare Russia’s television and culture with Ghana’s. Malova was stumped. “She pulled a Chernobyl,” one observer told the outlet. “She’s history.”
Malova made the finals anyway, but, as New York magazine noticed, there was an anomaly in the very fact she had even entered the pageant. “Oddly, Anna Malova was allowed to compete in this year’s Miss Universe pageant [1998] even though she was Miss Russia in 1995,” the magazine reported. “According to beauty-world sources, it’s not a coincidence that the stunning Slav, who wound up a finalist in last month’s event, is a friend of Donald Trump, co-owner of the event. Did the Donald pull a few strings on an old friend’s behalf? … While the Miss Universe camp insists Malova won the Russian event honestly, Malova’s agent says, ‘I don’t think she was Miss Russia this year. She was Miss Russia several years ago.’”
When the magazine asked for documentation that Malova had won the title a second time, the Miss Universe pageant headquarters declined to furnish it. Trump could not be reached for comment, but a spokesperson told New York, “I haven’t heard about Trump giving any preferential treatment to Malova.”
In the meantime, however, she spent time with both Trump and Epstein. Flight logs released by a federal judge in New York in 2019 showed that in February 1999, Malova, then 27, flew on board Epstein’s Gulfstream, the so-called Lolita Express, with Maxwell and Prince Andrew, from Epstein’s Little St. James (a.k.a. “Pedophile Island”) back to Florida.
Over the next two decades, Malova cut an erratic figure. She was arrested in 2010 on charges of criminal possession of narcotics, forgery, and criminal impersonation of a physician. She also appeared in gossip columns as the love interest of men ranging from comedian Garry Shandling to hedge fund billionaire George Soros, more than 40 years her senior.
PART 2:
Malova wasn’t the only woman who spent time with both Trump and Epstein. In 1997, Trump, who had just separated from Maples, was photographed with Maxwell at Ford Models’ 50th-anniversary party, where he ogled models throughout the evening.
At another event that year, according to the Sunday Mail, Trump, then 50, seemed to fall for a friend of Maxwell’s, 20-year-old London model Anouska De Georgiou, and flew her and Maxwell to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, after which he installed De Georgiou in “one of Donald’s many apartments” in New York.
But before long, De Georgiou told NBC News, she was being flown to Epstein’s homes all over the world. More than 20 years later, in 2019, De Georgiou’s court testimony was cited in British tabloid The Sun, which alleged that she had been abused by Epstein when she was “young and idealistic.”
“Jeffrey Epstein manipulated me, corrupted me, and sexually assaulted me,” she said, adding that the abuse was “devaluing beyond measure” and “lasted several years.”
As Epstein’s operation continued into the 2000s, he began importing girls from the former Soviet Union. After the 1998 Miss Universe pageant, Anna Malova signed up with Karin Models, which had been founded by Epstein friend Jean-Luc Brunel. Known as “le fantôme” (the ghost), Brunel, who also owned MC2 Modeling Agency, was the subject of a 1988 piece that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutesin which several young models accused him of groping them sexually, drugging their drinks, and rape.
“I really despise Jean-Luc. … This is a guy who should be behind bars,” John Casablancas, the late modeling agent, told journalist Michael Gross, whose book Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women alleges that Brunel repeatedly drugged and raped models. According to Casablancas, Brunel and his pals “were very well known in Paris for roaming the clubs. They would invite girls and put drugs in their drinks.”
And Casablancas, who married a 17-year-old when he was 50, would have known, having used his stature in the modeling business to indulge in similar activities with young girls at a Look of the Year modeling competition at the New York Plaza Hotel, with his friend Donald Trump, then the hotel’s owner. Trump was closely involved with the contest, in which the average age was 15, and, according to The Guardian, several of the models said that they were required by their agency to have dinner with Trump and Casablancas.
Trump’s behavior at such events is unclear, but, according to The Guardian, “The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models. Some of these allegations amount to sexual harassment, abuse, or exploitation of teenage girls; others are more accurately described as rape.”
In addition to whatever legitimate careers Brunel may have fostered, as a “model scout” he also allegedly hired “scouters” to identify, procure, and transport underage girls, many 15 years of age and under, hire them to give “massages,” and train them to give sexual pleasure. Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffreclaimed she was forced to have sex with Brunel as well, and was forced to watch him engage in “sexual acts with dozens of underage girls.” (Brunel, who couldn't be reached for comment, has denied taking advantage of underage girls, and MC2 president Jeffrey Fuller has denied that Epstein had any ownership or involvement in the company.)
MC2 wasn’t the first company to do something like this, and when it came to determining how to structure such a company—what kind of contractual relationships MC2 would have with employees, and so forth—its management looked to someone who already had experience in the business. Though Brunel was its titular leader, Epstein was really funding the agency and took the initiative when it came to dealing with such issues. According to a sworn deposition in 2010 by MC2 bookkeeper Maritza Vasquez, Epstein wanted MC2 to use the same system of incentives that drove “model scouts” and models at Trump Model Management, the modeling agency Trump had founded as T Models in 1999. (Trump Model Management discontinued operations in 2017.)
As the Epstein operation chugged along, Trump, who had married three models—Ivana, Marla, and Melania—was very much part of Epstein’s picture. According to court records, message pads confiscated from Epstein’s home showed that Trump called Epstein’s West Palm Beach mansion a number of times.
Asked under oath in a September 2016 deposition whether he ever socialized with Trump in the presence of girls under the age of 18, Epstein punted. Rather than answer the questions, he took the Fifth.
Trump Model Management allegedly indulged in many of the dubious practices that MC2 did, such as violating immigration laws and illegally employing young foreign girls. Three former Trump models, all noncitizens of the U.S., told Mother Jones in 2016 that Trump Model Management profited by using foreign models who came to the United States on tourist visas that did not allow them to work here. And two of the former models said that Trump’s agency suggested they lie on customs forms about where they planned to live. All of which meant they were perpetually scared of getting caught and pretty much at the mercy of the agency.
All of which was ironic indeed, given Trump’s hard-line immigration policies as president and his assertions that undocumented immigrants are taking American jobs.
Trump became known for hosting parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel, which he owned at the time, where older rich men were introduced to young women and girls who assumed “they’d get somewhere” by joining the party, as one partygoer, a fashion photographer, told Michael Gross, writing in the Daily Beast. “Of course, it never happens.”
According to the photographer, the girls were as young as 15. “[They were] over their heads, they had no idea, and they ended up in situations,” the photographer added. “There were always dramas because the men threw money and drugs at them to keep them enticed. It’s based on power and dominating girls who can’t push back and can be discarded.”
Trump would “go from room to room,” said the photographer. “It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor.”
In February 2000, Trump staged a pro-am tennis tournament at Mar-a-Lago and appeared with Epstein, Maxwell, and his latest girlfriend, Melania Knauss, whom Epstein claimed to have introduced to Trump. Epstein’s claim was reported in TheNew York Times, which noted that “while Mr. Trump has dismissed the relationship, Mr. Epstein, since the election, has played it up, claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump, though neither of the Trumps has ever mentioned Mr. Epstein playing a role in their meeting.”
But in 2004, after a friendship of roughly 17 years, Trump and Epstein had a serious falling-out when Epstein sought to buy a spectacular oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach called Maison de l’Amitié (“House of Friendship”) that was being sold out of a bankruptcy auction. The property, a nearly 62,000-square-foot neoclassical palace, had once been owned by Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retailer who was so close to Epstein.
Epstein had his heart set on the house, but he planned to make at least one major renovation project once he bought it: He wanted to relocate the swimming pool, and he brought Trump to the property to give him advice on how to do it.
But before the sale was finalized, Epstein was horrified to see that Trump, who was still underwater financially from his Atlantic City bankruptcies, outbid him with an offer of more than $41 million for the property. The purchase was financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already holding dubious loans for Trump.
Epstein was apoplectic and became even more enraged when Trump soon thereafter put the house up for sale for $125 million. Finally, Trump sold the house to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for a reported $96 million in 2008—never having lived there—and Epstein threatened to sue him. The two men never spoke again.
From then on, whenever Epstein’s name was mentioned to Trump, the whole tenor of the conversation instantly changed. And that wasn’t the end of it. In 2005, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein’s relationship to the young women around him. According to someone who knew him, Epstein believed Trump got the police to investigate him in retaliation for threatening to sue.
Their friendship frayed beyond repair, Epstein became less discreet as the keeper of Trump’s secrets and was not averse to showing off potentially compromising photos of him and Trump. An associate of Epstein’s who asked not to be identified told me that Epstein showed him one photo of Trump with a topless young girl. In another, the source said, Trump is with two young girls who are said to be laughing as they point out what appears to be a wet spot in an unfortunate location on his pants. The description of the photo suggested that it was a semen stain—but the photos have never been released.
From American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery, by Craig Unger, to be published by Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Craig Unger.
Malova wasn’t the only woman who spent time with both Trump and Epstein. In 1997, Trump, who had just separated from Maples, was photographed with Maxwell at Ford Models’ 50th-anniversary party, where he ogled models throughout the evening.
At another event that year, according to the Sunday Mail, Trump, then 50, seemed to fall for a friend of Maxwell’s, 20-year-old London model Anouska De Georgiou, and flew her and Maxwell to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, after which he installed De Georgiou in “one of Donald’s many apartments” in New York.
But before long, De Georgiou told NBC News, she was being flown to Epstein’s homes all over the world. More than 20 years later, in 2019, De Georgiou’s court testimony was cited in British tabloid The Sun, which alleged that she had been abused by Epstein when she was “young and idealistic.”
“Jeffrey Epstein manipulated me, corrupted me, and sexually assaulted me,” she said, adding that the abuse was “devaluing beyond measure” and “lasted several years.”
As Epstein’s operation continued into the 2000s, he began importing girls from the former Soviet Union. After the 1998 Miss Universe pageant, Anna Malova signed up with Karin Models, which had been founded by Epstein friend Jean-Luc Brunel. Known as “le fantôme” (the ghost), Brunel, who also owned MC2 Modeling Agency, was the subject of a 1988 piece that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutesin which several young models accused him of groping them sexually, drugging their drinks, and rape.
“I really despise Jean-Luc. … This is a guy who should be behind bars,” John Casablancas, the late modeling agent, told journalist Michael Gross, whose book Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women alleges that Brunel repeatedly drugged and raped models. According to Casablancas, Brunel and his pals “were very well known in Paris for roaming the clubs. They would invite girls and put drugs in their drinks.”
And Casablancas, who married a 17-year-old when he was 50, would have known, having used his stature in the modeling business to indulge in similar activities with young girls at a Look of the Year modeling competition at the New York Plaza Hotel, with his friend Donald Trump, then the hotel’s owner. Trump was closely involved with the contest, in which the average age was 15, and, according to The Guardian, several of the models said that they were required by their agency to have dinner with Trump and Casablancas.
Trump’s behavior at such events is unclear, but, according to The Guardian, “The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models. Some of these allegations amount to sexual harassment, abuse, or exploitation of teenage girls; others are more accurately described as rape.”
In addition to whatever legitimate careers Brunel may have fostered, as a “model scout” he also allegedly hired “scouters” to identify, procure, and transport underage girls, many 15 years of age and under, hire them to give “massages,” and train them to give sexual pleasure. Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffreclaimed she was forced to have sex with Brunel as well, and was forced to watch him engage in “sexual acts with dozens of underage girls.” (Brunel, who couldn't be reached for comment, has denied taking advantage of underage girls, and MC2 president Jeffrey Fuller has denied that Epstein had any ownership or involvement in the company.)
MC2 wasn’t the first company to do something like this, and when it came to determining how to structure such a company—what kind of contractual relationships MC2 would have with employees, and so forth—its management looked to someone who already had experience in the business. Though Brunel was its titular leader, Epstein was really funding the agency and took the initiative when it came to dealing with such issues. According to a sworn deposition in 2010 by MC2 bookkeeper Maritza Vasquez, Epstein wanted MC2 to use the same system of incentives that drove “model scouts” and models at Trump Model Management, the modeling agency Trump had founded as T Models in 1999. (Trump Model Management discontinued operations in 2017.)
As the Epstein operation chugged along, Trump, who had married three models—Ivana, Marla, and Melania—was very much part of Epstein’s picture. According to court records, message pads confiscated from Epstein’s home showed that Trump called Epstein’s West Palm Beach mansion a number of times.
Asked under oath in a September 2016 deposition whether he ever socialized with Trump in the presence of girls under the age of 18, Epstein punted. Rather than answer the questions, he took the Fifth.
Trump Model Management allegedly indulged in many of the dubious practices that MC2 did, such as violating immigration laws and illegally employing young foreign girls. Three former Trump models, all noncitizens of the U.S., told Mother Jones in 2016 that Trump Model Management profited by using foreign models who came to the United States on tourist visas that did not allow them to work here. And two of the former models said that Trump’s agency suggested they lie on customs forms about where they planned to live. All of which meant they were perpetually scared of getting caught and pretty much at the mercy of the agency.
All of which was ironic indeed, given Trump’s hard-line immigration policies as president and his assertions that undocumented immigrants are taking American jobs.
Trump became known for hosting parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel, which he owned at the time, where older rich men were introduced to young women and girls who assumed “they’d get somewhere” by joining the party, as one partygoer, a fashion photographer, told Michael Gross, writing in the Daily Beast. “Of course, it never happens.”
According to the photographer, the girls were as young as 15. “[They were] over their heads, they had no idea, and they ended up in situations,” the photographer added. “There were always dramas because the men threw money and drugs at them to keep them enticed. It’s based on power and dominating girls who can’t push back and can be discarded.”
Trump would “go from room to room,” said the photographer. “It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor.”
In February 2000, Trump staged a pro-am tennis tournament at Mar-a-Lago and appeared with Epstein, Maxwell, and his latest girlfriend, Melania Knauss, whom Epstein claimed to have introduced to Trump. Epstein’s claim was reported in TheNew York Times, which noted that “while Mr. Trump has dismissed the relationship, Mr. Epstein, since the election, has played it up, claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump, though neither of the Trumps has ever mentioned Mr. Epstein playing a role in their meeting.”
But in 2004, after a friendship of roughly 17 years, Trump and Epstein had a serious falling-out when Epstein sought to buy a spectacular oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach called Maison de l’Amitié (“House of Friendship”) that was being sold out of a bankruptcy auction. The property, a nearly 62,000-square-foot neoclassical palace, had once been owned by Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retailer who was so close to Epstein.
Epstein had his heart set on the house, but he planned to make at least one major renovation project once he bought it: He wanted to relocate the swimming pool, and he brought Trump to the property to give him advice on how to do it.
But before the sale was finalized, Epstein was horrified to see that Trump, who was still underwater financially from his Atlantic City bankruptcies, outbid him with an offer of more than $41 million for the property. The purchase was financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already holding dubious loans for Trump.
Epstein was apoplectic and became even more enraged when Trump soon thereafter put the house up for sale for $125 million. Finally, Trump sold the house to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for a reported $96 million in 2008—never having lived there—and Epstein threatened to sue him. The two men never spoke again.
From then on, whenever Epstein’s name was mentioned to Trump, the whole tenor of the conversation instantly changed. And that wasn’t the end of it. In 2005, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein’s relationship to the young women around him. According to someone who knew him, Epstein believed Trump got the police to investigate him in retaliation for threatening to sue.
Their friendship frayed beyond repair, Epstein became less discreet as the keeper of Trump’s secrets and was not averse to showing off potentially compromising photos of him and Trump. An associate of Epstein’s who asked not to be identified told me that Epstein showed him one photo of Trump with a topless young girl. In another, the source said, Trump is with two young girls who are said to be laughing as they point out what appears to be a wet spot in an unfortunate location on his pants. The description of the photo suggested that it was a semen stain—but the photos have never been released.
From American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery, by Craig Unger, to be published by Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Craig Unger.
Basically John Cody was leaning on Trump and Cody was affiliated with La Cosa Nostra
The Party Girl Who Brought Trump to His Knees
The Party Girl Who Brought Trump to His Knees
Trump Tower Was Home to Mob-Connected Shady Operators in 80s, 90s
Trump Tower Was an Entire Ecosystem of Criminal Sketchballs in the '80s and '90s
That somebody came out of that milieu and became President* of the United States is proof enough that god occasionally takes long vacations.
By Charles P. Pierce
Nov 2, 2020
SONIA MOSKOWITZGETTY IMAGES
A little while back, I celebrated the release of Without Compromise, an anthology of the work of the irreplaceable Wayne Barrett of The Village Voice, much of which details with great precision the slime-encrusted rise of our current president* throughout the wild kingdom of New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the great unexplored areas of this saga is the relationships the president* cultivated with members of what we like to call organized crime. To be fair, it was impossible to have a career in New York real-estate development in that period without coming to some kind of modus vivendiwith mobsters of one sort or another, just as it was impossible to make a fortune in post-Soviet Russia without being a towering crook.
I was cruising the 'Toobz recently, and I came upon a piece that Barrett wrote in 1991 about the curious arrangements that the president* made with some curious tenants in his pride and joy, Trump Tower in Manhattan. The piece is studded with the kind of small details that made Barrett's reporting so essential and, take it all in all, it's the entire natural history of a corrupt ecosystem entirely contained in a single building in midtown. For example:
Well, actually, your Trump Tower neighbors are as likely to be Medicaid cheats, coke dealers, mobsters, or those who may have gotten a touch too friendly with mobsters. Take, for example, Verina Hixon, a strikingly beautiful Austrian divorcee with no visible income (or alimony), who, in 1982, bought six apartments on the tower’s 64th and 65th floors for about $10 million. (Trump Tower is really 58 stories high, but Donald had juggled the floor numbers, skipping 10 flights and renumbering it as if it were a 68-story structure.)
Hixon’s good friend was the powerful concrete union boss John Cody, a balding, bulky, 60-year-old who had weathered eight arrests, including one for attempted rape, and three convictions. Since Donald had decided to build the tower of concrete, he and Cody became closely intertwined. But before the building was finished, Cody was indicted in an eight-count federal racketeering case, charged with taking $160,000 in kickbacks. His mob associations were so strong that the FBI claimed that Carlo Gambino, the most powerful mobster in America, came to the $51,000 wedding of Cody’s son in Long Island in 1973. The concrete boss’s bodyguard, indicted on a murder rap and bailed out by Cody’s investment banker son, was later shot to death. The Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force questioned Trump about information it had received indicating that the union leader had strong-armed him and won a commitment for an apartment in Trump Tower in exchange for labor peace during its construction...
Hixon’s good friend was the powerful concrete union boss John Cody, a balding, bulky, 60-year-old who had weathered eight arrests, including one for attempted rape, and three convictions. Since Donald had decided to build the tower of concrete, he and Cody became closely intertwined. But before the building was finished, Cody was indicted in an eight-count federal racketeering case, charged with taking $160,000 in kickbacks. His mob associations were so strong that the FBI claimed that Carlo Gambino, the most powerful mobster in America, came to the $51,000 wedding of Cody’s son in Long Island in 1973. The concrete boss’s bodyguard, indicted on a murder rap and bailed out by Cody’s investment banker son, was later shot to death. The Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force questioned Trump about information it had received indicating that the union leader had strong-armed him and won a commitment for an apartment in Trump Tower in exchange for labor peace during its construction...
Barrett tracked Trump for The Village Voice, offices pictured here around 1975.
MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORKGETTY IMAGES
...While there’s no evidence that Polo, the Weinbergs, or Bogatin were personally close to Trump, other felon residents were. Convicted cocaine dealer Joe Weichselbaum, whose helicopter company serviced the Trump casinos, didn’t move into the two adjoining apartments his girlfriend bought for $2.4 million until he got out of federal prison in 1989. But before that, the mysterious Weichselbaum—who was so friendly with Donald he was gossiping with his parole officer about Marla Maples well before her association with Donald ever hit the newspapers—rented an apartment owned by Donald in Trump Plaza, paying half its $7000 a month rent in bartered copter service. On his release from prison (he’d told his parole board he was going to become a Trump consultant), he and his girlfriend managed to move into their apartments without the burden of any mortgage financing.
Finally, there was Robert Hopkins, a Lucchese crime family associate, who was arrested in his Trump Tower suite for ordering a mob murder of a gambling competitor. While the murder count was dismissed, Hopkins was convicted of running one of the city’s biggest illegal gambling operations—taking in half a million a week and running numbers out of as many as a hundred locations. State investigators maintained a tap on his Trump Tower phone for months, concluding that he “controlled the enterprise” from the tower apartments.
Donald was not as friendly with Hopkins as he was with Weichselbaum, but he did know him through Roy Cohn, whose firm handled both Weichselbaum’s criminal cases and those of the major mob figure behind him, “Joe Beck” DePalermo. Robert Lamagra, a mob-tied mortgage broker, subsequently convicted in two federal fraud cases, arranged Hopkins’s mortgages of nearly $1.7 million. Donald personally visited the closing, to which Hopkins brought a briefcase containing as much as $200,000 in cash and sat at the end of Trump’s conference table counting it.
Donald was not as friendly with Hopkins as he was with Weichselbaum, but he did know him through Roy Cohn, whose firm handled both Weichselbaum’s criminal cases and those of the major mob figure behind him, “Joe Beck” DePalermo. Robert Lamagra, a mob-tied mortgage broker, subsequently convicted in two federal fraud cases, arranged Hopkins’s mortgages of nearly $1.7 million. Donald personally visited the closing, to which Hopkins brought a briefcase containing as much as $200,000 in cash and sat at the end of Trump’s conference table counting it.
The Bagman Cometh.
How does this guy get three votes?
Watch the Sammy The Bull clip in full.
Especially around:
24 minutes where Trump's name is SPECIFICALLY dropped as organizing rigged boxing matches with Mark Etess.
Again Trump's name is mentioned at 37 minutes.
Then at 41 minutes they specifically mention the mob communicating with Trump to send him messages and use the labor unions to threaten construction slow downs
Trump has BEEN around the mob.
On the verge of the Trump Taj Mahal being investigated for money laundering, 3 Trump Organization executives die in a mysterious helicopter crash
https://pressofatlanticcity.com/gal...cle_40ea7e95-9309-5e01-89ba-7f6c30409ff3.html
Guilani killed the investigation into this crash:
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214 @DrDealgood @Red Shield
Especially around:
24 minutes where Trump's name is SPECIFICALLY dropped as organizing rigged boxing matches with Mark Etess.
Again Trump's name is mentioned at 37 minutes.
Then at 41 minutes they specifically mention the mob communicating with Trump to send him messages and use the labor unions to threaten construction slow downs
Trump has BEEN around the mob.
On the verge of the Trump Taj Mahal being investigated for money laundering, 3 Trump Organization executives die in a mysterious helicopter crash
https://pressofatlanticcity.com/gal...cle_40ea7e95-9309-5e01-89ba-7f6c30409ff3.html
Guilani killed the investigation into this crash:
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214 @DrDealgood @Red Shield
Federal Investigators Execute Search Warrant at Rudy Giuliani’s Apartment
nytimes.com
Federal Investigators Execute Search Warrant at Rudy Giuliani’s Apartment
William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman
6-7 minutes
Prosecutors obtained the warrant as part of an investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws as President Trump’s personal lawyer.
Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press
April 28, 2021, 12:01 p.m. ET
Federal investigators in Manhattan executed a search warrant on Wednesday at the Upper East Side apartment of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who became President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, stepping up a criminal investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
One of the people said the investigators had seized Mr. Giuliani’s electronic devices.
Executing a search warrant is an extraordinary move for prosecutors to take against a lawyer, let alone a lawyer for a former president, and it marks a major turning point in the long-running investigation into Mr. Giuliani.
The federal authorities have been largely focused on whether Mr. Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs, who at the same time were helping Mr. Giuliani search for dirt on Mr. Trump’s political rivals, including President Biden, who was then a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan and the F.B.I. had for months sought to secure a search warrant for Mr. Giuliani’s phones.
Under Mr. Trump, senior political appointees in the Justice Department repeatedly sought to block such a warrant, The New York Times reported, slowing the investigation as it was gaining momentum last year. After Merrick B. Garland was confirmed as President Biden’s attorney general, the Justice Department lifted its objection to the search.
While the warrant is not an explicit accusation of wrongdoing against Mr. Giuliani, it shows that the investigation has entered an aggressive new phase. To obtain a search warrant, investigators need to persuade a judge they have sufficient reason to believe that a crime was committed and that the search would turn up evidence of the crime.
Spokesmen for the F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
The investigation of Mr. Giuliani grew out of a case against two Soviet-born men who aided his mission in Ukraine to unearth damaging information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter, who was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The prosecutors charged the two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, with unrelated crimes in late 2019 and a trial is scheduled for October.
While investigating Mr. Giuliani, prosecutors have examined, among other things, his potential business dealings in Ukraine and his role in pushing the Trump administration to oust the American ambassador to Ukraine, which was the subject of testimony at Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.
As he was pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens, Mr. Giuliani became fixated on removing the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, whom he saw as an obstacle to those efforts. At the urging of Mr. Giuliani and other Republicans, Mr. Trump ultimately Ms. Yovanovitch.
As part of the investigation into Mr. Giuliani, the prosecutors have explored whether he was working not only for Mr. Trump, but also for Ukrainian officials or businesses who wanted the ambassador to be dismissed for their own reasons, according to people briefed on the matter.
Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, it is a federal crime to try to influence or lobby the United States government at the request or direction of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department.
The prosecutors have scrutinized Mr. Giuliani’s dealings with Yuriy Lutsenko, one of the officials who helped Mr. Giuliani and his associates in their dirt-digging mission while also urging them to work to get the ambassador removed.
Among other things, the prosecutors have examined discussions Mr. Giuliani had about taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in apparently unrelated consulting business from Mr. Lutsenko, which resulted in a draft retainer agreement that was never executed.
Mr. Giuliani has said he turned down the deal, which would have involved him helping the Ukrainian government recover money it believed had been stolen and stashed overseas.
As the investigation heated up last summer, prosecutors and F.B.I. agents in Manhattan were preparing to seek the search warrant for Mr. Giuliani’s records about his efforts to remove the ambassador, but they first had to notify Justice Department officials in Washington, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Federal prosecutors must consult Justice Department officials in Washington about search warrants involving lawyers because of concerns that they might obtain confidential communications with clients. The proposed warrant for Mr. Giuliani was particularly sensitive because his most prominent client was Mr. Trump.
Career Justice Department officials in Washington largely supported the search warrant, but senior officials raised concerns that the warrant would be issued too close to the election, the people with knowledge of the matter said.
Under longstanding practice, the Justice Department generally tries to avoid taking aggressive investigative actions within 60 days of an election if those actions could affect the outcome of the vote.
The prosecutors in Manhattan tried again after the election, but political appointees in Mr. Trump’s Justice Department sought once more to block the warrant, the people with knowledge of the matter said. At the time, Mr. Trump was still contesting the election results in several states, a legal effort being led by Mr. Giuliani, those officials noted.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
Again...Trump is NOT a good guy. He's a fukking snitch and thinks he has the get-out-of-jail-free card and prosecutorial immunity. He doesn't. He's just allowed to run around on a leash because he's the fed's window to the underworld. He's a puppet who thinks he has no strings. He's THAT stupid. He is NOT a hero.
