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‘Once this is over, we’ll be kings’: How Lev Parnas worked his way into Trump’s world — and now is rattling it

By Rosalind S. Helderman and Paul Sonne | Published January 18 at 7:27 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 18, 2020 |

Last Sunday, a New York lawyer posted photographs of the shining dome of the U.S. Capitol on Twitter, announcing that he had just visited Washington to give Congress contents of an iPhone belonging to a onetime associate of President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

It would be a few days before the implications of his limited message became clear: The Lev Parnas hurricane was about to hit.

It was the week when the pomp and circumstance of the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history was supposed to take center stage in Washington. The House of Representatives formally voted to send the Senate charges that Trump abused his office by pressuring Ukraine to help his reelection bid. John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States, arrived in the Senate chambers to preside over the president’s trial and the swearing in of 100 senators.

But overshadowing that weighty moment were a cascade of revelations by a fast-talking, Ukraine-born businessman sporting an ankle bracelet who — speaking for the first time since his October arrest on campaign finance charges — directly implicated the president in the Ukraine scheme.

“President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” Parnas said in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday that earned the cable news show the highest ratings of its 11-year history.

“That’s the secret that they were trying to keep,” he added. “I was on the ground doing their work.”

Fueling his account were hundreds of pages of text messages, documents and photos released by the House that documented his interactions with Giuliani and a coterie of Ukrainians who claimed to have information about former vice president Joe Biden and a debunked conspiracy that their country conspired with Democrats in the 2016 election.

Parnas, with his Brooklyn-by-way-of-Odessa accent, has sought to fashion himself as the Joe Pesci version of John Dean — the former White House counsel who was star witness in the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon — casting himself an avowedly repentant participant in a rogue operation.

Some of his most explosive claims that Trump, Vice President Pence and Attorney General William P. Barr knew of his activities remain unsubstantiated and disputed. The president’s allies say his assertions are not credible, noting the serious criminal charges he faces.

“These allegations are being made by a man who is currently out on bail for federal crimes and is desperate to reduce his exposure to prison,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said this past week.

Still, the blizzard of new details in the documents Parnas had turned over raised a host of questions about Trump’s efforts in Ukraine — ratcheting up the pressure on Senate Republicans to allow witnesses to be called during the coming trial.

In his choreographed transformation from a selfie-snapping Trump devotee to a self-described truth-teller embraced by many on the left, Parnas has blazed a path similar to that of Michael Cohen, the longtime Trump fixer who last year turned on the president in the face of criminal charges.

As a legal strategy, it’s risky, experts agreed: Parnas has been indicted in New York for allegedly funneling foreign money into U.S. political campaigns. (He has pleaded not guilty). Prosecutors have said in court that they are considering bringing additional criminal counts against him, a perilous situation that defense attorneys generally advise requires extreme caution — and silence.

Parnas’s attorney, Joseph A. Bondy, has been agitating for weeks for Congress to call Parnas as a witness, an effort largely viewed as a bid to get House Democrats to extend him immunity. But then his client spoke out without any such protection.

In interviews, Parnas has said he felt abandoned and betrayed after his arrest, when Trump disavowed him and Giuliani failed to forcefully defend him.

His about-face has left him cast out of the elite realm he briefly occupied with Giuliani, a man he regularly called “my brother” who had swept him into a world of wealth and international power-brokering.

The former New York mayor initially stood by Parnas and his onetime business partner Igor Fruman after their arrests. “I certainly am not going to disavow them,” he said at the time, adding: “Everything I’ve known about them says they would not commit a crime.”

Since then, his tone has changed dramatically. This past week, Giuliani said he would not respond to Parnas’s allegations, writing in a text that “he has no credibility.”

“He’s burning out and best to stay out of his way,” he added acidly.

For his part, Parnas said he now feels liberated.

In an interview with The Washington Post, he compared himself to someone emerging from a “cult,” with fresh perspective on the dizzying events of the past two years.

“That arrest saved my life,” he said.

'I IDOLIZED HIM'

Two years ago, Parnas was fending off creditors in obscurity in Boca Raton, Fla. He shot to the tableside of the president’s closest allies and family members with a few well-placed campaign donations, a die-hard loyalty to Trump and some good old-fashioned chutzpah.

Parnas, 47, was born in Ukraine but moved with his family to the United States as a child and grew up in Brooklyn. He told The Post in an interview conducted before his arrest that he got his start in real estate, at one point selling Trump condos for Donald Trump’s father, Fred, and then worked in trading goods with the former Soviet Union before becoming a securities trader. He moved to Florida in the mid-1990s.

He barreled into Trump circles with a $50,000 donation to Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party less than a month before the 2016 election.

“I was really passionate about the president,” he said last fall before his arrest. “I started really believing that he could really make a change and make it happen.”

“I tell you honestly, I think he’s going to go down as one of the greatest presidents ever, even with all this negativity and everything that’s going on,” he said then.

Parnas told MSNBC last week that he was so passionate about Trump that he had photos of him all over his house. After his arrest, he said, his wife was embarrassed because the FBI told her that “I had a shrine to him.”

“I idolized him,” he said. “I mean, I thought he was the savior.”

In his interview with The Post, Parnas said he was able to rise quickly in Trump’s world because he discovered a “kink in the system”: the super PAC, which, unlike a candidate committee, can accept unlimited funds.

In May 2018, the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action reported receiving a $325,000 donation from an energy company Parnas and Fruman had recently formed.

Prosecutors have said the money did not come from their fledgling company, which had no business or revenue, but from a private loan Fruman took out against a Miami condo.

Giuliani met the two men around the same time, through a lawyer and friend who referred the duo to him, he has said.

Parnas said he sought out the former New York mayor to be a paid pitchman for a company he co-founded called Fraud Guarantee that claimed to shield investors from financial fraud. He arranged for Giuliani to be paid $500,000 by a Long Island lawyer who was an investor in Fraud Guarantee. He assumed their relationship would be a distant one, Parnas said this past week.

Instead, Parnas said, he was shocked and delighted to find himself constantly at the side of the president’s personal lawyer.

Before he knew it, Giuliani was inviting him and Fruman to hang out four to five nights a week, he said. They were zipping around the country to attend Trump rallies, and then traveling around Europe to gather information about Ukraine.

There were long nights at exclusive cigar bars and frequent strategy sessions at Trump’s hotel in Washington; a visit to a palace outside Madrid owned by a Venezuelan energy executive; and a huddle at a luxury Parisian club. Parnas joined Giuliani in the dugout to meet the New York Yankees during a special overseas baseball game in London. He accompanied the former New York mayor to a special annual commemoration of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and to the state funeral of former president George H.W. Bush at Washington National Cathedral.

Parnas said living in Giuliani’s world was a heady experience. “I looked up to him. I grew up in New York and he was a legend. And here I was sitting with him, every night,” he said.

At night, he would call his wife, Svetlana, and tell her about the powerful people he was meeting with Giuliani and the swanky fundraisers they were attending. “You won’t believe this!” he would exclaim.

'THE PERFECT STORM '

Parnas acknowledged that he had ambitions to use the connections he was making through Giuliani to improve his business prospects. He said he grew up in Brighton Beach with little money and an absent father. In recent years, he said, his career had been “up and down.”

“Sometimes we were buying Rolexes,” he said. “And sometimes we were selling the Rolexes to make the rent.”

Court filings show he has been dogged by debts. When he met Giuliani, he was being pursued for more than $500,000 in Florida courts by investing in a movie deal gone bad.

In his new environs, Parnas said, suddenly anything appeared possible: “I figured, once this is over, we’ll be kings.”

Still, he said, he understood from the start that he and Fruman, who often wore T-shirts paired with gold chains, did not fit in Giuliani’s circle.

“No one understood it,” Parnas said of their constant presence by his side. “I didn’t understand it.”

But at the time, he said, he believed Giuliani enjoyed their company — and that Giuliani appreciated that the duo were a solicitous entourage, willing to drop anything to join him at his favorite haunts, stay out late while he drank scotch and pick up the tab.

Now Parnas believes that the president’s lawyer drew the two Soviet-born men close after he realized they had connections in Ukraine, a Giuliani obsession. The former New York mayor was convinced Ukrainians had worked against Trump in the 2016 election and were in possession of evidence of Biden’s corruption.

“I think we were recruited,” Parnas said. “It was the perfect storm.”

Giuliani has said he began looking at Ukraine after he signed on as Trump’s personal attorney in April 2018, tasked with defending him in the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

That November, Giuliani has said he was approached by a former colleague who said a Ukrainian prosecutor had information to share about Biden and the Democrats with U.S. authorities.

Soon, Parnas and Fruman became Giuliani’s point men for his Ukraine operation.

The cache of records released by the House this past week made clear that Parnas was acting on Giuliani’s behalf and in close coordination him. The materials ranged the gamut, from photos of Parnas sporting a bulletproof vest for unknown reasons to extensive communications with top Ukrainian officials — including members of the country’s cabinet and key aides to its leaders.

The materials sharply undercut the notion pushed by the president’s supporters that the activities in Ukraine were about U.S. anti-corruption policy — rather than defeating Biden.

The outlines of the scheme were even scribbled in blunt terms on stationery from Vienna’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel — notes Parnas took as he spoke to Giuliani by phone during a June visit to the Austrian capital, according to his attorney.

“Get Zalenksy to Annouce that the Biden case will be Investigated,” Parnas wrote, referring to the effort to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations related to the former vice president.

The newly released documents showed that Ukraine’s top prosecutor explicitly offered to help in the effort against Biden and the Democrats in exchange for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, as well as a meeting with Barr and other actions that would potentially help his boss, then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who was in a fight for his political life in Ukraine’s presidential election.

And the materials laid out how Giuliani’s star witness in his campaign against Biden — former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin — was promised help with a visa to the United States that the embassy in Kyiv was blocking.

At one point, in a text message to Parnas, Giuliani wrote that he had gotten “no 1” involved in the effort to secure Shokin a visa — a reference, Parnas said this past week, to Trump.

Other text messages show extensive contact between Parnas and Derek Harvey, an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee — indicating that Nunes’s office sought to use the information Parnas was gathering. A Nunes spokesman and Harvey did not respond to requests for comment.

A HINT OF MORE TO COME

In December, Bondy began agitating to be allowed to provide Congress with Parnas’s material, which had been seized by prosecutors after his arrest. The federal judge presiding over the case in New York agreed to allow Bondy to share the material the day before he made his delivery to the House.

The documents filled in gaps in the narrative of the Ukraine pressure campaign. For Democrats who have been pushing for the Senate to call witnesses in its upcoming trial, the new information supported their arguments that there is still more evidence to gather.

The public cache of Parnas’s materials is not exhaustive. The House has released no messages, for instance, between him and his primary partner, Fruman.

And some Democrats have counseled caution in the face of his allegations, noting that he is accused of serious felonies.

“Parnas is someone whose evidence, whose testimony should be questioned, challenged, like any other witness,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) told CNN, adding, “but he should be a witness.”

Prosecutors have hinted in court that more of Parnas’s activities have not come to light yet. This past month, they revealed that he received a mysterious $1 million loan in September from a lawyer for Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian gas tycoon facing bribery charges in the United States. In court, Bondy said the loan was made to Parnas’s wife and had been intended to help the couple buy a home. He said that Firtash had cut all ties to Parnas after it started to become clear Parnas intended to assist the impeachment probe. He and Parnas have declined to comment further.

Meanwhile, Parnas’s prolific photographic documentation of his time in elite GOP circles has given him ample material to taunt his detractors, often through social media posts his lawyer has set to catchy music. Last Tuesday, hours before his client’s evidence became public, the lawyer tweeted a montage of photos of Parnas posing with Trump and different members of the president’s family, set to the tune of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.”

When Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN that “I don’t know Lev Parnas,” Bondy tweeted a close-up of Parnas and Conway, their heads leaning toward one another, both smiling widely. “#LevRemembers,” his lawyer wrote.

When Trump announced that former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi was joining his legal team, his lawyer tweeted a photo of Parnas and Bondi seated at a table together, their arms around each other’s shoulders.

When Trump himself told reporters on Thursday that he didn’t “know who this man is” — an assertion he had also made shortly after Parnas was arrested — his lawyer posted a video of Parnas chatting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in December 2016.

The video shows Parnas at the front of a crowd, introducing the president-elect to a broad-shouldered man who, according to Bondy, was then serving as the top tax official of Ukraine.

In interviews, Parnas has said he is convinced prosecutors working for Barr have pursued the criminal case against him to keep him quiet about Trump’s work in Ukraine. He said he believes transparency is now his best protection against further criminal action.

This past week, he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper his goal is to make Trump understand “he’s not a king.”

“And I think it’s important for the country to find out the truth,” he said, “exactly what happened.”

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Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

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Trump privately told donors new details about Soleimani airstrike at Mar-a-Lago fundraiser

By Colby Itkowitz and David A. Fahrenthold | Published January 18 at 11:51 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 18, 2020 |

President Trump delivered a dramatic account of the airstrike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, joked that he doesn’t care if construction projects kill all the rattlesnakes and noted his indifference to the budget during a private dinner with deep-pocketed donors Friday night at Mar-a-Lago, according to audio files obtained by The Washington Post.

Trump, his tone subdued and conversational, explained his motivation for attacking Soleimani and recounted listening to an anonymous military official countdown to the Jan. 3 strike.

The president said nothing about an “imminent attack” on U.S. interests or threats to four U.S. embassies as he previously has to justify the unilateral military strike that escalated tensions in the region and opened debate on presidential war powers.

Instead, he spoke broadly about Soleimani as “the father of the road side bomb” responsible for “every young, beautiful man or woman who you see walking around with no legs, no arms.” Trump said he heard about two weeks ago that the United States had Soleimani under surveillance and he was “talking about bad stuff.”

“He was saying bad things about our country, like we’re going to attack, we’re going to kill your people. I said, ‘listen, how much of this shit do we have to listen to, right?’” Trump said to applause from the donor crowd.

Trump went on to describe those final minutes before the strike, watching and listening from the Situation Room.

“ ‘Sir, they have two minutes and 11 seconds.’ No emotion. ‘two minutes and 11 seconds to live, sir. They’re in the car, they’re in an armored vehicle. Sir, they have approximately one minute to live, sir. 30 seconds. 10, 9, 8 ...’ Then all of a sudden, boom.”

The official on the line told the president Soleimani and the Iraqi military leader he was meeting with were “gone” and then hung up, according to Trump.

“I said, ‘Where is this guy?’ ” Trump said. “That was the last I heard from him.”

While the dramatic description of Trump’s experience watching the strike is new, Trump has spoken at rallies and on Twitter about the Soleimani attack as he hones his reelection talking points on his capability as commander in chief.

In a separate audio clip, Trump is heard boasting about increasing the defense budget by $2.5 trillion — a massive sum he may have gotten to by adding several years’ budgets; the Pentagon budget for fiscal 2020 is $738 billion. To those who criticized his spending and the growing national debt, Trump said, “Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country.”

For most of Barack Obama’s time in office, Republicans seemed to care very much about the budget, making fears around the national debt and deficit their top talking point. They’ve backed off those concerns under Trump.

The audio files, obtained by The Post, came in four short segments, and each cuts off midsentence or midpoint. CNN, which also obtained the files, first reported on Trump’s fundraiser remarks.

In the 40-second clip about the military budget, Trump said, “It’s been an incredible period of time and that’s despite the witch hunt. . .” before the audio cuts out.

In another short file, Trump laments the complicated process to build infrastructure, mocking environmental concerns, specifically mentioning turtle and rattlesnake nesting.

“As far as I’m concerned, you can kill those rattlesnakes. I’ll give you a little secret. As many as we kill, they’ll be here long after us. The rattlesnake. You can kill every son of a bitchin’ rattlesnake,” he said.

Then Trump segues to, “I’m not a big person who believes in sharks too much…,” before the audio file ends.

Trump is famously terrified of sharks. He has tweeted about his disdain for them and Stormy Daniels, who allegedly had an affair with Trump, said he was obsessed with sharks and once told her, “I hope all the sharks die.”

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New text messages put Devin Nunes on the hot seat

By Aaron Blake | Published January 18 at 9:50 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 18, 2020 |

A month ago, when phone records showed contact between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Lev Parnas, Nunes said he didn’t recall Parnas’s name and couldn’t confirm the call. On Wednesday, with Parnas about to appear on TV for the first time, Nunes suddenly offered a (very conveniently timed) confirmation, but he downplayed the call as being about “random things.”

Now, Nunes’s claims about his ties to Parnas are even more questionable.

Newly released documents Friday night showed Parnas in repeated contact with a Nunes aide, Derek Harvey. He appeared to be looping Harvey into the Ukraine effort led by Rudolph W. Giuliani, and the messages show the three of them met at the Trump hotel in Washington. Parnas also set up calls for Harvey with the same Ukrainian prosecutors who were working with Giuliani.

And in one exchange, there is an indication Harvey may have known this was all about Joe Biden:

“Also do you want to interview the general prosecutor who got [ditched] by Biden? Also the anti corruption prosecutor? Let me know,” Parnas wrote on April 19.

“Does tomorrow work?” Harvey responded.

Harvey even apparently became angry that Parnas and Giuliani were sharing documents with conservative journalist John Solomon, rather than Nunes’s office.

The combined picture is a Nunes aide who was pretty abreast of what Giuliani and Parnas were up to — to the point where he was meeting with them and expressing frustration at not being the recipient of their information.

And that isn’t easy to square with the picture painted by Nunes. Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, has suggested Parnas was just a person he didn’t know who was spouting a bunch of stuff that he wasn’t clued in on.

“I checked it with my records, and it was very clear — I remember that call, which was very odd, random, talking about random things, and I said, ‘great,’ you know, ‘talk to my staff,’ and boom, boom, boom,” Nunes said on Fox News on Wednesday. “That’s just normal operating procedure.”

The newly revealed text messages suggest this was a call that Harvey set up for his boss. Harvey sent Parnas Nunes’s contact information on April 10, which is two days before phone records indicate the call took place. The call, according to the phone records, lasted eight minutes.

There is some indication that perhaps Nunes wasn’t as intimately involved in the situation as Harvey was. In one of his TV appearances, Parnas said he was told to work with Harvey because of Nunes’s ethics investigation.

“The reason why Derek Harvey was more — I understood, I was told at that time [that] because Devin Nunes had an ethics — something to do with an ethics committee, and he couldn’t be in a spotlight,” Parnas told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

So it’s possible Harvey siloed himself off from his boss — and deliberately so. But he also set up a phone call for his boss with Parnas. To reconcile Nunes’s version of the call, Harvey did this without actually telling his boss what the call was to be about and what he had been working on with Parnas. And that’s on top of everything else that he was up to with Parnas and Giuliani, which Nunes’s comments suggest Harvey was freelancing on. It’s plausible, but it certainly raises plenty of questions. If you’re trying to keep the boss out of it, connecting him on a phone call with Parnas would seem to be the last thing you want to do.

Parnas, for his part, has said that phone call wasn’t the only time he spoke with Nunes.

“We met several times at the Trump hotel, but our relationship started getting basically where it expanded was when I was introduced to his aide, Derek Harvey,” Parnas said in the same interview.

The reason all of this matters is that Nunes was leading the charge on President Trump’s defense during the House impeachment inquiry. Now we know his office was at least somewhat involved in the underlying effort to obtain information from Ukraine. If Nunes knew anything about that and didn’t disclose it, that would look very bad.

Parnas’s credibility is still in question, given he’s under indictment. But the new revelations bolster his claim to a relationship with Harvey — if not Nunes.

And the new revelations also call into question Nunes’s credibility. He has slow-walked this whole thing, saying he didn’t recall the name of a person he spoke to for eight minutes and then declining to confirm the call with Parnas for more than a month. He only did so when he documents started coming out — documents that Harvey might well have known would confirm the ties between Nunes’s office and Parnas. Now Nunes’s version of events is that he wasn’t at all clued in to what Parnas was up to.

It’s possible, but he may want to be a little bit more forthcoming.

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The Devin Nunes-Ukraine Allegations, Explained

By Amber Phillips | Published January 18 at 8:26 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 18, 2020 |

In November, as the House of Representatives was investigating President Trump for pressuring Ukraine to help his reelection, someone in Trump’s orbit leveled accusations that the top Republican member in Congress on impeachment was actually in on the Ukraine scheme, too.

On Friday, Democrat impeachment investigators released texts from Lev Parnas that backs up his earlier claim, showing he talked extensively with one of Rep. Devin Nunes’s (R-Calif.) aides about Ukraine.

And so the allegation facing Nunes goes like this: That he was in on the very thing Congress has launched an impeachment inquiry over.

Let’s review the allegation, the players, and what Nunes has said about all this.

THE ALLEGATION

That Nunes and/or his staff met with Ukrainian officials whom U.S. diplomats have described as “corrupt" and who were feeding information to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to try to help Trump’s reelection.

The allegations all come from Parnas, a business associate of Giuliani. He was serving as Giuliani’s messenger in Ukraine because he spoke Russian. Through a lawyer this fall, Parnas said he would be willing to testify under oath that Nunes was working with them to damage former vice president Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Parnas gave Democrats in Congress thousands of pages of documents and even video about his work with Giuliani in Ukraine.

Now we know what some of those documents said. They lay out that this spring, months before the whistle- blower complaint would come to light, Parnas was texting Nunes aide Derek Harvey, trying to connect Harvey with a Ukrainian prosecutor and sharing information about other Ukrainian officials.

Why would a House Republican aide want to talk to a Ukrainian prosecutor? Well, we know that Nunes is a Trump ally who has gotten in trouble before for being seen as doing Trump's bidding in Congress.

And we also know through the texts that his aide, Harvey, seemed interested in any details that would undermine Trump’s Democratic opponents. The Post’s Paul Sonne, Rosalind S. Helderman and Greg Miller report:

In March, Parnas sent Harvey a link to a story by conservative columnist John Solomon suggesting the Ukrainians sought to help Hillary Clinton win in 2016.

“Any documents for us or are you going to keep working through Solomon?” the Nunes aide texted back a few days later.

Beyond the texts, there is more evidence that Nunes’s office was interested in information about Biden.

CNN reported in December that Parnas would be willing to testify that Nunes traveled to Vienna last year to meet with former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin. Shokin is the prosecutor Biden pressed Ukraine to remove in 2016 because he wasn’t doing adequate work to prosecute corruption.

At the time, Biden was working on having Shokin removed, his son Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, which had once been under investigation and which has a known history of corruption. There is no evidence that Hunter Biden acted illegally or that Joe Biden was acting to influence policy toward Burisma.

And CNBC reported in December that Parnas would be willing to testify that Harvey wanted to travel to Ukraine for this but scrapped the trip after he realized he would have to report it to the top Democrat on the committee, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.). Instead, they talked over Skype, according to Parnas’s allegation.

Texts show that Parnas was actively setting up a call with Harvey and Shokin and other Ukrainians who may have felt threatened by members of the Obama administration:

“Also do you want to interview the general prosecutor who got [ditched] by Biden ? Also the anti corruption prosecutor ? Let me know,” Parnas wrote on April 19.

“Does tomorrow work?” Harvey responded.

WHAT NUNES HAS SAID ABOUT THIS

When this came out in November, Nunes said stories reporting this were false, but he didn’t explicitly deny the allegations. And he has since changed his story about whether he knew Parnas, allowing that he now remembers a call with him.

Here’s Maria Bartiromo asking him in November on Fox News whether he met with Ukraine’s former prosecutor in Vienna last year, for any reason.

BARTIROMO: Bottom line, were you in Vienna with Shokin?

NUNES: Yes, so, look, Maria, I really want to answer all of these questions.

And I promise you I absolutely will come back on the show and answer these questions. But because there is criminal activity here -- we're working with the appropriate law enforcement agencies. We're going to file all this. Everyone's going to know the truth. Everybody's going to know all the facts.

But I think you can understand that I can’t compete by trying to debate this out with the public media when 90 percent of the media are totally corrupt.

Shokin denied that he met with Nunes.

There’s another denial of Nunes’s that needs closer parsing. Parnas’s texts show him getting the contact information of Nunes from Harvey. Last month, Nunes said he didn’t recall Parnas’s name, let alone talking to him. Then this week, hours before Parnas himself went on MSNBC to lay out what he knows, Nunes went on Fox News and said he now remembers talking to Parnas:

“It was very clear. I remember that call, which was very odd, random, talking about random things. And I said, ‘Great, just talk to my staff,’ … which is normal, standard operating procedure.”

Harvey and Nunes didn’t comment on these new text messages.

WHO’S MAKING THESE ALLEGATIONS AGAIN?

Parnas is a Ukrainian American whose lawyer said he worked with Giuliani over the past year to try to find damaging information about the Bidens in Ukraine, with the goal of ousting then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Parnas and another associate, Igor Fruman, were indicted here in the United States on campaign finance charges related to removing Yovanovitch.

Yovanovitch testified that she thought their financial interests were threatened by her anti-corruption campaign in Ukraine. And now, texts released by Parnas raise the question of whether she was being surveilled by a Republican congressional candidate. (Parnas and that candidate, David Hyde, both said they were joking.)

Parnas has a motive for talking now about all he knows: He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer told the New York Times that Parnas “reasonably believed Giuliani’s directions reflected the interests and wishes of the president” and that he is “remorseful for involving himself … in the president’s self-interested political plot.”

From there, it’s not a big leap to assume that Parnas could try to leverage his goodwill with Congress to the courts to get a lesser sentence.

WHAT COULD HAPPEN TO NUNES

Maybe nothing. It’s not clear that Parnas will get to talk to Congress about Nunes. When these allegations first came out, Schiff didn’t say whether he would reopen hearings to listen to them. It would seem like a politically rancorous thing to do now that Trump’s impeachment is out of the House and over to the Senate.

Some Democrats in Congress are saying they want a bipartisan panel in the House to investigate what Nunes did, on the grounds that he was using taxpayer money for a political purpose. That’s possible.

Nunes was already the subject of an ethics investigation by his peers in 2017, which looked at whether Nunes improperly gave Trump a heads-up on what the House Intelligence Committee was investigating with classified documents. The committee cleared him of wrongdoing.

Right now, it remains Nunes’s word against that of an accused criminal. But the texts from before Parnas was accused of a crime seem to back up the accused criminal’s story that Nunes was in on the Ukraine scheme.

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Dutch Trump fan says messages about U.S. ambassador’s movements were sent in jest

By Jon Swaine | Published January 18 at 5:09 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 18, 2020 |

A Dutch supporter of President Trump said Saturday that he supplied a Republican candidate with purported intelligence on the movements of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine last year, taking responsibility for text messages that raised concerns the diplomat was placed under surveillance.

But the supporter, Anthony De Caluwe, said in a statement that he was not involved in any surveillance of then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and that the messages were merely “ridiculous banter” with the congressional candidate, Robert F. Hyde, who in recent days became entangled in the impeachment case against Trump.

“My engagement in this exchange with Rob is something that has no credibility,” De Caluwe said in the statement, which was emailed to The Washington Post by a spokeswoman. The spokeswoman, Karyn Turk, said that De Caluwe had never been to Ukraine and had no contacts in the country.

Text messages released Tuesday by the House Intelligence Committee showed Hyde passing purported details on Yovanovitch’s whereabouts in March of last year to Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American associate of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Parnas is under federal indictment for alleged campaign finance crimes.

Additional material released late Friday by the committee indicated that the claims about Yovanovitch’s movements originated from a Belgian cellphone number. Some digits of the number were redacted, but the visible digits matched a number previously listed online as belonging to De Caluwe. An avatar accompanying the Belgian number in the released materials matched a photograph on De Caluwe’s Facebook page.

Yovanovitch was ousted from her job in Kyiv in May following an aggressive smear campaign against her involving Giuliani, which was amplified on conservative media. Giuliani has said he viewed Yovanovitch as hindering his efforts to secure helpful investigations by Ukrainian authorities.

Trump and Giuliani were pushing Ukraine to investigate a company that employed Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump for the presidency this year.

In a July telephone call with Ukraine’s president, Trump said Yovanovitch was “bad news” and that she would “go through some things”. The call was at the center of a whistleblower complaint from a U.S. intelligence official that led ultimately to Trump’s impeachment.

Yovanovitch called for an investigation after the messages were released this week. Ukrainian authorities said they were opening an inquiry into whether she was under surveillance.

Hyde, who is running for his party’s nomination for Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, has suggested in recent days that he was joking in his WhatsApp messages to Parnas. Parnas has said he did not take the messages seriously and did not believe Hyde was in fact tracking Yovanovitch’s movements.

De Caluwe, 54, has claimed on social media to live in Palm Beach, Fla., where Parnas has also lived. Turk, the spokeswoman, said De Caluwe embarked on a “playful exchange” of messages about Yovanovitch with Hyde last year after seeing posts about the ambassador on Hyde’s Facebook page.

“Anthony understands how these the exchanges released into media yesterday look,” Turk said in the emailed statement. “He has never had any contacts in the Ukraine. He is a citizen of the Royal Netherlands. He doesn’t know Lev Parnes [sic]. He stated that he was not involved in any surveillance of any Americans at any point in time.”

De Caluwe’s background could not immediately be verified. Past online postings indicate that he has worked on business ventures related to finance and renewable energy in central America, and has gone by the names Anthony Hemelrijk or Heavenrich. Turk confirmed that he has used the name Hemelrijk but said his legal name is De Caluwe. She did not respond to questions about the Heavenrich name.

De Caluwe said in the statement that he was “apologetic for contributing to any confusion” by sending the messages about Yovanovitch.

“My friendship with Rob was jovial and this exchange was just a part of a ridiculous banter,” he said. “Sometimes Rob’s behavior was odd, nonsensical and often comical. I wasn’t really sure what to make of this whole thing back then or now.”

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YET ANOTHER INSTITUTION CORRUPTED BY TRUMP AND TRUMPISM

The National Archives used to stand for independence. That mission has been compromised.

By Philip Kennicott | Posted January 18 at 3:30 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 18, 2020 |

The National Archives is one of the most imposing and beautiful buildings designed by architect John Russell Pope, who also created the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, the Jefferson Memorial and many of the finest houses, churches and association offices in the nation’s capital. Pope was a principal adviser on the design of what is known as Federal Triangle, where the Archives is located, and he was an architect keenly alert to the power of symbols in urban design. When planning the Archives, he succeeded in persuading the government to situate it where it now stands, on Pennsylvania Avenue halfway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House, suggesting its neutrality within the checks-and-balances system of the government.

Now the Archives has foolishly compromised the public’s sense of its independence, so artfully embedded in its landmark building. By blurring out details from protest signs in an image of the 2017 Women’s March, including the name of President Trump and references to the female anatomy — a decision the Archives publicly apologized for on Saturday — it has damaged the faith many Americans, particularly women, may have had in its role as an impartial conservator of the nation’s records. It has unnecessarily squandered something that cannot easily be regained.

THERE MUST BE CONSEQUENCES.

An Archives spokeswoman told The Washington Post the changes to a large-format image included in an exhibition about women’s suffrage were made “so as not to engage in current political controversy.” If that was the intent, they obviously failed, embroiling the institution in exactly the controversy they say they wanted to avoid. But no matter the proferred explanation or statement of apology, the decision indicates a lack of leadership and distinct confusion about the mission at the Archives. If the Archives wants to teach Americans about history, then it must be scrupulously honest in its presentation of all documentary evidence.

The blunder is egregious for multiple reasons. It indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of history among those responsible for the exhibition. The Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, was not a march for suffrage, which was extended to women in 1920. It was a march for equality, dignity and fair treatment. For many who attended, those issues were newly urgent given the man who had been inaugurated the day before. Many of the signs at the march were directed at Trump’s denigrating language, his cavalier comments about groping and kissing women without their consent, his support for denying them the right to control their own bodies and the many accusations of harassment and assault he has denied but never disproved.

Inequality, for women today, is not an abstraction, but something understood directly through their bodies, through legislative and regulatory efforts to deny them reproductive freedom, through the fear of assault and through inequities built into our system, from bathrooms to medical research, that makes female bodies — which outnumber male bodies in the United States by several millions — the exception to the male-dominated norms and rules.

Thus, scrubbing out references to women’s anatomy in the image was not a benign or neutral act of family-friendly censorship. It was censorship of the fundamental message of the Women’s March.

Scrubbing out negative comments about Trump is at least as disturbing, given the ballooning crisis of confidence in democratic institutions. America teeters on the precipice of authoritarianism, and that jeopardy affects every institution, no matter how seemingly detached from partisan politics its mission. The National Park Service was dragged into this vortex from the first day of Trump’s term, when a government photographer cropped out empty space in an image of the Mall taken during the president’s relatively sparsely attended inauguration. Our armed forces were dragged into it as well, when the president used military hardware as a prop for a rally at the Lincoln Memorial last July 4. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was entangled in the administration’s tortuous relation to truth when it backed the president’s false claim, complete with an altered storm map, that a hurricane had threatened Alabama last year.

Every institution will be tested, and the Archives has failed. To recover from this terrible mistake, it may be necessary to get out of the business of presenting exhibitions. The impulse to teach history is admirable, but history is never neutral, and institutions have a tendency to equate their mission with the triumph of larger historical forces. At the now shuttered Newseum, journalists were sometimes presented more as prophets and agents of social change, like the civil rights movement, than neutral observers. It is difficult, and sometimes impossible, for institutions to present history dispassionately without also flattering themselves for playing a constructive role in the drama.

The National Archives is in a particularly difficult position, which can be seen in its basic architecture and the allegorical figures that broadcast its mission. Pope emphasized the Archives’ independence by including a dry moat surrounding the building (now altered), massive bronze doors suggesting impregnability and giant porticos with columns on all sides that indicate its intent to rise above the fray in all directions. He dramatized its purpose with statues at its Constitution Avenue entrance, one a female figure dubbed “Heritage,” the other a male figure called “Guardianship.”

The main thrust of its symbolism is blunt enough: This building protects American heritage. But it is gendered symbolism, with heritage seen as bearing the seeds of the future, and guardianship depicted with the appurtenances of war. And heritage, in the United States, is fraught with violence, racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny, carefully packaged in storybook visions of well-intentioned, white-dominated patriarchy.

Given the severity of this recent blunder, it is not clear the Archives can be trusted to finesse our most complicated cultural and archival challenge, a reassessment of history that is rigorous, honest and inclusive. If the institution’s leadership wants to make amends, however, there are two places to start. Replace the image with the original, uncensored one. And seek out the women whose signs were airbrushed out of history and give each of them a genuine apology.

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walterfrodriguez · 5 years

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Girding for the Gridiron’s biggest day

Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens

UPDATED September 20, 1:04 p.m. Though the football season has only just begun, diehard fans know where they’re going to be come Feb. 2, 2020: watching the Super Bowl at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens. Those wanting to travel in style should have some deep pockets: A Super Bowl LIV package for a one-bedroom overlooking the beach at 1 Hotel South Beach will run them $13,963 a night, according to Five Star Luxury Travel, a Miami Beach-based brokerage specializing in listing and managing rental units at high-end condo-hotels. At the same property, a four-bedroom penthouse with ocean views throughout the unit is priced at $62,577 a night during the days around the big game.

Yet Five Star Luxury Travel owner Jennifer Restrepo insists Super Bowl spectators who might rent those accommodations are getting a bargain. “Our prices are 10 percent to 30 percent lower than if you book directly with the hotel,” Restrepo said. “And most of the five-star resorts on the beach are completely booked for Super Bowl.”

Indeed, according to travel booking site Expedia, a penthouse at 1 Hotel South Beach is going for $119,642 a night between Jan. 30 and Feb. 3, 2020 — the four-day weekend that includes Super Bowl Sunday. Elsewhere on the property, a unit identical to the one Five Star is listing for $14,272 was listed for $71,750 on Expedia. And one- and two-bedroom suites are completely sold out.

As Miami prepares to host the NFL’s premier event for the 11th time — the most for any host city — the local hotel and short-term rental sectors are banking on game-day-related bookings producing astronomical revenue. Realtors like Restrepo said luxury stays will significantly surpass average prices visitors pay during high-season, week-long events such as Art Basel and the South Beach Food and Wine Festival. “For those, you are looking at an average daily rate in the $3,000s,” she said. “Where it has jumped to for Super Bowl is pretty extraordinary.”

Super Bowl prices are more than double the nightly rates between Dec. 2 and 6, the week of Art Basel, when the “ultra penthouse” at 1 Hotel South Beach goes for $52,624 a night and a three-bedroom suite with an ocean view goes for $15,536 a night, according to Expedia.

The big bump

Just how much cash might the game rake in for hospitality? The Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau is projecting that hotels alone will see an $11.4 million increase during the four-day Super Bowl weekend compared to the same period in 2019. Luxury hotels and resorts such as Faena Hotel Miami Beach, the Setai, St. Regis Bal Harbour, Four Seasons at the Surf Club, Fontainebleau Miami Beach, Mandarin Oriental, JW Marriott Marquis and Kimpton Epic Hotel are completely booked. Meanwhile, rooms at three- and four-star lodges, hotels and hostels in downtown Miami and Miami Beach range from $354 to more than $1,000 a night.

The hotel industry is still in a boom cycle, said Rich Lillis, Boca Raton-based national director of Colliers International’s hotels group (see our analysis of the hotel market on page 56). “When we have an event like this, the demand goes off the charts,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons why investors show great interest in South Florida’s hotel sector … It fits into their macro thinking.”

Super Bowl visitors typically stay for a week, and in some cases two weeks, so hotels will be more selective in making rooms available, Lillis added. “They won’t take a single-night person if they can get someone else for two weeks into a room,” he said.

In the short-term luxury rental market, pricing will be even higher than for the 2010 Super Bowl, the last time it was held in Miami, as the number of homes available for rent in Miami Beach and surrounding coastal communities has shrunk in the past nine years, said Bill Hernandez, half of the Bill and Bryan Team at Douglas Elliman. He said homeowners in Miami Beach neighborhoods that don’t allow short-term rentals have stopped listing their homes with brokers and online platforms such as Airbnb. As a result, property owners in areas where the city allows short-term rentals, such as along Collins Avenue where the Setai, W Miami Beach and 1 Hotel South Beach are located, can charge a premium daily rate — about 50 to 75 percent more than what they would normally charge. Prices are even higher in single-family neighborhoods such as a small unincorporated section of the Venetian Islands, Hernandez added.

“Those that can do it are charging crazy numbers like $100,000 to $120,000 per week for mansions,” Hernandez said. “The folks who would spend this type of money are big-money CEOs and sports franchise owners and executives.”

Bryan Sereny, Hernandez’s partner at Douglas Elliman, said Super Bowl attendees seeking a posh house with at least 7,000 square feet can expect to pay $50,000 to $60,000 a night.

“That’s what people are paying for an 8,000-square-foot house in the Hamptons at the top of the market during the summer,” Sereny said. “As we get a little closer to the game, you could get more of a premium. Super Bowl is definitely the next level.”

The lowest rate Restrepo is offering for Super Bowl LIV is $10,252 for a one-bedroom unit with an ocean view. Two- and three-bedroom condos start at $18,793 and $34,873 a night, respectively (as of Sept. 15). The packages require a minimum four-night stay and include transportation to and from Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens via a limo or SUV, concierge services, daily massages and in-suite dining. For some perspective, the maintenance cost for a one-bedroom unit at 1 Hotel South Beach is $19,200 a year, Restrepo said.

1 Hotel South Beach

While Five Star Luxury Travel has received a couple of dozen inquiries, the firm has not yet booked any of the 1 Hotel South Beach units it advertises, Restrepo said. “It is pretty far in advance for these reservations,” she said. “We don’t anticipate to book them for another few weeks.”

Restrepo, Hernandez and Sereny said that while most luxury hotels in Miami and Miami Beach are officially filled up, the bookings are made by travel companies that resell the rooms to Super Bowl consumers who may have not yet finalized their plans. Super-high-end clients tend to make their travel plans two to three months in advance, they added.

Still, Restrepo said her clients — some of whom are football celebrities who own 1 Hotel units — are confident they will rent their condos at such exorbitant prices. “These are high-net-worth individuals whose 1 Hotel units are their third or fourth homes,” she said. “They only come to town a handful of times a year. It is amazing to have an investment home that can make this much income in one week.”

The other guys

Brokers Restrepo, Hernandez and Sereny are competing with sports tourism companies that buy large blocks of hotel rooms with packages similar to what Five Star Luxury Travel offers, but that also include access to VIP parties with former and current NFL stars and seats at the actual game. For instance, White Plains, New York-based On Location Experiences has base packages starting at $24,390 per person, which includes tickets to lower-level and club seats at Hard Rock Stadium and a minimum three-night stay at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach. A hotel spokesperson declined to comment regarding Super Bowl room rates and prices were not available on travel websites, since the hotel is fully booked for the four-day weekend.

Kyle Kinnett, owner of Indianapolis-based Bullseye Event Group, said his firm has packages starting at $6,000 for upper-level seats, VIP access to an NFL players’ tailgate party and stays at either the SLS Brickell, Fontainebleau Miami Beach, Viceroy or Mandarin Oriental. “We started contacting hotels two years ago,” said Kinnett. “It is harder to find hotel rooms than Super Bowl tickets.”

He said he’s seeing more interest in Super Bowl LIV because it’s in Miami. “You have a beach and you have an ocean,” Kinnett said. “Miami is a destination. My most popular package in Miami is a four-night stay. For Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta, it was a three-night package.”

Hotel operators prefer to work with companies like Bullseye because of the convenience of dealing with a single client, Kinnett said. “I tell them, would you rather sell me 50 rooms at an escalated rate and deal with one person writing you a check, or do you want to deal with dozens of individuals complaining about rates being too high, etc.?”

Kinnett declined to discuss the hotel room rates he secured.

As short-term rental brokers duke it out with the sports travel firms, business travel hotel operators and owners are seeking out deals with the NFL to house league executives, employees, vendors and contractors. Related Group Chief Operating Officer Matthew Allen, who is Miami-Dade co-chair of the Super Bowl LIV Host Committee, said roughly 17,000 rooms with minimum three-night stays between Miami-Dade and Broward have been blocked off for the NFL and related entities.

The league designated the InterContinental in downtown Miami as its headquarters hotel during the big game. The hotel, which has 653 guest rooms and more than 101,000 square feet of exhibition space, connects to the baywalk along Bayfront Park that will host the week-long NFL Experience. In Broward, the committee designated the Diplomat Beach Resort Hollywood as a host property because of its 1,000 guest rooms and 209,000 square feet of meeting space, Allen said.

Ryan Shear, a managing partner with Property Markets Group, said his firm is in preliminary discussions with the Miami Dolphins and the NFL to house personnel in its X Miami Apartments project at 230 Northeast Fourth Street in downtown Miami.

“We don’t have anything specific yet, but we do know there is a massive need for housing for the NFL,” Shear said. “For us, it’s beneficial in every sense of the word to promote our building during Super Bowl.”

Shear said he couldn’t comment on how much the firm would charge the NFL per room, and InterContinental Miami’s general manager, Robert Hill, did not respond to a phone message seeking comment about room rates for the Super Bowl.

In Miami Beach, the Hampton Inn at the Continental, a 100-key hotel at 4000 Collins Avenue set to open in the fall, snagged a contract with the NFL to block off 85 rooms for staffers from the league’s consumer products division, said Todd Benson, a partner with Boca Raton-based Pebb Capital, which co-owns the property with Duncan Hillsley Capital.

“The NFL has done deals with Hampton Inn before, so that is one advantage we had,” Benson said. “Plus, the NFL is getting a new hotel in a central location. We were a very attractive option for them.”

Anticipating they would vie for an NFL housing contract, the hotel’s management team did not place the corresponding dates for Super Bowl week into any hotel booking systems. “Those dates were excluded so we could be able to work on something like this,” Benson said. “If we had allowed reservations during Super Bowl week, we would not have stood a chance.”

This article has amended to reflect that Bill Hernandez of Douglas Elliman estimated the cost of renting Miami Beach mansions to be $100,000 to $120,000 per week rather than per day.

The post Girding for the Gridiron’s biggest day appeared first on The Real Deal Miami.

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nicolesrollins · 6 years

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Heading for higher ground: Why savvy SoFla developers are turning to Orlando for new projects

(Illustration by Andrew Colin Beck)

When Noah Breakstone first started shopping for development deals in Orlando in 2008, he didn’t see many others from South Florida doing the same thing.

But within the past few years, Breakstone, CEO and managing partner of Fort Lauderdale-based real estate development and investment firm BTI Partners, said he has seen a gradual increase in the number of South Florida developers turning their eyes northward.

“There’s a good number of developers from Miami up there these days,” Breakstone said. “That wasn’t the case before. It’s very frequent that I’m on the plane with other developers looking at Central Florida.”

If you ask the developers themselves why they are seeking projects in Orlando, they’ll say South Florida’s current development cycle is built out, land is expensive, vacant land is almost nonexistent and other costs are rising. Add to that the fact that Orlando is still growing fast in terms of visitors and population. Some cite the simple need to diversify their portfolio among different markets.

While all of these factors are certainly true, if you dig a little deeper and talk to more experts, you’ll find another reason why rising development costs in South Florida are inspiring developers to invest elsewhere: climate change.

“There’s no question that [rising seas and bigger storms are] driving rising costs along the coast, causing some to pause,” Breakstone said. “There’s only one direction the costs will go, for real estate and for taxes.”

BTI bought an 890-room condo-hotel development, now called the Grove Resort & Water Park, west of Disney World in 2014. For six years, the resort had been vacant and in foreclosure — Central Florida’s largest ever, at $150 million. BTI took possession of it after an auction with a credit bid of $69 million. BTI is still finishing the resort, building out the third phase.

Headline-grabbers who’ve been at the helm of some of South Florida’s biggest projects are also engaged in large-scale developments in Orlando.

Take, for example, Art Falcone — one of the developers behind the $4 billion Miami Worldcenter project — who is now building out a sprawling, Jimmy Buffett-themed Margaritaville development, also near Disney World.

Michael Dezer, too, whose company built the seaside high-rise cluster of Trump Towers and the Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, bought the 104-acre Artegon Marketplace shopping center in Orlando for $23.7 million in January 2018. Dezer is in the process of transforming the mall into a giant auto museum, and has filed plans to build the first of several possible apartment high-rises on the edge of the property.

And then there’s Alex Vadia, the developer behind Miami’s booming Midtown redevelopment, who bought entire city blocks in downtown Orlando in 2016, calling those purchases a long-term investment. Vadia’s buys include about 19 acres where the Orlando Sentinel’s hulking offices are, now emptied of printing presses. Vadia declined to comment on his investment for this story.

Pricey precautions

The cost of climate change and rising seas is very real in South Florida. Many luxury homes on the coast are being built with the idea that the ground floor can flood and leave most of the home above intact. The city of Miami Beach is spending $500 million to raise roads and seawalls. A recent report from Miami-Dade County said a majority of the region’s 67,000 septic tanks could be rendered ineffective in 25 years as water levels rise. The cost to connect all of those septic tanks to sewers would be more than $3.3 billion. As Breakstone said, those items add to taxes, land costs and, eventually, construction costs. Rising insurance costs along the coast also add to overall costs.

Much of Miami is only about six feet above sea level, and Miami Beach has large areas that are lower than that, where high tide events regularly flood streets. Orlando, in contrast, ranges from about 50 feet to more than 100 feet above sea level. The dubiously named Sugarloaf Mountain, just 30 miles west of downtown Orlando, is 312 feet above sea level.

An article published by the science journal Environmental Research Letters in May 2018 found correlations between elevation and property value appreciation in Miami-Dade County.

The article specifically stated that rising seas may result in climate gentrification in Central Florida, and said interviews conducted for the study suggest that “speculative property investors are already hedging on South Florida’s gradual exodus to central and north Florida.”

Despite the reported correlations, the study did not disclose specific cost data as relates to elevation — partly because many other factors influence property values.

“The findings would suggest that a consumer preference may exist in favor of higher elevation properties. Likewise, lower elevation properties may be subject to lower rates of appreciation due to flooding concerns,” the article said.

Jesse Keenan, a social scientist and faculty member at Harvard University and one of the study’s authors, said they did not look at statewide migrations, but the interviews done during their research support the idea that higher-level cities in Florida such as Orlando could be seeing some boost in migration or property value due to sea level concerns.

The allure of Orlando

While Orlando’s commercial and residential prices may one day eclipse those in Miami, they certainly aren’t there yet. Roughly $200,000 can buy a home of about 2,000 square feet in Orlando, but only about 835 square feet in Miami, according to a CNBC story based on 2018 Property Shark data.

There’s also a marked disparity in commercial prices between the two cities. A recent sale of a property in downtown Miami clocked in at $435 per square foot. In comparison, property around the edges of downtown Orlando has sold recently for less than $100 per square foot.

For more developers, Orlando projects seem to offer better bottom lines. Planned and under-construction office projects remain limited in Miami primarily because of high construction costs, high land prices and limited land availability, a CBRE 2019 forecast reported.

The average sales price per square foot for office properties has risen over 76 percent in five years and is projected to continue rising, the report found. In contrast, CBRE’s Orlando report cited “abundance of developable land, coupled with strong demographics.”

Orlando has been ranking in the top 10 U.S. cities for job and population growth in many recent years. The metro area swept past 2.5 million people for the first time in 2017, adding 56,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Miami metroplex, which includes Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, stood at around 6.1 million in 2017.

Rodrigo Azpurua, president and CEO of Miramar-based Riviera Point Development Group, said Orlando’s growth attracted his company’s investment in two new hotels near SeaWorld. And while the firm hasn’t given up on Miami, he also said he’s seen more Miami-area investors looking at Central Florida.

An additional factor behind Riviera’s Orlando move is to hedge the company’s bets in the event of a major hurricane strike.

“Sea level rise is happening, but not at the level that has impact in short term,” Azpurua said. “Having part of the portfolio in Orlando, in case of a hurricane in South Florida, that will protect us. It’s less likely in Orlando to have a major storm since it’s an hour from the coast.”

Denial ain’t just a river

While plenty of developers will admit that rising costs are driving an increasing number of their projects north, they’re often loath to connect the decision to climate change.

“I’m not smart enough to know what will happen with sea level in the future,” said Scott Webb, president of West Palm Beach-based Kolter Hospitality. “We’ll continue to invest in South Florida. Our moves to other markets are a long-term investment.”

The company is developing an AC Hotel at the top of Orlando’s newest downtown high-rise, the 28-story Church Street Plaza. The 180-key hotel should start on interior buildout this year and open in April or May of 2020, Webb said. Kolter also has new projects in Sarasota and St. Petersburg.

Rising costs are a factor in the company’s search for new markets, said Webb, but construction costs are making it difficult to complete projects everywhere. He dismissed the notion that climate change is behind Kolter’s Orlando investment.

“Like those locations [Sarasota and St. Petersburg], Orlando is attractive to us because it has multiple demand generators in business and leisure travel,” he said. “We look for high-density, urban, walkable locations. There’s only a few markets that offer that in Florida.”

Other developers emphasize an increasing number of benefits to development in Orlando as the primary reason for their moves.

Falcone, for one, is not new to Orlando, but his Boca Raton-based Falcone Group has made big new bets on Central Florida in part due to increased transit options, he said. It’s behind the $800 million, 300-acre Margaritaville Resort Orlando, which opened in December with a 12-acre water park and a plan for 1,200 homes over 300 acres. Vacation homes will start at $250,000. Falcone’s also developed projects in Reunion, a resort community near Disney World.

Falcone said the Miami and Orlando markets are increasingly interconnected. He cited the planned Virgin Trains route that will provide new dedicated rail service between both cities.

“What we’re seeing in Florida over the last 15 years is international travelers will go to Miami and Orlando,” Falcone said. “They take off a couple weeks often, and they want to see both places. That’s why the train connection makes so much sense.”

At 59, Falcone said, he doesn’t see sea level rise as a problem for his Miami Worldcenter.

“I wouldn’t say developers are ignoring it. It’s out of our control except for making buildings more sustainable,” Falcone said. “Downtown, I don’t see that affecting us in my lifetime… maybe the beach areas.”

There’s evidence to suggest that developers and homeowners have the climate issue very much on their minds, said Leonard Berry, retired director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University, who has served as a consultant for many environmental development agencies.

“If you’re seeing more South Florida people investing in Central Florida, I’d certainly think they are hedging their bets regarding long-term development,” Berry said.

The conversation is difficult for real estate professionals, added Berry, because they are afraid that more talk about the problem will lead to an exodus from areas along the coast.

Jason King, principal at Miami-based planning and design firm Dover, Kohl and Partners, said most developers still don’t willingly consider sea level rise in their new projects at first.

“They ask why they have to raise to 10 feet when 6 feet is the minimum. We say, ‘You really need to raise to 10 feet,’” King said. Realtors, though, are now talking a lot about rising seas in their conversations with buyers and sellers, he added.

“I bought another house in South Miami last year, and the Realtors talked a lot about sea level rise and climate change. They knew the flood zones and the evacuation zones,” King said.

For many wealthy buyers, however, the appeal of living on or near the water will override any concerns about additional costs, BTI’s Breakstone said. “The coast is the coast. People who want to be on the water; that’s a big factor for them,” he said.

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juditmiltz · 6 years