Читать книгу The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy - Greg Miller - Страница 12

CANDIDATES ALWAYS SEEK SYMBOLIC BACKDROPS AT MOMENTS of political embarkation. Ted Cruz chose a Christian college in Virginia for his announcement that he was entering the 2016 race. Jeb Bush wore shirt-sleeves at a state college in Miami. Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Clinton released a two-minute video that devoted more screen time to images of everyday Americans taking on new challenges than to the prohibitive favorite to be the next president.

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump had entered the presidential race on a gilded escalator. Without taking a step, he descended into a crowd of cheering supporters in the baroque lobby of Trump Tower.

A monument to excess, Trump Tower was an unlikely setting for the launch of a populist campaign. But it was inconceivable that Trump would begin anywhere else. The center of his self-created universe, with his palatial residence and his business offices on the skyscraper’s upper floors, the building is a fifty-eight-story manifestation of the image he spent his entire life cultivating: that of a dealmaker and business titan who transformed a family empire of unglamorous apartment complexes into a global brand synonymous with success and opulence.

The tower also served as a symbol of the vaunted boardroom savvy that Trump promised to bring to Washington. Certainly the breadth of his properties and the ubiquity of his brand were evidence of undeniable business talent—for seizing opportunity, sizing up people, and of course, selling himself. But like the tower’s marble and metallic veneer, the Trump aura has always masked a less regal reality. Behind the glittering name were repeated bankruptcies, racial discrimination claims, unpaid contractors, class action lawsuits, and financial entanglements with the criminal and corrupt. Beneath the tale of spun gold were opinions and a pattern of behavior that without the offsetting charms of wealth and fawning media attention would have led to ostracism. Discrepancies about the building’s true dimensions (he claims it has sixty-eight stories, ten more than actually exist) speak to a life premised on falsehood.

From childhood, Trump had been perceived as egotistical and a bully. As an adult, his views of women and minorities, as well as his vision of the American dream, seemed stuck in a bygone era, unaltered by the social movements that otherwise defined the majority of his generation and the politics of his hometown. Like anyone in high-end real estate, Trump was prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement. But he seemed to take these traits to extremes, habitually overstating—and outright lying—about the size of his fortune, the measure of his charity, even the ratings of his reality show. When he wasn’t making such claims directly, he would impersonate imaginary characters in phone calls to journalists, describing “Donald Trump” with a cascade of superlatives and fabrications.

These tendencies were on display from the outset of Trump’s campaign. As he stepped onto a stage draped with American flags, he dispensed with the clichés of announcing one’s candidacy—the faint praise of political rivals, the lofty rhetoric about hope, unity, and higher purpose. Instead, he delivered a diatribe that depicted America as a global laughingstock and presented himself as its only viable savior, a role he said he was willing to suspend his luxurious life to accept.

Many voters would be repulsed by the fact that Trump made no effort to subdue the coarse aspects of his personality or refine his message to avoid insulting entire demographic categories. But to others, it made him appealingly unscripted. In a field of candidates whose positions and even personalities were shaped by polls and focus groups, Trump stood out as strikingly authentic no matter the factual inauthenticity of many of his claims.

Trump’s opening speech was actually more honest than most to the extent that it was a remarkably accurate reflection of who he was as a person and what he would be like as president. He opened with a stream of falsehoods. He claimed a turnout of “thousands” to see his announcement, though reporters counted hundreds—some of them movie extras hired for the occasion; he said that America’s gross domestic product had plunged “below zero,” when it was well into the trillions and even its growth still registered positive; he accused the U.S. government of having spent $5 billion on the troubled website used by citizens to enroll in the subsidized health insurance program known as Obamacare, for which he offered no evidence.

His spurious depictions of the country’s finances were matched by extraordinary exaggerations of his own. He touted a personal net worth exceeding $9 billion, and brandished a supposed balance sheet verifying this total drawn up by a “big accounting firm” that he declined to name. In fact, he had overstated his net worth by at least a factor of two, according to the most reliable estimates,¹ and had opened his bid for the presidency with a version of the falsehood he had probably told most frequently in his public life.

Trump had long been utterly obsessed with his standing among America’s richest people, and often had gone to extraordinary lengths to cheat his way up such rankings. In 1984, smarting over Forbes’s decision a year earlier to value his holdings at $200 million—a fifth of what he claimed in interviews with the magazine—Trump waged a campaign to influence the next round of tabulations. He courted one of the main reporters on the project, twenty-five-year-old Jonathan Greenberg, with invitations to his office and company parties. He threw fistfuls of fictitious data at Forbes, claiming the Trump family owned more than 23,000 apartments worth $40,000 apiece. (Greenberg’s scrutiny found only 8,000, perhaps worth an average of $9,000.)

At one point, Greenberg took a call from a supposed Trump subordinate named “John Barron,” who sought to persuade the journalist that he failed to fully grasp the scale of Trump’s empire. Barron told Greenberg that Trump had taken possession of the majority of his father’s assets—a falsehood revealed later by family legal filings—and that because of the consolidated holdings Trump should be considered a billionaire. Greenberg made recordings of the odd conversations with Barron, and they made clear Barron was just Trump trying to alter the cadence of his voice.² Forbes saw through the ruse, at least in part, assigning Trump a net worth of $400 million. More rigorous scrutiny showed that even $400 million vastly overstated Trump’s wealth, so while the magazine had rejected the outrageous figures pushed by Trump and his phony alter ego, it still had moved him up. “This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real,” Greenberg later wrote. It “led to future accolades, press coverage, and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.”

The most poignant moment in Trump’s opening speech came when he spoke of his father. Fred Trump was the son of Friedrich Trump, a German immigrant who had been a barber and then a hotel manager and moved the family to a house on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and began accumulating money and properties in the burgeoning borough. Friedrich died during a flu epidemic when Fred was only twelve, leaving his family with the seeds of their future fortune. His widow, Elizabeth, managed the budding real estate business she renamed E. Trump & Son. Fred grew up to take the reins of the company, and as New York’s population and economy boomed, he turned its focus toward building sprawling apartment complexes. In the 1920s, vast tracts of Brooklyn and Queens were undeveloped. It was an auspicious and lucrative moment, and Fred Trump made the most of it.

“I started off in a small office with my father in Brooklyn and Queens,” Trump said during his announcement speech. “I learned so much just sitting at his feet playing with blocks listening to him negotiate with subcontractors.”

That father was a stern figure with streaks of his own vanity—neighbors recalled marveling at the Cadillacs in the family driveway with FCT license plates. The cars were the least of it: Donald grew up in a faux southern plantation twenty-three-room mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, surrounded by the trappings of wealth, including a chauffeur and a cook.³ Trump attended the nearby private Kew-Forest School, though poor grades and surly behavior later prompted his father to send the teenager to an upstate New York military academy.

The combination of Trump’s privileged upbringing and extraordinary ambition facilitated his future success, but it possibly stunted his development in other ways. Little about his background, for example, was conducive to racial sensitivity or an ability to empathize with the less fortunate. Class pictures from his childhood are even more lacking in diversity than the overwhelmingly white male cabinet he assembled as president. And while Fred Trump may have been a professional inspiration for his son, his views on race appear to have been less than enlightened. In 1973, the family firm was sued by the Justice Department for “refusing to rent and negotiate rentals with blacks.” (The Trump organization marked applications with a c for colored.)

Donald had stepped into the family business after earning a degree at the University of Pennsylvania, with ambition beyond his father’s low-rent apartment empire. That made fighting back the Justice Department not just a matter of the moment but his future, and he enlisted attorney Roy Cohn, infamous for his role as a top lawyer to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s anticommunist purges in Washington (which came much closer to an actual witch hunt). With the no-holds-barred Cohn steering them through the crisis, the Trumps fought back, filing a countersuit alleging false and misleading claims. The dueling suits ultimately ended in a settlement requiring the Trumps to refrain from further discrimination and place ads in newspapers assuring renters of all races they would be welcome. Cohn’s scorched-earth approach had a lasting influence on the twenty-seven-year-old Trump. Among the lessons was that truth could be drowned out by counterclaims and legal threats, and that the Justice Department wasn’t to be treated as an enforcer of enlightened laws or stalwart of American democracy. Sometimes it was the enemy, and you fought it.

EVIDENCE OF RACIAL ANIMOSITY WOULD CONTINUE TO FLARE UP throughout Trump’s career, and he would establish himself as the most xenophobic mainstream presidential candidate in recent history. The United States, he said, had become “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” He directed a stream of vitriol at America’s southern neighbor. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” That Trump’s buildings existed largely because of the labors of thousands of immigrants seemed irrelevant to him.

“He used to say, ‘Donald, don’t go into Manhattan. That’s the big leagues,’” Trump said of his father in his announcement speech. “I said, ‘I gotta go into Manhattan. I gotta build those big buildings.’” With his father’s financial backing, Trump was able to take that leap. In 1975, he embarked on his first big deal, reaching an agreement with the Hyatt chain to acquire a tired 1919 hotel, the Commodore, in midtown Manhattan near Grand Central Terminal, and transform it into a gleaming Grand Hyatt. It was a springboard to all the deals that followed.

In the ensuing decades, the deals got bigger and Trump got richer, but six times his companies entered bankruptcy, including after his misguided acquisitions of Atlantic City casinos, a luxury airline, and the legendary Plaza hotel. Debts and real estate reversals cost him access to conventional capital, as leading financial institutions increasingly refused to lend to him. In the late 1990s Trump was forced to turn to less discriminating sources of funds, most prominently Deutsche Bank. The German firm—Europe’s largest investment bank—had embarked on a major expansion into real estate lending and faced mounting suspicion that it was allowing itself to serve as a conduit of illicit cash for Russian oligarchs. Trump’s financial disclosures during the election showed he owed $360 million to Deutsche Bank, which by then was under multiple investigations for money-laundering schemes and massive mortgage-related fraud. Three days before Trump was sworn in as president, Deutsche Bank reached a $7.2 billion settlement with the Justice Department.⁴

Trump had always borrowed heavily in building his empire, calling himself the “King of Debt.” It was a common strategy in real estate development, using others’ money to reduce risk and multiply buying power, launching more and larger projects in the hope of collecting commensurate rewards. “He always used other people’s money, not cash,” said Barbara Res, who was a senior executive for Trump in the 1980s. “He always got somebody to put up funds for him. To put up the money. And he put up the brilliance.”⁵

Then in the mid-2000s, he abruptly changed course. The Trump Organization went from being a builder of high-end real estate, one that acquired properties and oversaw construction, to a licensing operation that took hefty fees from other developers for permission to affix the Trump logo on their hotels and condos. The king of debt also went on an inexplicable cash-spending binge, buying instead of building. In the nine years before running for president, he spent more than $400 million in cash on an assortment of properties, including a $12.6 million estate in Scotland, several homes in Beverly Hills, and $79.7 million for golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.⁶ He then plowed more millions into renovating and maintaining these properties, often, curiously, at a substantial loss.

A private company, the Trump Organization provided no explanation for how it had emerged from such financial peril in position to spend such sums. Trump “had incredible cash flow and built incredible wealth,” his son Eric said. “He didn’t need to think about borrowing for every transaction … It’s a very nice luxury to have.”

The shift toward licensing revenue was propelled by an unexpected break. In 2002, Trump was approached by the producer of the Survivor series on CBS to take part in a new reality show dubbed The Apprentice. Trump saw the tremendous promotional potential. (“My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he said.⁷) Trump began slapping his brand on a motley array of products, including menswear, steaks, vodka, and get-rich-quick classes at Trump University that would end in yet another class action lawsuit.

Even as his business evolved, Trump still saw himself as a real estate tycoon. His search for partners willing to pay millions merely for the use of the Trump brand—while shielding the American mogul from virtually all the financial risk—led him far from Manhattan into murky overseas terrain. Trump-branded projects in Azerbaijan, the Republic of Georgia, Brazil, and Indonesia put the future president in business with multiple individuals and companies suspected of money laundering, political corruption, and other categories of fraud.⁸

Russia had drawn Trump’s attention for decades. He pursued numerous deals to build a skyscraper in Moscow, starting in 1987 when he traveled to Russia to survey potential sites as part of a proposed partnership with the Soviet government.⁹ He tried again in 1996, announcing plans for a $250 million “Trump International” complex, and several times more in the ensuing decade.

None of those projects materialized. But while Trump could never gain a foothold in Moscow, Russian money began flowing out of the country and finding him. Endemic corruption under Putin had created an entire class of kleptocrats, loyalists enriched by the diversion of money extracted from the country’s oil and mineral wealth as well as other formerly state-owned assets. Many sought to move their mounds of currency overseas in case the Kremlin sought to grab them back, and money began surging into Trump’s portfolio.

In the United States, Trump-branded properties were increasingly sustained by an influx of cash from questionable foreign sources. His children Donald Jr. and Ivanka came under investigation for their promotional claims and the financing surrounding a forty-six-story condo hotel in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood built with substantial backing from investors from the former Soviet Union. Hundreds of condos at Trump-branded beachfront towers in South Florida were purchased by limited liability corporations—entities that mask the true owners’ identities, a perfectly legal arrangement but one that can conveniently be used to hide the conversion of illicit cash into Western assets. Among the buyers who did disclose their identities, at least five dozen had Russian addresses or passports. All told, they spent a combined $98.4 million on sixty-three condos.¹⁰ In 2008, the future president sold a Palm Beach estate to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, just four years after buying it for $41 million. His son Donald Trump Jr. said that same year that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.”

These dim corners of Trump’s empire mostly escaped the attention of a public captivated by the blinding glare of his brand. His rambling announcement speech was widely ridiculed by political experts as proof that his campaign was just another vanity project, that Trump wasn’t even making any pretense to be a serious candidate. But away from Manhattan and the Beltway, voters saw a Midas who might be able to transform a troubled American landscape. With their budding adulation, Trump began planning to take possession of a more prestigious piece of real estate: the White House.

Trump made only passing reference to Russia in his 2015 announcement speech, though months later he was secretly pursuing yet another potential deal to build “Trump Tower Moscow.” The project was spearheaded by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a Russian-born associate, Felix Sater, who had an office in Trump Tower and carried Trump-branded business cards. (Sater had spent time in prison for stabbing a man and had separately been convicted of fraud. Aiming to reduce his sentence, he became an FBI informant.)

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote to Cohen in an email touting the project.

ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR LATER, TRUMP TOWER WAS THE SETTING for a far smaller gathering kept secret from the public.

On June 6, 2016, music promoter Rob Goldstone circled back to Trump Jr. by email, asking when he might be free to speak with Emin Agalarov, whose father had helped bankroll the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, “about this Hillary info.” Trump Jr. then engaged in a flurry of messages and calls with both Goldstone and Agalarov. Phone records obtained by congressional investigators show two calls between Trump Jr. and Agalarov, one at 4:04 P.M. and another at 4:38 P.M., though it was unclear whether they spoke or exchanged voice mails.¹¹

Within that thirty-four-minute time frame, Trump Jr. made or received another call, though with whom remains a mystery. (Phone records showed the number as “blocked.”) Democrats in Congress would wonder whether Trump Jr. had conferred with his father—whose Trump Tower residence had a blocked number—over how to proceed. In testimony before congressional committees, Trump Jr. professed not to remember whom he’d spoken with.

Trump Jr. and Agalarov—whose developer father was sometimes referred to as the “Trump of Russia”—connected by phone again on June 7. That afternoon, Trump Jr. spoke with both Manafort and his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, another scion of a wealthy real estate family who had married into the Trump clan and become part of the candidate’s inner circle. Trump Jr. wanted Manafort and Kushner to attend the meeting. He then emailed Goldstone to set a time and place: “How about three at our offices?”

In later testimony, Trump Jr. would claim that he did not know the names or backgrounds of those being ushered into a suite of offices on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower on June 9. The event was marked on his calendar only as “Meeting: Don Jr./Jared Kushner.” Trump Jr. said Kushner and Manafort knew even less about the guests or their purpose, and had been asked merely to “drop in.” But the fact that Trump Jr. coordinated schedules with them and insisted on their attendance suggests that he saw the meeting as important enough to convene his father’s top aides.

The meeting occurred as planned on June 9, though the time was bumped to four P.M. Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort found themselves sitting across a large conference table from Goldstone and four Russian-speaking associates. Among them was a lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, with ties to senior officials in the Kremlin; Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist; Ike Kaveladze, a U.S.-based executive in the Agalarov company; and an interpreter.¹²

Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Kremlin are unquestioned if hard to accurately assess. She had earned a law degree in Moscow, worked in the office of a Russian prosecutor, and represented a roster of influential oligarchs—including a railway magnate who faced money-laundering charges in New York. “I am a lawyer and I am an informant,” she would later say in a television interview.¹³

But Veselnitskaya was best known in the United States for her campaign to overturn a set of banking and travel restrictions imposed on senior Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses. The sanctions were imposed as part of a congressional act named for a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison in 2009. Magnitsky was incarcerated by the Russian government while working for a U.S.-born businessman, William Browder, who claimed that he had been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars in an elaborate Russian tax fraud.

After Magnitsky’s death, Browder led a years-long crusade that culminated in the 2012 sanctions. Veselnitskaya became the point person in a Kremlin-orchestrated counter-campaign that involved lobbying members of Congress and orchestrating efforts to damage the reputations of Browder and Magnitsky. (Putin also retaliated by banning American adoptions of Russian children, a move that underscored how few levers are available to Moscow in sanctions showdowns.)

“I believe you have some information for us,” Trump Jr. said, getting straight to the point.¹⁴

Veselnitskaya launched into a meandering discussion about “individuals connected to Russia supporting or funding Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” Trump Jr. testified later. “It was quite difficult for me to understand what she was saying or why.” It eventually became clear that she was referring to a trio of male heirs to the Ziff Davis publishing empire and one of their companies, a firm that had invested with Browder in Russia and come under investigation by Russian authorities.