Author: clearandpresentdanger

So, Hunter Biden gets a special prosecutor and Jared Kushner gets three billion dollars from hostile foreign governments. What’s wrong with this picture?

In this article, I’m building a case for the following:

1. Jared Kushner leveraged his White House position to get a bailout for his terrible 666 Fifth Avenue investment. This could be a violation of federal law.

2. Kushner traded top secret documents and/or information from the White House to help MBS take over Saudi Arabia (and to excuse his murder of Jamal Khashoggi) and was paid over $2 billion for his efforts. If true, this is a violation of federal law.

3. Both Putin and MBS want Trump back in office so he can end American democracy and have us join the growing number of autocratic nations, giving them support rather than the antagonistic relationship they have with the Biden administration.  To that end, they’ve engineered a cut in oil production that will show up as higher gas prices by election time.

4. Also to that end, Russia engineered the “Hunter laptop” scandal, which Republicans are now running with to try to damage Biden’s chances in the 2024 election (as Kevin McCarthy bragged that they’d done with Hillary prior to 2016).

5. Finally, to that end, Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Gulf dictatorships with aligned interests are financing the Trump family (and thus the Trump campaign) via the LIV golf tournaments and Trump’s new billion-dollar real estate deal in Oman.

So, let’s go through them one at a time:

1. In early 2018, Jared needed a billion dollars or his entire life could come crashing down.

The son of a professional con-artist (Charles Kushner, who was pardoned by Trump) and a minor slumlord, Jared is said to have gotten advice from a PR professional when his father went to prison in 2005. Ben Walsh noted for Huffington Post that Jared’s dad tells the story that his PR friend advised Jared:

“Step one: Buy a New York newspaper. Don’t be too particular; any newspaper will do. Step two: Buy a big Manhattan building. Any building will do. Step three: Marry the daughter of a rich New York family. Anyone will do.”

Jared, the story goes, then purchased the New York Observer newspaper in July 2006; overpaid $1.8 billion for the 666 Fifth Avenue office building just down the street from Trump Tower in early 2007; and, now impressively credentialed as a Serious Guy, hooked up with Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, in 2008, marrying her in October, 2009.

But by the time Trump ended up in the White House, the note on 666 Fifth Avenue was coming due, and Jared was panicking. The building’s valued cratered in the Bush Real Estate and Stock Market Crash of 2008 and never recovered; it was appraised at a mere $820 million in 2010 and no American or European bank would go near it.

For two long pre-Trump-presidency years, 2015 and 2016, Jared and is father desperately tried to obtain funding for the building from the government of Qatar, via negotiations with Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani (known as “HBJ”), the former Prime Minister who at that time ran the country’s quarter-trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund.

After Trump won the election in November, 2016, the Kushners went so far as to invite HBJ to Trump Tower in New York; at that meeting he finally agreed to put up a half-billion dollars toward their financing, contingent on their getting other financing for the rest of the package.

When they couldn’t get the matching funding, however, HBJ and Qatar backed out of the deal in early 2017.

On May 20, 2017, Kushner had a secret, private meeting with the leaders of Saudi Arabia. Three weeks later, on June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt cut diplomatic relations with Qatar and blockaded that country, preventing the Qataris from obtaining food and other supplies.

According to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson this came as a complete shock to the US government, particularly as our Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf is based out of Qatar. Tillerson tried to defuse the situation but was unsuccessful when, in a bizarre and anti-American move, President Trump came out in support of the blockade of our military ally.

NBC News reported at the time that the Qatari government publicly believed the blockade was a reprisal against them for refusing to fund Kushner’s real estate deal. Finally, hungry, in 2018 Qatar gave in and backstopped two real estate deals for Kushner: $184 million in May to refinance a Chicago building he owned and an August 1st billion dollar refinance deal on 666 Fifth Avenue.

2. Kushner gave Saudi Arabia’s MBS top-secret information from the White House about who in that country was loyal to him and who wasn’t.

Much of this involved Jared Kushner apparently helping Mohammed bin Salman take over the country of Saudi Arabia from his cousin and the grandson of the king, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, in 2017.

As The Jerusalem Post reported:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October [2017] meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

In other words, Kushner apparently took top-secret US intelligence (from Trump’s Presidential Daily Brief) to Saudi Arabia about who was and wasn’t loyal to MBS and gave it to the Saudi prince, who then used that information to jail and murder his political opponents, solidifying his control of the country and its trillions. (Mohammed bin Nayef, the country’s leader who MBS overthrew, is still in prison.)

After Nayef was deposed and MBS took over Saudi Arabia, Qatar gave in and handed Kushner all the money he wanted, with Saudi Arabia giving Kushner an additional $2 billion soon after Trump left office.

3. Both Putin and MBS want Trump back in office.

Early last month, Saudi Arabia and Russia jointly announced a 2 million barrel per day cut in oil production, which is just now starting to work its way through world oil prices (world oil production runs around 80 million barrels a day).

By this time next year, this production cut may well have pushed US gasoline prices above $5 a gallon, particularly if US refiners — overwhelmingly aligned with the GOP — cut refinery production again like they did over President Biden’s objections in the months leading up to the 2022 election.

4. To help Trump back into office, Russian intelligence put together the Hunter Biden laptop “scandal.”

Hunter Biden, when he was deep into drugs and alcohol, was apparently using a Russian escort service to hook up with women he could pay for sex. Those women had time alone with him and his actual computer and his iPhone — and may have made good use of that time (particularly if Hunter blacked out after partying hard).

An email account associated with the Russian escort service appears to have seized control of Hunter’s iCloud account, which contained backups of both his phone and his laptop. Marcy Wheeler over at emptywheel.net has dug through the contents of Hunter’s laptop that Republicans have published, and this Russian seizure of the iCloud backup account appears solid (you can read all the details here and here).

From reading Marcy’s work and other publicly sourced materials, I believe it all shows that the laptop that Rudy Giuliani ended up with via a blind computer repair guy in New Jersey was simply a clone, which is why Hunter has no recollection of ever owning it or dropping it off and the signature on the receipt is not his.

The Russians, apparently, downloaded everything from Hunter’s iCloud account, tweaked it as they wanted, and wrote the data onto the hard drive of a random computer and dropped it off at the computer repair shop, whose owner was somehow connected to Rudy.

This is an old and standard trick in Russia: when Putin wants to discredit an opponent but doesn’t want to overtly poison them, it’s often “discovered” that they had a secret life, were secretly gay, were secretly corrupt, etc., a charge often backed up by doctored computer data.

In addition to blemishing the reputation of both Hunter and his dad, and providing salacious dick pics for a giddy Marjorie Taylor Greene to show to the world, the main benefit to Trump of this story is that when anybody brings up the corruption and insider-dealing of Jared and Ivanka (and her millions in trademarks from the Chinese when she accompanied Daddy to Beijing) they can respond with, “the Biden family is just as corrupt.”

This “they’re all corrupt” meme also accomplishes one of Putin’s main goals, which is to disparage western-style democracy and cause Americans to lose faith in our form of government. From there, it’s a short step — already promoted by millions of Trump followers — to replacing a democratically elected president with a full-on dictatorial autocrat. Even if it takes violence, as Matt Gaetz proposed yesterday.

As then-candidate Joe Biden told 60 Minutes on October 25, 2020 about the errant laptop:

“From what I’ve read and know, the intelligence community warned the president [Trump] that Giuliani was being fed disinformation from the Russians. And we also know that Putin is trying very hard to spread disinformation about Joe Biden. And so when you put the combination of Russia, Giuliani and the president together, you assess what it is. It’s a smear campaign because he has nothing he wants to talk about in his — what is he running on? What is he running on?”

And as Politico noted in an article titled, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say”:

“More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’”

And just last week America learned that an FBI whistleblower — an actual whistleblower, who filed all the right papers with the government and sought protection from reprisal (not a phony whistleblower, like Comer keeps trotting out in front of Congress) — came right out and told Congress in closed-door testimony that the entire Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian operation.

5. Gulf states, now aligned with petrobillionaire Putin, are helping finance Trump’s bid for office in 2024.

The Trump presidency was a boon for the oil-producing dictatorships around the Persian Gulf. Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia, and he and Kushner set aside the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Trump also ridiculed climate science, gutted the EPA, paused US government efforts to transition to clean fuels, and embraced increases in fossil fuel production worldwide.

In return, the oil nations of the Gulf have showered Trump with gifts. The most recent was including a new Trump hotel in a $4 billion real estate development in Oman, financed and put together by a Saudi real estate billionaire connected to MBS.

Trump has also received an unknown amount of cash for his promotion of the Saudi LIV Golf Tournament, which is now based in Trump hotels here in the US. Nobody knows how much money Trump has received, but if the Saudis are paying some of the players literally hundreds of millions of dollars (Tiger Woods says he turned down $700 million), it’s not a stretch to believe Trump may be getting something in that vicinity.

While Trump is pleading poverty to his sucker donors, he and his family are raking in a fortune from the Gulf petro-states. And they’re probably using some of that money in his campaign to retake the White House.

What we are seeing here is an all-out assault on democracy in America, coming from multiple dictatorial regimes that have an interest — both financial and political — in seeing Trump back in office.

That the GOP is more than happy to have their help tells us everything we need to know about how severely Trump and his ilk have corrupted the Party of Lincoln. Honest Abe is turning over in his grave…

West Bonner County, Idaho, like most of the state, is Trump country. The four-time indicted former president won 73% of the vote in the county in 2020. And, following their MAGA instincts, county voters swept in a radical right-wing school board in the November 2021 elections. 

HOWEVER — After seeing those two board members work diligently to destroy their schools, county voters overwhelmingly recalled them last Tuesday. 

The big 60% recall vote underscored the depth of disgust this conservative community felt for electing candidates who delivered exactly what they promised to do. And yet weirdly, they didn’t like conservative governance when it affected them directly!  

Defending themselves in the voter guide, recalled Board Chair Keith Rutledge wrote:

Your vote today will determine the future of our district. Voting AGAINST my recall will keep a conservative majority on the school board that is working hard to improve the outcomes for our district’s children. Voting for my recall will hand control of our district back over to the very same people that are responsible for 60% reading competency rates and call that ‘a success.’

Rutledge’s defense was OH NO THE LIBERALS. Vice Chair Susan Brown, also recalled, was even more unhinged in her voter statement:

If you want a board member who will fight for financial transparency, work to keep our schools free of woke agendas, and demand educational outcomes better than 60% competency for our children, vote AGAINST the recall.

WOKE WOKE WOKE.

Man, no one is buying that “woke” crap anymore, are they?

Their campaign website declared, “Keep the board CONSERVATIVE Vote AGAINST the leftist-backed recall.” No one bought that either.

So what did these two school board members do to merit the wrath of their conservative community?

For one thing, they lobbied for the defeat of a supplement school funding levy. Voters rejected the measure, which cost the district $4.7 million—a third of their budget. No organization can survive that kind of financial hit without serious consequences. As the recall organizers argued, “Rutledge and Brown failed to uphold their oaths of office to improve public schools, don’t respect their constituents or fellow board members and have shown a lack of concern for student education.” You don’t improve anything by decimating its budget.

In addition, they hired a school superintendent, Branden Durst, who had zero experience as either a teacher or school administrator. But, he had plenty of experience as a culture war warrior at the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is just as awful as you think it is. The top Education headlines on their website hyperventilate about Boise schools “affirm[ing] new sexual identities of ‘gender queer,’ ‘pansexual,’ and ‘nonbinary,’” cry about “woke pre-K and child care providers,” focus on bathroom policy nonsense, and pine for Florida-style education reforms that are gutting that state’s supply of teachers.

In fact, one of the headlines on their site hails West Bonner School District for implementing a transphobic bathroom policy. (I can’t imagine what it might be like growing up trans or queer in West Bonner.) Durst wasn’t hired to improve educational outcomes—the guy clearly has no clue what he’s doing—but to implement a culture war agenda with zero relevance to educating students. In fact, Durst is literally not qualified for the position, as Idaho requires, “four years of full-time certificated experience working with students while under contract with an accredited school.” Durst’s application must get a waiver by the State Board of Education (which hasn’t happened yet).

One of the dissenting school board members, Carlyn Barton, set the stage for the subsequent recall effort with her fierce opposition to Durst’s hiring on June 29:

[F]rom the research I have done, the superintendent candidate that was voted in is not currently qualified or able to fulfill all the duties of a public-school superintendent. Even with an emergency certification. The direction of our board has turned into a fascist dictatorship with an agenda which is far from our conservative point of view and no way open to uniting the board employees of this district or community. The direction or agenda that has been kept from the members, not only from the board, but our community.

Weird huh? They vote for fascist MAGA types, then wonder why the people they elected are acting like fascists.

Not that we should expect deeper reflection…

Dana Douglas, the chairwoman of Recall Replace Rebuild, described herself as a conservative Christian. She said the takeover of the school district is an example of what can happen when parents and voters do not pay close enough attention.

“It could happen anywhere,” Douglas said.

It’s the “lone wolf” theory applied to politics. You see, the problem wasn’t conservatism, it was just these two rogue actors who are hurting the wrong people. They’d have no trouble with conservatives at the state board of education, say, arbitrarily cutting Boise’s school budget by a third. Those people deserve it. Those kids aren’t even all white! West Bonner conservatives just don’t like it when they, themselves, suffer the consequences of conservative ideology.

Still, this made me laugh:

“This community is not going to back down,” Turner said. “We are awake now and we are going to stay awake.”

Yup, that is totally not woke. It’s awake. Not woke.

Got it?

p.s. The local MAGA crowd declared that the election was, you guessed it, fraudulent.

On Thursday, April 13, 2023, Donald Trump gave a seven-hour deposition to prosecutors in the New York Attorney General’s office as a part of the state’s civil suit against him and his family for fraudulent asset inflation and other financial violations. NY AG Letitia James released the transcript yesterday. Here are a few highlights.  This deposition tells us a lot about Trump’s mind:  he lies; he makes up claims then a few minutes later he disputes his own claim; he conveniently cannot remember; it was all someone else’s fault; I had nothing to do with it.

Q. Mr. Trump, are you currently the person with ultimate decision-making authority for the Trump Organization?

A. No.

Q. Who would that be?

A. My son Eric is much more involved with it than I am.

Poor Eric is so desperate for paternal love — yet right after the kickoff, Dad threw him under the bus. In addition, Trump then explained he had put the business in a revocable trust and was not aware of what was going on.

“It, essentially, meant that I was not involved or at a very minimal — I can’t even think of anything where I was involved.”

Trump explained he set up the trust because he did not want to have a “conflict” — even though he did not have to. He said he could have been just like George Washington.

“I tell the story that George Washington actually when he was President had two desks. One for his business — he was actually a very wealthy man — one for his business and one for running the country. I could have had that.”

I doubt Washington would have appreciated being called a kindred spirit by a serially bankrupt rapist sporting four criminal indictments. Then he added a spot of whataboutism.

“If you look at Biden, he certainly does business and politics at the same time.”

What a toddler. Even if Biden were as corrupt as Trump, two wrongs do not make a right. Trump then mentioned he had a “highly respected man” who was the “overseer of the trust.” The prosecutor asked,

“Who was that?”

To which Trump replied. “I don’t know his name. He was an attorney from Washington D.C. I didn’t know him. I believe I met him once very quickly and — ”

Remember when Trump said he has “one of the great memories of all time?” His capacity for lying is such that he thinks people will believe his claim he put his family business in the hands of a man whose name he cannot remember.

Trump then spends time outlining why he was such a great President — and again explains that he has had nothing to do with the company since 2015. He also claims his properties are like great works of art and worth a fortune — including Mar-a-Lago.

“When I bought Mar-a-Lago, I paid $8 million for it and today I think we’re going to be bringing in people that will tell you it’s worth a billion 250, billion and a half, maybe more than that.”

It gets worse. Trump added, “I think Doral could be worth 2 and a half billion by itself.”

$1.25 to $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion? The most generous valuation of Mar-a-Lago was $350 million by Forbes. This number is probably way off, as the most expensive Florida home sale ever was $173 million — paid for an estate bought by Larry Ellison, with a residence the same size as MAL on a lot with the same acreage.

Trump then claims he has cash to burn.

“We have a lot of cash. I believe we have substantially in excess of 400 million in cash, which is a lot for a developer.”

No doubt James will ask him to prove that at trial. Expect crickets. Trump then offers that “the No. 1 branding person at the time” valued the Trump brand at $2.9 or $3 billion. Adding,

“That was back in 2000 and something. And now the brand is worth much more.” And now “I think it’s the hottest brand in the world.”

This claim makes you wonder why so many Trump-branded properties are chiseling his name off the door.

Trump was not done. After some distraction about his NFTs, he circled back to his brand valuation. He told prosecutors that in his asset statements, he had not included the value of the brand.

“But if I wanted to show you a good statement, I would have added maybe $10 billion or something for the brand.”

No wonder the guy is rich. He has tripled his money in five minutes while sitting in a lawyer’s office.

Next, the prosecutors are interested in an email chain involving four employees of the Trump Organization — who become four more people Trump hardly knows.

Q. First, can I ask you who is Patrick Birney?

A. A gentleman who works for the Trump Organization, I believe.

Q. Do you know him personally?

A. Not very well.

Q. Donna Kidder?

A. Likewise, I don’t know her.

Q. You don’t know her personally?

A. I know who they are, but I don’t really

Q. You don’t work with her closely?

A. No.

Q. Okay. Same question for Mark Hawthorn. Do you know who he is?

A. I think the same answer, you know.

Q. And I’ll ask one more; Mike Levchuck?

A. Similar answer, yeah.

His memory does not get any better. Trump claims people have told him that his properties are worth a lot of money, but he cannot remember who they are beyond the fact they are very rich — or if he does remember them, he will not identify them because he does not want to embarrass them. Nor can he produce anything in writing.

Then followed a long discussion about debt, Doral, and rehabilitating country clubs. Trump does 95% of the talking, with his lawyers attempting to pile on. I have no idea if this helped Trump or the prosecution as much of what he said was in this form:

“Hey, I caught Biden making a mistake when he said — when he said, he’s going to close up gas at the end of the debate. I said, that was Perry Mason. Unfortunately, the election was rigged.”

Next, Trump claimed he was such a good credit risk that banks forced him to take money.

“We went to the closing and the bank said, I’m not going — we’re not going to close. We want you to take an extra hundred million dollars.”

And, “But the banks said, no, we want you. We feel you need more for this. We feel you could easily handle it. We’re not going to close unless you take more money.”

He also claimed that Allen Weisselberg, his CFO, was the guy who made all the appraisals because appraisers could be wrong — and besides, they were expensive.

“Not much. I mean, they [Weisselberg and his comptroller, Jeffrey McConney] would do it, I think, standard ways. Nobody — nobody could ever be expected to go out and hire appraisal firms. It would be too expensive.”

This gets us to page 117 out of 479. Which I think gives us enough to get a flavor of the event. Reading the deposition is to see a man whose mind cannot construct a coherent thought and will not go three questions without ludicrous self-aggrandizement. Worse for him, he steamrolls his own lawyers, who are trying to run interference. And if he ever tells the truth, it is by mistake.

He claims he has created the world’s greatest brand while denying he has anything to do with running the company. And, if the NY AG needs a sacrificial lamb, she should take Eric.