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    Trump-Kushner Hotel Project in Serbia Hits a Snag: Alleged Forgery

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    Serbian authorities say an official admitted to forging a document allowing a protected site in Belgrade to be demolished and replaced with a Trump hotel.The Trump family’s $500 million luxury hotel project in Serbia, slated to be built on the site of a bombed-out Defense Ministry building, has run into an embarrassing complication. A key document the Serbian government has relied on to deliver this deal was forged, officials there said this week.Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, and his business partners plan to build a luxury residential and commercial complex on the site of the long-vacant compound that is slated to include a Trump International Hotel, the first in Europe.The leader of the Serbian agency charged with protecting cultural monuments admitted to the authorities that he had forged a government document allowing the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense headquarters in Belgrade to be demolished and replaced with the Trump hotel.The project won tentative approval from the Serbian government last year, even before the government officially moved to revoke the protected historic status of the former Defense Ministry complex, which was heavily damaged during a 1999 bombing campaign by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.Serbian government officials say that the agency leader, Goran Vasic, fabricated an expert opinion to justify the government’s decision to strip the site of its cultural heritage status.“Vasic forged a proposal for a decision to revoke the status of cultural property,” the Office of the Prosecutor for Organized Crime said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Freed From Prison by Trump and Now Facing the Prospect of Going Back

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      At a hearing this week, witnesses described behavior by Jonathan Braun that could result in his being locked up again. In the early hours of Feb. 15, Jonathan Braun, a violent felon granted clemency by President Trump, was agitated.After getting into a heated argument with his wife and parents and kicking them out of his cavernous Long Island home, Mr. Braun knocked on the door of his live-in nanny under the pretext of retrieving his phone, which was charging in her room.What followed, according to the former nanny’s testimony on Friday, was a terrifying, degrading encounter. Mr. Braun, shirtless, entered the room, pulled her onto her bed and put her into a headlock, she said. Then he pushed her hand over his bare genitals as he groped her breasts, telling her he had always wanted to have intercourse with her.The nanny said she had wrested herself away from his grasp, escaped to her bathroom and locked herself in.Coming on the second day of a hearing that will determine whether Mr. Braun returns to federal prison, her testimony offered one of the most vivid depictions of the depraved behavior he is accused of engaging in. There were no defense witnesses.Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Braun’s 10-year sentence for drug trafficking at the end of his first term in office. The commutation came after Mr. Braun’s family used its close ties to the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser at the time, to secure Mr. Braun’s release.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jonathan Braun, Whose Sentence Was Commuted by Trump, Is Charged With Assault

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      Jonathan Braun, whose drug sentence was commuted by Donald Trump shortly before he left office, was charged on Long Island, the latest incident to raise questions of how clemency applications were vetted.Ever since Donald J. Trump issued a series of pardons and commutations as he left office, he and his allies have defended his administration’s vetting of clemency candidates, claiming they went through a vigorous screening process.But the case of one of those convicts — a New York drug dealer and predatory lender named Jonathan Braun, who had a history of violence and faced an array of other legal problems — has stood out and raised doubts about how rigorous the vetting was.On Tuesday, the police on Long Island arrested Mr. Braun after he allegedly punched his 75-year-old father-in-law in the head. Mr. Braun struck his father-in-law twice as he tried to protect his daughter from Mr. Braun, who was chasing after her while the couple had an argument in their home, according to the Nassau County District Attorney’s office.Mr. Braun’s wife, according to court documents, told police that Mr. Braun had assaulted her twice in the past five weeks. On July 17, the court documents said, Mr. Braun threw his wife off a bed onto the floor, “causing her substantial pain and bruising her legs.”Last week, on Aug. 12, Mr. Braun threw her to the floor and punched her in the head multiple times “causing her substantial pain, bruising” to her arms, legs and head and causing her to feel dizzy, the documents said.Mr. Braun pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors asked for bail but a judge released him without it.“He was released on his own recognizance after pleading not guilty and will address the allegations judicially,” said Mr. Braun’s lawyer, Marc Fernich.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Trump Doesn’t Have the Support of Corporate America

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      Stephan DybusRecent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.I know this because I have worked with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that roughly 60 percent to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans. The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.If you want the most telling data point on corporate America’s lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, look where they are investing their money. Not a single Fortune 100 chief executive has donated to the candidate so far this year, which indicates a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican presidential candidates dating back over a century, to the days of Taft, and stretching through Coolidge and the Bushes, all of whom had dozens of major company heads donating to their campaigns.Mr. Trump secured the White House partly by tapping into the anticorporate, populist messaging of Bernie Sanders, who was then a candidate, a move that Mr. Trump discussed with me when I met him in 2015. The strategy may have won voters but did little to enhance Mr. Trump’s image with the business community. And while a number of chief executives tried to work with Mr. Trump as they would with any incumbent president, and many celebrated his move to cut the corporate tax rate, wariness persisted. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Spoke Recently With Saudi Leader

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      It is not clear what the former president discussed with Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but news of their call came amid Biden administration negotiations with the Saudis over a Middle East peace plan.Former President Donald J. Trump spoke recently with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, their first publicly disclosed conversation since Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, according to two people briefed on the discussion who were not authorized to speak publicly about it.It was unclear what the two men discussed and whether it was their only conversation since Mr. Trump’s departure from the White House. Neither representatives for Mr. Trump nor an official of the Saudi government responded to requests for comment.But news of their discussion comes at a time when the Biden administration is engaged in delicate negotiations with the Saudis aimed at establishing a lasting peace in the Middle East, building on diplomatic ties between Israel and a number of Arab states forged through the work of the Trump administration.If President Biden manages to clinch a trilateral megadeal — which would probably include a Saudi-Israeli peace agreement, an Israeli commitment to a two-state solution, a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty and U.S.-Saudi understandings on a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia — he will need support from two-thirds of senators to ratify the U.S.-Saudi treaty. Mr. Trump, as the presumptive Republican nominee in firm command of his party, could potentially either block any deal or greenlight it for congressional Republicans.Mr. Trump has other reasons to maintain warm relations with Prince Mohammed. The former president and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and former senior White House adviser, established close ties with the crown prince while in office and have capitalized on that good will in their private businesses since leaving government.Saudi Arabia was the first stop on Mr. Trump’s first foreign trip as president — a sign of the value Mr. Trump placed on the relationship. Mr. Trump pursued major deals with the Saudis, including arms sales, and he defended Prince Mohammed at his moment of greatest international pressure, after the C.I.A. concluded that the crown prince had ordered the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Call for Israel to ‘Finish Up’ War Alarms Conservatives

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      Recent private remarks he made urging an end to the Gaza conflict, with no insistence on freeing Israeli hostages first, were another departure from conservatives’ support for Benjamin Netanyahu.Two Israeli journalists traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., a little over a week ago, hoping to elicit from Donald J. Trump a powerful expression of support for their country’s war in Gaza.Instead, one of them wrote that what they heard from Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago “shocked us to the core.”“Both U.S. presidential candidates, Biden and Trump, are turning their rhetorical backs on Israel,” concluded Ariel Kahana, a right-wing settler who is the senior diplomatic correspondent for Israel Hayom. The newspaper is owned by the billionaire Republican donor Miriam Adelson; Ms. Adelson herself arranged the interview with Mr. Trump, according to a person with direct knowledge of the planning.What had Mr. Trump said that so alarmed Mr. Kahana?He told the interviewers that Israel was losing public support for its Gaza assault, that the images of devastation were bad for Israel’s global image and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should end his war soon — statements that sounded far more like something President Biden might say than the kind of cheerleading Mr. Netanyahu has come to expect from Washington Republicans.“You have to finish up your war,” Mr. Trump said. “You have to get it done. We have to get to peace. We can’t have this going on.”That statement apparently troubled Mr. Kahana even more than Mr. Biden’s warnings to Israel. Mr. Biden has called for a six-week cease-fire in exchange for Hamas releasing Israeli hostages. In the interview excerpts released by Israel Hayom, Mr. Trump did not qualify his call for Israel to finish the war by insisting on the release of hostages.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Serbian Leader Says Kushner Deal Is Not an Effort to Influence Trump

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      After news reports that Jared Kushner plans to redevelop a site in Belgrade bombed by NATO in 1999, Serbian politicians clashed over whether the deal was appropriate.The president of Serbia on Monday batted away any suggestion that he might have intentionally tried to steer a valuable real estate project in Serbia’s capital to Jared Kushner, Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, in an effort to influence Mr. Trump should he return to the White House.“I died laughing,” the Serbian leader, Aleksandar Vucic, said at a rally, referring mockingly to news reports that Mr. Kushner was close to an agreement to invest $500 million in redeveloping a high-profile site in central Belgrade, the capital. “I read in some papers that I used this for a political influence on Trump, that corrupted America or someone in America. I am a miracle. It is incredible what all I can do.”Mr. Kushner, who was a senior White House adviser under Mr. Trump, has teamed up with a second former Trump aide, Richard Grenell, on the plan.The tentative agreement between the Kushner team and the Serbian government would grant Mr. Kushner’s investment firm a 99-year lease, at no charge, and the right to build a luxury hotel and apartment complex and a museum on the site of the former headquarters of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense in Belgrade, which was bombed by NATO in 1999.News of the proposal provoked strong objections on Monday from opposition party leaders in Serbia during a meeting of the parliament.Opposition party leaders said they had not been properly informed of the plan and called it inappropriate that an American company owned by a Trump family member would be allowed to earn profits off a site that a United States-led coalition bombed 25 years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kushner Deal in Serbia Follows Earlier Interest by Trump

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      More than a decade ago, before running for president, Donald Trump expressed interest in developing the same site in Belgrade that his son-in-law now plans to invest $500 million in rebuilding.The plan by Jared Kushner and his business partners to redevelop a prized location in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, echoes interest from Donald J. Trump a decade ago in pursuing a deal for the site and a similar proposal pushed during his White House term by a top aide now working with Mr. Kushner, a review of the project shows.The tentative agreement between the Kushner team and the Serbian government would grant Mr. Kushner’s investment firm a 99-year lease, at no charge, and the right to build a luxury hotel and apartment complex and a museum on the site of the former headquarters of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense in Belgrade, which was bombed by NATO in 1999. A draft outline of the agreement was provided to The New York Times by a Serbian official.In 2013, two years before he began running for president, Mr. Trump — Mr. Kushner’s father-in-law — told a top Serbian government official that he wanted to build a luxury hotel on the site. Associates of the Trump Organization traveled to Belgrade to inspect the location. The project did not come together before Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, and after being sworn in he vowed to not do any new foreign deals.But developing the site would again draw interest from Mr. Trump’s circle.Richard Grenell, whom Mr. Trump had appointed as a special envoy in the Balkans, pushed a related plan during the Trump administration that Serbia and the United States jointly work to rebuild the Defense Ministry site. He argued in favor of using American investments to transform the Belgrade site while he was still serving in his official capacity as an American diplomat in 2020, according to transcripts and a recording of remarks made during several government news conferences.Mr. Kushner said in an interview on Sunday that he had never discussed the Belgrade project with Mr. Trump and was not aware of his father-in-law’s prior interest in redeveloping the site.“I had no idea my father-in-law had been interested in that region, and I doubt he has any awareness of this deal we are working on,” Mr. Kushner said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Artificial Intelligence, Ukraine, China — The Big Buzz at Davos

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      C.E.O.s and world leaders gather in the Swiss Alps this year as war, trade risks and disruptive new technologies loom large.The topics on the mind of attendees at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, include artificial intelligence, the war in Gaza and the future of Ukraine.Denis Balibouse/ReutersThe meetings behind the meeting Thousands of global leaders have once again descended on snowy Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. The theme of this year’s event: “rebuilding trust.”But there are the public meetings, and then there are the real ones behind closed doors that the attendees are talking about most. These include discussions touching on U.S.-China tensions, the war in Gaza, artificial intelligence and the future of Ukraine.There is a kind of game that some C.E.O.s play with one another: How many public panels are you on, or how many times have you been in the Congress Center, the main hub for the forum’s big presentations? If the answer is zero, you’ve won. Top U.S. officials are set to appear on the main stage, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser. But speculation abounds about whom they’re seeing behind the scenes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More