The Trump-Qatar Scandal that Could End His Presidency<\/b><\/p>\n
Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n On the morning of Monday July 10th, broke online from three reporters at The Intercept \u2014 Ryan Grim, Ben Walsh, and Clayton Swisher \u2014 the headline, \u201cJared Kushner Tried and Failed to Get a Half-Billion Dollar Bailout from Qatar\u201d<\/span><\/a>, recounting events which could also have been titled (perhaps more interestingly) \u201cEvidence Trump Sparked Saud Boycott of Qatar to Salvage His Fortune and that of Daughter Ivanka\u201d. Here are key portions of that narrative, which will be introduced and accompanied by other details of this case, which add even more to the picture of the U.S. President\u2019s using his political position so as to protect, and add to, the wealth of Donald Trump and, even more, of Ivanka Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n Ivanka\u2019s husband, Jared Kushner, had used his ex-convict father Charles Kushner<\/span><\/a>\u2019s fortune to buy, in 2007, at the highest price ever paid for any building in NYC, 666 5th Avenue at 53rd Street; and, now, this investment could turn out to have been so bad as to bankrupt his father\u2019s, and his and his wife\u2019s company, Kushner Properties: <\/span><\/p>\n On 13 March 2017, Bloomberg News reporters David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby had bannered “Kushners May Get $400 Million From Chinese on Tower\u201d<\/span><\/a> and reported that a “planned $4-billion transaction includes terms that some real estate experts consider unusually favorable for the Kushners. It would provide them with both a sizable cash payout from [China\u2019s] Anbang Insurance Group for a property that has struggled financially and an equity stake in a new partnership\u201d that \u201cwould make business partners of Kushner Cos. and Anbang, whose murky links to the Chinese power structure have raised national security concerns over its U.S. investments. In the process, an existing mortgage owed by the Kushners will be slashed to about a fifth of its current amount,\u201d thus enabling Kushner Properties to avoid being bankrupted by Jared\u2019s 2007 purchase-decision. (Two days later, on March 15th, news became public that Anbang declined the deal<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n Just weeks prior to that news-report, Dow Jones had headlined on 16 February 2017, “One of Government’s Largest Landlords Pays Millions Each Year to Trump Company\u201d<\/span><\/a> and Alexandra Berzon and Peter Grant reported that: <\/span><\/p>\n President Donald Trump’s company receives tens of millions of dollars a year from Vornado Realty Trust, which relies on the federal government for a significant portion of its revenue and is vying for new work from Mr. Trump’s administration. \u2026 Two of the most valuable real-estate assets in Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, are 30% stakes in a pair of office buildings controlled by Vornado. \u2026 Vornado decides how much Mr. Trump’s company \u2014 the properties’ only other owner \u2014 receives from the partnership each year. \u2026 It is up to Vornado to decide how much of their incomes are held for capital upgrades and other long-term expenses and how much of the income is profit. Of that bottom-line figure, Vornado has to distribute 30% annually to Mr. Trump’s company. \u2026 <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Vornado bought a 49.5% stake in the mixed-use tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan from Kushner Cos., where Mr. Kushner at the time was chief executive. The next year, Vornado purchased retail space in the building for $710 million. \u2026 The company [Vornado], a major owner of buildings in Washington and other U.S. cities, counts the U.S. government as its largest tenant. \u2026 Government vacancies, he <\/i>[the head of Vornado] said on an investor conference call that year, are “the eye of the storm for our company.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n So, 666 5th Avenue is no longer owned fully by Kushner Properties, but also by Donald Trump\u2019s major business partner, Vornado (which is heavily dependent upon decisions by U.S. President Trump), and both could be bankrupted if some other investors cannot be quickly found to take on the burden of Jared\u2019s 2007 decision to purchase that building. (After Anbang said no, the Kushners were really desperate.)<\/span><\/p>\n This brings us to The Intercept\u2019s July 10th report, that U.S. President Trump might have requested the Sauds to blockade Qatar so as to punish the family who own and control Qatar, the Thanis. It says:<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout 2015 and 2016, Jared Kushner and his father, Charles, negotiated directly with a major investor in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, known as HBJ for short, in an effort to refinance the property on Fifth Avenue, the sources said.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Trump himself has <\/i>unsuccessfully sought financing<\/i><\/span><\/a> in recent years from the Qataris, but it is difficult to overstate just how important to Kushner the investment at 666 Fifth Avenue is for him, his company, and his family\u2019s legacy in real estate. Without some outside intervention or unforeseen turnaround in the market, the investment could become an embarrassing half-billion dollar loss. It\u2019s unclear precisely how much peril such a loss would put Jared, or his family\u2019s, finances in, given the opacity of their private holdings.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n HBJ, a former prime minister of Qatar who ran the country\u2019s $250 billion sovereign wealth fund, is a billionaire and one of the world\u2019s richest men. He <\/i>owns a yacht worth $300 million<\/i><\/span><\/a> called Al Mirqab, the same name he gave to the private investment firm that Kushner pitched. The former emir of Qatar summed up HBJ\u2019s power <\/i>with a quip<\/i><\/span><\/a>: \u201cI may run this country, but he owns it.\u201d \u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Meanwhile, the water is rising on the Fifth Avenue investment. And the blockade continues.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Had the Qataris known where things were heading diplomatically, said the source in the region, they\u2019d have happily ponied up the money, even knowing that it was a losing investment. \u201cIt would have been much cheaper,\u201d he said.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The Intercept\u2019s reporting-team present strong circumstantial evidence that, as they put it, “THE CRISIS DATES TO MAY, when President Trump visited Saudi Arabia and met with regional leaders there, laying his hands on the now-famous orb.\u201d That \u201corb\u201d is pictured here, atop my earlier article documenting<\/span><\/a> that the Sauds\u2019 power-competition against the Thanis to lead the global fundamentalist-Sunni movement, had long preceded the Sauds\u2019 boycott of Qatar, and that the Sauds quite likely requested from Trump during his visit there on May 20th<\/span><\/a>, whether he would back them on a boycott of the Thanis\u2019 Qatar, and that Trump (whether for personal business reasons or otherwise) was eager to say yes to that proposal from them. But, in either case (as I document there with links), Trump\u2019s pro-Saud position is supporting what the U.S. federal government has long been stating, in confidential communications, is, in fact, the world\u2019s biggest financial backer of Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist Sunni jihadist organizations. The royal Sauds are even bigger in that than the royal Thanis are. If Trump does this (supports jihadism) out of incompetency, or if he does it out of greed, makes no difference to his being able to be impeached and removed from office and replaced by Mike Pence. <\/span><\/p>\n Also, it should here be pointed out \u2014 which neither The Intercept\u2019s report, nor the Huffington Post\u2019s report that it linked to (including in the excerpt that\u2019s quoted here from the TI article) as backup for it, noted, but should<\/i> have noted \u2014 that Clayton Swisher, who wrote all of the HuffPo\u2019s article and co-authored TI\u2019s article, is an employee of the Thanis: as TI puts it<\/span><\/a>, \u201cClayton Swisher is the Doha-based director of investigative journalism with Al Jazeera Media Network.\u201d HuffPo failed to publish that essential information, but said only the far less relevant: \u201cClayton Swisher is an investigative journalist and author of two books on the Arab-Israeli conflict.\u201d What readers need to know, is that to be an employee of Al Jazeera is to be an employee of the Thani family<\/span><\/a>. Swisher writes as one of their agents. He also is the only one of the three co-authors of the TI article who lives and works in Qatar (Doha); so, he was probably the lead investigator among the three. The other two (Grim and Walsh) are U.S.-based and had previously worked for the Huffington Post, which has always been a Democratic Party organ (and the Democratic Party want President Trump to be impeached and Mike Pence to become President).<\/span><\/p>\n Whereas the \u2018Russiagate\u2019 argument against Trump is built upon so much misrepresentation as to be basically the Democratic Party’s turning of the Republican Joseph R. McCarthy now 60 years later, into a ghost against his own Republican Party and turning today\u2019s Democrats into McCarthy\u2019s mere imitators long after communism has gone, there is real and solid substance to the argument against Trump regarding his backing of the royal Sauds. The evidence against Trump on Saudi-Qatar-gate is clearly damning against Trump in either case, and the only real questions are the initiating motive behind, and the precise sequence of events immediately preceding, the 5-6 June 2017 boycott-blockade of Qatar<\/span><\/a>. Trump is now clearly impeachable if the Republican Party decides that Pence would serve their purposes more effectively than Trump does. At this stage, it\u2019s only a political judgment-call by Republicans. They won the 2016 elections, and they will decide what to do with their prize \u2014 whether, going forward into the 2018 mid-term elections, theirs will be the Trump brand, or become switched to the Pence brand. Corruption isn\u2019t, by any means, the only issue; there also are real policy-differences at stake, even within just the Republican Party. Pence built his base amongst fundamentalist Christians. And the judgment-call here will be made by Republicans, not by Democrats.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Trump-Qatar Scandal that Could End His Presidency Eric Zuesse On the morning of Monday July 10th, broke online from three reporters at The Intercept \u2014 Ryan Grim, Ben Walsh, and Clayton Swisher \u2014 the headline, \u201cJared Kushner Tried and Failed to Get a Half-Billion Dollar Bailout from Qatar\u201d, recounting events which could also have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":316500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[96,29,541,871,540,8748,981,20344,92,6257],"class_list":{"0":"post-316714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"tag-cover-up","9":"tag-democrats","10":"tag-media","11":"tag-qatar","12":"tag-republicans","13":"tag-saud","14":"tag-saudi","15":"tag-sauds","16":"tag-terrorism","17":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}