What’s the Story with Tom Barrack?

I want to share with you some notes I’ve been keeping about Tom Barrack, the man who is supposedly one of the President’s closest friends and confidantes as well as a friend of Paul Manafort. He had a big speaking role for Trump at the convention. He organized the inauguration. He’s a big person in Trump World. But the first thing to know about Barrack (pronounced ‘bare-rick’) is that he is the guy Donald Trump pretends to be: he is a fabulously successful and fabulously wealthy investor, developer and manager of real estate properties on a global basis. He operates what is essentially a private equity firm called Colony Northstar (formerly Colony Capital). This is what supposedly makes Barrack such a valuable sounding board for Trump: he doesn’t need Trump or his money. Trump is surrounded by clowns, frauds and phonies. But Barrack is, when it comes to global real estate/investor titans, the real deal.

For these reasons, it’s always seemed to me that Barrack doesn’t need in on any of Trump’s rackets. But he’s also been just in the background of a number of the big developments in the Russia story. This occurred to me again when I first learned about his ties to Rick Gates, which I’ll describe below.