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| The family that lies together, stays together? |
"It's frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write" Fake President fumed to reporters - apparently not understanding that he basically just defined the 1st Amendment right to Freedom of Expression.
Obviously there's nothing funny about his empty threat to try and use his executive power to revoke NBC's broadcast license, but there's a reason he's kicking up a fuss over a news story.
The old saying "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree" might best sum up the overtly unethical and illegal actions of Donald Trump, Jr. and his sister Ivanka as revealed in a joint investigation conducted by reporters from The New Yorker, WNYC and ProPublica that was released last week.
After listening to a WNYC segment on the story last weekend, it made Fake President's incessant tiresome whining about the NFL last make a lot more sense.
It also sheds light on why he flew down to Puerto Rico last week and made a complete ass of himself while trying to defend his administration's bungled response to the devastating hurricane damage in PR that left millions without power or fresh water before tossing paper towels into an audience of people waiting for him to announce some kind of federal aid package.
By now, Trump's bizarre modus operandi is pretty clear.
Whenever legitimate news stories that are not flattering to him, his family or advisers (current or former) are released, or about to be released, he immediately takes to Twitter to say something astronomically stupid and outlandish.
Or, he uses an appearance at a live televised event or press conference to lob some kind of red-meat statement (out to the 30-some percent of the American populace that still approve of what he's doing) like a grenade and waits for it to blow up.
Not to make an actual point or policy statement, but simply to try and change the media narrative.
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| The troubled Trump SoHo - which isn't actually located in SoHo |
If you take some time to read the expose on how Donald Trump, Jr. and Ivanka avoided a criminal indictment for blatant real estate fraud written by Jesse Eisenger, Justin Elliot, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, Fake President's erratic behavior last week seems more rational.
At the center of this latest Trump-themed debacle is the 46-story hotel-condominium called the Trump SoHo.
The name of the property is basically a lie since it's located on Spring Street and Varick in the Hudson Square neighborhood.
Local residents of the West Village have protested the construction of the $450 million boondoggle since construction started in 2006.
Not just because it's immense size is totally out of scale with the character of the buildings in the neighborhood on the lower west side of Manhattan - located well west of the actual SoHo.
The soulless 391-unit building, which the 5th edition of the AIA Guide to New York City described as a "banal glass box", was built on the site of the former Spring Street Presbyterian Church, and the discovery of human remains during excavation for the building temporarily halted construction until archaeologists determined they were from the 1800's-era church burial vault - did you see Poltergeist?
Two construction workers were killed in 2008 on the site when sub-standard wooden forms used to make concrete molds collapsed - including a Ukrainian immigrant construction worker named Yuriy Vanchytskyy who tumbled 42 stories to his death and was decapitated.
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| Russian fixer Felix Sater and Donald Trump |
He's the guy who wrote in a 2015 email that he could arrange the construction of a Trump Tower Moscow in Russia that would help Trump win the presidency.
As a New York Times article by Matt Apuzzo and Maggie Haberman back in August noted, Sater wrote in an email to Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen, "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it, I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this, I will manage this project."
Like many "Trump" building projects, Trump Soho is a licensing opportunity, so the brilliant "deal" Fake President made is to take some money for having his name plastered on the exterior of the building.
So while the Trump family didn't put a dime of its own money into the project, it bears all the hallmarks of Trump's sketchy carnival-huckster business ethics.
As Joey Arak reported in a 2011 SoHo News article, the project got a zoning exception that allowed the builders to make the building even higher in exchange for agreeing to build a relatively small section of public space at the base of the building - a little stretch of concrete plaza.
After getting their zoning exception, the operators then petitioned to turn the "public space" into an outdoor dining area for the exclusive use of hotel-condo guests / residents - MAGA!
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| Fraudsters: Ivanka Trump and Donald Jr. |
In 2010 he decides that Trump SoHo will be a "New York real estate coming out" party for his eldest children Donald, Jr. and Ivanka.
Like many residential construction projects in Manhattan, Trump SoHo's bank loans and financing hinge on selling at least 15% of the condos.
Because the area in which it's constructed isn't licensed for residential, people who buy condos in Trump SoHo can't legally live in them more than 120 days out of the year - the rest of the time they can lease their condo out as hotel space.
Who in his or her right mind would pay truckloads of money for a pricey Manhattan condo where they can only live 120 days out of the year? Exactly.
As the joint investigation by ProPublica, The New Yorker and WNYC revealed, as part of their father's New York real estate "coming out", both Donald, Jr. and Ivanka - then in their early 20's - were both tasked with selling condos to prospective buyers in Trump SoHo.
To attract the high-end buyers, they both flagrantly (and knowingly) lied about the occupancy of the building in order to lure potential buyers into believing that the condos were selling like hotcakes - but they weren't.
Their lying about the property attracted the attention of the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney's office, which opened an investigation into their activities in 2010.
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| Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. |
The owners quickly settled the lawsuit out of court in 2011, paying the ten condo owners 90% of their deposits back.
Despite the Trump Organization hiring a cadre of pricey criminal defense lawyers to protect Donald, Jr and Ivanka's privileged behinds, the Manhattan DA's investigation dragged on.
Which evidently angered Fake President - who brought his personal lawyer of ten years Marc Kasowtiz into the case to make it go away.
Kasowitz, who'd personally donated $25,000 to the reelection campaign of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. in early 2012, went to straight to the DA's office on May 12, 2016 and asked him to drop the case against Donny Jr. and Ivanka.
But just before that May 16th meeting, Vance's reelection campaign mysteriously returns the $25,000 Kasowtiz had donated just months before - three months after that meeting the DA overrules the recommendation his own assistant attorneys and drops the case against the Trump children.
Despite clear evidence that they'd both lied about the sales figures of Trump SoHo with the intent of duping potential buyers - a clear violation of the Martin Act.
It gets even sketchier.
6 months after Vance dropped the case, Kasowtiz makes another LARGER donation of $35,000 to Vance's campaign - and then helps arrange an additional $15,000 in donations to the sketchy DA's reelection campaign.
One really doesn't have to look far to see where the eldest Trump children get their predilection towards playing fast and loose with the truth in order to manipulate people into getting something they want or need.
Lying is apparently just a part of the Trump brand, which makes Fake President's unsubstantiated accusations about the media making things up all the more laughable - and indeed, pathetic.
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