TBR News July 11, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. July 11, 2016: “It is interesting to read the Internet news sites and see the propaganda at work. The liberal media praises Hillary, though here campaign is bogged down under allegations of misconduct. They hate Trump and do their best to attack him at every opportunity. The Russians, on the other hand, are far more subtle and much more effective. RT began to report the killing of black citizens by the police some time ago. When we first read these, it occurred the reporting might be incorrect so a check on the Internet disclosed that this reporting was not correct. Then the liberal Guardian picked up the stories and began to highlight them and now we have seen the results in the Dallas attack. If these perceptions of anti-black violence by the police are not corrected, serious civic unrest before the election will most certainly happen.”
The Müller Washington Journals 1948-1951
At the beginning of December, 1948, a German national arrived in Washington, D.C. to take up an important position with the newly-formed CIA. He was a specialist on almost every aspect of Soviet intelligence and had actively fought them, both in his native Bavaria where he was head of the political police in Munich and later in Berlin as head of Amt IV of the State Security Office, also known as the Gestapo.
His name was Heinrich Müller.
Even as a young man, Heini Müller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.
This work is a translation of his complete journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.
When Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA¹s station chief in Bern, Switzerland, James Kronthal in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation¹s capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum. His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum.
Müller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.
The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller¹s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.
Saturday, 23. June, 1951
Bunny is getting enormous now and her good days are being overwhelmed by the bad ones. I spend more time in my office than I used to but the weekends are not bad because most of my dear friends are off sailing on their little boats or getting drunk in dank bars somewhere in the District.
While they booze, I visit with their wives and certainly with Bunny in no condition for sexual romps, I visit far more often. I have managed to finally get rid of the Harvey woman who has now taken up with an Italian from their Embassy. When this goes far enough, I will let her fat, cowboy husband find out. Nice pictures should cheer him up and perhaps take his mind off of Philby.
I have been reading over a very secret file, certainly not intended for my eyes, that deals with the CIA’s activities in China over the past few years. Of course they hate Mao, not because he is a communist but because he has stopped the drug trade in China.
The CIA has now discovered the real secret of the economic power and success of the former British Empire. The trade that made England rich did not come from saffron, tin and rubber but only from opium! Yes, the British raised opium in India and sold it throughout the rest of the Orient, excluding Japan.
When the Chinese Emperor objected to 7,000 tons (!) of opium being shoved off every year on his country recognized its terrible effect upon the population, he tried to stop it by force. As they always do when faced with a weaker opponent, the British attacked China and forced them to continue to buy enormous amounts of their opium.
This terrible plague spread into Burma and Indo-China (where it was entirely controlled by the French government) but not into Japan. Japan was, and is, a small series of easily controlled islands and the British decided that country would be capable of fighting off their proverbial gunboats and left them fairly much alone.
England made billions of pounds annually through their cultivation and sale of opium throughout Asia and they fought to defend their terrible monopoly with everything they had. Shanghai was the drug capital of the world, great fortunes were made by such men as Stamford Raffles, the Jardin firm and the Sassoon family not to mention the billions of bribe money that flowed into the Bank of England during this time…from the eighteen fifties right up through the nineteen twenties.
As much as I dislike communists, I must say privately that Mao is certainly far better for the Chinese people than the British drug lords and their insidious poison.
Why, even Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather made a fortune dealing in illegal opium and used his boats to smuggle both huge amounts of drugs and illegal Chinese workers into the United States. What French writer stated that behind every great fortune lay a great crime? Balzac? I will have to look this up later. At any rate, it’s absolutely true.
The aristocratic Roosevelts who produced two presidents, stemmed from expelled, Shephardic Jews and made their money dealing in smuggled drugs!
In this report that I have been reading, I see that my dear friends here rescued a Chinese general, Ma Pufang, who had a lock on opium dealing in his part of China and who was an ally of Chiang (who was also a major drug dealer!). General Ma’s troops had been defeated by Mao and the CIA, who worked with him and often assisted him in the matter of not only protecting his drug business but actually became eager participants in it, flew him out of China with two million dollars of gold bars when Mao got too close for comfort.
This they did and they flew him and his precious cargo to Switzerland where the CIA opened a private bank account for him. Every cent of this money came from drug dealing but then the CIA not only knew this but were considered in every way to be Ma’s partners in crime.
Now, I have been reading over a very long and I must say, well-reasoned, paper advocating that the CIA actively engage in the opium (and of course heroin) trade. The reasoning is that we can take over from the British who are now totally defunct in this area and reap huge rewards. Not only will the Agency get vast sums of private and unreportable money to assist their world anarchy programs but, and this is even more disgusting, our sainted leaders can stuff their private purses with untold billions that will rival their current thefts from Congressional appropriations.
At this rate, Dulles, Wisner, Angleton and all the others, will end up with more money…and power of course…. than the American government (which they desperately wish to become.)
I personally find this to be repulsive, criminal behavior but I can do nothing about it at all other than to avoid touching it at all costs. I note from this report that the CIA is now actively running drugs into Cuba through their offices there cunningly disguised as a chemical company. It is useless to point out to these feeble-minded louts that many Americans go to Cuba and it will only be a matter of time before this wave spreads into the United States.
This is precisely the reason why I was, and still am, bitterly opposed to the use of the criminal germ warfare programs so eagerly advocated by the lunatic Wisner. It will all come back here to roost with the chickens as Robert says in his American way.
Monday, 25. June 1951
My dictating machine needs to be upgraded. These used to be small daily entries but are now growing out of all proportions. Pages have to be typed, corrected and filed and there is a space problem. The safe is getting filled up. Rumors have been reaching me via my friendly informants that Angleton is now being blackmailed and for what? He is a practicing homosexual as I have known for some time and one of his lovers has been demanding money from him! How wonderful! In Germany, I would have shortened both of them by a head but not in Washington these days. So, what will happen? The lover threatens to make public certain of Angleton’s nastier actions in the Agency (and some of them are really terrible, believe me) if he doesn’t pay up.
Not that James Jesus doesn’t have money. He has personally embezzled more Congressional secret funds than Dulles and the others put together. I suspect that the boyfriend will fall off a bridge one of these days.
Have entertained some of the senior personnel from the Vint Hill facility (the CIA’s Monitoring Station Number 1, also called the Vint Hill Farms Station. This was located near Müller’s home at Warrenton, Virginia. Another neighbor was Samuel Cummings, head of the CIA’s weapons procurement division. ed.)
There is a plan to set up some kind of an experimental station here and I have been asked to allow them to use some of the more remote acreage for it. Very private and I understand that it deals with some kind of medical experimentation. Bunny objects to this but we have been assured that none of the CIA and Army personnel will enter by the front drive and will not intrude on the residential buildings.
I believe from what I have been told that certain “sensitive” experiments will be carried on there. The buildings will be some kind of caravan temporary types and will be taken away later. The idea is that privacy is vital. I have no problem but if any of the horses start to die of strange diseases, there will be serious trouble. Wednesday 27. June 1951
Notes on a conversation with (Walter Bedell ed.) Smith. Dulles has been working on him to establish a closer relationship with Israeli intelligence, the Shin Bet. D. claims that the Jews have a well-developed intelligence network in Eastern Europe and that the CIA could benefit from this projected association. Angleton will act as the contact with the Israelis. As I pointed out to Smith, this association is fraught with real danger. As reasons, I gave him: Jews always in the past were loyal to Soviet Russia. They saw this country as supportive of their people. Stalin has used the Jews to a remarkable degree. . Most of the early Bolsheviks were Jewish, Lenin was half Jewish and the entire revolution was led by Jews. Stalin is a Georgian and does not like Jews but uses them the way Roosevelt did. I pointed out that much of this dual allegiance has now been transferred to the new state of Israel. There are many Jews in the new government there that are sympathetic to Moscow by background and that we ought to be extremely cautious in proceeding with this. If these internationalists, to use one of Stalin’s pet phrases, get too deeply connected with us here, God knows how many of our secrets will go not only to Tel Aviv but Moscow Central as well.
Dulles is not a competent intelligence man. He is a society lawyer with no real understanding of the intelligence field. He acts wise, is good humored and very well connected with the east coast society but outside of that, I personally would never have hired him. He pretends to be wise but is not. I do not trust pipe smokers. If they have no sensible answer to a question, they fiddle with their pipes and gain time for what passes for a wise answer.
Angleton is an intelligent…no, an intellectual man, but again not suited to the intelligence trade. He is very emotional, highly suspicious of everyone and to make things worse, a secret homosexual. Of course he thinks he is being secret about it but I certainly know because I make things like that my business. The Harvey woman also knows about this and has great contempt for him and his pretty young college students and fellow poets. If he were open about his perversions, it would not be as bad but as he is in cover, he becomes susceptible to blackmail. What if the Israelis, who are certainly very clever, ascertain Angleton’s socially unacceptable preferences? Will they supply him with handsome young Jewish men and thereby gain more than support from him?
I was once walking in a corridor with Angleton when some personage passed us and smiled and said some social pleasantry to him. Afterwards, he looked very serious and said to me, ’What did he mean by that do you think? I know he hates me so why was he friendly? They may be out to replace me!’
He is so filled with his own cleverness and so guilty about his sexual preferences,
that like Dulles (who is entirely heterosexual) I would not hire him either.
Terrorists smuggled into Europe amid refugee flow – Merkel
July 11, 2016
RT
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has admitted that some terrorists entered Europe among the wave of migrants that fled from Syria adding that the refugee flow was used in part to “smuggle terrorists” on to the continent.
Speaking to supporters of her Christian Democrat Union party in eastern Germany, Merkel admitted that militant groups had smuggled jihadists among those genuinely looking to seek asylum in Europe.
“In part, the refugee flow was even used to smuggle terrorists,” she said, as cited by Reuters.
Merkel’s open-door policy, which was criticized by a significant section of the German population, saw more than 1 million migrants arrive in Germany in 2015, with a number of those originating from Syria.
The announcement from Merkel comes just over a week after Germany’s spy chief Hans Georg Maassen said the domestic intelligence agency had obtained information on 17 IS militants who had entered Europe under the guise of refugees.
“There is strong evidence that… 17 people have arrived under Islamic State instructions,” Maassen said.
In the same month, a chilling plot emerged, which involved a group of Syrians linked to IS who wanted to carry out a terror attack in Dusseldorf.
Two members of the four-man group planned to detonate suicide vests in the center of the western German city, while the other members would look to kill as many people in the vicinity with a combination of explosives and gunfire.
Three of the suspects were identified as 27-year-old Hamza C., 25-year-old Mahood B., and Abd Arahman AK, 31. They were arrested at various locations around Germany. Their plan was revealed when a fourth member, 25-year-old Saleh A., handed himself in to police in France in February.
“According to current investigations, the four accused were planning to commit an attack in Germany for the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State,” said the prosecutors, as cited by AFP.
The head of Germany’s police trade union, Rainer Wendt, said that budget cuts are potentially making it easier for terrorists to cross into the country amongst the refugee influx because it is impossible to screen all the migrants.
“It would have been useful in the second half of last year to create conditions for background checks on all people who came to us, in fact, before they traveled [to Germany]. But that is past history now, as we cannot afford it,” he told the news show SWRinfo.
The German authorities announced in June that they are monitoring 499 Islamic extremists who are deemed by the security services to pose a threat. Interior Ministry spokesman Johannes Dimroth said security agencies had received regular tip-offs about possible Islamic extremists coming to Germany as asylum seekers and were systematically checking those reports.
However, placing all migrants under suspicion after the arrests would play into IS’ hands, Wendt stressed.
“We know since the attacks of Paris and Brussels that Islamic State wants to influence the migration debate in Europe and to whip up sentiment against refugees,” Wendt told Reuters. “This is part of their strategy. We must not fall into their trap.”
Report: Over 1,200 women assaulted in Germany on New Year’s Eve
Germany’s federal police have found that over 1,000 sexual crimes were committed across Germany on New Year’s Eve. Over 2,000 men are believed to have taken part in the crimes, though only 120 have been identified.
July 10, 2016
DW
A Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) inquiry into the wide-spread New Year’s Eve sexual assaults uncovered 900 cases of sexual crimes with over 1,200 victims, German media reported on Sunday.
The shocking assaults occurred not only in Cologne, but also in Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and other cities across Germany, reported German newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung,” which compiled the information from a BKA draft along with public broadcasters NDR and WDR.
Officials who worked on the report estimated that around 2,000 men took part in the crimes, but only 120 of them have been identified. Many of the assaults were carried out in large groups, raising the estimated number of suspects and victims.
“We have to assume that many of these crimes will not be followed up on,” BKA President Holger Münch told the reporters.
Suspects hard to identify
According to the BKA, most of the suspects came from North African countries.
While few Syrians are thought to have taken part in the assaults, the report noted that over half of the men who are allegedly responsible for the attacks have been in Germany less than one year.
“In this respect, there is a connection between the occurrence of the phenomenon and the strong levels of immigration in 2015,” said Münch.
Nationwide, there have only been four convictions since the New Year’s Eve attacks. In Cologne, two men were given suspended sentences while another suspect was acquitted. In Düsseldorf and Nürtigen, perpetrators received prison sentences. Courts in Hamburg released all suspects from pre-trial detention, reported the “Süddeutsche Zeitung.”
Münch attributed the unsatisfactory level of convictions to “investigation hindrances.” There was very little visual material to help police identify potential suspects and many of the women assulted were unable to fully describe their attackers.
Uncoordinated assaults
Münch also said there is “no evidence” to suggest that the crimes were planned and coordinated ahead of time. Shortly after the New Year’s Eve attacks, Germany’s justice minister said the acts could have been part of “organized crime.”
Across Germany, there were 642 cases solely dealing with sexual offenses, and 47 suspects were identified. The BKA counted 239 so-called combination offenses, when a theft occurred alongside a sexual crime, and said 73 suspects in these cases were identified.
Around 650 women were assaulted in Cologne and more than 400 in Hamburg, noted the BKA.
The BKA is set to publish its findings in full in the coming days. The agency has recommended more police patrols and increased video surveillance in light of the nation-wide attacks.
Many have criticized the response of Cologne officials during and following the attacks for poor security planning and raised questions nationwide about German police’s ability to respond in emergency situations, as well as issues over the integration of migrants.
Following the attacks, the German government introduced regulations to make it easier to deport foreigners convicted of crimes such as sexual assault or violent theft.
Germany’s definition of rape has also been expanded under a new law which was passed on Thursday, which will make it easier for victims of sexual assault to file criminal complaints in the future.
Details of Dallas gunman’s larger plans emerge after protests around the US
- Demonstrators across US renew outcry against police shootings
- Search suggests Micah Johnson prepared for larger attack, police chief says
July 10, 2016
by Jon Swaine in Dallas and Edward Helmore in New York
The Guardian
Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested in cities across the US this weekend, as protests against police shootings intensified and new details emerged about the motivations and plans of a man who killed five officers in Dallas.
During a weekend of protests over killings by police, more than 160 people were arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where demonstrations continued to grow over the fatal shooting by officers last week of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old African American, as he was pinned down during a struggle.
Military-style vehicles, teargas and smoke grenades returned to American streets for the first time this summer, and Barack Obama appealed for calm and said those who attack law enforcement undermine the cause of social justice.
The unrest built as authorities in Dallas said Micah Johnson, who opened fire on officers late last Thursday, had been plotting a wider bombing campaign that could have had “devastating effects”. Johnson was said to have been seeking revenge for the police’s treatment of African Americans.
Among the protesters arrested was DeRay Mckesson, a high-profile national leader in the Black Lives Matter movement. Police said Mckesson was arrested for blocking a street even as video he was livestreaming at the time of his detention indicated that he was off the roadway. He was released from custody late Sunday with a charge of “simple obstruction of a highway of commerce”.
Protesters complained they were being denied their rights to peaceful assembly. “In cities across America, police are responding to peaceful protests with provocation, violence, and unconstitutional arrests,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a prominent activist with the group Campaign Zero and a close ally of Mckesson’s.
Another 100 people were arrested during clashes with police in and around St Paul, Minnesota, where the death of Philando Castile after his shooting by a police officer last week was broadcast live on Facebook, causing widespread public anger.
As protesters blocked an interstate highway, police flooded streets in Bearcat military vehicles and used smoke bombs to break up demonstrations. The police chief, Todd Axtell, said about 20 of his officers had been struck with bottles, rocks and other items pelted at them by crowds, which he said was “a disgrace”.
Dozens more protesters were detained by police during protests in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore and Phoenix, where police used teargas and pepper spray to disperse crowds. More protests were planned for late on Sunday, including in St Louis, Missouri, where in August 2014 an unarmed black 18-year-old was killed in the suburb of Ferguson in a flashpoint that continues to reverberate two years later.
Tensions have risen even as the city of Dallas mourns the assassination-style killings of five police officers last week by Johnson, a 25-year-old army veteran and member of the New Black Panther party.
On Sunday, the Dallas police chief, David Brown, said investigators had found bomb-making equipment and written evidence indicating that Johnson was plotting attacks “large enough to have devastating effects throughout our city and our north Texas area”.
“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans, and thought what he was doing was righteous,” he added.
Brown said Johnson had apparently been planning to “target law enforcement, and make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement’s efforts to punish people of colour” since before last week’s fatal shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, which merely triggered his actions.
The police chief disclosed that Johnson had daubed the letters “RB” in his own blood on a wall of the parking garage where he was cornered and eventually killed by a police robot. The significance of the initials were unclear.
Investigators have also learned that Johnson had practiced military-style drills in his backyard and trained at a private self-defence school that teaches special tactics, including “shooting on the move”, a technique in which an attacker fires and quickly changes position, to keep his location uncertain and create the impression of multiple assailants.
The deaths of Sterling and Castile had had apparently moved Johnson to act before his more ambitious plan could be realised, Brown said. The gunman had kept a journal of combat tactics, Brown said, but his writings included “quite a bit of rambling in the journal that’s hard to decipher”.
The police chief also revealed details of the two-hour standoff between the gunman and police, which ended when officers sent a robot carrying a pound of C4 explosive to detonate near Johnson. The gunman, hidden in a brick corner where snipers could not see him and officers could not safely approach, demanded to speak only with a black police negotiator, Brown said.
“He lied to us, laughing, playing games, singing, asking how many did he get and saying he wanted to kill some more,” he said. The police chief eventually made the decision to improvise with the robot. “I began to feel he was going to charge us and take out many more before we would kill him,” Brown said, adding: “I approved [the decision] and I’d do it again under the same circumstances.”
Obama cut short a visit to Europe early this week and will travel to Dallas before convening a summit at the White House between police chiefs and community leaders. Speaking Spain on Sunday, he defended the “messy and controversial” tradition of American protest but reiterated his condemnation of violence against law enforcement.
“Whenever those of us who are concerned about failure of the criminal justice system attack police, you are doing a disservice to the cause,” Obama said.
Also on Sunday, Dallas’s mayor, Mike Rawlings, said marchers carrying weapons and dressed in body armor had distracted law enforcement from the actual gunman on Thursday, telling CBS’s Face the Nation that other individuals carrying guns on the scene “took our eye off the ball for a moment”.
“You can carry a rifle legally and when you have gunfire going on, you usually go with the person that’s got a gun,” he said. “And so our police grabbed some of those individuals, took them to police headquarters and worked it out and figured out that they were not the shooters. But that is one of the real issues with the gun rights issues that we face – that in the middle of a firefight, it’s hard to pick out the good guys and the bad guys.”
He added that investigators were talking to Johnson’s neighbors and family to learn whether “there’s anybody that aided and abetted him, conspired with him. We don’t have any new news on that regard. That is probably going to take some days.”
Donald Trump’s Anti-Establishment Scam
The Insider Posing as an Outsider Trying to Get Back on the Inside
by Nomi Prins with Craig Wilson
TomDispatch
“Establishment: A group in a society exercising power and influence over matters of policy, opinion, or taste, and seen as resisting change.” — Oxford Dictionary
Early on in his presidential bid, Donald Trump began touting his anti-establishment credentials. When it worked, he ran with it. It was a posture that proved pure gold in the Republican primaries, and was even, in one sense, true. After all, he’d never been part of the political establishment nor held public office, nor had any of his family members or wives.
His actual relationship to the establishment is, however, complex in an opportunistic way. He’s regularly tweeted his disdain for it. (“I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?”) And yet, he clearly considered himself part of it and has, at times, yearned for it. As he said early on in his run for the presidency, “I want the establishment — look, I was part of the establishment. Let me explain. I was the establishment two months ago. I was like the fair-haired boy. I was a giver, a big giver. Once I decided to run, all of a sudden I’m sort of semi-anti-establishment.”
An outsider looking to shake up the government status quo? An insider looking to leverage that establishment for his own benefit? What was he? He may not himself have known.
He once rejected the idea of taking establishment (or Super PAC) money, only — more recently — to seek it; he rebuffed certain prominent establishment players, only to hire others to help him (and fire yet more of them). He’s railed against the establishment, then tried to rally it to his side (even as he denounced it yet again). Now, with the general election only four months away, it turns out that he’s going to need that establishment if he is to have a hope in hell of raising the money and organizing the troops effectively enough to be elected. There, however, is the rub: power brokers don’t suffer the slings and arrows of “outsider” scorn lightly.
As a result, if he now needs the establishment more than he’d publicly admit, it may not matter. He may find himself ostracized by the very party he’s set to represent.
Once upon a time not so long ago, making America great again involved a bankroll untainted by the Republican political establishment and its billionaire backers. There would, The Donald swore, be no favors to repay after he was elected, no one to tell him what to do or how to do it just because they had chipped in a few million bucks. But for a man who prides himself on executing only “the best” of deals (trust him) this election has become too expensive to leave to self-reliance.
One thing is guaranteed: Donald Trump will not pony up a few hundred million dollars from his own stash. As a result, despite claims that he would never do so, he’s finally taken a Super PAC or two on board and is now pursuing more financial aid even from people who don’t like him. Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, erstwhile influential billionaire backers of Ted Cruz, have, for instance, decided to turn their Make America Number 1 Super PAC into an anti-Hillary source of funds — this evidently at the encouragement of Ivanka Trump.
In the big money context of post-Citizens United presidential politics, however, these are modest developments indeed (particularly compared to Hillary’s campaign). To grasp what Trump has failed to do when it comes to funding his presidential run, note that the Our Principles Super PAC, supported in part by Chicago Cubs owners Marlene Ricketts and her husband, billionaire T.D. Ameritrade founder J. Joe Ricketts, has already raised more than $18.4 million for anti-Trump TV ads, meetings, and fundraising activities. (On the other hand, their son, Pete, Republican Governor of Nebraska, has given stump speeches supporting Trump.)
To put this in context, that $18.4 million is more than the approximately $17 million that all of Trump’s individual supporters, the “little people,” have contributed to his campaign. (He is no Bernie Sanders who raised $220 million from individuals in the 2016 campaign season.) Even with all his wealth, Trump is in a funding nightmare, lacking the confidence of the Republican party and its most generous loyalists.
To be sure, other establishment billionaires have expressed support for Trump, like funding kingpin Sheldon Adelson who said he’d fork over $100 million to the Trump cause. It’s just that he hasn’t done that yet. Chris Christie is similarly trying to help raise funds for the campaign. But the man-who-would-be-veep hasn’t had much luck. So far, at least, Trump’s biggest establishment supporters have been more talk than action.
The Trump Team
In addition to the usual money not flowing in from the usual crowd, there’s the issue of actually preparing to staff a future administration with the usual people, not to speak of the seasoned set of advisers that normally surround presidential candidates. Increasingly, it seems that they may not be available or have already left the proverbial building — and that’s a problem.
Trump has vowed to fill his administration with “the best people.” (In a perfect world, they would, of course, be his clones.) Yet so far, he’s been pursuing what he has characterized as a “lean” strategy, which means that few are yet on board and it’s getting late in the game to fake it.
Usually by this time in the election cycle, nominees have pulled together their inner circle, mostly from well-known or rising establishment players, including policy wonks by the bucketful. He hasn’t. According to Vin Weber, a D.C.-based partner at Mercury, which bills itself as a global, high-stakes public strategy firm, who crafted Mitt Romney’s “policy shop” in 2012, the lack of infrastructure is unprecedented. Romney’s policy shop was first formed 18 months before the 2012 election and fine-tuned in January 2012. We’re in July 2016 and from Trump on this score — nothing. Nada. “Nobody in Washington that I know of,” Weber says, “is assembling a staff for an incoming Trump administration.”
Given his public war with his party, Trump may find himself without anyone left to fire. It’s one thing to cut back on government, another to have no one around to do anything.
Maybe winging it on national policy and disparaging those who might someday make such policy is endearing in The Donald, but not to the Washington establishment. Whatever the case, it might be useful before the Republican convention, which already promises to be a bizarre spectacle, to consider who Trump’s “best people” are — and aren’t — at the moment. Who are his most loyal advisers and supporters? Who would take a political bullet for him or put that bullet in him?
For the answers to such questions, it’s necessary to consider three categories: blood, money, and power. In the land of Trump (and Clinton), of course, blood — that is, family — comes first; financial interests, second; and the political power-elite (a.k.a. the establishment), last.
For Trump, family is foremost; general election finances are still remarkably lacking; and that final group remains infinitesimal, given how big the Washington establishment actually is. And do note that this has not been because The Donald hasn’t tried to broaden his establishment support. He just seems congenitally unable to succeed at it. It’s a deal he can’t broker. His supporters may think of him as one of them, but his outsider status has come about by default, not by strategic choice, and it shows.
Trump’s most loyal support comes from his family who make up his core “board of advisers.” They are anything but inside-the-Beltway types. If, however, he were to make it to the Oval Office, they could certainly be the new Clintons, the latest bloodline in Washington.
So from family to finances to establishment, here’s a rundown on key players in Trump World, who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and who’s out.
Trump’s Establishment Gets on Board
Ivanka Trump, Campaign Adviser
Omnipresent in his campaign, daughter Ivanka is the executive vice president of development and acquisitions in the Trump Organization. She “actively participates in all aspects of both Trump® and Trump branded projects.” The presidency is, of course, the ultimate branded project and were the economy to fall off a cliff one Trumpian day, the White House might make the perfect Trump luxury condo building.
For all practical purposes, Ivanka, not wife Melania, is Trump’s “first lady” (in waiting). She appeared on the presumptive board of The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice. It was widely rumored that she was the one who had the clout to get Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager who lifted Trump to victory in the primaries, fired. Put another way, the “establishment apprentice” got the shaft because he crossed the person with the real power in Trump’s campaign.
Jared Kushner, Campaign Adviser-in-Law
Ivanka’s husband, real-estate developer Jared Kushner, tried to persuade one and all that his ownership of the New York Observer didn’t make the paper’s endorsement of The Donald any less objective.
Before the turn of the twentieth century, the Stillmans (bankers) married the Rockefellers (industrialists) to breed young Stillman-Rockefellers who controlled a chunk of the banking sector for decades while advising multiple presidents. Depending on the fate of Donald Trump’s presidential bid, perhaps the 2009 Jared-Ivanka merger (wedding) will someday be seen in the same light. It was, after all, witnessed by an array of movie stars, television personalities, and politicians like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and present New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
If Trump is elected, Kushner could wind up appointed, say, Secretary of Real Estate. (Okay, that post doesn’t actually exist — yet.) Kushner set up critical meetings between Trump and key Republican dignitaries and leaders that were meant to elevate his father-in-law’s relationship with the party establishment.
In early May, the New York Times reported that “Donald J. Trump has asked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to begin quietly compiling a blueprint for a transition team should he win the White House in November.” If his recent actions are a guide, Kushner will undoubtedly try to snag some significant establishment players as the race progresses.
Paul Manafort, New Campaign Manager
Manafort, a man of controversy, comfortable with wealth and luxury (though refusing any cash compensation for being on the Trump Train), has 40 years of work for the Republican Party establishment under his belt. In addition to being a former principal at the lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, he played a leading role in George H.W. Bush’s nomination at the 1988 convention, Bob Dole’s in 1996, George W. Bush’s in 2000, and John McCain’s in 2008.
For a campaign selling anti-establishmentism, having a manager from the inner circles of D.C. might seem like sheer Trumpocrisy, but such seeming contradictions are the essence of The Donald.
Manafort, by the way, has kept an apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, which, as we know, is “one of the world’s elite luxury residences, catering to public figures, athletes, celebrities, and other affluent sophisticates.” In other words, he’s establishment with a view.
Michael Glassner, Deputy Campaign Manager
Glassner is another classic insider. An adviser to the George W. Bush campaign of 2000, he became a top adviser to Sarah Palin in the 2008 election (which may have been a recommendation in Trump’s eyes). He had also once been an adviser to Bob Dole and the Southwest regional political director for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Glassner is one of the small team of Trump’s establishment guys reportedly responsible for his chaotic preparations for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Donald F. McGahn II, Chief Legal Counsel
McGahn, one of Washington’s best-connected lawyers, is legal counsel for Trump and a partner at Jones Day, the elite law firm that lists anti-trust and government regulation as its top specialties. By February 2016, the firm had already received more than $500,000 in payments from the Trump campaign.
According to MSNBC’s Zachary Roth, McGahn “was a crucial player in creating the out-of-control campaign finance system that his boss now denounces.” He has helped connect Trump with Republican congressional leaders at his D.C. offices, further dispelling the myth that Trump is anti-establishment.
Steven Mnuchin, National Finance Chairman
Not to be outdone by Hillary’s Wall Street connections, Trump recently bagged a former Goldman Sachs partner to run his fundraising operation (the one he used to say he didn’t need). In terms of Mnuchin’s own political contributions, like the firm he once worked for, he’s spread the wealth around. He donated to both Romney and Obama. He also contributed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate and presidential campaigns. In 2012, he donated $20,000 to the Republican National Committee. Overall, Mnuchin has contributed more than $120,000 to political groups over the past two decades, slightly favoring Democrats.
Shades of Trump, according to Variety, he left Relativity Media, where he had been a co-chairman, two months before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015. He also led a group of billionaire investors that took over beleaguered California bank IndyMac from the FDIC at a bargain price during the financial crisis, profiting, that is, from the pain of California’s foreclosure victims.
Who’s Gone From the Trump Train?
The list of those who have jumped off or were thrown from the Trump train is also heavy on establishment types, though most weren’t exactly from its crème de la crème. Among them were:
Corey Lewandowski, Former Campaign Manager
Lewandowski developed his establishment muscle working for various Koch Brother initiatives and was legislative political director of the Republican National Committee in 2001. He had also worked for three congressional representatives and, most recently, the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers-funded organization.
According to the Wall Street Journal’s analysis of Federal Election Commission documents, Lewandowski was “paid $20,000 a month,” — the equivalent of an annual salary of $240,000, “or 45% more than 2012 GOP nominee and multimillionaire Mitt Romney paid his senior staffers.” He was involved in a notorious incident with a female Breitbart reporter. It seems that, organizationally, he lost out to Paul Manafort, alienated Ivanka, and in June was fired by Trump. He hit the tracks running — CNN promptly hired him as an on-air analyst for a reported $500,000.
Stuart Jolly, Former National Field Director
Jolly resigned on April 18th. He had previously worked at the Oklahoma chapter of the Koch brothers’ flagship group, Americans for Prosperity, and also at the Education Freedom Alliance, an organization focused on expanding school choice and free-market economics.
Upon leaving he offered this advice to Trump: “My hope is that you will continue to listen to those who have propelled you to victory.” However, he soon returned as a national adviser for political and fundraising activities at the pro-Trump Super PAC, Great America.
Roger Stone, Former Top Adviser
Stone, too, has been an establishment GOP operative for decades. In 1974, he left his position as staff assistant for Senator Bob Dole amid controversy over Nixon White House “dirty tricks.” Five years later, he co-founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee where he developed a knack for creating negative campaign ads. Before he resigned from the Republican Party on his blog in 2012, he had worked on 12 Republican presidential campaigns.
The story of his fate in the Trump campaign is murky. The Donald insists he fired Stone, while Stone insists that he was the one who said, “You’re fired!”
Rick Wiley, Veteran Republican Adviser
An establishment player and a former political director for the Republican National Committee, he was removed as Trump’s national political director in May 2016, two months after having been brought on board by Paul Manafort. The media cited various unnamed sources offering various reasons why. Whatever the explanation, he was in and then he was out, because measured thinking about position selection isn’t a Trump priority. Wiley now works for the Republican National Committee.
Who Doesn’t Want to Be Seen at Trump Station?
The list of establishment players exhibiting no interest in associating with The Donald or an absolute animus against him seems to expand by the day. It includes, of course, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, George W. Bush, and Lindsey Graham, among so many others — key players all in the Republican Party. Romney typically didn’t mince words, saying, “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the American public for suckers: he gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.”
Romney might be wrong about the hat.
Meanwhile, a troop of prominent Republicans are heading for the hills, not the party’s convention. Congressional representatives are going into opposition; convention delegates pledged to Trump are restless and other delegates are muttering about revolt. A former Republican national security adviser and a former Republican treasury secretary (and former Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO) have thrown their support to Hillary and the establishment cast of characters thinking about heading for the exits continues to lengthen.
If much of the rest of the establishment follows the present pattern and departs Trump Station, what will this election look like? If history is any guide, family is not enough in American politics, only in banking. A candidate needs a party establishment for everything from experience to organization to money.
Trump himself lacks experience in government or public service of any sort. He’s essentially at sea when it comes to what it might mean to govern this country. In this, he is anything but typical among Republican frontrunners who became president. William Taft was a former secretary of war. Herbert Hoover was secretary of commerce. Warren Harding was a senator. Calvin Coolidge was his vice president. Dwight Eisenhower was a decorated general. Richard Nixon was his vice president and had been in Congress for years. Ronald Reagan was, yes, an actor, but had also been the governor of California. George H.W. Bush had been a congressman, an ambassador, and director of the CIA. His son was, of course, governor of Texas.
If Trump continues to play the outsider card (as he essentially must, given what his supporters now expect) and continues to alienate ever more of the establishment, he’s likely to find himself fighting a battle of diminishing returns in his own party. And what about that establishment’s money? After all, what’s an election these days but a pile of donated money and backroom deals?
We know he raised significantly less than Jeb, Ted, and Marco and still beat them in the primaries, and that undoubtedly gave him a certain unrealistic sense of what was possible in a presidential campaign. The result: this May his campaign raised only $1.3 million to Hillary’s $42.5 million. If that’s a sign of what’s to come and his supporters, unlike those of Bernie Sanders (the only true populist in the race) don’t begin to up the ante drastically, watch out.
Unsurprisingly, establishment pockets are looking a good deal less deep these days when it comes to him, though Trump has begun to say that he might need to find up to $1.5 billion to run this race. Key establishment money-raising figures have now visibly turned their backs on him, just as he did on them.
The Koch brothers are not atypical in refocusing the future contributions of their Super PACs on Republican races in the Senate and House. Charles Koch even signaled the possibility, however faint, of taking a further step and using his money for the other side. “We would have to believe [Hillary’s] actions would be quite different than her rhetoric. Let me put it that way,” he said in an interview on ABC’s This Week. When asked if it was possible that another Clinton could be better than a Republican, he added, “It’s possible.” (With establishment money, all things are possible.)
Outside groups — PACs and Super PACs on both sides of the aisle — have already spent a combined $34.1 million on Senate and House races, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of Federal Election Commission data. That’s nearly double the amount spent at this point in the 2012 campaign. The Freedom Partners Action Fund Super PAC, a political arm of the Koch empire, has divided nearly $10 million among four key Senate races in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. It has, however, kicked in only $36,000 for anti-Hillary efforts and not a penny for Trump.
American Crossroads, a Karl Rove Super PAC, is also opting to focus on Republicans in the Senate, though so far it has doled out just $100,000 for that effort and $135,000 against Hillary. Rove has called Trump “a petty man consumed by resentment and bitterness,” which tells you all you need to know about where he’s likely to put his outfit’s money this election season.
It’s increasingly clear that the GOP establishment is playing a different end game than The Donald. Whether Trump or Hillary wins, they want a Congress stacked in favor of their needs, and perhaps many of them are looking to a Paul Ryan run in 2020 as their saving grace.
Trump Wins
So here’s a question for that ultimate insider of outsiders: Can Donald Trump actually lose the 2016 election? Let’s say Hillary beats him, as the polls of the moment suggest she will. Has he lost? Probably not.
After all, he’s brought his brand to a far broader global audience on a stage so much larger than any Apprentice imaginable. He could lose dramatically, blame the Republican establishment for being mean to him, and then expand the Trump brand into new realms, places like Russia, where he’s long craved an opening. Vladimir Putin and he could golf together bare-chested while discussing the imminent demise of the American empire. “My country could have been great again,” he could sigh, “if only it had voted me in.” His consolation prize: a Trump Casino in Moscow’s Red Square?
In other words, whether the establishment supports him or not, whether he wins on November 8th or not, his brand wins, which means that he triumphs.
Consider this: the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue with views of the White House is already wrapped in blue Trump International banners as it’s being converted into a luxury hotel. Due to open two years ahead of schedule and two months before Election Day, it’s one of Ivanka’s projects. It ensures that her father has branded the avenue regardless of whether he ends up in the White House or not. Given the property’s location and what its “presidential suite” is sure to look like, working in the Oval Office might prove to be a downgrade.
Seven ways FBI contradicted Clinton’s email claims
July 9, 2016
by Julian Hattem
The Hill
The Justice Department this week exonerated Clinton of allegations that she mishandled classified information.
But in the process, FBI Director James Comey opened the door to new charges that she lied to Congress and the American public.
Republican lawmakers are promising to refer to the FBI potential misstatements that Clinton made under oath during an 11-hour testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. That referral could lead to a new investigation, once again putting Clinton under the glare of the Justice Department.
Here are some of the statements Clinton has said on Capitol Hill and elsewhere contradicted by the FBI this week:
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email”
This is one of the first claims that Clinton made about her email setup, in a press conference at the United Nations shortly after it was revealed last year.
In fact, more than 2,000 emails now contain information considered classified, but most of that was upgraded after it was sent.
According to Comey, a total of 113 emails contained information that was classified at the time the messages were sent or received. Among those are eight threads containing 22 emails classified as top secret — the highest tier of classification.
“There was classified material emailed,” Comey told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday.
“There was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received”
After it became clear that a sizable portion of Clinton’s email traffic was classified, the former secretary of State has changed her story.
Some information may have been classified, but none was marked as such, she said during the Benghazi Committee hearing, repeating a claim she has uttered frequently.
But the reality is more complicated.
At least three emails among the more than 30,000 reviewed by the FBI have included some markings indicating information was classified.
“There were a small number of portion markings on, I think, three of the documents,” Comey testified this week.
Those markings, however, were incomplete and according to the State Department made out of “human error.”
Classified documents are supposed to be marked as such at multiple points throughout the document, including at the top and next to each sensitive portion.
The three emails in Clinton’s inbox did not include the markings at the top of the page, just the ones next to particular sections. And the relevant portions did not actually contain classified information.
According to Comey, Clinton might have not understood that the section markings — upper-case “C”s in parentheses — indicating that the information was supposed to be confidential, the lower tier of classification.
“I don’t think that our investigation established she was actually particularly sophisticated with respect to classified information and the levels and treatment,” the FBI director told the House Oversight Committee.
Still, Comey told reporters this week that anyone in Clinton’s position should have understood that dozens of the messages contained sensitive information.
“Even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” he said.
“It was allowed, but it was not a good choice”
Clinton has repeatedly described her email setup as permitted under the letter of the rules, though perhaps unwise. This quote came from the middle of her Benghazi Committee testimony.
Both the State Department’s inspector general and the FBI disagree with that claim.
The department’s internal watchdog released a harshly critical report earlier this year saying that the setup “would not” have been approved, had Clinton sought permission.
Had employees within the FBI had a similar system, Comey testified this week, they might have been subject to a range of punishments up to and including being fired.
“You could be walked out or, depending on the nature of the facts, you could be reprimanded,” the FBI director testified in the House.
However, the bureau would not have been able to prosecute them for federal crimes, he added. And there would be no punishments that could be handed down after the official had left office.
“I provided the department … with all of my work-related emails, all that I had”
Clinton has claimed repeatedly that all of her work-related messages were contained within the roughly 30,000 messages given to the State Department in 2014. Another batch of a similar size was purely personal, she has said, and those messages destroyed.
This quote also came from the hearing in the Select Committee on Benghazi.
The FBI managed to recover some of those deleted emails, through inboxes of her colleagues and from electronic breadcrumbs on decommissioned severs that Clinton used.
According to Comey, “thousands” of those allegedly personal emails pertained to her work at the State Department. At least of them contained classified information.
“I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two”
This is another early claim of Clinton’s, given during her March 2015, press conference explaining why she used a private server out of convenience.
The rationale, she said at the time, was to use just her one BlackBerry device for all email traffic, instead of switching between multiple devices.
But in fact, Clinton used “multiple devices” throughout her four years as the nation’s top diplomat, according to the head of the FBI chief.
“The FBI has the server that was used during the tenure of my State Department service”
The common understanding of Clinton’s setup is that she used a single server throughout all four years, as this quote during the Benghazi Committee hearing seems to assert.
But the FBI said that she used “several” different machines, which were taken offline as they became outdated and replaced.
“There were no security breaches”
It’s still unclear precisely what security mechanisms Clinton used to protect her servers from hackers.
But her presidential campaign has repeatedly said that there is no evidence that the machine was hacked, as she stated in this quote from the 2015 press conference.
The FBI was not able to uncover any evidence that hackers did break into her system.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Newt Gingrich Pals Around With Terrorists Saddam Hussein Once Armed
July 10 2016
by Robert Mackey
The Intercept
Newt Gingrich, who is being vetted to be Donald Trump’s running mate and appeared with the candidate in Cincinnati on Wednesday, left the campaign trail this weekend for an unusual reason. The former Speaker of the House had to fly to Paris to appear at a gala celebration for the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Mujahedin, an Iranian exile group that wants Washington’s backing for regime change in Iran.
In his remarks, Gingrich heaped praise on the MEK’s efforts, and congratulated them on the presence of another dignitary, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a senior member of the Saudi royal family and a former head of that nation’s intelligence service.
What Gingrich failed to mention in his enthusiastic endorsement of the MEK, however, is that the Iranian dissidents previously spent three decades trying to achieve their aim through terrorist attacks, and some of their first victims were Americans. He also avoided talking about the fact that the group’s terrorist cell was once based in Iraq, where it was armed and protected by Saddam Hussein.
The timing of Gingrich’s appearance at the MEK gala was awkward for Trump, since the candidate had spent part of the previous week arguing that the late Iraqi dictator, while being “a really bad guy,” deserved some credit because “he killed terrorists.”
“He did that so good,” Trump told supporters in North Carolina on Tuesday, “they didn’t read them the rights; they didn’t talk; they were a terrorist, it was over.”
Four days later, Gingrich reminded the world that Saddam, in fact, had a history of support for terrorist groups, like the MEK, whose members helped foment the 1979 revolution, in part by killing American civilians working in Tehran, and then lost a bitter struggle for power to the Islamists. After they were forced to flee Iran in 1981, the MEK set up a government-in-exile in France and established a military base in Iraq, where they were given arms and training by Saddam as part of a strategy to destabilize the theocratic government in Tehran he was at war with.
In recent years, as The Intercept has reported, the MEK has poured millions of dollars into reinventing itself as a moderate political group ready to take power in Iran if Western-backed regime change ever takes place. To that end it lobbied successfully to be removed from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2012. The Iranian exiles achieved this over the apparent opposition of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in part by paying a long list of former United States officials hefty speaking fees of between $10,000 to $50,000 for hymns of praise like the one Gingrich delivered on Saturday in Paris, where the MEK’s political wing held its annual “Free Iran” gala.
But, according to Ariane Tabatabai, a Georgetown University scholar, the “cult-like dissident group,” whose married members were reportedly forced to divorce and take a vow of lifelong celibacy, “has no viable chance of seizing power in Iran”:
If the current government is not Iranians’ first choice for a government, the MEK is not even their last—and for good reason. The MEK supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. The people’s discontent with the Iranian government at that time did not translate into their supporting an external enemy that was firing Scuds into Tehran, using chemical weapons and killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including many civilians. Today, the MEK is viewed negatively by most Iranians, who would prefer to maintain the status quo than rush to the arms of what they consider a corrupt, criminal cult.
Despite how little reality there is behind the claim that the MEK’s political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, is a force for democratic change, Gingrich was joined at the group’s gala in Paris by a bipartisan group of former U.S. officials, including former U.N. ambassadors John Bolton and Bill Richardson, a former attorney general, Michael Mukasey, the former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, the former Homeland Security Adviser Frances Townsend, the former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, and the former Vermont governor Howard Dean. The gala was even hosted by Linda Chavez, a former Reagan administration official who has loudly opposed Donald Trump’s nomination.
As Gingrich noted, however, perhaps the most important speaker at the MEK gathering this year was the Saudi royal, Prince Turki al-Faisal.
Although the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran is not new, Prince Turki’s speech to the dissident group seemed like a departure to many Iranians, not least because it was marked by the bizarre spectacle of the Iranian exiles interrupting his address to chant, in Arabic: “Al Shaab Yureed Isqat al-Nitham!” – “The People Demand The Fall of the Regime!”
Video of this moment, broadcast on Al-Arabiya, the Saudi-owned satellite news channel, showed Prince Turki respond: “I, too, want the fall of the regime.”
The comment, an open call for regime change in Tehran from a Saudi royal, struck Iranian journalists and activists as a turning point. It was also deeply ironic, given that the chant was used in the pro-democracy protests across the Middle East in 2011 that Saudi Arabia fought so hard to repress.
The Broken Sword: Deceit and Destruction in Florida
July 7, 2016
by Alicia Fong
MCR News
From: Laura Hawkins [mailto:firearms@affiliatedauctions.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 6:30 AM
To: Vermont Trotter
Subject:
. We also just received the sword, it is magnificent !!!
In September of 2015, Vermont Trotter, a resident of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, sent a valuable historical sword to the Affiliated Auction house of Tallahassee, Florida.
He did so at their request.
The firm had been recommended to Mr. Trotter by a Robert Johnson of Lakemont, Georgia. Mr. Johnson’s firm, Germania International, specializes in the merchandizing of Nazi items such as silverware from the SS, personality items such as Adolf Hitler paintings and Nazi-era tapestries.
This presentation sword, which had been in Mr. Trotter’s family for many years, was valued by the Florida auction house at over $100,000 and was duly insured by them for that amount.
Accompanying the sword were original family documents and official American military documents attesting to the originality of the sword
A month later, the sword was returned to Mr Trotter, broken. Accompanying the broken sword was a signed letter from Mr. Willis, Tallahassee-based real estate lawyer for the auction house. Willis stated that the sword had been broken while at the auction house.
The auction house refused to reimburse Mr Trotter for the sword damage and also refused to return his family documents.
Finally, Mr Trotter contacted the Florida governmental office that was in charge of business permits for that state, setting forth his complaints against the auction house.
The investigator for the agency conducted a through investigation and filed a formal complaint against the auction house for violation of a number of Florida laws.
The state also forced the auction house to surrender the family documents to them and in due time, these were returned to Mr Trotter
Mr Trotter has finally obtained the services of a civil attorney and is in the process of filing a civil lawsuit against Affiliated Auctions.