Apart the Madoro issue, where the administration can transfer punitive capital gain to Trump if it chooses the right leader for Venezuela his problems are multiplying. Here is a major gathering point:
Trump-Russia
Existential Fear: the definitive reason Trump is so subservient to Putin and Russian Oligarchs
Trump needs political favors as currency to pay off debt to Russian Mobsters!
That’s why he has such a strong affinity for Russia and why he is so subservient to Putin.
Trump’s over-the-top claims about his net worth and business successes have been widely reported as gross exaggerations. The Celebrity Apprentice and Fred Trump’s estate both temporarily lifted Trump out of his financial failures of the 1990s, but now Trump is once again saddled with massive debt with no way of digging himself out.
This time, Trump is indebted to Russian Oligarch mobsters instead of banks and junk-bond holders. Trump has tapped large amounts of Russian funding in attempts to expand his financial empire. The problem? Those investments are tanking and the Russians want their money back. Trump is starting to realize that he can’t walk away from Russian Oligarch mobsters the way he used to repeatedly walk away from institutional lenders and bondholders before they cut him off.
Trump’s Relationships With Russian Mobsters Go Back three decades
Just like Trump’s racism, Trump’s relationships with Russian Oligarch mobsters go back decades. Long before we heard about Pee Pee Tapes, Wikileaks or a Trump Tower in Moscow, Trump cultivated scofflaw business relationships with Russians, helping them to get their ill-gotten fortunes out of Russia.
In his book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America, May 2000, Robert I. Friedman tells us how Trump Tower in NYC and Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City became the venues of choice to launder Russian money through real estate transactions and cash. Trump’s properties became comfortable places for Russians to mingle. Incidentally, The Taj Mahal was cited 103 times by Federal Authorities for violating federal money laundering regulations.
This book wasn’t a Trump hit piece. It was a book about the Russian mob that also included research detailing how Trump and Russian mobsters crossed paths as part of the overall narrative. Thisexcerpt demonstrates how Russian Mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov hid from the FBI at mob-friendly Trump properties.
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Russian Mob Boss:
Vyacheslav Ivankov
Excerpt:
… Despite Ivankov’s flagrant, multinational criminal activities, during his first years in America, the FBI had a hard time even locating him “At first all we had was a name,” says the FBI’s James Moody. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around, and had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was in a luxury condo in Trump Towers” in Manhattan. – But almost as soon as they found him, he disappeared again leaving nothing but vapor trails for the FBI to follow. “Ivankov,” explained an FBI agent, “didn’t come from a walk-and-talk culture,” like Italian gangsters who take walks to discuss family business so they can’t be bugged or overheard by the bureau. “As soon as he’d sniff out the feds, he’d go into hiding for days at a time,” a trait that made him harder to keep tabs on than Italian mobsters.
“He was like a ghost to the FBI,” says Gregory Stasiuk, the New York State Organized Crime Task Force special investigator. Stasiuk picked up Ivankov’s trail at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the Trump-owned casino that the real estate magnate boasted was the “eighth wonder of the world.” The Taj Mahal had become the Russian mob’s favorite East Coast destination. As with other high rollers, scores of Russian hoodlums received “comps” for up to $100,000 a visit for free food, rooms, champagne, cartons of cigarettes, entertainment, and transportation in stretch limos and helicopters…
From the Author’s Footnotes: A copy of Ivankov’s personal phone book, which was obtained by the author, included a working number for the Trump Organization’s Trump Tower Residence, and a Trump Organization office fax machine.
In another excerpt, the author exemplifies how money was laundered through Trump properties and a Mafia-controlled bank.
… David Bogatin’s European businesses were taken over by Sergei Mikhailov, who later sold them. (Before he fled the United States, he turned over his mortgages for five pricey Trump Tower apartments to a Genovese associate. The mortgages were liquidated and the funds were moved through a Mafia-controlled bank in Manhattan’s Chelsea.)
After institutional lenders kicked trump to the curb, Trump turned to Russian sources
In the 1990s, American banks worked with Trump on a number of his projects, and he burned them badly. When bank lending dried up. trump tried the public funding route with junk-bonds to help his ailing Taj Majal. He burned bondholders, investors, vendors and employees badly. He burned the banks, bondholders and investors so badly, they wouldn’t touch anything having to do with Trump after that. Trump’s interests in and connections to Russian Oligarchs grew significantly after all other sources of funding dried up. Trump discovered that Putin’s Oligarch buddies were golf aficionados and had cash that Trump could tap, so he borrowed a substantial amount of money from them — possibly a hundred million dollars or more, despite his claims otherwise.
Trump denies having any financial connections with Russians, “NO NOTHING”
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS,
Trump Jr. contradicts his father, claiming Russians funded a “disproportionate” amount
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
— DJ Trump Jr. speaking at a Russian real estate conference.
Eric Trump also contradicts his father, going to the Russians “all the time” for money
Greensboro author Jim Dodson stands by Eric Trump story – the whole story
— Greensboro News and Record, May 2017
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James Dobson, Golf Writer
James Dodson: “So when I got in the cart with Eric, as we were setting off, I said Eric,
who’s funding? I know no banks—because of the recession, the Great Recession—have touched a golf course. You know, no one is funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.”
Eric Trump: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
James Dodson: ”Really?”
Eric Trump: “Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys [Russians] that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time [for cash].”
Dodson afterthought: “He just sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million.”
Trump’s Russian-funded businesses are failing
Trump’s businesses around the world have been failing, and Trump’s Russian funded golf properties are no different. An article from Reuters in 2016 tells us that Trump’s entire golf portfolio has lost half its value.
Donald Trump’s golf courses in Scotland are taking a beating
— Business Insider, October, 2016
“A Reuters examination of Trump’s golf empire earlier this year, based on his own comments and official filings, calculated that he had spent over $1.1 billion building a portfolio that was now worth about half that sum.”
Other Trump businesses are failing around the world
When Russian mobsters lose half of their investment, they aren’t happy about it. If you extrapolate from Eric Trump’s conversation, the Russians lost $50 million or more, possibly into the hundreds of millions.
What makes matters even worse, it isn’t just the golf properties. Trump’s businesses are failing across the board, leaving Trump with no way to pay back the Russians.
The PGA and R&A have pulled multiple tournaments from Trump’s courses. This is costing Trump millions in shared event revenue and millions more in marketing goodwill — every year.
Occupancy rates and room rates at Trump Hotels have declined precipitously. Owners of four major hotels globally have disassociated themselves from the Trump brand.
Even in Trump’s Manhattan back yard, condo owners are removing the Trump branding from their buildings because it’s hurting their property values.
Trump tumbles down the Forbes 400 as his net worth has taken a major hit since he launched his presidential run, — CNBC, October 2nd, 2018
President Donald Trump’s net worth has declined by more than $1 billion since the year he launched his presidential campaign at the foot of Trump Tower’s escalator, Forbes reported Tuesday [October 2018]…
… The president’s net worth stands at $3.1 billion, down from $4.5 billion in 2015, Forbes said. As a result, Trump has tumbled down the Forbes 400 list, the latest edition of which will be published in full Wednesday [October 2018].
Trump fears Russian bill collectors
Trump owes Russian Oligarch Mobsters hundreds of millions of dollars and he has no way to pay them back. Trump isn’t afraid of Pee Pee Tapes. Trump is afraid of Russian bill collectors with Novichok and Polonium 210 in their carry-on luggage. Not only is he afraid for himself, he is afraid for his adult children who are also tightly intertwined with the Trump Organization and may also be vulnerable.
Even if you consider existential fear to be hyperbole, there is no question that Trump fears the Russian Oligarchs to whom he owes millions of dollars. That is the reason he displays such a strong affinity for Russia over the United States, and such subservience to Putin and his Oligarch mobster cronies — at the expense of America’s interests. Putin is pressuring Trump to make good on his Russian debt and Trump is complying.
Another hotspot issue:
The disturbing signal Trump’s silence sends to Russia
By Samantha Vinograd
Updated at 12:00 PM ET, Mon January 28, 2019
Play Video
How Stone’s indictment links him to Julian Assange 02:53
Editor’s Note:Samantha Vinograd is a CNN national security analyst. She served on President Obama’s National Security Council from 2009-2013 and at the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush. Follow her @sam_vinograd. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN) — Every week, I offer a glimpse of the kind of intelligence assessments that are likely to come across the desk of the president of the United States, modeled on the President’s Daily Briefing, or PDB, which the director of national intelligence prepares for the president almost daily.
Here’s this week’s briefing:
Now that Trump’s longtime friend and informal adviser Roger Stone has been indicted, both our enemies and allies around the world can see that special counsel Robert Mueller has evidence to believe that senior Trump campaign officials spoke with Stone about Wikileaks and that a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases from Wikileaks, an organization that published information that Russia stole from Americans.
Sam Vinograd
The President’s “witch hunt” response to the special counsel’s indictment – especially when considered along with his response to previous ones – will likely be interpreted by many around the world as a sign that when it comes to Russia, he’s conflicted. By crying witch hunt louder than he decries Russia’s attack, he’s setting us up for another very dangerous election season. His failure to condemn illegal Russian behavior, especially when it involves his own associates and family, will probably be interpreted as condoning it. That opens the US to a lot of risk going forward.
Possible scenario based on a thin layer of social-psychological performance, drawn on very broad brushstrokes.
The issue of identity politics may be the fulcrum, around which a lot of tangential weights are expected to be be balanced.
The lowest common denominator appears to be the issue if social/psychological political weigh in in the broadest sense: that is the conflict between nationalism, versus internationalism as driving the agenda by the economic spectrum as it appears to be a factor in assessing the constitutional basis of social idioms.
Particularly, how do immigration/border-protection measure into referential national and psychological formulations of reactive and/or progressive processes emerging in the near far term global and regional=national contexts?
How do these factor in on acquired , predicated and assumed data, versus the simulated effects of perceived continua as amalgamated with the quantified data?
May be that such simulations of coercive and collusioned predictions are nothing else but an effort to integrate the otherwise linear and conflicted picture of a publicly unassumable and unacceptable scenario?
Such simulations have probably reached such advanced levels, as to generate the need to hypergenerate data, which may reach their normative levels of prior expected assumptions.?
Assumptions.
The reforming of dialectical logistics, given free reign in defining a newer ideological shift, as for instance the conflict over material or ideological dialectic, as actuating such future inclusive formulations, in a world where constitutional definition do not, or can not substantiate those pattern assumptions that validated them at their inception.
Those , static, at the time of their statistical certainty became probable and dynamic universal indexes, with procedures overcoming their presumed incentive values.
Short and long term acceptable curves have become less differentiable, where the outcomes have created objective planning to become much more prone to social dissatisfaction and anger, on the same patently reified level, not in tune with the expected mark of the simulation, whereby that Mark has to be placed far higher then even the most liberal expected goals, to hit that Mark.
The communist 5 year’s plans indicate an equal failure on part of social expectations to achieve goals , therefore, long term, the residual negative values could have indicated the economic failures within a much shorter time.
The increasing shortened time scale is evident to to co-measure an almost similar fashion on the face of free enterprise based social system, appearing as a probable vindication of Marxist, albeit belated prophesies.
The digestion of dynamic versus patent conflation of the effects of ideological social vacuums in so called ‘rouge’ nations, hedging their predictions on archaic, 50-100 years of backward ideology, can in no way become public universal policy, and advanced techno-cyber vested nations , of Europe, Russia and the U.S., are dynamically and collusive-apparently are deliberately undermining the patent expectant-projective political schemes, in order to guard against the dynamic-material diametrically conflicted ideology to disintegrate world wide, and subsequently, create a global unmanageable state of affairs, that could actually reverse the status quo into a world war continuation.
This is the function of the war on terror trilaterally by Russia, Europe, and the U.S…
This simulation is probably the most probable and effective way to predict the progressive utilization of a social psychological, political and economic realities facing the present global environment.
On release of Taxes.:
Here’s why House Democrats are going to go after Trump’s taxes – and soon
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 5:00 PM EST, Mon January 28, 2019
(CNN) House Democrats have been very careful in the opening days of Congress to pick their fights carefully.
Led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (California), the party stood up to President Donald Trump over his demands for a border wall – and won. But even with that victory in hand, top Democratic strategists are wary not to overstep their mandate from the 2018 election – concerned that looking as though they are attacking Trump on all fronts at all times will a) lessen the impact of any one fight and b) create a toxic partisan environment that could hurt them and their eventual 2020 nominee.