Trump Mar A Lago Raided by the FBI!

[no1novice]

Trump legal team admits possibility that ex-president could be charged

Lawyers tell special master reviewing Mar-a-Lago case he should not have to say which documents he may have declassified
Attorneys for Donald Trump said answering special master’s questions about declassification could hurt any possible defense to ‘any subsequent indictment’.
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Tue 20 Sep 2022 14.18 BST
Last modified on Tue 20 Sep 2022 17.00 BST

Donald Trump’s legal team has acknowledged the possibility that the former president could be indicted amid the investigation into his retention of government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Despite claiming days earlier that Trump couldn’t imagine being charged, his lawyers made the stark admission in a court filing on Monday proposing how to conduct an outside review of documents that were seized by the FBI in August.


A “special master” – a court official appointed to help administer the review process, the federal judge Raymond Dearie – had previously asked Trump to detail any materials stored at Mar-a-Lago that he may have decided to declassify.


In the court filing, Trump’s lawyers – who had successfully pushed for the special master’s appointment – said that requiring him to do so could hurt any possible defense should he later be charged, and that he should not have to “fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident” during the review.

As of Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers have contended he could declassify any of the documents, but they have stopped short of saying he actually did.

The former president so far has been loth to publicly consider the possibility that he could be criminally charged following the FBI’s search of his resort. In a 15 September interview with the conservative radio host Hugo Hewitt, Trump said, “I can’t imagine being indicted, I’ve done nothing wrong” – in either the classified documents case or the investigation into his efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

Trump also said, “I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it,” and that charges wouldn’t deter him from running for the White House again in 2024 if he wanted.

US justice department prosecutors filed their own proposal for the outside review of the seized documents, with key differences: while Trump’s team wants Dearie to make the seized documents reviewable within days, the justice department maintained that he should first check with the federal agency in charge of managing government records.


Dearie is set to have his first meeting with Trump’s lawyers and the justice department’s prosecutors on Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn. He was appointed to his role by the Florida-based federal judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the document-review process made necessary by the Mar-a-Lago search.

Cannon gave Dearie a deadline of 30 November to review the documents.

The FBI said its search of Trump’s resort came after agents developed compelling evidence that the former president was storing secret government materials there. According to officials, agents seized about 11,000 documents as well as 48 empty folders emblazoned with classified markings.

Trump and his associates have also been under congressional investigation for their actions before, during and after the deadly US Capitol attack that a mob of his supporters staged on 6 January 2021.

The attack aimed to stop the US House and Congress from certifying Biden’s victory in the previous year’s race for the Oval Office. Among other things, Trump is accused of ignoring pleas to call off his supporters on the day of the siege.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/20/trump-lawyers-charges-documents-fbi-mar-a-lago

[no1novice]

Oh god this is



80s hits and nuclear secrets: security concerns plague Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

Thousands of sensitive documents lay nearby as Trump was spinning the Village People in Mar-a-Lago’s not so private club
Mar-a-Lago.
Julian Borger
Julian Borger
Tue 20 Sep 2022 07.00 BST
Last modified on Tue 20 Sep 2022 17.02 BST

At a certain point in an average evening at Mar-a-Lago, the lights go down and the volume goes up, as the proprietor and former president of the United States turns DJ for the night.

A member of the Mar-a-Lago private club said that following a period of withdrawal after his election defeat, Donald Trump has in recent months assumed the role of social ringmaster, deciding to bring a disco vibe to the Palm Beach resort after dark.
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“At about 9.30pm every night, he’s sitting at his table, whether on the patio or inside, and they bring a laptop over and he starts picking songs, and he starts being a DJ for the night, but it’s sort of funny because he picks like the same 10 songs every night,” the club member said.

The Trump playlist is of a certain era, when he was a regular clubber in New York. The signature tune is the Village People’s YMCA, alongside The Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston, and a few Elton John numbers.
A bar area and room inside the Mar-a-Lago estate.
A bar area and room inside the Mar-a-Lago estate. Photograph: Zuma Press Inc/Alamy

“Sometimes he dances to it,” the club member said. “He will be at his table and he’ll dance while sitting.”

Towards the end of the evening, Trump will play a hymn, How Great Thou Art, which topped the charts when Elvis Presley sang it. It was a favorite of Trump’s father, Fred, a sentimental way of drawing a Mar-a-Lago soiree to a close.
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What might have otherwise seemed no more than a characteristically bizarre twist for a post-presidential career, looks more significant now that it is known that all the while the lights were low, the music was playing, guests were tipsy and the host was otherwise engaged, there were thousands of government documents, many of them highly sensitive, and at least one of them containing nuclear secrets, being kept illicitly in rooms and closets nearby. And all of this was unfolding in a venue described by former intelligence officials as a priority target for foreign spies.
An aerial view of Mar-a-Lago.
Mar-a-Lago: the lax security of Trump’s alternative ‘White House’ – visualized
Read more

“Without any question the former president, and those in his circle will be very important targets for any foreign intelligence service. They will be looking at: how do we get into that circle?” said Douglas London, a 34-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service, and author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.

London added: “He’s brought in really questionable people with various skeletons in their closets, financial or personal or political, who have vulnerabilities a foreign intelligence service could exploit.”
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It is a scenario which in other circumstances, might make for an uproarious comedy series, featuring spies from around the world tripping over each other in the dark as they race each other to grab hold of the motherlode of state secrets, as YMCA echoes around the darkened corridors.

The setting is suitably flamboyant. When it was built in the 1920s for a cereal heiress, Marjorie Merriweather Post, the style of the 58-bedroom palace was described as Spanish-Moorish-Portuguese-Venetian. There are gargoyles that look like they were borrowed from medieval Britain. The original decor was chosen by a Viennese theatrical designer.
Mar-a-Lago’s Grand Ballroom.
Mar-a-Lago’s Grand Ballroom. Photograph: Zuma Press, Inc./Alamy

When Trump bought it for $10m (£8.75m) in 1985, it had 58 bedrooms, an adjoining golf course and three bomb shelters. He said at the time he thought of the purchase as a “statement” rather than somewhere he could imagine living, but the high-end Floridian lifestyle grew on him and the place became his favourite home.
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In the 1990s, after a string of bankruptcies, he tried to squeeze desperately needed cash out of the property by trying to split it into plots, hold on to the main house, and sell the rest, but he was blocked by the local planning board.

The board also tried to veto his plan B, turning the estate into a private club, but he was able to outmanoeuvre his opponents on the panel by assiduously cultivating individual members and pointing out publicly and embarrassingly that almost all the other clubs in Palm Beach did not admit Jews or Black people.

There were few if any African Americans in the area who could afford the $100,000 (£87,454) initiation fee, which was doubled in 2017, but plenty of wealthy Jews, who had made their money in real estate and clothing. They became the bulk of the membership, the majority of them Democrats.

When Trump succeeded Obama as president, and Mar-a-Lago became the “winter White House”, the ambience began to change. Trump had no time for the official presidential retreat at Camp David, which he saw as too rustic. Also the Trump Organization made no money from him staying there. Mar-a-Lago was another matter.

The president saw no distinction between his personal life, his business and the public office, and Trump’s presidency became one of the club’s leading attractions. It was another label under the Trump brand. Paying guests were able to witness real-life scenes like Trump huddling with the then Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and his aides to hammer out a joint response to a North Korean missile test.
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In April 2017, Trump told the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, about the missile strikes he had authorized in Syria while the leaders sat in the Mar-a-Lago dining room eating what the former president described as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you have ever seen”.

After Trump was defeated in 2020, he decamped to his Florida retreat, taking with him boxes full of secret documents and a new clientele. The crowd that hung around Trump International hotel in Washington followed him to Mar-a-Lago.
The swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
The style of the property has been described as Spanish-Moorish- Portuguese-Venetian. Photograph: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy

“The club used to be serious money, serious players in business. Some really big players through the years have been members,” a longtime member reflected somewhat ruefully.
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“The new members of the club are a little bit Maga,” the veteran member said. “It’s very eclectic, a lot of foreigners, people that have made money in cryptocurrency, Oklahoma, fracking money. It looks more like the menagerie at the Trump Hotel in Washington.”

Asked specifically about the foreigners, this member said: “A lot of different people there that they didn’t really have before. You’ll have Chinese people. You’ll have maybe some additional Arab people.”

Even during the Trump presidency, there were significant holes in Mar-a-Lago’s security. Over the 2018 Thanksgiving holiday, a teenager, Mark Lindblom, slipped past guards and entered the club through a tunnel from the beach.

Two Chinese women were caught trespassing. One of them, Yujing Zhang, had no fewer than four mobile phones, an external hard drive, as well as five sim cards and a “signal detector” gadget for locating hidden microphones or cameras. She was deported without any clarity on what she was doing there and why she was in possession of such an array of electronics.

In the post-presidency, there are far fewer controls.

“Typically once a president becomes former president, there’s a scale-back in resources at the Secret Service, but that really is something that doesn’t lend itself to the Mar-a-Lago environment because of the obvious threats there,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence.
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Each year the club hires 80 to 90 foreign workers. They at least get vetted, but that is no guarantee against an insider threat, Figliuzzi said

“The fact that four years ago, the Secret Service vetted the guy who serves Trump Diet Coke 12 times a day, doesn’t mean that that guy is invulnerable to a $200,000 [£174,936] payment from a foreign intelligence agency,” he said.

The problem of the club members and their guests is far greater.

“Who are these members? Who’s vetting them?” Figliuzzi asked. “If you have the requisite money and you plunk it down, it appears you’re a member. And now here come your family members and guests and their cousins and their in-laws. And is it really possible for the Secret Service to even begin to think that they could vet the guest side of the house?”

All this helps explain why a Russian-speaking Ukrainian-born woman called Inna Yashchyshyn was able to mingle with club members and Trump himself in the spring and summer of 2021, posing as Anna de Rothschild, a Monaco-bred scion of the banking family.

Whether Yashchyshyn, and the two Chinese interlopers, were just opportunists or connected to something more sinister, remains unknown. But then the same could be said of much of the Mar-a-Lago crowd, especially the new arrivals. But perhaps the biggest question mark is hanging over the resort’s wounded and vengeful owner and DJ. No one knows what plans he had for his stolen trove of state secrets.

“Whatever he selected was because he had some intent to do something with it,” London said. “The question mark is: what were his intentions? But none of it is going to be a happy story. None of it is going to end well, in terms of the impact on national security.”

This article was amended on 20 September 2022. The teenager who entered Mar-a-Lago through a tunnel was Mark Lindblom, not “Mike Lindbloom”.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/20/donald-trump-maralago-nuclear-secrets-whitney-houston-security-flaws

[no1novice]

New York's civil fraud lawsuit against Donald Trump and family members

Trump and his children, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump, are named as defendants in the lawsuit. Allen Weisselberg, former CFO for the Trump Organization, and Jeff McConney, another longtime company executive, are also named.

James said she believes state and criminal laws may have been violated and referred the matter to the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York and the Internal Revenue Service.


attorney's office for the Southern District of New York and the Internal Revenue Service.

The US attorney's office declined to comment.

"These acts of fraud and misrepresentation were similar in nature, were committed by upper management at the Trump Organization as part of a common endeavor for each annual Statement, and were approved at the highest levels of the Trump Organization -- including by Mr. Trump himself," the lawsuit states.

As part of the lawsuit, James is seeking $250 million in allegedly ill-gotten funds and to permanently bar Trump and the children named in the lawsuit from serving as the director of a business registered in New York state. She is also seeking to cancel the Trump Organization's corporate certificate, which, if granted by a judge, could effectively force the company to cease operations in New York state.


Trump previously called James a "renegade prosecutor" who he said is running a "vindictive and self-serving fishing expedition." The Trump Organization called her previously allegations "baseless" and denied any wrongdoing.

Responding to Wednesday's announcement, Trump attorney Alina Habba said in a statement to CNN: "Today's filing is neither focused on the facts nor the law -- rather, it is solely focused on advancing the Attorney General's political agenda. It is abundantly clear that the Attorney General's Office has exceeded its statutory authority by prying into transactions where absolutely no wrongdoing has taken place."

Weisselberg's attorney, Nicholas Gravante, declined to comment.

The civil lawsuit comes as Trump is under increasing legal pressure as prosecutors are taking investigative steps that move ever closer to his inner circle.

Trump is facing numerous criminal investigations from federal and state prosecutors involving the accuracy of his company's financial statements, interference in the 2020 presidential election, and his handling of classified documents after leaving office. Trump has denied any wrongdoing
CNN com

[notoriousmkg]

Justsecurity.com has a very thorough analysis on what they have seen so far of James' filing. 

www.justsecurity.org/83161/tipping-point-the-new-york-attorney-generals-case-against-trump/

Some excerpts:

Trump’s midtown Manhattan penthouse apartment. In 2015, Trump’s financial statement reported the value of the apartment at $327 million. That figure was calculated by taking the square footage of the apartment—listed at 30,000 square feet in the statement—and multiplying it by a fixed price per square foot. But there was a problem with that method. According to Trump Organization documents received by the OAG, which were personally signed by Trump, the actual size of the apartment was just over 10,000 square feet. As Allen Weisselberg later testified, that resulted in an overstatement of “give or take” $200 million.

Trump’s golf course in Scotland. The Trump Organization purchased the property in 2006 for $12.6 million. Trump’s 2014 financial statement valued the property at more than $435 million—a return of nearly 3500% in eight years.

In one year, nearly a third of the amount of assets Trump reported as “cash” were in fact held in partnership entities that he did not control.

Upcoming October plea-bargained testimony from Allen Weisselberg - Even if Weisselberg ends up testifying only to his own illegal conduct on behalf of the Trump Organization—which is unlikely, given that he pleaded guilty to conspiracy—that evidence could be what is needed to convict the Trump Organization

[trixie]

Gee, I wonder if any other real estate in Scotland appreciated at 3500% in eight years?

[notoriousmkg]

11th Circuit accepted the DOJ's appeal:

"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled late Wednesday evening the DOJ can continue its investigation of classified materials seized from Mar-a-Lago during an Aug. 8 FBI raid


 

[tulip]

According to the Orange Menace's interview with Hannity on Fox -- if you're President, you don't have to go through any formal process to declassify documents. There may be one, but you don't have to go through it. In fact, you can just THINK about declassifying a document and voila! it's declassified.

Just when you think he can't be any stupider.... what's scarier is that there are people who will believe that declassifying documents by ESP is real.