Corporate documents exclusively obtained by Forensic News show that the Trump Organization’s formal legal advisor who was tapped as Trump’s Representative for International Negotiations in the Middle East managed the Delaware LLC with a Chinese bank account recently revealed by the New York Times.
The advisor, Jason Greenblatt, was just one of four Trump aides with access to the highly secretive Middle East peace plan, alongside Jared Kushner and two others.
The documents from Delaware include incorporation filings with Greenblatt’s signature. No other documents were on file, indicating that Greenblatt’s involvement with the company has not changed since its founding in 2006. Greenblatt’s involvement with the Delaware company has not been previously reported.
The bombshell New York Times story that revealed that Trump has held a hidden-from-the-public Chinese bank account identified the LLC with the account as “Trump International Hotels Management” in Delaware. In New York, where the LLC holds a branch and where corporate data is public, Trump used a company incorporation service to mask who controlled the entity.
The Times reported that in 2017, the LLC had a huge influx of revenue which was subsequently withdrawn by Trump. In total, Trump appears to have pocketed over $15,000,000 from unknown sources in 2017, his first year in office.
[su_quote style=”default” cite=”New York Times” class=”fancy-quote”]
Mr. Trump’s plans in China have been largely driven by a different company, Trump International Hotels Management — the one with a Chinese bank account.
The company has direct ownership of THC China Development, but is also involved in management of other Trump-branded properties around the world, and it is not possible to discern from its tax records how much of its financial activity is China-related. It normally reports a few million dollars in annual income and deductible expenses.
In 2017, the company reported an unusually large spike in revenue — some $17.5 million, more than the previous five years’ combined. It was accompanied by a $15.1 million withdrawal by Mr. Trump from the company’s capital account.
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Trump International Hotels Management paid over $188,000 in taxes to the Chinese government from 2013-2015, according to the Times report.
Trump’s 2017 withdrawal of over $15,000,000 from the account does not appear to match with his 2017 financial disclosures filed with the United States Office of Government Ethics. In those documents, Trump showed just over $1,500,000 in income from the company with a Chinese bank account, chalking up the income to “management fees”. The value of the company overall was listed as, “over $50,000,000”.
Though the Times did not disclose the Chinese bank with which Trump saw millions in income while in office, the four biggest banks in the communist state are all controlled by the Chinese government.
“financial operations are still controlled tightly by the government—specifically, through the nation’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). Not only is PBOC responsible for the planning and implementation of China’s monetary policy, but it also maintains all of the banking sector’s clearing, payment and settlement systems, in addition to overseeing the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, or SAFE, that establishes foreign exchange policies. Although they trade on public stock exchanges, each of the Big Four banks remains wholly or predominantly state-owned and headquartered in Beijing.”
By hiding his bank account in China from the American public throughout the first term of his presidency, Trump made himself susceptible to financial compromising material. Such situations in which a foreign government has knowledge of the personal finances of a sitting US president has raised serious concerns among former counterintelligence officials.
Greenblatt’s involvement with the Trump LLC with a Chinese bank account also potentially made him vulnerable in his position writing and discussing highly classified national security materials. Greenblatt left the White House in 2019 and took a position with an Israeli venture capital company. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.