Trump in a Bikini
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Op-Ed Columnist Trump in a Bikini
Is it too late for Hillary Clinton to surrender to Donald Trump's demand that she take a drug ...
New York Times - 9 hours ago
MELANIA TRUMP PHOTOS — Wannabe First Lady Shows More Skin!
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The Trump Side of Canadian Immigration
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So, that unraveled quickly.
The "grab 'em by the pussy" tape. The waves of Republican condemnation (and, less often, outright rejection). The midnight quasi-apology. The dictatorial threat to jail his political opponent. The misdirection, parading before cameras women who alleged that his opponent's husband did what he'd admitted doing on tape. The dozen or so women (and counting) who've come forward to say that, yes, he's done exactly what he bragged about doing. The lashing out, threatening to sue theNew York Times and People. Saying his 68-year-old rival's backside wasn't impressive. Accusing his accusers of lying, of being too unattractive to grope, of being in league with his rival's campaign, which in turn was in league with a Mexican businessman and the international banking cabal (coughJews cough).
Then there's the would-be demagogue's dangerous insinuation that if he loses, that means the election was rigged. His followers are listening. One told the Boston Globe, "If she's in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot." Another said he was going to become a poll-watcher to keep an eye on "Mexicans" and "Syrians": "I'm going to make them a little bit nervous."
Think about how insane this is: open talk (to a reporter!) of a coup and voter intimidation, egged on by a man who wants to be president of the United States.
It suffices to say that American politics has never seen a 10-day stretch quite like this – a "total meltdown," as the Time magazine cover put it. A candidate who, not so long ago, was a few good breaks away from the Oval Office, is now a pariah, a laughingstock, a target of unrelenting opprobrium. Three weeks is an eternity in politics, but it sure looks like the S.S. Trump has hit the iceberg. As I write, Donald Trump is about 6 points behind Hillary Clinton and, more problematic, struggling to get above 40 percent.
For the purposes of this column, let's assume that holds – that Trump is toast and that the Democrats will regain a slim Senate majority and win seats in the House. Now what?
Even if Trump is gone, the underlying roots of Trumpism will persist, entrenched into the base of the Republican Party. The stench of losing will be strong; there will be rounds of deserved "I told you so" recriminations from the GOP's savvier elites and intellectuals, the ones who saw Trump as the threat he was and refused to go along out of some misbegotten sense of party unity. There will be another autopsy that, like the one in 2012 that was so thoroughly disregarded, calls for increased minority outreach.
And, one would hope, there will be a price to pay for the spineless, cynical politicians and so-called religious leaders who stuck with Trump despite the pervasive mendacity, despite the repulsive attacks on Muslims and Hispanics, despite the allegations of sexual assault and the proud policy ignorance: Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, Pam Bondi and Ted Cruz, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and Orlando's own Paula White, to name just a few. Conversely, you'd hope that those who put country and principle ahead of party – e.g., John Kasich – would rise from the ashes to become the GOP's new vanguards.
But maybe not.
After all, even after Trump is gone, the roots of Trumpism will remain embedded in the Republican Party. He didn't win the primary by accident. He won because he tapped into an undercurrent of the ugliest elements of the American body politic: economic anxiety and discomfort with changing social mores, sure, but also racism, misogyny, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, fear of the other. As the saying goes, when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And there's no denying that many of Trump's followers feel oppressed watching the country become more multicultural, multiethnic, urban and libertine.
That's what they mean when they say they want their country back.
Trump's enraged base comprises a little less than half of the Republican Party, enough to make it a viable force going forward. More concerning, Trump still has a favorable rating of about 35 percent – people who approve of him, not just those who hate Hillary so much that they're willing to put up with him. That's tens of millions of people – deplorables, if you will – who shrug at or even applaud race-baiting and conspiracy-mongering.
That's not a good sign for our democracy. I can't help but wonder whether a more politically sophisticated demagogue without Trump's baggage and diarrhea of the mouth (or of the tweet) would have prevailed, or whether the 2020 Republican primary will be a race to repudiate Trump or to galvanize his followers. I suspect a little of both – and I'm not sure who will win.
Read the whole story
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The Donald and his sister, federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, both took helicopter flights with a guy who had a lot of ways to get people high.
With Donald Trump calling on Hillary Clinton to take a drug test before their third debate Wednesday evening, it’s the perfect time to bring up one of the biggest campaign issues that major news organizations have avoided: His long, deep, and strange involvement with a major cocaine and marijuana trafficker.
Trump presents himself as the most ardent law-and-order politician ever. Yet throughout his adult life Trump sought out—and worked closely with—more than a score of criminals, including Mafia associates, Russian mob associates, violent felons, con artists, swindlers, and most significant of all, the embezzler and mob associate Joseph Weichselbaum, a thrice-convicted felon.
Long ago, when Trump was the big man in Atlantic City, he got his helicopters to bring his high-rollers in and out of town through a company formed by Weichselbaum, to whom he also entrusted maintenance of the Ivana, Trump’s personal helicopter. Spy, a satirical magazine that often made fun of Trump, reported that Weichselbaum—at that point a twice-convicted felon—personally piloted the Trumps in that copter.
Weichselbaum also had another business: importing drugs from Colombia and shipping them from Bradford Motors, a Miami-area car dealership he partly owned, to Cincinnati.
When Weichselbaum got caught, his case was handled in a most unusual way, with both Donald Trump and one of his siblings in starring roles.
This relationship between the Republican presidential nominee and a major drug trafficker, revealed in court filings and other public documents, has never been explained by the candidate. Trump should be asked in every venue right up to Election Day for a complete and detailed accounting of this relationship.
Trump’s loud sniffling through the first two debates prompted all sorts of speculation. His lagging performance at the end of the first debate, when he lost focus and went off on yet another attack on comedian Rosie O’Donnell, further fueled that speculation. Former Vermont governor and prominent Democrat Howard Dean suggested that Trump snorted cocaine ahead of the first debate, an especially fraught diagnosis even for a physician.
The candidate says that he does not drink or use drugs and never has. I have no evidence to the contrary.
Dean’s rank speculation, and the questions raised on social media about Trump’s sniffling in the second debate, might have been the end of the issue except that Trump decided to breathe new life into it. At campaign rallies Trump said that it seemed to him that Clinton was the one on drugs. Trump declared, against the visible evidence, that Clinton was the one exhausted by debating, suggesting this was because the effects of drugs had worn off.
Trump is well known for projecting—taking things that apply to himself and saying that they apply to others. His comments about Clinton, who was alert and stood with good posture through both debates, did not help him.
But any questions about his personal drug use are small potatoes compared to his long, deep embrace of Weichselbaum. Trump risked his lucrative casino license to demonstrate his unflagging loyalty to a convicted drug trafficker.
The unusual relationship between Trump and Weichselbaum deserves at least as much attention as the Republican nominee’s refusal to make public any of his tax returns or the questions about what was contained in the Democratic nominee’s tens of thousands of emails that she says were private and that State Department staff deleted.
Yet, to use Trumpian language, I alone am raising the issue of his drug-distributor pal.
Law enforcement reports long ago identified Weichselbaum as a Mafia associate. At one time he was actively involved in cigarette-boat racing in Miami, a sport that attracted a number of high-level criminals ranging from fellow drug traffickers to corrupt financiers like Charles Keating, the poster boy for the savings-and-loan scandals of quarter century ago, who came in second in a race where Weichselbaum ran third.
Trump needed helicopters to fly high-rollers to Atlantic City. The selection of Damin Aviation was odd given that there were better-financed helicopter companies with longer track records. Damin was set up as a lightly financed tax-sheltered operation that benefited from lavish state of New Jersey subsidies. Despite that structure, it soon went bust and reemerged as Nimad—Damin spelled backward. It went bust again.
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Through all this Trump stayed with Damin, run by Joseph’s brother and continuing to him, instead of switching to any of the other helicopter providers.
Because Weichselbaum was then a twice-convicted felon, New Jersey gambling regulators eventually insisted he not be involved with providing helicopter services to the Trump casinos.
Yet Weichselbaum continued collecting a $100,000 salary (more than $220,000 in today’s money) and a company car and driver from Nimad. And Trump kept using the company that paid Weichselbaum even though he was supposedly no longer involved, which technically met the requirements imposed by casino regulators.
According to his indictment, Weichselbaum’s more lucrative business was having drugs delivered to Bradford Motors, the Miami-area car dealership he had an ownership stake in. At one point, he helped load up to 1,500 pounds of drugs at the time into cars that mules drove to the Cincinnati area for distribution in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, testimony and his confession established.
Trump learned of the indictment shortly after it was filed in October 1985, New Jersey Casino Control Commission records show. At that point Trump should have cut off all connections to Weichselbaum because failing to do so could cost him his casino license.
The New Jersey Casino Control Act requires owners to prove by clear and convincing evidence that they do not consort with criminals. The United States Supreme Court upheld this law because a casino license is a privilege, not a right.
Instead of abandoning Weichselbaum, Trump did him the first of several favors.
Two months after the indictment, Trump rented apartment 32C in the Trump Plaza Apartments on E. 61st St. in Manhattan to the Weichselbaum brothers, according to New Jersey Casino Control Commission records. Trump personally owned the unit.
It was an odd arrangement. The brothers were to pay about half the rent in cash and the rest in unspecified helicopter services, which would be hard to establish without a thorough audit, according to those casino regulatory files.
Meanwhile, Weichselbaum agreed to plead guilty in Federal District Court in Cincinnati. His Ohio lawyer, Arnold Morelli, asked that sentencing be done either in Miami, where Bradford Motors is located, or Manhattan where the confessed drug trafficker lived.
Instead the case somehow ended up in New Jersey—and in not just any courtroom, either. It came before Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s older sister.
After three weeks Judge Barry recused herself, explaining to the chief judge that her husband, Trump casino lawyer John Barry, and she had flown in the helicopters of a confessed drug trafficker. At the time, there was only a signed order reassigning the case, but not explaining the reasons for doing so. Six years passed before Barry’s reason for recusal—potentially damaging to the federal judiciary—emerged in a book by investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.
Then Trump wrote a letter on Trump Organization stationery pleading for mercy for Weichselbaum. He called him “a credit to the community.” Trump also described the drug trafficker as “conscientious, forthright and diligent,” not the sort of language a law-and-order presidential candidate would be expected to apply to a drug trafficker who moved more than 11 pounds of cocaine in one shipment alone and more than three quarters of a ton of marijuana in another.
When New Jersey gaming regulators first asked Trump about this letter he denied writing it. When they came back with a copy of the letter, Trump said under oath that his signature was on the page. What else he may have been asked is unknown because the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Gaming Enforcement’s report did not indicate that Trump was asked the obvious questions:
What prompted you to write the letter knowing you could lose your casino license over it?
What were your business dealings with Weichselbaum beyond helicopter services?
Did you invest in the drug deals?
Trump has never answered questions about this, including when he called me at my home on April 27 to tell me that unless he liked what I wrote about him he would sue me, something no other candidate for office has ever done in my half century of reporting.
Trump’s letter worked. Weichselbaum served just 18 months, while the mules who merely drove the drugs got sentences of up to 20 years.
When time came for parole, Weichselbaum said he had the required job and a place to live. He told authorities he would be Trump’s helicopter guy. Then he moved into Trump Tower.
It’s more than reasonable, indeed critical, that Trump be pinned down on just what motivated his unusual actions in the Weichselbaum case. He needs to be asked why, as he is now doing with Vladimir Putin, he went out of his way to make sure Weichselbaum knew that in Donald Trump he had a totally loyal ally who would never turn on him.
Having a tax cheat in the White House four decades ago and another a heartbeat away was bad enough. Why in the world would we want the ally of a drug trafficker anywhere near the Oval Office?
Wednesday evening, debate moderator Chris Wallace will have the opportunity to ask Trump why he stood by this convicted felon, risking his casino empire in the process.
Until Trump offers real answers, we have no way of knowing whether he simply displayed the kind of bad judgement he attributes to Clinton or was knowingly involved in Weichselbaum’s drug business.
Read the whole story
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The Daily Cougar |
Trump will destroy Republican Party by campaign's end
The Daily Cougar In response, Trump claimed that Ryan, the highest-ranking Republican in office and certainly one of the most respected, is a “feckless leader” and is a disloyal party member. He also implicated Sen. John McCain who, in Trump's own infamous words, said ... Michigan GOP vice-chair ousted for refusal to support TrumpDetroit Free Press Conservatism Never Fails: How the GOP Will Explain Away Trump's Disastrous CampaignSlate Magazine Michigan GOP official ousted over Trump oppositionThe Detroit News PennLive.com -TPM -WDIV Detroit all 102 news articles » |
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Ever since a series of bankruptcies left banks unwilling to lend to him, Donald Trump has been on the lookout for partners willing to fund the buildings that bear his name.
Sample the FT’s top stories for a week
You select the topic, we deliver the news.
Over the years the US presidential candidate has assembled an eclectic collection of backers and collaborators. Some had chequered pasts, with links to organised crime or fraud schemes. But perhaps the biggest risk for Mr Trump’s complex, often opaque, business empire was that it might be used for a purpose US officials fear is rife in the country’s real estate sector: laundering dirty money.
A Financial Times investigation has found evidence that one Trump venture has multiple ties to an alleged international money laundering network. Title deeds, bank records and correspondence show that a Kazakh family accused of laundering hundreds of millions of stolen dollars bought luxury apartments in a Manhattan tower part-owned by Mr Trump and embarked on major business ventures with one of the tycoon’s partners.
As Mr Trump runs for the White House, the revelations raise questions about what steps his business takes to ensure that the funds that pour through it are clean.
Jennifer Shasky Calvery, director of the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, warned in January that “corrupt foreign officials, or transnational criminals, may be using premium US real estate to secretly invest millions in dirty money”.
One former executive at a developer that worked with Mr Trump accused him of “wilful obliviousness” to the details of his partners’ dealings. But a spokesman for the Trump Organisation said it conducted “extensive” background checks on its partners, including hiring outside investigators.
One of those partners, Bayrock, has already been a source of controversy. Now the details of Bayrock’s association with the family of Viktor Khrapunov, a former Kazakh energy minister and ex-mayor of the city of Almaty, show it was connected to an alleged laundering scheme at the same time as it was collaborating with Mr Trump.
Lawyers for Almaty told a US court in March that Mr Khrapunov and his family “conspired to systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets … and to launder their ill-gotten gains through a complex web of bank accounts and shell companies … particularly in the United States”.
Mr Khrapunov, who now lives in Switzerland, says he is being targeted for opposing the man he used to serve, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s authoritarian ruler since 1989. His supporters say the family’s fortune comes from business success, not embezzlement.
Among the dozens of companies the Almaty lawyers say the Khrapunov laundering network used were three called Soho 3310, Soho 3311 and Soho 3203. Each was a limited liability company, meaning their ownership could easily be concealed.
The companies were created in April 2013 in New York. A week later, property records show, they paid a total of $3.1m to buy the apartments that corresponded with their names in the Trump Soho, a 46-storey luxury hotel-condominium completed in 2010 in a chic corner of Manhattan.
Bank statements submitted by Almaty’s lawyers indicate that the ultimate beneficiary of the Soho companies was Elvira Kudryashova, Mr Khrapunov’s California-based daughter. According to the Kazakh government, she, with her brother Ilyas, is a key link in the family’s laundering network.
Shortly before the Soho companies bought the apartments, more than $3.1m flowed out of Ms Kudryashova’s Wells Fargo account to the firm of Martin Jajan, a New York lawyer. Mr Jajan proceeded to sign purchase documents for the Trump Soho apartments as buyer’s agent. Other bank records show further links between Ms Kudryashova and her relatives and the Soho shell companies. Mr Jajan did not respond to a request for comment.
On the face of it, Mr Trump was not a beneficiary of the apartment sales. The vendor was another limited liability company, Bayrock/Sapir Organization LLC. It was named after the developers that jointly built Trump Soho: the Sapir Organisation, founded by Tamir Sapir, from Georgia, and Bayrock, founded by Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official.
According to regulatory filings, however, Bayrock/Sapir Organization LLC had a third co-owner — the man who licensed his personal brand to the project.
The Trump Soho, announced in 2006, was an early example of a building that bore the Trump name but was built by someone else. Mr Trump’s access to finance had been curtailed by bankruptcies. But as the star of The Apprentice, his celebrity stock was rising. Partners such as Sapir and Bayrock were prepared to pay to license his name.
Until it fell into financial trouble and changed hands in a 2014 foreclosure sale, Mr Trump enjoyed an 18 per cent share of the profits of the Trump Soho. Alan Garten, general counsel of the Trump Organisation, said Bayrock and the Sapir Organisation were responsible for apartment sales and for conducting due diligence on buyers. Both companies declined to comment.
Mr Garten said he had “no doubt” that “every legal requirement” had been fulfilled. Asked how a member of the Khrapunov family could nonetheless have bought apartments in the Trump Soho — two years after the family was charged in Kazakhstan with financial crimes — he said: “Maybe there’s something wrong with the law but we can’t fault [Bayrock and Sapir] for complying with the laws.”
The laws regulating US real estate deals are scant, experts say. Provisions against terrorism financing in the Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 attacks, obliged mortgage lenders to conduct “know your customer” research. But money launderers pay in cash. Sales such of those of the Trump Soho apartments have passed through this loophole, which was partially closed only this year.
In January, the US launched a pilot programme designed to identify the ultimate owners of shell companies used to buy premium property in Manhattan and Miami. In July officials reported that the new rules had corroborated concerns that “all-cash luxury purchases of residential property by a legal entity are highly vulnerable to abuse for money laundering”.
A spokesman for the Khrapunov family declined to answer detailed questions about the Soho apartment transactions and other deals. “Kazakhstan is using the legal systems of western countries to harass, wear down and destroy political opponents,” the spokesman said. All the Khrapunov family’s business activities “have been conducted in full accordance with Swiss laws,” he added.
Mr Garten of the Trump Organisation said: “We have no knowledge of who [the Khrapunov family] are and have done no business with them.”
Mr Trump’s former partners Bayrock, however, have dealt with them.
As work on Trump Soho got under way in 2007, the partnership between Mr Trump and Bayrock was gathering momentum. Another tower, in Fort Lauderdale, was rising. A 2008 Bayrock presentationincludes a picture of Mr Trump grinning beside Mr Arif and names him as a referee. Bayrock had its office on the 24th floor of Trump Tower and calls the Trump Organisation a “strategic partner”.
The same presentation says Bayrock was one of the backers of the redevelopment of the 101-year-old Hotel du Parc on the shores of Lake Geneva, owned by Swiss Development Group, a Geneva-based company. In May this year, Nicolas Bourg, a Belgian businessman who says he worked with Viktor Khrapunov’s son Ilyas on US real estate deals, claimed in a separate dispute that Swiss Development Group was “owned and controlled by Ilyas and his family and used to conceal the movement and investment of his family’s money”.
Swiss Development Group said it had been sold in 2013 but that it was still suffering “relentless and unsubstantiated pressure … for the sole reason [that] it was linked at some point in time to someone the Kazakh government wants to prosecute”.
The Kazakh government has also accused Helvetic Capital SA, another Swiss company, of being a vehicle for Khrapunov laundering. According to a 2007 draft contract, seen by the FT, Helvetic Capital planned to enter a $1.5m joint venture called KazBay. Its partner was to be Bayrock.
In a 2011 deposition, given in a dispute over the Fort Lauderdale project, Mr Trump said he had “never really understood who owned Bayrock”. Jody Kriss, a former Bayrock finance director, has claimed in racketeering lawsuits against his former employer that Bayrock’s backers included “hidden interests in Russia and Kazakhstan”. Bayrock has denied Mr Kriss’s allegations but declined to answer questions about the source of its funds and its relationship with the Khrapunovs.
Asked if the Trump Organisation had known where Bayrock’s money came from, Mr Garten said: “No. I had no reason to question the source of funds. Its principal investor [Mr Arif] had a successful track record.” He added: “When you do due diligence you act in good faith and try to look at all relevant material but there’s only a certain degree that you can look at things. You can do as much as possible but you are limited to public records.”
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