A President, a Billionaire and Questions About Access and National Security

The 2020 presidential campaign was underway, and Anthony Pratt was doubling down on Donald Trump.

Pratt, chair of a multinational paper and packaging company and one of Australia’s richest men, had already paid to join Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. He had also spent top dollar to ring in the new year there while rubbing elbows with the president. And, eager to behold a Trump reelection celebration at the club, he had offered to reach into his pocket once again as Election Day approached.

“If Potus is having his election party at mar Lago I’ll book as many rooms as available,” Pratt told an associate in a message obtained by federal investigators and reviewed by The New York Times. “Reasons he should,” Pratt continued, are that “1 it will shore up the Florida electoral college 2 it will be good for business.”

Trump spent the night of the election at the White House without the company of Pratt. But their relationship — forged over Trump’s chaotic four years in office — was indeed beneficial for both men and their businesses, new interviews and documents reviewed by the Times show.

Their interactions were ultimately swept up in one of the two federal criminal cases that the special counsel Jack Smith brought against Trump. Prosecutors have interviewed Pratt in the case in which Trump is charged with taking classified documents with him from the White House when he left office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. Pratt is listed as a potential witness who could testify against Trump at a trial next year.

In his interviews with prosecutors, Pratt recounted how Trump once revealed to him sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines, an episode that Trump denies. Another witness told prosecutors about hearing uncorroborated reports that Pratt spent $1 million for tickets to a Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve gala — voluntarily paying the club a huge markup for tickets that actually cost $50,000 or less, according to two people with knowledge of the previously unreported testimony.

New details of how a U.S. president and an Australian billionaire bonded over their mutual self-interest help to document the transactional ethos of the Trump presidency, and show how Trump melded his White House with his personal business in a way that, according to prosecutors, had ramifications for national security.

Pratt was hardly the only favor-seeker circling Mar-a-Lago, which became the fulcrum of the president’s two overlapping worlds, and a marketplace of sorts where favors, secrets and opportunities to lobby the president over clubhouse burgers were treated as currency. But Pratt, who rode in Trump’s motorcade and attended a White House state dinner, played the game better than most.

Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, had almost no relationship with Pratt before the 2016 election. But after, Pratt used his money and flattery to get on Trump’s radar: Pratt lavished praise on him in public appearances, bought newspaper ads that hyped Trump as a job creator and became a member of Mar-a-Lago.

The president took notice. When Pratt opened a new factory in Ohio that promised hundreds of new jobs, Trump toured the plant alongside Australia’s prime minister.

Pratt, in turn, gained priceless publicity and proximity to the power of the presidency, providing him entree into an administration whose policies lowered his taxes and benefited his business.

Behind closed doors, however, Pratt described Trump’s business practices as being “like the mafia,” according to covert recordings obtained by “60 Minutes Australia” and shared with the Times.

The private comments, captured while Trump was still president, provide a rare glimpse into how a businessperson on the other side of Trump’s transactions actually viewed the New York real estate developer’s tactics — with a mix of blunt acknowledgment and admiration for someone so willing to test the boundaries of the presidency.

On the recordings, Pratt recounts how Trump shared with him in December 2019 what he describes as elements of a conversation the president had with Iraq’s leader right after a U.S. military strike there aimed at Iranian-backed forces. Days later, a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad would kill Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.

At one point, Pratt said, Trump discussed the phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier that year that had helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment. “That was nothing compared to what I usually do,” Trump said, in Pratt’s recounting.

It is not clear whether Pratt shared these accounts with prosecutors or whether prosecutors are aware of the recordings.

Pratt also describes on the recording how Trump asked his wife, Melania, to strut around Mar-a-Lago in her bikini “so all the other guys could get a look at what they were missing.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Trump condemned prosecutors and said the information was coming from “sources which totally lack proper context and relevant information.”

In his own statement, Trump defended his relationship with Pratt. “He’s a member of the most successful club in the country, Mar-a-Lago, and from a friendly country in Australia, one of our great allies,” Trump said. “I don’t know him well but he seemed like a nice person. He built a factory in Ohio and created American jobs, which I’m in favor of.”

Representatives for Pratt did not respond to several requests for comment.

<b> ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the great Anthony Pratt!’ </b>

Pratt, who had once pledged $1 billion to fight climate change at the Clinton Global Initiative, was a relative latecomer to Trump’s corner.

It was only after Trump won in 2016 that Pratt raced to embrace him, congratulating the president-elect on Twitter. Pratt’s spouse, Claudine Revere, an American whose company ran catering at the Trump-operated skating rink in Central Park, donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration. As a foreign citizen, Pratt could not donate, but he attended the event and soon dropped a reported $200,000 on a Mar-a-Lago membership.

At an event in May 2017 attended by Trump, Pratt pledged to invest $2 billion to create manufacturing jobs, mainly in the Midwest. He credited the move to Trump, who called it “beautiful.”

“Everything that he does, he is making America greater,” Pratt said of Trump on Fox News.

By the end of Trump’s first year in office, his presidency was bearing fruit for Pratt. The Australian Financial Review estimated that Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cut helped increase Pratt’s personal wealth by more than $2 billion.

At the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party that year, Trump was captured on video feting Pratt, a recording that Pratt then emailed to Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue. At the time, Pratt and Perdue were also discussing the U.S. food supply, an issue vital to the packaging industry.

The seesaw of goodwill continued in the spring of 2018, when Pratt took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal linking Trump to the creation of manufacturing jobs. (In an interview with The Australian newspaper, Pratt said he had told Trump that he was building his “next big operation” in Pennsylvania, which he noted was “a big swing state.”)

When the two men crossed paths at a dinner in Mar-a-Lago soon after the ad appeared, Trump remarked, “Anthony, great to see you and thanks for the ad!” according to an account in The Australian Financial Review.

Trump then announced to the dining room, “Ladies and gentlemen, the great Anthony Pratt!”

The room erupted in applause.

<b> Finding POTUS </b>

Once Pratt had access to Trump, he only wanted more.

“Is POTUS going to be at MarLago again this season and if so do you know when,” he wrote to a Mar-a-Lago employee in May 2018, according to records that were turned over to the special counsel’s office and reviewed by the Times.

Pratt then returned to Mar-a-Lago for New Year’s Eve for a second straight year, inviting a number of guests and clients.

A witness in the federal documents case told prosecutors that Pratt spent $1 million to attend the party, well in excess of the normal charge, according to people with knowledge of the testimony. The witness did not have firsthand knowledge of the claim, and it is unclear if prosecutors ever verified it. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump was a no-show for the 2018 New Year’s Eve party. With the government shut down, he remained in Washington.

Pratt soon pivoted to the next big holiday.

“What are the odds the President will be at MarLago for Easter?,” Pratt asked the Mar-a-Lago employee in early 2019. Pratt was in luck that time.

Later that year, Pratt attended a state dinner at the White House for the Australian prime minister.

By spring 2020, Pratt set his sights on the possibility of an election night party.

Months before the election, Pratt contacted the Mar-a-Lago employee to say that “the us federal presidential election is on Tuesday November 3” and to ask, “Will mar Lago be open the weekend before?”

He offered to book as many rooms as possible at the club, where he liked to entertain clients.

Pratt followed up, asking, “can u find out if election night will be at mar Lago if so I’ll come with guests.”

Although Pratt’s election night hopes ended up being dashed, he often sounds almost giddy in the secretly recorded conversations at his proximity to the leader of the free world and his entourage. He also speaks admiringly about how Trump learned from his mentor — lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn — how to walk up to the line of illegality without crossing it.

“He’s got incredible balls,” Pratt says. “Trump says, ‘Would you go and tell that guy over there to steal for me?’ And so he can say, ‘I never told the guy to steal.’ And things like that is how Trump gets away with it.”

Pratt also boasts in these private conversations about his relationship with Rudy Giuliani, now under indictment in Georgia on charges of conspiring with Trump and others to subvert the 2020 election results.

Pratt claims on one recording that he paid Giuliani about $1 million to come to his birthday party as a celebrity guest. The pandemic prevented Giuliani from attending, but Pratt says on the recording that “now he rings me once a week.”

“Rudy is someone that I hope will be useful one day,” Pratt says. A spokesperson for Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.

In a draft version of a speech that Pratt gave to a Jewish group in the fall of 2019, he bluntly planned to reveal becoming a member of Mar-a-Lago to get a “seat at the table where the president relaxes socially, and mingles with his guests.”

The draft speech, provided to the Times by “60 Minutes Australia,” tracks closely with the remarks delivered by Pratt but contains several crossed-out lines that describe a transactional relationship with Trump. It is not clear whether Pratt himself wrote the speech or if he crossed out the lines.

Membership at Mar-a-Lago, a crossed-out line of the draft states, “definitely turned out to be a strategic investment — and a very good investment.”

Another crossed-out line: “President Trump is a very reciprocal man.”

<b> The Trump bazaar: Coffee and nuclear secrets </b>

On one of the recordings, Pratt recounts a drive in Trump’s presidential motorcade, in December 2019, when the president regaled him and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about the airstrike he had ordered in Iraq a short time before. He also says Trump told him about a private phone call he had with the Iraqi leader.

“He said, ‘I just bombed Iraq today and the president of Iraq called me up and said, “You just leveled my city,”’” Pratt recalls on the audio recording. “And he said, ‘I said to him, OK, what are you going to do about it?’”

In an interview, Graham said he had no recollection of the conversation. And it is unclear whether the conversation with an Iraqi leader, as described by Trump in Pratt’s account, actually happened.

Three months after Trump left the presidency, Pratt joined Trump in his office at Mar-a-Lago for a chat, during which the Australian businessperson suggested that Australia should purchase submarines from the United States.

That prompted Trump to lean in, as if aware he was sharing a confidence, in Pratt’s account to investigators. According to Pratt, Trump described the number of nuclear warheads that U.S. submarines typically travel with, and their stealthy proximity to Russian waters.

In November 2021, Pratt flew to Florida to have coffee at Mar-a-Lago and meet with Trump, records show. It is unclear what they discussed, or if they have met since.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/us/politics/anthony-pratt-donald-trump.html">The New York Times</a>.