The 2020 presidential campaign was underway and Anthony Pratt was doubling down on Donald J. Trump.
Mr Pratt, chairman of a multinational paper and packaging company and one of Australia’s richest men, had already paid to join Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. He had also spent a lot of money ringing in the New Year there while interacting with the President. And because he couldn’t wait to attend a Trump re-election celebration at the club, he had offered to dig in again as Election Day approached.
“When Potus hosts his election party at Mar Lago, I book as many rooms as are available,” Mr. Pratt told an employee in a message obtained by federal investigators and reviewed by The New York Times. “The reasons he should do this,” Mr. Pratt continued, are that “1 it strengthens Florida’s Electoral College and 2 it will be good for business.”
Mr. Trump spent election night at the White House without the company of Mr. Pratt. But their relationship — solidified over Mr. Trump’s chaotic four years in office — was actually beneficial for both the men and their companies, new interviews and documents reviewed by The Times show.
Their interactions eventually became embroiled in one of the two federal criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump by special counsel Jack Smith. Prosecutors have questioned Mr. Pratt in the case in which Mr. Trump is accused of taking classified documents from the White House when he left office and obstructing efforts to get them back. Mr. Pratt is listed as a potential witness who could testify against Mr. Trump at a trial next year.
In his interviews with prosecutors, Mr. Pratt recounted how Mr. Trump once revealed to him classified information about American nuclear submarines, an episode that Mr. Trump denies. Another witness told prosecutors that he had heard unconfirmed reports that Mr. Pratt had spent $1 million on tickets to a New Year’s Eve gala at Mar-a-Lago – and had voluntarily paid the club a huge markup for tickets that were, in reality would have cost $50,000 or less, according to two people with knowledge of the previously unreported testimony.
New details about how an American president and an Australian billionaire teamed up out of mutual self-interest document the transactional ethos of the Trump presidency and show how Mr. Trump merged his White House with his personal businesses in a way that prosecutors say had Impact on national security.
Mr. Pratt was hardly the only favor-seeker circling Mar-a-Lago, which became the hub of the president’s two overlapping worlds and a kind of marketplace where favors, secrets and opportunities, the president over Clubhouse burgers to influence, were treated as currency. But Mr. Pratt, who rode in Mr. Trump’s motorcade and attended a state dinner at the White House, played the game better than most.
Mr. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, had almost no relationship with Mr. Pratt before the 2016 election. But afterward, Mr. Pratt used his money and flattery to get on Mr. Trump’s radar: Heaped praise on him at public appearances, bought newspaper ads touting Mr. Trump as a job creator, and became a member of Mar-a- Lake.
The president took notice. When Mr. Pratt opened a new factory in Ohio that promised hundreds of new jobs, Mr. Trump toured the plant with the Australian prime minister.
Mr. Pratt, in turn, gained invaluable exposure and proximity to the power of the presidency, giving him access to a government whose policies lowered his taxes and benefited his business.
Behind closed doors, however, Mr. Pratt described Mr. Trump’s business practices as “like the Mafia,” according to undercover recordings obtained by “60 Minutes Australia” and shared with the Times.
The private comments, recorded while Mr. Trump was still president, offer a rare glimpse into how a businessman on the other side of Mr. Trump’s transactions actually viewed the New York real estate developer’s tactics — with a mix of blunt appreciation and admiration for someone so willing to test the limits of the presidency.
In the recordings, Mr. Pratt recounts how in December 2019, Mr. Trump shared with him elements of a conversation the president had with the Iraqi leader immediately after a U.S. military strike there against Iranian-backed forces. Days later, a US drone strike in Baghdad killed Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.
Mr. Pratt said Mr. Trump once discussed the phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this year that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “This was nothing compared to what I normally do,” Mr. Trump said in Mr. Pratt’s report.
It is not clear whether Mr. Pratt shared these reports with prosecutors or whether prosecutors have knowledge of the recordings.
Mr. Pratt also describes in the recording how Mr. Trump asked his wife Melania to strut around Mar-a-Lago in a bikini “so all the other guys could see what they were missing.”
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Trump condemned the prosecutors and said the information came from “sources that completely lack proper context and relevant information.”
In his own statement, Mr. Trump defended his relationship with Mr. Pratt. “He is a member of the most successful club in the country, Mar-a-Lago, and comes 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 support.”
Representatives for Mr. Pratt did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the great Anthony Pratt!”
Mr. Pratt, who once pledged $1 billion to fight climate change as part of the Clinton Global Initiative, has been a relative latecomer in Mr. Trump’s corner.
It was only after Mr Trump won in 2016 that Mr Pratt ran to hug him and congratulated the president-elect on Twitter. Mr. Pratt’s wife, Claudine Revere, an American whose company ran the catering at the Trump-run Central Park skating rink, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. As a foreign citizen, Mr. Pratt was unable to donate, but he attended the event and soon donated a reported $200,000 toward a Mar-a-Lago membership.
At a May 2017 event attended by Mr. Trump, Mr. Pratt pledged to invest $2 billion to create manufacturing jobs, mostly in the Midwest. He attributed the move to Mr. Trump, who called it “beautiful.”
“Everything he does makes America greater,” Mr. Pratt said of Mr. Trump on Fox News.
By the end of Mr. Trump’s first year in office, his presidency was bearing fruit for Mr. Pratt. The Australian Financial Review estimated that Mr. Trump’s corporate tax cut in 2017 helped boost Mr. Pratt’s personal wealth by more than $2 billion.
At the New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago that year, Mr. Trump was captured on video honoring Mr. Pratt, a recording that Mr. Pratt then emailed to Mr. Trump’s Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue. At the time, Mr. Pratt and Mr. Perdue also discussed the U.S. food supply, an important issue for the packaging industry.
The wavering of goodwill continued in the spring of 2018, when Mr. Pratt took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal linking Mr. Trump to manufacturing job creation. (In an interview with The Australian newspaper, Mr. Pratt said he told Mr. Trump that he was setting up his “next big operation” in Pennsylvania, which he said was “a big swing state.”)
When the two men crossed paths at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago shortly after the ad appeared, Mr. Trump remarked, “Anthony, good to see you and thank you for the ad!” according to a report in The Australian Financial Review .
Then Mr. Trump announced in the dining room: “Ladies and gentlemen, the great Anthony Pratt!”
The room erupted in applause.
Find POTUS
Once Mr. Pratt had access to Mr. Trump, he only wanted more.
“Will POTUS be back in MarLago this season and if so, do you know when,” he wrote to a Mar-a-Lago employee in May 2018, according to documents provided to the special counsel’s office and reviewed by The Just.
Mr. Pratt then returned to Mar-a-Lago for the second consecutive New Year’s Eve and invited a number of guests and customers.
A witness in the federal documents case told prosecutors that Mr. Pratt spent $1 million to attend the party, well above the usual amount, according to people familiar with the testimony. The witness did not have firsthand knowledge of the claim and it is unclear whether prosecutors ever verified it. Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr Trump was not present at the 2018 New Year’s Eve party. With the government closed, he remained in Washington.
Mr. Pratt soon turned his attention to the next big holiday.
“What are the chances that the president will be at MarLago for Easter?” Mr. Pratt asked the Mar-a-Lago employee in early 2019. Mr Pratt was lucky then.
In the spring of 2020, Mr. Pratt had his sights set on the possibility of an election night party.
Months before the election, Mr. Pratt contacted the Mar-a-Lago employee and told him that “the U.S. presidential election is on Tuesday, November 3rd” and “Will Mar Lago be open the weekend before?”
He offered to book as many rooms as possible at the club, where he happily received customers.
Mr Pratt asked: “Can you find out if election night will be held at Mar Lago?” If so, I will come with guests.”
While Mr. Pratt’s election night hopes were ultimately dashed, in the secretly recorded conversations he often appears almost giddy at his proximity to the leader of the free world and his entourage. He also speaks admiringly of how Mr. Trump learned from his mentor, the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, how to push the limits of illegality without crossing them.
“He has incredible guts,” Mr. Pratt says. “Trump says, ‘Would you tell that guy over there to steal for me?’ And so he can say, ‘I never told that guy to steal.’ And Trump gets away with things like that.”
Mr. Pratt also brags in these private conversations about his relationship with Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is facing charges in Georgia of conspiring with Mr. Trump and others to undermine the 2020 election results.
Mr. Pratt claims in one recording that he paid Mr. Giuliani around $1 million to come to his birthday party as a celebrity guest. The pandemic prevented Mr. Giuliani from being present, but Mr. Pratt says in the recording that “he now calls me once a week.”
“Rudy is someone I hope will be useful one day,” Mr. Pratt says. A spokesman for Mr. Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.
In a draft speech that Mr. Pratt gave to a Jewish group in fall 2019, he planned to reveal bluntly that he would become a member of Mar-a-Lago to get “a seat at the table where the President socially relaxed”. mingles with his guests.”
The draft speech, provided to The Times by “60 Minutes Australia,” closely follows Mr. Pratt’s remarks but includes several crossed-out lines describing a business relationship with Mr. Trump. It is not clear whether Mr. Pratt wrote the speech himself or whether he crossed out the lines.
Mar-a-Lago membership, according to a crossed-out line in the draft, “definitely proved to be a strategic investment – and a very good investment.”
Another line crossed out: “President Trump is a very reciprocal man.”
The Trump Bazaar: Coffee and Nuclear Secrets
In one of the recordings, Mr. Pratt recounts a ride in Mr. Trump’s presidential motorcade in December 2019, when the president briefed him and Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, about the air strike he had recently ordered in Iraq. He also says that Mr. Trump told him about a private phone call he had with the Iraqi leader.
“He said, ‘I just bombed Iraq today, and the Iraqi president called me and said, ‘You just leveled my city,'” Mr. Pratt recalls in the audio recording. “And he said, ‘I said to him, OK, what are you going to do about it?'”
In an interview, Mr. Graham said he had no recollection of the conversation. And it is unclear whether the conversation with an Iraqi leader, as Mr. Trump describes in Mr. Pratt’s report, actually took place.
Three months after Mr. Trump left the presidency, Mr. Pratt met with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago office for a conversation in which the Australian businessman suggested that Australia buy submarines from the United States.
That led Mr. Trump to confide in Mr. Pratt’s account to investigators, as if he were aware that he shared a trust. Pratt said Mr. Trump described the number of nuclear warheads U.S. submarines typically carry and their clandestine proximity to Russian waters.
In November 2021, Mr. Pratt flew to Florida to have coffee at Mar-a-Lago and meet with Mr. Trump, records show. It is unclear what they talked about and whether they have met since then.
Susan Beachy contributed to the research.