Is there a trail leading to Trump in the Manfort evidence?

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

I'm not professing to know anything, just reporting the results of a little digging. The Manfort evidence list for his second trial https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.190597/gov.uscourts.dcd.190597.389.5.pdf contains emails-lots and lots of emails. Item #53 on the Manafort evidence list is an email dated 1/8/2015 with a subject line "RE: Trump-UBS Mortgage". Trump's financial disclosure statement contains an entry showing his two largest creditors are Deutsche Bank and an obscure Real Estate Investment Trust called Ladder Capital. Ladder gave Trump a sweetheart deal by refinancing his mortgage on a Trump property in NYC formerly held by UBS when nobody else would lend him money.

Ladder Capital, Deutsche Bank, Trump & Kushner

While the media has frequently covered Deutsche Bank, there has been very little coverage of Ladder Capital Finance, despite its importance as one of the largest creditors of the U.S. president. A June 2017 article had a very brief overview of the ‘obscure’ company financing the president, while Crain’s provided insight on how “Trump’s relationship with Ladder underscores the growth in the city’s shadow-banking industry. The term refers to a wide array of financial institutions that make loans and perform other bank-like activities but aren’t regulated as such.” Unlike a typical bank, Ladder Capital is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) that has a niche “writing riskier commercial mortgages than banks are typically comfortable with.”

A review of property records in NYC’s online document database ACRIS shows that loan agreements from Ladder Capital Finance for four Trump properties total $282 million (see links to source documents below). Two GAP mortgages for over $80 million were also recorded, but the ACRIS filings do not show if or when mortgages and loans have been paid. The data in Trump’s June 2017 financial disclosure (below) is vague, and shows Ladder debt ranging from $110 million to over $150 million. It is clear, however, that Ladder Capital Finance holds significant financial leverage related to money owed on four Trump real-estate holdings, including the well-known Fifth Avenue Trump Tower property.
Trump's Two Largest Creditors

Meet the Obscure Company That Just Lent Trump Even More Money
Ladder Capital Finance is already the president’s second-largest creditor.

On the liabilities side of the ledger, there is something new to be found. According to the 2017 disclosure, Trump refinanced a mortgage worth between $5 million and $25 million that he had with the Swiss bank UBS for the Trump International Hotel and Tower near Central Park. The entity that refinanced the UBS loan was Ladder Capital Finance, a small, somewhat obscure outfit that isn’t a bank at all, but rather what’s known as a real estate investment trust or REIT. Ladder Capital’s refinancing appears to have been a sweet deal for the president: According to the disclosure, the refinancing lowered the mortgage’s interest rate by a sizable two points, to 4 percent from 6.2 percent.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/06/trump-ladder-capital-loan/

We already know Deustche Bank has been caught laundering Russian money. Might this be a trail for Russian money through Manafort to Trump's favorable mortgage terms? I don't know. It's the only piece of evidence in the entire list that mentions the name Trump. Could be nothing, but then again......

[Laxman]

1. Dig A Little More....

any you will see one other item that mentions Trump. #1300 on the list. An e-mail from Alan Friedman about being the first European to interview Trump after the election. That will lead you to this interesting item:

How Alan Friedman, Italy’s Professional American, Put Paul Manafort in Jail

Alan Friedman is Italy’s professional American. A former journalist with a baritone voice and perfect, if heavily accented, Italian, he has for decades provided the American perspective to Italians.

He hosted and produced Italian television shows, ran in elite circles, wrote the authorized biography of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and still contributes columns to the country’s most prestigious newspapers.

But for all his fame and influence in Italy, few had heard of Mr. Friedman in the United States until he helped land President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in jail.

Documents filed last month by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as part of the investigation into Russia’s influence campaign in the 2016 American presidential election, showed that Mr. Friedman worked closely with Mr. Manafort in creating the so-called Hapsburg Group.

That was the informal name of a group of European politicians surreptitiously paid through overseas accounts controlled by Mr. Manafort, starting in 2011, to lobby American politicians to support Viktor F. Yanukovych, then the leader of Ukraine and a favorite of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/world/europe/how-alan-friedman-italys-professional-american-put-paul-manafort-in-jail.html

Maybe this is going to be a little more interesting than the first trial.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

2. I should probably have researched my fantasy football team this much

Entry number 1568, an email on 10/13/2017 about "today's WSJ" What was in the April 13, 2017 Wall Street Journal? Well, they could have been referring to a lot of different articles but my bet is it's this one.

CIA Director Pompeo Calls WikiLeaks ‘Hostile’ Entity ‘Often Abetted By State Actors Like Russia’

WASHINGTON—Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo on Thursday called the website WikiLeaks a “nonstate hostile intelligence service,” likening it to a foreign government that attempts to undermine U.S. interests and conduct espionage.

In his first public remarks as the head of the spy agency, he pointed to an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies earlier this year that concluded Russian military intelligence “had used WikiLeaks” to release emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and that “Russia’s primary propaganda outlet,” the English-language media network RT, “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-director-pompeo-calls-wikileaks-hostile-entity-often-abetted-by-state-actors-like-russia-1492124950

They seemed to have a lot of interest in the Wall Street Journal. Meeting with the editorial board, interviews....Kwas op-ed for the WSJ (which I will assume refers to former Polish leader and head of the EU Aleksander Kwasniewski-an opponent of Mr. Manafort's client Yanukovych)

[DeminPennswoods]

3. Craig Unger's new book

traces all the history of the Russian mob and its connections with Ukraine's (where Manafort ties in) energy sector and the money generated from it that was laundered through buying Trump real estate.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

4. Squeezing Manafort might bring this all into the open

It's all just this web of shifting finance mechanisms. They're all big money transactions. The private financing seems to be very opaque. I guess the key is to find the entrance point for the dirty Russian money. Once it's in the system it seems to disappear into this morass of financing and refinancing deals. Trump with all of his over-leveraged positions and lack of access to traditional financing had to be a prime outlet for laundered money.

[DeminPennswoods]

5. It's mind-boggling for sure

Unger's book does a good job connecting the dots, but it's a spiderweb of connections.