--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Thanks for having me on the show, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about Donald Trump Jr. and the two Trump Tower controversies that have him in the middle. David Fahrenthold is a reporter for The Washington Post and has been covering this story. David, thanks for joining us.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There used to just be one Trump Tower controversy, but now it seems like there are two. Both are somehow linked to Donald Trump Jr., and I'm wondering if you could give us a tour of both. They're easy to tell apart in one way because they're in different places. The first Trump Tower we talk about is the one in New York, the one on Fifth Avenue. That's the one where in the summer of 2016, Don Jr. famously agreed to meet with a Russian lawyer who later emerged was closely tied to the Kremlin, who had come to him offering what he thought would be dirt on Hillary Clinton, his father's political opponent.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: That's right. There's already been a lot of controversy about that because obviously it's illegal under U.S. law for foreign nationals to offer things of value to presidential campaigns or for campaigns to accept them. That's the sort of New York-based Trump Tower controversy for Donald Trump Jr.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What we're talking more about this week is the non-existent but planned Trump Tower in Moscow. Trump Sr. had had this long-running goal of building some kind of building, some giant building in Moscow. It goes back to the 80s, goes back to the days of communism. And he was still pursuing it into his presidential campaign and into 2016, we learned from Michael Cohen's guilty plea.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Cohen said in federal court that he lied to Congress. He says to support Mr. Trump's timeline of a Moscow real estate deal that was being negotiated during the 2016 campaign. Cohen told congressional committees in 2017 he stopped working on the Trump Tower Moscow project in January 2016, before Republican caucuses and primaries began.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one of the things that's interesting about that is that there was this contact between the Trump organization, of which Don Jr. was an executive, and the Kremlin itself. Michael Cohen, sort of the Trump intermediary, called the Russian government, talked for 20 minutes to an assistant to someone who's very close to Putin about trying to get the Kremlin's direct help in their development ideas in Moscow.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: So we know now it wasn't just that Donald Trump Sr. was trying to do business with somebody in Russia during his presidential campaign. He was trying to do business with the government of Russia's help. He was asking the government of Russia for help at the same time he was running for president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So those two controversies, one, as far as we know, involves Dunn Jr. a little more directly. That's the one from the Trump Tower in New York. But they both have kind of swept him up and swept his father up in investigations and scrutiny. So I wonder if we could get into each of them in more detail.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Yeah, so it's all these weird intermediaries, these sort of hangers-on that made the connection. In this case, it was a music producer, Rob Goldstone, and a guy named Eamon Agalarov, who is sort of like an oligarch son, who's also sort of a movie star and a music star in Russia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Russian. Music's populated mainly by the children of oligarchs.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Okay. That's why I don't buy much of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so it came together where there was a lawyer, Veselnitskaya from Russia, who is not a Russian government employee as far as we know, but close to the Russian government, comes to Don Jr. through these intermediaries. And what Don Jr. thinks he's getting is dirt on Hillary Clinton.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: This is in the middle of 2016, the middle of the presidential campaign. Don Jr. famously says in the email, if it's what you say, I love it. They have the meeting. And as far as we know, the Russian lawyer is there to talk about adoptions or adoption policy, something that didn't seem like it delivered on the expectation of dirt that Don Jr. had going in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So remind us exactly what was murky or just straight up illegal about what Don Jr. thought he was about to get in that room in Trump Tower in Manhattan.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Well, federal law says that foreign nationals can't contribute to U.S. presidential campaigns. And when they say contribute, that goes beyond the sense of, you know, giving $20 or $100. It also means giving things of value to political campaigns. And in this case, the argument that some people have made was that the offer of opposition research, dirt, whatever it was, damaging information on Hillary Clinton, this was something coming from a Russian offering something that a political campaign would typically have to pay for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hmm. The president seems really sure that there was no collusion in this meeting. But all of these figures and all of these conversations that did and didn't happen are important for tower number two. This tower non-existent. But what's the story there?
--:-- David Fahrenthold: So it was going it was there been a lot of iterations of this deal as I said going back to the late 80s but sort of the last one the one that was sort of up for discussion in 2015 and early 2016 was this really fanciful plan it was going to be I think a hundred stories tall the tallest building in Europe Trump wanted to build this giant building in Moscow and put his name on it was going to be a residential building he wouldn't put up the capital to build the building he would just license his name to some local investor and he would get you know licensing fee maybe an operation fee as well as some piece of the condo sales.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At one point, apparently, the people on Trump's side had discussed offering the penthouse, to which they assigned a value of $50 million, to Vladimir Putin himself, in the hopes that Putin would live there and all the other oligarchs would want to live beneath him.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Has that been verified It been reported in a number of places that the Trumps discussed it Whether they actually offered it to Putin or not I don't know It hard to put yourself in Vladimir Putin's shoes obviously but it might be a little insulting Vladimir Putin one of the richest people in the world He's got vast estates He controls the wealth of the Russian government He doesn't need a free penthouse right And certainly doesn't need to owe anybody a favor for a free penthouse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not like Vladimir Putin's living in a fifth-floor walk-up and is like, oh, I'd like to really make an upgrade. He's got what he needs.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Right, a joke that wasn't lost on Saturday Night Live this weekend, actually.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, Vlad, I'm sorry I had to cancel our meeting. No, I get it, Donny. Hey, when am I moving into Trump Tower penthouse in Moscow? I'm kidding. I would never set foot in a dump like that.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: So how does Michael Cohen's testimony factor into this imagined tower? It contradicts what everyone in the Trump orbit had told us previously about this last iteration of the Moscow plan, which was that it had all ended in January 2016.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, that's an important demarcation line because if it ends in January 2016 before the vote in the Iowa caucuses, then you could say, well, Trump discarded it before the presidential campaign really began. If it continued into June, though, that means that during all those caucuses and primaries, as he was gaining the lead and keeping the lead in the Republican primary and becoming the frontrunner and then the Republican nominee, he was trying to set up a deal in Russia and trying to contact the Russian president.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: In fact, asking the Russian government for favors in that period, that's a much different animal. And so I think what Cohen has said and what seems like he's provided evidence to prove this really casts a different light on Trump's relationship with Russia throughout the 2016 campaign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Has Cohen's credibility as a witness to all of this been affected by the fact that he's changed his stories multiple times?
--:-- David Fahrenthold: You know, that's sort of a recurring question on the Trump-Russia investigation and that Trump's people were – they called them the B team, I think is insulting to B teams. It was like the Z team often, people like Jerome Corsi, Roger Stone, people who were like sort of professional tricksters, liars. Their profession was political deception. And Michael Cohen was not a political operator, but he obviously had – he was a lawyer, but he was more of a fixer for Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was somebody who was sort of – you know, would try to intimidate people with lawsuits. He was somebody who worked the seamy side of the legal profession.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: In this context, though, Cohen seems to be standing out in this field of not very impressive witnesses in that he has provided, I think, some documentary evidence, some corroboration. And when he turned, he seems like he turned all at once and has gone from deceiving to now consistently saying he's telling the truth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where the other guys, Stone, Manafort, Jerome Corsier, kind of back and forth, back and forth.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: And so who else was in on this Moscow Tower and Russia deal? And how involved was Donald Trump Jr.?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there were a couple people. One was this guy Felix Sater, who was a Russian-American figure. He's a guy with a colorful past, which included spending a year in prison for slashing a man's face in a bar fight. With a margarita glass.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: And a stock fraud conviction involving a mafia-linked brokerage firm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He became later a Trump, sort of a real estate developer, worked closely with Trump, helped develop the Trump Soho in lower Manhattan, the former Trump Soho.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: What kind of man are you, Felix Eder? I guess complex, to say the least.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He speaks Russian. He was one of Michael Cohen's big contacts with the Russian government, with people in Russia. He's an important figure. He also is cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: The Trump organization was a unipolar system. There was Trump's senior. He made all the decisions. And everybody else's job was to sort of bring, scout out things and bring them to the boss. And so that includes his children. You know, Don Jr. and Eric, their job was to like go check out deals and bring them to the ultimate decision maker. They didn't have any decision-making power on their own.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you know, Don Jr.'s role seems to have been in some of these cases to try to find developers, find sites, sort of scout out deals and then bring them to his dad. He may have played that role in this particular iteration of the Trump Tower Moscow deal too.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: Well, it's illegal to be a U.S. business and bribe somebody in a foreign country. And if there was an offer made to Vladimir Putin of, you know, here's a free penthouse, now can you get us some land permits? If that sort of thing happened, you could see perhaps a Foreign Correct Practices Act prosecution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We still know so little about Don Jr.'s role in the Trump Tower Moscow deal or about the Trump Tower Moscow deal in general. It's hard to know exactly where, if anywhere, a criminal liability could lie.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: I mean, if Donald Trump is, I guess, removed enough from these decisions, but his son is in the room making them or facilitating them, is there a chance that he's found guilty of something? And if so, what does that mean for the president?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump Jr.'s people have told me and my colleagues he's not worried at all about criminal liability. There's been other reporting that Don Jr. expects to be indicted imminently.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: As with many things involving the Mueller probe, we just don't know. But if Don Jr. is part of some sort of contact with the Russians, it's hard to believe that his father wasn't involved in it too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As I said, Don Sr. was a micromanager and not somebody who gave – who delegated authority. He might delegate the responsibility to go out and search for deals, but the decision maker was always him.
--:-- David Fahrenthold: So if Don Jr. was part of anything that came to fruition or anything really substantive, it's hard to believe his father wasn't at least aware of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up, the life and times of Don Jr.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hey. You are our outgoing intern. We're going to miss you dearly.
--:-- Intern: Aww, I'll miss you. People can find the intern application to be your successor. Oh. At the Vox Media Careers page. Yes, they should fill it out and apply. Apply. It's so fun.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's the spirit, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. I want to ask you, what were you doing New Year's Eve 1999?
--:-- Intern: I was probably asleep. I was about four years old.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You don't have any recollection of the Y2K hysteria.
--:-- Intern: I have studied Y2K in school. SIDS. It's a course they teach? No, like in the history of the United States. They talk about Y2K?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Really? I mean, I feel like the only things we learned was that everyone freaked out and thought computers were going to explode because they didn't know how to go from 1999 to 2000.
--:-- Intern: This is true. But did you know there's a podcast about Y2K now called Headlong Surviving Y2K from the people who brought you missing Richard Simmons? You can find out how much people freaked out because I think the extent of it might be beyond your wildest imagination.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Probably because I don't remember. Headlong, surviving Y2K wherever you find your podcasts.
--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you watch Saturday Night Live, you get the impression that Donald Trump Jr. is sort of like the smart-ish one, and Eric's like the dumb-ish one. How were your summers, guys?
--:-- Donald Trump Jr.: Ooh, busy.
--:-- Eric Trump: For me, it was running the Trump organization. Breaking ground on a new Trump property. And I had swim lessons.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Is that about right?
--:-- Eric Trump: I think that is not true. I think that's unfair, especially to Eric.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What we found, you know, these two brothers are sort of there in charge of the Trump organization now. And they've chosen very different paths under their father's presidency.
--:-- Eric Trump: Eric is mostly business and a little bit politics. Eric has seemed to sort of take on the leadership of the Trump organization, which needs leadership right now. It's in kind of a weird place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don Jr. has chosen effectively a political path, campaigning for people. appearing at political events, raising money, being a pathway for the alt-right and the far-right into his father's administration.
--:-- Eric Trump: He does very little work on the business.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you look at the people that my father made promises to, he's going back and speaking to those people. I mean, he's been back to Montana. He's been back to North Dakota. He's been back to what I call the dark zone, you know, everywhere between New York and Malibu.
--:-- Eric Trump: The irony isn't lost on me that the brash billionaire from New York is the guy that went to those people, that he went and spoke to them. And guess what? He continues to do it because he's actually fighting for them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So no further offense to Eric, but Don's the one who seems wrapped up in these two tower situations now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So let's hear a bit more about him. He's one of five Trump kids. Yeah. Yeah, he's the oldest and he's the son of Trump and his first wife, Ivana.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Remember who Donald Trump was in the 80s and 90s, sort of this like tabloid king of New York. Don Jr. was like 10, 11, 12. His father is divorcing his mother, taking up with Marla Maples. And his father clearly enjoys being sort of this, you know, famous person who's caught between two beautiful women.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don Jr. obviously didn't reflect well on him, didn't turn out well for him. He has said he spent months without speaking to his father. He spent a lot of his time with his maternal grandparents who lived in Czechoslovakia, communist Czechoslovakia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he didn't actually spend that much time with his dad in his years growing up. There were times where it was just, you didn't want to have to deal with everyone making those assumptions, however ignorant they may be, that I don't say, you know, introduce myself as just Don, or sometimes I'd avoid the last name at all costs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don Jr., after graduating Penn, went to Colorado for a year, and it says he bartended and lived out of his truck and hunted and fished.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But, you know, after a while he came back, and he basically joined the life that he was always destined to have as kind of an underling to his father.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's interesting to watch he and his sister, Ivanka, they both joined the Trump organization. You know, she strayed even less far.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Each sort of had their own spin on their father's persona, meaning they were used to a lifestyle where you were like you live kind of as a reality show. Even before reality TV was a thing, Ivanka and Don Jr. both take on that idea that they should live out kind of in public as a performance.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they choose different performances. Ivanka is sort of the high end. She aims at upper end elegance. That's her brand.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is a sample of some of our collections and you can see we have everything from coats to beautiful weekends to incredible knits that have been so popular.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don Jr. is definitely the low end. He is the sort of crass, blue collar side of his dad's personality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He spends a lot of time going on talk radio shows and complaining about how you can't make fat jokes anymore. You can't even make fat jokes now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a whole segment of people that, that's almost the worst one. It's easier to do a racial thing than it is a fat one, because everyone knows they're fat and they get really offended.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of my favorite Don Jr. stories, just to show you how he was sort of an echo of his father, but a much less interesting echo His father when he gets engaged to Marla Maples announced it on national TV Don Sr called in to Regis and Kathy Lee to announce he was engaged It was national news.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don Jr., when he gets engaged to his wife, knows that, okay, this is something you have to make kind of a public spectacle about. But he chooses to propose to his wife in a jewelry store at the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey as part of a promotion for the jewelry store.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Will you re-get engaged? Yes. We were there as he popped the question in a jewelry store. I'm very happy. She better be very happy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So even the New York Post, you know, which had covered every move of the Trump, was kind of like, oh, God, this is so lame. This is beneath us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Somebody sent me this crazy thing from like 2008 where the New York Post did like a pullout section, Christmas with the Trumps. And it was Don Jr. and his wife and their first kid. Don Jr. is wearing this outfit that looks like he stole it off the back lot of a Guys and Dolls production. It's like a lot of pinstripes and everything. in front of the Christmas tree. Like, he knows he should be on display, and this is how he's trying to do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he didn't really find an audience for that, because after all, there was a Donald Trump senior until his dad really ran for president. Then the spotlight was big enough that there was room for Donald Trump Jr. to be kind of his own character, and that's what he's become in the last couple of years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Donald Trump is probably the disciplinarian parent that America has needed for a long time. OK, you know, because we can't just be told that everything's great and everything's fine and you're OK. And, you know, you're a winner and we give you a participation medal. So people don't like that he actually speaks straight and hard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, you see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s and what was actually put out there. And you look at it compared to like the TNC platform of today. You're saying, man, those things are awfully similar.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All the Trump supporters that see what he's doing and are happy. right now, they're happy, they're watching, they're winning. They gotta stay in the game. They gotta stay motivated, because the other side, all they have is hate. That's all they got.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think he sees himself as kind of his father's sort of emissary to real America, red America, because he's, and this part is absolutely genuine, he's a really good hunter. So he's been a spokesman for his father in that way, and he tries to sort of bridge the gap between, you know, New York wealth and hunters in Iowa, hunters in Montana, places like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what was, what exactly did he do in the immediate aftermath of the election?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One thing that was really interesting, actually, about this period was that Don Jr. had spent a lot of the election promising a role for himself in his father's administration. He said he would be to people who were sort of conservationists, hunters who were interested in protecting public lands for hunting. I'll be your voice in my father's ear.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And almost immediately after Trump won, Trump Jr. gave up that role. The other thing was he would be a businessman. He would stay out of his father's administration, stay out of politics, just run the Trump org.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we've seen almost since day one that he's not taken on that role either. I mean the most consequential thing that he's done for the Trump organization that we know of is he sits on the board of Trump International Hotel in New York City on Central Park.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the investors there were so unhappy with their returns that they were trying to get rid of the Trump name. And Don Jr. actually had to go to a board meeting and argue that they should keep the name Trump on the Trump International Hotel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's probably one of the most consequential things he's done for the business since his father started in office.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If Don Jr. isn't really that involved in the politics and isn't really involved in the business, what does he do now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's dating Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former Fox News personality. And they have kind of a performative life of fighting liberals on Twitter, posting pictures with their kids, you know, posting pictures of themselves hunting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As far as like what does he get up in the morning and do besides that, I don't really know. I don't think it's the business. And right now there's no politics because we're in a lull.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there a chance if he can escape this whole Mueller investigation unscathed that Donald Trump Jr. is sort of the George W. Bush of the Trump political regime?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The question is where would he run? I mean like his father, he could never win elected office in New York City or New York State.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'd have to find a place where, you know, Trump Jr. could just show up and by virtue of being Donald Trump Jr. with no preexisting connection to the state could win.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that state would also have to have a Democrat, you know, or a retiring Republican, somebody who, you know, an obvious space for him to go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Certainly possible. We talk to people who say, you know, look, Don Jr. loves politics, loves giving speeches. I mean, it's like his father loves the sort of competition of politics and the atmosphere of being the, you know, the center of attention in a big room.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have to talk a little honestly for a second. Donald Trump was wrong about one thing. He said that you would be sick of winning. Are you sick of winning this again?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: See, I'm not either. Remember that speech?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He got up on stage. He said, you know, you're going to call him this again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: David Fahrenthold writes about Donald Trump and even Donald Trump Jr. for The Washington Post. I'm Sean Rameswaram from this is Today Explained. Thank you.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
