House Oversight — Estate records
- Pages
- 2
- Text
- Searchable
Text as released
Machine-read from the scan. Names, dates and numbers can be misread — check anything you rely on against the original page.
From: J [jeevacation@gmail.com] Sent: 2/1/2019 4:11:28 PM To: Michael Wolff Subject: Re: FYI Needs edit but ... ie 36! M Ryboloev not known in 05 , Talk later On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 11:07 AM Michael Wolff < > wrote: Books and newspaper accounts of Trump's 45 years in business were full of his shady dealings, and the presidency had only helped to highlight them and to surface even juicier ones. Real estate was the world's favorite money laundering currency and Trump's B-level real estate business was quite explicitly designed to appeal to money launderers. What's more, Trump's own financial woes, and desperate efforts to maintain billionaire lifestyle, cache, and market viability, forced him into constant and unsubtle schemes. Practically speaking, you couldn't miss him, as the Mueller investigation appeared to be finding. In November 2004, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later caught in a scandal involving under-age prostitutes, agreed to buy out of bankruptcy a house in Palm Beach, Florida for $30 million—a house that had been on the market for two years. Epstein and Trump had been close friends—playboys in arms, as it were—for more than a decade, with Epstein often counseling Trump on his chaotic financial affairs. Epstein took Trump to see the Palm Beach house to advise him on construction issues involved with moving a swimming pool. As he prepared to finalize his deal for the house, an incredulous Epstein saw a severely cash-constrained Trump bid $41 million for the property, buying it through an entity called Trump Properties LLC, financed by Deutsche Bank. Trump, Epstein knew, had been renting his name, telling Epstein he ought to do the same—that is, for an ample fee, Trump was willing to serve as a front man to disguise the actual ownership in a real estate transaction. (This was, in effect, just another variation of Trump's basic business model of licensing his name for commercial properties owned by someone else.) A […]