Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Anderson Cooper: Trump oddly silent on tax returns" 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 had 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 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 mob. Trump became close with Russian oligarchs and the Russian mob, who were in turn close to Putin. They owned Trump before he ever met 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. “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.”
    18
  2. "Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally on Aug. 21, 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.” Congress was furious over Trump’s secret efforts to secure a nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia. Congress was rightfully furious when they discovered that the Saudis refused to accept limits preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon. It was revealed that Trump gave approval for American companies to share certain nuclear energy technology with the kingdom without a broader nuclear deal in place. House Dems began investigating Trump's nuclear talks with Saudi after the Oversight and Reform Committee announced in February it was launching a probe to “determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump administration are in the national security interests of the US or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U.S. foreign policy.” Energy Secretary Rick Perry approved seven authorizations that let U.S. companies share certain nuclear energy technology with Saudi Arabia.  lawmakers were outraged when they found out they were not told about the approvals, saying the secrecy violates the Atomic Energy Act, which requires that Congress be kept “fully and currently informed” of 123 agreement negotiations. Trump has been beholden to the Saudis for decades. They bailed him out when American banks refused to loan the con-man anymore money. In 1991, as Trump was teetering on bankruptcy yet AGAIN, and scrambling to raise cash, he sold his 282-foot Trump yacht “Princess” to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal for $20 million. Four years later, the prince came to his rescue again, joining other investors in a $325 million deal for Trump’s money-losing Plaza Hotel....Which eventually went under anyway. In 2001, Trump sold the entire 45th floor of the Trump World Tower across from the UN for $12 million, the biggest purchase in that building to that point, according to the brokerage site Streeteasy. The buyer: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The most recent example of Trump's emoluments clause violations came last year in August when a visit from Saudi officials to Trump's Trump International Hotel in NYC helped boost the hotel's quarterly revenue by 13% in 2018's first quarter. The bump came after two straight years of booking declines for the property. Since Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and lobbying groups for it have been lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels. A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging at his Washington hotel through March of last year, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.. Attorneys general for Maryland and the District of Columbia cited the payments by the Saudi lobbying firm as an example of foreign gifts to Trump that could violate the Constitution’s ban on such “emoluments” from foreign interests.
    13