TRUMP’S TASTE FOR ROUBLES
Pulitzer prize-winning author who exposed The Donald’s dodgy dealings with shady Russian moneymen says...
THERE are few more glittering events in the American social calendar than a Presidential inauguration – a gladhanding festival of parties, parades, galas and celebratory balls. And so it will be on Friday, when 70-yearold Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45th US President.
Yet even in a nation famous for its colourful entrances, this will be one of the most extraordinary of inaugurations – tainted by the refusal of A-list stars to accept their invitations, and surrounded by a miasma of claims as sordid as they are outlandish and which, should they be proved true, could doom the Trump Presidency before it has even begun.
The allegations – that Trump took Russian bribes and that Moscow prostitutes performed perverted acts at his request – have been denied, of course, and vigorously. With his usual bombast, Trump denounced the 35-page dossier containing the claims as ‘fake news’. Russia duly backed him up, insisting it does not collect compromising information on people.
Perhaps they are right. So lurid are some of the claims, they might well have been devised by a hostile intelligence agency, not to say the writers of a low-budget mini series. It is true no one will know the truth until we see the videotapes the Russians are said to hold.
YET the claims are entirely plausible, too, as even a passing acquaintance with the history of Donald Trump makes clear. And while his strange sexual behaviour is established fact, Trump’s murky dealings with Russian financiers I have helped expose are a bigger threat still; a time bomb of financial compromise and corruption that could destroy his Presidency – even without the help of the Russian security services or the British former spy said to have compiled the explosive dossier.
First, consider the claims of his behaviour with call girls in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. Trump has continually boasted of a voracious sexual appetite, but he told a press conference last week that the allegations he was caught on film were evidently false as he is always careful to avoid hidden cameras.
Conveniently, he seemed to forget that tape that emerged of him bragging about grabbing women by their genitals. There is no doubt, either, that he is a risk taker, reckless even, when it comes to women. When his then wife, Ivana, ran the Trump Castle casino hotel in Atlantic City, Trump kept his mistress Marla Maples just a few miles away at Trump Plaza, where I spotted her nine months before it became public.
There is a particular irony, too, in his dismissal of the sex claims against him as ‘fake news’, as he has a history of propagating bogus stories of his own, not least when it comes to women. Posing as fake publicists, he planted made-up stories about his sexual exploits – including being solicited by Madonna, Carla Bruni and Kim Basinger.
Yet for all that, it is hard to believe that any sex tapes could truly damage Trump, a figure already lampooned as the **** grabber in chief. Rustbelt America did not vote for a choirboy.
No, the real threat to Trump lies in the second major claim against him – that he has taken bribes to do the bidding of Putin and his cronies who, the dossier says, have spent the past five years preparing the ground. (Public records reveal Trump’s lucrative financial dealings with the Russians going back many more years). Here there would be real grounds for potential blackmail and here, too, the accusations are all-too plausible. Trump has long boasted of his deep ties to Russian oligarchs, statements he now wants everyone to forget. Trump’s dependence on Russian money and his authorisation of an alleged tax fraud involving shady Moscow businessmen came long before Vladimir Putin’s intelligence operatives hacked the emails of American Democrats.
Is it then a surprise that Trump praised Putin, often gratuitously, during the campaign? Meanwhile, he denounced American intelligence services, comparing them to Nazis only last week. He is now talking about lifting sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea.
There was a time, before he ran for Presidency, when Trump was only too keen to trumpet his links with Moscow money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ his namesake son Donald Jnr told a real estate trade gathering in New York nine years ago. ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.’
For example, in 2008 he sold a Florida waterfront estate for £82million, more than twice what he paid for it. And the purchaser was a company whose name disguised the real buyer – Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev.
The sums of money are vast. Trump finds himself a material witness in an alleged £250million income tax fraud when profits from the Trump SoHo Hotel in Manhattan disappeared in a deal he authorised. He denies any wrongdoing but yet again the hands of the Russians are visible. The project was run by a former Soviet commerce official, Tevfik Arif, who is now fabulously wealthy, and by Felix Sater, a violent felon and frequent Trump travelling companion who is the son of a reputed Russian mob boss in New York. The profits vanished to a corrupt Icelandic bank which was a favourite of Russian oligarchs. Trump claims that he barely knows Sater and would not recognise him, a claim even Slater has dismissed as false.
Trump’s publicly known connections to Russian oligarchs are extensive. His de facto campaign manager, until scandal forced him out, was Paul Manafort, who was the Washington agent for Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin-backed ex-President of Ukraine.
While his denials of sexual misconduct have been outright, Trump has said rather less in answer to questions about his links with Russian money.
HE WAS asked last week whether his team had any contact with Russia during the campaign. He gave no answer, but two months ago, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told a Russian news agency: ‘There were contacts… We are doing this during the election campaign… I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives.’
That Trump is corrupt is beyond doubt. I and others have proved it. That he is a sexual predator is established fact.
Yet what will worry him now is the growing suspicion that he is what the Soviets called a ‘useful idiot,’ as stooge of America’s sworn enemy, Vladimir Putin, so financially in bed with Russian criminal associates that he will take office compromised in his ability to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’
Trump lacks any moral core, any history of ethical conduct – and this could destroy his Presidency if fellow Republicans hold him to a minimal standard of propriety, and that’s without the latest, all-too-believable, allegations. As with Nixon, the only US President who had to resign because of corruption, my advice is this: follow the money.