Free Republic

On Sunday, GOP presidential candidate and real estate tycoon Donald Trump did what many do in August on the east coast: he spent a day at the shore with his family. In this case, he was visiting with the in-laws of his daughter Ivanka, Charles and Seryl Kushner, parents to Trump’s son-in-law Jared, the owner and publisher of the New York Observer.

This visit was no ordinary social call. The Kushners were hosting an intimate meet-and-greet on Trump’s behalf at their seaside estate on the New Jersey shore weeks after injecting $100,000 into Trump’s Make America Great Again super PAC.

More than a decade ago Kushner was one of the biggest behind-the-scenes players in New Jersey’s real estate-obsessed political establishment. In the early 2000s, through his relatives and companies, Charles Kushner could be personally linked to almost 5% of the donations collected by then-N.J. Gov. James McGreevey’s 1997 and 2001 gubernatorial campaigns. He was also the largest single donor to Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Robert Torricelli.

Just weeks later in July 2004, Charles Kushner was indicted by then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and interstate promotion of prostitution (!) for trying to derail a federal investigation Christie’s office had opened into Kushner’s political operations during the prior year. It turned out that Charles was concerned about his sister’s cooperation with Christie’s grand jury and decided to blackmail her into silence by hiring a prostitute to seduce her husband. In a Bridgewater, N.J. motel room of the Red Bull Inn (not kidding) equipped with a hidden video camera Charles secretly recorded his brother-in-law in flagrante. Charles then sent the tape to his sister, threatening to make it public unless she stopped cooperating with the feds.

It’s now ironic, of course, that Charles Kushner is back in the game supporting the GOP candidate who is nudging Christie out of the race. But family or not, it remains to be seen if even the likes of Donald Trump can afford to carry the baggage that comes with this guy.

Kushner is a billionaire real estate developer, former Democratic power-broker, and convicted felon. He’s also the father of Jared Kushner, the titular owner of the New York Observer.

Charles Kushner’s father, Joseph, arrived in the U.S. in 1949 and started out as a construction worker before moving into real estate, gradually assembling a portfolio of 4,000 apartment units in New Jersey over the course of three decades. Joseph later bequeathed his real estate assets to his two sons, Charles and Murray, and the younger of the two, Charles, who had been working as a real estate and tax lawyer, stepped in as CEO in 1985. Charlie Kushner set out on an aggressive expansion plan, extending the firm’s reach beyond its traditional New Jersey territory, acquiring high profile property in New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Maryland and diversifying into new businesses, picking up stakes in insurance, banking and telecommunications companies. But his reputation as a savvy investor was soon eclipsed by his legal troubles, which split the family into two factions and landed Charles in jail.

Although he’d been one of Jersey’s most powerful developers for years, Kushner only really became a household name in 2004 when twin scandals enveloped his career and left him disgraced and incarcerated. One of the state’s most prominent political donors, Kushner had channeled millions to Democratic candidates since the ‘90s and was one of Jim McGreevey’s primary backers when he launched a bid for governor. In 2004, it came to light that Kushner had skirted campaign finance laws, making political donations in the names of his real estate partners without their consent, a scheme that allowed him to direct millions to candidates like McGreevey, who received more than $1.5 million from the real estate developer between 1997 and 2001. The scandal got messier when it was revealed that Kushner’s brother and sister, Murray and Esther had cooperated with the federal investigation into his campaign activities, and that Charles had retaliated for the perceived betrayal by hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law. Kushner pleaded guilty in federal court to 18 charges, including retaliating against a federal witness and violating campaign finance laws. He received a two year prison sentence as part of the plea (and paid a $508,900 fine), but only served a one-year sentence and went right back to the office, business as usual.

http://gawker.com/550119/charles-kushner

Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s former chief political advisor and close friend, self-admitted hit man

Stone was for many years a lobbyist for Donald Trump on behalf of his casino business

In 1996, Stone resigned from a post as a volunteer spokesman in Senator Bob Dole's campaign for president after The National Enquirer wrote that Stone had placed ads and pictures in racy swingers publications and a website seeking sexual partners for himself and his second wife, Nydia Bertrane Stone, whom he married in Las Vegas in the 1992. Stone initially denied the report. On the Good Morning America program he said: "An exhaustive investigation now indicates that a domestic employee who I discharged for substance abuse on the second time that we learned that he had a drug problem is the perpetrator who had access to my home, access to my computer, access to my password, access to my postage meter, access to my post-office box key". In a 2008 interview with The New Yorker Stone admitted that the ads were authentic.

“Like Trump says repeatedly, the media are the most dishonest group of people in America”

Besides Trump who is usually in bed with them and until they dare question him then they are trash. I don’t understand how so many smart people can fall for Trump and his phony conservatism.

Chicago financier Jay Pritzker and New York developer Donald Trump settled a two-year-long, bitter legal feud over the management of New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, which they jointly own and which the Pritzker family’s Hyatt Corp. manages. The legal arrangement clears the way for major renovations at the midtown Manhattan convention hotel.

Brenner’s investigation occurred when Trump’s business empire was in the dumps and the real-estate scion was personally overexposed by millions of dollars. But he didn’t think that was a problem: “I’m more popular now than I was two months ago. There are two publics as far as I’m concerned. The real public and then there’s the New York society horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I go out now, forget about it. I’m mobbed. It’s bedlam.”

Here’s how Donald explained the tabloid fascination with Ivana: “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”

And here’s a story about one incident that left Ivana distraught:

Trump even called a press conference to announce Ivana’s new position as the president of the Plaza hotel: “My wife, Ivana, is a brilliant manager. I will pay her one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy!” Ivana called her friends in tears. “How can Donald humiliate me this way?”

I was still searching for Donald Trump. On a rainy Thursday in July, I went down to federal court, where he was set to testify in a civil case in which he was a defendant. Along with his contractor, Trump had been accused of hiring scores of illegal Polish aliens to do the demolition work on the Trump Tower site. “The Polish brigade,” as they came to be called, had been astonishingly exploited on the job, earning four dollars an hour for work that usually paid five times that.

When I got to the courtroom, Trump had gone. His lawyer, the venerable and well-connected Milton Gould, was smiling broadly, for he appeared to believe that he was wiping the floor with this case. Trump had said that he knew nothing about the demolitions, that his contractor had been “a disaster.” Yet one F.B.I. informant testified that he had warned Trump of the presence of the Polish brigade and had told him that if he didn’t get rid of them his casino license might not be granted.

I wandered down to the pressroom on the fifth floor to hear about Trump’s testimony. The reporters sounded weary; they had heard it all before. “Goddamn it,” one shouted at me, “we created him! We bought his bullshit! He was always a phony, and we filled our papers with him!”

“Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory,” his lawyer had told me. “If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”

“One of my lawyers said that?” Trump said when I asked him about it. “I think if one of my lawyers said that, I’d like to know who it is, because I’d fire his ass. I’d like to find out who the scumbag is!”

One of Trump’s first major deals in New York was to acquire a large tract of land on West Thirty-fourth Street being offered by the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. Trump submitted a plan for a convention center to city officials. “He told us he’d forgo his $4.4 million fee if we would name the new convention center after his father,” former deputy mayor Peter Solomon said. “Someone finally read the contract. He wasn’t entitled to anywhere near the money he was claiming. It was unbelievable. He almost got us to name the convention center after his father in return for something he never really had to give away.”

Trump’s first major real-estate coup in New York was the acquisition of the Commodore Hotel, which would become the Grand Hyatt. This deal, secured with a controversial tax abatement from the city, made Trump’s reputation. His partner at the time was the well-respected Pritzker family of Chicago, who owned the Hyatt chain. Their contract was specific: Trump and Jay Pritzker agreed that if there were any sticking points they would have a ten-day period to arbitrate their differences. At one point, they had a minor disagreement. “Jay Pritzker was leaving for a trip to Nepal, where he was to be incommunicado,” a lawyer for the Pritzker family told me. “Donald waited until Jay was in the airplane before he called him. Naturally, Jay couldn’t call him back. He was on a mountain in Nepal. Later, Donald kept saying, ‘I tried to call you. I gave you the ten days. But you were in Nepal.’ It was outrageous. Pritzker was his partner, not his enemy! This is how he acted on his first important deal.” Trump later even reported the incident in his book.

“Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he told the architect Der Scutt before a presentation of the Trump Tower design at a press conference in 1980. “Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.” “I don’t lie, Donald,” the architect replied.

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner

Trump wrote that he once considered an open marriage with his first wife, and in his book “The Art of the Comeback” he said: “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.”

Trump has also said: “I have too much respect for women in general, but if I did [write about my love life], the world would take serious notice. Beautiful, famous, successful, married — I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names...”

Cruz sex scandal publisher and Trump are pals; don’t expect any ‘Lyin’ Pecker’ tweets

After the National Enquirer published a story about an alleged sex scandal involving Senator Ted Cruz, some are calling shenanigans because of Donald Trump’s close relationship with the Enquirer’s CEO David Pecker

The tabloid has publicly endorsed Trump with the sensational headline “Trump Must be President!” and has published at least one highly negative article about Dr. Ben Carson before he dropped out of the race.

The National Enquirer is owned by AMI Inc. David Pecker is the CEO. Pecker is a Trump friend.

Our source says that with Trump “protected” by the tabloid, “Some of the staff are furious. Trump’s such fertile ground, and it drives them crazy to not only be staying away from it, but running puff pieces for him.”

Trump and Pecker have certainly been known to scratch each other’s backs.

This week’s Enquirer features a piece under the screaming red banner: “Charismatic billionaire Donald Trump writes exclusively for the Enquirer.” In the column, entitled “America is being laughed at … and things must change!” Trump outlines his qualifications for the White House, including the fact that in his view, wife Melania “would make a terrific first lady!”

In 2010, Trump tweeted, “David Pecker would be a brilliant choice as CEO of TIME Magazine — nobody could bring it back like David!”

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/confidential/donald-trump-tabloid-won-enquire-dee-article-1.2327968

“Likewise, I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence”

*********

This fall, New York’s national-affairs reporter Gabriel Sherman wrote about the close relationship between GOP front-runner Donald Trump and the Enquirer CEO David Pecker after the tabloid printed some stories about Ben Carson’s alleged medical mishaps. Per Sherman:

This person also said that Trump’s campaign was a source for the [Carson] article: “His campaign provided information that was used,” he explained. A Trump friend said that in the days leading up to the article’s publication Trump was telling people that Carson “had a lot of medical malpractice suits” and “almost killed a guy.”

**********

Donald Trump’s Alliance With the National Enquirer

Trump and Enquirer CEO David Pecker have been friends for years. “They’re very close,” said a source close to the Enquirer. In July 2013, Trump even tweeted that Pecker should become CEO of Time magazine, which at the time was being spun off from its corporate parent, Time Warner. “He’d make it exciting and win awards!”

Dan Bluer

http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/03/18/amanda-carpenter-right.-blackball-trump-endorsers./

Epstein’s alleged sex slave Virginia Roberts first accused Clinton of visiting Epstein’s notorious island near St. Thomas in an affidavit filed in January. She’s suing the US Justice Department for how they handled Epstein’s plea deal. Her attorneys are suing Dershowitz for defamation, and now, Dershowitz is addressing the claims head-on in his own deposition in that case, taken on October 16.

According to a deposition transcript reviewed by Radar, Dershowitz recalled that Roberts had previously “described in great detail a dinner with Bill Clinton and two underaged Russian women who were offered to Bill Clinton for sex,” an incident she said occurred in 2002. And while he insisted that he believed that to be a “lie,” he acknowledged that he can’t prove it.

http://radaronline.com/celebrity-news/bill-clinton-orgy-island-claims-alan-dershowitz-deposition/

Epstein’s alleged sex slave Virginia Roberts first accused Clinton of visiting Epstein’s notorious island near St. Thomas in an affidavit filed in January. She’s suing the US Justice Department for how they handled Epstein’s plea deal. Her attorneys are suing Dershowitz for defamation, and now, Dershowitz is addressing the claims head-on in his own deposition in that case, taken on October 16.

According to a deposition transcript reviewed by Radar, Dershowitz recalled that Roberts had previously “described in great detail a dinner with Bill Clinton and two underaged Russian women who were offered to Bill Clinton for sex,” an incident she said occurred in 2002. And while he insisted that he believed that to be a “lie,” he acknowledged that he can’t prove it.

http://radaronline.com/celebrity-news/bill-clinton-orgy-island-claims-alan-dershowitz-deposition/

The Oxford-educated Maxwell, described by many as a man-eater (she flies her own helicopter and was recently seen dining with Clinton at Nello’s on Madison Avenue), lives in her own townhouse a few blocks away. Epstein is frequently seen around town with a bevy of comely young women but there has been no boldfaced name to replace Maxwell. “You may read about Jeffrey in the social columns, but there is much more to him than that,” says Jeffrey T. Leeds of the private equity firm Leeds Weld & Co. “He’s a talented money manager and an extremely hardworking person with broad interests. Most unusual, though, is that in this media-obsessed age he is not in any sense a self-promoter.”

maintains some sort of money-management firm, though you won’t get a straight answer from him,” says one well-known investor. “He once told me he had 300 people working for him, and I’ve also heard that he manages Rockefeller money. But one never knows. It’s like looking at the Wizard of Oz — there may be less there than meets the eye.”

Says another prominent Wall Streeter: “He is this mysterious, Gatsbyesque figure. He likes people to think that he is very rich, and he cultivates this air of aloofness. The whole thing is weird.”

Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,’’ Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people — be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition is the former president. In his eyes, Clinton as a species represents the highest evolutionary form of the political animal. To be up close to him, as he was during the African journey, is akin to seeing the rarest of beasts on a safari. As he put it to a friend upon his return from Africa, “If you were a boxer at the downtown gymnasium at 14th Street and Mike Tyson walked in, your face would have the same look as these foreign leaders had when Clinton entered the room. He is the world’s greatest politician.”

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/

Without a doubt, the absolutely raunchiest part of the Epstein affadavit stars a mysterious young woman named “Nada Marcinkova.” Lesbian strap-on raunchiness, ending in something that sounds to us a little bit like rape. We get all the details but no explanation of who Marcinkova is or what her relationship with Epstein was. She’s not one of his high school victims, and doesn’t seem to have talked to the police. But it somehow seems fitting that this mysterious money manager to the billionaires would have an unknown Czech sex puppet lying around.

http://dealbreaker.com/2006/07/meet-nadia-marcinkova-star-girl-of-the-raunchiest-part-of-epstein-scandal/

Nadia Marcinko (Slovak:a Marcinková) is a FAA certified commercial rated pilot and flight instructor, holding a Single (land & sea) Multi engine (land) instrument rating and Gulfstream C/G-IV & C/G-1159 type rating certificates. She is the CEO of Aviloop, an aviation website.

After a career as a model, Marcinko started flight training at a flight school at the Palm Beach County Florida Airport. With 250 hours in her logbook, she accepted an offer from a friend to obtain her Gulfstream II rating and was certified shortly thereafter.