Tom Barrack plays a central, if somewhat unheralded role in all of our Trump troubles, as you can read in his Wiki bio…
It was Barrack who, in 2010 pulled Jard Kushner’s chestnuts out of the fire with a 70 million dollar loan on Kushner’s distressed and over-leveraged 666 5th Avenue property, the terms of which he made less onerous at the request of Trump.
It was Barrack who recommended Paul Manafort be hired as campaign Chair, and who later pried a plank out of the 2016 Republican Platform calling for release of the 28 pages of The Joint Inquiry into 9-11’s report that implicated Saudi Intelligence figures connected to the Kingdom’s government.
And he was Chairman of Trump’s Inaugural Committee, the activities of which we will hopefully soon be learning much more about.
Barrack is of Lebanese descent and has made much of his approximately 1 billion dollar fortune in the Gulf region, and his criticisms of U.S. and Great Britain’s history in the region are not without merit and worthy of consideration.
However this charge...
“Speaking on stage at the Milken Institute MENA Summit in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, Barrack was asked by CNN’s Becky Anderson about the reputational damage to Saudi Arabia over the Jamal Khashoggi killing.
In response, he joked: “As long as you don’t make me a guest at the Ritz.”
With regards to the murder of journalist Khashoggi, Barrack said that “whatever happened in Saudi Arabia, the atrocities in America are equal, or worse ...”
...seems to me patently ridiculous.
Sure, it takes only a casual perusal of American history to find crimes and atrocities equal to or worse than the killing of a lone journalist.
My readers here are knowledgeable enough that I hardly need to list them.
But the luring of, brutal murder and dismemberment of one of our own citizens in one of our flagged Embassies - and sanctioned explicitly (allegedly) by our head of state is not among them.
But you see, Barrack further states, MBS is merely misunderstood:
“The atrocities in any ... country are dictated by the rule of law,” he continued. “So for us to dictate what we think is the moral code there, when we have a young man and regime that is trying to push themselves into 2030, I think is a mistake.”
Maybe, Tom, you should look to shoring up your own legal defense team rather than apologizing for MBS.
Cause we are coming after you.
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