Hey guys, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party in Rhode Island on October the 27th and then November the 3rd with Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and a bunch of others down there in Lake Jackson.
Jeff Deist and all them, Mises Institute, are having me out to give a talk about media stuff.
And that's November the 3rd down there in Lake Jackson.
If you like Ron Paul events and you're nearby, I'll see you there.
Sorry I'm late!
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR!
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw us.
He died.
We ain't killing they army.
We killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying.
Say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Aren't you guys going to say something?
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
All right you guys, introducing Justin Elliot, from ProPublica.
He's got this very important piece.
I hope you'll look at it.
It's called Trump's Patron in Chief, Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Justin?
Good.
Good to be here.
Good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Great piece of work.
Very interesting.
So, Sheldon Adelson, he's worth $35 billion.
Who's that and how'd he get so rich?
Yeah, so Sheldon, I think it's actually Adelson, although people seem to pronounce it both ways.
Oh, okay.
His people say Adelson.
He and his family are the majority owners of Las Vegas Sands, which is a big casino company.
His money originally was from casinos in Vegas, but actually now most of it comes from a series of properties they own over in Macau, which is in Southern China.
He's also a longtime political donor, mainly to the Republican side, and that has increased a lot in recent years.
For example, right now in the midterms, he's given something ...
He and his wife have given something like $90 million to the Republican congressional campaign efforts, and he also gave at least $20 million to help Trump back in the 2016 campaign.
He's somebody that cares a lot about Israel.
He described himself as a one-issue guy, and that issue is Israel.
That's interesting to note the way you do end the piece that ...
I think you said he's the son of a cab driver, actual rags-to-riches guy, Adelson?
Yep.
Yeah, definitely.
He grew up in Boston.
I think you said his father had a sixth-grade education, and Adelson, he's now 85, actually, but he has started or acquired dozens of businesses.
He actually got into the casino industry relatively late in life, and he's now something like, if you believe Forbes, I think the 20th richest person in the entire world, so this is a real ...
Unlike a Donald Trump, this is somebody that really has been an incredibly successful rags-to-riches businessman.
All right, now, Trump famously, in the campaign, renounced Sheldon Adelson, and in fact, I guess I was reminded, or maybe I hadn't noticed this before, but in the quote, he stops himself.
He says, Sheldon, you know, could be the Kochs, anybody, but he started to renounce him, specifically, and I guess he did tell the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, they're like, who needs your donations?
I'm so rich already.
You can't own me.
You can't control me, guys, this kind of thing, but I guess that didn't last too long, huh?
Yeah, I mean, it's remarkable, if you look back to the early stages of the Republican primary back in 2015, there was that quote you mentioned, and there's actually a tweet, there's always a tweet, where Trump is talking about Rubio, Marco Rubio, and he says, Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio, because he, Adelson, feels he can mold Rubio into his perfect little puppet.
I agree.
He was derisively referring to Adelson, but that changed by mid-2016, when Trump locked up the nomination, and Adelson, who is, by all accounts, a very loyal, partisan Republican, got behind Trump, and then he and his wife ended up giving at least $20 million to the Trump side, and then at least another $60 million to Republican candidates that cycle.
They're probably the single biggest donors on that side.
It's hard to say, because we don't have full disclosure, but they are among the biggest donors on that side.
You mentioned Israel.
We've got a lot to talk about on that line, but when it comes to his political donations in the past, you list McCain, well, I guess first Giuliani, then McCain, Gingrich, then Romney.
Those are both examples of where, first, he picks the guy who's the more Zionist ideologue, and then he ends up settling for supporting whoever gets the nomination anyway.
Is that basically the story there?
Yeah.
Again, he said that he's a one-issue guy, and that issue is Israel.
You see every presidential campaign cycle, or at least in the few recent ones in which he's been a truly major donor, you see Republican candidates going out to Las Vegas to woo him and woo the family for their support, and Israel policy is a huge part of that.
He's actually arguably an even bigger force in Israeli politics.
Obviously, Israel's much, much smaller than the U.S.
He's a huge longtime ally of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, and Adelson actually also owns a big newspaper in Israel that is known for being incredibly and consistently supportive of Netanyahu and his policies.
Yeah.
That's such an important point, the overlapping funding there, where there's a lot to complain about in terms of Israeli influence in the United States on American policy, but then the poor Israelis as a population, they're saddled with a bunch of very rich, very right-wing pro-Israel forces in the United States that support very right-wing forces inside Israel and possibly preclude the idea that somebody with a little bit more fairness toward the Palestinians in mind would even have a chance.
I guess this guy's not an Israeli, he's an American, right?
I'm not an expert on sort of Israeli campaign finance, but from all the coverage I've read over there, there's been a lot.
Adelson, and there's a few others like him, has been really like a towering figure in their politics.
Again, he owns a major newspaper that he's actually given away for free, and it may actually be the single largest newspaper over there at this point, called Israel HaOm, which means Israel Today.
There's a nickname that I think is going off the Hebrew, but it's potentially known as the BB paper, the Netanyahu paper.
So yeah, he's a huge figure over there, and again, obviously it's a much, much smaller country and so somebody with this amount of money and the willingness to spend it is going to have even more influence over such a small country.
And now in the campaign of 2016, Trump was always very Zionist.
It was just that he had, in these two instances, somewhat distanced himself from Adelson, and then I guess from AIPAC a little bit.
And though it's true that some people were hopeful, and even more people, I think, on the neocon side were terrified that he meant what he said about possible fairness and balance in negotiating between Israel and Palestine and reacted in that way.
That was never really in the cards.
So it would be, and I'm not saying you say this, I'm just saying, I'm just kind of clarifying.
I don't think anyone's ever really said that Trump became that much more Zionist in his beliefs or anything like that because of Adelson's influence.
And yet you do, in the article, you directly tie some of these donations to the policies, at least correlation, if not direct causation.
But boy, it sure looks like it when you talk about pulling out of the joint plan of action for the Iran deal, the Iran nuclear deal, as well as moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
Yeah.
I mean, and it's actually, it's been publicly reported, I believe, by the New York Times that Sheldon Adelson did publicly, I'm sorry, did privately lobby Trump on moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which is important because that's the sort of ownership, for lack of a better word, of that city is contested, obviously, a Palestinian's claim, at least East Jerusalem.
And most of the world recognizes those claims.
I think Trump actually broke at least a couple decades of bipartisan precedent when, earlier this year, he did move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
I believe Guatemala was the only other country that did that.
And that's something that Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, have been pushing for since at least the mid-90s.
I found some stories referencing them lobbying personally on Capitol Hill for that back in, I believe, 1995.
And, you know, I don't think any of this was a real secret.
Adelson, if you could look online for a video of the big opening ceremony, and the Adelsons were in the front row next to Jared Kushner and Mnuchin, the treasurer's secretary, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister.
So- And John Hagee.
They're given front row seats and, you know, these are private citizens.
So they were obviously incredibly important in that, on that particular policy move.
Yeah.
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And now, same thing too on the JCPOA, huh?
Yeah.
I mean, so Adelson has certainly, you know, in the Obama years was, was very critical publicly of the Obama policy on Iran.
It was, he said some, at one point it was somewhat famously, he sort of half joked, it seemed like he was half joking, but it was sort of unclear.
He talked about dropping a nuclear bomb in Iran or somewhere in like a, I think he said like in like a desert area to show them that we were serious.
So he's, you know, has very hawkish views on that issue.
And you know, we don't, it's not totally clear how Trump came to the decision to kill the Iran deal.
But you know, we, one thing you can see is that, you know, I laid out my story, but like very close, timing wise, very close to the timing of when Trump officially announced they were doing that, killing the deal.
The Adelson made a huge donation to the Republican campaign efforts for the midterms.
So, you know, are those things, are those two things connected?
Hard to say, but they came in very close proximity.
And now just to make sure I understand that $30 million, that's part of the $90 million that you cited earlier for the same midterm effort?
That's right.
Yeah.
It's sort of been, you know, we get these sort of quarterly disclosures, so you add them up over time.
But yeah, that was one of the early donations for this cycle.
So in 2016, $20 million to the Trump campaign, $60 million to the Republicans overall.
And now in the midterms, $90 million already, 30 of which you directly correlate to this within a couple of days of the JCPOA decision there.
And another gave $5 million to the Trump inauguration, which I think was one of the biggest, if not the biggest single donation in history.
So, and again, these are just the, these are the donations we know about.
It's possible there are some to these groups that don't disclose that we don't know about.
So these are really minimums.
And you quote Alan Dershowitz in the article saying that, oh yeah, he has full access and calls Trump all the time, right?
Yep.
There's a remarkable level of access.
You know, he's had dinner at the White House with Trump.
They talk regularly on the phone by, you know, by all accounts, including what Dershowitz told me.
I think the New York Times put it at once a month that they talk.
And you know, it's very hard to get at as a reporter what's being said in these phone calls because there's a very small group of people, perhaps in some cases, only Trump and Adelson themselves that actually know what's being said.
What we do know is that this is a quite extraordinary level of access for somebody that is a private citizen.
And now, is he involved in the actual settler movement in the West Bank in any way, do you know?
You know, I know that the family has given money to Israeli Jewish institutions in the West Bank.
I believe they just had a medical school at a university in the West Bank named after them that they gave a bunch of money to.
At a settlement there, you're saying?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
A university in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
You know, in terms of, you know, I don't know that they, you know, literally own real estate in the West Bank or anything like that, but they certainly have made donations to institutions there.
And do you know about donations to, say, organizations that, you know, are politically active lobbying for settlers, whether, you know, in Washington or in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem?
Sure.
I mean, the, you know, so Adelson definitely, at least in the past, was a big donor to AIPAC.
There was some, this is not something I looked at, but there was some reporting several years ago that they had a falling out, possibly actually over the Iran deal.
And what I can tell you is that Adelson is a major donor to the Zionist Organization of America, ZOA, which is sort of one of the more farther right-wing groups in the general American pro-Israel advocacy scene.
And certainly ZOA, if you look at, you know, their positions, they're certainly not unfriendly to the West Bank settlements.
And now, so it's interesting, too, you call up, you remind us in the article about the campaign against McMaster, who, you know, I was happy to see fired for different reasons, but I always wondered what they had against him.
He supposedly, you know, and they're telling, oh, he's some horrible anti-Semite or hates Israel or some kind of thing.
I know that can't possibly be true.
So what was it that he actually ever did or said that got him in so much trouble?
Yeah, I mean, this actually goes back to ZOA.
So ZOA, again, this group that Adelson or the Adelson family are the single biggest donors to, launched a big public campaign against McMaster.
And their claim was that he, quote-unquote, had animus towards Israel and was too friendly to Iran.
They didn't seem to have much evidence for that.
I guess he'd made some personnel changes that they didn't like.
I think he, if I remember correctly, I think he perhaps fired some people that had been brought in by Mike Flynn.
So hard to know where they were getting that.
And again, they did not really cite convincing evidence for the idea that he had any kind of animus towards Israel.
But then what you saw was there were some press reports where it came out that Sheldon Adelson had actually emailed the head of ZOA and said that he supported the campaign against McMaster.
And then it was also reported, again, by the New York Times, that Adelson had wanted, and I guess asked Trump to appoint John Bolton to a high-level position.
So a few months after this campaign, Trump fires McMaster and replaces him with Bolton.
Now, I'm not saying that Sheldon Adelson was behind, was single-handedly sort of puppet mastering those moves, but I do think it's a significant thing when you have a major donor to the president come out publicly against a sitting cabinet member.
So I think that's quite significant.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not like McMaster ever said, we've got to come up with a two-state solution before it's too late, or any kind of thing like that in his life, right?
I mean, I don't know his whole record, but again, from looking at the ZOA campaign against him, they put out some research report.
They said in there that he had animus toward Israel, but there was no compelling evidence to back that up.
It makes sense, like you're saying, that they just wanted Bolton.
And so whatever they had to do or say against this guy, get it done to get Bolton in there.
Yeah.
I mean, so certainly we know that Bolton, we know through a lot of reporting over the years that Bolton is certainly close to the Adelsons, and yeah, now he's National Security Advisor.
Yeah.
Which is a problem.
No, McMaster, I would have demoted him to sergeant, sent him to Afghanistan, but that's different.
All right.
So now, I'm glad that we say this to the end, because it is, to me, it's the least important part of this, although it is important too, though, is the access that he's bought to the Trump administration to get them to put pressure on the Japanese to give him gambling concessions.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So basically what I found, I mean, we don't have sort of the full picture here, but what I found is that Adelsons' company, Las Vegas Sands, has been trying for years to build a casino in Japan.
Japan doesn't have casinos, they just legalized them, but they're only going to be issuing a few licenses, so there's a big expensive competition among big casino companies to get one of these licenses, which are going to be thought to be worth a lot of money.
This market's going to be worth many billions of dollars a year.
Adelsons' company wants one of these licenses, and what I report in my story is that early in the Trump presidency, Trump actually raised Adelsons' company, Sands, to Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister.
This was actually first reported over in Japan and has become a Japanese newspaper, and it's become a political issue over there by critics of the casino legalization law, but this is something that's sort of still in progress.
I mean, Adelsons and Sands haven't gotten this license yet, but again, over in Japan, there's been criticism of Abe by some people saying that his policies on the casino issue are really designed to serve what President Trump wants and what his donor Sheldon Adelson wants.
And I'm sorry, because I kind of scanned over the article again this morning, but something tells me that there was something in there I missed that I did notice when I actually read the thing through carefully before about their previous relationship when Trump was in the gambling business.
Was there something there?
Yeah, I mean, they have an interesting history.
I mean, so Trump, it's sort of easy to forget this now, but he was a casino guy.
He no longer is, but he had casinos going back to the 80s.
What I learned in my reporting is that, at least according to somebody I talked to that used to work with Adelson, that Adelson didn't think much of Trump when he was in the casino business and sort of was dismissive of him.
Of course, it's true that Trump's casinos ended up going bankrupt multiple times, whereas Adelson has thrived and is now at the very top of the industry, so they've actually crossed paths going back to at least the early 90s.
And Trump has said that he's known him for years, so there's a sort of interesting history there, which has ...
They were certainly ...
It does not seem like they were friends in the past, but now, sort of post-2016, they have at least a very strong sort of political alliance.
Yeah, we need to find a way to stoke those personal resentments, you know?
I sent Trump a tweet one time that said, you know Sheldon Adelson talks about you behind your back, you know, this kind of thing.
We need to get that through to him.
Someone get a guest spot on Fox News and smuggle that in there and see if we can get him to see that and start to worry about it, because I don't know what else could break him apart on this point.
I mean, again, Adelson is simply paying him handsomely for doing what he was probably apt to do anyway, so ...
He was always an Iran hawk, for example, or he's always ...
He obviously never cared what happened to the Palestinians or anything like that, so ...
Yeah, I mean, I think Trump, in terms of his Israel policy, there was that one moment in, I believe it was one of the debates that you mentioned before, where he said something about trying to make the deal of a lifetime and sort of be even-handed, but I think if you look at the last few years, that was really an exception, that statement, to ...
If you look at the people that he's appointed and the policies, that was a sort of strange outlier statement, and I think that's not usual for Trump, right?
I think it's been said that he's been on every side of every issue.
Exactly.
And then one statement like that, with him especially, you really can't put much stock in it.
Yeah, I mean, the most important thing about it is how revealing it was for the reactions that people screamed, fairness, oh my God, what's going to happen?
Can't have fairness?
It'll be the end of everything, so ...
I don't know, I like that part, but yeah, he clearly never meant that.
And we see what his deal of the century is, and that is, all right, here's what you're going to get, Palestinians, and it ain't much, and you're going to be happy, because you've got no better choices coming.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the deal hasn't ...
The plan has sort of been long promised, and it keeps being delayed, and I think the last I read, it's not something I've been reporting on, but I think the last I read, they're now delaying it until after the election, so who knows what that's going to look like, and whether it'll ever be released at all.
Yeah, I mean, Kushner's given interviews, and Greenblatt has given interviews and stuff describing more or less what it's going to be, and it's going to be basically a continuation of the occupation in everything but name, right?
Maybe a little bit more welfare payments than before?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm not an expert on it.
Well, all right, well, yeah, I mean, we'll see, but it doesn't sound like it's very much of anything that the Palestinians would call a deal of a century.
I think that's fair to say.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, I appreciate you coming on the show to talk about this.
It's a very important article, and very good work you've done, so thanks again.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that's Justin Elliott.
He's at ProPublica, and this one is called Trump's Patron in Chief, Casino Magnate Sheldon Adelson.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
