Andrea Bernstein: The Trumps, The Kushners and American Greed

Hi, I am Anna Sale. I host the podcast "Death, Sex and Money" from WNYC studios and we say it's the show about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more I am Andrea's colleague at WNYC your colleagues yes andrea co-hosts the Trump Inc podcast which you have not heard it's incredible it's an incredible feat of journalism that they put out these investigative podcasts about the ways in which the Trump administration and the interest of the Trump Organization have been ah layered upon each other in many many ways and she's of course the author of the new New York Times best-selling book American oligarchs and that's what we're gonna talk about this evening when Andrea was getting ready to send the book out into the world she called me and she said Anna there's a lot of death sex and money in here we've got to talk about it there really that's what we're gonna do this evening but I want to start Andrea to hear about your process Andrea used to be my editor in the WNYC newsroom when we were covering politics together and as I was reading this book I was thinking how has she managed to put together a story in a way that I've never thought about before about two families that have been so thoroughly reported on and investigated not just by the political press corps but by robert muller by US attorneys by the tabloid press and I came away sort of not just understanding these families in a new way but also understanding the American moment that we're in in a really deeper way so Andrea when you were thinking about this book what was the framing that you wanted to start with like what what did you feel like was the piece that was missing and then where did you start the reporting to do that so first of all thank everyone for coming it's really great to see so many of you out here and I hope for those of you who haven't had a chance to read the book that you get a chance to read it because I wrote this book to be read it is a multi-generational saga and I wanted to write it as a multi-generational family story which is the basis of obviously a lot of fiction narratives and is a really compelling thing to read so the way that this book began I mean it it came out of the reporting that we've been doing on the Trump family business and the Kushner family business at WNYC and ProPublica and I had just finished reporting a big story for The New Yorker that we do with the pro-public on WNYC about how Don junior and Ivanka Trump avoided criminal indictment and after I finished writing that story which was a big feat I remembered that I had gotten many months earlier an email from an editor that I had not really followed up on so I thought oh maybe I should be in touch with that book editor so I went and sat down with the book editor and he had known that I had covered the Bridgegate scandal which was when Chris Christie's aides had closed off access lanes to the George Washington Bridge and I had done a lot of reporting on that and he said you can do this story about the trumps and the Kushner's same people same world and I thought about it and I decided he was right it was actually it was literally the same people and the same world and it was people that I knew so I had that as a starting point and I began to think about the reporting that I had done and the ways that the patterns of behavior had been passed on from grandfather or father to son to daughter father to son to son and I thought to myself how does that happen and so as I began to think about the story I began to think what is it about these families that makes us not just a family story but also a story about our time and I had covered the 2016 presidential campaign and I so I thought it wasn't like Trump just appeared on the scene in won the election because of a lot of flukes or a lot of explanations it was about something that happened in our democracy and I wanted to understand all of that together the multi-generational saga of the families but also of the democracy so that's where the story idea came from and I really knew right away that's the story that I wanted to write I didn't know for example when I put Ukraine on page one of the introduction that I would be speaking to you all tonight when the president's defense has just rested its case and then impeachment trial that involves Ukraine so it's sort of like the final chapters are still being written in real time but I knew that that was the story that I wanted to do and then I just started to read everything and one of the things that I find so amazing and I know you know this but like most people don't read everything most people don't read what is in front of them and they don't really understand it and most journalists I mean every I don't blame people because people are overwhelmed and there's a lot to read but one of the things I did was I read every document I read and read through every court file that I can find involving the Trump and Kushner family I went and pulled all the land records I just I have so many stacks of documents and then I put post-its on them and then I took the post-its that were important and I organized them and I kept staring at them until the pattern emerged and that is really how I wrote the book which I know sounds painless and it definitely wasn't paid and you say in the notes on sources section of the book which I read really closely because I'm like how did she do this and you say that neither Donald Trump nor Ivanka Trump talked to you would do an interview for the book Charles Kushner Jared Kushner's father and Jared Kushner answered some questions of yours but not all of your questions so how did you get into sort of the mechanics of these families and how they pass down lessons of how to maneuver in business and in politics without that access so it turns out that a lot of people in New York have first-hand knowledge of these families and we're willing to talk about it so I did speak to over 200 people even and there were people who identified themselves as the friends of Donald Trump or of somebody Trump or somebody Kushner but they were they said to me you can use my name because I don't want the Souris which is a Yiddish word for sort of grief and so they wouldn't I didn't I couldn't use people's names so I just felt like okay I have to work extra hard every event that I'm gonna write about I have to really make sure I talk to as many people as I can get on the phone and I just kept calling people and calling people and calling people and I was kind of shocked when some people said yes they would talk to me but people did I had to protect a lot of people because I think everybody understands that our president is quite vengeful so people were nervous about talking to me and I said okay I will protect you so that was the bargain but I wasn't I made sure that if it was in the book it was going to be correct and then I also hired a fact-checker to check all the facts so there's probably some mistakes I'm sure that there are but I really really really tried hard to get the story right by just talking to as many people as I could and and when my editor said you know these people he really was right in ways more deeply than I knew and even since I've written the book it turns out that I know six people who are from Livingston New Jersey where the commissioners are from or know people who are from Livingston New Jersey or who were at a family barbecue begin the book with the 2009 wedding ceremony of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and it's a who's who you're naming all of these people from New York Society New York politics New Jersey politics New Jersey Society and then as as I was reading the book I was thinking wow like there's so many ways in which these families were doing the same things in real estate you know 50 years before that wedding did they were they aware of each other before Ivanka and Jared so I mean yes because and they were aware and they're sort of places in the book where their stories kind of mesh but they weren't really working together or are sort of involved in each other's world until that wedding and one of the reasons why I wanted to start the book with the wedding is because it's a book about the marriage of money and power so where better to start than at a marriage but also because oh I mean there's a reason why a lot of drama starts with a wedding because it's a thing it's a time when something is actually happening a group people comes together it's kind of like a live event live theater and something transformative happens right in front of them and it's sort of a moment of real drama so that seemed like a good place to start the story plus it was a place to show where here was Donald Trump and Charlie Kushner to a somewhat lesser extent but also Charlie Kushner sort of gathering people around him in a Display of power and inviting all these people to the wedding that could serve their business interests and in that way sort of compromising people by bringing them close and it's a big big theme of the book about how the Trump and the Kushner family have brought people close to them hired them gotten in business deals with them got in other kinds of relationships and then use that to enhance their own power so the phone call with President Solinsky sounds extremely familiar to me because it's a pattern that I've seen over and over and over in the history of the Trump business so the Kushner's and the Trump's operate in the same ways in a lot of ways but they have very different backgrounds and I want to spend a little time talking about Ray Jarrod's grandmother you rely a lot on an oral history she gave about her family's escape from Poland and eventual settlement in New Jersey just tell us about ray what have you what did you yeah so ray Kushner is I mean I spent a lot of time listening to Ray Kushner's testimony she gave two oral testimonies and she tells this incredibly harrowing story of survival which I will abbreviate in a moment but just on the question of process while I was listening to her story someone said to me well is her story true and I said well it wouldn't be and then they said no apparently there are some people who did not tell the truth about their Holocaust experience so I listened to Ray's testimony but I went to the Holocaust Research Center and I said please send me everybody's testimony that survived this town so I listened to half a dozen people's testimony and that's how I put together the story and the answer to her question was that basically her story did check out and the story is that so Ray Kushner grew up in a fairly middle-class family in Northeast Poland what is now Belarus and was the daughter of a furrier and had a very active civic life and she began hearing stories about how Germans were coming and they were killing Jews in southern Poland but nobody believed it I mean she said in her testimony who would believe such a thing and then the Soviet Union comes in and takes over and then the Nazis come and take over and things are okay I mean like not awful for a while like the Jews have to wear yellow stars and walk in the middle of the street but then on one December day thousands of Jews are rounded up and they're brought into a courthouse and they're told you go to the left you go to the right and one way meant to live and one mate meant to die and the cushion her family was sent to die and they were on the line to get on a truck which was taking people to mass graves where they were going to be shot and fallen to their own grave and somebody said is anybody here a furrier because the Nazi army needed four coats and hats for their army to march into Moscow so they pulled the Kushner family out of the line but at that moment ray Kushner's mother he said run to one of her older daughter Esther because she wasn't really sure if they were gonna survive she said run so one of you will survive and her daughter Esther ran and was captured by the Nazis and boarded the trucks three members of that family were murdered by the Nazis and eventually there is only out of tens of thousands there's only hundreds of Jews laugh and they realized they were going to die and they had thought for a long time there must be some reason God was saving them the Nazis believed they were too valuable to kill them but they realized no they were going to die so they dug a tunnel out underneath the barbed wire in the searchlights and they hid the bags of dirt that they were excavating in the walls and under the beds and they crawled out several football fields in length two feet wide and everybody made it out of the ghetto some of the people including red Kushner's brother ran in the wrong direction and the Nazis captured them the next day but she and her sister and her father escaped and lived in the forest with a band of Jewish partisans until the end of the war and then after the war they basically illegally crossed several borders she met her husband who is at that time named yussel Berkowitz and they walk and they sneak around border guards and they end up in a refugee camp in Italy where they're stuck because even after the Holocaust and even after yesterday is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and even after people knew about the camps they were still not letting Jews into the United States and they couldn't go anywhere so they kept applying for visas and then they realized that if yesil cush yesil Berkowitz posed as Rey's father's son so as his father-in-law's son they would have an easier time with immigration laws so he changed his name to Joe Kushner and they were able to immigrate in the United States they lost everything so there were no documents that would tell a different story and they arrived in the United States as the Kushner family with two dollars in their pockets and built a business and that is the origin story of the Kushner family that's Jared Kushner's grandparents jared krishna's grandparents Ivanka Trump's grandfather I did not know until I read your book in 1927 is when he incorporated his company his real estate company also a year that he was arrested right so he was arrested for being at a Klan rally and we don't know what he was doing there we don't know I mean literally I went and sort of look through all the documentation I never mean I'd it was he a bystander was he being disruptive we don't know what we do know about Fred Trump was that he was sued by the US Justice Department for not renting his apartments to blacks and this many many many years later decades later when Donald Trump was also working at the company and they promised I mean there were many depositions showing that they in fact were were not renting apartments to Black's and they settled the case with the Justice Department and promised not to do it anymore so I just want to like I want to take a moment and really kind of reporter you are you've found this 1927 New York Times citation about arrests at a Klan rally and the number that the names of the men who were arrested including Fred Trump and then you make clear that it's not quite clear what he was arrested for but you say that there was some sort of citation for refusing to leave a parade or something like this right the the clarity of your journalism and the detail I and the suggestion of what that could have been about I just very much I mean I try readers who write what I know and one of the things that I felt was very important is when journalism and writing and documentation and academia and science are under such assault I really wanted to really put together what I knew and what I could corroborate and that's what I wanted this book to be I wanted this to be a space of truth not of what I thought or what other people felt something else you document thoroughly in the book is for Fred Trump he knew that real estate was not just about location location location it was about political donation donation donation and I wondered do you have a sense of how he learned how to maneuver around New York City politics at that point yes history I mean he was a really entrepreneurial guy and he he I mean he worked really hard his father died his father Friedrich Trump died in the Spanish influenza epidemic and he when he was a teenager and he had a job where he would pull carts on icy roads because the mules would slip so he was a hard-working guy and he was in real estate and what he figured out in the mid 30s is he wanted to get a piece of a bankruptcy of a case that was in bankruptcy a company that was in bankruptcy court was being divided up and the judge really had wide discretion about who was going to get the pieces and he really wanted to get a piece so he figured out at that moment who controlled the judges and who controlled the judges in Brooklyn was the Brooklyn Democratic political machine and he understood that he had to cultivate ties with that Brooklyn political machine because they were doling out they controlled the judges they controlled the contracts so he starts to create these ties and he gets a piece of the contract but then his huge break comes when he realizes that also the Federal Housing Administration the Federal Housing Administration is also a tool of the Brooklyn machine and he starts to curry favor with this person a guy named Tommy Grace and he gets this outsized portion of Federal Housing Administration loans which enables him to build these huge projects in Brooklyn and Queens and before World War Two is over he becomes a millionaire in 1940's dollars and that's what launches him the ability to see that it's government support of real estate that is going to lift it all up and he had to get to the decision-makers to make sure that when they had discretion things are gonna go his way and I mean that it so defines the Trump business model through the decades currying favor with whoever figuring out where is the person who is going to be able to deliver the thing you want and then figuring out how to curry favor with that person whether it's through a donation whether it's through giving to their favorite charity whether it's through charming them and taking them on his helicopter there were variety waise but Donald Trump Fred Trump and then Donald Trump sort of used went through all of them and you talk about the Kushner family also figuring out how to pull those levers as well but before we leave Donald Trump's parents I want to talk a bit about his mother because some things I didn't know from the book she was an immigrant from Scotland and what was her job when she came to me she was a domestic so she worked for Andrew Carnegie in his mansion and it's where she got her case I mean she worked in a sort of Golden Age home and it's where she got her taste that we're all now familiar with columns gold fancy things I mean it really does come from Donald Trump's mother and it made me wonder about that do you have a sense of the class like ramifications of their marriage they met at a dance hall Fred Trump and Trump's mother like what was was now there were still immigrants he was still on the way up she was very I mean aspiring and so they married I mean one of the things that's interesting about Donald Trump's family is his great-grandfather came to his grandfather came to the country and made his fortune at a time when even though there was a lot of wealth inequality you could still change your class so there was more elasticity so there was a lot of land it had been appropriated from native populations but it was basically given to immigrants there were other government supports and it meant that you could arrive in this country poor and become very rich so there was much more mobility it's something that's become much harder especially since the tax cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 which has decreased social elasticity and made it much harder for anybody any Friederike Trump arriving today would have a much harder time doing what Friedrich Trump did and you note that Friedrich Trump in part left Europe because of the inheritance the tax rights around right I mean there's a lot of inheritance stuff in the book and I actually have the wills of Fred Trump and Joann Drake Kushner and I sort of traced the patterns and you can see how they are getting money to their children and grandchildren and it's one of the real themes that I look at is the intergenerational transfer of wealth because it's enables each successive generation to become wealthier and wealthier more and more quickly and it's something that both families perfected the art of and are still doing to this day so speaking of the next generation when Donald Trump marries Ivana Trump who wrote the prenup Oh Roy Cohn row at the prenup right Bobby said something there's so many the epigraph of my book is a quote from an unpublished interview of Charles Kushner that was given to me by a journalist or to the New York Times and it says no human being could write this script only God could have and one of the things that kept amazing me is that people who showed up early in early chapters of the book like Roy Cohn is one Roger stone is another Paul Manafort is another I was all writing about them early on and they're in the early chapters of the book and then they come back and act 5 I did not know that Donald Trump was gonna say where is my Roy Cohn when I was writing about his relationship with Roy Cohn who he met when the Justice Department was suing the Trump family over racial discrimination and so Donald Trump hired Roy Cohn and Roy Cohen did all kinds of hyper aggressive and sometimes over the line leave a legal work for Donald Trump one of them was the prenup that they wrote with Ivana in which Ivana Trump actually got very little and the original the first biographer of Donald Trump is a investigative journalist from New York named Wayne Barrett who actually died that night before Trump was inaugurated and all his papers are down at the University of Texas and I went down to the archives and I looked at there was 300 boxes of papers the prenup is there so I actually read the prenup agreement with Ivana Trump that Roy Cohn had drawn up and will you tell us who officiated their wedding I didn't know this either Pele norman vincent peale officiated their wedding so author of the power of positive thinking yes huh I mean yeah what he was for John Trump are always power scenes so as was that last the city officials came same for his second wife Marla same for his third wife Melania Hillary and Bill Clinton came to that wedding during the campaign Donald Trump talked about how people came to his wedding because he including Hillary Clinton because he gave money to her foundation thank you so we've talked about political donations being a marker of both the Trump's in the Kushner's way of doing business some a story you tell in this book about Donald Trump when he is kind of starting out on his own is a relationship he has with the new york city housing commissioner and a phone call that this man receives after he denies affordable housing tax abatements for the Trump Tower he gets a phone call what was that phone call he gets a phone call threatening him too threatening to kill him because he hadn't given a tax abatement to Donald Trump and this is a New York City Housing Commissioner not a very fancy person he lived in am not a very fancy house in Brooklyn and his phone number was listed and he got this death threat and he reported it to the NYPD the same day that he gets a death threat the FBI hears from Donald Trump who says he hears that somebody is threatening Tony glide when the housing Commissioner so then Donald Trump sues the housing commissioner personally for denying him his tax abatement you want to keep going tell where the story oh so he sues him and then two years later he invites him to a restaurant and he says to him why don't you come work for me and this is somebody who was paid $80,000 a year and wasn't really going to go anywhere and there's Donald Trump who's by then quite glamorous and says you're gonna do all kinds of exciting projects come work for me and so he does he goes any works for Donald Trump and this is something that I've seen many many times and Tony Gladman was just one example of people who really got enthralled by the glamour and the glitz and sort of just the kind of thrill of the risk of being around Donald Trump you just didn't know what was gonna happen and he goes to work for him and he has a miserable time Donald Trump is abusive towards him he's overweight he ends up leaving Donald Trump after a period of time and that he dies basically of a stroke at a very young age I think it was 59 and one of the reasons I wrote about Tony Gladman in this book was because it was such a like a prototype for me of a kind of relationship that I kept seeing with Donald Trump people would go work for him and the most extreme example something that we've all seen which is Michael Cohen who felt just like he was going to like Donald Trump was his shot Donald Trump was going to make him a success and Trump understood that about him so he kept asking him to cross lines and he would ask him to do one thing and then Michael Cohen would do it and then he would do another thing and then it got to the point where so many lines had been crossed there was no turning back and that to me was a real example of how Donald Trump manipulated the people around him to achieve his goals something I have long wondered about is his relationship with his adult children the three children who worked for him now or who work for the Trump Organization now or Ivanka works for him in the White House you write in the book that when Ivana and Donald divorced Don Jr who was then 12 years old didn't speak to his father for a year do you have a sense at all about how those adult children came back around and it's amazing to you that they have built their adult lives in such close proximity to him I mean it's such a complicated thing because really a lot of people told me that when his children were young he was not interested in them and I mean I think we could sort of see from the way he led his life publicly that that rings true but he also is somebody who boldly using the importance of family and all of his children I think maybe for the same reason as somebody like Tony glide Minh or Michael Cohen wanted to be around him because he was glamorous and it was exciting and he had a TV show and he was sort of somebody and that was a choice that they made and you know they've had I mean their relationships all of the his adult children have sort of different and complicated relationships with him but they have all sort of returned to this family business and in a lot of ways I think we're gonna talk about this in a minute it's a real archetype for what's happening in the government right now which is that the people that Donald Trump favors are the ones that have power and everybody else is on the outside but when you're on the inside I mean we see people now they keep doing it and they must be getting something out of that relationship I want to move back to the Kushner's for a moment because something I didn't know in the night that the ways in which they're sort of chronologies and are intertwined in the 1990s Charles Kushner is ambitious he's he sort of raised the profile of his family in New Jersey through political donations he's very proud of this it's caused some tension with his siblings you quote President Bill Clinton's remarks at yes with the Kushner family company in Charles Kushner's office and Charles Kushner has his eyes on the prize in Manhattan like Trump before him he wanted to move the family business to Manhattan how did Charles Kushner sort of maneuver to try to get that get that sort of stake in the ground and Manhattan power circles so I mean he starts to look to Manhattan fairly early on in his career the point that you mentioned he's really still building his empire in New Jersey and he starts to realize like Donald Trump also realized the importance of political donations political ties he becomes the largest Democratic donor in New Jersey and as you say like there's this troop of people that come through Bill Clinton comes through Rudy Giuliani comes through Hillary Clinton comes through they all have to go to his office he takes them to the school that he's named after his father the Joe Kushner Hebrew Academy which has sort of trumped size letters on a hill in Livingston New Jersey and he does that to enhance his power he buys into Manhattan fairly early a building called the puc building which isn't Soho which is where the puck the magazine was originated and he sort of begins slightly to move in Manhattan but then what happens is there's this dramatic betrayal and the Kushner family Charlie Kushner starts to make illegal campaign contributions to New Jersey politicians he national politicians he makes them in the names of other people who are his business partners including his brother and his sister and Joe Kushner to be able to pass on his assets tax-free this is Charlie Kushner's father has set up a series of interlocking trusts and business relationships so even though they he and his brother don't work together they're tied together and his brother sees that all this money is flowing out illegally to political campaign contributions and also to speaking fees for Bill Clinton and Bibi Netanyahu and he objects and he sues his brother a very ambitious young US Attorney Chris Christie notices and starts to investigate Charlie Kushner for tax fraud and campaign finance violations in the course of this Charlie Christian becomes convinced that his brother and sister have cooked up the case and so he enlists a police captain from East Orange New Jersey to hire a sex worker to entrap his sister Esther's husband Billy so remember that this is the sister Esther who is named for his aunt Esther who's been murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust and he's been named for his uncle cannon Kushner who is the one that ran the wrong direction when he escaped from the tunnel and he has now entrapped his Esther's husband and with the sex worker and makes a videotape of it and he holds on to it for a while but then he realizes the case isn't going to go away and he sends it to his sister on the eve of her son's engagement party her son Jacob is one week difference in age from Jared Kushner and they've grown up like brothers and she brings the tape to the US Attorney's Office at Chris Christie's office and Charlie Kushner is arrested for witness tampering and he eventually pleads guilty to witness tampering and campaign finance and tax law violations and serves a year in prison when he gets back to out of prison he decides he's done with New Jersey he's gonna say goodbye and that's when they sell what they really built their empire on which is a lot of sort of middle modest suburban developments housing in the suburbs and he sells a lot of it over a billion dollars worth and then he the Kushner family buys a building in Manhattan six six six Fifth Avenue for 1.8 billion dollars which is the I know only God could write the script right they buy it for 1.8 billion dollars which is the most anybody has ever paid for a building in Manhattan Charlie Kushner cannot sign the loan documents because he's a convicted felon so 26 year-old Jared Kushner signs the 1.8 billion dollar deal on his birthday on his birthday and they become Manhattan real estate moguls and it's because I mean it's clearly they wanted to make a splash and make a statement we've arrived around this time Jared also buys a newspaper the New York Observer and he becomes a very important personage instantly in New York because he owns this big building he owns a newspaper and everybody understands that he comes from this family of a large Democratic donors and he becomes a sought out person in New York really at that moment just as he is finishing law school and business school he's not even done with law school in Business School when he makes these big purchases I didn't fully appreciate until I read the book that it was I'd always heard of six six six Fifth Avenue and that purchase being Jarrod's first big buy and didn't realize it was because his father yeah I mean there look very very close and so far as I know I mean they speak to each other every day so far as I know to this day so I think it was very hard for people who work with them to understand was it Jarrod was it Charlie but they were very very close and acting in concert and how old was Jared Kushner when he made his first big political donation 11 this was one of the donations that his father had orchestrated and so if you you can go and look it up in the Federal Elections it says the records it says Jared Kushner student and it was like twelve hundred thirty thousand dollars two thousand dollars two separate contributions of one thousand dollars I think and how did Jared Kushner understand the prosecution can so a time served if it's father's if a family narrative of resentment really develops Charlie Kushner when he gets out of jail says my parents who are in heaven would forgive me for what I have done but they would never forgive my brother and sister for collaborating with the government and Jared Kushner really nurtured this narrative and during the 2016 campaign according to Chris Christie's book but corroborated he said to Chris Christie this was not a matter for prosecutors this was a matter for family or the rabbis to settle and he very much felt like this was a chris Christie hit job on him he was very upset when Trump wanted to hire Chris Christie and did chris Christie to be his transition chief but as you know there is no Chris Christie in the cabinet Jared Kushner after the election had chris Christie fired as transition chief and the 30 binders of material that had been vetted by Christie's team of vetting information on potential policies and potential cabinet appointees those 30 binders of material were tossed into the Trump Tower dumpsters how do you understand one of the things that you note in the beginning of your book is the ways in which all of this is systemic and one of a statistic you note is how in the last 30 years the rate of white-collar crime yeah vestigation has declined and it made me wonder pause with the chris Christie investigation of Charles Kushner who's a major Democratic donor how do you think about it do you think of it like this was political do you think of it like clearly he did he broke the law so whether it was political or not it doesn't matter I think about that Chris Christie was a young Republican prosecutor on the rise and Charlie Kushner committed some very serious crimes and having really read the court file and understanding it and they were they were I mean there wasn't just this chris Christie case there was a FDIC case and there was an FEC case and Charley Krishna was in a lot of hot water and there were a lot of people looking at him not just chris christie and he really crossed some lines but that doesn't mean that chris christie also didn't see that there was you know I mean he was an ambitious prosecutor and this was a high-profile Democratic donor so and he wanted to run for governor on a platform of rooting out corruption so this is a pattern that we see a lot in New York and New Jersey of sort of ambitious prosecutors talking about how they're going to get rid of corruption and then running for office on the basis of that there's been a I mean chris Christie did it Rudy Giuliani did it Eliot Spitzer did it they all got rid of Crowe Cuomo did it yes corruption in New York and New Jersey as you know so yeah so I mean I think that it is complicated and one of the things I really hope that I make clear in my book is that these stories are complicated and I wanted to have all the layers of complexity there and there's not necessarily just you know one way to say like here's the hero here's the villain here's the good guy here's the bad guy it's just the story of what happened which like all human stories is an immensely complex story having said that I mean I do think that the white collar prosecution thing I mean what I mean the fact that Chris Christie charged Jared Kushner's father with campaign finance violations at a time when his own party didn't really believe that there should be campaign finance violations and tax fraud at a time when his own party was cutting taxes is an extraordinary historical fact but I do think that we're in a very perilous moment now with white color prosecutions and in fact the statistic that you cite I had to while I was writing the final version I had to update it because they came out with a new version and white collar prosecutions were at a new historic low from when I first wrote in the book and I think it's a problem and I think that I mean the Bridgegate case was heard before the Supreme Court two weeks ago and if that if the plaintiffs win there will be very few tools for prosecutors to go after her up ssin in these kinds of cases in the United States yeah I'm looking at the citation you say in 2019 the rate of prosecution dropped again to the lowest level in 33 years clearly there's not a lot of white-collar crime happening these days right you mentioned Jared Kushner's purchase of the New York Observer and I want to spend a little time on media because I think that's an important part of this story as well the New York Observer is this paper that covers real estate covers power in the New York City area I did not know that before Jared Kushner bought the New York Observer it was looking into his father's business dealings yeah while he was on the Port Authority board which is a very powerful politically powerful thing it is the same people because the Port Authority was the agency that was involved in the Bridgegate scandal so it's like really really the same thing people in cast of characters it's extraordinary anyway sorry and you do you feel like that was that at all part of his interest in this paper unclear I mean you know what we know is that the way that Jared Kushner backed up by her father Charlie use that paper was to enhance his family's business interests and ultimately to enhance his father-in-law's business interests and there was a lot of tension at the paper because Jared Kushner wasn't a journalist and he came to the observer and he would I mean one of the first things he did though he denies this was he asked his editorial staff to prepare a hit job on Chris Christie and he he that word hit job was used a lot at the New York Observer and various editors would say we're not writing a hit job on such and such a person because it's a textbook example of malice but also because nobody's heard of this person that you want me to write a hit job on not Chris Christie but somebody else but there was a lot of that a lot of a sense of the media and the newspaper was a tool to advance Jared Kushner's business interests and one of the reasons I do well on this and the book because at the time Jared Kushner was sort of seen as part of the New York establishment and New York society is sort of embraced him he was seen as an important person same for Ivanka Trump and so people cut him a lot of slack in the way he was using the newspaper but when I went back and I looked at the pattern in light of the way the current White House sees journalism it was just so clear that they felt that journalism and newspapers were tools for an agenda and that that really stretched back at least to Jared Kushner's time in the New York Observer if not prior to that how did Jared Kushner become close with Rupert Murdoch so he had met him early on around the time he was buying The Observer he sought out his advice as a sort of mentor and he became friends with him and with his wife Wendy Wendy Murdock and one of the things that people that the observer told me was that he would come into the newsroom and he would say oh I spent the weekend with Rupert and Wendy on their yacht and he would talk about it and so it sort of started out being a social thing and over the years of the observer he really began to adopt Rupert Murdoch's worldview and his view of how news news media should be used so he began to adopt more and more conservative viewpoints which surprised his own staff because people thought of him as sort of this vaguely liberal democratic person but he began to take on quite conservative political views and there's a scene in the book where after Mayor Bill DeBlasio is elected or is wins the primary so when you were in New York I didn't know this was happening but de Blasio wins the primary and he hasn't make nice meeting with the real estate people because everybody realizes once he's won the primary is gonna win the mayoral election in real estate did not back to Blasio so they have a make nice meeting and Jared Kushner starts vocally criticizing Bill DeBlasio and his progressive agenda and saying it's going to be the ruination of New York City and people in this meeting were so surprised because they were sort of first of all Jared Kushner had not really expressed political views but they didn't understand how conservative his political views were so one of the things that I show in the book is that his current political view is not a radical break as some people in New York believed but actually derive from a sort of whole threat of development and the friendship with the Rupert Murdoch was definitely part of that and I should note that Bill DeBlasio primaries 2013 writing 16 election not long after right right that is something that I thought about a lot is how utterly consistent the Trump family in particular and Donald Trump in Bretagne has been in the 80s and 90s I wondered looking back at this record of not just how he behaved but how the media covered him during that time my sense is that he was seen as sort of always kind of like a little bit of a joke but a spectacle who you still invited to parties mm-hm and even the kind of like the people who wanted to make fun of him they did it in kind of a smug way like spy magazine and the right short fingered Vulgarian kind of framing of him and I wondered if do you feel like the New York City press corps whether they were covering business or politics missed something big I'm not fact-checking Donald Trump not um yeah I mean I think except for Wayne Barrett I think people really did miss that part of the story I mean I think you know one of the things that I don't think that people realized is that what's going on with both the trumps and the Kushner family is that politicians which were many many of them Democrats went to these families to ask for donations and treated them in a fairly gave them a light touch and so I think that people took their cues from that that that you know he was sort of they were both courted and it was a way that he could compromise people because he could make these enormous excuse me you could make these enormous political donations and everybody knew it so that sort of kept the criticism at bay which I think kept the media at bay that he was sort of seen as kind of the enfant Arriba and if he lied so what was the implication and so people definitely criticized him I mean by the time you'd run for campaign he'd already sued Tim O'Brien who was at the time at the New York Times for writing a book saying he wasn't a billionaire he was only a multi-millionaire and he had sued a lot of people and he had treated media very aggressively I mean he did he threatened a lot of reporters and he actually sued Tim O'Brien and he threatened to sue lot of reporters he also did something which I talked about in the book where he would try to give people tickets to sporting events and then once they had the tickets to the sporting events he would call their editors and say like they were compromised and that's how he got a number of very sharp reporters off the beach so well yes I think yes to what you're saying but I also think he had a lot of techniques for manipulating people that were not immediately apparent what do you think is like the Family Code of the Trump family what what are the sort of organizing principles so I think the family code is family above everything and I think we have seen that brought to the US government that people so first of all his actual family but then people who are loyal to him those people are favored everybody else's on the outside everybody else is expendable and there is this blurring of family interests in business interest that goes on I mean it's really hard for me to overstate how crazy this is because I spent so many years looking at political donations and reading FEC disclosures and seeing like where the money went and how it got into politician's pockets and with President Donald Trump people just pay him directly and outright every single day they go to his hotel they go to his golf clubs they might buy a condo they just pay him money and he is tracking who pays him money President zalenski and that phone call made sure to tell him I stayed in a trump branded hotel because Donald Trump cares who's paying him money so it is an extraordinary thing that people can pay him money and be on the inside and that is really what our government has come to and it's one of the reasons why I mean when I wrote that when I proposed the title for my book American oligarchs I didn't know what was gonna happen but what I have increasingly seen is this government that is just being pushed towards oligarchy which means extremely wealthy people can manipulate in ways benefit them and then get the government in motion to do things that will enable them to make money even faster and unfortunately that is the position we're we're in right now I want to have you read a section where you sum that up in a way that is chilling it's on page 407 so this is from the epilogue where I have just finished talking about Hana Arendt and you're gonna have to read it to find out why tilting the country towards oligarchy requires confusing as Trump did in his first formal press conferences president elect company and country making notice diction between the national interest and what he sees as his broader family interest Trump's family is necessarily his own family his wife and children and their spouses and their children family also includes those officials and employees from whom he demands obsequious loyalty though unlike his actual family these people can move in and out of favor at Trump's whim and you go on to say in that section it ends a government racing towards a world where it's impossible to play by the rules because the rules exist only according to Trump swim and thinking about it becoming even if you want to play by the rules not knowing what the rules are right I mean I think we see that in the impeachment trial where there have been you know seven sets of rules shown okay so Trump didn't do anything wrong he didn't commit any crimes it wasn't a crime don't pay attention to what John Bolton was saying whatever John Bolton says is false okay if he did what John Bolton says that's not a crime either so there's this constant sense of a moving target and you see this and this sort of like pugilistic court cases that I've been following where Trump has been suing various people who want documents and things from him and there's a sense that whatever the rule is it doesn't apply to him so I mean I found myself in a Manhattan courtroom with Donald Trump's lawyer arguing yes he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not be investigated so long as he's a sitting president that is the official position of Donald Trump's lawyers and that case is going to the Supreme Court in March even though he has lost it at all the lower court levels so it is the case that they are making that there very explicitly that the rules don't apply and I think that he he has managed to live his life that way and I think that we are now at this moment where that is really being tested and the question is sort of if there is no reckoning for Donald Trump how does he interpret how the rules apply to him and how the rules go forward I'm gonna ask a few questions from the audience now I do want to say one thing though the last word of the book is hope and I really really worked hard on I promise you I didn't make you read 425 pages and then just say be hopeful there is a really rational and I hope well argued reason about why I still have hope and so I want you to get to that word and I will tell you because Andrea is not just an incredible investigative reporter but also a sort of poet it hope it is it is motivated by a conversation she had with another Kushner Tony Kushner no relation yeah which I thought was just a wonderful little flourish a question from the audience can you tell us about the Kushner family ties to Saudi Arabia so I so far as I understand the Kushner family ties to Saudi Arabia really did originate with the during the campaign and in the presidency I I mean it's I spent a lot of time looking to see if there were financial ties or business ties that predated that and I couldn't find them which doesn't mean they don't exist because it's hard to uncover their business relationships but it does seem something that developed out of Jared Kushner before he had views on most things had a very clear view on Israel and he really aligns himself with the la cude party Bibi Netanyahu Bibi Netanyahu was a family friend he played basketball with Jared and Livingston and so that is Jared Kushner's political view and the relationship with the Saudis really seemed to come from his believing that that relationship could support the State of Israel and we see it today in the peace plan that Jared Kushner released which I haven't studied because I've been talking about the book but this that that is the sense that the Saudis could support him and he forged this relationship with Mohammed bin Salman who's like Jared Kushner sees himself as a disrupter like Jared Kushner has a fraught relationship with his own family and was seeking power in Saudi Arabia and they developed this relationship and after the murder of Jamal khashoggi Jared Kushner was asked how can you support this family and basically what he said is the Middle East was a very tough place and you have to have some allies and I'm picking the Saudis but he continues to break the rules I mean he exchanged whatsapp messages with Mohammed bin Salman even though he was advised against it by his own intelligence agencies and in fact there was evidence that US intelligence agencies thought the Saudis were spying on the u.s. using Jared Kushner as a vector and warned him against it so but the relationship continues I'm interested to hear how you answer this question what is the end game for the Trump's and the Kushner's after 2020 or 2024 so not entirely clear but one of the things that's become interesting to me through this Ukraine scandal is when we in our trumping podcast first started investigating Donald Trump's business I really thought we were looking for ways he was sending himself money and that is something that we've looked at but the book is titled the marriage of money in power and I actually think that one of the things that Donald Trump wants to do is enhance his power that's what he was doing in Ukraine I mean there were a lot of business interests swirling around Ukraine Rudy Giuliani and his associates had all kinds of energy deals there's a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitri fear - who has been indicted by the US and his fighting extradition and is pouring money into that side of things so there's a lot of business interest swirling around it but so far as I can tell what Donald Trump was actually just doing is using the levers of government to enhance his own power and that seems to be what he's really tried to do throughout his career is enhance his own power so I guess the answer to that question is enhance his own power in ways that I haven't thought about yet so I don't know I like this question because it's about the ways in which how New York society and elite New York is repositioning itself visa visa Kushner's and and the Trump's do you think Carly cloths purposely tried to avoid association with the cushion or family until Project Runway and can you give some backstory okay so Carly Clause is married to Jared Christian's brother Josh and she was asked about whether she would wear a particular outfit in Project Runway to a Kushner or to dinner with the Kushner's and then she released a video saying I did not vote for Donald Trump in the election I mean Isis Jared Kushner sisters Jared Kushner sister-in-law I have really not done much reporting on Karlie Kloss so I don't want to get too much out of my skis here but in the rest of the Kushner Trump world these kinds of utterances are quite deliberate but I just don't know because I haven't reported it and I just did not spend a lot of time looking into that particular relationship I want to make sure you have time to sort of brag about some documents that you dug up because you looked at documents that other people have not looked closely at what are what are one or two that you dug up that you feel really proud so I think the most obvious one is the the Hebrew immigration Aid Society case file on Jared Kushner's grandparents which shows the history of their arrival it shows how they arrived u.s. with two dollars in their pocket how they were helped and how they were set up and they were just detailed notes about the interactions that the caseworkers had at the time so this was just an extraordinary document to look at this case file a real piece of the historical record there were a couple of other things that I found along the way one was an affidavit written by Ivanka Trump at the time that Eric Schneiderman who was the Attorney General of New York and resigned in disgrace after it was found that he had abusive relationships with women but before that he sued Trump University for fraud and settled it for 25 million and the Trump family after they filed that lawsuit filed an ethics complaint saying that Eric Schneiderman had been shaking them down and in the course of that Ivanka Trump filed an affidavit in which she talked about from her perspective all the ways that Eric Schneiderman had courted her and it was so interesting to me because you just don't normally get that kind of frank conversation from political donors so she talked about how he wanted to take her to John Orr's Vongerichten which is a very fancy restaurant in the Trump International Hotel in New York and meet with her and Jared Kushner's 20 influential friends and how he wanted her to contribute to the American Friends of Israel concert with you chuck Pearlman and how Eric Schneiderman wanted to her to go to a fundraising event for yes Kamala Harris when she was running for attorney general and she served talks about how she does all of these things because she wants to get on his good side basically it's not quite her language that that's basically what she's saying so it's an incredible affidavit from the inside about how power and political donations work in New York from her point of view so that was very very interesting to me I mean there was a whole bunch of other stuff that I found on like social media and video tapes and I watched a lot of apprentice episodes this book oh here's another question for the audience because I want to I want to know about this before Trump's inauguration Ivanka Trump met with Al Gore about the climate was there any kind of according about this meeting that you know about um just a little bit I mean I don't think it went anywhere I know more about the other meeting that she had with Cecile Richards where she proposed that if Planned Parenthood could stop providing abortion services she could call off the Republican insistence on defunding Planned Parenthood so that definitely happened during that period I know less about the Al Gore meeting but I don't think it I mean there's you know the US has retreated from the Paris climate Accord so I think the results are in how should we think about how Ivanka Trump operates as a as a political operator and as a business person so Ivanka Trump is very much like her father and I think if you read the book you will understand all of the ways she's like her father her relationship to the truth her view of the correct business practices she's much more polished than her father and I think one of the things about the wedding scene that I talked about is how so Ivanka unlike her husband Jared Kushner and her father Donald Trump is actually a child of the Manhattan elite and she was really accepted in the Manhattan cultural elite and gave them a kind of access to that world through her but when it comes to politics she is absolutely 100% loyal to her father now something interesting about Ivanka Trump is she doesn't participate much in the sort of bullying and criticism but she wants to sort of tell a positive story of the administration so that is what she sees her role is occasionally she steps out of that role but I there were a lot of people in New York who told me that they were friends with Ivana core they were friends with Jared and they when they went to the White House they were sure that they were going to represent the New York point of view on things and prevent their father or father-in-law from doing anything too crazy and there's a lot of betrayal in the book that is one of the levels of betrayal where a lot of people who thought they were friends with them and thought they were part of their world were shocked when they went to the White House and were not more for so advocates of what they viewed as their side you say the New York way of doing things and that is something I thought about a lot reading about Ivanka's grandfather and then her father and now where we are in the 21st century and how the New York way of doing things in the mid 20th century was paying off politicians getting the approvals you needed to get how much do you think about where we are now with our the US government the federal government how much of it is a sort of New York style local politics yeah a lot more than it used to be I I mean I think that you know one of the things that I also talked in the book is about in the book is the destruction of campaign finance laws and I went back and I read the Citizens United case and I read this thing that Obama said about it which kind of shocked me which was that it was going to allow foreign influence in u.s. elections which he said in his State of the Union address in 2010 which I hadn't really noticed at the time and one of the things that's happened as a result of the destruction of the campaign finance system is money can come in through to the election system in so many ways that if you are a businessman or woman you are crazy to not give to the system because it's not very much money in terms of your bottom line and so two things are happening this it has been made much more systematically easier for people to contribute to the political system in all kinds of dark money and nefarious ways but also the president has signaled that if you give to him he'll give you something and we see in the recent indictment of Lev para nós people know left Parnas right an eager Froome in the rudy giuliani associates who were working with him in ukraine they were indicted for funneling Ukrainian money into the u.s. electoral system why because they wanted an energy they want to set up an energy business and they wanted to set up a marijuana business and they also wanted some stuff to happen on in the Ukrainian world so there so their worldview this sort of is the Ukrainian way of doing things brought right into our governmental system this incredibly transactional nature of things and I did anybody listen to the tape that live Parnas released if you know Trump at this dinner party and they're like he's like yes I'll do this for you yes I'll do that for you I mean he is a transactional politician he said it his inauguration speech at the Republican convention I understand that the system is rigged and I alone can fix it nobody understands the system better than me and I think it's true no but he does understand the system better than me but he hasn't fixed it he has broken it beyond recognition he has made it possible for everybody to behave in the way that he did as a businessman and he has telegraphed that people will be rewarded for behaving in that way I have one last question for you Andrea but but I want to let you all know that Andrea signing books I guess I'm signing books and I want to say even if you have a book please buy another one you know the RNC spent 94 thousand dollars to bulk buy down juniors books so he could be on the bestseller list and I have you all so please buy my book gift it to a friend I read the audio book if you like audio books it's also on Kindle and I am very much would like to sign them for you and also please read it yes and it's already been on the New York Times bestseller list but we can all keep it there so my last question for you Andrea is this is a story about two families the Kushner's and the trumps it's also a story about American systems and political structures and after you did this reporting how much do you think the trouble we're in is because of one of these families in particular and how much do you see them as participating in systems that are breaking down and will continue to be broken even if they are not on the scene yeah I mean I think both I mean I think that American democracy is very broken and that created an opening for somebody like Donald Trump to take over but I also think that Donald Trump has specifically corroded democratic institutions and acted he didn't need to learn oligarchy from the former Soviet Union because he practiced it in New York and he understood that he could give money to politicians and get what he wanted and he corroded the system from within and I didn't quite understand that when I started my reporting that that kind of behavior also had been immensely damaging to democracy and then he brought it to the White House so I think the answer is it is both the specific choices of these two families but also the fact that we as a society have failed to defend our democracy against all these assaults now I do really believe in hope and I believe in hope because we can still push back on the assault on truth this book is an attempt to say here's here's a record that I made records exist truth exists and I'm still doing that so I still have hope Thank You Andrea Bernstein's thank you for coming

Channel: Commonwealth Club of California

Views: 947,606

Rating: 4.6038842 out of 5

Keywords: ANDREA BERNSTEIN: THE TRUMPS, THE KUSHNERS AND AMERICAN GREED, The Kushners, Trump, trump 2020, trump vs biden, biden 2020, trump in the news, trump press conference, trump poll numbers, trump family, jared kushner, Invanka trump, trump for president, Mar a lago, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr

Id: aFd7-AbwwBA

Length: 70min 48sec (4248 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020