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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
“A frivolous society can only achieve dramatic significance through what it’s frivolity destroys”–Edith Wharton
Introduction: While the public’s attention is focused on the impeachment proceedings, highly suspicious information has surfaced involving the finances of “Team Trump,” Deutsche Bank, ostensible “suicides,” and apparent destruction of financial records.
With the failure of a Trump filing in appeals court, this concatenation appears to be headed to the Supreme Court, where both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh clerked for former Justice Anthony Kennedy. (Kavanaugh took Kennedy’s seat.)
During the confirmation hearings of both judges, none of the occupants of the Democratic Senatorial Clown Car brought up the fact that Justice Kennedy’s son Justin was in charge of Deutsche Bank’s real estate lending department when the institution was Trump’s only lender. Justin Kennedy also had strong professional transactions with Jared Kushner’s real estate operations, as well.
Thomas Bowers–a key Deutsche Bank official involved with Donald Trump’s dealings with the bank–allegedly committed suicide in late November of 2019, as “The Donald” attempted to keep his financial records from Congressional investigators. ” Thomas Bowers, identified as a former Deutsche Bank executive who signed off on controversial loans to President Donald Trump, died last week after apparently taking his own life at 55.. . . . ‘One source who has direct knowledge of the FBI’s investigation into Deutsche Bank said that federal investigators have asked about Bowers and documents he might have. Another source who has knowledge of Deutsche Bank’s internal structure said that Bowers would have been the gatekeeper for financial documents for the bank’s wealthiest customers.’ . . . .”
In addition to Mr. Bowers, a Deutsche Bank executive named William Broeksmit allegedly committed suicide in 2014. His son, Val, has given the FBI documents involving the bank’s dealings with Team Trump. “Federal authorities are investigating whether Deutsche Bank complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes, the latest government examination of potential misconduct at one of the world’s largest and most troubled banks . . . . The investigation includes a review of Deutsche Bank’s handling of so-called suspicious activity reports that its employees prepared about possibly problematic transactions, including some linked to President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner . . . . The same federal agent who contacted Ms. McFadden’s lawyer also participated in interviews of the son of a deceased Deutsche Bank executive, William S. Broeksmit. . . . . . . . F.B.I. agents met this year with Val Broeksmit, whose father was a senior Deutsche Bank executive who committed suicide in January 2014. Mr. Broeksmit said he had provided the agents with internal bank documents and other materials that he had retrieved from his father’s personal email accounts. . . .”
Irregularities suggesting money laundering also involved Deutsche Bank dealings with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The bank ignored its employees’ requests to rile reports with the government. ” . . . . Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog. . . . .But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government. . . .”
In addition to possible money-laundering transactions involving Trump and Kushner, Deutsche Bank lent Kushner $285 million the day before election day, a fortuitous move that allowed Kushner to net $74 million on a real estate investment. ” . . . . One month before Election Day, Jared Kushner’s real estate company finalized a $285 million loan as part of a refinancing package for its property near Times Square in Manhattan . . . . . . . The Deutsche Bank loan capped what Kushner Cos. viewed as a triumph: It had purchased four mostly empty retail floors of the former New York Times building in 2015, recruited tenants to fill the space and got the Deutsche Bank loan in a refinancing deal that gave Kushner’s company $74 million more than it paid for the property. . . .”
Deutsche Bank does not have Trump’s tax returns, something flagged by the institution’s employees as unusual. Note that Deutsche Bank previouslh said in a letter to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York that they had tax returns for two members of the Trump family! That changed, quickly! “If investigators are going to get their hands on President Trump’s tax returns, they will have to find them somewhere other than Deutsche Bank. The German bank — which for nearly two decades was the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to lend money to Mr. Trump . . . Last month, The New York Times and other media outlets asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York to unseal a letter from Deutsche Bank that identified two members of the Trump family whose tax returns the bank possesses. On Thursday, the court rejected the request. Part of the reason, it said, was that Deutsche Bank had informed the court that ‘the only tax returns it has for individuals and entities named in the subpoenas are not those of the president.’ Current and former bank officials previously told The Times that Deutsche Bank had portions of Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns. . . .”
An unnamed Deutsche Bank executive noted in an e‑mail to the aforementioned David Enrich that this was highly unusual, and the bank may have destroyed the documents and cleansed their servers: ” . . . . David Enrich, finance editor at The New York Times, posted to Twitter a screenshot of his conversation with the unnamed executive in which they expressed surprise that Deutsche told a federal appeals court it did not have the president’s tax returns anymore. ‘Holy f**k,’ the executive wrote, per the screenshot. ‘The circumstance could be that they returned any physical copies or destroyed any physical copies under an agreement with a client and cleansed their servers. Not normal though.’ . . . . ”
A disturbing perspective on the alleged “suicide” of Thomas Bowers, who was in charge of Trump’s dealings with the bank, as well as the alleged “suicide” of William Broeksmit is provided by an argument voiced by Trump attorney William Consovoy in a hearing at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals: ” . . . . [Judge] Dunne brought up Trump’s famous statement when he caught fire during the 2016 Republican primary, saying, ‘I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’ ‘If he did pull out a handgun and shoot someone on Fifth Ave,’ Dunne asked, ‘would the local police be restrained?‘Judge Chin raised Dunne’s point. He asked Consovoy for his ‘view on the Fifth Avenue example.’ ‘Local authorities couldn’t investigate, they couldn’t do anything about it?’ he asked. ‘No,’ replied a visibly annoyed Consovoy amid stifled chortles. ‘Nothing could be done? That’s your position?’ Chin repeated. ‘That is correct, that is correct,’ Consovoy responded . . . .”
It now appears that the Deutsche Bank case will be heard by the Supreme Court. There are already two similar cases on their way to the court. It will be more than a little interesting to see how the SCOTUS rules, and how Judges Gorsuch and Kavanaugh perform in the case. ” . . . . A federal appeals court said Tuesday that Deutsche Bank must turn over detailed documents about President Trump’s finances to two congressional committees, a ruling that will most likely be appealed to the Supreme Court. . . . Democratic-controlled congressional committees issued subpoenas to two banks — Deutsche Bank, long Mr. Trump’s biggest lender, and Capital One — this year for financial records related to the president, his companies and his family. Mr. Trump sued the banks to block them from complying . . . . Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said in a statement that ‘we are evaluating our next options including seeking review at the Supreme Court of the United States.’ He called the congressional subpoenas ‘invalid as issued.’ . . . .”
When the Senate hearings for Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were held, none of the Senators questioned the nominees about some critical relationships:
Anthony Kennedy’s son Justin was Trump’s banker at Deutsche Bank. Furthermore, jurists who clerked for Anthony Kennedy figure prominently in Trump’s judicial appointments:
- ” . . . . He [Trump] picked Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who had served as a law clerk to Justice Kennedy, to fill Justice Scalia’s seat. . . .”
- ” . . . . Then, after Justice Gorsuch’s nomination was announced, a White House official singled out two candidates for the next Supreme Court vacancy: Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Raymond M. Kethledge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati. The two judges had something in common: They had both clerked for Justice Kennedy. . . .”
- ” . . . . In the meantime, as the White House turned to stocking the lower courts, it did not overlook Justice Kennedy’s clerks. Mr. Trump nominated three of them to federal appeals courts: Judges Stephanos Bibas and Michael Scudder, both of whom have been confirmed, and Eric Murphy, the Ohio solicitor general, whom Mr. Trump nominated to the Sixth Circuit this month. . . .”
- ” . . . . Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin . . . . spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role. During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history. . . .”
The Justin Kennedy/Trump family relationship does not end there: After Kennedy left Deutsche Bank in 2009 he went on to become co-CEO LNR Property LLC. LNR Property saved Jared Kushner’s midtown Manhattan property in 2011:
- ” . . . . from 2010–2013 Justin Kennedy was the co-CEO of LNR Property LLC with Tobin Cobb. . . .”
- ” . . . . According the New York Times, in 2007 Kushner Companies purchased ‘an aluminum-clad office tower in Midtown Manhattan, for a record price of $1.8 billion.’ At the time the NYT wrote that this deal was ‘considered a classic example of reckless underwriting. The transaction was so highly leveraged that the cash flow from rents amounted to only 65 percent of the debt service.’ . . .”
- ” . . . Who came to the rescue? None other than LNR Property, the company whose CEO at the time was Justin Kennedy. According to the NYT and the Real Deal, Mr. Kushner and LNR ‘reached a possible agreement with LNR Property, a firm specializing in restructuring troubled debt and which oversees the mortgage, that would allow him to retain control of the tower by modifying the terms of the $1.2 billion mortgage tied to the office portion of the building.’ . . .”
Last time we checked, Deutsche Bank was not a Russian bank. The program concludes with review of information from Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile.
. . . . The [FBI] file [on Martin Bormann] revealed that he had been banking under his own name from his office in Germany in Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires since 1941; that he held one joint account with the Argentinian dictator Juan Peron, and on August 4, 5 and 14, 1967, had written checks on demand accounts in first National City Bank (Overseas Division) of New York, The Chase Manhattan Bank, and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., all cleared through Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires. . . .
Program Highlights Include: Discussion of the alleged “suicide” of Calogero Gambino, a Deutsche Bank attorney; the fact that Anthony Kennedy only agreed to resign after he was assured that Brett Kavanaugh would be named as his replacement.
1a. Thomas Bowers–a key Deutsche Bank official involved with Donald Trump’s dealings with the bank–allegedly committed suicide in late November of 2019, as “The Donald” attempted to keep his financial records from Congressional investigators. ” Thomas Bowers, identified as a former Deutsche Bank executive who signed off on controversial loans to President Donald Trump, died last week after apparently taking his own life at 55.. . . . ‘One source who has direct knowledge of the FBI’s investigation into Deutsche Bank said that federal investigators have asked about Bowers and documents he might have. Another source who has knowledge of Deutsche Bank’s internal structure said that Bowers would have been the gatekeeper for financial documents for the bank’s wealthiest customers.’ . . . .”
People walk past Deutsche Bank’s Manhattan headquarters following news that the global banking giant will be letting go of thousands of employees due to a major restructuring at the German bank on July 08, 2019 in New York City. The bank has announced that it will reduce its workforce by 18,000 people in Asia, Europe and America.
Thomas Bowers, identified as a former Deutsche Bank executive who signed off on controversial loans to President Donald Trump, died last week after apparently taking his own life at 55.
According to Forensic News Scott Stedman, “One source who has direct knowledge of the FBI’s investigation into Deutsche Bank said that federal investigators have asked about Bowers and documents he might have. Another source who has knowledge of Deutsche Bank’s internal structure said that Bowers would have been the gatekeeper for financial documents for the bank’s wealthiest customers.”
The news of Bowers’s death was initially shared late Tuesday afternoon by New York Times reporter David Enrich.
I’ve learned that Tom Bowers, a former senior @DeutscheBank executive, died last week at 55 in Malibu, Calif. I knew him. It’s very sad.
— David Enrich (@davidenrich) November 26, 2019
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s initial report attributes Bowers’s death to suicide by hanging.
Bowers previously worked as Deutsche Bank’s head of their U.S. Private Wealth Management division.
According to the New York Times, Deutsche Bank “agreed in 2005 to lend Mr. Trump more than $500 million [to build a skyscraper in Chicago]. He personally guaranteed $40 million of it, meaning the bank could come after his personal assets if he defaulted.”
After that loan was extended and the relationship between Deutsche Bank and Trump was solidified–and well before it went sour in 2008 due to Trump being unable or unwilling to repay the first loan–banker Rosemary Vrablic was assigned the Trump portfolio.
Vrablic’s direct boss during her relationship with Trump was Bowers.
That New York Times story notes:
Traditionally, private bankers discreetly manage customers’ wealth and act as high-end concierges. Ms. Vrablic, who started her career as a bank teller and then worked at Citigroup and Bank of America, did that and more. She also arranged large real estate and commercial loans for her best clients.
To lure her, Deutsche Bank guaranteed that she would earn at least $3 million a year, unusually rich terms for a private banker, and would bypass a layer of management to report directly to Thomas Bowers, the head of the American wealth-management division, according to people familiar with her contract.
Hired in 2006, Deutsche Bank lavished praise on Vlabic and another recent hire, Dominic Scalzi, who were brought on as “Managing Directors and Senior Private Bankers in [Deutsche Bank’s] US Private Wealth Management (PWM) business.”
“Rosemary is widely recognized as one of the top private bankers to the US ultra high-net-worth community,” Bowers said in a press release at the time. “With both Rosemary and Dominic’s extensive banking and structured lending experience, we will further enhance our position as a leading integrated Private Bank.”
By 2010, Trump and Deutsche Bank were on lending terms again. (A lawsuit between Trump and the bank over his failure to repay the $500 million loan was settled.) Trump reached out to Vrablic via his recently acquired son-in-law and her client Jared Kushner.
On Trump’s dime, Vrablic arrived in Miami to inspect a property Trump was interested in buying: the Doral Golf Resort and Spa. The star of NBC’s The Apprentice needed $100 million to make the deal.
…
He wanted an additional $48 million to infuse into the Chicago skyscraper bearing his name. Part of that second loan would help him pay off what he owed the bank’s investment banking division.
“Ms. Vrablic and Mr. Bowers tentatively agreed to both loans,” the Times story notes–and the relationship between Deutsche Bank and the eventual 45th president soared after that.
Due to Vrablic’s and Bowers’s trust in Trump, Deutsche Bank loaned Trump $170 million as he transmogrified the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D.C. into what is now another Trump-branded hotel.
Trump’s ultimately unsuccessful billion dollar efforts to purchase the Buffalo Bills was also underwritten by the German investment firm.
And the extended Trump clan got the benefits of that long working relationship as well. Again the Times:
Deutsche Bank lent money to Donald Trump Jr. for a South Carolina manufacturing venture that would soon go bankrupt. It provided a $15 million credit line to Mr. Kushner and his mother, according to financial documents reviewed by The Times. The bank previously had an informal ban on business with the Kushners because Jared’s father, Charles, was a felon.
The relationship continued into 2015 when an additional $19 million loan was dispensed for Trump’s Doral estate. One final loan was broached in 2016–Trump needed money for his golf course in Scotland. But by then Trump’s rhetoric had worn thin with Deutsche Bank’s upper echelons and their reputational risk committee.
And Bowers was out–he joined Starwood Capital Group.
1b. Another former Deutsche Bank manager was found dead in 2014, an apparent suicide.
William Broeksmit, a former senior manager at Deutsche Bank with close ties to co-Chief Executive Anshu Jain, has been found dead at his home in London in what appears to have been a suicide. Jain and the bank’s other co-CEO Juergen Fitschen announced Broeksmit’s death in an internal mail to Deutsche Bank employees. When asked about the death, London’s Metropolitan Police issued a statement saying a 58-year-old man had been found hanging at a house in South Kensington on Sunday afternoon and been pronounced dead at the scene. Police declared the death non-suspicious. Broeksmit, a U.S. national, was an instrumental founder of Deutsche’s investment bank and one many bankers, including Jain, who joined Germany’s flagship lender from Merrill Lynch in the 1990s, when Deutsche launched plans to compete on Wall Street. Broeksmit was also a principal actor in Deutsche’s efforts to unwind its riskier positions and to reduce the size of its balance sheet in the wake of the global financial crisis. His death comes at an uncomfortable juncture for Jain and Fitschen, whose reign has been dogged by poor results and legal troubles since they took over from Josef Ackermann in 2012. ... The two CEOs are expected to defend their reform record at the bank’s annual news conference on Wednesday. Last week, they revealed that litigation and restructuring costs had pushed Deutsche to a surprise loss in the fourth quarter of 2013.
CLOSEST ALLY
Broeksmit, who worked as head of risk and capital optimisation, was viewed as one of Jain’s closest allies and a key player in the bank’s attempts to recover following the financial crisis. Jain sought to have Broeksmit join the management board as head of risk management in 2012. But in a major setback for both men, German regulator Bafin blocked the appointment, saying Broeksmit lacked experience leading large teams. Bafin was not immediately available for comment. The Bundesbank, which also oversees Deutsche, declined to comment. Broeksmit worked alongside Jain at Merrill Lynch before joining Deutsche in 1996 as part of group of roughly 100 bankers who, alongside Edson Mitchell, formed the core of Deutsche’s new investment banking business. Mitchell, one the bank’s most powerful executives, died in a plane crash in 2000.
1c. In addition to Mr. Bowers, a Deutsche Bank executive named William Broeksmit allegedly committed suicide in 2014. His son, Val, has given the FBI documents involving the bank’s dealings with Team Trump. “Federal authorities are investigating whether Deutsche Bank complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes, the latest government examination of potential misconduct at one of the world’s largest and most troubled banks . . . . The investigation includes a review of Deutsche Bank’s handling of so-called suspicious activity reports that its employees prepared about possibly problematic transactions, including some linked to President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner . . . . The same federal agent who contacted Ms. McFadden’s lawyer also participated in interviews of the son of a deceased Deutsche Bank executive, William S. Broeksmit. . . . . . . . F.B.I. agents met this year with Val Broeksmit, whose father was a senior Deutsche Bank executive who committed suicide in January 2014. Mr. Broeksmit said he had provided the agents with internal bank documents and other materials that he had retrieved from his father’s personal email accounts. . . .”
Federal authorities are investigating whether Deutsche Bank complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes, the latest government examination of potential misconduct at one of the world’s largest and most troubled banks, according to seven people familiar with the inquiry.
The investigation includes a review of Deutsche Bank’s handling of so-called suspicious activity reports that its employees prepared about possibly problematic transactions, including some linked to President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, according to people close to the bank and others familiar with the matter.
The criminal investigation into Deutsche Bank is one element of several separate but overlapping government examinations into how illicit funds flow through the American financial system, said five of the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the inquiries. Several other banks are also being investigated.
The F.B.I. recently contacted the lawyer for a Deutsche Bank whistle-blower, Tammy McFadden, who publicly criticized the company’s anti-money-laundering systems, according to the lawyer, Brian McCafferty.
Ms. McFadden, a former anti-money-laundering compliance officer at the bank, told The New York Times last month that she had flagged transactions involving Mr. Kushner’s family company in 2016, but that bank managers decided not to file the suspicious activity report she prepared. Some of her colleagues had similar experiences in 2017 involving transactions in the accounts of Mr. Trump’s legal entities, although it was not clear whether the F.B.I. was examining the bank’s handling of those transactions.
The same federal agent who contacted Ms. McFadden’s lawyer also participated in interviews of the son of a deceased Deutsche Bank executive, William S. Broeksmit. Agents told the son, Val Broeksmit, that the Deutsche Bank investigation began with an inquiry into the bank’s work for Russian money launderers and had expanded to cover a broader array of potential misconduct at the bank and at other financial institutions. One element is the banks’ possible roles in a vast money-laundering scandal at the Danish lender Danske Bank, according to people briefed on the investigation. . . .
. . . . F.B.I. agents met this year with Val Broeksmit, whose father was a senior Deutsche Bank executive who committed suicide in January 2014. Mr. Broeksmit said he had provided the agents with internal bank documents and other materials that he had retrieved from his father’s personal email accounts.
Until his death, William Broeksmit sat on the oversight board of a large Deutsche Bank subsidiary in the United States, Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, which regulators have criticized for having weak anti-money-laundering systems.
Many of the bank’s anti-money-laundering operations are based in Jacksonville, Fla., where Ms. McFadden was one of hundreds of employees vetting transactions that computer systems flagged as potentially suspicious. . . .
1c. Another Deutsche Bank “suicide” was that of bank counsel Calogero Gambino.
A senior Deutsche Bank regulatory lawyer has been found dead in New York after committing suicide, New York City officials said on Saturday. Calogero Gambino, 41, was found on the morning of Oct. 20 at his home in the New York borough of Brooklyn and pronounced dead on the scene, according to New York City police. Gambino was an associate general counsel and a managing director who worked for the German bank for 11 years, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported his death.
He had been closely involved in negotiating legal issues for Deutsche Bank such as a probe by regulators of banks over allegations they manipulated the Libor benchmark interest rate as well as currency markets. Gambino was also an associate at a private law firm and a regulatory enforcement lawyer between 1997 and 1999, the Journal said, citing Gambino’s LinkedIn profile and conference biographies. He died by hanging, said Julie Bolcer, spokeswoman for the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. The manner of death was suicide. . . .
2a. Irregularities suggesting money laundering also involved Deutsche Bank dealings with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The bank ignored its employees’ requests to rile reports with the government. ” . . . . Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog. . . . .But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government. . . .”
Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog. The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.
But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government. The nature of the transactions was not clear. At least some of them involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious. . . .
. . . . But former Deutsche Bank employees said the decision not to report the Trump and Kushner transactions reflected the bank’s generally lax approach to money laundering laws. The employees — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ability to work in the industry — said it was part of a pattern of the bank’s executives rejecting valid reports to protect relationships with lucrative clients. . . .
. . . . Ms. McFadden and some of her colleagues said they believed the report had been killed to maintain the private-banking division’s strong relationship with Mr. Kushner. After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.
Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said. Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client. . . .
2b. In addition to possible money-laundering transactions involving Trump and Kushner, Deutsche Bank lent Kushner $285 million the day before election day, a fortuitous move that allowed Kushner to net $74 million on a real estate investment. ” . . . . One month before Election Day, Jared Kushner’s real estate company finalized a $285 million loan as part of a refinancing package for its property near Times Square in Manhattan . . . . . . . The Deutsche Bank loan capped what Kushner Cos. viewed as a triumph: It had purchased four mostly empty retail floors of the former New York Times building in 2015, recruited tenants to fill the space and got the Deutsche Bank loan in a refinancing deal that gave Kushner’s company $74 million more than it paid for the property. . . .”
One month before Election Day, Jared Kushner’s real estate company finalized a $285 million loan as part of a refinancing package for its property near Times Square in Manhattan.
The loan came at a critical moment. Kushner was playing a key role in the presidential campaign of his father-in-law, Donald Trump. The lender, Deutsche Bank, was negotiating to settle a federal mortgage fraud case and charges from New York state regulators that it aided a possible Russian money-laundering scheme. The cases were settled in December and January. . . .
. . . . The Deutsche Bank loan capped what Kushner Cos. viewed as a triumph: It had purchased four mostly empty retail floors of the former New York Times building in 2015, recruited tenants to fill the space and got the Deutsche Bank loan in a refinancing deal that gave Kushner’s company $74 million more than it paid for the property. . . .
3a. Deutsche Bank does not have Trump’s tax returns, something flagged by the institution’s employees as unusual. The bank had previously informed the Second Circuit Court of Appeals “If investigators are going to get their hands on President Trump’s tax returns, they will have to find them somewhere other than Deutsche Bank. The German bank — which for nearly two decades was the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to lend money to Mr. Trump . . . Last month, The New York Times and other media outlets asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York to unseal a letter from Deutsche Bank that identified two members of the Trump family whose tax returns the bank possesses. On Thursday, the court rejected the request. Part of the reason, it said, was that Deutsche Bank had informed the court that ‘the only tax returns it has for individuals and entities named in the subpoenas are not those of the president.’ Current and former bank officials previously told The Times that Deutsche Bank had portions of Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns. . . .”
If investigators are going to get their hands on President Trump’s tax returns, they will have to find them somewhere other than Deutsche Bank. The German bank — which for nearly two decades was the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to lend money to Mr. Trump — has told a federal appeals court that it does not have the president’s personal tax returns, the court said on Thursday. Democratic-controlled congressional committees issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank this year for financial records related to the president, his companies and his family.
Mr. Trump sued the bank, which became his main lender after a string of bankruptcies cost other banks hundreds of millions of dollars, to block it from complying. That litigation is working its way through the federal courts. Last month, The New York Times and other media outlets asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York to unseal a letter from Deutsche Bank that identified two members of the Trump family whose tax returns the bank possesses.
On Thursday, the court rejected the request. Part of the reason, it said, was that Deutsche Bank had informed the court that “the only tax returns it has for individuals and entities named in the subpoenas are not those of the president.” Current and former bank officials previously told The Times that Deutsche Bank had portions of Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns. . . .
3b. An unnamed Deutsche Bank executive noted in an e‑mail to the aforementioned David Enrich that this was highly unusual, and the bank may have destroyed the documents and cleansed their servers: ” . . . . David Enrich, finance editor at The New York Times, posted to Twitter a screenshot of his conversation with the unnamed executive in which they expressed surprise that Deutsche told a federal appeals court it did not have the president’s tax returns anymore. ‘Holy f**k,’ the executive wrote, per the screenshot. ‘The circumstance could be that they returned any physical copies or destroyed any physical copies under an agreement with a client and cleansed their servers. Not normal though.’ . . . . ”
A former Deutsche Bank executive who reviewed President Donald Trump’s tax returns reportedly said it is “not normal” that the institution no longer holds copies of those records. Trump for many years relied on Deutsche Bank for loans to sustain his real estate business when many other institutions would not lend to him because of his rocky financial history. The president is accused by some, including his former attorney Michael Cohen, of manipulating the value of his assets to either secure finance or reduce his tax bill.
He has broken with recent precedent for presidents and refused to release publicly all of his recent tax returns, despite pressure to do so. Congress is investigating Trump’s finances and attempting to get hold of his tax returns from Deutsche. But the bank told the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals that it did not hold them. David Enrich, finance editor at The New York Times, posted to Twitter a screenshot of his conversation with the unnamed executive in which they expressed surprise that Deutsche told a federal appeals court it did not have the president’s tax returns anymore. “Holy f**k,” the executive wrote, per the screenshot. “The circumstance could be that they returned any physical copies or destroyed any physical copies under an agreement with a client and cleansed their servers. Not normal though.” . . . .
4. A disturbing perspective on the alleged “suicide” of Thomas Bowers, who was in charge of Trump’s dealings with the bank, as well as the alleged “suicide” of William Broeksmit is provided by an argument voiced by Trump attorney William Consovoy in a hearing at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals: ” . . . . [Judge] Dunne brought up Trump’s famous statement when he caught fire during the 2016 Republican primary, saying, ‘I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’ ‘If he did pull out a handgun and shoot someone on Fifth Ave,’ Dunne asked, ‘would the local police be restrained?‘Judge Chin raised Dunne’s point. He asked Consovoy for his ‘view on the Fifth Avenue example.’ ‘Local authorities couldn’t investigate, they couldn’t do anything about it?’ he asked. ‘No,’ replied a visibly annoyed Consovoy amid stifled chortles. ‘Nothing could be done? That’s your position?’ Chin repeated. ‘That is correct, that is correct,’ Consovoy responded . . . .”
I wasn’t expecting laughter in court today. But at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, there were stifled chortles as personal attorneys for President Trump finally arrived at the logical destination of their argument that he is immune not only from prosecution – but from investigation.
It came in Trump’s appeal challenging a state grand jury subpoena for financial records from his longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA. Manhattan District Attorney General Counsel Carrey Dunne told the appeals court that Trump was acting as if the law did not apply to him, and was trying to have it both ways by asserting executive protections over an investigation that concerned his private business. Trump attorney William Consovoy had argued that not only does the Constitution prevent a sitting president from indictment, but it also prevents criminal investigation or “process” from being applied to the head of state.
Dunne brought up Trump’s famous statement when he caught fire during the 2016 Republican primary, saying, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” “If he did pull out a handgun and shoot someone on Fifth Ave,” Dunne asked, “would the local police be restrained?” “Would we have to wait for impeachment?” he added.
If the judges were moved by Dunne’s argument, it wasn’t immediately obvious. The trio – composed of Democrat-appointed Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, Judge Denny Chin, and Judge Christopher Droney – stayed typically stone-faced. But when Consovoy retook the podium with his booming voice and somewhat bilious affect, fielding more questions from the court, he doubled down on his argument that congressional, federal, and state bodies are forbidden from investigating a sitting President.
Judge Chin raised Dunne’s point. He asked Consovoy for his “view on the Fifth Avenue example.” “Local authorities couldn’t investigate, they couldn’t do anything about it?” he asked. “No,” replied a visibly annoyed Consovoy amid stifled chortles. “Nothing could be done? That’s your position?” Chin repeated. “That is correct, that is correct,” Consovoy responded, before qualifying it by saying that a president could be prosecuted after leaving office. . . .
5. It now appears that the Deutsche Bank case will be heard by the Supreme Court. There are already two similar cases on their way to the court. It will be more than a little interesting to see how the SCOTUS rules, and how Judges Gorsuch and Kavanaugh perform in the case. ” . . . . A federal appeals court said Tuesday that Deutsche Bank must turn over detailed documents about President Trump’s finances to two congressional committees, a ruling that will most likely be appealed to the Supreme Court. . . . Democratic-controlled congressional committees issued subpoenas to two banks — Deutsche Bank, long Mr. Trump’s biggest lender, and Capital One — this year for financial records related to the president, his companies and his family. Mr. Trump sued the banks to block them from complying . . . . Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said in a statement that ‘we are evaluating our next options including seeking review at the Supreme Court of the United States.’ He called the congressional subpoenas ‘invalid as issued.’ . . . .”
“Trump Loses Appeal on Deutsche Bank Subpoenas” by David Enrich; The New York Times; 12/03/2019
A federal appeals court said Tuesday that Deutsche Bank must turn over detailed documents about President Trump’s finances to two congressional committees, a ruling that will most likely be appealed to the Supreme Court.
…
Democratic-controlled congressional committees issued subpoenas to two banks — Deutsche Bank, long Mr. Trump’s biggest lender, and Capital One — this year for financial records related to the president, his companies and his family. Mr. Trump sued the banks to block them from complying.
…
Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said in a statement that “we are evaluating our next options including seeking review at the Supreme Court of the United States.” He called the congressional subpoenas “invalid as issued.”
Mr. Trump has seven days to seek a further delay from the high court before the banks must comply.
Mr. Trump, who broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns during the 2016 campaign, has already turned to the Supreme Court in an effort to fend off other government investigations into his personal finances. Two other cases, involving the disclosure of his tax returns to the Manhattan district attorney and to a congressional committee, are awaiting action by the court.
But the requests for documents from Deutsche Bank are notable because of the breadth of financial information they could provide about Mr. Trump and his business dealings.
Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s main lender after a string of bankruptcies and loan defaults cost other banks hundreds of millions of dollars; over the past two decades, the German bank lent him and his companies a total of well over $2 billion. The bank’s files would most likely contain a rich trove of documents including details about how he made his money, who his partners have been, the terms of his extensive borrowings and other transactions.
The subpoenas, issued in April by the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees, sought nearly a decade’s worth of tax returns and other financial documents that the banks obtained from Mr. Trump, his family and his companies. The subpoenas also demanded information about any suspicious activities that Deutsche Bank detected in Mr. Trump’s accounts.
Investigators for the two committees are hoping the materials will shed light on any links Mr. Trump has had to foreign governments and whether he or his companies were involved in any illegal activity, such as money laundering for people overseas.
The committees have also said the information is important to their attempts to craft legislation. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have argued that the subpoenas served no legitimate legislative purpose and were overly broad. Spokesmen for the committees had no immediate comment on Tuesday.
The ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit contained one caveat: The lower court must consider whether and how the banks disclose a limited set of sensitive personal information that would have no bearing on the government investigations. Such information could include checks that were written by Mr. Trump or his companies to cover employees’ medical expenses.
But, the court ruled, the presumption should be in favor of handing over more documents, not fewer. “Many documents facially appearing to reflect normal business dealings will therefore warrant disclosure for examination and analysis by skilled investigators assisting the committees to determine the effectiveness of current regulation and the possible need for improved legislation,” the court wrote.
The ruling concluded: “The committees’ interests in pursuing their constitutional legislative function is a far more significant public interest than whatever public interest inheres in avoiding the risk of a chief executive’s distraction arising from disclosure of documents reflecting his private financial transactions.”
The decision is the latest this year by a federal court to uphold the broad powers of Congress to investigate the president.
In two similar cases, the president has asked the Supreme Court to overrule lower courts and to block attempts to review his finances. Last month, the Supreme Court issued a temporary stay related to a subpoena that the House Oversight and Reform Committee issued in April. Mr. Trump has also filed a petition seeking review of a request from prosecutors in Manhattan who are seeking information from his accounting firm, Mazars USA.
6a. The connections between the family of Anthony Kennedy and the Trump milieu run deep. Anthony Kennedy’s son Justin was Trump’s banker at Deutsche Bank.
Furthermore, jurists who clerked for Anthony Kennedy figure prominently in Trump’s judicial appointments:
- ” . . . . He [Trump] picked Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who had served as a law clerk to Justice Kennedy, to fill Justice Scalia’s seat. . . .”
- ” . . . . Then, after Justice Gorsuch’s nomination was announced, a White House official singled out two candidates for the next Supreme Court vacancy: Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Raymond M. Kethledge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati. The two judges had something in common: They had both clerked for Justice Kennedy. . . .”
- ” . . . . In the meantime, as the White House turned to stocking the lower courts, it did not overlook Justice Kennedy’s clerks. Mr. Trump nominated three of them to federal appeals courts: Judges Stephanos Bibas and Michael Scudder, both of whom have been confirmed, and Eric Murphy, the Ohio solicitor general, whom Mr. Trump nominated to the Sixth Circuit this month. . . .”
- ” . . . . Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin . . . . spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role. During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history. . . .”
President Trump singled him out for praise even while attacking other members of the Supreme Court. The White House nominated people close to him to important judicial posts. And members of the Trump family forged personal connections.
Their goal was to assure Justice Anthony M. Kennedy that his judicial legacy would be in good hands should he step down at the end of the court’s term that ended this week, as he was rumored to be considering. Allies of the White House were more blunt, warning the 81-year-old justice that time was of the essence. There was no telling, they said, what would happen if Democrats gained control of the Senate after the November elections and had the power to block the president’s choice as his successor. . . .
. . . .When Mr. Trump took office last year, he already had a Supreme Court vacancy to fill, the one created by the 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia. But Mr. Trump dearly wanted a second vacancy, one that could transform the court for a generation or more. So he used the first opening to help create the second one. He picked Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who had served as a law clerk to Justice Kennedy, to fill Justice Scalia’s seat. . . .
. . . .Then, after Justice Gorsuch’s nomination was announced, a White House official singled out two candidates for the next Supreme Court vacancy: Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Raymond M. Kethledge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati.
The two judges had something in common: They had both clerked for Justice Kennedy.
In the meantime, as the White House turned to stocking the lower courts, it did not overlook Justice Kennedy’s clerks. Mr. Trump nominated three of them to federal appeals courts: Judges Stephanos Bibas and Michael Scudder, both of whom have been confirmed, and Eric Murphy, the Ohio solicitor general, whom Mr. Trump nominated to the Sixth Circuit this month. . . .
. . . . Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.
During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history. . . .
6b. After Kennedy left Deutsche Bank in 2009 he went on to become co-CEO LNR Property LLC. LNR Property saved Jared Kushner’s midtown Manhattan property in 2011:
- ” . . . . from 2010–2013 Justin Kennedy was the co-CEO of LNR Property LLC with Tobin Cobb. . . .”
- ” . . . . According the New York Times, in 2007 Kushner Companies purchased ‘an aluminum-clad office tower in Midtown Manhattan, for a record price of $1.8 billion.’ At the time the NYT wrote that this deal was ‘considered a classic example of reckless underwriting. The transaction was so highly leveraged that the cash flow from rents amounted to only 65 percent of the debt service.’ . . .”
- ” . . . Who came to the rescue? None other than LNR Property, the company whose CEO at the time was Justin Kennedy. According to the NYT and the Real Deal, Mr. Kushner and LNR ‘reached a possible agreement with LNR Property, a firm specializing in restructuring troubled debt and which oversees the mortgage, that would allow him to retain control of the tower by modifying the terms of the $1.2 billion mortgage tied to the office portion of the building.’ . . .”
. . . . Justice Kennedy has two very successful sons in their own right, Gregory and Justin Kennedy. Gregory Kennedy, a Stanford Law graduate (a Stanford man like his father), was named CEO of Disruptive Technology Advisers in October of 2016. According to his LinkedIn page: Disruptive Technology Advisors is a “Los Angeles based merchant bank with an exclusive focus on mid to late stage growth companies.” . . . .
Justin Kennedy, a graduate of UCLA and Stanford(again like his father), has spent his career in the world of banking, investment, and, interestingly, real estate. In particular, from 2010–2013 Justin Kennedy was the co-CEO of LNR Property LLC with Tobin Cobb. In the world of high-stakes NYC real estate it would be fairly improbable that the Trump or Kushner groups, monoliths in their own right, would not have mingled or done business with the LNR at some point in time. We were not surprised, therefore, to discover that there is a likely connection. Here’s what we know:
According the New York Times, in 2007 Kushner Companies purchased “an aluminum-clad office tower in Midtown Manhattan, for a record price of $1.8 billion.” At the time the NYT wrote that this deal was “considered a classic example of reckless underwriting. The transaction was so highly leveraged that the cash flow from rents amounted to only 65 percent of the debt service.” The Times continues:
“As many real estate specialists predicted, the deal ran into trouble. Instead of rising, rents declined as the recession took hold, and new leases were scarce. In 2010, the loan was transferred to a special servicer on the assumption that a default would occur once reserve funds being used to subsidize the shortfall were bled dry. But the story may yet have a happy ending for Kushner, a family-owned business that moved its headquarters from Florham Park, N.J., to 666 Fifth, its first major acquisition in Manhattan.”
Who came to the rescue? None other than LNR Property, the company whose CEO at the time was Justin Kennedy. According to the NYT and the Real Deal, Mr. Kushner and LNR “reached a possible agreement with LNR Property, a firm specializing in restructuring troubled debt and which oversees the mortgage, that would allow him to retain control of the tower by modifying the terms of the $1.2 billion mortgage tied to the office portion of the building.” A spokesman for Mr. Kushner told the Wall Street Journal in March of 2011 that “[t]he Kushner’s are ready and willing to invest more money into the property as soon as they can come to mutually satisfactory terms with the servicing agent.” In that same article Kushner’s father-in-law and the future President commented on the negotiations with Justin Kennedy’s company.
Speaking about the deal, Trump told the WSJ that Kushner is “a very smart young man…I think it (loan renegotiations) will come out well for him and everybody.” At this point there is no doubt that there was a direct business relationship between LNR and Kushner Companies at the time Justin Kennedy and Jared Kushner were both CEO. Even the future President was aware of the deal and commented on its respective merits. (That being said, it is not impossible that Jared Kushner and Justin Kennedy did not meet in connection with the specific deal in question; however, given the stakes involved it does seem more than likely that the two CEO’s would have interacted as negotiations were being conducted.)
The connections between Kushner, Kennedy, and Trump do not end there. Coincidentally, in 2011, the year in which some of these negotiations took place, Justin Kennedy for the first time was ranked on the New York Observer’s 100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate at #36. Donald Trump clocked in at #12. The New York Observer was owned at the time by none other than Jared Kushner himself. . . .
6c. Following the nomination by President Trump of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, we get confirmation that Trump got Kennedy to resign by agreeing to replace him with Kennedy’s former clerk Kavanaugh:
While the White House was successful for the most part in keeping President Donald Trump’s SCOTUS pick under wraps for the past two weeks, Trump was essentially decided on his nominee after Justice Anthony Kennedy told him he would retire in a meeting, Politico reported.
According to aides close to the White House who spoke to Politico, in that meeting Kennedy recommended Trump pick Brett Kavanaugh, who had served as a former law clerk to Kennedy. While Trump was reportedly already interested in Kavanaugh before that discussion with Kennedy, the retiring jurist’s recommendation helped seal the deal. . . .
7. The program concludes with review of information from Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile.
. . . . The [FBI] file [on Martin Bormann] revealed that he had been banking under his own name from his office in Germany in Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires since 1941; that he held one joint account with the Argentinian dictator Juan Peron, and on August 4, 5 and 14, 1967, had written checks on demand accounts in first National City Bank (Overseas Division) of New York, The Chase Manhattan Bank, and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., all cleared through Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires. . . .
Fascism and the Dangers of Economic Concentration
Trump AG Barr will escape impeachment thanks to ‘corrupt’ Republicans – Nadler
June 21, 2020 The Guardian, UK by Martin Pengelly
This article reports that the US Attorney General, William Barr is using the justice system to reward President Trump’s friends and punish his enemies instead of being a neutral prosecutor of criminal activity. He wasn’t to replace the head Federal Prosecutor for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman who was appointed to the position by a Federal Judge with the SEC Commissioner Jay Clayton who heads the Securities and Exchange Commission who does not have any experience as a federal prosecutor. This prosecutors office has pursued investigations and prosecutions of allies of Donald Trump including two of his personal lawyers, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani. The Turkish investigations with General Flynn has been essentially closed due to interventions by Barr.
This article does not mention this but there are many questions regarding Trumps behavior with Turkey (a WWI ally of the Kaizer) and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan including having considered plans to kidnap his political rival Fethullah Gülen; abandoning our Military allies in Syria, the Kurds and permitting Turkey to take over that section of the Syrian Border and militarily defeating the Kurds. But the most interesting point in this article is that Clayton’s firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, has represented Deutsche Bank, one of Trump’s largest creditors which is itself under investigation by the DOJ. In the 1920s and 1930s Sullivan and Cromwell’s lawyers included Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles whose largest clients were Nazi Germany. John Foster Dulles used to sign his cables to Germany with the closing remark “Heil Hitler”. The question is does this investigation is getting too close to the Underground Reich and their Corporate Constituents?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/21/donald-trump-ag-william-barr-impeachment-republicans-berman-nadler?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
This article includes the following statements:
• Barr and Trump want that replacement to be Jay Clayton, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission who has never worked as a federal prosecutor. Barr had said the US attorney in New Jersey, a Trump ally, would fill the role in an acting capacity.
• The prestigious district has pursued investigations and prosecutions of allies of Donald Trump including two of his personal lawyers, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani.
• On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, House intelligence chair Adam Schiff was asked if he accepted the reported explanation that Trump’s move to replace Berman with Clayton was “simply the president wanting to do a favor for a golfing buddy”.
• “I can’t accept that explanation,” Schiff said, “given the pattern and practice of both the president in seeking to use the justice system to reward friends, punish enemies, protect people he likes, and Bill Barr’s willingness to carry that water for the president.
• Clayton’s firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, has represented Deutsche Bank, one of Trump’s largest creditors which is itself under investigation by the DoJ. On Sunday Republican senator Tim Scott told ABC’s This Week: “There is no indication that those investigations will stop.”
• Nadler, like other Democrats, has suggested Barr is seeking to impede investigations close to Trump. Asked which, he said: “I think it’s obvious that a number of investigations the southern district has been doing with reference to the president’s associates, Giuliani, the Turkish investigation, we’ve seen a pattern of Barr corruptly impeding all these investigations. So this is just more of the same.”
• Bharara said he thought Barr’s conduct “shows there is an unfitness for office”.
A federal judge’s family was just attacked at her home on Sunday. Esther Salas’s husband, Mark Anderl, was critically injured and her son, Daniel Anderl, was killed. The gunman was dressed as a FedEx deliveryman and shot Mark when he answered the door and killed Daniel when he came to the assistance of his father. Judge Salas was in the home’s basement during the attack and wasn’t harmed.
The gunman, Roy Den Hollander, fled the scene and was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound several hours later in his vehicle. Hollander was a long-time anti-feminist ‘Men’s Rights’ lawyer/activist with a history of suing over things like ‘ladies’ night’ at bars or Women’s Studies programs at universities. In August of 2016, Hollander filed a lawsuit against a number of major media organizations over their allegedly unfair coverage of Donald Trump. More recently, he had a challenge to the military’s male-only draft pending before Judge Salas. So on the surface this appears to be instance of a plaintiff seeking revenge against a judge. And in this case it’s a plaintiff who is like an old school proto-‘incel’ seething with rage so it’s not like he doesn’t fit a profile.
It sounds like Hollander first got into the Men’s Rights movement after marrying a Russian woman while working for Kroll, so he has a background in private intelligence. He claims the woman was actually a prostitute who swindled him and the experiences from that divorce appear to have radicalized him.
It also sounds like Hollander had terminal cancer which no doubt would have played a role in his decision to carry out a murder/suicide. In addition, it sounds like Hollander is a suspect in the recent unsolved murder of another prominent ‘Men’s Rights’ lawyer/activist Marc Angelucci, who worked on a similar cases to Hollander and was shot dead at his home on July 11. So the details that are emerging paint a picture of a terminally ill Hollander deciding to end his own life by first taking out some perceived enemies.
But there was another major coincidence to this story that’s hard to ignore: the attack on Judge Salas’s family came a few days after Judge Salas was assigned a new lawsuit against Deutsche Bank file last week involving the Jeffrey Epstein case. Recall how Deutsche Bank employee whistleblowers charged that the bank was routinely ignoring conducting even minimal due diligence of its clients and when anti-money-laundering units at the bank raised concerns about Epstein’s accounts the executives ignored them. And when the bank finally tried to close its Epstein account it allegedly failed to find and close all of the dozens of accounts Epstein had at the bank’s private-banking divisions due to an antiquated account management system.
On July 15, the class action case Karimi v. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft et al. was filed on behalf of everyone who purchased Deutsche Bank stock between November 7, 2017 and July 6, 2020, over charges that the bank violated federal securities law by making false and/or misleading statements and/or failing to disclose that the bank failed to properly monitor clients that the bank itself deemed to be high-risk (with Jeffrey Epstein specifically named as one of those high-risk clients). So it’s the kind of class action lawsuit that could be extremely uncomfortable for Deutsche Bank.
Might this attack on Judge Salas’s family be related to the Deutsche Bank case? Some sort of attempt at intimidation? The timing, coming just days after Salas gets that get, is hard to ignore. At the same time, Hollander did independently have a case before Salas and he appears to have begun his murder/suicide spree with the killing of Marc Angelucci days before Karimi v. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft et al. was even filed.
Then again, who knows when Deutsche Bank would have learned that this lawsuit was in the works. The bank may not have learned long before July 15. In addition, it’s worth noting that Hollander has been open about the terminal nature of his cancer since had a Go-Fund-Me page for it so people who knew Hollander knew he was dying. And that raises an interesting question: when a far right unhinged figure like Roy Den Hollander lets the world know he’s dying, does he get murder/suicide-for-hire inquiries? We’re now living in an era of encrypted communication networks that put all sorts of far right and criminal figures in quiet contact with each other. So when when someone like Hollander lets it be known they’re dying you have to wonder how many parties start contacting them and trying to steer them towards a strategic high-profile strategic final act. Keep in mind that you can’t really directly intimidate a federal judge. It would require something indirect and it would also required not actually killing the judge (unless the intent is to intimidate the next judge who gets the case).
So given the timeline of events it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this was just a really remarkable coincidence unless we assume Hollander was hired or convinced to attack Salas’s family by someone affiliated with Deutsche Bank. And while a murder/suicide-for-hire scenario may seem like highly unlikely, keep in mind that the Deutsche Bank lawsuit could impact far more parties than just Deutsche Bank. It was more than just Jeffrey Epstein who was taking advantage of Deutsche Bank’s ‘antiquate accounts management’ systems all these years, after all. So somehow influencing this judge may have been a top priority of a large number of very powerful bad actors. That’s part of what makes this such an intriguing story: the idea that someone could have arranged for Hollander to go on this murder/suicide spree in order to influence the Deutsche Bank case implies we’re talking about a remarkably powerful and influential group behind it with an immense amount to lose if this case goes forward. And if there’s one bank on the planet with clients that fit that description it’s Deutsche Bank, which is why this lawsuit is happening in the first place. Ok, first, here’s a Daily Mail piece that describes the initial ambush at Judge Salas’s home days after the Deutsche Bank lawsuit was assigned to her court:
“The shooting came days after the judge was assigned a case with links to Jefferey Epstein, although there is not yet any suggestion that the attack is linked to her work.”
If someone wanted to send the juge a message about the lawsuit having someone attack her home and that would have been one way to do it, although it’s unclear how she would interpret that message given that her husband was critically injured and only child was killed:
And now here’s a piece on Hollander’s background after his body was found in a car with a FedEx package addressed to the judge several hours after the attack, along with documents related to Marc Angelucci who was killed a week earlier:
“Hollander comes under scrutiny a week after the violent death of another prominent men’s rights figure—Marc Angelucci, an attorney who worked on similar cases to Hollander and who was shot dead at his house. The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office said Monday that no arrests have been made in Angelucci’s death.”
A terminally ill Men’s Rights lawyer/activist kills a fellow Men’s Rights lawyer/activist and then a week later attacks the family of the judge in a Men’s Right case he’s pursuing before killing himself. Is that the entire explanation for the attack?
Is it a coincidence that a dying obscure far right figure chose this moment to attack Judge Salas’s family days after a class action lawsuit was filed that could crack open decades of dark secrets sitting in Deutsche Bank’s books? Is it a giant coincidence? On the surface it does indeed appear to be a giant coincidence. Then again, on the surface Deutsche Bank is a respectable bank and isn’t just a giant money-laundering cutout for some of the most powerful criminal networks on the planet. Surface appearances can be deceiving.
Here’s a set of articles about the major investors behind the coronavirus “Oxford vaccine” that’s being developed by Vaccitech, a company created by a pair of Oxford University researchers in partnership with AstraZeneca. As we’ll see, it turns out the two major investors in Vaccitech quietly and somewhat scandalously acquired their stakes in the company starting in mid-October, making them perhaps two of the ‘luckiest’ investors of this entire pandemic. It also turns out one of those two major investors was Deutsche Bank’s global head of equity trading until 2017, so a Deutsche Bank insider is playing a key role in this particular vaccine’s development. And given that this is the vaccine that is arguably winning the COVID vaccine ‘race’ that makes this former Deutsche Bank insider someone who could end up playing a very important role in determining how this pandemic plays out. And while it’s unclear if this former Deutsche Bank executive has ties directly to President Trump, the fact the Trump has long-standing ties to the shady underworld of Deutsche Bank suggests this is a story worth keeping an eye on in part because it could be another avenue for Trump to exert influence over the vaccine race, especially in light of the growing concerns that the Trump administration is going to somehow try to prematurely approve a vaccine before the November elections:
As we’re going to see, while the vaccine in question is typically referred to as the “Oxford vaccine”, that’s a bit of a misnomer. The vaccine is indeed being developed by two Oxford researchers and Oxford University does have a small stake in the main venture capital firm invested in Vaccitech, Oxford Sciences Innovation PLC (OSI). OSI, which was founded by the university in 2015 to help capitalize on university spinoffs owns, a 46 percent stake in Vaccitech. But the university only holds about 5 percent of OSI, with the rest being held by private investors. So the University of Oxford owns about 5 percent of the firm that owns 46 percent of Vaccitech, making it a fairly small stakeholder in the whole enterprise.
There are a number of different high-profile investors in OSI, including Google’s venture capital firm GV and Chinese telecom giant Huawei. Another Chinese conglomerate, Fosun International, holds around a 2.7% stake in OSI. But by far the largest sharehold in OSI is an investment firm Braavos Capital, which was incorporated on October 16, 2019, by Andre Crawford-Brunt and Magda Wierzycka. Crawford-Brunt spent 22 years at Deutsche Bank — starting off as an open outcry trader at Deutsche Bank in South Africa 1994 — and became Deutsche Bank’s global head of equity’s trading until he retired in 2016. He also has a history of investing in other hightech Oxford spinoffs. Wierzycka is the wealthiest woman in South Africa. Crawford-Brunt joined the OSI board in February, after what was described as a period of upheaval when OSI’s chief executive and chairman both departed. So some sort of major shakeup at OSI recently took place and Crawford-Brunt and Wierzycka appear to be at the heart of it.
Now as we’re also going to see, Crawford-Brunt and Wierzycka are facing conflict of interest accusations as a result of Braavos’s investments in OSI. In May of this year, an investor in the South Afican investment firm Syngia complained after a disclosure to Syngia investors in March revealed a number of transactions between Braavos Investment Advisers in the UK, and Sygnia subsidiaries. The letter indicated that Braavos had been incorporated with two 50 percent partners, Crawford-Brunt and Wierzycka. Braavs agreed to enter into a services agreement with Sygnia Asset Management UK, (SAM UK), a subsidiary of Sygnia, for infrastructure, office space and other support. Braavos would pay an annual fee of about R13.9 million to SAM UK. But then another Syngia subsidiary, Syngia Life, would make investments in Braavos’s private equity funds, paying Braavos a 1.5 percent plus 20 percent performance fee. As the investor noted, that’s a pricey fee for what is basically a passive investment. Adding to the problem is that the fees couldn’t be negotiated. But here’s the worst part: Wierzycka is co-CEO of Syngia and Crawford-Brunt is a non-executive director. So two top Syngia officers, Crawford-Brunt and Wierzycka, basically set up Braavos back in October as a shell company to skim the profits off of Syngia’s investments in OSI and didn’t inform their investors about this arrangement until March of this year, a month after Crawford-Brunt joined OSI’s board.
And as we’ll see, it was disclosed in February of this year that Braavos had been rapidly growing its stake in OSI in the prior six months, acquiring a 20 percent stake at that time. But since Braavos wasn’t incorporated until October 16, that 20 percent stake had to have been acquired in just a few months. That’s how rapidly Crawford-Brunt and Wierzycka acquired what is now the largest stake in the leading coronavirus vaccine developer. Like two months before the outbreak was official acknowledged. And let’s not forget that, based on what we know now, there’s strong indications that the coronavirus was already circulating the globe by the fall of last year, with a number of athletes at the Wuhan Military World Games reporting getting sick at the games or shortly after (which would obviously raise the possibility of some of them being sick before the games and bringing it there). And those Military World Games took place in the last week of October. So Braavos was incorporated like days before what could have been a kind of global super-spreader event for the virus. The timing is remarkable.
Ok, first, here’s a Wall Street Journal article that describes the Vaccitech investors and the broad array of different investors in OSI, from Huawei to Google. But it’s Braavos Capital that has emerged as the dominant force in OSI and only after a period of tumult that saw its former leadership leave the company:
“OSI’s biggest investor, though, is Braavos Capital, an investment firm started last year by Andre Crawford-Brunt, who was Deutsche Bank’s global head of cash equities trading when he left in 2016. He long had a small personal investment in OSI and has invested in Oxford spinouts directly. He has told investors that he launched Braavos—named after a wealthy, fictional city in the “Game of Thrones” stories—for the sole purpose of investing in Oxford-based companies. The firm is backed by South African-listed fund manager Sygnia Ltd. and its co-chief executive, Magda Wierzycka.”
Yes, the biggest investor in OSI happens to be an investment firm started last year (October 16) by the guy who was Deutsche Bank’s global head of cash equities trading until he left the bank in 2016. Crawford-Brunt is now on the OSI board following the departure of OSI’s chief executive and chairman. Braavos already has a 20 percent stake and apparently wants to bump it up to 25 percent. So OSI has very recently experienced a kind of Braavos takeover just months before the scope of the pandemic really became clear:
Now here’s a quick piece for August of 2017 about Crawford-Brunt leaving Deutsche Bank that gives us a bit of an idea about his 22 year career there and his subsequent interest Oxford-related investments:
“Crawford Brunt is a board member of a South African firm that tests embryos for genetic abnormalities, called Genesis Genetics. He’s also chair of an Oxford University-based spinout focused on the blood diagnostics sector (“or, as I call it, the Theranos that works”) and has funded Deep Science Ventures – a programme that brings together scientists, experts and investors to get new science-based ventures off the ground.”
So technology investments aren’t new for Crawford-Brunt, in particular Oxford-related technology investments, even if his investments in OSI through Braavos are very new. As the following article from February describes, it was only at that point in mid February that Braavos’s 20 percent stake in OSI was publicly revealed and that Andre Crawford-Brunt was going to be joining the OSI executive board. This was just days after the former OSI chairman, Patrick Pichette, stepped down. As the article notes, Pichette’s departure was preceded by departure of the former chief executive of OSI, Charles Conn, in November. So both of these high profile departures took place shortly after the formation of Braavos Capital (incorporated on October 16) and Braavo’s rapid acquisition of OSI shares and Crawford-Brunt joining the OSI board:
“Details of the shareholding have emerged just days after Patrick Pichette, the former Google chief financial officer, stepped down as chairman of OSI, following the exit of Charles Conn, the former chief executive who left in November. Both men had joined less than a year ago.”
Two high-profile departures of OSI figures who had both been at the company for less than a year due to a “misalignment in views”. That’s the internal tumult at OSI what coincided with the rise of the Braavos stake in the firm, followed by Andre Crawford-Brunt taking a position on the board. The was a power battle and the Braavos group won...just as the pandemic was starting to emerge on the world stage.
But Braavos’s investments in OSI weren’t done just for the benefit of Crawford-Brunt or Magda Wierzycka. This was ostensibly being done on behalf of Syngia. And as the following article from May describes, that work Braavos was doing on behalf of Syngia was extremely well compensated work. And it was only in March that investors were formally informed about it. Keep in mind that the above article revealing Braavos’s 20 percent state in OSI was published in February, so the involvement with Braavos and OSI was apparently first revealed at that point, a month before Syngia sent out its letter to investors explaining that Braavos was investing on behalf of Syngia:
“These related to fees on policyholders’ funds; the high fees being charged on policyholder funds (1.5 percent plus 20 percent performance fee) for what was essentially a passive investment; the fact that the fees could not be negotiated; the fact the policy holders were investing in high-risk venture capital funds; why the establishment of Braavos had not been disclosed to shareholders, and the conflicts of interest in the directorships of Sygnia and Braavos.”
Those are quite a few complaints that appear to be very legitimate. And note this interesting tidbit: Wierzycka announced in May that she bought shares in OSI. So are those shares outside of the Braavos/Syngia investment in OSI? If so, that would be one way for Wierzycka/Crawford-Brunt to effectively acquire more than a 20 percent OSI stake:
So at that point it’s kind of a mystery as to how much of OSI is ultimately under the control of Wierzycka and Crawford-Brunt. Now here’s another article from early June that gives more information on this conflict of interest complaint and the timeline of when Braavos was established. And as the article notes, it was October 16 when Braavos was incorporated but investors weren’t informed about this until Syngia’s March investor newsletter. So the sudden acquisition of 20 percent (or more) of OSI by Wierzycka and Crawford-Brunt ostensibly on behalf of Syngia was very recent and very quiet. Quiet enough that even Syngia’s investors didn’t know about it until after that 20 percent stake had been acquired:
“They did, however, announce a related-party transaction in March where Braavos was entering into a contract with Sygnia Asset Management UK and Sygnia Life, but at no point did they declare a possible conflict of interest by allowing Wierzycka and Crawford-Brunt to set up the competing business in London.”
That’s how shady this whole situation is: even when Syngia belatedly sent out notification of the fund’s new arrangements with Braavos in March of this year, five months after Braavos’s October 16th incorporation, at no point in this letter to investors did they mention the obvious conflict of interest of Braavos being set up and run by two Syngia officers:
So that conflict of interest story is going to be interesting to watch, especially if Vaccitech really does win the vaccine race and the much hoped for massive profits materialize. The more the profits the more incentive there’s going to be for people to fight about this conflict of interest.
Finally, here’s an article from January of 2018 that gives us an idea why Vaccitech was well-position to develop a coronavirus vaccine on such short notice. The article is about Google’s venture capital firm, GV, deciding to invest in Vaccitech, which was focused at the time on developing a universal flu vaccine that wouldn’t have to be modified each year to deal with the constantly changing strains of flu virus in circulation. The novel idea for their approach to a flu vaccine is to build the vaccine using proteins from the core of the influenza virus instead of proteins on the surface because surface proteins (like the now-notorious “Spike” S‑protein) tend to mutate at much higher rates than internal proteins. If a vaccine that targets internal influenza virus proteins can be developed it can in theory work for years all over the globe. That was the big prize Vaccitech was pursuing. But there were other products Vaccitech was working on including including a Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) vaccine that the company was already running clinical studies on. So the COVID-19 vaccine Vaccitech is working on is presumably a variation the MERS vaccine it already had in clinical studies:
“Vaccitech’s new vaccine works by using proteins found in the core of the virus rather than those on its surface. Surface proteins stick out like pins from the virus and change all the time, while those in the core are stable.”
A stable flu vaccine. It’s a neat concept. Let’s hope they can get it to work. But it’s the clinical studies on a MERS vaccine that is really invaluable in the current pandemic:
And that’s all part of what makes the remarkably fortuitous yet scandalous investments by Braavos in OSI so fascinating in the context of the pandemic began shortly after Braavos was formed (and potentially was circulating even before Braavos was formed): Vaccitech wasn’t just a company working on a universal flu vaccine. It was also a company with clinical trials for a MERS vaccine, which would have made it one of the most precious companies on the planet by the time the coronavirus pandemic had clearly become a global menace. But it wasn’t until around February that it became clear that the virus was going to be a global problem and by then Braavos had quietly acquired at least 20 percent of OSI over the prior several months. So was that remarkable timing just dumb luck on behalf of Braavos? Because if not, there’s some other questions that need to be asked during this conflict-of-interest investigation.
Interesting timing: The two Deutsche Bank employees in charge of managing the relationship between bank’s private banking division and the Trump Organization just announced their retirement at the end of the year. Both Rosemary Vrablic and Dominic Scalzi had their retirements announced in the same statement by the bank.
Recall the interesting terms of Vrablic’s hiring back in 2006, where she was given unusually lax oversight that allowed her to report directly to Thomas Bowers, the head of the American wealth-management division. And then Bowers allegedly ‘commit suicide’ back in November of 2019. Also keep in mind that once President Trump leaves the White House, the odds of a serious investigation into the Trump Org’s history with Deutsche Bank are only set to increase in coming years. And now two of the key witnesses of that history jointly announced their retirements:
“Vrablic and Scalzi have worked closely together for years since joining Deutsche Bank a decade ago. Vrablic was a trusted contact to the Trump Organization and Kushner and assumed the bank’s lending relationship with Trump in the private side of the bank after the commercial lending division stopped doing business with Trump.”
A trusted contact to the Trump Organization. That’s how people describe Rosemary Vrablic. A trusted contact who had minimal oversight that was limited to Thomas Bowers, a guy who ‘committed suicide’ last year. If anyone knows where financial ‘bodies are buried’ it’s Vrablic. And now she’s retiring, along with Dominic Scalzi, right before the ongoing investigations into the Trump Organization can really get underway. Again, interesting timing.
Also keep in mind that it’s entirely possible Donald Trump, or Jared Kushner, will once again approach Deutsche Bank for more loans after he leaves office. Trump TV isn’t going to pay for itself! And at this point we have to wonder if Deutsche Bank actually wants to continue its relationship with Trump. He’s more than just a credit risk. He’s trouble. So while it’s possible Vrablic and Scalzi are retiring in the hopes that doing so now will help with any upcoming investigations, it’s also worth keeping in mind the possibility that Deutsche Bank is ditching these figures the Trump Org is clearly comfortable working with in order to avoid a future Trump relationship.
Are Trump and Kushner too skeezy for Deutsche Bank? That’s unclear at this point, but if so that would be pretty amazing since it didn’t actually seem possible for someone to be too skeezy for Deutsche Bank. One more broken norm from the Trump era.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/valentin-broeksmit-federal-informant-whistleblower-dead-el-sereno-high-school-california/
Federal informant found dead on El Sereno high school’s campus
By Matthew Rodriguez
April 27, 2022 / 1:13 AM / CBS/City News Service
A man believed to have worked with federal authorities to investigate the activities of Deutsche Bank and its ties with former President Donald Trump was found dead on an El Sereno high school’s campus Monday.
A cleaning crew found the body of Valentin Broeksmit, 45, self-described as a “comically terrible spy,” around 6:40 a.m Monday morning. He was declared dead at about 7:05 a.m. on the Woodrow Wilson High school campus off on the 4500 block of Multnomah Street according to the Los Angeles County Coroner. Officials have yet to release a cause of death pending an autopsy.
School police said that they had no video that shows him coming onto campus and are unsure how long he’d been on the campus.
Broeksmit was last seen driving a red Mini Cooper on April 6, 2021, in Griffith Park on Riverside Drive. Although Broeksmit had gone missing his Twitter account remained active. Freinds and journalists claimed to stay in contact with him during his disappearance, with Forensic News investigative journalist Scott Stedman tweeting that he last spoke with Broeksmit in January.
Stedman wrote that Broeksmit had given him “Deutsche Bank documents that highlighted the bank’s deep Russia connections.”
“It is very sad,” he added. “I don’t suspect foul play. Val struggled with drugs on and off. Waiting on further info.”
New York Times reporter David Enrich, who said that Broeksmit helped the FBI in its probe into the financial institution, also wrote that Broeksmit struggled with drug abuse and would often conjure “far-fetched theories” while bending the truth.
Stedman said that Broeksmit’s father had committed suicide in 2014 which haunted the 45-year-old.
“To see his life end so short is incredibly depressing,” Stedman wrote.
Broeksmit, who was also subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee during its probe into Trump and the bank, reportedly offered hundreds of documents to federal investigators and journalists who were looking for ties between Deutsche Bank and Trump. The documents were left behind by his stepfather William, who was an executive for the bank, died.
“This is terrible news,” Enrich tweeted. “Val was a longtime source of mine and the main character in my book. We had a complicated relationship, but this is just devastating to hear.”
NOTE: The person that the media seems to trust the most at “ruling out foul play” is named Scott Stedman, who is an anti-Russia shill for something called “Forensic News Service”. A quick perusal of their page makes it clear they are some kind of pro-Ukraine op, so I won’t even bother breaking that down further. However, look who I just found on their team!
Aaron Parnas... son of LEV PARNAS!
https://forensicnews.net/team/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Parnas
Aaron Gideon Parnas[1] is the son of Lev Parnas.[2] He is of Jewish-Ukrainian descent.[3]
In 2017, at the age of 18, Parnas completed both a diploma from Florida Atlantic University High School and a B.A. in political science and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University. Despite not being old enough to vote, he campaigned door-to-door for Marco Rubio and Donald Trump.[4][5] He graduated from George Washington University Law School in 2020 at the age of 21.[6]
In 2020, Parnas authored a memoir entitled TRUMP FIRST: How the President and his associates turned their backs on me and my family.[2] Despite being a supporter of Trump during the 2016 United States presidential election, he is now a Democrat and voted for Joe Biden in 2020.[7][3]
In December 2021, Parnas was working at a Miami based white-collar defense boutique law firm.[6] He is also a democratic digital strategist.[8] In early 2021, Aaron began serving as the press secretary for the Miami-Dade Democratic Party.
In a February 24, 2022 interview, Parnas expressed shock about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and stated that his relatives were trying to evacuate.[9] He has become a pro-Ukrainian TikToker and was one of several influencers to speak with Joe Biden in an effort to combat disinformation.[3][8]
NOTE: Here we see Scott Stedman freaking out on Twitter for people having “conspiracy theories” when he is saying effectively that it must be an overdose, despite no release of cause of death from police yet. Hey, Scott, I can hold off on assuming cause of death and not speculate. Why can’t you? Overdoses and suicides happen... but so do murders.
https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/status/1519446725496242177
When the Supreme Court conservative majority wrote Friday’s ruling ending Roe v Wade, pains were taken in the majority opinion to assure the public that the ruling in no way should be seen as a harbinger of the further erosion of the many other constitutionally protected rights that were won over the last century through the courts. Of course, as we’re going to see, that majority opinion had a notable minority dissenter: Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote a concurring opinion that called for the courts to review those exact rights the rest of the majority insisted were in no way put in peril by the ruling. Beyond that, he called for these rights — like the right to same sex marriage or the right to contraception — to be review by the courts as soon as possible. Justice Thomas wants to rock the boat in a big way right now.
So who should we believe? Justice Thomas? Or the rest of his fellow conservative justices? It’s one of the big questions looming over this ruling: do we believe the four conservative justices who insist that this wasn’t a sign of things to come. Or the one justice who isn’t mincing words?
And that brings us to another fun fact to keep in mind in this whole situation: Don’t forget that Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and even Amy Coney Barrett all publicly indicated during their nomination hearings that they were going to respect the Roe precedent. In other words, they all lied. And these are the justices who are now trying to assure the public that the loss of more rights isn’t on the way. And that’s why, when we read Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion, it’s important to keep in mind that the conservative justices who appeared to disagree with Thomas also have a track record of lying about their plans:
“The conservative majority, through Justice Samuel Alito, promises that this decision poses no risk to other constitutional rights related to bodily autonomy and private relationships. Justice Brett Kavanaugh echoes that vow again in his concurring opinion.”
Don’t worry, no other constitutional rights were put in peril with this ruling. That was the message from most of the conservative justices who just ruled that the right to an abortion isn’t actually protected under the basic constitutional rights. But Clarence Thomas isn’t having any of it. As far as Thomas is concerned, other constitutional rights won in the 20th century should also be revisited, ASAP. Rights like same-sex marriage or access to contraception:
So what should be expect? Were justices Kavanaugh and Alito being sincere when they wrote that all of these other rights won through the courts aren’t at all put in jeopardy by this ruling? Or was Clarence Thomas just saying what the rest of his justices didn’t want to acknowledge too soon. After, if indeed Thomas’s vision for the future of the court is shared by his fellow conservative justices, it’s not like they’re going to want to come out and say it.
And that brings us to the following story about crocodile tears. Specifically, Susan Collin’s crocodile tears over how betrayed she feels by justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. As Collins reminds us, these justices basically promised that Roe was safe during their nomination years not that long ago. And we can now see what their words are worth. So when justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch want to assure the public that other rights aren’t at risk, keep in mind Susan Collin’s crocodile tears of betrayal:
““This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon,” she said in a statement released earlier Friday.”
Who know why Susan Collins apparently took Gorsuch and Kavanaugh at their word when they made one statement after anther during their confirmation hearings indicating that they weren’t planning on overturning Roe. It was beyond obvious that they were planning on doing so. Someone isn’t going to be nominated to the Supreme Court by a contemporary Republican president unless they are absolutely dead set on overturning Roe. Especially when they’re nominated by Donald Trump, who was overt in his desire to nominate justices who would overturn Roe and is now taking credit for the ruling. Susan Collins was obviously operating in bad faith when she took Kavanaugh and Gorsuch at their word. But Susan Collin’s bad faith isn’t the issue at hand here. It’s the blatant bad faith of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Bad faith that they are hoping we just forget about as they make repeated reassurances that no other rights are at risk.
Of course, there’s one significant difference between abortion rights vs the rights to same sex marriage or contraception: there has been a decades-long grass-roots movement fixated on overturning Roe. The GOP didn’t really have a choice on this given the importance of the evangelical Right to the party’s voting base. And that’s why one of the big questions looming over the fate of the futures of these rights has to do with the how much demand there really is for overturning them. Is the same evangelical base that’s been fixated on abortion now going to set its site on contraception? It does sound plausible, although it’s hard to imagine the issue have the same level or intensity of support.
But there’s another factor to keep in mind here: the overturning of these rights is all part of piece of a larger fundamental transformation of the nature of the US government. A fundamental transformation with a ‘states rights’ theme that the right-wing oligarchy has long wanted to see: rolling back virtually all of the rights that aren’t explicitly in the US Constitution, which would include the rights for all sorts of government regulatory power over business and private interests. In other words, when it comes to the future judicial threats to constitutional rights, we shouldn’t just be worried about the whims and desires of the evangelical Right. We also have to be watching for the oligarchy channeling those whims and desires for their own agenda. The contemporary conservative movement in the US is already a merger of theocratic and oligarchic interests. It’s what got us to this point, after all.
And that brings us to the following article from back in March about some rather controversial statements made by Republican Senator Mike Braun: According to Senator Braun, all sorts of rights need to be revisited by the court. Rights including the right to interracial marriage. And while Braun’s office walked back his comments after the fact and claimed Braun didn’t realize what he was saying, as we’re going to see Braun was very explicit. He viewed the right to interracial marriage as one of many rights that aren’t protected in the Constitution and should be decided at the state-level. It was someone ironic that he explicitly cited interracial marriage as one of the rights he wanted to see returned to the states given that, as we saw, that’s one of the rights gained in the 20th century that Clarence Thomas didn’t cite as warranting a review ASAP.
Also keep in mind that Braun is far from the most extreme member of the GOP Senate caucus. That’s part of the content here: these calls for the statements were being made by someone who, by the standards of today’s GOP, is a relative moderate. And he didn’t appear to be calling for the overturning of the constitutional right to interracial marriage due to some sort of deep seated opposition to interracial marriage. Instead, Braun fell back on a generic argument that rights not explicitly stated in the Constitution are implicitly left up to the states. It’s the kind of ‘judicial philosophy’ that demands the rolling back of the US into the 19th century on the principle:
“There are some mush-mouthed bits here and there, but overall, Braun certainly seems to understand what he’s talking about, and in fact sounds like a man who has given this whole topic very careful consideration. The first time the reporter asks him about interracial marriage, he says “you can’t have it both ways” when it comes to states’ rights, and that “diversity” is the “beauty of the system.” The second time he’s asked if the court should have let states determine whether or not to ban Black and white Americans from being wed, he says “yes.” Finally, asked about Griswold v. Connecticut, the case where the court struck down laws barring contraception, he says that regardless of the issue, he pretty much always believes states should have the right to “manifest their points of view” (because we all talk like Instagram influencers now). To his credit, Braun is being extremely clear and consistent. Say what you will about 1950s-style states’ rights fundamentalism—at least it’s an ethos.”
It’s just bad faith all over the place. Whether we’re talking about Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch lying to the world during their confirmation hearings, Susan Collins pretending to believe the blatant lies, or Senator Braun pretending he didn’t just call for an end to the constitutional right to interracial marriage, we’re looking at the same underlying phenomena: powerful people lying about how they intend to use their power going forward.
But part of what makes the story about Senator Braun so disturbing is he inadvertently made clear the larger game here: turning almost every right into a state-level right, and then using the GOP’s enduring domination at the state-level to effectively wield unchecked power. A kind of corrupted warped authoritarian version of federalism. That’s the plan. A plan already decades in motion, with decades of creeping judicially-sanctioned authoritarianism yet to come. Creeping and/or lurching as the case may be.
And the hits keep coming. Or, rather, the beatings will continue: The Supreme Court just issued its latest rebuke to modern age with the kind of ruling that should serve as a remind that the conservative majority is just as much a creature of big corporations and business interests as it is a captive of the far right on social issues. In a 6–3 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court struck down the EPA’s authority under the Clean Power Act to mandate that power plants transition to cleaner energy sources.
The ruling appears to be predicated on the “major questions case” right-wing legal theory that asserts that government agencies be exacting when interpreting the powers Congress has delegated to them. According to Roberts, pushing a transition to cleaner, renewable sources of energy, goes beyond what Congress intended when it gave the EPA the authority to regulate air pollutants.
As Justice Kagan writes in her dissent, “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it...When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get out-of-text-free cards.” In other words, this ruling was a semantic word game dressed up as a legal theory. Surprise!
And while Roberts didn’t indicate in his opinion that the logic of this ruling should be applied to other areas of regulation, he didn’t shut down that possibility either, which is rather ominous given the obvious ways the “major questions doctrine” can be applied to other regulations. So while the Supreme Court’s conservative majority didn’t entirely gut the EPA’s ability to regulate air pollution, as many feared might happen, the majority also left that option very open.
There’s another hint as to whether or not we should expect this ‘major questions doctrine’ to be applied to more regulations in the future: this ruling wasn’t even about an existing regulation. Instead, it was over an Obama-era regulation that the Biden administration isn’t even planning on reviving. Yep, in setting up this ‘major questions doctrine’ precedent, the conservative majority decided to strike down a non-existent regulation. It’s a big hint regarding future intent:
“Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the opinion for the Court. Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the dissenting liberals, and Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence, joined by Justice Samuel Alito.”
As we can see, Justice Roberts doesn’t shy from staying true to his corporate lawyer roots. The conservative majority was so eager to restrict the EPA’s authority that it took up a case involving an Obama-era regulation that the Biden administration wasn’t even planning on reviving. And by making this ruling based on the “major questions case” right-wing legal theory, the court was basically affirming that theory for future use. A theory that raises questions about virtually all regulations that relegates them to semantic word games, like whether or not the EPA’s mandate under the Clean Air Act allows the agency to mandate cleaner energy sources. According to the logic of the “major questions case” theory, mandating cleaner energy sources rwas a bridge too far for the agency. It’s the kind of ominous ruling that hints at a lot more ominous rulings involving other federal agencies are on the way:
And note the dissent from Justice Kagan: she’s basically declaring the conservative majority to be intellectually bankrupt and devising special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ that magically appear whenever the conservative majority needs to justify what it wants. It’s a remarkable dissent in that it doesn’t just sounds like a dissent against this ruling. Justice Kagan was making a statement about the intellectual and moral integrity of current Supreme Court conservative majority:
How much longer before the liberal justices just start openly calling their conservative colleagues legal frauds in these dissenting opinions? Because that’s basically what Kagan just wrote, even if she wasn’t quite that explicit. So how many more magical ‘major questions doctrine’ rulings are we going to see before Kagan openly declare the court corrupt? Time will tell. Time and one openly corrupt ruling after another after another.
And don’t forget that Kagan’s dissent didn’t just come in the face of this ruling. Her dissent came in the wake of one absurd pro-corporate ruling after another for years. As the following July 2020 piece by David Sirota reminds us, when John Roberts was plucked from obscurity in 2005 by George W. Bush to become the new Chief Justice, he was plucked precisely due to corporate America’s confidence that John Roberts was going to be committed corporate whore through and through. And boy where they right!
“The CFPB ruling exemplifies the court’s sharp shift to right — a shift that relatively few even know about because media headlines about the court typically focus on social issues.”
While the overturning of Roe may have shocked the American public, shocking rulings on matters of corporate accountability have long been a feature of the Roberts Court. In the case of the 2020 CFPB ruling, Justice Kagan points out how the ruling effectively wipes out what was seen as a central feature of the agency when lawmakers created it. It’s an interesting observation in light of the “major questions” basis of the Roberts EPA ruling. When it was clear the CFPB was following the stated mission of the agency lawmakers intended, the Roberts court magically found a new excuse:
And as the article reminds us, this was why Roberts was nominated back in 2005 in the first place: to be a corporate legal whore. The Chief Corporate Legal Whore, in this case. That’s his mission. A long-term decades-long mission that requires that Roberts occasionally pretend to be a ‘moderate’ for the sake of maintaining some degree of legitimacy for the court in the eyes of the public. It’s intended to be a slow boil:
It’s been quite the long con: even to this day, the John Roberts’s judicial extremism and corporate whoring are barely recognized by the public at large. He really has succeeded in slow boiling the US in close to two decades of corporate shilling at the highest court in the land. And at the relatively youthful age of 65 (youthful for a justice), we have decades more of this slow boiling to go. Well, decades of Roberts’ slow boiling long con. Future generations will presumably have centuries and millennia to enjoy the slow boil of climate change.
No one said ‘moving past’ the taint of Jeffrey Epstein was going to be easy. Or cheap. But it does appear that the big banks that played key roles in Epstein’s sex trafficking operations are arriving at legal resolutions. One multi-million dollar settlement at a time...along with consistent denials of any wrongdoing. It’s a theme.
A theme that played out once again with this last week’s $75 million settlement in the case brought against Deutsche Bank by a group of “Jane Doe” Epstein victims in New York. Recall how lawsuits were filed by Epstein victims against both Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan back in November, alleging that Epstein hadn’t acted alone in his sex trafficking but had help from the banks. The suit alleged that the banks knowingly facilitated the large sex-trafficking-related cash flows. Also recall how, a little over a month after that lawsuit was filed, the attorney general of the Virgin Islands, Denise George, also filed a lawsuit against JP Morgan on charges that the bank turned a blind eye towards Epstein’s use of the bank to facilitate his sex-trafficking. Then, days after George filed the suit, the governor of the Virgin Islands, Albert Bryan, fired George for apparently unrelated reasons. As we also saw, both Bryan and former-government John deJongh Jr. have personal ties to the special treatment Epstein received from the Virgin Islands government over the years he was based there, including special tax treatment. That case brought by the Virgin Islands is still going despite George’s mysterious firing. So we’ve seen both the legal heat, and apparent legal shenanigans, playing out over the ongoing investigations into the roles played by both JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. That’s part of the context of this $75 million settlement by Deutsche Bank: the legal investigations into both Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan aren’t over. Yet. More large settlements will presumably be required
Nor is this week’s settlement the only ongoing Epstein-related case against these banks. Recall the lethal attack on the husband and son of federal judge Esther Salas in July 2020, just days after Salas was assigned a case brought by Deutsche Bank investors against the bank, charging that the bank failed to monitor ‘high-risk’ customers including Epstein. As we’re going to see, that class action case, Karimi v Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft et al., was reassigned to judge Jed Rakoff and settled for $26.3 million back in January. Deutsche Bank denied any wrongdoing as part the settlement. This is a good time to recall how Deutsche Bank employee whistleblowers charged that the bank was routinely ignoring conducting even minimal due diligence of its clients and when anti-money-laundering units at the bank raised concerns about Epstein’s accounts the executives ignored them. And when the bank finally tried to close its Epstein account it allegedly failed to find and close all of the dozens of accounts Epstein had at the bank’s private-banking divisions due to an antiquated account management system. That damning evidence is part of the context of these settlements.
And while Deutsche Bank may have settled in its ‘Jane Doe’ case, the charges against JP Morgan are still going. And getting worse. That’s what we learned earlier this month when new allegations were brought against Jes Staley, the former head of JP Morgan’s private banking division from 2000 to 2009. Staley wasn’t just in charge of Epstein’s accounts at JP Morgan, according to the allegations. He was an active participant in raping girls with Epstein’s permission. Those were the charges brought against Staley a few weeks ago. Beyond that, judge Rakoff has order JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to set aside time to testify as part of the trial. JP Morgan, in turn, has filed a lawsuit against Staley. So at the same time Deutsche Bank appears to be paying one fine after another in order to ‘move past’ its Epstein culpability, things could be getting worse for JP Morgan. And Barclays...it turns out Staley went on to become the CEO of Barclays.
There’s another angle to these legal cases that should be kept in mind: the the class action lawsuit brought by the Deutsche Bank investors that was settled back in January for $26.3 million didn’t simply allege that the bank was negligent when it came to Epstein. They charged that the bank’s executives and management board “routinely overruled compliance staff so that the bank’s wealth management business could commence or continue relationships with high-risk, ultra-rich clients” such as Epstein, “founders of terrorist organizations, people associated with Mexican drug cartels, and people suspected of financing terrorist organizations,”. That’s what Judge Rakoff wrote back June when he rejected Deutsche Bank’s request to dismiss the suit. It’s a reminder that these lawsuits targeting the banks that facilitate Epstein’s sex trafficking empire didn’t just threaten exposing their sordid relationship with Epstein. This has the potential to get much bigger. And dirtier.
Ok, first, here’s a NY Times excerpt on the recent $75 million settlement that promises to end the ‘Jane Doe’ lawsuits brought against the bank back in November. A relatively cheap settlement all things considered:
“The settlement, which requires approval by a federal judge, would resolve a proposed class-action suit that alleged the bank had helped enable the disgraced financier’s sex trafficking of young women by missing warning signs in Mr. Epstein’s accounts that he was engaged in wrongdoing.”
One more Epstein-related lawsuit has been tentatively settled. This time it’s the suit brought against both Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan by Epstein victims back in November. A suit that sure looked promising from the start given that Deutsche Bank had already agreed to pay New York regulators $150 million for repeatedly overlooking suspicious transactions involving Epstein. But it’s still just Deutsche Bank settling here. JP Morgan has yet to settle:
And as the following Bloomberg piece from back in January reminds us, this isn’t the first Epstein-related large settlement for Deutsche Bank this year. The Karimi v. Deutsche Bank AG class action case — a case originally assigned to Judge Esther Salas before the lethal assault on her family home — was also settled by Deutsche Bank back in January with a $26.3 million settlement. Along with any denials of wrongdoing, of course:
“Rakoff’s approval resolves a class action suit filed in 2020 over the bank’s anti-money-laundering and “know your customer” systems. In the suit, the plaintiffs cited Deutsche Bank’s business relationship with Epstein, Russians including billionaire Roman Abramovich and what they called “other unsavory high-net-worth individuals and their affiliated companies.” They used Epstein’s name more than 100 times and called him “a particularly egregious example.””
As we can see, Epstein wasn’t the only unsavory client cited in the suit. Just “a particularly egregious example” of a much larger pattern of conduct that apparently included “founders of terrorist organizations, people associated with Mexican drug cartels, and people suspected of financing terrorist organizations.” It’s a reminder that the Epstein-related troubles of these banks may not be limited to Epstein:
Considering the $150 million settlement with New York state financial regulators, it’s not hard to see why the bank would have jumped at the $26.3 million class action settlement. Especially when it got to continue denying any wrongdoing. Again, there’s potentially a lot more under this rock.
And that brings us to another disturbing update in the ongoing legal struggles for Epstein’s bankers: the figure in charge of Epstein’s accounts for JP Morgan isn’t simply accused of facilitating Epstein’s sex trafficking activities. He’s also charged with raping Epstein’s victims. Yep, those are the charges that have been brought against Jes Staley, the former head of JP Morgan’s private banking division from 2000 to 2009. According to the allegations, Staley “used aggressive force in his sexual assault of [anonymous victim ‘JPM Jane Doe’] and informed [her] that he had Epstein’s permission to do what he wanted to her.” Staley reportedly exchanged 1,200 emails with Epstein between 2008 and 2012, which is the period after Epstein was convicted for soliciting a minor in that now-notorious 2008 federal sweetheart plea bargain. Those are the new allegations that were brought against Staley as part of the ongoing lawsuit filed against both Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan back in November by Epstein’s victims. The kind of allegations that, if true, suggest this already gross story could get a lot more gross by the time its over:
“Staley, a former private banking chief at JP Morgan, is alleged to have ‘used aggressive force in his sexual assault of [anonymous victim ‘JPM Jane Doe’] and informed [her] that he had Epstein’s permission to do what he wanted to her,’ the ruling, filed on Monday, states.”
It’s hard to imagine a more damning picture for JP Morgan than what Staley is being accused of in these new charges. Except, well, it obviously could get more damning. Like if we found out that JP Morgan’s leadership was aware of the nature of Staley’s relationship with Epstein. And with the multiple ‘Jane Doe’ lawsuits and the Virgin Islands suit still ongoing, it appears there’s still plenty opportunity for prosecutors to force JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon onto the stand. What will Dimon ultimately concede under oath?
And then there’s the 1,200 emails exchanged between Staley and Epstein from 2008 to 2012, after Epstein’s conviction. What kind of damning evidence is residing in those emails? Is JP Morgan itself fully aware of the contents of these emails? It’s a hint that this story could get even worse as this case plays out:
So that’s our update on the ongoing Epstein investigations. Deutsche Bank is steadily settling its way out of its legal troubles while JP Morgan appears to be reacting to the charges against Staley by filing its own case against Staley. It’s the kind of defense that requires absolutely no information coming out indication that JP Morgan’s higher-ups knew what was happening. Keep in mind that JP Morgan kept Epstein as a client until 2013, five years after Epstein’s federal sweetheart plea deal. It’s not like the bank had no idea who they were dealing with at that point. Will JP Morgan continue to fight and deny the charges? Or ultimately settle? We’ll find out, although at this point we should probably expect denials until undeniable evidence comes out, at which point it will be settlement time. And, of course, time for us all to forget this ever happened and pretend like similar things couldn’t still happen today.