Transcripts For MSNBCW The Rachel Maddow Show 20170812 04:00

Transcripts For MSNBCW The Rachel Maddow Show 20170812 04:00:00

Apparently he got the nickname of the commodore in his days as a kid running those Ferry Services in new york harbor. The other guys who worked the harbor alongside him called Him Commodore as a way of teasing him. And it stuck. And then that kid who they mocked as the commodore grew up to amass one of the largest fortunes in american history. The kind of fortune that leaves a mark. In 1917 right next to the thenbrand new Grand Central station opposite vand built avenue, a huge new hotel went up with thousands of rooms. It was called the Commodore Hotel. It was named after correspond kneel i couldnt say, the Commodore Vand built. Had a statute of him right out front. And that hotel was one of new yorks big successful shmancy centrally located famous it was a big deal because the Commodore Hotel was a big Landmark Piece of new York Real Estate right next to Grand Central station. It also had this poetic storied connection to the great vanderbilt family. But it was a highprofile deal because that Young Real Estate developer put the city over a barrel in order to do the deal. You want Tax Abatements and Special Treatment. By and large youve gotten Special Treatment . Thats correct. Hektd very Special Treatment ten years ago when new york city was thought to be going bankrupt. Trump, who was then a brash 28yearold, bought the difficult lap dated Commodore Hotel on 42nd street just as it was about to be boarded up. He gutted it. From a real estate has become the hottest city in the world. People are flocking here by droves. And i guess a lot of things had to do with it, mostly i feel it was the psychology of making new york a winner as opposed to a loser. Its a nice line, but straight public relations. The tax holiday that the Trump Organization was given to build this hotel in 42nd street is it worth 45 million but donald trump wouldnt dream of blushing. Probably its greatest thing the city ever did and the city is the first to acknowledge it. They went overboard and gave a break for the first time in the history of new york we got this commercial tax abatement. I would have never built the development if i didnt get the tax abatement. Taking over that old Landmark Hotel when the city was in dire straits. That whole deal wasnt a private real estate deal. It involved a whole a lot of skin in the game from taxpayers. The arrangements over that hotel deal was trump would be absolved of paying millions of dollars, over 150 million in Property Taxes that the city would have otherwise collected from him. In exchange the stiff new york was basically they became a stake holder. They were guaranteed financial stake in the hotels success. The city would receive annual payments based on how the hotel did each year. The city gets a piece of the hotels revenue. And you know what . The hotel did pay the city. The whole deal worked for a few years until it didnt. Trump got his side of the deal okay. He didnt have to pay 150 million in Property Taxes. But by around 1986, the hotel was doing really well. It was doing better than it had ever done before revenue wise. So the city was expecting the several Million Dollars from the deal each year thus for. Starting in 1986 the payments stopped coming. The hotel just randomly that year sent over a few hundred thousand dollars instead of the millions of dollars the city was expecting. Thats where the story gets really good. It was bad, terrible for new york. Bad overall in terms of the balance of good and evil in the world. But this story is good for us as americans in our in terms of trying to understand whats happening to our government and to the american presidency now and why. This is why. This is Andrew Weissman a career prosecutor who made his name helping to dismantling organized Crime Networks including Organized Crime Rackets that were running schemes on wall street. One of those cases got him involved in the prosecution of a onetime member of the Trump Organization a man who played a key role in the development of and the money behind the trump soho project. He also led the Enron Task Force which unraveled that multibillion dollars complex corporate con job. Andrew weissman works for Robert Mueller now. Then theres lisa page. Shes a former prosecutor with deep experience in Organized Crime and Money Laundering including working with an fbi task force that has pursued Money Laundering cases related to putinconnected oligarchs. This is greg andres, hes the latest hire we know of on Robert Muellers Special Counsel investigation. He ran the fraud unit in the Criminal Division of the u. S. Justice department. He specializes is Money Laundering, tax fraud, market manipulation, corruption. Greg andres is a big fish. He also now works for Robert Mueller. Three weeks ago, bloomburg was first to report the Mueller Investigation was turning to trumps business past. Trumps Business Transactions. That ninety we called john dowd to get his response to the news. He responded to us bizarrely. Mr. Dowd told us he did not believe that Business Transactions were under investigation by the Mueller Investigation. He told us he just didnt think that was true. And then he told our producer who was on the phone with him, quote, this is the last call we will ever have, and then he hung up. It was really weird. Whether or not the president s lawyer chooses to believe it or not, by the end of last week, cnn was flashing it out. Quote, the fbi is reviewing financial records related to the Trump Organization as well as trump himself, his family members, his campaign associates. Theyve combed through the list of Shell Companies and buyers of trump Real Estate Properties and scrutinized the tenants of trump tower reaching back more than a half dozen years. Which you would think wouldnt give him enough time to be working for other people as well, apparently proceed pro bono at 4 00 in the morning on a weeknight. But heres the tell. Heres where history starts to help and where something that otherwise Doesnt Make Sense Kind of starts make sense. Look at the difference how Paul Manafort and donald trump are reacting here to Whats Going On in the Mueller Investigation. Paul manafort has dropped his previous legal representation as of last night. He has now set up a new legal team to represent him, one that specializes in taxes, banking, foreign crypt practices act. His new lead lawyer is literally a Certified Public Accountant in addition to being a lawyer. That makes sense given the turn in the investigation. In contrast, the president is not doing that. The president is not putting together that kind of team. Hes got the new york guy who handled his divorce records and who threatens the new york times. Hes got the christian Rights Attorney who goes on funds a lot and who could definitely defend the president very well if it turns out the major legal liabilities that hes put up a Ten Commandments tablet in the oval office. The president also has this new lead attorney whose highest Attorney Experience in the past was having a Hedge Fund Client not just convicted but given the longest sentence ever for Insider Trading and whose more recent Financial Experience appears to be the late night misspelled emails about the wrong client that hes sending to the wall street journal. Hey, at least its wall street. As this investigation into the president has turned into a follow if money kind of thing, as it has turned toward financial matters, the president has not tuned up his defense, his representation, to meet that kind of a challenge. He doesnt have legal financial specialists on board. He doesnt have tax attorneys on board. Even previous president s in other smaller scandals have had. Other president s in smaller scandals have had people on board at this stage going through the finances with a finetoothed comb, red teaming any discrepancies or potential problems. Whether or not there is anything in President Trumps finances that will ultimately draw attention from the Special Counsel, its interesting and notable that the president doesnt appear to be preparing any sort of financial defense against a Special Counsel team that is absolutely chockfull of financial specialists. Why is that . Go back to the Commodore Hotel. When that deal between trump and the city of new york went bad in the 80s because the city figured out he had stopped paying his part of the deal, when that that went basd bad, something unusual happened. He used this deal to not pay Property Taxes. When the city realized he wasnt giving them their cut of the profits, they didnt just sue him to get their money. They got access to his books. There was a ciauditors office. He had this deal with the city. So the city was able to get the books. The city was able to audit the hotel. And to this day, that Commodore Hotel scandal remains one of the only times we the public have ever been allowed to see how the president conducts himself financially in business. 80s new york city officials found that his partners had short changed the city out of 2. 8 million. It was an example off extraordinary flimflammery. Audittors found trump in this letter he signed formally authorized accounting changes that understated the hotels profits to lower what was owed the city in rental fees. Uniquey . It was very sneaky. He cheated the city a substantial sum of money. She was the new york city Auditor General in 1986. And it took a couple of years, tons of Stone Walling on the part of trump, but Container Ber seen the and her team did audit and report on how trump was running that business. And her public report concluded that basically trump was running two sets of books. One that was the real estimate of prochltsd at the hotel and another set they used just for this deal with the city to try to maintain a front that showed that the hotel was broke and didnt have to pay the city anything. The citys audit said trump used, quote, an Accounting Methodology that the abrent and distoretive to make it look like the hotel owed less to the city. Abc looked at this again last year. Cbs Got Forensic Audittors to look at the five kids. They described, quote, failures in basic bookkeeping, and efforts to stymie officials. In the course of trying to do this audit at the hotel back in the day, the autotors at one point were physically blocked from being allowed into the trump hotel to start the audit and that went on for more than a year. According to the cbss report, it was what the citys audittors discovered inside that most surprised them, the amount of Financial Information that was simply missing, the amount of missing information was staggering. Ledgers to show income expenses, the ledgers for seven months out of the 12month year were simply gone. The hotel said the ledgers had been sent to new jersey and then lost in a flood . The computerized version of those records, the hotel said those were sent to chicago, but after those records got sent to chicago, somehow they just disappeared. Sad. But the audit did get done. It was very, very ugly. All sorts of shenanigans went on for years with this inning thflt at one point trump offered a job to the auditors brother so he could work at the Trump Organization. The trump side sued the city over releasing the report to the public. A city clerk then conveniently mislabored the case so it effectively got lost in the files for years until after trump had sold off his shares at the hotel at which point another clerk came across the mislabored case and resurrected it. It was just a disaster. But if you are wondering why, now as an american citizen, why as President Donald Trump is behaving strangely when it comes to Special Counsel investigation, consider that the potential legal exposure of his financial dealings as a businessman, if thats where the Special Counsels investigation is going, that would be something almost prpunprecedent in his entire 71 years of life. Obviously he hasnt released his tax returns, two pages of one federal return from 2005. Thats all anybody has seen of his taxes ever. His business, the Trump Organization, its privately held, and its beyond that, infen tes mally small. Theres also a Trump Foundation which as a nonprofit, they did have to make Public Disclosures because theyre nonprofit. Those filings were such a line by line Disaster Area they became a fulltime beat for reporters like the Washington Posts David Faron Hold Last year earning him a Pulitzer Prize and showing the country how trump illegally used his nonprofit to settle lawsuits related to his business and make political donations to appear to be tied to things he wanted for his business much how they used the nonprofit as a way to uses other peoples money to pay for things like his sons boy scouts membership fee which was 7. He also used his nonprofit to buy portraits of himself to hang at his golf courses. That created such a mess for him that he tried to close the nonprofit and New York State wont let him because they say if that thing got shut down, it would interfere with an ongoing investigation. So that didnt go well. And that Foundation Stuff which was a catastrophe, thats just what happened when people got a peek at whats supposed to be the nonprofit part of his finances the part he knew would have to one day be open to the public. If its true the investigation is now prying open the real business part of his finances, stuff he never thought would ever be made public, it is worth knowing that weve had precisely one peek over the years into what those look like. It was an example of extraordinary flimflammery. Extraordinary flimflammery. Its also worth noticing that the president appears to be making no preparation whatsoever to defend anything in his finances, to boack him up, lega representation. The tiny window we have had into whats in his finances makes that seem like an insane strategy if hes really going there. Why doesnt he think he needs to play defense on this stuff . America has always had rich guys. New york has always had rich guys. Some rich guys had fortunes big enough that for more than a century they left a mark. In this case, modern history gives us reason to believe this might leave marks of a different kind, marks on the presidency. Hold that thought. Its ok that everybody ignores me when i drive. Its fine. Because i get a Safe Driving Bonus check every six months im accident free. Because i dont use my cellphone when im driving. Even though my family does, and leaves me all alone. Heres something else. I dont share it with mom. I dont. Right, mom . I have a brand new putter you dont even know about its awesome. Safe driving bonus checks, only from allstate. Sometimes i leave the seat up on purpose. Switching to allstate is worth it. 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