https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-panama/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34722716)

180 headline mixed with photo

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34722910)

The buildings literally have Trumps name on them, and the Russian mobsters who bought Trump properties to launder the money have in many cases been convicted.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34722926)

this is criminal only in a rhetorical way

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34725884)

The Financial Times reported Thursday morning that Felix Sater, former business partner of President Donald Trump with deep ties to the Mafia and Russian government, is cooperating in an international investigation into an alleged money-laundering network. Sater has a history of channeling money from prominent families in the Eastern bloc into Trump properties. This could pose problems for Trump, given Sater’s history of outing former close associates in exchange for immunity.

According to recent reports from The New York Times and Bloomberg, these financial connections are also being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia.

Sater is undoubtedly one of the more unsavory people the president has conducted business with. He was famously involved in a clash at a bar where he stabbed another man in the face with the stem of a martini glass, an assault that landed him in prison for a year. He pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Mafia but avoided jail time by becoming a valuable federal informant for the FBI and CIA. Andrew Weissmann, the prosecutor who negotiated that plea deal, has been hired by Robert Mueller.

Then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch said in a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch during her confirmation as Barack Obama’s Attorney General that Sater provided “information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”

In 2002, Sater reinvented himself, working at a real estate development firm called Bayrock Group. Bayrock’s offices are conveniently located on the 24th floor of Trump Tower in New York, which is where the paths of Sater and Trump cross. In a 2008 sworn deposition Sater said he would pitch Trump business deals (“just me and him”) on a “constant basis.”

By around 2005, Trump began licensing his name for real estate developments in New York and Florida. He struck up an exclusive deal with Bayrock to develop a property in Russia, a deal which later fell through while the others remained.

The same 2008 deposition reveals more of the casual nature of the business relationship between Sater and Trump. Sater says he would “pop [his] head into Mr. Trump’s office” to tell him how the Russia deal was coming along. According to Sater, Trump asked him to escort Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump during their 2006 trip to Moscow.

Looming in the background of all this, however, is Sater’s murky and checkered past. In 2007, Bayrock Group became a partner in Trump’s SoHo property. The property offering plan to New York State says that there were “no prior felony convictions of Sponsor [Bayrock], or any principals of Sponsor.” In December of 2007, The New York Times ran an article unearthing Sater’s criminal history. Two days later, Trump was deposed in a lawsuit. He stated multiple times that he had “very little” interaction with Sater. Despite this, in 2010 Sater toted around a business card that read he was a “senior adviser” at the Trump Organization.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34722957)

https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-sater-trump-20170223-story,amp.html

Trump business associate led double life as FBI informant — and more, he says

Working from a 24th-floor office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, Felix Sater spent years trying to line up lucrative deals in the United States, Russia and elsewhere in Europe with Donald Trump’s real estate organization.

For much of that time, according to court records and U.S. officials, Sater also worked as a confidential informant for the FBI, and — he says — U.S. intelligence.

“I was building Trump Towers by day and hunting Bin Laden by night,” Sater, now 50, told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview from New York.

As managing director of Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate development firm, the Russian-born businessman met Trump in 2003, court records show, when Trump was looking to expand his business and branding organization around the globe.

Although few projects were built, Sater worked on hotel and condominium deals with the Trump Organization through 2010 in New York, Florida, Arizona, London, Moscow and elsewhere even as he secretly helped the FBI infiltrate and take down organized crime figures, according to court records.

Trump has denied they were close, but Sater had access to Trump’s inner circle as recently as this year.

In January, Sater and Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, met in a New York hotel with a Ukrainian lawmaker who asked them to bring the White House a pro-Russian peace deal for Ukraine.

The New York Times, which first reported the meeting, quoted Cohen as saying he gave the envelope containing the proposal to Michael Flynn, then Trump’s national security advisor, but Cohen now denies delivering it.

“I acknowledge that the brief meeting took place, but emphatically deny discussing this topic or delivering any documents to the White House and/or General Flynn,” Cohen wrote in an email to the Los Angeles Times.

The White House has “no record” of receiving the Ukraine peace proposal, according to spokesman Michael Short.

There is no question that Sater led a double life during the years he worked with the Trump Organization.

In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to a federal charge of racketeering for his role in a Mafia-linked $40-million stock fraud scheme. He quickly cut a deal, agreeing to become a secret FBI informant in hopes of getting a lenient sentence.

Court records were sealed to protect Sater’s identity, so his role in the fraud case stayed secret for a decade while he was at Bayrock. After a court hearing in 2009, he was fined $25,000 but was not sent to prison or ordered to pay restitution

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34722971)

LJL

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34726028)

Trump put his name to the development and stood to make up to $75 million from it, according to a bond prospectus for the project. He did not exert management control over the construction and was under no direct legal obligation to conduct due diligence on other people involved.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34723095)

Why do you idiots think real estate in NYC is so expensive and like 40% of the units are vacant?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34725833)

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.”

The significance of such transactions is not lost on Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Citing a person familiar with the F.B.I. probe, Bloomberg reported in July that Mueller’s team is investigating a series of deals Trump struck, including the Trump Organization’s failed SoHo development that involved Russian nationals, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and the president’s sale of a Palm Beach estate in 2008. All three deals have drawn scrutiny for their ties to Russian interests; as Craig Unger outlined for the Hive, the 2014 Trump SoHo development is likely of interest to Mueller thanks to the involvement of Felix Sater—a Moscow-born, Russian-American businessman who did time for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass—and the now-defunct company he worked for, the Bayrock Group. Similarly, Russian developer Aras Agalarov, whose son Emin helped broker the controversial Trump Tower meeting last June between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, paid $20 million to bring Miss Universe to Moscow. And Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the Florida mansion for a staggering sum of $95 million in 2008—despite Trump having paid just $41 million for the property four years prior.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#34747358)

I stayed at the Trump in Panama, it was NOT up to god emperor standards.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802396&forum_id=2#37415698)