So like Iran-Contra being a convoluted piece of treason, the Broidy Affair is not about his altruism covering for another of 45*’s Playboy model dalliances at $1.6 million but Broidy getting a $600 million deal from the U.A.E..
Pay-to-Play(boy).
Any Cohen flip might have multiple angles on influence peddling beyond the Forbes paddling of the Stormy Daniels affair. The two David Dennisons were not so dissimilar.
We’ll soon see who really is willing to “take a bullet” for whom, considering that the price for admitting to an affair and an abortion (for someone else) is about $600 million from the U.A.E.
Here is some additional context that now seems especially noteworthy:
Just two days before that (December 2 2017) meeting, on November 30, Broidy wired $200,000 from his Bank of America account to Real Estate Attorneys’ Group, a California firm.
On December 5, REAG transferred that money to attorney Keith Davidson. Davidson was at the time supposedly representing the legal interests of Shera Bechard, a Playboy model with whom Broidy now claims to have had an affair.
(Bechard fired Davidson shortly afterward, when she became convinced that Davidson was actually working in concert with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, to protect Cohen’s client’s interests rather than hers.)
That $200,000 was supposed to be the first of eight quarterly payments that “David Dennison” agreed to make to Bechard, in order to buy her silence about an affair and a subsequent abortion. All this was laid out in an NDA recovered from Michael Cohen’s office when it was raided last month.
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But as I argued at length and in detail in this space two weeks ago, Broidy’s account raises a lot of questions — and I believe a more plausible explanation of all the facts at hand is that he agreed to pay Bechard seven figures as a favor to Donald Trump, who actually impregnated Bechard, and then needed to hush her up about their affair and her subsequent abortion.
Trump, I pointed out, is exactly the kind of man who has affairs with women like Shera Bechard, while Broidy has a history of bribing public officials to further his business interests — indeed, he had even made payments to the mistress of a politician he was bribing. And it was clear Broidy had spent much of 2017 touting his connections to Trump to various foreign officials.
The AP exposé only strengthens the evidence for my hypothesis: The first payment from Broidy came two days before the meeting that apparently helped him ink a nine-figure deal with a foreign country — a deal based in no small part on his access to, and influence on, Trump.
If it’s difficult to imagine Broidy being willing to take the fall for Trump’s affair with Bechard and then paying her a seven-figure sum, it’s much simpler to imagine it simply as a perfectly timed and fantastically profitable bribe.
nymag.com/...
...the only hard evidence for Broidy’s claim that his payoff to Bechard wasn’t actually a straight-up bribe of the president of the United States continues to be Broidy’s own assertions.
nymag.com/...
This is a story about a shadowy world of international lobbying, a seven-figure payoff, abortion, the man who calls himself Donald Trump’s “consigliere,” a pedophile posing with the president … and Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Month for November 2010 and November 2011.
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Broidy’s donation to the RNC came on November 30, 2017. Just two days later, he gained a second one-on-one meeting with Trump, where he relayed flattering words from the Gulf states and their support for the work Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was doing on a Middle East peace plan.
A short time later, the UAE agreed to a whopping $600 million contract with a Broidy intelligence firm, and — according to the AP — the first check for $36 million would arrive in January of this year.
So what we have so far is a sordid tale of oil-soaked money and the nation’s highest office — but there is also a bizarre twist.
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Now, the AP story, which lays bare the extent of Broidy’s efforts to curry favor with the president, also casts the Shera Bechard saga in a whole new light.
We now know that that the first installment of Broidy $1.6 million-over-two-years payments to the Playboy model was made last December 1 — one day after his $189,000 check to the RNC and one day before his second Oval Office confab with Trump.
Is the timing a remarkable coincidence, or does it somehow tie into the anxiety of Broidy and his new partner Nader to strengthen their bond with the White House at the very moment that the $1 billion payday of a lifetime was on the line, halfway around the world?
www.philly.com/...