WaPo: Unearthed letters show Trump attacking journalists for telling the truth since the 1980s.

[DetlefK]

Full story at WaPo behind paywall.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/new-documents-reveal-how-a-young-trump-bullied-the-press-for-years-as-he-hid-his-actual-wealth/

On Friday, journalist Jonathan Greenberg published a stunning exposé of how Donald Trump, in his younger years, managed to maintain his brand of success and fortune — and keep attracting investors to his projects — even in the face of devastating business losses and incompetence.

The short answer: he threatened, intimidated, and bullied reporters out of telling the truth about his business empire.

“I turned up three never-before-published letters from Trump to Forbes from 1989, in which he claimed to be worth $3.7 billion,” wrote Greenberg. “We now know that he reported losses of about $100 million that year and that he was treading near insolvency. Then I started to contact other people who had collided with Trump in those years. Journalists told me how he’d tried to block their reporting on his empire — by making up ethical scandals about them, furnishing fake documents and, in one case, threatening to expose the private life of a closeted media executive. Wall Street analysts witnessed a campaign of intimidation that began when Trump got one of them fired for (correctly) doubting his casinos’ ability to pay off their debts.”

[octoberlib]

1. Trump used to get so pissed at Spy magazine

which coined the term “ short-fingered vulgarian “. They sent him a check one time for something like 7 cents, just to see if he’d cash it and he did.

[jmowreader]

7. That was a great stunt

The editors wanted to see which celebrities would deposit a check for basically nothing so they sent out dozens of checks for under $1. Trump was one of the few who did.

[Ms. Toad]

10. And why wouldn't he?

As long as you have a bank account, the cost of cashing a check is a signature. Pennies add up.

[UTUSN]

2. K&R

[Wounded Bear]

3. You don't get to be that good of a lying asshole without a lot of practice...

[malaise]

4. I suspect that he has threatened lots of ReTHUGs and Fundie preachers

This lying MoFo should have been in prison ages ago

[Ms. Toad]

11. My reaction, as well.

Why would this suprise me.

[Achilleaze]

5. The republicans worship at his* Altar of Falsehood

Didn't the repubes used to believe that Satan was the Father of Lies? I guess they don't believe that anymore, because they are fully embracing lies now.

Or maybe the repubes have just kissed-off the teachings of Christ because they have chosen a new 'billionaire' GAWD, inc. who grifts our hard-earned tax money not to feed the hungry, but rather so he can pamper himself playing golf with other fatcat republicans?

* aka republican Draft-dodger-in-Chief

[salin]

9. LA Times cartoon pegs it:

[chowder66]

6. It's also worrying that Wall Street didn't warn investors about his junk bonds and financial

troubles because they were afraid of lawsuits or getting fired. That doesn't give me much confidence in them.

[Pepsidog]

8. One of the worst people to have ever lived.A bully and a true coward.

[dalton99a]

15. "The worst human being on the planet became its most powerful"

[Pepsidog]

20. So true and incredible.

[octoberlib]

12. Some paragraphs from the article. Trump's worse than a piece of shit. there are no words.

Elsewhere, Trump’s bullying was even more brazen — and the consequences even more dire. In March 1990, Marvin Roffman, one of the nation’s leading casino industry stock analysts, told Wall Street Journal reporter Neil Barsky that Trump might not be able to gross the $1.3 million per day he needed to keep the Taj Mahal going. Trump retaliated. He called Roffman’s boss at Janney Montgomery Scott and threatened to sue unless the firm fired Roffman or printed a letter from him saying, in Roffman’s telling, “that sonofabitch reporter Barsky misquoted” him and that “the Taj Mahal was going to be the greatest success ever.” Roffman, a 17-year veteran analyst, resisted and was fired the next day. The following year, not long before the Taj went belly up, Roffman won a $750,0000 arbitration decision against his former firm. Soon after that, he settled a defamation suit, for an undisclosed sum, against Trump.

Still, the firing didn’t go unnoticed on Wall Street, and other observers began to moderate what they told investors about Trump’s stocks and bonds, even though they were clearly terrible investments. “We have had a number of calls from analysts around the country who are very concerned about this,” Alfred Morley, president of the national organization representing financial analysts, told the New York Times at the time. “Their basic concern is, Is the analyst’s responsibility in jeopardy because of an outside influence?”


Trump had laid the groundwork perfectly for his comeback a few years later. In 1995 and 1996, he floated more than $500 million in public stock offerings and more than $1.3 billion in junk bonds to Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, his consolidated holdings company. One might think that after the 1991 bankruptcy, which caused lenders to lose billions of dollars, analysts would warn their clients against buying Trump’s stock or junk bonds. Yet in searching news reports from those years, I could not find a single Wall Street analyst who told the media anything negative about Trump’s new public company. Trump’s finances were a mess: His Taj Mahal casino had lost more than $136 million during the four previous years, and he was just weeks from defaulting on his own loans when the stock debuted in 1995. But Wall Street was careful not to criticize. “After I got fired, analysts weren’t able to speak freely,” Roffman recalls. It “sent a message to others in our business. .?.?. ‘Keep your mouth shut or you’ll never work in this industry again.’ After that I could not get a job as an analyst.” He sums up that period this way: “Telling the truth about Trump was dangerous to your career.” It was also a perilous time for investors, who, over the next 14 years, would lose more than $1.5 billion on Trump’s stocks and bonds as the public casino company went bankrupt twice.

Trump found a way to send a similar message to reporters, like Barsky, the Wall Street Journal correspondent who had recently won a prestigious award for covering the collapse of Trump’s empire. As Barsky recalled in a 2016 op-ed, a Trump executive called in 1991 and invited him to a boxing match in Atlantic City. “I declined at first, but my editor encouraged me to go,” Barsky wrote. “Then, in an act of bad judgment, I accepted free tickets for my brother and father.” A few weeks later, Barsky wrote a tough piece about Trump’s finances, after which, as he recounted in his op-ed, a Trump spokesman called the New York Post and, according to a senior Post reporter, asked, “How would you like to destroy the career of a Wall Street Journal reporter?” The spokesman told the Post that Barsky had “extorted the tickets, asked for a suite at the Taj, and that out of anger that I hadn’t received more favors, had written negative articles” about Trump. The Post ran a piece airing the claims.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2019/06/14/feature/how-donald-trump-silenced-the-people-who-could-expose-his-business-failures/?utm_term=.78dc16749513

[Boomerproud]

18. They call us snowflakes eh?

Everything I read about him makes me ill. I'm re-reading HIllary Clinton's book today and have Jim Acosta's book on hold at the library. He gets away with everything. I can't take it.

[Blaukraut]

19. Now more than ever I believe this guy is compromised

And it's probably more than just the Russians who have financial dirt on him.

[Skittles]

13. in other words: HE IS A THUG

[dalton99a]

16. Yep. A common street thug and a low-life scumbag criminal.

[dalton99a]

14. This is a must read.

[thesquanderer]

17. Good piece but it's perfectly possible to be worth billions yet lose $100 mill in a given year. (nt)

[Martin Eden]

21. This guy should be in an Orange Jumpsuit, not the White House

Trump is the enemy of the free press.