Transcripts For CSPAN2 David Enrich Dark Towers 20240713

Club. I want to take a second might be going to please silentio cell phones. We will be recording audio and video so thats a great incentive to try phones, and also to ask questions with open the floor up, theres a standing mic here in the middle when we do that after the talk here following the talk and the questions there will be assigning. We have books available behind the register. After the talk if you want to get up and purchase book and come back david would be more than happy to sign the. Finally after everything is said and done if you could collapse futures pictures about them up against a surface, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Tonight i have the pleasure of hosting david unhra, plaintiff entered at New York Times. He previously was a reporter and editor at the wall street journal in new york and london. Before that he was journal of European Banking london and has won numerous journalism awards including the 2016 award for feature writing. He is the author of the spider network, how a math genius and gain of scheming bankers pulled off one of the greatest games in history which is shortlisted for the Financial Times bestselling book of you. His new book dark towers Deutsche Bank, donald trump, and an epic trail of destruction, david traces the banks darkest of its relationship with you as president as well as tragic case of william brooks. Everyone please join me in welcoming david and rick david enrich. [applause] hello. I have the pleasure of doing lots of luck event of the past two years from my previous book and ive done book events like this, which im not kidding, six people in the room, and so this is just awesome. Im going to take a picture because [laughing] my wife were not believe this. Ill take a couple pictures. So thank you all for coming. Its an honor to be here and is extremely gratifying to see a turn out like this for a book about a European Bank that no one has ever heard of. So i just wanted, i guess for nonfiction audiences, nonfiction books people generally do not read to start by want to read just the opening section of the book which is just take a couple minutes just to set the scene and then i will explain why im setting the scene and i got into writing this book in the first place. It was a little before 1 p. M. When a wiry american emerged from the tube station into a drizzle, the type of dreary january that the earned london its reputation as a decrepit place in the long winter but the man looked around. Normally even in this dark season the block was pretty and bustling with shoppers. This sunday and early 2014 it was desolate. He didnt feel well. Get woken up groggy from the previous night drug fueled jam session with his band. Then on the card underground train on its way to chelsea yet been killed or by surge of negative energy like a dark spirit had brushed past him. He lit a a cigarette and trudgd towards the entrance to the gallery, he said down and if you attempt to stay dry. He was scaled to brunch at the gallery cafe with his parents. The last time eating them was a month earlier in december 2013 people they set set off for the caribbean and then the vocation in oman. He just turned 38 while he was a talented musician with 34 albums to his name, none were charttoppers, he lived up to his father puts them in years as a Senior Executive at Deutsche Bank one of the Worlds Largest Financial Institutions. Tall skinny scraggly his friend sometimes told he resembled a trip. He was determined on the senate not to get an earful from his mother about looking like a slot. He wore slacks, a blue blazer and a black woolen cap. At exactly 1 00 he arrived at the arch brick wall that snaked around the gallery. He was notorious in your stomach for never being on time but he was was in his upsets with punctual pairs were nowhere to be seen. Where are you guys he texted . She didnt respond. Val wanted to cross a pedestrian street bruising the rope boutiques and overpriced shops. He came across a bookstore which specialist and coffee tables about art and culture. For the past couple of years thou had been collecting rare first editions, the older and more famous the author of the better. He was so into his hobby that you can follow to work for an organization that gathered unwanted books from estate sales and distribute them to needing children. He would sit to the stacks hidden for hidden gems for his own library. The bookstore was mostly empty. I like this. Val browsed until something caught his eye. An enormous volume with a shimmering silver color priced at 650 pounds from about 1000. It was a limitededition collection of iconic photos of the beatles including the one of a pillow fight in the paris hotel room. The book was signed by the photographer photography pages or so luxuriously metallic that he could see his reflection in then. He started to daydream about convincing his parents to buy for them as a belated birthday gift. His iphone buzzed interrupting his reverie. The call was from a blocked number. Val answer. Woman with a thick accent. Val was pretty sure it was his parents housekeeper. Emergence emergency to your father, your father. Val asked which was talking about . He couldnt get her to integrate the thing he could get was to his parents flat which was a mile away. He put the book down, raced outside and hailed a black cat. 21 evelyn gordons instructs the got driver. The twominute drive felt endless. The cant seem to crawl through londons traffic choked streets past daily townhouses and brick apartment blocks and highend restaurant and a granite grocery stores. Val went to the potholes seems he might encounter when you write. His father was hurt. They because of a family argument. Maybe its just he was locked at its computer and need his sons help. The taxi pulled onto evelyn gardens, a wide quite street but instead of having a meeting about cars to park in the middle as well on the sides. Now in addition to the bmws and audis and mopeds, and maintenance was stationed at the curb. Val paid the cabbie and sprinted across the street. His parents lived in a flat on the third floor of white trimmed red brick building. Its heavy black door normally open the advisor was ajar. Val galloped up two flights of stairs. The georges parents apartment was wide open. In the middle of a hallway bill was lying on his back his eyes close. Neck brace tilted his head back at an unnatural angle. Paramedics rustic tube jutted from his mouth. What the f is this . Val screen. He killed himself, his mother gasped. He hung himself with daisies leash. Thats obvious and upsetting way to start this talk and upsetting way to start the book. This was general 26, 2014, and 90s after that i lived in london at the time and was a journalist working for the wall street journal. I got in touch with val because i heard about the suicide, a very Senior Executive at Deutsche Bank and i wanted to learn more. There were rumors flying all over london that broeksmit committed suicide in part because upset about set the been going on at the bank. He was extreme close to the banks ceo at the time, and i wanted to forget what was going on. Bill and his wife had three children val was stepsons light divvied up the task of contacting his widow and his family members with a couple of my colleagues. And i got val. Val had an active social Media Presence at the time. He was in a band called bikini robot army, and the band was active on twitter and instagram and facebook. And val was a character i could tell right away. He was posting lots of pictures about doing wild and crazy stuff, lots of drugs, lots of vaguely pornographic pictures of his exploits with women. He discusses, was a completely appropriate guy. On his website i emailed him and it is myself and said, im looking into your father understand more about what happened and why and hoping we can talk. I had been a journalist at that point for i dont know, like 14 years or so and i written lots of emails of the nature made lots of phone calls of that nature and i been conditioned, like every other journalist, you almost never get a response in a situation and is usually a situation where you maybe send that initial email and you want to be respectful because theres a tragedy and the family is grieving but you also need to be persistent. That was my opening salvo unexpected over the coming days and weeks i would making additional phone calls, emails, maybe showing up at his home. Lo and behold the next day val responded to me and he said what is it you want to know about my father asked i explained i heard rumors about what happened with his dad, and val grudgingly agreed to get on the phone with me a few days later on the condition of my colleagues and i stop arresting the rest of his family, which seemed fair enough. So a few days later i i got one phone with val and the started a journey that has led to this book. Because val it turned out had gotten onto his dads computer or shortly after his death and it figured out the passwords to his personal email addresses. Theres a personal email account, yahoo, gmail accounts inside this account he would eventually find his father had been sending and receiving thousands and thousands of emails and documents related to his work at the bank. And val eventually turn them all over to me. What it showed, bill broeksmit paterno, i started doing a lot of research into who bill broeksmit was and he becomes, he and try to become the protagonists of this book. Bill broeksmit was american, a ministers son in illinois, rural illinois. He became a banker like he was kind of not your normal reckless aggressive banker. He was much more cerebral, thoughtful and intellectual, conservative. He became known both first at Merrill Lynch where he got his start in the banking world and then it Deutsche Bank as the man with the ethical compass and the conscience of the place picky with the guy who, this was an industry dominated dash macwants to go, go, go, step on the gas, shoot first, ask questions later. Bill was kind of a super ego when he was a way to second, this looks a little too easy to actually be right. Shouldnt ask more questions . He was smart enough and respected enough that people listen to him. And so what happened at Deutsche Bank over the years is its kind of a parable for what happened in the Banking Industry writ large over a long period of time. Banks went from being these companies that essentially existed to serve their customers, and they became entities, not only their customers. Their customers, the communities in which they operated, their employees, government and, of course, it was their shareholders, investors, the owners. They went from serving a whole wide range of constituencies like that to serving just one very narrow constituency which was their shareholders. That meant their goal went from doing whats best for clients and communities to doing whats best for shareholders, and that in maximizing profits as quickly as possible. As a got to know bill broeksmit to talking to his friends and family members and former colleagues, and then got to kw him through reading his emails and seeing him in action trying to curtail peoples risktaking trying to remember the fundamental question of is this best for clients . If not, why on earth are we doing it . It was quite an oldfashioned, and i kept thinking about this. We didnt write free much about this at the time because this was 2014, 2015 and its interesting and Deutsche Bank was really Important Financial Institution and really troubled Financial Institution at the time but i was working for an american newspaper and this is a german bank, a European Bank that despite its great problems and despite its big presence in the United States no one really cared. And then in 2016 a certain someone started running for president , and that certain someone had a very, very special relationship with Deutsche Bank. Donald trump was completely offlimits to the mainstream financial world because he had this nasty tendency of defaulting on virtually every loan he received for a very long period of time, and thats not, when banks are looking for customers to do business with, someone who it has welldocumented pattern of stiffing his lenders is generally not your first point of call. And so he was just offlimits. Banks would not touch them. They his phone calls. I heard some crazy stories about the Great Lengths that banks would go to avoid doing business with donald trump, even his friends wouldnt touch him. Theres one anecdote about telling people about. You can tennesseebased we know about trump these days, and so the story goes like this. Its at bear stearns which was, i dont know if anyone remembers bear stearns, it used to be a wall street bank and then it collapsed because it wasnt very well run. Even bear stearns wouldnt touch donald trump. Bear stearns new guy is one of the top executives a guy named ace, and the use of relationship with ace to get his foot in the door and propose that bear stearns lend him when hundred million dollars. Ace told one of the bankers okay, go do with donald trump. He wants 100 million. The banker talks to donald trump. Its not a crazy page trump is making but it felt so they will not lend him anything. He says donald, will call you back when make a decision. He just decided he will not call them back. Trump is probably smart enough to get the message that the lack of return phone call means no, thank you will not be loaning you when hundred million dollars. Trump didnt get the message and kept calling the guy back over and over again. The banker did not have to say no and such is wouldnt answer, return his phone calls. Trump took ace greenberg, this kind boss, probably his bosses boss after breakfast and said ace, why can he get my phone calls returned . It so rude. Ace come stomping back in after breakfast and says what you do not return his phone calls . Its summary. The banker says we can solve this problem by lending him 100 main dollars otherwise i dont know which one you to do do. Ace says we are obviously not doing that but they got away to solve this problem. The banker thinks about it for a look at it and finally decides hes got a plan. He donald trump and he says donald, im so sorry ive been dodging or phone calls. It truly rude a guide to say we cant make this loan. Trump says why cant you . He says ace greenberg doesnt want to. [laughing] it gets better contestant. Ace greenberg says or trump says, what i talk about . Ace and i are buddies. Just this month i had with him. The banker says yes, dollar, d thats just the problem. Ace came back and said there are four people we can do business with what we dont want to be on the other side of the loan from. Henry kravitz, l gates, Warren Buffett and donald trump. [laughing] and trump pauses for a second and thinks about it and says, yeah, i can see that. That makes sense. [laughing] and i heard that story and i just thought to myself, i sometimes discount the value that Investment Bankers provide and the solutions they put up and had to say this to be a whole new appreciation for the cleverness of some Investment Bankers. Anyway, Deutsche Bank did not have the scruples that bear stearns had when he came to deciding whom to link to. And it was so eager to develop a foothold in america and develop a presence on wall street that it needed to pick up the scraps that of the banks wouldnt touch. Donald trump was one of those scraps, and its starting in the late 1990s the bank started making low turn out to be about 2 billion in loans to trump over the next 20 years. By the time trump was elected president he still owed about 350 million. Deutsche bank was by far his largest creditor. They financed all of this marquee projects including here in washington, what used to be the Old Post Office building that is now the trump something hotel. I come sort of looking back at this relationship i develop with val, everything i learned about his son dash son of thing i let his father and his fathers career and being the voice of conservatism and Risk Management inside this reckless outofcontrol bank, and i realize maybe this was the vehicle to tell the story of how this random, obscure german bank with a name that no one can pronounce and no one no, no onn america has heard of, how it became not only synonymous with financial destruction and economic doom and mayhem, but also really helped propel donald trump to the white house. So i spent the past two years or so reporting and writing about this for the New York Times. Primarily focused on the trump relationship because i already knew the Deutsche Bank story. And it has just been, im a nerd, and i spent a lot of time probably the past ten years focusing on an attesting that Deutsche Bank and wondering why no one would pay attention, by editors kind of rolled her eyes when he started talking about it. Its been such a pleasure to actually have a way to tell the story now in a way that amazingly people seem to care. Thats my stance and i would be happy to answer questions. Sure people have a lot of questions about trump and ive lots of answers. [laughing] [applause] i was told to make sure people use the microphone. Given your research on the origins and history of Deutsche Bank, is it your view that the banks financing of auschwitz, which i assume included its crematoriums, was that, did they know of what they were doing . Yes. Well, its not quite that simple, but first of all their support of nazis is just more extensive than the construction oshawa spigot also finance the construction right next door to a chemical factory that provided poison gas. You guys know this. Deutsche bank was the company that contacted many jewish owned businesses all over europe as germany conquered those country. It took over the local banks and stock stop lending and kind of help get juice out of the companies that off the customer ranks. It took the gold of the nazis had taken out of the teeth and out of the jewelry boxes of jews and others and sold it to provide the nazis with hard currency. In fairness to the bank, which sounds ridiculous from what i just said, this is what large German Companies were doing in order to survive at the time. So Deutsche Bank is not unique in having done something evil. It is clearly a party to genocide and i think its been easy for the bank with the benefit of many decades having passed to chitosan ties that and explain it away. The reality is that we dont know for fact Deutsche Bank knew exactly what was happening inside auschwitz or what that gas was going to be used for or whose goal it was they were selling in istanbul. I think we can kind of apply a just reasonable standard to this looking back, and how could they not have known . Its well known. One of the Board Members of the Chemical Company that was making the poison gas was basically the ceo of Deutsche Bank. If he didnt know, i mean how could he not know . But i dont approve of it. I think its safe the assumption Deutsche Bank knew about this and did it anyway. I think its dangerous to make too many historical comparisons to something that is really incomparable in human history, but it is true that Deutsche Bank over and over again in its 150 years to come this is its 150th birthday by the way. Happy birthday, Deutsche Bank. Over and over again they have done the expedient thing in order to take shortcuts in order to increase profits and sometimes to survive, and that has led them to commit many, many crimes. Obviously for taking genocide stands out as uniquely evil but theyve done a lot of that stuff and it generally is because they are rushing to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, consequences be damned. Wow. Thank you. Youre welcome. Thats probably more than you were looking for. First of all thank you for this book. Im a financial regulator and i think somebodys stories of the db needed telling for far too long so thank you. Where are you regular . [inaudible] i like to ask about im sure youre where val, i cant pronounce his last name, im sure youre aware that val is very active on social media and are not actually portraying his version of events. His theory of what hes saying is generally its much more direct, the connections between money mongering through Deutsche Bank to paying trump, the nuts and bolts of it. I have finished a book and i dont like to go that deep into it but hes pretty adamant you do not touch on that, at least to the extent he wishes you did. I was hoping you could comment on the. I was hoping someone would bring this up because im going to answer question i promise you but let me just step back a little bit first. So val and and i go back aboutx years, and one of the things im good at as a journalist it turns out im really good at working with sources and the good at getting people who are not supposed to talk to talk, and that, im not very good a lot of things but thats one of things im good at. I had a lot of relationship with complicated sources of my career and val for it away no close competitors is the hardest most complicated most intense source relationship ive ever had. Thats partly because ive known him for so long. Its partly because ive known them in the context of him having suffered this awful tragedy. With his fathers death. Its also partly because val is a complicated person. This is someone who was shoved into the foster care system at a very young age and is basically left by his family even though they were there and couldve taken care of him. He was left there. Its some of his subsequent to that has had a lot of problems with Substance Abuse and addiction. And those are issues that he continues to deal with. He is a troubled, complicated person whom i care about and whom i have tremendous amount of respect for and sympathy for. Val and i are not getting along that well right now, were not. Ill be honest about that. Thats frankly kind of an understatement. Back in october i wrote a story about val for the New York Times that kind of described a very public at a relationship that i just alluded to, and in that i mentioned the fact val had a history of Substance Abuse, history of credit card theft i noted one of the things that was motivating val as he tried to share his fathers secret documents with me, including myself over the years was that he really want to make a name for himself. He wanted to become famous, trying to get a feel deal and i was just out and out no, i was at the visiting him last week for podcast were doing and what i told that is i actually regret what i wrote, how the tone i took in that article. I think it was kind of accurate and to think on his from my perspective and is written in the first person but it was a little too hard. It was a little too mean and i told him im sorry and i am. So i say that all not to like just have you guys be my therapist, but because i think this provides context as to why val so angry. So val after the article read which i think was early october has been on, hes been waging a war against me online, which is very tricky for me to deal with, and completely unfair territory. One thing hes been doing is talking other news outlets, and i say this with respect but that are not the New York Times or the Washington Post or the wall street journal or bloomberg or quarters of the associate press, the Financial Times or cnn or pbs or npr, and again they are scrappy and have different standards and they are run by younger people with less experience. Seriously i i say that with respect. Some other stuff that has been appearing that trenches been after spreading which really oversimplifies things, there is not everyone who in business journalism has been focused on Deutsche Bank and tone trump has spent much of the past probably five years, certainly the past four years searching for proof of this elusive rumor that Deutsche Bank, its not really Deutsche Bank that financially supporting trump. It is russia that is financially supporting trump and theres a tremendous amount of smoke there and sense of circumstantial evidence and everyone is looking for the fire, and me more than anyone and meant i wish i could stand here right now its a i found it but i didnt. And neither did val. And you did the news outlets he has been talking to the First Amendment of circumstantial evidence that provides this book provides the most conferences and i could description of what the circumstantial evidence is and what it means and how to interpret it. But if youre reading things like this kremlin man mystically financing trump loans, that may be true and thats the rumor weve all been chasing the media for many years now here there is not proof of it and val does not proof of it. I wish i did have proof it but i dont. I didnt get all the way to the projects i dont know but there is a lot of news run Donald Trumps tax returns and the Deutsche Bank has been subpoenaed to produce them. You would imagine if tboned of money they a lot of financial documents. What is your take on whether they going to produce them, whether they have them . They probably dont have them. This is another weird one where my reporting in my life is intersected, serendipitously with the news here. First of all, as background, there are couple of the congressional committees here, the house financials to me and House Intelligence Committee both conducting investigations that involve Deutsche Bank and its relationship with donald trump. Both of those committees have subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, i guess last spring, seeking basically everything they have on donald trump which includes not only donald trump but sam and his companies as well. That includes his tax returns, it includes any kind of Financial Statements they have related to his business or himself. It includes any documentation about loans or other services they provided it includes documentation about any suspicious transactions the bank protected evolving trump and commissioners accounts. And so one of the things kushner. I stopped talking some my within at the bank during the time at all these trump loans were made, and a couple of my sources were involved in deciding whether to make the loans and human trump financial documents as part of the Due Diligence process. Two of those people told me that not only did they have some of trumps tax returns, they had it was a poll tax return, it was the first several pages, i cant even remember the form it is, its been a long going back from 2011 2014 i think. Not only did they say they had them, these people had seen them. Theyd seen them in the banks possession. And then in in a Court Hearingn federal court, trump suit Deutsche Bank for complying with his speedy did he suit stood to return to him . No, to block them from complying. In a Court Hearing Deutsche Bank said lawyers said you know what . We do at some tax return but we dont have president trumps personal tax returns. This left me scratching my head because i talk to people who said they had seen them and so i called, i texted one of these people and they said youre not going to believe what just happened in court. They said they dont have them. He said, im not even going to say but there was some obscene words use any said they are lying. Ive seen them with my own eyes. I dont know if they destroy them or return them or what but it definitely had them. It sounds like they gave them back. I dont know to trump, eus i dont know what happened in the circumstances but usually what would happen is that a client as right to request his materials be returned. I dont know when that happened exactly. Certainly in the past couple of years but i dont know if that predate or postdates come imagine is before the subpoenas were issued because i dont think even reckless criminal Deutsche Bank would do that after they received a federal subpoena. But i dont know. Anyway, the point being it sounds like they do not have president trumps personal tax returns. I get some of the tax returns that were sought by the subpoenas which includes his family members, and his companies. The tax returns ive always thought, i want to see them as much as anyone. The New York Times has led the way reporting on this. To a certain extent its a little bit of a red herring. The tax returns, if they ever become public, im not going to show some of the most important things we want to know about trumps finances. They are not conditionally sources of income. You are not going to show his business partners. Theyre not going to give a real view of which assets he has a better valuable especially in countries that are outside the United States. The things Deutsche Bank as that are much more valuable are going to be his of the finest statements, his income statements and any documents around, my understanding is the bank as very detailed kind of an org chart that show relationship between different trump is is is they have other, where all the monies coming from. They got the documents or a lot of them and if also got documents that show some of the concerns that employees raised about suspicious transactions that went on in the trump and kushner accounts. This is something that is not i dont think its not gotten as much attention as a rep thought it would but there are employees in Deutsche Bank offices can find offices who raised repeatedly red flags about what they deem to be suspicious transactions involving trump and kushners accounts including money going to russians wear, concerned were overruled and it was never reported to the government. In one case the employee was fired after speaking out about it. Wasnt there some money to russians during his inauguration . It was the Kushner Companies in the summer of 2016, yes, which is amazing. And its amazing to me, banks always struggle with compliance issues and they struggle with when and how to file suspicious activity report with the government. Most banks and on the side of overreporting the transaction rather than underreporting at the over reported such an extent that its probably its like they flood the Treasury Department with his reports at such an extent you cant make heads nor tails. Deutsche bank and explicitly decide to go and opposite direction which is to hold back on these particular even when someone raised a fuss about these trump pincushion transactions, they still didnt do it. Is are still a chance a subpoena would be yes. I mean, oral arguments before the Supreme Court on march 31 and a decision expected in june. So its entirely possible i think the court will order Deutsche Bank to comply which means it would be handing over documents, trumps financial documents to Congressional Democrats over the summer, and will work you mentioned bill broeksmit was a banker with a conscious. Can you give any examples of when he urged Deutsche Bank got to do something or when he persuade them not to yeah. This isnt entirely responsive to what youre saying but the clearest example of his conscience, not even his conscience, he was just a Good Business sense, was that he was on the Oversight Board of Deutsche Banks main u. S. Legal entity, and entity bank, and this is a legal entity that among other things was doing the lending to donald trump. This is an entity that has at any given time tens of billions of dollars of assets going through it and its an entity that only a very few employees including no chief financial officer, no real accounting staff and broeksmit raised a huge stink on the Oversight Board about why it was that this hugely important part of the bank that was under intense scrutiny from our friends at the fed, and why on earth they didnt have a cfo . Why on earth they seem to be shirking some of what the fed was asking them to do including trying to conduct real aggressive or known as stress test in the Banking Industry and broeksmit is one of the key people inside the bank emails show that was really pushing the bank to take more seriously what the fed was asking and to just really clean act. He did not succeed. Looking forward to reading the book. Can you talk more about Justice Kennedys on and what role he may have played in the approval of trumps loans through Deutsche Bank . Yes. Everyone who is interested in Justin Kennedy. Suggest and was at Deutsche Bank for about ten years from i think 98 or 99 until 2009, and he was in what was called the commercial real estate business of Investment Bank. His job was to make big commercial real estate loans, finance the construction of high rise up and hotels and things like that. And then package of those loans, package them into bonds which think that sold investors. His role was to basically handle the second half of of the procs rather than the first half so he wasnt the one going out dancing i will link to you and you and you turkey was saying it would lend to you, you and you this out mechanically we can package it into bonds and sell it. Our expectation based on how were going to sell and structure it affects how much money we can afford to lend you and Interest Rate which would make those loans. It sounds kind of technical and complicated but actually a lot of ways the most important part of the lending process. Kennedy had a strong personal relationship with donald trump and ivanka trump as well. He was one of the people who are a number of loans, most notably i think, they did a huge 640 million loan to trump to build a huge skyscraper in chicago. Kennedy was one of the lead point man on the transaction. This turned out to be a real fateful loan for both trump and for Deutsche Bank because it was made in 2005 and three years later the financial crisis happens, and trump is having a lot of trouble selling the luxury condos in the building would have to pay back the money he was supposed to pay back the money come and as Deutsche Bank for a sixmonth extension, and the grant it, and extension comes up in november 2008 right as a financial crisis hits. Trump doesnt have the money to repay or doesnt have the desire to repay. He takes the very unorthodox approach which in addition to the folding of the loan he sues Deutsche Bank, because the financial crisis was an act of got it essentially void the contract and on top of that im going to see you because you cant the financial crisis and i want 3 billion in damages. So the led to a bunch of litigation, and identified reporting around kennedys role in all of this, and kennedy bumped into trump. Trump sues the bank and the bank says you got to be kidding me. This is not the first time he has done something really aggressive with Deutsche Bank and caused them a bunch of money to find the bank its like we are done with his combatant for all seriously, and they are not by the way. But that was kind of the temporary thinking and that meant for kennedy that when it is important client was gone from the bank. Kennedy bumped into trump a short while after the lawsuit was filed, and trump said something to the effect of no hard feelings, i hope. Kennedy, and kennedy, thinking that his longterm future, no problem, business is business, like lets be pals. He left Deutsche Bank at the end of 2009 and went on to strike up a very longterm and very successful and lucrative business relationship with trump and his children and kushner as well helping them to other projects even after left Deutsche Bank. Anyway, i cant even rumored exactly what your question was, but the relationship between trump and Justin Kennedy was long and multifaceted. Anthony kennedy would often come by Deutsche Banks offices and talk to kennedy and his colleagues and give people hugs. He was a known presence in the Deutsche Bank offices. I dont want to spoil the ending of the book, but it comes back to this at the end because kennedy leaves the Supreme Court. Without giving anything away i will say thats not entirely unrelated to the work his son had done at the bank many years earlier. [inaudible] excuse me . [inaudible] microphone. Microphone. This is reminding of the conversation i had with my husband ten years ago one of trumps more highprofile bankruptcies when my husband and i and i were worth more than on trump was at the time. Im really interested in following up on the conversation from the Federal Reserve gentleman here. What, if any, action has the german banking regulators of the European Banking regulators taken against Deutsche Bank, given the recklessness, not just in this case with trump but the rest of the business . The american regulators ive spoken to for this book, a number of them described the german regulators using kind of similar phraseology, which was they were the representatives of Deutsche Bank. The main german banking regulators which is known for, it plays defense for its hometown companies, and Deutsche Bank is the biggest Hometown Company there is, Proud National institution. As americans, american agencies and british agencies launched all sorts of investigation into the bank Deutsche Bank would insist those inquiries and requests information didnt go straight to the bank or the banks lowes. They had be routed through the local regulator, which is kind of the way its supposed to work but is usually not rigidly enforced. Deutsche bank would insist all these requests would go through this german delicacy. This happened over and over and over again. Recently i think theyve gotten the message they need to be a little more serious and there is now a new regulator that ostensibly regulates Deutsche Bank. But the u. S. And the british authorities have much more aggressive. I will say that the fed, i dont think comes across with all that good in his book either. Im sorry. Its mostly your colleagues in new york. I mean, the fed was aware of and had an opportunity to stop moneylaundering involving russians with Deutsche Bank going back almost 15 years now, and on multiple occasions just took this very soft slap on the wrist a a written penalty and u better not do it again approach. We now know it didnt work but even at the time theres a scene and a book for Deutsche Bank gets their complaints people get chewed out by fed officials who were angry at them about laundering tens of millions of dollars for wealthy russians. They are expecting based on the angry tone of these regulators that theyre going to get a penalty so in the range of about 100 million. Instead you get a panel of zero and there issued, just not doing it. Which is about what you could have expected. Cant resist the open mic. My question maybe a little nerdy. More of clarification. He mentioned over about ten years, 20 years, that Deutsche Bank had lent trump and maybe the family more generally but trump 2 billion and that somehow hes been able to sort of whittled that debt down to 350 million. How much of the difference between those figures can you sort of track in terms of profit from the business that was finest to those loan . Profits for trump or Deutsche Bank . Profits for trump. Well hes the one who has to pay back. I dont think trump, i dont think the loans have been really profitable for him to have enabled him to do things that are very profitable, and the loans from Deutsche Bank when a remarkable things about them is Deutsche Bank was so desperate to do business with anyone a good including trump. They were practically throwing money at it. Even after he default of the do or charging Interest Rates that any of us with cleancut histories would never get any million years. 2 on 100 million, for example, which is fabulous. So that in the sense of a hugely profitable transaction or trump even though hes been interest on the loan if you paste it back. Its still much cheaper than he would be able to get anywhere else and allows him to go build things or buy things that are going to produce income at a rate much higher than 2 . Its easy to pay back. The funny thing about this is that trump, despite its default and despite his record not think anyone back, for the most part Deutsche Bank has emerged out of his pretty whole. Its not as if Deutsche Bank lost buckets of money on this relationship with trump. First of all, charging him huge fees for all sorts of other services they were providing, whether managing his money or and again not to spoil the book but playing Matchmaking Services where it introduced him to wealthy russians, but it was the bank was, in the end, in the final accounting i think from a poorly financed respect to the relationship with trump was probably profitable. Just in terms of the pure dollars and sense financial i think its probably been a good one. I think difference between the 2,000,000,000. 350 million its pretty clear. Those loans for small date back, starts in 1998 with a loan to renovate the building on wall street prep those loans got paid back over and over and over. The 350 million i think maybe five loans that it been made since 2011. The others have been paid back either to Deutsche Bank or to other parties that ended up lending it. Sorry, thats a simple question that i made very complicated. Isnt there are a lot of iron here that the germans are supposed to be prudent savers and, you know, ive always felt this, and all of a sudden Deutsche Bank which is the National Bank is loaning money this way to trump. The interesting, the real irony of that to me is that the whole reason Deutsche Bank felt it was necessary and important to get into doing the wild and crazy stuff it did on wall street and with characters like trump is that it turns out that being the bank to a bunch of savers and people who dont really want to borrow money is not lucrative. So the bank in the 80s and 90s is watching as its rivals in america and in london were just minting money on all sorts of crazy wall street activities and on peoples just burning desire to get into debt. People and institutions burning desire to get into debt. So Deutsche Bank serving a primarily german clientele, the germans did not want to go into debt. Theyre scarred by their own historical legacies and so Deutsche Bank went with really trying to boost its profitability and attract International Investors and the way to do that is to make money by lending by getting more people in debt. So it turned its sights towards really all over the world, including in america where it found people like trump. And so could i also say before i forget, this is completely unrelated, its not just trump that they were doing business with. Trump was the famous marquee client they had and generating headlines. This was a bank so desperate to get in bed with anyone it could, it was really just open for business with the worst of the worst of capitalism and Jeffrey Epstein he think is the worst example of that. He lied to everyone and said he was a billionaire and a wonderful financier, blah, blah, blah, by 2012, 2013 after he had been convicted of sex crimes, people kind of realized he was full of it and morally reprehensible. So he started getting kicked out of his banks and the final bank to kick him out jp morgan finally washed its hands of epstein in the end of 2012 and early 13 and epstein who at this point had a lot of money that he had somehow from some people and was still trying to keep up this facade of being this international kind of business man didnt have anywhere to go and he probably would have had to shut down his dirty little operation were it know the for a certain bank that decided even when every other bank had cut him off from the financial system, it was willing to get in bed with him and that bank youll not be surprised to hear was Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Bank continued to do business with epstein up until the time of his arrest last summer and that was even after multiple employees in the Compliance Division and the bank raised concerns not only about the ethics and morality of dealing with someone who was a convicted sex criminal, but having known to have done a lot more bad stuff than what hed been criminally charged with, but also that they were seeing signs of him internally of him laundering money and possibly bribery and things like that. And yet, the bank, once again, overruled those concerns and continued doing business with epstein because it seemed lucrative to do so. And yeah, i was wondering, first, what is sort of the net worth of Deutsche Bank right now and what is roughly the total amount of fines and settlements they had to Pay Associated with the conduct related to the financial crisis . First question i dont know off the top of my head. The metric i have in my head is that its stocked peaked in 1990 or 2007 at the time the worlds biggest bank. As of a couple of months ago, its market value had declined by 95 , from that peak. Its actually gone up a little bit in the past couple of months because people some investors are, i think, gaining a little more confidence that maybe they are going to focus on reforming themselves. T the theyve been fined, i dont know the exact number and how much theyve been fined either, its well over 10 billion which sounds like a ton and it is a ton. Its probably not the bank that has received the biggest fines. This is an industry thats been fined a lot and has behaved very badly. And Deutsche Bank definitely has the distinction, i think of being the worlds most destructive bank. I think thats in part just the pure destruction of money that its and you look at that and the market value declined by 95 , which is pretty impressive. But basically also every financial scandal over the past 10, 15, 20 years and Deutsche Bank has been either at or near the center, whether its laundering money, bribing government officials, manipulating Interest Rates and manipulating currencies, evading taxes and violating sanctions and i said laundering money, laundering money, deceiving its customers and ripping off governments. I can go on and on, its a bad bank. Didnt they get new management . Theyve cleaned house and had new management several times in the past and the guy running it now, christian sabon who has been at Deutsche Bank 30 years, spent his whole life there. Ive met him. He seems serious and the bank is shrinking a lot and trying to turn over a new leaf. And he, christian said, i think, late last year as he announced the latest turnaround plan they presented to investors, foo in finally, weve made a lot of mistakes and were going back to the old days and he needs to brush up on history before he says Something Like that. They have a long, tough road ahead and it will be interesting to see whether they survive. So we have time for one more question. Thank you very much. Ive really been enthralled by your information. My question to you is, its obvious that Deutsche Bank played a very integral role in getting donald trump back on his feet financially as youve alluded to and document in your book so brilliantly, but don, jr. , as weve seen so many times on television when he was asked quite a few years ago, well, who you is it that your father got back on his feet financial will i financially was turned down and turned down and he said the russians. Whats the connection between the russians like btr and Deutsche Bank and you can get a clear picture or handle on. Obviously, doesnt take a lot to connect the dots between vtr and Deutsche Bank. Vtb. Vtb. And its actually the i think it was eric trump who made the comment about the russians financing the golf courses and its even better than you said. He said, donald trump or that russians have been financing our golf courses and right at the time they said that they had just bought a new golf course in miami, doral, guess who paid for the financing of that in Deutsche Bank . And he said it was the russians, but it was Deutsche Bank who paid for it so its obviously confusing whether it was the russians or Deutsche Bank in eric trumps mind. Look it, Deutsche Bank has been in russia for on and off for more than a century. It has extraordinarily close ties with Russian Companies and with the russian government. The banks long time ceo joe ackerman when he stepped down at ceo Vladimir Putin offered him a job in the kremlin running the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund and vtb known as kind of the spy bank because it was it had offices all over the world, it was kind of an outpost for russian intelligence and financed the kgb during the cold war and is now run by a close pal of putins. And with Deutsche Bank, theyre so close and the son of the ceo of vtb was running Deutsche Banks operations until he died in mysterious accident and vtb and Deutsche Bank and entirely the team that started the Investment Bank business was a crew that was hired directly from Deutsche Bank, the two banks have lent each other tens of millions of dollars in recent years and its not tens of millions its hundreds of millions of dollars has been lent and so, the ties are very tight. And you know, it offers a very neat explanation for why Deutsche Bank would be willing to take such extraordinary and imprudent risks lending to trump. Maybe they werent taking any risks. Maybe the loans were essentially guaranteed by vtb. Meaning it was vtb and therefore the kremlin financing donald trump and not Deutsche Bank. Thats a delicious, entirely plausible rumor. And i and so many other journalists have spent i mean, i in particular honestly because ive devoted the past several years of my life digging into this. Ive been looking, ive been examining documents, ive been interviewing and scores of people who are involved in this, and i dont know if its true. I dont have proof. What i have is a lot of circumstantial evidence and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence. And, yeah, i wish i could say more. What would be your speculation as to why vtb is so enthusiastic of financing trump, obviously indirectly through Deutsche Bank. Can i say one other thing about vtb, i forget. Felix seder, we all know who he is, not that hes reliable, but he says when trump was planning to build trump tower in moscow, he says, and sader was involved in this, he says that vtb was arranging the travel visas for the trumps and sader is not the most reliable witness on these things. Why would they be doing this . I dont know, essentially would be the kremlin doing this and we know, obviously, that the russian government was interfering in the 2016 election trying to get trump elected and so its not that hard to imagine why a governmentowned bank would be trying to make Donald Trumps life a little easier and make him kind of a more kind of, you know, polish his record as a businessman. Again, i do not have proof thats what happened. I dont even have its not even proof, its like, there are a lot of rumors, theres a lot of circumstantial evidence, but we would never publish that in the newspaper, its not solid. I wish i had it, but i dont. It would be strictly classified, maybe speculation at this point, but i guess my fundamental question to you is, what horse in the race do the russians have through vtb and directly through Deutsche Bank of supporting trump . What are they ultimately going to gain by it, end game. The end game is clear. The russian end game was clearly to get trump elected. Maybe that wasnt the end game. That was one of their goals, clearly and that obviously was successful. I dont know that vtb was actually doing anything to support trump financially or otherwise, all i know are rumors. Definitely, i dont want to speculate about why they might have wanted to do something, but im not even sure they did. I know thats frustrating and unsatisfying, but appreciate your honesty. [applause]. We will now have the signing right up here at the table and if you could fold up your chairs and lean them against something straight, that would be great. Tonight on book tv, starting at 8 00 eastern, highlights from our in depth program. We begin with the author of a number of books, among them a history of the black National Anthem and breathe, and followed by a novelist, a spark of light, journalist and Science Fiction novelist, cory discusses his books. And in the time of social distancing, get a good book. Next anna wiener, author of uncanny valley, on her experience in working on Tech Startups in san francisco. Were honored to come full circle tonight not only a local author and regular customer at book stores, anna wiener covered silicon valley