Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Could Trump go to jail over his taxes? Watergate prosecutor weighs in" video.

  1. Ultimately Trump's involvement with Russia's criminal underworld created an opening for Putin and his agents to manipulate and control him. Trump has had contacts with Russian crime bosses for 35 years. His properties have laundered money for them. Russian Oligarchs as well as the Russian mafya are both connected to Russian intelligence. It's virtually impossible to tell who is who. They were and still are, living and working in Trump's buildings. After the fall of the Soviet Union, you suddenly had Russians who became wealthy Oligarchs overnight, with billions of dollars that have to be laundered out of Russia. It opened the floodgates for the Russian mafya and for the oligarchs. A good way to launder that money is through real estate. Trump made it clear he was ready, willing and able to do that without asking any questions. Trump was $4 billion in debt after his casinos failed in Atlantic City. He came back thanks to the Russians. When Trump first visited Russia in 1987, he immediately came back and took out full page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Washington Post. These ads were very anti-NATO, anti-Western alliance, and that was exactly what the Russians wanted, even today. Trump had started laundering money for the Russian mob in 1984. In ‘92, the Russian mob had people like Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, who was one of the key figures under the mob boss Mogilevich. The FBI was looking all over for him, and then they discovered that he was actually living in Trump Tower. A lot of the Russian mobsters were going to Trump Tower to launder money as well. Trump was completely overextended in Atlantic City. He ended up $4 billion in debt. He had no future at all until the Russians came to his aid. Russian Oligarchs made Trump an offer that he could not refuse. Suddenly Trump started dealing with cash, because he couldn’t get loans from American banks anymore. The only bank that would loan him money was Deutsche Bank, which is the preferred bank for Russian Oligarchs and the Russian mob. There were ways of laundering money that Trump had. The financing of building projects that involved $400 million or $500 million to build a skyscraper. Once the building was constructed, they could sell the condos through the shell companies, and limited liability corporations. This was done anonymously in all cash transactions with Russian oligarchs and other people affiliated with the Russian mafia. They owned Trump before he ever met Putin. Trump became close with the oligarchs who were in turn close to Putin. The Russians used Trump's apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.. With Trump's constant need for new infusions of cash and his well-documented troubles with creditors, Trump made an easy “mark” for anyone looking to launder money. Public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians—including the dirtiest and most feared of them all, Semion Mogilevich. In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. Mogilevich’s greatest talent, the one that places him at the top of the Russian mob, is finding creative ways to cleanse dirty cash. According to the FBI, he has laundered money through more than 100 front companies around the world. In 1991, he made a move that led directly to Trump Tower. That year, the FBI says, Mogilevich paid a Russian judge to spring a fellow mob boss, Vyachelsav Kirillovich Ivankov, from a Siberian gulag. If Mogilevich was the brains, Ivankov was the enforcer.. The feds wanted to arrest Ivankov, but he kept vanishing. “He was like a ghost to the FBI,” one agent recalls. Agents spotted him meeting with other Russian crime figures in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, and Toronto. They also found he made frequent visits to Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which mobsters routinely used to launder huge sums of money. In 2015, the Taj Mahal was fined $10 million—the highest penalty ever levied by the feds against a casino—and admitted to having “willfully violated” anti-money-laundering regulations for years.. The FBI also struggled to figure out where Ivankov lived. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around,” James Moody, chief of the bureau’s organized crime section, told Friedman. “We had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.”
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