Trump: Timeline of an Israeli Asset
It is evident to anyone that Donald Trump, in his capacity as president, has been a fantastic boon for the state of Israel. During Trump’s presidency from 2017 to 2021, Israel — under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party — experienced an unprecedented procession of strategic and symbolic victories, all orchestrated by the Trump White House in coordination with Israel:
The torpedoing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran deal, which sought to de-escalate tensions between Iran and the West through the regulated dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program. The JCPOA was vehemently opposed by Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of whom favor military action and harsh economic sanctions against Iran. Trump ordered the withdrawal from the deal little more than a week after Netanyahu delivered the “Iran Lied” speech, in which he presented ostensible proof in the form of Iranian intelligence documents that Iran was not in compliance with the JCPOA. Additionally, the Trump administration placed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran and officially designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization. This regime change operation was conducted under the umbrella of the Iran Action Group, headed by Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook.
The American-Israeli drone strike assassination of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, the long-time commander of the Quds Force, the branch of the IRGC specializing in unconventional warfare and military intelligence operations, including Iranian coordination with proxy organizations Hezbollah and Hamas. The elimination of Soleimani, described as a “genius of asymmetric warfare” and “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East,” had long been a prime strategic objective of Israel’s. Israel attempted to assassinate Soleimani at least twice — once in 2015 and again in 2019 — but both attempts were foiled. Intelligence sharing and cooperation between Israel and the U.S., whose baseline is very high in general, expanded even further during the Trump administration.
The United States’ recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the strategic Golan Heights, and its declaration of the legality of the Israeli policy of expanding Jewish settlements into the West Bank under international law, both drastic divergences from long-standing U.S. policy. Benjamin Netanyahu arranged a gesture of gratitude to Trump for this policy coup by arranging to have a new Golan Heights settlement named after Trump.
The normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Arab states of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain through the US-mediated Abraham Accords, with the tacit backing of Israeli ally Saudi Arabia. This effort was widely recognized as an effort to counter Iranian influence in the Middle East.
The recognition of deeply contentious Jerusalem as the official, undivided capital of Israel by the United States, in addition to the movement of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This had been another highly significant aim of Israel. The Trump administration completely abandoned the consensus of American foreign policy with regard to Jerusalem since 1948, that the future of Jerusalem must be the subject of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The attempted two-state “resolution” of the Israel-Palestine conflict in what was called the “Middle East Peace Plan”. In reality, the doomed plan, which received no input from Palestinians, and was immediately rejected by Palestine and Israeli settlers, proposed an extremely weak and fractured Palestinian state, and was a smokescreen for the eventual Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley and most of the West Bank. In a 2016 interview, incoming U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, stated that Donald Trump would support the Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank.
The cessation of US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the closure of the PLO office in Washington, D.C.
The first visitation of an sitting US president to the Kotel (otherwise known as the Wailing Wall), a site venerated by Jews as the sole remnant of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem.
The broadening of the interpretation of Title VI of the US 1964 Civil Rights Act to include discrimination based on ‘anti-Semitism’ by allowing the government to interpret Judaism as both a race or nationality, and a religion under federal law.
The pardoning of Jonathan Pollard’s handler, former Israeli Air Force colonel Aviem Sella, at the request of Benjamin Netanyahu.
I want to tell you that the Jewish people have a long memory, so we remember the proclamation of the great king, Cyrus the Great, the Persian king 2,500 years ago. He proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon could come back and rebuild our Temple in Jerusalem. We remember a hundred years ago, Lord Balfour, who issued the Balfour Proclamation that recognized the rights of the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland. We remember 70 years ago, President Harry S. Truman was the first leader to recognize the Jewish state. And we remember how a few weeks ago, President Donald J. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Mr. President, this will be remembered by our people through the ages. — Benjamin Netanyahu
No U.S. president since ultra-Zionist Lyndon Baines Johnson has been as enmeshed and at unity with Israeli and Jewish interests as Donald Trump. Multiple high-ranking Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, have likened Trump to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who — as legend has it —facilitated the movement of Jewish exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem so that they could establish the Second Temple of Jerusalem. In Isaiah, God chooses Cyrus “to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armor … so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel.”
In particular, Trump has been affiliated with a disproportionately Russian anti-communist faction of Jewry with deep ties to transnational organized crime and maximalist goals with respect to the state of Israel. This bizarre symbiosis precedes his 2015 ascension to political prominence by decades.
Furthermore, declassified 2018 FBI documents unambiguously demonstrate that Israeli agents assisted Trump in winning the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump met in-person with said Israeli agents on at least one occasion during the 2016 election cycle.
Fred Trump
Donald Trump inherited his peculiar relationship with Jews from his father, Fred Trump.
Fred Trump made his fortune developing primarily relatively inexpensive apartments and single family homes for lower-middle and middle class households in Brooklyn and Queens during the postwar economic boom.
Besides profiteering off Federal Housing Authority contracts, Fred further displayed capitalistic connivance and prudence by cultivating close ties with Brooklyn’s Democratic Party patronage machine, centered around the Madison Democratic Club. At the time, Brooklyn’s Democratic machine was dominated by Jews such as Stanley Steingut, future New York mayor Abe Beame, and Fred Trump counsel Abraham “Bunny” Lindenbaum, all of whom Fred liaised with. Beame and Lindenbaum, an expert in New York zoning ordinances and Zionist activist, collaborated with Fred to obtain municipal approval for his cornerstone Trump Village real estate project in Coney Island, Brooklyn.12 Fred donated generously to Beame’s 1974 New York mayoral candidacy. Later, Bunny Lindenbaum and his son, Sandy, would aid Donald Trump in breaking into Manhattan real estate, no doubt at the behest of Fred, who capitalized and underwrote Donald’s earliest and most successful ventures.
In the early 1970s, the Trump Organization faced a high profile civil rights lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice alleging serious infringement of the Fair Housing Act — in particular, the Trump Organization was alleged to have discriminated against black renters. Fred Trump’s preference was for Jewish tenants, and he instructed Trump Organization rental agents to rent only to “Jews and executives.”3 In effect, many Trump property developments were Jewish ghettos. Notorious fixer and attorney Roy Cohn (later to play an even more significant role), who first met Donald Trump in 1973 at Manhattan discotheque, Le Club, was retained by the Trumps for their defense in the lawsuit. The Trumps eventually settled out of court.
Many Trump properties were located in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, which had been inhabited primarily by first and second generation Yiddish-speaking Jews from the Pale of Settlement, and was later subjected to a massive influx of Soviet Jews beginning in the 1970s, resulting in it being given the moniker “Little Odessa.” Brighton Beach is infamous for being the epicenter and headquarters of the Russian-Jewish mafia in North America. In fact, the neighborhood is the nexus of the relationship between the Trump family, organized Jewry, and the Russian-Jewish mafia.
In the process of developing apartments in Brighton Beach in the early 1950s, Fred initiated a nearly five decade-long friendship with Beach Haven rabbi, Israel Wagner, when he donated land he owned in the area to the Jewish community on the condition that it be used as the site of a newly constructed synagogue. Fred located his offices in Beach Haven, regularly visited the local synagogue to converse with Wagner (whom he referred to as “my rabbi”), and attended annual fundraising dinners held by the synagogue, bringing his entire family.45
Fred Trump was a prolific purchaser and promoter of Israel Bonds, which were instrumental in financing the civil and military infrastructure of the nascent state.6 According to New York Magazine, Fred became close friends with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1980s while Netanyahu was serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in Manhattan.
Fred’s serial donation to Jewish organizations would later be emulated by his son. According to The Jerusalem Post,
[Donald] Trump has also given generously to Jewish philanthropic organizations, including the Jewish National Fund and United Jewish Appeal, dating back to his very early career. Many of his donations and event appearances were quite private and went unrewarded – at least with publicity, a commodity Trump values enormously.
Trump often touts his connections to the community and hangs several Jewish awards prominently above his desk in Trump Tower, including JNF’s Tree of Life, awarded to him in 1983 for his fund-raising abilities, according to one longtime board member.
In addition to insinuating himself with the Jewish community for commercial purposes, it is speculated that Fred deliberately cultivated ties with the Jewish community so as to deflect suspicions that, being an ethnic German in America during and immediately after World War II, he might have been anti-Semitic or sympathetic to Nazi Germany. However, these explanations only go so far, as Fred Trump maintained his extraordinary proximity to and affinity toward Jewry well after he was established in New York real estate, and after German-Americans were viewed with suspicion. In truth, the exact genesis of the Trumps’ near unity with Jewry remains somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps Fred Trump simply discovered the skeleton key that unlocks true power; perhaps it’s simply anthropological, and without much need for further explanation.
Roy Cohn
It is widely known that Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s personal attorney from the early 1970s to his death in 1986. However, Cohn’s role in Trump’s life totally transcended that of a personal attorney — Cohn was Trump’s closest advisor, mentor, and friend. Cohn was an eminent legal ‘fixer’, among the most connected men in New York, and facilitated Trump’s entry into the rarefied stratosphere of Manhattan commercial real estate by embedding him in social and political networks with profound national and transnational power.
[Cohn] became Donald’s mentor, his constant advisor on every significant aspect of his business and personal life. — Trump biographer Wayne Barrett
Born into a privileged Jewish family, Cohn eventually became a key node in a constellation of Jewish right-wing anti-communists with connections to Jewish organized crime, the state of Israel, and the highest echelons of American politics. Cohn’s father, Albert, a New York Supreme Court justice, was influential in the Bronx Democratic machine and was close to New York mayor and Fred Trump ally, Abe Beame.7
After graduating from Columbia Law School, Cohn became an assistant U.S. attorney and a leading member of the American Jewish League Against Communism (AJLAC), an elite anti-communist pressure group — populated with many ostensible former communists — whose strategic objective was to promote Zionism at the expense of communism among Jews, reflecting increasing Jewish skepticism towards the Soviet project as a result of its real or perceived lapses into anti-Semitism.8 With J. Edgar Hoover as his mentor, he immediately began endeavoring to prosecute supposed Soviet moles inside the American state apparatus, which he accomplished under the direction of the mysterious U.S. attorney Irving H. Saypol.
Later, Cohn worked as chief counsel for red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, who headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Fellow anti-communist Jew and AJLAC luminary George Sokolsky, a nationally syndicated Hearst newspaper columnist and advisor to McCarthy, recommended Cohn to McCarthy. While McCarthy is the person most commonly associated with the Red Scare, he was only the figurehead; the Red Scare was engineered primarily by anti-communist Jews with ties to Jewish organized crime.
Cohn’s primary liaison with subterranean Jewish organized crime networks was Lewis Rosenstiel, the head of liquor conglomerate Schenley Industries. According to the New York Times, in 1922, while on vacation in the French Riviera, Rosenstiel — apparently already plugged into transnational power — was advised by Winston Churchill to prepare for the end of alcohol prohibition in America, after which he purchased a group of shuttered distilleries that later became Schenley Industries, in a deal backed and underwritten by the investment bank Lehman Brothers.
According to investigations undertaken by the US House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in the 1960s and 1970s, Rosenstiel was part of a “consortium” with underworld figures that smuggled Canadian liquor (sourced from the Jewish Bronfman family’s Seagram’s liquor company) into the United States during Prohibition. A particularly significant member of the consortium was notorious Jewish mobster and transnational operative Meyer Lansky, with whom Rosenstiel was very close.
Rosenstiel’s relationship with Cohn was arguably analogous to Cohn’s relationship with Trump: Rosenstiel trusted Cohn “as a son”, and Cohn’s services were always at Rosenstiel’s disposal. The relationship between Lansky, Rosenstiel, and Cohn appeared to conform to a vague hierarchy — Cohn and Lansky reportedly referred to Rosenstiel as “Supreme Commander”, while Rosenstiel called Cohn “Field Commander”.9
In the mid-1940s, the Jewish Agency (then an arm of the World Zionist Congress) established a vast clandestine arms smuggling network throughout North America and Europe to facilitate the flow of weapons to Zionist guerillas and irregulars fighting for the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state in British Palestine. The operation, which later came under the aegis of the paramilitary organization Haganah, recruited Jews from all occupations and socioeconomic strata, including and especially the Jewish criminal underground.
One such mobster fingered to aid the Zionist cause was the aforementioned Meyer Lansky, who facilitated the illegal transfer of weapons from the United States to Israel in the 1940s through his connections to the Italian mafia, which largely controlled the longshoremen’s unions and docks on the east coast. Much of this activity was financed through the Lansky-Rosenstiel-Bronfman bootlegging operation.
Cohn’s activism and advocacy on behalf of Jewish causes was not unrelated to his relationship with Donald Trump. As evidenced by documents from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library archive, Cohn was honored at a 1983 fundraising gala jointly hosted by the B’nai B’rith & State of Israel Bonds Organization for his lifelong service to Israeli and Jewish interests, an event for which Trump served as an honorary chairman alongside Rupert Murdoch.10 Of course, the promotion of Israel bonds is simply a continuation of the old bootlegging operation by other means. There is a direct line, through Cohn, from the globe-spanning clandestine operations undertaken in the early 20th century to support the establishment of the state of Israel, to Donald Trump, Cohn’s closest friend in the last decades of his life.
Roger Stone
Consummate insider Cohn introduced Trump to most of the key individuals who would advise and assist him later in life, particularly with regard to his political ambitions: GOP lobbyists Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, and Zionist media tycoon Rupert Murdoch were all personally introduced to Trump by Cohn.
Roger Stone — also a Roy Cohn protege — began his career as a Republican operative and lobbyist working for Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign under the tutelage of Jewish mob-attorney and Red-baiting political strategist Murray Chotiner, Richard Nixon’s lifelong confidante and advisor. Through Chotiner, Nixon’s political career was bolstered and financed in its embryonic stage by Southern California’s Jewish criminal underworld, at the time controlled by Micky Cohen, one of Chotiner’s many criminal associates.11
Chotiner arranged for Cohen and his affiliates to donate substantial sums to Nixon’s first campaign for the U.S. House in 1946. According to Cohen’s memoirs, at the same time he was bankrolling Nixon’s nascent political career, he was deeply involved in organizing fundraising efforts in Los Angeles and Las Vegas for the Zionist paramilitary Irgun organization.12
This support would later pay off when Nixon — the first U.S. president to visit Israel — saved Israel from an almost certain defeat in the Yom Kippur War by resupplying Israeli military losses and entering into a brief game of nuclear brinkmanship with the Soviet Union, which backed the Arab coalition. It’s certainly looking as if a very similar scenario might very well be recapitulated in a second Trump presidency.
Stone was introduced to Trump by Cohn in 1979, while Stone was serving as the New York regional political director for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, which was backed by Cohn. At this time, Stone was working under notorious GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein, who has also worked as a political advisor to Richard Nixon, Viktor Orban, and Benjamin Netanyahu, whose 1996 electoral victory is credited in large part to Finkelstein. It has been speculated that Finkelstein, who was known to have a propensity for inventing concise phrases and slogans, invented the phrase ‘Make America Great Again’, which was first deployed in the 1980 Reagan campaign.
Fred Trump donated $200,000 (three quarters of a million dollars in 2024 dollars) to the Reagan campaign, and obtained the building where the campaign’s New York headquarters was located.13 Stone was the animator of Trump’s first presidential dalliance in 1987 with the almost $100,000 of newspaper ads in which Trump criticized American foreign policy. Later, throughout 1990s, Stone remained a close advisor of Trump’s, lobbying on behalf of his casino business and serving as campaign manager for Trump’s 2000 Reform Party candidacy campaign.
However, Stone’s crowning achievement would be his role in miraculously catapulting Trump to the presidency in 2016. Stone served as a 'Political Advisor’ to the budding campaign until August 8, 2015, when he left, citing personality differences with other campaign personnel. However, Stone continued to communicate with the campaign in an unofficial capacity, remaining one of Trump’s closest confidantes, organizing pro-Trump activist groups (including the original “Stop the Steal” effort in the run-up to the 2016 Republican National Convention), and promoting him in the media until the day of the general election. In the 2017 documentary Get Me Roger Stone, 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort stated that “Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what’s Roger and what’s Donald.” In fact, as will be shown later, Stone’s role transcended that of any person formally involved with the campaign.
Cohen, Sater, and Chabad
Three of Trump’s closest advisors throughout his political and business career — Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater — have direct ties to Russian-Jewish Mafia groups. The Trump Organization is staffed at the higher levels almost entirely by Jews. Even assuming that wealthy and powerful people might be far more likely than the average person to be affiliated with shadowy, connected Jews, this is still a remarkable fact.
He surrounds himself oddly enough with Jewish personnel, both then and now: his real estate lawyer is Jewish, his house counsel is Jewish, his controller is Jewish, his chief of staff, chief financial officer, executive vice president, his first executive vice president – I was his litigator for 15 years. — Jay Goldberg, employee of Trump’s from 1990 to 2005
Russian Jews became particularly numerous and ascendant after the mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel and the United States following the Six-Day War in 1967 and the USSR’s abolition of its ban on immigration to Israel in 1971. Many of these Russian Jews adopted the identity and moniker of ‘anti-communism’ as a result of their having been targeted by Soviet security services for black market activities, which Jews dominated in the USSR. Then, at the height of the Cold War, they insinuated themselves with Western political elites by virtue of their ostensible anti-communism.
From 2006 to 2009, Stone was paid $400,000 to work as a ‘political director’ with his own office for now-disbarred attorney, Scott Rothstein.14 Rothstein was the chairman and CEO of now-defunct prominent Fort Lauderdale law firm, Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler (RRA), whose clients included many of the largest businesses and banks throughout South Florida. During the time Stone worked at RRA, Rothstein, through an investment subsidiary, was perpetrating a massive $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme, one of the largest in history. The scheme collapsed in 2009, prompting Rothstein to flee to Morocco after consulting with RRA lawyers on which countries have extradition agreements with neither the United States nor Israel.
While in Morocco, Rothstein wired millions in ill-gotten gains to his Moroccan bank, and to persons affiliated with Israeli organized crime, including Shimon Levy, who served prison time in Israel for harboring an Israeli criminal figure suspected of two “grisly murders”.15 Rothstein eventually returned to the United States, where he was convicted of racketeering, fraud, and conspiracy charges, and sentenced to 50 years in federal prison.
Stone was interviewed regarding his involvement with Rothstein in the Broward Palm Beach New Times: “When I noted that a lot of the Rothstein Ponzi money came from people with strong ties to Israel (Nordlicht, Huberfeld, the Levys, etc.), [Stone] said, ‘Well, you could put that another way -- all the money came from Jews… This is Jew-on-Jew crime. I'm a Catholic, so what business of it was mine? I don't think Rothstein took any gentile money.’”
From 2006 to 2018, New York attorney Michael Cohen served as Donald’s personal counsel and as an executive in the Trump Organization, answering directly to Trump, with an office next to his. He was involved at a high level in marketing and selling condos, and public relations. His role was additionally described as that of a “fixer” and “consigliere”, somewhat analogous to Roy Cohn, except subordinate as opposed to senior. According to the New York Times, “if anyone crossed Mr. Trump or stood in his way, Mr. Cohen, who was known to sometimes carry a licensed pistol in an ankle holster, would cajole, bully or threaten a lawsuit, according to a half-dozen people who dealt with him over the years.” From 2017 to 2018, he served as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
In his youth, Cohen was close to his uncle, Morton Levine, a Jewish mafia associate who owned the El Caribe Country Club in Brooklyn, in the vicinity of Russian-Jewish Little Odessa. As a teenager, Cohen worked part-time at El Caribe, whose clubhouse hosted the personal offices of ultra-violent Russian-Jewish mobsters, Evsei Agron and Martin Balagula. This brought Cohen into the orbit of the Brighton Beach Russian-Jewish mafia, through which he became miraculously wealthy by obtaining extremely valuable taxi medallions in rigged auctions.1617 Cohen inherited his uncle’s stake in El Caribe, which he retained partial ownership in until 2016.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Evsei Agron was the boss or ‘Godfather’ of the New York Russian mafia, and, despite his reputation for unhinged cruelty, was very well connected in New York. One of Agron and Balagula’s highest level contacts was Rabbi Ronald Greenwald, who was involved behind the scenes in high-intrigue international diplomacy (including attempting on numerous occasions to have the U.S. government grant Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard clemency), and was the primary liaison between the Nixon administration and the American Jewish community.18
Cohen was childhood friends with another individual in the Trump orbit affiliated with Russian-Jewish organized crime, Felix Sater, whose family immigrated to Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood from the Soviet Union via Israel in 1974. According to the FBI, Sater’s father, Mikhail Sheferovsky, was a subordinate of prolific Russian-Israeli arms dealer and money launderer, Semion Mogilevich, and was convicted of extorting money from local restaurants, grocery stores, and a medical clinic.19
According to multiple sources, Sater himself has been affiliated with Mogilevich, and even served as shamash (Hebrew for “helper” or “assistant”) to Mogilevich when he visited the United States. In 1998, Sater was convicted for his involvement in a $40 million penny-stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Russian-Jewish Mafia, and became an informant for the FBI.
In the mid-2000s, the Trump Organization collaborated with the Bayrock Group — an entity capitalized entirely by wealthy emigrees from former Soviet bloc countries looking to park their dubious wealth in American real estate — in developing a number of properties, including the Trump SoHo in Lower Manhattan. Sater was a managing director of Bayrock, and in that capacity was a senior advisor to the Trump Organization. Although Trump denies having been close with Sater, Sater himself affirms that he had a deep working relationship with Trump, and multiple sources from within the Trump Organization described the pair as being close, citing frequent meetings and near-constant phone calls between the two. Sater, in league with Michael Cohen, was also instrumental in attempting to develop Trump Tower Moscow during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
Sater, Cohen, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner are all prominent members of Chabad, one of the world’s largest Hasidic movements. Chabad — which was instrumentalized as a subterranean anti-Soviet network both inside and outside the USSR by American intelligence services20 — tends to attract Russian Jews such as Felix Sater.
From Politico:
‘It’s not a surprise that Trump-minded people are involved with Chabad,’ said Torossian. ‘Chabad is a place that tough, strong Jews feel comfortable. Chabad is a nonjudgmental place where people that are not traditional and not by-the-book feel comfortable.’
He summarized the Chabad attitude, which is less strict than the Orthodox one, as, ‘If you can’t keep all of the commandments, keep as many as you can.’
Torossian, who coincidentally said he is Sater’s friend and PR rep, also explained that this balance is particularly appealing to Jews from the former Soviet Union, who appreciate its combination of traditional trappings with a lenient attitude toward observance. ‘All Russian Jews go to Chabad,’ he said. ‘Russian Jews are not comfortable in a reform synagogue.’
There is evidence suggesting that Trump facilitated the laundering of moneys by the Russian-Jewish mafia through his Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey in the 1990s. In 1998, the Trump Taj Mahal was issued the largest fine ever given to a casino by the federal government for violating anti-money laundering rules codified in the Bank Secrecy Act a remarkable 106 times in its first year and a half of operation. The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day.
This massive violation occurred at a time when Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino was the preferred gambling location for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, and at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy. Notably, Trump’s other Atlantic City casinos did not have a record of systematic abrogation of money laundering laws. However, the Taj Mahal — the casino of choice for the Russian-Jewish mafia — did routinely violate such laws.
Jeffrey Epstein
Despite claims to the contrary, Donald Trump had a close relationship with the now-deceased sex-blackmailer and Israeli intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein’s female collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell, and Maxwell’s father, the storied media tycoon and Israeli asset Robert Maxwell, since at earliest the late 1980s. It is known that Trump was friendly with Robert Maxwell, having attended an exclusive party on his infamous yacht in 1989.
According to British investigative journalists Gordon Thomson and Martin Dillon, Maxwell was a conduit between the KGB, Israeli intelligence, and the predominantly Jewish emerging kleptocrat oligarchy in Russia in the 1980s, creating numerous shell companies that were used to facilitate massive capital flight and launder the oligarchs’ dirty money. Maxwell reportedly conducted much of this activity in league with the aforementioned globe-trotting money launderer Semion Mogilevich, who obtained his Israeli passport through Maxwell. Mogilevich was one among many “refusenik” Soviet Jews Maxwell aided in making their way to the West.21
In a profile of Epstein in New York magazine in 2002, Trump remarked: "I've known Jeff [Epstein] for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life." After Trump purchased the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, he and Epstein were spotted together at Palm Beach events, including a pre-pageant dinner at Mar-a-Lago in 1992. They socialized in both Palm Beach and New York City, and, according to Epstein’s private pilot, Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet on multiple occassions.
A source who knew Epstein and Trump during this time noted in an interview with The Washington Post that "they were tight" and "they were each other's wingmen". According to Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, “they were good friends… I know [Trump] is trying to distance himself, but they were.” He added that Trump used to comp Epstein’s mother and aunt at one of Trump’s Atlantic City casino hotels. Author Michael Wolff wrote that Trump, Epstein, and real estate investor Tom Barrack were like a "set of nightlife musketeers" on the social scene in the 1990s. In 2003, New York magazine reported Epstein hosted a dinner party in his Manhattan residence to honor Bill Clinton, who did not attend, although Trump did attend, along with Mort Zuckerman, Epstein sponsor Leslie Wexner, Sergey Brin, and Peter Mandelson.
Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was initially targeted for grooming and brought into Epstein’s orbit by Ghislaine Maxwell while she was working as a spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. In 2016, a federal suit with two affidavits from anonymous witnesses was filed in New York by a Jane Doe, accusing Epstein and Trump of sexually assaulting her at a series of parties at Epstein's New York townhouse in 1994, when she was 13 years old. The plaintiff was scheduled to appear in a press conference six days before the 2016 election, but abruptly canceled the event; her attorney asserted that the woman had received credible threats. The suit was dropped on November 4, 2016.
In 2012, Epstein’s former house manager, Alfredo Rodriguez, attempted to sell Epstein’s so-called ‘Little Black Book’ of contacts — which he kept as “insurance” against Epstein — to an undercover FBI agent, after which a redacted version was obtained and published by now-defunct website Gawker in 2015. Rodriguez circled several entries in the contact book of individuals whom he identified as “material witnesses” to Epstein’s child abuse.22 Donald Trump’s entry — listing every conceivable method of contacting him — is circled. Other entries circled include Ghislaine Maxwell, Leslie Wexner, Ehud Barak, Jean-Luc Brunel, and Alan Dershowitz — all individuals who were later revealed to have been deeply involved with Epstein, lending credibility to Rodriguez’ claims.
Family Ties
As with most American and Western elites, the Trump family is consanguineous with Jewry. Most notably, Trump’s eldest daughter and Jewish convert, Ivanka Trump, is married to Jared Kushner, scion of the once-disgraced Kushner power-family. Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, a wealthy New Jersey real estate mogul and Democratic Party megadonor, is a self-described Zionist and prolific donor to Jewish and Israeli causes, having donated to illegal settlements in the West Bank, and sponsored countless Jewish schools, community centers, and synagogues throughout the New York metropolitan area.
In the early 2000s, Charles Kushner became New Jersey politician Jim McGreevey’s primary backer in his successful 2001 New Jersey gubernatorial election. At the same time, McGreevey entered into a homosexual affair with Golan Cipel, a former Israeli naval officer, high-level consulate official and parliamentary aide whose U.S. visa application was sponsored by Kushner. In the wake of an extortion scandal involving McGreevey and Cipel, local journalists and investigators concluded that it was very likely that Kushner and Israeli operative Cipel hatched the extortion plot together.2324
Like the Trump family, the Kushners have deep personal ties to Benjamin Netanyahu. Charles Kushner financed and sponsored Netanyahu’s early political ambitions in Israel. During this time, when Netanyahu visited the United States, he would stay at the sprawling Kushner residence in Livingston, New Jersey, where he slept in Jared’s bedroom, while Jared retreated to the basement.25
Jared Kushner was instrumental in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and transition team, having been granted a top secret security clearance at the request of Trump so that he could attend White House intelligence briefings. He was Trump’s closest advisor during his presidency, with the title of ‘Senior Advisor to the President’; Trump was reportedly closer to Kushner than any of his cabinet-level officials or children. Most notably, Kushner was entrusted with spearheading the Trump administration’s laughable Israel-Palestine “two-state” resolution, the Abraham Accords, and other normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states (the so-called “Middle East Peace Plan”).
In his capacity as the head of the 2016 Trump transition team, Kushner — at the behest of Donald Trump — unsuccessfully attempted to overturn official U.S. policy under the Obama administration regarding UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which sought to declare Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as illegal under international law. The Obama administration correctly surmised that the Israeli settlers’ escalating aggression was destabilizing an eventual two-state solution, and planned to abstain from voting on the resolution, thereby guaranteeing its passage in the UN Security Council. Kushner directed to-be National Security Advisor Michael Flynn to contact officials from foreign governments, including Russia, to learn where each government stood on the resolution and to influence those governments to delay the vote or defeat the resolution.
According to BuzzFeed, “After hanging up, Flynn told the entire room [at the Trump transition team HQ] that they’d have to start pushing to lobby against the U.N. vote, saying ‘the president wants this done ASAP.’”
Israel & the 2016 Election
While there is evidence that some rather reckless and ineffectual individuals in Trump’s entourage attempted to collude with the Russian government in the 2016 election, there is, according to declassified FBI documents, definitive proof that agents of the Israeli government met with Donald Trump and agreed to help him win the election. The heavily redacted documents, which contain explicit references to contacts in “Jerusalem” and “Israel”, show that throughout 2016, Trump confidant Roger Stone was in constant communication with at least one Israeli agent with whom Stone was coordinating to covertly intervene in the election in favor of Trump. Additionally, messages contained in the documents reveal several attempted in-person meetings between Trump, Stone, and the Israelis, and at least one successful in-person meeting between Trump and the Israelis.
The May 2018 documents, produced as part of the Mueller investigation into foreign election interference, are an FBI search warrant and its accompanying affidavit. The warrant is directed at securing the Google and iCloud accounts of a mysterious Israeli operative or asset acting (who legendary journalist James Bamford speculates may have been veteran Netanyahu go-between Isaac Molho) under the direction of an individual identified as “PM.” The FBI agent who wrote the affidavit noted, “I believe ‘PM’ refers to the ‘Prime Minister.’” This can only mean Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Israeli agent initially contacted Stone through virulently pro-Israel and Islamophobic political commentator, Jerome Corsi, who remained involved in the communications. The communications began in May 2016, before the Republican National Convention.
Later, throughout May and June of 2016, the unidentified Israeli agent frantically attempted to set up meetings between himself, Donald Trump, Stone, Corsi, and an Israeli Minister without portfolio. According to The Times of Israel, which reviewed the documents, the Israeli government at the time included a minister without portfolio, Tzachi Hanegbi, appointed in May with responsibility for defense and foreign affairs.
Due to scheduling and potentially other issues, these meetings never materialize. Further attempts are made to arrange a meeting in July, this time apparently including a “Lt. General” — possibly Benny Gantz, who had recently retired as Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. A 3-star Lieutenant General is the highest rank in the IDF, and is held only by the Chief of the General Staff. Additionally, there is indication that Netanyahu was pressing for a meeting, as the Israeli agent wrote in one message, “the PM is putting pressure for a quick decision.”
The July meeting apparently falls through as well, prompting the Israeli agent to message Roger Stone in August, “as per [Prime Minister], we have one last shot… History will not forgive us. TRUMP IN FREE FALL. OCTOBER SURPRISE COMING!”, and “[Trump] is going to be defeated unless we intervene. We have critical intel. The key is in your hands!” This is an indication that, regardless of whether the Israelis were ever going to successfully meet Trump in-person, they intended to intervene in the election on his behalf by supplying “critical intel.”
Throughout the entire affair, Stone and Corsi discuss obtaining pending Hillary Clinton private email server files from WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, in addition to “what if anything Israel plans to do in Oct.” Although it is obvious that the FBI’s working theory in the search warrant was that the Israeli operation was in some way related to Stone’s well-known communication with WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, there is no definitive proof that Israel’s operation had anything to do with WikiLeaks. It is possible that Stone and Corsi pursued the WikiLeaks emails independently.
Finally, in late October, the Israeli agent achieves his objective of meeting with Donald Trump face-to-face, and confirms that he is helping his campaign: “I am in NY- met with DJT and helping. Victory is in sight.” As mentioned in the document, there is a suspicious dearth of iCloud messages between Stone and the Israeli agent in the critical period of September and early October, indicating that either the messages were thoroughly erased, or a more secure form of communication was used.
2024
The 2023-2024 Israel-Gaza War has rapidly evolved into a regional conflagration involving Hezbollah, Iran, the United States, Russia, and other actors, putting the state of Israel in an extremely precarious position. Its uncertain future hinges on robust and unconditional support from the United States, which a second Trump administration is most likely to provide given Trump’s seemingly natural affinity toward Israel and Jews.
This is common knowledge in Israel, where according to polls, nearly 60% of Israelis favor Donald Trump in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, while only 25% prefer Kamala Harris. Israel was one of the only countries in the world where Trump maintained favorable approval ratings throughout his presidency.
“Deep down I think Donald has a Jewish heart,” said Greenblatt, who has attended services with Trump where he would hum along to Aleinu and stand and sit with the flow of ritual. — The Jerusalem Post
Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, 213-217
After the Gold Rush, Vanity Fair, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/share/e515a2cd-a51b-4f83-8d61-6ebb9a104e0a
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The Hidden Story of the Trump Family Rabbi, Israel 365 News, https://israel365news.com/331998/the-hidden-story-trump-family-rabbi/
How Trump’s developer dad and a Brooklyn rabbi saved a synagogue, New York Post, https://nypost.com/2020/10/17/how-trumps-developer-dad-and-a-brooklyn-rabbi-saved-a-synagogue/
The Swedish Whopper, Haaretz, https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2016-03-25/ty-article/donald-trumps-struggle-with-the-truth/0000017f-deef-db22-a17f-feff968c0000
Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, 129-132
Jewish Unit Vows ‘Communist Purge’, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1948/03/15/archives/jewish-unit-vows-communist-purge-league-forms-here-to-ferret-out.html
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Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Digital Archives, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/digitallibrary/whormsubject/me001/40-654-12019891-024-009-2018.pdf
Richard Nixon’s deep-seated mob ties spelled out in ‘The Mafia’s President’, New York Daily News, https://www.nydailynews.com/2017/11/04/richard-nixons-deep-seated-mob-ties-spelled-out-in-the-mafias-president/
Gangsters for Zion, Tablet Magazine, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/gangsters-for-zion
How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America, Vanity Fair, https://web.archive.org/web/20210808020730/https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-roy-cohn-relationship
In the crosshair’s of Roger Stone’s pathological attack machine, Columbia Journalism Review, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/roger-stone-attack.php
The Rothstein Wires, Broward Palm Beach New Times, https://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/the-rothstein-wires-6440308#more
Mafia haunts and fraudulent friends put Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen on the spot, The Sunday Times, https://www.thetimes.com/article/mafia-haunts-and-fraudulent-friends-put-trump-s-fixer-on-the-spot-vfs5tzx2r
Cohen unmasks corrupting Trump, LA Times, https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=b8a2b739-c715-4dae-a9be-7afe87f18297
Robert Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America, 33-37, 54-58
Trump’s Russian Laundromat, The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
The roots of today’s revival of Russian Judaism lie deep in the Soviet past, Mosaic Magazine, https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/history-ideas/2017/03/the-roots-of-todays-revival-of-russian-judaism-lie-deep-in-the-soviet-past/
Gordon Thomas, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, 173-181
Decoding Jeffrey Epstein’s mysterious, star-studded Black Book, Vanity Fair, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-black-book-nick-bryant
Did Jared Kushner’s father set up former N.J. governor Jim McGreevey?, Vanity Fair, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/charles-kushner-jim-mcgreevey-scandal
Jim McGreevey and his main man, New York Magazine, https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/9874/
When Netanyahu slept at the Kushners, Jerusalem Post, When Netanyahu slept at the Kushners — and other media tales of Trump’s Jewish confidantes - The Jerusalem Post