Book: Dark Towers

New book featured on Rachel tonight, releases tomorrow.  All about Trump, Russian organized crime money, and the bank that acts as a conduit between them.

Next month, the Supreme Court hears the case on whether Deutsche Bank has to release Trump's financial records.

Rachel's speculation: Trump will do EVERYTHING, up to and including defying a Supreme Court ruling, to prevent that.

The Deutsche Bank Building was severely damaged in the 9/11 attacks.



Disputes between the building owners and insurers kept the building from being demolished for another 5 years.  During that time, more than 700 human bone fragments were discovered in and around the building, probably from the 9/11 collapses.

Finally in December 2006 the building was cleared for demolition.  In May 2007 work was halted when a 22-foot section of pipe fell 35 stories and impaled Firehouse 10.  Two firefighters were injured.

In September the building caught fire.  Two firefighters were killed in the blaze, and 105 were injured.  There is evidence the fire was not an accident.

I wonder how many of Trump's records will have "disappeared" in the fire?

None. If they say they did, Deutsche Bank will be lying.

Before most of it was bought by Deutsche Bank, that was the Bankers Trust building. I worked in IT for Bankers Trust, and I was familiar with the archiving and disaster recovery plans. Historical business records were archived to Iron Mountain on a regular basis. When 9/11 happened, all of the critical data was transferred to the Jersey City data center so that business could continue from there, within a timeframe of a few hours (at most). We practiced that, long before, in case some terrorist attack or major y2k failure or something happened - Bankers Trust was very technologically advanced, for a bank, whatever faults it may have had in other areas.

You will have trouble convincing me that whatever DB operations were moved to that data center were not added to the disaster recovery and archiving plans.

I haven't been paying much attention to this issue, so this article was a bit of an eye-opener for me.

Trump Is Counting on the Supreme Court to Save Him

NoCoPilot wrote:

Next month, the Supreme Court hears the case on whether Deutsche Bank has to release Trump's financial records.

Trump may have been saved by the coronavirus.  Even *I* am not cynical enough to suggest that his totally inadequate response to the crisis is in any way related, but I'm sure he's more than thrilled to accept the happy consequences.

On the other hand, Rachel Maddow *did* predict something of this sort:

Quote :

Rachel's speculation: Trump will do EVERYTHING, up to and including defying a Supreme Court ruling, to prevent that.

I finally broke own and ordered the book, used.  I had resisted, figuring a) I probably had a pretty good idea what was in it and b) there was ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE his Deutschebank records would ever be released, since they will expose not only Trump himself and all his financial misdealings, but they'll also expose the networks of Russian organized crime figures who have supported him since 1990, and THEY certainly wouldn't allow the records to be released.

Well, turns out I was wrong on the second point.

So I'm probably wrong on the first as well. Time to read the book and find out what Cyrus Vance may be sitting on (before he mysteriously falls down a staircase).

Deutschebank was making lots of risky commercial real estate loans in the late 1990s/early 2000s, with the intention of getting enough of them to create "mortgage-backed securities" based on commercial paper rather than the traditional homeowner mortgage derivatives, as was then popular among banks. With derivatives they could, in theory at least, sell off the risk of these underlying loans.

Into this breach Donald Trump strutted, when no other bank would touch him, after a string of painful loan defaults.

The material now in Cyrus Vance's hands should be jaw-dropping.

Tons of Russian drug and oil money was laundered through Deutsche using hundreds of anonymous shell companies.  These funds were dumped into "legitimate" US real estate, such as Donald Trump's condominiums, paying several times the asking price and never occupying the premises.  Then after a decent interval of a month or three, the units were sold again, back to Deutsche or to another Russian needing to launder rubles, and the cash was now free and clear.

Trump's entire empire rests on these "services provided" to Vlad Putin & Friends. Most of it happened between the Bush Crash of 2008-9 and Trump’s announcement of candidacy in 2015 — IOW well within the timeframe of the records Vance requested and received.

The book is more about Deutsche’s rise and fall, than their relationship with Trump. Trump was a very small cog in the larger story of a sober and responsible bank that got caught up, along with almost every other bank, in the avarice and obscene greed that was the derivatives market of the early 2000s. Dozens of books have detailed this story of seemingly endless cash with zero risk, and how risk managers who said it was too good to be true were shoved aside by go-go portfolio managers who promised to make everyone rich.

And it worked for a while.

Even Deutsche, who invested heavily in credit default swap “shorts” initially profited when the skyrocket first faltered. They thought they were smart. They thought their positions shielded them from further damage if the calamity continued to grow.

They were wrong.

If the derivatives market had been allowed to fail — as it was certainly wont to do — it would have taken down the world financial system with it. The consequences of that are hard to imagine. The bailout, which unequally benefited the worse offenders, is the only reason the planet’s economies are still functional, and we’re not trading sheepskins and pretty rocks for food.