There is almost no footage of Jared Kushner speaking. This sort of thing (from Josh Marshall) makes me wonder if he’ll be called to testify before Congress:
I’ve heard and seen various of bits of evidence, claims, suggestions and so forth that make it seem increasingly likely to me that Jared Kushner is in a lot of trouble and specifically that that meeting with the government-backed Russian banker was what most people must suspect: Kushner took the opportunity of his father-in-law’s surprise win and the budding relationship with Russia (whatever sort that relationship may turn out to be) to hit up the Russians for money to save his family’s real estate empire – specifically, to help get out of under the losses tied to the big building on 5th Avenue in midtown.
Anonymous At Work
Kushner’s family has a history of selling each other down the river, in the worst possible ways, when times get tough. I don’t do popcorn, but I’ll hit up Raisinettes at Costco later.
r€nato
I sure hope I am not the only one who would dearly love to punch in the mouth every single Trump-felcher who spent the last eight years screaming about how supposedly corrupt Obama’s administration was.
Bobby Thomson
Missing a Too.
MattF
Yeah, 666 Fifth Ave. Appropriately enough.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Anonymous At Work: Kushner’s planned tower in Jersey City would be right by the tower that the other side of his family has already built.
Adam
Rare footage of Jared speaking.
https://youtu.be/-SsFME-MTiA
Ryan
Yup, this is my most likely theory. The big unknown is what the Russian bank gets in exchange for the massive financing, what are they asking?
Kay
You have to admit the arrogance is really breathtaking. Your father in law wins the Presidency in an upset. You have no idea how any of this works- government, the presidency, none of it, and the FIRST thing you do is cut some shady deal.
I read that Kushner described Christie’s gross, clumsy, inept scheme to tie up traffic as “bad ass” and I feel like that says it all about him.
willard
@Adam: Thanks! I needed that.
Immanentize
Although it is a very long story in details, when I was about six? I broke a curtain rod in the restaurant, “Top of the Sixes” in that building — 666 5th Ave.
trollhattan
@Immanentize:
“Spare the rod and spoil the antichrist.”
Victor Matheson
Anyone who can work Kajagoogoo into a blog post title wins the internet for the day.
rikyrah
Kushner is a slave catcher.
I hope his azz winds up in an orange jumpsuit.
ruemara
I truly cannot believe we went from a decent man with decent folks in his employee to this cartoon version of a thieves cartel. Kleptokakistocracy. Mark my words. The damage that has been done… I’d believe more in a just universe if these types were struck by lightening so often we had battery packs strapped to their asses as a sustainability measure. May their deeds find them, may the Erinyes take them.
SatanicPanic
I love talking about the 666 Fifth deal because it’s one of the few areas I can plausibly claim to know something about, but really anyone should be able to understand what a dumbsh*t deal that was. Pay the highest price in NY history for a building that’s generating enough income to pay 75% of the mortgage, that’s almost full so there’s no easy way to raise rents. Smart!
If anything, Kushner is DUMBER in his real estate dealings than his dumb*ss father-in-law, who at least made a smart purchase with 40 Wall St.
Stan
Vell, zhey don’t vant anyone to hear zee Rhhussian aksent, da?
rk
@Ryan:
The banker is a known Russian spy. In return for the loan, Kushner tells the orange baboon to lift Russian sanctions, Putin makes billions, gives a cut to the buffoon. Trump the pretend billionaire becomes an actual billionaire. It’s all about enriching one family. The country can go to hell. I don’t think it’s complicated at all. There’s no hidden agenda. It’s all about making money. The only person with some crazy motive may be Flynn. The only thing that surprises me is how Bannon does not seem to have any Russian connections.
TenguPhule
@SatanicPanic:
So that rules out Trump and Kushner.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Well, that’s generally how it works.
SatanicPanic
@TenguPhule: Well, yeah. I suspect even Trump wouldn’t have done that deal, but since I don’t think he had that much money lying around back then I guess we can’t know what kind of financial trouble he would have gotten himself into.
TenguPhule
@r€nato:
Stomping on their crotch repeatedly is my preference.
rikyrah
@Ryan:
it’s obvious to me:
the 500 BILLION DOLLAR EXXON DEAL?
Why does it have to be more complicated than that?
Half a TRILLION DOLLARS?
Mnemosyne
@r€nato:
Frankly, one of the reasons the right wing screams so crazily about the evil Obama and Clintons is to inoculate Republicans against corruption charges. They know those screeches are fake, and the majority of their audience knows that they’re fake, and that lets them assume that counter-charges by the Democrats are equally fake.
IOW, conservatives are so convinced that Obama and Clinton are totally corrupt that they don’t have any problem with Trump being totally corrupt. It just means that Both Sides Do It, so they can ignore the actual facts and stay asleep.
Betty Cracker
The mention of the building in question gives me an excuse to share my most popular tweet evar!
rikyrah
@Kay:
never forget..
FLYNN.WAS.WITH.HIM.
Mnemosyne
@rk:
I can’t google it from the phone, but Bannon does have Russian connections. Breitbart gets money funneled to it by Putin.
mouse tolliver
Until some can prover otherwise, I’m just going to go on believing the Kush sounds like Jame Gumb when he talks. Right down to using the pronoun “it” when he’s talking to other human beings.
Cheryl Rofer
More about that bank. Russia and the Soviet Union have used trade-related organizations as bases for spies like, forever.
Doug!
@Betty Cracker:
Got the devil’s dildo in my mind.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: Funny how Democracy Now & Breitbart have those things in common. TYT gets seed money from Roehmer. Jesus, is everything compromised?
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
Ironically, I think everyone but the Clintons got compromised by the Russians. That’s why Hillary had to be taken down.
Doug!
@Victor Matheson:
Thanks
ArchTeryx
Man, am I dumb.
I’d said that the AHCA had disappeared from the front page – the same day that an AHCA call to action was posted by David Anderson on the front page. Durrrrr, I have the dumb.
Leaving my silo a bit, I will say that the Comey testimony and all the other crap coming down, if nothing else, makes a fine Grand Guignol show – minus the blood (so far). I don’t treat it with the breathless anticipation of much of the left so much as a horror-comedy. It’s the only way I have to get myself through what’s coming (besides my bright, shiny new lifeboat seat).
Not imminently dying is rather nice, but I don’t want to dance over other people’s graves, either (with certain exceptions).
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: That is indeed a brilliant tweet. Well done!
geg6
@ruemara:
They can’t corrupt this particular pack of jackals. One of the big advantages of being the 10,000 most popular political blog.
TenguPhule
@ruemara:
Do you really want an answer to that question?
Rasputin's Evil Twin
@r€nato: No, no punching. This is a job for blunt instruments, and maybe sharp ones if you really want to finish things off. Amateur.
ruemara
@geg6: Speak for yourself. If russia has a decent calorie free donut and the Powerball numbers, I’m becoming a loony republican. I give up.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
My goodness, the graphics on Nicole Wallace’s show. First time I’ve seen them.
And she’s got Chris Christie to defend trump! BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA
ETA:
that’s why they’re working so hard to make “unmasking” happen, so they can talk about how Obama and trump are equally implicated in the Russian scandal.
Shalimar
@rk: The orange baboon already has a deal to lift the sanctions, which is probably why they didn’t give Kushner a new loan deal. The Russians have so much leverage on the Trump administration now, it’s only a matter of time before people like Page start dying mysteriously as a warning.
The Moar You Know
@SatanicPanic: I know just enough about real estate to be a danger to myself and anyone near me, but even I can recognize that this is what is known to experts as a “bad investment”.
Redshift
@Mnemosyne: And they were one of the major outlets for laundering Russian disinformation during the election so Fox could pick it up without getting it directly from obvious Russian sources.
Quinerly
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
SEN Cornyn said he intends to question Comey tomorrow about Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton…and HRC’s private email server.
SatanicPanic
@The Moar You Know: They were losing something like $10 million per month. Might still be losing that much.
Redshift
@Mnemosyne:
There was a clear effort to accuse Obama of everything Shrub had been guilty of, no matter how ludicrous the accusation (too many vacations, for example. I think this was not so much so they could claim “both sides do it,” but rather so that reflexively both-sider media will do it for them without prompting.
Paula
@r€nato: Yep.
glory b
Doug, I’m in awe of that title.
Mary G
@rk: When Steve Bannon is the least shady person in a group, you know it’s bad.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
The Devil’s Dildo…. Perfect!!
Patricia Kayden
@ruemara: It’s shocking how Americans went from voting for an upstanding, well-spoken, family-oriented, dignified, classy gentleman to a bigoted braggart who can barely string together two words. Pretty much Americans have elected the male version of Sarah Palin. Not trying to sound negative but I don’t see how we’re getting out of this without a whole lot of damage.
rikyrah
Comey walked in and KNEW he had to metaphorically guard his pussy. https://t.co/cU2boPH7ZX
— Girls Really Rule. (@girlsreallyrule) June 7, 2017
Pence has just canceled his scheduled appearance on @NewsHour-is this just a coincidence or a direct reaction to the Comey Statement?
— Girls Really Rule. (@girlsreallyrule) June 7, 2017
The Moar You Know
@SatanicPanic: My first job out of college, back in 1990, was for a slumlord’s real estate brokerage. I learned a few things there (enough to be a danger, like I said). One of the biggies was “no negative cash flow, not for any reason ever”. Over that year, one of the partners came within a week of having to declare BK because he got caught in a negative cash flow spiral. It can happen, no matter how smart you are. How you deal with it is what differentiates the successful real estate investor from the one who’s now living in a busted-up trailer in the Santa Cruz mountains.
That’s a rather high negative cash flow for even a billionaire to support for long. Me, I’d sell the building ASAP and eat the loss while I still had the money to afford it.
Chet Murthy
@Patricia Kayden:
I’m callin’ foul. For casting *unfair* aspersions at Sarah Palin! HAHAHA! Putinfluffer is much, much, much worse than a mere male version of Caribou Barbie!
mouse tolliver
@Betty Cracker: As Rachel noted, Ivanka tried to build a giant vagina in Azerbaijan in a deal with corrupt Iranian money launderers.
https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-be3516c2554ed0dd9dd1cfa31b52fff2
Jare-Jare and Iva were made for each other.
p.a.
Whenever I hear talk about ClintonCorruption (billorhill) remember 2001-2009 which party controlled DoJ, and ask the yakkers if the Bush admin was in on it? Otherwise the lack of action means it was all BS. Of course, the loons can fall back on ‘greatest criminal minds and conspiracy evah…’
And point out the lack of action now on Bamz and Mrs ‘Lock Her Up’. Of course, Justice MIGHT have other things ‘diverting’ them currently :-)
Betty Cracker
To paraphrase a comment I read elsewhere, if Kushner goes to jail, it could really boost Ivanka’s working mom cred for branding purposes. Silver lining!
Also, to Rikyrah’s point — the fact that Flynn was with Kushner makes it pretty obvious the whole corrupt bunch was in on the deal. No way was Kushner freelancing. Also, it explains why Trump was so desperate to derail the investigation of Flynn.
Mnemosyne
@p.a.:
Hey, it’s hard work destroying evidence of your party’s corruption and compromise by the Russians. Hard work!
Barbara
@mouse tolliver: Kushner’s voice is reputed to be soft and sibilant.
Betty Cracker
@mouse tolliver: OMFG, I’d missed that! Hilarious!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I have Nicole Wallace on mute– because I can’t find the remote to turn off the machine– and I just saw that Christie of New Jersey is defending the conversation described by Comey as a “normal New York City conversation. What is it with these bridge-and-tunnel guys and they’re obsession with pretending to be from some romanticized vision of NYC, high society Manhattan, rough-and-tumble Brooklyn, Don Corleone’s (I think) Lower East Side, depending on which self-image they’re trying to construct in the moment.
Christie wants that c*sin0 greeter’s job bad, I guess.
Mnemosyne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Since Christie is in the corruption up to his eyeballs, of course he thinks it’s normal. It’s what mobsters do, and he himself is one of the mobsters, so what the problem? It’s like asking John Gotti if it’s morally wrong to kill a snitch.
Morzer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I wonder if Christie has been promised the Attorney General spot when Sessions is helped to retire in the not too distant future.
SatanicPanic
@The Moar You Know: That’s definitely the strategy you go with if you’re risk averse. Sometimes you might buy something that’s underperforming and rehab it and jack up rents. But you want to buy a building with substantial vacancy because most office tenants are on 3-5 year contracts so it’s not like you can just post a “we’re raising rents in 30 days!” notice like you can with apartments. I’m surprised they got a loan to buy the building, but IIRC this was like 2006 or 2007.
Morzer
Noted with interest in the Fundie Racist Heads Exploding category:
https://gizmodo.com/incredible-discovery-pushes-back-origin-of-homo-sapiens-1795885082
Barbara
@The Moar You Know: Here is the full story: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/nyregion/kushner-companies-666-fifth-avenue.html?_r=0
They bought it in 2007 at too high of a price, and rents went down instead of up because of the recession. They brought in other investors who now own pieces, but the long range goal was to tear down the existing structure and put up a trophy building. Which means that in planning for that, they can’t really enter into long term leases as current leases expire. They bought it at probably the single worst time, in early 2007, just before it had dawned on most people that real estate was in bubble territory.
Chet Murthy
@Barbara:
FTFY. Dean Baker sold his house in ’04, explicitly saying it was b/c the crash was coming. Others did the same.
Corner Stone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: There is nothing that spells “WIN” quite like Chris Christie telling a supremely qualified woman she does not know what big words mean.
Barbara
@Chet Murthy: And yet, the crash did not come until much later. They obviously overpaid. They paid twice per square foot than the next highest purchaser paid for Manhattan real estate. Not predicting the bubble was the least of their problems.
zhena gogolia
@Immanentize:
Alfred Drake’s agent had an office there.
SatanicPanic
@Barbara: but again, it wasn’t even that they lost money because of the recession- they were already losing money with no obvious way out of the problem. The recession only made it worse.
Corner Stone
Michael Steele seems to have maybe (maybe) reached his rope’s end?
Corner Stone
Trump does not give one fucking shit about anything Paul Ryan or McConnell has to say about any damn thing.
bemused
@Betty Cracker:
Betty, you are awesome.
Corner Stone
No, Chuck Todd. “Washington” did not cause this. The fucking Republican Party caused this.
catclub
@Chet Murthy:
yep, I was saying that last year. Palin had actual experience in the government. Trump had zero. Goes to show what an old rich white guy gets away with (is assumed competent) that few others do.
bemused
@Chet Murthy:
We sold our small business a year before the crash. Sold it sooner than we planned because of what we were reading from Baker, Krugman and others who were scoffed at by cable news.
Cheryl Rofer
@Barbara: This can be a sign of money laundering.
jayboat
@Cheryl Rofer:
Color me shocked.
Barbara
@Cheryl Rofer: I had not thought of that. If they had bought more of it with cash I think that might be a more likely possibility, but if you read the whole article, so much of it was purchased with debt financing that can’t be paid back out of the proceeds from the asset — even before they face a balloon payment of interest — that it seems more like money evaporating into thin air. Some of the financing might have come from money launderers, and a lot of the so-called secondary loans have been paid back. Still, that would be one heck of a favor, because as of now, they have no easy way out.
Barbara
@SatanicPanic: Right. That’s kind of what I was saying. My father in law used to tell us that in real estate, you are as wealthy as your biggest deal. There is just so much leverage involved that you can easily lose whatever equity you amassed from a series of successful deals just by losing your shirt on one property.
sdhays
@Patricia Kayden:
I’ve seen this a lot over the last year or so, but I really think it does a disservice to Palin. Unlike the Preznit, she’s not obviously suffering from some clinical degenerative mental condition; she’s just not very bright. And while I don’t think she would bat an eye at stepping all over the Constitution and rolling in corruption, I don’t think she’d waltz into active treason the tRump did. I think, for example, she would have been more likely to actually know, and be modestly concerned about the fact, that there are 11k+ US soldiers stationed in Qatar before adding them to the Axis of Evil.
She’s very stupid and horrible, but the Ambulatory Acne Pustule is in a complete class of his own.
Gvg
@Barbara: if you are planning a tear down, you buy a lower worth building surrounded by higher value. This was a stupid plan. I think he got competative on the bidding and couldn’t stand to “lose”. Showing off maybe. We’re there a lot of headlines about the purchase?
The other time I have head of super over priced paying was when foreigners or people from a different real estate market bought somewhere using the prices they were used to as guides. For instance I think in the 80’s the Japanese and Hong Kong buyers over paid here because they are so crowded they thought our land prices were a bargain, then they couldn’t sell. Kushner should not have that excuse. Maybe he thought he had a sucker lined up already.
Cheryl Rofer
@Barbara: I’m not an expert on such things, could barely figure out the interim financing when I bought this house, but money laundering relies on exactly such complications. Paying too much for a property seems to be one way to do it. I’ll let others jump in if they understand that sort of thing better than I do.
Gvg
@Corner Stone: the Michael Steele from the GOP or the British Intellegence guy, or am I confused?
zhena gogolia
@Gvg:
I thought the British guy was Christopher.
Barbara
@Gvg: I assume that they are courting foreign investors on that theory, as well as with the idea that there may be other strategic interests that would cause them to overpay, such as getting a visa, or getting their money out sooner rather than later. I don’t pretend to be prescient on the future of retail and office space, but if Manhattan has even a resemblance to D.C., both are likely to be weaker rather than stronger in the coming decade.
Betsy
The expressions on little Jared’s face always seem sidelong and creepy. You never hear a word out of him but he’s always glancing at something to one side or another. Plus, so often, that ever so slight Mona Lisa hint of a smile. It gives the impression of someone taking it all in, someone opportunistic and not in a good way. These are just visual impressions. We’ll see what the real evidence discovers.
Bjacques
I would have gone with Kush, Kush, Sweet Harlot.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@ruemara: The Scottish writer Hal Duncan refers to these people and their European counterparts as kleptofascists.
Morzer
@Bjacques:
Jar Jar Binks-in-Law.
SiubhanDuinne
@Immanentize:
Oh, cool. I once threw up in one of the potted palms at “Top of the Rock,” but I was 26 at the time.
SiubhanDuinne
@Quinerly:
Well, that’ll be new and refreshing.
J R in WV
@SiubhanDuinne:
Mrs J and my dad were at the Greenbrier Resort once for a fancy press conference, with a reception. They both grabbed for what they thought were bacon-wrapped stuffed mushrooms, but which were actually chicken livers… neither of them can eat liver, so there they were, looking for somewhere, anywhere to unload that liver.
My dad was quite dapper, too, so if you knew him, it was extra funny to think of him trying not to disgorge that thing instantly. Fortunately, it was / is the kind of place with lots of flowers and such in big pots, so it wasn’t hard to find a place to drop the liver off. There’s an artist colony, greenhouses, tea in the afternoon with a string quartet, very schmancy. A little too fru-fru for me, but some folks like that.