[Beyond Nuclear note: Interestingly, the recently published prison memoir, by President Donald J. Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen (Disloyal, A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump), discusses the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant. Cohen writes, in a chapter entitled "Typhoon Stormy" (about the porn star, Stormy Daniels, her flamboyant attorney Michael Avenatti, and the FBI raid, and subsequent criminal charges, that would ultimately land Cohen in federal prison):
Here's an idea: why don't I spare you all the nonsense involving Michael Avenatti and me? I hope the reviewers will take note of this tender mercy.
While Avenatti was taunting me on television and calling me an idiot, all leading to his own seemingly inevitable downfall, I was getting the best form of revenge possible: I was living well. After the election, I'd set myself up in the New York office of Squire Patton Boggs, a top-tier firm located at Rockefeller Plaza, as a strategic alliance, which really meant the partners could brag to their clients that the personal attorney to the President of the United States was part of their outfit. I was also using my company, Essential Consultants [the very company Cohen used in 2016, to illegally issue hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, to conceal her sexual affair with Trump], to take on clients like AT&T, Novartis, Columbas Nova, and BTA Bank -- high-level companies desperate for insights and connections to the President and willing to pay for my assistance.
Was I cashing in on my relationship with Trump? Of course I was. What would you do? By March of 2018, to give but one example, I was brokering deals at the level of global, multi-billion-dollar transactions. Take the private dinner I had at Mar-a-Lago at the time, flying down to Florida in the private jet of Ben Ashkenazy, a real estate investor who runs a multi-billion-dollar fund with interests in the Plaza Hotel, Union Station in Washington, DC, and Faneuil Hall in Boston; he was the kind of dude who had Drake sing at his daughter's bat mitzvah. Down in Palm Springs, I met with Franklin Haney, a Memphis businessman who'd long been a Democrat but who gave $1M to Trump's inaugural committee and hired me to help finance a proposed nuclear power plant in Alabama. Haney also needed a ton of federal approvals to complete the project, which was where I came in to help and guide his attorneys greasing the wheels of commerce and government.
These were super-yacht types of people {Beyond Nuclear note: Coincidentally, in fact, just a couple months later, in May of 2018, Haney himself had reportedly anchored his gigantic yacht at D.C.'s Southwest waterfront, during the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability's "DC Days"}, and that constituted my reality under President Trump, so all the cable TV yapping from Avenatti and the tut-tuts on liberal cable networks were like water off a duck's back. The real reason I'd come to Florida was to meet with Hamad bin Jassim, who had been the Prime Minister of Qatar from 2007 to 2013, the Foreign Minister from 1992 to 2013, and the CEO of the Qatar Investment Authority, or QIA, from 2005 to 2013. But those titles don't remotely describe his real authority, as the single person responsible for the disposition of the QIA's $320 billion fund. That made him perhaps the only human being on the planet with power comparable to Vladimir Putin when it came to money and decision-making.
At the time, Qatar was being isolated by the Saudi Kingdom, and I was trying to put Hamad in the good graces of the President of the United States as a way for the tiny, mega-rish emirate to hedge their geopolitical risk. I knew Hamad from years earlier, when the Qataris had been considering investing in a building in New York and I'd tried to broker the deal, but now I was treated entirely differently by the Emir and others as the lawyer for Donald Trump. Hamad was deferential and highly respectful of my role. When Hamad asked for a one-on-one sit down with Trump, I reached out to Jay Sekulow, a lawyer who'd represented Sean Hannity and whom I introduced to Trump, and had become his day-to-day point man for me in the White House.
There I was, going into Mar-a-Lago as the power broker who'd set up a meal between one of the richest men in the world and the President of the United States, and I'd done it with incredible ease. That was what I was talking about when I wrote about the mesmerizing effect of being around Trump: for all the bullshit and bluster, he really was running the world, and I really was an incredible, unbelievably, insanely powerful attorney and fixer, on an intergalactic plane of existence.
The dining room was packed with billionaires, like Nelson Peltz and Ike Perlmutter, but in that crowd, Trump was a God amongst Gods. In the middle of the room there was a single table, surrounded by red velvet rope to isolate it from the others, and there were three places set at the table -- one for the President, one for Hamad, and one for me. The most powerful, the richest, and yours truly, a reality that I still can't quite fathom to this day. Trump was likewise in a fantasyland, I could tell: he always had rich people floating around him, but now he was literally the center of attention, as he'd always wanted to be. The truth was that I felt like a billion dollars. I was unstoppable, I figured; all I had to do was ask, and there I was with one of the richest men in the world, deferentially awaiting the leader of the free world.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States," one of the staff members announced, and in came Trump to astanding ovation. The only thing I can compare the rapturous reception to was the way North Koreans bow and scrape at the sight of Kim Jong-un.
"Hamad, you are one of the richest men in the world," Trump said by way of introduction as he reached the table, "and you know my lawyer, MIchael."
The acknowledgement made me feel special, for sure. The conversation ranged from Middle East geopolitics to the economy, a level of abstraction about the world's most important questions I'd only ever witnessed when I met Henry Kissinger. Hamad bin Jassim had keep knowledge about the needs of the region and the underlying reasons for the Sunni-Shiite division and the war in Yemen.
The Emir talked about ISIS and Hezbollah and Iran and the justness of the cause of the Houthi insurgents in Yemen. Jared Kushner was working on a plan for an overall peace in the Middle East, at least in theory, but here the Emir was going directly to Trump to ensure that his views on the most pressing existential questions facing his nation were heard. He had good reason to want the meeting. Trump was close with the young Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, and the Saudis hated the Qataris, so Hamad meeting with Trump was an opportunity of infinite value.
Shrimp cocktail, steak, grilled salmon -- the food was always excellent at Trump's properties, and the dinner went on for a couple of hours, with my opinion sought on various questions by the President and Hamad. I could feel everyone in the room staring at the three of us at the table reverentially. So you think Avenatti and the porn star were on my mind? You think that nitwit calling me an idiot had any impact? I mean, who was the real idiot? I felt like I was staring at a Power Ball ticket and I had all the correct numbers and the jackpot was $700M. I was sure that Donald Trump had my back and in the end the whole Stormy Daniels mess would be a storm in a teacup. Nothing would happen to me, I was sure, no matter what.
As Trump, Hamad, and I made our way through the room after eating, I made sure to introduce him to Franklin Haney, the developer who was going to pay me a broker fee of $10M, plus a sizable fifteen percent interest in the company, if I assisted him in getting money for his nuclear plant. Hamad bin Jassim had just undertaken to invest up to $45 billion in the United States, so a simple $2 billion in Haney's project seemed not only reasonable but highly likely.
Pages 341 to 345; emphasis added]
Beyond Nuclear note: But Trump did not have Cohen's back. The very next passage in Cohen's memoir describes the FBI raid on his residence, as the Robert Mueller investigation closed in on Cohen's illegal campaign contributions, made as hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, to buy her silence about a sexual affair with Trump, in the closing phase of the 2016 presidential election campaign.
In fact, the morning of the raid was the last time Cohen ever spoke to Trump, he writes. After that, Trump threw Cohen -- his very close confidant for more than a decade -- under the bus, seeking to distance himself from the scandal, and potential legal repercussions.
Cohen's arrest and eventual imprisonment may have disrupted Franklin Haney's lobbying campaign for financial and regulatory favors at the time. But, as Garry Morgan's message above makes clear, Haney has not given up on his efforts to open the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Alabama.
And this sordid tale is not the only one involving Trump's inner circle, and get-rich-quick nuclear power development schemes, the risks and the law be damned. Take Trump's close friend, Thomas J. Barrack, Jr., and Trump's disgraced former National Security Advisory, Michael Flynn. Barrack chaired Trump's inaugural committee. Flynn pleaded guilty, is still embroiled in legal controversy and jeapordy, for lying to FBI agents about his interactions with the Russian ambassador during the Trump Transition in late 2016. Both Barrack and Flynn were involved in a scheme to sell atomic reactors to Saudi Arabia, during the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, the 2016 to 2017 Trump Transition, and even after Trump took office (including direct official involvement by Trump's former Energy Secretary, Rick Perry). The scheme included an attempted end run around Congress, in disregard of legally-binding nuclear weapons nonproliferation safeguards. The U.S. House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, under the chairmanship of the late Elijah Cummings (Democrat-Baltimore, Maryland), published two major investigative reports about the illicit Saudi Arabian atomic reactor new build scheme.