Tagged: Jared Kushner
Exclusive: Trump/Russia on Manhattan’s E. 64th Street
The block is East 64th Street in Manhattan between Madison and Fifth avenues, one of the poshest in the city.
Residents and owners have over the years included Trump’s children, the family of Jared Kushner, a Russian oligarch, a Soviet-born billionaire and major GOP donor, and the family of another Russian oligarch friendly with Ivanka.
The story of East 64th Street isn’t a story of collusion over a cup of borrowed sugar, but rather a story about the global elite — people from all over the world who are connected by networks of money, power and influence that concentrate themselves in cities like New York and London.
Just across the street from Central Park, you’ll find the limestone mansion that Trump’s children once called home. Don Junior, Ivanka and Eric Trump moved into 10 E. 64th Street after their mother, Ivana, was granted sole custody in her tumultuous 1992 divorce. Ivana still lives in the building.
Across the street, at 11 E. 64 Street, sits a mansion owned by Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch and aluminum tycoon who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Deripaska’s stake in the building was revealed in a case brought in New York by Alexander Gliklad, who was seeking billions in dollars from Deripaska:
U.S. government sanctions prevent Deripaska from selling the pied-a-terre he purchased a decade ago for $42.5 million from art dealer Alec Wildenstein.
Complicating matters, Deripaska’s house was occupied last year by the ex-wife and children of Roman Abramovich, another Russian oligarch connected to Putin who is perhaps best known for his ownership of London’s Chelsea Football Club.
Dasha Zhukova, Abramovich’s ex-wife, listed her address as 11 East 64th Street on this New York City property record a year ago:
Perhaps not coincidentally, Dasha Zhukova happens to be good friends with Ivanka Trump. The two women have known each other for more than a decade and were photographed together at the U.S. Open tennis tournament during the 2016 presidential election. Abramovich and Kusher have met three to four times in social settings, Bloomberg reported.
Another owner on East 64th Street is Ukrainian-born Len Blavatnick, one of the richest men in the world. Blavatnik spent $90 million to buy a Gilded Age limestone townhouse at 19 E. 64th St.
Blavatnik is a business partner of his 64th Street neighbor, Oleg Deripaska. The two have stakes in Rusal, one of the world’s biggest aluminum producers, although Deripaska was recently forced by the U.S. government to give up control of the company.
One of Rusal’s major shareholders, SUAL Partners Limited, was founded by Blavatnik and the sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Blavatnik resigned from Rusal’s board two days after Donald Trump was elected president.
Blavatnik, who is now a citizen of both Britain and America, donated $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration
During the 2016 election, Blavatnik contributed another $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators.
The top recipient was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who raked in $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik’s holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings.
Marco Rubio’s Conservative Solutions PAC and his Florida First Project received $1.5 million through Blavatnik’s two holding companies. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina received $800,000 from Blavatnik’s company. Ohio Governor John Kasich took $250,000 from Blavatnik and Arizona Senator John McCain another $200,000.
Blavatnik had tried to buy 19 E. 64th St. for years. He even sued the previous owners, the Wildenstein family, when an earlier deal fell through. His lawsuit describes the building in almost loving terms:
The Kushners long had a presence on the block as well. A family company purchased 26 E. 64th Street in 1989 and sold it 2007, the same year that Jared met Ivanka.
Finally, the last person I could find connected to Trump on this fascinating block was Verina Hixon, who used to rent an apartment at 14 E. 64th Street. She was kicked out for nonpayment of maintenance fees.
Hixon’s story is just as wild as any of her better-known neighbors. The Daily Beast ran a story about her titled “The Party Girl Who Brought Trump to His Knees.”
In 1982, the Austrian-born, Swiss-educated Hixon bought four apartments in Trump Tower for $10 million. The apartments were widely believed to belong to Hixon’s “friend,” John Cody, head of a local Teamsters union that was closely linked to the Cosa Nostra. Cody went to jail, Hixon went bankrupt and lost the Trump Tower apartments.
She found a new home on East 64th Street where she befriended Ivana Trump. Ivana visited Hixon’s $20 million chalet in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Ivana brought along her dachshunds who relieved themselves all over Hixon’s home and that was the end of their friendship.
Facebook, Jared Kushner and Russia
Call me skeptical.
I don’t believe that Facebook won the election for Donald Trump. That’s the claim put forth in this hagiographic profile of Jared Kushner in Forbes and in many other media outlets.
The traditional campaign is dead, another victim of the unfiltered democracy of the Web–and Kushner, more than anyone not named Donald Trump, killed it.
We see these stories every time a new president is elected. A while back it was Obama’s “data crunchers.” This time, the key to Trump’s victory, Kushner would like us to believe, were computer algorithms that targeted potential Trump supporters with social media to stunning effect.
Kushner takes credit for hiring Cambridge Analytica, a company owned by Robert Mercer who also happens to be a Trump supporter, Breitbart investor, and a reclusive hedge fund billionaire.
The secret weapon was Cambridge Analytica’s computer algorithms that figure out who you are based and what motivates you based on all the times you click Like on Facebook, as Cambridge Analytica’s Jack Hansom explains in this video:
These algorithms turned up some surprising findings. Liking the New Orleans Saints mean you’re less likely to be “conscientious,” i.e. do the right thing. And liking the Energizer Bunny means you’re more likely to be neurotic.
So what? Well, one or two of these things don’t tell you much, but the average person has hundreds of Facebook Likes which allows Hansom and his colleagues to build a surprisingly accurate picture of your personality. You can test this on yourself here.
Facebook allows you to drill down to the kind of person in the kind of place you want. (You can even reach “Jew haters” in Idaho if you wish.) Here’s Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix showing how his company’s model could be used to drill down to find every “persuadable” gun rights advocate in Iowa:
It’s very impressive (and very creepy), and it makes for a good story, one that Silicon Valley loves in an everybody-is-stupid-except-for-me way.
But the problem with the claim that Kushner and his machine learning wizardry won the election for Trump is that everybody was doing it. Hillary Clinton had a team of mathematicians and analysts crunching data. Ted Cruz had hired Cambridge Analytica as well, but then he ran into the Trump train.
I may be wrong, but I’d wager the $1.8 billion worth of free airtime that TV networks gave Trump every time he opened his trap probably had a lot more to do with him winning the election than Cambridge Analytica.
Trump knows how to get on TV: He is a promotional genius. What will he say next? He’s a modern day PT Barnum and Jeff Zucker‘s CNN couldn’t get enough.
Setting that aside, the Facebook/Jared Kushner story is still pretty important. And what’s important about it is that Special Counsel Robert Mueller thinks it’s pretty important. Facebook may not have won Trump the election, but it may seriously damage his presidency.
CNN reported Sunday that Mueller, who’s investigating Trump’s links to Russia, had served Facebook with a search warrant. Mueller was interested in the $100,000 worth of ads purchased by bogus accounts that Facebook on Sept. 6 acknowledged had “likely operated out of Russia.”
Mueller’s search warrant for Facebook is a big deal, a former federal prosecutor explains:
Mueller would have had to show the judge that there was reason to believe that one or more foreign individuals committed a crime and the evidence of the crime could be found on Facebook’s servers.
The crime is that foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing money “or other thing of value” (like $100,000 worth of Facebook ads) in connection with an election. It’s also against the law to solicit, accept, or receive such a contribution. (Here is the statute.) And if someone on the Trump campaign knew about the Russian Facebook ads and did nothing to stop it, that is also a crime — aiding and abetting.
Did someone on the Trump campaign know about the Russian Facebook ads. We don’t know yet, but the answer lies in targeting. To put it in Watergate terms: Who targeted whom and when?
Were the Russian Facebook ads and the Trump campaign targeting the same people? And if so, how did a bunch of Russian trolls in St. Petersburg or Vladivostok or where ever know to target, say, black women in Milwaukee or rural voters in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, for example?
I tried to ask Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, but didn’t get a reply.
This question intrigues Sen. Mark Warner, the leading Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, as he said on the Pod Save America podcast:
Warner: When you see some of the explanation and some of the fact that it appears that, for example, women and African Americans were targeted in places like Wisconsin and Michigan, where the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play … It was interesting that those states seem to be targeted where the bots — where they could could create a lot of these fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, could in fact overwhelm the targeted search engines that would end up saying on your news feed, you suddenly got stuff that “Hillary Clinton’s sick” or “Hillary Clinton’s stealing money from the State Department.”
I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots. Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware really raises some questions. I think that’s a worthwhile area of inquiry.
How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?
Vietor : I wonder if they just asked Jared [Kushner] like Trump does with all of his questions. We’ll find out.
Warner : We’ll find out. More to come on that.
Sen. Warner thinks it’s a worthwhile line of inquiry, and it’s a good bet Mueller does too. The information Facebook handed over to Mueller included the targeting criteria the bogus Russian accounts used, The Wall Street Journal reported.
An unnamed Trump campaign staffer told CNN that the key to the whole inquiry may be found on Facebook’s servers.
Only Facebook can answer three critical questions: were the same databases used by the Trump campaign and Russian operatives to coordinate targeting of voters; was money used to promote pro-Trump posts, and, if so, how much was spent and by whom; and will Facebook reveal if bots were successfully used to push fake news posts?
Hopefully, Robert Mueller knows the answers.
Jared Kushner’s Shady Real Estate Deal?
Readers of this site will recall that in 2008 Donald Trump sold a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian billionaire named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million. As we now know, Rybolovlev grossly overpaid.
This sale is remarkably similar to a real estate deal at the heart of a bribery scandal involving Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham of California, who sold his home to a defense contractor for much more than it was worth. Cunningham pleaded guilty to accepting at least $2.4 million in bribes and in 2006 was sentenced to prison.
Well, there are two ways this bribery-scam-disguised-as-a-real-estate-transaction can work. You can overpay for an asset. Or you can sell an asset for much less than it’s worth.
Buried in The Washington Post’s recent story about Jared Kushner’s loans from Deutsche Bank, Trump’s favorite bank are interesting details about a real estate transaction that should invite scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, who is said to be investigating Kushner’s finances.
Kushner, it turns out, purchased four floors of a New York City office building for $296 million in October 2015. Fast forward 12 months and — presto! — Kushner’s office space was appraised at $470 million.
That’s a 59 percent increase in a year. Not quite as impressive as Trump’s 231 percent markup on the Palm Beach mansion he sold to the Russian billionaire, but still. Not bad.
What was Kushner’s secret?
An executive at Kushner Cos. told The Washington Post that the company had a “vision for the property when we purchased it that no one else had, and are proud to say that we executed on it.”
Translation: Kushner Cos. leased the space. When the four floors in the former New York Times building near Times Square were purchased, the offices were only been 25 percent occupied.
A great business move. Or …
Is there another explanation? Indeed, there may be.
The firm that sold Kushner Cos. the space in The New York Times building was Africa Israel USA, part of the conglomerate owned by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev.
Born in the former Soviet Union, Leviev keeps a framed photo of Vladimir Putin on a shelf in his office. In a 2007 profile in The New York Times, Leviev described Putin as a “true friend.”
Did Leviev give Kushner a — wink, wink — good deal as a favor from friends overseas?
Kushner isn’t Leviev’s only connection to Trump’s inner circle. He has tried to do business in Moscow with the man himself.
Trump and Leviev
AFI Development, another subsidiary of Leviev’s Israeli conglomerate, develops real estate in Russia. In May 2008, he invited Trump to his Madison Avenue store.
Leviev wanted to work with the Trump Organization on developing two hotels in Russia, according to Kommersant, the respected Russian business daily.
Astute readers of this site will recall that back in the 1990s, a corrupt Moscow city official named Vladimir Resin (aka The Russian with the Million-Dollar Watch) offered Trump the opportunity to develop a pair of decrepit hotels in Moscow, the Hotel Rossiya, just off Red Square, and the rundown Hotel Moskva.
During Trump’s meeting with Leviev, the Israeli billionaire offered Trump the chance to develop the very same hotels, the Rossiya and the Moskva, according to Kommersant.
The Rossiya
The Moskva was a small, venerable Moscow hotel that is now run by the Four Seasons. The Rossiya was a 3,000 room concrete box that was plagued with vermin and organized crime. The hotel’s general director was shot dead in a December 1997 contract killing. The hotel has been demolished.
(I’m beginning to wonder whether the Rossiya and Moskva are some sort of code words, given how often they come up in Trump’s life.)
Nothing came of this meeting with Leviev. In a statement, Leviev said that he and Trump “never had any business dealings with one another, contrary to speculation.” [Trump sold his Palm Beach mansion to the Russian billionaire in July, a few months later after meting Leviev.]
Another coincidence overlooked by reporters: Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP represented Leviev’s firm Africa-Israel USA in the sale of the former New York Times building. The lawyer representing Trump in the Russia probe is Marc E. Kasowitz, a name partner at the firm.
Rotem Rosen, described as Leviev’s “right-hand man” in this press release for a circumcision ceremony or bris is a former chief executive of Africa-Israel USA and CEO of the Sapir Organization. The Sapir Organization jointly developed the troubled Trump SoHo, a 46-story Manhattan luxury hotel-condominium completed in 2010.
Trump hosted Rosen’s wedding to Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago in December 2007. Both Trump and Kushner attended the aforementioned 2008 bris.
It’s these interlocking links that must be driving Mueller’s office nuts. What is coincidence and what isn’t?
Maybe Kushner’s big gain on the old New York Times building is just savvy business. After all, when Leviev’s Africa-Israel Investments purchased the building in June 2007 for $530 million. Just three years earlier, the newspaper had sold the property for $175 million, prompting this observation from the Donald: