Trump’s self-descriptor as “king of debt” cuts many ways, with “many sides”. Trump’s indebtedness does have many creditors, including continuing criminal enterprises, aside from the now numerous emolument violations.
part of Trump’s business empire has been built on untraceable funds, some apparently linked to Russian criminal networks
In the early 2000s, a series of bankruptcies meant Donald J. Trump was shunned by most lenders. Struggling for credit, he started selling his name to high-end real estate projects. This report examines in detail the criminal connections that propelled one such project – the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama – and how this case bears some of the same disturbing hallmarks as other Trump developments.
Since he became President of the United States, numerous investigations and articles have probed Trump’s business dealings and his alleged links to criminals and other shadowy characters. It is understood that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation under the Department of Justice will also examine his real estate business. This is important because it seems likely that, following his various bankruptcies, at least a part of Trump’s business empire has been built on untraceable funds, some apparently linked to Russian criminal networks.
The Russian lawyer at that Trump Tower meeting claims Donald Trump Jr. asked for dirt on Hillary Clinton.
(WASHINGTON) — The CIA has identified Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to Wikileaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties, according to a new U.S. intelligence report, senior U.S. officials said on Thursday.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Central Intelligence Agency and others have concluded that the Russian government escalated its efforts from discrediting the U.S. election process to assisting President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign.
“The difference is what’s important.”
In December of last year, Steele informed Luke Harding, a journalist for the Guardian, that “the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals” between Trump and individuals with the Kremlin ties warrant investigation. “Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” the former spy said, according to a conversation detailed in Harding’s new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. “The difference is what’s important.”
According to his book, Steele did not elaborate on this point to Harding, but his implication was clear: it’s possible that Trump was indebted to Russian interests when he descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to declare his candidacy. After the real-estate mogul suffered a series of bankruptcies related to the 2008 financial crisis, traditional banks became reluctant to loan him money—a reality he has acknowledged in past interviews. As a result, the Trump Organization reportedly became increasingly reliant on foreign investors, notably Russian ones. As Donald Trump Jr. famously said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
www.vanityfair.com/…
Dismissed as a failure and all but forgotten, President Warren G. Harding has re-emerged as a much more interesting man over the past 13 months.
Just over a year ago, the Library of Congress released a trove of steamy love letters that Harding wrote to his mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips, in the decade before he became the nation’s 29th president. (How steamy? Let’s just say they feature a character named Jerry, and it’s a body part, not a person.) And on Thursday, The New York Times broke the news that DNA testing had confirmed that Harding, who was married for 33 years until his death in 1923, had fathered a child with a second paramour, Nan Britton, during the same period in which he was penning love notes to Phillips.
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...the most damning assessment of Harding’s qualifications for the presidency came not from historians or partisans but from the man himself, who admitted repeatedly to reporters that he was in over his head. (“A man of limited talents,” Harding once said of himself.)
“He felt woefully under-qualified for the job, and that set in motion a chain of events that set him up to be one of the worst presidencies in history,” Kruse elaborated to me. “He was nervous about it, so he surrounded himself with old friends from his hometown, who themselves were unqualified for the jobs they held and many of them corrupt.” Harding’s pick to head the veterans bureau just a few years after World War I, for example, was a man he’d met while vacationing and who later engaged in a “massive swindle.” And as fans of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” will recall, Harding’s attorney general, Harry Daugherty, was running a criminal operation that made him rich.
www.google.com/…
The Teapot Dome Scandal was a bribery incident that took place in the United States from 1921 to 1922, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and two other locations in California to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. In 1922 and 1923, the leases became the subject of a sensational investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Fall was later convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies and became the first Cabinet member to go to prison. No person was ever convicted of paying the bribes, however.
Before the Watergate scandal, Teapot Dome was regarded as the "greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics".[1] The scandal damaged the public reputation of the Harding administration, which was already severely diminished by its controversial handling of the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 and the President's veto of the Bonus Bill in 1922.[2]
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