Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meeting with the Usual Suspects in Trump Tower, November 17, 2016.
Remember the meeting with Shinzo Abe in Trump Tower, a couple of weeks after the election, when people were somewhat alarmed that Ivanka and Jared sat in? And remember the Mar a Lago national security meeting in February 2017?
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, February 10, 2017
Yesterday Caleb Melby of Bloomberg News reported that by some coincidence the government of Japan entered into a real estate deal with Jared Kushner & family shortly after the February meeting. On March 31 2017, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. closed on a stake in a building in Brooklyn, 175 Pearl Street, owned by the Kushner family. The government of Japan owns a controlling interest in Nippon Telegraph & Telephone. In effect, the government of Japan and the Kushner family are co-owners of the building.
The Brooklyn transaction represented a premium of more than 60 percent on a price-per-square-foot basis over what Kushner Cos. and its partners paid four years earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The deal enabled the Kushner group to take larger ownership stakes in nearby buildings in Brooklyn’s chic Dumbo neighborhood that have signed tenants such as Etsy Inc. and WeWork Cos.
Kushner Cos. is now a co-owner with the NTT unit. The Japanese firm owns 23 percent of the building through limited liability companies plus more through a Normandy-controlled investment fund, a person familiar with the arrangement said. A day after the companies bought 175 Pearl St., the NTT company purchased a stake in Normandy itself. Kushner Cos. maintains a non-controlling share of less than five percent.
The sale was made through a New Jersey company called Normandy, and until yesterday it wasn’t publicly known that Japan was the real purchaser. This is what was reported in March 2017:
Normandy Real Estate Partners is set to close Friday on the $100 million purchase of a majority stake in  at Dumbo Heights, The Real Deal has learned. The 204,000-square-foot property, which has remained vacant for over a year, is part of the complex being developed by Kushner Companies, RFR Realty and LIVWRK.
Normandy, a New Jersey-based real estate investment firm, will take the lead on redevelopment and leasing efforts at the eight-story property. Kushner Companies, LIVWRK and RFR will move into a “single-digit†minority position, sources said. Invesco, which was an equity partner in the building, is being bought out, sources added.
It was not immediately clear if brokers were involved. Representatives for Kushner, RFR and Blackstone declined to comment, while Normandy and LIVWRK did not respond to requests for comment.
Wait, Blackstone? Blackstone CEOÂ Stephen Schwarzman is one Trump’s BFFs. There are allegations floating around that Trump owes Blackstone a ton of money, although I don’t know if that’s been verified. Blackstone has been doing a lot of business with Trump’s buddies, the Saudis, lately.
So I did a little more digging. The Pearl Street property is part of a complex of properties in Brooklyn (including the old Watchtower building) that the Kushners bought and have been developing into office towers. Blackstone was involved in the financing. This is from May 2017:
For Jared Kushner, last summer was a whirlwind of deal-making. On the campaign trail, in the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, the real estate scion was endeavoring to convince his father-in-law, Donald Trump, to install new advisers. At the same time, as CEO of his family’s namesake company, Kushner was helping negotiate one of the largest real estate deals ever completed in Brooklyn, the purchase of a famed commercial property overlooking the East River.
On both fronts, Kushner prevailed. The first week of August, along with two partner firms, he succeeded in acquiring Brooklyn’s Watchtower complex, owned for decades by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for $340 million. Two weeks later he secured the resignation of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, paving the way for Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to take on senior White House roles.
Kushner stepped down from his role as CEO of Kushner Companies (now simply “Kushnerâ€) in January, prior to Trump’s inauguration, and has agreed to divest himself of some assets. But he remains the beneficiary of more than 200 family-owned properties across the U.S., including 25-30 Columbia Heights. That arrangement puts the property’s prospective tenants in an unusual situation. However indirectly, they will be paying rent to a man with an office in the West Wing. Not only that, but a man who has positioned himself as the behind-the-scenes connection point between business and the administration, responsible for overseeing the president’s innovation office and brazenly at ease orchestrating public-private deals.
I love all the name dropping. Here we get to it:
Kushner did not hold back from mixing business and politics while traveling on Trump’s first overseas trip last week, even as reports that he had attempted to establish back-channel communications with Russia began to surface. For example, Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder and CEO of the Blackstone Group—which provided financing for the Columbia Heights acquisition—joined Kushner in Riyadh, while riding high on the news that Saudi Arabia had agreed to invest $20 billion in a Blackstone infrastructure fund. (Schwarzman heads the White House’s business-advisory council.)
Of course, Blackstone might not have been involved in the deal with Japan,but I thought it was interesting. Now, back to Bloomberg:
Trump’s victory was a source of acute concern in Japan. He ran a protectionist, Japan-bashing campaign, vowed to drop a Pacific trade deal, accused Tokyo of manipulating its currency, threatened to remove U.S. troops from the country and even suggested Japan might have to develop its own nuclear weapons. When Trump won, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe skipped a planned Peru visit and flew to New York to be the first head of state to personally congratulate the president-elect in a Trump Tower meeting that included Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who was still running Kushner Cos. at the time.
Trump warmed to Abe and, after taking office, White House officials asked Finance Minister Taro Aso to join Abe on his next visit for trade talks with Vice President Mike Pence. The Japanese leaders extended their push in a February 2017 trip to the White House, where Aso and Pence talked about economic cooperation. Afterward, Abe joined Kushner and other members of the Trump family aboard Air Force One for a flight to Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort owned by the president.
NTT Urban Development and Normandy bought the Brooklyn property six weeks later from the Kushner group, which included Invesco Ltd. Atlanta-based Invesco had a majority stake in the property, which was operated by Kushner and Aby Rosen’s RFR Holding LLC.
Now, a year later, the Pearl Street property still sits empty and undeveloped. And ugly, I might add. This is what it looks like:
175 Pearl Street, Brooklyn
Needs some work, I’d say. See also Rachel Maddow’s report on this last night.
The Grifter in Chief and his family are America's Putin lite.
Anybody else play with Kenner Set as a kid? It was a plastic construction-set toy, with red beams and girders that only fit together in very square geometries that reflected US society in 1959.
175 Pearl looks like it could have been made from Kenner Set parts.
elkern… Thanks for the flashback. I remember Kenner sets. It got me thinking about my Davy Crockett cereal bowl that I got for getting a good report card. Those were the days! I loved that bowl.
https://www.antiquesnavigator.com/archive/2016/09/13/311692454437.jpg
I had a Lone Ranger cereal bowl.
An architect friend refers to that style as Mid 20th Century Institutional
I feel cheated. I just had a plain cereal bowl. But, on the other hand, my parents took me to see Roy Rogers and Trigger in person. I fell in love with Roy when I was about 6 yo and was going to marry him when I grew up. Unfortunately, Dale Evans wouldn't get out of the way. But he's still my favorite cowboy.
grannyeagle..Happy trails to you. Just the other night I was listening to Roy singing, Don't fence me in, on You Tube. I enjoy listening to the oldies. My wife doesn't enjoy my selection in music. She overheard me listening to Lawrence Welk a while back and now she makes wear headphones so she doesn't have to listen to my kind of music. Life is so unfair!
Sigh. America is lost and may never be found again! McCabe has been fired two days before he retired; thus, he loses his pension. Look up the word trump in the dictionary and you will find the definition as "cruelty beyond all imagination."
My cereal never made it to the bowl. Ate it straight from the box. Still do today, stuffing it in my face, one large handful after another. I never sent away for those fancy-schmancy bowls and spoons.
The level of graft and corruption is just overwhelming, and its having sort of a numbing effect, where when stuff like this comes out, its so routine that its like, meh.
Bonnie..Yeah, It really boils my blood to hear Trump say that McCabe's firing is a great day for democracy. Especially coming from a shit bag who isn't capable of telling the truth. Every other word out of his mouth is a lie. I doubling down on my prayers that Trump and his brood all get indicted.
What Trump did to McCabe won't sit very well with the intelligence community. If he manages to provoke a response, or can find something that can be made to appear like a response, he'll use it to flog his "deep state" conspiracy theory, and his supporters will buy it.
I have long thought that the Sons of the Pioneers were great. I love their chord progressions, kind of halfway between Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks.