March 15, 2018 / by emptywheel

 

Those Trump Panama Hotel Documents? Might Include DOD Grift

Remember how I observed that the takeover of Trump Panama, even as Trump staffers madly shredded documents, by a guy who bought into the troubled hotel just as Trump became President, might have more to do with leverage over Trump than the mostly empty building?

These people are all douchebags and the brawling side show is fairly amusing. But it does seem that Fintiklis bought into something far more than a mostly empty hotel, and he’s now using it as leverage against the Trump family business.

The fight over the Trump Panama hotel seems to be as much about the fight over records that may show whether Ivanka knew she was involved in money laundering with Russian mobsters and Colombia narcotics traffickers as it is over who gets to run the mostly empty hotel.

The Daily Beast and Sparrow Media report that some of those papers the Trump folks may have been shredding might pertain to $17,000 spent by DOD after Trump became President.

Pentagon officials spent more than $17,000 at the Trump Ocean Club hotel in Panama in the first half of 2017, according to documents obtained by a government watchdog group.  The money was spent to cover general lodging expenses, according to the documents. It isn’t clear why.

The Panama Hotel expenditures make up 12% of the $138,093.23 DOD spent in total, and the rest of the expenditures are for more locations which we knew Trump was grifting us for: Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, and Las Vegas. Maybe those other locations will reveal some DOD personnel were at meetings we didn’t otherwise know (though we’ve known Mar-a-Lago to host some key NatSec meetings).

But it’s unclear who got sent to stay at the Trump hotel in Panama.

Trump and his spawn will only make about $600 out of this — so it’s not like their grift is paying their bills. But it may provide clear evidence of grift.

Copyright © 2018 emptywheel. All rights reserved.
Originally Posted @ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/03/15/those-trump-panama-hotel-documents-might-include-dod-grift/