Tuesday, October 23, 2018

THE PARTNERSHIPS OF DONALD TRUMP AND THE SAUDIS BUTCHERS


FACT CHECK: DOES TRUMP HAVE NO FINANCIAL INTERESTS IN SAUDI ARABIA?

Brad Sylvester | Fact Check Reporter
  

President Donald Trump claimed on Twitter that he has no financial interests in Saudi Arabia.



Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump

For the record, I have no financial interests in Saudi Arabia (or Russia, for that matter). Any suggestion that I have is just more FAKE NEWS (of which there is plenty)!
Twitter Ads info and privacy

“For the record, I have no financial interests in Saudi Arabia (or Russia, for that matter). Any suggestion that I have is just more FAKE NEWS (of which there is plenty)!” he said Oct. 16.

Verdict: True
Trump has no investments in Saudi Arabia, but he has done business with the Saudis over the years.

Fact Check:
Before Trump became president, he stepped down from the Trump Organization, a conglomerate of roughly 500 businesses that operate globally. He retains ownership and a financial stake in the company despite claims by some that this could lead to conflicts of interest.

The issue came to the forefront in the wake of the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, as some speculated that Trump’s cautious response to Khashoggi’s death may be linked to his financial interests in the country.
“I’m very concerned that U.S. national security policy is for sale and that the business connection between the Saudi royal family and the Trump family may explain why this administration has been so soft on the Saudis throughout the past two years, but especially the past week,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told Business Insider.

Nearly a dozen Senate Democrats, including Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy and Elizabeth Warren, signed a letter calling for the president to release more information about his company’s potential business dealings with Saudi Arabia, citing “significant concerns about financial conflicts of interest.”

But The Daily Caller News Foundation could find no instances in which the Trump Organization has had business investments in Saudi Arabia.

“Like many global real estate companies, we have explored opportunities in many markets, that said, we do not have any plans for expansion into Saudi Arabia,” a Trump Organization spokesperson told TheDCNF in a statement.

This statement is supported by Trump’s financial disclosure reports. The documents show that there were eight Trump businesses with the name “Jeddah”, the second-largest city in Saudi Arabia, in their title at one point, but all were inactive by Nov. 15, 2016.

Eric Trump, an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, reiterated his father’s tweet during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” Thursday morning.

“There’s zero investments in Russia. There’s zero investments in Saudi. We have absolutely nothing to do with those countries,” he told the hosts.

While Trump doesn’t currently have any interests in Saudi Arabia, he has frequently done business with the Saudis.

Trump sold a yacht to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in 1991 for $20 million, and Alwaleed was one of multiple investors who bought Trump’s Plaza Hotel for $325 million in 1995. A decade later, Trump sold an entire floor of the Trump World Tower in Manhattan to the Saudi government for $4.5 million.

More recently, the Trump Organization has profited from Saudi stays at its hotels in the U.S.

WaPo reported that Trump’s luxury hotel in Chicago has seen a 169 percent increase in Saudi stays in 2018 compared to the same period in 2016, and the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan received a 13 percent revenue increase in room rentals for the first three months of 2018 after a five-day visit by associates of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

A public relations firm working for the Saudi government also spent $270,000 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2017, as reported by The Daily Caller.

The attorneys general from D.C. and Maryland to filed a lawsuit against Trump in June 2017 alleging that foreign payments to his D.C. hotel constitute a violation of the Emoluments Clause, a section of the constitution which states that no person holding office may accept gifts or payments from any foreign government without the consent of Congress.

“It’s unprecedented that the American people must question day after day whether decisions are made or actions are taken to benefit the United States or to benefit President Trump,” Democratic Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said in a news conference.
The Trump Organization has pushed back on the notion that any of these dealings have had political underpinnings.

“The renting of a hotel room from one of the Trump businesses is not correlated to President Trump’s performance of the duties of the Office of President,” Bobby Burchfield, an ethics lawyer for the Trump Organization, argued in the Texas Review of Law and Politics. “The Trump businesses rented hotel rooms before the President took office, and presumably they will do so after he leaves office, just as they are doing while he is in office. Those transactions are not derived from his performance of the Office of President.”


SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP’S SECRET SAUDI MISSION:

“You saved my a rse again and again… So, I’ll save yours like Bush and Obama did!
WHO IS FINANCING ALL THE TRUMP AND SON-IN-LAW’S REFINANCING SCAMS???
FOLLOW THE MONEY!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/10/swamp-keeper-trump-claims-fake-news-is.html
"I doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message he's sending. Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended royal family, have been his patrons for years, buying his distressed properties when he needed money. In the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's flashy yacht so that the then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to stave off personal bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the Plaza Hotel, one of Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an entire floor of his landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in 2001."

 


From blackmailing princes to murdering journalists: how Saudi Arabia’s spy network has expanded under Mohammed bin Salman

Raf Sanchez
Inside the Georgian mansion in Mayfair that houses Saudi Arabia’s embassy in London, two offices of Saudi intelligence operatives are busy at work. 
The first office belongs to the General Intelligence Presidency, Saudi Arabia’s foreign intelligence agency. Its staff are engaged in the “normal” work of spies, meeting with MI6 to discuss Britain and Saudi Arabia’s shared fight against al-Qaeda or to swap secrets on Iran. 
The second office has a darker purpose. There the staff of the Mabahith, Saudi Arabia’s secret police, are tracking people of interest inside the UK. 
Its operatives are watching obvious targets like Saudi dissidents who have gone into exile in Britain, or London-based Islamists whose ideology is seen as a threat to Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy.
But they are also keeping tabs on Arab businessmen and the decadent lives of Gulf royals living the UK. The Mabahith’s spies are especially interested in compromising material they can use as blackmail to further Riyadh’s interests.      
“These guys gather the dirt and they hold it until directed,” said a former Saudi embassy employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They want to know who is sleeping with who, who is drinking and doing drugs, who is spending money they don’t have.” 
Saudi spies and secret police work out of the kingdom's embassy in London Credit: Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images
The set-up in the London embassy is replicated at Saudi diplomatic posts around the world, forming a vast web of spies watching the kingdom’s enemies and surveilling its own people. 
While this apparatus has existed for years, it has become more aggressive and more violent under Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, who controls the Saudi security services. 
His ambition to silence critics abroad and stomp out political rivals at home has depended on a new ferocity in the intelligence agencies. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi is just the most extreme example.  
“For many decades Saudi Arabia had a system in which the king sought to develop a policy consensus within the royal family, the clerical establishment, and the entrepreneur elite,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who now heads the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institute. 
“That has changed profoundly in the last few years. Instead of a consensual system they have moved to a very autocratic system, which relies much more on the intelligence services hounding out dissent at home and abroad.” 
Maher Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer, was allegedly part of the squad that killed Mr Khashoggi Credit: Sabah via AP 
Mr Khashoggi was no stranger to the craft of the secret police or how its methods changed over time. In the mid-2000s he worked at the Saudi embassy in London as an advisor to the ambassador, Prince Turki bin Faisal. The prince was Saudi Arabia’s spy chief before moving to the UK.  
One of Mr Khashoggi’s embassy colleagues was Maher Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer stationed in London. Mr Mutreb is now under arrest in Saudi Arabia as part of the 15-man squad accused of Mr Khashoggi’s murder.   
In his Washington Post column, Mr Khashoggi noted the aggression of Saud al-Qahtani, a senior aide to Crown Prince Mohammed who was sacked over the weekend amid the fallout out of the killing. The prince’s aide made no secret of his hatred for dissidents and once asked his 1.35 million Twitter followers to give him names for a blacklist.
Mr Khashoggi pointed to the tweet as an example of how unrestrained Saudi repression had become in the last two years. “Writers like me, whose criticism is offered respectfully, seem to be considered more dangerous than the more strident Saudi opposition based in London.” 
Saudi Arabia’s spies have always focused on the UK, which has given safe harbour to many Saudi dissidents as well as Islamists and anti-monarchists from across the Middle East. 
One of their targets has been Sa’ad al-Faqih, the leader of Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a UK-based Saudi opposition group that campaigns to replace with the royal family with an Islamic government.
Saad al-Faqih, a Saudi dissident based in London, has been a target for Saudi intelligence Credit: AP Photo/Richard Lewis
Dr Faqih was attacked at his home in Willesden Green, northwest London, in June 2003 by two men who he said claimed to be plumbers. They tried to spray chemicals in his face and then attacked him with a spanner but he was able to fight them off. 
He believes the two white men were British gangsters hired by Saudi Arabia to kidnap him, a claim that the kingdom has always denied.  
Dr Faqih has not faced any more physical attacks since 2003. But he has felt a heightened threat since Crown Prince Mohammed began to gather power three years ago and he started taking new security precautions. “We feel extra danger because we know that this boy is reckless and impulsive,” he said. 
Saudi dissidents were rattled by an incident in August this year on the pavement outside Harrods in central London. Ghanem al-Masarir, a popular Saudi political satirist who often mocks Crown Prince Mohammed, was confronted and attacked by two Saudi men. 
“They were shouting about the king and Mohammed bin Salman and they said: ‘how dare you insult al-Saud?’” Mr Dosari said. He is convinced that the men were put up to the attack by Saudi intelligence. 
“I don’t think they were trying to kill me or kidnap me but they wanted to insult me and to send a message that I was not safe where I was,” he said. Video footage of the attack was widely shared by pro-Saudi Twitter accounts under a hashtag celebrating the attack.
The Saudi embassy in London did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Saudi Arabia insists that Mr Khashoggi's death was the result of "a rogue operation" which was not ordered by the government.  
Before the killing in Istanbul made global headlines, the starkest example of the Saudi intelligence's new aggression was an apparent campaign to kidnap rebel princes in Europe and bring them back to Saudi Arabia. 
According to the BBC, three princes who had fallen out with the royal family have been captured since 2015. One, Prince Sultan bin Turki, a grandson of King Abdulaziz, accepted a flight on a Saudi government private jet from Paris to Cairo in January 2016.    
The prince went to sleep on the flight and when he awoke he realised the jet was in fact heading Saudi Arabia. He was dragged off the plane by Saudi agents and is believed to be under house arrest to this day. 
Saudi dissidents joke darkly that Mr Khashoggi’s death probably means they are safer now than they have been in years because Riyadh will be unwilling to risk another international scandal. But none believe the danger has fully passed. 
Over the weekend, King Salman ordered his ministers to prepare reforms of the Saudi intelligence services to prevent another incident like Mr Khashoggi’s death. No one should expect sweeping changes: the head of the reform committee is none other Crown Prince Mohammed himself. 
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