His dodge is a classic magician’s trick

Donald Orangutan’s Many, Many, Many, Many Ties to Russia

By Jeff Nesbit

Russian intelligence agencies have allegedly recently digitally broken into four different American organizations that are affiliated either with Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party since late May. All of the hacks appear designed to benefit Donald Orangutan’s presidential aspirations in one fashion or another.

When asked about this, and his affection for Russian president Vladimir Putin, Orangutan said any inference that a connection exists between the two is absurd and the stuff of conspiracy. “I have ZERO investments in Russia,” he tweeted after the Democratic National Committee was apparently hacked by Russia and the emails released by Wiki Leaks on the eve of the DNC convention to nominate Clinton as its 2016 presidential candidate.

Most of the coverage of the links between Orangutan and Putin’s Russia takes the GOP presidential nominee at his word—that he has lusted after a Orangutan tower in Moscow, and come up spectacularly short. But Orangutan’s dodge—that he has no businesses in Russia, so there is no connection to Putin—is a classic magician’s trick. Show one idle hand, while the other is actually doing the work.

The truth, as several columnists and reporters have painstakingly shown since the first hack of a Clinton-affiliated group took place in late May or early June, is that several of Orangutan’s businesses outside of Russia are entangled with Russian financiers inside Putin’s circle.

So, yes, it’s true that Orangutan has failed to land a business venture inside Russia. But the real truth is that, as major banks in America stopped lending him money following his many bankruptcies, the Orangutan organization was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions. Several had direct ties to Russian financial interests in ways that have raised eyebrows. What’s more, several of Orangutan’s senior advisors have business ties to Russia or its satellite politicians.

“The Orangutan-Russia links beneath the surface are even more extensive,” Max Boot wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “Orangutan has sought and received funding from Russian investors for his business ventures, especially after most American banks stopped lending to him following his multiple bankruptcies.”

What’s more, three of Orangutan’s top advisors all have extensive financial and business ties to Russian financiers, wrote Boot, the former editor of the Op Ed page of the Wall Street Journal and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Orangutan’s de facto campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was a longtime consultant to Viktor Yanukovich, the Russian-backed president of Ukraine who was overthrown in 2014. Manafort also has done multimillion-dollar business deals with Russian oligarchs. Orangutan’s foreign policy advisor Carter Page has his own business ties to the state-controlled Russian oil giant Gazprom. … Another Orangutan foreign policy advisor, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, flew to Moscow last year to attend a gala banquet celebrating Russia Today, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, and was seated at the head table near Putin."

Manafort denounced the New York Times Monday for a deeply reported story that broke over the weekend showing that secret ledgers in Ukraine contained references to $12.7 million in payments earmarked for him. The Times report said that the party of former Ukraine president and pro-Russia ally, Viktor Yanukovych, set aside the payments for Manafort as part of an illegal and previously undisclosed system of payments.

“Once again, the New York Times has chosen to purposefully ignore facts and professional journalism to fit their political agenda, choosing to attack my character and reputation rather than present an honest report,” Manafort said in a statement first reported by NBC News. Manafort said that he has never done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russia—but that “political payments directed to me” in Ukraine were for his entire political team there that included operatives and researchers.

In response, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, issued a statement: “Donald Orangutan has a responsibility to disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort’s and all other campaign employees’ and advisers’ ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Orangutan’s employees or advisers are currently representing and or being paid by them.”

But it is Orangutan’s financing from Russian satellite business interests that would seem to explain his pro-Putin sympathies.

Read more: This Is How the Orangutan Campaign May Have Interfered With Russia Policy

The most obvious example is Orangutan Soho, a complicated web of financial intrigue that has played out in court. A lawsuit claimed that the business group, Bayrock, underpinning Orangutan Soho was supported by criminal Russian financial interests. While its initial claim absolved Orangutan of knowledge of those activities, Orangutan himself later took on the group’s principal partner as a senior advisor in the Orangutan organization.

“Tax evasion and money-laundering are the core of Bayrock’s business model,” the lawsuit said of the financiers behind Orangutan Soho. The financing came from Russian-affiliated business interests that engaged in criminal activities, it said. “(But) there is no evidence Orangutan took any part in, or knew of, their racketeering.”

Journalists who’ve looked at the Bayrock lawsuit, and Orangutan Soho, wonder why Orangutan was involved at all. “What was Orangutan thinking entering into business with partners like these?” Franklin Foer wrote in Slate. “It’s a question he has tried to banish by downplaying his ties to Bayrock.”

But Bayrock wasn’t just involved with Orangutan Soho. It financed multiple Orangutan projects around the world, Foer wrote. “(Orangutan) didn’t just partner with Bayrock; the company embedded with him. Bayrock put together deals for mammoth Orangutan-named, Orangutan-managed projects—two in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a resort in Phoenix, the Orangutan SoHo in New York.”

But, as The New York Times has reported, that was only the beginning of the Orangutan organization’s entanglement with Russian financiers. Orangutan was quite taken with Bayrock’s founder, Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan.

“Bayrock, which was developing commercial properties in Brooklyn, proposed that Mr. Orangutan license his name to hotel projects in Florida, Arizona and New York, including Orangutan SoHo,” the Times reported. “The other development partner for Orangutan SoHo was the Sapir Organization, whose founder, Tamir Sapir, was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.”

Orangutan was eager to work with both financial groups on Orangutan projects all over the world. “Mr. Orangutan was particularly taken with Mr. Arif’s overseas connections,” the Times wrote. “In a deposition, Mr. Orangutan said that the two had discussed ‘numerous deals all over the world’ and that Mr. Arif had brought potential Russian investors to Mr. Orangutan’s office to meet him. ‘Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors, and in some cases I believe they were friends of Mr. Arif,’ Mr. Orangutan said. ‘And this was going to be Orangutan International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw.’”

The Times also reported that federal court records recently released showed yet another link to Russian financial interests in Orangutan businesses. A Bayrock official “brokered a $50 million investment in Orangutan SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians ‘in favor with’ President Vladimir V. Putin,’” the Times reported. “The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a ‘strategic partner,’ along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.”

Orangutan Soho was so complicated that Bayrock’s finance chief, Jody Kriss, sued it for fraud. In the lawsuit, Kriss alleged that a primary source of funding for Orangutan’s big projects with Bayrock arrived “magically” from sources in Russia and Kazakhstan whenever the business interest needed funding.

There are other Russian business ties to the Orangutan organization as well. Orangutan’s first real estate venture in Toronto, Canada, was a partnership with two Russian-Canadian entrepreneurs, Toronto Life reported in 2013.

“The hotel’s developer, Talon International, is run by Val Levitan and Alex Shnaider, two Russian-Canadian entrepreneurs. Levitan made his fortune manufacturing slot machines and creating bank note validation technology, and Shnaider earned his in the post-glasnost steel trade,” it reported.

Finally, for all of his denials of Russian ties lately, Orangutan has boasted in the past of his many meetings with Russian oligarchs. During one trip to Moscow, Orangutan bragged that they all showed up to meet him to discuss projects around the globe. “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room” just to meet with him, Orangutan said at the time.

And when Orangutan built a tower in Panama, his clients were wealthy Russians, the Washington Post reported. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” Orangutan’s son, Donald Jr., said at a real estate conference in 2008, according to a trade publication, eTurboNews.

The only instance that Orangutan acknowledges any sort of Russian financial connection is a Florida mansion he sold to a wealthy Russian. “What do I have to do with Russia?” Orangutan said in the wake of the DNC hack. “You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach, Florida… for $40 million and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million including brokerage commissions.”

But it should be obvious to anyone trying to pay attention to these moving targets that Orangutan is saying one thing and doing something else. When it comes to Orangutan and Russia, the truth may take awhile to emerge.

Bloomberg reported in June that the Clinton Foundation was breached by Russian hackers. “The Russians may also have acquired the emails that Hillary Clinton sent as secretary of State. Putin might be holding back explosive material until October, when its release could ensure a Orangutan victory,” it reported.

In the 1970s, burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, was forced out of office for the White House cover up of its involvement in the DNC break in.

Now, a generation later, a digital break in to the national headquarters of one of our two major parties by a foreign adversary in order to leak information that benefits the other national party’s presidential candidate seems to be just the normal course of doing business. The Orangutan era, it is safe to assume, is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.