https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdeuZxrkoz0
Three days before the
presidential election, Jared
Kushner and Ivanka Trump visited the
Queens gravesite of Rabbi Menachem
Mendel Schneerson and, according to The Times of Israel,
they prayed for Donald Trump’s victory.
Schneerson, who died in 1994, is an
interesting character. Although he never claimed it himself, some of his
followers consider him the Messiah, and others believe he is still alive.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known to
many as the Rebbe, was a Russian Empire-born American Orthodox Jewish rabbi,
and the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. He is considered one of the most influential
Jewish leaders of the 20th century.
As leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch
movement, he took an insular Hasidic group that almost came to an end with the
Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential movements in
world Jewry, with an international network of over 3,000 educational and social
centers. The institutions he established
include kindergartens, schools, drug-rehabilitation centers, care-homes for the
disabled and synagogues.
The
Kushner family is Modern Orthodox, and of course Ivanka converted to Judaism
prior to her marriage to Jared. Still, according to Ben
Schreckinger of Politico Magazine, Kushner was affiliated with the
Chabad house at Harvard when he was a student there. Since settling in DC, the couple
has reportedly been attending services at a Chabad synagogue.
What
Jared and Ivanka want to do in their spiritual lives is their business, and I
have no intention of casting any aspersions on the Chabad-Lubavitch
movement or Rabbi Schneerson. I do however want to explore some things
that may circle back to this pre-election pilgrimage to Schneerson’s grave.
Let’s
begin here:
Starting in 1999, [Vladimir] Putin enlisted
two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich,
who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the
Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi
Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”
There’s
a good chance that if you know of Roman Abramovich, you know him as the owner of the Chelsea Football Club
of the English Premier League. You may not know that he was a victor (along
with Paul Manafort’s patron Oleg
Deripaska) in the bloody
aluminum wars of the 1990s, or that he was reportedly the
person who convinced Boris Yeltsin that Putin would be a proper successor. You
probably are not aware that Ivanka Trump is very close friends with
Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova, with whom she recently attended the U.S. Open
tennis tournament in Queens. Zhukova reportedly attended the inauguration as
Ivanka’s personal guest.
It
takes a little more doing to understand the Trump family’s connections to Lev Leviev. To begin
with, we need to go back to Bayrock, the company that Donald Trump teamed up
with to build his Trump Soho project. There were three main actors in that
enterprise. One was
convicted mob associate and murky FBI informant Felix Sater. Another was
Tevfik Arif, a shady man
with likely Russian intelligence connections who was once was arrested by the
Turks on Mustafa Kamal Ataturk’s yacht and “charged with running an
international underage prostitution ring.” The third was the late Tamir Sapir,
another man with ties to Russian intelligence.
Interestingly, all these men
have connections to the Chabad movement. Felix Sater was honored as Man of the Year in 2014 by the
Port Washington Chabad house. The same Chabad house’s website lists Tevfik
Arif, who is not Jewish, “among its top 13 benefactors.”
But it’s Tamir Sapir who links Trump
back directly to Lev Leviev.
Pay
close attention to this:
…the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born
in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened
an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered
largely to KGB agents.
Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In
December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago.
The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The
groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the
Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.
Five
months later, in early June
2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to
the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had
become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally
arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy
site.
The
man I want to focus on is Rotem
Rosen. He is described here as the CEO of Leviev’s American holding company and
his “right hand man.” Now, remember that Leviev was described at the top as one
of two oligarch’s who Putin tapped to establish the “Federation of Jewish
Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would
come to be known as ‘Putin’s rabbi.'”
Now,
let’s flash ahead to Trump’s
trip to Moscow to host the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.
After
the contest, Trump attended a vodka-infused 1 a.m. after party at which ticket
holders were promised a meeting with the New Yorker, along with the pageant
contestants.
Trump also met with the Agalarovs to
talk business…
…Joining Trump’s November 2013 meeting
with the Agalarovs were Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen,
a pair of New York-based Russian developers who helped to develop the Trump
Soho hotel and condominium project in Manhattan.
You should know the Agalarovs because they
initiated the undisclosed June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between
Kushner, Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. and a brood of Kremlin-connected
conspirators offering dirt on Hillary Clinton in return for sanctions relief.
Alex Sapir is the son of Tamir Sapir,
brother of Zina, and brother-in-law of Rotem Rosen.
Let me be clear here, Trump hosted the
wedding of Lev Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago. Lev Leviev is so close to
Putin that he was one of two oligarchs tapped to help him gain control of the
leadership of the Russian Jewish community back when he assumed power.
Two decades ago, as the Russian president
set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a
project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it
with a parallel structure loyal to him…
…In
1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev
to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for
Russia’s Jewish civil society, the Russian Jewish Congress, led by oligarch
Vladimir Gusinsky, a potential threat to Putin and President Boris Yeltsin. A
year later, Gusinsky was arrested by Putin’s government and forced into exile.
At the time, Russia already had a chief
rabbi as recognized by the Russian Jewish Congress, Adolf Shayevich. But
Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival
organization. The Kremlin removed Shayevich
from its religious affairs council, and ever since it has instead recognized
Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, leaving the country with two rival claimants to
the title.
These
are extraordinarily close ties between Putin and Trump and that also connect
Trump’s business discussions in 2013 about Moscow real estate projects with the
June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower that has become one of the strongest pieces of
evidence of collusion in the election.
Seen
in this light, Jared and Ivanka’s pre-election pilgrimage to Rabbi Schneerson’s
grave takes on a different tone.
And
then there’s this:
In May 2015, a month before Trump
officially entered the Republican presidential primary, Kushner bought a
majority stake in the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street from
Leviev for $295 million.
I’m
not sure if it was actually a majority stake or just a really
expensive condo, but Mueller is looking into it and it may tie into
the firing of Preet Bharara:
As
special prosecutor Robert Mueller and Congress both continue to search for ties
between the Trumps, Kushner and Russia, Kushner’s acquisition of a commercial
condo in the New York Times building has become one of many targets. In 2015,
Kushner and his family business, Kushner Cos., bought a portion of the building
from Russian real estate billionaire Lev Leviev for $295M, The Guardian
reports. The transaction first
came up due to the $285M Kushner borrowed from Deutsche Bank to complete the
transaction. Deutsche Bank and two companies tied to Leviev, Africa Israel
Investments and Prevezon, have all recently been the subject of money
laundering investigations. A laundering case against Prevezon led by
then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara abruptly ended in May, two months after Trump
fired Bharara, with a $6M settlement that raised eyebrows.
But,
remember, Trump told us he has absolutely nothing to do with Russia and no
business interests there.
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