We reached Leo Abbe this afternoon at the private equity firm Iroquois Capital, and asked him about an application he and Richard Abbe, Iroquois’s managing partner, made on January 20 to secure the trademark “Trump News Network.”
We asked him if he and Richard were actually connected to the former president, or if they had merely snagged the name before Trump could.
“No comment,” he said, and told us Richard would be similarly uninterested in talking about it.
One of our readers, Eivol Ekdal, noticed the new listing at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Dated last Wednesday, when Trump left office, it has a pretty generic look as far as trademarks go…
Here’s that description of the Trump News Network, but less shouty: “Providing news in the nature of current event reporting; providing current event news via a global computer network; news reporter services in the nature of news analysis and news commentary; providing an Internet news portal featuring links to news stories and articles in the field of current events.”
The Abbes also, on the same day, registered “Patriot News Network.”
Hey, that’s clever.
Here’s how Richard describes himself at his website:
“Having been on Wall Street for over two decades, Richard traces his love for investing back to his teen years. This passion, which was birthed out of conversations with his father, would eventually lead him to receive his undergraduate degree from Hobart University, where he currently serves on the Investment Committee for Hobart & William Smith Colleges Endowment. Prior to co-founding Iroquois Capital, Richard co-founded Vertical Ventures, LLC. Other positions include working in Equity Middle Market Institutional Sales at Lehman Brothers, Senior Managing Director at Gruntal & Company, and Founding Partner at Hampshire Securities. Richard Abbe is drawn to investing for a few reasons, one of them being his love of helping promising businesses in the early stage of their life grow. Excited by new beginnings, Richard likes being a part of a prospective new business to help supply the funds needed to seed a great idea.”
Certainly, growing something called the Trump News Network could be a great beginning, now that the former president has made it plain that he will continue to be a force in American politics.
Abbe was in the news about a year ago when a lawsuit against him filed by the founders of the airport spa company, XpresSpa, was dismissed by a federal district judge. The XpresSpa founders had claimed that Abbe was among a group of investors who had made false statement in order to take over the business in a merger, but the judge decided the lawsuit lacked merit and ended it.
According to the Federal Election Commission, Richard Abbe made a $250 contribution to the Biden for President campaign in August, and Leo Abbe made three contributions last year to Act Blue totaling $150.00.
We’ll be interested to see whether the new network actually takes off.
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Posted by Tony Ortega on January 26, 2021 at 15:40
