Trump’s Bond Money Connected With Russia. Shocking, Not Surprising

What you’re about to read is troubling, but there have been rumbles about this. Donald Trump miraculously came up with a bond last Friday. That is, he secured a bond proposal before the 11:00 a.m. court hearing tomorrow, March 11, in the E. Jean Carroll case. But he has not posted a bond. Those two things are different. If all is in order, then the $91M that he’s on the hook for pending the appeal of the Carroll case will be indemnified, by the Chubb insurance company. If something isn’t in order, then Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, will object and an Order To Show Cause will be the next step.

This level of detail has only been reported by ABC News and by independent journalist Seth Abramson, who has discovered a direct link between Russia and the bond money that Trump just obtained. Or, will obtain, assuming that all is in order. And perhaps he’ll obtain more from Chubb. This is a lengthy article and may be behind a paywall, but I will give you some highlights so you can see where the origins of the bond money are indeed a matter of national security and that is somehow being glossed over. I am shocked but on the other hand, I can’t say I’m surprised, that this isn’t a major story right now. And it comes as zero surprise that Russian money is bailing Trump out. It would be surprising if that wasn’t the case.

Some of the warnings major media received about this bond—warnings major media is at this very moment ignoring to the detriment of not just E. Jean Carroll but all of the United States—are itemized below. Proof thereafter does an exclusive “deep dive” into everything that’s wrong with Trump’s bond proposal. It’s a story that will shock you, as the entwined story of the Greenberg Family and the Trump Family is truly an astonishing one that at seemingly every stop points directly at Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

Mary McCord, Former DOJ Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security

[Report.]

• “Yes, we’re talking about how difficult it might be for Trump [to post bonds]…but he has certainly plenty of people who might want to bail him out on that. Some of those might be foreign [nationals], some of those might be Russian oligarchs, some of those might be people right here in America. Anytime you are talking about someone who’s running for president or holding any elected office and potentially could have some indebtedness or feeling of owing somebody else something, that’s very dangerous. Particularly here, as we know [Trump’s] fondness for Vladimir Putin, his continuing praise of Putin and the way [Putin] governs Russia, and that’s something [due to which] I could very much see people there [in Russia] who have the means to help him out [wanting to do so]. And there’s plenty of other countries that would like to get some favors from Donald Trump should he become the [American] president again.”

The story goes on to state how John Bolton says that Trump is consumed by his legal and financial problems and consumed always by himself. So that right there makes him a national security risk — at least it would anybody else not named Trump. It also reveals that “concern over Trump’s staggeringly large—and ever growing—debt load is now so significant that there’s even a website that tracks live the amount that Trump owes to state and federal courts.” This is certainly not normal for anybody, let alone a presidential candidate.

So what actually matters? What sort of evidence would we expect, all things being equal, E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan to be asking U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan to be looking at on Monday afternoon, the start time for a show cause hearing related to Trump’s bond proposal should Carroll and Kaplan object to it? A good example would be the intertwining of the billionaire Greenberg Family and the billionaire Trump Family, given that the current billionaire scion of the former, Evan Greenberg, is now trying to bail out the billionaire scion of the latter, Donald Trump, at a time it is appears that—for very good reason—no one else in the entire world was willing to do so.

If it turns out—as the sum and substance of this Proof report suggests it might—that Trump and Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg are successful in salvaging the former U.S. president’s financial health and 2024 presidential candidacy through an opaque bond proposal American major media did nothing whatsoever to investigate, what’s to stop the two men from teaming up again on or before March 25, 2024, when Trump owes a nearly half a billion-dollar bond to another court in New York? The answer, of course, is nothing; very bad (or absent) reporting tends to have almost immediate consequences.

One fact above all in the timeline that follows cannot be missed, and for this reason is here foregrounded: Trump’s new lender, Evan Greenberg, isn’t just the son of famous Republican, banker, and adviser to presidents Maurice “Hank” Greenberg; the elder Greenberg was Evan Greenberg’s boss for a quarter of a century, and at a company he effectively built—making the relationship him and his son much more than a typical father-son one. Indeed, it is best analogizes to the odd relationship between Donald Trump and his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. And the fact that both Greenbergs have now spend much of their joint and separate business careers trying to figure out how to extract remunerative value from the former Soviet Union conjoins all four men—the two Trumps and the two Greenbergs—further still, as does the fact that just as the Trumps have long banded together more closely than they might otherwise have done due to investigators and regulators that long gravely threatened the family fortune.

The story continues that the attorney general of New York also investigated the Greenbergs for fraud. We say so often here that the 2024 election is the showdown between Good v. Evil and every single day we get more evidence supporting that proposition.

1992: During a long course of private correspondence with Richard Nixon, Maurice Greenberg, CEO of insurance company AIG, informs the former president that he has created the Russian-American Investment Bank, a partnership of American entities (but primarily AIG) and Russian (and other former Soviet) ones, including, by way of example, both the City of Moscow and The Pension Fund of Russia. Greenberg, who is at this time the boss of future Trump lender—and his son—Evan Greenberg, is keen on using the Soviet Union’s fall to create new wealth for his family and for others.

1994: Nixon, the infamously corrupt and nearly impeached former president, founds a far-right think tank, The Nixon Center. Soviet-born Dimitri Simes—who will be, as of 2018, an acknowledged Kremlin agent and Putin propagandist working for Russian state television—becomes its first CEO.

1998: The Nixon Center is renamed The Center for the National Interest (hereinafter “CFTNI”). By 2009, CFTNI will boast of its very robust U.S.-Russia Relations Program.

May 2000: Vladimir Putin becomes President of Russia, and his autocratic impulses quickly raise doubts for American businessmen like Maurice (“Hank”) Greenberg as to whether or not they’ll be able to continue to extract as much wealth out of Russia as they had been doing for much of the 1990s. Putin’s job is to convincingly woo men such as Greenberg with the promise of lucrative U.S.-Russia partnerships continuing.

The article goes on to show Maurice Greenberg and Donald Trump living almost parallel lives. In the 2010s, the elder Greenberg was involved in civil litigation with the New York attorney general “underscoring that Maurice Greenberg’s turn to doing business in Putin’s Russia after signing a consultancy with the Kremlin while at AIG in 2003 is in part a circumstance born of necessity. This too mirrors how Donald Trump sees his business dealings in the United States; while, like Maurice Greenberg, Trump always desired to do business in Russia, this ambition became urgent after U.S. and European banks stopped lending to him due to his stint as the worst businessman in the United States.”

Very simply, Donald Trump is up against the wall right now, with his shoulders pressed a few inches into the plaster. He is trapped. He is going to lose either his entire empire, or certainly the lion’s share of it. So it makes perfect sense that he’s got people like Viktor Orban coming over to cut campaign promos for him and that he’s attempting to get Russian money to bail him out of his woes. At this point, Trump’s life is reading like something that Ian Fleming would have written, if he ever could have conceived of a villain as bizarre as Donald Trump, sort of a cross between Goldfinger, and a circus clown, the man with the golden toilet. And a golden gun, which one of his MAGA minions put his likeness on.

According to Reuters, Maurice Greenberg has said that what happened with AIG and the NYAG cost him “90%” of his total wealth. Per Reuters, this means that as a result of the same office now pursuing Trump for over $454 million, the Greenbergs’ worth dropped from a net of $3.2 billion to a net of approximately $320 million.

Also 2005: Determined, following his successful signing of a consultancy agreement with AIG two years earlier, to find new and perhaps less savory ways to increase his influence inside the United States, Vladimir Putin—using oligarch and self-admitted Kremlin agent Oleg Deripaska as an intermediary—signs a deal with Donald Trump adviser Paul Manafort (a business partner of Trump friend and former Richard Nixon adviser Roger Stone) to have Manafort secretly advance the Kremlin’s interests both in the United States and, even more importantly, Ukraine, which Putin views as little more than a Russian client state readily usable as a nation-sized bank for his schemes.

Manafort’s deal pays him a staggering $10 million a year—roughly half the salary of the then-highest-paid player in Major League Baseball, New York Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez.

2006: The Library of Congress reports CFTNI as having an annual budget of only $1.6 million, which would seem to suggest it’s being almost entirely bankrolled by Maurice Greenberg—who by 2019 is being said by the New York Times to have given $1 million a year to CFTNI for a very long time. This explains why Greenberg is Chairman of the Center for the National Interest for many years. While this author has not yet been able to determine when the elder Greenberg began in this role, it’s clear that in 2014 (when Maurice Greenberg is 89 years old) he steps down as the Chairman of CFTNI and becomes Chairman Emeritus. Greenberg, who is now 98, appears to give up his position at the pro-Kremlin CFTNI to his son Evan, the future Donald Trump lender.

June 2008: The now-disgraced Maurice Greenberg, whose reputation in American business has in some quarters been shattered due to events at AIG, does what Trump is doing at the very same time due to his inability to borrow money in the United States: he turns to Putin’s Russia. The difference is that whereas (according to Donald Trump Jr. in a speech to investors in 2008 and Eric Trump in an interview with a golf reporter in 2014), the Trumps spend the mid-2000s to 2014 borrowing from Russian banks, the cannier Maurice Greenberg does something better: uses an investment fund focused on Putin’s Russia that he had created after his public AIG ouster, Starr Russia Investments III, to buy a huge chunk of a Russian bank.

I don’t know why this isn’t on the front page of the New York Times — or maybe it will be in a few days. Some people regard Seth Abramson as a bit of a crackpot, a conspiracy theorist in his own right. I certainly don’t have the resources to fact check every single item in this article, at least not before I publish it tonight, so I simply submit this to you with the query: what is your opinion why this isn’t being hailed as a major news story? As Abramson pointed out, only ABC News noted the difference between a bond arrangement being proposed and a bond actually being posted and accuracy is a key tenet of journalism. In a spirit of fair play, maybe we should just assume that all the major media outlets will jump on this story when and if something isn’t right vis a vis the bond proposal?

Regardless of whether Abramson is jumping the gun or the mainstream media is asleep at the switch, or both, I think it’s totally fair and rational for us to assume that Trump is going to get his money anywhere that he can and he’ll sell out everything to the highest bidder.

It will be interesting to see what Joe Biden does later on in the year. It’s customary that presidential candidates are briefed on matters of national security interest and I’m going to bet that Biden is going to not give the same leeway to Trump that he would give to a Mitt Romney, a Nikki Haley, or anybody credible and remotely ethical. Not when Trump is under indictment for refusing to return classified documents that he should not have removed in the first place. John Bolton has already gone on record saying it would be a mistake.

 “No prior presidential candidate has ever been under indictment for compromising classified information. That alone is reason to withhold intelligence briefings. There is no legitimate argument that denying the briefings would impair Trump’s campaign — he doesn’t understand what they would brief anyway,” Bolton said.

He added that if the White House does decide to provide briefings, “they should only be to Trump, alone, with no aides. That way, any leaks would by definition be from Trump himself.”

Donald Trump is the most dangerous man in the world right now. His stupidity and arrogance has landed him in copious amounts of legal hot water and his desperation will lead him to sell us out in any way that he can. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself, if Biden told Trump anything sensitive, that information would be sold before the sun came up the following day. Such is my fervent belief. But the article wherein I quoted Bolton made it clear that the briefings offered to presidential candidates are “usually not as highly classified as the president’s daily briefing.”

This is the lay of the land as we go into 2024. Trump’s former national security advisor is advising not to tell Trump anything. I wince, thinking that we’re even in this position. May democracy prevail, somehow, and this dime store tyrant be defeated.