The Final Stretch

Some of you have asked for more of a look into my world. What it’s like when potential stories rain on you, as they are this week. What do you do? Who do you call?

While I love the fact that “corruption” is an extremely broad category, encompassing international politics, finance, the law the culture… it’s tricky when there’s Epstein-related news, Kushner-related news, British royal family news, Hunter Biden-related news, Trump Investigation news, a market meltdown and campus culture war news – and it’s only Wednesday. It can be paralyzing. That’s why it’s so helpful to hear from you what topics you are interested in. I’m going to continue to poll you at the bottom of the page. And we are going to start some Q and A sessions going forward, where I get to hear more from you. And we have a dialogue. Please write in the comments section topics you’d like to address with me through a live chat session.

Today I want to mention the campus culture war news from Stanford Law school. You‘ll recall I did a series of deep dives about an event that got shut down at Yale Law School almost a year ago (here and here), so the fight over free speech at our top law schools is something I’m fascinated by. Why do law students at the top law schools in the country heckle visiting conservative speakers, this time a Trump-appointed Judge, to the point that they get accused of censorship and find themselves, I’d argue, on the wrong side of the mainstream narrative? They run the risk of looking primitive, when they are anything but. They are the brightest and the best in the country.

It’s a subject I’ve been researching for a deep-dive project that I’m not ready or at liberty to disclose yet. But what I can tell you, as I write this on March 16 is that for the second time in my career we are approaching deadline time for an Audible podcast series. I find myself thinking a lot about the spring of 2021 when we approached a deadline for Chasing Ghislaine – my first Audible podcast series. It was a huge learning curve. Not least because when you write for the ear you need to write in themes, as opposed to chronologically, which is what you mostly do for readers.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery of all was that the closer we neared to the end for Chasing Ghislaine, the more my colleagues insisted I rest! How unusually solicitous, you might be thinking! But they were governed by a very practical concern: my voice. It turns out that your voice really suffers if you are tired or de-hydrated. And just as if a movie star is late, ill or has a melt-down (see news reports of the new Jamie Fox/Cameron Diaz movie shoot in London) it halts production, so too, if a podcaster’s voice cracks, it wrecks the studio schedule. It’s a whole costly saga! And my voice did get tired one after during production for Chasing Ghislaine – annoyingly on a day after which I thought I’d got a good night’s sleep.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Questions, Questions, Questions…

Apologies for the gap between posts. I succumbed to the flu and by the time I started to see straight, it felt like everything else had turned upside down.

To me, the SVB crisis feels like deja vu. That’s because I spent the months after the 2008 Financial Crisis interviewing many of the former senior lieutenants at what had been Lehman Brothers for what would become my 2010 book The Devil’s Casino.

Is what had happened at SVB exactly the same? No and yes. In fact I spoke to one or two of my old Lehman sources who told me they thought it was right in the current environment of high inflation that regulators protected the deposits of SVB’s customers. (They still believed that it was wrong that the government had let them fail back in 2008, seeing it partly as the result of a long-standing rivalry with Goldman Sachs).

But there are echos of 2008 and Lehman in the SVB narrative. That SVB’s CEO reportedly sold millions in stock shortly before the bank run is reminiscent of the behavior of Lehman’s president Joe Gregory who had cashed several hundred million dollars of stock, and asked for a further $233 million from the Lehman estate after the bankruptcy. That US regulators worked all weekend to come up with a solution and that the SVB UK got acquired in the nick of time by HSBC after British lawmakers, including PM Rishi Sunak stayed up all night reminded me how in 2008, at the end of that cataclysmic September weekend of desperate negotiations, the British arm of Lehman got deserted by the US and woke up Monday morning with no funds. I reported how Lehmans’ General Counsel, Tom Russo phoned his UK counterpart and said “you are on your own.” You can be sure that the British remembered that, too, these past hours.

 

In time I am sure we will come to learn more of the details of the mistakes, the overreach, and the culture that caused the debacle, but for now we live with questions.

And speaking of questions: Going into the weekend, I spent time on the phone fielding questions on two topics I’ve touched on before. First is Jes Staley.

Read the rest at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Royal Family’s Suprising Role Model? Fergie

I was flicking through my news feed last night, and saw that Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, or Fergie as all Brits still affectionately call her, was in the US, talking up her new novel, A Most Intriguing Lady.

I haven’t been paying much attention to the minutiae of the Fergie’s life so it took me a few mouse clicks to get up to speed and learn that she’s written several novels, and has a contract to write 20 more. She’s so successful she says she is now is in a position to support her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, with whom she lives.

The Queen’s corgis are now in her care. Think about what the enormity of that gesture shows. The Queen’s late husband banned Fergie from the house. But the Queen entrusted her with the creatures she loved most.

In one of Fergie’s TV interviews, I noted that she was generous about absolutely every member of the British Royal Family who came up in conversation. She didn’t dwell on the bad, she harped on the good. She said she was thrilled that Harry had found love as he deserved. She adores her ex-brother-in-law King Charles. The invitations to the Coronation have not gone out yet. If she’s not invited to the Coronation, she will pass the time eating coronation chicken. And sausage rolls.

Read the rest at Vicky Ward Investigates

Trump vs DeSantis: What Trump’s Recent Bump In the Polls Could Mean Longterm?

Listen to our conversation at Vicky Ward Investigates.

“Billionaire Time…”

Today I wanted to mention a slightly different thought about why Trump and Kushner were dangerous for America. It has to do with the dangers of being too rich before going into office: Reed Galen of the Lincoln Project asked me about this. And I hope you will listen.

I wasn’t feeling great when I did this last week, having just broken my shoulder, falling on the ski slopes. (Yes, I am a terrible skier and I will not be missed on the mountain). Normally, for something like this, when I don’t know the subject ahead of time, I get anxious as to whether or not I’m completely up to speed on all the different current events in the world. I read as much as I can every day but even so, you can miss things, especially when you are working on a deep dive, which I have been these past months – and will be a little while yet. (I’ll tell you about that when I’m able).

The issue with real estate is that it’s an industry with very few rules and regulations. Unlike Wall Street firms which tend to have strong cultures, most developers just do whatever they want. It’s a ruthless world where one person’s victory is another’s loss, and where people lie frequently in order to re-trade a deal at a more favorable price or just to win. There’s a reason the annual industry party in New York, after which I named my book, is called by its own attendees “The Liars’ Ball.”

This was the culture that both Trump and Kushner grew up in and imported to Washington, DC. I reported in my 2019 book, Kushner, Inc., how when one prominent Middle Eastern financier, the former Qatari Prime Minister “HBJ” visited Trump in Mar-a-Lago early on in the Administration, he remarked afterwards he’d found our leaders “open for business….”

Read the rest at Vicky Ward Investigates.

Ukraine War Special: Would You Get Pregnant Because Putin Promised To Pay Your Mortgage?

Yesterday, I ran part one of my Ukraine War One Anniversary Special Q and A with the Russian American supermodel, Kira Dikhtyar, who has a cousin fighting for Ukraine and another fighting for Russia.

Today, in Part Two, Kira reveals that, after what felt like an impossible start, she has figured out how to work successfully in the US and, that she is 10-weeks pregnant with her second child. Her eldest son lives in Moscow. She explains that a huge incentive for the pregnancy was the fact that, last Fall, Russian President Vladimir Putin increased the value of his policy of Maternity Capital, as an effort to repopulate Russia following the death-toll from the war in Ukraine. Kira explains she will receive half a million Russian rubles for giving birth to her second son, as long as he’s born under the Russian flag, which can happen, even in the US.

The following is edited and condensed for clarity.

Kira: I’m ten weeks pregnant. Because of the increased numbers of men going to war, Putin increased maternity capital, especially maternity capital for the second child – to sky high numbers.

It happened right after the militarization started. I think three or four months ago, Putin made a statement that he raised the maternity capital, which in Russia already existed.[to combat falling population numbers.]

So basically for the first child you get a certain amount of money from the government. For the second child you get a large amount of money for the government. Same with the third child.

But because of the militarization Putin said when there were like 80,000 graves that came back from the war, he said that 80,000 graves is 200,000 unborn children demographically.

So he is really looking after the country, not only now but in the future. So if you have a second child you get half a million in Russian rubles, and you can use it for a mortgage on an apartment. So basically, you can get an apartment in Russia, like a two bedroom apartment for this kind of money, from the government to stimulate childbirth.

Vicky: Well first of all, are you planning to go back to Russia or are you going to stay here and have your baby?

Read the rest of our conversation at Vicky Ward Investigates.

“My Cousins are Fighting on Either Side…They Tell Me: ‘We Don’t Know Who To Shoot'”

My readers may recall that I met Russian supermodel Kira Dikhtyar because of Jeffrey Epstein. Kira had met Epstein when she was just 17. A former Russian Olympic gymnast, she had come to New York for modeling work. Epstein considered her in a special category of models. A top tier. These were women he paid to hang around in his home or office to look decorative while he held meetings with Middle East potentates and US plutocrats. At the start of the war her work for Western clients dried up abruptly, even though she is a dual citizen. She went back to Moscow; and then “figured out” how to return to New York and make her situation work economically – more of which you’ll hear tomorrow.

Read our Q and A at Vicky Ward Investigates.

Defense Attorney in the Alex Murdaugh Trial Who Pulled Gun on Me Does Same To Prosecutors…Who Are Not Amused

Forgive me for going down memory lane a second time this week, but some stories are too good not to get a second run.

Case in point the propensity of Dick Harpootlian, the State Senator and colorful lead defense attorney for South Carolina Lawyer, Alex Murdaugh, to whip out a gun in unusual circumstances. I’ve reported that he did exactly this eighteen months ago when I was sitting across from him on the side of his desk in his office in Columbia, SC, as I shall I remind you below.

He did it again Tuesday in court as the defense winds up in the double homicide trial that has riveted the country. He pointed a .300 Blackout at prosecutors and muttered “Tempting”. The court, other than prosecutors, exploded in laughter. Harpootlian then got on with explaining that he was demonstrating that Murdaugh could not have shot his wife and son because whoever did shoot them must have been taller, in order to hold the gun at the correct angle.

What Harpootlian is doing is as clever as it is darkly funny.

When he opened his desk drawer and took out a handgun in the middle of our interview, I was so shocked and bemused, that I almost forgot the question I’d just asked him, which was: How had the person whom Alex Murdaugh arranged to shoot him at close range, missed?

Read the rest at Vicky Ward Investigates.

How Jeffrey Epstein Weaponized Humor

One of the many things people may not understand about Jeffrey Epstein is the way he deployed black humor as a seduction method.

He used it to lean into the darkness about him, not away.

For example when I first met him in person, I am fairly certain that he left out a copy of a book by the Eighteenth Century sexual libertine, the Marquis de Sade in his townhouse in New York, as a joke. His idea of a joke, that is. He knew that I’d already learned that he had a reputation for sexual something – at that point in my reporting, I wasn’t yet fully sure what – and his way of trying to diffuse the tension and probably distract me from the seediness of what I was hearing, (I hadn’t yet got to any alleged criminality) was to make light of it.

It’s also why he kept a vast stuffed elephant in the living room of his Paris apartment. The Epstein “joke” was that this was the “elephant in the room”…ie a metaphor for his sexual crimes. It was effective because people who had heard he went to jail in 2009 for soliciting a minor bought into his “I didn’t know her age..this whole thing is so misguided” shtick, because why would anyone who had abused an underage woman (let alone hundreds of them) make such an enormous, apparently hilarious joke of it? It defied belief.

Welcome to who Jeffrey Epstein really was, in addition to being a sexual pervert. A brazen but brilliant manipulator, not just of women and children. But of powerful, successful men, too. Jes Staley, the former CEO of Barclays and former head of JP Morgan’s private bank, has said that he never knew of Epstein’s criminal sexual abuse and trafficking. Prosecutors in the US Virgin Islands allege otherwise in papers filed yesterday.

Read the rest at Vicky Ward Investigates.

Who Are Sarah and Omar Aljabri? In Photographs and in Words…

Monday I told you the story of how, back in December 2017, Jared Kushner met with former Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney in the Trump White House. Mulroney asked Kushner to speak to the Saudi Crown Prince, MBS about releasing two very young political prisoners, Sarah and Omar Aljabri, then only 17 and 18.

They had been placed under a travel ban and weren’t yet in prison, though that would come at 6am on March 16, 2020, when fifty plain-clothed officers arrived at their home in Riyadh in twenty unmarked cars and detained them.

The Aljabri’s father, Dr. Saad bin Khalid Aljabri, who had escaped to Canada as an exile, is considered an ally and a hero by US Intelligence.

But Kushner came back to Maloney a month later and said he couldn’t help get the Aljabri children released. Kushner said it was too difficult. The situation was “toxic”. Monday, I described the details of what is known about what happened after their arrest.

First, MBS texted Dr. Aljabri that he if he returned, he’d release them. Dr. Aljabri said MBS then sent a hit squad to assassinate him in Canada but it was foiled at the border. MBS denied this happened.

But three years later, in March 2020, days after MBS’s chief rival for the throne, Mohammed Bin Nayef [MBN] was “disappeared,” in Saudi Arabia, police came for Omar and Sarah. Their father had been MBN’s right-hand aide.

Their family hasn’t heard from them since. It’s been almost three years.

Read on at “Vicky Ward Investigates“