THE SWAMP UNDER THE RADAR

Prior to the digital age radio, television, movies and theater were the media through which people became visual celebrities. One of the ways in which Hollywood and Broadway introduced up-and-coming talent was through movies and musicals called “New Faces of [year]”. These no longer exist because, if they did, by the time such productions had appeared, many new celebrities would have already come and gone via Facebook, You Tube and the like. That is why only readers of my generation will recognize that the cover of this blog is an adaptation of a poster for a Broadway production of “New Faces of 1937”.

In the Trump era, so many astounding things are happening on a daily basis that many stories involving names that would have been headline news prior to November 2016 never get above the noise level – particularly in revealing some of the seamier aspects of the Trump presidency . While the brief summaries of the stories of the five “New Faces of 2018” shown above are currently below the  radar, they are doubtlessly contributing to Trump’s current state of mind.

ELLIOT BROIDY’s  prodigious fundraising for Trump and the Republican party has given him entrée to the Oval Office despite his history of corruption.

In the early 1990s Broidy founded Markstone Capital and subsequently became a major donor to and fundraiser for George W Bush. However, in 2008 his world of influence  came crashing down when it was revealed that, in order to raise the $800 million he had needed to fund Markstone, Broidy had bribed administrators of a number of State government employee pension funds. His greatest success was a $250 million commitment from the New York State employee pension fund, which he secured by paying nearly $1 million in bribes to New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi and his associates. For this Hevesi went to prison for 20 months, but Broidy  avoided prison, paying a fine of $18 million and instantly going “from hero to zero”

Broidy gradually worked his way back up to the top of the Republican ladder. Now his  interactions with Trump and Michael Cohen (Trump’s erstwhile lawyer and fixer), are likely again to bring his name to negative prominence, because of several interwoven matters.

While it is well known that Trump had affairs with porn star Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) and with Playboy model Karen McDougal – and that Michael Cohen arranged to have both of them paid off for their silence shortly before the 2016 election – it is  not so well known that Cohen  used exactly the same contract format, aliases for the involved parties and specially set-up company, that he  used to hide those payments, also to pay $1.6 million in installments to induce Shera Bechard (Playboy’s Miss November of 2010) to have an abortion. These payments were supposedly on behalf of Broidy – who had allegedly got her pregnant –

There are reasons to believe that it was actually Trump, not Broidy, who had had the affair with Bechard that resulted in her pregnancy. Not the least of these is that Trump has a history of obsession with Playboy Playmates and that he had a personal friendship with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and often visited the Playboy Mansion. Bechard is a one-time Hefner girlfriend.

In addition, Broidy’s pattern of making payoffs to people who could make decisions enriching him, is consistent  with his  taking the rap for Trump and paying the $1.6 million to Shera – particularly since  Broidy was negotiating two contracts over which Trump could have had great influence. First, he was trying to secure a huge security contract with the United Arab Emirates, which he actually pitched to Trump at The White House. Second, he was negotiating a contract with former Malaysian Prime Minister Hajib Razak which would pay him an $8 million non-refundable deposit plus $75 million if he could get the US Justice Department to quash a case in which it was trying to seize $1.7 billion that was diverted from 1 Malaysia Development  Bhd, The 1MDB scandal had landed $681 million into Razak’s personal bank account.

MARIA BUTINA is a 29 year old Russian who came to Washington and became a graduate student at American University in 2016. She was arrested in July 2018, as she was preparing to leave the US, and charged with being an unregistered agent of the Kremlin. Butina had used the ruse of having founded a Russian gun rights group (there is no gun rights movement in Russia) to become deeply involved with the NRA. She seems to have been instrumental in channeling a lot of Russian money through the NRA to the Trump campaign as well as to very pro-gun Republicans running for election to the Senate and House in the 2016 elections. She was under the control of Alexander Torshin, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Russia, who was described as Putin’s emissary for building warmer ties with the US.

As part of her efforts to influence the election Butina socialized closely and intimately with J.D. Gordon, a man nearly twice her age. Gordon served for six months as Director of National Security for the Trump campaign. In introducing the two, a top NRA executive told Butina that Gordon was playing a crucial role in the Trump campaign’s transition efforts and that his views on international security were listened to by “all the right people”.

Before her arrest, Butina was able to insinuate her way into events where she met with people closely associated with the Trump campaign and administration, including Donald Trump Jr. Her activities seem to be an indication that Russian attempts to influence Trump’s policy towards Russia are even deeper than has been otherwise reported.

DAVID PECKER, Chairman of American Media Inc (publisher of the National Enquirer) is a close friend of, and collaborator with, Trump. Their relationship dates back to the 1990s. He is reputed to have a safe full of unfavorable information about Trump, which his publications have withheld. Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Cohen, on Trump’s behalf, negotiated with Pecker to pay Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000.00 to buy the exclusive rights to her story about her alleged affair with Trump. In a practice known as “catch and kill” the story was never published. American Media reportedly was reimbursed by Trump for the purchase.

Pecker was subpoenaed by federal investigators in April in connection with the Michael Cohen case. He has now been granted federal immunity to testify in the Mueller investigation. He is likely to be required to reveal not only information related to the Karen McDougal matter, but also the other material that is buried in the safe, including derogatory information about Trump’s activities while he was a real estate developer and reality television star.  

ALLAN WEISSELBERG is chief financial officer of The Trump Organization. He has worked for the Trumps for decades, starting as an accountant for Trump’s father. He has a deep relationship with the family and knows virtually everything about Trump finances, including details of Donald’s tax returns, which he is responsible for preparing.

His name came to light in July when Michael Cohen released a recording of his conversation with Trump in September 2016, in which he told Trump that he had spoken with Wesselberg about setting up a company through which to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

As a result of this, federal prosecutors granted him immunity for his grand jury testimony about Michael Cohen. While the immunity is limited to Cohen’s dealings with Trump, these dealings are extensive, because Cohen served as Trump’s lawyer and fixer for many years (including making extensive attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow), so it is probable that  federal prosecutors and the Mueller team now have a great deal of inside information about the inner workings and finances of the Trump organization.

OMAROSA MANIGAULT NEWMAN was a contestant on the first season of “The Apprentice” and continued to appear with Trump on subsequent episodes. She joined  the Trump campaign as Director of African-American Outreach and, after Trump’s election, was given the specially created position of Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison, from which she was fired in December 2017.

During her tenure in the White House, Omarosa witnessed many things that caused her to change her mind about Trump and she secretly recorded much of what she witnessed. Now she has written “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House”, which was released on August 14^th and topped the New York Times best-seller list on August 23^rd. In the book she calls Trump a racist and observes that his cognitive function is declining.

She has subsequently released tapes: one of John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff, firing her (in the highly-secure Situation Room no less). and implying that she would be offered a substantial position in return for her silence; and another of Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, actually offering her a contract for $15,000.00 per month for “a senior position in the 2020 Trump campaign” with unspecified and very limited work requirements in return for her silence. She has also released a tape of a meeting in The White House of Trump advisers discussing the possible existence of a recording of Trump saying the N-word during a taping of The Apprentice (which Omarosa alleges in her book), after Eric’s spokesperson had denied that such a discussion took place.

There is good reason to question Omarosa’s ethics and veracity. After all, instead of resigning, she had to be fired from the White House after she had turned against Trump – and she also made secret recordings that seriously violated White House security. However, tapes don’t lie and Omarosa claims to have many more of them – and so, I would guess, does Mueller.

What do these stories have in common? They speak to the previously unimaginable  corruption that now  exists in and around the Trump Presidency. Far from draining the swamp, today The White House is the swamp. So if and when Broidy’s bribery, Buttina’s channeling of Russian funds, Pecker’s hidden dirt, Weisselberg’s inside  financial information and Omarosa’s unreleased tapes hit the airwaves, our radar screens will really light up.

The New Faces of 1937 were thrilled to be featured on Broadway. The New Faces of 2018 are only concerned with how to slither out of the swamp.