By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 27, 2020

In response to the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes that was released today, I am releasing a chapter on the scandals, bankruptcies, and financial problems of Trump from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  These controversies surrounding the financial and business history of the Trump Organization (which even Steve Bannon has apparently described as a “criminal enterprise”) are of greater interest in light of this new New York Times report, but they should have been of far greater, sustained interest from 2015, when Trump began his candidacy for the presidency and when most of this information was already publicly available.  This research of mine was mainly conducted and published in different forms in 2016 and 2017, though some important segments came later., and the resulting material is best understood by reading my full eBook, eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment, including Trump’s deeply relevant and deeply shady business history.  For helpful and important background on some of the figures mentioned, but not fully introduced, below—including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top Russian mafia “godfather,” Semion Mogilevich, and his intricate work in Ukraine with Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash (and his front-company Highrock) and now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team-felon Paul Manafort for Putin stooge Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, his Party of Regions and benefactor Rinat Akhmetov, and their schemes to bend Ukraine to Moscow’s will and fight pro-Western Ukrainian leader Yulia Tymoshenko; including Manafort’s work with Russian oligarch and top Putin operative Oleg Deripaska to advance Russian interests; including background on another of Putin’s top men in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk; including how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld; including interesting background on Felix Sater; including Alexander Shnaider’s ties to Russia and Ukraine, as well as those of his father-in-law, Boris Birshtein and his company Seabeco, as well as oligarch Alexander Mashkevich’s ties to all that—see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

UPDATE: Sept 29: The new New York Times second bombshell report on Trump’s finances, this one about The Apprentice TV show being a screen onto which to project Trump’s “success” amidst a reality of failure behind it, discusses a dynamic that I already noted here close to a year ago and beginning in 2016. In other words, Trump’s “success” amounted to his obtaining shady Russian-/former Soviet-linked financing, letting others take the fall in disastrous deal after disastrous deal, outlitigating anyone trying to hold him accountable, and self-promotion on The Apprentice that helped to obscure his many scandals.

Now, let’s jump into my eBook chapter and Trumpworld in the mid-2000s…

VIII. Russian and Former Soviet Money Rife with Putin Ties Came to America and Trumpworld when Trump was Hurting for Cash

Around this time, key figures in these operations in Ukraine began reaching out to U.S. lobbyists and political consultants for assistance (noted in a 2007 Wall Street Journal article by none other than Glenn Simpson, who, as mentioned earlier, testified to congressional committee staff years later on Trump’s ties to Russia). Among the interactions he and a colleague catalogued:

• Semion Mogilevich himself enlisted the services of William Sessions, a Republican who was the only FBI director to be fired… at least until Trump fired James Comey for investigating Trump and his people’s ties to Russia.  Mogilevich retained Sessions’s services at least during 2007 in an unsuccessful effort to get his criminal charges cleared with the U.S. Government and his name removed from the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.  The middleman for that particular effort was consultant Neil Livingstone, whose firm GlobalOptions employed many Russians and people from former Soviet republics (Livingstone eventually ran unsuccessfully in 2012 for the Republican nomination for the Montana governor’s race with Ryan Zinke—the Trump Administration’s disgraced and former Secretary of the Interior who resigned mired in scandal in December, 2018—as his running mate).  
• Furthermore, two-time Mississippi governor and major Republican operative Haley Barbour founded a consulting firm that in 2004 introduced Livingstone’s GlobalOptions to Firtash’s Highrock, which engaged GlobalOptions in at least two contracts, one of which was mysteriously referenced in a lawsuit involving an unnamed member of Ukraine’s government.  Notice here how Mogilevich and Firtash are working hand-in-hand, just a bit removed from each other: their modus operandi. 
• Beginning in 2003, Deripaska engaged 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole to lobby for the visa to the U.S. he was being denied because of his organized crime ties.  Manafort worked on Dole’s presidential campaign and was working with Deripaska on Putin’s agenda when Dole’s efforts were successful, briefly getting Deripaska a visa before the FBI had it revoked shortly after.

Beyond these acts, there were plenty of interesting moves made by Russians and Russian-linked characters in the 2000s that directly involved Trump and his family.

In understanding why and how the moves below were made, it is crucial to understand that by the mid-2000s, Donald Trump had been abandoned by every major Wall Street bank as an unreliable and difficult partner.  The one exception to the Wall Street bank Trump boycott was Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump some $2 billion and in recent years has been caught in massive scandals, including two major Russian money laundering scandals.  One such scam involved Deutsche orchestrating some $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that seem to have been part of an enormous Russian money laundering scheme.  New York State and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines (the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority portion of the fine is the largest that body has ever assessed) against Deutsche at the end of January, 2017, separate from a Department of Justice investigation that has stalled under Trump but is still ongoing.  It was also revealed back in March, 2017, that Deutsche was involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money for some $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, part of a massive global Russian “Laundromat” laundering scheme with many banks involving $20-$80 billion from 2010-2014, the very years of Yanukovych’s presidency in Ukraine.  Among those involved in the scheme include Russian oligarchs and the F.S.B., with some of the money in the scheme apparently being used to further Putin’s and Russia’s interests.

So, back to Trump, who was hurting for money, especially after he had to declare a bankruptcy for one of his businesses in 2004, his fifth such bankruptcy up to that point (with another still to come) and with Deutsche as one of his only sources of money.  But another other major source?  Russian and former-Soviet-republic-connected money.

Just a mere four years after the 2004 bankruptcy, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., publicly remarked that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

In other words, the 2000s were years when Donald Trump Sr. was aggressively and desperately courting Russian business and investment with few other significant options.

And that “business” and “investment” that would be done would be quite astounding: a series of spectacularly scandalous, high-profile development deals detailed below that would roughly total $1.5 billion and that would involve people, structures, and results ripe for, and attractively (perhaps best), explained by money laundering.

They would end in failure, scandal, and lawsuits.

Nearly all of these deals exploited lax regulations in the U.S., Canada, or other real estate markets.  And there are so many other crooked deals and Russians involved—over the years and continuing into his presidency, at least 3,500 lawsuits have been filed against Trump and/or his companies, by far unprecedented for any U.S. presidential nominee of a major party—that it can be overwhelming.  Just one report from Reuters noted nearly $100 million was invested by Russians (including some “politically connected” elites but not including Russian-Americans who did not purchase units using a Russian address or passport) in seven Trump properties in South Florida, and that over a third all of the units in the seven properties were owned by shell company LLCs often designed to mask their owners’ identities.  But here, we will stay focused on those players who have or will play prominent roles in our Ukraine-focused saga.

In Manhattan, Ukrainian Vasily Salygin—who would later become an official in Ukraine’s Party of Regions at the same time Manafort was advising it—would buy an apartment in Trump World Tower, among the first to do so after the skyscraper opened in 2001. This purchase would be brokered by fellow-Ukrainian Sam Kislin, who, as mentioned before, had done business with Trump decades earlier, had become particularly close to Rudy Giuliani, and was considered part of a Mogilevich Russian mafia organization by the U.S. law enforcement officials.

The Bayrock/Sater Deals: Russian-Linked, Shady Money and Colossal Failure Become Trump’s Style

Meanwhile, Kislin’s old business partner selling Trump televisions, Tamir Sapir, can be seen as a major catalyst for some of the wildest, most scandalous series of Trumpdeals covered in this entire exploration. Living in Trump Tower, Sapir had easy access to Trump and the families of the two men became friends.  In the early 2000s, Sapir would introduce Trump to Bayrock, ostensibly a real-estate firm led by Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan whose rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable.  None other than our Felix Sater was then Chief Operating Officer (and eventually the dominant force) within Bayrock, the office of which was even in Trump Tower itself.  Saterdirectly partnered with Trump repeatedly throughout this period, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. around the Russian capital in 2006 (in which capacity, he let Ivanka spin around in Putin’s chair in the Russian president’s Kremlin office) and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians.  None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through, but other massively scandalous deals with Bayrock did go further in America.

One of Bayrock’s partnerships with Trump in the U.S. in Fort Lauderdale was originally conceived of as the Trump International Beach Club.  According to a lawsuit—spearheaded by a pair of former Bayrock employees, Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam, who were seeking damages against Bayrock, Arif, and Sater, and assisted by the aforementioned attorneys Oberlander and later Lerner—Arif put up an initial $2 million in capital.  Then, the lawsuit alleges, Arif and Sater conned Elizabeth Thieriot—a friend of Arif’s who was also Sater’s landlord—by lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club.  That lawsuit claims her investment was 12 times the value of that percentage, allowing Sater and Arif to make a 1,125% profit on her investment, and that the pair committed tax and financial fraud and defrauded Thieriot of her rightful share.  Others may have been victims, too, but after she took the pair to court in 2006, it is unclear how or if the case was resolved.  The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by Trump himself in October, 2007.

Bayrock’s most prolific partnership with Trump, however, was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan.  The deal was concocted in 2006 by Trump, Sater, Arif, and Sapir.  In an arrangement specifically approved by Trump, the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its Sater/Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million for it and three additional projects—flow from Icelandic firm FL Group. 

FL Group was later linked to the Panama Papers revelations and was widely known as a hub for the money of wealthy Russians, apparently those “in favor with Putin,” according to the Kriss v. Bayrock lawsuit.  In addition, cumulonimbus-size clouds of well-founded suspicion of involvement with big-time Russian money-laundering then surrounded the incredibly deeply interconnected Icelandic financial system of which FL Group was a key part.  Financing for these four projects was also secured from Mashkevich, formerly of Mogilevich-summit host Birshtein’s Seabeco and a major business partner with Deripaska concurrent with Deripaska’s work with Manafort on behalf of Putin.  This FL Group financing happened to come at a time both when Mogilevich and his network (including Manafort) were laundering money for the massive Ukraine scheme and Deripaska seems to have been engaged in money laundering with Manafort and Gates.

The Trump SoHo deal itself was deliberately structured to cheat authorities out of tens of millions in revenue, as the investments were illegally restructured as loans to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, “loans” that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time.  Furthermore, some of the transactions involving the Trump SoHo were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the virtually certain purpose of laundering money, transactions from which Trump profited.  Specifically, there was investment for the purpose of alleged money laundering linked to Mashkevich—who, as noted, has his own separate history of alleged money laundering—involving the family of prominent Kazakh politician Viktor Khrapunov, once the mayor of Almaty. Sater has been helping federal authorities investigate Khrapunov’s alleged money laundering for years, but Sater himself was recently sued by a Kazakh Bank and the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, alleging he worked with Khrapunov’s son, Ilyas Khraphunov, to launder millions in part to help build a potential (an infamous) Trump Tower Moscow (to be discussed later).  A similar U.S. suit from the same parties targeting Viktor Khrapunov that had added information about Sater to its filings just recently had all its claims against Viktor dismissed because of the terms of a previous legal settlement. 

The bottom line is that, given all the general shadiness surrounding Trump, the Khrapunovs, Sater, Sapir, Arif, Mashkevich, and FL Group, there are plenty of reasons to be extremely suspicious of Trump SoHo’s various funding streams.     

In the end, the Trump SoHo project went terribly awry for Trump, who was sued for fraud along with his children Ivanka and Eric Trump, both of whom had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers.  In a 2011 settlement, Trump refunded 90% of the deposits for the building’s condos and the property went into foreclosure in 2014.  The Manhattan District Attorney’s office had even been building a serious criminal case against Ivanka and Eric for some two years, but, mere months after longtime-Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz discussed the matter with the Manhattan District Attorney—one of whose top donors before and after was Kasowitz himself—the D.A., Cyrus Vance, rather incriminatingly dropped the case in 2012, overruling his own prosecutors in the process and saving the Trump kids from serious legal trouble (Vance would also give Harvey Weinstein a free pass with a sexual groping allegation in 2015). As a denouement, in November, 2017, the Trump Organization was paid by the SoHo’s corporate owner—weary of the scandals and the negative attention brought on by Trump’s political career—to terminate their contract early, with the Trump Organization ending its management role and fully disassociating itself from the building by the end of the month.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, a second of the Trump/Bayrock projects with the FL Group financing was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  This second Trump/Bayrock project there, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and lead to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million.  The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule, and Sater and his Bayrock partners may have secretly cashed out their stakes in this project and the three FL Group–linked other projects in an arrangement made with FL Group equal to the initial $50 million “investment” loan.  Trump eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing both Trump and Bayrock of fraud.

As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, with Trump refusing to accept any responsibility and blaming the problems on the housing bubble bursting and the Great Recession.  Florida courts declined to rule that Trump or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court in 2016, but most of the lawsuits against Trump and his partners resulted in undisclosed settlements.  The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for a relatively mere $115 million at a foreclosure auction.

A third deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failure that never even got a concrete start. When Trump began eyeing the Phoenix, Arizona, area’s Camelback location for a luxury residential tower back in late 2003, Trump’s team, and later Trump himself, met with the mayor, who was not impressed with Trump nor the proposal.  At a January 2005 meeting, when plans were unveiled, local residents even showed up to argue against the development. Still, by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans.  It seems Sater’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough petition signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approvals, but under this public pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision anyway and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise.  At that point, Trump himself abandoned the project for at leas the stated reason of not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition.

Ernie Mennes, the owner of the Camelback property who had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/Trump developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing Sater of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” as well as of stealing money from the project.  The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of Sater’s special relationship with the federal government.  By June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to the faux $50 million “investment” by FL Group was Queens, New York, property called Waterpointe.  Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but its soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and, thus, Bayrock was fined $150,000; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe, then sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half the amount Bayrock had paid for it.

Unsurprisingly, Bayrock would later find itself facing heavy legal problems.  Emerging out of a process that began in 2008 in Delaware was a lawsuit filed with the New York State Supreme Court in May of 2013 by aforementioned former business partners of Sater’s at Bayrock—Kriss and Ejekam—against Bayrock, Sater, Arif, and their associates.  The plaintiffs sued for damages and nonpayment related to Sater’s hiding of his criminal past and what their lawsuit, moved to federal court, says was his use of Bayrock primarily as a criminal organization for criminal activities, especially alleged money laundering and fraud.  In this suit, Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and the Trump Organization are named as defendants.

The state court process removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit in a way that left unresolved their guilt, responsibility, or innocence.  The case dragged on and on, over years, but was finally settled in February, 2018, after a number of the accusations against Sater were withdrawn, but the details of the settlement have not been revealed.

Confusing?  Of course.  That likely by design.  What we do know overall is that these deals were going down at a time when Mogilevich, Manafort, Firtash, and others were involved in the Ukraine gas plot and were eager to move and allegedly launder billions of dollars out of Ukraine as part of that scheme.  Starting in late 2007, they were facing increased scrutiny from the new Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko—Yushchenko’s right-hand woman during the Orange Revolution—and her allies in the Ukrainian government.  If Sater’s father really was part of Mogilevich’s crew, as the U.S. Supreme Court writ of certiorari asserts without evidence, or if Sater was himself connected to Mogilevich, as Simpson with his legal counsel present asserted to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee staffers and after being reminded that lying to Congress is a prosecutable federal offense that can land someone up to five years in prison, then it seems highly likely that Mogilevich would have been running Ukraine gas scam money through these Bayrock deals.  If these claims of ties between Mogilevich and Sater are unfounded, Mogilevich still has some entry points—most likely Mashkevich and FL Group, but also others—into these deals besides Trump himself that could have been on his radar, too, that should also be looked into for possible money laundering related to the giant Ukraine gas scam.

It was also clear from these deals and others that Trump and the people around him were hardly rigorous vetters, let alone eager to turn down deals coming in from people with suspicious business practices and questionable, even criminal pasts tied to organized crime or to hostile foreign governments and even those governments’ intelligence agencies.  Thus, selecting Trump as either an unwitting or willing conduit for money that needed to be moved stealthily, even laundered, was pretty much a no-brainer, especially since his playboy celebrity status made it much easier to attract additional “partners” to further distract and normalize, lending an air of respectability to these murky deals.  And in all of these details, it is those additional folks who paid the biggest prices by far.

When Sater left Bayrock in 2008, none of those disastrous deals stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” even after Trump was made aware of Sater’s criminal past.  For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship with Sater, as Trump lied repeatedly in sworn testimony about it and his ties to Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them.  And there is no distancing Trump from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 lists three of the Trump-named projects discussed above before all others, lists the Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), and lists Donald Trump as its first “reference” and “Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

On top of all that, it was revealed in March of 2017 that Sater owned several shell corporations tied to Don Jr., the Trump Organization, and/or another executive with shady ties, shell companies that had sold no products, had no customers, and were ideal for money laundering.  More on Sater later… 

As for Arif, Sater’s main partner at Bayrock, he was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with, of all people, Mashkevich and apparently underage girls on board a yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part.  Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was never charged.

Trump Tower Toronto: Connecting Putin, Mogilevich, and Ukraine Even More with Donald Trump

Another scandal-ridden Trump deal would involve a major property development in Toronto. 

To understand this deal, we must go back again to Ukraine, where we left the Zaporizhstal steel mill—Ukraine’s fourth largest—in the possession of Alexander Shnaider, former Seabeco employee and son-in-law of Boris Birshtein, Seabeco’s owner and the Mogilevich-summit-host from back in 1995.  By 2006, Shnaider was turning down a $1.2 billion offer for the mill.

But in 2007, Shnaider and Trump began building the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto.  It was partly funded by Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB) of Austria, which, according to Glenn Simpson, is “the go-to bank for top-level Russian dirty stuff.”  And in 2008, FL Group conspicuously loaned Shnaider €45.8 million ostensibly for a yacht at the same time Shnaider’s former Seabeco colleague Mashkevich was also working closely with FL Group and Trump on the Bayrock projects.  After investors were slammed during the ensuing global financial crises that exploded that same year, Shnaider sought to sell his company’s near-total stake in Zaporizhstal to help finance his Trump project, which he did in 2010 for some $850 million passed through five shell companies.  The Zaporizhstal buyer was an unknown Russian acting on behalf of the Russian government and who, in turn, was funded by the Russian state-run bank VEB (Vnesheconombank), which had as the chairman of its board at that time none other than Vladimir Putin himself and which has been sanctioned because of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.  Then-Ukrainian President Yushchenko saw much of VEB’s activity in Ukraine at the time as infringing on his nation’s sovereignty and said that he tried looking into the transactions for Zaporizhstal and other privatizations of national assets, but was blocked by pro-Russian lawmakers.

Furthermore, selling Zaporizhstal to a Russian fit well into Putin’s scheme of trying to extend Russian influence over Ukraine’s industry and natural resources using Russia state-owned assets, such as Kremlin-run banks and energy companies, in tandem with the likes of oligarchs such as Dmitry Firtash and Rinat Akhmetov.  Shnaider had carried out a similar operation in Armenia with a company that ran the electrical grid there in 2002, handing it off to a Kremlin-run company and giving Russia further leverage in another former Soviet Republic.  2003 saw him pick up a steel mill in Russia, then sell it to a Russian state military subsidiary company, but was given a quarter-stake in return, making him a business partner with Putin’s government.  The pattern is clear: Shnaider was expanding Putin’s power.

It was reported by the Financial Times in mid-2018 that Shnaider was able to attract the VEB-funded Russian buyer because he had secretly agreed he would pay $100 million “commission” to “introducers” speaking for the Kremlin.  Legal filings in a dispute between Shnaider and his then-main business partner, Shifrin with whom he had bought up Zaporizhstal to begin with, suggest that some of that $100 million ended in the hands of officials in the Russian government.  The $100 million seems to have been a bribe and would make the whole Trump Tower project one huge money laundering machine.  Shifrin claims Russian officials made clear threats that his Russian holdings would be in trouble if he did not sell Zaporizhstal to them.  After the sale, VEB seems to have operated in such a way as to ensure Kremlin control over the steel mill, too.

Akhmetov had seemingly narrowly missed out on acquiring Zaporizhstal from Shnaiderback in 2010, and the $850 million price was $160 million more than Akhmetov had offered.  But in a stellar example of the amount of cross-collusion going on, of that difference, $50 million went to Akhmetov (all while Akhmetov was backing the parties to the gas scheme), $10 million to Shnaider and Shifrin’s company, and $100 million, as noted, to the “introducers.”  This deal was set up by the Ukrainian Igor Bakai, who had served in Kuchma’s government and in Naftogaz before fleeing Ukraine to Russia during the Orange Revolution.  Though the succeeding Yushchenko government wanted him for financial crimes, Moscow declined to hand him over and clearly found him useful in 2010.  A lawyer of Birshtein’s indicated in 2017 that $15 million from the Zaporizhstal sale went into the Trump Tower Toronto project, but the newer Financial Times report suggests this figure was $40 million.  After that further investment from Shnaider, Trump would earn millions through the deal. In July, 2011, just a year after Shnaider and Shifrin sold Zaporizhstal, Akhmetov was able to gain majority ownership of it, when he was a sitting member of Ukraine’s parliament with the Party of Regions.  Incidentally (or not), with just days until Trump’s 2016 electoral win, Shifrin was granted Russian citizenship.

Like the other deals discussed above, the Toronto deal fell into the same pattern of coming apart amid scandal and lawsuits from dozens of investors saying they were lied to and who are apparently still suing both Trump and Shnaider. Late in 2016, the property was placed into bankruptcy receivership, and in the summer of 2017 Trump’s stake in the project was completely bought out, his name removed from the building that July.

Rinse, Repeat for Panama

Still another massive scandal-ridden deal from this period was just exposed by an NBC News/Reuters/Global Witness joint series of exposés on the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City, Panama.  Ivanka Trump was particularly involved in this project, and Eric Trump was also involved substantively, though there is, as of yet, no evidence that shows any of the Trumps were aware of the criminality swarming their project; as usual, their best defense is that they are just incredibly stupid.  This project, which began in 2005 and opened in 2011, became a massive hub for organized crime—including the Russian mafia—to use for money laundering, as demonstrated by the overwhelming evidence presented in the reports. 

Notably, in 2007, Bear Stearns “underwrote a $220 million bond issue” that would help finance the project’s construction, less than a year before Bear Stearns’s meltdown initiated the Great Recession.

In 2011, the Trump Ocean Club’s Board of Directors voted to end Trump’s management of the building, claiming TRUMP was engaged in financial wrongdoings.  His response was to sue them and a bitter fight ensued, ending in a confidential settlement that still left Trump managing the building.  By 2013, the company Trump had partnered with to make the whole Trump Ocean Club happen was filing for bankruptcy.  The Club’s majority owners kept trying to remove Trump’s name and end his involvement entirely, which they were finally able to do in 2018—including taking physical control of the property away from Trump’s security staff with actions of a Panamanian judge and the assistance of armed police on the site—and court rulings soon after this in New York and Panama affirmed that result, paving the way for Marriott to take over management of the property later that year.  Legal filings made in June, 2019, by the majority owners who pushed out Trump even argue the Trump Organization evaded paying Panamanian taxes while running the property and claim both to have the financial records to prove evasion and that auditing by Panamanian authorities has demonstrated such tax evasion.

But the shady Trump Panama deal also has a link to our Ukraine drama.  A Ukrainian businessman named Igor Anopolskiy was involved in several companies dealing with Trump Ocean Club units and in marketing the Club’s units to Ukraine.  In 2014, he was convicted in Ukraine for forging travel documents, but had his three-year prison sentence strangely first suspended and then, in 2017, purged from his record.  Even more suspiciously, he has since 2005 been a shareholder in a Ukrainian travel agency that once had among its other shareholders one Oxana Marchenko, who, according to Global Witness, “is believed to be the wife” of Viktor Medvedchuk.

While Oxana (or Oksana) is a major Ukrainian TV personality who dabbles in Russian oil drilling through a Cyprus-based company, Medvedchuk is an even more connected individual.  He was one of Ukraine’s first post-Soviet oligarchs and in none other than the natural gas business, and by 1999 he was a close ally of then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, supporting him in tandem with Oleksandr Volkov, who at the time was funneling money from Birshtein to Kuchma and was the latter’s campaign manager, as discussed previously.  Medvedchuk later became Kuchma’s chief of staff from 2002-2005, yet also became very close with Putin’s number-two, then-Russian Prime Minister and later-President Dmitry Medvedev.  But Medvedchuk is even closer with Putin himself, who is the godfather to Medvedchuk’s and Marchenko’s daughter (Medvedev’s wife is the godmother) and has pushed for, and seen, Medvedchuk take leading roles in Ukraine’s politics.  In such roles Medvedchuk backed Yanukovych, has worked to steer Ukraine away from the West and closer to Russia, and has played a major role as a negotiating representative “for” Ukraine in major disputes with Russia on everything from gas deals to the current war. 

Clearly, there is a distinct possibility of some sort of cash flow from Ukraine into the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, and this possibility should be of keen interest to American, Ukrainian, and Panamanian officials, among others.

The Manafort, Firtash, and Mogilevich Manhattan Money Laundering Moves

As Tymoshenko moved to fight the overall Kremlin-serving gas scheme, laundering the gas-generated proceeds became even more important to the people involved.

To this end, Manafort may have engaged in money laundering, possibly including his 2006 cash purchase of a $3.675 million Manhattan Trump Tower apartment using one of the shell companies cited in Special Counsel Mueller’s October, 2017, indictment.  If that property was involved, it means a direct link between alleged money laundering that was part of Putin’s Ukraine gas plot and Trump himself. In 2008, Manafort and Gates were personally involved in moving money—alleged laundering—to the U.S. through multiple deals involving Manhattan properties, according to court documents.  Those documents detail how Manafort ran a shell corporation that was part of the machinery that pushed money into real estate deals on behalf of Firtash and their mutual allies, with Firtash in one case allegedly laundering some $25 million in an $895 million deal involving the Drake Hotel.  But that deal never came fruition, resulting a number of parties that felt cheated and defrauded.

Another major money laundering case involved the arrest of Mogilevich-linked Russian mobsters in Trump Tower itself.  A Mogilevich-outfit Russian mafia boss, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov (somewhat famous for allegedly rigging figure skating in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah to get Russians gold medals), and his lieutenants Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik were allegedly overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring.  The scheme drew rich participants and was, in part, operated out of the Trump Tower. The whole caper ended up being the subject of the recent Jessica Chastain movie Molly’s Game.  Important for our story, the gambling ring was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine and its ringleaders engaged in some $100 million in money laundering.  In 2009, Trincher purchased a Trump Tower unit just below one owned by Donald Trump himself. In his own apartment, Trincher almost held a fundraiser two years later for future-Trump-ally and bigwig Republican Newt Gingrich.  A mold problem ended up derailing the plans for the fundraiser, with a water leak being detected. Other mobsters in this overall Mogilevich cell also owned Trump properties.  Many of these folks did not escape justice in 2013 raids orchestrated by U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Preet Bharara, a noted foiler of Kremlin plots but who was later fired by Trump soon after Trump became president.  Tokhtakhounov did manage to get away, though, and was soon after a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s very own 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow. The two men arrived within minutes of each other, and it is certainly possible they interacted there.  Tokhtakhounov is regularly spotted at trendy public places in the Russian capital, easily still evading justice.

How does one make sense of so much scandal?  Just the Trump deals involving Bayrock, Toronto, and Panama alone amounted to some $1.5 billion, and there was a clear pattern with each: money connected one way or another to the Kremlin or the Russian mafia, failure, scandal, lawsuits, an overwhelming stench of money laundering, and the Trump name being removed by Trump backing out or Trump being forced out.  Taken together, it is pretty improbable that so much disaster could surround one person without a greater, deliberate purpose behind such losses, that people would risk so much money without money laundering being the real reason behind these deals.  And those deals certainly match the model of the Manafort, Gates, Firtash, and Mogilevich Manhattan money moves for Yanukovych, the Party of Regions, and Putin that were clearly money laundering, even if a court case has not yet produced a guilty verdict regarding those deals.  These were the big deals he was doing while he was rebuilding himself and using his TV show The Apprentice to build a huge national fanbase

Let us also pause here to note Trump’s direct involvement with two major financial firms—Bear Stearns and FL Group—just before they failed and were the two major catalysts for the worst global economic crises since the Great Depression.  FL Group failed spectacularly in 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks and funds.  The firm’s failure was a major factor in the collapse of Iceland’s financial sector, a collapse that served as a catalyst for the 2008 global financial crisis and America’s Great Recession.  Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close (direct and/or indirect) ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking that they were acting more out of Kremlin interests than business ones.  In the case of Bear Stearns, its collapse would be the first big domino on the U.S. side of the global financial crises and the catalyst for the U.S. Great Recession.  The Trump deals were not insignificant and were important factors in both firms’ collapses, so, it would not be without accuracy to say that Donald Trump played an important role in causing the economic crises that erupted in 2008.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindleand Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

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Originally published by Hill Reporter August 1, 2018

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), March 6, 2019

See related article: Cohen’s Shady Family Business Dealings’ Unexplored Links to Key Trump-Russia Figures Demand Scrutiny

AMMAN — To many people following the Trump-Russia investigation for the start, it might be surprising that Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump “lawyer” and soldier, and Paul Manafort, a longtime Republican operative, political wizard for a rogue’s gallery of dictators over decades, and Campaign Chairman for Trump’s campaign during arguably the most crucial stretch of 2016, would become two of the most significant current centers of gravity in the Trump-Russia investigations.

But to those who have been paying close attention, this is not surprising at all (I’ve been writing about Manafort for over two years and Cohen for over a year).  And their specific work that raises significant concerns about Kremlin attempts to co-opt Trump and people close to him over the years overlaps in meaningful ways, an overlap that has generally been overlooked, but that merits a closer inspection.

Currently, Cohen is the subject of “many” inquiries that have been ongoing for months, and it seemed as though he could have been arrested at any moment. Now, Cohen seems both to have turned on Trump and to be cooperating with authorities (rather enthusiastically, it seems, with Team Cohen releasing a profoundly relevant and incriminating conversation of a private conversation with Trump and more potential tapes on the way). Cohen’s apparent change of heart occurred after he started feeling as if Trump betrayed him and left him out to dry, taking his loyalty for granted.

Meanwhile, Manafort is, yet again, being further investigated and is locked up in jail because of his attempts to obstruct justice and tamper with witnesses with the assistance of his old long-time colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik, U.S. officials, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller, assert was (and may still be) a Russian military intelligence operative, and is now starting what looks to be a grueling trial in federal court in Virginia, with another trial set to begin in Washington in September.

But one must go back decades to correctly understand why both Cohen and Manafort are so central to the Trump-Russia probe.  And no, this is not about the surprisingly and impressively graceful and tenacious pornstar Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels), who, if anything, has received a disproportionate amount of coverage that has drowned out some of the deeper, more complex aspects of the Trump-Russia scandal.

*****

In the 1980s, Donald Trump bought some 200 televisions for one of his hotels from an electronics store run by Semyon “Sam” Kislin and Tamir Sapir, immigrants from the then-Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Georgia, respectively.  Their store was a known hot-spot for senior government officials, spies, and politicians all from the Soviet Union.

Sapir may have (once) been part of or even come to the U.S. secretly working for the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied). Rumors swirled around the sources of his extremely unlikely and massive wealth.  One of his primary business partners pled guilty to longtime scams with the Gambino Crime family.

As for Sapir’s partner, as I noted in more detail previously, Kislin was a longtime ally of Rudolph Giuliani: a prolific repeat donor to the future-Trump-ally’s mayoral campaigns, with Giuliani as mayor even appointing Kislin to his economic council where he served until Giuliani’s final year as mayor. Kislin would also later serve on another of the city’s economic advisory groups.  By at least the mid-1990s, U.S. authorities believed Kislin had helped launder millions for the Russian mafia, had helped bring in a suspected hired assassin to America, and specifically had been linked by the FBI to Vyacheslav Ivankov’s Russian mob crew based in Brighton Beach as a “member or associate.”

Ivankov—one of the Russian mafia’s top men in America—lived in Trump Tower, had the Trump Organization’s private contact numbers in his address book, and also loved frequently spending time—along with other Russian mobsters at Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, NJ.

Ivankov reported to Russian mafia “boss of bosses” Semion Mogilevich, perhaps the most powerful mobster in the world today, a financial mastermind known for long-term schemes, a top concern of the FBI for decades, and a longtime-friend and ally of current Russia President Vladimir Putin, who shields him to this day from U.S. (and other) authorities.

Mogilevich set up a front company in America in 1995 that would perpetrate a massive stock fraud worth $150 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Its ostensible “CEO” was Jacob Bogatin, who made repeated donations in this role to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Jacob’s brother, David Bogatin, had served in the Soviet Army in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, targeting U.S. aircraft.  By the mid-1980s, Bogatin had purchased five Trump Tower apartments that Trump had personally sold to him. By 1990s, he was also a key soldier for Mogilevich.

A man that a U.S. Supreme Court petition for a writ of certiorari alleges was another Mogilevich lieutenant, Mikhael Sheferovsky, had a son, Felix Sater, who, even without his father’s possible relationship with Mogilevich (which Felix denies), ended up having his own ties to the Russian mafia.

Sater was involved in a massive stock fraud and money laundering scheme worth tens of millions. Sater ran his illegal operation in the mid-1990s from an office in none-other-than-Trump-owned 40 Wall Street. It’s well-known that Sater’s plan involved the Russian mafia, but it is not publicly known if Mogilevich was involved. If Mogilevich were involved, it would hardly be surprising because of his involvement in similar stock fraud and money laundering in the U.S. and Canada during the same period.

Many details of Sater’s case remain sealed because he later mysteriously cooperated with the U.S. government on national security issues in a deal made on the government’s side by Andrew Weissmann, then a federal prosecutor and now a key member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

Glenn Simpson (a Fusion GPS opposition research lead investigator on numerous Russian cases including Trump’s connections to Russia and the infamous Prevezon/Magnitsky case, discussed later) also testified to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee staff that Sater has strong ties to the Mogilevich crew. Specifics on which basis Simpson is alleging this are not clear.

Sater also grew up in Brighton Beach—a neighborhood notorious for being a Russian mafia enclave—and had a friend since childhood from that neighborhood whose uncle ran a catering establishment in New York then popular with Russian mafia figures.  That friend was Michael Cohen, the same Michael Cohen close to Trump and at the center of the Stormy Daniels saga.

*****

Mogilevich was hardly only focused on North America.  In 1995, he attended a major summit for Eastern European mafia bosses in Tel Aviv hosted by Boris Birshtein, a Russian émigré living in Canada who ran a number of ostensible businesses under the Seabeco name.  The main agenda was laying out plans for their Ukrainian operations.

Not long after, Mogilevich would be making major moves in Ukraine’s energy sector.

Those moves were all related to corrupt relationships and arrangements with Ukraine’s pro-Russian (then-)President Leonid Kuchma, who was close with Putin and other major Ukrainian politicians. At one point, $5 million was delivered by Birshtein and his Seabeco associates to Kuchma’s campaign manager, Oleksandr Volkov, known for his ties to Russian organized crime. Volkov also just happened to be Seabeco’s representative in Ukraine.

Meeting at Birshtein’s Seabeco and working for it throughout the 1990s were two men who would come to dominate large parts of Kazakhstan’s natural resource sector and forge very close ties with that country’s corrupt political leadership as two members of a corrupt Kazakh “Trio” of oligarchs, one being Alexander Mashkevich.

At the same time, Russian-born Canadian Alexander Shnaider also began working for Seabeco in 1991 while in law school; he would eventually marry his boss’s daughter, Simona Birshtein, and he rose quickly in Seabeco’s steel sector.  Shnaider and a partner would later found a company that began aggressively buying up the Ukrainian government’s shares in Ukraine’s fourth-largest steel mill, Zaporizhstal.

Also in Ukraine was Ukrainian businessman Viktor Topolov. By the late 1990s, Topolov’s construction company was allegedly employing multiple Russian mobsters, including as a “vice president” Leonid Roytman, whom the FBI has found to be a Mogilevich-associated (confessed) hitman and who said that the company regularly functioned to set up mafia meetings.

It seems Topolov was also involved in a scandal involving alleged money laundering and embezzling with Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz, the giant Russian state gas company Gazprom, and a Ukrainian football team named CSKA Kiev.  The football team was managed by Topolov until he handed it off to Andrii Artemenko in 1999. Artemenko was himself involved in, and later took much of the fall for, the laundering/embezzling scandal.

*****

In the 2000s, these relationships would explode into billions of dollars in scandal and shake the foundations of a nation.

By at least 2000, Ukraine’s President Kuchma seemed to tacitly approve of, or at least not try to block, whatever designs Mogilevich had for Ukraine and was also aware both of the mafia don’s longstanding relationship with Putin and that the two were already plotting something big for Ukraine.

Kuchma tried to fix the 2004 Ukrainian election to install his chosen successor Viktor Yanukovych, and the well-known 2004-2005 Orange Revolution thwarted this election fraud.  The disgraced Yanukovych needed a political rebirth, and it was none other than Paul Manafort, who was brought in to help him try to beat the Orange Revolution and then to rehabilitate him.  With his deputy Rick Gates, Manafort was effectively the political manager for Yanukovych and his political party, the Party of Regions.

Essentially, Putin would arrange to have Gazprom sell natural gas cheaply to Firtash, who ran the relevant intermediary company called RosukrEnergo (RUE), and Firtash would then generally sell that gas to Ukraine at much higher rates.  The profits would then be laundered by Mogilevich and others and used both to bribe Ukrainian politicians to do Russia’s bidding and to fund Yanukovych and his party.

Manafort and Gates even allegedly worked directly with Firtash to launder some of this money into fraudulent Manhattan real estate deals using shady shell companies.

One of the shell companies mentioned in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of Manafort (John Hannah LLC) is the same one Manafort used in 2006 for a cash purchase of a $3.675 million Trump Tower apartment, raising a distinct possibility the property was used for Ukraine-related money laundering.

Manafort and Gates also partnered with close Putin ally and Russian aluminum oligarch-billionaire Oleg Deripaska on various projects serving Russia’s and/or Putin’s interests and funneling Yanukovych’s private fortune and those of his inner circle away from prying eyes.

Over the years, Manafort would end up owing Deripaska no less than a staggering $60 million.

Also at this time, from 2004-2007, future-Trump-campaign-advisor and repeated FISA superstar Carter Page advised both Gazprom and another Russian state-owned energy company—RAO UES—all the way on the other end of this massive Ukrainian gas scam, making it highly unlikely he was not at least partly aware of what was going on.

Michael Cohen would also become heavily involved in Ukraine in the 2000s. Cohen started his business career as a personal injury lawyer, then pursued some other business interests that ended in dozens of lawsuits and involved mafia-linked associates.  Both he and his brother, Bryan Cohen, married Ukrainian women, Bryan marrying Oksana Oronov, daughter of Alex Oronov, a “longtime” business partner of Mogilevich-linked Topolov (linked to the earlier alleged money laundering that had involved Gazprom and the Kiev soccer team), who had now become a powerful Ukrainian politician.

Together, the Cohens, Alex Oronov, and Topolov all joined a Ukrainian ethanol business venture.  In 2006, the Cohen brothers personally tried to convince Americans to invest in building a factory for the business and failed to do so, though they did meet Topolov in the process. Others funded the investment to the tune of millions, and no ethanol was produced at the factory.  All this was at the same time that the Ukrainian gas scheme and money laundering of Mogilevich and Manafort were in full effect.

Going back to Sam Kislin, after his work with Giuliani, in the early 2000s, he brokered a deal for a condo in Trump World Tower for Vasily Salygin, who would soon become an official in Ukraine’s Party of Regions at the same time Manafort was running its political affairs and then some.

Around this time, Kislin’s old partner Sapir—who now owned a $5 million apartment in Trump Tower, with Trump calling Sapir and his family “great friends”—introduced Trump to Bayrock, ostensibly a real-estate firm led by Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan whose rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable.

The earlier-introduced Sater now enters Trump’s orbit as the COO of Bayrock, the office of which was even located in Trump Tower. Sater now famously partnered with Trump (and sometimes his children Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr.) in a series of potential deals (including the infamous Trump Tower Moscow with his old friend Cohen) and actual deals, most of which ended in disaster, failure, lawsuits, and scandal, with hundreds of millions in losses.

The most famous of the actual deals was the Trump SoHo, and none other than Alexander Mashkevich was one of its chief financiers.  By this time, Mashkevich was also a dominant player in aluminum and orchestrated a huge aluminum deal with Deripaska in 2004 at a time when Deripaska’s relationship with Manafort was taking off, while the other two members of Mashkevich’s Kazakh “Trio” had been dealing with Gazprom.

Four specific deals, SoHo included, of Bayrock’s that had been signed-off on by Trump personally received $50 million in “financing” from an Icelandic firm—FL Group—known as a hub for Russian investors, investors apparently linked to Putin and money laundering. FL Group’s $50 million investment was illegally structured as a “loan” designed to cheat governments of taxes and helped precipitate some of FL Group’s woes that led to its meltdown, which helped spark the 2008 global financial crises.

Sater was the point man for these deals, which were alleged, in a settled-in-late-February long-running lawsuit, of being RICO money-laundering scams.

Meanwhile, back in Ukraine, by 2001, Shnaider and his business partner had acquired a 93 percent stake in Zaporizhstal for some $70 million. They managed the deal at a time when steel was the country’s most significant industry, accounting for about 25% of Ukraine’s GDP.  By 2006, Shnaider was turning down a $1.2 billion offer for the mill.

Then came 2007, when Shnaider partnered with Trump to begin building the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto.  And in 2008, FL Group conspicuously loaned Shnaider €45.8 million ostensibly for a yacht at the same time Shnaider’s former Seabeco partner Mashkevich was also working with FL Group and Trump on the Bayrock projects.

After investors were pounded during the ensuing global financial crises that exploded that same year, Shnaider sought to sell his company’s near-total stake in Zaporizhstal to help finance his Trump project, which he did in 2010 for some $850 million through five shell companies.  His buyer was an unknown Russian acting on behalf of the Russian government and who, in turn, was funded by the Russian state-run bank VEB (Vnesheconombank), and the chairman of its board at that time was Vladimir Putin himself.  Subsequent chairman Sergei Gorkov, a graduate of the F.S.B.’s academy, would meet Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in December 2016, just after Trump’s victory against Clinton and while the bank was under U.S. sanctions because of the war in Ukraine).

Zaporizhstal fit well into Putin’s and Mogilevich’s scheme of trying to extend Russian influence over Ukraine’s industries and natural resources.  Yanukovych financier Akhmetov had apparently narrowly missed out on acquiring Zaporizhstal from Shnaider back in 2010 but was able to gain majority ownership in July 2011, when he was a sitting member of Ukraine’s parliament with the Party of Regions.

Like the other deals discussed above, the Toronto deal fell into the same pattern of coming apart amid scandal and lawsuits from dozens of investors saying they were misled and who are still suing both Trump and Shnaider.

Still another massive scandal-ridden deal from this period involves the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City, Panama, which began in 2005, with the Tower opening in 2011.  To get to that point, in 2007, Bear Stearns “underwrote a $220 million bond issue” that would help finance the project’s construction, less than a year before Bear Stearns’s meltdown (along with FL Group’s) initiated the global financial crises of 2008.

(Pause: This means that scandalous Trump projects were major catalysts in the two main corporate collapses that were themselves the catalysts for the global financial crises!)

The Panama project involved Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, drug cartels, the Russian mafia, and a Ukrainian businessman named Igor Anopolskiy, who has strong financial ties to Oxana Marchenko, apparently the same Marchenko who is the wife of Viktor Medvedchuk…

Medvedchuk was one of Ukraine’s first post-Soviet oligarchs (and in none other than the natural gas business), and by 1999 he was an important ally of then-Ukrainian President Kuchma, supporting him in partnership with Volkov, who at the time was funneling money from Birshtein to Kuchma as previously discussed.  Medvedchuk later became Kuchma’s chief of staff from 2002-2005 and also became very close with Putin’s number-two, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.  But he is even closer with Putin himself, who is godfather to Medvedchuk’s and Marchenko’s daughter (Medvedev’s wife is the godmother).

Putin has pushed for and seen Medvedchuk take leading roles in Ukraine’s politics.  In such positions, Medvedchuk helped Yanukovych, has worked to steer Ukraine away from the West and closer to Russia, and has played a significant role as a negotiating representative “for” Ukraine in major disputes with Russia on everything from gas deals to the current war.  He was also one of the first officials sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea for his role in that affair. That same year Medvedchuk met Manafort whom Medvedchuk has praised as “the best, both among foreign and domestic political consultants,” which makes the fact that Medvedchuk was reported to be in contact with the Trump campaign during 2016 concerning “U.S.-Russia cooperation” unsurprising yet still very troubling.

Even now, a prostitute in a Thai Jail has been exposed by suppressed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny as being connected with Oleg Deripaska. She was with him, and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko, who is a big-time foreign policy guy in the Kremlin, on a yacht at the height of the 2016 election, shortly before Manafort had offered to brief Deripaska on Trump’s campaign (presumably) on behalf of Putin.  The prostitute, known as “Nastya Rybka,” recorded video of Deripaska and Prikhodko talking about Russian relations with the U.S., and noted more such interactions in writing.

Rybka is threatening to share damning evidence she claims to have—including audio recordings she claims proves collusion between Manafort, Deripaska, and Prikhodko to interfere in the U.S. election. Rybka has asked the U.S. for asylum and protection from Russian authorities in exchange for the information she says she can offer.

If only Deripaska had a fixer like Michael Cohen, who apparently allegedly regularly paid women who had extramarital sexual affairs with Trump (and at least one other significant Republican Party figure, Elliott Broidy) to be quiet and go away.

Outside a courtroom in mid-April of this year in which the business inside centered on criminal inquiries into his own business dealings, Cohen took time to share cigars with Rotem Rosen and other friends.

Rosen married Tamir Sapir’s daughter, Zina Sapir, in 2007 at a ceremony hosted by Donald Trump himself at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and the next year, Trump and Kushner attended the newlywed couple’s bris for their newborn.

Rosen was the longtime right-hand man of Lev Leviev, a famous Israeli diamond oligarch from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.  Leviev is close and, it seems, a friend to Vladimir Putin, but also is close with the Sapirs, Deripaska, and (another) Russian aluminum oligarch named Roman Abramovich, who is himself close to Putin and was apparently the first to recommend Putin to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a successor.  Abramovich owns the UK club football team Chelsea, and until recently lived in the UK. Following Russia’s shocking recent Skripal chemical nerve agent attack on British soil, the UK declined to renew Abramovich’s visa, and he made aliyahto Israel, instantly becoming that nation’s wealthiest citizen).

When former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who had been talking on tape about Putin’s “good relationship” with Mogilevich, among other things, was assassinated with radioactive material in the UK in 2006 on the orders of the Kremlin (not that different from the Skripal poisoning), he was helping both British and Spanish intelligence look into money laundering and organized crime ties surrounding Abramovich.

Ivanka has been very close with Dasha Zhukova, Abramovich’s wife during this period (they separated in mid-2017, and Abramovich has since curiously been spotted with Polina Deripaska, Oleg’s “estranged” wife) for over a decade (introduced, interestingly, by Wendi Deng, then Rupert Murdoch’s wife and more recently a rumored lover/girlfriend of, yes, Vladimir Putin).  Abramovich became acquainted with both Kushner and Ivanka as a result.

His and Putin’s friend Leviev, whose company’s U.S. operations were headquartered at Trump’s 40 Wall St. property (where Sater ran his 1990s’ massive scam), was a business partner of Denis Katsyv, scion of a Putin ally, through Katsyv’s company Prevezon. Their dealings were at the heartof the whole Magnitsky money laundering and Russian sanctions saga that, in turn, led to the infamous June 2016, Trump Tower meeting hosted by Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Jr. with a variety of Russian operatives with deep Kremlin connections.

Leviev later conducted a major business deal with Kushner in 2015 and financing from Deutsche Bank related to that deal is under scrutiny by federal authorities. Deutsche also helped finance Donald Trump for years when few other banks would, and financed the Prevezon deal between Katsyv and Leviev. The Prevezon deal later became the subject of a settled civil case from the local U.S. Attorney’s office and is still the subject of a criminal probe there (a piece I wrote on Prevezon/Magnitsky was even censored in Russia). “Magnitsky” has since become synonymous with a human-rights crusade against Putin, and his Kremlin allies carried out by one Bill Browder, who has been a repeated target of Putin and Russian authorities as a result.

Another money laundering case of note involved the arrest of Mogilevich-linked Russian mobsters in Trump Tower when local boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and his minions Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik were allegedly overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring. The ring targeted wealthy clientele and was, in part, operated out of the building (and was the subject of the recent Jessica Chastain movie Molly’s Game).  The gambling ring was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling, its ringleaders also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering.

In 2009, Trincher bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by Donald Trump, in which Trincher nearly held a fundraiser for future-Trump-ally Newt Gingrich two years later. The fundraiser never occurred after a mold problem, and a water leak was detected. Other mobsters in the outfit also owned Trump properties.  The minions did not escape justice in 2013 raids orchestrated by Preet Bharara (later fired by Trump), but Tokhtakhounov did and was soon after a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant. The two men arrived within minutes of each other, and it is certainly possible they interacted there in Moscow, a city where, to this day, Tokhtakhounov is regularly spotted at trendy public places.

*****

Meanwhile, Manafort’s and Gates’ work led to the triumphant rise of Yanukovych’s Party Of Regions and of Yanukovych’s ascent to Ukraine’s presidency in 2010.  Ultimately, the gas scam that empowered those wins precipitated the 2014 (Euro)Maidan revolution, the ouster of Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and today’s civil war in Ukraine.  At this time, Manafort and Gates were lobbying the U.S. government to improve the corrupt image of Yanukovych’s government, and it was for lying about this work that Alexander van der Zwaan, son-in-law of major Putin-linked Russian oligarch billionaire German Khan, was sentenced in April, the first defendant in Mueller’s Russia probe sentenced to time in prison.

After Trump’s presidential win and eleven days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Cohen met with a Russian oligarch close to Putin and the Kremlin named Viktor Vekselberg, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to Putin’s hostile actions. The two men discussed Russian-American relations in Trump Tower in New York; probably not coincidentally, a company of Vekselberg’s ended up sending Cohen substantial sums of money amounting to more than half a million dollars.

A diplomatic episode from the beginning of Trump’s presidency ties all this together.  Early in 2017, Cohen teamed up with his old friend Sater and Topolov’s old associate Artemenko from the alleged Gazprom-related laundering scam in an unofficial diplomatic meeting in Manhattan regarding Ukraine. This meeting was organized by Alex Oronov, whom Artemenko described in March 2017 as a “partner, mentor, teacher and friend.” His statement was made shortly after Oronov had mysteriously died.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a “peace” plan for Ukraine that had support from senior Putin aides, one that would cede to Russia official control over Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed with a 50 or 100-year “lease.”  At the meeting were also discussed ways to undermine Ukraine’s current anti-Putin president, Petro Poroshenko.  Cohen personally delivered the proposal to National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who had attended a Russian gala dinner in 2015 while seated at Putin’s table, which was next to Vekselberg’s table. Flynn would later resign from Trump’s team because of his Russian entanglements that would then lead to his indictment by the Special Counsel.

Such excellent Ukraine work assisting Russian interests would have made Manafort proud, and Manafort may even have played a role in it.  Manafort few to Europe in July, 2013, on a private plane owned by a company co-founded by Artemenko’s father, and Manafort made at least 19 trips to Kiev in the 20 months after Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014 to work for the Opposition Bloc, Artemekno’s party and the successor to the Party of Regions, even possibly partnering with Medvedchuk.

Soon after the last trip, he and Gates joined the Trump campaign, just in time for the campaign to defang the Republican Party Platform’s harsh language on Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Cohen’s work on the 2017 “peace plan” would, had it been adopted, have been the long-worked-for culmination of over a decade of work by Manafort and Gates. This “peace plan” would have basically put an official stamp of approval on the latest in the long series of Putin, Yanukovych, Medvedchuk, and their whole crew’s efforts to enforce Russian domination of Ukraine through corruption, politics, lobbying, laundering, annexation, and war. Russia’s any means necessary approach was often orchestrated in no small part by Manafort.

With Manafort sidelined by the clouds hanging over his head, Cohen, along with his old friend Sater, were virtual representatives of Manafort, both in agenda and in spirit, ready to carry the pro-Russian torch Manafort had so diligently carried steadfastly for so long.

What is clear at a minimum is that an awful lot of people with deep ties to the Russian government, the Russian mafia, especially to Mogilevich, and involvement in (sometimes alleged) money laundering surround both Cohen and Manafort in profound, sustained ways. Those ties also appear to pertain directly to their relations to Trump the businessman, Trump the candidate, and Trump, the president.  At worst, this could go way beyond collusion.

In particular, large-scale involvement by a network of Russian operatives ties dealings in Ukraine to dealings in America, suggesting some sort of coordinated effort by a network spanning continents and oceans.  This network and the way it engaged Trump and his (future) people for years—all out there for those willing to give them the time and scrutiny they deserve—have been woefully undercovered by major American news outlets, with too little coverage and too little depth, often just scratching surface layers and eschewing the core while foregoing any deeper, larger-picture analysis, perhaps mentioning in a major article or two, but failing to connect the dots or revisit when another look is warranted.

If this all looks suspicious to you, we can be sure it all looks suspicious to Mueller, and that he is being more thorough than the news media or most Republicans in Congress.

Manafort and Cohen are at the center of this saga, now more than ever, with law enforcement zooming in on their activities ever more closely with each passing day, getting closer to the truth, far closer than the myopia of the journalistic and editorial class has allowed the news media to reach.

This overlap in pro-Russia work and connections between Manafort and Cohen would be as good a place to start as any if the news media is to unearth the deeper layers of this story and help voters be armed with a far larger sense of the truth than that which has been presented thus far as they consider their votes in the coming midterms and beyond.

Adapted in part from author’s earlier work published on July 31^st, 2016, November 4^th, 2016,March 28^th, 2017, and July 27^th, 2017.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related article: Cohen’s Shady Family Business Dealings’ Unexplored Links to Key Trump-Russia Figures Demand Scrutiny

Also see how Manafort and Cohen fit into the larger Trump-Russia saga and an explanation of the below chart in article: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

A deep look at the Clinton vs. Sanders fight: the history, the present, and a path forward. Sanders never had more than the slimmest of chances. Besides never winning over even close to a majority of the Democratic constituency on a state-by-state basis, Sanders also failed to understand even the basics of politics, which is more than just haranguing special interests and saying what you think with no filter. Clinton knows this, and it is a big part of how and why she has accomplished more in her career than Sanders. Ultimately, if you don’t share the same beliefs as the political party you want to lead and don’t know how to play the game of politics, you won’t be successful, no matter how much you and your supporters would love to ignore the game. But the game is part of reality, part of politics, and part of winning. And, like in sports, in politics, winning is not only everything, it’s the only thing. It doesn’t mean you need to sell your soul, but it does mean that the model Sanders has laid out is both naive and ineffective, even more so in a general election. Still, we come here not only to criticize, but to both praise and bury the Sanders campaign.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 29, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) April 29th, 2016 

CNN/NBC News

AMMAN — Now is a critical time for the Democratic Party. There are two candidates vying for the presidential nomination of the Party. One is Hillary Clinton, very active in Democratic politics for almost half a century since her rejection of Republican ideology in 1968, coming after her days as a “Goldwater Girl” and being raised by a very conservative father, a political transformation she underwent during her days as an undergraduate at Wellesley College.

The other is Bernie Sanders.

*****

How We Came to This Point

The official Senate page listing all the senators of the 114th Congress does not list Bernie Sanders as a (D) for Democrat, but as an (I), displaying his status as an independent. Bernie’s own Senate website still proudly states that he is “the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history,” in his “About” section. As a non-Democratic who in twenty-five years in the House and Senate combined refused to declare himself as or officially become a member of the Democratic Party, and who proudly maintained his independence as a democratic socialist, he has clearly, beyond any reasonable doubt, failed to take over the Democratic Party as a shining outsider white knight he had hoped to be, an outsider that would have forced the Party hard and far to the left. And it was a Democratic Party that he only just joined (apparently) in time for this election season, but one for which for he so long clearly harbored disdain.

Listening to his rhetoric on the campaign trail, he clearly still harbors this disdain, playing a delicate balancing act of repeatedly decrying “The Political Establishment” that favors Clinton while simultaneously seeking its approval and endorsement (even to the degree of trying to get superdelegates to switch their support from Clinton to him), a contradiction that increasingly has not gone unnoticed. 

Despite his surprising early success (a near-tie in Iowa and a resounding, crushing victory in New Hampshire), it has been clear to those willing to look at the hard numbers of electorate beliefs and trends, supported by masses of polling and social science research, from quite early in the race that Sanders’ ability to win the diverse type of constituency necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination was practically nonexistent. As I noted before, this precise moment came in Nevada, when Hillary Clinton won by staggeringly dominant support from African Americans and Latinos. Prior to this win, the polling data already heavily confirmed that Sanders’ core of support consisted of white liberals and young people, a core nowhere near large enough win the majority of the overall national Democratic constituency. The main question was as to if Sanders’ very strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire would give African Americans and Latinos pause enough to consider, and then vote for, Sanders in large enough numbers for him to win the nomination. The Nevada contest on February 20th, coming just a week before South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic base would vote in its contest, and that coming just a few days before (the first) Super Tuesday contests that would award the most delegates in any single day and that would include most of South, with its heavily black Democratic constituency and with Texas and its huge Latino constituency, was Bernie’s one chance to show he could win over a diverse coalition of support before the South Carolina and the rest of the South would create a reality of, votes, delegates, numbers, and probabilities that would effectively end his candidacy in all practical terms if he failed to do so. 

After all, the laws of human behavior show that if a certain demographic of people favor one candidate generally by more than 4 to 1 (African Americans) or more than 2 to 1 (Latinos), those ratios will not switch in a matter days and weeks in the absence of some sort of remarkable event.

Such an event never happened in the run up to Nevada, and it has not since.  Clinton was not indicted by the FBI in relation to her e-mail scandal, a probability that might have even been lower than Sanders’ miniscule chances of winning the nominations, nor did she suffer a dramatic collapse or series of gaffes. On Sanders’ side, he stubbornly failed to tailor or alter his message in any significant way to appeal to new groups who had thus far not bought into it. Aggressively trying to court African Americans on his terms, not theirs, was never a sound strategy.

Sanders’s Ideological Disconnect

Yet it is a hallmark of his idealist, socialist, even pseudo-Marxist theories of social change that maintain if only the masses were educated in the right ideology, they would largely come on board and support the revolution (never mind that time and time again people have proven this theory wrong, from Russia to China and elsewhere). “Educating voters” was a phrase Sanders and his supporters constantly used when explaining how a conservative country like the United States would suddenly elect a socialist president despite a fierce, visceral opposition to socialism among huge swaths of voters, particularly many millions of voters in key, populous battleground swing states that are crucial for victory in November. Like many Russians, Yugoslavs, and others before them, African Americans are not receptive to ideas of Bernie’s socialist “political revolution,” its prospects even far dimmer than his sliver of a chance at winning the nomination. If Sanders can’t win over such staunch Democrats, how will more conservative non-Democrats and Republicans respond to his message?

In constant use of phrases like “political revolution” and “educate the American people,” Sanders, like most ideologues, demonstrates his disconnect with—even war against—reality. For the ideologue, data, facts, context, research, all matter little; ideas, inspiration, and ideals are what matter most; and yet, that is why the vast majority of ideologically-driven revolutions have failed miserably and have often descended into mass-murder of the very masses the revolutions are ostensibly designed to save after these masses speak out and say “no, thank you,” to revolution. 

Of course, Bernie Sanders and his movement are not violent like the Bolsheviks, Maoists, or Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

But there are similarities in mentality. 

That’s why the nickname applied to Sanders supporters of Sandernistas is so apropos; the revolutionary Nicaraguan Sandinistas were also self-styled populist “democratic socialists.”

One similarity that I’ve already noted is the arrogance of belief that most people are simply with them, a belief that is simply an assumption and not based on any wider research and is based at best on anecdotal experiences. Another similarity in mentality is that those who disagree must have been brainwashed. Still another is that every single power structure or mainstream institution is nefariously stacked against them. There are not rational people, institutions, or credible authorities that disagree with the revolutionary ideals and plans, these ideologues say, because the powers that be have either warped or bribed the vast majority of policy, political, and economic experts and academics, as well any non-“alternative” news media (“alternative” meaning media that is for the revolution, its plan and ideals, not critical of them). And Mayor of Burlington Bernie Sanders in the 1980s vigorously supported the Sandinistas, even arranging to have their TV programming broadcast on Burlington’s local public-access cable stations.

Rob Swanson/File

The idea that thinking people can either rationally disagree or rationally conclude that such ideas might be nice but are not practical on a variety of levels simply does not occur to the ideologue. In my many exchanges with Bernie Sanders supporters, I have to yet to hear or watch or read, or even see from the candidate himself, any kind of thought-out, intelligent, detailed, worthwhile response to this concept of rational disagreement. Instead, the response is snark and slogans, castigation and conspiracy theories, as if somehow, to question Bernie Sanders (!) even on his quest for the presidency automatically makes us somehow deficient, all the while these ideologues never question their own deficiency when it comes to anything regarding the nuts and bolts of actual governance. This campaign has, among too many of Sanders’ followers, become something of a messianic cult, where the messiah is come and if you don’t get it you’re part of Team Devil. And, to a degree, the contempt that Sanders’ supporters have for anyone who disagrees with them—regardless of how rational the disagreement’s basis is—is mirrored, though more politely if still quite rudely, by the candidate himself.

Decoding the Debate

This contempt was on full display in the last Democratic debate, but has hardly been limited to just that stage.

AP Photo/Seth Wenig

Without a doubt, that latest Democratic debate in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (you can watch the full debate here) was the most spirited, eventful debate on the Democratic side yet: nasty, full of contrasts, and even with a few big surprises. But like all the other debates, in which Hillary Clinton had commanding leads in some sort of combination of delegates, votes, and polls, this debate once again featured a Bernie Sanders that needed to do something dramatic to alter the dynamics of the race to have even a prayer of a chance of winning the nomination, and, once again, that he failed to do.

It wasn’t for trying or lack of trying, but, as has often been the case with Sanders, the level of effort and level of strategic and tactical planning did not match each other. Both candidates were claiming that New York state was their home turf: Sanders, with his thick Brooklyn accent and his youth spent growing up in Brooklyn, and Clinton, with her service as a New York’s Senator from 2001-2009 and living in the state since those days up through the present day. Sanders made the calculation that perhaps he could afford to be, by far, his most aggressive and condescending yet to Clinton, perhaps feeling that NY would, in the end, prove to be more his home state than hers. He was snide, dismissive, and sarcastic; he laughed at her, mocked her, repeatedly used sarcasm; his body language and motions all evening were hostile, with him contorting his face constantly in expressions of derision and amusement while Clinton was talking (she, conversely, was often calm and stoic while he spoke) and literally pointing his finger at her incessantly, wagging and waving it at her invasively, raising it often while she was still talking, interrupting her, too (not that she did not interrupt him a few times as well). He was hypocritical in his modes of attack (her tiny amounts of fossil fuel industry contributions that her campaign and PACs received are, apparently, fair game, but not the small amount of high per-capita guns coming from Vermont into New York City; her votes should be viewed in black and white, his with respect to his environment and details). He even questioned her motives, again—what has been a staple of the Sanders campaign—implying that Clinton is a corrupt hack, bought and sold by her special interest donors, without actually directly leveling the accusation. Apart from interrupting Sanders, Clinton did none of these things. She stuck to a more elevated tone and to the issues, and did not question his motives for voting on gun issues the way he did with her even though he did not return the favor on other issues. 

Some would say because Bernie did not attack Hillary on the e-mail and  Benghazi issues that this is somehow him taking the high road, an example of his being exceptionally civil. I find that to be wholly unconvincing; unlike Republicans, Democrats do not see these issues as either terribly substantive or evidence that Clinton did something seriously wrong. Like most politicians, Sanders decided to attack Clinton where he could gain points for doing so; in a Democratic nomination contest with mainly Democrats voting, that was on issues of campaign contributions and super PACS, not on what Republicans were throwing at her. If anything, Bernie holding back on the e-mails and Benghazi is a just sign that Democratic voters would not have responded well to such attacks. Had he gone down that road, Bernie would have looked and sounded just like the desperate Republicans have if he had attacked her on those issues; it would have hurt Brand Bernie. So no, Bernie didn’t avoid those lines of attack out of charity and kindness; it was in his interests not to come off sounding like Republicans. When the topic resounds with the Democratic base, he has been happy to attack Clinton.

Conversely, I have not heard Clinton attack Bernie Sanders for broadcasting Sandinista propaganda in Burlington, for how he campaigned during the Vietnam War to reduce the American military to “local citizen militias and Coast Guard,” for how in 1980 he served as an elector in an obscure Trotskyist political party that called for “solidarity” with the Iranian Revolution even as its regime held Americans hostage, among other gems from Sanders’ past. And yet, you never hear Clinton being given credit for playing nice with Sanders, even though she clearly is, overall. The general approach for both seems to be that they attack each other from the left, not the right or with other tabloidy-stuff. And, as nasty as this race has gotten, the tone is astronomically more mature, substantive, and polite than the race on the Republican side. 

Of course, as the front-runner, it makes sense that Clinton would not come out swinging the way Bernie did, who was far behind and had to make up a huge gap. That is politics, and Sanders, lest we forget, is still a politician, much like Clinton. Neither has been a saint, but Sanders campaigns on being one while Clinton never has. So attack her he does, and often not fairly, often by insinuation, often indirectly, and often letting his surrogates and supporters do the dirty work, whom he often fails to restrain. That has not been much of a high road for those who have been playing close attention, although this has largely escaped scrutiny because of the outlandish conduct on the Republican side that has made it seem tame in comparison.

And in the debate, happy to attack her he was; Bernie clearly felt comfortable not holding back much against her. 

This calculation, in the end, would prove to be disastrously wrong.

In Bernie’s opening statement, he noted how far behind Clinton he was at the beginning of the race, and attributed how close it was to what claimed was the “radical” move of “telling the American people the truth” (the clear implication is the Clinton is not).

As usual, Sanders attacked Clinton for the support that she and organizations that support her received from special interests, including Wall St.

Sanders’ first big stumble was in saying he didn’t think the government should break up the banks, that the banks should break themselves up, a thoroughly unconvincing response from a man who has made the big banks one of America’s great public enemies in his campaign.  The second came right after, when he could not name a single instance of when Clinton’s money she received from Wall St. influenced a specific decision of hers when she was in power in the Senate. He followed up with his inability to do this with a salvo of nasty sarcasm belittling her speaking out against the big banks, noticing mockingly and acerbically that the bankers “must have been crushed by this.”

One line of attack that I thought was particularly unfair was Sanders’ minimum wage cheap shot swipe against Clinton. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. I will point out that from 1998, when I had my first job one summer while I was in high school, through mid-2013, the vast majority of the jobs I had and the vast majority of the hours I worked were at or near the minimum wage ($7.25-$8.25 an hour). Much of this was in the retail industry while I was in school or trying to transition to something better suited to my background and skills. So I know what it’s like to work a minimum wage job more than many Americans, and I care about this issue a lot. Hillary Clinton wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour, a huge increase of over 65%. She further thinks that in many localities, like New York City, $15 makes more sense, and she has supported such efforts at the state and local levels to make the minimum wage $15. The thing is, Clinton and many experts recognize that a one-size-fits-all minimum wage is not a good solution for the country as a whole; the cost of living in Northern Virginia, New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston, among other places, is dramatically higher than in most other parts of the country, particularly rural areas and small towns. A $15 minimum wage in the near future would be very difficult for many small businesses outside of major U.S. metropolitan areas to handle or afford. Clinton’s nuanced approach is very much called for, Sanders’ oversimplistic approach (as is often his type of approach to many issues) is not and would harm the economy in many parts of America. For Sanders to try to portray Clinton as if she is somehow against American workers, as if she has not fought for a $15 minimum wage in important instances, and to attack her so strongly on this issue, to me does not seem fair. Sanders’ calling for a nearly 107%, unrealistic increase in the minimum wage across-the-board, period, and to attack Clinton’s over 65% increase—still a major, historic increase—is attacking someone who is still fighting hard on an important issue to most Democrats, just in a different way than Sanders, and seems to be splitting hairs on an issue where they are far closer than they are apart. I would also add that it is telling that Sanders wants to discuss who wants the higher federal minimum wage instead of actually discussing the actual policy itself and the differences between $12 in a rural area and $15 in NYC, between federal efforts and state and local efforts. Sanders should, if his mantras are to be believed, be better than hyperinflating such differences. 

One could be tempted to say the same for Clinton on Sanders with, say, guns, except that she is generally responding to attacks from Team Sanders that have been going on for months. If he is going have some major attacks that focus on minor differences, it is entirely reasonable that Clinton respond in kind. Further, I would argue that their differences in guns are more substantive than their differences on the minimum wage

Bernie, as was his usual response to the issue of gun violence, noted that he had a rating grade of a D- from the NRA. Hillary was very effective in attacking his votes that were in line with the interests of the NRA (for these he had a nuanced explanation, but for all the issues with Clinton where her votes are questionable, it’s black and white to him!), but she should have mentioned that her grade is an F, and while that might not seem like a big deal to some, Sanders voting against the Brady Bill five times and for shielding gun manufacturers from liability are not insignificant differences; they are differences that may very well account for lives lost and lives saved, and certainly account for the different grades they have received from the NRA and for why Clinton’s grade was lower than Sanders; even in the NRA’s view, Sanders did not do everything he could to restrict guns; in its view, Clinton did; otherwise, both candidates would have received and F. And, while only a tiny number of the overall traced guns from crime scenes in New York came from Vermont, Clinton is still absolutely right that Vermont had more guns per capita showing up in New York crime scenes than any other state, so using that statistic to point out that that laxer gun laws in Vermont have had negative consequences for New York—an effect outsized for its tiny population—is fair game when discussing gun policy in general before the New York state primary, since both Sanders and Vermont have been less tough on guns than Clinton and New York.

Israel, Palestine, and the Politics of Political Theater

The one moment where I was by far the most impressed by Sanders was when he was bold in speaking out on the plight of the Palestinian people. I have written numerous pieces in which I have been extremely critical of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians, of its tactics and strategy, of its occupation, of Netanyahu.  I agree with Sanders 100% that, overall, the military intervention in Gaza in the summer of 2014 was disproportionate. A part of me was disappointed that Clinton did not express some of the same sentiments time in her recent AIPAC speech that Sanders has expressed, but at the same time, Sanders did not make the comments in question to AIPAC, which he skipped and which would certainly have been hostile to his message, and made the comments instead in an interview with the New York Daily News. Rather, Hillary (understandably if not admirably) tailored her message in a close race with Sanders, where even some polls in NY had them close, and, while not denying Sanders’ points, certainly avoided discussing them at all in favor winning over America’s Jewish political establishment in what has been a difficult primary (with NY state voting soon after this speech, NY being home to a huge portion of America’s Jews and, therefore, the world’s) and looks to be a difficult general election, one in which Republicans will try to make Democrats and Clinton look weak in terms of support for Israel. Sanders, as an American Jew and as many Jews do, may feel freer to criticize Israel than Americans who are non-Jews. Sanders also made the aforementioned comments to the New York Daily News as someone whose chances of ever being president were very slim; months from now, when Sanders is not the nominee or the president, he will face little scrutiny, and pay few penalties, for uttering them. Yet, if Hillary Clinton had said these things the way Sanders had said them, she could very well pay a price in November in a close race with Trump, or even once in the White House as she seeks to engage Israel and win reelection.

I can’t fault Hillary for not taking a big political risk on publicly speaking out for Palestinians the way Sanders has, though I would have preferred that her AIPAC address contained more lines addressing the plight of the Palestinians. Playing her cards closer to her chest is more than warranted in this instance, and I take far more comfort in Clinton’s actions over her long career rather than ascribe much to her statements made on the campaign trail when it comes to demonstrating fairness to both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She came out for a Palestinian state as First Lady, before her husband, and when she was Secretary of State, she repeatedly criticized Israel and Netanyahu for their treatment of Palestinians and settlement expansion, both privately and publicly.

As admirable, then, as Sanders’ speaking on the plight of the Palestinians was, it also demonstrated how politically unsavvy he is.  And political savviness is a crucial trait that one trying to run the American political system and run one of its two major political parties must possess. Sanders was even forced to suspend his Jewish outreach coordinator after it was discovered just days before the NY primary that she had posted some very pointed criticism of Netanyahu, utilizing offensive language, on social media. It is entirely possible, even probable, that Sanders comments and the story of his outreach staffer may have cost him some Jewish support in NY; Clinton did, after all, outperform the final polling that was conducted in the state, and Sanders underperformed. If she campaigned strongly right now during the election for Palestinians rights, it might cost her votes in a crucial state like Florida, and if she lost the election, she would also lose her ability to push for those very rights even as she spoke for them on the campaign trail. Sure, she slyly dodged the issue at AIPAC and the debate, but doing so was simply smart if not admirable politics (the former often more effective than the latter in terms of public discourse), and her record shows that there is little reason to believe she won’t stick up for Palestinians while still vigorously defending Israel’s right to defend itself.

If only politics were as simple as simply saying what you think, directly, all the time, consequences be damned, then Bernie’s style would make sense. But it’s far more complicated. Sometimes politics involves holding your tongue, playing your cards close to your chests, not saying everything you believe, tailoring your message, waiting for the right time. People who support Bernie like him for generally doing none of these; even some people who don’t support him like him for the same reason. 

But politics is often a dance, a game, kabuki theater; in Bernie’s world, most people agree with him (the silent masses!), and if you just mobilize their support, presto! That’s how you get change done, that’s how you transform America from a plutocracy to one of shared socialist values.  And that is what Sanders and his supporters believe.

Except it’s never that simple, that is not the real world, that is not the real America. 

The bottom line is that such an approach has not made him a winner in this race (it was clear since Nevada he would not win, clearer since Super Tuesday I, and now only painfully, obviously clear to all but his most die-hard, delusional partisans). But even before this presidential campaign, his approach has only led him to pass one—just one—of his own bills in twenty-five years in Congress to Clinton’s ten bills in eight years. His mentality and worldview have not made him an effective legislator; relative to Sanders, Clinton was a very and far more effective legislator. Sanders might not realize this as deeply as he should, but there is a hell of a lot more to politics than simply standing up and saying what you believe. Millions of people in the streets may sound nice, but that is not how any major change came about in America, certainly not without numbers and leadership in Congress to back up such forces. As Sanders’ candidacy has proven beyond a doubt, filling tens of thousands of people in a park, street, or stadium is hardly representative of the level of support a candidate has: Sanders drew a remarkable 27,000 people to a rally in Washington Square in Manhattan about a week before the New York primary, yet lost 42% to 58% to Clinton, by about 300,000 votes.

Truce, Peace, or an Alliance with Sanders and Sandernistas?

I know I’ve been hard on Sanders, and his followers. I just don’t have much patience for “movements” that are clearly doomed from the start, that at best, succeed only in highlighting a few issues a bit more than usual, but that most often simply succeed in inflaming the passions of a minority of millions, filling their heads with unrealistic expectations, causing their hearts to swell with hope, a hope that will only be crushed and let down, feeding a roller coaster of emotions that crests mightily, continues to crest well-after all reason has warned them this will not end the way they envision, and inevitably leads to disappointment in one way or another. The Sanders “movement” is but one of many of such “movements,” and whether or not it is generally forgotten and just a minor blip on the political radar, has less to do with Sanders himself and more to do with whether his adherents buy into the two-party system, make their peace with reality, and start to work on their causes as active, registered members of the Democratic Party, bolstering it during mid-terms (when it has recently suffered losses), and thereby earning a seat at the table and a right to help steer the course of the Party, having put in their time, having voted with Democrats for repeated election cycles, have been there to withstand the onslaught or organized Republicans. Because what is perhaps most offensive to me about the typical Sandernista, besides the gleeful and inaccurate denigration of Hillary Rodham Clinton, is the sense of entitlement that most Bernie Sanders supporters—most of them non-(registered)-Democrats, independents, unaffiliateds, who are and have been supporting third-parties, whose inaction or misdirected action has been as responsible for the Tea Party takeover of Congress and the election of George W. Bush in 2000 as any other single group of people—feel that they automatically have the right to participate, take over, and lead the Democratic Party for which they have long held disdain and have not fought for over the years. 

Sorry, but you haven’t been with us, you haven’t supported us, not enough. If you get to take part in an open or mixed primary, good for you, welcome to the action, but this is rightfully at the discretion of state parties, and the state parties that say “Democrats only for the Democratic primary” are perfectly within rationality and their legal and political rights to make their contests closed to non-Democrats. Nothing entitles you to have power in my party, not when you’re not a member, not when you haven’t been there fighting on our side. 

Sure, we appreciate the level of enthusiasm you have displayed; now, let’s see if you have the patience and maturity to stay engaged over time and apply that enthusiasm to actually making a difference. Simply latching onto a single candidate in a single election cycle that you think will change everything is not only foolish, but is the lazy, easy way out, when far more is required of you as a citizen over far longer a period of time than months or one year. I could have—and did—say many of the same things about Obama supporters in 2008; we got a fine president in Obama, to be sure; but the “hope and change” he campaigned on in that election, the transformative persona that so many of his supporters believed in, turned out to be a big disappointment, to no surprise to me. And yet with Obama, even if that more emotional aspect of his appeal never came to fruition, we had a candidate and a president who at heart was also a deep, substantive thinker, and thus disaster was averted and a pretty decent presidency emerged where “hope and change” failed. I was able to proudly cast my vote for him in November, both in 2008 and 2012. Bernie Sanders, as he has amply demonstrated time and time again, in interview after interview (most clearly in the now infamous New York Daily News interview), is not a man of substance, is not a deep thinker. It would have been with a large sense of unease if I had to vote for him in November in order to prevent Trump from winning the White House.

So no, I will not apologize for not respecting your movement, for not respecting your candidate, for not respecting the awful way you and he have treated the remarkable if imperfect woman who will be our standard bearer this fall. I was right to declare war on you when you and your candidate were out of hand and going to far.

But now I offer an olive branch: I offer a truce if you reign in your atrocious attacks on her, if Sanders is careful to encourage you to do the same, if Sanders stops allowing crowds to loudly boo Hillary at his rallies, if he himself reigns in his attacks on Clinton and focuses primarily on the issues for which he has been such a vocal and passionate advocate, then I happily offer a truce. I offer peace if you vote for Hillary in the fall, and do your part to stop a Trump and Republican takeover of the government. And I offer an alliance if you will register as a Democrat, be there election after election including midterms, stick with the Party and try to slowly change it from within, and maturely note as adults that, like in any relationship, there will be times that the Democratic Party will disappoint you, and such are no times to childishly storm off and say “I’m through.” 

Believe me, I understand being frustrated with the Party; I thought a few times about leaving myself, so full of disappointed was I. But that is no way to help the party, to change it over time, to make a difference. And the sidelines are no place to be for anyone who claims to care about politics, their countrymen, their nation, is not place for doers; the sidelines are for the narcissists, the delusional, the selfish, the self-indulgent, the noisemakers. And it’s not about me, about whether or not I respect you or vice versa, about any personal anger you may or may not feel in reading this or any of my other pieces, comments, or tweets, or those of anyone else; it’s about whether or not Bernie Sanders supporters are mature enough to become part of the solution—swallowing some bitter pills, compromising, even putting up with some things and policies they don’t like (gasp!) in the interest of the greater good—rather than being part of the problem.

There will be no revolution, no unicorns. Just the same type of political warfare we’ve had for generations. You have two sides; you don’t have to love one or both, but you either pick the one that is closest to you on the issues and help it move policy and itself in the better direction on those issues, or you are irrelevant at best, or empowering the side that moves policy in the worse direction on the issues at worst. This is reality. Declaring war no reality has not worked out well for you or the Sanders campaign. But history will judge you if you declare war on reality, if you aren’t part of the solution, of the real fight for real change.

Bernie Sanders is a passionate, exceptional advocate for the small number yet incredibly important types of issues he has chosen to take up, and he has drawn in millions of people who, together with him, can make a difference if they are willing to dance. They don’t get to dance on their terms; newcomers seldom do, and if they try to dance on their terms, they will dance alone, in a void, with no music. And even someone like Hillary Clinton is very constrained by both the realities of the political system and the American electorate. Operating within those constraints, and knowing how to do so, is the key to success in politics. And Clinton has understood this from her days as an undergraduate; even then she pushed against the Saul Alinksy tactic for disruption, and passionately knew that the best way to affect change in a messy system was to take responsibility for that system by working to change it from within, something Clinton has done ever since her days as an undergraduate at Wellesley, as this must-read article notes. 

This is the difference between her and Sanders, the realist and the fantasist.

Sure, it would be wonderful to destroy what we don’t like about the system by simply willing and haranguing it away. But that does not happen in reality, revolutions are incredibly rare, successful ones even rarer, non-violent ones that are successful even rarer than that. 

Sanders and his supporters never had more of a chance than hope and prayer; it is now time for responsible citizens to come together and to stop dreaming of a longshot Hail Mary, to not to make demands on a front-runner who will have more than enough delegates to seal the nomination, but to roll up their sleeves, and to get ready for the long-hard work of bringing about real change, to not bank an entire critical election against a terrifying opponent and the fate of a nation to hope and a prayer, but to bet more solidly on thought-out plans of workable change within the constraints of present reality and to back a candidate with an actual record of bringing about change by working practically within the system.

To be fair to Sanders, he and his wife Jane have signaled and begun to demonstrate over the last few days that the campaign will be toning down its attacks on Clinton and that they have no plans to play a “spoiler” role or run as a third party. This is both a welcome and a necessary step, if overdue. If this is indeed what they are doing, this is great news for all of us.

Join Us and Vote Democratic in the Fall

George Takei/Facebook

I know many of you Sanders supporters are angry and bitter. But that’s life. I was angry and bitter in 2008 when Clinton lost to Obama, but I came around to support Obama by November; Clinton lost and I did not feel she was entitled to make any major demands. I was also bitter and angry when Kerry and Gore lost in 2004 and 2000, respectively. But I didn’t give up. 

George Takei’s recent eloquent plea to unite for this fall election, to #VoteBlueNoMatterWho, should not go unheeded. We are defined just as much by what we do in defeat as what we do in victory. Sore losers and sore winners are both noxious forces. Yet as a Hillary Clinton supporter, I don’t feel like we’ve won anything yet. It’s all about November. And it’s been clear since the last Republican debate that the Republicans will not be nearly as big a mess as liberals were hoping they would be, as I have noted before, and the conventional wisdom that the Republican Party will deny Trump the nomination if it comes to a contested convention, thereby leading to a Republican meltdown and schism and the Party’s destruction, is misleading, as I have also noted before. In other words, Democrats will face an organized and tough foe in the fall, one led by Trump, who has an unprecedented ability to play the media in his favor. Unless Trump and the Republicans are kept out of the White House, their hands kept far away from Supreme Court nominations, we will all have lost. Like it or not, you’re stuck with Clinton if you’re on the left. But it’s up to all of us to make sure we aren’t stuck with Trump and the Republican Party that produced and empowered his rise over many years of anti-intellectualism, nativism, hatred of government, of division. Love or hate Hillary, she is against all of these things. So the choice in November is no choice at all. Are you with me? Are you with her? Are you with us? Or will you help them, even by inaction or misdirected action?

I’m with her. And you should be too, Sandernistas. And who knows, once you see what she can do in power, maybe you will actually like her. Even if you never like her, you still have a part to play if you want to be a responsible citizen in stopping the Republicans and Donald Trump. It’s up to you to convince your most die-hard compatriots that Clinton is better than Trump and worth supporting against him.  Get to it!

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Anti-immigrant Americans in the mid-nineteenth century were known as “Know-Nothings,” a title well-deserved for Republicans when it comes to the immigration issue today.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 27, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 27th, 2015

AMMAN — Illegal immigration is seldom not in the political spotlight these days. Prominent Republican politicians, in particular, are quick to emphasize the supposed massive harm that illegal immigration causes the United States and its legal citizens and residents. Calls to deport all illegal immigrants are now routine and regular among leading contenders for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for the 2016 election. In fact, the consistent Republicans leader and front-runner in the polls of late, businessman and reality-TV personality Donald Trump, seems to talk about this issue more forcefully and more prominently that any other candidate. Add to this fact that he seems to be getting a nearly unlimited amount of press coverage and the situation is clear: illegal immigration is currently one of the most talked about political issues, possibly the most talked about issue, and looks to be a dominant topic throughout the 2016 election season, with or without Trump.

Leading Republicans, especially Mr. Trump, have made some bold claims about illegal immigration: who the immigrants are, what effect they are having on our country and economy, what solutions will best work towards addressing the problem. Here, we will get to bottom of the real nature of the human beings who come to work and live in the United States illegally and the effects they collectively have on America as a whole and the states where they are most numerous. Then we will look at what some of the leading Republicans are saying, and see how that squares with the reality of the situation.

The Current State of Illegal Immigration

Pew presents research that shows illegal immigrants living in the U.S. peaked after a steady increase of many years in 2007 when they reached 12.2 million people (about 4% of America’s population then). That level has since reached a relatively stable level and has declined from its 2007 peak of 12.2 million to 11.3 million in 2014 (3.5% of the U.S. population), and was as low as 11.2 million in 2012. These people represent 26% of America’s foreign-born population, down from 30% in 2007. That means that, roughly, for every four foreign-born people that enter the U.S. and stay, three do so legally. A little over half of the illegal population (52 %) are Mexicans as of 2012 but this percentage is in decline, as are their absolute numbers, to 5.9 million down from 6.4 million in 2009.  At the same time, illegal immigrants from other some other parts of world have slightly increased. After Mexico, for 2013 only El Salvador had an illegal immigrant population that is more than 5% of the total illegal population, and only slightly so. The country with the next highest number of its people living illegally in the U.S. is Guatemala, with a little under 5%. India comes next, in the middle between 4% and 3%, followed by Honduras and then China, with a bit under 3% each. The only other country that broke 2% was the Philippines, and only slightly. The Dominican Republic follows at close to 2%, with South Korea slightly behind. The only other countries that are each contributing at least 1% of the total illegal U.S. population, in descending order, are Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Vietnam, Peru, and Brazil, the last three at 1% and the others only slightly above this.

As of 2013, almost sixteen percent had arrived just recently (less than five years prior), over 24% had been in the U.S. from five to nine years, over 28% percent had been in the U.S. from ten to fourteen years, 14.5% had been in America for fifteen to nineteen years, and 17% for at least twenty years. Combining elements of this data, we can see that in 2013 over 40% of illegal immigrants had been living in the U.S. for less than a decade, while almost 32% had been here for at least fifteen years. The largest number of illegal immigrants, over 28% of the total, arrived from 2000 to 2004 and about 24% arrived from 2005-2009. This means that about a little over one-half the total illegal immigrant population arrived in the decade of 2000-2009 (for those looking for political “blame,” George W. Bush was president for almost that entire time, meaning more of the current illegal immigrants arrived under his presidency than under any other president). About 17% arrived from 1995-1999, and about 11% from 1990 to 1994 (28% overall from that decade). About 12% have arrived from 2010 on, and only about 8.5% before 1990, although it should be remembered that in 1986 the Reagan Administration gave legal status to about 2.7 million illegal immigrants who had entered the U.S. before 1982 after Congress passed a law authorizing Reagan to do so in 1986. Further action by Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, added to this number and brought it closer to three million than 2.7 million. In addition, many Cuban immigrants have legal status in the U.S. as the special situation between Cuba and the U.S. over the decades since Castro’s revolution gave way to special policy, law, and agreements for people arriving to the U.S. from Cuba, giving them legal status in ways that if they were not specifically Cuban would have left them part of the illegal immigrant community. As of 2013, over 1.1 million people born in Cuba were living in the U.S, the product of a half-century of these special policies.

The recent decline in illegal immigration is in part due to the Great Recession; since 2009, about 350,000 people each year (100,000 of them Mexican) have entered the U.S. illegally, but this represents a dramatic decline in the number of immigrants from over a decade ago, when far more people were coming to the U.S. illegally and far more illegal immigrants as a share of the total pool were recent arrivals, with the proportion of illegal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade almost doubling since 2000 while the proportion who have been in the U.S. for less than five years being more than halved since 2000.

Also, from 2009 to 2012, the illegal immigration population fell in fourteen states and rose in only seven. Illegal populations decreased in Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, New York, Massachusetts, and grew in Idaho, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Jew Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and Florida. The six states of Texas, Florida, California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey together have 60 % of the illegal immigrant population in the country, and Nevada is the state with the highest proportion of its population (8 %) consisting of illegal immigrants. Nevada also stands out as the state with the highest percentage of K-12 students who have at least one illegal immigrant parent (18%), while next-highest are the states of California, Texas, and Arizona, where that number is between 13% and 11%. Overall in the U.S., about 7% of all K-12 students fall under this category, with almost four-fifths of those being born in the U.S.  Illegal immigrants also make up 5.1 % of the labor force, a rather high percentage considering they just account for 3.5% of the population. The states with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants in their labor forces (ranging from 10% to 8%) are Nevada, California, Texas, New Jersey, and, again, Nevada leads the pack with 10% (for those wanting more data on illegal immigrant populations state-by-state you can look here and here).

As far as their socio-economic status, in 2013 illegal immigrants were almost twice as likely be living in poverty (27.6%) than the population as whole (14.5%, taken from census data including illegal immigrants), are far less educated—only 13.6 % of illegal immigrant adults had at least a college degree and only a little more than half had successfully finished high school compared with 31% and almost nine out of ten for the whole population, respectively—and are much less likely to have health insurance, with only about one-third of illegal immigrants having coverage compared with over 86.8% of Americans in general.

Republicans might be particularly surprised to learn about illegal immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. system overall. At the federal level, their tax contributions far outweigh any financial payments they receive. For example, Illegal immigrants pay about $15 billion in payroll taxes each year into Social Security, but only take about $1 billion in benefits, and over the years they have paid about $300 billion into Social Security, accounting for 10% of the contributions even though they are only about 3.5% of the population (and never more than their 4%-2007-peak) and are only about 5% of the labor force. They also paid $11.84 billion in 2012 alone in state and local taxes with about 8% of their income (compared with 5.4% of the income for the richest 1% of Americans). Only a small percentage of illegal immigrants receive any type of federal benefits, even though they still often pay payroll taxes that go to Social Security and Medicare. Giving all illegal immigrants temporary legal work permits could bring in as much as $2.2 billion more in state and local taxes. President Obama is trying to do this for a 5.2 out of America’s 11.4 million illegal immigrants through executive action (which would generate about $845 million in new state and local taxes if fully implemented), despite lawsuits from twenty-six states, twenty-four of which have Republican governors, that have put his program on hold.

While there is some variation at the state and local level, state and local costs associated with illegal immigration are an overall small percentage of state and local spending, and have only a “modest” effect on state and local budgets (averaging 5% of the relevant programs), an impact that is greatly offset by state and local taxes paid by illegal immigrants and by federal assistance for covering these costs, though not wholly offset, with some states pulling in modestly less revenue relative to expenditures related to illegal immigrants and other states (e.g., Texas) pulling in significantly morerevenue from them than they spend on them. These numbers only relate to state revenues and expenditures, and do not even factor in other much-harder-to-measure but very significant economic benefits for the states’ economies (e.g., illegal immigrant consumer spending, productivity and contribution to states’ GDPs, and the costs employers save by paying relatively low wages to them).

Thus, for America as a whole, illegal immigration would seem to bring in more economic benefits than costs.

As for crime, immigrants tend to be imprisoned less often than native-born Americans (one-fifth the rate of native-born Americans and decreasing significantly over the years), seeming to have either or a combination of less of a crime-committing tendency or being “more responsive to deterrent effects” and going out of their way to avoid any problems with law enforcement. This is also true across all immigrant groups, from Indians and Bulgarians to Mexicans and Guatemalans. However, it should also be noted that the data of this study was not able to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Crime also decreased nationally as illegal immigration increased and crime decreased even more so in states with large immigrant populations, with immigration even seeming to actually decrease crime in cities. Even statistics that show proportions of illegal immigrants in federal prisons are relatively high for violent crimes are incredibly misleading, as almost all of these crimes are handled by state and local authorities; for example, the statistic that illegal immigrants in 2013 were 9.2% of all federal prisoners held on murder charges might seem bad, but this only involved eight cases. In short, there is no data linking illegal immigrants or specific groups of them, such as Mexicans, with higher rates of committing violent or drug-related crimes than the native-born American population. In fact, four out of five drug-related arrests by the U.S. Border Patrol—and this does not include normal domestic arrests, only those made by the Border Patrol—involved American citizens. This suggests the problems are not so much about Mexicans bringing drugs into the U.S. from Mexico, but, rather, Americans bringing drugs in from Mexico and, more generally, the high American demand for illegal drugs.

Many Republicans “Know-Nothing” About Immigration As an Issue or How to Handle It and Their Harsh Approach to Immigrants Matches Their Harsh Approach to Everything Else

The current leader—and dominantly so, from polls to media coverage—among the Republican presidential candidates, real estate mogul and reality-TV-personality Donald Trump—has called for deporting all 11+ million illegal immigrants, as well as any of their American-born children, whom are derisively called “anchor babies” by Trump and those with harsh views on immigration but whom are widely accepted to be defined as citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  Such a move would cost at least hundreds of billions of dollars to well over a half-trillion and take as long as twenty years, and if associated economic costs are included, could cost closer to $1 trillion for America overall.  Trump’s comments also suggest he clearly believes that many illegal immigrants are criminals: drug traffickers, murderers, rapists, etc. But Trump’s plan and views on illegal immigration, like many Republicans and conservatives’ views on this issue, are based on a highly inaccurate fantasy of “false assumptions” that is light on facts and heavy on mythology. Trump seems to be dragging other candidates down with him on this issue, too.

Critics of the Tea Party and the Republican Party often find a dearth of rationality and practical or forward thinking; that in 2015 the number one issue in the Republican nomination contest—illegal immigration—is, as noted above, a problem that has dramatically lessened in severity, volume, and proportionality has done little to reduce the incessant importance of this issue in the conservative/Republican mind. With America as a nation facing real-life severe, looming crises and with most of the of the oxygen in the political discussion of one of America’s two major political parties being burned focusing on a problem that is becoming far less of an actual problem while other problems only increase with severity, there is little to respect in that party—the Republican Party—as being worthy of serious consideration for taking over the reins of governance of our modern super-state replete with crises requiring serious, rational, and grown-up solutions. America is hardly the only place where such xenophobia is growing, for one only needs to look at Europe in recent years, for example, to dispel such a notion. And as alarming as the recent nativist wave should be for all Americans and people in the world for whom a well-governed, rational America tackling its crises head-on and being an example worthy of emulation and alliance throughout the world, the emergence of xenophobia in this time of crises should also hardly be surprising. There is nothing new in America having a fluctuating undercurrent of nativism, or anti-immigrant feeling, hinged with anything from a hint of intolerance to outright bigotry and violence (just watch Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York to get a loose sense for this vibe in years past), but in the year 2015, to see a party—its leaders and base of constituents—so crudely consumed by blind, ignorant, and irrational fear and hatred of “the other” is banal in the most tedious and hackneyed sense.

While many of us are ready to move forward into the twentieth century, too many others are stuck in the nineteenth. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton came out with a bold new plan to tackle the $1.2 trillion student loan debt-bubble and college financing, put forth a detailed economic plan that emphasizes raising median and women’s income, proposed a bold environmental/energy policy that even exceeds President Obama’s recently proposed plan, laid out an immigration policy that would give millions of hard working, law-abiding illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, and spoke out passionately about the racism in American society and in its criminal justice system.  A Republican Party that lost the last two presidential elections by losing a majority of all American gender and ethnic categories by more than ten percentage points (and often far more) except males as a group and whites as a group  is running on defining an exclusive America that rejects or ignores others—illegal immigrants, homosexuals, the poor and uninsured (Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Scott Walker both just released health care plans that would dramatically lessen assistance for the poor and uninsured, those people most in need of healthcare)—is now seeking to build a community and constituency of Americans based on existing affluence, privileges, rights, and opportunities and that takes care of it members through the distribution of benefits through the system while excluding from these benefits those who are currently shut outside of this community.  How this party expects to win in the face of changing American demographics that very much do not favor white voters and will only make such strategieseven less likely to succeed than in the past is a mystery for which no one has an answer. It is the 2012 election’s “makers vs. takers” debate all over again, and is the political equivalent of a town election campaign based on shifting resources to the nice, gated communities of homeowners and away from those outside these gated community—immigrants, the poor, the uninsured, perpetual renters, homeless, and those struggling while working part-time jobs with no benefits.

For such a campaign, America is a gated community where those with means should band together; in the immigration debate, this is about keeping “non-Americans” out of the community and shutting the gate, but this theme runs rampant through all the other Republicans’ policies, generally speaking, except those who are to be shut out are no longer illegal immigrants without American citizenship, but American citizens of much lesser means looking for ways into the gated community but whose chances are all but crushed by a society that keeps punishing them for their lack of means. All this is part of a general redistribution of wealth, energy, and resources away from the needy and to the affluent. If many Republicans want to deport millions of illegal immigrants, this same crowd also wants to deport millions of Americans not from the soil of our nation but from the rolls of welfare, Medicaid, educational assistance, affirmative action, Obamacare, and other programs that make a major difference in the lives of those Americans without means. Thus, immigration warfare and class warfare are in many ways one in the same, from the same exclusive heart and spirit that captures so much of today’s conservative movement.

One final point: 72% of Americans are against forcing illegal immigrants to leave America, with only 27% against letting them stay; this even includes a majority of Republicans (56%), but you would not know this from listening to many of the leading Republican candidates.

Time for Republicans to Look to Lincoln

In thinking about immigration as an issue, perhaps the greatest Republican—Abraham Lincoln—can be the most instructive even 150 years later. In Lincoln’s time and before the Civil War, a new political party emerged, popularly called the “Know Nothings” and officially called the (Native) American Party (it doesn’t get more nativist than that for an official title!). They were virulently anti-immigrant and would likely capture the same people that in today’s America that are so angry and paranoid about immigration. For Lincoln, the anti-immigrant sentiment was dangerously similar to proslavery sentiment.  In a speech given shortly after Independence Day in 1858, Lincoln noted how that holiday was often celebrated by the descents of the Americans who fought the Revolution as a day to celebrate both their ancestors and their connection to these ancestors. He continues:

But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, [loud and long continued applause] and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]

Thus, for Lincoln, a shared love of freedom and equality within immigrant and native-born alike united all as Americans. But also for Lincoln, discriminating against a black man in America was the same as discriminating against a German man or anyone else:

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—“Hit him again”], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!

In an 1859 letter of Lincoln’s in which he wrote why he would not support certain anti-immigrant initiatives, Lincoln expressed his disdain of any measure based on the exclusion of people:

Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.

An earlier 1855 letter has Lincoln expressing a deep sadness with the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “ all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal,  except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes,  and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

Well, it sure seems Lincoln would feel despair in reaction to his own Republican Party today on the issue of immigration (not to even mention others). As usual with Lincoln, I find myself as a writer humbled in reading him, and at this point I cannot “add or detract” to his poetic words. Perhaps no other American can so beautifully and simply express how anti-American it is to be anti-immigrant. Trump and other Republican presidential hopefuls are missing the facts of reality in their framing of this issue. But when it comes to the spirit of their sentiment, it is their own Lincoln they should read to can see how deeply wrong they truly are.

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

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