A new article scheduled for Thursday release looks at Trump ties to Cuba during the trade embargo.
Rachel Maddow shares an exclusive sneak peek at a new Kurt Eichenwald article in Newsweek that will examine Donald Trump’s business ties to Cuba when the U.S. embargo was still in place.
Maddow began her report by relating that Eichenwald’s latest scoop is “expected to drop as a cover story in Newsweek Magazine” Thursday morning.
Relating that her “crack producers… have obtained a small piece of this scoop before anyone else has.” However, she goes on to convey “two words of caution.”
- “Number one, we have not obtained the whole article.”
- “Number two, neither MSNBC nor NBC News have accessed the whole article either. So I have to tell you – obviously – because we cannot review what we got in context, we can’t review the full article yet – we have not independently verified this information. What we’ve got and what I’m going to share with you tonight is the lead paragraphs of this story which sum up what Kurt Eichenwald said are his findings.
Maddow then showed an advance copy of Newsweek’s new cover with the title of the article: “The Castro Connection” and the subtitle: “How Trump’s Company Violated The U.S. Embargo Against Cuba.”
Reminding viewers that the article has not been published yet, Maddow goes on to reveal the information her producers received from Newsweek:
A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.
Reiterating that they received an excerpt earlier that evening, Maddow reads the next portion of the article they received from Newsweek:
Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corporation. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company, then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, on how to make the venture appear legal by linking it after-the-fact to a charitable effort.
Once again reminding viewers that these were excerpts that they exclusively obtained from Newsweek, Maddow read the final portion they received, explaining that these final sentences discussed the timing of the “alleged act by Donald Trump to illegally do business in and skirt the U.S. embargo there.”
The payment by Trump Hotels came just before the New York business mogul launched his first bid for the White House by seeking the nomination of the Reform Party. On his first day of the campaign, he traveled to Miami where he spoke to a group of Cuban-Americans, a critical voting bloc in the swing state. Trump vowed to maintain the embargo and never spend his or his companies’ money in Cuba until Fidel Castro was removed from power. He did not disclose that, seven months earlier, Trump Hotels already had spent money sending consultants on the secret trip to conduct business in Havana.
UPDATE: You can now read the full Newsweek article here.
You can watch Maddow explain it all:
- Source Links – August 29, 2020
- About Pat Warde: Eulogy Tribute by Eleanor Hughes – April 1, 2019
- Editorial Note – January 15, 2019
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