Today Is The Seventh Anniversary Of The Secret Trade That Put Trump In the White House

Seven years ago, on this date, a backroom trade occurred that would shift the future of the Presidency, the Republican party – and the Supreme Court, to where it all is today. Remarkably, very few people in the media paid much heed at the time.

Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee for President, who lacked the support of the financial and ideological center of his party, had been struggling in the polls against Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R. Tx) who’d come second in the Republican race, and who did have the support of the GOP establishment, had refused to endorse Trump at the Republican Convention.

Cruz’s chief worry, shared by the Federalist Society (Fed Soc), the conservative lawyers’ club he’d joined at Harvard Law School, was that Trump didn’t really care about the Supreme Court. The fear was that in Trump-fashion, were he elected President, he might nominate a bunch of cronies to the Court, who had not been groomed by the GOP establishment (aka Fed Soc). A guy atop Fed Soc called Leonard Leo and Sen. Cruz, were adamant that a list hand-picked by Leo was exclusively what Trump must select from. The greatest urgency was in the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia. The Holy Grail for a new Conservative court would be something Cruz and Leo, both staunch Catholics, had long talked about: repealing Roe v. Wade.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Pipeline to Power: The Forty Year Plan to Capture The Supreme Court

Monday morning a friend texted me a story in the New York Times about Steve Calabresi, a renowned constitutional law professor and the co-founder and de-facto leader of the Federalist Society, the Conservative debate club that wields outsize influence and, which Donald Trump has publicly declared, hand-picked the three Supreme Court Judges nominated on his watch. Approximately 90 percent of the federal bench in the Trump era were either in or had been in Fed Soc.

According to the Times, Calabresi has now flip-flopped on the important question of whether or not the Constitution says Trump can be on the ballot for the 2024 election. Last month Calabresi said, in a blog post, Trump is ineligible. (The argument is, basically, that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment bans officials who then cause insurrections).

But then the professor changed his mind, arguing essentially that the Constitution says there’s a difference between those elected to office and those appointed to office.

He’s not the first legal thinker to change his mind about to how interpret the Constitution. And he’s a bit mystified that the Times bothered to put his thoughts on the front page. “Must have been a very slow news day,” he told me on the phone with a chuckle.

But the Times is right to care what Calabresi thinks. He’s a man of much greater political influence than most people realize. He’s the intellectual backbone and curator of the Supreme Court.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Leon Black’s Epstein Nightmare Worsens

I’m slowly emerging from a break following wrapping up my forthcoming Audible Original podcast series which will drop on September 21st.

Standby for details!

Meanwhile: an acquaintance in the art world stopped me in the street and asked “Can you believe the news about Leon Black?”

I was actually confused in the moment as to which piece of news he was referring to. Because Leon Black, who is the multi-billionaire who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein and admitted to paying him $158 million for tax advice and who stepped down from running the private equity giant Apollo Global Management, and from chairing the board of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), has had back-to-back bad news recently.

First: On July 21st it emerged in the New York Times that back in January Black paid the U.S. Virgin Islands $62.5 million to avoid being civilly sued in Epstein-related charges. (Epstein was domiciled in the US Virgin Islands. Its Attorney General is suing JP Morgan for $190 million claiming they banked Epstein, while aware of his sex-trafficking operation. JP Morgan has denied this. The bank has paid $290 million earlier this year to settle similar claims from Epstein survivors).

I’ve learned that lawyers representing the USVI interviewed Epstein survivors before settling with Black. The Times reported that Brad Edwards, a lawyer representing many Epstein survivors, was present at the mediation talks but told the Times reporter he was not “at liberty to discuss the topic.”

Whit Clay, a spokesman for Mr. Black, told the Times: “Mr. Black engaged and made payments to Jeffrey Epstein for legitimate financial advisory services, which, based on everything now known, he very much regrets. Consistent with settlements of other major U.S. banks, Mr. Black resolved the U.S.V.I.’s potential claims arising out of the unintended consequences of those payments. There is no suggestion in the U.S.V.I. settlement that Mr. Black was aware of or participated in any misconduct.”

Second: On July 24th, Senator Ron Wyden, the Finance Committee chair, published a sixteen-page letter he’d sent to Black’s lawyers, revealing that the Committee has been investigating Black’s tax and estate planning for over a year.

Sen. Wyden says this is due to “inconsistencies” in an “independent” report filed by the law firm Dechert LLP, in which Black explained away the $158 million to Epstein, who was neither an accountant or a lawyer, as payment for tax advice.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

There’s One Book You Must Read this Summer

Greetings all. I’m on my way back from a much-needed break after mostly wrapping up the Audible project I’ll be announcing shortly. In coming days I’ll be bringing you up to speed on all the reporting developments around the topics you know I love to cover. Epstein, Kushner, Trump and more.

First, however, I need to tell you about a book, out tomorrow, July 11th. No Ordinary Assignment by Jane Ferguson.

Jane is one of the rising stars in the elite tiny group of TV correspondents who report from dangerous far-flung war zones. She’s currently the Special Correspondent for PBS Newshour. She’s won an Emmy, the George Polk Award and a Peabody Award. She’s done incredibly difficult, dangerous reporting from deep inside Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Beirut and more.

But what makes her memoir a standout, the best memoir I’ve read since Michelle Obama’s Becoming, is the writing that borders on the poetic. In a way her prose style reminds me of Harper Lee, a novelist who was no war reporter—but just as Lee could transport her readers into a sun-baked street in the South, where time slowed, fans fluttered, and sweat beads gathered, so, too Ferguson takes us deep into the smells, the sounds, the spirit of the people in the conflict zones she buries herself in.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

WHAT WAS TRUMP THINKING?

I’m not the only person asking “why.”

Why did Donald Trump pretty much shoot himself in the foot, not just by not returning classified documents as asked by the DOJ, but by bragging about his possession of classified documents while knowing he was being recorded?

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, documented Trump’s historic seemingly uncontrollable show-off impulses.

And, as you’d expect, on air, there’s been plenty of armchair diagnosis on TV about narcissistic personality disorders as well as speculation about leverage Trump could, possibly, have wanted to exercise with foreign states with whom he wants to do business deals: The leading candidate being Saudi Arabia.

But I think there’s more to it.

In his mind, the best defense is the best offense. And, given his background in the unregulated often opaque and ruthless world of New York real estate, it might appear that he assumes (not necessarily wrongly) that everyone else is playing dirty, so he needs to play dirtier to gain the advantage.

Readers of my 2014 book The Liar’s Ball may recall a fascinating episode in which Abe Wallach, Trump’s former executive vice president for acquisitions and finance, gave me this first person account of what happened on a long-haul flight. (He told me he never told Trump any of this).

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Jeffrey Epstein was Davos on Steroids

So, the Wall Street Journal has produced two more brilliant Epstein scoops (here and here) that shed further light on my story last week about Epstein’s role as an elite global concierge.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to speculate that someone with access to the discovery in the civil suits filed by the US Virgin Islands and Jane Doe against JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank is sharing documents with the paper. That would explain why the Journal has cited the content of previously unseen emails and snippets of Epstein’s calendar in years post his 2008 conviction as a sex offender.

Turns out that in Epstein’s “pretend penitent era” for want of a better description (he told everyone that the 17-year-old he “solicited” had not told him her true age) his home was like a sort of Davos on steroids.

The list of US VIPs he held meetings with gets longer by the minute. Venture capitalist Reid Hoffman flew with him to his Island. The CIA director William “Bill” Burns met with Epstein when he was the deputy secretary of state in 2014 and, reportedly, he thought Epstein was just a rich guy.

“The director did not know anything about him, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector,” a CIA spokesperson said. (I cannot be the only person marveling at the apparent porousness of our State Department, and the lack of basic background information supplied to the guy now in charge of the CIA).

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Jeffrey Epstein’s Elite Concierge Service

At this point, there’s little breaking news on Jeffrey Epstein that shocks me. I never imagined that 20 years after I had the worst reporting experience of my career, dealing with him, that the questions I found impossible to solve at the time, would not only still be questions – but questions of international interest.

Friday, I was shocked. The Wall Street Journal broke a completely fascinating story about how JP Morgan bankers kept visiting Epstein for years after it closed its accounts with him in 2013. (They’d woken up to the extraordinary fact he withdrew over $750,000 a year in cash. In lump sums of $80,000).

There’s one paragraph in particular in the story that is worth dwelling on:

JPMorgan employees continued meeting with Epstein after his accounts were closed about other clients and to discuss introductions he could make to potential clients, according to people familiar with the meetings.

Think about that. In 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, if the WSJ has its timeline right, Epstein was considered someone of such important connectivity inside the world’s plutocracy that JP Morgan employees came crawling, regardless that he himself had been fired as a client. For whatever reason, he was a gateway to wealthy people who were otherwise unreachable. Or, at the very least, that’s how he sold himself. And, apparently, he was believable.

It’s this elite concierge aspect of Epstein that is just so intriguing. How the heck could Epstein, a college dropout, with no broker’s license, embed himself so completely in the lives of the uber-rich that they trusted him and not America’s biggest bank?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates.

Even At JP Morgan They Wondered Who Jeffrey Epstein’s “Clients” Were

So, papers filed last week in the US Virgin Island’s suit against JPMorgan, alleging the bank knowingly benefitted from the sex-trafficking schemes of its former client Jeffrey Epstein, contains the charge that senior executives knew the seriousness of claims against Epstein as far back as 2006 – and banked him anyway. The amended suit claims that “senior executives joked about Epstein’s interest in young girls.” According to the complaint, in 2008 Mary Erdoes, CEO of JP Morgan Assets and Wealth Management, “received an email asking her whether Epstein was at an event ‘with miley cyrus.’” And, according to the suit, Erdoes also “admitted in her deposition that JPMorgan was aware by 2006 that Epstein was accused of paying cash to have underage girls and young women brought to his home.” JP Morgan has denied the charges. It stopped banking Epstein in 2013.

I’ve always maintained, that based on my reporting, Epstein’s sex trafficking was enabled by an entire eco-system of people, men mostly, who either invested with him, or attended his dinners, or took his money, or agreed to put his name on a building or institute – and in general legitimized him. And that it’s a travesty that the identities of these people are mostly still hidden in the shadows. Significantly, the list of names of high net-worth and high-profile individuals Epstein was allegedly helping woo to JP Morgan’s “Donor Advised Fund” is still not public.

Read the rest at Vicky Ward Investigates

Low Maintenance Melania?

There has been much speculation about the private wife of the outspoken husband. Melania didn’t travel with Donald Trump to his indictment, and he didn’t thank her in his post-arrest speech (despite thanking his five children, including their own son Barron who he described as “smart and tall”). She’s given no public statement on the indictment, not even one as vanilla as Ivanka’s. In fact, Melania’s first social media post since early March was a zoomed in stock photo of a pink rose, with the caption “Happy Easter!” A source told People Magazine (of which, one suspects, she might possibly be a reader) that she just wanted to be left alone, that her husband’s political events “aren’t comfortable for her” and “she remains angry and doesn’t want to hear [the alleged hush money payment] mentioned.”

Yet on Sunday, she was spotted having Easter brunch with Donald Trump behind velvet rope inside the Mar-A-Lago ballroom.

It’s not the first time Melania has seemingly yo-yoed around her husband. Some famous examples:

She slept through the 2020 Election night.

She delayed moving to the White House in 2016 as leverage for negotiating a post-nup.

She swatted Trump’s hand away when walking down the red carpet to greet Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

If you are confused, well perhaps what follows is helpful:

I looked up an old Q & A I did in 2013 with Trump, in his then office in Trump Tower in New York. His desk was overflowing with papers. The walls were crammed with photos of himself. He described the secret of the success of his marriage to Melania, which might be paraphrased as:

She doesn’t bother me. She doesn’t interrupt my golf game or ask me to have dinner with her. Men whose wives force them to do things like that end up dumping them. I recently golfed with a bonehead who actually left on the 9th hole because his wife phoned and asked him to come home. What an idiot! Particularly because he’s not a good golfer, and he was playing well…

If you are really interested, you can read it in full at Vicky Ward Investigates. Just don’t shoot the messenger.

Trump, The Ringmaster Returns

I thought I’d gotten my dates and countries confused.

First, there was the footage of the majestic plane, a Boeing 757 with a Rolls Royce engine, landing from its journey from West Palm Beach. The fleet of sleek black-guzzling SUVs surrounding it on the tarmac. The subsequent race into Manhattan, the closed-off streets, the crowd. The anticipation as one waited for a door to open and …

You might expect the figure emerging from the limo and waving to the crowds to be her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Instead, it’s our former POTUS, Donald Trump. But you already know that.

Try flipping the TV channel and you’ll be hard-pressed to go five minutes on cable news without feeling the sort of satiation and tense anticipation that normally precedes a Presidential Inauguration or a British Royal church ceremony. The last time I recall so much live coverage of someone on the move was when the Queen’s coffin was being transported from Westminster Abbey to her final burial at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. And the time before that was the police chase of OJ Simpson.

Read the rest at Vicky Ward Investigates