Maggie would have snubbed Huawei, says Trump aide
That’s the insult Trump hurls at rivals. But how does he respond to claims about his eye-watering losses of ONE BILLION dollars?
THERESA May’s plan to allow Chinese firm Huawei to help build Britain’s 5G network could put the UK’s security relationship with America at risk, the US Secretary of State said last night.
In a dramatic escalation of the rhetoric over the issue, Mike Pompeo said ‘insufficient security’ would hinder America’s ability to share certain information with its closest ally.
Delivering a stinging criticism of the PM, he also invoked Margaret Thatcher, saying the Iron Lady would have taken a tougher stance on China.
‘Ask yourself: Would the Iron Lady be silent when China violates the sovereignty of nations through corruption or coercion?’ Mr Pompeo said at the Centre for Policy Studies, a conservative British think-tank in London.
‘Insufficient security will impede the United States’ ability to share certain information within trusted networks. This is just what China wants – to divide Western alliances through bits and bytes, not bullets and bombs.’
Earlier, in a press conference with Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Mr Pompeo said: ‘I have great confidence that the UK will never take an action that will break the special relationship. With respect to 5G, we continue to have technical discussions. We are making our views very well known.’
The thinly veiled threat came as a US cyber-security chief warned that Washington would have to reassess how it shared information with Britain if it allowed Huawei’s technology into its network.
Diplomat Robert Strayer said: ‘We have very closely integrated information- sharing relationships with the UK and a range of other countries.
‘In all those relationships, we rely on trust and protection of information. We would, if a country had Huawei in its 5G network, have to reassess how we are sharing information to ensure we are protecting the information.’
The US has repeatedly told allies not to use Huawei’s technology to build new 5G networks because of fears it could be a vehicle for Chinese spying – an accusation the company has denied.
Mrs May, however, is expected to give the go-ahead to the firm having a restricted role in Britain’s 5G networks, according to a leak from top
‘We rely on trust’
secret meetings. The leak was blamed on the then Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, who was sacked last week despite his denials.
In the Commons yesterday Tory MP Julian Lewis, chairman of the defence select committee, described the Huawei deal as ‘naive to the point of negligence’.
In an apparent reference to Mr Williamson, he said: ‘Shouldn’t we be grateful to all those ministers, present and former, who have opposed this reckless recommendation?’ Mrs May defended the move, saying: ‘The UK is not considering any options that would put our national security communications at risk, either within the UK or with our closest allies.’
Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright told MPs that the Government had still not made a final decision on the inclusion of Huawei in the UK’s 5G networks.
THe one single thing all voters knew about donald Trump when they put him in the White House was that — love or hate him — he knew how to make money.
Many hoped he would jumpstart the U.S. economy, making inspired trade deals and trouncing rivals such as China and the eU.
Why? Because he had done much the same in his own stellar business career.
‘I’m the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far,’ he boasted in June 2015.
But that image of the billionaire tycoon, who lectured would-be entrepreneurs in the reality TV series The Apprentice and wrote a bestselling memoir about his deal-making acumen, was questioned yesterday.
According to an investigation into his financial history by the New York Times, Trump, at the peak of his success, lost more than $1billion in a decade of business deals.
At the same time he was writing about his money-making abilities in his 1987 book Trump: The Art Of The deal.
However, according to figures from his tax returns obtained by the New York Times, Trump lost $1.17billion and, as a result, America’s Internal Revenue Service allowed him to avoid paying income tax for eight of the ten years between 1985 and 1994.
In 1990 and 1991, Trump’s core business losses were more than $250million each year — double those of any other U.S. taxpayer in those years, the New York Times reports.
The president was quick to take to Twitter yesterday to ridicule claims that he is incompetent with money, insisting his filing of huge losses in his taxes was just ‘sport’.
HE EXPLAINED how property developers frequently structured their accounts to avoid showing a profit. According to Trump, property developers in the eighties and Nineties were entitled to ‘massive write-offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases’.
He went on: ‘Sometimes considered a “tax shelter”... you always wanted to show losses for tax purposes.’ To finish it off, he branded the NYT’s investigation a ‘highly inaccurate Fake News hit job!’.
Trump’s rhetoric was not lost on his critics, who pointed out that
he had frequently skewered other businesses for using U.S. tax relief — not least Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man.
ever since he announced his candidacy for the presidency, Trump’s financial records have come under serious scrutiny.
And when he took office, he broke with long-standing political tradition by refusing to publicly release his full tax returns, fuelling speculation that he has something serious to hide.
The New York Times said it did not obtain his tax returns directly but someone who had legal access to them passed information to the newspaper.
The figures obtained by the New York Times date back to 1985, when Trump first appeared on Forbes magazine’s annual list of America’s richest people separate from his property developer father, Fred. Forbes estimated donald was worth $600million.
Back then, the New Yorker was establishing himself as a major player in the city’s property world, completing Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt Hotel and the garish Trump Tower — as well as a large casino in Atlantic City.
That year, he borrowed hundreds of millions more dollars for further glitzy purchases, including a second casino (which cost him $352million), a Manhattan hotel ($80million), his palatial Mar-alago home in Florida ($10million), a hospital ($60million) and a railway yard ($85million) in New York he intended to redevelop into luxury residential buildings.
His appetite prompted the former chief of bankers Bear Stearns to compare him to a ‘Rocky Mountain vulture’.
His Mar-a-lago club in Florida took a decade to make a profit, while other businesses never did, including a shuttle airline he bought for $365million and an American football team, the New Jersey Generals, that folded two years after he bought them.
His reliance on daddy’s wallet has also raised eyebrows.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed that he received only a ‘ very small’ $ 1million loan from his hard-headed property tycoon father to start him out in business.
But just as Trump Sr allowed his son to do a newspaper delivery round in his chauffeur- driven Cadillac, he reportedly cushioned him financially, too.
The New York Times reported last October that, from the age of three, Trump received at least $413million in today’s money from his father.
Trump began earning money from his father when he was a toddler and was a millionaire by the time he was eight.
And after he graduated from university, Fred gave him the equivalent of $1million a year.
By the time he was in his 40s and 50s, the annual sum had increased to more than $5million, the New York Times reported. When Fred died in 2004, donald inherited a further $177million.
Indeed, if he had invested his inheritance in an investment fund on the U.S. stock market in 1988, his net worth would now have more than tripled to $13billion.
In The Art Of The deal, Trump said: ‘You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.’
Whatever the case, the new claims will certainly deliver ammunition to his critics.