FBI questions Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, buyer of WTBTS properties

[JW Insider]

From http://www.wnyc.org/story/trump-kushner-little-known-business-partner

Donald Trump and Jared Kushner Meet With Business Leaders, January22 2017
(Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press / Associated Press)

 

 

May 25, 2017 · by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz

The Watchtower in Brooklyn Heights is one of the most noticeable edifices in New York. It’s a complex of buildings on a bluff above the East River, with a sign on top that flashes the time and temperature. It used to be the world headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

But today, workers are preparing to give it a makeover. Like so much else in Brooklyn, the Watchtower has been sold to developers. It changed hands last August, shortly after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President.

The timing is relevant, because the buyer was Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. At $340 million, Kushner’s purchase of the Watchtower was one of the biggest real estate transactions in Brooklyn history.

Kushner didn’t buy the Watchtower alone. He had help from a company called CIM Group, a private equity firm based in Los Angeles. Over the years, documents show, CIM has done at least seven real estate deals that have benefited Trump and the people around him, including Kushner. Those deals included stabilizing the scandal-plagued Trump SoHo hotel, a key Manhattan holding for Trump and his children Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr.

At the same time, records show, CIM Group, with approximately $19.7 billion under management, has pursued an array of lucrative government contracts, pension investments, lobbying interests, and a global infrastructure fund, all of whose fortunes could benefit from a Trump presidency.

While both Kushner and Trump have distanced themselves from their businesses, neither man has divested. Ethics experts including Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law say that because of the two men’s ongoing business interests, the web of connections with CIM is troubling, even if no laws are broken.

“Trump gives new meaning to the idea what’s good for Donald Trump is apparently good for America,” Clark said. “He doesn’t actually seem to have a conception of the public interest outside of himself or his company or his family. That’s astounding.”

The White House declined to comment for this story, but in the past has defended Trump and Kushner’s business ties, saying they’ve been vetted and are in compliance with laws and regulations. CIM declined to comment on potential conflicts.

What is CIM?

CIM Group is certainly known at the top echelons of New York real estate. But the company itself — its character, its founders — seem to leave few traces beyond the properties in which it invests.

“CIM stands out as being very secretive,” said Konrad Putzier, a reporter for the Real Deal magazine and website who has covered the company for several years. “The fact that we don’t even know what CIM stands for says it all.”

A spokesman said in an email "CIM stands for CIM…that is all."

CIM was founded in Los Angeles in 1994 by Shaul Kuba and Avi Shemesh, two Israelis, and Richard Ressler, a former New Yorker with private equity in his family — his brother Tony Ressler co-founded industry giant Apollo Global Management with his brother-in-law, Leon Black.

CIM’s strategy is to get good returns for investors by investing in undervalued urban real estate. The firm quickly became known in California for courting influential politicians and donating tens of thousands of dollars to a series of statewide political action committees.

In 2004, the firm acquired a package of properties that included the Kodak Theatre (now the Dolby Theatre) in Hollywood, where the Academy Awards are held. They purchased the real estate at a deep discount, after the previous owner ran into financial difficulties.

A few years later, CIM persuaded the city of Los Angeles to arrange a $30 million HUD loan to reconfigure the theater to stage shows from Cirque du Soleil. The arrangement was supposed to last a decade and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in new economic activity. Cirque’s show, however, fizzled after little more than a year.

CIM has plenty of friends in Los Angeles, but it also has plenty of critics. Dennis Zine, a retired police officer and former city councilman, helped the company win the right to develop the derelict Reseda Cinema, which appeared in the opening sequence of Boogie Nights. Zine said CIM promised big things, but then neglected the project, embarrassing him in the process.

“They burned their bridge with me,” Zine said.

CIM Moves into New York

Throughout the early 2000’s, CIM kept rolling up cash, in part by drawing investments from public pension funds like those in New York State  and California. In 2010, when CIM made its first foray into New York, the two states had more than a billion dollars with CIM. Neither pension fund would discuss the reasons for their investments.

It was a great time for investors with an appetite for risk and the potential big payouts. The financial crisis had wiped out big banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Those that were still around were barely lending, and many New York developers were struggling to pay their bills.

One of those was Harry Macklowe, who had acquired the site of the old Drake Hotel in Midtown Manhattan but lacked the money to build. Court records show Macklowe had tried to work out a deal to finance the project with Paul Manafort, who would later become Trump’s campaign manager, and a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitry Firtash who had friendly relations with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. But those negotiations went nowhere.

Then, in January 2010, CIM partnered with Macklowe to erect what is now known as 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere.  One unit later sold for $95 million.

Later that year, CIM saw another opportunity: the Trump SoHo.

Though the condo-hotel project had been announced on “The Apprentice” finale in 2006, it was troubled from the start. Neighbors were immediately alarmed and upset with the idea of an outsized tower in the low-rise, chic district.

Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, recalled that the project was plagued with problems. He said there were “deadly construction accidents, bodies being exhumed on the site from a 19th century abolitionist church, falling objects from the building.”

Just after a gala ribbon-cutting for the Trump SoHo in the fall of 2007, the New York Times reported that one of principals in the building partnership, Felix Sater, had been convicted of assault for cutting a man with a broken margarita glass in a bar fight. He’d pled guilty to a stock fraud scheme. Another principal, Kazakh-born Tevfik Arif,was arrested on child-prostitution charges in Turkey. He was later acquitted.

It was, as Berman described it, “just an endless array of scandals and connections between the financiers and Russian and Central Asian mobs.”

Condo buyers sued Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr., saying they lied about how many units had been sold. The Manhattan District Attorney began investigating whether there had been criminal fraud. The lawsuit was eventually settled, with the plaintiffs required to sign non-disclosure agreements. With few witnesses, the D.A. dropped its probe.

By 2010, the partners behind Trump SoHo, were falling behind on their construction loans, and the lenders were threatening foreclosure.

That’s when CIM stepped in with a reported $85 million lifeline.

Important Partners

The same month CIM saved Trump SoHo, December 2010, CIM bailed out the project’s  co-developer, Tamir Sapir, on two other properties he owned: 11 Madison Avenue and the William Beaver House in Lower Manhattan. In all, CIM spent more than a half-billion dollars and gained a stake in some prime New York City properties.

“There was a short window of opportunity that they just seized,” said the Real Deal’s Putzier.

CIM also soon embarked on its first venture with Kushner, an office building at 200 Lafayette Street. The New York Post reported that when they sold the building in 2013 — after $30 million in renovations — the new buyer paid three times as much as Kushner and CIM had initially invested. CIM and Kushner also appeared to turn a quick profit on another jointly-purchased office building, 2 Rector Street.

“The connection with Kushner, it’s very fitting,” Putzier said. He noted that the Kushner Companies own 20,000 apartments and 13 million square feet of office and industrial space, “but...they’re a family company, so when they do a lot of deals they usually need a partner with a lot of equity to help them, and that has often been CIM Group.”

Kushner Companies agrees. In a statement, President Laurent Morali — who replaced Jared Kushner as the firm’s top executive after Kushner went to work in the White House — said “CIM is a strong longstanding partner with a developer’s DNA. They can work through complicated situations, are thorough and strategic, yet also make quick decisions.”  The feeling is mutual: CIM said in a statement that it has “strong, collaborative relationship with the team at Kushner, which has proven to be a valuable local partner.”

CIM also said it “has only one business relationship with a Trump-related company” — the Trump SoHo. The Trump Organization declined to comment for this story; it manages the property under the terms of a licensing agreement.

"The headline attraction of being somehow even tacitly aligned with the President of the United States could provide an incredible fundraising opportunity if they play it right, if they spin it the right way," said Serge Reda an adjunct professor at Fordham Business School. While the specifics of CIM's pitch to investors are unknown, Reda said it would be expected that a private equity firm would discuss its record.

When CIM started making deals with the Trumps and the Kushners, its executives had no idea their business partners would one day occupy the Oval Office. But now they do, and ethics experts say that puts CIM’s connections to the First Family and its significant government business dealings in a new light.

The full extent of CIM’s government ties is not known; much of its business is private, though some investments are publicly traded. In public disclosures, CIM said it received annualized rent of $37.7 million from the General Services Administration and other federal agencies. The company said that losing business from a downsized government "could have a material adverse effect."

CIM also depends on the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, which provides a path for foreign investors in American real estate to obtain U.S. green cards. According to the non-partisan research group Opensecrets.org, CIM spent $430,000 on federal lobbying in 2015, putting it among the top ten real estate firms lobbying on that issue. CIM listed preserving the EB-5 program as a major lobbying priority.

This is the same program that Jared Kushner’s sister Nicole Meyer, one of his siblings who now runs the family business, was recently promoting in China.

There’s one more program CIM might benefit from, which could dwarf its profits from EB-5, rents or pensions. According to SEC disclosures, CIM has an infrastructure investment fund which it acknowledges is sensitive to “regulation” and “political events.”  If Trump gets an infrastructure bill passed, funds like this could earn many millions from projects like roads and tunnels.

Kushner is at the center of the administration’s building plans. In March, the White House announced that he would head an “Office of American Innovation” whose mandates include “creating transformational infrastructure projects.”

"Whether the parties are doing something untoward or not, the situation creates doubt, and it will follow the President throughout his term as long as he owns his business," said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington or CREW. "It’s a question we shouldn’t be having to ask.” His group is suing the president for violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

Last December, as the president-elect was preparing to move to the White House, the firm did one more deal with Trump-world: CIM helped Kushner Companies buy 85 Jay Street, a parking lot in Brooklyn, for an eye-popping $345 million.  

Watch that space.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/trump-kushner-little-known-business-partner

[JW Insider]

At about 4:50 pm, yesterday, WNYC introduced a story with a lead that included something like: 'Next, we'll discuss the purchase of the Watchtower buildings and Jared Kushner.'

At the time it was on the radio, Kushner had not yet been made a part of the FBI story that gained traction to be a bigger part of the political news just a couple hours later.

This story does not reflect negatively on the Watchtower, of course.

But there is no doubt that if this particularly venture fails as one of Kushner's bad deals (he's made other bad deals along with good ones) the Watchtower will continue to be mentioned. (A comedian, John Oliver, spoke of these bad deals while making fun of the Watchtower deal just a couple weeks ago. He used Kushner's quotes about what he wanted to do with the Watchtower buildings, but Oliver never mentioned the "Watchtower" itself.) What makes some people worry about Kushner's deal, is that Kushner buys the Watchtower's multi-block complex down by the Brooklyn Bridge for more than a third of a BILLION dollars. Then he gives the Watchtower Society even MORE, another third of a BILLION, for a single parking lot!

 

[JW Insider]

6 hours ago, AllenSmith said:

Useless information

Very possibly useless, agreed. But it's also a heads up that the Watchtower could be in the news again in unexpected places. The video that John Oliver (HBO) used looked exactly like the Kushner video from jw.org.

Kushner is in the news as part of an investigation that will probably go a lot longer than planned. Trump's real estate deals will be a part of the mix due to the fact that his son has already bragged about how helpful Russia was in providing money. And now CIM, a secretive funding source, is linked to both Kushner, Trump, and some potentially shady deals that have combined into Kushner's use of foreign banks and investors: (Ukraine, Turkey, Russia, China) and which therefore continue to tie in Manifort and Flynn.

It doesn't matter whether Trump colluded with Russia anymore to keep this investigation going. (It would not be surprising if there never was any collusion with Russia, and if Russia never tried to "hack" the 2016 U.S. election.) The problem is that the Trump family has long been involved in shady money deals, and there are several stories like the one in the report that involve mafia, foreign money launderers, lying to investigators, etc, that go all the way back to the 1980's. Remember, too, that Trump's former transition advisor, Chris Christie, put Jared Kushner's father in prison. One of those old stories (2007-2010) was alluded to in the report:

7 hours ago, JW Insider said:

Condo buyers sued Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr., saying they lied about how many units had been sold. The Manhattan District Attorney began investigating whether there had been criminal fraud.

So, just a heads up. Political investigations can take on a life of their own.

[TrueTomHarley]

While I admit this glorifies myself, not God, it also fits perfectly. Therefore I can probably insert it without the Librarian, that old hen, going anal the way she does about hawking a book other than the dull works of pedantry she herself has placed on her library shelves.

From 'No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash:'

Here are the top news stories of 2016:

1.   Trump won.

2.   The other side blamed Putin, who

3.   Got mad.....

5.   Jehovah’s Witnesses (my people) moved their headquarters from Brooklyn Heights, where they had been for over 100 years, to way, way out in the sticks.

6.   Jerod Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, bought their old building. Video of him saying nice things about Witnesses appeared on jw.org. I had no idea who he was at the time, but when I found out, I worried anew. See - I caught a heavy dose of news each day while I was writing, and it irritated me, but I stuck with it – how else would I learn about the snowfall outside my window? Now, no one is capable of total non-bias, but they are capable of trying. I’m not used to the referee leaning on the scales – it never used to happen. But when I would grouse about the media, which I did a lot, some took it as support for Trump! I could picture the Watchtower sign going down, a Trump sign going up, and fellow Witnesses, who weren’t paying overclose attention saying: ‘how did Tom manage that?’.....

...I looked diligently for that interview with Jared Kushner who bought the Bethel building, and it is no longer there. It’s too bad because he says nice things about us, such as how a handshake deal means something with the Witnesses. I don’t know for certain why it was removed, and just possibly it hasn’t been, for it was never a headline – maybe it’s still buried as an addendum somewhere.  But the Watchtower will go to great lengths to establish that they are absolutely apolitical. In this era of rabid politics, one can depend upon some yoyo coming across the video of Kushner touring the building he would soon buy and take it as proof that Jehovah’s Witnesses had struck a deal to erect Theocratic Trump Tower.

[TrueTomHarley]

36 minutes ago, AllenSmith said:

That’s why we have ignorant governments, that think the Watchtower is now embodied with politics, and have foolish people like in Russia, that now call us extremist,

Tempting though it may be to say such things, in the light of what has happened, Russia would regard this statement itself as being 'political.' Seen through their eyes (which we should always try to do with anyone....okay, almost anyone) their intransigence is not totally baseless. 

Emily Baran's book details how all the typical religious reasons accounted for atheistic Soviet Russia persecuting Jehovah's Witnesses. But there were additional ones. The Communists regarded us also as a political movement disguised as a religion. If that seems paranoid, consider that such views were held during the cold war, the most paranoid of times, when anything from the West (like Brooklyn) was held in deep suspicion by the East, and vice versa. 

Early JW works occasionally picked up on Western terminology, such as 'iron curtain,' which the Soviets themselves would never use. Too, the Soviets got stuck being 'the king of the north,' who puts trust in 'the god of fortresses.' The book of the 1930's, 'Government,' lambasted Soviet communism as 'doomed to fail.' Of course, it said the same about democracy, for its point was the inferiority of all human government, not one in particular, but atheistic Russia could hardly be expected to pick up on the nuances, and they didn't.

These days the antagonism against us is mostly stirred up by the Church, as it always is. But the latent distrust of Witnesses from the political days has never vanished. Indeed, even during the 25 years of Jehovah's Witnesses operating as a 'legal' religion there, the government has never acknowledged the mass deportations of our brothers to Siberia in the 40's and 50's.

So while there are some here who 'spill' more than I would, even assuming I had stuff to spill, they are not the ones who will get us into hot water with Russia.

[JW Insider]

35 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

...I looked diligently for that interview with Jared Kushner who bought the Bethel building, and it is no longer there.

Moved once and then removed. Thought they might put it on the Watchtower's real estate site, but it's not there either. I think this whole real estate site gets removed soon,  so it's the last time to play with function that lets you fly all over Brooklyn Heights and look at the 360-degree views.

https://watchtowerbrooklynrealestate.com/

You can even imagine what that parking lot will look like with a rust-colored translucent glass building on the lot.

 

 

 

 

[TrueTomHarley]

By any chance, does the Watchtower's time & temp &Read the Bible Daily sign stay up as an item of historical significance? You can't remove a shingle around here if it has been deemed historical.

[JW Insider]

Because the Towers Hotel is the last piece of Brooklyn property the Watchtower is still in the process of selling, the site I mentioned above now bases its 360-degree views from just above that particular building. I like the view for the nostalgia and great memories, and since the view is from just above my old corner room on the tenth floor. The first picture below shows the window of my old corner apartment perfectly. And just think, it's probably true that someday, not a stone will be left upon a stone of any of these buildings.

To get to the pictures like the ones below, just to go the property link and click on the [View 360^o Panoramic] button.

 

[TrueTomHarley]

25 minutes ago, AllenSmith said:

That’s where we defer with the kind of creed one represents and dismisses. Personally, my “statement” stands as “antipolitical”,

My only point was that it matters little how you or I intend something to be taken. What matters is how our audience does take it. It is a encouragement to use words seasoned with salt, that's all.

28 minutes ago, AllenSmith said:

If you want to take me on

Of course I do not. We are on the same team.

[TrueTomHarley]

1 hour ago, JW Insider said:

 I like the view for the nostalgia and great memories,

"My Bethel friend used to tell me how visiting speakers from the hills would rail on about the wickedness of the big city. It made him squirm - ‘New York City is our home,’ he’d say. He and his wife maneuvered forever to land a magnificent, if stamp-sized, apartment in the Sliver Building – housing is on a seniority basis. We joined them there for wine and cheese after a day sightseeing. Unwinding with a breathtaking view of Manhattan beneath them – ah, what a life! But they were soon transferred to Patterson where they would look out their window and see cows."

[JW Insider]

4 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

"My Bethel friend used to tell me how visiting speakers from the hills would rail on about the wickedness of the big city. It made him squirm - ‘New York City is our home,’ he’d say.

I had the NW corner of the 10th floor. Nearly all the NW and SW corners facing the NYC skyline were assigned to Governing Body members, and the few that weren't taken by them were assigned to 4 Bethelites at once. But these rooms each had their own bathrooms (in other buildings you could share one down the hall) and you'd still have more than double the space you would get when 2 roommates shared a smaller room. They rounded me up to 4 years of seniority on "day 1" (by including the few of months of auxiliary before regular pioneering). The Towers Hotel was just opening up, and in fact a few old ladies still lived in the building from time immemorial. A few allowed themselves to be moved (consolidated) into new identical apartments on another floor, but after a certain age, no reasonable offer can make a person leave their "ancestral home." So we basically waited until they died. (Although some on the construction crew would joke that we offered a little encouragement in that regard when jackhammers touched adjacent walls and ceilings.)

There were still a few floors that couldn't open up for Bethelites for a couple more years because of this. As they opened up, however, there was a little less demand for this room, as most "bidders" didn't want to share a room with three others. Bert and Charlotte Schroeder had a SW corner, same size as the one I was in, that somehow looked like a large room from a Victorian mansion, due to smart use of a Murphy bed, beautiful furniture and drapes, custom granite countertops, etc. I furnished mine with select items that Brooklyn Heights neighbors threw out on those special days the city Sanitation Department designated for the collection of large items. We took bookcases to the carpentry shop for sanding and repainting, and fold-out sectionals to the upholstery shop. You wouldn't know the place was a dormitory until after 10:00pm.

Everyone railed against the "evils of NYC" but you certainly hit the correct tone of how many of the older ones with skyline views felt when they moved to Patterson, and a few who more recently moved to Warwick. It's beautiful...but...

4 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

But they were soon transferred to Patterson where they would look out their window and see cows."

 

[TrueTomHarley]

51 minutes ago, AllenSmith said:

This is exactly why I write against, those that pretend to be part of a community, 

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate." ... Cool Hand Luke

When I spoke of being tactful with salt-seasoned words, the audience I was referring to was the Russian government, which has misconstrued Jehovah's Witnesses as political. 'Don't feed into it' is what I'm saying, since we want them to treat us better, not worse.

How you treat the avant-garde folks here is entirely up to you. My words to O'Maly were seasoned with fire and sulphur. It's not exactly the circuit assembly here, is it?