Lev Parnas to Trump: Let Me Conduct Shadow Diplomacy in Ukraine…Again.

Great to chat with Lev after so long.

Watch, particularly around the 19.40 minute mark and you will see that, in all seriousness, he is fielding calls from Republicans and Ukrainians who say it would be smart for him to get back on Trump’s radar and for Trump to send him to conduct shadow diplomacy in Ukraine! Again! Despite his history with Trump, he’d like to do it and believes it would be beneficial.

Why?

A. Unlike the people currently around Trump he knows the players in Ukraine and he understands their culture and the language.

B. He believes there is a valuable minerals deal to be done, but not the one that is on the table right now which, Lev believes, is not beneficial to either the US or Ukraine, but beneficial to Russia (thanks to the input of Kirill Dmitriev and Jared Kushner, he says). The way to get at a truly beneficial deal is through the Ukrainian oligarchs, he believes.

C. All sides cannot save face in front of the cameras. In the shadows, he can.

D. He’d be happy to go all in for Trump, again.

(That’s Lev, for you!)

Watch the conversation at Vicky Ward Investigates

Live chat with Mikhail Zygar on the historic showdown between Trump, Vance & Zelensky

If you want to know just how delighted Vladimir Putin was by today’s extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office, the blow-up between JD Vance, Donald Trump and Vlodymyr Zelensky, pay particular attention to what Mikhail says around the twenty minute mark in our conversation: If you can believe it, Russians are now naming their children “Trump”.

What happens as a result of the ugly impasse now in Ukraine? In Russia? In Europe and elsewhere geopolitcally?

Watch the conversation at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Idaho Four, Trump, Zelensky, Epstein….

Watch the video on Vicky Ward Investigates

My Chat with Russia’s “Last Journalist” Mikhail Zygar

Hi All,

So my chat with Russian journalist and author Mikhail Zygar was as fascinating and as on point as I’d hoped given the quickening narrative around US/Russia/Ukraine relations. And a reminder, that in Trump foreign policy: all roads always lead to Jared Kushner.

I cannot believe that Mikhail’s scoop of yesterday has gone so under-reported: namely that it was Kushner and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmetriev who put the talks in Riyadh together.

For those who missed my earlier post about who Mikhail is, and that backstory, here’s a refresher.

Watch the conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates

My Conversation With Michael Cohen

Hi All,

So, Rome was not built in a day.

And on my debut live video chat, we had a sound hiccup, and then a video hiccup. And my screen kept on fading out. However, we survived and here it is!

It was good to chat to Michael whom I haven’t seen for a long time.

We were first introduced, shortly after Trump took office in 2017 at a breakfast at the Core Club in New York. We then got to know each other well that first summer of the new administration out in the Hamptons. We’d meet for coffee at the appropriately named “Coffee House” in Bridgehampton when Michael was starting to get the inkling that the “big guy” was not going to be there for him after all and that he was en route to becoming the first member of his self-described “thrown-under-the-bus” club.

It occurred to me it’d be good to get his insight into what’s going on inside Trump World, given he was, as he says, Donald Trump’s first call in the morning and his last call at night for many, many years.

Watch the conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates

The Idaho Four

Dear Readers,

Here it is!

The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy My new book, published by Little, Brown and Company, co-authored with the wonderful James Patterson. The pub date is July 14. You can pre-order it here.

This book is much different from my previous tomes, which as you know, focus on the apex of money, power, politics and the culture. But it’s this one with which I feel most personally engaged.

First, there’s my partnership with James Patterson.

I barely knew Jim when we embarked on this, and he barely knew me. I’d articulated that there was something about this story that touched me—most obviously that my sons are college students and the same age as the victims—to Bill Robinson, an old friend. Bill runs Jim’s business empire, and the next minute Jim was on the phone telling me that what happened had touched him too, so “let’s do it together.”

I had no idea how this partnership would work. Jim is the best-selling fiction writer in the world. And I am…just me. Which is not nothing—but it’s not him.

He phoned me early on and told me he’d spent the weekend reading my earlier book, Kushner, Inc. and that he’d got the point of it, but he was clear that he did not want this new book of ours to feel like Kushner, Inc. He was clear that we were not going to stand 40,000 feet above our subject matter, reporting dispassionately in the style of the New York Times, as if it had nothing to do with us.

No, he said. This book should feel personal. Through us, readers should feel that they are in the small town of Moscow, Idaho. They should feel there with the victims and their friends on that college campus of the University of Idaho as tragedy strikes and there with the townsfolk, the victims’ families, and law enforcement through the uncertainty, fear and fallout of the coming days, weeks and months.

I will be honest: I was nervous to try to write his way…

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Trump and Nixon…

This morning I was re-reading my second book, The Liar’s Ball, published in 2014 about the world of New York real estate – about which Trump tweeted ““Just finished reading a poorly written & very boring book on the General Motors Building by Vicky Ward. Waste of time!” This was actually pretty helpful in terms of marketing.

In fact, I am not critical of Trump in the book; if anything: perhaps the Middle East leaders mulling the proposed “Riviera” in Gaza should take notes from it: his love of building and construction is readily apparent. No question he created value. And he made money.

But, in the book I do point out an unavoidable fact, which is that Trump lost the chance to buy the prestigious General Motors Building for very little, given that its owner, his partner, had gone bust. For this he blamed the 9/11 attacks, which rendered the offices of his lender, Deutsche Bank, out of action.

I was re-reading my book chiefly, because I suddenly remembered a small detail which now doesn’t feel so small – which is that, according to a senior executive who worked for Trump, one of Trump’s frequent guests at Trump Tower was Richard Nixon. Trump even wanted the Nixons to live at Trump Tower.

That strikes me as particularly relevant given Trump’s impounding of USAID – and much else.

In the 1970s it was President Nixon who told Russell Train, the administrator of the EPA he did not want to spend funds appropriate by Congress on an anti-pollution project in New York. But New York City turned around and sued Train. The Supreme Court settled it, saying, essentially if Congress has appropriated the funds, the president cannot simply impound them – which led Congress to pass the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

So: Does Trump think this Supreme Court, the background of which I have made an entire podcast series about and you can listen to here, might rule differently over USAID? That the court will agree that Trump should have the power over funds that Congress has already appropriated?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

White House Whiplash!

“Do you have the stamina to make it through four years of this?”

That’s the question one of my top DC sources asked me, slightly-tongue-in-cheek, this morning. I was checking in because I’ve been away in Europe and London for a few days, and I’ve also been focused on the copy-edits of my upcoming book with James Patterson. So the volley of extraordinary headlines flying out of the White House over the weekend, and last night, made me feel utterly disoriented, as if I’ve been away for a year, not a few days. In this short timespan, Trump appointed Marco Rubio acting head of USAID, having just abolished USAID (apparently the website went dark while Rubio was in transit and taken completely by surprise), and started to dismantle the CIA.

This was all before last night’s press conference with Bibi Netanyahu. My source told me that, like many of you probably, he’d checked out for an hour or so just to have an early dinner, but on re-emerging discovered that we were now possibly going to war: occupying Gaza, forcing 2 million Palestinians out, and rebuilding the place as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

It’s enough to cause anyone indigestion.

So, several thoughts on this…

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Trump/MBS Tap Dance

Donald Trump just delivered spectacular proof of the truth in Shakespeare’s famous line about deception: “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

This morning, he spoke via video to the well-heeled crew at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, appearing to be fulsome about the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman. “He’s a fantastic guy,” he said. And then mentioned that he’s going to ask MBS to “round out” the $600 billion investment he promised yesterday on the phone to one trillion.

And then he blithely demanded that the Saudis and OPEC lower oil prices in order to end the Russia-Ukraine war…

“Saudi Arabia is f…..d” read one of the many astonished messages flooding into my WhatsApp.

Or is the picture more complicated?

My sources suggest that it is.

Even ahead of Trump’s lecture to the crowd at Davos, my phone was blowing up this morning around the news of the call, yesterday, in which MBS promised Trump $600 billion.

Most of the data suggests that Saudi Arabia cannot remotely afford that, as it pushes to wean itself away from an oil-dependent economy. On top of paying a projected minimum $1.3 trillion for Vision 2030, MBS needs to build the infrastructure to host the 2034 FIFA world cup.

In December, Saudi’s foreign reserves fell to $414 billion – less than the money he promised to Trump. If the reserves fall further there’s a risk Saudi Arabia will need to devalue its currency.

The Kingdom’s GDP is about $1 trillion. So in other words, if you take things at face value, MBS just pledged $600 billion over four years – which works out to $150 billion a year – in other words, 15 percent of the current Saudi GDP to invest in the US….

It hardly makes sense.

So, why did MBS make the phone call and promise to spend that amount?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Trump Family Turnover

Sunday, late afternoon, standing in a packed room in a DC hotel at a party in honor of incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, I found myself nose to nose with a charming man who told me was a banker.

A couple minutes more interrogation and then it emerged he wasn’t your average banker.

“My father was the dictator who ran …..[name of a well-known African country I won’t reveal to protect the source]. So, when he was kicked out I came here and became a banker…Now I might have to go back to XXX.”

Small talk at inauguration parties in DC is unlike small talk in New York – or London for that matter. Or Los Angeles.

I bring up LA, because inauguration weekend in DC reminded me eerily of the Oscars weekend, the only difference being the freezing temperature. There’s the same jostling for the best invites, the same energy, the same nightmarish traffic. (Actually the D.C. traffic gridlock was much worse.)

The only thing I found really baffling about the DC parties was the black tie dress code.

I get why you’d want to wear a long dress to the candlelight dinner on inauguration eve, for example. And there was a late night private dance party in a certain ambassador’s home that was by far the chicest event I’ve ever been to in DC and certainly merited getting dressed up for.

But most of the inaugural events, including the balls, don’t involve dancing by anyone other than the Trump family who are roped off, up on a stage. And there’s no sitting down.

So, why does one need to be in black tie to stand up, drink, eat and network? Most of the women put on their gowns at lunchtime so they don’t waste hours in horrible traffic changing. (But a wise piece of advice came from my host, who told me to wear my jeans or something comfortable to the weekend daytime events, because, he said, I’d stand out, which might be helpful, given my profession. I was skeptical but, of course, he was right.)

What I also hadn’t fully appreciated was just how difficult it is to get anywhere. The snow and the ice on Sunday night made it almost impossible. By the time I went to bed at 2 a.m. I felt like I deserved an Olympic gold medal for navigating the frigid streets of D.C. in three inch heels.

So when, on Monday, Trump mentioned that Melania’s feet were killing her, for once I was completely in sync with what the First Lady must be feeling.

My party experiences aside, two things stood out to me about the day itself:

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates