In the nick of time, Tom Barrack is back!

Just as journalists, anchors, and most everyone else was having a collective coronary attack at the news of Matt Gaetz’s nomination as Attorney General, Trump’s long-time friend, the billionaire investor Tom Barrack, no stranger to these pages, sauntered back into the public arena after too long an absence. In his inimitable way, he somehow calmed the roiling water and brought people’s temperatures down.

I’d forgotten until I watched him give a command performance on both CNBC’s Squawk Box and with Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg, that Barrack’s unique gift is that when he talks, time seems to stand still. He has a gift for making the preposterous sound reasonable. You can understand why, my sources tell me, he’s pretty much the only person who was welcome in both the UAE and Qatar, when the former was blockading the latter. You can quickly see why it’s useful even for Trump, who, as we know, doesn’t like to be upstaged, to have him out there.

You may recall that back in the fall of 2022, I spent day after day in a courtroom in Brooklyn, covering Barrack’s criminal trial. Barrack was charged by the Eastern District of New York on 9 counts of espionage for the UAE. He took the stand in his own defense – usually considered a risky move by defense lawyers – but in this case, he had the jury at “Hello”. As he told his life story, I’ve never seen a jury so visibly charmed. He was acquitted of all charges.

But the experience, understandably took a toll. How could it not?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates