She washes and gilds all she touches
Virginia Heffernan points out that corruption requires the legitimate world to protect its gains. Star witness: Princess Ivanka.
Crooks seeking legitimacy are not fenced out in America. The U.S. is teeming with enablers champing at the bit to serve rich thugs: lawyers, lobbyists, bankers, security firms, consultants and PR people.
Like Paul Manafort for instance, and like…Princess Ivanka.
Oh, Ivanka. Her livelihood is as opaque as her full-coverage foundation, but she plays a critical role in her father’s administration — and in the broader danse macabre of corruption and legitimacy.
The foundation dig is cruel but warranted – I noticed when watching that clip the other day where Princess rebukes the “inappropriate question” about the King’s pussygrabbing: she’s absolutely plastered in makeup, as if wearing a clay mask. It’s somewhat creepy.
The so-called first daughter proves that “laundering” applies to more than money. She washes and gilds just about everything she touches. Consider her warehouses upon warehouses of petroleum-based separates, many of them sewn for poverty pay in sweatshops. When you call this schmatte smorgasboard the Ivanka Trump Collection it does brisk business — if not on Rodeo Drive, then in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
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It’s impossible to keep track of all the gangsters Ivanka has palled around with. But what’s truly damning are the shady real-estate projects she has made rise and go forth.
In 2006, she oversaw the development of the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City. The project was connected to a Brazilian money launderer later arrested for fraud and forgery as well as a Russian investor who’d previously been jailed in Israel for kidnapping…
Ivanka was also a ranking official on the Trump SoHo, which has since shed the name Trump. In 2010, as ProPublica and WNYC have reported, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office began building a criminal case against Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. for using inflated sales figures to defraud prospective buyers. After receiving a visit from Trump family lawyer and campaign donor Marc Kasowitz, then-DA Cyrus Vance Jr. backed off.
There’s more, there’s Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver, which the FBI is now investigating.
When an organization exists not to build buildings but to brand them, its business is optics. And Ivanka has long window-dressed the Trump Organization’s deals. She was born to make the shoddy look cute, to legitimize corruption.
And if it’s the coverup and not the crime that will ultimately bring down the Trump syndicate, Ivanka may turn out to be the point person for its demise.
Sad.
There’s also the bit about the Panama property being the scene of an armed standoff between local authorities and upstanding citizens who have been falsely accused of destroying documents and money laundering.
The interface between business and organised crime requires heavy policing. We need a war on corruption.