A Time To Kill

What a welcome change from Epstein-related material, to read Ilium, a new literary spy-thriller by a very old, dear friend, Lea Carpenter, whose elevated prose-style is joyous to read. Like all the best writers, Lea uses the particular – a young, single impecunious British woman, whose parents are dead, and who is unwittingly recruited as a CIA asset – to tell a universal story about all the shades of grey that compose humanity. And war.

With nods to Greek mythology, Carpenter’s suspenseful tale of international espionage and revenge deliberately refuses to pinpoint one side as good and the other side as bad. What she’s interested in highlighting is complexity. How people on both sides are capable of ugliness, brutality, deception, but also love and compassion. Simultaneously.

Even the book’s title Ilium – the code name given to the spy operation Carpenter’s heroine finds herself recruited to – is a wry sleight of hand. Given the obsession one of the main characters has with the Iliad and the parallels, in particular, between the story of the Trojan Horse and the way in which Carpenter’s protagonist must pose as something she is not in order to inveigle herself into the bosom of a family she is to betray, readers are tempted for much of the book to think that they understand the double-entendre.

But no. Carpenter takes her time to reveal that the hidden meaning lies outside Greek mythology. In fact: “Ilium was a scriptural reference to the biblical idea that there is a ‘time to kill.’ That there is such a thing as moral vengeance…”

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Demolition Day

It sat there grotesquely in the midst of the daily hubbub of college life, sticking out on the rise of a slope like a fat middle finger on the hand of a school bully.

Given the elevation, it was hard to go about campus and escape its demonic glare. You could see it from the lower field. You could see it from the Sigma Chi fraternity house and the other frat houses speckled along Nez Perce Drive, the road, named after the local Native American tribe, that winds its away across the college past the residences to the golf course and then the Kibbie Dome. Some of the students pointed out that, unfortunately, you could see it even from some of the classrooms.

1122 King Road, Moscow, Idaho. A one-time regular student house that morphed, overnight, into a house of horrors. In the pre-dawn hours of November 13, 2022, four of its six occupants — Maddie Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin — were brutally murdered. Tall poppies felled before they’d even properly bloomed. Locals still don’t know why.

Every day the house stood since, has felt like a day too long to those in its shade. There are some degrees of evil of which it’s unbearable to be reminded. The boarded-up windows, 24-7 security and the police tape around the house did little to soften the nightmare of what had happened there.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Epstein Story Gets Even Darker

To: Vicky Ward

Fri 11/22/2019 1:08 PM

I met Mr. Epstein in 2008 not long before he was sentenced to jail and since I personally can name businessmen in Russia who were having sex with 14-15 year-old girls and doing it on a regular basis, I didn’t understand why he was charged and sentenced to jail.

I received this email (spelling and grammar have been corrected for clarity) in 2019. It came from one of the Russian models referenced in the sobering article in last night’s Wall Street Journal describing how Jeffrey Epstein continued to manipulate vulnerable women long after his jail-time in 2009.

This is something that the numerous plutocrats of Epstein’s acquaintance preferred to either not know or not mention, as is referenced in the article. This suggests many in his influential circle abetted what amounted to a continuation of the sex-trafficking ring he’d begun in the 1990s. The difference in his post-jail life was that he sought out mostly Eastern European immigrants, many of them models.

Reading the article, I was reminded of what the Russian model had said to me in 2019, soon after Epstein’s death. And what she’d written to me in that startling email above — The sexual abuse she’d suffered at just 14 in her native Russia was commonplace. In many Eastern European countries the age of consent is 14.

This meant that at the time she told me she didn’t comprehend the scale of Epstein’s evilness. I recall that at one point she told me with, I hate to say, almost pride that “not one of the women suing Epstein is from Eastern Europe.” Her implication was that they weren’t going to complain publicly about Epstein’s insidious crimes because that sort of behavior was normalized culturally back home.

Well, per the Journal, that has changed.

The article by Khadeeja Safdar is a piece of terrific reportage, piecing together conversations, emails, and discovery from the recent litigation involving Epstein victims and Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan. (The banks settled.)

The statistics she reports are shocking. Two lawyers involved in the class action suits against the banks told Safdar that they’ve interviewed 130 Epstein accusers. Fifty-five of the women said they only met him after his conviction in 2008. Forty-five of the fifty-five are from Eastern Europe. One lawyer said that the women have identified twenty men to whom Epstein allegedly sent them for sex. The names of the men are not publicized in the piece.

Here’s the clever thing: in his last decade Epstein flaunted what he was doing in public. And that cover was remarkably effective.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Journalism Is Not Dead!

Last night I attended a symposium at NYU Skirball Center about the future of journalism and its role in a polarized world.

I went because my close friend Tina Brown was talking and this is a topic I care about passionately. Traditional journalism, let’s face it, is in crisis. Deep-dives are expensive and newsrooms are shrinking and cutting budgets.

As I listened, I felt so grateful to all of you for supporting my work here. And so grateful for the Substack platform and for the direct dialogue I am able to have with all of you. I don’t just learn from my sources. I learn from you, especially when you write me. I learn from the people who tell me they hate what I write. That’s OK. I’m eager to learn and to discuss. The one thing worse for democracy than a heated, over-the-top conversation is no conversation at all. Thus, the danger of living in a country as polarized as this one is that the Right and the Left don’t talk to each other. One looks down on the other and vice versa. Each thinks they are in possession of true facts and the other team is deluded.

I’ve felt the division keenly recently because I’ve been spending a great teal of time far from New York in the Pacific North West reporting for the book I’m writing with James Patterson about the awful murders in Moscow, Idaho.

Moscow is a mostly liberal town, but Idaho, as you know, is deeply Republican. Many of the people I’ve interviewed bring their guns into the room with them.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Why Kushner Held a Private Meeting with Billionaires and the Qatari PM

Axios had a fantastic scoop this morning. Barak Ravid, the Israeli journalist whom CNNhas also just (smartly) hired as an on-air analyst, reported that last Wednesday Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump held a private lunch meeting at Coco’s, a member’s-only club restaurant in the General Motors Building in New York. At this meeting, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani addressed a group of plutocrats, many of whom were Jewish.

According to the report, Al Thani walked through the background behind Qatar’s close relationship with Hamas over the years, saying that the relationship was, in fact, supported by the US who’d wanted an open channel to Gaza. He added that the billions sent to Gaza in the last five years were coordinated with Israel.

I phoned some of my well-placed Middle East sources to ask what was really going on here seeing as the Qataris and Jared Kushner have a relationship that is – to put it mildly – controversial.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Kushner Family, Alan Dershowitz, and Trump White House Pardons

So, in Sunday’s New York Times there was a very long, detailed article about a seemingly very strange Trump White House pardon to a young man, Jonathan Braun, who had ties to the Kushner family. According to The Times, Braun was serving a 10-year sentence for trafficking marijuana and cooperating with a federal investigation, when the pardon came down the pike. As a result the government lost a key witness and a major investigation into predatory lending was stalled. Reportedly, Jared Kushner had been heavily involved in lobbying for Braun’s pardon. Kushner declined to comment.

The article reported how Braun had been in the same class as Nicole Kushner, Jared’s younger sister, at Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, NJ. One of the school’s main benefactors is Kushner’s father, Charles, who hung up the phone when contacted by The New York Times.

The article also reported the involvement of lawyer Alan Dershowitz. I remembered Dershowitz’s involvement — and direct line to Kushner advisor Avi Berkowitz — in another Trump White House pardon (commutation, to be precise), that of kosher meat kingpin, Sholom Rubashkin. (I broke this story for CNN in 2019. The story is linked below.)

This spurred me to phone Dershowitz.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

“She’s Got the Biggest Set of Balls In The Room”

There’s fever-pitch speculation over what Ivanka Trump will say about the Trump Organization. Her father and her brothers are accused, civilly, of fraud. Scheduled to testify tomorrow, she’s there as a fact-witness. She was dismissed from the case earlier this year, for timing reasons (she left the organization in 2017, so the New York State appeals court ruled that the Attorney General’s suit was filed too late after that date to be applicable to her).

In case the lawyers are not up to speed, below is an excerpt from Kushner, Inc that details exactly what Ivanka did while she was employed at the Trump Organization. Even I had forgotten the details of the deals she negotiated with shady foreign partners. (The kids were incentivized by their dad to bring in their own ventures.) Hard to believe she won’t be asked about some of these.

In fact, her work in the family business impressed her father so much that he believed she ought to be the one to ultimately lead it. His one time Organization senior advisor, Felix Sater told him: “She’s got the biggest set of balls in the room.”

Now, of course, there’s a question as to whether or not there will even be a meaningful business to hand off to any of his kids. Which has driven Trump completely nuts. To my eye, he seems to be far more overtly upset about this civil case than about the three criminal ones.

Possibly that’s partly because this case strikes at the heart of who, under all the bluster, he really is. In 2013 Ivanka told me that even though she was proud of how her father had morphed into a polymath businessman, (it was the era of The Apprentice) Trump himself was most proud of being “a builder.”

But, as you’ll read, he “built” less and less when his children entered the business. The company focused on licensing deals with foreign partners.

And as Ivanka heads to court, it’s perhaps worth remembering that at the Trump Organization, like most New York real estate businesses, very little, if anything, got written down. Which is, of course, convenient:

They did not write memos or budgets or project costs. In fact, they did not even keep files. The children would simply meet with a prospective partner and then stroll into their father’s office, tell him about the deal, and he’d make a decision. Whoever brought the project in would oversee it to completion (or, as would often be the case, to its demise).

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Jared and Ivanka Go for Global…

Spurred by events both at home and abroad, the repositioning of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner is moving at a pace beyond what I’d imagined last week.

In New York, Judge Arthur Engoron has ruled that Ivanka Trump will, in fact, have to testify under oath against her father in the civil fraud suit filed by the New York Attorney General Letitia James. (Today, her brother Don Jr. is expected to start to give testimony).

Ivanka’s public response to the news, so far, has been to post smiling birthday photographs of herself in her new $24 million home wearing a short pink dress surrounded by her children, and husband.

She showed off the birthday flowers she’d received. Not just a few flowers. But a florist’s worth.

The messaging is effective.

Donald who? Real estate business what?

The pictures show that she’s her own person, with her own family and life. Her last name might be Trump, but for right now she self-identifies as all Kushner.

And – incidentally – that means very, very rich. Along with the sumptuous new home, the children are styled in matching clothes; there are catered dinner parties al fresco, and so on….

Lawyers I’ve spoken to are not surprised that her lawyers did not fight Judge Engoron’s decision. To fight the issue further might have signaled something that’s in direct contrast to all her Instagram posts, namely that she has something to hide.

What lawyers for the Attorney General almost certainly want to ask her when she testifies next week is who was involved in deciding the Trump Organization’s inflated valuations (from which, the judge has said, she has benefitted).

Bear in mind Trump’s answer to this has already been: “I didn’t get involved in it very much.”

So, you can already hear the lawyers asking: Who did, Ivanka? Who made those decisions?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

JAVANKA IS BACK!

The past few days I’ve been startled to see the revival of something that was seemingly lost during the years of the Trump presidency: the PR savviness of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

But it’s there in the headlines and images flooding the digital news. Saturday night, Ivanka showed up to Kim Kardashians’ 43rd Birthday dinner in Los Angeles, smiling and keeping stumm when paparazzi asked her about her lawyer’s efforts to keep her out of her father’s civil court case in New York.

Looking sensational in a sparkling white crop top and skirt-with-a-long-slit at an the women-only affair, it was a fascinatingly-timed reminder of not only how these past three years, she has separated herself from her father, his legal troubles and his political ambitions – but also of how mainstream social rejection is not something she or her husband want in the long term.

What was most striking to me about her presence at the Kardashian birthday – was that she clearly wanted to be there. And vice versa. Kardashian and co happily posed for the cameras, arms around each other. It was a VERY different sort of interaction from the very awkward efforts at small talk Ivanka conducted when she was at the 2019 G20 Osaka Summit with French President Emmanuel Macron, then British Prime Minister Theresa May, ECB head Christine Lagarde and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau.

It was such moments that backfired so spectacularly on the couple when they were in government. Such exchanges were brazen reminders that not only was the couple not qualified to be in the Trump White House, but of the diplomatic havoc kleptocracy can wreak.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Art of Trump and Pump and Dump

I hate to say it but I fear the fraud trial of Donald Trump may well work to his political advantage.

Yes, I know that’s the politically incorrect thing to say.

But, having reported extensively on the ruthless world of New York real estate for my 2014 book The Liar’s Ball, sorry, I think people may struggle to get worked up about a civil case where the only possible real victims are (theoretically) lenders who’d be stupid enough to believe Trump’s hyperbole about the valuations of his real estate.

I gave a talk a couple weeks ago for a panel at The Real Deal, the industry must-read. And I noticed that the room really came awake when I talked about Harry Macklowe, the charismatic rogue who is the protagonist of The Liar’s Ball. And, when discussing Charles Kushner.

When I talked about Trump in the context of his real estate, I felt a slight ennui in the room.

That’s because as a self-aggrandizing real estate developer who is long on hype and short on facts and possibly principle, he’s not especially atypical. (For example, Harry Macklowe, who is beloved in the industry rather infamously knocked down a couple of buildings in the middle of the night while, it emerged, the gas was left on. He continued on, pretty much uninterrupted). In fact, you could argue that the real reason President Trump was atypical as a President was precisely because he continued to operate as a run-of-the-mill New York developer in charge of his family office.

Trump’s fantastical math is egregious, yes, but in the wheeling and dealing of New York City real estate, it’s actually commonplace for buildings to “grow” in valuations — perhaps not by the magnitude of Trump’s penthouse (which according to Judge Engoron’s ruling was multiplied threefold) — and it’s also commonplace to lie (hence the annual party’s nickname for itself: The Liar’s Ball).

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates