Unofficial & Unauthorized - My Supplement to Whitneys Book (s)
Just getting through these books now. I waited for the Kindle Version so am behind others who got the hard copy.
II
Its a great book(s), especially in its pre-Clinton White House era history and Epsteins history. Definitely a lot of interesting things, some of which she had written about before but with more detail. Its pretty dense in spots, lots of names, companies, organizations and many interlocking parts that really are a bit too much for many of our brains unless you are already familiar with many of them, and even then.
Whitney should get Richard Grove to put his “Brain” to work and then sell that as part of the books
The book uses Epstein as its center to narrate a thesis for the merging of organized crime, intelligence, MIC, finance and tech who use sex to blackmail rich and powerful people to make money and obtain power for the Elites . They use middle managers like Epstein to avoid getting their own hands dirty, and dispose of them when they become inconvenient or are threats.
Epstein is of course connected to many other players in this Corrupt Game, who all seem connected no more than 1-3 degrees of separation, guys like Trump , Adnan Khashoggi, Roy Cohn, Steve Hoffenberg, Trump, Bill Clinton, Leon Black, Mega Group -Wexner, Lauder, Fisher, Tisch, Bill Barr, James Riadi, Mark Middleton , Ron Brown, Jean Luc Brunel, the Maxwells, Douglas Leese, Richard Secord, Bill Gates, Edmond Safra, Theodore Shackley, Peter Thiel, Nicole Junkerman, Charlie Trie, Edgar Bronfman, Craig Spence, Jackson Stephens, Robert Keith Gray, Earl Brian, Rafi Eitan, Evelyne de Rothschild, Marc Rich. , Lew Wasserman, Robert Vesco , Edwin Wilson , Larry Summers and so many more.
However, probably because of a limitation of the books size, I feel there are some important gaps especially with regard to Trump, Russia, Taiwan Gate and even Epstein/Maxwells to a lesser extent.
Besides space , other explanations for these omissions could be oversight or they did not meet Whitneys sourcing standards. Fair enough.
Whitney asked a simple question on Twitter
The simple answer is the Left today seems all in with the so called Deep State and Big Techs Transhumanist Agenda. Why would they talk about a book exposing this. Their sponsors wont like it. Also, despite there being some cool new stuff on Clinton-Epstein what is mentioned about Trump has mostly all been reported by the Mainstream Media. So there is nothing in it for the lefts sponsored alternative media, and they risk exposing their audience to inconvenient facts .
And lets face it, the alternative media on both sides has been corrupted by money. If you want to make more money, you need to pick one side or the other because nobody wants to sponsor anyone not pushing one of the Elites agendas (and they control both sides as they are true Hegelians)
While there are many inconvenient facts in the book for the Neocon Right that taint Reagan and both Bushes, and of course the Intelligence Community, for the Trump Right the reports on Clinton-Epstein, Chinagate, and Clintons Iran-Contra drug running stories trump (no pun intended) what is is unflattering about Trump, most of which has been reported elsewhere. They will eat this up.
In any event, what I feel deserves more emphasis for a complete picture is that from the late 1980’s through the 2000’s, one of the biggest influences on Organized Crime and illicit money was the opening of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) . The Russian or Red Mafia came to the US in a big way thanks to the influx of immigration and increased travel to and from the region and open markets. Not to mention the Oligarchs (many of which were criminals) who with the help of Western Bankers and Regulators looking the other way were sending dirty money to the US and laundering it by purchasing expensive Real Estate and spending big in Casinos, and of course investing in legitimate companies and using them as a cover for their criminal or legal but nefarious activities
In addition, as America and the West were funneling billions to Asia, including to China by transferring production to China and buying the goods we no longer made here , and siphoning profits through middlemen and stashing them offshore thus evading taxes before laundering some it back to the US, billions more were returning thanks to the looting of Russia and the rest of the FSU , which fueled stock and real estate bubbles as well as organized crime, and which brought with it increased human sex trafficking and illegal drugs
To be fair this is touched on by Whitney, but perhaps got overwhelmed since the emphasis is more on Epstein and his connections to this world is not as well documented. At least, that was my sense.
So what I am going to do here is provide supplementary information that I feels adds to the picture Whitney painted (read the books)
In her books she mentions
In his article, shortly after introducing Epstein as an “immensely powerful New York property develop and financier,” Rosser states that Epstein “has made many millions out of his business links with the likes of Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner, whose trust he runs
Yet the big question is which business links with Trump made Epstein money? We read about how they were friends and palled around, went to the same parties and such, enjoyed the girls, flew on each others planes and all, and competed for the same property, but what business links with Trump made Epstein money?
Of course, Epstein like Trump was involved in Real Estate but we are not aware of them being involved in the same deals together. Indeed their breakup was due to competition to acquire the same property in Florida in 2004. Since the limits of Trumps dealings in the Financial World seems limited to borrowing money, its hard to see Epstein making money off Trumps debts or Trump being fool enough to invest in Epsteins scams. They did seem to have a common interest in Modeling, as we shall see. However, its unclear how Trump helped Epstein financially in this area.
The one thing Trump offered Epstein that probably enriched Epstein was increased access to a vast social network of very wealthy people. Fishing in the Trump pond of NYC Guppies was probably lucrative, plus Trumps mob links may have offered Epstein some protection and other opportunities. Just speculation on my part
Anyways, I am going to cover a lot of ground and I wont be able to answer that question definitively. We will probably never know for sure.
My hypothesis is that Epstein, Clinton and Trump were part of the so called “Enterprise”. Intelligence assets assigned to different business or political roles of the Enterprise’s different divisions. At times the tasks they were assigned interlocked with each other , at other times they did not.
There is one thing we know for sure, anyone operating at the level these three were , at least in the post-PROMIS World , were not operating under the radar. They could be brought down at anytime. If they pleased their taskmasters, they were free and could get approval for loans in large amounts or receive large donations. If they failed in anyway, they get busted, and if they know too much and are a threat they die.
Epstein was a threat to someone. As was Brunel. And Thomas Bowers (Trump and Epsteins Deutsche Bank banker) , Stephen Hoffenberger and Mark Middleton. All killed or suicided from 2019-2022. Since Epstein was already dead , guess who they were a threat to? I wont answer that. Maybe you can figure it out after reading Whitneys books and the rest of this.
I wont even dwell on the so called natural death of Adnan Khashoggi in 2017 and Iran Contra Whistleblower Bruce Hemmings 2021 death, after all they were old , but Adnans nephews (Jamal) assassination in 2018 was weird.
Al Arabiya reported that Khashoggi once tried to persuade bin Laden to quit violence. Khashoggi said: "I was very much surprised [in 1997] to see Osama turning into radicalism the way he did."Khashoggi was the only non-royal Saudi Arabian who knew of the royals' intimate dealing with al-Qaeda in the lead-up to the September 11 attacks. He dissociated himself from bin Laden following the attacks.
[Maybe Jamal knew something he shouldn’t have?]
Also, George Nader (connected to Lauder, Trump, Khashoggi) was arrested around the same time as Epstein and Ghislaine met the same fate a year later. It sure looks like someone was cleaning house
For now, Trump and Clinton (and Ghislaine) are not perceived as threats to their Elite backers, although that might change. Anyways, I digress
This is definitely too long for Email so click on Title to see the whole thing.
As some of the topics may not be of interest to all, I will list them here in the order they will be covered so you can scroll past to something more interesting
JEAN LUC BRUNEL
JOHN CASABLANCAS
PAOLO ZAMPOLLI
TRUMP MODELS
ADNON KHASHOGGI-MARCOS/40 WALL ST
RESORTS INTERNATIONAL-ROTHSCHILDS BAILOUT
TRUMPS EARLY MOSCOW TRIPS
PAN AM CONNECTION-HOFFENBERG-EPSTEIN-TRUMP
BILL BROWDER-MAXWELL-SAFRA-PREVEZON-TRUMP TOWER
TRUMP-CLINTON
FELIX SATER-MOGILEVICH-COHEN (not COHN)
BAYROCK-ARIF-SAPIR-CHABAD-LEVIEV
CARGOMETRIC-NSA OF CARGO-SCOTT BERGERSON-TERRAMAR, CFR
STANLEY POTTINGER
THOMAS BOWERS-DEUTSCHE BANK
BANK LEUMI
ROSEMARY VRABLIC (TRUMPS-KUSHNER’s BANKER
LARRY MIDDLETON-STEPHENS INC
CHINA -GATE OR TAIWAN -GATE OR BOTH
TRUMPS CHINESE SAVIOURS
TRUMPS NEWEST CHINESE BUSINESS PARTNER
TRUMPS “COCO CHOW (pet name for Elaine Chao)
GEORGE NADER
EPSTEIN -TRUMP BREAK UP-MORE RUSSIAN MONEY
WORLD COMMERCE CORPORATION-ATLANTIC COUNCIL-AIC-AIG
WILLIAM BARR- CLINTON-EPSTEIN-TRUMP
BROOKFIELD ASSET MANAGEMENT-BRONFMANS-KUSHNER
LARRY FINK-DONALD TRUMP
EPSTEIN-GIULIANI-ROSS-MNUCHIN-BLACK SIGHTING POST-CONVICTION
Note: Just because I link to something does not mean I agree with everything in the link, just what I posted.
Jean Luc Brunel.
Whitney does a great job covering Brunels -Epstein relationship and their use of Models.
Brunel started his Modeling career in Paris where there were no age of consent laws. Europe as a whole was pretty relaxed in this area where even countries with such laws had the age of consent at 14 or 16 years old. Even in the US a number of states like Massachusetts where the age of consent is 16. NY is one of those with 18 as the age of consent. Not that its ok for these old guys to be messing around with teenagers, legal or not.
However, IMO Whitney falls short in her coverage of Trump in this area
Sometime between 1995 and 1999, Brunel rented an apartment in Trump Tower, whose owner Donald Trump was still close to Epstein at that time and who also has had controversial ties to the modeling industry.
Thats it. The only reference an obscure hard to find book : Swaine, Henley, and Osborne, “Jean-Luc Brunel.”
So lets summarize
Jean-Luc Brunel-
An agent for Karin Model Management in 1975.
Founder of Next Model Management’ 1989
Bought Karin in 1995 which became MC2 in 2005
MC2 Model Management announced co-founder Brunel would be the agency procurer in 2012
1988, one of Brunel’s wealthy friends, Steven Mnuchin – who would later become the Secretary of the Treasury under President Donald Trump , apparently helped Brunel set up one of his modeling companies. He denied this
Steven Mnuchin was the point of contact for ‘Next Management Corporation’ as the Department of State (DOS) process person. That means that anyone wishing to communicate with, or perhaps, sue, the corporation would have to contact Mnuchin. And, as with almost every other man connected to the fall-out of the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell child trafficking ring – Steven Mnuchin said he was “not clear” how he ended up in that role for the Brunel brothers and that he did not “recall” ever meeting either one of them.
In 1985, three years earlier, Mnuchin graduated from Yale University. While at univeristy, he was a member of America’s most secret society – the ‘Brotherhood of Death’. It is perhaps better known as ‘Skull & Bones’ – with draconian initiations for the 15 new members that are selected every year.
Mnuchin was working for Goldman Sachs in 1988, so perhaps him being a Department of State (DOS) process person was part of a service Goldman Sachs offered Next Management Corp, and Mnuchin’s name was used for many companies. I don’t know
John Casablancas
Whitney mentions Epstein trying to get into the modeling business
Around this time, in 2004, Epstein was seeking to gain his own foot-hold in the modeling industry as he attempted, but failed, to acquire the US branch of Elite Models.
Sarah Marks, “New York Branch of Elite is sold for £4.4m,” Evening Standard, August 25, 2004, Section D, p. 33.
From Whitneys Source
According to the New York Post, Miami-based Eddie Trump - no relation to billionaire Donald - outbid financier Jeffrey Epstein and ID Models boss Paolo Zampolli.
The sale does not affect the parent company in Switzerland or affiliated branches worldwide.
Elite, which was founded by John Casablancas in 1971, was credited with creating the supermodel cult of the 1980s when it represented Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1507877/Elite-New-York-branch-sold.html
Paolo Zampolli and John Casablancas mentioned in the article were quite close to Trump who had set up his own modeling agency in 1999
Excerpts from the link below
In 1991-On the Spirit of New York, a large private yacht , a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights surrounded by a crowd of older men surrounding them.
This was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour.
At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas.
Casablancas was sued by a former Look of the Year contestant. According to the lawsuit, when she was 15 and Casablancas was 46, at Look of the Year 1988 in Japan, Casablancas said he was “falling in love” with her. At the end of the competition, the lawsuit states, “contestants drank and partied late into the evening” and Casablancas told the teenager to come to his hotel room.
There, Casablancas sexually abused the girl “several times over the evening”. The abuse allegedly continued the following year; when the girl became pregnant, Casablancas told her “she would be having an abortion”. The abortion was allegedly “arranged and paid for” by Elite.
Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. He was also one of its 10 judges.
One of the judges in 1991, Gèrald Marie, raped one of the contestants when she was 13
In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others.
Another contestant, who was 15 at the time, also remembers being asked to walk for Trump, Casablancas and other men on the boat in September 1992. She says an organiser told her that if she refused, she would be excluded from the competition.
“I knew in my gut it wasn’t right,” she recalls. “This wasn’t being judged or part of the competition – it was for their entertainment.”
While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years, were aged between 14 and 19.
Over the last six months, the Guardian has spoken to several dozen former Look of the Year contestants, as well as industry insiders, and obtained 12 hours of previously unseen, behind-the-scenes footage. The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models.
No such allegations have been levelled against Trump, who at the time was dating Marla Maples, the woman who in 1993 became his second wife.
It also appears that Epstein had a Casablancas connection during the 1990s. According to a lawsuit filed in the US three months ago, in 1990 Casablancas sent a teenage model for her first “casting call” at a residential address on New York’s Upper East Side, to meet a “photographer” who, it turned out, was Epstein. The lawsuit states that Epstein ordered the 15-year-old girl to undress before taking photographs of her, pushing her against a wall and sexually assaulting her.
For more on Casablancas and Brunel and their connections to Trump read this
Look of the Year was an event sponsored by Casanovas Elite Model.
Paola Zampolli
He founded ID Models in New York City in the mid 1997.
-The agency operated until 2008
Zampolli allegedly cultivated the career of Melania Knauss, whom he introduced to Trump at a party he hosted at the Kit Kat Club in the 1998 and secured Melania’s visa to the US. Says Melania—
“I have known Paolo Zampolli since 1995 when we first met at a modeling agency in Milan”
In 2008 Zampolli ended ID Modeling and formed a partnership with Trump and the Trump Organization as “Director of International Development”
Mr. Zampolli..... In 2013 he became, by appointment, the United Nations ambassador of Dominica, a country of which he is not a citizen. A Brazilian model, Amanda Ungaro, his wife of a decade and the mother of his young son, herself became ambassador of Grenada to the United Nations, also by appointment.
In his office, along with pictures of him posing with Mr. Clinton and Mr. Trump’s jet, there are hundreds of framed photographs of him with dignitaries. His passion now, he says, is sustaining the life aquatic. (“The ocean dies, we die.”)
He has started an organization, We Are the Oceans, the flags of which fly outside his house and whose scuba-themed pillows are on his oversize bed. In March, Page Six covered a gala of ambassadors and pouting socialites at his home that in part benefited an organization called Save Our Shark Coalition.
Zampolli once partnered with Ghislaine Maxwell on a save-the-oceans charity.
The initiative was the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, which sought to ensure the United Nations included oceans in its Sustainable Development Goals.
A 2013 news release on the website for TerraMar — which announced it was shuttering in the days after Epstein’s arrest — describes the alliance as a four-way partnership between TerraMar; another nonprofit called the Global Partnerships Forum; the late Stuart Beck, who served as “ambassador on oceans and seas” from the Pacific island nation of Palau; and a Trump friend, Paolo Zampolli, an Italian-born businessman who has served in diplomatic posts for Caribbean nations.
Before his diplomatic career, Zampolli co-founded a model management company and served as the Trump Organization’s director of international development. He has long been credited with introducing Trump to his third wife, Melania, though The New York Times reported this month that Epstein has also claimed credit for the introduction.
Zampolli said he was unaware of Maxwell’s connection to the Sustainable Oceans Alliance but that he does recall that Beck — who served on TerraMarr’s board in 2013 — brought Maxwell to the United Nations twice to discuss her oceans advocacy.
TerraMar sought to build social networks around ocean protection, issuing free “Ocean Passports” to anyone who pledged to support its goals, making them an “ocean citizen.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/21/jeffrey-epstein-trump-clinton-1424120
On December 22, 2020, Mr. Zampolli was announced as an appointee Member of the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by President Donald Trump
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Zampolli
Trump Models
-Trump Model Management NY later shortened to T Management was founded by Donald Trump in 1999
-Trump Modeling signed Trump’s the girlfriend now wife, Melania Knauss, to shoot for British GQ on his Trump plane
-At the time Trump crested his modeling company he was married to Marla Maples and dating model Melania
-Models who worked at Trump during the mid aughts reported problems- including uncomfortable living quarters and flouting immigration laws
-There are multiple public reports that the agency forced girls to work for slave wages
-Trump Modeling did not close it doors until 2017
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-trump-models-tell-their-story-2017-2?op=1
An interesting side note
Donald Trump announced he was opening a modeling agency, Trump Management Group, with Buti at the helm.
"I've made $5 billion because I bank on the right people," Trump told New Yorkmagazine. "And I think he's a terrific, unjustly accused guy. Restaurants, with all the unions and hamburgers you got to deal with, are not for him. But Tommaso loves women and women love him back. He's a natural to run a modeling agency."
The businessman was indicted by the United States Attorney's Office on federal charges of conspiracy, fraud and money laundering in December 2000 and arrested in Milan
https://www.newsweek.com/tommaso-buti-italian-businessman-pardoned-president-donald-trump-1562970
Tommaso Buti was pardoned by Trump in 2020
Adnon Khashoggi
Trump got many ideas for the Trump Tower from Adnon Khashoggi who threw many parties at his penthouse at the Olympic Tower in the early 80’s.
Trump’s yacht, the Trump Princess, had originally belonged to the Saudi arms dealer — the uncle of slain Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi — and Maxwell’s yacht had originally belonged to one of Adnan’s brothers.
When the Marcoses were indicted in 1988 for allegedly diverting money from the Philippines, Khashoggi was charged with helping them cover up the building’s ownership. After Khashoggi and Imelda Marcos were acquitted, she walked on her knees through St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Bernstein recalled, and the arms dealer threw a lamb feast with belly dancing.
By 1993, the building was a “vertical ghost town” whose windows were dark while the rest of the Financial District glowed, the Associated Press reported. Kinson Properties, an arm of a Hong Kong-based footwear and real estate company, acquired it that year. Trump pounced when Kinson had trouble turning the building around, he wrote. He said he paid $1 million for the right to lease the building through 2059.
In 1982, 40 Wall Street was purchased by Joseph J. and Ralph E. Bernstein, who were discovered later to have been operating as a front behind dictatorial Philippines president Ferdinand E. Marcos. It was not the only building in Marcos’ portfolio of buildings in New York City: the Crown Building on 5th Avenue and the Herald Square shopping mall were among others likely using funds taken from the Philippine government treasury.
Once Marcos was removed from leadership, his assets in the United States were frozen, which led to a contentious feud between the Bernstein brothers and the associate of an arms dealer, who both claimed ownership of the building
Financial companies like Deutsche Bank, Manufactures Hanover’s Trust Company, Toronto Dominion Bank, Loeb, Rhodes & Co., Bache & Co., White, Weld & Company have all been headquartered at 40 Wall Street. The U.S. Navy had offices inside during World War II. Other companies include Western Union and Westinghouse Electric Corporation.
[When the Marcoses were indicted in 1988 for allegedly diverting money from the Philippines, Khashoggi was charged with helping them cover up the building’s ownership.]
In 1995, Donald Trump purchased [the lease on] 40 Wall Street [from Hong Kong owned Kinson Properties] for a figure that is still debated. New York Times wrote at the time, it was less than $8 million. Trump wrote in his book, Never Give Up, and said on The Apprentice and CNBC he paid $1 million for it. “Even people who know very little about real estate can be duly impressed by that price,” he contends in his book, “I had been watching this building for decades, and I knew a lot about it before making my move.” The Federal Election Commission disclosure forms from 2015 show he has a debt of over $50 million on 40 Wall Street for the lease of the land.
Regardless, 40 Wall Street is considered his most successful real estate venture, transforming the declining skyscraper icon into a residential and office building. Trump representatives said at the time of the sale that $100 million would be spent in renovations following the purchase, and much of the surfaces have been gilded, but The Real Deal reported in 2012 that only $35 million was spent.
Resorts International - Rothschild Bailout
1987, Donald Trump purchased his first casino interests when he acquired 93 percent of the shares in Resorts International, which evolved from a CIA money-laundering front company set up by CIA chief Allen Dulles in the 1950’s. Resorts International has a sordid history that began in the early 1950’s when it evolved from a CIA and Mossad front company which had been established for the purpose of money laundering the profits from drug trafficking, gambling, and other illegal activities. The appropriation by the mafia of casinos like those operated by Resorts International was the result of a decision by the Meyer Lansky Syndicate to expand operations outside Las Vegas.
https://ordoabchao.ca/articles/donald-trump-chabad-lubavitch-oligarchs
1990-Trump found himself in financial trouble when his three casinos in Atlantic City were under foreclosure threat from lenders, but was bailed-out by senior managing director of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, Wilbur Ross, who Trump would later appoint as Secretary of Commerce. Ross, who is known as the “King of Bankruptcy,” specializes in leveraged buyouts of distressed businesses.
“We could have foreclosed [on the Trump Taj Mahal], and he would have been gone,” Ross told the paper last year. Trump was allowed to keep a 25-percent share of the Taj. The bondholders took half. And as the Post reported, “To outsiders it seemed Trump was still running the casino.”
https://nypost.com/2016/11/25/icahn-ross-saved-trump-brand-from-taj-mahal-casino-mess/
Evelyn de Rothschild.
. He was chairman of N.M. Rothschild & Sons the time of Trumps bail out by Wilbur Ross of N.M. Rothschild & Sons . He would go on to marry Lynn Forrester who is Epsteins pal and frequent Clinton White House visitor
As mentioned in Whitneys book the President of N.M. Rothschild & Sons Robert S. Pirie had in recent years helped James Goldsmith and Robert Maxwell hostile take over Crown Zellerbach and Macmillan Publishers respectively.
Wilbur Ross was the number 2 man behind Piries, specializing in friendly takeovers and known as the King of Bankruptcies dealing with many of the largest bankruptcies in history at the time
Ross would be appointed by Clinton to head the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund He would also be a partner in the takeover of the distressed Bank of Cyprus in 2014 where a lot of Russian Oligarchs parked their billions, and of course as mentioned would later become Trumps Secretary of Commerce.
For some reason Whitney did not mention N.M. Rothschilds role in Trumps bankruptcy in the book although she has mentioned it in interviews.
Trumps Earlier Moscow Trips
1987-After purchasing the mob-CIA connected Resorts International Trump took an all-expenses-paid jaunt to the Soviet Union in July to discuss building the Russians some luxury hotels. Two months after his return from Russia, Trump turned to Roger Stone, a Nixon-era dirty trickster then with the firm of Black, Manafort & Stone, for political advice.
Trump had met Stone and his colleague Paul Manafort through Roy Cohn. Under Stone’s tutelage, on September 1, 1987, just seven weeks after his return from Moscow, Trump suddenly went full steam ahead promoting his newly acquired foreign policy expertise, by paying nearly $ 100,000 for full-page ads in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times calling for the United States to stop spending money to defend Japan and the Persian Gulf, “an area of only marginal significance to the U.S. for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent.” He wrote. “. . . It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/150646/young-trump-went-russia
[Manafort would chair the Trump presidential campaign from June to August 2016]
1996- Trump’s trip to Moscow to allegedly negotiate for a Trump Tower Moscow
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on ‘collusion said On page 650 of this thousand-page doorstop of a report, that Trump went to a party at the Kempinski hotel on a visit to Moscow in 1996 and: ‘at the party, Trump may have begun a brief relationship with a Russian woman named XXXX XXXX.’ The name is of course redacted.
The report says that Trump may have met the woman again when she came to New York two years later. It quotes a Russian newspaper story as saying he welcomed a number of guests to an event in New York ‘among whom was the charming XXXX XXXX,
“Miss Moscow”…Trump recalled that two years ago, during his stay in Moscow, [she] was for him the most beautiful hostess of the capital, whose charms were not overshadowed even by Claudia Schiffer and Tina Turner, who lived in the same hotel. He recalled with pleasure the excellent company with which he spent time in Moscow.’
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, “Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities,” Leon Black was on the Trump trip, along with David Geovanis and Bennett LeBow, two men Black knew from his days as head of mergers and acquisitions at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the long defunct Wall Street investment bank.
Black came out of Drexel and Drexel attempted to entrap its clients with sex. Connie Bruck’s The Predators’ Ball described the famed annual bash for Drexel’s raiders. One part was when the heavy hitters were brought to a room full of enticingly beautiful women.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
Black and Epstein were pretty tight if memory serves correctly
Mr. Black knew Mr. Epstein for decades — in 1997 he made Mr. Epstein one of the original trustees of what is today called the Debra and Leon Black Foundation
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein.html
Pan Am Connection-Hoffenberg-Epstein-Trump
Mr. Trump's control of Resorts also throws into question the future of Pan American World Airways Inc., a company in which Resorts owns a 9 percent stake.
Pan Am, the financially troubled airline in which Resorts invested because of Mr. Crosby's fascination with aviation, is likely to attract other bidders. Wall Street sources said a handful of interested parties had already contacted Mr. Trump about the stake, currently worth about $56 million.
According to the sources, Mr. Trump will, in time, probably sell the Pan Am stock, either to another airline looking for a merger or to a party seeking control of Pan Am's attractive service operation.
In the last few months, at least one other airline company, AMR Inc., the parent of American Airlines, has expressed an interest in Pan Am, but merger talks were unsuccessful. The least likely outcome, airline analysts believe, would be for the hard-pressed Pan Am to repurchase the stock itself. 'Family Was Scared'
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/10/business/trump-buys-73-stake-in-resorts-for-79-million.html
Hmmm, and as soon as Trump acquires a 9% stake in Pan Am which he is probably looking to unload Hoffenberg and Epstein try to take over Pan Am. 1987 was a very interesting year
But in 1987, Towers began constructing one of the largest frauds in history. The scheme began when Towers acquired the parent of two insurance companies, Associated Life Insurance and United Fire. Then, Towers launched a takeover attempt against Pan Am, the once-proud but then-struggling airline.
To boost its chances, Towers told the SEC that it had an expert on its team: Epstein. Towers called him “a financial advisor who has been familiar with Pan Am for approximately six years” and was now advising Towers.
What neither regulators nor Pan Am knew was that, as Hoffenberg admitted later in court, Towers had begun devising a classic Ponzi scheme, named for a swindler who defrauded investors by moving money back and forth to create the false impression that profit was being made.
After acquiring the insurance companies, Towers began siphoning funds from them to make its bid for Pan Am look viable. Hoffenberg and Epstein also began pulling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves, court documents show. Hoffenberg issued more than 50 checks from the insurance companies to pay his stepdaughter’s tuition, expenses on his private plane and monthly $25,000 checks to Epstein.
“I advanced money to Epstein perpetually because I thought this thing could work,” Hoffenberg said. “He could sell anything. People loved him.”
When the airline takeover failed, the insurance companies faltered.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/final-evasion-for-30-years-prosecutors-and-victims-tried-to-hold-jeffrey-epstein-to-account-at-every-turn-he-slipped-away/2019/08/10/30bc947a-bb8a-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html
[Hoffenberg incidentally was represented in his trial by none other than Rudy Giuliani who would one day become Trumps attorney]
Bill Browder-Maxwell-Safra-Prevezon-Trump Tower
Bill Browder as many know is responsible for the 2012 Magnitsky Act which is the weapon (sanctions) that would be most used in the upcoming Cold War with Russia
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/14/the-magnitsky-act-explained/
Browder set up an investment fund for Robert Maxwell. With this job, Browder was directly responsible for part of Maxwell’s investments and he travelled extensively across the former communist bloc.
Maxwell’s investment bankers also included Salomon Brothers.
However, in November of 1991 Maxwell mysteriously died while vacationing off the Canary Islands. It soon turned out that Maxwell’s business empire sat on a mountain of debt he was unable to repay.. For Browder, having worked for Maxwell was toxic for his career. For a while he found that no other employer would touch him and he only managed to get a job in mid-1992 with Salomon Brothers, another scandal-prone investment bank.
This was the job that finally brought Bill Browder to Russia. While the bank was covering activities and deals in all of Eastern Europe, Browder declared himself “the investment banker in charge of Russia”.
To his astonishment, he found that the Russian government was selling about 30 percent of each of some 27,000 Russian companies for a sum total of $3 billion. After a few days in Moscow, Browder rushed back to Salomon Brothers to try to convince his bosses and colleagues that they were “giving money away for free in Russia.”
Buying vouchers was only the first step in the privatization process. Investors then had to exchange the vouchers for the actual shares of Russian firms. This was done at Russia’s unique voucher auctions.
Only a few months after Browder invested Salomon Brothers’ money in what he called, “the most undervalued shares that had ever been offered anywhere in history,” The Economist published an article titled, “Time to bet on Russia?” which triggered a wave of interest in Russian stocks among western investors. Browder’s $25 million portfolio soon appreciated to $125 million turning him into hero at Salomon.
One of Salomon’s clients was an Israeli billionaire Benny Steinmetz . He was so impressed with Browder that he offered to help bankroll his own investment management shop, bringing along a small group of investors, the most important among whom was the Syrian-Israeli banker Edmond Safra. This led to the birth of the Hermitage Fund in 1996 laundered it profits out of Russia through Cyprus
2016, June 9 , Donald Trump Jr. sent Kushner an email inviting him to a Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016 with several Russians associated with Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov, including attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya — who had represented Prevezon Holdings in a civil forfeiture case in the southern district of New York (SDNY).
This case involved the laundering of proceeds — some of which were transferred through Deutsche Bank — ripped off from the $230 million in Russian taxes Bill Browder allegedly paid on his Hermitage company.
The email subject of the proposed Trump Tower meeting — cc’d to Paul Manafort — was “Russia – Clinton – Confidential.” Kushner originally omitted mention of this now infamous meeting on his security clearance form.
Lost in the hoopla over the June 9 Trump Tower meeting is the Prevezon association.
In 2015, Kushner and his family business, Kushner Cos., bought a portion of the building from Russian real estate billionaire Lev Leviev for $295M, The Guardian reports. The transaction first came up due to the $285M Kushner borrowed from Deutsche Bank to complete the transaction. Deutsche Bank and two companies tied to Leviev, Africa Israel Investments and Prevezon, have all recently been the subject of money laundering investigations.
A laundering case against Prevezon led by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara abruptly ended in May, two months after Trump fired Bharara, with a $6M sweet heart settlement that raised eyebrows.
Trump-Clinton
During the period Epstein was running in and out of the White House and palling around with the Clintons Trump was on very good terms with both
Donald Trump was for the Clintons before he was against them
Hillary Clinton took a seat in the front pew at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Florida, one of 450 guests on the balmy Saturday night in January 2005 when Donald Trump tied the knot with Melania Knauss, his third (and current) wife. At the reception that followed, Bill Clinton joined his wife, the former first lady who was then serving Trump’s home state of New York in the Senate.
Trump now says Clinton had “no choice” but to attend his wedding because he donated money to her campaign
There was the September 1999 interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in which Trump remarked that Clinton would have gone down in history “as a great president” if not for the Lewinsky scandal, which admittedly had been handled “disgracefully.”
In a CNN interview in 2007, he said that Clinton, then running for president for the first time, was a “terrific” person who “would do a good job” cutting a nuclear deal with Iran because she “always surrounded herself with very good people.”
On Tuesday, BuzzFeed reported on an archived web page of a blog post on TrumpUniversity.com in March 2008 in which Trump wrote that Clinton would “make a great president or vice-president.”
After declining to enter the presidential race in 2012, Trump told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that Clinton had done a great job as secretary of state.
“Hillary Clinton I think is a terrific woman,” he said. “I am biased because I have known her for years. I live in New York. She lives in New York. I really like her and her husband both a lot. I think she really works hard. And I think, again, she’s given an agenda, it is not all of her, but I think she really works hard and I think she does a good job. I like her.”
“I just like her,” Trump remarked, adding the same of the former president. “I like her husband. Her husband made a speech on Monday and was very well received. He is — he is a really good guy, and she’s a really good person and woman.”
Trump sounded a similar note in an October 2013 interview with Larry King, who asked Trump if he thought the former secretary of state would run for the White House a second time, pointing out that she is a “fellow New Yorker.”
“Yeah, and I know her very well. They’re members of my club, and I like both of them very much, and he was with you one time and he said he likes me,” Trump said, adding, “and I do like him.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/donald-trump-hillary-bill-clinton-relationship-217191
Felix Sater-Semion Mogilevich-Cohen
So we all know Trump and Epstein were pals or at least close acquaintances going back to 1987 and had mutual friends like the billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi whom Trump bought his yacht from. They had a falling out around 2004 before Epstein got charged with diddling little girls, allegedly over a dispute over a piece of property both wanted to buy.
This is stuff we all know. We also know the guy Trump appointed as his Secretary of Labor (Acosta) was the guy who gave Epstein his sweet heart deal because he was told Epstein belonged to intelligence. Epstein reportedly bragged at one time he was CIA
In this period (2004-2008) after breaking up with Epstein Trump began partnering with another Intelligence Asset at Bayrock. A fellow by the name of Felix Sater, who is the son of a guy who allegedly worked for a Russian Mafia crime boss, a Ukrainian Born dude named Semion Mogilevich mentioned quite a bit in Whitneys book)
However Sater was also pals with Trumps former lawyer Cohen (2006-2018) as they grew up together. In return for helping out FBI and other Intelligence Agencies in the Former Soviet Union and tracking down Stinger Missiles he stayed out of jail for Stock Fraud that he was charged with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Sater
Bayrock-Arif-Sapir-Sater-Chabad-Leviev
Bayrock, the company that Donald Trump teamed up with to build his Trump Soho project. There were three main actors in that enterprise. One was convicted mob associate and murky FBI informant Felix Sater.
Another was Tevfik Arif, a shady man with likely Russian intelligence connections who was once was arrested by the Turks on Mustafa Kamal Ataturk’s yacht and “charged with running an international underage prostitution ring.”
The third was the late Tamir Sapir, another man with ties to Russian intelligence.
Interestingly, all these men have connections to the Chabad movement.
Felix Sater was honored as Man of the Year in 2014 by the Port Washington Chabad house. The same Chabad house’s website lists Tevfik Arif, who is not Jewish, “among its top 13 benefactors.”
But it’s Tamir Sapir who links Trump back directly to Russian Oligarch Lev Leviev.
…the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.
Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.
Five months later, in early June 2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy site.
Lev Leviev is so close to Putin that he was one of two oligarchs tapped to help him gain control of the leadership of the Russian Jewish community back when he assumed power.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/04/17/michael-cohen-gets-a-special-visit/
And then there’s this:
In May 2015, a month before Trump officially entered the Republican presidential primary, Kushner bought a majority stake in the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Leviev for $295 million.
The transaction first came up due to the $285M Kushner borrowed from Deutsche Bank to complete the transaction. Deutsche Bank and two companies tied to Leviev, Africa Israel Investments and Prevezon, have all recently been the subject of money laundering investigations. A laundering case against Prevezon led by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara abruptly ended in May, two months after Trump fired Bharara, with a $6M settlement that raised eyebrows.
You can read this from David Livingstone for more detail
https://ordoabchao.ca/articles/donald-trump-chabad-lubavitch-oligarchs
Here is more on Chabad Lubavitch
NOTE: just to be clear, Trumps Russian Links are to Oligarchs and Organized Crime. Not Putin. I do not buy that Trump is a Russian Agent for Putin as some of my links suggest. I do believe he is and was a US Intelligent asset, like Clinton, Epstein and Felix Sater
Cargometric-NSA of Cargo, Scott Borgerson-TerraMar, CFR
Borgerson had married Maxwell, who turned 60 on Christmas Day, in 2016, but they kept it a secret from almost everyone — even the British media heiress’ own devoted family.
The secret marriage only emerged in court papers in 2020 when Borgerson tried to get his wife freed with a $28.5 million bail package.
https://nypost.com/2022/01/03/ghislaine-maxwells-husband-scott-borgerson-dumped-her-for-yoga-teacher/
Scott Borgerson founded CargoMetrics which has been called the NSA of Global Trade.
It seems very likely it is an intelligence front, and likely associated with MOSSAD given Ghislaine Maxwell’s relationship with Borgerson, as well as the financial backing received by Israeli shipping magnate Idan Ofer
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/israels-idan-ofer-backs-hedge-fund-1.5392395
First, a bit of an overview
CargoMetrics, a start-up investment firm, is not your typical money manager or hedge fund. It was originally set up to supply information on cargo shipping to commodities traders, among others. Now it links satellite signals, historical shipping data and proprietary analytics for its own trading in commodities, currencies and equity index futures.
CargoMetrics was one of the first maritime data analytics companies to seize the potential of the global Automatic Identification System. Ships transmit AIS signals via very high frequency (VHF) radio to receiver devices on other ships or land. Since 2004, large vessels with gross tonnage of 300 or more are required to flash AIS positioning signals every few seconds to avoid collisions. That allows CargoMetrics to pay satellite companies for access to the signals gleaned from 500 miles above the water. The firm uses historical data to identify cargo and aggregation of cargo flow, and then applies sophisticated analysis of financial market correlations to identify buying and selling opportunities.
With his degrees in hand, Borgerson applied for a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the application process he met Edward Morse, now global head of commodities research at Citigroup. Morse was on the CFR selection committee in 2007 and recommended Borgerson as a fellow.
Morse introduced Borgerson to commodities, and to trading terms like “contango” and “backwardation.”
He came to me in 2009, after he had been turned down by 17 VCs, was maxed out on his credit card, was married and had a newborn son,” says Beardsworth, who was reviewing the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Obama administration’s transition team.
Beardsworth came to the rescue, not only committing to invest a small amount but introducing his friend to Doug Doan. A West Point graduate and Washington-based angel investor, Doan took to Borgerson right away
Borgerson had already begun to contemplate converting CargoMetrics from an information provider into a money manager; he saw the potential to extract powerful trade signals from its technology rather than share it with other market participants for a fee.
Manzi, a fellow Fletcher School grad who had mentored Borgerson since the company’s early days, put up more money (making CargoMetrics one of his single largest investments) and introduced him to a powerful group of wealthy investors. Separately, the CFR’s Morse suggested that Borgerson meet with Daniel Freifeld, founder of Washington-based Callaway Capital Management and a former senior adviser on Eurasian energy at the U.S. Department of State. Impressed by Borgerson’s “intellectual honesty, vigor and more than four years of historical data,” Freifeld brought the idea to a billionaire third-party investor, who took his advice and became one of CargoMetrics’ largest backers. “I would not have suggested the investment if CargoMetrics had not done the hard part first,” adds Freifeld, declining to name the investor.
A chance encounter in the fall of 2012 gave the CargoMetrics team its first taste of real Wall Street trading. Attending an Arctic Imperative conference in Alaska, Borgerson met the CIO of a large investment firm, whom he declines to name.
[Many believe this was David Rubenstein, CEO of Carlyle Group]
When Borgerson confided his ambition and that CargoMetrics had developed algorithms to trade on its shipping data once it was legally structured to do so, the CIO suggested CargoMetrics provide the analytical models for a separate portfolio the money manager would trade. Live trading using CargoMetrics’ models began in December 2012.
Manzi brought in longtime banker Gerald Rosenfeld in 2013 to craft and negotiate the move to make CargoMetrics a limited liability investment firm. Rosenfeld acted in a personal role rather than in his position as vice chairman of Lazard and full-time professor and trustee of the New York University School of Law. The whole process took a year and a half. During that time Blackstone checked in as an investor.
Unlike the Rothschilds 200 years ago, only a small percentage of the trades that CargoMetrics makes relate to beating official government data. Most simply are aimed at identifying mispricings in the market, using the firm’s real-time shipping data and proprietary algorithms.
At a whiteboard in his conference room, Borgerson sketches out CargoMetrics’ general formula. He draws a “maritime matrix” of three dynamic data sets: geography (Malacca, Brazil, Australia, China, Europe and the U.S.), metrics (ship counts, cargo mass and volume, ship speed and port congestion) and tradable factors (Brent crude versus WTI, as well as mining equities, commodity macro and Asian economic activity).
Using satellite data with hundreds of millions of ship positions, CargoMetrics makes trillions of calculations to determine individual cargoes onboard the ships and then to aggregate the cargo flows and compare them with historical shipping data. All that leads to the final comparisons with historical financial market data to find mispricings.
If CargoMetrics observes an appreciable decline in export shipping activity in South Africa, for example, its trading models will determine whether that is a significant early-warning sign by considering that information alongside other factors, such as interest rates. If CargoMetrics believes a decline in the rand is forthcoming, it might short it against a basket of other currencies.
“This is like a heat map showing opportunity,” Borgerson says, noting that CargoMetrics is not trading physical commodities. “We are agnostic on whether to be long or short, and let the computers spot where there is a mispricing and liquidity in the markets.” He sums up his simple, but still less than revealing, process by writing on the whiteboard “Collect, Compute, Trade.”
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b14z9qvl205nh2/cargometrics-cracks-the-code-on-shipping-data
In 2012, Scott Borgerson appeared at an event he later described as pivotal for him: a conference held in Alaska under the banner of an initiative called Arctic Imperative (a precursor to the Arctic Circle initiative). It was the second in a two-year series of the gatherings, and [Alice] Rogoff (Carlyle Group- David Rubenstein’s wife) was the driving force behind it.
Borgerson credited a meeting with an unnamed CIO of “a large investment firm,” which he declined to identify, at the 2012 Arctic Imperative conference in Alaska, with kickstarting an experiment in using CargoMetrics’ data trove to drive quantitative trading decisions.
(There’s no direct proof of this, but looking over the record of attendance at the 2011 and 2012 conferences, it appears that the CIO Borgerson was most likely to have met would have been Carlyle’s. David Rubenstein himself took an interest in and participated in the Arctic Imperative conferences.)
That data-to-trading experiment was a real-world proof of concept for the quant fund Borgerson had begun to envision in the first couple of years after taking CargoMetrics live as the “NSA of global trade.” As the Institutional Investor story observes, that was a major shift in emphasis for the company. (For one thing, it meant buying out the original venture capital investors, who had bought in on the starting premise of focusing on the data product.)
After the “large investment firm” came on board, says Institutional Investor, “Live trading using CargoMetrics’ models began in December 2012.” Over the next year and a half, CargoMetrics geared up to begin operating a fund, something that required support from outside investors. Blackstone became one of them; meanwhile, another investor which had already taken interest in Borgerson’s quant-fund plan for CargoMetrics was Callaway Capital Management, a Washington, D.C.-based investment firm started by Daniel Freifeld.
Freifeld had been a senior adviser on Eurasian energy issues to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after being an adviser to the Hillary campaign in 2007-08. The picture of Borgerson as a semi-anonymous maverick data-monger starts to fade a bit as these various facts emerge.
Borgerson may not have known the Clintons or Obama’s top administration officials, but the people who ran in their orbit knew Borgerson.
Borgerson was developing his quant-fund plan with the help of such connected people between 2011 and 2013. And that’s when he and Ghislaine Maxwell ran into each other through their shared interest in the Arctic.
Interesting that the collision occurred when Borgerson’s company entered the field of serious fund management.
Maxwell accompanied Stuart Beck, a 2013 TerraMar board member, to two United Nations meetings to discuss the project. Maxwell presented at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik Iceland in 2013.
Scott Borgerson, listed on TerraMar's board of directors for 2013, appeared with Maxwell at the Arctic Circle conference.
In June 2014, Maxwell and Borgerson spoke at an event in Washington, DC sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, titled “Governing the Ocean Commons: Growing Challenges, New Approaches”.
What exactly makes Maxwell an expert on the high seas, other then her association with sex trafficking and Little St. James Island, and traveling on her Fathers Yacht
Borgerson's company raised nearly $23 million from investors, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt led a $10 million funding round for CargoMetrics in August 2017. Cargo Metrics has business ties with Maersk Tankers, FedNav, Western Bulk and True Freight.
In addition to Eric Schmidt from Google, other prominent investors include Howard Morgan, co-founder of quant investing giant Renaissance Technologies; famed hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones; Israeli shipping magnate Idan Ofer; and shipping services leader Clarksons PLC.
As mentioned CargoMetrics is also backed by Blackstone, the hedge fund. Blackstone also owns a significant stake in Engineer's Gate, the hedge fund which has significant connections to... Jeffrey Epstein .
Engineers Gate founder Glenn Russell Dubin retired from the hedge fund in January 2020. Glenn Dubin’s name was revealed in a sealed deposition that relates to the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandals.
https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/77509/cppib-exits-engineers-gate-hedge-fund-investment
Its interesting to note Scott Borgersons overlapped with Jeffrey Epsteins time at CFR. Here is a CFR publication authored by Scott in 2009, Epstein’s last year at CFR. Ghislaine sets up TerraMar a couple of years later
https://www.cfr.org/report/national-interest-and-law-sea
Stanley Pottinger
He is the Father of Matt Pottinger.
Matt was Deputy National Security Adviser in Trumps NSC at the time COVID was breaking out. According to Deborah Birx he was instrumental in pushing many of the COVID policies we hate so much like testing, masks, lockdowns, etc. he was also the one who lobbied for Birx to head the White House Coronavirus Response
After divorcing Matts Mother in 1975 Stanley began a 9 year affair with Gloria Steinem who has known ties to the CIA
In 1980, the FBI put a wiretap in the Gulf Capital Corp. when Pottinger recommended a man named Cyrus Hashemi be used to carry a message to Khomeini, NBC reported.
Pottinger, who headed the Justice Department's civil rights division under Ford and Nixon, was Hashemi's lawyer after leaving government service.
But federal officials say the wiretap recorded Pottinger advising Hashemi on arms shipments, NBC said. They say Hashemi was Khomeini's arms broker in New York.
'The government says Pottinger ... was heard on hidden microphones giving advice on how to make military shipments to Iran through dummy companies in other countries,' NBC said.
'Federal authorities say that military supplies, disguised under phony invoices, were flown to Zurich, Switzerland, then shipped to Teheran' by the T and T Trading Company located in Basel, Switzerland, NBC said.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/05/25/Stanley-Pottinger-head-of-the-Justice-Departments-Civil-Rights/3173454305600/
Stanley was reported to be a CIA operative and, in fact, was reported to be Hashemi's CIA controller for many of these purposes. The story that was going around-and this was broadcast and published in a number of places-is that Stanley Pottinger was named as an unindicted co-conspirator i and narrowly escaped indictment because the FBI had lost the wiretaps, and the overhears of Pottinger which apparently the Justice Department claims were necessary to indict him were lost, therefore he couldn't be indicted.
Shortly thereafter in 1984 Stanley Pottinger and Gloria Steinems relationship fizzled. Stanleys cover was blown, and Gloria moved on
A bit more on this character Pottinger was conspiring with from wikipedia
In mid-1985 Hashemi was partnered with Adnan Khashoggi in "World Trade Group", "a joint venture ... that was seeking to trade farm equipment, oil and military weapons with Iran."Roy Furmark was also involved.
In June 1985 Hashemi approached William Casey with a new arms-for-hostages plan.The Los Angeles Times reported in 1988 that "according to newly declassified CIA and State Department memos, Hashemi approached then-CIA Director William J. Casey with an arms-for-hostages plan of his own that was strikingly similar to the one that would soon be embraced by the White House as its secret Iran arms initiative." A June 1985 CIA memo documented a call regarding a potential arms-for-hostages deal from Hashemi to Shaheen. The Times said in 1988 it had discovered that Hashemi was meeting with Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar, and that Hashemi's efforts to arrange a deal collapsed in August 1985 due to Kashoggi's competing efforts to arrange US access to Ghorbanifar via Robert McFarlane.
Hashemi died suddenly in 1986 shortly before Iran-Contra scandal was exposed. The man suspected of being behind the leak was Admiral Arthur Stanley Moreau who served as assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A month after the news broke Moreau died of a heart attack at age 55. Cant blame Pfizer for that but the CIA had their ways even then (not that I have proof they were behind it)
But I digress
Lets flash forward
Stanley Pottinger had a law firm.
From wikipedia we see
Stanley Pottinger represented more than 20 survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stanley_Pottinger
Lets dig deeper
Stan Pottinger is a partner for Edwards Pottinger, a Florida-New York law firm. The firm focuses on civil litigation with special attention to sex abuse cases; mediation; press and media matters; and healthcare law.
After his government service, Mr. Pottinger practiced law at Troy, Malin & Pottinger, a Los Angeles, Washington, Paris-based law firm. Following a few years of investment banking, he established Pottinger Media Group LLC (PMG), a New York firm which acted as agent and consultant on literary and press matters. PMG also established Velocity Press, a private publishing company.
https://www.epllc.com/attorneys/stan-pottinger/
Interesting, focusing on sex abuse cases and invested in Media/Publishing companies. CIA has been known to invest in Media/Publishing Companies. Now why would a presumably still CIA Agent be interested in handling Sex Abuse Cases?
I’ll try to guess. For those of you who are familiar with what Epstein was doing you know he was allegedly running a blackmail operation for one or more intelligence agencies. Video rich and powerful people diddling kids that he arranged for them and then those he gave it to would use it to get money or influence their actions in areas of interest. But in such operations you run the risk of the kids growing up and blowing the whistle on what you are doing. That happened with Epstein.
What happens next is you run the risk of criminal prosecution and civil action that can expose some very important people. If you can control the Justice System with puppet AG’s like Acosta you can keep the case from going to court some of the time. But what about the times you can’t keep it out of court. Well, then you want to make sure you have lawyers representing the victims who will settle or at least a judge you own that hears the case and keeps important evidence off the record (we may have seen that in Ghislaines trial)
What I am suggesting is that it was Stanley Pottingers purpose in going after these Epstein victims cases. Indeed every case he handled to conclusion got settled and did not go to court
Now some of you might wonder why there have been no indictment of the Johns diddling these kids despite having it all on tape. Here is my hypothesis. These tapes are now in the possession of the FBI, not the Mossad or the CIA who no doubt burned some of them for their own purposes but some of these Johns are assets that still have value. They don’t want to burn them all.
The ones they did burn, shaking them down for money , can be burned again, but by someone else , maybe someone like Stanley Pottinger.
This story by the NYT will give you an idea of what I am talking about. But don’t buy the narrative without question that Kessler was a fraud and the tapes don’t exist. Maybe thats true but consider that maybe is a deception and Kessler delivered the goods.
One more thought. In January 2020 it was reported a record number of CEO’s resigned.
Related? I dont know
Mr. Edwards, who did not respond to interview requests, had a law firm called Edwards Pottinger, and he soon referred Kessler to his New York partner. Silver-haired and 79, Mr. Pottinger had been a senior civil-rights official in the Nixon and Ford administrations, but he also dabbled in investment banking and wrote best-selling medical thrillers. He was perhaps best known for having dated Gloria Steinem and Kathie Lee Gifford.........
After an initial discussion with Kessler in Washington, Mr. Pottinger briefed Mr. Boies — whose firm was also active in representing accusers in the Epstein case — about the sensational claims.....
In his conversations with Mr. Pottinger and, later, Mr. Boies, Kessler said his videos featured numerous powerful men who were already linked to Mr. Epstein: Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister; Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional lawyer; Prince Andrew; three billionaires; and a prominent chief executive.....
Mr. Pottinger and Mr. Boies have known each other for years, a friendship forged on bike trips in France and Italy. In legal circles, Mr. Boies was royalty: He was the one who fought for presidential candidate Al Gore before the Supreme Court, took on Microsoft in a landmark antitrust case, and helped obtain the right for gays and lesbians to get married in California.
But then Mr. Boies got involved with the blood-testing start-up Theranos. As the company was being revealed as a fraud, he tried to bully whistle-blowers into not speaking to a Wall Street Journal reporter, and he was criticized for possible conflicts of interest when he joined the company’s board in 2015.
Two years later, Mr. Boies helped his longtime client Harvey Weinstein hire private investigators who intimidated sources and trailed reporters for The Times and The New Yorker — even though Mr. Boies’s firm had worked for The Times on other matters. (The Times fired his firm
By 2019, Mr. Boies, 78, was representing a number of Mr. Epstein’s alleged victims. They got his services pro bono, and he got the chance to burnish his legacy. When Mr. Pottinger contacted him about Kessler, he was intrigued.
On Sept. 9, Mr. Boies greeted Kessler at the offices of his law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, in a gleaming new skyscraper at Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side......
Kessler claimed that a technology executive had introduced him to Mr. Epstein, who in 2012 hired Kessler to set up encrypted servers to preserve his extensive digital archives. With Mr. Epstein dead, Kessler boasted to the lawyers, he had unfettered access to the material. He said the volume of videos was overwhelming: more than a decade of round-the-clock footage from dozens of cameras......
Mr. Boies and Mr. Pottinger had decades of legal experience and considered themselves experts at assessing witnesses’ credibility. While they couldn’t be sure, they thought Kessler was probably legit.......
According to excerpts viewed by The Times, Mr. Pottinger and Kessler discussed a plan to disseminate some of the informant’s materials — starting with the supposed footage of Mr. Barak. The Israeli election was barely a week away, and Mr. Barak was challenging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The purported images of Mr. Barak might be able to sway the election — and fetch a high price. ........
[Conspiracy to interfere in a foreign election. Who do they think they are? The CIA?]
Can you share your contact that would be purchasing,” Kessler asked.
“Sheldon Adelson,” Mr. Pottinger answered.
Mr. Adelson, a billionaire casino magnate in Las Vegas, had founded one of Israel’s largest newspapers, and it was an enthusiastic booster of Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Pottinger wrote that he and Mr. Boies hoped to fly to Nevada to meet with Mr. Adelson to discuss the images.
“Do you believe that adelson has the pull to insure this will hurt his bid for election?” Kessler asked the next morning.
Mr. Pottinger reassured him. “There is no question that Adelson has the capacity to air the truth about EB if he wants to,” he said, using Mr. Barak’s initials. He said he planned to discuss the matter with Mr. Boies that evening.
Mr. Boies confirmed that they discussed sharing the photo with Mr. Adelson but said the plan was never executed.
[Sidney Aldeson was one of Trumps biggest financial supporter]
The men whom Kessler claimed to have on tape were together worth many billions. Some of their public relations teams had spent months trying to tamp down media coverage of their connections to Mr. Epstein. Imagine how much they might pay to make incriminating videos vanish.
You might think that lawyers representing abuse victims would want to publicly expose such information to bolster their clients’ claims. But that is not how the legal industry always works. Often, keeping things quiet is good business.
One of the revelations of the #MeToo era has been that victims’ lawyers often brokered secret deals in which alleged abusers paid to keep their accusers quiet and the allegations out of the public sphere. Lawyers can pocket at least a third of such settlements, profiting off a system that masks misconduct and allows men to abuse again.
Mr. Boies and Mr. Pottinger said in interviews that they were looking into creating a charity to help victims of sexual abuse. It would be bankrolled by private legal settlements with the men on the videos.
[charities are a great way of avoiding taxes on the income]
Mr. Boies acknowledged that Kessler might get paid. “If we were able to use this to help our victims recover money, we would treat him generously,” he said in September. He said that his firm would not get a cut of any settlements.
Such agreements would have made it less likely that videos involving the men became public. “Generally what settlements are about is getting peace,” Mr. Boies said.
Mr. Pottinger told Kessler that the charity he was setting up would be called the Astria Foundation — a name he later said his girlfriend came up with, in a nod to Astraea, the Greek goddess of innocence and justice. “We need to get it funded by abusers,” Mr. Pottinger texted, noting in another message that “these are wealthy wrongdoers.”
Mr. Pottinger asked Kessler to start compiling incriminating materials on a specific group of men......
The lawyers held out hope of getting Kessler’s materials. But weeks passed, and nothing arrived. At one point, Mr. Pottinger volunteered to meet Kessler anywhere — including Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.
[seems a strange place to want to meet]
Mr. Boies had concluded that Kessler was probably a con man: “I think that he was a fraudster who was just trying to set things up.” And he argued that Kessler had baited Mr. Pottinger into writing things that looked more nefarious than they really were. He acknowledged that Mr. Pottinger had used “loose language” in some of his messages that risked creating the impression that the lawyers were plotting to monetize evidence of abuse.
Several days later, Mr. Boies returned for another interview and was more critical of Mr. Pottinger, especially the hypothetical plans that he had described to Kessler. “Having looked at all that stuff in context, I would not have said that,” he said. How did Mr. Boies feel about Mr. Pottinger invoking his name in messages to Kessler? “I don’t like it,” he said.
But Mr. Boies stopped short of blaming Mr. Pottinger for the whole mess. “I’m being cautious not to throw him under the bus more than I believe is accurate,” he said. His longtime P.R. adviser, Dawn Schneider, who had been pushing for a more forceful denunciation, dropped her pen, threw up her arms and buried her head in her hands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/business/david-boies-pottinger-jeffrey-epstein-videos.html
Boies and Pottinger discussed using the promised videos in litigation or to try to extract settlements from the men in the videos, with the money going to a charitable foundation, the New York Times alleged. The settlements would remain private.
When Kessler asked Pottinger to provide some hypotheticals to explain how money could be collected from those depicted in the videos, Pottinger provided two examples, according to the article.
In one hypothetical, Pottinger said the money would be split among his clients and the foundation. Up to 40% of the money would go toward attorney fees.
In the second hypothetical, the lawyers would ask the men on videotape to hire them and make a contribution to a nonprofit as part of the retainer. Hiring the lawyers would prevent the men from being sued.
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/man-who-claimed-to-have-epstein-sex-tapes-duped-david-boies
It just sounds very fishy. I mean if it was just a hoax or a con why did they make such a big deal of it by publishing it big on NYT. There is a hidden purpose behind this story IMO. Maybe its just them covering their asses or its their way of letting the Johns know they are coming for them but not to worry so long as they pay up.
And last but not least here is another Epstein connection to Trump matters
Judge Bruce Reinhart’s wife Carolyn Bell is an Assistant U.S. Attorney, who was appointed by Gov. Rick Scott.
Judge Bruce Reinhart is a popular American magistrate Judge. Judge Bruce Reinhart came to the limelight after he Represented Jeffrey Epstein’s Pilots And Secretary. Now Judge Bruce Reinhart is popular as the Judge who signed off on the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion and donated $2,000 to Barack Obama’s campaign. Previously Judge Bruce Reinhart has represented several employees of the billionaire pedophile.
https://wikinewspedia.com/judge-bruce-reinhart-wiki/
Thomas Bowers-Deutsche Bank
Thomas Bowers, head of the firm’s Private Wealth Management Division was discovered hanging from a rope in his New York home before Thanksgiving (2019), just as FBI agents were hoping to interview him about the loans he’d approved to Epstein and his various shell companies. Epstein had followed Bowers to Deutsche Bank in 2013, where – despite his allegedly defaulting on some $25 million in loans from Citigroup – Bowers securedfurther high-risk loans and credit lines for the convicted sex offender.
Bower was the boss of Jared Kushners and Donald Trumps personal banker at Deutsche (Rosemary Vrablic) and handled Epsteins business personally. Trump/Kushners received over 600 million dollars in loans in recent years when nobody wanted anything to with Trump or Kushners convicted felon Dad (Charles)
Side note: Deutsche Banks headquarters in NY following the destruction of its former building on 9/11 was the same address as Trumps grand fathers barber shop in 1905
Bank Leumi (Israeli Bank)
Mentioned a couple of times in Whitneys book related to Diamond Trading and Israel,
Rosemary Vrablic
had enrolled in Bank Leumi’s credit-training program in the 1980’s which launched her banking career. This bank served wealthy Russians and happened to be a hub for tax evasion and would be busted for not doing enough to combat money laundering. This is where Vrablic would learn the ropes.
The Kushners were among her earliest customers . They happened to have a long-running relationship with Bank Leumi the Israeli lender where Vrablic began her career .
Deutsche Bank-Overview
Deutsche Bank has an estimated $320 million in loans on 3 properties: data from Trump's June 2017 financial disclosure form and estimate based on full loan amounts reported in the news .
After Trumps bankruptcies few banks would do business with Trump by Deutsche Bank came to the rescue time and time against despite defaults on loans with Deutsche Bank
Besides Deutsche Bank , a company named Ladder Capital Finance issued $282 million in loans to Trump on 4 properties. In Feb 2017 the Related Companies bought $80 million in Ladder stock. Stephen Ross, chairman & founder of Related Companies, has been a client of Rosemary Vrablic a senior banker at Deutsche Bank, who counts Trump and Jared Kushner as customers
Deutsche's Rosemary Vrablic arranged loans for Trump & prior to election, Deutsche funded $285 million for Jared Kushner to refinance loan on part of former NYT building bought from Putins fav oligarch Lev Leviev whose company AFI was involved in Prevezon $ laundering case
Rosemary Vrablic started in banking in the mid 80’s with Israeli Bank Leumi where the Kushners were customers. Her boss at Deutsche Bank handled Epsteins account which he had brought over from JP morgan after they stopped doing business with Epstein in 2012
Deutsche Bank is being sued by investors over their questionable loans to wealthy and suspect clients. The Judge hearing the case had her husband and son shot by a former member of Kroll Associates who was based in Moscow in the late 90’s.
Many don’t recall but Deutsche Bank handled the Puts that were placed shortly before 9/11 with a former Kroll Associate working for the CIA, and Kroll in charge of WTC security
Deutsche Bank has allegedly been a huge money launderer for Russian and FSU oligarchs. The recent FinCEN leaks involve more than $2 trillion USD worth of flagged transactions from 1999 to 2017.
Much of that laundered money was ploughed into luxury real estate
The majority of the transactions come from Deutsche Bank which had more than half the $2 Trillion-dollar sum of the FinCEN Files. The main focus is on Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
Larry Middleton-Stephens Inc
Having more than one event chair is not unique in the world of philanthropy, but the Middletons, founders of Middleton Heat & Air, bring a lifetime’s worth of teamwork to this year’s gala, which will support emergency and trauma services in honor of first responders.
“We believe the Arkansas Children’s Foundation requested all three serve as co-chairs because members of their team had witnessed the closeness and strength of our working relationship that we enjoy as siblings, friends and business partners,” Larry says.
“The bond that we enjoy today is a result of us learning at a young age that life was better when we faced challenges as a team.”
Among the trio’s Miracle Ball responsibilities are the components of financial support, communication, organization and relationships, Sandy says.
In fact, the Middletons, Larry in particular, are responsible for the Miracle Ball’s 007 theme that comes complete with games of chance, a lavish casino setting based on the Bond films, hors d’oeuvres, martinis and an opportunity to win a 2020 Jaguar or a trip to Italy.
Larry recently visited the Montenegro Casino in Monte Carlo, the site of Bond’s high-stakes poker game in “Casino Royale.” Bond’s was a life-and-death adventure, but then, Sandy notes, there is just as much in the balance when it comes to the work of Arkansas Children's.
“The theme fit our interest in sharing with our community the high stakes Arkansas Children's takes on to serve our state’s children and the high stakes our first responders deal with daily for all of our benefits,” she says.
Larry is executive vice president at financial services firm Stephens Inc., Sandy is co-owner of real estate developer Coastal Partners and Mark is president of investment firm MidCorp Capital.
Just as they have followed different business paths, the Middletons also have different connections to Arkansas Children's.
“Living in central Arkansas, I have observed the growth of the institution and shared in the pride of having one of the leading children’s hospitals in the country in our backyard,” Mark says.
[Well thats interesting, Marks brother Larry is a high level long term Executive at Stephens Inc, and they are all interested in James Bond themes and Children’s welfare. No wonder Mark got along with Epstein]
https://www.littlerocksoiree.com/post/129060/a-family-bond-not-so-secret-service
Chinagate or Taiwangate (or both)
August 22, 1997
Former Clinton Aide Is Linked
To Taiwan's Central Bank
By PHIL KUNTZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- Mark Middleton, a former White House aide now entangled in the Democratic Party's foreign fund-raising scandal, called a Little Rock, Ark., brokerage house in mid-1995 with an odd tip: Taiwan's central bank was shopping for a money manager to invest some of its reserves in U.S. government securities.
According to officials at the firm, Stephens Inc., Mr. Middleton told Chief Operating Officer Curt Bradbury that they would be perfect for the job, because Taiwan wanted to do business with a company perceived to have connections to President Clinton.
Though the brokerage house's relationship with the former Arkansas governor has been rocky at times, Stephens is a force in the state's politics and supported Mr. Clinton's campaigns financially at key moments in his career.
"He said they want to do business with friends of the president," recalls Mr. Bradbury. The implication, he adds, was that Taiwan wanted to build a relationship with the Clinton administration through
Stephens. At the time, Taiwan was lobbying hard for enhanced treatment from the U.S.
Stephens declined the offer, which it later learned would have involved a $30 million account. "Thank God we didn't take that money," Mr. Bradbury says now.
Indeed, in the two years since, there has been an intense focus on the flow of Asian money into the U.S. political system. Investigators have been examining reports that supporters of both China and Taiwan were interested in using money to influence policy toward Asia.
Stephens officials say they don't know whether congressional investigators and federal law-enforcement authorities probing the campaign-finance scandal know about the matter, because the company hasn't received official inquiries about it.
Responding to two letters outlining the details of this article, the Central Bank of China in Taipei says in a fax: "We never discuss our correspondent-bank lists to the public."
Mr. Middleton's lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirms that his client suggested that Stephens vie for the bank's business, but denies he suggested anything about its political motives. "No one ever suggested to him, and he never suggested to anyone, that an arrangement with Stephens would somehow curry favor with the president," Mr. Luskin says.
Mr. Middleton, a focus of the Senate committee that is investigating campaign abuses, knew Mr. Clinton from their days together in Arkansas and became a major fund-raiser for his 1992 campaign. He held a midlevel White House job until February1995, when he left to try to broker business deals in Asia.
Traveling in Asia, Mr. Middleton left many with the impression that he was a player in Mr. Clinton's inner circle and could arrange meetings with the president. At times Mr. Middleton was treated accordingly, meeting with numerous political and business tycoons.
Mr. Luskin denies his client was "going around making himself out to be a big shot." Nevertheless, it is clear that Mr. Middleton was visiting Asian power-brokers at a time when major foreign-policy issues were brewing, including the controversy surrounding President Clinton's May 1995 decision to let Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui visit his alma mater, Cornell University.
Though friendly with the Taiwanese, the U.S. doesn't officially recognize it as a separate country; China claims sovereignty over the island. Mr. Lee's visit caused a major rift with China that continued into 1996, when Beijing tried to intimidate Taiwan with military maneuvers and Mr. Clinton sent warships to the region as a warning to China.
Among those Mr. Middleton rubbed elbows with in 1995 was the Taiwanese central bank's governor, Yuan-dong Sheu, a friend and political appointee of Taiwan President Lee. In August 1995, Mr. Middleton was feted at a dinner with a handful of leading Taiwanese businessmen, including Mr. Sheu. Also at that dinner was a Taiwanese-American businessman and one-time major DNC fund-raiser, F.T. Hsu, who months earlier had used his access to the president and Vice President Al Gore to lend his voice to a major lobbying campaign to pressure Mr. Clinton to let President Lee visit Cornell.
This dinner happened within a day or so of Mr. Middleton's previously reported, controversial meeting with Liu Tai-ying, who heads the business arm of Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang Party. Chen Chaoping, a consultant who was there, has said repeatedly, including once in court in Taiwan, that Mr. Liu offered to donate $15 million to aid President Clinton's campaign. Messrs. Liu and Middleton deny that.
Faced with a libel suit, Mr. Chen later said he had misunderstood what transpired. But a Taiwanese judge dismissed libel charges against two journalists who had reported the alleged offer, calling Mr. Chen's court testimony “more credible" than his recantation, and the journalists' article "not entirely groundless."
Exactly when in mid-1995 Mr. Middleton approached Stephens Inc. is unclear.
Stephens officials say he first called his brother Larry Middleton, who works in Stephens' capital-management division.
Stephens officials say Larry Middleton doesn't recall his brother mentioning anything about Taiwan looking to do business with a friend of the president. Mr. Luskin says, "Mark simply thought that this might be an opportunity to get some business to his brother."
Idea Came "Out of the Blue'
Next, Mark Middleton called Mr. Bradbury and suggested he meet with the bank's governor, Mr. Sheu, to discuss the idea.
Mr. Bradbury says he was dubious because he considered the idea unusual and "out of the blue."
Central banks occasionally parcel out small portions of their reserves to outside managers, but usually they manage reserves in-house. The vast majority of the Taiwan's approximately $90 billion in foreign-exchange reserves is managed in-house.
People with inside knowledge say a small portion of the Taiwan bank's portfolio is managed by a handful of outside brokers, including Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Some experts say the proposed deal with Stephens was unusual because the amount of money involved is tiny for a large central bank. Moreover, these experts considered it odd that, absent some other motive, Taiwan's bank would go to a large regional firm that isn't a big player in the government-bond market rather than a Wall Street house. "That strikes me as an extremely unusual and odd sort of transaction," says Lou Crandall, chief economist with R.H. Wrightson & Associates Inc., a bond-market research firm.
Mr. Bradbury discussed the idea with Warren Stephens, the company's president, and both decided against pursuing it, Stephens officials say.
They add the principal reason for rejecting the idea was the political nature of Mr. Middleton's initial approach, which they say Mr. Bradbury "clearly recalls." Mr. Bradbury informed Mr. Middleton of the decision.
Apparently, however, some at Stephens didn't get the message and continued pursuing the matter. Mr. Bradbury was annoyed to find out months later that it was still under consideration and moved to kill it once and for all.
The result was an extraordinary April 23, 1996, letter from Mr. Stephens to Mr. Sheu explaining why his company wasn't interested in the deal: It might be seen by some as "an attempt to influence U.S. policy toward Taiwan and perhaps China," he wrote, adding: "I'm sure this seems far-fetched to you, but I believe it could actually happen."
--Marcus W. Brauchli in Shanghai and
Leslie Chang in Taipei contributed to this
article.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.impeach.clinton/c/u3TAhvOMWng/m/a_jAXXaoWeUJ
Whitney devotes quite a lot of space detailing Mark Middleton and Epsteins frequent meetings with Clinton and speculating on what they may have been about. The gist of it is campaign donations on behalf of China by Asian friends in return for US military tech transfers to China. Indeed, I have no doubt some of that was going on. However, I don’t think it was the full story.
There was also something called Taiwan gate going on although this did not get exposed until later.
In addition, as Whitney points out we know thanks to Lynn Forrester de Rothschild that Epstein was most interested in currency markets
In a letter dated April 27, 1995, Lynn Forester, now Lynn Forester de Rothschild, wrote: Dear Mr. President: it was a pleasure to see you recently at Senator Kennedy’s house. There was too much to discuss and too little time. Using my fifteen seconds of access to discuss Jeffrey Epstein and currency stabilization, I neglected to talk to you about a topic near and dear to my heart. Namely, affirmative action and the future.
By 1997 the Currency Markets in Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe exploded. Anyone having advanced knowledge of this planned event would make a killing
Keep in mind Jeffrey Epstein became a member of the Trilateral Commission at this time. This was a Bilderberger like group including Asia started by David Rockefeller to help develop Asia in the Wests image. The currency devaluation that occurred served to slow the migration of production to China and make other Asian countries for attractive for investment
Lets start with Taiwangate
But the Taiwangate stories out of Asia also revive an issue Bolton encountered during his March 29, 2001, confirmation hearing held by the Senate foreign relations committee. During that session, he was asked if he had ever served as consultant to the Taiwanese government. Bolton said he was paid $10,000 a year in 1994, 1995 and 1996 by Taiwan to write research papers on Taiwan-U.N. membership issues. With Lee’s slush fund still a secret, there was no reason for senators to question Bolton about the ultimate source of the payments. Instead, Democratic senators were more interested in whether Bolton–who had previously called for U.S. recognition of Taiwan as a separate nation (thus, opposing the U.S. official position of “one-China”) and who had received money from Taiwan–would have to recuse himself from Taiwan-related issues. Bolton provided the obligatory reassurances. The Democrats were also concerned with his arch-conservative approach to arms control and foreign policy issues
Some scandals find traction in Washington, others fizzle. The Taiwangate affair–which involves a $100 million secret Taiwan government slush fund that financed intelligence, propaganda, and influence activities within the United States and elsewhere–seems to be in the latter category at the moment. The beneficiaries of the lack of attention include three prominent Bush appointees at the State Department who, before joining the Bush administration, received money from this account. And one of these officials, John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, submitted pro-Taiwan testimony to Congress in the 1990s without revealing he was a paid consultant to Taiwan. His work for Taiwan, it turns out, was financed by this slush fund.
On April 2, The Nation reported that news stories out of Asia, citing leaked classified documents, showed that former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui had established an illegal covert fund when he was in office and that several million dollars from it apparently were used to pay for a pro-Taiwan lobbying campaign in Washington mounted by Cassidy and Associates, a powerful lobbying firm. The clandestine account, according to the Asian media reports, underwrote the travels of Carl Ford, Jr., a former senior CIA analyst who was a consultant to the Cassidy and Associates effort.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/taiwangate-fallout-free-scandal/
[Bolton of course would become Trumps National Security Adviser]
Now China gate
Clinton's China policy was largely inherited from George Bush. In 1989, as part of a sanctions package meant to punish Beijing for the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, Senator Al Gore sponsored legislation barring U.S.-made satellites from being launched on Chinese rockets--unless the President declared such a launch to be in the national interest.
Under pressure from American corporations desperate to get their satellites into orbit, Bush issued nine such waivers between 1989 and 1992--and Gore denounced him as "an incurable patsy." But after Clinton was elected President, he came under the same pressure from business leaders, who argued that the export controls endangered America's telecommunications primacy. Clinton began signing the same waivers (there have been 11 on his watch).
In 1996, an American company, Loral Space & Communications, used a waiver to export a $200 million satellite that was destroyed when the Chinese rocket carrying it into space exploded. In the aftermath, Loral and another firm, Hughes Electronic Corp., gave information to the Chinese that, according to the Pentagon, may have helped China hone its ICBM guidance systems--a possible breach that has been under investigation by the Justice Department for 18 months.
Last February, another Loral waiver request landed on Clinton's desk. The State Department supported the waiver, arguing that it would promote trade with China and enhance America's position as the world telecommunications leader. But Clinton knew that Loral's technology transfer was under investigation. He also knew that Loral's chairman, Bernard Schwartz, was the largest individual donor to the D.N.C. in 1996, responsible for more than $600,000 in soft-money donations.
Clinton signed the waiver; he has called it "routine." But since it was first reported two weeks ago--mixed in with the sensational but apparently tangential Chung-Liu allegations--the embarrassment has mounted beyond anything Clinton could have imagined.
Though the China connection may have nothing to do with Clinton's decision to grant the waiver, it is giving Republicans a kind of traction the Lewinsky scandal never did
https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/05/25/time/china.missles.html
Currency Markets
[Given Epsteins interest in Currency Markets perhaps all those Epstein meetings with Clinton and Middleton (a banker) were about prepping for the Currency devaluations in Asia that were to begin in 1997. Coordinating this with Asian businesses and central banks to minimize their pain in return for campaign contributions and plenty of profit for Epsteins bets?]
United States is keenly interested in Taiwan's economic role, especially in the ongoing regional economic crisis. Though its currency has fallen relative to the U.S. dollar and its growth rate has flagged a bit, Taiwan is widely seen as the East Asian economy best situated to weather the current crisis. U.S. policy makers, worried about another round of currency devaluations in Asia, hope Taiwan's currency remains strong. A devaluation in Taiwan would place added pressure on the Hong Kong dollar and the Chinese yuan--something U.S. policymakers wish to avoid. Asian economic uncertainty also slows Taiwan's investment in the Chinese mainland; worth over $30 billion, Taiwan investment is widely seen as a moderating factor in the ongoing Taiwan-PRC rivalry.
Meanwhile, Taiwan's relatively healthy economy and large foreign exchange reserves are attractive to cash-starved Southeast Asian leaders. They are now willing to offend PRC sensitivities by meeting with senior Taiwan leaders in the hope of gaining added assistance from Taiwan. Taiwan has also taken steps to meet U.S. requirements for entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Once it wraps up a few pending issues with other trading partners, the sole obstacle to Taiwan's WTO entry will be the widely recognized implicit requirement backed by the PRC that the PRC must enter the WTO first before Taiwan can enter.
[China entered WTO in 2001. Bush voted yes despite the Spy Plane Incident that revealed many military secrets to China-
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/10 snowden-documents-reveal-scope-of-secrets-exposed-to-china-in-2001-spy-plane-incident/
]
On July 2, 1997, Thailand devalued its currency relative to the U.S. dollar. This development, which followed months of speculative pressures that had substantially depleted Thailand’s official foreign exchange reserves, marked the beginning of a deep financial crisis across much of East Asia. In subsequent months, Thailand’s currency, equity, and property markets weakened further as its difficulties evolved into a twin balance-of-payments and banking crisis. Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia also allowed their currencies to weaken substantially in the face of market pressures, with Indonesia gradually falling into a multifaceted financial and political crisis. Hong Kong faced several large but unsuccessful speculative attacks on its currency peg to the dollar, the first of which triggered short-term stock market sell-offs across the globe. And severe balance-of-payments pressures in South Korea brought the country to the brink of default.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/asian-financial-crisis
1998 Ruble Collapse
The ruble rate fell threefold, overnight from 6 to the dollar to 21 by early September. Inflation soared to over 80 percent and the Central Bank’s attempt to stabilize the economy using a fixed exchange rate between 1994 and 1998 ended in complete failure
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/08/22/remembering-russias-1998-financial-crash-op-ed-a62595
Trumps Chinese Saviors
In 2016 US presidential candidate Donald Trump said China was “raping” the US with unfair trade practices, and now it has emerged that the New York real estate tycoon may have a history of hurling accusations at Chinese, including Shui On Land chairman Vincent Lo and New World Development chairman Henry Cheng Kar-shun.
Trump, who made his name by building on his father’s New York property empire, has boasted “I’ve made a tremendous amount of money dealing with China,” and swears that he knows about “winning from China.”
Part of that winning strategy may involve liberal use of litigation, with Shui On’s Lo, who developed the Xintiandi complex in Shanghai, telling the New York Times recently that for Trump, “To file a lawsuit is nothing. It’s just like having lunch.”
That “war” started with a distressed Trump selling off a site that he couldn’t develop to scions of two of Hong Kong’s most successful real estate families.
Caught out when the New York property market slid in the early 1990s, Trump sold Riverside South to a company controlled by Lo and Cheng in 1994 in return for the two Hong Kong developers assuming Trump’s debts and promising him a 30 percent stake in any profits, according to an account in the New York Times.
Cheng, is the eldest son of New World and Chow Tai Fook founder Cheng Yu-Tung, with the elder Cheng estimated to be Hong Kong’s third richest man, with a fortune of $15 billion. Lo, is the younger son of the late founder of developer Great Eagle Holdings, Lo Ying Shek, and has had a long relationship with Shanghai party secretary Han Zheng.
These sons of eastern empire builders were reportedly surprised when, after their company sold the then largely completed Manhattan development in 2005, Trump slapped Lo and Cheng with the $1 billion suit, claiming “staggering breach” of fiduciary duty. Even before he became famous for his reality TV braggadocio, Trump’s confidence was on display as he insisted that he could have landed an offer well above the property’s $1.76 billion sale price.
Despite his claims of “winning from China,” however, the judge in the case ruled against giving Trump the $1 billion cash, although the billionaire did eventually gain the rights to profits from two projects in New York and San Francisco that Cheng and Lo bought with the proceeds of the Riverside South asset, both of them branded as Bank of America buildings.
https://www.mingtiandi.com/real-estate/outbound-investment/when-donald-trump-sued-vincent-lo-and-henry-cheng-for-1-bil/
Donald Trump’s business owes an estimated $1.3 billion, nearly $200 million more than it did when he left office. But that doesn’t mean that he’s under more financial pressure. In fact, Trump’s balance sheet is in better shape today than it was months ago.
The reason: Earlier this year (2021), JPMorgan Chase helped loan $1.2 billion against a San Francisco office complex in which Trump holds a 30% minority interest. As a limited partner, Trump would not be personally liable for that debt in the event of a default. But it still has a huge effect on his finances. In fact, the new loan allowed Trump and his business partner, publicly traded Vornado Realty Trust, to pay back their previous debt against the building, which was due last month, and extract about $616 million in cash.
In other words, the refinancing increased the debt on the property but also provided its owners with more liquidity. If Trump received 30% of the cash-out, the deal would have boosted his liquid holdings from an estimated $110 million to nearly $300 million.
. Two months after the Trump Tower loan comes due (2022), another piece of debt will mature—this one tied to a New York City skyscraper named 1290 Avenue of the Americas. Like the San Francisco building, Trump owns a 30% limited partnership interest in 1290 Avenue of the Americas alongside Vornado, which holds the other 70%. If Vornado refinances that building, too, Trump could easily extract another $75 million.
Doing so would provide the former president with some additional breathing room heading into 2023, when he has two loans with a combined original principal of $125 million coming due against Trump Doral, a golf resort in Miami. That property has struggled recently, so it could be challenging to refinance. Same goes for Trump’s hotels in D.C. and Chicago, which have an estimated $215 million of Deutsche Bank debt expiring in 2024.
Note: Vornado had acquired the Chinese Investors 70% stake with Trump keeping 30%.
So Trump owes the Rothschilds (Rothschild & Co. handled his 1991 bankruptcy negotiations) and Chinese Investors, not to mention Russian Money Launderers (buying his Real Estate) and foreign banks like Deutsche Bank (giving him hundreds in millions of dollars in loans when nobody else would after his bankruptcies) a lot for his good fortune.
Trump’s newest business partner: A Chinese firm with a history of SEC investigations
Shanghai-based Arc Capital, an investment firm that has been the target of probes by securities regulators, is at the center of the deal to take Trump’s media venture public.
Arc Capital, an investment advisory firm based in Shanghai, has repeatedly helped create or finance companies with little or no revenue, no customers and office locations that point to P.O. boxes, according to a Washington Post review of regulatory and court filings. One claimed to be developing autonomous drone software despite having no employees; another said it operated a publicly traded in-home bakery “specializing in freshly-made cakes and cupcakes” before saying it pivoted into touch-screen technologies for a “diversified blue-chip client base,” regulatory filings show.
The United States allows shell companies to be listed on public markets but requires operators to truthfully represent them as businesses with no active operations, securities lawyers said. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Arc of deceiving investors about the scope of its operations, the locations of the businesses and the identities of the people behind them, documents show.
This year, Arc helped create Digital World Acquisition, an investment vehicle that has raised over $1.2 billion to conduct a merger with Trump Media and Technology Group. Digital World is what’s known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a type of shell business that raises money from investors to acquire a private start-up with strong growth prospects. The deal, which still must be approved by shareholders and regulators, has the potential to enrich the former president and turn his nascent social media start-up into a public company overnight.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/23/trump-spac-deal-sec/
[The deal might be in some jeopardy as of now, but we shall have to wait and see if he gets his hands on the money]
Trumps “Coco Chow” (pet name for Elaine chao)
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Chao immigrated to the United States when she was eight years old. Her father founded the Foremost Group, which eventually became a major shipping corporation. Chao was raised on Long Island, New York, and subsequently received degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Harvard Business School. She worked for a number of financial institutions before being appointed to several senior positions in the Department of Transportation under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, including Chair of the Federal Maritime Commission (1988–1989) and Deputy Secretary of Transportation(1989–1991). She served as Director of the Peace Corps from 1991 to 1992 and as president of the United Way of America from 1993 to 1996.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced on November 29, 2016, that he would nominate Chao to be Secretary of Transportation.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Chao on January 31, 2017, by a vote of 93–6, with her husband, then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, abstaining
The Transportation Department's inspector general cited numerous instances where Chao's office helped promote her family's shipping business. The inspector general asked the Trump administration's Justice Department in December 2020 to consider a criminal investigation into Chao, but the DOJ refused.
The company her father founded (and which her sister, Angela, currently runs), The Foremost Group, has extensive ties to the Chinese state and Chinese elites.It obtained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans from a bank owned by the Chinese state, has substantial interests tied to a major shipyard funded by and long-term contracts with a steel producer owned by the Chinese state. In what The Times described as "a rarity for foreigners", Angela and James Chao have served on the boards of a Chinese state-owned shipbuilder, and Angela has been on the board of the Bank of China, as well as the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (which was created by the government of China).
From January 2018 to April 2019, 72% of the total tonnage shipped by Foremost was shipped to and from China. The Foremost Group has almost no footprint in the United States other than its headquarters in New York.
During the period when Chao appeared with her father at promotional events for the family company, the US Department of Transportation repeatedly sought to cut funding and loan guarantees for domestic American shipping companies, shipyards, and shipbuilders. These proposed budget cuts were rejected by Congress in a bipartisan fashion.
Chao's Department also sought for three years to prevent funding for a program that supports the viability of small domestic US shipyards, and a separate program that issues loan guarantees for the construction or reconstruction of ships with American registration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/us/politics/elaine-chao-china.html
In May 2020, the Trump administration removed the acting Inspector General of the Transportation Department, Mitch Behm. Behm, who was not a political appointee, was conducting an investigation into whether Secretary Elaine Chao was giving preferential treatment to projects in Kentucky. Her husband, Mitch McConnell, is the Senator of Kentucky and faced a re-election bid at the time.
Trump appointed Howard "Skip" Elliott as interim Inspector General of the Transportation Department. However, at the same time, Elliott served in a dual role where Chao was his boss. Thus, Elliott was head of an office that was investigating his own actions and those of Chao.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Chao
George Nader
2016-George Nader like Epstein he has had several run-ins with the law over the years related to sexual abuse of children. He was convicted in the 1990s of transporting child pornography publications, and imprisoned in 2003 for sexually abusing ten boys in the Czech Republic.
He pleaded guilty in early 2020 to flying a 14-year-old boy from Europe to the US for sex, and transporting pornography depicting child sexual abuse and bestiality.
During the George H. W. Bush Administration he helped to free American hostages in Lebanon after the Iran–Contra affair.
During the Clinton Administration, Nader tried unsuccessfully to broker an Israeli–Syrian peace agreement, working with Estée Lauder heir Ronald Lauder, a Mega Group connection that may have put him in Epsteins/Maxwell/Trumps circle
2016 August 3, Nader met with Trump Jr., Erik Prince, and Joel Zamel, an Israeli entrepreneur and specialist in social media manipulation, to offer help to the Trump team in winning the elections.
There are conflicting accounts of whether the close to 2 million dollars Nader paid Zamel after Trump's victory is attributed to that or not.
Nader served as an envoy representing Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammad bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
Joel Zamel, is an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation and owner of intelligence gathering firms including Wikistrat and the Psy-Group.
Wikistrat bills itself as a “crowdsourced” geopolitical analysis firm based in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of Wikistrat’s clients were foreign governments; that Wikistrat is, for all intents and purposes, an Israeli firm; and that the company’s work was not just limited to analysis. It also engaged in intelligence collection
Psy Group, deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates in 2016 used social media manipulation to help Trump beat his Republican primary opponents and Hillary Clinton. Psy Group’s founder Joel Zamel also owns WikiStrat, which reportedly gamed out how to successfully interfere in an election as early as 2015.
Psy-Group is a former Israeli private intelligence agency which was owned by Joel Zamel and operated by CEO Royi Burstein from Petah Tikva, which closed after revelations that it was under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The company had conducted both online perception management, social media influencing/manipulation campaigns, opposition research honey traps and clandestine on-the-ground activities for clients.
Royi Burstien, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army, headed an intelligence unit before starting Psy-Group and acting as Psy Group’s vice-president of business development.
Zamel proposed an extensive social amplification campaign to support Trump’s 2016 campaign, and Nader is reported to have pledged the Saudis and the UAE would foot the bill. Nader would later give Zamel $2m for those services, although Zamel disputes that claim.
Erik Prince, founder of security firm Blackwater, hired Nader to help with contracts with the Iraqi government; in a 2010 deposition, Prince identified Nader as a "business development consultant".
Prince is now working for the Chinese. Frontier Resources Group (FRG) is based in the UAE and is a subsidiary of Prince’s Frontier Services Group (FSG). Prince sold a majority stake in FSG to the Chinese in 2013. His boss is now Chang Xhenming, who is very close to President Xi Jinping.
Chang is also chair of China’s massive Citic Group. FSG is one of the companies helping to build “re-training” camps for ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim communities in China’s Xinjiang province. China detains 1 million people in those camps and keeps 13 million people under surveillance.
Epsteins Carbyne has ties to China through Co-founder Lital Leshem. Leshem, who remains a shareholder at Carbyne, now works alongside Erik Prince.
Chinese authorities use a platform not unlike Carbyne to illegally surveil Uyghurs. China’s Integrated Joint Operations Platform brings in a much bigger data-set and sources of video, which includes an app on people’s phones. Like Carbyne, the platform was designed to report emergencies. Chinese authorities have turned it into a tool of mass surveillance.
The app monitors every aspect of a user’s life, including personal conversations, power usage, and tracks a user’s movement. “
In January 2017 Nader was at a meeting on the Seychelles islands between the Emiratis and Erik Prince, and was present when Prince met with officials from the UAE and Kirill Dmitriev, head of state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund representing Putin
https://unlimitedhangout.com
https://ordoabchao.ca/volume-six/israel-first
Interesting note- 2016-The developer of the uCampaign app, Vladyslav Seryakov, is an Eastern Ukrainian military veteran who trained in computer programming at two elite Soviet universities in the late 1980s.
The main investor in uCampaign is the American hedge fund magnate Sean Fieler, who is a close associate of the billionaire backer of SCL and Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer.
An article published by Business Insider on 7 November 2016 states: “If users download the App and agree to share their address books, including phone numbers and emails, the App then shoots the data [to] a third-party vendor, which looks for matches to existing voter file information that could give clues as to what may motivate that specific voter.
Thomas Peters, whose company uCampaign created Trump’s app, said the App is “going absolutely granular”, and will—with permission—send different A/B tested messages to users’ contacts based on existing information.”
Despite the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, it seems that the Republican data machine is still a shadowy network that includes international operators, tangled up with vendors under intense scrutiny for unlawful conduct in multiple jurisdictions,” he said. “I don’t understand why Republicans don’t insist on working with domestic tech vendors and technologists who are U.S. citizens
Naders Takedown, at the same time as Epstein
In January 2018 he was questioned by FBI agents working on behalf of special counsel Robert Mueller, and child pornography was incidentally found on one of his three cell phones as agents inspected it pursuant to a warrant. In June 2019 he was arrested by federal agents and charged with possession of child pornography and images of bestiality[8] and, for a second time, transportation of child pornography, and held in jail pending trial in Virginia. Also in 2019 he was charged with having transported a 14-year-old Czech boy from Europe for sex at his Washington-area home in February 2000. Nader reached a plea deal with prosecutors: in January 2020, he pleaded guilty to charges of possession of child pornography and transportation of a minor, for which prosecutors recommended the minimum penalty of 10 years in prison; in June 2020, he received that sentence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Nader_(businessman)
Not saying its related but Adnon Khashoggi nephew was assassinated in 2018 a year after his Uncle died
Epstein -Trump Breakup-More Russian Money
In November 2004, Epstein and Trump's friendship ran into trouble when they became embroiled in a bidding war for a $40 million mansion, Maison de L'Amitie, which was being auctioned in Palm Beach. Trump won the auction for $41 million, and successfully sold the property four years later for $95 million to the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev. That month was the last time Epstein and Trump were recorded to have interacted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
[More Russian Money. Nice.]
World Commerce Corporation -Atlantic Council, AIC-AIG
This company was mentioned by Whitney in her book. It is very hard to find anything on it. Its most likely a precursor to the Enterprise, a collection of interlocked companies aligned with organized crime and retired spooks. Not very visible. I seem to remember reading somewhere it disbanded sometime around 1962 a couple of years after Donovans death but I cant find any mention of that now. This is about the same time as the Atlantic Council was formed, which is NATOS Think Tank, members are retired spooks and generals and linked to a web of global companies
Anthony Cave Brown, the biographer of OSS founder and head William Donovan – one of the primary movers behind the scenes of the WCC – links the firm to efforts to rebuild European industry in the aftermath of World War II, while Ralph Ganis parses out the linkages between the WCC and the construction of the industrial infrastructure for NATO.
With holdings and interests in mining, oil, natural gas, film, shipping, agriculture, and tourism, the WCC did indeed pursue this goal.
The Atlantic Council is an American think tank in the field of international affairs, favoring Atlanticism, founded in 1961
Not exactly sure where I got the below list but it looks credible
Individuals involved in WCC:
William Horrigan -- president -- OSS veteran
John Pepper -- vice president
Ricardo Sicre -- vice president -- OSS
B.H. Boncompagni -- general counsel -- some kinfd of Italian prince from an ancient money family
Edward Blick -- director
James F. Cavagnaro -- director -- VP of Transamerica, the holding company that owns Bank of America
W.W. Cumberland -- director -- expert on Latin American economies, had been part of the John Foster Dulles Paris Peace Conference delegation, advisor to the State Department, financial advisor to the Haitian government, member of the New York Stock Exchange
William Donovan -- director
Daniel de Menocal -- director
Russell Forgan -- director -- OSS, investment banker, had been involved in the committees that set up the CIA
Joseph Grew -- director
L. Boyd Hatch -- director -- investment banker, business partner of Floyd Odhum, who owned RKO before selling it to Howard Hughes. Hatch and Odum developed Pine Glenn Clove, a private retreat for the New York and Hollywood bigwigs located in Utah
Frank Ryan -- director
William Stephenson -- director
Edward Stettinius -- director
Companies mentioned in the WCC 1945 papers
British-American-Canadian Corporation
Keswick Marine Panama S.A. (see Jardine-Matheson file)
Weyerhauser Steamship Company: the maritime subsidiary of the Weyerhauser logging and mining complex, based in canada
Bechtel Brothers-McCone International Company: the Bechtel conglomerate's division set up to handle projects in Saudi Arabia
Sun-Douglas Shipping Corporation: no available information on this company other than it was registered in Panama and appears in the Panama Papers. Wondering if this is connected to Sun Oil, because they had a subsidiary, Sun Shipbuilding.
Seven Seas Shipping Company: principles unknown, appears to have been set up in the 1930s.
International Corporation Company: one of the most generic names I've ever seen
Perhaps the first American private Intelligence Company is American (AIC) International Corporation which eventually spawned AIG. Not the acronym in reverse is CIA
The directors of American International and some of their associations were (in 1917):
J. OGDEN ARMOUR Meatpacker, of Armour & Company, Chicago; director of the National City Bank of New York; and mentioned by A. A. Heller in connection with the Soviet Bureau (see p. 119).
GEORGE JOHNSON BALDWIN Of Stone & Webster, 120 Broadway. During World War I Baldwin was chairman of the board of American International Shipbuilding, senior vice president of American International Corporation, director of G. Amsinck (Von Pavenstedt of Amsinck was a German espionage paymaster in the U.S., see page 65), and a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation, which financed the Marburg Plan for international socialism to be controlled behind the scenes by world finance (see page 174-6).
C. A. COFFIN Chairman of General Electric (executive office: 120 Broadway), chairman of cooperation committee of the American Red Cross.
W. E. COREY (14 Wall Street) Director of American Bank Note Company, Mechanics and Metals Bank, Midvale Steel and Ordnance, and International Nickel Company; later director of National City Bank.
ROBERT DOLLAR San Francisco shipping magnate, who attempted in behalf of the Soviets to import tsarist gold rubles into U.S. in 1920, in contravention of U.S. regulations.
PIERRE S. DU PONT Of the du Pont family.
PHILIP A. S. FRANKLIN Director of National City Bank.
J.P. GRACE Director of National City Bank.
R. F. HERRICK Director, New York Life Insurance; former president of the American Bankers Association; trustee of Carnegie Foundation.
OTTO H. KAHN Partner in Kuhn, Loeb. Kahn's father came to America in 1948, "having taken part in the unsuccessful German revolution of that year." According to J. H. Thomas (British socialist, financed by the Soviets), "Otto Kahn's face is towards the light."
H. W. PRITCHETT Trustee of Carnegie Foundation.
PERCY A. ROCKEFELLER Son of John D. Rockefeller; married to Isabel, daughter of J. A. Stillman of National City Bank.
JOHN D. RYAN Director of copper-mining companies, National City Bank, and Mechanics and Metals Bank. (See frontispiece to this book.)
W. L. SAUNDERS Director the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 120 Broadway, and chairman of Ingersoll-Rand. According to the National Cyclopaedia (26:81): "Throughout the war he was one of the President's most trusted advisers." See page 15 for his views on the Soviets.
J. A. STILLMAN President of National City Bank, after his father (J. Stillman, chairman of NCB) died in March 1918.
C. A. STONE Director (1920-22) of Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 120 Broadway; chairman of Stone & Webster, 120 Broadway; president (1916-23) of American International Corporation, 120 Broadway.
T. N. VAIL President of National City Bank of Troy, New York
F. A. VANDERLIP President of National City Bank.
E. S. WEBSTER Of Stone & Webster, 120 Broadway.
A. H. WIGGIN Director of Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the early 1930s.
BECKMAN WINTHROPE Director of National City Bank.
WILLIAM WOODWARD Director of Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 120 Broadway, and Hanover National Bank.
The interlock of the twenty-two directors of American International Corporation with other institutions is significant. The National City Bank had no fewer than ten directors on the board of AIC; Stillman of NCB was at that time an intermediary between the Rockefeller and Morgan interests, and both the Morgan and the Rockefeller interests were represented directly on AIC.
Kuhn, Loeb and the du Ponts each had one director. Stone & Webster had three directors. No fewer than four directors of AIC (Saunders, Stone, Wiggin, Woodward) either were directors of or were later to join the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
We have noted in an earlier chapter that William Boyce Thompson, who contributed funds and his considerable prestige to the Bolshevik Revolution, was also a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — the directorate of the FRB of New York comprised only nine members.
And on AIG I found this
American International Group [AIG] is a subsidiary of AIC. Internet searches suggest that AIG was created in 1919 by a 27-year old named Cornelius Vander Starr, a recently discharged US Army buck private from Fort Bragg, California (a military installation from 1859-64). However, the facts don't support the legend.
Sadly, on the Internet, when urban legends are repeated often enough they obfuscate the truth. Fiction becomes reality. Legend would have us believe a 27-year old, with no advanced education and no money, who served 8 months in the army at the end of WWI—and who never fought in the war and never took officer's training—was discharged as a 2nd Lieutenant after 8 months of service.
Legend would have us believed he joined an insurance brokerage firm, Shean & Deasy and virtually overnight became its manager, yet quit his dream job after only a few months to become a mail clerk with the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. Starr, the legend goes, wanted to see the world—which was why he purportedly joined the Army. (Note: In 1914 the Pacific Mail Steamship Co., was purchased by AIC to get the US mail contracts for Asia, and to serve as a toehold in Asia for AIC.)
AIC in 1914 had already embarked on the path to creating a global economy. The first attempt by the money mafia to create world government would come in the Treaty of Versailles .
C.V. Starr, who was born on Oct. 15, 1892, graduated from Fort Bragg High School in 1909. He began selling life insurance for the James Nelson Realty Co. in Fort Bragg around 1913. In 1914 he moved to San Francisco to sell auto insurance for the Pacific Coast Casualty Co. In 1917 he went to work for an insurance brokerage firm, Shean & Deasy, leaving them to join the army. Logic suggests he came out of the service 8 months later when the Armistice was signed as a buck private. As a soldier, he went no where and did nothing at a time when soldiers might spend one whole hitch waiting for one stripe.
Some of Starr's biographers claim he came out of the army as a sergeant, others claim he made lieutenant. Neither makes sense and sound like someone remodeling Starr's past to give him a biography worthy of a wealthy man's latter-year stature.
Starr and Frank Raven formed American Asiatic Underwriters—an insurance agency selling policies, not issuing them.
Raven had been selling insurance in China since 1904, and had been very successful. He amassed several million dollars, enough to begin underwriting policies. That history's probably correct. At some point, Starr and Raven formulated plans to create an insurance company that would actually insure the policyholders. That, too, is correct. But, that company was not AIG. It was AAU.
Starr returned to the United States and convinced several American insurers—in particular Globe Life, Rutgers and National Union—to act as a re-insurer, covering AAU's risk. There may have been a stipulation that forced AAU to open sales offices in the United States since that happened. But now, at age 29, Starr was on his way. But not with AIG. The new company was American International Underwriters [AIU].
(My research revealed an American International Group IPO to purchase AIU. I could not determine the date of the IPO.)
Starr and his partner managed to build a very lucrative, very successful insurance company with relatively low capital in about two decades. They were so successful that AIU was under contract to manage all of AIG's overseas property-casualty business.
Using guesswork alone it's likely the IPO was exercised sometime between 1947 when Mao overran China and 1950 when Starr created a new entity, CV Starr & Company. Or, at the latest, in 1955 when he formed the CV Starr Foundation whose wealth was comprised largely of AIG stock that is now worth about $3.5 billion. None of the various websites contain the history of AAU, AIU, AIG or AIC. It's almost like all of them encourage legend building.
Its so incredibly frustrating that there is such a paucity of information on what certainly were very important companies that no doubt played a big role in our history
BILL BARR -Clinton-Epstein -Trump
One of the more interesting sections in Whitneys book is Barrs alleged connection to Bill Clinton
A 1992 memo from Duncan to high-ranking members of the attorney general’s staff notes that Duncan was instructed “to remove all files concerning the Mena investigation from the attorney general’s office.” The attorney general, serving under George H.W.Bush, at that time, was William Barr.
As mentioned before, Barr had been a former CIA officer before then joining the Agency-linked law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge.
Reed alleged that one of the CIA’s point men in the Arkansas operations was a man who claimed to be the general counsel for Southern Air Transport and went by the name Robert Johnson. Johnson seemed to give Governor Clinton his marching orders, and was particularly incensed when Bill’s wayward brother, Roger Clinton, was busted in 1985 for peddling cocaine. As previously mentioned, Roger’s penchant for cocaine was one he shared directly with Lasater, who testified that the two had frequently indulged in the drug together.
Johnson reportedly told Clinton that he was “Mr. Casey’s fair-haired boy” and that Arkansas had been the CIA’s “greatest asset.” Johnson went on to deliver to Clinton the following message: “Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you’re No. 1 on the short list for a shot at the job that you’ve always wanted. You and guys like you are the fathers of the new government. We are the new covenant.”49
According to Terry Reed, who witnessed these happenings, he would later learn that Robert Johnson was none other than William Barr. These allegations place Barr’s use of the alias Robert Johnson in an interim period where little is known about Barr’s activities – he had served as Deputy Assistant Director for Legal Policy in the Reagan White House until September 1983, and then had joined President Bush’s Justice Department in 1989. As previously discussed, it was between the months of September and October 1983 that Casey’s pre-Enterprise support for the Contras began moving in a concrete way, and it was also in this same period that Manuel Noriega had entered the picture.
The answers that Barr provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee states that between 1983 and 1989, he had returned to the CIA-linked firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, and in 1985 had become a partner at that firm.
So here is an interesting timeline of Billy Barr, some of which is covered by Whitney
1974 - former OSS Donald Barr's hired Jeffrey Epstein to teach at Daltons High School
Barr went to work full time for the CIA when he left Columbia in 1973.
During his first two years with the Agency, Barr worked for the intelligence Directorate in the China Department. Bush was in Beijing in 1975 as defacto China Ambassador. As many know Bush has been alleged to have been connected to the CIA even before he became CIA director
1976- Barr worked in the CIA legal team when CIA Director George H. W. Bush, fresh from his post as U.S. envoy to China, rallied the agency to undertake covert activities that included propaganda, regime change, infiltration of groups, creation of scandals, assassinations , drug running and revolutions. Barr prepared briefs for Bush’s stonewalling responses to congressional probes, led by Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike, that attempted to bring the Bush and [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger covert action under the rule of American law….As Deputy Assistant Director for Legal Policy in the Ronald Reagan White House, Barr would have been involved in the nascent stages of the illegal Reagan administration and Central Intelligence Agency operations to arm the Nicaraguan Contras.
In order to hide financial transactions between the CIA, the Contras, Colombian narco-lords, and others, the Reagan White House and CIA used the banking network of BCCI, which was primarily funded by the then-president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan.
1978- Barr went to Washington University's law school as a night student clerk, upon Bush's recommendation, for U.S. District Judge Malcolm Wilkey in Washington, DC. Wilkey had dissented, as widely reported, from the court’s historic opinion ordering President Richard M. Nixon to turn over his secret Watergate tape recordings, arguing that discussions between a president and his advisers are protected by “absolute privilege.”
During the 1960s, Wilkey had been general counsel to a copper-mining conglomerate operating in Chile under the political management of Prescott Bush’s banking partner, Spruile Braden. Salvador Allende became Chile’s President and confiscated Braden’s huge El Teniente mine. Allende was soon overthrown and murdered in 1973. In 1976, Chilean opposition leader Orlando Letelier had been blown up by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. Though the U.S. media generally blamed the Chilean secret police for the killing, it is well established that then-CIA director George Bush had penetrated the Chilean agency and had squelched all U.S. police investigation into the murder [which killed also Letelier’s American aide Ronni Moffett in Sheridan Circle in the city’s downtown]. Malcolm Wilkey, later served as George Bush’s ambassador to Uruguay and arranged cool-out payments to Chileans who might have fingered Bush’s CIA for the Letelier bombing.
On Judge Wilkey's recommendation, Barr started in Oc tober 1978 as an associate of the Washington, D.C. law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge. Barr immediately took up the representation of B.F. Saul II, a Maryland real estate magnate who only a few months earlier had become chairman of Financial General Bankshares. In his later testi mony to the Senate hearings on his confirmation for Justice Department posts, Barr revealed that he had represented B.F. Saul beginning November 1978, and in 1979, 1981, and
1982.
This was an extraordinarily important stretch of time in his client's life. During this period, Financial General was taken over in stages by BCCI, a London-based bank with Arab and other principal investors tied to Anglo-American intelligence. Saul's Financial General Bankshares changed its name to First American Bankshares, and functioned as the Maryland, District of Columbia, and Virginia arm of the British spook-bank BCCI
Barr told the Senate that he had represented B.F. Saul through March 1982. By this time, the BCCI takeover of First American was completed. In April 1982, Clifford re placed B.F. Saul as First American's chairman, although Saul stayed on the board. In May 1982, Barr ceased being a private attorney, and joined the White House legal staff, becoming an intimate collaborator with Vice Presidents George Bush counsel C. Boyden Gray
1982- Barr joins Reagans DOJ legal team
1983 Barr left the administration in September returning to Shaw the law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridgewhere he Barr represented elements of BCCI money laundering operation. He also represented the CIA front company Southern Air Transport, a major trafficker in narcotics.
Mid 1980’s (refresher)
Reed alleged that one of the CIA’s point men in the Arkansas operations was a man who claimed to be the general counsel for Southern Air Transport and went by the name Robert Johnson. Johnson seemed to give Governor Clinton his marching orders,
Johnson reportedly told Clinton that he was “Mr. Casey’s fair-haired boy” and that Arkansas had been the CIA’s “greatest asset.” Johnson went on to deliver to Clinton the following message: “Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you’re No. 1 on the short list for a shot at the job that you’ve always wanted. You and guys like you are the fathers of the new government. We are the new covenant.”
According to Terry Reed, who witnessed these happenings, he would later learn that Robert Johnson was none other than William Barr
1988 October Executives BCCI were indicted in , on charges they conspired with cocaine traffickers to launder millions of dollars in narcotics profits.FortyU.S.and foreign banks, evidently complicit in the international drug trade, were sub poenaed to produce records before a Tampa, Florida grand jury. BCCI was further exposed as an instrument for the trans actions of Oliver North and his associates, who had been criminally employed by Vice President George Bush in the Iran and Contra operations.
1989- December , Bush ordered the U.S.bombing and invasion of Panama, killing thou sands. Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega, who knew the dirtiest drug-pushing secrets of BCCI, Bush, and North, was kidnapped and imprisoned in Florida. Barr, as the head of the OLC, justified the U.S. invasion of Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega.
1991 December Attorney General Barr announced that BCCI had entered a guilty plea to certain racketeering charges, in return for which the U.S. Justice Department agreed to drop all other federal and state charges that might be brought against BCCI entities in the future. In the plea bargain arrangement, BCCI forfeited all of its estimated $550 million in assets in the United States, and there were some minor jail sentences. But the global drug apparatus, which had for a time been publicly challenged, was safe.
1991-1992 Under the leadership of Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and William Barr, who was then an official in the Bush Justice Department, the BCCI investigations were stopped.Plea bargains protected the world's top drug bank ers, and protected President Bush and his criminal employee North.In exchange for leniency, officials of BCCI agreed to help Bush prosecute General Noriega for alleged drug trafficking.
Barr then reached a final settlement of the BCCI case, foreclosing all further investigations of the BCCI-linked drug apparatus.
1991 November 26, Barr became Attorney General under Bush -six months after the convenient back-to-back deaths of a sitting and former senator who were involved in investigating Iran-Contra and the October Surprise.. Barr played a key role in helping Bush arrange pardon of "the Iran-Contra Six" of high-level criminals. Barr, as Bush's Attorney General, not only helped Bush in his pardon of the Iran-Contra Six but he did everything in his power to stymie the Walsh investigation and efforts by Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, and House Banking Committee chairman Henry Gonzalez of Texas, to get to the bottom of Iran-Contra, the October Surprise, BNL, BCCI, and the Inslaw scandals.
Bush was under investigation by the special prosecutor, Judge Lawrence Walsh, for his role in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. Also under investigation were former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and two top CIA officials, Clair George and Dewey Clarridge. They had all plotted to evade a congressional ban on aid to the counterrevolutionaries in Central America by illegally selling weapons to Iran.
1992, Chile’s Supreme Court decided that President Bush could be legally ordered to appear in Chile, to testify on the role of the CIA in the Letelier case; Chilean generals claimed that they have been wrongly blamed for the killing, and that the Bush’s CIA ordered the 1976 bombing. The U.S. chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General William Barr, did not respond. But what he did was to hire Malcolm Wilkey as a special prosecutor to intimidate the Democratic Congress in the House Post Office affair.
1992-Barr as attorney general in 1992 authored the report The Case for More Incarceration, where he argued for an increase in the United States incarceration rate.
1992- Barr played direct role in sidelining an investigation into an Italian bank that the CIA used to funnel aid to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The scandal was known, briefly, as Iraq-gate.
The backdrop was the geopolitics of the horrific war between Iran and Iraq in 1980-88, which killed millions. In the interests of harming Iran, President Bush authorized a program of covert support for Iraq, including the provision of targeting intelligence and commercial loan guarantees. The latter were made via the Atlanta branch of the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL).
The story was politically potent because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait in August 1990. President Bush had to raise an international military coalition to drive him out.
The Iraq-gate story illustrated how, once again, a U.S. covert operation had backfired. The Iraqi dictator had been emboldened by the covert support of the CIA to launch a war on a weaker American ally.
Barr made sure the Iraq-gate scheme was not fully investigated.
“Were the intelligence services of the U.S., Britain and Italy all aware of—and participants in—the West’s secret, unlawful arming of Saddam?” asked New York Times columnist William Safire. “Of course; but the stonewalling strategy of the departing Justice politicians is to have the C.I.A. take the gaspipe for all the wrongdoers.”
Under pressure to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate, Barr slyly appointed a special examiner, a magistrate with much less time and money. A retired judge conducted a cursory investigation and absolved both the CIA and Justice Department of wrongdoing.
1992-As attorney general during the George H.W. Bush administration, Barr played a key role in developing a secret program that served as the blueprint for the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans’ phone records.
The data collection began in 1992 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, President George W. Bush, authorized the NSA to gather its own logs of Americans' phone calls in 2001. It was approved by william Barrs Justice Department and in four successive presidential administrations and detailed in occasional briefings to members of Congress but otherwise had little independent oversight, according to officials involved with running it.
The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas.
The result was "a treasure trove of very important information on trafficking," former DEA administrator Thomas Constantine said in an interview.
The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. "This was aimed squarely at Americans," said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That's very significant from a constitutional perspective.
1992 Barr had started the Justice Department's internal investigation of the FBI director, Sessions, in 1992.
Sessions, is a native of Fort Smith, Arkansas. He was a former federal judge nominated by Republican presidents to high-ranking federal posts, including as a federal prosecutor and federal judge in the Western District of Texas before his appointment by President Reagan to lead the FBI.
Sessions FBI was probing drug-running via Mena and related money laundering via BCCI that implicated the Bush and Clinton networks, and Barr himself in various ways, including a purported 1980s money laundering relationship with Vince Foster, a partner with Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.
Sessions was forced to resign in early 1993 by the incoming Clinton Administration, including its Attorney General Janet Reno. Foster, by then White House deputy counsel during the first six months Clinton Administration, was found dead that summer in a Northern Virginia park in a purported suicide that has long raised questions among independent investigators about the official story.
Curiously, both Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr would serve as Trumps Attorney General
1994: Barr went on to be general counsel for GTE, a large independent phone company in the Bell System era, until its merger with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon, and then was general counsel of Verizon until his retirement in 2008. After that, he joined Time Warner as a board member (right after it separated from Time Warner Cable), making close to $2 million in connection with the AT&T-Time Warner merger last year.
Barr assisted in the dramatic reconsolidation of the telecom industry through a tsunami of mergers, lobbying, and litigation following the breakup of AT&T in 1984. Basically, his employers did whatever they could to frustrate the aim of the 1996 Telecom Act to create competition for local phone service, while presiding over mergers that effectively reconstituted Ma Bell. Barr was being a good lawyer—that's what his employers wanted, even as their corporate identities morphed over time.
1999- cable was an upstart provider of internet access, serving about 300,000 Americans, compared to 35 million who got access over copper phone lines. Barr argued strenuously that "open access" rules (then applicable to phone lines) also be applied to cable: After years of mind-numbing litigation, Barr and his employers eventually succeeded in getting the FCC to change the rules that had been intended to foster competition in local phone service. Most of the 6,000 or so competing phone providers that had emerged by 1999 could not survive on the incredibly thin profit margins the resulting regulatory structure allowed them, and fell over dead. Meanwhile, the incumbent phone companies obtained permission from the FCC to sell services beyond phone calls, like data and long-distance products, and quickly consolidated: GTE became part of Bell Atlantic, which became Verizon.
Today, the pre-1984 Ma Bell has been effectively reborn in the form of giant conglomerates Verizon and AT&T. And Barr was there for all of that, working to re-merge and re–vertically integrate his part of the telecom industry into a powerhouse. Now Verizon is focused on premium wireless services, where profit margins are highest; it doesn’t want to be thought of as a basic wired data transport company---the 21st century equivalent of a telephone company.
And when it comes to cable, it’s amazing how prescient Barr's 1999 testimony was. In fact, the cable industry (after its own wave of consolidation) has come to dominate "a large percentage of local pipelines," particularly in urban areas. In its last earnings call, Comcast touted its “connectivity centric” business model and said it has 47 percent of the US high-speed internet access market, but hopes to get more. Indeed, the cable industry routinely accounts for more than 100 percent of net new subscriptions to high-speed internet access, as consumers who can afford cable flee DSL.
In other words, the controllers of the bottleneck---that last segment of a communications network between a neighborhood node and homes and businesses, sometimes called the “last mile”---want a tighter bottleneck, and we've got less competition than ever.
Requiring everybody to open up their “last mile” facilities to competition, thus breaking open any local chokehold over access to the consumer, would have been the only way to insert competition into the equation, as former Justice Department Antitrust Division head Anne Bingaman argued in 1999. But we didn't do that, partly because of Barr and his employers.
DOJ Antitrust Division head Makan Delrahim has made the sensible argument that (today’s) AT&T, which owns the second largest distributor of pay TV, satellite company DirecTV, will likely use Time Warner programming to advantage AT&T’s distribution business---to the further detriment of rivals---if AT&T is allowed to keep Time Warner.
Delrahim knows that talented lawyers can find ways around rules such as "don't discriminate in favor of subdivisions of your conglomerate.” Behavioral limitations---often used to resolve antitrust cases---just don't work. That's why, sometimes, conglomerates with market power at one level need to be kept from the other levels of the supply chain, particularly when those conglomerates are effectively operating private, unregulated infrastructure utilities. Legions of antitrust scholars have said this makes total sense.
But Barr’s ideas about consolidation and the appropriateness of making an information distribution business more profitable by controlling key inputs and making them unavailable to other distributors were formed during his go-go years of merging and acquiring in the telecom industry. And so Barr, in an affidavit filed in the AT&T-Time Warner case, said Delharim’s argument against the merger seems at risk of being based not on "a well-versed substantive analysis, but rather political or other motivation."
Having spent much of his private-sector career sticking Ma Bell back together after her 1984 breakup, Barr said he views Delrahim's recommendation that AT&T be required to divest big parts of the combined company if the merger were to be approved as "inexplicable" and "extreme." (Because of the nearly $2 million he stands to gain from that deal, Barr will have to recuse himself from being involved with it if he is, as expected, confirmed as attorney general.)
For more than two decades, William Barr was one of the most talented lawyers around at undoing behavioral limitations attached to mergers and statutes.
Epstein/Barr
Court records show Kirkland & Ellis continued to represented Epstein through 2011, while Barr worked at the firm. Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI Assistant Director for counterintelligence said that Barr’s Father, Donald Barr, once hired Epstein to teach at Dalton School, a private academy in New York City.
Alexander Acosta was a former Kirkland litigator and later would be U.S. labor secretary under Trump, who as a Florida federal prosecutor signed off on Epstein’s sweetheart plea deal in 2007 in Florida
Court records show Kirkland & Ellis continued to represented Epstein through 2011. Barr worked at the firm in 2009.
2019- while there are rumours Bill Barr visited Epstein in his cell before his death there is no evidence this is the case. He did visit Epsteins cell mate after the “suicide”, allegedly to make sure inmates were well treated (or to buy his silence?)
He did not recuse himself from the investigation
Mr. Barr is personally overseeing the four federal inquiries into the matter and is briefed on them multiple times a day. In less than two weeks, he suspended the two prison employees who guarded Mr. Epstein the night he died, transferred the warden and found a new permanent director for the Bureau of Prisons. He stayed apprised of the autopsy and was alerted that the coroner would officially rule the death a suicide. And federal prosecutors in New York have subpoenaed more than a dozen prison officials and employees as the fast-moving investigation into Mr. Epstein’s death intensifies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/us/politics/william-barr-jeffrey-epstein.html
Needless to say, nothing of substance resulted from Billy Boy’s investigation
Brookfield Asset Management-Kushners-Bronfmans
2018-NEW YORK CITY—Kushner Companies received relief for its aluminum-clad albatross of 666 Fifth Ave. Brookfield Asset Management purchased a 99-year, 100% leasehold interest in the 1.5 million square-foot Midtown Manhattan office building. Although the financial terms were not disclosed The New York Times reported Brookfield (a top investor Vanguard is 9% owned by Black Rock, also Qatar is part owner) paid approximately $1.1 billion in upfront rent, and that Charles Kushner, who’s now heading the company, negotiated to pay lenders substantially less than what was owed on the building. The paper previously had reported that the property had a $1.4 billion mortgage with accrued interest due in February 2019.
The funds from Brookfield’s leasehold would come in handy for another transaction involving the same asset.
Kushner Companies purchased the 49.5% interest in 666 Fifth Ave. from its partner Vornado Realty Trust (Black Rock has significant holdings) for approximately $120 million. (Originally bought for 80 million and assumption of half of the Kushner mortgage) That deal was originally announced in April with Vornado CEO Steve Roth’s letter to shareholders filed with the SEC.
[Vornado is also a partner with Trump on joint ownership of buildings in SF and NY]
Along with Vornado’s sale of its interests, the existing mortgage loan on the property was repaid. Vornado will receive net proceeds of approximately $57 million and will recognize an $8 million financial statement gain in the third quarter for the participation it held in the mortgage loan. Vornado will continue to own the property’s retail space which currently houses Uniqlo, Tissot and Hollister with 125 feet of frontage on Fifth Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets.
Previously, to pay off debt in July 2008, the Kushners had sold the controlling interest in the building’s 90,000 square feet of retail space to the Carlyle Group and Crown Acquisitions for $525 million. In July 2012, Vornado acquired the retail component from Carlyle and Crown for $707 million.
Brookfield is planning major renovations to upgrade the office condominium. The 115-year-old global alternative asset manager with $285 billion in assets under management is banking on turning around the building’s fortunes.
“With its ‘Main and Main’ location, direct transportation access and currently unrefined physical characteristics, 666 Fifth Ave. has the potential to be one of New York City’s most iconic and successful office properties,” says Ric Clark, senior managing partner and chairman, Brookfield Property Group. “Given Brookfield’s experience in successfully redeveloping and repositioning major office assets in New York and other cities around the world, we are well placed to capitalize on that opportunity.”
In 2007, with Jared Kushner at the helm, Kushner Companies bought the 1957, 41-story Midtown tower for $1.8 billion from Tishman Speyer Properties and TMV Real Estate. The transaction attracted a great deal of attention due to its staggering price tag.
Subsequently, with the financial crisis, the property did not generate its projected revenues. With Kushner’s becoming a special advisor to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, the building received even more negative attention. This included conflicts of interest questions when foreign and domestic investors were sought to help alleviate the real estate’s heavy financial burdens.
Brookfield is a name that towers over the global investment industry, even if it receives less scrutiny or attention than rivals of similar size. The name adorns the skyscrapers of London’s Canary Wharf, Berlin’s reconstructed Potsdamer Platz and New York, where Brookfield dwarfs every other commercial landlord. And it reaches far beyond real estate; Brookfield’s eclectic investment portfolio includes 14,500km of railways and toll roads, about one-seventh of France’s mobile phone masts, and Westinghouse, the formerly bankrupt nuclear reactor maker.
Who is Brookfield? Originally an outgrowth of the Bronfman liquor dynasty, the group today attracts money from ordinary stock market investors, sophisticated public pension systems and sovereign states including Qatar, the gas-rich Middle East emirate
Yet what exactly Brookfield is, and how it operates, is maddeningly difficult to ascertain. To unpack the Canadian group’s accounts is to discover not so much a company as a giant, triangular jigsaw board that spreads across the world and covers assets worth $500bn. The pieces are hundreds of corporate entities, all locked together by elaborate contracts, which give 40 people at the top the right to rule huge sections of the puzzle almost as if it were their own.
Two days before Brookfield bought the Kushners’ office tower last August (2018) , an executive named Brian Kingston dialled into a conference call with analysts and casually disclosed that his team had just closed a $1.4bn transaction involving a different set of New York properties. Brookfield was the seller. It was also the buyer.More precisely, the buyer was BAM, which sits a few rows from the top of the Brookfield triangle, and is sometimes known as Brookfield for short.
But this time BAM was in fact putting up money, to buy a 28 per cent stake in a bunch of New York office towers. And it was doing more besides. The buildings were owned by Brookfield Property Partners, a separate Nasdaq-listed company that sits further down the triangle, trades under the ticker BPY and — confusingly — is also sometimes known as Brookfield for short.
Because BPY does not employ any property specialists, it delegates tasks such as identifying assets to buy and sell to other parts of the Brookfield empire. As well as snapping up the New York office tower stakes, therefore, BAM was steering BPY to get rid of them.
BAM told investors in November 2018 that it planned to sell the property interests to outside investors “in the near term”, but more than a year later, it has yet to announce a buyer.
Even today, shareholders know little about why BPY wanted to sell 28 per cent of its core office portfolio for $1.4bn, or why BAM wanted to buy. The rationale was that BPY needed cash. “The only reason we did that,” Mr Flatt says of the office tower deal, was that “it [BPY] needed some extra capital. And this was an easy way to do it.”
The money was needed, Mr Flatt explains, to pay for a big wager on US malls — a sector that many investors have left for dead.
[Gee whiz, I wonder how that worked out for them]
BPY consummated the bet in August 2018 when it merged with retail landlord GGP, whose shareholders received cash payments worth $9.3bn. Yet that was also the month when some of BPY’s cash was committed to 666 Fifth Avenue, the office lease in midtown Manhattan that is still jangling nerves from Washington DC to Doha.
The Kushner deal was assembled from several pieces of the Brookfield empire. The lease was signed by a company named BSREP III Nero LLC, a possible allusion to the emperor who was blamed for the burning of Rome. That company is owned by a fund called BSREP III, which is managed by BAM and was, at the time, controlled by BPY — all of which placed the deal where global finance blends into geopolitics on the jigsaw.
The known links between Qatar and Brookfield all converge on the investment group’s listed property fund BPY. About one-tenth of the fund’s assets are tied up in skyscrapers in Canary Wharf and Manhattan that are co-owned by Qatar, but the connection goes further. Through a sovereign wealth fund, Doha is one of BPY’s biggest investors, holding $1.8bn worth of BPY preferred equity.
In theory, Qatar has significant influence over BPY. It is entitled to choose one person to sit on BPY’s board, and to receive confidential information that other investors never see. Both sides have previously indicated that, when Brookfield was negotiating a $1.3bn lease on 666 Fifth Avenue, a building that Charles Kushner had discussed with the Qataris the previous year, the emirate was not involved.
In the public accounts of BPY, the listed property fund that received Qatari investment, 666 Fifth Avenue has already all but disappeared. Last January, BPY lost control of BSREP III, the private vehicle that owns the building, after reducing its stake to $1bn. New investors piled in, each taking a piece of the Kushner tower, and lifting the private fund’s firepower to $15bn.
That influx of cash has not made the tower’s ownership any more transparent. A handful of US pension funds have acknowledged their participation, but few other investors have been identified publicly.
Knowledgeable people insist that no Qatari money is involved. Materials reviewed by the FT show that about $3bn of the total comes from sovereign governments, although they do not specify which ones, and $2bn of it from the Middle East, although the document does not say exactly where.
https://www.ft.com/content/595a77d0-3867-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4
Donald Trump and Larry Fink
BlackRock's CEO and co-founder Fink, one of the world's largest venture capitalists and member of the Trilateral Commission as well as the World Economic Forum's board of directors, has been hired by the Federal Reserve to help "stabilize the credit market" in the wake of the Corona crisis. This means, according to the New York Times, that BlackRock can profit from the advice that gives:
Under one of the programs that BlackRock will help lead, the Fed can buy exchange-traded funds that hold stakes in investment-grade bonds, a type of investment that BlackRock sells.
It is the same procedure as after the financial crisis of 2008. Even at the time, BlackRock worked closely with the Federal Reserve. The state and capital are in the same boat, and the big bad guys run the ship regardless of who holds the presidency.
Fink was also a former Trump's personal fund manager.
Larry did a great job for me. He managed a lot of my money. I have to tell you, he got me great returns. (Donald Trump)
https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/08/investing/larry-fink-blackrock-dark-clouds-trump/index.html
Good article-history fink
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/04/fink-201004
Epstein -Giuliani-Mnuchin -Ross sighting post conviction
Jeffrey Epstein, 66, attended a screening and dinner party back in August 2010 for the film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in Southampton
The dinner was at the home of David and Julia Koch, and Epstein can be seen in photos chatting with attendees after Peggy Siegal put him on the guest list
'He was chatting to Jonathan Farklas, Leon Black and Wilbur Ross. He was sitting right near Rudy Giuliani,' wrote Page Six at the time
Steve Mnuchin was also present, as were designers Tory Burch and Tamara Mellon and billionaires Steven Schwarzman and Henry Kravis
Epstein should have been registered as a sex offender in New York at the time but it is unclear if he was as his hearing was not until 2011
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/static/videoplayer/6.17.2/styles/mol-fe-videoplayer.min.css" />
Jeffrey Epstein hobnobbed with high-profile guests from the worlds of politics, banking, Hollywood and philanthropy at a Hamptons party just two months after his release by the state of Florida for soliciting a minor.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7270735/Jeffrey-Epstein-Trumps-closest-advisers-Wilbur-Ross-Rudy-Giuliani-Steve-Mnunchin.html
Thats all folks.