Prelude To Detroit: Why No One Will File ABA Grievance On Bill "Boo Boo" Barr - Starring Barbara McQuade With Stephen Henderson On WDET

Today, Barbara McQuade was on WDET Stephen Henderson's show speaking upon the U.S. Department of Justice when someone called in, most promptly on cue with the conversation, to to ask, "How come no one has filed a grievance on Bill Barr to the American Bar Association?".

Allow me to respond:

New York City Bar To Bar Bill Barr From The Bar For Promulgating The Trafficking Of Tiny Humans

http://reggieturner.com

Reggie was, and is, uber, super mean to my Sweetie.

#maytheheavensfall

Detroit litigator Reginald Turner named president-elect of American Bar Association

Reggie Turner,
"Legal Genius" (trademark pending)
ABA President

A Detroit litigator has started his term Tuesday as the president-elect of the American Bar Association.

Reginald Turner, a law firm member of Clark Hill PLC, will serve as the president-elect of the ABA for one-year, the ABA said in a news release. He will become president of the association in August 2021.

“Being a lawyer means conducting yourself with professionalism, service and honor,” Turner said in a news release. “As I assume a leadership role in the ABA, I will honor those values and fulfill the obligation to pursue access to justice, which is true justice.”

More news:Michigan August Primary 2020: Polls open on an Election Day unlike any other

Turner has held many roles in the ABA by serving a chair of the ABA House of Delegates Rules & Calendar Committee, the Committee on Issues of Concern to the Profession and the Committee on Credentials and Admissions. He has also served as a Michigan delegate in the ABA House of Delegates.

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Prelude To Detroit: Buzzfeed & CNN Find Out Through FOIA That You Cannot Hack A Handwritten Letter

Jason Leopold has yet to tell us how Cernovich came into possession of his Confidential Congressional Documents, which were published by Buzzfeed, to assassinate a character in the act of blasphemy.

So, who was this FBI Special agent who had to give White House Counsel the FBI director's email address, who then, generated a missive, got Trump to approve and sign, then deliver to a third party, a letter of termination,  on the other side of town, in under four minutes?

It is simply magical, like how Michigan Attorney General Bill *Smooches* Schuette was able to get Michigan Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to file the Detroit Fake Ass Bankruptcy within minutes of him representing the State of Michigan in the Court of Claims.

I just do not know why I want to say JonesDay.

It is almost like filing a fake ass letter of resignation in D.C. when you are in Detroit.

Manafort had lots of Corporate Shape Shifting Rock Financial mortgages, you know, but rumor has it MERS is still under SIGTARP investigation and there is also an internal audit going on of the mysteriously roaming mortgages, but hey, what do I know?

#maytheheavensfall

New FBI Documents From Mueller’s Russia Investigation Reveal What Witnesses Said About Trump

BuzzFeed News filed a public records lawsuit to get the documents Robert Mueller used to write his report. Today, we are publishing the ninth installment of what witnesses in the investigation told Mueller’s team.

A new cache of witness interview summaries from special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election was released Monday in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by BuzzFeed News and CNN.

Key Takeaways:

• These documents include five pages of Jared Kushner’s FBI interview summary — but all five are completely redacted. The FBI’s notations indicate that much of the material relates to an ongoing law enforcement investigation. Senior Assistant Special Counsel Andrew Goldstein told Kushner that answering a question with “I don’t recall” if he indeed did recall was considered a lie.
• Interview summaries for former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, former White House lawyer and senior Justice Department official James Burnham, and former Stone associate Randy Credico are also almost entirely redacted. McFarland and Credico’s summaries include markings that indicate redacted information relates to ongoing investigations.
• A chunk of the 412 pages of interview summaries relates to the special counsel’s investigation of Roger Stone. That material had been withheld during Stone’s prosecution, but now that it has ended — with a 40-month prison sentence that Trump commuted — the documents are being released. They are still heavily redacted.
• The documents indicate that in the fall of 2017, the accountant for Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer, was under the impression that Cohen was getting a White House job and “needed to liquidate his assets.” Cohen did not get an administration position.
• Michael Cohen used to refer to himself as “Trump’s pitbull” — before he flipped on his former boss and cooperated with Mueller — and according to his accountant, even had a statue of himself in his office bearing that title.
• An Ohio woman who caught the attention of the special counsel’s office because in 2016 she renamed her Twitter account @Guccifer2 — after the character credited with hacking and leaking Democratic emails — told the FBI she had created the account to see if it would be censored by Twitter.
• One witness whose name was redacted told investigators that before the Miss Universe pageant, Trump “would have all of the contestants line up on stage and then he would ask them questions about each other.” Most people would be cleared out of the room for this exchange, which was recorded, the witness said.

These documents, known as FBI 302s, shed light on what Trump administration officials and campaign staffers, as well as other people close to the president, told federal law enforcement agents about events during and after the campaign. In the last set of summaries that were released, one witness said people in Trump’s “orbit” didn’t care whom they hurt, believed their “deep state narrative,” “read books like ‘The Turner Diaries,’” and “downloaded military manuals from the internet.”

A person whose name was withheld on privacy grounds told investigators during an Aug. 11, 2017 interview that after the 2016 election Trump's "hardest" supporters were "shut out" of the new administration by the Republican National Committee, which cut a deal with Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff.

"They had many favors to repay the Committee. Trump gave Priebus a chance but Priebus didn't get the healthcare bill passed," the person told Mueller's investigators.

On Nov. 21, 2017, an FBI agent and two lawyers from Mueller’s office interviewed Jeffrey Getzel, who had worked as an accountant for Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen. Getzel was under the impression that Cohen was up for a job in the White House. He told investigators that roughly a month to a month and a half before the interview, someone (whose name is redacted) told Getzel that Cohen “was going to the White House and that COHEN needed to liquidate his assets.”

Getzel said he respected Cohen’s “significant position” in the Trump Organization. He noted to investigators that Cohen had a statue of himself in his office with the phrase, “Trump’s pitbull” written on it, a phrase that Cohen used to describe himself in the past, according to CNN.

A White House job never materialized, though. Cohen would eventually turn on his former boss and cooperate with Mueller’s investigation. He pleaded guilty to financial crimes unrelated to his dealings with Trump as well as campaign finance violations related to his role orchestrating hush-money payments to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

Getzel told investigators that Cohen was “an extremely sharp individual,” but also a “difficult client” who didn’t pay his bills on time. Cohen “resented paying taxes more than most people” that Getzel did work for, he said, and would pay penalties at the end of the year rather than paying quarterly estimated taxes.

Much of Getzel’s interview summary is redacted, but one section makes clear that he spoke with Mueller’s team about Essential Consultants, the corporate entity that Cohen created to facilitate the hush-money payments. Getzel said that if he’d known more about Essential Consultants, he would have “pushed harder to encourage COHEN to include his interest in the company” in a personal financial statement.

Getzel knew about another corporate entity that Cohen recently created, Michael D. Cohen & Associates P.C. Getzel told investigators that he didn’t think the company had “any real value” because its only client was Trump, ”who had a propensity for firing people.” The Washington Post reported Cohen used that business to pitch himself as a consultant to companies based on his close ties to Trump.

“As such,” the summary reads, “MDCPC was not really a company COHEN could sell to anyone.”

One of the interview summaries is of Cassandra Ford, an Ohio woman who caught the attention of the special counsel's office because in 2016 she renamed her Twitter account @Guccifer2, after the character credited with hacking and leaking Democratic emails. Ford's identity and the interest she attracted from Mueller's investigators were first revealed in October 2018, in an article in BuzzFeed News.

Ford was interviewed by the FBI in April 2018. In the six-page summary of that encounter, much of which is redacted on privacy grounds, she explained why she created @Guccifer2 and chose to give the impression that she was Russian.

"In creating her own twitter account @Guccifer2, Ford wanted to see of the account would be censored by Twitter, because of the notoriety of Guccifer2.0," the interview summary said. She went on to say that she chose the Volgograd time zone for her Twitter account in order to “appear to be Russian.”

Screenshot of the Mueller Memos
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
“Ford used the photo of Felix Dzerzhinsky as her Twitter profile photo. Ford read in the article on Smoking Gun that some of the documents released by Guccifer2.0 persona had the name of Dzerzhinsky on internet and thought he had a ‘creative background,’” the summary said.

In a separate interview, the Republican strategist Jason Miller, who was chief spokesperson of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, told the FBI he sought assistance from the Republican National Committee in 2016 poring over the hacked Democratic National Committee emails that WikiLeaks released. Moreover, he said he recalled hearing stories “about there potentially being a tape in which Trump used the ‘N-word."’ When the campaign learned it was the infamous Access Hollywood tape, Miller said he and the campaign went into damage control. He said he was responsible for disseminating the statement that Trump’s “grab em by the pussy” line “amounted to locker room talk.”

Although the Mueller investigation led to 37 indictments and seven convictions, Trump has aggressively sought to discredit it, repeatedly referring to it as a “witch hunt.” His efforts have been supported by Attorney General Bill Barr, who has intervened in several cases related to the investigation, including the prosecutions of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and political consultant Roger Stone. Last year, Barr also tapped a US attorney in Connecticut, John Durham, to investigate the origins of the Russia probe.

Last month — after Trump commuted Stone’s prison sentence and referred to the probe as a “hoax” and “witch hunt” that the “Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency” — Mueller broke his silence by writing an op-ed in the Washington Post defending his investigation. In June, in response to a separate lawsuit filed by BuzzFeed News and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a previously blacked-out portion of the Mueller report was disclosed; it showed that Mueller’s team suspected Trump had lied to investigators in his written responses to their questions about Stone.

The final 448-page Mueller report, released in April 2019, was the most hotly anticipated prosecutorial document in a generation. But it reflected only a tiny fraction of the primary-source documents that Mueller’s team had amassed over the course of its two-year probe; much of the content of the typewritten interview summaries taken by the special counsel’s office has never before been reviewed publicly. A month after the report was released, BuzzFeed News sued the FBI and the Department of Justice, seeking access to those records. That litigation was subsequently joined by CNN.

In October, a federal judge ordered the release of the documents, and the two agencies began releasing 302s last November. Under the court order, records must be disclosed every month; to date, the government has produced about 3,000 pages of summaries from interviews with more than 500 witnesses who spoke to Mueller’s team during the course of the investigation.

The vast majority of the 302s have been heavily redacted, leaving vast swaths of information about what witnesses told investigators obscured from view. BuzzFeed News has challenged some of those redactions, arguing in court that one category of exemption the government has cited to justify the withholdings was legally unfounded, politically motivated, and implemented solely to protect the president.

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Prelude To Detroit: The Residuals Of Kamala Harris - Kofi Bonner Takes Over Bedrock

I wonder if anyone is going to ask Kamala Harris about her time with Kofi Bonner.

Quicken Loans agrees to $32.5 million settlement in federal mortgage fraud lawsuit

#maytheheavensfall

Dan Gilbert's Bedrock hires Kofi Bonner as new CEO

Kofi Bonner

Kofi Bonner has been named CEO of Bedrock, the company announced Wednesday. The former Cleveland Browns chief administrative officer and California developer replaces Matt Cullen, who left Dan Gilbert's Detroit-based real estate development company last month to work on two Ohio casinos.

Bonner starts Sept. 21. Bedrock said that Bonner has "extensive experience in leading complex development projects in metropolitan areas."

Kofi Bonner is the new CEO of Bedrock.
As co-chief operating officer for Irvine, California- based FivePoint Holdings, Bonner led the development of projects including San Francisco Shipyard and Candlestick Communities.

“I look forward to building on the accomplishments of Mr. Gilbert and the talented team at Bedrock by advancing the transformational development program, partnering with the community to deliver positive social outcomes and working with local businesses to further the incredible momentum that Detroit and Cleveland have seen over the last decade," Bonner said in a statement.

Bonner was the executive vice president and chief administrative officer of the Cleveland Browns for seven years where he oversaw business operations and the development of the Cleveland Browns Stadium, according to Bedrock.

His other past experience includes roles as an affordable housing developer for Oakland Community Housing Inc.; redevelopment director for Emeryville, California; director of community and economic development and interim city manager of Oakland; and chief economic advisor to Willie Brown, then Mayor of San Francisco.

“With his extensive experience leading landmark projects on the West Coast and the years he spent in Cleveland with the Browns, Kofi Bonner is the right leader to build on Bedrock’s nearly 10 years of transformational development work,” said Bill Emerson, Bedrock Vice Chairman. “Bedrock has a really exciting future as momentum builds at the Hudson’s Site, Book Tower and dozens of other projects, and I look forward to partnering with Kofi to ensure they have a positive and lasting impact on the communities where we serve.”

Bill Emerson, the acting CEO, will retain his role as vice chairman of both Bedrock and Rock Holdings Inc.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Faked cleanup at Hunters Point Shipyard much worse than Navy estimates

The U.S. Navy is drastically understating the severity of the ongoing environmental scandal at its former shipyard in San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood, an official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared in newly released documents.

The biggest redevelopment project in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake, with 12,000 planned housing units as well as millions of square feet of office and retail space, transformation of the former warship repair base and nuclear weapons testing laboratory—an EPA Superfund site contaminated with industrial and radioactive pollution—has largely been on hold since 2016, when the EPA halted land transfers while a fraud scandal could be unraveled.

Workers with Tetra Tech, a Pasadena-based firm with a history of winning government contracts, first came forward beginning in 2012 with allegations that the cleanup had been faked on the orders of higher-ups at the company.

A review of Tetra Tech’s data, conducted last year by other contractors hired by the U.S. Navy and first published by Curbed SF, found that as much as 49 percent of the company’s work had signs of manipulation or outright falsification and could not be trusted.

However, an independent review by the EPA found that the Navy dramatically understated the scope of the problem. According to the EPA, as much as 97 percent of the cleanup data is unreliable and must be retested, John Chestnutt, manager of the EPA’s local Superfund Division, wrote in a December 27 letter.

“The data analyzed demonstrate a widespread pattern of practices that appear to show deliberate falsification, failure to perform the work in a manner required to ensure [cleanup] requirements were met, or both,” Chestnutt wrote.

Chestnutt’s letter was obtained and published Monday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an advocacy group based in the Washington, D.C., area.

The EPA’s current review only covered about 40 percent of the base. However, the EPA’s findings echo criticism of the Navy’s handling of the scandal from environmental watchdog groups and neighborhood advocates.

Tetra Tech first admitted to providing false soil samples in 2014, but was allowed to continue working after blaming the problem on low-level employees and submitting other workers to “ethics training,” excuses and solutions the Navy appeared ready to accept until more whistleblowers came forward alleging more widespread and systemic fraud—allegations that have now been sustained.

“What makes these findings so remarkable is that the Navy was on notice for years that it had a major data meltdown on its hands yet is still trying to cook the books,” said Jeff Ruch, PEER’s executive director. “The Navy created an environmental nightmare on this stretch of the San Francisco Bay but instead of cleaning it up has spent the past several years compounding it.”

The Navy created an environmental nightmare on this stretch of the San Francisco Bay but instead of cleaning it up has spent the past several years compounding it.
Derek Robinson, the Navy’s program manager for Hunters Point, did not respond to an email or a telephone message seeking comment.

Michele Huitric, a spokesperson at the local branch of the EPA, did not offer comment to Curbed SF. In a statement issued to the San Francisco Examiner Monday, Huitric said that the EPA, which is responsible for overseeing the Navy’s cleanup of the shipyard, is “pleased” that the Navy will be “resampling the impacted parcels.”

The Navy is supposed to begin retesting contaminated shipyard land sometime this summer. No timeline or start date for that work has been publicly released.

According to Ruch, the shipyard scandal is “unfolding into the biggest case of eco-fraud in U.S. history.” Only the Volkswagen emissions scandal, in which the automaker sold 500,000 cars designed to cheat the Clean Air Act, can compare, Ruch told Curbed SF.

The shipyard is divided into alphanumeric parcels. In a review of the work on Parcel B, the Navy found issues with 15 percent of the data collected. On Parcel G, the Navy recommended 49 percent of the data be resampled.

But according to a “technical team including national experts in health physics, geology, and statistics” assembled by the EPA, 90 percent of the data on Parcel B is untrustworthy. On Parcel G, 97 percent of the data is “suspect,” according to the EPA.

Tetra Tech workers falsified data in a variety of ways. These include pulling soil samples from an area known to be clean—the site of a former movie theater—and passing them off as soil from areas known to be dirty; running scanners too quickly to detect contamination; faking chain-of-custody records; and faking results at on-site testing laboratories.

Together, those two parcels comprise about 40 percent of the base’s land area. According to plans filed by FivePoint, the developer of the SF Shipyard, those parcels are the planned future homes for the area’s densest residential development and the core of a retail area.

FivePoint is closely associated with Miami-based homebuilding giant Lennar Urban, which in turn has close ties to the local Democratic Party power structure in San Francisco.

The development behemoth’s regional vice president, Kofi Bonner, is a former aide to Willie Brown, San Francisco’s former mayor. And Brown is a principal in Golden Gate Global, an investment fund that’s luring overseas investors to sink capital in the shipyard project in exchange for visas.

California’s two U.S. senators are part of the same San Francisco-based power circle: former state attorney general Kamala Harris is a Brown associate who served as city district attorney. And senior U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is a former San Francisco mayor.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, “we’re not seeing California’s or even San Francisco’s delegation up in arms about this,” PEER’s Ruch noted. “San Francisco’s members of Congress are very well placed. They could enact revenge. They could force hearings.”

“You would think at the head of the line of aggrieved parties would be the U.S. Navy, but they don’t appear to be aggrieved,” he added. “There are no consequences.”

In a statement emailed to Curbed SF, Taylor Griffin, a spokesperson for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents most of San Francisco in Congress, said Pelosi and her staff “continue to closely monitor” the situation, and has been in “close touch” with both the EPA and Navy.

“Public health and safety remains our top concern, while working to ensure the timely delivery of long-awaited housing and jobs when the cleanup is completed,” Griffin wrote.

Ironically, under embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, cleaning Superfund sites has been a stated priority—and a source of rare praise for the Trump Administration from environmental advocates, who have credited Pruitt with pushing private companies to perform “aggressive, accelerated cleanups,” as the Washington Post reported in January.

[M]uch of the $1 billion in taxpayer money spent on cleaning up the shipyard has gone to waste.
Meanwhile, the fraud means that much of the $1 billion in taxpayer money spent on cleaning up the shipyard has gone to waste—and Tetra Tech, the contractor responsible for the faked data, has largely escaped punishment.

The company, which posted profits in excess of $350 million last year, managed to escape paying a $7,000 fine levied on it by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on appeal.

Tetra Tech is also a subcontractor on a $1.4 billion work arrangement with the Department of Energy to clean up pollution at Los Alamos in New Mexico—the historic home of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb (which was shipped in secret to Hunters Point, where it was loaded onto a ship for delivery to the Pacific). Critiques of that arrangement have fallen on deaf ears at the Department of Energy, which stated that Tetra Tech would remain involved.

Tetra Tech has yet to comment publicly on the findings. However, the company appears to be preparing for a leadership shift—and to compensate departing leaders.

According to SEC filings, in March, company shareholders approved a severance plan for Tetra Tech executives. For the next two years, executives “terminated by the company without ‘cause’” are eligible for “lump sum cash severance payments,” including salary, bonuses, and “full vesting of outstanding unvested stock options.”

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

SIGTARP Is Not Finished With The Detroit Land Bank Authority & Its Legal Geniuses - Gerrymandering

Just a friendly reminder that SIGTARP has yet to conclude anything in Detroit when it comes to TARP & Hardest Hit Funds.

Gerrymandering: "If you do not live there, you cannot vote there."

Dear Mike Duggan - NO! You May Not Have $250 Million Bond To Make Up For The $250 Million Stolen By The Detroit Land Bank Authority

https://sterling-group.com/search/?search=detroit

Cocktails & Popcorn: OVERSIGHT Hearing On SIGTARP & Its Multifaceted Issues With The Administration Of The Hardest Hit Fund

Not one mention of Detroit.

https://beverlytran.blogspot.com/p/detroit-land-bank-authority-leaks.html

#maytheheavensfall

Detroit Land Bank Authority tears down last house with federal grant money

DETROIT (FOX 2) - The Detroit Land Bank Authority hit a milestone on Friday, August 14, 2020. The grant program that was launched six years ago funded its final demolition.

"We're very excited that we were able to accomplish over 15,000 demos," said Deputy Executive Director Tammy Daniels. A blighted home on Waveney where squatters used to live was the final demo.

Federal grant ends for Detroit Land Bank Authority

The Detroit Land Bank Authority demolished its final home Friday under a federal grant program that has been funding the demolitions for the past six years.

At the height of the program, the Land Bank Authority would demolish sometimes nearly 100 blighted homes a week. But, despite successes, the program faced a federal probe that resulted in criminal charges of two former employees of a demolition firm.

"In a program operating at this scale, there's going to be some problems. This was something that was never done before. We did not have a roadmap so, yes, there were mistakes. And there will continue to be issues," Daniels said.

As the Land Bank demolishes its last house, what happens to the future of demolitions in the city?

"We still have 8,000 properties that need that level of attention and so Proposal N is critically important to finishing the work that we started," she said.

When Detroit residents vote in November, they can support Proposal N (for neighborhoods), a plan to address vacant houses in Detroit through rehabilitation or demolition.

"I think we need it because there's a lot of abandoned houses here in the city because we've got squatters, little kids that could go inside the houses and get hurt," said Stephenie Lee, who lives near the final demolition site.

And if the proposal is not approved?

"Right now we're only budgeted for $9.5 million, and that's really restricting us to emergencies only. And for us, it's even restricting the emergencies," said LaJuan Counts, City of Detroit Demolition Director.

You can read more about Proposal N here.

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Tales Of The New Crown: Dan Gilbert Just Bought Two Gifts

This definitely needs new artwork and a audio-visual upgrade.

#maytheheavensfall

Dan Gilbert LLC Just Bought Two Mansions in Palm Beach For More than $40 Million

An LLC linked to Cavs owner Dan Gilbert just purchased the 11,000-square-foot Palm Beach mansion featured in the video above for $24.5 million. The listed address of the buyer, "Golden Crate LLC," is that of Quicken Loans, in Detroit.

A Florida real estate blog reported that a document filed with the city of Palm Beach was signed by Matthew Rizik, current CFO of Gilbert's Rock Ventures.

Literally the day before, Palm Beach outlets reported, the same Gilbert-linked LLC purchased an $18.75 million mansion in the same area. That home, however, is only 5,000 square feet. Ho-hum.

Who knows whether Gilbert intends to use these for personal use, as investment properties or something else. The $24.5-million Mediterranean estate in the video above, which reportedly has nine-and-a-half bathrooms, was last sold for $20.38 million, netting the previous owner a cool $4 million.

Gilbert's personal fortune was revealed to have ballooned to $34 billion last week, after the initial public offering of Rocket Cos. corporate stock. He is now the 28th-richest person on planet earth.

Cleveland, Ohio, and Cuyahoga County, meanwhile, on the brink of crippling economic crises spawned by the coronavirus, will be paying off the debt on renovations to the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, a venue where fans may not congregate for several years, until 2034.

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Prelude To Detroit: Warren Buffett & Dan Gilbert Have Tales To Tell

Oh, Warren,

Take my hand and let us go down the rabbit hole.

#maytheheavensfall

Pulling pranks, bidding for Yahoo, and launching a $1 billion basketball stunt: Rocket founder Dan Gilbert and Warren Buffett are close friends with a colorful past

Warren Buffett & Dan Gilbert
in Detroit

Rocket Companies, which owns Quicken Loans, went public on Thursday, boosting founder and chairman Dan Gilbert's fortune to about $34 billion.

Gilbert is close friends with Warren Buffett and has partnered with the investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO several times over the years.

For example, Gilbert and Buffett pranked Quicken employees with a fake sale in 2014, Berkshire insured a $1 billion Quicken marketing stunt the same year, and Buffett agreed to finance a bid for Yahoo by Gilbert and other investors that ultimately failed.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Rocket Companies' founder and chairman Dan Gilbert saw his net worth soar to $34 billion after the parent company of mortgage lender Quicken Loans went public on Thursday.

Gilbert — who is also the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team and the founder and controlling shareholder of StockX, the online sneaker marketplace — now boasts a fortune roughly half the size of Warren Buffett's, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO will likely be cheering Gilbert on, as the pair have been friends and occasional business partners for years.

"I'm an enormous admirer of Dan and what he has accomplished in Quicken Loans," Buffett told CNBC in May 2016.

Read more: BANK OF AMERICA: Buy these 5 commodities now for profits into next year as pandemic uncertainty boosts their prices and lifts gold to $3,000

Rocket didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Pledges, prizes, and pranks

Gilbert and Buffett first met at a conference years ago, and became acquainted over lunch in Buffett's hometown of Omaha, according to Reuters.

In 2012, Gilbert signed the Giving Pledge, which Buffett launched with Bill and Melinda Gates to encourage the world's wealthiest people to give away at least half of their fortunes to philanthropic causes.

Gilbert roped in Buffett two years later, when Quicken's marketing team wanted to hold a competition with a $1 billion reward for any contestant who filled out a perfect bracket for the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament.

No one succeeded, but Quicken paid Berkshire an estimated $10 million premium to insure the prize, according to Crain's Detroit Business.

Read more: 100 deals and $1 million in profit a year: Here's how Mike Simmons made a simple change to his real-estate investing strategy that took him from small-time house flipper to full-fledged mogul

Gilbert also interviewed Buffett at an event called Detroit Homecoming in 2014. The pair revealed backstage that they pranked most of Quicken's management team on April Fools' Day that year: Gilbert falsely claimed that Berkshire had bought the company, and Buffett played along on a video call, Crain's Detroit Business reported.

"I go along with whatever he comes up with, and so far I haven't gone to jail," Buffett joked at the time.

Buffett also agreed to finance a group of investors including Gilbert when they tried to buy internet titan Yahoo in 2016, Reuters said. The consortium's bid ultimately failed.

There's no mention of Buffett beyond the basketball stunt in Rocket's initial public offering filing. However, in light of their tie-ups over the years, it would be no surprise if Gilbert name-checks him during future interviews and earnings calls.

Read more: Investors are piling into socially responsible ETFs at an unprecedented rate — and Morgan Stanley says these 4 stocks are best-positioned to profit from the trend

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rocket Companies IPO jumps 19.5%; company promises Detroit neighborhood investments

Shares of Rocket Companies Inc., the parent of billionaire Dan Gilbert's mortgage lending giant, closed up more than 19% on their first day of trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange.

An unspecified amount of the $1.8 billion the company is set to earn from its initial public offering will support initiatives in its hometown, such as increasing internet access in Detroit neighborhoods, CEO Jay Farner told The Detroit News.

The first public shares of Rocket, which includes Quicken Loans, ended trading up 19.5% to $21.51 on the exchange under the RKT symbol — a milestone for the Detroit company that was an early harbinger of the city's revitalization and recruiter for young tech talent. The firm is slated to become the seventh-largest IPO of 2020, according to Dealogic, with 100 million shares available at $18 each.

The price was lower than the original $20 to $22 range the company had suggested last week for the IPO. Despite the decrease, shares did reach a high of $22.70 around 2 p.m. and were in line with last year's 18% average first-day price rise.

"The purpose of this was not to raise capital," Farner said in an interview. "Whether it was $3.3 billion or $2 billion, the goal was to take the company public, which is an important step and gives us more flexibility into the future."

The stock's performance was a "Goldilocks stock-price bump," said Erik Gordon, a faculty member at the University of Michigan's Ross Business School.

It was "high enough to make money for investors who bought stock at the opening price and not so high as to make you think the company sold the stock for too little," he said.

The smaller IPO, Farner said, is expected to bring about a long-term investor base thinking three to five years in the future. Although Rocket is in the mortgage business, it is seeking to pitch itself as a tech disruptor in the industry by allowing homebuyers to apply for loans completely online.

The company represents about 9% of the highly fragmented mortgage industry, Farner said, but it hopes to grow it to 25% over the next decade. Rocket Companies closed $145 billion in loans in 2019 and recorded $893.4 million in profit on revenue of more than $5.1 billion.

Although COVID-19 had put a pause on IPO plans in the spring, low interest rates have spurred a frenzy of refinancing and homebuyer activity that contributed to record months in March, April and May, Farner said. Coupled with an upward trending market since March, the company decided now was the time to go public.

"I think the market is really recognizing or confirming that we have some pretty special technology that we can grow and scale and do so profitably," he said.

Going public should help Rocket reach its goal, Farner said, providing opportunities for greater name recognition and funds to improve its market share. It also provides for an employee stock option — something Gilbert has wanted to provide to the company's more than 20,000 employees, most of whom work downtown and many of whom are highly sought tech talent.

"It was challenging to do that in our previous structure," Farner said. "You see that a lot in Palo Alto, California. Here in Detroit, I think, it's less common. We're proud that we can offer our employees the opportunity to be owners of the business."

The funds will support the company's greater efforts in Detroit, as well, Farner said. A company spokesman declined to disclose how much of the offering would support those initiatives.

"We're selling only about 5% of the organization," Farner said. "We wanted to take that and be able to use it for some of the initiatives here in the city of Detroit, not just today, but though for example the Gilbert Family Foundation to provide even more capital to continue to help our city down the road."

The Gilbert Family Foundation has contributed to COVID-19 relief efforts in Detroit as well as supported efforts in education and blight removal. IPO funds also will support efforts around the Connect 313 Fund, an initiative to increase internet access in the city.

"Technology empowers us to get a loan, to buy a home or find a home, get a mortgage; it increases education," Farner said. "It's crazy 30% of people here don't really have that. We are working with others to solve that problem."

Gilbert will maintain a majority controlling stake in the company with 79% of shares under a multi-tiered system. He will have final say over major decisions such as the election of board directors, proposed mergers, or sale of the company's assets. Gilbert's net worth totals $7.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Gilbert founded the company in 1985. In 2010, he moved its headquarters from Livonia to downtown Detroit. He joined Farner and other executives in New York to ring the opening bell in New York. They wore face masks amid the pandemic.

“Rocket has spent the last 35 years becoming America’s largest mortgage lender by taking the road less traveled,” Gilbert said in a statement. “I have full confidence in Jay and the rest of the senior leaders to build on the blueprint that got the company to where it is today and find innovative ways to reach new clients in the future.”

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Dear Mike Duggan - NO! You May Not Have $250 Million Bond To Make Up For The $250 Million Stolen By The Detroit Land Bank Authority

One of Mike Duggan's money hustle signs I snatched
because it caused me Post Traumatic Fraud Distress.

NO!

You cannot have any more money.

Do you realize what great lengths I have arduously harrowed just to find out what you did with the Hardest Hit Funds, Neighborhood Stabilization Funds 1 & 2,  property taxes and all the other taxpayer funded Public Private Partnerships that allowed the fraud schemes to go on in the exfiltartion and selling off the land patents of the City of Detroit, replete with those fake ass quiet title, mortgage, quit claim, reverse mortgage, blah, blah, blah, and those foreign tiny humans trust funds?

Cocktails & Popcorn: WXYZ Found The Detroit Development Fund But Forgot To Ask Who Owns The Patent

NO!

What did you do with the last $250,000,000?

https://beverlytran.blogspot.com/p/detroit-land-bank-authority-leaks.html

Fund your campaign?

Fund your buddies' campaigns?

Perhaps, we should ask Alexis Wiley what happened to all that money.

I know where lots of these properties you just gave away are.

Then, you used public money through our institutions of learning to come up with some more fake ass laws, like the ones Ian Conyers introduced to expand that fake ass Detroit Land Bank Authority, to set up more fake ass LLCs, or not, to flip, cash, flip, or for the properies that are too blighted, hand out to your next wave of foreign insurgents, so they can be ready, at a moment's notice, to do the bidding of your political handlers.



What are you going to do with the properties you save?

Give them to the Detroit Land Bank Authority to run them through the property tax, mortgage fraud, money hustle system, again?

I have a better question.

What are you going to do with the land?

More land patents?

More gerrymandering?

Forced migration?

I have a better idea.

How about going after all the fraudfeasors who were just a-stealin' the children, land & vote?

Last time I checked you were still an officer of the court.

I bet Dan Gilbert could help you recover all that $250,000,000 so you do not have to burden the residents of the City of Detroit, again.

Dan Gilbert has friends.

Correct me if I err in my assumption, but, do you not still have an active SIGTARP investigation going on for stealin' that money that was supposed to go to saving houses and removing blight?

I had better stop before Mikey forecloses on my property, again.

I hate when that happens because no one in City and County governments, or the "Elected Ones" want to provide me any assistance.

Must be those federal indictments.

Plan N bond proposal would save some Detroit homes, demolish others

Detroit — A neighborhood improvement plan that would hinge on a $250 million bond proposal on the November ballot was introduced Tuesday by Mayor Mike Duggan and other city officials.

The plan — called Proposal N, as in neighborhoods — would stabilize 8,000 vacant but structurally sound houses and demolish 8,000 structures that can't be saved. The city would commit to a goal of awarding more than 50% of all contracts to Detroit companies.

"This will transform the quality of life in the neighborhoods in this city if we secure 8,000 houses and move families in and get rid of the 8,000 burned-out houses that can't be saved," Duggan said during a press conference. "We believe all of this is possible and we're going to put people to work."

Detroit City Council is expected to consider in the next two weeks whether to put the bond proposal on the Nov. 3 ballot. If voters approve the proposal, bonds would go to market in December, officials said.

According to the city, the bond can be sold without raising property taxes by phasing in new debt payments as other debt drops off.

The latest proposal follows the City Council's rejection last fall of Duggan's previous $250 million plan aimed at erasing blight. At the time, some city council members cited unresolved questions and concerns including a long-running federal criminal investigation into the city’s demolition program. Others called for more inclusion in the hiring of Detroit workers.


Earlier this year, the city hired a leader for its new demolition department and the demolition program shifted July 1 from the control of the Detroit Land Bank and Detroit Building Authority to the city government for the first time in six years.

The new proposal puts higher priority on saving structurally sound houses, officials said. The previous plan was more aggressive on demolitions and called for 19,000 demolitions by mid-2025.

According to the city, there are 14,000 houses that require demolition. Under the latest proposal, 8,000 would be demolished during the next three years. The city plans to seek other funding to complete the rest of the demolitions in 2023 and 2024.

The city has depleted the $263 million it received through the federally funded Hardest Hit program. It was used to fund 15,000 demolitions.

Contractors will be required to either comply with the city's executive order requiring that 51% of all hours on the job be worked by Detroit residents — or pay into the city's job training funds. Another option is to interview Detroiters first from a list of applicants provided by the city's Detroit at Work program.

"We're going to be able to knock down homes in our most challenged neighborhoods, in our most low-income neighborhoods — the areas that didn't see these types of resources in the past," Councilman Scott Benson said.

"We're going to be able to hire our residents who are going to be looking for jobs," he said.

After the $600 a week in extra federal unemployment benefits runs out July 25, Benson said, "You're going to see a great change in people's economic standing within the city of Detroit. It's important that we give people a chance to invest and rebuild their own communities."

City Councilman Andre Spivey said Tuesday that after the council rejected the mayor’s previous proposal, he asked for a more robust plan that would include renovation and provide more opportunities for local demolition contractors.

“I support this plan,” he said. “I’m ready to vote on it when the time does come. I still receive phone calls from residents who live near a vacant house, and it is leaning close to their home. I still have residents who cannot get homeowners insurance on their property because they live in an area where they have too many vacant homes."

Securing the 8,000 houses that would be saved would involve clearing out the structures, installing secure exterior coverings over doors and windows, and fixing holes in roofs.

“It adds value to anybody that wants to buy it," Duggan said. "We’ll probably put $10,000 or so into securing the outside, fixing the roof. That means for anybody who to buy that house, we’ve added $10,000 of value right off the bat. It makes it far more attractive to the community groups. And if you’re a buyer, you can put in plumbing and furnace and not have to be nearly as worried that somebody is going to come in and steal them because we have a secure exterior system in place.”

The plan would putt $90 million toward stabilizing homes and $160 million for demolition.

George Preston, president of the Mohican Regent Resident Association, said Tuesday he’s pleased to hear of the plans. Preston has lived in his eastside neighborhood for almost 40 years. One concern among neighbors is blighted vacant properties, he said.

“We try to do our part in terms of trying to keep it as clean as we possibly can, but we want people in these properties,” he said. “I’m excited when I hear that hopefully this is something that going is coming. We’re going to get people hopefully in these properties, we’re going to get these properties cleaned up and bringing about a vibrant neighborhood.”

Preston said he hopes an increase in residents in the neighborhood would attract more businesses to the area.

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

The Intercept Is The First To Commence The Unmasking Of Detroit - Brenda Jones, Dan Gilbert, Detroit Land Bank Authority & SIGTARP

Brenda Jones & Detroit Land Bank Authority
behind the obverse Seal of the City of Detroit

FUN FACT! BRENDA JONES CERTIFIED HER OWN CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION AS A CITY OF DETROIT ELECTION COMMISSION MEMBER BECAUSE SHE REFUSED TO RESIGN

ANOTHER FUN FACT! BRENDA JONES IGNORED MULTIPLE ELECTION COMPLAINTS OF ELECTION FRAUD WHEN SHE CERTIFIED HER OWN CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION

ONE MORE FUN FACT! SIGTARP IS INVESTIGATING THE TARP MONEY QUICKEN LOANS CONTRIBUTED TO BRENDA JONES' CAMPAIGN

LAST FUN FACT! BRENDA JONES WAS MEAN TO MY SWEETIE

http://beverlytran.blogspot.com/search?q=BRENDA+JONES#axzz6NfyXb8lX

It seems Detroit is about to be unmasked.

This article is a nice start, so I shall grade it a C+, just because it did not take the time to identify TARP as the public subsidy nor did it mention the Detroit Land Bank Authority as the vehicle for TARP.

Rashida got some of that TARP money for her campaign, too, you know.

To better foreshadow, think of it like this: Detroit politicians funded their campaigns from the fake ass mortgage and tax foreclosure crisis, then participated in blasphemy to take out a congressional office holder, just so they could run for his seat to cover up the fact that they did what they did - stealin' the children, land & vote.

Let us see if The Intercept, or anyone else for that matter, will bring it up.

#maytheheavensfall

TLAIB OPPONENT BRENDA JONES COLLECTED CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS FROM QUICKEN LOANS EXECUTIVES AS PUBLIC SUBSIDIES FLOWED

Brenda Jones & Greg Mathis

IN THE WEEKS leading up to Brenda Jones’s vote in November 2017 to award $250 million in taxpayer funds to billionaire Dan Gilbert and his Quicken Loans empire, the Detroit City Council president cashed $8,000 in campaign checks from current and former executives at Gilbert’s companies. In total, Jones has received nearly $25,000 in campaign contributions from the executives, their spouses, and Quicken’s political action committee, while Gilbert, Michigan’s richest man, has accumulated over half a billion in public subsidies.

The $250 million from the city council allowed Gilbert, the owner and co-founder of Quicken Loans, to continue an ambitious redevelopment of downtown Detroit through his real estate company, Bedrock. In the years that followed — and as Jones collected more Gilbert-linked campaign contributions — the relationship between Jones and Gilbert has only tightened.

Jones is one of just two elected officials, alongside her ally, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, on the board of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation. One section of the Trump tax cuts included the bipartisan Opportunity Zone program, which selects low-income census tracts for lucrative tax breaks. The DEGC helped to craft Michigan’s recommendations to the Treasury Department for Opportunity Zone designations that benefited Gilbert. A ProPublica investigation revealed Gilbert’s role in lobbying for the census tract designations, which sparked outrage in Detroit, including a call for a congressional investigation from first-term Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who represents the city in Congress.

Jones, however, made no public statement as anger rose at Gilbert following the revelations. Jones also stayed silent as Gilbert attracted criticism for refusing to assist the city in collecting income taxes from the new, wealthier residents of Bedrock’s luxury apartment buildings.

Jones and Tlaib faced off in two elections in 2018, one to fill the remainder of former Rep. John Conyers’s term, the second for the nomination to succeed him in the next Congress. Jones won the first, serving for roughly three weeks, while Tlaib won the second, going on to become a high-profile member of the so-called Squad, quickly making headlines declaring that House Democrats would “go in and impeach the motherfucker.”

Related
Brenda Jones Took Illegal Campaign Cash From Donors Doing Business With the City of Detroit
Gilbert, who has been referred to by President Donald Trump as “a great friend,” is the most powerful man in Detroit, and owns vast swaths of the city. But his team responded angrily and attacked Tlaib’s demand for an investigation. “Rep. Tlaib would be well served to spend some time at www.oppzonefacts.com learning the truth behind the false ProPublica narrative before advocating that the government spend the public’s money chasing a ghost story,” a Quicken Loans representative told the local press. Now Gilbert has an opportunity to help a politician deeply enmeshed in the census tract designation as a board member of a powerful local development agency, as opposed to a member of Congress, Tlaib, who demanded a federal investigation into the controversial tax break.

Polls for the August 4 Democratic primary show a tight race.

The Intercept reported last month that Jones had received illegal campaign contributions in her 2017 re-election campaign to the Detroit City Council. Neither Jones nor Gilbert, through Quicken Loans, responded to requests for comment.

GILBERT’S ENTRANCE into Detroit began in 2011 when Quicken Loans moved its headquarters to downtown from Livonia in the Michigan suburbs. In a city that is 84 percent African American, with 35 percent of the city and half of its children in poverty, Gilbert’s role in Detroit’s politics and development have not come without controversy. Community discomfort with Gilbert’s vaunted new status was encapsulated in 2017 when Bedrock ran an ad campaign titled “See Detroit As We Do” featuring overwhelmingly white models.

“Dan throws a tremendous amount of money around in the city,” said Maurice BP-Weeks, who lives in Detroit and is co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “He is a political kingmaker. It’s difficult for people to credibly contest him and feel that they can keep their job or their funding because those are the things that are threatened when you take on such a powerful person. If you’re contesting power in Detroit, you’re contesting Dan Gilbert.”

Gilbert is the richest man in Michigan, with a net worth of $7.3 billion.

“The risk here is that a small group of developers can capture a city council or county board and get overpaid to do something they would have done anyways” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which advocates for transparent and fair municipal subsidies.

“If you’re contesting power in Detroit, you’re contesting Dan Gilbert.”
“For a city like Detroit, it really doesn’t have the luxury of wasting any money,” LeRoy said. “Do you want to put all your eggs in one basket, like Dan Gilbert-sized office parks, or do you try to do other things where you’re not putting so many eggs in one basket — where you’re doing public transit, public infrastructure, health, and education, all the things that benefit lots of employers and don’t put you at risk of any one company’s business plan not working out?”

Between 2011 and 2016, Gilbert and his affiliated companies spent $451 million purchasing parcels of land in downtown Detroit. Gilbert and his companies employ over 17,000 workers in Detroit, making it the city’s largest employer. Of the five lenders that had the highest percentage of foreclosures in the city in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, only Quicken is still extant. As of 2015, half of the properties that Quicken has foreclosed on had become blighted. Gilbert has been a leading advocate of expanded government funding to tear down blighted structures. Last June, Quicken Loans paid $32 million to settle charges brought by the Justice Department that it had approved hundreds of loans for unqualified borrowers, and then profited when the borrowers defaulted.

“Dan Gilbert and Brenda Jones are not looking out for the residents,” said Charlevoix VIllage Association President Toyia Watts, a community organization that led the opposition to the 2017 giveaway. “They’re not putting money in the pots for fixing up homes, give the people that live here the empty lots they’ve maintained. We’ve given developers too much power over the community. They have too much power over our neighborhood. The way they’re making money doesn’t work for us.”

BP-Weeks noted the connection between Quicken’s role in the subprime lending crisis and Gilbert’s role in crafting development policy in Detroit today. “Quicken is the folks that were responsible for the last housing crisis” said BP-Weeks. “For an executive of Quicken making all those decisions including about housing is ridiculous. He should not be making those decisions.”

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©