Eric Trump Bragged About The Family’s Russian Money Connection To Finance Golf Courses
A bombshell new report reveals that in 2014 Eric Trump bragged “we have all the funding we need out of Russia” when talking about his family’s 17-course, international golf empire.
Author James Dodson recounted the story this weekend to Boston’s NPR radio station WBUR:
“Trump was strutting up and down, talking to his new members about how they were part of the greatest club in North Carolina,” Dodson says. “And when I first met him, I asked him how he was — you know, this is the journalist in me — I said, ‘What are you using to pay for these courses?’ And he just sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million.”
“So when I got in the cart with Eric,” Dodson says, “as we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’ And this is what he said. He said:
‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’
I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’ Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting.”
The Trump Organization announced a partnership with Textron Corporation in 2004, who entered the market in 1991 and became America’s largest golf course lender.
Textron Corporation financed the Bedminster, New Jersey course, which Trump used extensively though the transition and plans to spend his winter weekends (at obscene cost to taxpayers).
Coincidentally, former Trump campaign advisor Richard Burt —who is a foreign agent registered to Alfa Bank — used to serve on the International Advisory Committee to Textron Corporation’s Board of Directors, though it’s totally unknown if the parties interacted, or if Burt and Trump ever met prior to the 2016 campaign due to the company’s golf financing relationship.
The Trump Organization’s ties to Russia increased dramatically in the wake of a 2008 keynote speech delivered by Donald Trump Jr. in Moscow to an Adam Smith Conference about real estate.
Less than two months later, Trump sold a $100 million dollar Florida home to the Russian fertilizer king.
That’s when Trump Jr. delivered his infamous quotation about Russians “making up a disproportionate cross section of their assets.”
Financial markets that enabled golf club construction, acquisition and development crashed in 2008 when the oversupplied market for memberships collided with the worldwide financial crisis, ending a two decades long boom in the sport.
In 2009, Textron Corporation exited the golf mortgage lending market permanently.
That’s probably why Eric Trump bragged about having all the funding his family needed to nationally known golf writer in the Charlotte, North Carolina outing — because nobody else was getting financing for those kinds of properties.
They still aren’t.
Of Trump’s 17 golf courses, ten were purchased after 2009, when Textron had already exited the finance business.
Two of Trump’s courses were purchased during the 2009 calendar year at the peak of the bust.
It’s significant that Trump was able to obtain so much financing in a barren mortgage market, because it enabled him to purchase those assets at a massive discount, buying properties at a price below the replacement cost of those golf courses.
Unusually, Trump acquired this flood of capital at very same time he was busy suing his primary real estate lender Deutsche Bank over his Chicago tower and at the same time, worldwide financial markets melted down. New lenders are traditionally extremely reluctant to lend to a borrower who had filed what appears to be a frivolous lawsuit demanding $3 billion dollars in damages against his current bankers in court.
Once again, Trump’s Russian business ties are surfacing, and this report directly contradicts the 20 times they’ve denied having any connections.
From 2009 onward there hasn’t been a steady source of golf financing, yet the Trump Organization went on a worldwide building and acquisition spree after damaging its relationship with the firm’s primary bank financing partner.
Donald Trump’s golf course buying spree was plainly fueled by “alternative financing” after the Great Recession.
According to James Dodson’s new report, Eric Trump has admitted that the family’s golf course funding was from Russian sources.
President Trump still refuses to release tax returns which would quantify just how much money he’s borrowed from Moscow over the years, and more importantly, from whom.
The revelation that Eric Trump bragged about Russian money only adds to the urgency
Watch Donald Trump Jr. tell a 2012 interviewer about his family’s Russian business ties in a video first discovered by the Democratic Coalition’s Scott Dworkin:
