Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 7:35 pm

Panicked Devin Nunes cancels Sally Yates public testimony on Donald Trump and Russia
By Bill Palmer | March 24, 2017 | 0

After House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes had originally announced that former acting Attorney General Sally Yates would testify during the March 20th public hearings on Donald Trump and Russia, that ended up not happening for reasons which were never explained. Now today we’re finally getting confirmation today that Yates was ultimately scheduled to testify during the March 28th public hearings – but we’re only learning this information because a panicked Nunes just called it off.
Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intel Committee, posted the following today: “BREAKING: Chairman just cancelled open Intelligence Committee hearing with Clapper, Brennan and Yates in attempt to choke off public info” (source: Twitter). This means that after Devin Nunes had his bizarre meltdown earlier in the week in which he shared classified information about the FBI’s Donald Trump investigation with Donald Trump, and then leaked it to the public as well, he’s now in total panicked meltdown mode.
It’s not clear what Schiff and the Democrats on the House committee, who lack a majority and have no support from their House Republican counterparts, can do in response. However, politicians from both parties have been demanding that Nunes recuse himself, or that the House Intel investigation into Trump-Russia be replaced by an independent committee investigation. This cancelation signals that Nunes is even more of a Donald Trump puppet than previously thought, and that he’s willing to fully destroy his own reputation in order to protect Trump. But Sally Yates may not have to wait long at all to get her moment before the cameras.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has been taking its own Trump-Russia investigation far more seriously on a bipartisan basis. While it has yet to publicly unveil a witness list, its initial round of public hearings will take place on Thursday, March 30. Whether or not Sally Yates is included in the opening round, they’ll certainly bring her in at some point. And so Nunes and Trump are merely delaying her inevitable testimony; nevertheless she persisted
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/pa ... ssia/2044/



so sad Eddie Munster.....
'The Bill Is Over' House GOP Pulls Health Care Bill Before Sure Defeat
Image
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/leaders ... are-repeal





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34SlZH7r8LE


Andrea Mitchell

trump staffers expect subpoena.....current trump staffers are purging devices

rumor trump's gonna try and blame it all on Flynn
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby freemason9 » Fri Mar 24, 2017 10:19 pm

Why Nunes' strange and panicked behavior last week? He discovered that he, too, was swept up in "incidental" surveillance of the Trump/Russia connection.
The real issue is that there is extremely low likelihood that the speculations of the untrained, on a topic almost pathologically riddled by dynamic considerations and feedback effects, will offer anything new.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 10:38 pm

yea being partners with some Russian in a Winery ...being on the Trumps transition team...ya might get some stink on ya


Devin Nunes’ Entire Net Worth Sunk In Company With Strong Ties To Russia

http://addictinginfo.org/2017/03/22/bom ... to-russia/

and then there's this

MYSTERY
Devin Nunes Vanished the Night Before He Made Trump Surveillance Claims
The Republican intelligence chairman got a message and jumped out of an Uber. The next morning he made a bombshell claim based on classified information.
Tim Mak

03.24.17 8:25 PM ET
Hours before the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee announced his shocking claims about surveillance of the Trump transition team on Wednesday morning, he practically disappeared.
Rep. Devin Nunes was traveling with a senior committee staffer in an Uber on Tuesday evening when he received a communication on his phone, three committee officials and a former national security official with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast. After the message, Nunes left the car abruptly, leaving his own staffer in the dark about his whereabouts.
By the next morning, Nunes hastily announced a press conference. His own aides, up to the most senior level, did not know what their boss planned to say next. Nunes’ choice to keep senior staff out of the loop was highly unusual.
The Republican chairman had a bombshell to drop.
“The intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition,” Nunes told reporters Wednesday morning.
Nunes reviewed “dozens of reports” produced by the U.S. intelligence community that showed this, he added. Though the surveillance was done legally, Nunes said he was “alarmed” that information about transition officials was widely disseminated throughout the government, and that in some cases their names were “unmasked,” meaning not hidden as is usually the case when when a U.S. person’s information is collected through foreign surveillance.

Immediately after the press conference, Nunes went to the White House to brief the president. Afterwards, Trump said he felt “somewhat” vindicated by the briefing for his false claim that President Obama “wiretapped” him during the election. (Nunes has maintained this is not true.)
Democrats and Republicans were taken by surprise by Nunes’ actions.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, hinted at the unusual circumstances Friday during a press conference, criticizing the chairman for “what appears to be a dead of night excursion.” It appears Schiff was being literal.
“All of us are essentially in the dark,” Schiff told reporters Friday. “It’s not just that he hasn’t shared them with Democrats on the committee, he hasn’t shared them with Republicans on the committee.”
“I’m the only one who’s seen the documents, as far as I know,” Nunes said Friday.
Nunes’ office had no comment for this story.

“There’s all kinds of speculation like this floating around about his source, his whereabouts, the circumstances of his announcement, etc. I’m not going to comment on it,” his spokesman said.
Where Nunes went and who his source was for this information—which he said was still incomplete—is now a mystery with serious repercussions for the independence of his investigation into Russian interference with U.S. elections.
“This information was legally brought to me by sources who thought that we should know it,” Nunes added.
Nunes said the documents involved “legally collected foreign intelligence under FISA,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and they confirmed U.S. persons were incidentally collected during surveillance. This information would have been classified, by the very nature of its contents—and would have needed to be reviewed in a special location.
“If we’re assuming in good faith that the chairman of the intelligence committee made sure to conduct himself within the bounds of the law, then any classified material reviewed by him would have needed to be reviewed in a secure facility,” explained Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in national security clearances. “There are a very small number of them in the general area of the District of Columbia. And there are log entries to enter any SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility]. Assuming that whoever gave it to him was authorized to have that information, he would have had to have visited a SCIF.”
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have suggested that Nunes’ source was the White House, looking to distract from FBI Director James Comey’s revelation Monday that the bureau is investigating whether members of Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.
“Where did [Nunes] receive this information? From our knowledge, no one on his staff and no other members were a part of this,” Rep. Eric Swalwell said on MSNBC on Thursday. “So that means it had to be outside of the Capitol. So, did he go to another agency? And does that mean that the White House was a part of this? It sure seems like the White House after what came out on Monday was scrambling to do anything it could to put another smoke bomb into this investigation.”
Even before this controversy, Nunes’ independence had been questioned. Nunes had been a member of the president’s transition team, and his office had previously acknowledged that he had, at the request of the White House, spoken to a reporter to challenge reports of links between Trump associates and Russia.
The White House denied any knowledge of Nunes’ source.
“I’m not aware of where he got the documents from. I don’t know,” said Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Friday. “I don’t know where he got them from. [Nunes] didn’t state it. So I don’t have anything for you.”
“We don’t talk about sources at this committee. We want more people to come forward,” Nunes added Friday.
The president did, however, promise evidence supporting his wiretap claim would be given to the House or Senate intelligence committee. Trump told Fox News that he would “be submitting things before the committee very soon.”
“We will be submitting certain things, and I will be, perhaps, speaking about this next week,” Trump said last week. This has not yet occurred, as far as the public knows.
On Friday, Nunes also announced that the committee controlled by Republicans had indefinitely postponed a scheduled open hearing Tuesday with former national security officials, replacing it with a closed hearing with the heads of the FBI and NSA.
“For House Republicans and the White House, this is about obstruction and distraction,” Rep. Mike Quigley told The Daily Beast. “And this week there were three: that Obama wiretapped Trump tower, number two, this middle of the night excursion, and number three, canceling the open hearings. I just tell my colleagues that we have to keep up the pressure so they don’t turn the lights out.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... laims.html



Andrea Mitchell says she's heard—from a single source—Trump officials are purging their phones b/c they're scared of getting subpoenaed

is this because your dad got caught trying to KIDNAP someone?
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Breitbart headline
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 25, 2017 8:43 pm

The Long, Twisted, and Bizarre History of the Trump-Russia Scandal
Here's the timeline you need to keep track of the controversy.

HANNAH LEVINTOVA MAR. 24, 2017 10:34 AM


Carlo Allegri; Klimentyev Mikhail; Carlos Barria; Kevin Lamarque; Monterey Herald; Sergei Karpukhin; Jim Loscalzo (via ZUMA)
The Trump-Russia scandal—with all its bizarre and troubling twists and turns—has become a controversy that is defining the Trump presidency. The FBI recently disclosed that since July it has been conducting a counterintelligence investigation into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russia, as part of its probe of Moscow's meddling in the 2016 election. Citing "US officials," CNN reported that the bureau has gathered information suggesting coordination between Trump campaign officials and suspected Russian operatives. Each day seems to bring a new revelation—and a new Trump administration denial or deflection. It's tough to keep track of all the relevant events, pertinent ties, key statements, and unraveling claims. So we've compiled what we know so far into the timeline below, which covers Trump's 30-year history with Russia. We will continue to update the timeline regularly as events unfold. (Click here to go directly to the most recent entry.) Please email us at scoop@motherjones.com if you have a tip or we've left anything out.

1986: Donald Trump is seated next to Russian Ambassador Yuri Dubinin at a lunch organized by Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics scion Este Lauder, who at the time is running her cosmetics business. "One thing led to another, and now I'm talking about building a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin" in partnership with the Soviet government, Trump later writes in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal.

January 1987: Intourist, the Soviet agency for international tourism, expresses interest in meeting with Trump.

"Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room," Trump said of his 2013 visit to Moscow for his Miss Universe contest.
July 1987: Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, fly to Moscow to tour potential hotel sites. Trump spokesman Dan Klores later tells the Washington Post that during the trip, Trump "met with a lot of the economic and financial advisers in the Politburo" but did not see Mikhail Gorbachev, then the USSR's leader.

December 1, 1988: The Soviet Mission to the United Nations announces that Gorbachev is tentatively scheduled to tour Trump Tower while the Soviet leader is visiting New York and that Trump plans to show him a swimming pool inside a $19 million apartment.

December 7, 1988: Trump welcomes the wrong Gorbachev to New York—shaking hands with a renowned Gorbachev impersonator outside his hotel.

December 8, 1988: President Ronald Reagan invites Donald and Ivana Trump to a state dinner, where Trump meets the real Gorbachev. According to Trump's spokesman, the real estate mogul had a lengthy discussion with the Soviet president about economics and hotels.

January 1989: For $200,000, Trump signs a group of Soviet cyclists for the Albany-to-Atlantic City road race, dubbed the Tour de Trump, that will take place that May.

November 5, 1996: Media reports note that Trump is trying to partner with US tobacco company Brooke Group to build a hotel in Moscow.

January 23, 1997: Trump meets with Alexander Lebed, a retired Soviet general then running to be president of Russia, at Trump Tower. Trump says they discussed his plans to build "something major" in Moscow. Lebed reportedly expressed his support, joking that his only objection would be that "the highest skyscraper in the world cannot be built next to the Kremlin. We cannot allow anyone spitting from the roof of the skyscraper on the Kremlin."

2000: Michael Caputo, who later runs Trump's primary campaign in New York during the 2016 race, secures a PR contract with the Russian conglomerate Gazprom Media to burnish Russian President Vladimir Putin's image in the United States.

2005: Trump reportedly signs a development deal with Bayrock Group, a real estate firm founded by a former Soviet official from Kazakhstan, to develop a hotel in Moscow and agrees to partner on a hotel tower in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Trump works on the projects with Bayrock managing partner Felix Sater, a Russian American businessman. The New York Times will later publish a story revealing Sater's criminal record, which includes charges of racketeering and assault.

2007

September 19: Sater and the former Soviet official who founded Bayrock, Tevfik Arif, stand next to Trump at the launch party for Trump SoHo, a hotel-condominium project co-financed by Bayrock.

November 22: Trump Vodka debuts in Russia, at the Moscow Millionaire's Fair. As part of its new marketing campaign, Trump Vodka also unveils an ad featuring Trump, tigers, the Kremlin, and Vladimir Lenin.



At the Millionaires' Fair, Trump meets Sergey Millian, an American citizen from Belarus who is the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA (RACC). Subsequently, Millian later recounted, "We met at his office in New York, where he introduced me to his right-hand man—Michael Cohen. He is Trump's main lawyer, all contracts go through him. Subsequently, a contract was signed with me to promote one of their real estate projects in Russia and the CIS. You can say I was their exclusive broker." According to Millian, he helped Trump "study the Moscow market" for potential real estate investments.

December 17: The New York Times publishes a story about Felix Sater's controversial past, which includes prison time for stabbing a man with a margarita glass stem during a bar fight and a guilty plea in a Mafia-linked racketeering case. The article characterizes Sater as a Trump business associate who is promoting several potential projects in partnership with Trump.

December 19: In a deposition, Trump is asked about his plans to build a hotel in Moscow. He says, "It was a Trump International Hotel and Tower. It would be a nonexclusive deal, so it would not have precluded me from doing other deals in Moscow, which was very important to me."

2008

April: Trump announces he is partnering with Russian oligarch Pavel Fuks to license his name for luxury high-rises in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics. But Fuks ultimately balks at Trump's price, which the Russian business newspaper Kommersant estimated could have been $200 million or more.

July: Billionaire Dmitri Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch, buys a Palm Beach mansion owned by Trump for $95 million, despite Florida's crashing real estate market and an appraisal on the house for much less. Trump bought the property for $41.35 million four years earlier. Rybolovlev goes on to give conflicting explanations for why he bought the property.

September 15: Donald Trump Jr. speaks at a real estate conference in Manhattan, where he says "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets…We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

Date unknown: Trump's team reportedly invites Sergei Millian to meet Trump at a horse race in Florida, where, according to Millian, they sit in Trump's private suite at the Gulfstream race track in Miami. "Trump team, they realized that we have a lot of connection with Russian investors. And they noticed that we bring a lot of investors from Russia," Millian told ABC News in a 2016 interview. "And they needed my assistance, yes, to sell properties and sell some of the assets to Russian investors." Millian says that following this meeting with Trump, he works as a broker for the Trump Hollywood condominium project in Miami, selling a "nice percentage" of the building's 200 units to Russian investors.

2010

May 10: Jody Kriss, a former finance director at Bayrock, files a lawsuit against the company. The suit alleges that Bayrock financed Trump SoHo with mysterious cash from Kazhakstan and Russia and calls the building "a Russian mob project." (The complaint notes that "there is no evidence that Trump took any part in" Bayrock's interactions with questionable Russian financing sources.)

Date unknown: Bayrock's Sater becomes a senior adviser to Trump, according to his LinkedIn profile. Though Trump later claims he would not recognize Sater, Sater has a Trump Organization email address, phone number, and business cards.

2013

May 29: Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star and the son of billionaire real estate developer Aras Agalarov, releases a music video for his song "Amor." In the video, he pursues Miss Universe 2012, Olivia Culpo, through dark, empty alleys with a flashlight. Following the video's release, representatives of Miss Universe, which Trump at the time owns, discuss with the Agalarovs holding the next pageant in Moscow. The Agalarovs persuade them to host Miss Universe at a concert hall they own on the outskirts of Moscow.

June 18: Following the Miss USA contest in Las Vegas, Trump announces that he will bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow.


He also wonders if Putin will attend the pageant, and if Putin might "become my new best friend?"


June 21: Vladimir Putin awards Rex Tillerson, now Trump's secretary of state, with Russia's Order of Friendship. As the CEO of Exxon Mobil, Tillerson had developed a long-standing relationship with the head of Russia's state-owned oil company, Rosneft, dating back to 1998.

October 17: In an interview with David Letterman, Trump says, "I've done a lot of business with the Russians," noting that he once met Putin.

November 5: In a deposition, Trump is asked about a 2007 New York Times story outlining the controversial past of Felix Sater. Trump replies that he barely knows Sater and would have trouble recognizing him if they were in the same room.

"Putin even sent me a present, a beautiful present," Trump boasted.
November 8: Trump, in Russia for the Miss Universe pageant, meets with more than a dozen of Russia's top businessmen at Nobu, a restaurant 15 minutes from the Kremlin. The group includes Herman Gref, the CEO of the state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, Russia's biggest bank. The meeting at Nobu is organized by Gref—who regularly meets with Putin—and Aras Agalarov, who owns the Nobu franchise in Moscow.

- According to a source connected to the Agalarovs, Putin asks his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, to call Trump in advance of the Miss Universe show to set up an in-person meeting for the Russian president and Trump. Peskov reportedly passes on the message and expresses Putin's admiration for Trump. Their plans to meet never come to fruition because of scheduling changes for both Trump and Putin.

November 9: Trump spends the morning shooting a music video with Emin Agalarov.

-The Miss Universe pageant takes place near Moscow. A notorious Russian mobster, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, attends the event as a VIP, strolling down the event's red carpet within minutes of Trump. At the time, Tokhtakhounov was under federal indictment in the United States for his alleged participation in an illegal gambling ring once run out of Trump Tower. Emin Agalarov performs two songs at the pageant.

- MSNBC's Thomas Roberts asks Trump if he has a relationship with Putin. Trump replies, "I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he's very interested in what we're doing here today."



November 11: Trump tweets his appreciation to Aras Agalarov, the Russian billionaire with whom he partnered to host Miss Universe, also complimenting Emin's performance at the pageant and declaring plans for a Trump tower in Moscow.


November 12: Trump tells Real Estate Weekly that Miss Universe Russia provided a networking opportunity: "Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room," he says. The same day, two developers who helped build the luxury Trump SoHo hotel meet with the Agalarovs to discuss replicating the hotel in Moscow. Aras Agalarov, whose real estate company secured multiple contracts from the Kremlin and who once received a medal of honor from Putin, later claims he and Trump signed a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow following the pageant. (The deal never moved past preliminary discussions.)

November 20: Emin Agalarov releases a new music video featuring Trump and the 2013 Miss Universe contestants.



2014

March 6: Trump gives a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and boasts of getting a gift from Putin when he was in Russia for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. "You know, I was in Moscow a couple months ago, I own the Miss Universe pageant, and they treated me so great," Trump said. "Putin even sent me a present, beautiful present, with a beautiful note."

May 27: At a National Press Club luncheon, Trump says, "I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer."

2015

September: FBI special agent Adrian Hawkins contacts the Democratic National Committee, saying that one of its computer systems has been compromised by a cyberespionage group linked to the Russian government. He speaks to a help desk technician who does a quick check of the DNC systems for evidence of a cyber intrusion. In the next several weeks, Hawkins calls the DNC back repeatedly, but his calls are not returned, in part because the tech support contractor who took Hawkins' call does not know whether he is a real agent. The FBI does not dispatch an agent to visit the DNC in person and does not make efforts to contact more senior DNC officials.

September 21: On a conservative radio show, Trump says, "I was in Moscow not so long ago for an event that we had, a big event, and many of [Putin's] people were there…I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people. I can't go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary."

September 29: Trump praises Putin during an interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly: "I will tell you, in terms of leadership he is getting an 'A,' and our president is not doing so well."

November 10: At a Republican presidential primary debate, Trump says of Putin that he "got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stablemates."

November 11: The Associated Press, Time, and other media outlets report that Trump and Putin were never in the same studio. Trump was interviewed in New York, and Putin was interviewed in Moscow.

December 10: Retired General Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was reportedly forced out in 2014, attends and is paid $30,000 to speak at Russia Today's 10th anniversary dinner in Moscow, where he is seated next to Putin.

December 17: Putin praises Trump in his year-end press conference, saying that he is "very talented" and that "he is an absolute leader of the presidential race, as we see it today. He says that he wants to move to another level relations, a deeper level of relations with Russia…How can we not welcome that? Of course, we welcome it." Trump calls the praise "a great honor" from "a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond." He adds, "I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other toward defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect."

2016

February 17: At a rally in South Carolina, Trump says of Putin, "I have no relationship with him, other than that he called me a genius."

March 21: In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump identifies Carter Page as one of his foreign policy advisers.

March 30: Bloomberg Businessweek reports on Page's past advising of Gazprom, Russia's state-owned gas company. Page tells Bloomberg Businessweek that after Trump named him as an adviser, positive notes from his Russian contacts filled his inbox. "There's a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation" in terms of easing US sanctions on Russia, Page explained.

April 26: The Washington Post reports that Paul Manafort, then Trump's convention manager (who would later be promoted to campaign chairman), has long-standing ties to pro-Putin Ukrainian officials. Between 2007 and 2012, Manafort worked as a political consultant to Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russia part. He helped Yanukovych remake his image following the Orange Revolution and mount a successful bid for the Ukrainian presidency.

April and May: The DNC's IT department contacts the FBI about unusual computer activity and hires cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to investigate. In May, Crowdstrike determines that hackers affiliated with Russian intelligence infiltrated the DNC's network.

June 14: The Washington Post reports that Russian hackers penetrated the DNC's computer network.

June 15: Guccifer 2.0, an online persona that US intelligence officials link to Russia's military intelligence service, takes credit for the DNC hack and posts hacked DNC documents. Guccifer will go on to post additional hacked documents—from the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and purportedly from the Clinton Foundation—at least nine more times in the months leading up to the election. (Some reports contest that the documents came from the Clinton Foundation itself.)

July 7: Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page criticizes US sanctions against Russia during a speech at the New Economic School in Moscow. Politico later reports that Page asked for and received permission from Trump's then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to speak at the Moscow event.

July 18: The Washington Post reports that the Trump campaign worked with members of the Republican Party platform committee in advance of the Republican National Convention to soften the platform's position related to Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The platform reportedly included a provision that promised to provide arms to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, but Trump campaign staffers encouraged the committee to jettison this language.

- Trump surrogate Sen. Jeff Sessions meets with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, on the sidelines of a Republican National Convention event put on by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

July 18-21: Trump campaign staffers Carter Page and J.D. Gordon, the campaign's director of national security, also meet with the Russian ambassador during the convention.

July 22: WikiLeaks publishes nearly 20,000 hacked DNC emails, in advance of the Democratic National Convention. Some of the emails indicate that DNC officials favored Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders.

July 24: Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, appears on ABC's This Week, where he is asked whether there are connections between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime. Manafort says, "No, there are not. And you know, there's no basis to it."

July 25: Trump tweets about the hacked DNC emails:


July 26: US intelligence agencies tell the White House they now have "high confidence" that the Russian government was behind the DNC hack. This is reported by media outlets but not publicly confirmed by intelligence agencies.

- In an interview with NBC News, Obama says hacks are being investigated by the FBI, but that "experts have attributed this to the Russians." He notes, "What we do know is that the Russians hack our systems. Not just government systems, but private systems. But you know, what the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that—I can't say directly. What I do know is that Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin."

July 27: Trump encourages Russia to hack Clinton's emails, saying during a news conference, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you'll probably be rewarded mightily by our press." At the same event, he declares, "I never met Putin. I don't know who Putin is."

July 31: On ABC's This Week, Trump again denies knowing Putin, saying, "I have no relationship with him." Trump also denies that his campaign played any role in getting the Republican Party to soften its platform on arming Ukraine.

- On Meet the Press, Manafort denies that he or anyone within the Trump campaign worked to change the platform.

- Sen. Jeff Sessions defends Trump's efforts to cultivate a friendship with Russia during an appearance on CNN: "Donald Trump is right. We need to figure out a way to end this cycle of hostility that's putting this country at risk, costing us billions of dollars in defense, and creating hostilities."

Late July: The FBI launches a counterintelligence investigation into contacts between Trump associates and Russia. There is no public confirmation of this investigation at the time, but FBI Director James Comey later confirms the investigation in a March 2017 hearing before the House intelligence committee.

August 5: Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks, asked by the Washington Post about Carter Page's July speech in Moscow, downplays his role as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, saying he "does not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign."

- Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone writes an article for Breitbart in which he denies that Russia was behind the DNC hack. He argues that Guccifer 2.0 has no ties to Russia.

August 6: NPR confirms the Trump campaign's involvement in encouraging the Republican Party to soften its platform's pro-Ukraine position on Russia's annexation of Crimea.

August 14: The New York Times reports that Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau has discovered Manafort's name on a list of "black accounts" compiled by ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally. The tallies show undisclosed payments designated for Manafort totaling $12.7 million between 2007 and 2012, the years that Manafort worked for Yanukovych as a political consultant. (Manafort denies receiving any illicit payments.)

August 17: Trump receives his first classified intelligence briefing as the GOP nominee for president. He brings Michael Flynn with him to the meeting, which includes discussion of the intelligence community's assessment that Russia was interfering in the US election.
August 19: Manafort resigns from the Trump campaign.

August 21: Roger Stone tweets:


August 29: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pens a letter to the FBI, asking the bureau to investigate the possibility of election-tampering by Russia in the upcoming presidential election. "I have recently become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election is more extensive than widely known," Reid writes. "The prospect of a hostile government actively seeking to undermine our free and fair elections represents one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War and it is critical for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use every resource available to investigate this matter thoroughly."

August 29: Yahoo News reports that the FBI has found evidence that the state voter systems in Arizona and Illinois were breached by hackers possibly linked to the Russian government.

August 30: House Democrats send a letter to FBI Director James Comey calling on the bureau to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and any impact these ties may have had on the hacking of the DNC and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

September 5: The Washington Post reports that US intelligence agencies, including the FBI, are investigating possible plans by Russia to disrupt the presidential election.

- Putin and Obama have a tense meeting at the G20 summit in China, where they discuss Syria, Ukraine, and cybersecurity. In December, Obama will tell reporters that he confronted Putin about Russia's alleged interference in the election and told him to "cut it out."

September 7: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggests publicly for the first time that Russia may be responsible for the DNC hack, pointing to Obama's July statement that "experts have attributed this to the Russians." Clapper adds that "the Russians hack our systems all the time."

September 8: Trump responds to Clapper's comments in an interview with RT, the English language arm of a Russian state-controlled media conglomerate, casting doubt on whether Russian hackers were responsible for the DNC hack. "I think maybe the Democrats are putting that out," Trump says. "Who knows, but I think it's pretty unlikely."

- Jeff Sessions meets with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in his Senate office. He is the only one of the Senate armed services committee's 26 members to meet with the ambassador in 2016. The meeting occurs days after Putin and Obama's tense G20 meeting.

September 22: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, release a statement about Russia's interference in the US election. "Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election," they said. "We believe that orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to conduct such actions could come only from the very senior levels of the Russian government."

September 23: Yahoo News reports that US intelligence officials are investigating whether Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page discussed the possible lifting of US sanctions on Russia and other topics during private communications with top Russian officials, including a Putin aide and the current executive chairman of Rosneft, who is on the Treasury Department's US sanctions list. Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller claims that Page "has no role" in the Trump campaign and says that "we are not aware of any of his activities, past or present."

September 25: In a CNN interview, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway denies that Page is affiliated with the Trump campaign. "He's certainly not part of the campaign that I'm running," she said.

In response to a question about Page's possible connections to Russian officials, Conway says, "If he's doing that, he's certainly not doing it with the permission or knowledge of the campaign," She adds, "He is certainly not authorized to do that."

September 26: Page takes a leave from the campaign.

- During the first presidential debate, Clinton brings up the allegations that Russia orchestrated the DNC hack. Trump responds: "I don't think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?"

October 1: Roger Stone tweets:



October 3: Roger Stone tweets:


October 7: US intelligence agencies issue a joint release saying they are "confident" the Russian government interfered in the US election, in part by directing the leaking of hacked emails belonging to political institutions like the DNC. This is the first official government confirmation that Russia orchestrated the hacking and leaks during the election.

-Late on Friday afternoon, a leaked video of Trump boasting of groping and kissing women without their consent is published by the Washington Post. Half an hour later, WikiLeaks begins to release several thousand hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

October 9: During the second presidential debate, Clinton accuses Trump of benefiting from Russian hacking and other interference in the election. Trump responds, "I don't know Putin. I think it would be great if we got along with Russia because we could fight ISIS together, as an example. But I don't know Putin."

Referring to Trump campaign staffers Russia's deputy foreign minister, said the day after the election: "A number of them maintained contacts with Russian representatives. There were contacts. We continue to do this and have been doing this work during the election campaign."
October 11: The Obama White House promises a "proportional" response following the US intelligence community's conclusion that Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC and other groups.

October 12: Sources briefed on the FBI examination of Russian hacking say the agency suspects that Russian intelligence agencies are behind the hacking of the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and a Florida election systems vendor.

- Roger Stone says he has "back-channel communications" with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, through a mutual friend.

October 19: During the final presidential debate, Trump casts doubt on the US intelligence community's conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the election. He also denies having ever met or spoken to Putin, despite his previous statements to the contrary. "I never met Putin," Trump says. " I have nothing to do with Putin. I've never spoken to him."

October 30: The plane belonging to Dmitri Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who purchased Trump's Florida mansion in 2008, is in Las Vegas the same day Trump holds a rally there.

- Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sends a letter to FBI Director James Comey calling on him to release what Reid calls "explosive" information about Trump's Russia ties. "In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government," Reid writes. "The public has a right to know this information."

October 31: Mother Jones reports that a veteran of a Western intelligence service has given the FBI memos saying that Russia had mounted a yearslong operation to co-opt or cultivate Trump and that the Kremlin had gathered compromising information on Trump during his visits to Moscow that could be used for blackmail. The story notes that the FBI has requested more information from this source.

Date unknown: Prior to Election Day, Flynn contacts Kislyak. It's unknown how often the pair communicated or what they talked about.

November 1: NBC News reports that the FBI is conducting a preliminary inquiry into Paul Manafort's business ties to Russia and Ukraine. Manafort tells NBC, "None of it is true." He denies having dealings with Putin or the Russian government and says any allegations to the contrary are "Democratic propaganda."

November 3: Dmitri Rybolovlev's plane lands in Charlotte, North Carolina, about 90 minutes before Trump's plane lands at the same airport in advance of a Trump rally to be held that day in nearby Concord.

November 9: Trump wins the presidential election.

November 10: Interfax news agency reports that the Russian government had contact with the Trump campaign during the campaign. Referring to Trump campaign staffers, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia's deputy foreign minister, says, "A number of them maintained contacts with Russian representatives" in the Russian Foreign Ministry. And he adds, "There were contacts. We continue to do this and have been doing this work during the election campaign."

- Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tells the Associated Press that Russian foreign policy experts have been in contact with the Trump campaign. "And our experts, our specialists on the U.S., on international affairs…Of course they are constantly speaking to their counterparts here, including those from Mr. Trump's group," Peskov said.

November 11: Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks tells the Associated Press that the allegations of contact between the Trump campaign and Russian officials are false. "It never happened," she says. "There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign."

November 16: The director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, implies that he believes Russia interfered in the US election. In response to a question about WikiLeaks hacks during the election, Rogers says, "This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect."

November 17: Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, sends a letter to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the committee's top Republican, calling for an investigation into Russia's interference in the election.

November 23: The Wall Street Journal reports that in October 2016, Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a meeting of a French think tank run by a couple, Fabien Baussart and Randa Kassis, who have "worked closely with Russia to try to end the conflict" in Syria. Kassis is the leader of a Syrian group endorsed by the Kremlin that seeks to cooperate with Moscow ally President Bashar al-Assad.

November 29: Seven members of the Senate intelligence committee write a letter to Obama asking him to declassify relevant intelligence on Russia's role in the election.

Early December: Two Russian intelligence officers who worked on cyber operations and a Russian computer security expert are arrested in Moscow and charged with treason for providing information to the United States. (There is no indication of whether the arrests are related to the Russian hacking of the 2016 campaign.)

December 8: Carter Page, no longer a foreign policy adviser to Trump, visits Moscow, where he tells a state-run news agency that he plans to meet with "business leaders and thought leaders."

December 9: The Washington Post reports that a secret CIA assessment concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win the presidency. In response, the Trump transition team issues a statement attempting to discredit the CIA's conclusion: "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago…It's now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again.'"

December 11: In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Trump again casts doubt on the US intelligence community's findings on Russia's interference in the election. "They have no idea if it's Russia or China or somebody," Trump says of the CIA's findings. "It could be somebody sitting in a bed some place. I mean, they have no idea."

December 13: Trump names Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon Mobil, as his secretary of state nominee. Tillerson has long-standing ties to Russia and Putin. Tillerson helped Exxon cut several oil-drilling deals with Rosneft, Russia's state-owned oil company, and in 2013 Putin awarded Tillerson the Russian Order of Friendship.

December (date unknown): Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner meet with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at Trump Tower. Kislyak was not caught on tape entering the building, suggesting that he may have been brought in through a back entrance.

December 29: Obama announces sanctions against Russia for the country's alleged interference in the presidential election. The measure includes the ejection of 35 Russian diplomats from the United States; the closure of Cold War-era Russian compounds in Long Island, New York, and in Maryland; and sanctions against the GRU and the FSB (Russian intelligence agencies), four employees of those agencies, and three companies that worked with the GRU.

- Michael Flynn holds five phone calls with Kislyak, during which they at some point discuss US sanctions on Russia. (White House press secretary Sean Spicer later claims falsely that they held just one call, in which they merely discussed "logistical information.")

2017

January 6: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence releases a report saying that the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA believe there is evidence that Russia actively tried to help Trump win the election. They also conclude with "high confidence" that Russian military intelligence used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and a website called DCLeaks.com to release the hacked documents and that Russia's military intelligence branch channeled hacked material to WikiLeaks.

January 10: CNN reports that Obama and Trump received classified briefings that covered allegations contained in the Russia-Trump memos authored by the Western intelligence official that Russian intelligence possessed compromising material on Trump.

- BuzzFeed publishes the Trump-Russia memos in full.

- Trump calls the Russia memos story "#fakenews" on Twitter.


- During his Senate confirmation hearing, Jeff Sessions responds to questions about alleged contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia by saying, "I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians."

- FBI Director James Comey testifies at a Senate intelligence committee hearing. He is asked whether the FBI is investigating Trump campaign staffers' ties to Russia. Comey declines to answer the question.

January 11: Trump again denies the allegations in the Russia memos in a series of tweets. Also in reference to the Russia allegations, he asks, "Are we living in Nazi Germany?"


- At his first news conference since being elected, Trump acknowledges that Russia was behind the hacks, saying, "As far as hacking, I think it was Russia. But I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people."

January 13: Trump again calls claims about his Russian connections "fake news." His tweet refers to a comment by a Kremlin spokesman earlier in the month that called the US intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the US election "absolutely unfounded."


January 15: In an appearance on Face the Nation, Vice President-elect Mike Pence says Michael Flynn told him that he did not discuss US sanctions during his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

January 19: The New York Times reports that the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, and the Treasury Department's financial crimes unit are investigating Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Roger Stone for their possible contacts with Russia during the campaign. As part of their investigation, the Times reports, these agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions.

January 20: Trump is inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States.

January 23: White House press secretary Sean Spicer holds his first White House press briefing. He insists that national security adviser Michael Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador included no discussion of US sanctions.

January 24: The FBI interviews Flynn about his phone conversations with the Russian ambassador. Flynn reportedly denies having discussed US sanctions on Russia.

January 26: Sally Yates, the acting attorney general, informs White House counsel Don McGahn that Flynn had discussed US sanctions on Russia with the Russian ambassador, despite Flynn's claims to the contrary in his FBI interview.

- McGahn informs Trump of Yates' report that Flynn had a conversation with the Russian ambassador in December that included a discussion about US sanctions. This reveals that Flynn misled Pence when he said he had not had substantive conversations with the Russian ambassador.

January (date unknown): Michael Cohen, Trump's personal attorney, meets at a Manhattan hotel with Felix Sater and a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker to discuss a potential peace plan for Ukraine and Russia. The New York Times reports that Cohen delivered this plan to Flynn. Cohen confirms he met with Sater and the Ukrainian lawmaker, but denies that they discussed a Ukraine-Russia peace plan or that he delivered such a plan to Flynn or the White House.

February 7: Trump tweets:


February 8: In an interview with the Washington Post, Flynn denies discussing US sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

February 9: A spokesman for Flynn softens the national security adviser's denial, telling the Washington Post that "while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn't be certain that the topic never came up."

February 10: Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump says he is not aware of reports that Flynn has discussed US sanctions with the Russian ambassador. He has in fact been aware of Flynn's contacts with Kislyak since late January.

- Dmitri Rybolovlev's plane lands in Miami, the day before Trump is set to arrive at Mar-a-Lago for the weekend.

February 13: Flynn resigns following reports that the Justice Department warned the White House that Flynn had misled senior members of the administration, including Pence, about whether he discussed US sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

February 14: The New York Times reports that American intelligence and law enforcement agencies have intercepted repeated communications between Trump campaign officials and other Trump associates and senior Russian intelligence and government officials.

- Spicer denies that Trump or his campaign had any contacts with Russia during the election.

February 15: During a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump does not answer a question about potential connections between his campaign and Russia during the election. He blames Flynn's ouster on leaks. This is a different position than the one taken by the White House previously: that Flynn was asked to resign because he misled Pence about his communication with the Russian ambassador.

- Reince Priebus, Trump's chief of staff, asks the FBI to publicly knock-down media reports that the US intelligence community was investigating the Trump campaign's alleged contacts with Russia intelligence operatives during the election. The FBI refuses to do so. The administration then enlists the help of the intelligence community and several members of Congress, including Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)—the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, both of which are conducting investigations into Trump's Russia connections—to call media outlets to counter stories about contacts between Trump staffers and Russians.

- In an appearance on PBS Newshour, Carter Page denies that he had any meetings with Russian officials in 2016.

February 16: At a news conference, Trump is asked whether anyone in his campaign had been in contact with Russia. He replies, "Nobody that I know of." He also denies having any contact with Russia, saying, "Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia."

February 17: FBI Director James Comey meets with members of the Senate intelligence committee. That same day, the committee sends letters to more than a dozen agencies, groups, and individuals, asking them to preserve all communications related to the committee's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

February 19: During an interview on Fox News, Priebus denies that the Trump camp had any contact with Russia.

February 28: Republicans on the House judiciary committee vote down a Democrat-sponsored resolution that would have required the Trump administration to disclose information about Trump's ties to Russia (and his possible financial conflicts of interest).

- White House lawyers ask Trump staffers to preserve any materials related to possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.

March 1: The Washington Post reports that Jeff Sessions, Trump's attorney general, did not disclose in his January confirmation hearings that he twice met with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. Sessions had said during a confirmation hearing that "I did not have communications with the Russians." Sessions' Justice Department spokeswoman says Sessions met with Kislyak in his capacity as a senator on the armed services committee, and that the question during the confirmation hearing was about the Trump campaign's Russian connections.

March 2: Facing criticism over the revelations that he withheld information regarding his meetings with the Russian ambassador during his confirmation hearings, Sessions announces that he will recuse himself from any investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

- On NBC, Sessions denies that he ever discussed the Trump campaign with Russians. "I have not met with any Russians at any time to discuss any political campaign and those remarks are unbelievable to me and are false," he said. "And I don't have anything else to say about that."

- Alex Oronov, a Ukrainian billionaire businessman who was connected by marriage to Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime lawyer and associate, dies unexpectedly. Oronov's daughter was married to Cohen's brother. Oronov reportedly set up a January 2017 meeting between Cohen and Russian officials to discuss a possible "peace plan" between Russia and Ukraine that would have formalized Putin's control over Crimea. The New York Times reported that this peace proposal was hand-delivered to Michael Flynn prior to his forced resignation.

- The White House acknowledges that Jared Kushner and Flynn met with Sergey Kislyak at Trump Tower in December. The meeting was first reported by The New Yorker.

- The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump Jr. was paid at least $50,000 for his October 2016 appearance before a French think tank run by a couple allied with Russia on ending Syrian conflict.

- USA Today reports that two other Trump advisers, Carter Page and J.D. Gordon, met with Sergey Kislyak during the Republican National Convention.

- In an MSNBC appearance, Page says he doesn't deny that this meeting took place.

- J.D. Gordon tells CNN that during the Republican National Convention, he did in fact push to alter the Republican platform's draft policy on Ukraine to align it with Trump's views on Russia.

March 3: Trump dresses down senior staffers in a meeting in the Oval Office over Jeff Sessions' recusal and over news reports connecting the Trump administration to Russia.

March 4: Without providing any proof, Trump alleges that President Obama wiretapped his phones during the election.


March 5: Press Secretary Sean Spicer says the White House is requesting that the congressional intelligence committees examine Trump's allegations that Obama wiretapped Trump during the campaign as part of their investigation into Russia's election activity. Spicer also says the White House will not comment further on the wiretapping allegation until the completion of this investigation.

March 10: Trump adviser Roger Stone acknowledges that during the 2016 campaign he exchanged direct messages on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that US intelligence agencies believe was a front for Russian intelligence. Stone claims the conversations were so "perfunctory" and "banal" that he had forgotten about them.

March 15: Asked about his decision to accuse Obama of wiretapping him without evidence, Trump hints that information will soon emerge to back up his claims. "I think you're going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks."

March 20: The House intelligence committee holds its first public hearing on its investigation into Russia's interference in the US election. Responding to the committee's questioning, FBI Director James Comey confirms that the bureau has since July been "investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts." Both Comey and NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers dismiss Trump's claim that Obama wiretapped him during the election.

- In response to questions from Mother Jones' David Corn, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chair of the House intelligence committee, tells reporters he has never heard of key figures connected to the Trump-Russia scandal, including Carter Page and Roger Stone.

- Spicer tells reporters that Paul Manafort, who ran Trump's campaign from April 2016 to August 2016, "played a limited role" on the campaign "for a very limited amount of time."

March 22: The Associated Press reports that, starting in the mid-2000s, Manafort worked on behalf of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to "influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government." The news service quotes a 2005 strategy memo authored by Manafort, who writes, "We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success." Manafort denies working on behalf of Russian interests.

- Mother Jones reports that Manafort tried to help Deripaska secure a visa to the United States. The aluminum magnate had been denied entry to the United States at various points because of suspected ties to the Russian mafia.

- Rep. Devin Nunes, without briefing Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), his Democratic counterpart on the intelligence committee, or other members of the panel, calls a surprise press conference, announcing that he has seen evidence that the intelligence community "incidentally" picked up communications by Trump transition officials in the course of lawful surveillance on foreign parties. He claims that the names of Trump officials were "unmasked" and that "none of this surveillance was related to Russia."

- In a remarkable departure from intelligence committee norms, Nunes visits the White House to brief Trump on his findings. The president later says he feels "somewhat" vindicated by the information Nunes shared.

- Schiff releases a statement expressing "grave concerns" about Nunes' actions and casting doubt about whether a "credible investigation" can be conducted under these circumstances.


- Schiff tells MSNBC's Chuck Todd that there is "more than circumstantial evidence now" of potential collusion between Trump officials and Russian operatives.

- CNN, citing "US officials," reports that the "FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign."

March 23: The Associated Press reports that US Treasury Department agents have obtained records of "offshore financial transactions" by Paul Manafort, in conjunction into an ongoing anti-corruption investigation into his work in Eastern Europe. According to the new service, "As part of their investigation, U.S. officials were expected to look into millions of dollars' worth of wire transfers to Manafort. In one case, the AP found that a Manafort-linked company received a $1 million payment in October 2009 from a mysterious firm through the Bank of Cyprus. The $1 million payment left the account the same day—split in two, roughly $500,000 disbursements to accounts with no obvious owner."

- Trump tweets:


- Rep. Nunes apologizes to Democratic members of the intelligence committee for failing to brief them on the new information he obtained and instead taking it straight to the White House, but he won't explain why he took this unusual action.

March 24: Rep. Devin Nunes holds a press conference, where he announces that Paul Manafort has volunteered to testify before the House intelligence committee.
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2017/ ... l-timeline
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 25, 2017 9:50 pm

Through the looking glass with Trump and Nunes
Image
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 22: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) speaks to reporters after a meeting at the White House March 22, 2017 in Washington, DC. Nunes said that he has seen reports from the U.S. intelligence agencies that show communication from members of President Trump's transition team and the president himself were incidentally collected. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES


By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan GLOBE COLUMNIST MARCH 23, 2017
When FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress on Monday that his bureau is investigating possible collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russians seeking to influence our election — and shot down Trump’s claim that he was wiretapped by President Obama, while the president tweeted a rival storyline in real time – our nation took another step through the looking glass.

Now it’s gotten curiouser and curiouser, to quote “Alice in Wonderland.”

The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Devin Nunes, tried damage control for Trump on Wednesday, holding a press conference to describe US surveillance of foreigners that “incidentally” swept up conversations involving Trump’s transition team, and briefing the president on the congressional probe he’s leading. Speaking separately to reporters, the president said he felt “somewhat” vindicated for insisting Obama wiretapped him, and told Time magazine that what Nunes said “means I’m right,” a canard now refuted under oath by intelligence chiefs and clung to only by those who believe microwave ovens are spying on us.

Now Nunes, who was himself a member of Trump’s transition team, discovered that when you throw a lifeline to someone who’s treading in uncharted waters, you’re in danger of being pulled down yourself.

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It’s not the first time the California Republican has rushed to administer aid to Trump. He defended National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign after it was revealed he lied about discussing sanctions with Russia while Obama was still in office. The White House also enlisted Nunes two months ago to deny stories of a probe into links between Trump aides and Russian operatives — news that Comey confirmed under oath this week.

View Story
Powerful House Republican aids Trump’s claims of surveillance
Representative Devin Nunes said the president or his closest associates may have been “incidentally” swept up in foreign surveillance.
Fast Forward: Brits arrest suspects, Nunes tips off Trump, Cruz man-crushes on Gorsuch

In his haste again this week to toss the president a line — however threadbare — to buoy Trump’s insistence he was spied upon, Nunes made a number of mistakes.

First, the congressman publicly discussed surveillance apparently classified under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. That’s odd, to say the least, given that Nunes and his Republican colleagues spent most of Monday’s hearing arguing that the biggest threat to national security was not Russia, but leaks from the US national security establishment.

Second, Nunes cited an anonymous source. That’s also odd, given the White House’s attack on anonymous sources and efforts to discredit blind quotes as “fake news.”

Third, Nunes failed to share with Democratic committee colleagues his information on alleged US surveillance of foreigners that swept up conversations with Trump aides. It’s the job of his committee to provide bipartisan oversight of intelligence community actions, and in this case, to draw independent and credible conclusions about Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Fourth, and perhaps most troubling, Nunes discussed an ongoing investigation with the president, whose team is a subject of the probe and whose attorney general was forced to recuse himself because of undisclosed election contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Nunes apologized to the committee Thursday, but his actions cast serious doubt on the probe he’s leading, and will bolster demands for an independent special committee to take over. Already, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona called Nunes’s actions “bizarre” and told MSNBC that Congress has lost its “credibility to handle this alone,” making an independent probe a necessity. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called Nunes “a stooge of the president.”

The House intelligence committee’s ranking Democrat, Representative Adam Schiff of California, was appalled, telling reporters Nunes must “decide if he’s leading an investigation” or is “a surrogate of the White House. Because he cannot do both.” Schiff also said that evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia was “more than circumstantial.”

Representative Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat on the committee, was incredulous Nunes would scurry off to brief a president “who is potentially a target of this investigation. No — it’s beyond absurd,” Himes told CNN, practically sputtering in disbelief.

It reminded me of Alice telling the Red Queen that one cannot believe impossible things. The Queen, accustomed to her bizarre world, retorted: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice.”

For us down in this rabbit hole, I daresay we’re getting too much practice.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/201 ... story.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 25, 2017 10:05 pm

Combative Trump TV spokesman Boris Epshteyn is about to step down: report
David Ferguson DAVID FERGUSON
25 MAR 2017 AT 21:03 ET

Trump surrogate Boris Epshteyn defends the Trump Foundation on CNN (Screen cap)

Sources in Pres. Donald Trump’s administration say that one of the president’s top TV surrogates is stepping down from his role in coming days.

Politico said on Saturday that Boris Epshteyn will be leaving his position as a spokesman and taking on a “less visible” role in the White House.

Epshteyn served as a vociferous defender of Trump and his policies first as a volunteer and then a paid campaign official.

His combativeness extends beyond the times when cameras are rolling, however. Earlier this year, Politico reported that Epshteyn has been known to “terrorize” network executives and talent bookers, prompting Fox News to blacklist him from any further appearances.

In 2014, Epshteyn was arrested for sucker-punching a man in the parking lot of a bar, according to the Smoking Gun.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/combat ... wn-report/


Donald Trump’s Russia scandal explodes: Boris Epshteyn abruptly resigns from White House post
By Bill Palmer | March 25, 2017 | 0

Boris Epshteyn, the Russian immigrant who played a prominent role in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and then went on to take a high ranking job in Donald Trump’s White House, has abruptly resigned today without giving a reason. Epshteyn has had deep financial and business connections to his native Russia in recent years, and his sudden resignation today – as reported by CNN – comes as the Trump Russia scandal is exploding in real time.

Epshteyn was best known to the public as the comically inept Trump campaign surrogate who made a series of bumbling appearances on cable news networks. But behind the scenes, Boris – who was born in the Soviet Union and then immigrated to the United States in 1993 – was deeply involved with Russian financial interests. In 2013 he moderated a conference panel in New York City called “Invest in Moscow” (source: Huffington Post) which created such controversy for the city that Mayor Michael Bloomberg ultimately disavowed its sponsorship of it. In the same timeframe, Boris appeared in a YouTube video (link) in which he offered the Russian government tips on how it could win over more American money.

Donald Trump’s decision to give a prominent role to Boris was yet another instance of Trump loading up his campaign with people who had obvious ties to Russia. That list also included Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn. When it was later revealed that the FBI is investigating those four men in connection to the Trump-Russia election rigging conspiracy, Epshteyn’s name was nowhere to be found in those reports – leading some to posit that perhaps his Russian ties may have merely been incidental rather than criminal. But the timing of his abrupt resignation today changes everything.

Yesterday, pieces fell into place to strongly suggest that Michael Flynn may have cut a deal with the FBI against Donald Trump. And now that it suddenly appears Flynn may imminently reveal everything about the Trump-Russia scandal, the Donald Trump White House has suddenly pushed Boris Epshteyn into resigning (link: CNN). That’s not coincidence; Boris was likely a major player in the scandal. Look for another shoe to drop on this imminently.
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/donald ... post/2061/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 26, 2017 10:01 am

Russian born White House Adviser Boris Epshteyn talks about how to do biz in Russia-cuz hes an expert!

Boris Epshteyn leaving WH— born in Russia

Image

Russian born White House Adviser Boris Epshteyn also spoke on an "Invest in Moscow" panel with city officials
Image

Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 27, 2017 1:47 pm

get to know Boris Epshteyn.....he's just not your ordinary person to quit the trump WH :evilgrin

how did he get security clearance??

Trump Aide Boorish Boris's Assault Bust
White House advisor once sucker punched man

View Document
Boris Epshteyn Bust

Image
MARCH 10--A White House aide known for his combative behavior was once arrested for sucker punching a smaller man during a bar dispute, an attack that left the victim bloodied and resulted in the assailant being sentenced to attend anger management classes, according to police and court records.

Boris Epshteyn, a special assistant to President Donald Trump, was busted by Arizona cops in January 2014 after walloping another patron during a 2:25 AM confrontation at a Scottsdale nightspot. Epshteyn, 6’ 4” and 275 pounds, attacked a man seven inches shorter and about 70 pounds lighter than him, cops reported.

Epshteyn, 34, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge and was sentenced to attend counseling, perform 25 hours of community service, and pay about $360 in fines and court costs. He was also barred from having contact with the victim or returning to Whiskey Row, the business where he was arrested.

Seen in the above Scottsdale Police Department mug shot, Epshteyn is a special assistant to the president in charge of overseeing White House officials and surrogates appearing on TV on behalf of the Trump administration. In a Politico story this week, Epshteyn, who was born in Moscow, is portrayed as a coarse Trump advocate who has frequently offended network bookers and made comments that have been "interpreted as racially insensitive and demeaning.”

Epshteyn, a lawyer and New Jersey resident, went to college with Trump’s son Eric and was a frequent cable news guest during the presidential campaign. He was among the first group of key hires announced by Trump before he took office in January. In addition to his messaging duties, Epshteyn reportedly authored the White House’s controversial statement commemorating International Holocaust Memorial Day (which included no reference to the six million Jews killed by Nazis).



As detailed in a police report, Epshteyn had been partying with friends at Whiskey Row when an argument broke out with other patrons. Epshteyn told police that a man in the other group, Adam Raspanti, had been “hitting on” and kissing his friend’s girlfriend. “An argument ensued and they were separated,” cops noted.

Raspanti, 33, told police that he “observed Boris being kicked out of the bar” following the argument. When he later spotted Epshteyn inside Whiskey Row (seen below), Raspanti told police, he asked, “Didn’t you get kicked out an hour ago?”

Epshteyn responded by punching Raspanti in the face.

After bouncers stepped in and “everyone was removed” from the bar, Scottsdale cops arrived to find Raspanti holding his nose and apparently in pain. Witnesses told officers that Epshteyn “punched the victim in the face, blooding [sic] and bruising the man’s nose. There was corresponding evidence of injury on the man.”

Police described Epshteyn as a “large white male in a pink shirt” and “significantly larger than” his victim.

During questioning, Epshteyn denied striking Raspanti, a claim contradicted by witnesses. He charged that he had been shoved by Raspanti as he went to the bar to close out his tab, but that nothing further transpired.

Epshteyn was arrested for assault and transported to a nearby precinct where he was booked on the misdemeanor count. He was released after about an hour in custody.

After entering his guilty plea, Epshteyn was placed in a “diversion” program for first-time offenders. After Epshteyn fulfilled all conditions of the program, prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the Scottsdale City Court case. A judge signed off on the motion in December 2014. (6 pages)
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... est-473920



and I am very sure this has nothing at all to do with Nunes :P


Devin Nunes plot thickens, as his spokesman concedes he met source for surveillance claim at White House
http://www.latimes.com/politics/washing ... story.html


Nunes Made Secret Trip to White House Complex for Wiretap ‘Evidence’
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/201 ... ce=copyurl


and then's there's poor Jared...can't catch a break

Thomas B. Malone‏ @TBrianMalone 5h5 hours ago
Jared Kushner dirty too!!

Prison will be particularly difficult for @jaredkushner
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Kushner’s Felon Father Back at Helm of New York Empire With Two Fellow Inmates
“It can’t hurt to be doing business with Jared Kushner’s family. It’s a road to the administration.”
Image
Charles and Jared Kushner.
Photographer: Patrick McMullan
by David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby
January 27, 2017, 4:00 AM CST
It’s hard to find work right out of prison. But Avram Lebor and Richard Goettlich walked from their Alabama penitentiary into top jobs at the real estate company then run by Jared Kushner, now President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. The two men, convicted in separate sprawling fraud schemes, were hired several years ago by his father, Charles Kushner, who had been locked up in the same federal prison with them.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... to-company
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby SonicG » Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:12 pm

Epshteyn is Source E in the Steele dossier according to Seth Abrahamson...
"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 8:59 am

Friday, January 13, 2017

The Orbis dossier continues to have fascinating repercussions -- for example, we have just learned that the Senate Intelligence Committee will now hold hearings into Trump's Russian ties. Don't let anyone try to convince you that this decision is unrelated to the dossier.

The preceding post on "Watersportsgate" inspired a couple of informants to send me interesting leads. In fact, they may be bombshells.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THIS POST. You won't find this information anywhere else. Only widespread discussion can generate verification.

As everyone now knows, the report containing the "golden shower" allegation originated with a private intelligence-gathering firm called Orbis, run by a respected former MI6 agent named Christopher Steele. Orbis caters to high-powered corporate clients. In that world, a private intelligence firm simply cannot stay in business if the product is sloppy or mendacious.

No-one can fairly claim that the dossier was put together for purposes of propaganda, for the simple reason that the text was never meant for public consumption. Buzzfeed put the dossier online only after learning that the American intelligence community was taking these claims very seriously -- seriously enough to brief both Obama and Trump.

Everyone is talking about those 36 pages, but few have actually read them (even though I went to the trouble of putting the whole lot through OCR; scroll down a couple of posts). Those who have bothered to read this material know that the true source for the "golden shower" story is not CNN -- not Buzzfeed -- and, ultimately, not even Orbis. Orbis got the story from three separate sources, labeled Source D, Source E and Source F.

Source D appears to be someone who works for Trump. Source F is someone who works for the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow.

The "big fish" in this barrel is Source E: He not only confirmed the watersports "kompromat" claim, he also spilled many another bean. In fact, I would say that those other beans are the truly important ones.

Writers for the Washington Post -- who have apparently seen an unredacted version of the dossier -- identified Source E as a Russian emigre who is very close to Donald Trump. But so far, no-one has given you a name.

Until now.


An anonymous informant tells me that Source E is Boris Epshteyn, the man who is running Trump's inauguration. As you may have heard, his job has not been an easy one. During the campaign, Epshteyn -- an investment banker born in the former USSR -- was often seen on cable television, defending Trump at every turn.

You are probably wondering: How can I be sure of this identification, since I have only one anonymous informant? In truth, I'm not certain -- not 100%. But the claim certainly seemed very plausible after I checked out Epshteyn's Wikipedia page and looked up this NYT biographical sketch.

Everything fits. EVERYTHING.

He's a Russian emigre. He knows Moscow very well. (Source E knew Source F, who works at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton.) He's extremely close to Trump. He got "in" with the campaign via a relationship with Trump's son.

In October 2013, Epshteyn helped moderate an investment event "Invest in Moscow!" The panel was composed mainly of Moscow city government officials, like Sergey Cheremin, a city minister who heads Moscow’s foreign economic and international relations department.
In the Orbis dossier, Source E's special area of knowledge seems to be investment in Russia.

Epshteyn got his start in Republican politics as part of the 2008 John McCain campaign. McCain has played an intriguing role in the saga of the Orbis dossier. The story at the other end of that link makes a lot more sense if you posit that McCain has a pretty good idea as to who was feeding information to Orbis.
Published reports conflict about how, when and from whom McCain learned about and obtained the memos.

In a story published late Wednesday on its website, the New York Times reported, without attribution, that McCain caught wind of the anti-Trump memos and got copies last month from David J. Kramer of Arizona State University's McCain Institute for International Leadership.

That would contradict other published accounts, including one Tuesday in the Guardian, which reported McCain "was informed about the existence of the documents separately by an intermediary from a western allied state" and "dispatched an emissary overseas to meet the source."

CNN reported Tuesday that McCain learned about the dossier from "a former British diplomat who had been posted in Moscow."
The Guardian now identifies the intermediary as Sir Andrew Wood.

Why would a high-level British official contact McCain? Perhaps the UK wanted background information on the man we know as Source E. Perhaps they knew that McCain was in a position to divulge that kind of information.

Intriguingly, Ephsteyn is married to a Google executive. His Twitter feed has been very sparse of late, and contains no reference to the controversy generated by the Orbis dossier.

If Ephsteyn is Source E, then we may fairly presume that the joint intelligence task force investigating these claims went to the FISA court specifically to get permission to eavesdrop electronically on Boris Ephsteyn. Remember: Permission is needed only if the target is an American.

Permission was finally granted in October. I have no idea what the intelligence "haul" might have been.

And that's not all folks! Another anonymous informant sent me an astonishing link to a certain Google document marked "private." This document gives details of more than 200 companies in Russia that can be linked to Donald Trump.

Remember, Trump says he has no business dealings in Russia.

I suggest that you download this document right now; I have no idea how long it will be online. As for its credibility and accuracy -- well, in my opinion, this can be determined only after a large number of people start doing research. Could it be a hoax? Possibly. But if so, it is unlike any other hoax I've ever seen.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2017/01/ ... ation.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 5:58 pm

I'm putting all the dead Russians in this thread ...this one maybe connected also ...maybe not we will see

Reports: Russian Interior Ministry Official Shot Dead
March 28, 2017

The head of the Russian Interior Ministry's construction department has reportedly been shot dead in Moscow.

The Interfax news agency cited an unidentified law-enforcement official as saying that Nikolai Volkov was killed on March 27.

Volkov was the head of the Interior Ministry's Renovation and Construction Department.

The Interfax report said police believe the motive was robbery, suggesting that the killing was not directly related to Volkov's job.

Based on reporting by Interfax, Meduza, and Moskovsky Komsomolets
http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-volkov-in ... 95580.html


Devin Nunes’ company suddenly tries to cover up the business it conducts in Russia
By Bill Palmer | March 28, 2017 | 0

Six days ago, Palmer Report reported that House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has most of his net worth tied up in a company that does business in Russia (link). This was easily verified, because the company’s own publicly available website listed the name and contact of the Russian distributor in plain sight. But as of now, the company has suddenly rather clumsily removed Russia from its distributor list.

Devin Nunes has an approximate net worth of $51,000, and he has $50,000 of it tied up in a company called Alpha Omega Winery, according to the Los Angeles Times (link). This stood out as potentially suspicious in light of Nunes’ bizarre recent behavior with regard to Donald Trump’s Russia scandal, in which he’s gone to great lengths – including sharing classified intel with the public – to protect Trump on his Russia scandal. Scott Dworkin of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump had documented that Alpha Omega listed itself as doing business in Russia through Luding Trading Company (screen shot). But if you look at Alpha Omega’s distributor list now, Russia has since been removed (link). So what happened?

In apparent response to our article, Alpha Omega Winery posted the following message on Twitter on March 23rd: “The only time Alpha Omega did business in Russia was in 2013 when a broker handled a one-time transaction for 22 cases of wine” (link). However, this is refuted by the Russian distributor itself, Luding Trading Company. Its website still lists itself as selling three types of Alpha Omega wines in Russia (link). As such it appears Devin Nunes’ company Alpha Omega merely deleted the Russian distributor from its website in attempt at covering up the connection, despite continuing to do business through it. This makes the connection more suspicious, not less
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/coveru ... ssia/2086/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:03 pm

Trump's business network reached alleged Russian mobsters
Oren Dorell , USA TODAY Published 5:05 p.m. ET March 28, 2017 | Updated 2 hours ago


President Trump and his properties have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations and money laundering. USA TODAY

To expand his real estate developments over the years, Donald Trump, his company and partners repeatedly turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics — several allegedly connected to organized crime, according to a USA TODAY review of court cases, government and legal documents and an interview with a former federal prosecutor.

The president and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering.

Among them:

• A partner in the firm that developed the Trump SoHo Hotel in New York is a twice-convicted felon who spent a year in prison for stabbing a man and later scouted for Trump investments in Russia.

• An investor in the SoHo project was accused by Belgian authorities in 2011 in a $55 million money-laundering scheme.

• Three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.

• A former mayor from Kazakhstan was accused in a federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in 2014 of hiding millions of dollars looted from his city, some of which was spent on three Trump SoHo units.

• A Ukrainian owner of two Trump condos in Florida was indicted in a money-laundering scheme involving a former prime minister of Ukraine.

Trump's Russian connections are of heightened interest because of an FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump's presidential campaign and Russian operatives to interfere in last fall's election. What’s more, Trump and his companies have had business dealings with Russians that go back decades, raising questions about whether his policies would be influenced by business considerations.

Trump told reporters in February: "I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all."

Yet in 2013, after Trump addressed potential investors in Moscow, he bragged to Real Estate Weekly about his access to Russia's rich and powerful. “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump said, referring to Russians who made fortunes when former Soviet state enterprises were sold to private investors.

Five years earlier, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. told Russian media while in Moscow that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets" in places like Dubai and Trump SoHo and elsewhere in New York.

New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.

“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.” Many of those meetings happened in Trump's office at Trump Tower or at sales events, Lenz said.

Read more:

Jared Kushner to meet with Senate Intelligence Committee in Russia probe
Donald Trump's ties to Russia go back 30 years
Why does Donald Trump like Russians? Maybe because they love his condos
Dealings with Russian oligarchs concern law enforcement because many of those super-wealthy people are generally suspected of corrupt practices as a result of interconnected relationships among Russia's business elite, government security services and criminal gangs, according to former U.S. prosecutor Ken McCallion, as well as Steven Hall, a former CIA chief of Russian operations.

“Anybody who is an oligarch or is in any position of power in Russia got it because (President) Vladimir Putin or somebody in power saw some reason to give that person that job,” Hall said in an interview. “All the organized crime figures I’ve ever heard of (in Russia) all have deep connections and are tied in with people in government.”

FBI Director James Comey acknowledged at a congressional hearing into Russian interference in the U.S. election March 20 that many wealthy Russians may have close ties to the Kremlin and may be acting on its behalf.

Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection to any of the individuals mentioned in this article.

However, the deals, and the large number of Russians who have bought condos in Trump buildings, raise questions about the secrecy he has maintained around his real estate empire. Trump is the first president in 40 years to refuse to turn over his tax returns, which could shed light on his business dealings.

The White House declined to comment about this article, referring questions to the Trump Organization in New York. Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, denied any transactions with people named in this article.

“The allegations ... are entirely without merit," Miller said in an email. "The Trump Organization never entered into a single transaction with any of these individuals and the condominium units were all owned and sold by third parties — not Trump.”

Trump's privately held company works through a network of subsidiaries and partnerships that make direct connections hard to trace, particularly since he has refused to release his tax filings. In addition, some of the Trump Organization's investors and buyers operate through shell companies and limited liability corporations that hide the identities of individual owners.

Trump and the Trump Organization signed licensing agreements for an ownership stake in properties such as Trump SoHo and Trump International Beach Resort, which bear the Trump name without requiring an investment by him. In the SoHo project, Trump received an 18% share of the profits in return for use of his name,according to a deposition Trump gave in 2007 for a defamation lawsuit he brought against an author.

The SoHo project

President Trump reacts after delivering his first address
President Trump reacts after delivering his first address to a joint session of Congress from the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 28, 2017. (Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo, POOL, EPA)
Among Trump's partners in the SoHo project was Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant who spent a year in prison for the 1991 stabbing. He later cooperated with the FBI and the CIA for a reduced sentence after he was convicted in a $40 million stock manipulation and money-laundering scheme in New York state.

Sater was a partner in the Bayrock Group, which developed the Trump SoHo. Sater's criminal past was not well-known until publicly divulged in 2007. As he sought investment opportunities in Russia, he carried business cards identifying him as a senior adviser to the Trump Organization that included the company's email and phone number.

In February, Sater introduced a Ukrainian politician pushing a pro-Russian peace proposal to Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer and former chief counsel at the Trump Organization, Cohen told NBC News.

Sater, 51, did not respond to multiple emails sent to his company or to calls seeking comment. He wrote on his company website that he made some bad decisions in the past but that he had paid his debt to society and helped the government with "numerous issues of national security, including thwarting terrorist attacks against our country.” His website was dark last week, displaying the message, "Maintenance mode is on."

One source of financing recruited by Bayrock for the SoHo project was Alexander Mashkevich, according to a deposition by former Bayrock partner Jody Kriss in a federal lawsuit. A Bayrock investment pamphlet lists Mashkevich as a source of financing for the Bayrock Group. Mashkevich, a Kazakhstan mining billionaire, was accused in Belgium in 2011 in a $55 million money-laundering scheme. Mashkevich and two partners paid a fine and admitted no wrongdoing.

Federal indictments in New York, California and Illinois allege that people who bought Trump condos include felons and others accused of laundering money for Russian, Ukrainian or central Asian criminal organizations.

One indictment describes Anatoly Golubchik and Michael Sall, who own condos in Trump International Beach Resort in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and Vadim Trincher, who owns a unit in Trump Tower in Manhattan, as members of a Russian-American organized crime group that ran an illegal gambling and money-laundering operation.

Money laundering was an issue for Trump's Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, which was fined $10 million in 2015 for failing to report suspicious transactions. Federal rules are designed to protect the U.S. financial system from being used as a safe haven for dirty money and transnational crimes, Jennifer Shasky Calvery, then-director of the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen), said at the time. It was the largest penalty the agency ever levied against a casino since reporting requirements began in 2003, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"The Trump Organization admitted that it failed to implement and maintain an effective (anti-money laundering) program; failed to report suspicious transactions; failed to properly file required currency transaction reports; and failed to keep appropriate records as required by (the Bank Secrecy Act)," FinCen said in a statement.

The statement said warnings over repeated violations went back to 2003, but it did not mention Russians.

In Los Angeles, the federal lawsuit filed in 2014 by lawyers for the Kazakh city of Almaty accuses former mayor Viktor Khrapunov of owning three Trump SoHo units through shell companies used to hide hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly looted by selling state-owned assets. Kazakhstan is a former Soviet republic.

The Trump SoHo project "was largely financed by illegally obtained cash from Russia and Eastern European sources, including money provided by known international financial criminals and organized crime racketeers," former prosecutor McCallion wrote on his blog in October. McCallion was an assistant U.S. attorney in New York from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s under presidents Carter and Reagan. He later investigated several Trump investors on behalf of private clients who wanted to invest in Trump SoHo and alleged they were cheated by Bayrock out of the opportunity to do so.

The Manafort connection

A view of the Trump SoHo hotel condominium building,
A view of the Trump SoHo hotel condominium building, on Feb. 21, 2017 in New York City. The development of Trump SoHo, completed in 2010, was constructed in partnership with the Bayrock Group. (Photo: Drew Angerer, Getty Images)
McCallion, as a private lawyer, also represented former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko in a 2011 lawsuit alleging that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, engaged in a racketeering and money-laundering scheme to hide $3.5 billion in stolen funds, much of it by buying U.S. real estate.

Manafort's co-defendants were Dmitry Firtash, a Ukranian gas executive under federal indictment for bribery, and Semyon Mogelivich, identified by the Justice Department as head of a transnational criminal organization that posed a threat to U.S. national security. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2015 because Tymoshenko was unable to show the role of each defendant in the alleged money-laundering plot.

Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign in August, days after Ukrainian investigators alleged that secret ledgers showed $12.8 million was put aside for Manafort by the party of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in a popular uprising in 2014. More details about the alleged secret payments surfaced March 20.

Manafort, who has acknowledged working for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, has denied receiving off-the-books pay and said his compensation covered campaign staff, polling and television ads in Ukraine.

Manafort also allegedly worked for a Russian billionaire to advance Putin's interests a decade ago, the Associated Press reported March 22.

Firtash, a major donor of Yanukovych's party, was indicted in 2013 by U.S. prosecutors in Chicago for allegedly paying officials in India $18.5 million in bribes for licenses to mine titanium ore. Firtash said he is an innocent victim of American efforts to punish political allies of Putin. His extradition from Austria to the United States was approved in February and then put on hold while an Austrian judge considers a Spanish indictment against him on charges of money laundering and organized crime.

In an interview with USA TODAY, McCallion said he spent years looking into the Trump Organization, the businesses and individuals that dealt with it, and the possibility that Trump's real estate empire may depend on hundreds of millions of dollars from Russians.

“The FBI is always concerned if public officials can be blackmailed,” McCallion said. “It’s Russian-laundered money from people who operate under the good graces of President Putin. If these people pull the plug on the Trump Organization, it would go down pretty quickly.”

Luke Harding, author of A Very Expensive Poison, about the 2006 lethal poisoning of defected Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210 in London, said the lawlessness in former Soviet republics like Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan explains why businessmen from those countries seek safe havens to invest their wealth.

“If you steal money in a place like Russia, you have a problem,” Harding said. “You need to convert it to rubles and dollars and put it somewhere someone can’t steal it from you. One place to do that is buy real estate in New York, Miami or London.”

Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, said not all wealthy Russians are crooks or beholden to Putin. “It’s more complicated than that," Cohen said.

"There are oligarchs who are FOPs (friends of Putin) and there are those who lost their assets due to corruption, abuse of power, a crummy legal system and the lack of property rights," he said. "Many of these people moved abroad, to London, New York and Florida. They are refugees from the corporate raiding Russian-style practiced for the last couple of decades."

Some became wealthy before Putin's rise to power "and in some cases are in hidden resentment or quiet opposition to Putin," Cohen said. “A lot of these people run big businesses, banks, retail, oil and gas, and these are legitimate businesses that pay taxes" in Russia.

Here is a closer look at some of the Trump project investors or condo buyers with alleged ties to organized crime and the Russian government:

Felix Sater

Sater spent a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass at the Rio Grande restaurant and bar in New York in 1991. According a lawsuit filed by former partner Jody Kriss, Sater held a controlling share of the Bayrock Group, which developed the Trump Soho condominium tower in New York that was completed in 2010.

A federal criminal complaint in New York in 1998 accused Sater of money laundering and stock manipulation but was kept secret by prosecutors because the Russian immigrant was working as a CIA informant, according to numerous published reports. Salvatore Lauria, a co-defendant and future partner at Bayrock, co-wrote in a 2003 book that he and Sater sought to reduce their sentences by acting as middlemen for the CIA to buy weapons that fell into the hands of mobsters after the fall of the Soviet Union. The scheme fell apart, but the relationships remained, according Lauria's book, The Scorpion and the Frog: High Crimes and High Times.

Kriss, a former finance director for the developers, accused Sater, Lauria and their Bayrock partners in a 2010 federal lawsuit of diverting millions of dollars to shell companies to avoid U.S. taxes. He also claimed they kept secret Sater's criminal past and his guilty plea to racketeering charges while “he was aiding the prosecution of his Mafia and Russian organized crime confederates.”

Kriss alleged that while Bayrock was seeking money from foreign investors for Trump SoHo, it considered two groups of Russians with offices in Iceland. One group offered better terms, but Bayrock rejected that and went with the FL Group, which provided $50 million in financing and was “in favor with Putin,” according to the lawsuit that is still pending.

Sater and his co-defendants denied the allegations, calling Kriss’ lawsuit a long-running extortion scheme. But many of the racketeering and fraud claims against them survived a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, according to a Dec. 2 order signed by U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield.

Sater's criminal past came to light in 2007. That year, Trump testified in a deposition in a defamation lawsuit that he didn't think Sater was a principal at Bayrock and that he was considering not doing business with him anymore. But Sater subsequently traveled to Russia carrying business cards identifying him as a senior adviser to Trump with a Trump Organization phone number and email address, according to photos of the card posted online by NBC, the BBC and other news organizations. In 2013, Trump said in another deposition that he didn't think Sater was connected to the Mafia, that Sater mostly dealt "with my company, not me" and that "if he was sitting in the room right now I really wouldn't know what he looked like."

Sater told The Washington Post last year that he met one-on-one numerous times with Trump. He met alongside Donald Trump Jr. in Phoenix with local officials, and in New York he met repeatedly with Trump and his staff to talk about potential deals in Los Angeles, Ukraine and China, the Post reported.

Trump's lawyer, in interviews with The New York Times and the Post, downplayed the relationship between the two men, saying Trump met and spoke with lots of people but his relationship was with Bayrock, not Sater. Sater did not respond to calls and emails sent to his office.

Alexander Mashkevich

Mashkevich, a Kazakh mining billionaire, was a source of money for the SoHo project, according to a Bayrock investment pamphet.

Investigators in Belgium accused Mashkevich and two of his Kazakh business partners of money laundering and forgery connected to the $55 million in alleged bribes they received from a Belgian company in the mid-1990s, according to the Financial Times. In 2011, all three men agreed to pay an undisclosed fine to settle the case. They admitted no wrongdoing, and the charges were dropped.

Mashkevich and former Bayrock partner Tevfik Arif were embroiled in a case in 2010, when Turkish police alleged prostitution and human trafficking after they raided a luxury yacht that Mashkevich chartered. After police boarded the Savarona — once owned by the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — they arrested 10 wealthy men, including Arif, a former Kazakh official. They also found nine young women from Russia and Ukraine — two were 16 years old — and “a huge amount of contraceptives,” according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

Mashkevich, who was not at the scene, and Arif denied being involved in anything illegal. The women stayed silent about their involvement, according to published reports. Mashkevich was not charged with a crime. Arif was charged but acquitted, and the court file was sealed.

Peter Kiritchenko

Kiritchenko, a Ukrainian businessman who owned two condominiums with his daughter at Trump International Beach Resort in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., was named in a money-laundering scheme involving former Ukraine prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko.

According to federal prosecutors in San Francisco in 2009, Kiritchenko helped Lazarenko launder millions of dollars obtained through extortion by purchasing luxury real estate in the United States and other countries. Kiritchenko was convicted of one count of receiving stolen property in California after he testified against the former prime minister. Lazarenko was sentenced to eight years in federal prison and fined $9 million after he was convicted on multiple counts of money laundering.

A federal appeals court said Kiritchenko was a "deep and willing" accomplice "in the heart of the conspiracy."

Viktor Khrapunov

Khrapunov, a former Kazakhstan energy minister and mayor of Almaty, owns three units in the Trump SoHo through shell companies, according to lawyers for the Kazakh city who filed a 2014 federal lawsuit against him in Los Angeles. Almaty's lawyers alleged in the lawsuit that Khrapunov used real estate in California, New York, Europe and the Middle East to hide hundreds of millions of dollars looted by selling state-owned assets. Khrapunov, who lives in Switzerland, denies the claim, saying he and his family are being targeted by a political opponent, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Anatoly Golubchik, Vadim Trincher and Michael Sall

Three Trump condo owners — Golubchik, Trincher and Sall — were convicted in 2013 in federal court in New York of participating in an illegal high-stakes sports betting ring for a Russian-American organized crime group. The betting ring operated illegal gambling websites and catered almost exclusively to wealthy oligarchs from the former Soviet Union, according to prosecutors.

Golubchik and Sall own Trump condos in Sunny Isles Beach. And professional poker player Trincher owns a condo in Trump Tower in New York City.

Golubchik and Trincher were principal leaders of the enterprise, which included money laundering and extortion, prosecutors charged in the indictment.

The godfather of the operation was identified as Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, who federal prosecutors said was a Vor, “a powerful figure in former Soviet Union organized crime” who never left Russia because he was under indictment in the U.S. for his role in allegedly bribing officials at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Sall helped launder tens of millions of dollars from the gambling enterprise, prosecutors said when they announced that all three condo owners pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Sall pleaded guilty to interstate travel in aid of an unlawful activity — illegal gambling. Golubchik and Trincher pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit racketeering. Tokhtakhounov remains in Russia, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/worl ... /98321252/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 29, 2017 8:33 am

WHY FBI CAN’T TELL ALL ON TRUMP, RUSSIA

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Donald Trump, Trump Tower
Photo credit: James Hughes / NY Daily News via Getty Images
Reporters: Jonathan Z. Larsen is the former editor of The Village Voice, whose reporting team included the late Wayne Barrett and Robert I. Friedman. These people and the paper produced many of the important early investigative reports on Donald Trump and on the mob. Larsen is now a senior editor and board member of WhoWhatWhy. Russ Baker, a former investigative reporter for The Village Voice, is Editor-in-Chief of WhoWhatWhy. C. Collins is a WhoWhatWhy reporter.

***

The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot tell us what we need to know about Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia. Why? Because doing so would jeopardize a long-running, ultra-sensitive operation targeting mobsters tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and to Trump.

But the Feds’ stonewalling risks something far more dangerous: Failing to resolve a crisis of trust in America’s president. WhoWhatWhy provides the details of a two-month investigation in this 6,500-word exposé.

The FBI apparently knew, directly or indirectly, based upon available facts, that prior to Election Day, Trump and his campaign had personal and business dealings with certain individuals and entities linked to criminal elements — including reputed Russian gangsters — connected to Putin.

The same facts suggest that the FBI knew or should have known enough prior to the election to justify informing the public about its ongoing investigation of potentially compromising relationships between Trump, Putin, and Russian mobsters — even if it meant losing or exposing a valued informant.

***

It will take an agency independent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to expose Donald Trump’s true relationship with Moscow and the role Russia may have played in getting him elected.

Director James Comey recently revealed in a congressional hearing for the first time that the FBI “is investigating … the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

However, a two-month WhoWhatWhy investigation has revealed an important reason the Bureau may be facing undisclosed obstacles to revealing what it knows to the public or to lawmakers.

Our investigation also may explain why the FBI, which was very public about its probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails, never disclosed its investigation of the Trump campaign prior to the election, even though we now know that it commenced last July.

Such publicity could have exposed a high-value, long-running FBI operation against an organized crime network headquartered in the former Soviet Union. That operation depended on a convicted criminal who for years was closely connected with Trump, working with him in Trump Tower — while constantly informing for the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), and being legally protected by them.

Some federal officials were so involved in protecting this source — despite his massive fraud and deep connections to organized crime — that they became his defense counsel after they left the government.

In secret court proceedings that were later unsealed, both current and former government attorneys argued for extreme leniency toward the man when he was finally sentenced. An FBI agent who expressed his support for the informant later joined Trump’s private security force.

In this way, the FBI’s dilemma about revealing valuable sources, assets and equities in its ongoing investigation of links between the Trump administration and Russian criminal elements harkens back to the embarrassing, now infamous Whitey Bulger episode. In that case, the Feds protected Bulger, a dangerous Boston-based mobster serving as their highly valued informant, even as the serial criminal continued to participate in heinous crimes. The FBI now apparently finds itself confronted with similar issues: Is its investigation of the mob so crucial to national security that it outweighs the public’s right to know about their president?

Jack Blum, a former senior Senate investigator and one of America’s foremost experts on white-collar financial crime, sums up the complexity — and the urgency — of the situation:

“What makes this investigation especially difficult is that it will lead into the complex relations between the counterintelligence operations of the FBI and its criminal investigative work,” says Blum.

“Further, it is likely other elements of the intelligence community are involved and that they have ‘equities’ to protect. Much of the evidence, justifiably, will be highly classified to protect sources and methods and in particular to protect individuals who have helped one or another of the agencies involved.”
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FBI, New York Office
Photo credit: FBI

“I Can’t Go into Those Details Here”
In his March 20 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, FBI Director James Comey said that he could not go into detail about its probe into the Trump administration’s Russian connection.

If he had, we might have learned that, for more than three decades the FBI has had Trump Tower in its sights. Many of its occupants have been targets of major investigations, others have been surveilled, and yet others have served as informants. One thing many of them have in common is deep ties to organized crime — including the Russian mafia.

Felix Sater fits all of these categories. A convicted felon, Sater worked in Trump Tower, made business deals with Donald Trump through Sater’s real estate firm, Bayrock, cooperated with the FBI and CIA and was subsequently protected by the DOJ from paying for his crimes. And the Moscow-born immigrant remains deeply linked to Russia and Ukraine.

Based on documents examined by WhoWhatWhy, it is possible to draw certain conclusions that help connect the dots between Trump, the FBI, Russia and the mob.

The resulting picture is not a pretty one for Donald Trump. However, because of its efforts to neutralize the organization of perhaps the world’s most powerful mobster — a man considered a serious national security threat — the Bureau might just have compromised its own ability to provide to Congress or inform the American public about all of the ties that exist between Trump, his presidential campaign and the regime of Vladimir Putin.

Further, Trump’s business association with Sater and Bayrock may have put the president’s financial interests at substantial risk, including possibly millions of dollars in fines, penalties, or other damages, should civil or criminal misconduct be proven in court or otherwise resolved if claims were triggered. Anyone who knew of Trump’s jeopardy in this matter would have enormous leverage over the Trump operation.

The government’s kid-glove treatment of Sater is partially explained in those long-suppressed legal documents, which reveal that the mobbed-up businessman was perceived by the authorities to be extraordinarily cooperative and useful. Legal filings on Sater’s behalf state that he “reported daily” to the FBI for many years.

Sater agreed to assist the US government on issues of national security and organized crime. His activities were first revealed in a lawsuit brought by a former employee of Sater’s real estate firm, Bayrock. While working with Trump, Sater’s name became “Satter” publicly — presumably with the knowledge if not the encouragement of the FBI. This distanced Satter the businessman, and his partners, from Sater the criminal.

Attorneys representing the plaintiff spent years untangling the financial machinations of Bayrock — which they allege involve hundred of millions of dollars in claims arising from, among other things, money laundering and fraud.

They also sought to expose the government’s awareness of — even complicity in — Sater’s activities.

Their efforts to unseal court documents, including Sater’s legal history, have been met with a concerted pushback by DOJ lawyers, mischaracterizations of the case record, and even — according to the attorneys — anonymous death threats.

Felix Sater could not be reached for comment.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... SpFtCmoD5o

A Stunning Discovery
The story of Donald Trump’s business dealings with a Russian mobster might never have come out were it not for a Bayrock employee stumbling upon Sater’s cooperation agreement with the FBI, among other sensitive information, that had inadvertently been left accessible.

That employee sought out attorney Fred Oberlander, who combed through the documents. Over time, Oberlander — who was instructing undergraduates at Yale University in computational physics and computer science from age 18 — began to deconstruct the byzantine financial structure that was Bayrock, which allegedly hid a range of crimes, including massive-scale money laundering from sources in the former Soviet Union.

On February 10, 2010, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, instructed Oberlander, in a secret order, not to inform the legislative branch of the United States government what he knew about Felix Sater. (That order remains under seal, but a federal judge has unsealed a redacted version.)

Apparently, the appellate court was persuaded that the unusually broad order was justified on the merits, but the lawyers opposing Sater found the imposed remedy extraordinary.

“Our being ordered to not tell Congress what we know may well be the first and only hyper-injunction in American history,” asserts Oberlander’s own attorney, Richard Lerner. “If there are others who have been scared silent by judges who wish to nullify Congressional and public oversight, we may never know. That is frightening.”

Hyper-injunctions
Characters Out of a James Bond Movie
Preventing the Russian mafia from expanding its foothold in the United States has been one of the Bureau’s top priorities. In fact, it might be the FBI’s most important function apart from its role in the fight against terrorism.

The Russian mob has a breathtaking and underappreciated reach. It is so powerful that FBI Agent Peter Kowenhoven told CNN in 2009 that Semion Mogilevich, its “boss of bosses,” is a strategic threat, and a man who “can, with a telephone call or order, affect the global economy.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o29wm7c5FlA


US authorities came to see Mogilevich, who is described as close with Putin, as not only a danger to the financial system but a potential threat to world peace. He had access to stockpiles of military weapons and even fissionable material, snapped up as the Soviet Union fell apart.

His rumored ability to deliver the makings of weapons of mass destruction to the highest bidder — as well as his experience in smuggling opium from Afghanistan — would take on the very highest importance after 9/11, when European intelligence sources reported that al-Qaeda representatives had contacted Mogilevich in search of nuclear material.

The Russian mob should also not be confused with a mere crime syndicate. It is an organization comprised of state actors, oligarchs, and specific groups of individuals working collectively with the authority of the Russian government — a “mafia state.” At times, it is difficult to tell where the mob ends and the government begins.

To some, the Russian mob brings to mind the globalized villains of a James Bond movie, who want everything and will stop at nothing.

Robert I. Friedman, a former colleague of the authors of this article at The Village Voice, drew the ire of Mogilevich for his reporting on the Russian mafia. The “boss of bosses” put a $100,000 price on Friedman’s head soon after the publication of one of his fearless exposés of Mogilevich, and the FBI suggested that he stop reporting on the topic. (Friedman died in 2002, at the age of 51, of a rare blood disease he was said to have contracted on a trip to India.)

Enter Trump
Right from the earliest days of Trump Tower, in 1983, some of the choicest condominiums, including those in the 10 floors immediately below the future president’s own triplex apartment, went to a rogues gallery of criminals and their associates.

Granted, the construction and gambling industries have long been bedeviled by connections to organized crime. It may have been impossible for Trump to have avoided those ties altogether. Nevertheless, according to many news stories and public records, Trump has repeatedly been linked to organized crime figures and their associates.
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Donald Trump, Roy Cohn
Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, October 18, 1984. Photo credit: Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

To be sure, nouveau riches of all stripes were attracted to the Trump “glamour” and might well have had difficulty gaining approval of traditional condo or coop boards. Nonetheless, Trump must have known that many of his occupants were problematic — and likely to draw the attention of law enforcement.

Tower occupants have included:

– Verina Hixon, a close friend of John A. Cody, New York’s concrete union boss, living in six units just below Trump’s triplex. Cody, with ties to the Gambino crime family, was later sentenced to five years in prison for racketeering. Trump and Cody reportedly helped Hixon with a loan so she could pay for the units.

– Robert Hopkins, who was arrested in his suite for ordering a mob murder of a gambling competitor. Hopkins would eventually be convicted of running a massive gambling ring, partly from Trump Tower, an operation that occasioned what was perhaps the first of many wiretaps in the building. Trump appeared in person at the closing on the apartment, where, according to our Village Voice colleague Wayne Barrett’s 1991 Trump biography, Hopkins sat at the end of a conference table counting out $200,000 in cash. (It was mob lawyer Roy Cohn who introduced Hopkins to Trump.)

– Sheldon and Jay Weinberg, an enterprising father-son duo: The father was masterminding the biggest Medicaid fraud known at the time; the son was later indicted on grand larceny and insurance fraud. The Weinbergs rented directly from Trump three condominiums he had kept for himself.

– David Bogatin purchased five apartments on the 62nd floor while running a massive tax avoidance scandal involving commercial gasoline sales. Bogatin had ties with Italian and Russian mobsters. He would later flee to Poland and set up a highly successful chain of banks there before being extradited to the US, where he ended up in the maximum-security state prison in Attica, NY.

– Joseph Weichselbaum, Trump’s helicopter pilot, convicted of drug trafficking on three occasions.

– Glamorous international art dealer Helly Nahmad, then 34, who lived in a sprawling apartment in Trump Tower (and according to some accounts owned the entire 51st floor), was later convicted and served five months of a one-year sentence for running an illegal gambling operation. He helped orchestrate super-high-stakes card games that sometimes were played in Trump Tower and “catered to billionaires, Russian oligarchs, Hollywood stars, and pro athletes,” including Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Tobey Maguire, and Ben Affleck. Also convicted were Vadim Trincher and his sons Eugene and Ilya; the Trinchers had apartments in Trump Tower too.

Of course, living in Trump Tower by no means suggests any sort of criminality or association between or among the residents. Still, the list is impressive.

But even in this company, one man stands out. Not surprisingly, he is from the former Soviet Union.

Spying on Trump Tower — Since 1983
When the Soviet Union was breaking up in the early 1990s, Mogilevich (AKA “The Boss of Bosses,” AKA “The Brainy Don”) suborned a Russian judge to spring a ruthless and canny lifetime criminal from a Siberian prison. His name was Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov.
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Vyacheslav Ivankov, Semion Mogilevich
Vyacheslav Ivankov and Semion Mogilevich (inset) Photo credit: Alchetron (public domain) and FBI / Wikimedia

Four months later, in March 1992, Ivankov arrived in the United States to organize a new criminal network. He would take the disparate elements of already-established Russian-speaking criminals and use them to create a sophisticated, well-managed operation that could launder funds and generate cash flow as part of a transnational network. But authorities had no idea where he was.

“And then,” recounted a former FBI agent in Robert I. Friedman’s book Red Mafiya, “we found out he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.”

The moment the Feds spotted him, he vanished again, only to resurface later in an Atlantic City casino: Trump’s Taj Mahal.

Thus, by the early 1990s, both the arrival of Russian organized crime in the US and the strange attraction of Trump properties for Russian mobsters were on the Bureau’s radar.

FBI activity in Trump Tower dates back to soon after it was built, in 1983. Around that time, the Bureau put electronic surveillance in the building with a tap on the phone of the above-mentioned Trump Tower resident Robert Hopkins, a Lucchese crime family associate, who was eventually arrested in the Tower for ordering a murder.

FBI interest in Trump Tower continued through the 1990s, when the Bureau, working closely with US prosecutors at the Eastern District (which includes Brooklyn), began to focus on the business operations of a man with ties to Mogilevich: the aforementioned Felix Sater.

At about the same time, Trump found himself in a bind with his commercial lenders, who kept his public mystique alive while in essence secretly stripping him of control of his casinos and putting him on an “allowance,” as they tried to salvage what they could from the wreckage of his disastrous business decisions. They retained the Trump name on his most iconic properties, based on the cold calculation that his “brand” might still help draw customers.

Трамп и его деньги (Trump and his Money)
As Trump lost access to traditional lines of credit, his desperate need for financing led to sources that are murky, at best, including monies traceable back to the former Soviet Union — a circumstance that may explain Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns.

According to two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax returns, purportedly sent anonymously to reporter David Cay Johnston, Trump appeared to make an enormous amount of money that year — earning more than $153 million, which put him into a tiny class of super-rich Americans, probably numbering in the dozens.

Trump’s windfall seems to have developed around the same time that investors from countries of the former Soviet Union started opening the cash spigot.
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James Comey, Loretta Lynch,
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch with FBI Director James Comey (left), and US Attorney Preet Bharara at a press conference on March 24, 2016. Photo credit: FBI



A 2013 indictment of the illegal high-stakes card games’ organizers, brought by US Attorney Preet Bharara, alleged not only high-stakes illegal gambling and the laundering of approximately $100 million dollars, but also extortion, as ring members used threats and force to strip ”money and property” from clients.

One of the operation’s leaders, Alimzhan “Taiwanchik” Tokhtakhounov, an alleged international crime boss and admitted friend of top Mogilevich lieutenant Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov (who, as noted, was found living in Trump Tower at one point), managed the ring from afar; he could not legally enter the US as he was already wanted on charges of trying to bribe ice-skating judges at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Tokhtakhounov has often been tied to Boss of Bosses Semion Mogilevich.

Bharara, whom Trump recently fired — after accepting the resignations of other US attorneys left over from the Obama administration — is not the only big name who was involved in investigating the goings-on in Trump Tower. Former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch also played a part. Lynch, first a prosecutor and then the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, would have had knowledge of an FBI operation that involved Sater, the Russian mobster-turned-cooperating-witness.

“If he (Sater) were sitting in a room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” – Donald Trump, 2013 deposition
While Sater has recently been the subject of some news coverage — his name came up during the March 20 House Intelligence Committee’s public hearing on Russia, when Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) asked FBI Director James Comey about him — no thorough exploration of the Bureau’s dealings with this key informant has been published.

Until now.

The information below is based on an extensive exploration of those dealings, and of previously unexamined and unpublished legal documents, which the government has sought to suppress.

The picture that emerges goes to the heart of the many questions raised about Trump’s relationship to Putin’s Russia in the weeks before and after the presidential election.

Efforts to try to get this information to the public appear to have been aggressively blocked by the DOJ because it would potentially expose their own operations — both those that have been effective and others that have not.

***

Felix Sater had been on the Bureau’s radar since the mid-1990s, when they were investigating Russian mob–affiliated financial scams.

Very soon after Semion Mogilevich associate “Yaponchik” Ivankov arrived in the US, in 1993, Sater, together with an Italian mob associate named Salvatore Lauria, and others, had taken over a firm called White Rock and created a criminal brokerage whose only purpose was to fleece investors and launder money.

Support WhoWhatWhy
It excelled at “pump and dump” scams, a practice in which stock prices are artificially inflated, then sold to unsuspecting investors — especially targeting elderly and unsophisticated buyers with high-pressure cold-calling tactics. White Rock included members and associates of four of the five major New York City organized crime families, including the nephew of mobster Carmine “the Snake” Persico and the brother-in-law of Gambino hit man Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, as well as Russian criminal elements.

The Art of the (Double) Deal
Although shuttering Sater’s operation was considered a great success, authorities soon decided they could leverage it to get even bigger fish. Thus, they cut a deal with Sater, seemingly to help them go after the Russian-speaking mob, and its “Brainy Don,” Semion Mogilevich.

Instead of serving jail time, Sater became a highly valued FBI informant. Using unnamed connections, Sater arranged to locate some Stinger missiles that Osama bin Laden had supposedly placed on the market — an older model that could be used to shoot down commercial airliners.

Immediately after September 11, 2001, Sater received a call from the chief of a new section in the FBI who wanted to talk to him about Stingers, according to Salvatore Lauria in The Scorpion and the Frog, co-authored with journalist David S. Barry. Months later, Sater joined Bayrock — the real estate development company with offices in Trump Tower — and he was soon partnering in business deals with Donald Trump himself. This raises some interesting questions: Did Sater take the job at Bayrock at the FBI’s direction? Indeed, was Sater’s business relationship with Trump at the FBI’s behest?

One thing is certain: Bayrock became one of the most important links between Trump and big-money sources from the former Soviet Union.
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Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater
Donald Trump, Bayrock partner Tevfik Arif, and Felix Sater attend the Trump Soho Launch Party on September 19, 2007 in New York. Photo credit: Mark Von Holden / WireImage

The firm was founded by Tevfik Arif, a former Communist Party functionary in the Soviet republic of what is now Kazakhstan. Arif had formed another entity called Bayrock in Moscow in 1989, during the very last years of the Soviet Union.

Many Soviet functionaries transitioned to successful careers in market capitalism with the help of friends in high places: those with access to resources could make enormous profits by pilfering the moribund Soviet state, and such funds were best laundered and moved abroad for safekeeping and investment. Real estate was generally seen as a stable investment.

During the five years Sater worked at Bayrock, he traveled throughout the former Soviet Union, ostensibly looking for real estate sites to develop with the Trump Organization — while also allegedly laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit funds from mysterious sources in the former Soviet Union. And all the while he was working as an informant for the FBI.

Soon after joining Bayrock (about late 2001 to early 2002), he effectively took control of it — while of necessity hiding that fact from its lenders and clients. Sater was the firm’s Chief Operating Officer, and according to assertions in a lawsuit filed by a former Bayrock employee, by 2006 he owned more than 63% of the firm.

Sater’s dominant role came despite the fact that he was a felon. Because of the services he was providing to the US government, this information was withheld from banks and others with whom Bayrock signed contracts, including condominium buyers.

The Trump organization lent its name to Bayrock projects in Toronto, Florida, Arizona, and in New York City, in the chic SoHo neighborhood; the SoHo project was the only Bayrock development into which the Trump Organization actually put up any equity. Most of the Bayrock-affiliated projects failed, though, leaving a trail of angry investors as well as a string of lawsuits and countersuits. According to legal depositions, most of the projects that Sater worked to develop overseas — necessitating trips to Russia, Poland, and Ukraine (including numerous trips to Crimea) — never seemed to get off the drawing board.

Sater and Trump sometimes traveled together. In September 2005, Trump and apparently Sater flew along with his wife Melania to Colorado, where Sater talked to a local reporter about possible Trump-Bayrock development projects in Denver.

The real estate tycoon and the undercover mobster were close enough that, according to his deposition testimony, Sater could simply walk up a flight of stairs to Trump’s office and stop in for an impromptu chat. Indeed, Sater and the Trump clan grew so close that in February 2006, at the personal request of Donald Trump, the mobster joined his children Ivanka, Donald Jr., and his son’s wife Vanessa in Moscow to show them around, according to his deposition testimony. While he was in Moscow he emailed a journalist about possible Trump-Bayrock developments in Denver, in which he indicated he was with Don Jr.; a few days later Sater is alleged to have called one of the partners at the Arizona project and threatened to have him “tortured and killed,” according to later court filings.

Sater’s tenure at Bayrock might have lasted longer, had The New York Times not “outed” his criminal past in 2007.

Yet a few years later, after Sater had left Bayrock, he could still be found in Trump Tower. But now he was apparently working directly for Trump himself, with an office, business cards, phone number and email address all provided by the Trump Organization. The cards identified him as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.”

Today, Trump claims to have trouble remembering Sater.

“Trump was asked about Sater in depositions related to other cases in 2011 and 2013. In the first, Trump acknowledged that he used to speak with Sater ‘for a period of time.’ Yet in the second, Trump said, ‘if he were sitting in a room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,’” Mother Jones reported.

In early December 2015, Trump still seemed unclear when asked by an Associated Press reporter about Sater. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” he said. “I’m not that familiar with him.” Ivanka and Don Jr. also later said that they had no memory of being with him in Moscow.


FBI agent Leo Taddeo definitely did not “have to think about it.” Taddeo had worked in the Italian and Russian organized crimes sections of the New York FBI office and had directly witnessed the ramifications of the arrival of “Yaponchik” Ivankov in 1992 — and the influence of Mogilevich — in the Russian-speaking community, New York financial markets, and beyond. He rose to be the head of the Russian organized crime section — and was one of Sater’s FBI handlers. Taddeo testified on Sater’s behalf at his sentencing, praising his “extraordinary” cooperation and stressing how “capable,” “important,” and “effective” he was.

During the years when Trump and Bayrock pursued their joint projects, the Trump SoHo was planned, designed and funded, and ground was broken for it.

So Bayrock, of which Sater came to own a majority, and the Trump Organization, headed by the future president himself, did several high-profile deals together and had offices close by each other in Trump Tower, and yet the current president claims that he is “not that familiar with him.”

There are a number of possible reasons why Trump has had to tread lightly around the issue of Sater. Aside from what Trump might have known about Sater’s back-channel connections to the Russian government or organized crime, their joint projects also pose enormous financial risk to Trump.

If he or anyone around him — such as other Trump Organization executives, accountants and lawyers — had knowledge of Sater’s criminal past and yet entered into contracts with him and Bayrock, Trump and his company would then be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars — and possible jail time.

Why?

Because parties to bank loans and investment contracts must confirm that no owner or manager has been convicted of fraud, and if that confirmation is false, anyone who knew of the fraud is potentially liable. The same would be true even if someone learned about Sater’s criminal status after signing the contract but continued with it.

Thus, if Trump knew Sater was a convicted felon but did business with him anyway, he, the Trump Organization, and anyone within the company who knew of it could face substantial penalties or fines. This might especially be true for the Trump-Bayrock projects, as so many of them ended terribly, with multiple lawsuits across many states.

However, the information of Sater’s past financial criminality was officially hidden because his legal docket in the White Rock/State Street case was kept secret (owing to his continuing “cooperating witness” status). For this reason, even after performing due diligence, someone entering business agreements with Sater would find no evidence of his criminal past.

Ukraine: The Big Prize
The FBI’s failure to fully expose Trump’s Russian connection before the election seemingly emboldened the entire Trump team — from the president to his former campaign manager to his “bulldog” personal lawyer — along with Sater, to take actions that can be seen to have benefited Putin. Nowhere is this more true than with Ukraine.

This former Soviet republic is central to Putin’s dream of restoring Russia to its Cold War-era greatness and protecting its borders. Annexing Crimea from Ukraine was a huge victory for him. Holding on to that strategically important region and maintaining access to it by controlling eastern sections of Ukraine itself are vital to Putin’s ambitions.

Other crucial strategic issues concerning Ukraine include its desire to join NATO, seen by Russia as a huge threat. There is also the matter of a pipeline that brings natural gas from Russia through Ukraine into fuel-hungry Europe, importantly Germany. Mogilevich was later named as the secret majority owner of the Ukrainian stake in a mysterious intermediary company, half-owned by Russian energy giant Gazprom. (Mogilevich, as well as Sater’s father, who has been identified as part of the Mogilevich organization in a Supreme Court petition, both hail from Ukraine. Mogilevich’s lawyer denied that his client had any connection to the company.) While questions swirled about the deal, Sater, then serving as an FBI informant, traveled to Ukraine and Russia — ostensibly searching for properties to develop with the Trump Organization.

For his part, candidate Trump didn’t even acknowledge that Russia had annexed Crimea or engaged its military in Eastern Ukraine, when the issue came up early in the presidential campaign.

“Just so you understand. [Putin] is not going to go into Ukraine, all right?” Trump said in an interview shortly after he was nominated — before being corrected on the facts.

Trump’s platform chairman J. D. Gordon reportedly had met with the Russian ambassador during the convention. In an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta, Gordon said he had advocated the softening of the GOP platform language on Ukraine — a softening that Trump himself had advocated earlier in the year at a meeting with Gordon. Gordon’s later comments seem to walk that assertion back, but the GOP platform was changed.
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Paul Manafort
Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

At that time, Trump Tower resident Paul Manafort was still running the campaign — until he was forced out because of his ties to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and other powerful forces sympathetic to Russia. But Manafort’s connections to Russia ran even deeper than suspected back then.

On March 22, the Associated Press reported that Manafort had been paid the astonishing sum of more than $10 million a year in the 2000s by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally, to implement a plan that would “greatly benefit the Putin Government.”

Stranger still, just last month, Trump associates Sater and Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, lobbied then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn with a scheme to lift sanctions on Russia, imposed after it seized Crimea. They delivered a proposed “peace plan” for Ukraine that infuriated the country’s current prime minister. The proposal would have advanced the ambitions of a pro-Russian politician whose movement Manafort helped shape

It turns out that, like so many other figures in this story, Cohen has his own substantial Ukrainian ties. After graduating from what is considered by many to be a third-tier law school, Cohen became a personal injury lawyer. He married a woman whose parents are Ukrainian, and his brother, also a lawyer, married a woman whose father rose from humble Ukrainian roots to become a billionaire.

Much Less Than Six Degrees of Separation
While all this high-stakes maneuvering between the US and Russia over Ukraine was unfolding, the DOJ and FBI were hard at work to prevent the Sater-Trump story from becoming widely known.

WhoWhatWhy has learned that a number of key law-enforcement figures associated with Sater’s role as a government informant have continued protecting him — which has inevitably helped to keep under wraps the criminal goings-on in Trump Tower. One of these figures even went on to work for Trump.

FBI Special Agent Gary Uher not only investigated (alongside fellow Agent Leo Taddeo) the early “pump and dump” case that originally snared Sater, he also apparently served as one of Sater’s handlers. After Uher retired from the Bureau’s New York office in 2011, he went into the private security business with another former FBI agent, in a firm named XMark — which became one of a small army of private security firms that guarded Trump during the presidential campaign. (Neither Uher nor Taddeo responded to requests for comment.)

In fact, both XMark and Uher personally began receiving payments from the campaign as soon as Trump announced, in June 2015. Uher’s name surfaced in the press a handful of times, sometimes in allegations that he roughly handled protestors at Trump rallies. Yet until now, no one has pointed out that before he went to work for Trump, Uher ran Sater.

It is not clear how Trump and Uher would have even known each other were it not for the man both knew in common — the man Trump was consistently vague about during the campaign — Felix Sater.

As for Taddeo, in July 2016, as talk of possible efforts by the Kremlin to help Trump’s campaign continued to pick up steam, the Washington Post ran a story that downplayed the possibility and quoted the ex-agent, now in the private sector: “This is not Putin trying to help Trump,’’ he said. The article identified Taddeo as “a former FBI special agent in charge of cyber and special operations in New York”.; it did not tell readers he had been Sater’s former FBI handler when Sater worked with Trump.
Image
Gary Uher, Donald Trump
Left to right: XMark partners Ed Deck and Gary Uher accompany Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with his private security director, longtime Trump Organization employee Keith Schiller, after delivering an address in Birch Run, Michigan, August 11, 2015. Photo credit: Bill Pugliano / Getty Images

The paths of other central characters in the case are also curious.

Two of Loretta Lynch’s colleagues at the Eastern District US Attorney’s office, Leslie Caldwell and Kelly Anne Moore, left government service to join the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and both represented Sater at his 2009 sentencing hearing. Caldwell returned to government work in late 2013 when she was tapped to serve as Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division — the number three position at the Justice Department.

Moore is still at Morgan Lewis. That firm was hired post-election by Trump to sort out ethical issues concerning possible conflicts of interest — which considering this history takes on a whole new meaning. (Neither Caldwell nor Moore responded to requests for comment.)

Trump’s announcement that he had retained Morgan Lewis as ethics counsel was clearly meant to blunt calls for disinvestment or use of a blind trust for the oversight of his businesses. Curiously, on the same day that Trump made the announcement, the Moscow office of Morgan Lewis was named “Russia Law Firm of the Year” for 2016 by an industry association.

By entrusting Morgan Lewis with addressing his conflicts — and presumably demanding confidentiality agreements in the process, as is his practice — was Trump insulating himself from the release of information that would reveal the true nature of his financial relationship with Sater, Bayrock, and others?

Such revelations — which could have exposed Sater’s criminal history, his interactions with Trump, the full scope of Bayrock’s financial arrangements with the Trump Organization, and perhaps the true source of Bayrock’s financing — all would be covered by attorney-client privilege.

With so many players and so many layers of involvement, getting to the bottom of Trump’s Russian connection is a Herculean task. And there is one further complication.
Image
Leslie Caldwell
Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, July 21, 2016. Photo credit: The Justice Department / YouTube

The Trump-Sater-Mogilevich-Putin saga, with its intertwining domestic and international threads, is almost certainly a battleground for powerful elements in the US intelligence complex. Even unravelling one thread — the FBI’s “running” of Felix Sater as an informant — is a challenge at every level. The FBI historically has been riven by internal battles over priorities and strategies — and the Bureau has waged fierce turf wars with other intelligence agencies, notably the CIA.

Why We Need an Independent Investigation
To sum up, WhoWhatWhy’s investigation suggests that the FBI, in using an informant with a strong connection to Trump and alleged ties to Russian mobsters — including one deemed a national security threat by the US — has seemingly tied its own hands in investigating the president.

This makes it difficult for the Bureau to pursue the president’s long-running proximity to mobsters, including gangsters from the former Soviet Union, and to those with close connections to the Russian president and oligarchic elite.

This in part could explain the FBI’s odd behavior and the confusing back and forth on what the government knows about Russia’s interventions in the 2016 election.

In this complex tale, it is sometimes hard to keep focused on the most important connections. The FBI used Sater in high-value projects; perhaps to help take down the Brainy Don Mogilevich, who takes us straight to Putin. That connection is so sensitive as to be deadly. Indeed after Ivankov, Mogilevich’s lieutenant and Trump Tower resident, publicly discussed Mogilevich’s close ties to Putin, he was gunned down by a sniper on a Moscow street.

At the end of 2015, the Justice Department’s criminal division, headed by Leslie Caldwell — the former Eastern District prosecutor and later Sater’s attorney — removed Mogilevich from the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, an extremely rare occurrence. Suspects are usually removed from the list for only two reasons: arrest or death.
Image
Semion Mogilevich, FBI, wanted poster
FBI wanted poster for Semion Mogilevich, 2009. Photo credit: FBI and Zscout370 / Wikimedia

Donald Trump has been a big Putin fan for years. This has been a subject of speculation and derision, but it has not gone further than that.

Given how close Trump was with Sater, and Sater with the FBI, and the fact that the FBI was working to thwart Mogilevich (who was close to Putin), the big question is this: Why is this president’s unusual enthusiasm for the Russian leader, and Russia in general, not already a formal topic of urgent inquiry?

Something doesn’t add up.

Whatever it is, we need to know. And, as this article demonstrates, the FBI, for a variety of reasons, is not likely to tell us the whole story.

And, it should be pointed out, what is vitally important to the public interest is not always what the Bureau considers a crime. That is why the role of independent investigators, including, notably, journalists, is so vital. Jack Blum, the former senior Senate investigator and leading expert on white-collar financial crime, stresses the gravity and urgency of the situation:

“However complicated an investigation might become, it goes to the heart of our democracy and it must go forward. This time, unlike other investigations, including the Kennedy assassination, CIA-Chile, and Iran-Contra, it has to go to the heart of the matter no matter how long it takes and no matter how shocking the conclusions.”
http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/03/27/fbi-ca ... mp-russia/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Mar 29, 2017 1:11 pm

Just wanted to share this insight/rant from Larisa Alexandrovna on Facebook. Thought this would be the most pertinent thread to place it.


Rant:

Let's assume for a moment that the Chair of the House Intel Committee was Adam Schiff, a Democrat. Let's assume that the POTUS was HRC and she was being accused of a myriad of crimes.

What if Schiff ran off in the evening one night to meet a source at the White House? What if said source provided documents to Schiff for him to view. Instead of informing the rest of the House Intel Committee or sharing the intel with them (or the FBI for that matter), Schiff called a presser the next day and made all sorts of unsubstantiated claims about Clinton campaign associates, etc., giving cover to Clinton? What if In the process, Schiff made a series of disclosures of classified information public, like the existence of multiple FISA warrants for several Clinton staffers? What if despite knowing there was an FBI investigation related to Clinton, Schiff not only made public classified information related to that, but also then ran to the White House to inform Clinton of his findings? What if up until that point no one knew that Schiff had in fact had been at the White House the evening before and that is where he had gotten his information? What if informing Clinton then, he chose to launder his allegations through the press so as to seem like a third party, unaffiliated source had provided him with the intel?

What if ONLY after the press had learned about Schiff getting his information from someone at the White House the evening before, did Schiff finally come clean and admit that is where he was?

What if a few days later, a prominent Clinton staffer abruptly resigned without an explanation? What if House Intel hearings scheduled for the following week were suddenly cancelled by Schiff without explanation just as the former acting AG and others were set to testify against Clinton or at least provide unfavorable testimony?

What if the press found out after all of this that the AG set to testify was being pressured by the Clinton White House, thereby making the cancellation of the hearings seem suspect? After all, if the former acting AG was willing to testify despite White House pressure, then the White House would have to invoke privilege, which would seem suspect in and of itself, no?

What if all of this was happining against the backdrop of larger allegations of collusion with a foreign state to influence the US election against Trump? What if this included allegations that a foreign power had hacked the RNC and leaked information to help Clinton? What if there was a larger issue of alleged Clinton criminal behavior in agreeing to subvert foreign policy while still a candidate in exchange for shares of a very lucrative energy company? What if all of this that Schiff was doing was against the larger backdrop involving an already ongoing FBI investigation into collusion by the Clinton campaign with a foreign power?

After all of this, what if Schiff was asked to recuse himself from this particular investigation, despite the appearance of impropriety and he refused? What if legal scholars believed Schiff to have acted wildly inappropriately and he still refused? What if members of Congress asked Speaker Pelosi to remove Schiff and the Speaker refused?

If all of this happened, how would the Republicans react? I bet we can guess. Let's just use the word Benghazi as the most benign of actions they might take: a bunch of hearings and millions of tax payer dollars in investigations. My guess, however, that the Republicans would likely bring impeachment to the table by this point and forgo additional hearings of any sort.

And this is where we are. Regardless of impropriety there is an appearance of impropriety and as such, Nunes must not only recuse himself, but resign from the Chairmanship and the Intel Committee. Because he won't, it gives credence to the appearance of him colluding with the White House and Ryan covering for Nunes, implicates him as well in the collusion.

That only leaves the Senate Intel Committee and the FBI, assuming either of those bodies have not already been compromised by partisanship or worse. In other words, we are hanging by a sliver of a thread to anything resembling a check on the Executive Branch. If that tiny piece of credibility is blown, then we are not living under the rule of law or in a democracy with three co-equal branches of government. Remind the cult members you know the next time you hear them chanting "Lock her up." Remind them that they are clearly not interested in the rule of law. They just hate HRC, which makes their entire argument against HRC null. And this is why I am not a Dem or a Repub. They don't stand with the Constitution. They stand with their respective cults.

Nunes must resign. Period. Ryan must resign. Period. This is not about politics for me. Never has been. I am not a Dem. I belong to no party.

This should be a moment for all when we say "have you no decency sirs?"

End of rant
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 29, 2017 1:14 pm

yes this is a Paul Ryan scandal now :)

and this since I posted it in the wrong thread


Malcolm Nance Retweeted
Michael Adams‏ @mla1396 8h8 hours ago
More
RUH8: A rare insight into how the Russian propaganda machine works by @krypt3ia

Malware, Espionage & Tradecraft


https://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2017/03/ ... nr-online/



Krypt3ia
(Greek: κρυπτεία / krupteía, from κρυπτός / kruptós, “hidden, secret things”)
RULEAKS: Russian Media and Disinformation in Ukraine by the DNR-ONLINE
Image
INTRODUCTION:

Back in December I located a dump of data on the darknet placed there by a hacker collective in Ukraine called RUH8. The dump is rather good sized and all come from Russian backed Ukraine sources. RUH8’s dumped one group in particular that I was interested in because I located a piece of malware in the email spool that, once run through the usual tests, showed to be something not widely seen before. I will cover the malware further down the article and will include IOC’s but once I harvested the email spool itself and began to get things translated things got even more interesting.

Once I mirrored the site I got some help from <REDACTED> and set to work in translation of emails and documents attachments. Most of the bulk of the dump is average emails concerning daily business but a few began to tell a tale of the company that the emails came from and how it was in fact a Russian front organization created for propaganda in Ukraine and used to manipulate the populace in the Donetsk People’s Republic (The Russian separatist area of Ukraine) and those outside it including other countries outside of Ukraine.

Having all of this come to light just after the election win for Trump, and now coming out here in the midst of the Russian intervention and collusion investigations today, I thought this report would be prescient and give a rare insight into how the Russian propaganda machine works, how the intelligence apparatus of Russia works in this respect, and perhaps bring to light a new piece of malware for everyone to see.

THE LEAK:

The leak by RUH8 in the darknet consists od more than a few entities email spools as well as individuals that they have described as assets of Russia. In the case of this post the data comes from the domain dir-online.ru. This is a media org in Ukraine that is Russian backed and as I said before caters to the Donetsk People’s Republic. Within the dump there are many documents covering the day to day but five documents stood out amongst them all (frankly there are more to be analyzed and one needs Russian speakers to translate them all) as being all things shady.

RUH8 is also the group that hacked and dumped “The Grey Cardinal’s” email spool as well. Having gone through that spool I did not find any malware of merit or anything that was new so I moved on in mirroring and checking for goodies. They keep adding content to the site too so I would expect eventually I will locate some more goodies in the future. Keep an eye on the blog for more when I find it. The Grey Cardinal though is an interesting figure and I recommend you all read up on him as well.

THE PROPAGANDA PLAN:

Right, well on to the good stuff! The following documents found in this dump show Russia’s machinations at propaganda in Ukraine, well, at least this small slice of it.

DOC1

From Translator: This talks about “anti-Russian hysteria” in the media and about disinformation and fake news that makes Russia look bad. And also that pro-Russian voices are accused of being agents of the Kremlin. To counter this, this document outlines a project to create a pro-Kremlin media campaign in the Ukraine that includes a budget for hiring journalists and buying equipment like computers and voice recorders, a budget for freelancers and “insiders”, Website hosting, web administrators, editors, advertising, The amounts — which are, for some reason, in US Dollars, are $9,250 for initial set-up expenses, and $38,280 ongoing costs. Those could be monthly costs — the salary of a full-time journalist is listed at $2,000, and that’s likely to be $2,000 a month. The editor in chief, who’ll be based in Kiev, will get $2,500 a month. Hey, their freelance budget is $6,000 a month!

DOC2

From Translator: is a little disturbing, since it outlines how the anti-war movement in the Ukraine can be used for pro-Russian purposes. For example, the idea is to create a picture of the leaders in Kremlin as corrupt power-grabbers who are using the war in eastern Ukraine to distract everyone from their own problems. Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine is just misformation from Kiev. Sounds totally legit.

Oh, and I figure out why it’s all in US Dollars. Hah, this is funny. Way back when I was based in Russia — something like 20 years ago, when the Soviet Union had just collapsed, inflation was rampant. Stores had to change the prices on all their products several times a day! To deal with it, they all switched to using Dollars or Euros instead, the traitors! To fix the problem, instead of fixing the economy, the Russian government outlawed the use of foreign currencies on prices. So what the stores did was switch to using something called the “arbitrary unit” — which just happened to be worth as much as the dollar, by pure coincidence. Ever since then, this “arbitrary unit” has been the default price. It particularly convenient during inflationary periods, or when dealing with local currencies in different republics. Plus, everyone knows what it means. So, in this document, they use the term “arbitrary unit” and in others, they seem to have just used the dollar symbol instead.

Also, I can confirm that the ongoing expenses are per month — they spelled that out in this budget.

So anyway, this is another juicy document. They’ve put together a budget for running a fake anti-war grassroots organization.

Initial costs are $79,200 for things like computer equipment, recruiting, registering domain names and getting business and media licenses, and website design. It’s interesting that in both this budget and the previous one I looked at, they’re careful to get all the permits and licenses in place. They might be trying to undermine the government of a foreign country, but at least they’ve got all their paperwork in order!
Then the ongoing expenses are $86,000 and include salaries for regular contributors and freelancers, salaries for editorial managers and copyeditors, a financial manager and their deputy, $2,000 for a lawyer, $20,000 for online advertising, and $10,000 for promotion on social media like Facebook and VKontakte (Russia’s LinkedIn).

They’re expecting 100,000 unique visitors a day on weekdays.

It’s interesting they note that they’ll be playing games with the tax status of their employees — like in the U.S., there’s a difference between paying people as staff (where the employer has to pay a chunk of the taxes) and as freelancers (where the poor schmuck has to pay for everything). Also, in Ukraine, folks living in the disputed territories don’t have to pay taxes. They’re saying that they can save 40% as a result of playing around with this, which they claim is common practice in the Ukraine.

So not only are they undermining a foreign government, but trying to avoid paying taxes while they do it! I don’t know which is worse.

Document docxk7EDEjG06i is a plan for creating a major national media outlet from scratch. It will take $347,640 in startup costs, and about $146,500 a month in ongoing expensies. Total costs, for an eight-month period, are $3.82 million, including advertising costs, and other related expenses. Again, they’re playing around with the taxes. And they’re expecting to get a quarter million visitors a day on weekdays.

This one also has a budget for protection against DDOS attacks. They estimate that this will cost $2,000 a month (including the site hosting itself).

They also plan to sell advertising here, and have an ad sales department, and the editor in chief’s salary will be $10,000 a month plus a share of the ad revenues.

That’s not too shabby… Then they’ve got some projections for costs and revenues after that first eight-month period, which is interesting for those of our readers who plan to launch an online magazine in the Ukraine…

DOC3

From Translator: This is super evil. I’m really impressed! The idea is is to create a pro-European, anti-Russian website — with the underlying message that the Ukraine will be better off without those annoying eastern provinces, and let Russia have them, so that it can enjoy its wonderful European future without them dragging the country down. So, again, they have an editorial budget. $69,900 in setup expenses, $65,000 a month in ongoing expenses, and plans to reach 100,000 readers a day on weekdays.

DOC4

From Translator: This is a plan to create a news site to cover the conflict in the disputed territories, because people are hungry for war news. The idea is to make it seem objective and independent, but slip in a pro-Russian point of view. So they’ll use terms associated with anti-Russian reporting, but slant the coverage to make Ukraine look bad. Yicch. Startup expenses: $97,200, ongoing expenses: $126,500 per month, expected audience: 120,000 unique visitors a day during weekdays.

DOC5

From Translator: This is an analysis of the Ukrainian political system and how a lot of work is done by “shadow” organizations in government. There don’t seem to be any action items here.

DOC6

From translator: This is an overview of the Ukrainian media climate, and on how anti-Russian it is, and blames Western advisers for some of it.

So here is the context from these documents from the translator for you…

From Translator: These emails seem to have been sent to Georgi Bryusov, who heads up Russia’s wresting federation, and are in reference to a meeting with “PB.” I don’t know who “PB” is.

Bryusov then forwarded them on to Surkov.

So, how likely is this?

Well, I spent a some time covering a similar conflict in Georgia, where there was also a “separatist” province, called Abkhazia, and the conflict there was used to put pressure on the Georgian government. Although it was supposed to be a purely local, homegrown movement, Abkhazia — which didn’t even have an airport — somehow had fighter jets and bombed Georgian-controlled areas with them. (I was in one of those areas with a group of UN observers while it was being bombed. Fun! The Georgians shot down one of the planes which … surprise, surprise! … turned out to have a Russian pilot inside.)

Russia also paid the operating costs for the Abhazian press center, where I spent many a happy day. All international phones calls were free! I could call my editors anywhere in the world, and file stories about the brave Abkhazian rebels! They also fed us and provided us a place to sleep, and organized regular trips to the front lines where we could enjoy being shot at by the Georgians. They also showed us how well prisoners of war were treated and corpses of people killed by the Georgias and, allegedly, mutilated. (Though the Red Cross folks I talked to couldn’t confirm that the mutilations were real and not, say, the expected results of getting too close to an explosion.)

Anyway, the bottom line is that I do have personal experience of Russian spending gold to manipulate the media, in case anyone ever had any doubts that they were willing to do it.

As you can see from the commentary above, and you too can read the documents as well, the Russians set up a media company including websites and formulated plans to manipulate people toward the Donetsk People’s Republic and against a Free Ukraine. I am still going through the dump looking for the bills for the domains mentioned as well and will run them through Threatcrowd and other sources to see if they were used at all for malware C2 and propagation. Which brings me to the use of dnr-online as a C2. Interestingly enough the site itself is not a C2 but it does have connectivity to other IP addresses and domains that are.
Image
dnr-online.ru
Image
WHOIS for dnr-online.ru

Image

5.101.152.66

The archology of malware that talks to 5.101.152.66 is rather interesting. There’s a bit of everything bad attached to that one to be sure including that MrSweet address that is ransomeware central. 5.101.152.66 is owned/created by beget.ru which has quite the many few dirty connections as well.
Image
beget.ru WHOIS

beget.ru
Image
Of course beget could be innocent enough but as you can see there is enough of Mos Eisley in there to make one not want to get an account there and set up a site right? I will continue to look into other domains within the networks that dnr-online bought as soon as I can locate the bills for them or domain names and that will be another post I am sure. What all of this tells you though, is that the Russians have always been carrying out these kinds of active measures against people like those in Ukraine as well as what they did to us in the election of 2016. This is not a one time deal and certainly will not be the last one we shall see. In fact, the bots and the domains will continue to be set up by the likes of the SVR and GRU in hopes of manipulating the general populace toward the goals of the Putin regime until it’s demise.

… and likely past it.

THE MALWARE & GROUNDBAIT:

Right! now on to the other interesting bit found in the dump from dnr-online. In looking at the spool I dumped all attachments into a folder and began checking them for malware. All the word docs, excel sheet, power-points etc. The docs all checked out but one zip file had a .scr file in it that turned out to be malware. The file (Центр управления восстановлением ДНР справка-доклад за 13 октября 2015 года.exe) Center for Recovery Management of the DNR certificate-report for October 13, 2015.exe came from an email comiing in from a Russian source to the head of dnr-online. I am unable to source the headers at this time of the email but the question becomes was this malware sent to the DNR by RUH8 or was this malware sent to DNR to send to others in some other campaign. I cannot say either way but, the malware is a new sample of GROUNDBAIT or Prikormka that was detected and reported on by ESET running rampant in Ukraine. Given that ESET claims that this malware was being used against the separatists in Ukraine it stands to reason that the logic here is that the malware was to be used by the propaganda campaign against those it was seeking to manipulate. However, the nagging thing for me is the way this was passed around. The email has no real context in the text and to me it seems to imply that it is a fix for things inside dnr. My other thought is that maybe someone got hold of the GROUNDBAIT raw sample and re-used it by re-packing it and setting it against dnr-online.

An interesting notion…

I contacted ESET and talked a bit with the guy who did the work and he was.. Well.. Not so helpful. So here are the IOC’s for this file for you all to look for.

IOC’s
Filename: Recovery Control Center Help DNR-Report for October 13, 2015
Filetype:.exe
SHA256: f9a96ad58fb946981d196d653ec28fa31d6f946a7e2f6784b317dd9adc557b62 (AV positives: 52/57 scanned on 04/30/2016 07:33:42)
File raw: zip file: zipnh4dZDtMUk.zip

https://www.hybrid-analysis.com/sample/ ... mentId=100
https://virustotal.com/en/file/4eaf154c ... 484661011/

https://virustotal.com/en/file/4eaf154c ... 484661011/

Dropped executables
“archive.rar” has type “gzip compressed data from NTFS filesystem (NT)”
“helpldr.dll” has type “PE32 executable (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386 for MS Windows”
“samlib.dll” has type “PE32 executable (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386 for MS Windows”
“rbcon.ini” has type “ASCII text with CRLF line terminators”

Writes directory archive.rar (exfil)

C2 connected:185.68.16.35
Connects and downloads second stage: GET http://wallejob.in.ua/wd.php?sn=2120161 ... pol_x&bt=0 HTTP/1.1

https://www.threatcrowd.org/ip.php?ip=185.68.16.35
https://www.threatcrowd.org/malware.php ... 38ad1b3546
domain: wallejob.in.ua
descr: Domain registered for customer of Ukraine.com.ua
admin-c: UKRAINE-UANIC
tech-c: UKRAINE-UANIC
status: OK-UNTIL 20170619000000
nserver: ns114.inhostedns.com
nserver: ns214.inhostedns.net
nserver: ns314.inhostedns.org
mnt-by: UKRAINE-MNT-INUA
mnt-lower: UKRAINE-MNT-INUA
changed: hostmaster@ukraine.com.ua 20160907200219
source: INUA

Found malicious artifacts related to “185.68.16.35” (ASN: , Owner: ): …
URL: http://wood-house.com.ua/ (AV positives: 2/68 scanned on 12/27/2016 16:55:43)
https://www.threatcrowd.org/domain.php? ... use.com.ua

URL: http://wallejob.in.ua/ (AV positives: 5/68 scanned on 11/17/2016 02:10:28) <—GROUNDBAIT C2
https://www.threatcrowd.org/domain.php? ... ejob.in.ua
https://www.hybrid-analysis.com/sample/ ... onmentId=1

URL: http://zarabatak.ru/ (AV positives: 1/68 scanned on 07/20/2016 10:59:29)
https://www.threatcrowd.org/domain.php? ... rabatak.ru

URL: http://psh.co.ua/ (AV positives: 1/68 scanned on 07/14/2016 04:35:37)
https://www.threatcrowd.org/domain.php?domain=psh.co.ua

URL: http://sem-dev.co.ua/ (AV positives: 1/68 scanned on 07/14/2016 04:33:23)
https://www.threatcrowd.org/domain.php? ... -dev.co.ua

wood-house.com.ua
domain: wood-house.com.ua
dom-public: NO
registrant: xdkjv649
mnt-by: ua.intermedia
nserver: ns311.inhostedns.org
nserver: ns211.inhostedns.net
nserver: ns111.inhostedns.com
status: ok
created: 2014-11-07 13:31:27+02
modified: 2016-11-03 16:37:39+02
expires: 2017-11-07 13:31:27+02
source: UAEPP

registrar: ua.intermedia
organization: SE Rabotnov Volodymyr
organization-loc: ФОП Работнов Володимир Володимирович
url: http://names.com.ua
city: Melitopol
country: UA
source: UAEPP

contact-id: xdkjv649
person: Vladimir V Rabotnov
person-loc: Работнов Владимир Владимирович
e-mail: not published
address: not published
address-loc: not published
phone: not published
mnt-by: ua.intermedia
status: ok
status: linked
created: 2013-04-05 15:01:02+03
modified: 2014-01-08 23:42:17+02
source: UAEPP



TYING IT ALL TOGETHER:

So what we have here is the insider’s view of how dnr-online, a propaganda wing within Ukraine’s Donetsk People’s Republic put together a media service(s) and planned to use them as a framework of Russian propaganda in the region. We also have malware that is known to be actual spycraft in the region within it’s mail spool being passed around at least to two sources inside, one of them being the director of the DNR company. Was that malware meant to infect and eventually allow for the dump in the darknet or was the malware being passed along for other uses that we cannot see in this spool dump? In either case this information makes it clear that in Ukraine the Russian propaganda and espionage machines are alive and well and using the net as a force multiplier at the very least.

I will continue looking at the growing dumps by RUH8 and let you all know about any malware and goodies that pop up. It is also of interest to you all that this dump has been around and certain groups have looked at it and just sort of said “Nothing to see here” which is interesting to me. I mean malware that no one has seen really and plans for propaganda in the region are of no interest? I guess maybe these groups just did not want to spent the cycles on looking deeper into the data. I actually did with the help of others as well as checked the forensics on the metadata to insure the stuff was real.

…but that’s just me… I am not a churnalist.

Oh well..

More when I have it.

K.

https://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2017/03/ ... nr-online/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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