.times of Israel
In his new book, “House of Trump, House of Putin,” which was published last week, Unger sets out to show how, through the decades, first the Russian mafia, and then the Russian oligarchs, built a network of relationships with Trump and with Trump’s business empire, which centrally included buying hundreds upon hundreds of luxury apartments in Trump’s dozens of residential towers. That vast income for Trump — Russian money which, Unger claims, was essentially laundered via Trump companies using the loopholes of America’s “virtually unregulated” real estate industry — played a vital role in the resurgence of his ailing and failing businesses, helping Trump rise from the financial ashes to begin the journey that ultimately took him all the way to the White House.
En route, Unger charges with incendiary detail in the book, Trump became nothing less than “a Russian asset”: The Russians saved him from financial ruin; Russian mafia bosses made their homes in Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in Manhattan; and an international real estate firm called Bayrock, “staffed, owned and financed by émigrés from Russia and the former Soviet Union, operated out of the building.”
“I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA,” Trump tweeted in January 2017. “NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING.” In fact, Unger shows, Trump became entangled with dozens of individuals tied to the Russians — some of them notorious criminals, some of them alleged criminals, some of them neither.
But Unger’s revelations directly impact Israel as well. About half of those 59 named “Russia Connections” are Jewish, and about a dozen of the 59 are Israeli citizens and/or have deep connections to Israel. (Several of those he names, such as Lev Leviev, Alexander Mashkevich and Mikhail Chernoy, are very wealthy and prominent businessmen with direct access to the highest levels of Israel’s elected leadership.)
Those numbers necessarily raise questions about whether Israel too is being compromised by Putin’s Russia — about whether unsavory characters are exploiting Israel’s Law of Return to gain Israeli citizenship and by extension access to the West; about whether Israel, with its own lax financial regulations and inadequate law enforcement, is serving as a conduit for money laundering by Moscow-linked individuals and companies; and about whether Moscow is building strategic relationships with Israeli politicians — as Unger charges it has done to such phenomenal effect with the president of the United States — in order to influence and if necessary subvert Israeli policies in its interest.