OMG. Does Trump Not Even Know His DOJ Sued His Repo Man Bond Backer W/Ties To Money Laundering?

Yes, that explosion you hear off in the distance is the You Can’t Make This $hit Up file exploding once again. It happens on a regular basis, simply nothing to be done about it as long as Trump world dominates our headlines and our culture. What caused it to blow up today is this article in the Daily Beast describing how Don Hankey, (Trump’s bond backer’s) financial company, was sued by Trump’s DOJ for unlawful lending practices. And to whom they made these subprime loans is the real story. Or we should say, the lead in to the real story, because Mr. Hankey has some very interesting business connections. Mama mia, here we go again.

The subject of that suit, however, also revealed a historical commonality with Trump: disrespecting members of the U.S. military.

According to the settlement agreement in the case, Hankey’s company—Westlake Services—had systematically violated the rights of military employees over a period of several years, illegally repossessing dozens of cars in violation of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. Westlake immediately settled, agreeing to pay $700,000 in damages to the affected servicemembers, along with a roughly $61,000 fine to the federal government.

Evidently Trump isn’t the only one who regards members of our military as “losers” and “suckers.” Clearly Hankey does as well.

Then, while the government was monitoring Westlake’s compliance, the DOJ discovered new SCRA violations, forcing the firm to pay another $225,000 to settle those allegations in 2022. Combined, the full payout came to just under $1 million. Hankey—Westlake’s founder, chair, and largest stakeholder—was not personally named in the complaint, and the settlement was signed by company president Ian Anderson.

Hankey’s past is important context for his loan to Trump, and his company’s choppy history with federal law enforcement—as well as the fact that his firm would be regulated under a potential second Trump administration—may cast the loan in a new light.

Gee, ya think? You mean it could be troublesome to some people that the GOP candidate for president of the United States is only able to get his bonding requirements met by a loan shark, and not just any loan shark, but one that his own Department Of Justice took to task for unfair treatment of military members and veterans? Could that possibly be of note to anybody? If I was on Team Biden right now, I would be collapsing with laughter. But look for this to be whitewashed and both sided, like every Trump bombshell these days. Here’s the lead story on Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell tonight, unless I miss my guess.

And it gets worse. Now this company that Hankey owns is beginning to sound like the leg breaking cement overshoe boys.

At the time of the repercussions, federal violations weren’t new to Westlake. Hankey, whose estimated $7.4 billion net worth outstrips Trump’s, made his fortune in the repo world, targeting low-income customers with high-interest auto loans.

In fact, two years before the DOJ sued Westlake and its wholly-owned subsidiary Wilshire under the SCRA, those same two entities were nailed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for “illegal debt collection tactics,” resulting in more than $44 million in restitution payouts and a civil fine of $4.25 million.

In the initial DOJ complaint, filed on Sept. 17, 2017, the Trump administration alleged that Westlake had unlawfully seized at least 70 cars from servicemembers, in violation of protections under the SCRA. (While the complaint itself bears the imprimatur of Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the investigation was launched under President Barack Obama, whose DOJ first notified Westlake of the probe in October 2016.)

According to prosecutors, over a period of five years, Hankey’s firms had repossessed dozens of vehicles belonging to military employees without obtaining the necessary court orders required under the law. Four of the seizures took place while members were either on active duty or within one year of their departure.

That gives you some idea of who Hankey is. But wait, there’s more. Seth Abramson has a column up today that describes how Hankey and his business partner have managed to give Trump backing of up to a billion dollars — but they claim they don’t even know the man.

Hankey and Greg Garrabrants, [are] two fabulously wealthy, well-connected, and savvy political operators who combined have conceived of ways to lend the Trump Family well over a billion dollars—there was an unusual willingness amongst these professionals to immediately report out the Hankey-Garrabrants line, no matter how facially preposterous it was.

And here’s that line, in brief:

1. Both men say that they’ve never met or even spoken to Donald Trump—by any means or for any purpose—though Trump is the man they both vote for every election and have lavishly supported financially (as a politician and a borrower);
2. Hankey says that he didn’t even know one of his companies (Axos Financial) was lending hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump, even as Garrabrants says he was so familiar with Trump’s property empire while lending him hundreds of millions via Axos that—despite never having met or spoken to the man he was lending to—he didn’t need the usual information about Trump any lender would need from a borrower, didn’t need to do a walk-through of Trump National Doral before rescuing it from ruin because he was familiar enough with it already to become involved with it immediately upon request, and has only been in Trump Tower a single time for a walkthrough, during which walkthrough he only saw Eric Trump and never met his father (whose primary residence at the time was in the building Garrabrants was then in, and who was at the time seeking hundreds of millions from Garrabrant, despite allegedly never deigning to meet him); and
3. to the extent that these two men have been termed “the lender[s] of last resort to the Trumps” by Rolling Stone, this fact is nevertheless more or less news to them because (a) Garrabrants has never met or spoken to Jared Kushner despite being involved with his businesses to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (and Kushner, for his part, says he neither knows nor has met Garrabrants or even was aware Garrabrants had rescuing him financially until after it happened), and (b) Hankey only reached out to Donald Trump to save him from financial and political ruin because “he would have done the same for anyone.”

These are the facially unserious, impossible-to-credit tales of ignorance, aloofness, and lily-white naïveté now being sold to major media by one of the richest men in the United States (Hankey, net worth $7.4 billion) and one of the highest-paid CEOs in the United States (Garrabrants, annual salary last reported at around $34.5 million). Really?

No investigator would accept these responses as honest—indeed, upon receiving them would treat them as signs of “consciousness of guilt”—but with American media in this decade, these self-exculpations are treated as satisfactory even as no one seems to believes a poor and/or nonwhite man arrested for a street crime about anything he says.

This is a lengthy article, which I suggest you read in full. Here are a few other passages from it which are noteworthy.

According to Hankey—who clearly wants to obscure who he spoke to on Team Trump upon reaching out to it, largely by implying that his first contact was with “Trump’s lawyers” (which is almost certainly not true, because that’s unlikely to be how cold-calling this particular potential client would work)—Trump’s legal team “initially offer[ed] 20% cash and 80% investment-grade bonds”, which means that as of last week Trump was representing to his potential last-ditch lender that he was able to offer just $35 million in cash (a figure consistent with what Trump biographers have said Trump likely has on hand, contrary to his insistence he has $500 million in cash).

But after a several-day delay—during which time Hankey reached out to Trump’s legal team to confirm that the investment-grade bonds they’d submitted for his review had passed muster (though what if any due diligence Hankey did on that question we can’t know)—attorneys for the beleaguered ex-president suddenly announced a startling switch-up: Trump now had $175 million in cash to offer, rather than just $35 million.

There was no explanation given to Hankey, apparently, for why Trump, who’s known he would need hundreds of millions of dollars in supersedeas bonds in New York since September 2023, suddenly found that he was able to put up five times more cash than he had just proposed to Hankey a few days earlier. This about-face would by itself raise all sorts of alarm bells among federal investigators, especially as Hankey confirms that “the [unexpected] decision to use all cash came from Trump’s team.”

So what changed in Donald Trump’s finances over the last few days of the Knight Bond closing that he was instantly able to—or else, was forced to—so dramatically change a funding profile he should’ve more or less had on lockdown many weeks earlier? Were the “investment-grade bonds” that Hankey says he was offered actually Truth Social “meme stock” positions, which have come to seem worthless over just the last few hours? If so, this would return us to scrutinizing how Jeff Yass, a GOP mega-donor billionaire who’s part owner of major Chinese tech company ByteDance, orchestrated Trump being in position to save himself by borrowing—maybe illegally—against a technically illiquid position in Truth Social (as he can’t liquidate his position for some time, and then only in extremely slow fashion and via extremely attenuated processes).

If Trump sought to illegally use illiquid assets to secure a bond from a lender with alleged direct or indirect ties to foreign money launderers, that would be something America should know and that federal investigators indubitably need to find out now.

This is so utterly crooked on so many levels. Again, the simple and straightforward thing to do would be for the GOP to pull the plug collectively and not put Trump on the ticket again. But you know they won’t do it. The Republicans are like a bunch of broken down gambling addicts. They’re depending on that next score, that big payoff, and they’re convinced that their sunken costs to date justify their insane actions.

This is the story to watch between now and November. Let’s see who Hankey and the other financiers in Trump’s life are and what they do to help Trump. And let’s closely watch who else they do business with. That’s the trail of breadcrumbs to follow.

Never lose sight of Nikita Khrushchev’s vow in 1956: “We will take you over without firing a single shot. We will defeat you from within.” Donald Trump is selling out America to the highest bidder and the Republican party is fine with that. Just fine.