Speaking of Qatar and Trump family corruption

Here’s a consolidated excerpt of this podcast with Dan Alexander from the interview about Donald Trump’s previously secret payments from the nation-state of Qatar:

“The president does not have to disclose who has tenants are. He’s asked to say to federal ethics officials where he is – which companies are paying him money – but he doesn’t have to say which companies are paying those companies money. So, it’s a loophole that allows him to take any enormous sums of money from lots and lots of different places without any disclosure.

And so what I wanted to do is figure out where all that money is actually coming from. And so I went through, property by property, and looked to try to see who the tenants were. And I found a document that was sorta like the ‘Holy Grail’ that I’ve been missing, that listed all of the tenants inside Trump’s two hardest-to-access buildings, which were 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York City and 555 California Street in San Francisco. These are actually Donald Trump’s two most valuable buildings in his entire portfolio, and they have a lot of tenants paying a lot of money.

I saw on this document that one of the tenants was the Qatar Investment Authority, and my eyes popped out of my head because I never heard of this! The Qatar Investment Authority is a sovereign wealth fund that basically acts as an arm of the Qatari government. So, if you were to picture a tenant who would be a problem for a president to have, one of the top five names that you would come up with would be the Qatar investments.

[...]

But the strangest thing, what was it?

There was no one there!

At the reception desk behind the glass, there was no one in their conference rooms that have glass walls. I could see through into a lot of the office. I walked to other entrances. There was no one in other parts of the office. I knocked as hard as I could. They were glass doors. I didn’t want to break them, but I knocked as hard as I could without breath, without threatening the break. No one answered. I ended up coming back the next day at a different time, thinking, you know, maybe their hours are just strange. The same thing, nobody answered. Then, your mind starts connecting the dots:

Here is a foreign government leasing space in Donald Trump’s most valuable building.

No one knows about it.

  Dworkin Report

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.