A Trump Family Thanksgiving: Pass the Affidavits!
Young America’s Fun Couple - and the grand marshals of this year’s Homecoming Parade in Stepford, Connecticut - Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are both in a spot of trouble at the moment. This at least will give them something to talk about when the whole family, and everybody’s lawyers, get together for Thanksgiving dinner next week. The way things are going in and around the First Family, you’re going to need to swear out an affidavit to get somebody to pass the cranberry sauce, which may well be wired by the FBI.
First, it seems that Jared may have had one of his periodic memory lapses when the Senate Judiciary Committee asked him for some emails he’d gotten from WikiLeaks and others that concerned a “backdoor Russian overture” to him and to the Trump campaign. According to Politico, the two ranking members of the SJC pretty clearly have in hand at least copies of the documents that Kushner forgot on top of the washing machine when the committee asked to see them. They wrote to Kushner:
“We appreciate your voluntary cooperation with the Committee’s investigation, but the production appears to have been incomplete.”
In other words, we know what you didn’t send us and you have this one more chance before the hammer really comes down. Then, on Friday, Foreign Affairs lit one more fire under the Dauphin-in-Law’s backside.
Hyzagi’s meeting with Assange resulted in a friendly feature in the Observer and kicked off a long-running series of laudatory articles about the WikiLeaks founder - many of those stories including exclusive details about the Australian transparency advocate. Later, the Observer also became a favored outlet of Guccifer 2.0, a suspected Russian hacker, who along with WikiLeaks released troves of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
WikiLeaks tweeted some of the Observer’s coverage, including stories expressing doubt that the Russians had meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Kushner has long denied any collusion with the Russian government, which is suspected of targeting the 2016 election, but his newspaper proved a favored conduit for hacks, which the U.S. intelligence community says were carried out on Kremlin orders. The Observer was not the only outlet that received exclusive access to Guccifer 2.0 documents - or those from other outlets such as DC Leaks, widely believed to be part of the same campaign - but it was the only one owned by someone who was part of the Trump campaign.
As for the Tsarina, Reuters, working with NBC News, has some interesting details about the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, which, because this was a Trump Organization project, and this is the way they do things, involved Ivanka Trump meeting with shady financiers and Russian gangsters.
A Reuters investigation into the financing of the Trump Ocean Club, in conjunction with the American broadcaster NBC News, found Nogueira was responsible for between one-third and one-half of advance sales for the project. It also found he did business with a Colombian who was later convicted of money laundering and is now in detention in the United States; a Russian investor in the Trump project who was jailed in Israel in the 1990s for kidnap and threats to kill; and a Ukrainian investor who was arrested for alleged people-smuggling while working with Nogueira and later convicted by a Kiev court. Three years after getting involved in the Trump Ocean Club, Nogueira was arrested by Panamanian authorities on charges of fraud and forgery, unrelated to the Trump project. Released on $1.4 million bail, he later fled the country. He left behind a trail of people who claim he cheated them, including over apartments in the Trump project, resulting in at least four criminal cases that eight years later have still to be judged.
Alexandre Nogueira was the Brazilian swindler with whom Ivanka Trump apparently was so impressed that she brought him in on the development of the Ocean Club, and all the other international grifters followed after. Nogueira also as we have seen took it on the arches, leaving a battalion of angry people whom he’d stiffed behind. This also is an essential part of the Trump Organization business plan, as we have seen.
It was not his job to check the source of money that investors used to buy units in the Trump Ocean Club, Nogueira said. “I didn’t know the money was coming from anything illegal. As long as they were doing wire transfers and not cash, I wasn’t worried about the source of it.” Nogueira said that no one asked him about the source of funds. “Nobody ever asked me. The banks didn’t ask. The developers didn’t ask. The Trump Organization didn’t ask me. Nobody asked me: ‘Who are the customers? Where did the money come from?’” It is unclear how much, if any, laundered money went into the Trump project.
“Mr. Nogueira? There’s a whole lot of cocaine flaking off this stack of $20s.”
“Pay that no mind. Put ‘em on spin cycle and forget about it.”
I don’t know how Robert Mueller keeps up. I truly don’t.
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