Transcripts For CSPAN2 David Enrich Dark Towers 20240713

Questions, there will be a signing. We have books behind the register. When you come back david will be happy to sign them and then finally after everything is said and done if you could collapse your chairs and prop them up against the wall that would be greatly appreciated by the staff. Thank you. So yes, tonight politics and prose has the pleasure of hosting david enrich at the New York Times. He previously was a reporter and editor at the washington journal, new york and london and was a journal editor. Hes won numerous journalism awards including 2016 journal for future writing and previously the author of the Spider Network hell a genius and scheming that bankers pulled off one of the greatest scams in history which was shortlisted for the Financial Times best of the year and his new book dark towers Deutsche Bank donald trump and the epic trail of destruction, traces the dark history with the president as well as the tragic case of William Brookes illustrates the evolution of character that has become a global face of financial malfeasance. I will attend jump in. Please join me in welcoming david enrich to politics and prose. [applause]. Thank you for coming. It is an honor to be here at extremely gratifying to see a turnout like this for a book about European Bank no one has ever heard of. And with those nonfiction audiences people generally do not read to start i want to read the opening section just to set the scene and i will explain why and how i got into writing the book in the first place. A little before 1 00 p. M. When a wiry american emerge from the station into the drizzle the dreary weather that earns london the reputation as a depressing place during the winter months. He looked around normally even in the dark season it was bustling with shoppers the sunday early 2014 it was desolate. He didnt feel well he woke up groggy from the jam session with his being into the night before then on the train on the way to chelsea he had negative energy like a dark spirit brushed past him. He lit a cigarette and went into the gallery his head down trying to stay dry. He scheduled a branch of the cafe with his parents the last time he had seen them was one month earlier before they set off for the caribbean in all man. He just turned 38 while a talented musician with 34 albums his father had spent many years as the Senior Executive at Deutsche Bank. Tall and skinny and scraggly his friends told him he resembled a tramp he was determined not to get an earful from his mother about looking like a slob he wore slacks and a blazer and a wall cap. At exactly 1 00 oclock he arrived at the brick wall that goes around the gallery. He was notorious to never be a time to hear he was his parents were nowhere to be seen. Where are you he texted . She did not respond. He wandered across the street and came across the bookstore which specialized in coffee table books about art and culture. Collecting rare first editions the older and more famous author the better he was so into the hobby he had done volunteer work to gather from estate sales distributing to children. He was searching through hidden gems for his own little library. The bookstore was mostly empty. He browsed the shelves until something caught his eye with a silver color cover priced about 1000. 650 pounds of limited edition of the iconic photos of the beatles including the Paris Hotel Room it was signed by the photographer it was so metallic he could see his reflection he started to daydream about convincing his parents to buy for him as a belated birthday gift. The call was from a blocked number and he answered it a woman with a thick accent was on the line. Emergency she shouted your father. He couldnt get a coherent answer the only thing he could think is he needed to get to his parents flat about 1 mile away in kensington. You put the book down and raced outside and hailed a black cab. He instructed the driver to the address it would crawl through the streets past the state lead town houses and high and restaurants and organic grocery stores. Locals hurried around the sidewalks keeping pace with the taxi to the possible scenes you might encounter when he arrived. Maybe his father was hurt, a family argument where he was locked out of his computer and needed his sons health. The taxi pulled into evelyn garden a wide street instead of a median a lot of cars parked in the middle as well as the side. Known addition to the bmws an ambulance was at the curb he paid and sprinted across the street. His parents lived on the floor the door was ajar he went up two flights of stairs the door to his parents apartment was wide open. In the middle of the hallway bill was lying on his back is eyes closed his a neck brace at his head back at the unnatural angle and a plastic tube jetted from his mouth. His mother was curled in a fetal position on the dark floor her head resting on a pillow next to her husbands face and was wailing. He kneeled beside her stroking her hair. What is this he screamed . He killed himself. He hung himself with the daisies leash. Obviously that is an upsetting way to start the book and start the talk. Nine days after that i lived in london at the time it was a journalist for the wall street journal. I got in touch with val because i heard about the suicide as a very Senior Executive at Deutsche Bank and i wanted to learn more with rumors flying all over london that he had committed suicide in part because he was upset about something at the bank, he was extremely close to the bank ceo at the time and i wanted to figure out what was going on. Bill and his wife had three children so i split up the task to contact his widow with a couple of the colleagues and i got val. He had a very active social Media Presence at the time. He was in a band called bikini robots army they were active on twitter and facebook and instagram. And val was a character i could tell right away. Posting lots of pictures about doing wild and crazy stuff. Lots of drugs and vaguely pornographic pictures with women and introduce myself and said i am looking into your fathers death im trying to understand more about what happened and why and im hoping we can talk. I had been a journalist at that point for about 14 years and have written lots of emails of the nature of foreign calls and i have been conditioned you never get a response in that situation it usually a situation where you send initial email and you want to be respectful because there is a tragedy in the family is grieving but you need to be persistent. That was my opening salvo i expected i would be making additional phone calls or emails or to show up at his home. Low and behold the next he responded and said what do you want to know about my father . I claimed i had heard rumors of what happened with his dad so he agreed to get on the phone with me a few days later grudgingly on the condition that we stop harassing the rest of the family which seemed fair enough. So if you days later i got on the phone with val and this started a journey that has led to this book. Because it turns out val had gotten onto his dads computer very shortly after his death and figured out the passwords to his personal email address. Yahoo and gmail and inside he would eventually find his father was sending and receiving thousands and thousands of emails and documents related to his work at the bank. And val eventually turned them all over to me. What it showed it turns out i was doing a lot of research into who bill was but he and val are the protagonist of the book. Bill was an american, a minister son and rural illinois. He became a banker but not your normal reckless aggressive banker much more cerebral, thoughtful and conservative. He became known at Merrill Lynch where he got his start in the Deutsche Bank as the man with the ethical, this and the conscience of the place. And it was dominated by the it everybody wants to go go go. Step on the gas. Bill was the super ego and said wait this is too easy shouldnt we ask more questions . He was smart enough and respected enough people listene listened. So at Deutsche Bank it is a parable for what happened in the Banking Industry at large over a long period of time. The banks went from thes companies that existed to serve their customers and became entities and the communitie communities, employees, governmt and of course shareholders and investors and owners it was a whole wide range of constituencies and that meant the goal went from doing what is best from science and communities which is best from shareholders to maximize profits as quickly as possible. And with the former colleagues and then got to know him and seeing him in an action and to remember this fundamental question is this best for clients and if not why are we doing it . It was quaint and oldfashioned and i kept thinking about this we didnt write very much about this at the time because it was 2014 or 2015 and its interesting Deutsche Bank was a troubled Financial Institution at the time but i was working for an american newspaper and this is a german European Bank despite its presence in the United States nobody really cared and then in 2016 a certain someone started to run for president and they had a very special relationship with Deutsche Bank. Road donald trump was completely offlimits to mainstream financial world because he had a nasty tendency to default on everybody had over a long period of time so when banks are looking for customers someone who has a welldocumented pattern of stiffing lenders is not your first point of call. So he was offlimits. Banks were not touch him a return phone calls there were some crazy stories about the great links the banks would go to avoid doing business with donald trump even his friends would not touch them there was one anecdote so the story goes like this that bear stearns used to be a wall street bank and then it collapsed because it was a very well run. So even bear stearns would not touch donald trump they knew one of the top executives and he used his relationship to get his foot in the door and propose that bear stearns went him 100 million basically said you deal with donald trump he wants 100 million and the banker talks to donald trump is not a crazy patch but its trump and says we will call you back and then decides he will just not call him back and trump is smart enough to get the message the lack of the return phone call means we will not load you 100 million he didnt get the message and kept calling him back over and over the banker didnt know how to say no so he took Hank Greenberg out to breakfast and says why cant i get my phone calls returned it is rude so ace says why are you not returning the phone calls in the banker says we can solve the problem by giving them 100 million and he says were obviously not doing that is a figure out a way to solve the problem. So the banker thinks about it and finally decides so he calls back donald trump and says im so sorry ive been dodging your phone call is very rude but we cant make this loan. Trump says why . Because ace greenberg doesnt want to. [laughter] so ace im sorry trump says what are you talking about . We are buddies i had breakfast with him this morning and the banker says that is the problem he came back and said there are four people we cant do business with henry kravitz, bill gates, Warren Buffett and donald trump. [laughter] and trump caught it in thinks about it and says yes i can think about it and that makes sense. [laughter] sometimes i discount the value in their solution for this gave me a whole new cleverness of Investment Banker so Deutsche Bank did not have the scruples of bear stearns when it came to deciding who to lend to it was so eager to develop on that presence so they needed to pick up the scraps other banks would not touch and donald trump was one of the scraps so the 19 nineties the bank started to make a return of 2 billion of loans over 20 years. By the time he was elected president he still owed 350 million and then they finance all of his projects including here in washington which used to be the Old Post Office building that is now the trump something hotel. So looking back at this relationship i developed with mel brooks and everything i val brooks and what i learned about his father inside this reckless and outofcontrol bank so maybe this is the vehicle to tell the story how this random obscure german bank no one had heard of how not only became synonymous with financial destruction and economic doom but help to propel donald trump to the white house. They spent the past two years reporting and writing primarily focused on the trump relationship. I am a nerd and i spent a lot of time the past ten years focusing on and assessing about Deutsche Bank why nobody would Pay Attention so its such a pleasure to actually have a way to tell the story now in a way that amazingly people didnt care. I would be happy to answer questions im sure people of questions about trump and i have lots of answers. [laughter] [applause] so on the origins of Deutsche Bank is it your view with the financing of auschwitz which included the crematoriums that they know what they were doing . Yes. Its not quite that simple but first of all they were not supporting the nazis its more than financing the construction about twits but also next door to auschwitz to a chemical factory that supplied poison ga gas. You know this. It conducted as germany conquered thes countries and then to stop lending and then to offer customer ranks it took the goal the nazis are taking so in fairness of the bank this is what large German Companies were doing to survive at the time. And then to do something evil it is clearly a party to genocide and it is easy with the benefit and to explain that away. What reality is, we dont know for a fact that Deutsche Bank knew exactly what was happening inside auschwitz or what the gas would be used for so we can apply a reasonable standard to this looking back. And the come at one Chemical Company making the poison gas but it is safe under the assumption that Deutsche Bank knew about this and did it anyway. And to make too many historical comparisons to anything that is incomparable in Human History but but in the 150 year history it is the h birthday by the way. And they have done that expedient thing and to increase profits and then with genocide and then generally they are russian to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Is probably more than what you are looking for. And somebodys been needing to tell this story for far too long. So i would like to ask a question im sure you are aware of val is very active in social media saying youre not accurately portraying his version of events. And to say its much more direct to pay off trump the nuts and bolts of it and that he did not touch on that. I was hoping somebody would bring this up because i will answer your question. I promise but i will step back first. Val and i go back six years one of the things im good at is working with sources and getting people that are not supposed to talk, to talk. Thats one of the things im good at. And with those complicated sources and val far and away was the hardest and most complicated and intense source relationship i have ever had. Thats partly because i have known him for so long and partly because i know him in the context of suffering this awful tragedy of his fathers death. He is complicated and someone who was put into the foster care system at a very young age and left there by his family even though they were there from ages five to nine and his formative years and someone subsequent to that had a lot of problems with Substance Abuse and addiction and those are issues he continues to deal with. He is a troubled complicated person whom i care about have a tremendous amount of respect and sympathy for. We are not getting along very well right now i will be honest about that. That is an understatement. I told the story in the New York Times that described a complicated and intense relationship and in that i mention the fact he had a history of Substance Abuse and credit card theft. I noted one of the things that was motivating val as he tried to share his father secret documents with me is that he really wanted to make a name for himself he was trying to get a film deal and he lives in los angeles now i was just out there visiting him last week for a podcast. I told him them i regret and the tone that i took in the article it was accurate and honest from my perspective it was written in the first person but a little too hard and a little too mean. I told him i am sorry. And i am. I say that all not to have you guys be my therapist but i think its the right context as to why he so angry. After that article ran in early october he has been waging a war against me online which is very tricky for me to deal with he has been talking to other news outlets with the Washington Post or wall street journal or bloomberg or the Associated Press or pbs or npr. And scrappy but seriously i say that with respect. Some of the stuff appearing it over simplifies things and then to spend much of the past five years with proof of this elusive rumor that Deutsche Bank and there is a tremendous amount of smoke and times of circumstantial evidence everybody looks for the fire and me more than anyone i wish i could stand here right now and say i found it but i didnt. And neither did val or the news outlets he is talking to. This provides the most comprehensive description of the circumstantial evidence and how to interpret it but with they were secretly financing the trump loan that could be true there is not proof of it i wish i did have proof but i dont. There is a lot of news over the tax return in the Deutsche Bank has been subpoenaed to produce them if they load him money they would have financial documents so what is your take if they will produce them or they probably dont have them. This is another weird one where my reporting and life intersected broadly serendipitous with the news. So as background there are a couple of congressional committees here in the House Intelligence Committee conducting investigations that involve Deutsche Bank and its relationship with donald trump and both of those have subpoena Deutsche Bank seeking basically everything they have a donald trump with his family and companies as well including tax returns and any Financial Statements and any documentation of loans or other Services Provided or any suspicious transactions so as soon as i heard about this i started to talk to my sources who were at the bank during the period when the trump loans were made. A couple of my sources were involved to decide whether or not to make the loan and to review his financial documents as the Due Diligence process. And with those pages going back from about 2011 and they have seen them and then in the Court Hearing in federal court and then to with those congressional subpoena. He sued them to block them from complying. So Deutsche Banks lawyers said you do have some tax returns but we dont have president trumps personal tax returns this left me scratching my head because i talk to people who had said they had seen them so i texted one of these people and said you will not believe what just happened in court and they said they dont have them i wont even say it because we have cameras but there were some of seen words and said they are lying i have seen them with my own eyes i they return them or destroy them but they definitely had them. So it sounds like they gave them back to trump. I dont know what happens in these circumstances but usually is the client has a right i know when that happened and exactly what that predates or postdates because i dont think even and reckless criminal Deutsche Bank word do that but i dont know. The point being it doesnt sound like they have his personal tax returns i do have some that were stopped by the subpoenas which include family members my want to see them as much as anyone and the New York Times and they have led the way on the taxes but to a certain extent it is a red herring if they do ever become public they will not show the most important things we want to know about his finances, it will not show his sources, Business Partners or a real view especially in countries and that which is much more valuable is the income statements and then the bank shows that relationship they have the documents for a lot of them. And with the trump and kushner account but with those employees in the Deutsche Bank compliance officers who raised repeatedly red flags which they deem to be suspicious transactions with the trump and kirchner accounts with the money going to russia where the concerns were overruled and in one case the employee was fired after speaking out about it. It was Jared Kirchner company which was amazing to me they always struggle with compliance issues and when and how to have the specific one suspicious activity report they over reporter rather than underreport and they underreport to such an extent that they fled the Treasury Department that you cannot make heads or tails. And in particular when they raise a fuss about the trump and kushner transactions they still didnt do it. The oral arguments before the Supreme Court its entirely possible to comply to the Congressional Democrats over the summer the story continues. Give examples of when he asked Deutsche Bank not to do something . Not to be entirely responsive but not even his conscience but in the sense to be a conservative businessman is that he was on the Oversight Board with the Deutsche Bank Trust Company and this is a legal entity thats doing the lending to donald trump at any given time tens of billions of dollars of assets and the accounting staff and those raising a huge stink on the Oversight Board and under intense scrutiny from the front one friends at the fed and why on earth and when the fed was asking them to do to try to conduct aggressive stress test in the Banking Industry and was one of the few people and what the fed was asking for them to clean up his act and he did not succeed. Can you talk about the kennedys son and what he may have played in the approval of trumps loans through Deutsche Bank . Everybody is really interested in Justice Kennedys son. Of 98 or 99 through 2009 and he was in the commercial real estate business of the Investment Bank so his job was to make big commercial real estate loans and then package those and package them into bonds and kennedys role was to basically hand over the process and say i would then to you but if we want to you this is how mechanically we can package the bond and solid and our expectation affects how much money we can afford to lend you and Interest Rate so it sounds technical and complicated but thats the most important part of the lending process and kennedy had a strong personal relationship with donald trump and of longer trump as well and most notably the huge 600 milliondollar loan to trump to build a skyscraper in chicago and kennedy was one of the lead appointments on that transaction and it turned out to be a faithful loan it was made in 2053 years later the financial crisis happened and trump had trouble selling these luxury condos so he had to pay back the money and asks Deutsche Bank for a six month extension and they grant it and then it comes up right as the financial crisis hits and trump doesnt have the money or the desire to repay and then to take the very unorthodox approach he sues Deutsche Bank arguing because of the financial crisis as an act of god it avoids the contract and on top of that then we will have 3 million of damages that led to litigation and around kennedys role in all of this he bumped into trump so trump sues the bank you got to be kidding this is not the first time he has done something aggressive with Deutsche Bank to cost them money and say we are done once and for all seriously. They are not by the way but that was the temporary thinking so for kennedy one of his important clients is gone and kennedy bumped into trump after the lawsuit was filed and trump said something to the effect of no hard feelings i dont. [laughter] and kennedys thinking of his longterm future says no problem this is business and in fact he was he led deutsche left Deutsche Bank and went on a very longterm and lucrative relationship with trump and his children doing other projects even after he left Deutsche Bank. I cant even remember exactly of your question but that relationship with trump and Justice Justin kennedy and Anthony Kennedy would talk to kennedy and his colleagues so he was a known presence in the offices i dont want to spoil the ending of the book it is entirely unrelated. Smith this reminds me of a conversation i had with my husband ten years ago when he had more high profile bankruptcies but i am interested in following up on a conversation from the Federal Reserve what if any action has the german regulators taken against Deutsche Bank with the recklessness . The american and regulators a number of them describe the german regulators using that similar phraseology that were the representatives of Deutsche Bank. The main german banking regulators they play defense and Deutsche Bank is the biggest there is the Proud National institution and as americans launch those british agencies to those civil investigations into the bank Deutsche Bank would insist those inquiries and requests for information didnt go straight to the bank or the lawyers but routed through the local regulator technically the way it is supposed to work but not enforced but they would insist the request and they would die in the maze of german bureaucracy over and over again more recently they got a little more serious now with the euro zone regulator but the us and british authorities have been much more aggressive so i will say i dont think the fed looks good either in this book the fed was aware of and had the opportunity to stop Money Laundering with Deutsche Bank going back 15 years on multiple occasions a very soft slap on the wrist with that approach now we know it didnt work now there is a scene in the book by fed officials are angry about wandering tens of millions of dollars and they are expecting based on the angry tone of these regulators but instead they get a penalty of zero. Maybe my question is more of clarification but over ten or 20 years Deutsche Bank had lent trump or the family more generally 2 billion and somehow that 350 million how much of a difference between those two figures can you track from businesses that were financed . Profits for trump or Deutsche Bank . He has to pay back the loans havent been profitable for him they enable for him to do things one of the things about him that they were so desperate to do business even after they defaulted they were charging a ridiculously low Interest Rate the any of us would not do in a million years 2 percent to 100 milliondollar loan for example. So that in itself because even though he pays interest on the loan it is still much cheaper that will produce income and the rate much higher the funny thing about this is that despite his defaults and not paying anyone back dche bank has emerged out of this whole so its not as if they lost money first of all charging huge fees and all sorts of other services whether managing the money but the match making services to introduce them to western real estate including resorts but the bank for the financial perspective it was profitable but in terms of the pure dollars and cents so those loans first of all with the loan to renovate in wall street and those are not paid back over and over so the 350 million against the four or five loans made since 2011 the others havent been paid back to Deutsche Bank or those others sorry it was a simple question i made very complicated. Isnt this the irony that the germans are supposed to be prudent savers now all of a sudden trump and Deutsche Bank it is there National Bank is loaning money to trump does the money come from those prudent savers . Most of the money is borrowed from Big International investors to issue debt or its own stock is not the german savers that are subsidizing but the real irony to me the whole reason it is necessary and important to get into the wild and crazy stuff it did on wall street is that it turns out being the bank to a bunch of savers is not lucrative so the bank in the eighties and nineties is watching the arrivals in america were minting money on wall street activities and peoples burning desire to get into debt so serving a primarily german clientele the germans do not want to go into debt they are start by their own historical legacies so Deutsche Bank went to try to boost the profitability attract International Investors in the way to do that to lend to other people more in debt so really all over the world including america where theres people like trump and also before i forget completely unrelated to the question but its not just trump they were doing business with he is obviously the most famous client that they have but this is a bank that so desperate to get bank on to get in bed with anyone it could it was doing business with the worst of verse of american capitalism and Jeffrey Epstein is a clear example he has lied to everybody saying he was a billionaire and a financier and blah blah blah but by 2012 and 2013 after convicted of sex crimes people realized he was full of it and morally reprehensible so he was kicked out of his bank the final to kick them out was j. P. Morgan finally washing their hands of epstein and 2013 and at this point he had a lot of money from some people and was still trying to keep up this facade of this International Businessman had nowhere to go and he probably would have had to shut down his dirty little operation if not for a certain bank you came and decided even when every other bank had cut them off from the Financial System was willing to get in bed with him and that was Deutsche Bank they continue to do business of epstein up and tell the time of his arrest last summer even after multiple employees in the compliance divisions and elsewhere raise concerns not only the ethics and morality someone as a convicted sex criminal but also well known having done a lot more bad stuff than what he was criminally charged with but also seeing signs internally of laundering money and bribery and things like that but yet the bank overrule those concerns and continue to do business with epstein because it seemed lucrative to do so. I am wondering first what is the net worth of Deutsche Bank right now roughly the total amount thats related to the financial crisis . The first question i dont know off the top of my head but the metric that i have is that it stop pete and 2007 at the time it was the worlds biggest bank as a couple of months ago the market value had declined by 95 percent it has gone up a little bit the past couple of months because some investors are a little more confident they will focus on reforming themselves. They have been find i dont know the exact number but its well over 10 billion which sounds like a ton and it is but its not the bank that has received those biggest fines in the industry and Deutsche Bank definitely has that distinction to be the worlds most destructive bank and that is in part the pure destruction over the past ten or 15 years Deutsche Bank has been at the center to manipulate Interest Rates or currencies and evading taxes to violate sanctions laundering money, ripping off governments and i can go on. Bad bank. What about new management . They are cleaned house several times in the past ten years. The guy who has been at Deutsche Bank 30 years i have met him. He seems serious the bank is shrinking and trying to turn over a new leaf and said late last year as he announced the latest turnaround and have made a ton of mistakes were going back to our roots and be like we were in the olden days and to brush up on their history. One more question. My question is it is obvious Deutsche Bank played an integral role to help them get back on their feet financially as you have alluded to but don junior as we have seen on television when asked a question years ago how did your father get back on his feet financially for these banks were turning him down . He foolishly said we get our money from the russians so fundamentally what is the connection between the russians and Deutsche Bank which have painted a very clear picture but obviously it doesnt take a lot to connect the dots of the tb. Actually i think eric trump made the comment and its even better than you said. He said the russians have been financing our golf courses when at the time he said that they just bought a new golf resort in miami called the doral who paid for that . Deutsche bank so he said publicly the russians paid for it but it was Deutsche Bank actually so it was very confusing if it was the russians or Deutsche Bank. [laughter] and so Deutsche Bank has been in russia on and off for more than a century and has extraordinarily close ties with Russian Companies in the russian government and ackerman when he stepped down as ceo he was offered a job in the kremlin running the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund and vet be known as a spy bank because it has offices all over the world for russian intelligence and financing the kgb during the cold war now run by a close pal of putin and it links and it is so close the son of the coo was running the moscow operations until he died in a mysterious accident. [laughter] vet be in Deutsche Bank physically have the entire team that started the Investment Bank business where is higher directly from Deutsche Bank the two banks that lent each other tens of millions of dollars in recent years hundreds of millions of dollars. That has been lent. So it offers a very neat explanation for why Deutsche Bank would be willing to take such extraordinary risks maybe those loans were guaranteed so that is the delicious entirely possible rumor. And then devoted the past several years of my life and been examining documents and to have a lot of circumstantial evidence and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence. So if they are financing trump. And the other thing about btv that i forgot felix if you know who he is, not that he is reliable but he says that when trump was went on wanting to build trump tower in moscow , he says it was btv that got the visa and the travel arrangement so he is not the most reliable witness but why would they be doing this . I know it would be the kremlin and obviously we know the russian government was interfering in the election trying to get trump elected and it wasnt that hard to imagine why government owned banks would be trying to make Donald Trumps life a little easier and polishes record as the businessman but i did not approve thats what happened not even proof there is a lot of rumors and circumstantial evidence that we would never publish that in the newspaper i wish i had it but i dont. It could be speculation at this point but what horse in the race do they have through Deutsche Bank to support trump . What will they gain by it. The endgame clearly with the russian government clearly is to get trump elected. That was one of their goals clearly and that was successful. I dont know vet be was trying to support financially all i know is the rumors i dont want to speculate why they might want to do something but im not sure that they did. Only last about 250 years which means americans high and could be up on july 4, 2026. Guest the only thing we learn from history as weve learned the cliche that we learn nothing from history and this is the age oof age of empires and t nations. The average length is 250 years. Some lasted longer like the roman empire but all follow the same pattern to decline and the amount of characteristics that contributed to those