Trump as mob boss

Anthony Pratt, one of Australia’s wealthiest men, made his way into Donald Trump’s inner circle with money and flattery.

Mr. Pratt, the chairman of a multinational paper and packaging company and one of Australia’s richest men, had already paid to join Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

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Their interactions were ultimately swept up in one of the [...] federal criminal cases that the special counsel Jack Smith brought against Mr. Trump [...] in which Mr. Trump is charged with taking classified documents with him from the White House when he left office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. Mr. Pratt is listed as a potential witness who could testify against Mr. Trump at a trial next year.

In his interviews with prosecutors, Mr. Pratt recounted how Mr. Trump once revealed to him sensitive information about American nuclear submarines, an episode that Mr. Trump denies. Another witness told prosecutors about hearing uncorroborated reports that Mr. Pratt spent $1 million for tickets to a Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve gala — voluntarily paying the club a huge markup for tickets that actually cost $50,000 or less.

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Behind closed doors, however, Mr. Pratt described Mr. Trump’s business practices as being “like the mafia,” according to covert recordings obtained by “60 Minutes Australia” and shared with The Times.

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“Trump says, ‘Would you go and tell that guy over there to steal for me?’ And so he can say, ‘I never told the guy to steal.’ And things like that is how Trump gets away with it.”

Mr. Pratt also boasts in these private conversations about his relationship with Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is under indictment in Georgia on charges of conspiring with Mr. Trump and others to subvert the 2020 election results.

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“Rudy is someone that I hope will be useful one day,” Mr. Pratt says.

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On the recordings, Mr. Pratt recounts how Mr. Trump shared with him in December 2019 what he describes as elements of a conversation the president had with Iraq’s leader right after a U.S. military strike there aimed at Iranian-backed forces. Days later, a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad would kill Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.

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Mr. Pratt also describes on the recording how Mr. Trump asked his wife, Melania, to strut around Mar-a-Lago in her bikini “so all the other guys could get a look at what they were missing.”

  NY

Ha. Not like he was getting a look at that himself. (I'm guessing. Not without paying her anyway.)  According to Pratt, Melania was sitting there at the time and responded, "I'll do that when you walk around with me in your bikini."

By the end of Mr. Trump’s first year in office, his presidency was bearing fruit for Mr. Pratt. The Australian Financial Review estimated that Mr. Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cut helped increase Mr. Pratt’s personal wealth by more than $2 billion. At the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party that year, Mr. Trump was captured on video feting Mr. Pratt, a recording that Mr. Pratt then emailed to Mr. Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue. At the time, Mr. Pratt and Mr. Perdue were also discussing the U.S. food supply, an issue vital to the packaging industry.

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On one of the recordings, Mr. Pratt recounts a drive in Mr. Trump’s presidential motorcade, in December 2019, when the president regaled him and Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, about the airstrike he had ordered in Iraq a short time before.

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In an interview, Mr. Graham said he had no recollection of the conversation. And it is unclear whether the conversation with an Iraqi leader, as described by Mr. Trump in Mr. Pratt’s account, actually happened.

Since when do we take Lindsey Graham's word for anything?

Three months after Mr. Trump left the presidency, Mr. Pratt joined Mr. Trump in his office at Mar-a-Lago for a chat, during which the Australian businessman suggested that Australia should purchase submarines from the United States.

That prompted Mr. Trump to lean in, as if aware he was sharing a confidence, in Mr. Pratt’s account to investigators. According to Mr. Pratt, Mr. Trump described the number of nuclear warheads that U.S. submarines typically travel with, and their stealthy proximity to Russian waters.

(Matched pair:  Stephen Colbert said Pratt's hair looks like it was made out of Trump's face, and Trump's hair looks like it was made out of Pratt's face.)