These leaked emails are the first evidence that proves that Donald Trump and his family personally knew of Felix Sater’s felony crime and participated in a meeting about covering it up.
Donald Trump hawked the Trump SoHo Condo Hotel extensively on NBC’s The Apprentice, but committed a bank fraud to keep the project afloat the following year, and dragged his family into it. The newly leaked emails from the Sapir Organization’s attorney document a “time sensitive and should not be pushed back” meeting the Trumps demanded on January 21st, 2008.
The meeting happened soon after the New York Times publicly revealed in mid-December 2007 that the Trump Organization’s investor and SoHo partner Bayrock Company’s manager-member Felix Sater had secretly entered financial felony plea deal in the late 1990s.
Donald Trump, his daughter Ivanka and sons Don Jr. and Eric collectively demanded and presumably attended the important meeting to chew out Bayrock about the project, and specifically Felix Sater about his felony past.
We know because Sater wrote Bayrock’s investors complaining that his own company wanted to fire him after meeting the Trumps.
Hiding a financial felon’s involvement is a form of criminal bank fraud. The Trump SoHo project ultimately failed and was foreclosed by lenders. Instead of informing banks and buyers about Sater’s criminal past, as was the Trump Organization’s obligation, the Trump family proceeded to keep the felony secret as Sater engaged in a scheme to hide his interests in the deal.
The information about Trump and Sater defrauding banks has come to light only because attorneys Fred Oberlander and Richard Lerner refused to back down. They filed and are litigating two of the civil cases against the Trump SoHo’s developers.
Federal judges and prosecutors threatened them with prosecution for revealing that Sater was given an illegally light sentence for his crime, in secret. The judges even issued an order that gagged them from telling Congress about the judges’ own misconduct, but the attorneys persisted and are pursuing a civil law claim against the developers of Trump SoHo.
The attorney Richard Lerner has since written an extensive, fact-checked article about the harmful effects of secret sentencing in Law360 based on his wild experiences in the Trump SoHo case with Sater, who became an FBI informant against his mafia partners in the scheme.
The Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is America’s top anti-mafia federal law and the threshold for violating the law is merely participating in a business which engages in a pattern of illegal or fraudulent behavior.
New York state also has a RICO law, which is not subject to the powers of the Presidential pardon and could be enforced by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, alongside any federal investigation.
“The statute of limitations on RICO acts lasts for ten years from the last known act,” for RICO based upon bank fraud, according to lawyer Joshua Gold, who is licensed to practice in New York since 1999. “These emails are less than ten years old.”
Even though Trump’s participation in the project dates back to far more than ten years ago—and was far more than just licensing the family’s brand name—only criminal acts like hiding his partner’s felony count, start the clock ticking on the ten years a prosecutor could call forth a criminal case on the matter.
