“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“

Jared Kushner Missed Chance to Save Children of US Ally from MBS

In December 2017, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney went to the White House to see then-senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner. Mulroney asked Kushner to mediate with Mohammed Bin Salman, who had formed a tight relationship with Kushner and had recently deposed his cousin, Mohammed Bin Nayef, and become Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. This meeting and its specifics have not been reported before.

Mulroney asked Kushner to speak to MBS about releasing two very young political prisoners, Sarah and Omar Aljabri, then only 17 and 18. They weren’t yet in prison, though that would come. They were being detained at home in Saudi Arabia, banned from travel. The Aljabri’s father, Dr. Saad bin Khalid Aljabri, who had escaped to Canada as an exile, was considered an ally and a hero by US Intelligence.

Indeed a bipartisan group of senators describe him:

Dr. Aljabri has been credited by former CIA officials for saving thousands of American lives by discovering and preventing terrorist plots. His development of a modem forensics system in Saudi Arabia reportedly contributed to the significant curtailing of terrorist groups including Al Qaeda. His work was of vital importance to U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the post 9/11 era.

But Kushner’s answer, according to three sources with knowledge, when he came back to Mulroney a month later: Sorry, he couldn’t help Aljabri or his young kids, who have EU passports as well as Saudi. The situation, Mulroney has quoted Kushner as saying, was “toxic.” (Mulroney did not respond to an emailed question about the exchange).

Read the rest of the story at “Vicky Ward Investigates”

Why Buster Murdaugh Flipped the Bird At Star Witness

So, Buster Murdaugh family and his aunt, Lynn Murdaugh Goattee, have been reprimanded and been sent to the back of the court during the trial of South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who is charged with killing his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul.

Thursday Buster Murdaugh, Alex’s only surviving son flipped the bird at Mark Tinsley, the lawyer representing the family of Mallory Beach, the beautiful teenager who died in a boat crash in February 2019, while Tinsley was testifying about the civil suits he brought on their behalf against Murdaugh and others. Prosecutors argue that it was that pressure to disclose financials for the civil suits around the crash led a desperate Alex Murdaugh to shoot his wife and son, in the hopes of causing a distraction.

Tinsley testified that Alex Murdaugh had tried to intimidate him when he learned Tinsley was suing him personally. “I thought we were friends,” Murdaugh supposedly said to Tinsley.

So, yes, Tinsley said, they had been friends.

So, what happened?

Read on, at “Vicky Ward Investigates“

Murdaugh Trial: Will The Sex Worker Testify?

Where is Lindsey Edwards? That’s what sources say the increasing numbers of people watching the dramatic twists and turns of the double murder trial of South Carolina lawyer, Alex Murdaugh want to know.

Will prosecutors call her a character witness?

Edwards is a former sex worker who worked in Charleston, who gave a startlingly frank on-camera interview to local website, Fits News, last summer. This was after she’d been interviewed by SLED in connection to the Murdaugh case.

In her interview to Fits News, she described being choked by Alex Murdaugh during “servicing” him, one weekend when he was at a bachelor party at a resort called the Isle of Palms. She said she thought she was going to die. And that his violence had taken her unawares because beforehand, he’d been “gentlemanly”. He’d told her his name, what he did and they’d talked about “alcohol”. “My expectations were still pretty high…this shouldn’t be that bad,” she told Fits News founder, Will Folks. “But I was violently choked with both hands, being pinned down to the bed… I saw stars…”

Murdaugh wasn’t the only powerful person she’d seen compromised through her sex work. She told Folks she had a list of golfers, caddies, even a cop, she’d met through her Madam. Many of these people had done hard drugs and more. But before she released any names, other than Murdaugh, she vanished. The belief, a source says, is she moved.

Read on at “Vicky Ward Investigates”

Armie Hammer: Why Was He So Reckless?

My question to psychologist and trauma survivor Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD, is: why would Armie Hammer, or indeed anyone, risk everything by creating a digital record of his inner thoughts? Why are people willfully blind about the vulnerability of phones and laptops?

Listen to our conversation at “Vicky Ward Investigates”