Very important podcast and author of the new book american oligarch. I found it incredibly detailed and informative. One of the first things that struck me reading the book is it like youre the perfect person for this because yo they have immersed yourself in a dork new jersey politics for a career and now we have not only trump and kushner with so many others running for president. Theres cory booker, rudy giuliani. Right now why do you think there are so many news workers and folks at the upper levels of power in american politics . Guest it is such an interesting question because for so many years but i was covering in the politics is new york and in the cold. Not of course people like Harvey Clinton who ran for president but somehow because new york was iowa or New Hampshire really wasnt in important states except for fundraising purposes and one of the things that happened when trump is elected president has to she was so of this world i have been covering, a world of the new York Real Estate and reeling and dealing and political donations. I felt lost a sense of obligation. I have to cover trumped and his business in the white house. Ive been spending 25 years. I understand the patterns. Low and behold the stories are very similar to ones i might have been covering in new york. The state is so much larger and the consequences are so much a serious. I found that incredibly detailed those that read it carefully one of the first parts of the book is this detailed explanation of the ancestors some of them are slaughtered by the nazis, he is jewish and some of them escape in a very harrowing horrifying experience as the ancestors go through and germany and poland and take it to america and you contrast that in a number of places with the administrations immigration policy today. Guest i think the story is fascinating, and he does talk about being the grandson of holocaust survivors. He talks about it as a story of american success, that his grandparents fled the nazis and survived, made it to america, came from nothing and built a business. All of that is true, but what is not so apparent is the choices his grandparents made to get to this country. I want to be clear it is an incredible story of bravery and tenacity and escape. His grandmother was part of a small group of survivors. Out from under the barbed wire and escaped and made it to the forest where they lived through a brutal winter and after the war in the account. It was occupied by the nazis and the soviet union and now its part of belarus. To walk and take the train and until they got to a refugee camp in italy and then they were there for three and a half years because even after the holocau holocaust, the law was very antisemitic and there was a quota. And this despite the account of the family themselves to describe and develop the took on his wifes maiden name so he had been born and renamed himself Joseph Kushner had presented itself as the sum of his fatherinlaw and they did get the visa and needed to new york. They did what they had to do so that they could build a family and build a business and achieve great success. Ultimately on the line to see their grandson and one of the powerful positions on earth. Amazing storytelling on your part, now that he is they know faith is an important part of who he is and obviously ivanka converted to an orthodox jew to marry him. You can see in this family how much they care about and think about their ancestry. How do you think his faith informs white house today . Guest the reason i think it is complicated is because they run through the book and one has to do with the rules and rule breaking but obviously the Kushner Family broke rules to get here and to achieve success in their business and break norms in the white house position. Obviously hes a religious person and exploring that tension makes the book an interesting reading because people i tried hard enough to present an end this way but to present all the aspects of the character including the religious faith and response to it. Host my one question on this obviously is part of an administration that has a strict policy that many, Many Americans support and others oppose. Do you think that Jared Kushner fully supports the policies. Now kushner comes from a family where loyalty is above everything and he married into a family ive never heard him criticize when hes asked about his fatherinlaws policies he supports them 100 . A lot of democrats in new york assumed or felt or thought that kushner and ivanka trump one of them a belief in their causes and candidates. They felt they would have a back channel and would be able to prevail upon them to shake the president s policies. There are a lot of levels of betrayal. They thought that they were part of Jared Kushner world and ivanka trump the 20 go to the white house this is something i heard over and over again. Host what do you make of the relations and that theyve learned from mr. Murdoch . Guest when he was about 25 or 26yearsold he bought a newspaper called the new York Observer and people who work there at the time understood his politics as a kind of left centrist in said over the years they would be surprised. They would say ivanka or i were with rupert or Wendy Murdock when they were married and spoke about their weekend trips. First it was a social thing and then he began espousing more conservative ideas. His newspaper on the editorial page did, t too. People solve it more and more in the model of the publication that serves a particular agenda in. Host it really details all of the real estate career in incredible detail and i encourage people who either got to know the president from watching the apprentice or reading about him but this is a detailed account if you can see many steps along the way. A certain portion of the money making is relying on the Government Program which might surprise some people given his political position. With shared a couple of examples of times the president used by Government Programs to advance his business. Guest the studio is across the street from the Grand Hyatt Hotel which was known as the commodore hotel, and this made donald trump a real estate mogul. His father had been a Real Estate Developer but it was mostly brooklyn and queens and new york. He wanted a tax break and a tax giveaway from the government. He managed to pry his political connections which were sort of decreased from his father had been a member of the club called the madison Political Club in brooklyn for decades. He and later donald gave a lot of money and went to the fundraising dinners and hired the lawyers and out of that club came the mayor so when donald trump wanted to purchase the hotel he had a meeting with the Property Owner and said we can get a meeting with the mayor and he got a meeting the next day and said anything they want with his arms around, anything they want, they get. And with donald trump was able to get was the first tax break for commercial real estate for a hotel in the history of new york city. It had never been done before. This was a commercial project. It was the biggest tax break in the history of new york and when he thought it h keeps order for both sides. He had state approval when he did not and he told the state they had a Bank Approval when they did not and he filed a document with the state without the signature of the bank that no one apparently noticed and then he boasted about all of this so that is how donald trump became a manhattan Real Estate Developer was through this project with political connections and fraud and double dealing and after that he went on to other projects, trump tower put together in a similar way and other projects that all had a similar outline of him working his political connections and being unabashed about not telling the truth when it served his business interest which is a pattern that all of us have covered his mouth still see today. Host i think many people are familiar with trump being viewed as a ba bad boy of real estate and even his character on the apprentice hes cutting through red tape and willing to take big risks. People have read the book is obviously have learned about the casino business etc. He also has documents but had to pay supplements to people, Trump University is an example of that. One of the hotel that i was discussing. Trump was under investigation for possibly hiring a lawyer, biting off a lawyer just what he was looking at. The lawyer at the time said to him why dont you meet with an fbi agent who donald trump met with the fbi agent at his Fathers Office with his then wife and their then toddler son, john junior. There were no charges and this is a part of a pattern to the document. For years they just looked at something donald trump does and he charms the agent, takes them to the helicopter and 21 club. They come away impressed and dazzled and do not ultimately investigate and. So, this happens with deal after deal where he escapes scrutiny. I think the most interesting recent example was a story that he wrote that involved his adult children, ivanka and don junior. Do you want me to keep going . Host that is an example where she takes a roll and they appear they came very close to being in real trouble in criminal trouble and i would love to hear more about it. Shrub famil the trump familye sued by some in the hotel and they said that the family had applied and vastly overstated how many units per sold. What is important as anybody that knew the real estate understands if you are going to buy real estate in that an apart building or on a street, the real estate is more valuable if people live in the houses nextdoor versus those that are empty. They were sued for saying that they were 60 sold when in fact they were not even 15 . The Manhattan District Attorney gets a look at it and starts to investigate and he investigates and investigates and it moves through the office. There is an email trail that his children are seen discussing and there is a clear knowledge of it so they told me there was no doubt they had knowledge of what it takes to build a case that the first they hired a very powerful wellconnected team of white collar lawyers to try to make it go away and they didnt make it go away. So then the personal attorney that im sure you are familiar had been in a major donor three months later over the objections of the prosecutors office, the District Attorney closed the case and they were never prosecuted for selling fraud in manhattan but this is when he was getting ready to run for president and people we spoke to, people close thought this would have been a very big bad situation and its one of the cases where theres been this come closest to criminal charges. Host has a lot of civil lawsuits etc. That example is right it was recent and close to. It explains a lot of what we are seeing now with 50 impeachment situation and the other congressional investigation and the current investigation where the president as a private businessman was extremely adept so he might charm fbi agents and he might threaten people and my tire wellconnected lawyers or as he did for many years to support the charity of the District Attorney. There were all kind of ways he could get himself into the crease with Law Enforcement in new york and new jersey. He befriended a u. S. Attorney named Chris Christie said he made sure he understood his friends were and he was able to make it work for him, he was never charged in a criminal case. It is interesting to have that background as we go into this situation where he is being called to account and there is a public reckoning and in some cases even though hes president , he is not able to make things go the way as he once did. I think that we can see now where it is going but one of the interesting dynamics having written about and reported on all of these decades of debate he avoided Law Enforcement to be confronted in the report and now the impeachment inquiry is a revealing insight into how he must feel when investigators are in this doorstep. Host hes escaped so many situations it seems he was up against it. The book is over and over like it will knock him out of the white house either. She becomes bolder than next time. After his testimony was thought to be done the next day President Trump called the president of ukraine and asked us to do a favor and then it is a pattern that you see throughout his career and one of the things in the book. Host the sort of last ten or 15 years of the career and you just detailed this as well hes come out of Atlantic City but still isnt being went to buy anything and no banks will expand his empire. Then he sort of managers through a number of different relationships to get from the bank and there are some russian purchases with trump real estate and it adds up to this point some liberals are hoping there might be some unknown russian money behind the real estate or russian oligarchs. What do you think the odds are that there there is still some business connection between putin, russia. Guest we dont have the tax return as you know congress tried to get information and they said even though the bank was willing to turn over the documents, that case is now going to the Supreme Court and will be heard in march so we will learn perhaps if donald trump or Deutsche Bank will ever have to turn over any of that information. So, the answer is we just dont have the documents and dont have the data and as you know this is one of the fundamental frustrations about covering with vast International Interest and we dont know who the investors or because they are not set up to demand information so it doesnt really tell you who people are. So, we are it like it is unsure but one of the things i spend a lot of time thinking about in my book one of the things i didnt realize is the oligarch money into the real estate began coming in in the early part of the century and began flowing into real estate around the city and really, really propping it up. This is coming at period they cannot get the banks to support them which is astounding if you think about it he has trouble doing business with american banks because they were so irked by him so when he got his loans, he was in a situation that is what he was looking to cut licensing deals, Deutsche Bank, south korea to the former soviet union to anybody that could put money into his properties that wasnt going through the scrutiny of the Banking System and it happened at the same time that capital is flowing into new york more generally. And it does appear that the family was able to harness that through a lo a lot agreed to gio investigative reporting that we are only seeing a tiny crack of light in the door and not the full light of day of what we would be to see what those relationships are. Host ivanka along with jerry is a president ial adviser. You go through the career in great detail. What do you think the role was that the president the presidenn they were in the private sector . There were a couple of rolls. At a general level, she was in charge of the hospitality business, the hotels which by the way, the Hotel Business prior to the presidency generally is higher ranking them some of the other pieces of business. A lot of new yorkers have said to me that when she was starting out, because she didnt go right from college but almost. They said to me that when she was starting out, he would put her on the phone and they wouldnt understand why this was happening to bankers and Public Officials what they hear is ivanka and its something his father had done for him which was just put him forward into the limelight at an early age. So its somebody that reflects back positively on him because shes smart and understands business and doesnt seem to have a sort of outerborough said she becomes the person to make everything accessible in the family business. Along the way, as i document my together whenever they need the number of lawsuits about this, she seems to herself to have dipped into the practices in particular practices of misrepresentation pretty wholeheartedly. Host i would agree with that. Guest there was a lawsuit in california where she had sent a letter around that turned up in court papers to the buyers. It started right before the Great Recession but one of the things they were particularly upset about is that she kept saying this property isnt subject to Market Forces into people lost their entire investment. Nothing was ever built and finally it was brought to a lawsuit. The trumps settled the lawsuit but in the course of settling, ivanka settled by saying we were victims here also but the Trump Organization as it is this ever been stronger and she lists a number of places where they had businessehavebusinesses that wee opposite. And then his adult children. What do you think donald trump will do when he leaves the white house in one year or five years from now cracks between four and eight years in politics but what will he do when he leaves . He will move to florida. [laughter] i think its very hard to predict the future. Certainly what is really interesting to me that people in the new york state real estate world the first thing they wanted me to understand is they want me to know that donald trump is not one of us so that if he wasnt part of the civic Real Estate Society but his practices are so far off the scale perk i want to be clear donald trump is in a category by himself and thats it they want to understand in the Real Estate Industry in new york. He is an outlier as was his father. The New York Times said this isnt something you hear every day about a real estate family in new york. They have been living in washington now and have been working in the white house and in politics. Every company in new york and new jersey what are their aspirations for the future . The attack. Right now there is a Broad National portfolio and ivanka says she is focusing on the white house. It is important to pause on Jared Kushner if you think of the people he has outlasted steve bannon, jim mattis and it goes on and on. So many officials and Jared Kushner not even 40 years old is one of the most powerful people on earth. So it is hard to know what they want to do next only that they said their focuses is on washington and washington business. Speaking about women and families and she speaks in a way somebody wanting to have a political career would speak having said that i dont know what that means. I have tried very hard to interview ivanka and Jared Kushner. So i could not ask them that question. Although if i ever had the opportunity i would ask how they see their future. Before they got into politics glancing lee they were those that i covered and i actually worked with them there was a gap in between when i left it when they came but there are many people that we know in common it in the course of covering them in the course of governmen government, they were on the edges of that. But really when i began to pay much closer attention to Jared Kirchner and ivanka trumpet was when i was in Council Bluffs iowa and donald trump was speaking at an event with Jerry Falwell junior and introduced his soninlaw Jared Kushner. I was really surprised to see him on the National Stage with his fatherinlaw because he had been behind the scenes type of person and newspaper publisher so you would necessarily get on stage with a president ial candidate and then the point where i really started to question the role they were playing in his campaign and white house. Again when he does leave office what is a likelihood to be charged with the crime in the private sector . I think covering the court cases that have been addressing this issue. One is where he has claimed he cannot even be investigated for any Business Practices run afoul of the law and the District Attorney has said one of the big problems with added statute of limitations these were committed 2011 perhaps over 2010. That the clot can run out. It is entirely possible for some of these the clock runs out if President Trump is reelected. However it could go to the Supreme Court and they will decide the president cannot be investigated which is a startling conclusion in some ways it is even more significant than the impeachment inquiry of the political trial because this means no Law Enforcement agent or agency anywhere in the country can investigate a sitting president and fundamentally to change our understanding of the role of checks and balances this is why call the book american oligarch because the conclusion that im a very factbased reporter and i want to understand stuff and the documents and the interviews and to come to this conclusion is that our government is more and more influenced by the very wealthy including the trumps and they can control more of the system over a very significant steppingstone if the Supreme Court rules the president cannot be investigated for anything then we do have a situation with a president is given permission to act in a certain way so it is on the mind of the judiciary but it is unprecedented and we will find out when the Supreme Court term ends in june and it will really affect the future of our democracy and if that remains something recognizable like what we see now. Or if we have a situation where there is no accountability. So the subplot is the us diplomat for the us Foreign Policy was to set up a system to be held to account if people cannot be held to account it leads to corruption and bipartisan policy. So while the bipartisan roots argue in the president ial power in one of the things that i ask myself. And then with Brett Kavanaugh is a great believer president ial power. And the fact that they even took these cases and the dc circuit. So no way should the present act with immunity but the Supreme Court took it anyway even though there was no disagreement. That they would consider this. It is to be lost in that impeachment trial. Your book does an absolute great job with the policy changes in court cases that made wealthy americans much wealthier and i know you make comparisons where a previous generation for those who had incredible power and politics that it is a gilded age and for those titans. What happened in the gilded age and there was no taxation so wealthy monopolies these figures like the cotton cartel and the Senate Gallery and the fat cats that was symbolic of the gilded age. People could walk right into the horrible government and there was a push back Teddy Roosevelt came in Franklin Roosevelt and advocated taxation. There were rules to make that were more democratic and then to spread democracy so what has happened in the last 50 years of history is the opposite. Since reagan became elected and began cutting taxes, our taxes have become much much lower. And at the same time it is easier and easier for her money to get into elections. In the course of reporting my book look at the obama state of the union speech after the Citizens United case. This is the case in which it was essentially decided and unlimited flow of corporate money can go into elections. President obama said this will open the floodgates to foreign influence in elections. And that caught me short because i had not realized that was a discussion. But when you make it so easy for dark money to come into campaigns, Campaign Contributions used to be so low there were not fancy evasive mechanisms that each of these car decisions made it harder like people for you and me you could spend a whole year trying to figure out who one company is that you gave to some Political Action group to figure out who is giving to elections. And they found ukrainians tried to legally purchase tickets to the trump inaugural and the indictment is a new york to funnel money and it is poor decisions that have been made easier and easier and also when donald trump is in the white house after spending his entire career getting around Campaign Finance laws and to understand from his perspective the power and he has said as much in the 2015 campaign i give to them and then they are there for me. Obviously the president ran a campaign on a businessman and you have details of the falsities he has made about his own wealth and success and crimes he has committed but he said he would bring about tremendous Economic Growth in america and the economy has been very strong since he was president so how much does praise does he get for the economy right now i think when it goes well it is positive to the president but i think the important indicator of broad historical terms is look at wealth and the quality some people are doing very well but if you have a situation of vast equality then you have such strain. So it is a hard question to answer. And to bring into the white house so that means efficient management instead we see conflict of interest, lie interest, lies, financial shenanigans and a situation where you know so many people feel the attorney general booked a ballroom there for a party because they understand that trump is a transactional president will look favorably on them if they give money to him. That is the business the president has brought to the white house not efficient management is waste fraud and abuse but the argument over efficiency in the white house for what trump has brought is Something Else entirely. I think in both of the systems created to help entrepreneurs and businesses and also the various rule breaking that trump has done during his career, Jared Kushner and jared on and donald trump are born into wealthy families how much of their power and success is contributed to their own talents and efforts and how much do we attribute to the fact that you become wealthy if you start wealthy quick. One thing i wanted to talk about the intergenerational transfer of wealth and successive generations have benefited from legal schemes to avoid paying taxes so that means the next generation becomes richer and richer and thats a snowball so there is a study of what happens to the very rich this is the year that Jared Kushner and donald mann dash and if Anke Mann Ivanka trump were born so the line on the chart shoots upward and that is what is happening with the rich and the very wealthy the trump and kushner families they are getting wealthier and wealthier very very fast. And it is impossible to answer the question that you asked because the amount of money transferred from one generation to the next is increasingly the unfettered ability to flow, it floods out the data points you could not even answer that. So the tax cuts and jobs acts of 2017. And the New York Times did a recent analysis that not only were hundreds of billions of dollars lost from revenue by the deficits is 1 trillion. So we see a situation the wealthy can hold onto their well and the government is getting much much less revenues as these broad historical trends less and less taxation and capped off by the tax cuts and jobs act of 2017. One of the favorite thing on themes of the book is when you are in court and Michael Cohen who is trumps personal lawyer he was his fixer to go solve problems but he would pay people off and paid off Stormy Daniels to make sure that story did not become public. He is in prison right now and with the family members his daughter. Im sorry. And then that you would have sympathy for Michael Colon even though he has committed crimes and campaign fraud. I think we were saying earlier about the Kushner Family especially in these partisan times to see people as paper cutout dolls to present real human characters that have flaws and bad points me and my colleagues of the podcast have some very hardhitting reporting of Michael Colon before he was indicted. We were out on the field the day the office was raided by the fbi. And i covered the trajectory of the court cases and that became interesting to me over the case that all the testimony he gave the public testimony, closeddoor testimony he talks about a situation that was very familiar to me and the Trump Organization he went to work for donald trump and it was so thrilling and so exciting that anything could happen and then donald trump crossed the line and then he would ask them to cross another line that was farther off the edge and then he would do that and then could not go back bad is the situation a number of people who i have talked to say they crossed lines for him and then they were stuck to not say no. With Michael Colon finally obviously he did plead guilty he got some information to the prosecutors about his former boss and donald trump turned on him stopped paying for his lawyers and called him a rat and Michael Colon said in the courtroom i did this crime but i did it to help the Political Campaign of someone else and what he said and now im paraphrasing is wise of that person also being called to account quick c gets up in court and starts to say to the judge im sorry and his daughter starts to sob for guy look over at her and i handed her tissues she looks at it she wipes her eyes Michael Colon can hear her crying. Its very sad. He said i did not want to be a villain in history. Its something we see over and over that people who have been very close to donald trump would do anything Michael Coleman said he would take a bullet for him but when they veered from the path for one reason or another he rejected him and that something weve seen over and over again. We have about five minutes to go. One of them is we spent a lot of time reporting on conflicts of interest and concerns of conflicts of interest between his administration and the government that they keep very separate when he was elected but now they travel others problems with his hotel. That the president donates his president ial salary is he actually making more money or less money cracks what do you think about that quick. I agree it is a mystery and its uncomfortable i would like to know if the president is personally profiting from the presidency. But i think its clear to all of us the president has brought in a certain way of being its perfectly fine for him to use Government Resources for his business and seemingly is perfectly fine for his associates. And in some ways to unravel this ukraine scandal with peoples desire to make money with off the books government and all kinds of ways. It is clear trump has brought that approach to the white house and has permeated the government. So the question of him shaping the entire style of government that is certainly happening with the personal bottomline may not be affected but his power could enhance these techniques. Thats what we have to keep our eye on. When the trumps or would donald trump is not the president , whenever that is , do you think the trump and Kushner Family returned to new york they will be welcome back . Their friends are very wealthy and welltodo a lot of people like themselves could they come back to the private sector or do they have to live in florida or somewhere else . They did change their residency to florida so there is that. So this is what is clear and for this policy and the administrative chaos. And that is very loud and among the entire population. I covered Political Campaigns and whos going to win and whats going to happen. And then to hedge your bets. And then we get out of the prediction business we understand the forces at play. That its very hard for a political future so i will take a pass. [laughter] thats all right. But you said earlier today with the obligations you write this book and we have an incredibly polarized time in america. And relentlessly that you touched on this a little bit but you say it was worth it to write this because it seems like it seems like it doesnt affect anybody. And if he does like it then he promotes it. And then could have some difference in the election Going Forward . I hope my book is not just now but ten years from now that i dont mean to just tell a story of the intergenerational families and how we got to this point and we try to lay that out. And then to understand where he came from. But looking at what is happening specifically at the white house right now. Is that they read and discuss no matter what their Political Parties are in it is not an aggregation of facts to put into their political machine but us and that time. Guest thank you. Its great to have the chance to talk with you. Keep up the good work yourself. Of this program is available as a podcast. All programs can be viewed on the website at booktv. Org. Next booktv Monthly Program with off and wall street journal columnist jason riley the author of the case for open borders, please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed and faults like power a critique of black civil rights leaders