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

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