Three Things: Two USAs and a Bear
[NB: Check the byline, thanks! /~Rayne]
These things aren’t worth a full post but perhaps they’re worth a brief look. They bugged me when I ran across them — now it’s your turn.
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The sketchy work former U.S. Attorney and now-former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta did on Jeffrey Epstein’s prosecution — a non-prosecution — looks worse as time goes by and we learn more about Epstein’s recidivism.
(Which really isn’t recidivism since he wasn’t prosecuted by the feds, yes? He continued business as usual unabated.)
But Acosta wasn’t the first U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida under the Bush administration. He replaced Marco Jimenez, conveniently in time to prosecute Jack Abramoff and investigate Jeffrey Epstein.
Jimenez’ departure to return to private practice in June 2005 didn’t draw much attention, though he was one of the relatively few USAs who served less than their full four-year term after appointment by the president. This seems odd given how much scrutiny the U.S. Attorneys received during the Bush administration due to “Gonzales Seven” scandal — the U.S. Attorneys dismissed en masse on December 7, 2006 by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Jimenez wasn’t one of the attorneys summarily fired by Bush.
At the time both Marcy and I had speculated about possible unifying reason(s) why the U.S. Attorneys were terminated. One of them was the possibility some of the USAs were LGBTQ and/or might be sympathetic to LGBTQ targets in prosecutions. Another reason was related to the handling of energy cases like Enron, FERC corridors, fracking, and pipelines.
But it didn’t occur to me that another possible unifying reason was human trafficking.
New Mexico’s U.S. Attorney was fired with the rest of the “Gonzales Seven.”
And Epstein not only had a residence in south Florida but in New Mexico.
What a coincidence.
David Iglesias was the USA for New Mexico until December 2006, succeeded by his assistant Larry Gomez. Gomez never received a nomination by Bush with Senate approval; he served the rest of Bush’s term as acting USA. Iglesias wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that he believed he and the rest of the “Gonzales Seven” were terminated for political reasons.
Two GOP members of Congress — Representative Heather Wilson and Senator Pete Domenici, both now out of office — had pressed Iglesias to prosecute a corruption case. There had also been pressure to investigate and prosecute voter fraud.
Epstein’s New Mexico ranch is now under investigation.
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Speaking of New Mexico, I’ve had this squirreled away for a while because I wasn’t certain what to make of it last October.
The acting U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, James Tierney, entered an agreement with the Trump administration in July 2017 about its “zero tolerance” policy pertaining to the El Paso Sector. The program separating children from family members was piloted through New Mexico, beginning there nearly a year before it was rolled out to the rest of the country.
The El Paso Sector should not to be confused with city of El Paso, which is located in Texas. Texas also has four USAs.
Why was the agreement with New Mexico’s USA alone and not with the USAs for all the border states — Texas, Arizona, California, and New Mexico? Why with an acting USA instead of waiting for a Senate-approved appointee?
Note also that Damon Martinez, appointed by President Obama, was forced out as U.S. Attorney for New Mexico in March 2017. Tierney was the acting USA until Trump nominee John C. Andersen was approved by the Senate in February 2018.
Sure would like to know what the trend is in New Mexico for human trafficking prosecutions.
I hope like hell children separated from their families or unaccompanied haven’t been trafficked out of U.S. concentration camps while the federal government looks the other way.
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And now back to a tangent related to Epstein, who once worked for now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns before he opened his own financial management services firm.
This is really more of a reminder, I should say: Trump and/or his organization had obtained alternative financing through Bear Stearns, some of which was tied up in the beginning of the 2008 crash.
Fusion GPS’ Glenn Simpson’s January 2018 testimony before the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence mentioned Trump having had relationship with Bear Stearns:
[SIMPSON]… There’s the Trump vodka business that was earlier. And then ultimately, you know, what we came to realize was that the money was actually coming out of Russia and going into his properties in Florida and New York and Panama and Toronto and these other places.
And what we, you know, gradually begun to understand, which, you know, I suppose I should kick myself for not figuring out earlier, but I don’t know that much about the real estate business, which is I alluded to this earlier, so, you know, by 2003, 2004, Donald Trump was not able to get bank credit for — and if you’re a real estate developer and you can’t get bank loans, you know, you’ve got a problem.
And all these guys, they used leverage like, you know, — so there’s alternative systems of financing, and sometimes it’s — well, there’s a variety of alternative systems of financing. But in any case, you need alternative financing.
One of the things that we now know about how the condo projects were financed is that you have to — you can get credit if you can show that you’ve sold a certain number of units.
So it turns out that, you know, one of the most important things to look at is — this is especially true of the early overseas developments, like Toronto and Panama — you can get credit if you can show that you sold a certain percentage of your units.
And so the real trick is to get people who say they’ve bought those units, and that’s where the Russians are to be found, is in some of those pre-sales, is what they’re called. And that’s how, for instance, in Panama they got the credit of — they got a — Bear Stearns to issue a bond by telling Bear Stearns that they’d sold a bunch of units to a bunch of Russian gangsters.
And, of course, they didn’t put that in the underwriting information, they just said, we’ve sold a bunch of units and here’s who bought them, and that’s how they got the credit. So that’s sort of an example of the alternative financing. … [bold mine, excerpt pages 95-96]
We already know Trump and Epstein were friendly — enough so to party together. Was there some relationship between Epstein’s financial management firm and Trump’s business which might have helped Trump obtain access to Bear Stearns even while Trump was having difficulty getting credit elsewhere?
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This is an open thread. What little stray things popped up recently that aren’t worth a post by themselves?
