Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 23, 2017 7:03 pm

Trump (White House) asks FBI to publicly knock down reports about Trump/Russian stories

FBI refuses ... :P

violates long standing rules about contacting FBI

CNN

ok here's the story

FBI refused White House request to knock down recent Trump-Russia stories
By Jim Sciutto, Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz, Manu Raju and Pamela Brown, CNN
Updated 6:02 PM ET, Thu February 23, 2017

Washington (CNN)The FBI rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump's associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign, multiple US officials briefed on the matter tell CNN.

White House officials had sought the help of the bureau and other agencies investigating the Russia matter to say that the reports were wrong and that there had been no contacts, the officials said. The reports of the contacts were first published by The New York Times and CNN on February 14.
The direct communications between the White House and the FBI were unusual because of decade-old restrictions on such contacts. Such a request from the White House is a violation of procedures that limit communications with the FBI on pending investigations.

Trump aides were in constant touch with senior Russian officials during campaign

The discussions between the White House and the bureau began with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on the sidelines of a separate White House meeting the day after the stories were published, according to a U.S. law enforcement official. A White House official disputes that account, saying that McCabe called Priebus early that morning and said The New York Times story vastly overstates what the FBI knows about the contacts. The White House official said that Priebus later reached out again to McCabe and to FBI Director James Comey asking for the FBI to at least talk to reporters on background to dispute the stories. A law enforcement official says McCabe didn't discuss aspects of the case but wouldn't say exactly what McCabe told Priebus.
Comey rejected the request for the FBI to comment on the stories, according to sources, because the alleged communications between Trump associates and Russians known to US intelligence are the subject of an ongoing investigation.
The White House did issue its own denial, with Priebus calling The New York Times story "complete garbage."
"The New York Times put out an article with no direct sources that said that the Trump campaign had constant contacts with Russian spies, basically, you know, some treasonous type of accusations. We have now all kinds of people looking into this. I can assure you and I have been approved to say this -- that the top levels of the intelligence community have assured me that that story is not only inaccurate, but it's grossly overstated and it was wrong. And there's nothing to it," Preibus said on Fox News Sunday last weekend.
CNN has previously reported that there was constant communication between high-level advisers to then-candidate Trump, Russian officials and other Russians known to US intelligence during the summer of 2016.
Several members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees tell CNN that the congressional investigations are continuing into those alleged Russian contacts with the Trump campaign, despite Priebus' assertion that there is nothing to those reports.
It is uncertain what the committees will eventually find and whether any of the information will ever be declassified and publicly released. But the push to investigate further shows that Capitol Hill is digging deeper into areas that may not be comfortable for the White House.
The Trump administration's efforts to press Comey run contrary to Justice Department procedure memos issued in 2007 and 2009 that limit direct communications on pending investigations between the White House and the FBI.
"Initial communications between the [Justice] Department and the White House concerning pending or contemplated criminal investigations or cases will involve only the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General, from the side of the Department, and the Counsel to the President, the Principal Deputy Counsel to the President, the President, or the Vice President from the side of the White House," reads the 2009 memo.
The memos say the communication should only happen when it is important for the President's duties and where appropriate from a law enforcement perspective.
A Department of Justice spokesman said Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reviewing the memos and that "the Department is following the guidelines in its communications with the White House."
The White House and the FBI declined to comment publicly for this story.
The effort to refute the CNN and New York Times stories came as increasing numbers of congressional members were voicing concern about Russia's efforts to influence individuals with ties to Trump.
On February 17, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held a briefing with Comey. It's unclear what was said, but senators suggested there was new information discussed about Russia.
"Every briefing we go through we gain new information," said Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, a member of the committee. Lankford declined to be more specific about the briefing.
Sen. Angus King of Maine also declined to reveal what was discussed during the Comey briefing. In response to a question on Priebus' strong denial of the claims, King said he was "surprised" that Priebus would be "that categorical."
Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the goal of his panel's inquiry is to follow "leads wherever they go even if they may be uncomfortable to Republicans."
"The American public will want to know if the President had personal or financial ties to the Russian government," Swalwell said.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/politics/ ... a-stories/


Right Turn Opinion
Trump’s Russia scandal reaches a political tipping point
By Jennifer Rubin February 23 at 12:30 PM

President Trump on Feb. 15 faced renewed questions on whether his 2016 presidential campaign had contacts with Russian officials. Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, withdrew a day before his confirmation hearing. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
Until this week, the Russia connections of President Trump, his advisers and his campaign were “only” a media story, a trigger for international intelligence investigations (foreign intelligence services, like ours, are running down leads, no doubt) and a foreign policy nightmare (Will he betray Europe? Will he relax sanctions?). Now it is a political nightmare for Republicans.

The intrigue surrounding Michael T. Flynn put the story front and center. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s renewed vigor suggests that there is something to be found.

Consider this report on town hall meetings:

A USA TODAY analysis of local news coverage from Montana to Virginia found several incidences of voters pressing Republican lawmakers on Russia, in addition to hot topics such as Obamacare and immigration restrictions.

Rep. Tom Reed, who represents a rural, working-class district on the southwest tip of New York, was peppered by a number of constituents during his first town hall at a senior center, with one exchange in particular turning testy as Reed said he hadn’t seen enough evidence to merit a formal probe. Some in the crowd yelled “What are you covering up?” and “Russia!” as the woman called the issue “embarrassing” for the nation.

Montana Sen. Steve Daines recently told tele-townhall callers the government has “got to investigate” after being asked “what’s going on” with the Trump administration and Russia.

The confrontations show that Trump’s potential ties to Russia are resonating beyond the Capital Beltway to become a grass-roots issue.

Politico likewise reports that voters are asking questions about why Republicans aren’t taking the Russia issue more seriously:

Constituents and liberal activists are demanding to know what GOP lawmakers are doing to help or hinder investigations into the president’s ties to Moscow and Russian interference in the 2016 election. The scrutiny suggests the firestorm over alleged ties between Russian officials and members of Trump’s campaign and administration has spread well beyond the Beltway.

“I am very concerned about the Trump administration and his ties to Russia,” a woman told GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley in Garner, Iowa, on Tuesday — winning huge applause from the overflow crowd when she said that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should recuse himself from any investigation.

Meanwhile, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, created a stir on Thursday during a radio interview when she suggested that Flynn should come testify. Even more significant, when asked about using the subpoena power to demand the president’s tax returns, she said: “I don’t know whether we will need to do that. If it’s necessary to get to the answers, then I suspect that we would.”

Well, absent a full voluntary disclosure of Trump’s finances, we find it hard to see how it would not be necessary. Quite apart from Russia, a flurry of reports on his trademarks bestowed by foreign powers suggests that he has a serious emoluments problem under the Constitution. With regard to Russia specifically, the plot keeps thickening. The New York Times reported that longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen met with pro-Russia Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii V. Artemenko and Felix H. Sater, a Trump associate who helped search for business deals in Russia (where Trump says he has no connections) as late as 2015. Now Ukraine is looking at treason charges against Artemenko. Shouldn’t Cohen and Sater, at the very least, be called to testify about Russian deals involving Trump?

We’ve called for all lawmakers of both parties to take a pledge requiring disclosure of Trump’s tax returns for the past 10 years and an investigation into all foreign monies received, followed by enforcement of the emoluments clause. That seems the bare minimum obligation any responsible lawmaker charged with oversight should undertake. If they won’t do so, it is fair to ask why they are protecting a president who has refused to show his tax returns, sever ties with his businesses or say a critical word about the Russian president.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ri ... 150633e060
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 » Thu Feb 23, 2017 9:24 pm

Image



Meanwhile Artemenko just tossed Trump's lawyer under the bus.

Lawmaker: Trump lawyer pushed Ukraine deal

A Ukrainian lawmaker said he discussed a pro-Russian peace deal with President Trump's personal lawyer, but the lawyer has denied the claim. CNN's Nick Paton Walsh reports.Source: CNN
http://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2017/02 ... al-pkg.cnn



Malcolm NanceVerified account‏@MalcolmNance 2h2 hours ago

This is the beginning of the end.| FBI refused White House request to knock down recent Trump-Russia stories



CNN: FBI Refused WH Request To Refute Stories About Russian Contact

Pablo Martinez Monsivais
ByMATT SHUHAMPublishedFEBRUARY 23, 2017, 6:11 PM EDT

CNN reported Thursday that the FBI and other federal agencies rejected the White House’s request to refute stories about contact between members of the Trump campaign and Russian nationals, including members of the Russian intelligence community.

CNN's report was based on multiple unnamed U.S. officials briefed on the matter.

The New York Times and CNN reported last week that members of the Trump campaign and Russian nationals were in repeated contact during the campaign.

Trump affiliates mentioned in the Times’ story all denied that they knowingly had untoward contact with Russians during the campaign. Roger Stone later denied any contact categorically.

CNN reported that contact between the White House and FBI began on Feb. 15, the day after the stories were published. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus spoke about the story on the sidelines of a meeting about an unrelated matter, according to the network.

The White House pushed back on CNN's characterization of the exchange. McCabe apparently told Spicer that the reports were overstated, an unnamed White House official told CNN.

[CNN has updated their story to reflect that an unnamed White House official later confirmed the network's description of the exchange between McCabe and Priebus]

The network reported that FBI Director James Comey refused to tamp down on the stories publicly, because the contacts between Trump campaign staff and Russians is the subject of an ongoing investigation.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/c ... ia-reports




David CornVerified account‏@DavidCornDC 7m7 minutes ago
More
David Corn Retweeted Susan Hennessey
Remember that Nixon tried to kill the FBI Watergate investigation by leaning on the CIA to tell the FBI it was a national security matter.



What’s particularly odd about this is it’s just not credible that the White House didn’t know the investigation was taking place. It had already been reported on in the NYT and by CNN. Surely, if the White House hadn’t know about the investigation before the stories came out, once it was reported they checked with their sources at FBI and elsewhere to confirm that in fact the investigation was ongoing. That means White House chief of staff Reince Priebus knowingly asked the deputy director of the FBI to lie, which potentially could have affected the investigation by other agencies and by Congress — if the FBI says it’s not true, that carries weight. And that would constitute interference with multiple investigations.
http://americablog.com/2017/02/trump-tr ... -ties.html




first Article of Impeachment against Nixon was ......OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

Priebus does not have clearance to talk with the FBI about this at all
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 » Fri Feb 24, 2017 12:25 pm

Reince Priebus Needs to Leave Trump's White House. Today.
He made the FBI mess even messier, and he can't clean it up.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
FEB 24, 2017

We should have seen this coming. Apparently, after CNN broke its big old scoop about how the White House tried to use the FBI to help squash news stories about the connections between Russia and the Trump team, the administration put together a fairly solid pushback by which it claimed that the whole mess was a kind of casual conversation at a White House meeting between members of the administration and FBI officials. This is a plausible political strategy in response to an incredibly serious threat to an administration's credibility.

Then, somebody looked away and the president* found his phone again.



FIND NOW!

TRUMP SMASH!

Yeah, that'll get everyone on the same page. Won't drown out the echoes, though.

Subsequent thereto, Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his subordinates and agents in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such unlawful entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities. ...Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

—Article I, Passed By the House of Representatives, July 27, 1974.

Maybe Watergate marked me. Maybe it made me prone to overreact and to jump at shadows and to assume the worst in every smoke-or-fire story that pops in Washington. Maybe it just touches off the visions of Gordon Liddy and Tony Ulasciewicz that forever dance somewhere in my subconscious. Maybe my brain went modified limited hangout 45 years ago and never came back.

Or maybe not.

From the aforementioned CNN scoop:

The FBI rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump's associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign, multiple US officials briefed on the matter tell CNN. But a White House official said late Thursday that the request was only made after the FBI indicated to the White House it did not believe the reporting to be accurate. White House officials had sought the help of the bureau and other agencies investigating the Russia matter to say that the reports were wrong and that there had been no contacts, the officials said. The reports of the contacts were first published by The New York Times and CNN on February 14. The same White House official said that Priebus later reached out again to McCabe and to FBI Director James Comey asking for the FBI to at least talk to reporters on background to dispute the stories. A law enforcement official says McCabe didn't discuss aspects of the case but wouldn't say exactly what McCabe told Priebus. Comey rejected the request for the FBI to comment on the stories, according to sources, because the alleged communications between Trump associates and Russians known to US intelligence are the subject of an ongoing investigation.
The fact that it was obvious anagram Reince Priebus who reached out, marking him once again as one of the most dangerously oblivious lightweights in the history of the Republic, further proves the truth of the old political axiom that you should never put into a position of great power someone who couldn't get elected to the state senate from Kenosha.

(And, again, James Comey steps center stage as the most interesting man in politics. However, if I'm Comey, I'm running the ol' Geiger counter over every takeout order for the next few months.)


Getty
As I said, maybe I was marked forever back in the John Sirica Days, but this seems like something that could be the beginning of the end of the end of the beginning. Or something. You can't use the FBI like your own private spin team. You can't have an office in the White House and even think you can do that. If the idea ever crosses your mind, you should immediately hand in your hard pass, walk out to Pennsylvania Avenue, and catch the first bus to the nervous hospital. God only knows if it was actually legal for them to do this, since nobody's really sure what "adjustments" Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has wrought in the Department of Justice regulations since he took over—or since the story broke at around 7:30 last night. But legality is far too narrow a metric for a fck-up of this magnitude. As RN used to say, let me make this perfectly clear.

You can't use the goddamn FBI to squash news stories you don't like any more than you can send the FBI out to shoot the guy who dented your fender outside the goddamn pro shop. Do you think the guys with the badges are valet parking attendants or your own private security goons? And you can't do it when the FBI is already investigating you on suspicions of the very same conduct detailed in the stories you're trying to squash. What in the hell is wrong with you, man?

First of all, Priebus has to go. Today. Even if there's nothing illegal in what happened—and even, as seems completely implausible, the request was made out of simple anger at inaccurate reporting instead of abject terror that accurate reporting was getting too close to where the borscht got made last year—Priebus is revealed as a guy who should not be allowed to spread butter with anything sharper than his thumb, let alone run the staff of any White House, including Camp Runamuck. This is, or ought to be, a career-ender.

THIS IS, OR OUGHT TO BE, A CAREER-ENDER.
Second, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III shouldn't be allowed within an area code of any investigation of the contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. (I suspect there might be several of these.) He's hopelessly compromised.

Third, come on, man. You don't go this far out on a limb because you're pissed about fake stories. Not even this White House is that stupid. You take this kind of long chance because you believe that there's something out there that's worse than being found to be using the FBI to ratfck the New York Times. That's why old RN said this to Harry Robbins Haldeman on June 23, 1972.

"That the way to handle this now is for us to have [CIA director] Walters call [FBI director] Pat Gray and just say, "Stay the hell out of this…this is ah, business here we don't want you to go any further on it." That's not an unusual development…"
In our current parallel situation, the FBI is the CIA and the New York Times is the FBI, and that's the only thing that may keep this from being an actual obstruction of justice. But, as I said, that's a very limited way to measure the magnitude of this story. This is plainly a White House that has no compunction about asking the federal law enforcement apparatus to run its errands, and to operate as barroom bouncers on call whenever the jefe feels inconvenienced. At least Nixon hired his own investigators when he got pissed at newspaper leaks. These clowns tried to turn the FBI into the Plumbers. It's going to get really crowded in DC parking garages pretty soon.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/po ... ate=022417
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 » Fri Feb 24, 2017 10:33 pm

report spiked by WH sees the light of day because of AP

oops Gen. Yellowkekc is gone now trumpty dumbty is shopping around for evidence for his muslim ban and he is enlisting republicans to call reporters off the record to tell them there is nothing to this Russia thing...one of the congressmen Nunn is on the Intel committee and he did call reporters and so did Richard Burr ..called reporters last week



White House effort to justify travel ban causes growing concern for some intelligence officials

By Jake Tapper and Pamela Brown, CNN
Updated 7:42 PM ET, Fri February 24, 2017
Trump requests intel report to justify ban
.;

Iran: Travel ban an affront to the entire nation


Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has assigned the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, to help build the legal case for its temporary travel ban on individuals from seven countries, a senior White House official tells CNN.

Other Trump administration sources tell CNN that this is an assignment that has caused concern among some administration intelligence officials, who see the White House charge as the politicization of intelligence -- the notion of a conclusion in search of evidence to support it after being blocked by the courts. Still others in the intelligence community disagree with the conclusion and are finding their work disparaged by their own department.
"DHS and DOJ are working on an intelligence report that will demonstrate that the security threat for these seven countries is substantial and that these seven countries have all been exporters of terrorism into the United States," the senior White House official told CNN. "The situation has gotten more dangerous in recent years, and more broadly, the refugee program has been a major incubator for terrorism."

The report was requested in light of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' conclusion that the Trump administration "has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States." The seven counties are Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The senior White House official said the desire to bolster the legal and public case that these seven countries pose a threat is a work in progress and as of now, it's not clear if DHS and DOJ will offer separate reports or a joint report.
One of the ways the White House hopes to make its case is by using a more expansive definition of terrorist activity than has been used by other government agencies in the past. The senior White House official said he expects the report about the threat from individuals the seven countries to include not just those terrorist attacks that have been carried out causing loss of innocent American life, but also those that have resulted in injuries, as well as investigations into and convictions for the crimes of a host of terrorism-related actions, including attempting to join or provide support for a terrorist organization.
The White House did not offer an on-the-record comment for this story despite numerous requests. The Department of Homeland Security, however, issued a statement Friday afternoon saying the seven countries were identified by the Obama administration as being of "great concern for terrorism."
DHS spokeswoman Gillian M. Christensen said the report was "commentary from open source reporting versus an official, robust document with thorough interagency sourcing. The (Office of Intelligence and Analysis) report does not include data from other intelligence community sources. It is clear on its face that it is an incomplete product that fails to find evidence of terrorism by simply refusing to look at all the available evidence."
"Any suggestion by opponents of the President's policies that senior DHS intelligence officials would politicize this process or a report's final conclusions is absurd and not factually accurate. The dispute with this product was over sources and quality, not politics," Christensen added.
Dissension and concern
The White House expectation of what the report will show has some intelligence officials within the administration taking issue with this intelligence review, sources told CNN.
First, some intelligence officials disagree with the conclusion that immigration from these countries should be temporarily banned in the name of making the US safer. CNN has learned that the Department of Homeland Security's in-house intelligence agency, the I&A offered a report that is at odds with the Trump administration's view that blocking immigration from these seven countries strategically makes sense.
It's not clear if this was the conclusion of the I&A report but many DHS officials have said they do not think nationality is the best indicator of potential terrorist inclinations.
A Department of Homeland Security source who asked for anonymity since he was not authorized to speak on the record said the report from the I&A officials did not meet the standards of the agency since it relied upon open source material and did not utilize necessary data from the intelligence community, specifically the FBI.
Others in DHS disagree with that assessment of the I&A report and a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security told CNN that some DHS officials are concerned that the new I&A director -- Acting Undersecretary for Intelligence David Glawe -- may be politicizing intelligence. One source familiar with the department told CNN that Glawe came into I&A "like a bull in a china shop."
A DHS official says the intention was to put together a comprehensive report with multiple sources and other agencies but the individuals in I&A did not do that to the standard that was required by their leadership, so Glawe said the report wasn't suffficient to go forward. Christensen said "the concerns were not about the conclusions but about the way the report was put together with accurate sourcing and proper staffing."
The seven countries were originally designated by DHS in the Obama administration for tighter immigration scrutiny -- removing them from the visa waiver program -- but not for a temporary suspension of immigration, as the Trump administration has attempted.
A second issue for many in the intelligence community is the notion of the Trump White House seeking an intelligence report to fit the policy instead of the other way around, sources tell CNN.

Trump's travel ban wouldn't have stopped these deadly terrorists
A senior government official told CNN that the normal procedure would be for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to be tasked with creating such an intelligence report, working with all relevant agencies and providing dissenting views. Theoretically, this would be done before the policy was formulated.
The senior White House official told CNN that it's possible that the National Counterterrorism Center, via the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and perhaps the National Security Council might also provide reports on the same subject.
A senior government official told CNN that the National Counterterrorism Center, via the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has already been tasked with such a report, separately from DHS and DOJ. This has prompted some in government to wonder whether the White House is shopping around among agencies for the report that best bolsters their policy and legal support for it.
Other intelligence officials told CNN that such discussions among agencies about differing interpretations of the existing intelligence are not unusual and do not necessarily reflect an effort to "shop around" for intelligence to support a particular policy.
White House to make its case
The White House is determined to prove that the Ninth Circuit argument is wrong, as are Democrats and those in the media, that terror attacks do not predominantly originate from the seven countries targeted by Trump's order.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler said on CNN late last month that "the various people who have, in fact, committed terrorist acts in this country, from 9/11 on, none of them came from any of the seven countries that are the subject of the President's executive order."
The senior White House official told CNN that the Ninth Circuit's language that no one from those seven countries has "perpetrated a terrorist attack" or Nadler's comment that none had "committed terrorist acts" is false.

"It's using the most narrow definition of the term you can use," the official said -- referring only to those who had successful killed an innocent civilian. That definition does not include those who wounded Americans, or those who plotted but failed in their attacks, or those who tried to join or provide material support to a terrorist group. Information will soon be presented to the public that makes this stronger case using the broader definition.
A case in point: Somali-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan attempted to run over and stab 13 innocent people at Ohio State University last November. He and his family left Somalia in 2007 and moved to Pakistan, arriving in the US in 2014. He was a legal permanent resident. His attack would not count using the more narrow definition.
"In most cases, the American people don't hear about these cases," the senior White House official said, "but these cases have required thousands of man-hours by law enforcement in any number of plots to commit terrorism against this country. The threat is very jarring."
The White House official said the Obama administration tried to downplay the threat while the Trump administration believes in a culture of "very robust disclosure."
Asked about the report Thursday on "The Lead," Rep. Dan Donovan, R-New York, emphasized that the intelligence community be nonpartisan.
"They should take data, take information, shouldn't interpret it in a political way and provide the President the information he needs to make decisions to protect our country," he said.
Also commenting on the report was Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who acknowledged that he hadn't seen the specifics but "it looks wrong to me."
"We ought to be doing the intel first, then set the policy and in large part based upon the intelligence," Haass said. "If these reports are true, it's yet another example where this administration is having real trouble forging a functional relationship with the intelligence community."
UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect new information from the Department of Homeland Security.http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/politics/ ... officials/



Draft Homeland Security intel report contradicts Trump's rationale for Muslim ban

By Joan McCarter
Friday Feb 24, 2017 · 4:21 PM CST

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 7: (AFP OUT) U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as he meets with county sheriffs during a listening session in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on February 7, 2017 in Washington, DC. The Trump administration will return to court Tuesday to argue it has broad authority over national security and to demand reinstatement of a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries that stranded refugees and triggered protests. (Photo by Andrew Harrer - Pool/Getty Images)

Those seven countries included in popular vote loser Donald Trump's Muslim ban (rejected by numerous federal courts) do not pose a security threat to the United States, contra Trump's rationale for the ban. That's according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security.

A draft documentobtained by The Associated Press concludes that citizenship is an "unlikely indicator" of terrorism threats to the United States and that few people from the countries Trump listed in his travel ban have carried out attacks or been involved in terrorism-related activities in the U.S. since Syria's civil war started in 2011.
Trump cited terrorism concerns as the primary reason he signed the sweeping temporary travel ban in late January, which also halted the U.S. refugee program. A federal judge in Washington state blocked the government from carrying out the order earlier this month. Trump said Friday a new edict would be announced soon. The administration has been working on a new version that could withstand legal challenges.

Homeland Security spokeswoman Gillian Christensen on Friday did not dispute the report's authenticity, but said it was not a final comprehensive review of the government's intelligence. […]

The three-page report challenges Trump's core claims. It said that of 82 people the government determined were inspired by a foreign terrorist group to carry out or try to carry out an attack in the United States, just over half were U.S. citizens born in the United States. The others were from 26 countries, led by Pakistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iraq and Uzbekistan. Of these, only Somalia and Iraq were among the seven nations included in the ban.

This is a preliminary draft from "a single" intelligence source that doesn't include "data from other intelligence community sources," Christensen said. Actually, though, it’s not just one source. It's drawn from "Justice Department press releases on terrorism-related convictions and attackers killed in the act, State Department visa statistics, the 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment from the U.S. intelligence community and the State Department Country Reports on Terrorism 2015." So that counts as several sources as far as most people are concerned.

The draft was compiled by civil service staff in DHS, not Trump appointees. We already know that the Trump team is on the case, trying cook the books. They’ll undoubtedly manufacture some attacks, like Bowling Green or all that stuff happening in Sweden.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/2/24 ... Muslim-ban


Trump administration sought to enlist intelligence officials, key lawmakers to counter Russia stories

National Security reporter Greg Miller reports that the Trump administration is enlisting extra help to dispute stories alleging Trump-Russia contacts. (Jorge Ribas, Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)
By Greg Miller and Adam Entous February 24 at 8:47 PM
The Trump administration has enlisted senior members of the intelligence community and Congress in efforts to counter news stories about Trump associates’ ties to Russia, a politically charged issue that has been under investigation by the FBI as well as lawmakers now defending the White House.

Acting at the behest of the White House, the officials made calls to news organizations last week in attempts to challenge stories about alleged contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, U.S. officials said.

The calls were orchestrated by the White House after unsuccessful attempts by the administration to get senior FBI officials to speak with news organizations and dispute the accuracy of stories on the alleged contacts with Russia.

The White House on Friday acknowledged those interactions with the FBI but did not disclose that it then turned to other officials who agreed to do what the FBI would not — participate in White House-arranged calls with news organizations, including The Washington Post.

Two of those officials spoke on the condition of anonymity — a practice President Trump has condemned.

Trump discusses reports of possible contacts between his campaign staff and Russian intelligence Play Video4:33

The officials broadly dismissed Trump associates’ contacts with Russia as infrequent and inconsequential. But the officials would not answer substantive questions about the issue, and their comments were not published by The Post and do not appear to have been reported elsewhere.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer confirmed that the White House communicated with officials with the aim of contesting reporting on Russia, but maintained that the administration did nothing improper. “When informed by the FBI that [the Russia-related reporting] was false we told reporters who else they should contact to corroborate the FBI’s version of the story.”

The decision to involve those officials could be perceived as threatening the independence of U.S. spy agencies that are supposed to remain insulated from partisan issues, as well as undercutting the credibility of ongoing congressional probes. Those officials saw their involvement as an attempt to correct coverage they believed to be erroneous.

The effort also involved senior lawmakers with access to classified intelligence about Russia, including Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees. A spokesman for Nunes said that he had already begun speaking to reporters to challenge the story and then “at the request of a White House communications aide, Chairman Nunes then spoke to an additional reporter and delivered the same message.”

Unlike the others, Nunes spoke on the record and was subsequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

In an interview, Burr acknowledged that he “had conversations about” Russia-related news reports with the White House and engaged with news organizations to dispute articles by the New York Times and CNN that alleged “repeated” or “constant” contact between Trump campaign members and Russian intelligence operatives.

[5 times Donald Trump’s team denied contact with Russia]

Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon walks with White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
“I’ve had those conversations,” Burr said, adding that he regarded the contacts as appropriate provided that “I felt I had something to share that didn’t breach my responsibilities to the committee in an ongoing investigation.”

The administration’s push against the Russia coverage intensified Sunday when White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said in television interviews that he had been authorized “by the top levels of the intelligence community” to denounce reports on Trump campaign contacts with Russia as false.

Priebus’s denunciations ranged from calling the articles “overstated” to saying they were “complete garbage.”

Administration officials said that Priebus’s comments had been cleared by FBI Director James B. Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. In doing so, the FBI’s leadership would appear to have been drawing a distinction between authorizing comments by a White House official and addressing the matter themselves.

Former intelligence officials expressed concern over the blurring of lines between intelligence and politics, with some recalling Republican accusations that the Obama administration had twisted intelligence in its accounts of the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

“I doubt that there was any enthusiasm from the intelligence leadership to get involved in this in the first place,” former CIA director Michael Hayden said, noting that it seemed unlikely that Priebus’s bluntly worded denials were consistent with the “precise language” favored by intelligence analysts.

“Think Benghazi here,” Hayden said in an interview by email. “This is what happens when the intel guys are leaned on for the narrative of the political speakers. The latter have different rules, words, purposes. Getting intel into that mix always ends unhappily, [and] it looks like we just did.”

The Trump administration’s actions reflect its level of concern about coverage of its relationship with Russia. Trump has continued to praise Russian President Vladimir Putin, even after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had interfered in the U.S. presidential race to help Trump win.

Trump has also repeatedly disparaged the intelligence agencies that his administration last week turned to for support. Shortly before taking office, Trump accused U.S. spy agencies of a Nazi-style leaks campaign to smear him.

The White House statements on the issue Friday came after CNN reported that the FBI had refused administration requests to publicly “knock down” media reports about ties between Trump associates and Russian intelligence.

Administration officials disputed the account, saying that rather than soliciting FBI feedback, Priebus had been pulled aside by McCabe on the morning of Feb. 15 and told, “I want you to know” that the New York Times story “is BS.”

The FBI declined to discuss the matter.

White House officials declined to comment on the administration’s subsequent effort to enlist other government officials and would not agree to allow the identification of the intelligence officials who had spoken to The Post last week. In separate calls, those individuals insisted on being identified only as “a senior intelligence official in the Trump administration” and “a senior member of the intelligence community.”

In a brief interview on the night of Feb. 15, the senior intelligence official said that the suggestion that there was frequent contact between Russians and Trump associates was false, describing any conversations as sporadic, limited and based on Russia’s interest in building a relationship with the future Trump administration rather than shaping the 2016 presidential race.

The senior intelligence official appeared to be referring to contacts between Trump’s designated national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump was sworn in as president. Flynn was forced out of his job earlier this month after The Post reported that Flynn had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak and then misled Trump administration officials about the nature of his contacts.

Officials at the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on whether senior officials at those agencies had discussed Russia coverage with the White House or been involved in efforts to refute stories on that subject.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo is the senior-most intelligence official in the administration, with former senator Dan Coats (R-Ind.) still awaiting confirmation as director of national intelligence.

As a Republican member of Congress, Pompeo was among the most fiercely partisan figures in the House investigation of Benghazi, which centered on accusations that the Obama administration had twisted intelligence about the attacks for political purposes.

It is not unusual for CIA leaders to have contact with news organizations, particularly about global issues such as terrorism or to contest news accounts of CIA operations. But involving the agency on alleged Trump campaign ties to Russia could be problematic.

The CIA is not in charge of the investigation. Given the history of domestic espionage abuses in the United States, CIA officials are typically averse to being drawn into matters that involve U.S. citizens or might make the agency vulnerable to charges that it is politicizing intelligence.

A U.S. intelligence official declined to discuss any Pompeo involvement except to say that he was “not involved in drafting or approving statements for public use by the White House this past weekend on alleged Russian contacts.”

Whether there were such contacts remains a major point of contention. Beyond Flynn, the investigation has focused on other figures including Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, who had previously served as a paid political adviser to the Putin-backed president of Ukraine.

U.S. intelligence reports cite multiple contacts between members of Trump’s team and Russians with links to the Kremlin, during the campaign and afterward, according to officials who have seen them. Such reports were based on intercepted Russian communications and other sources, the officials said.

Nunes, who served as a member of Trump’s transition team, has resisted calls for his House committee to investigate alleged contacts between Trump associates and Russia. He said in an interview that after months of investigations, U.S. authorities have turned up no evidence of such contacts.

“They’ve looked, and it’s all a dead trail that leads me to believe no contact, not even pizza-delivery-guy contact,” Nunes said, appearing to rule out even unwitting contact between Trump officials and Russian agents. Investigators, Nunes said, “don’t even have a lead.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... 39c97e1be2


Just a reminder

WASHINGTON — Days after Islamist militants stormed the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn reached a conclusion that stunned some of his subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency: Iran had a role in the attack, he told them.

Now, he added, it was their job to prove it — and, by implication, to show that the White House was wrong about what had led to the attack.


In Trump’s Security Pick, Michael Flynn, ‘Sharp Elbows’ and No Dissent
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITTDEC. 3, 2016

WASHINGTON — Days after Islamist militants stormed the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn reached a conclusion that stunned some of his subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency: Iran had a role in the attack, he told them.

Now, he added, it was their job to prove it — and, by implication, to show that the White House was wrong about what had led to the attack.


Mr. Flynn, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen to be his national security adviser, soon took to pushing analysts to find Iran’s hidden hand in the disaster, according to current and former officials familiar with the episode. But like many other investigations into Benghazi, theirs found no evidence of any links, and the general’s stubborn insistence reminded some officials at the agency of how the Bush administration had once relentlessly sought to connect Saddam Hussein and Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Years before Mr. Flynn met Mr. Trump, his brief tenure running the Defense Intelligence Agency foreshadowed some of the same qualities he has exhibited more recently as he has plunged into politics and controversy as a key campaign adviser to Mr. Trump, who shared his desire to usurp what he viewed as Washington’s incompetent and corrupt elite.

Guiding Trump, an Ex-General Who Shakes His Fist at Washington OCT. 18, 2016
Many of those who observed the general’s time at the agency described him as someone who alienated both superiors and subordinates with his sharp temperament, his refusal to brook dissent, and what his critics considered a conspiratorial worldview.

Those qualities could prove problematic for a national security adviser, especially one who will have to mediate the conflicting views of cabinet secretaries and agencies for a president with no experience in defense or foreign policy issues. Traditionally, the job has gone to a Washington veteran: Condoleezza Rice, for instance, or Thomas E. Donilon.

The Last Word

The new job will give Mr. Flynn, 57, nearly unfettered access to the Oval Office. Whether it is renewed bloodletting in Ukraine, a North Korean nuclear test or a hurricane swamping Haiti, he will often have the last word with Mr. Trump about how the United States should react.

For Mr. Flynn, serving as the president’s chief adviser on defense and foreign policy matters, represents a triumphal return to government after being dismissed as agency director in 2014 after two years there.

Heading the agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, was supposed to be the capstone of a storied career. Through tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Flynn had built a reputation as a brash and outspoken officer with an unusual talent for unraveling terrorist networks, and both his fiercest critics and his outspoken supporters praise his work from those wars.

In numerous interviews and speeches over the past year, Mr. Flynn, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, has maintained that he was forced out as director for refusing to toe the Obama administration’s line that Al Qaeda was in retreat. The claim has made the general something of a cult figure among many Republicans.

“D.I.A. has always been a problem child and it remains that way,” said Representative Devin Nunes, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team. “Flynn tried to get in there and fix things and he was only given two years until they ran him out because they didn’t like his assessment.”

The congressman added: “They didn’t have an excuse to fire him, so they made it up. Nobody has been able to fix that place.”

But others say he was forced out for a relatively simple reason: He failed to effectively manage a sprawling, largely civilian bureaucracy.

At the agency, “Flynn surrounded himself with loyalists. In implementing his vision, he moved at light speed, but he didn’t communicate effectively,” said Douglas H. Wise, deputy director from 2014 until he retired in August. “He didn’t tolerate it well when subordinates didn’t move fast enough,” he said. “As a senior military officer, he expected compliance and didn’t want any pushback.”

The Boss Is Always Right

Founded in 1961, the Defense Intelligence Agency has long been in the shadow of the Central Intelligence Agency, and with the end of the Cold War it lost its primary mission of collecting and analyzing information about the Soviet military. Strained by a decade of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was performing an uncertain role within the constellation of American spy agencies when Mr. Flynn arrived at headquarters in mid-2012.

The agency’s system of human intelligence collection was perceived as largely broken. The effort to rebuild it was underway when Mr. Flynn took control in 2012, but he made it immediately known that he had a dim view of the agency’s recent performance.

During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.

Current and former employees said Mr. Flynn had trouble adjusting his style for an organization with a 16,500-person work force that was 80 percent civilian. He was used to a strict military chain of command, and was at times uncomfortable with the often-messy give-and-take that is common among intelligence analysts.

Some also described him as a Captain Queeg-like character, paranoid that his staff members were undercutting him and credulous of conspiracy theories.

At times, the general also exhibited what a number of officials described as tone-deafness on the larger strategic challenges confronting the nation.

The most glaring example came in early March 2014, just after Russia had seized Crimea. American officials were weighing whether to impose sanctions in response, but Mr. Flynn was pushing ahead with plans to travel to Moscow to build on an existing intelligence-sharing initiative with his Russian counterparts. He also wanted to invite Russian military intelligence officials to Washington to discuss the threat of Islamist militants. His superiors ordered both canceled.

By the end of his tenure, he had largely cut out senior staff members from significant decision-making, relying instead on a small circle of trusted advisers he had come to know during his overseas military deployments.

His bosses — Michael G. Vickers, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, and James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence — came to think that the agency was adrift, and that Mr. Flynn refused to address its biggest problems.

“Regrettably, he got engaged in an increasingly bitter and organizationally paralyzing feud with his senior staff when he should have been focused on building the intelligence capabilities” of the agency, said Mr. Vickers, who was Mr. Flynn’s immediate boss at the Pentagon.

During his tour in Iraq, he served under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, running intelligence for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, whose relentless campaign of raids and airstrikes hollowed out Al Qaeda in Iraq. When General McChrystal went to run the war in Afghanistan in 2009, Mr. Flynn signed on as his intelligence chief.

“He wasn’t a staid intelligence officer. He was aggressive. He was about the mission,” said Richard M. Frankel, a former senior F.B.I. official who worked with Mr. Flynn at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “He can have sharp elbows because he is about the mission.”

He burnished his reputation as an intelligence officer — but also for controversy. He co-wrote a paper, “Fixing Intel,” that offered an early hint of his disdain for the civilian intelligence analysts he would later clash with at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Published by a Washington think tank, it bluntly stated that “the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” infuriating officials at the D.I.A. and the C.I.A.

More problematic from the military’s perspective was Mr. Flynn’s willingness to share intelligence with other countries. He returned to Washington at the end of 2010, and found himself under investigation for sharing sensitive data with Pakistan about the Haqqani network, arguably the most capable faction of the Taliban, and for providing highly classified intelligence to British and Australian forces fighting in Afghanistan.

His superiors eventually concluded that he was trying to prod Pakistan to crack down on the Haqqanis (they have yet to do so), and the general remains unapologetic about sharing intelligence with British and Australian forces. “They’re our closest allies! I mean, really, we’re fighting together and I can’t share a single piece of paper?” he said in an interview last year.

Around the same time, he was also getting to know Michael A. Ledeen, a controversial writer and former Reagan administration official. The two men connected immediately, sharing a similar worldview and a belief that America was in a world war against Islamist militants allied with Russia, Cuba and North Korea. That worldview is what Mr. Flynn came to be best known for during the presidential campaign, when he argued that the United States faced a singular, overarching threat, and that there was just one accurate way to describe it: “radical Islamic terrorism.”

He has posted on Twitter that fear of Muslims is rational, written that Islamic law is spreading in the United States, and said that Islam itself is more like a political ideology than a religion. The United States, he wrote in “Field of Fight,” a book about radical Islam he co-wrote with Mr. Ledeen, is “in a world war, but very few people recognize it.”

Implicating Iran

Mr. Flynn saw the Benghazi attack in September 2012 as just one skirmish in this global war. But it was his initial reaction to the event, immediately seeking evidence of an Iranian role, that many saw as emblematic of a conspiratorial bent. Iran, a Shiite nation, has generally eschewed any alliance with Sunni militants like the ones who attacked the American diplomatic compound.

For weeks, he pushed analysts for evidence that the attack might have had a state sponsor — sometimes shouting at them when they didn’t come to the conclusions he wanted. The attack, he told his analysts, was a “black swan” event that required more creative intelligence analysis to decipher.

“To ask employees to look for the .0001 percent chance of something when you have an actual emergency and dead Americans is beyond the pale,” said Joshua Manning, an agency analyst from 2009 to 2013.

Beyond Benghazi, American officials said that in time, the general grew angrier at what he saw as the Obama administration’s passivity in dealing with worldwide threats — from Sunni extremist terrorism to Iran. He also saw the C.I.A., an organization he had long disdained, as overly political and too willing to advance the White House’s agenda.

In particular, he became convinced that the C.I.A. was refusing to declassify many of the documents found at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, because they seemed to undercut the administration’s narrative about Qaeda strength at the time Bin Laden was killed.

“If they put out what we knew, then the president could’ve not said, in a national election, Al Qaeda’s on the run and we’ve killed Bin Laden,” Mr. Flynn said before the latest election, referring to Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election bid. “Even today, he talks about Bin Laden as though that was a stroke of genius. I mean, c’mon!”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/us/p ... -past.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 Iamwhomiam » Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:03 pm

seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 24, 2017 10:33 pm wrote:
"oops Gen. Yellowkekc is gone now trumpty dumbty is shopping around for evidence for his muslim ban..."


Well, seek and ye shall find...


Deportee charged in Conn. slaying

By Neil Vigdor and Daniel Tepfer, Connecticut Post Published 11:56 pm, Friday, February 24, 2017

Bridgeport, CT

One day after Donald Trump's administration excoriated Connecticut's governor for defying its immigration enforcement orders, a deportee from El Salvador was charged in the fatal stabbing of his girlfriend and abduction of their 6-year-old daughter in the state's largest city.

Wanted for murder and kidnapping as part of an Amber alert, Oscar Hernandez led police on a manhunt through four states Friday before he was captured in Pennsylvania by late morning. His daughter, Aylin Sofia Hernandez, suffered minor injuries to her head and leg and was being treated before being turned over to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families.

Police identified the victim as Nidia Gonzalez, 26, who they said was stabbed along with a female friend in the couple's basement apartment on Greenwood Street. The other victim, who police did not identify, was listed in critical but stable condition at St. Vincent's Medical Center.

Court records show that Hernandez, 39, was deported to his native El Salvador in 2013 after being convicted of assaulting a former girlfriend in Stamford, where he worked as a chef at a deli on Long Ridge Road.

The grisly crime caught the attention of the White House, which issued new deportation rules this week as part of a presidential executive order.

"The tragedy in Bridgeport illustrates that undocumented criminals can and do find their way into our country and that must stop," a White House official told Hearst Connecticut Media.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy drew the ire of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer Thursday after the governor's office advised police chiefs across the state not to take any special action against undocumented immigrants, including honoring immigration detainer requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for non-violent offenders. Spicer said Malloy was selectively enforcing federal immigration laws and setting a bad example for his constituents and counterparts in other states.

But Malloy stood his ground over the controversial guidelines, saying they adhere to a 2013 law known as the Connecticut TRUST Act that sets specific criteria for the types of suspects that can be held and flagged for immigration violations by state and local police. The person must be a convicted felon, gang member or on a terrorist watch list under the law, which went into effect in January 2014, after Hernandez was deported.

"Our local laws are designed to protect our residents and also ensure that those in harm's way feel safe seeking help from law enforcement," Malloy spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly said Friday. "That's why convicted violent felons are detained for deportation under our state laws that the governor has consistently and strongly supported."

The showdown over Trump's immigration executive orders — the first cracking down on sanctuary cities and the second giving ICE broader latitude over who it deports — foreshadowed a potential tense weekend for Malloy as he traveled to Washington for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association. The group had work sessions with Vice President Mike Pence on Friday and Trump coming up on Monday.

Connecticut has the widest wealth gap in the nation, with its largest cities reliant on tens of millions of dollars in federal aid annually. Several of them are clinging to their status as sanctuary cities, including Hartford and New Haven, despite Trump's executive order threatening to cut off funding for cities that harbor undocumented immigrants. Bridgeport is weighing the adoption of the designation itself.

"Ensuring public safety is a fundamental role of government and President Trump is committed to enforcing the laws that keep violent criminals off our streets," the White House official said. "For that reason, all violent criminals that are here illegally will be apprehended and deported but to be effective we need greater security to ensure that these criminals are not entering the country."

At 2:45 a.m. Friday, the couple's landlord made a 911 call about a disturbance in the cramped basement apartment, said Bridgeport Police Capt. Brian Fitzgerald. When police got there they found blood everywhere.

"It was a horrible, horrible scene, just awful that people suffered that way," said Police Chief Armando Perez.

A traffic camera on the George Washington Bridge picked up the license plate of a silver Hyundai Sonata rented by Hernandez, tipping law enforcement off on his escape route. At 11:15 a.m., Bridgeport police received a call that the car had been spotted by a Pennsylvania state trooper. Hernandez refused to pull over and led police on a chase that ended when he crashed into some patrol cars. He suffered minor injuries and was being held pending an extradition hearing.

In December 2011, Hernandez was convicted in state Superior Court in Stamford of third-degree assault, second-degree threatening and reckless endangerment for a domestic violence incident against his girlfriend at the time, according to court records.

But he walked out of the courtroom with a conditional discharge, a court order to stay away from the victim and court notice that he was going to be deported.

"Oscar Obedio Hernandez, a citizen of El Salvador, was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on Oct. 29, 2013. He was removed from the United States by ICE officers in Hartford, Connecticut on Nov. 27, 2013," said Shawn Neudauer, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Republican Peter Lumaj, an immigration lawyer from Fairfield who is exploring a run for governor, slammed Malloy and said his lax policies are putting residents in danger.

"He's really promoting lawlessness and chaos in our state," said Lumaj, who immigrated to the U.S. from Albania. "I think we're turning our state into a sanctuary state. This thing is going to come back to haunt him."

Police say the stabbings happened after the mother and the female friend returned home from a night of drinking. It's unclear whether the couple's daughter witnessed her mother's murder.

"She lost her mom and now she has lost her father," said Perez, tearing up. "We as a community will embrace her."

nvigdor@hearstmediact.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy

Staff writers Frank Juliano, Jim Shay and Cedar Attanasio contributed to this report.


http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Deportee-charged-in-Conn-slaying-10958625.php

I learned about this tragedy soon after the Amber alert was issued:

http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Columbia-Greene-counties-eyed-in-Amber-Alert-for-10956351.php
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 26, 2017 12:05 am

There's More to the Michael Cohen Story
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Richard Drew
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedFEBRUARY 24, 2017, 11:58 PM EDT

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I was intrigued to learn a few days ago that President Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, once founded an ethanol business in Ukraine. It's referred to as a family business. So presumably he set it up with relatives of his wife, who is Ukrainian. This isn't any big scoop I uncovered with my masterly reporting skills. It's referenced right in one of the biggest stories of the last week in The New York Times, the one about Cohen, Felix Sater and Andrii V. Artemenko, the renegade Ukrainian MP who pitched Cohen (and, he hoped, Mike Flynn and Donald Trump) on his 'peace plan' for Russia and Ukraine and who is now being investigated by the government of Ukraine for treason.

Now, to be clear, there's nothing wrong or suspicious about setting up a business in the energy sector in Ukraine. But it did make me see Cohen's role in all of this in something of a new light. In most of the coverage of Cohen's not infrequent appearances in the Russia/Trump saga, he is presented as a blunt-affect New York City lawyer who seldom makes it east of Queens. That's one of the things that has always made his cameos in these stories a bit odd and hard to figure. But if he's set up a family business in Ukraine, it seems like this terrain and the cast of characters and politics might not be so foreign to him after all.

Then there are some more details.

This article in the English language section of the Urkainian news website Hromadske International has more details. Now, before discussing this I should say that I always try to be cautious dipping into the press of a country I don't know in some detail. It's hard to know the difference between The New York Times and the National Enquirer without your linguistic and cultural-political bearings. However, in this case I spoke to a good friend who is part of the Ukrainian-American community. She is familiar with the publication and the people who run it. So while I cannot specifically confirm the details of this article, I'm confident it is a legitimate publication. The article I'm referencing is an English translation of the original in Ukrainian. The usage is a little rough in places. But it's clear enough.

In any case, the article is a backgrounder on Artemenko, pivoting off the original story in the Times. It goes into various details about Artemenko's background. Then it gets to Cohen. In an interview at Strana.ua, he says that while Sater is a recent acquaintance, he's known Cohen since back when Cohen was setting up the ethanol business in Ukraine. So at least according to to Artemenko, he and Cohen have known each other for some time. This wasn't just a courtesy meeting Cohen took with a stranger as a favor to Sater.

And then there's this.

Artemenko told Strana.ua that this wasn't the first time they'd talked about the "peace plan." He says that he was discussing the peace plan with Cohen and Sater “at the time of the primaries, when no one believed that Trump would even be nominated.”

So at least according to Artemenko, discussions about the "peace plan" go back to the first half of 2016.

That's interesting.

I should note this caution. Artemenko seems like a pretty shady character, based on this article and the other write-ups over recent days. He could certainly be lying about his contacts with Cohen before February 2017 for any number of reasons. This whole story is a swirl of confusion, lies and misinformation. So this isn't just a perfunctory caveat. It's a real possibility. But given the demonstrable lack of credibility of Cohen and the rest of the players on the Trump side, I see no reason to dismiss his claims out of hand. After all, in a period of 48 hours Cohen gave four different versions of his side of the story about this meeting, successively dismissing each of his previous stories as "fake news."

We should ask Artemenko for more details and ask Cohen whether these new details are true.

It has always struck me as highly odd that, in the current climate of suspicion over Russia's ties to Trump, Cohen would take that moment to meet with Sater - a former business associate who Trump now claims he wouldn't recognize - and a Ukrainian with a pro-Russian peace plan. It makes a bit more sense if the relationship goes back before this year.

We shouldn't take any of this at face value. But it seems like there's a lot more here than one meeting.

More reporting on this is required.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the ... ohen-story



Panicking over Russia scandal, Donald Trump cancels on White House Correspondents’ Dinner
By Bill Palmer | February 25, 2017 | 0

Just one day after his White House was caught having leaned on the leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to throw the media off the trail of his Russia scandal, and half a day after a leading Republican Congressman called for a Trump-Russia special prosecutor, Donald Trump is now making what can only be described as the biggest panic move of his presidency to date. In a stunning development, Trump announced today that he’s canceling his traditionally scheduled speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

Donald Trump made the announcement this afternoon in a tweet which sounded more like something you’d find written inside of an RSVP note: “I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!” Who’s supposed to wish everyone well? Who was he even talking to in this tweet? No further explanation was provided. But the context seems clear enough. Trump is now fully at war with the American media, having gone so far this week as to begin banning the news outlets from press briefings who have done the most legwork in exposing his Russia scandal – which backfired when other major news outlets boycotted the briefing in protest.

And as a result of his ongoing attacks, the media is now every bit as much at war with Trump. Bloomberg recently announced that it’s canceling its White House Correspondents’ Dinner afterparty, while CNN is now considering skipping the dinner itself. The event has always represented a moment of fun and games between the president and the media, and yet in the midst of the Russia scandal and Trump’s war on the media, there can be no fun and games. But Trump’s timing is particularly suspect.

The 2017 White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t set to take place until April 29th. That’s more than two months from now. Donald Trump still had plenty of time to see which way the wind ends up blowing with his Russia scandal before officially announcing that he’ll sit it out. So did he post this tweet today so that he could be the one to back out, before any more news outlets can announce they’re backing out because of him? Or was this just another desperate attempt at distracting the media from his Russia scandal for a day? It doesn’t seem to be working. Contribute to Palmer Report
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/pan ... nner/1671/


Top Democrat has 'grave concerns' about Trump-Russia investigation
Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he won't tolerate 'White House interference.'
By AUSTIN WRIGHT 02/25/17 10:08 AM EST Updated 02/25/17 10:41 AM EST
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The top Democrat on the Senate committee investigating President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia says he has “grave concerns” about the independence of the probe following a report that the panel’s Republican chairman helped the White House knock down negative news stories.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Saturday he called Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to express his concerns.

But Warner did not go so far as to say he was giving up on the Intelligence Committee’s probe, which many Democrats consider the best hope for getting to the bottom of the ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow given that GOP leaders have made clear they won't agree to a select committee or independent commission.

“I will not accept any process that is undermined by political interference,” Warner said in a statement. "I am consulting with members of the Intelligence Committee to determine an appropriate course of action so we can ensure that the American people get the thorough, impartial investigation that they deserve, free from White House interference.”

Warner also issued a warning to his GOP counterparts, saying that if he determines the Intelligence panel “cannot properly conduct an independent investigation, I will support empowering whoever can do it right.”

His warning is a nod to the many Democratic lawmakers and a few Republicans who have called for an independent commission or select committee to investigate the issue.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, both issued statements Saturday saying the new developments heightened the need for an independent commission.

“We must have a truly independent commission to investigate the actions of the President, his campaign, his associates, and Russian officials and agents,” Cummings said. “The American people will not stand for an investigation that is tainted, that inappropriately shares information with the President's team, or that serves as nothing more than the President's political mouthpiece."

On Friday night, The Washington Post reported that the White House had enlisted intelligence officials and key members of Congress — including Burr and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — to call media outlets to challenge allegations about repeated communications between Trump associates and Russia.

The House Intelligence Committee is also investigating communications between Trump aides and Russia.

A spokesman for Nunes, Jack Langer, said the congressman had already been reaching out to media outlets about the issue and contacted an additional reporter after the request came from the White House.

"Chairman Nunes made inquiries into the allegations published by the New York Times and couldn't find evidence to support them," Langer said. "So he told that to multiple reporters, and then a White House aide asked if he would speak to one more. So he spoke to that reporter as well, telling that person the same thing he told the other reporters."

Burr also told the Post he reached out to news outlets and said he felt he was doing nothing wrong, adding: “I felt I had something to share that didn’t breach my responsibilities to the committee in an ongoing investigation.”

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, blasted the White House’s behavior, saying intelligence professionals “are not there to serve as the President's PR firm.”

“For its part, the intelligence community must resist improper efforts like these by the Administration to politicize its role, and in Congress we will have to redouble our vigilance to ensure that the community is never compelled to do otherwise,” Schiff said.

Also on Friday night, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) called for a special prosecutor to oversee an investigation into Trump associates' ties to Russia, saying Attorney General Jeff Sessions should not be involved.

It’s unclear if Issa, who was a major supporter of Trump during the presidential campaign, was aware of the Post’s report when he made the remarks on HBO's "Real Time" with Bill Maher.

"You cannot have somebody, a friend of mine Jeff Sessions, who was on the campaign and who is an appointee," Issa, the former chairman of the House oversight committee, said. "You're going to need to use the special prosecutor's statute and office to take — not just to recuse. You can't just give it to your deputy. That's another political appointee."

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/t ... ner-235391


Priebus contacting intel officials about Russia investigation is the first stage of ‘a cover-up’: analyst
Tom Boggioni TOM BOGGIONI
25 FEB 2017 AT 13:33 ET

Appearing on MSNBC, an intelligence analyst hammered White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus for contacting intelligence officials about their investigations into Russian involvement in the Trump Administration, calling it, “the first stage of a cover-up.”

Friday it was revealed that Priebus had been in contact with top FBI officials — including Director James Comey and assistant director Andrew McCabe — asking that they help push back at stories linking Trump administration officials to Russian intelligence agents.

According to terrorism analyst Malcom Nance, the failed attempt by Priebus to bully intelligence officials is a sign that something is up.

Joining guest host Jonathan Capehart on AM Joy, Nance excoriated the White House efforts, saying they are trying to deflect attention away from Russian influence.

“This is just trying to get your eye off the ball,” Nance explained. “Russia conducted a full scale national cyber warfare operation against the United States and it appears there was some level of coordination. Roger Stone seemed to have advanced information about leaks that were coming out. Rudy Giuliani was coming out and saying this. Donald Trump was an active participant on July 27 when he said, ‘Russia, if you’re listening, please release these hacked e-mails.’ He knew an operation was going on.”

“The question is: what did they know, when did they know it and were they in collusion?” Nance continued. “What’s happening with Reince Priebus now is, he is trying to divert the message by going and playing the very people who should not be talking to him about ‘simmer this down, tamp this down.'”

“They’re very worried and, and to tell you the truth, I think they’re preparing for stage one of their cover-up,” Nance concluded.

Watch the video below via MSNBC:
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/priebu ... p-analyst/


Democratic senator accuses FBI Director Comey of withholding information on Russia for political reasons

Pamela Engel

Sen. Ron Wyden has suggested that FBI Director James Comey is using classification to hide information about possible Russian interference in the US election for political reasons, according to The New Yorker.

The Democratic senator from Oregon told the magazine that he's concerned intelligence is becoming politicized.

"My increasing concern is that classification now is being used much more for political security than for national security," Wyden said.

Wyden sent a letter, along with six of his colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to President Barack Obama three weeks after the election saying the senators "believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the US election that should be declassified and released to the public."

"We wanted to get that out before a new administration took place," Wyden told The New Yorker. "I can't remember seven senators joining a declassification request."


Wyden also pressed Comey on this point during a Congressional hearing in January. Comey said he couldn't discuss the supposed ties between some of President Donald Trump's associates and Russians.

"When a foreign power interferes with American institutions, you don't just say, 'Oh, that's business as usual,' and leave it at that," Wyden told The New Yorker. "There's a historical imperative here, too.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ron-wyde ... sia-2017-2
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 26, 2017 12:14 pm

Donald Trump's Mystery $50 Million (or More) Loan

The president of the United States might have a secret creditor.

RUSS CHOMAFEB. 23, 2017 6:00 AM


Among Donald Trump's debts—the source of some of his most intractable conflicts of interest—is a mystery loan that Trump has not publicly explained. And this means that the president could have a secret creditor to whom he owes tens of millions of dollars.

According to Trump's financial disclosure records and various news reports, Trump is carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. These transactions could provide his creditors with leverage over the new commander-in-chief. Moreover, it would be difficult for Trump to refinance or modify the terms of his various loans without raising suspicion that he is receiving favorable treatment because of his position. (Imagine a bank gives him a good rate. Would this suggest it might receive preferential treatment from the US government Trump heads?) Because Trump has refused to release his tax returns, it's impossible for the public to know exactly how much he owes and to whom. And Trump never kept his campaign promise to reveal all his creditors and obligations.

The financial disclosure form he filed last year did note more than a dozen loans totaling at least $713 million. But the full amount could be more. And buried in the paperwork is a puzzling debt that ethics experts say could suggest that Trump has a major creditor he has not publicly identified.

According to the disclosure, in 2012, Trump borrowed more than $50 million from a company called Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. (The true value of the loan could be much higher; the form requires Trump only to state the range of the loan's value, and he selected the top range, "over $50,000,000.") Elsewhere in the same document, Trump notes that he owns this LLC. That is, he made the loan to himself. There's nothing necessarily unusual about that.

Here's where the situation gets odd. With Trump owning the Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC—and the LLC being owed $50 million or more by Trump—this company should be listed on Trump's disclosure as worth at least that much, unless it has debt offsetting this amount. Yet on Trump's latest disclosure form, Chicago Unit Acquisition is not listed at all. The disclosure rules say that any asset worth more than $1,000 must be noted. So this is the mystery: Why is this Trump-owned firm that holds a $50 million-plus note from Trump not worth anything?

Buried in the paperwork is a puzzling debt that ethics experts say could mean Trump has a major creditor he has not publicly revealed.
The answer could be that Chicago Unit Acquisition has its own debts that cancel out its value, says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who specializes in government and corporate ethics. In other words, Trump's LLC could owe $50 million and possibly much more to one or more creditors that have not been disclosed to the public. Though the president essentially could be on the hook to some entity or some person for over $50 million, the financial disclosure rules do not require Trump to list the loans and liabilities of companies he owns. (He only has to reveal his personal loans.)

"I think the American people are at risk because we don't know know with whom Donald Trump is entangled financially," Clark says. "If I owe a lot of money to someone, I will probably want to do what I can to keep that person or institution happy. We don't know the terms of this debt and we don't know whether Donald Trump will be tempted to look out for his own financial interest in addressing the concerns of his creditor, whoever that is."

A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that Trump pays a minimum of $4.4 million a year in interest in connection with his loan from Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. His disclosure form states he pays the prime interest rate plus 5 percent for this loan. (Consequently, Chicago Unit Acquisition would have at least that much in annual revenue, though none is reported.) And the Journal report deepened the mystery. It noted that it had paid two research firms to search for paperwork connected to this loan, but both came up empty-handed.

In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, Trump briefly addressed the loan. He said that he had purchased the debt, via Chicago Unit Acquisition, from a group of banks he had previously borrowed from. Jason Greenblatt, the Trump Organization's chief legal officer, would not discuss with the Times why Trump had not simply retired the debt and instead was continuing to pay interest on it. "I am not sure it's appropriate for us to discuss our sort of internal financial reasoning behind transactions in the press," Greenblatt told the Times. "It's really personal corporate trade secrets, if you will. Neither newsworthy or frankly anybody's business."

On his 2015 disclosure form, Trump did list Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC as having a value, putting it at between $1,000 and $25,000—still substantially lower than the sum Trump reports owing to it. When the Times asked Trump why Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC was valued so low on his financial disclosure, he replied, "We don't assess any value to it because we don't care. I have the mortgage. That is all there is. Very simple. I am the bank."

"Whether or not Mr. Trump cares or not about a liability is irrelevant to his obligation to disclose information on the Form 278," says Norm Eisen, who was a top ethics attorney in the Obama administration and who now co-chairs Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Questions about the apparent inconsistency in how the loan was and is treated on his disclosures are legitimate, and a normal president would provide additional information to clear them up."

Alan Garten, Trump's personal attorney, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration and who co-chairs CREW with Eisen, says if there are no loans offsetting the value of Chicago Unit Acquisition, Trump's disclosure form should list the outstanding debt as an asset. "None of the underlying assets or liabilities of the LLC owned by Trump need to appear on the 278—just its net value and Trump's ownership in it," Painter says. "That is one of the reasons the form is incomplete. If the LLC is owed money, that is a positive; if it owes money, that is a negative, for determining its value."

Either Trump's disclosure report is incomplete or there could be a hidden creditor, Eisen and Painter assert. If Trump were to release his tax returns, as all other major presidential candidates have done in recent decades, they point out, he could clear up the matter by providing information on his interest payments. (Eisen and Painter have filed a lawsuit against Trump alleging that the president has violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by maintaining a number of beneficial financial relationships with foreign governments.)

"Without more information, we cannot properly assess the import of this entry, or of the changes in how it was reported," Eisen says. "We need those additional details, including to assess possible conflicts. It may well be the case that the answers lie in Mr. Trump's tax returns, but he has refused to provide them. This is yet another transparency failure on the part of the president."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... y-creditor
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 26, 2017 8:04 pm

It's All So Confusing (The Michael Cohen File)

Kathy Willens
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedFEBRUARY 26, 2017, 3:48 PM EDT
4751Views
I noted yesterday that President Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, appears to have a longer-standing relationship than he'd let on with that renegade member of the Ukrainian parliament, Andrii V. Artemenko. Artemenko is the guy who met with Cohen and erstwhile Trump business associate Felix Sater to discuss Artemenko's "peace plan" to settle things between Ukraine and Russia. Cohen originally told The New York Times that he took a copy of the "peace plan" in a sealed envelope and passed it on to Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, days before Flynn resigned in disgrace.

A day later Cohen denied doing so.

Confused yet? Welcome to my life.

I've been trying to piece these details together. Yesterday I noted that that Cohen, Sater, Artemenko meeting apparently wasn't the first, at least not according to Artemenko. Artemenko says that he's known Cohen for a long time, since back when Cohen was setting up a family business in Ukraine years ago. He also says that he and Cohen began discussing his plan for Ukraine and Russia back during "the time of the primaries, when no one believed that Trump would even be nominated."

This is all quite illuminating in the way of background. As I mentioned yesterday, one of the oddities of Cohen's occasional appearances in the Trump/Russia story is that unlike Manafort or Flynn or Carter Page who have known contacts in the Former Soviet Union (not that there's anything wrong with that), Cohen just seemed like Trump's bully lawyer from New York. But it now seems like Cohen has fairly extensive ties to and knowledge about Ukraine - which is of course the cockpit of the current deep freeze in relations between Russia and the United States.

So what is Cohen's connection to Ukraine? Here's what I've come up with so far.

Cohen's wife was born in Ukraine. Cohen told former TPMer Hunter Walker that she hadn't been in Ukraine since 1972. Cohen is 50. So presumably his wife is roughly the same age and emigrated to the United States as a small child. This would make her parents Ukrainian immigrants as well, assuming her parents raised her in the United States.

It's the role of Cohen's in-laws that first got my attention.

TPM Reader BR flagged my attention to this 2007 article in The New York Post. The piece itself is really just a puff piece about the amazing investment opportunities you can find purchasing apartments in Trump high-rises. Written shortly before Cohen joined the Trump Organization (or shortly after, depending on which source you read), the article is about savvy real estate investor Cohen who was buying up Trump apartment properties right and left because they were such hot investments. From the Post ...
Once some buyers go Trump, they never go back. Take Michael Cohen, 40, an attorney and partner at Phillips Nizer. He purchased his first Trump apartment at Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in 2001. He was so impressed he convinced his parents, his in-laws and a business partner to buy there, too. Cohen’s in-laws went on purchase two more units there and one at Trump Grande in Sunny Isles, Fla.
Cohen then bought at Trump Palace at 200 E. 69th St., and Trump Park Avenue, where he currently resides. He’s currently in the process of purchasing a two-bedroom unit at Trump Place on Riverside Boulevard – so, naturally, Cohen’s next step is to purchase something at Trump Plaza Jersey City. He’s now in negotiations for a two-bedroom unit there.

“Trump properties are solid investments,” says Cohen, who’s also looking at the new Trump SoHo project.

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump agrees.

“Michael Cohen has a great insight into the real-estate market,” Trump says. “He has invested in my buildings because he likes to make money – and he does.

“In short, he’s a very smart person,” he adds.

Let's piece this together.

As I read this, Cohen, his parents, his in-laws and a business partner each purchased at least one apartment unit in Trump World Tower. His in-laws purchased an additional two units in Trump World Tower and another unit at Trump Grande in Florida. That's a total of seven apartments in two Trump high rises, with four purchased by Cohen's Ukrainian emigre in-laws.

Cohen then bought two more units, one at Trump Place and another at Trump Park Avenue and was at the time of the publication of the article purchasing two more units - one at Trump Place and another at Trump Plaza Jersey City.

This is a total of at least eleven apartment units in Trump buildings purchased by Cohen's family (and business partner) between 2001 and 2007. In 2007, Cohen was 40 years old working at a small to medium sized city New York law firm. Before arriving at that firm he practiced personal injury law. One needn't be a billionaire to afford that many Trump properties, of course. But eleven apartment units would have cost an extraordinary sum of money.

Since four were purchased by Cohen's in-laws they must have had a lot of money or the ability to borrow a lot of money too. How wealthy are they? How wealthy was Cohen in his mid-late 30s? If I'm adding this up right he purchased a total of four luxury apartments in New York City and a fifth just outside the city. I've lived in New York City for a dozen years and I know a lot of lawyers here. They make a lot of money, particularly partners at prestigious firms. But I don't know any at that age who owned five luxury apartments.

Maybe Cohen is just incredibly savvy and made a ton of money on those Trump properties. Because two years ago, in February 2015, New York real estate trade sheet The Real Deal reported that Cohen purchased a $58 million rental building on the Upper East Side. Sources who discussed the deal with The Real Deal told the paper that Cohen also owned buildings on the Lower East Side and in Kips Bay. That's a lot of buildings. And apparently it was a real score securing the deal for the Upper East Side apartment building because there were a lot of foreign purchasers bidding on the property too. Robert Knakal, whose firm represented the seller told the paper: “While they were not successful here, there were many foreign bidders competing for this asset. Historically, foreign buyers have provided equity financing for local operators but rarely have purchased rent-regulated assets directly. This could be a new trend unfolding.”

Maybe Cohen first hit it rich with the ethanol business he set up with family in Ukraine and that's what allowed him to start buying so much Manhattan real estate?

Presumably Cohen's in-laws or their family back in Ukraine are the 'family' with whom he set up in the ethanol business - where and when Artemenko says they first met. But wait, Cohen told Hunter Walker that he'd only visited Ukraine "twice" in “either 2003 or 2004." And that was because his “brother’s father-in-law lives in Kiev.”

Wait, is Cohen's brother also married to someone from Ukraine? I guess it's possible Cohen's brother is married to an Australian woman and his wife's father just happens to live in Kiev. But whatever the specifics Cohen sure seems to have a ties to Ukraine, doesn't he? Was the family he set up the ethanol company with, his brother's Ukrainian in-laws?

Needless to say, there's nothing untoward about setting up a business in Ukraine. And there's nothing untoward or uncommon about foreign buyers or emigres buying up New York City real estate. There's virtually no political instability to worry about and the prices basically only go up. But Cohen's ties to Ukraine seem extensive. He also appears to move quite a lot of money in his own right - not just in deals he's managed for Trump. And if Artemenko is telling the truth (by no means a certainty), he started discussing plans with Artemenko for a 'peace deal' to bring peace to Ukraine and lift sanctions on Russia in the early stages of Trump's campaign.

At this point, I confess to having many more questions than answers. But after learning more about Cohen, I was much less surprised that the FBI was looking into his activities over the last 2 years, as they reportedly also doing with Flynn, Manafort, Page and Stone.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/it- ... cohen-file
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 27, 2017 6:52 am

The momentary calm before this week’s upcoming Donald Trump Russia scandal hurricane
By Bill Palmer | February 25, 2017 | 0

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of nothing happening in the public eye today when it comes to the Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. Listen carefully, because it’s quiet. Way too quiet. And that’s what stands out. Since the Trump-Russia scandal went into overdrive last month, there hasn’t been a day where another shoe hasn’t dropped. Until, suddenly, the silence of this moment. That’s because the Trump-Russia hurricane is in the process of imploding.

When we last left our unrealistic and poorly plotted airport gift shop spy novel, Reince Priebus had been caught obstructing justice by unsuccessfully pressuring the FBI over the Trump-Russia investigation, which naturally leaked on Thursday. Then someone in the White House (probably also Priebus) was caught successfully pressuring officials from other intel agencies, along with two Republicans in Congress, to mislead the media over Trump-Russia. That also leaked, this time on Friday, because everything leaks in this age.

And then on Friday night we were left with the cliffhanger: Congressman Darrell Issa realizing the shit was about to hit the fan and making the calculated move of publicly calling for a Trump-Russia special prosecutor. Here was one of the most nakedly partisan Republicans in Congress, finally giving the Democrats something they wanted, because he knows something we don’t, and he suddenly wants to distance himself as far from Trump as possible. This was, in metaphorical parlance, a rat fleeing a sinking ship while screaming “THE SHIP IS SINKING” into a megaphone. And then today… nothing.

Even a befuddled Donald Trump seemed to preemptively try to fend off today’s latest Trump-Russia bombshell by announcing that he won’t attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April — only to then realize he’d created the distraction for nothing, because there was no bombshell today. Nothing happened. This is one of the quietest days the Trump-Russia scandal has had in a month. And when things have progressed this far, a total lack of noise on the outside is because there’s too much transpiring on the inside, and no one wants to talk about it until their ducks are quite lined up.

Ask yourself, for instance, what the odds are that Priebus still has a job by end of day on Monday. Trump’s pattern, whether it’s Paul Manafort or Michael Flynn, is that anyone caught red handed in the Russia scandal gets thrown overboard. And yet there are only so many times you can use that trick until you’ve run out of bodies to toss, or toss one who’s angry enough to start blabbing. So there are some interesting discussions going on right now in the West Wing about who takes the fall this time. Last time we went through a weekend like this, Flynn ended up resigning late Monday night after figuring out during the course of the day that he’d run out of support.

And speaking of Priebus and Flynn, now that the FBI probably has the former on obstruction and definitely has the latter on lying under oath, no wonder they haven’t leaked anything to the outside lately; they’ve nailed the insiders. Which of them is more likely to sing first? Or has one of them sung already?

And you just know that as we speak, news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post are pursuing their latest leaked story that they’ve been gifted by the intel community. There’s no rush since it’s the weekend. They’ll dig as deep as they can into what they’ve been given, and then publish the bombshells late on Sunday night, as is their custom.

Oh, and what are the odds that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both just happened to re-enter public life the day before the Democratic National Committee election? They’ve surely been chomping at the bit to carve out their unofficial roles in the anti-Trump resistance, but felt they needed to let a little time pass. Perhaps they’ve decided that their party having new official leadership means the time is right. So the clock is now ticking on whatever they’ve each been cooking up.



And yet at this precise moment the entirety of the political news realm feels like one big tease. So many shoes are about to drop, you’ll end up concluding they must have belonged to a centipede. But for today at least, everyone on the inside is just kind of teasing you. Where is Reince Priebus hiding? What does Darrell Issa suddenly know that we don’t? And why was President Obama seen walking the same New York street that Trump lives on?



There’s a Trump-Russia hurricane coming this week. You can feel it. It’s just not making landfall today. Saturday Night Live can’t even be bothered to be live tonight; it’s a repeat. Even Donald Trump is looking around right now at the lack of Russia scandal developments today, confused, wondering why he bothered shouting all that nonsensical distraction this afternoon. In hindsight, he should have saved it for Monday. That’s when he’s likely to need it.

http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/wee ... ndal/1676/



Reince Priebus and the long list of political allies Donald Trump has left for dead
By Bill Palmer | February 26, 2017 | 0

After having been exposed just before the weekend for having obstructed justice while trying and failing to make Donald Trump’s Russia scandal go away, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus will start the workday on Monday by trying to assess how much support he still has left in the building. He might find it from his White House allies. He shouldn’t expect any support from Trump himself. Don’t be shocked if Reince ends up resigning by end of day Monday – because it’s just how Trump does these things.

Impeach Trump Now

During his relatively brief time in politics, Donald Trump has demonstrated a remarkably consistent habit of leaving his own political allies for dead the minute they become too controversial – even if doing Trump’s bidding was what got them into trouble. Does anyone believe Michael Flynn was doing anything with Russia that he didn’t have Trump’s blessing for? And yet, four days after Flynn was publicly outed for it, he was gone. And he’s one of an increasingly long trail of political carcasses which Trump has left behind him.

Real News. Fake President.

It’s not just that Donald Trump has scapegoated hired hands like Corey Lewandowski for running the kind of ineffective campaign Trump asked him to run, and Paul Manafort for getting caught up in Trump’s Russia scandal. Trump has done this to his friends as well. Remember when Chris Christie was going to be in his administration? Trump dumped him the minute the bridge scandal got too hot. And even Rudy Giuliani, who appears to have illegally colluded with the FBI to rig the election in Trump’s favor, was shut out of a cabinet position after he made the mistake of bragging about his collusion.

And that’s just the short list of allies whom Trump has opportunistically left for dead as needed. What’s remarkable is that as of yet, none of these people have publicly turned against Trump. Lewandowski remained on the campaign payroll so he would stay loyal. Giuliani was given a minor job to keep him quiet. Christie has been conned into believing he’ll get a Trump White House job eventually. Trump has his ways of keeping some of the ghosts from telling tales.



But Flynn committed a felony by lying to the FBI about Russia. How loyal will he remain once he gets offered a deal to keep himself out of jail? And it appears Reince Priebus broke the law by leaning on the FBI. If Donald Trump scapegoats Priebus this week, and keeps scapegoating every one of his allies whenever it’s opportunistic to do so, it’s a matter of time before he has no allies left – and one of the scapegoats decides to take Trump down with him. At this rate, it may come sooner than you think
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/rei ... dead/1679/




Meet the 32 people who have already controversially exited the Donald Trump administration
By Bill Palmer | February 26, 2017 | 0

Donald Trump promised that he would “drain the swamp” in Washington and find “the best people” for his own administration. Instead he’s found the worst people, and he’s already had to drain his own swamp a number of times during his brief tenure. There have been resignations, firings, and staffers escorted out of the White House after being flagged by the FBI. In total, at least thirty-two people have already controversially exited the Donald Trump administration.

1. Out like Flynn: The most prominent departure has been the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn after he was caught colluding with the Russian ambassador. But he’s just the beginning.

2. No one even told him: Ben Carson’s top HUD advisor, Shermichael Singleton, was fired without Carson’s knowledge when it was discovered that he had previously criticized Donald Trump.

3. Deare in the headlights: National Security Council Senior Director Craig Deare was fired for making fun of Trump behind his back.

4. Vanishing act: Cory Louie, the chief information security officer for the White House’s Executive Office of the President, was fired and escorted out of the building weeks ago. Strangely, he hasn’t been heard from him since, and his LinkedIn page still lists him as having the job.

5-10. The FBI crackdown: Weeks after they began working inside Donald Trump’s White House, six of his staffers were all flagged by the FBI and escorted out of the building on the same day.

11. The CIA crackdown: Shortly before Michael Flynn resigned, the CIA purposely got his deputy Robin Townley fired by refusing security clearance.

12-21. The mass resignation: Ten members of a Presidential Advisory Commission all simultaneously resigned, citing Trump’s racism as the reason.

22. Eight days a week: After just eight days on the job, a Muslim staffer resigned.

23-24. One sex scandal, two departures: After AJ Delgado alleged that Jason Miller got her pregnant during an affair, he resigned from the White House Communications Director position he had just accepted two days earlier, and she also bailed from the Trump administration.

25. Bridge too far: Chris Christie was the head of the Trump White House transition team before being ousted from whatever administration job he was supposed to have.

26-28. Army, Navy, Labor: Donald Trump’s nominees for Secretary of the Army, Secretary of the Navy, and Secretary of Labor have now all withdrawn in controversy before they could be confirmed.

29. CIA again: Former CIA Director James Woolsey quit the Trump transition team, saying he no longer had a role.

30-31. Monday Night Massacre: Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates and the head of ICE on the same night. It later turned out Trump had fired Yates after she tried to warn him about Flynn’s connections to Russia. And finally…



32. Price is right: National Security Council spokesman Edward Price resigned due to Trump’s antics.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/32- ... ited/1680/
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 27, 2017 6:17 pm

Michael Cohen Ukraine Bigly

Richard Drew
ByJOSH MARSHALL
PublishedFEBRUARY 27, 2017, 3:58 PM EDT
4727Views
As I try to pull all this stuff together, I wanted to mention a few more fascinating details. Yesterday we noted that renegade Ukrainian MP Andrii Artemenko says he's known Cohen for years. They first met when Cohen was setting up that ethanol business with family in Ukraine. Artemenko also says he started talking to Cohen about his "peace plan" for Russia and Ukraine back during the presidential primaries - long before the meeting in early February with Cohen and Felix Sater, which the Times reported last week. We also noted that in addition to Artemenko and the ethanol business, Cohen seems to have a lot of business and personal ties to Ukraine. Almost everywhere you look actually.

Well, it turns out there's more.

Before Cohen hooked up with Trump (circa 2006-07), Cohen made a lot of money in the New York City taxi business. A friend mentioned this to me this morning. Sure enough it's discussed in this story in The Wall Street Journal from January. How'd Cohen get into the taxi business? That's not clear. But his business partner was a law client named Simon Garber, who the Journal describes as a "Ukrainian-born taxi baron."

Cohen sold his share of the business to Garber in the early aughts before he hooked up with Trump, though for whatever reason, as the Journal notes, he "remains listed on New York City taxi and state corporation records as owning some taxi medallions through companies with colorful names such as Sir Michael Hacking Corp. and Mad Dog Cab Corp."

It seems like the taxi business may be where Cohen first became a wealthy man and it may have been his income from the taxi business which allowed him to start snapping up Trump apartment properties, how Cohen first came to Trump's attention. But that wasn't the only business Cohen was in around that time. About the same time Cohen set up another business with two other Ukrainian immigrants, Arkady Vaygensberg and Leonid Tatarchuk.

This was MLA Cruises, a Florida company which took patrons on cruises outside US territorial waters to gamble. Cohen was CEO. MLA Cruises collapsed in a welter of lawsuits mainly targeting Vaygensberg and Tatarchuk. MLA Cruises may not have been as successful. But it's still quite a fascinating business to have been in.

More to come, I assure you.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/mic ... aine-bigly



Facing treason charges, conspirator admits Russia blackmail plan sent to Trump’s White House
By Bill Palmer | February 27, 2017 | 0

Earlier this month came the news of a spectacularly strange story in which Kremlin-backed politician Andrey Artemenko went through friends and associates of Donald Trump to deliver a blackmail plan to Michael Flynn’s office. The plan would have involved Trump using Russian blackmail material to oust the president of the Ukraine, so Artemenko could take over the country and give Crimea to Russia. Some of the conspirators are denying this or changing their stories. But now Artemenko is confirming the entire thing.

Andrey Artemenko is now confirming that he met with current Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen and former Donald Trump business associate Felix Sater in New York last month to deliver the blackmail plan to them. He also says he later received “confirmation” from Sater that the plan had in fact been delivered to Trump’s White House, according to Business Insider. But the plan appeared to have fallen apart when Michael Flynn subsequently resigned due to the exposure of his own role in the Trump-Russia scandal.

This confirmation from Andrey Artemenko is crucial because Michael Cohen gave two different stories to the media about the conspiracy, both confirming and denying it. This is the same Michael Cohen who was accused of negotiations with the Russians over Trump’s own blackmail problems, though Cohen denies this.

Andrey Artemenko’s open admission of his role in the Russia-Ukraine blackmail plan is notable in that a prosecutor in the Ukraine recently announced that Artemenko may be facing treason charges for his role in the plot, which involved ousting the legitimately elected president of the Ukraine. It’s unclear if Artemenko is now coming clean as part of an attempt to get himself out from under those charges. But in any case he’s now directly implicating both Cohen and Sater in the conspiracy.
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/facing ... ouse/1683/
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 » Mon Feb 27, 2017 10:20 pm

BANK OF CYPRUS

DEUTSCHE BANK

DONALD TRUMP

RUSSIA

VLADIMIR PUTIN

WILBUR ROSS
......the new Commerce Secretary :)

oh.....and the Fertilizer King :)


To this day, why Deutsche Bank has continued lending to Trump and his organization remains a mystery.


Deutsche Bank Said Fined $5,000 in Russia Mirror Trade Probe...only $5,000 dollars :P

The tale of Trump, an unwanted mansion and a Russian fertilizer king
MFINAL-020704 BIZ GOSMAN HO
via @glenngarvin

Since the allegations about Donald Trump’s business connections to Russia started to fly last year in the middle of his presidential campaign, the fog of political war has made it difficult to tell the real from the shadow. Except for one very visible landmark: a sprawling, rococo seaside mansion in Palm Beach that Trump himself liked to boast about as an example of his real-estate acumen.

“What do I have to do with Russia?” he replied to reporters’ questions at a press conference in Doral last summer. “You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach … for $40 million, and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million.”

That was a bland, if fairly accurate, summary of a wild and goofy tale of the Palm Beach real-estate market involving tax fraud, Russian billionaires, lurid divorce-court accusations and — at least in the opinion of some Palm Beach observers — the execrably vulgar taste of the super-rich.

It’s a tale that’s now coming to a sad end: That $100 million mansion, once the most expensive home in America, has become its most expensive tear-down. Not a single trace of the compound remains, and soon even its address will disappear: The 6.3-acre estate on which it stood has been broken into three parcels, and one of them has already sold.

“It’s an odd story, but Palm Beach real estate can be kind of strange,” said Gary Pohrer, one of the island’s real-estate agents. “People decide they want something, and they’ll pay a price that doesn’t necessarily correspond to reality.”

More here.


http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpol ... -king.html


NESS
FEBRUARY 27, 2017 6:31 AM
Donald Trump and the mansion that no one wanted. Then came a Russian fertilizer king

The former Abe Gosman house at 515 N. County Rd. in Palm Beach was purchased by Donald Trump, who in 2008 sold it to entity connected to Russian billionaire Dmitri Rybolovlev. Photographed in 2005, Donald Trump stands in front of 515 N. County Rd., the estate he bought at auction for about $41 million, renovated and then sold in 2008 at a recorded $95 million. Some have said the décor of the mansion at 515 N. County Rd. was gaudy and mismatched. The whole sage began when healthcare tycoon Abraham Gosman declared bankruptcy in March 2001. The 6.3-acre estate on which this 62,000-square-foot mansion stood has been broken into three parcels, and one of them has already been sold for $34.34 million. The former Abe Gosman house at 515 N. County Rd. in Palm Beach was purchased by Donald Trump, who in 2008 sold it to entity connected to Russian billionaire Dmitri Rybolovlev. Photographed in 2005, Donald Trump stands in front of 515 N. County Rd., the estate he bought at auction for about $41 million, renovated and then sold in 2008 at a recorded $95 million.

Photographed in 2005, Donald Trump stands in front of 515 N. County Rd., the estate he bought at auction for about $41 million, renovated and then sold in 2008 at a recorded $95 million. Jeffrey Langlois Palm Beach Daily News
BY GLENN GARVIN

Since the allegations about Donald Trump’s business connections to Russia started to fly last year in the middle of his presidential campaign, the fog of political war has made it difficult to tell the real from the shadow. Except for one very visible landmark: a sprawling, rococo seaside mansion in Palm Beach that Trump himself liked to boast about as an example of his real-estate acumen.

“What do I have to do with Russia?” he replied to reporters’ questions at a press conference in Doral last summer. “You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach … for $40 million, and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million.”

That was a bland, if fairly accurate, summary of a wild and goofy tale of the Palm Beach real-estate market involving tax fraud, Russian billionaires, lurid divorce-court accusations and — at least in the opinion of some Palm Beach observers — the execrably vulgar taste of the super-rich.

It’s a tale that’s now coming to a sad end: That $100 million mansion, once the most expensive home in America, has become its most expensive tear-down. Not a single trace of the compound remains, and soon even its address will disappear: The 6.3-acre estate on which it stood has been broken into three parcels, and one of them has already sold.

“It’s an odd story, but Palm Beach real estate can be kind of strange,” said Gary Pohrer, one of the island’s real-estate agents. “People decide they want something, and they’ll pay a price that doesn’t necessarily correspond to reality.”

The story begins in March 2001, when healthcare tycoon Abraham Gosman, who had moved from Massachusetts to Palm Beach a few years earlier and reinvented himself as a philanthropist, declared bankruptcy. That financial catastrophe would eventually result in tax-fraud convictions for Gosman and his wife.

One of the casualties of the bankruptcy was the 62,000-square-foot mansion Gosman had built at 515 N. County Road and dubbed Maison de l’Amitie, the House of Friendship. A showcase for his charity events just a mile north of the vaunted Breakers hotel, it included a ballroom with a capacity of hundreds, an art gallery, underground parking for scores of cars and a 100-foot swimming pool. It was nested among a slew of outbuildings, including a barn, guest houses and a tennis cottage.

The Gosmans managed to hold on to it for a couple of years, but by 2004 it had been seized by the bankruptcy court and put on the auction block. There were several bidders, hoping to scoop up a plutocratic property at a dollar-store price, but Trump — a real-estate mogul still more than a decade distant from political ambitions — pounced, grabbing the house for $41.35 million.

“He bought it strictly as an investment to flip,” said Carol Digges, the Palm Beach real-estate agent who would eventually re-sell the house for Trump. “He never intended to live there.”

And he didn’t. After doing some renovation on the house, Trump put it back on the market in 2006 at price that made even jaded Palm Beach eyeballs pop: $125 million. Gossip Extra publisher and columnist Jose Lambiet, one of a few reporters Trump invited to tour the house in an attempt to drum up buyers, was even more astonished by the price after he looked around.

“I’d been in the house before, at one of Gosman’s charity parties, and Trump had hardly changed anything, just put on a couple of coats of paint,” Lambiet said. “Even that — well, he told us the fixtures in one of the bathrooms were gold, but as he walked away, I scratched a faucet with my fingernails and it was just gold-covered paint.”

Lambiet has visited many homes of wealthy owners with more money than taste, but he considered the Maison de l’Amitie in a class by itself. “It was just terrible-looking, really gaudy,” he said. “Nothing fit together — it was sort of haphazard inside.

“There was a room with a floor made of cobblestones, and in the corner was a real wood oven for pizzas. It looked like an old Italian pizza place. Who does that in their house? ... I thought, he’s never gonna sell this. And he didn’t, the house stayed on the market for a couple of years.

“And then the Russian came along.”

“The Russian” was Dmitry Rybolovlev, a cardiologist-turned-potash-magnate (Russian newspapers called him “the Fertilizer King”) whose net worth was estimated in the financial press to be well north of $10 billion. By 2008, when he first inquired about the mansion, Trump had already cut the price to $100 million, and Rybolovlev offered even less, $75 million.

But Rybolovlev is well known for buying homes as if he’s spending Monopoly money. His 24-year-old daughter Ekaterina bought Skorpios, the 74-acre Greek island where Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy, for a price estimated at $150 million or more. Then there’s the family’s $88 million apartment overlooking Central Park West, the $20 million home in Hawaii acquired from actor Will Smith and the $135 million residence in the Swiss resort of Gstaad. (To be perfectly fair, that one consists of two houses.)

Trump, sensing his fish had taken the hook, hung tough on his price. On July 15, 2008, Rybolovlev bought the house for $95 million (Trump says credits on the closing costs brought the total package to $100 million), believed to be the biggest home sale in American history.

Although some real-estate publications made much of the fact that the mansion was on the market for nearly two years before it sold, Digges, the real-estate agent who sold it, wasn’t surprised. “When you’re sitting in that price range, there’s not 50 people in line waiting,” she said. “People with that kind of money are not readily available.”

Confidentiality agreements, she said, prevent her from discussing exactly how Rybolovlev came into the picture other than to say that “the client came to me on a referral.” Trump himself has said he never met Rybolovlev, who conducted the entire transaction through intermediaries.

In the rough-and-tumble Russian financial world, anybody with wealth like Rybolovlev is viewed with a certain degree of suspicion, and his business career — which includes a charge of murder, of which he was acquitted — has certainly had its share of adventures. Much of it is shrouded in mystery; he almost never talks to reporters.

But South Florida never got a chance to see him up close. Rybolovlev never lived in his new mansion and is believed to have visited only once. That may have been due in part to a terrible mold problem discovered after he bought it.

Perhaps more importantly, though, not long after the sale closed, Rybolovlev became ensnarled in a divorce from his wife Elena, a toxic spill that splashed on for seven years. In court papers, she accused him of hosting lascivious orgies involving young girls on his yacht; he had her arrested for jewel theft.

The divorce case ended in an undisclosed settlement in 2015. And last year, Rybolovlev gave up on the mansion, successfully seeking permission to tear it down and divide the land under it into three parcels.

By November, the first of them had already sold, drawing $34.34 million for 2.35 acres.

“I thought the Russian was crazy to buy the place at that price, but now it looks like he’ll at least break even,” mused gossip columnist Lambiet.

Probably not, countered real-estate agent Pohrer: Although Rybolovlev may make back his purchase price, he’s been paying about $1.4 million a year in taxes since 2008, as well as the considerable upkeep on the huge house. “Overall, he’s going to wind up losing a pretty penny on this, maybe around $20 million,” Pohrer said.

“I actually thought the price was a little low,” he added. “There’s really no other vacant coastal land in Palm Beach for sale — everything else is going to come with a house on it. And this was the biggest of the three parcels, so the others will go for less.”

Who exactly purchased the land remains a mystery. Legal documents associated with the sale list only the name of a holding company. “I would have thought I’d be able to find out the name of the buyer by now,” said Pohrer. “But I haven’t been able to. That surprises me.” So, maybe there’s still a surprise ending in store.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/busines ... rylink=cpy




The Troubling Russian Connections Of Trump Nominee Wilbur Ross
February 27, 2017 5:17 pm
The Troubling Russian Connections Of Trump Nominee Wilbur Ross


In the midst of the Trump Administration’s many other Russian entanglements, it turns out that Wilbur J. Ross, Jr., the billionaire American investor who is one of Donald Trump’s closest advisors on trade and economics, has direct financial ties to several leading oligarchs from Russia and the Former Soviet Union (FSU).

The U.S. Senate should thoroughly investigate these ties before it votes on Ross’ nomination to be Commerce Secretary when it returns from recess next week.

Central to this inquiry is the question of Ross’s role as Vice Chair and a leading investor in the Bank of Cyprus, the largest bank in Cyprus, one of the key offshore havens for illicit Russian finance. Ross has been Vice Chairman of this bank and a major investor in it since 2014. His fellow bank co-chair evidently was appointed by none other than Vladimir Putin.

The Bank of Cyprus is just one of more than 100 direct and indirect investments that Ross listed on his U.S. Office of Government Ethics financial disclosure form last month. He recently promised to resign as Vice Chairman of the Bank and disinvest from it within the next 90 days if his nomination is approved.

Mere divestiture will not suffice here, even if it was immediate. Exiting a brothel in a hurry doesn’t explain what you were doing there in the first place.

Ross’ involvement in the Bank of Cyprus raises many questions about his judgment, but also about the Trump Administration’s seemingly endless direct and indirect connections with friends and associates of Vladimir Putin, who all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies say conspired to interfere in the November 2016 U.S. election on behalf of Donald Trump.

Whether or not these connections involve any criminality, these are the kind of relationships that most American business people would not tolerate for 30 seconds.

After all, as discussed below, since the 1990s Cyprus has served as one the top three offshore destinations for Russian and former Soviet Union flight capital, most of it motivated by tax dodging, kleptocracy, and money laundering. As of 2013, just before the banking crisis, Russian deposits accounted for at least a third of all bank deposits in Cyprus. As one leading newspaper put it, “Russian money is in fact at the heart of the island’s economy.”

Nor is Ross’ Bank of Cyprus in particular – now probably at least half owned by Russians, as we‘ll see — any stranger to money laundering, tax dodging, or odious finance. With a market share of 30 percent, Bank of Cyprus has long been the market leader in Cypriot financial chicanery:

As of 2013, for example, more than 81 percent of the bank’s deposits were accounted for by 21,000 mainly foreign depositors, up to half of them Russians, who each had at least €100,000 on deposit.
By 2013, after a decade of rampant inflows of offshore capital and irresponsible lending, Bank of Cyprus alone had €11.5 billion of delinquent loans on its books – 60 percent of the country’s entire gross domestic product. At that point, it required €11.3 billion of Emergency Liquidity Finance from the Central Bank of Cyprus to survive.
The top 20 Bank of Cyprus borrowers reportedly accounted for €3 billion of these non-performing loans. This is consistent with the patterns found in other recent credit booms—dodgy real estate projects, bust-out loans to insiders, and rampant control fraud.
In March 2015, it was discovered that 19 of the Cyprus Parliament’s 56 Members of Parliament, owed BOC €51.2mm, including 13 MPs whose non-performing loans totaled €35.3m. The following month, the Parliament adopted a new pro-bank law to accelerate foreclosures. Evidently, the revelations increased the pressures to act.
In a series of recent criminal trials in Nicosia, five former CEOs, Board Chairmen, and managers of Bank of Cyprus have been charged with a wide variety of financial misconduct pertaining to the pre-2013 period. The charges include conspiracy to defraud investors, forgery, and market manipulation. No one has yet been convicted.
There are also disturbing reports of several recent high-profile money laundering cases in Cyprus. There are also reports that attempts to clean up money laundering and improve financial transparency stalled, and that as of 2016, “Geldwasching” may be back, not only in Cyrus as a whole, but also at the Bank of Cyprus.

So this is the fundamental question: How did a prospective U.S. Commerce Secretary come to play a lead role in what turns out to be one of the world’s leading haven banks for laundering Russian money, precisely at a time when the U.S. Government and the EU have been trying so hard to enforce economic sanctions against Russia and Putin’s wealthy allies?

Before the U.S. Senate approves Ross’s nomination, it is essential to get to the bottom of these curious relationships. Unfortunately, no one bothered to ask Ross even a single question about them, the Bank of Cyprus, or dirty Russian money at his January 18 confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, where he received unanimous approval along with a ringing endorsement from his Florida Senator.

In “TrumpLand,” however, as we have recently come to appreciate, that was eons ago. And there are now signs that the U.S. Senate may finally be waking up.

THE ‘BANKRUPTCY KING’ SWOOPS IN

In July 2014, Ross became Vice Chairman of the Bank of Cyprus. At that point the bank was in deep financial trouble, having nearly failed in 2013.

Ross, who specializes in buying troubled firms cheap and then reselling them, organized a group of U.S. and European-based investors to spend €1 billion (U.S. $1.3 billion then) to acquire 17 percent of the common stock of this deeply troubled bank, including Ross’ own 1.6 percent stake.

Since then, Ross has played an active role in recruiting and nominating its senior management team, especially its board chairman, Josef Ackermann, the long-time former Chairman of Deutsche Bank — one of the few banks in the world that would make loans to Donald Trump.

THE ROOTS OF THE CYPRUS CRISIS

To understand Ross’s role in Bank of Cyprus, we really have to start with what happened following the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, when state-owned enterprises, vast amounts of oil and gas reserves, and mineral wealth were sold for a song to a new class of incredibly rich, politically well-connected oligarchs and their partners in the state security apparatus.

As we have recently explored elsewhere, from the mid-1990s on, this massive re-concentration of wealth gave way to an extraordinary outflow of flight capital, and the proliferation of tax dodging and criminal enterprises.

Among the key beneficiaries of this economic crisis was Vladimir Putin, who rode it to power. But the tsunami of illicit Russian money also greatly benefited Donald Trump, who, as discussed in more detail in a previous article, simply could not have financed his bankrupt business empire in the early 2000s without it.

Of course, Trump has reiterated time and again—most recently at his White House press conference on Feb. 17—that he has no business deals with Russia. Significantly, Trump said nothing about Russians, investors from other former Soviet Union states like the Ukraine or Kazakhstan, or ventures with Russians outside of Russia and the former Soviet Union.

In the past, even Trump has boasted repeatedly about raking in many millions from Russian oligarchs who bought luxury Trump apartments and joined his golf clubs. Nor has he denied that he was paid $13 million to hold the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. His three oldest children also made 13 trips to Moscow over 18 months, in what the Trump Organization described at the time as business trips intended to recruit Russian investors.

Furthermore, as noted below, one Russian oligarch shelled out at least $95 million to Trump in one Florida real estate deal. This allowed Trump to more than double his $41 million investment in that property in four years. This profit were earned at a time, when by Trump’s own account, the U.S. real estate market was a “disaster”—so dead that he actually sued Deutsche Bank, his one remaining global creditor, in a failed effort to avoid repaying a $40 million real estate loan.

DESIGNER HAVEN

In Ross, we see an indirect beneficiary of the 1990s Russian debacle. More suspicious money inundated Cyprus, and especially the Bank of Cyprus, than could possibly be put to work in that island nation. Ultimately this created a lucrative opportunity for Ross, his investment group, and the wealthy Russian investors in the Bank.

The Bank of Cyprus is certainly no ordinary bank. At the time it nearly failed in March 2013, it was the largest financial institution in Cyprus, a tiny island country that is strategically located in the eastern Mediterranean and is one of the EU’s newest members.

According to money laundering experts, the Bank of Cyprus also has a long history of being up to its ears in Russian flight capital. Indeed, Like Trump and Putin, Cyprus in general—and the Bank of Cyprus in particular—have been huge beneficiaries of Russia’s 1990s economic crisis and the extraordinary deluge of dirty money that it produced. Especially since Cyprus was admitted to the EU in 2004 and the Eurozone in 2008, the island has captured the bronze medal, just behind more venerable havens like the Switzerland and the UK. And, as noted, the Bank of Cyprus was the market leader, as the island’s largest single financial institution, which for a time also had branches in Moscow, the Ukraine, Greece, and Rumania.

Of course Russian flight capital might have landed in many places. The interesting thing about Cyprus’ unusual success in capturing it is that it was by design. Since the 1980s, the Cypriot tax system, tax treaties, financial regulations, company laws, and residency requirements have all been carefully engineered to attract offshore money, especially from the Russia/FSU region. This was done at the urging of the island’s influential bank lobby and its nearly 2,000 lawyers and accountants. The Central Bank of Cyprus did its part by turning a blind eye to money laundering, unless it clearly involved terrorism.

So the island soon developed quite a reputation. Today, Cyprus-based holding companies and banks account for a majority of the world’s direct investments into Russia and a significant share of all Russian capital outflows. And the Bank of Cyprus has led the way.

Much of this direct foreign investment into Russia from Cyprus involves “round-tripping,” where funds are channeled through offshore companies and then rerouted back as if it were foreign capital. The financial secrecy and special tax treaty provisions offered by Cyprus insulated the owners from pesky annoyances like taxes, creditors, exchange controls, and restrictions on money laundering.

By the mid-2000s, many affluent Russians had also decided to move their “human capital” to Cyprus. Thousands bought real estate on the sunny, relatively democratic isle and started living there at least part time. Up to 50,000 Russians now reside in Cypriot enclaves like “Limassol-grad,” which features Russian language newspapers, radio stations, schools, restaurants, films, law firms, and ice-cold bottles of Baltika. Especially after Cyprus was admitted to the EU (2004) and the Eurozone (2008), they expected bank deposits to be guaranteed by the ECB and that the Euro would be relatively sound. Those who could afford to invest €5 million in real estate ($6.5 million back then) could also get EU passports, which allowed them to move freely around Europe. It was a uniquely Cypriot combination – Mediterranean relaxation and Russian riches.

MORE MONEY THAN LEGITIMATE USES FOR IT

Sadly for many Cypriots, all this loose incoming Russian loot—combined with lax Eurozone bank regulation and the Cyprus banks’ increasing confidence after 2008 that the ECB would bail them out, no matter how they misbehaved—led to a classic case of what economists now call “the finance curse.”

Eventually, the deluge of unregulated offshore deposits produced a gigantic financial bubble. Cyprus banks issued more than €160 billion of dodgy real estate loans and corporate loans and poured tens of billions more into dodgy Greek bonds.

The result was a tandem debt crisis. Especially after the Greek debt crisis hit in 2011, Cyprus banks started to tremble. But no one wanted to slow lending and trigger a (much milder) recession, so they delayed facing reality as long as possible.

By 2013 the island’s two largest private banks, the Bank of Cyprus and Laiki, were on the verge of insolvency. Cypriot government debt soared to 125 percent of gross domestic product, as the overall economy and tax revenues tanked. By 2012-13, private bank loans exceeded 800 percent of GDP. Even today, while the public debt ratio still hovers around 100 percent, an astounding 60 percent of Cyprus bank loans, or 150 percent of GDP, are classified as “non-performing” because they are not being paid back. For comparison, U.S. banks now class just 1.28 percent of their commercial loans as nonperforming.

To this day, Cyprus is still paying a huge price for this boom-bust cycle and the failure to regulate its financial institutions. While it is no longer in the acute care ward, and the IMF has recently praised the island – in contrast to Greece!—for being able to pay off the emergency loans and terminate the bailout program, Cyprus still suffers from the enormous private debt overhang. And that, in turn, has yielded slow growth, 15 percent unemployment, and a highly uncertain future—plus the pleasure of hosting 50,000 Russians.

For Wilbur Ross and his fellow private vulture capitalists, this Russian-flight induced crisis presented an irresistible investment opportunity. (Exactly who introduced Wilbur’s group to the island is an interesting question that the Senate should explore.)

The bank’s management and board spent the first year after the March 2013 crisis staving off bankruptcy with the help of €10 billion in ECB and IMF emergency assistance—including €6.5 billion for the Bank of Cyprus alone. In 2014 it decided to raise new capital. In July 2014, in exchange for €1 billion, Ross and his group were able to acquire 17 percent of the bank’s stock, the largest single ownership block, plus the Vice Chairmanship and significant management influence.

The only trouble was that Ross and his group could not afford to be too discriminating about who their co-investors were. To this day, as noted, not only is Bank of Cyprus at least half owned by Russian investors, but several of the largest ones are “super-garchs” who have business and personal histories that are, to be polite, colorful.

Nor could Wilbur’s investment group afford to be too particular about the uses these co-investors made of the bank, or the fact that Bank of Cyprus’s new business model – apart from financial chicanery and more MP loans – requires an awful lot of hard work trying to collect money they don’t have from thousands of recalcitrant borrowers.

THE BANK AND THE OLIGARCHS

Under the terms of Cyprus’ 2013 agreement with the ECB and the IMF, to qualify for for their €10 billion bailout—fully €7.3 billion of which went to bail out the Bank of Cyprus and other private banks — the country was compelled to agree to “bail-in” “large depositors” – those with over €100,000 on deposit.

In return for seizing 47.5 percent of their deposits, 21,000 of depositors – and especially a core group of about 560 – initially received 81.5 percent percent of the bank’s stock. When the Ross group arrived this was slashed. The Bank’s financial disclosures don’t permit us to say precisely how this ownership is distributed. But at least a third to fifty percent accrued to wealthy Russians who received stock in proportion their confiscated deposits. In addition, our three leading identified Russian ‘garchs also ended up owning at least 14.3 percent of the bank.

Another 9.6 percent of Bank of Cyprus shares is managed on behalf of Laiki’s former customers – many of whom were also Russian depositors — by Bank of Cyprus management, without direct board representation. All told, as discussed in this footnote, even after the Ross group’s entry, at least 40 to 50 percent of the Bank of Cyprus’s voting power is now Russian-controlled.

As for the largest Russian shareholders, we are only able to identify those who now own at least at least 3 percent of Bank of Cyprus’s shares. But even this subset includes several well-known oligarchs. All three maintain important connections to Russia, they all are on reasonably good terms with President Putin, and at least one is no stranger to Donald Trump.

THE RUSSIAN CONNECTIONS

Vladimir Strzhalkovsky: Vice Chair, Bank of Cyprus, October 2013-June 2015

For a year after Wilbur Ross arrived on the scene at the Bank of Cyprus in July 2014, until June 2015, his fellow Co-Chair and leading co-investor was none other than Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, described by the New York Times and the Financial Times as “a former KGB agent” and as a “long-time associate of Putin’s.”

Strzhalkovsky reportedly owned 2.5 percent of the Bank of Cyprus from October 2013 until June 2015. He told an interviewer that his family would retain at least 1.8 percent of the Bank – more than Ross owns.

How did Strzhalkovsky become the Bank of Cyprus’ Vice Chair in October 2013? It is most likely that he was appointed by Putin, his “long time associate” and fellow former KGB agent, to represent the estimated 33-50 percent of the bank’s 2013 “large depositors” who were Russian, and who had had nearly half of their deposits confiscated and converted into stock.

Strzhalkovsky continued to serve as Bank of Cyprus’s Vice Chair until he sold part of his stake—0.7 percent of the Bank of Cyrpus— to Viktor Vekelsberg.

Before joining Bank of Cyprus, from 2008 to 2012, Strzhalkovsky had served as Chairman/ CEO of the Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel. In 2010, the Polish business community reportedly lobbied him to appeal directly to Putin to adopt a softer line toward Poland – more evidence that he have a direct line to the Russian President. In 2012 Strzhalkovsky gained the distinction of receiving the largest management buyout in Russian corporate history—a $100 million payment for leaving his post at Norilsk. It was described by the New York Times as follows:

“…(A)nother data point in the shift of corporate wealth and influence away from the first generation of former Soviet businessmen—known as the oligarchs—and toward a coterie of well-connected former security service agents who made their mark under President Vladimir V. Putin…”

Before that, from 2004 to 2008 Vladimir Strzhalkovsky had run Rostourism, the Russian equivalent of the FSU’s Intourist tourism agency—long a source of invaluable “kompromat” for the Russian secret service. He had also served on the boards of several leading Russian companies, including Aeroflot and the giant energy company Inter RAO UES.

Interestingly, even while Vice Chair of the Bank of Cyprus from 2013 to 2015, Strzhalkovsky had also served on the board of Olympstroy, a corruption-ridden state company that in 2014 grew to be notorious for mismanaging the construction of sports facilities at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. The Sochi Olympics cost a record $51 billion—four times the cost of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

As one report on Olympstroy alleged:

“In the six years since the Kremlin founded Olympstroy to oversee construction in Sochi, the lavishly funded state corporation has changed directors four times and barely managed to finish the sites in time for the Games. The corporation is shrouded in an almost complete lack of transparency. Government audit reports are not made available to the public, and parliamentary attempts to gain access to its books were blocked by the pro-Putin majority. Its first boss …managed to increase costs by 50% in six months without spending all the money the company already had or even starting to build any Olympic sites before fleeing the country. His successor…. was quietly ushered aside after failing to cope with the scale of the project. The third boss, (another) longtime Putin associate.. falsely claimed that private investors had put up what was actually taxpayer money…Shortly afterwards, investigators launched six separate investigations into no-show hiring at Olympstroy…”

The only other reference we found to a “Vladimir Strzhalkovsky” goes back much farther, and it is not certain that it refers to our subject. In August 1968, the Polish Army conducted “Operation Dunabe” in support of the Soviet crackdown on “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia. A certain young Russian-Polish Sergeant, “Vladimir Strzhalkovsky,” reportedly participated in that operation. Given that our Vladimir was supposed to have been born in Leningrad in 1954, if it was him, he would have at least been just the right age.

Here are a few questions that Senators should ask Ross, under oath, in public hearings about Strzhalkovsky:

Have you ever visited Cyprus? Have you ever met with Vladimir Strzhalkovsky? When, where, how many times and for what purposes? What records of those meetings do you or the bank have, and will you produce them? Did you or your associates have email, messaging, mail or phone contacts with Strzhalkovsky and his associates? Can you provide records of those communications?
During the year that you and Strzhalkovsky were co-chairs and co-investors in the Bank of Cyprus, were you aware of Strzhalkovsky’s KGB background? Of his extensive connections with Putin? If not, how do you explain this lack of diligence?
As a “turn-around king” with a special focus on banking, how would you assess Vladimir’s Strzhalkovsky special bank management expertise? What other special skills does he have?
To you knowledge, did any of the Russian intelligence services ever make use of the Bank of Cyprus? Which ones? What efforts did you make to learn of Russian intelligence services regarding Bank of Cyprus activities?
What conversations, if any, did you have directly or through associates with Putin or his associates? Did you keep records of such contacts and, if so, will you provide them?
What inquiries did you make about the money flowing into Bank of Cyprus? Did you ask for reports about criminal proceeds? Tax evasion? Russian interference in the affairs of other countries, including especially Cyprus and the United States?
It is true that Vladimir Putin selected Strzhalkovsky to be Vice Chair of the Bank? If so, given the fact that Putin appointed Strzhalkovsky, did you see any indications that Putin, his family of entities he controls did business with the Bank of Cyprus? Did it occur to you to make such inquiries?
What reports, if any, did you make to U.S. banking, money laundering, terrorist finance, and intelligence agencies about Bank of Cyprus and its customers? Please describe the Bank’s activities with respect to controlling flight capital, money laundering, and tax dodging during your tenure.
Are you aware that Strzhalkovsky’s family is still an investor in The Bank of Cyprus?
Did you discuss the Sochi project and its huge costs with Strzhalkovsky? Were you aware of published reports that the Sochi Olympics contracts were riddled with fraud? That Strzhalkovsky was one of Olympstroy ‘s directors?
What, if any, conversations did you have with Russians, including Strzhalkovsky, Putin and their associates concerning Donald Trump, the Trump Organization or the Trump family? To your knowledge, has Strzhalkovsky ever met Donald Trump or any members of his family?
Viktor Vekselberg: Bank of Cyprus board member and largest single shareholder (9.3 percent stake); Russian aluminum tsar, reportedly worth $11-$17 billion; long-time business partner of Ukrainian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, the UK’s wealthiest citizen; reportedly enjoys good relations with Vladimir Putin.

As of now, Ross maintains a joint Co-Chairmanship in Bank of Cyprus with Maksim Goldman, who represents Lamesa Holding S.A., a part of the Renova Group, an aluminum and oil conglomerate that is majority-owned by Vekselberg.

As of 2014, Lamesa’s stake in the Bank was 5.5 percent; in 2015 it was increased to 6.2 percent with the purchase of the 0.7 percent stake from Strzhalkovsky. In January 2017, it increased again to 9.3 percent, making Renova Group the bank’s largest single shareholder.

Together, with his long-time business partner Leo Blavatnik, Vekselberg is a major aluminum and oil industries investor through Renova Group, their corporate umbrella group. He also reportedly owns the world’s largest collection of Faberge eggs, and a yacht, the Odessa II, that is valued at $150 million.

Vekselberg is the seventh wealthiest Russian, according to the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. He is reportedly also on reasonably good terms with President Putin. In fact, he reportedly delighted the “new Tsar” by spending millions to buy up the Faberge eggs and return them to a special museum he has created for them in Moscow. Vekselberg has denied reports of some tension between him and Putin. There have been some recent reports of tensions in the relationship, but VV has denied it.

Here are a few questions that Senators should ask Ross in public hearings about Viktor Vekelsberg:

When, where, and under what circumstances have you ever met or communicated with Viktor Vekelsberg or his business partners? How frequently do you communicate directly through Maksim Goldman or anyone else associated with Renova Group?
What business dealings, if any, have you had directly or indirectly with Vekelsberg and his various business enterprises? With his partner Len Blavatnik — directly or indirectly? What role has he and his family played in the bank? Do other members of his family do business with the Bank? Do other members of his affiliated companies do business with the Bank or with other investors in the Bank? To your knowledge, has he or his business partners done any business with the Trump Organization?
What has been Renova’s role at the Bank of Cyprus? How does Vekelsberg use the bank, as a depositor, investor, or borrower? What loans or advances were extended to him or at his direction to others? Has Vekelsberg brought any new clients to the bank? If so, who?
What can you tell us about business dealings between Vekelsberg and others associated with the Bank of Cyprus and Renova Group and Donald Trump, his organization, and his family?
Were you aware that Vekselberg’s long time business partner is Len Blavatnik? Were you aware that on October 25 2016, AI ALTEP Holdings Inc., a company reportedly based in New York City and owned directly or indirectly by Vekselberg’s business partner Len Blavatnik, made a $1 million contribution to Senator Mitch McConnell’s “Senate Leadership Fund?”
Dmitry Rybolovlev: Reportedly owned the largest stake in the Bank of Cyprus as of 2010 (9.7 percent); bought Donald Trump’s Palm Beach house in 2008 for $95 million, at the time the most expensive property in the U.S., more than doubling what Trump paid four years earlier; his personal jet’s flight pattern shows an odd coincidence of airports with Trump’s appearances on the fall campaign trail.

Wilbur Ross also has a direct link through the Bank of Cyprus to a third leading Russian oligarch who, as of 2010, was the bank’s largest single investor and appears to still own a significant position in the Bank.

This is Dmitry Rybolovlev, a 50-year old Russian once known as the country’s “potash king.” During the “Wild West” days of Russian privatization back in the mid-1990s, “Rybo” had acquired a two-thirds stake in a critical fertilizer company, Uralkali, which eventually supplied up to 30 percent of global potash sales. Beginning in June 2010, however, shortly before Rybolovlev invested €233 million in the Bank of Cyprus, he rather wisely started to dispose of his 66 percent stake in UralKali, completing the divestiture in 2011. Since then potash prices have slumped, so in hindsight, this was an adroit move.

Even after an expensive divorce, in recent years Rybolovlev’s net worth has variously estimated at $5 to $13.8 billion, depending on the year and source, with $7.8 billion being the most popular guesstimate. According to published reports, he has a very impressive €500 million art collection, although some of it was recently the subject of nasty litigation concerning provenance. He has also reportedly acquired Citbank CEO Sandy Weill’s $88 million penthouse in New York, a $20 million mansion in Hawaii that used to belong to the actor Will Smith, a waterfront property in Palm Beach that he purchased from Donald Trump, two luxury villas in Gstaad, two personal jets that are reportedly worth over $100 million, including a private Airbus A319, a mansion on the Rue de l’Elysée in Paris that overlooks the Presidential Palace, the entire island of Scorpios, a $68 million 67-meter yacht, and the football club in Monaco.

If this fellow had invented fertilizer, it is hard to believe that this collection of toys and lucre or his collection of invoices from divorce attorneys would be any more elaborate.

In addition to just being yet another fabulously rich Russian natural resources billionaire — for our purposes Rybolovlev is interesting for at least three other reasons.

First, as noted, in 2010 Rybolovlev bought 9.7 percent of the Bank of Cyprus, becoming at that point by far its largest single investor. By 2013, just before the crash, he had reportedly increased that to 9.9 percent. Even after the 2013 crash and refinancing that produced a “haircut” for existing Bank of Cyprus investors, he appears to have retained at least a 3.3 percent stake. Although this stake is larger than Ross’s 1.6 percent, Rybolovlev does not have a seat on the board of directors.

Second, like many other hyper tense members of the Russian elite, since the early 2000s Rybolovlev has been on of a crusade to diversify his wealth internationally. The potash mines were hard to relocate physically, so he sold off some his stake in it, and has focused since 2007 on purchasing foreign properties, joining the Russian émigré flood abroad.

In particular, in addition to all the other foreign properties described earlier, in June 2008 he purchased a Palm Beach waterfront property from Donald Trump for $95 million plus a sales commission, one that Trump had reportedly purchased himself in July 2004 for just $41 million. The unusual nature of this transaction is only underscored by the fact that the property had been valued at just $59.8 million on Palm Beach County’s tax rolls as of 2013. Eight years later, in 2016, Rybolovlev had the 60,000 square foot mansion that Trump built torn down, subdivided the property in three, and sold off a 2.74-acre plot for $34 million – nearly $3 million per acre less than he had paid for it.

This price gain is also especially interesting because in mid-2008, Trump was complaining loudly the American real estate market was “dead” and that many of his projects were cratering. Indeed, as we noted earlier, that same year he fought tooth and nail to avoid repaying a $40 million real estate loan to Deutsche Bank.

Now precisely at that crucial point in mid-2008, just as the Great Recession was unfolding, this extraordinary $50 million Russian cash injection into Donald Trump’s balance sheet may well have saved him from personal bankruptcy. On top of his six other corporate bankruptcies, that one, in turn, might well have been the beginning of the end for Donald Trump’s political ambitions.

Third, according to flight logs from FlightRadar24 and PlaneFinder, as well as photos of planes on the ground taken from Jetphotos.com and amateur photos taken at airports by amateur Twitter journalists, an Airbus A319-133X(CJ) with the registration M-KATE that very much appears to belong to Dmitry Rybolovlev appears to have followed some very unusual flight patterns during the fall 2016 American presidential campaign.

When Rybolovlev still owned his potash company, he reportedly maintained an Airbus A319 that was outfitted for personal use. This plane, with the registration M-KATE, is registered to Sophar Property Limited, a British Virgin Islands company. While this company was originally registered to UralKali, the potash company that he disposed of by 2011, apparently Rybo, as he is known, enjoyed this plane and another, a Falcon, so much that he retained ownership, or at least use rights, to the two planes, this Airbus and, a Falcon jet. The Airbus A319’s registration is reportedly named after one of his two daughters, Ekaterina.

For our purposes, the intriguing thing is that this plane, normally based in Moscow and Switzerland, can be tracked. According the flight logs available from FlightRadar24, it made numerous flights all over the U.S. from August 2016 through November 2016, the peak season for the U.S. 2016 Presidential campaign – of course right at the moment when Moscow was supposedly trying to jack the election on Trump’s behalf.

Moreover, in at least three cases, Airbus A319M-KATE showed up at very same airports, where candidate Trump was – in the North Carolina cities of Charlotte and Concord and in Las Vegas, for example. Indeed, in the case of Charlotte, local photographers took pictures of M-KATE and the Trump campaign jet at the very same airport on November 3, 2016. During a presidential campaign close aides often arrive before and after the candidate, times that overlap with the Rybolovlev jet in several cities. Rybolovlev’s plane photographed at Charlotte airport on Nov. 3.

Local photographers took pictures of M-KATE and Trump’s Boeing 757 the Trump campaign jet at the same airport on November 3, 2016.

Indeed, earlier this month — on Friday, Feb. 10 2017 — Rybolovlev‘s Airbus A319 M-KATE flew all the way from Switzerland to Miami. That airport is near where the White House said that the president was partying with hedge fund mogul Steven Schwartzman in Palm Beach on Saturday night. Rybolovlev’s jet returned to Switzerland on February 12, flight records show.

There were also M-KATE flights to Westhampton, New York and Los Angeles in early August 2016 and October-November, 2016, but the intersections with Trump’s travels are less clear.

Why would Rybolovlev’s plane scurry back and forth from Moscow to odd destinations like Charlotte and Concord, as well as to Las Vegas, New York, Burbank, and Miami, to arrive there precisely when Trump was there? The obvious question: was Rybolovlev a Putin emissary?

These flight patterns that were first noted by observant “Twitter journalists” like @Observer14 and @AceInCharlotte back on Nov. 3, 2016, just as they were occurring.

But what could Rybolovlev possibly have been carrying that couldn’t have been ported more efficiently and discretely by other methods? Furthermore, are we sure that relations between Putin and Rybolovev are all that good? After all, in 2008, Igor Sechin, Putin’s Deputy Prime Minister at the time — and now the Executive Chairman of the fabled Rosneft, the world’s largest publicly-traded oil producer — reportedly threatened to prosecute Dmitry Rybolovlev’s potash company over a mine disaster, exposing it to huge fines. Soon after this threat, Rybolovlev’s potash company, UralKali, reportedly paid $250 million of “voluntary” compensation to the government. After that Rybolovlevalso accelerated his efforts to diversify abroad. The Financial Times does say that relations between Putin and Rybolovlev are now fine. But this pattern also fits the standard Putin stratagem whereby oligarchs are pressured into becoming semi-feudal servants of the de facto modern Tsar.

In any case, these flights remain a genuine enigma. We do yet not have any eyewitness reports or photos that show that Rybolovlev was actually on the planes or actually met with Trump or any of his staff. But these coincidences, combined with everything else we know about Rybolovlev’s connections to Trump and Ross, certainly deserves further scrutiny.

This prompts still more questions for Wilbur Ross, this time regarding Dmitry Rybolovlev:

How long have you known Dmitry Rybolovlev? How much of the Bank of Cyprus does he currently own? What role has he and his family played in the bank? Do other members of his family do business with the Bank? Do other members of his affiliated companies do business with the Bank or with other investors in the Bank? What contacts have you or associates had with Dmitry Rybolovlev?
What attention did you and your team pay to Rybolovlev because of his 3.3 percent (and at one time nearly 10 percent) stake in the Bank of Cyprus? What due diligence did you or your associates perform regarding Rybolovlev and Trump? What did you find?
When and how did you learn of the lucrative deal Trump made with Rybolovlev in 2008 to sell his Florida property at a huge profit? As a long-time Trump friend and associate, were you involved in that deal? Did you meet Rybolovlev at the time? To your knowledge, has Donald Trump had any other business dealings with Rybolovlev or his associates?
Have you or your businesses done any business with Rybolovlev or entities associated with him?
When and when if ever, have you or your team met or communicated by telephone mail, email, or through intermediaries with Rybolovlev? Are you aware of any occasions where Dmitry Rybolovlev may have met with Donald Trump or other members of his staff? Were you present at any occasions in the last year in the U.S. or elsewhere where Dmitry was present? How do you account for the unusual flight patterns listed above? Do you know who recently bought one-third of Rybolovlev’s Palm Beach property? Did you attend the Schwartzman party in Palm Beach on February 11? Was Dmitry there? Did you meet Donald Trump or other members of his staff that weekend? If so, what was discussed?
Josef Ackermann: Chairman of the Board, The Bank of Cyprus since 2014; former Chairman of Deutsche Bank (2002-12) during period when it engaged in a wide range of corporate misbehavior, including laundering $10 billion of Russian money, incurred fines that nearly bankrupted the bank, which is the largest single lender to the Trump Organization; “Friend of Vlad” who reportedly knows Putin well.

When Wilbur Ross became Vice Chairman of The Bank of Cyprus in July 2014, one of his first acts was to nominate Josef Ackermann, who had headed Deutsche Bank from 2002 to 2012, to become Bank of Cyprus’s new board chairman. He assumed that role in November 2014 and still holds it.

Even back in July 2014, it was difficult to make Ackermann’s decade running Deutsche Bank look like an achievement, to say the least. Since then, it has become even clearer that he presided over a period of spectacular chicanery at Germany’s largest bank. Given this, his nomination by Ross to head the Bank of Cyprus in 2014 seems peculiar, to say the least.

One possible explanation is that Wilbur Ross is a long-time financial ally of Donald Trump, dating back to an effort to restructure his casinos in 1990. From 2002 to 2012, under Ackerman, Deutsche Bank had become Trump’s largest bank creditor by far, with more than $650 million of loans to the Trump Organization and even more to other Trump partnerships, as of 2008. Trump’s 2016 financial disclosures show that out of $650 million owed by him and his organization, $364 million was owed to Deutsche Bank.

Meanwhile, ever since Trump failed to repay more than $900 million of bank loans in the early 1990s, other major U.S. and European banks had largely rejected him. He did not help his own cause by bragging in print that he had borrowed from the banks knowing full well that he would never repay.

To this day, why Deutsche Bank has continued lending to Trump and his organization remains a mystery.

Indeed, according to recent press reports, Deutsche Bank has recently been looking into allegations that the Russian Government may have guaranteed some of the bank’s more generous loans to Trump during the Ackerman period, either directly, or through offshore banks and companies.

This would resemble a similar approach that was used by Putin in France. In 2014, he helped secure €11 million for Marine Le Pen’s cash-starved National Front from the “First Czech-Russian Bank,” a Moscow-based bank, as a reward for her support for Russia’s March 2014 invasion of Crimea and other Putin policies.

In any case, as noted, during Ackermann’s tenure at Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Bank had indulged in an incredible range of financial misconduct, from sanctions-busting, interest rate rigging, and mortgage fraud to facilitating tax dodging, illicit trading, illegal foreclosures, rigging energy markets, and money laundering. By no means were any of these full-blooded “white collar crimes” that were prosecuted to conviction and sentence; in most cases, they were disposed of by settlements and, at worst, deferred prosecution agreements. But in many ways that is the point – leniency may explain why they kept recurring.

Since 2010 all this misconduct has finally caught up with the bank, if not its former senior executive. Although no one has gone to jail, Deutsche Bank has already had to pay nearly $20 billion in fines and settlement costs.

Those already booked include a recent $7.2 billion U.S. Justice Department settlement for issuing fraudulent mortgage-backed securities in the 2008 financial crisis – the largest penalty of its kind to date. This was also coupled with a $5.3 billion fine against Ackermann’s previous employer, Credit Suisse, for the same exact kind of toxic RMBSs. Another case led to a $650 million fine for laundering $10 billion of Russian money, by way of Deutsche Bank’s offices in Moscow, New York, and Cyprus.

All these penalties were announced in January 2017. They all pertain to behavior that took root on Ackermann’s watch. As a New York State financial regulator remarked when he announced the Russian money-laundering fine for Deutsche Bank in January, “This Russian mirror-trading scheme occurred while the bank was on clear notice of serious and widespread compliance issues dating back a decade.”

Since 2016, all this misbehavior has finally caught up with Deutsche Bank’s stock price. DB’s stock price has sharply underperformed other bank stocks because of the billions of litigation expense and penalties, to a large extent for offenses that originated during the Ackerman years. This, in turn, has led to huge job cuts, and even some serious concerns about whether Germany’s largest bank may soon require a bailout of its own.

Meanwhile, Ackermann has moved on, bonuses and all, despite recent demands from shareholders to claw them back.

As the saying goes, however, “A shoemaker does not just make one shoe.” There are some reports from investigative journalists that Cyprus is still up to its old tricks, albeit on a smaller scale. As a German ZDF TV investigative program concluded last year after succeeding in laundering €15 million through the Bank of Cyprus and other Cyprus banks, “Money laundering in Cyprus is still possible.” If so, the mere force of competitive pressures mean that Bank of Cyprus cannot stay far behind.

This is especially irritating to money laundering experts. After all, one of the key conditions for the €7.3 billion bailout that Cyprus received from the ECB and IMF in 2013-2016 was that Cyprus banks would commit to much tougher programs for monitoring compliance with “anti-money laundering” rules and statutes. As Ackermann acknowledged in a June 2016 interview, however, “There may still be individual cases…Money laundering had been the business model of Cyprus, and it is a difficult struggle.”

Evidently, it is not a struggle for everyone. In addition to becoming Chairman of the Board of the Bank of Cyprus, Ackerman has also joined the board of directors of Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova Group. This is consistent with the fact that Ackermann also reportedly enjoys a long-standing, warm relationship with Vladimir Putin. While at Deutsche Bank, he met with Putin and other senior Russian officials frequently, served on Russia’s Foreign Investment Advisory Council and its “consultative committee” to form an “International Financial Center” in Moscow, and strongly endorsed Putin’s peculiar idea of a “free trade zone” between Russia and the EU. In Putin’s own words, “It would take ages to describe everything that Deutsche Bank is doing in Russia.”

Indeed, I fear that it may.

So we also have a few more questions that Senators should ask Ross, under oath, in public hearings, with respect to Josef Ackermann:

How long have you known Josef Ackerman? What loans or other business dealings have you had with Credit Suisse or Deutsche Bank? Do you have a private banking relationship with Deutsche Bank? With Credit Suisse?
Are you aware of Deutsche Bank’s history with respect to Donald Trump? To your knowledge, does Josef Ackerman know Donald Trump? To your knowledge, was he involved in the lending relationship between Deutsche Bank and the Trump Organization or between the private banking side of Deutsche Bank and Donald Trump or is family? Was this a factor in your decision to hire him?
What due diligence did you do with respect to Josef Ackermann? What questions did you ask Ackermann about his connections to Trump, Putin and Russian oligarchs? Are you aware that Josef Ackerman has a very cordial relationship with Vladimir Putin? Was that a factor in your decision to nominate him? Does Vladimir Putin ever any banking relationships with The Bank of Cyprus?
Given Ackerman’s track record, and in light of your own reputation for bank turn-around management, why did you hire Josef Ackerman to be Chairman of the Board of The Bank of Cyprus? How confident should its shareholders be in his leadership?
WILBUR ROSS – SUMMARY

At 79, Wilbur Ross’s energy level and sheer capacity to take on new challenges are impressive. If approved, he would be by far the oldest U.S. Commerce Secretary ever. But his nomination is actually not that surprising.

To begin with, Ross’ relationship with Trump goes back at least to the early 1990s, when he helped to finance one of Trump’s first Atlantic City casino deals. Ross has also been one of the most generous donors to Trump’s 2016 campaign. And he is widely reported to be one Trump’s most trusted advisors—in so far as Trump listens to anything other than the voices in his head.

Ross fits right in with the ruling financier elite, way more easily than the President. Of course, Trump campaigned against all these folks when he was courting the lumpen proletariat back in the fall, but when he realized for the first time on Election Eve that he might actually have to govern, he immediately began to invite the hard-working Ivy elite in to do a reverse takeover.

Most important, while Ross’ investment funds have had trouble raising money lately, reportedly out of concern about his age, he does provide Trump with a certain degree of respectability in the investment community. While Trump falsely claims a degree from the Wharton School (he actually attended Penn’s undergraduate real estate economics program), Ross has a degree from Yale and earned a Harvard MBA. While Trump has no record of public or community service of any kind, Ross serves on the boards of a dozen prominent non-profits, including the Japan Society (Chair), Brookings, and the Dean’s Advisory Board at the Harvard Business School. He also holds seats on the boards of 70 for-profit firms, including 7 banks and 19 offshore haven companies.

The January 15 “Ethics Agreement” Ross signed with federal Office of Government Ethics promises that he will divest up to 80 of these investments within 90 to 180 days and that he will resign from most of his board seats as well.

Unfortunately, however, this does not put an end to potential conflicts of interest, especially in the Ross case.

First, from the standpoint of potential conflicts, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Ross still insists on retaining tens of millions of dollars in investments in non-transparent offshore entities.

These include a major co-investment with the Chinese government, a stake in a shipping company that will probably be subject to Commerce Department regulations, and a Cayman Islands “fund of funds” whose underlying assets and co-investors are completely invisible — for all we know they include “friends of Putin.” Ross hasn’t been asked.

Second, the proposed terms of disinvestment are pretty slack. Three months is an eternity on Wall Street – plenty of time to alter their value if Ross were so inclined.

Third, there are no limits on Ross’ partners’ investments in the Bank of Cyprus or any other enterprises. They might decide to reward him in Heaven for favors done now,

Fourth, Ross is not required to unwind his extensive loan portfolio, including the very large sums that he and his group owe to big banks like JP Morgan. These banks may well be within the range of various federal government regulations that official actions by Ross could impact.

Fifth, If Mr. Ross were so inclined, an endless variety of murky dis-invest and buy-back deals might be constructed to offset his formal disinvestments. This is the essence of the problem with trying to enforce conflict of interest rules against extremely rich business people who have built up global networks of other rich business people over decades. Favors are discretely provided and reciprocated. Just ask Vladimir Putin.

Just for the sake of argument, however, let’s assume for the moment that Wilbur is too long in the tooth to take advantage of such loopholes or be motivated by selfish considerations. Let’s also stipulate that he really does believe that what he is serving the public good, as he sees it.

Even then, there is still another valid concern — the most important. From this angle, classic “conflicts of interest” analysis and Ross’s pledges to discontinue his investments and board seats both miss the point.

For just as with the President, the stench of dodgy associations lingers on. In other words, even if Ross divested everything down to his garters, there would still be this annoying puzzle: Why, at the ripe old age of 77 — way back in 2014 — did Wilbur Ross step in with a lot of his and his associates’ money to save this feral bank in Cyprus? Why did he pursue all these associations with dodgy Russian “investors,” including “close associates of Putin?”

Before it confirms Mr. Wilbur Ross, the U.S. Senate needs to conduct a full investigation and demand public testimony to help us understand this glaring puzzle.

IMAGE: Wilbur Ross testifies before a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be commerce secretary at Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
http://www.nationalmemo.com/ross-russian-connections/




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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 » Tue Feb 28, 2017 8:37 am

short story of all of that

Donald Trump cabinet member and business associate co-owned Russian money laundering bank
By Bill Palmer | February 27, 2017 | 0

For the past few weeks, Palmer Report has been reporting on two separate Trump-Russia storylines. One involved a bank, which has loaned more than a billion dollars to Donald Trump, getting busted for Russian money laundering. The other involved Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev buying a house from Trump and then making the strange habit up flying into town wherever Trump goes. Now it turns out they’re two halves of the same Trump-Russia scandal.

As we’ve previously reported, Deutsche Bank has mysteriously loaned more than a billion dollars to Donald Trump and his business partners over the past few years, at a time when most other banks viewed him as too big a risk. We’ve also reported that Deutsche Bank was busted for laundering Russian money for clients in places like New York, where Trump lives, raising the question of whether its willingness to float loans to Trump was really just a cover for Russia to funnel money to him.

But as it turns out, Deutsche Bank was laundering the money through Bank of Cyprus. The two most prominent owners of Bank of Cyprus? One is Donald Trump’s associate Dmitry Rybolovlev (source). The other is Donald Trump’s new Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross (source). That’s the missing link established by Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show tonight. And suddenly, you realize this is all one larger scandal.

Russia was laundering money into Deutsche Bank, through another bank owned by two Donald Trump associates, at the same time it just happened to be inexplicably loaning large sums of money to Trump even though he was a poor investment risk. Trump then rewarded one of the go-between bank’s owners by making him the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. And the other owner of the bank just happens to be the guy who does real estate business with Trump and keeps flying into whatever town Trump visits whenever he’s away from the White House.
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/russia ... bank/1690/
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
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 28, 2017 8:39 am

Image




ANNALS OF DIPLOMACY
MARCH 6, 2017 ISSUE
TRUMP, PUTIN, AND THE NEW COLD WAR
What lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election—and what lies ahead?
By Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa

The D.N.C. hacks, many analysts believe, were just a skirmish in a larger war against Western institutions and alliances.
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
1. SOFT TARGETS

On April 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the K.G.B., ordered foreign-intelligence operatives to carry out “active measures”—aktivniye meropriyatiya—against the reëlection campaign of President Ronald Reagan. Unlike classic espionage, which involves the collection of foreign secrets, active measures aim at influencing events—at undermining a rival power with forgeries, front groups, and countless other techniques honed during the Cold War. The Soviet leadership considered Reagan an implacable militarist. According to extensive notes made by Vasili Mitrokhin, a high-ranking K.G.B. officer and archivist who later defected to Great Britain, Soviet intelligence tried to infiltrate the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committees, popularize the slogan “Reagan Means War!,” and discredit the President as a corrupt servant of the military-industrial complex. The effort had no evident effect. Reagan won forty-nine of fifty states.

Active measures were used by both sides throughout the Cold War. In the nineteen-sixties, Soviet intelligence officers spread a rumor that the U.S. government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the eighties, they spread the rumor that American intelligence had “created” the aids virus, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. They regularly lent support to leftist parties and insurgencies. The C.I.A., for its part, worked to overthrow regimes in Iran, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Chile, and Panama. It used cash payments, propaganda, and sometimes violent measures to sway elections away from leftist parties in Italy, Guatemala, Indonesia, South Vietnam, and Nicaragua. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early nineties, the C.I.A. asked Russia to abandon active measures to spread disinformation that could harm the U.S. Russia promised to do so. But when Sergey Tretyakov, the station chief for Russian intelligence in New York, defected, in 2000, he revealed that Moscow’s active measures had never subsided. “Nothing has changed,” he wrote, in 2008. “Russia is doing everything it can today to embarrass the U.S.”

Vladimir Putin, who is quick to accuse the West of hypocrisy, frequently points to this history. He sees a straight line from the West’s support of the anti-Moscow “color revolutions,” in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, which deposed corrupt, Soviet-era leaders, to its endorsement of the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Five years ago, he blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. “She set the tone for some of our actors in the country and gave the signal,” Putin said. “They heard this and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work.” (No evidence was provided for the accusation.) He considers nongovernmental agencies and civil-society groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the election-monitoring group Golos to be barely disguised instruments of regime change.

The U.S. officials who administer the system that Putin sees as such an existential danger to his own reject his rhetoric as “whataboutism,” a strategy of false moral equivalences. Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser under President Obama, is among those who reject Putin’s logic, but he said, “Putin is not entirely wrong,” adding that, in the past, “we engaged in regime change around the world. There is just enough rope for him to hang us.”*

The 2016 Presidential campaign in the United States was of keen interest to Putin. He loathed Obama, who had applied economic sanctions against Putin’s cronies after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine. (Russian state television derided Obama as “weak,” “uncivilized,” and a “eunuch.”) Clinton, in Putin’s view, was worse—the embodiment of the liberal interventionist strain of U.S. foreign policy, more hawkish than Obama, and an obstacle to ending sanctions and reëstablishing Russian geopolitical influence. At the same time, Putin deftly flattered Trump, who was uncommonly positive in his statements about Putin’s strength and effectiveness as a leader. As early as 2007, Trump declared that Putin was “doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.” In 2013, before visiting Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, Trump wondered, in a tweet, if he would meet Putin, and, “if so, will he become my new best friend?” During the Presidential campaign, Trump delighted in saying that Putin was a superior leader who had turned the Obama Administration into a “laughingstock.”

For those interested in active measures, the digital age presented opportunities far more alluring than anything available in the era of Andropov. The Democratic and Republican National Committees offered what cybersecurity experts call a large “attack surface.” Tied into politics at the highest level, they were nonetheless unprotected by the defenses afforded to sensitive government institutions. John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a former chief of staff of Bill Clinton’s, had every reason to be aware of the fragile nature of modern communications. As a senior counsellor in the Obama White House, he was involved in digital policy. Yet even he had not bothered to use the most elementary sort of defense, two-step verification, for his e-mail account.

“The honest answer is that my team and I were over-reliant on the fact that we were pretty careful about what we click on,” Podesta said. In this instance, he received a phishing e-mail, ostensibly from “the Gmail team,” that urged him to “change your password immediately.” An I.T. person who was asked to verify it mistakenly replied that it was “a legitimate e-mail.”

The American political landscape also offered a particularly soft target for dezinformatsiya, false information intended to discredit the official version of events, or the very notion of reliable truth. Americans were more divided along ideological lines than at any point in two decades, according to the Pew Research Center. American trust in the mainstream media had fallen to a historic low. The fractured media environment seemed to spawn conspiracy theories about everything from Barack Obama’s place of birth (supposedly Kenya) to the origins of climate change (a Chinese hoax). Trump, in building his political identity, promoted such theories.

“Free societies are often split because people have their own views, and that’s what former Soviet and current Russian intelligence tries to take advantage of,” Oleg Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general, who has lived in the United States since 1995, said. “The goal is to deepen the splits.” Such a strategy is especially valuable when a country like Russia, which is considerably weaker than it was at the height of the Soviet era, is waging a geopolitical struggle with a stronger entity.

In early January, two weeks before the Inauguration, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, released a declassified report concluding that Putin had ordered an influence campaign to harm Clinton’s election prospects, fortify Donald Trump’s, and “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.” The declassified report provides more assertion than evidence. Intelligence officers say that this was necessary to protect their information-gathering methods.

Critics of the report have repeatedly noted that intelligence agencies, in the months before the Iraq War, endorsed faulty assessments concerning weapons of mass destruction. But the intelligence community was deeply divided over the actual extent of Iraq’s weapons development; the question of Russia’s responsibility for cyberattacks in the 2016 election has produced no such tumult. Seventeen federal intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia was responsible for the hacking.

In testimony before the Senate, Clapper described an unprecedented Russian effort to interfere in the U.S. electoral process. The operation involved hacking Democrats’ e-mails, publicizing the stolen contents through WikiLeaks, and manipulating social media to spread “fake news” and pro-Trump messages.

At first, Trump derided the scrutiny of the hacking as a “witch hunt,” and said that the attacks could have been from anyone—the Russians, the Chinese, or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds.” In the end, he grudgingly accepted the finding, but insisted that Russian interference had had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” Yevgenia Albats, the author of “The State Within a State,” a book about the K.G.B., said that Putin probably didn’t believe he could alter the results of the election, but, because of his antipathy toward Obama and Clinton, he did what he could to boost Trump’s cause and undermine America’s confidence in its political system. Putin was not interested in keeping the operation covert, Albats said. “He wanted to make it as public as possible. He wanted his presence to be known,” and to “show that, no matter what, we can enter your house and do what we want.”


ILLUSTRATIONS BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO

2. COLD WAR 2.0

Remarkably, the Obama Administration learned of the hacking operation only in early summer—nine months after the F.B.I. first contacted the D.N.C. about the intrusion—and then was reluctant to act too strongly, for fear of being seen as partisan. Leaders of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies met during the summer, but their focus was on how to safeguard state election commissions and electoral systems against a hack on Election Day.

That caution has embittered Clinton’s inner circle. “We understand the bind they were in,” one of Clinton’s senior advisers said. “But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, ‘I’m speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack. The Russian government at the highest levels is trying to influence our most precious asset, our democracy, and I’m not going to let it happen.’ A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice. My attitude is that we don’t have the right to lay blame for the results of this election at anybody’s feet, but, to me, it is bewildering—it is baffling—it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House.”

The Obama circle, which criticizes Clinton’s team for failing to lock down seemingly solid states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that the White House acted appropriately. “What could we have done?” Benjamin Rhodes said. “We said they were doing it, so everybody had the basis to know that all the WikiLeaks material and the fake news were tied to Russia. There was no action we could have taken to stop the e-mails or the fake news from being propagated. . . . All we could do was expose it.”

Last September, at a G-20 summit, in China, Obama confronted Putin about the hacking, telling him to “cut it out,” and, above all, to keep away from the balloting in November, or there would be “serious consequences.” Putin neither denied nor confirmed the hacking efforts, but replied that the United States has long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddle in Russian affairs.

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In October, as evidence of Russian meddling mounted, senior national-security officials met to consider a plan of response; proposals included releasing damaging information about Russian officials, including their bank accounts, or a cyber operation directed at Moscow. Secretary of State John Kerry was concerned that such plans might undercut diplomatic efforts to get Russia to coöperate with the West in Syria—efforts that eventually failed. In the end, security officials unanimously agreed to take a measured approach: the Administration issued a statement, on October 7th, declaring it was confident that the Russians had hacked the D.N.C. The Administration did not want to overreact in a way that could seem political and amplify Trump’s message that the vote was rigged.

The White House watched for signs that Russian intelligence was crossing what a senior national-security official called “the line between covert influence and adversely affecting the vote count”—and found no evidence that it had done so. At the time, Clinton was leading in the race, which, the official said, reinforced Obama’s decision not to respond more aggressively. “If we have a very forceful response, it actually helps delegitimize the election.”

That sense of caution continued during the transition, when Obama was intent on an orderly transfer of power. Secretary of State Kerry proposed the creation of an independent bipartisan group to investigate Russian interference in the election. It would have been modelled on the 9/11 Commission, a body consisting of five Republicans and five Democrats who interviewed more than twelve hundred people. According to two senior officials, Obama reviewed Kerry’s proposal but ultimately rejected it, in part because he was convinced that Republicans in Congress would regard it as a partisan exercise. One aide who favored the idea says, “It would have gotten the ball rolling, making it difficult for Trump to shut it down. Now it’s a lot harder to make it happen.”

During the transition, officials in the Obama Administration were hearing that Trump was somehow compromised or beholden to Russian interests. “The Russians make investments in people not knowing the exact outcome,” one senior Administration official said. “They obtain leverage on those people, too.” No conclusive evidence has yet emerged for such suspicions about Trump. Another Administration official said that, during the transfer of power, classified intelligence had shown multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russian representatives, but nothing that rose to the level of aiding or coördinating the interference with the election. “We had no clear information—that I was aware of—of collusion,” the official said. That question, however, persists, and will likely be a central focus for congressional investigators.

By Inauguration Day, January 20th, the evidence of a wide-scale Russian operation had prompted the formation of a joint task force, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the financial-crimes unit of the Treasury Department. Three Senate committees, including the Intelligence Committee, have launched inquiries; some Democrats worry that the Trump Administration will try to stifle these investigations. Although senators on the Intelligence Committee cannot reveal classified information, they have ways of signalling concern. Three weeks after the election, Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and six other members of the committee sent a public letter to Obama, declaring, “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public.” At a hearing in January, Wyden pushed further. While questioning James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., Wyden cited media reports that some Trump associates had links to Russians who are close to Putin. Wyden asked if Comey would declassify information on that subject and “release it to the American people.” Comey said, “I can’t talk about it.” Wyden’s questioning had served its purpose.

Later, in an interview, Wyden said, “My increasing concern is that classification now is being used much more for political security than for national security. We wanted to get that out before a new Administration took place. I can’t remember seven senators joining a declassification request.” Asked if he suspects that there has been improper contact between the Trump campaign and Russian interests, Wyden said, “I can’t get into that”—without revealing classified information. “But what I can tell you is, I continue to believe, as I have for many months, that there is more that could be declassified.” He added, “When a foreign power interferes with American institutions, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s business as usual,’ and leave it at that. There’s a historical imperative here, too.” After viewing the classified materials, Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the Russia investigation, “This may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”

Two weeks before the Inauguration, intelligence officers briefed both Obama and Trump about a dossier of unverified allegations compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. The thirty-five-page dossier, which included claims about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 trip to Moscow, had been shopped around to various media outlets by researchers opposed to Trump’s candidacy. The dossier concluded that Russia had personal and financial material on Trump that could be used as blackmail. It said that the Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for years. According to current and former government officials, prurient details in the dossier generated skepticism among some members of the intelligence community, who, as one put it, regarded it as a “nutty” product to present to a President. But, in the weeks that followed, they confirmed some of its less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals. “They are continuing to chase down stuff from the dossier, and, at its core, a lot of it is bearing out,” an intelligence official said. Some officials believe that one reason the Russians compiled information on Trump during his 2013 trip was that he was meeting with Russian oligarchs who might be stashing money abroad—a sign of disloyalty, in Putin’s eyes.

Trump denounced the dossier as a fake. Putin’s spokesman called it “pulp fiction.” But, before the dossier became public, Senator John McCain passed it along to the F.B.I.; later, some of his colleagues said that it should be part of an investigation of Trump. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, vowed to investigate “everywhere the intelligence tells us to go.”

For many national-security officials, the e-mail hacks were part of a larger, and deeply troubling, picture: Putin’s desire to damage American confidence and to undermine the Western alliances—diplomatic, financial, and military—that have shaped the postwar world.

Not long before leaving the White House, Benjamin Rhodes said that the Obama Administration was convinced that Putin had gone into an “offensive mode beyond what he sees as his sphere of influence,” setting out to encourage the “breakup” of the European Union, destabilize nato, and unnerve the object of his keenest resentment—the United States. Rhodes said, “The new phase we’re in is that the Russians have moved into an offensive posture that threatens the very international order.” Samantha Power offered a similar warning, shortly before leaving her post as United Nations Ambassador. Russia, she said, was “taking steps that are weakening the rules-based order that we have benefitted from for seven decades.”

For nearly two decades, U.S.-Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable. Although the two countries have come to agreements on various issues, including trade and arms control, the general picture is grim. Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like “the second Cold War.”

The level of tension has alarmed experienced hands on both sides. “What we have is a situation in which the strong leader of a relatively weak state is acting in opposition to weak leaders of relatively strong states,” General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of nato, said. “And that strong leader is Putin. He is calling the shots at the moment.” Shirreff observes that nato’s withdrawal of military forces from Europe has been answered with incidents of Russian aggression, and with a sizable buildup of forces in the vicinity of the Baltic states, including an aircraft-carrier group dispatched to the North Sea, an expanded deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin, for its part, views the expansion of nato to Russia’s borders as itself a provocation, and points to such U.S. measures as the placement of a new ground-based missile-defense system in Deveselu, Romania.

Robert Gates, who was Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, describes relations between Obama and Putin as having been “poisonous” and casts at least some of the blame on Obama; referring to Russia as a “regional power,” as Obama did, was “the equivalent of referring to isis as a J.V. team,” in his view. “I think the new Administration has a big challenge in front of it in terms of stopping the downward spiral in the U.S.-Russia relationship while pushing back against Putin’s aggression and general thuggery,” Gates said. “Every time nato makes a move or Russia makes a move near its border, there is a response. Where does that all stop? So there is a need to stop that downward spiral. The dilemma is how do you do that without handing Putin a victory of huge proportions?”

Some in Moscow are alarmed, too. Dmitry Trenin, a well-connected political and military analyst for the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that in early fall, before Trump’s victory, “we were on a course for a ‘kinetic’ collision in Syria.” He said that the Kremlin expected that, if Clinton won, she would take military action in Syria, perhaps establishing no-fly zones, provoking the rebels to shoot down Russian aircraft, “and getting the Russians to feel it was Afghanistan revisited.” He added, “Then my imagination just left me.”

Not in a generation has the enmity run this deep, according to Sergey Rogov, the academic director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, in Moscow. “I spent many years in the trenches of the first Cold War, and I don’t want to die in the trenches of the second,” Rogov said. “We are back to 1983, and I don’t enjoy being thirty-four years younger in this way. It’s frightening.”



3. PUTIN’S WORLD

Putin’s resentment of the West, and his corresponding ambition to establish an anti-Western conservatism, is rooted in his experience of decline and fall—not of Communist ideology, which was never a central concern of his generation, but, rather, of Russian power and pride. Putin, who was born in 1952, grew up in Leningrad, where, during the Second World War, Nazi troops imposed a nine-hundred-day siege that starved the city. His father was badly wounded in the war. Putin joined the K.G.B. in 1975, when he was twenty-three, and was eventually sent to East Germany.

Posted in one of the grayest of the Soviet satellites, Putin entirely missed the sense of awakening and opportunity that accompanied perestroika, and experienced only the state’s growing fecklessness. At the very moment the Berlin Wall was breached, in November, 1989, he was in the basement of a Soviet diplomatic compound in Dresden feeding top-secret documents into a furnace. As crowds of Germans threatened to break into the building, officers called Moscow for assistance, but, in Putin’s words, “Moscow was silent.”

Putin returned to Russia, where the sense of post-imperial decline persisted. The West no longer feared Soviet power; Eastern and Central Europe were beyond Moscow’s control; and the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union were all going their own way. An empire shaped by Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin was dissolving.

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In Moscow, Western reporters could arrange visits to crumbling nuclear-weapons sites, once secret underground bunkers, and half-empty prison camps. The most forbidding commissars of the Soviet Union—leaders of the K.G.B., the Army, and the Communist Party—failed in an attempt to pull off a counter-revolutionary coup d’état, in August, 1991, and were locked away in a notorious prison called the Sailor’s Rest. Other high-ranking loyalists, refusing the judgment of the new order, administered justice for themselves. The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, knowing that he was about to be arrested, wrote a note (“I lived honestly all my life”), shot his wife, shoved the barrel of a revolver into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

For Westerners caught up in post-Cold War triumphalism, it was easier to take note of the new liberties than of the new anxieties, which were profound for millions of Russians. The fall of the imperial state meant the loss of two million square miles of territory, a parcel larger than India. Tens of millions of ethnic Russians now found themselves “abroad.” Amid newfound freedoms of expression, travel, religion, and association, there was also a palpable sense of disorientation, humiliation, and drift.

In speeches and interviews, Putin rarely mentions any sense of liberation after the fall of Communism and the Soviet Union; he recalls the nineteen-nineties as a period of unremitting chaos, in which Western partners tried to force their advantages, demanding that Russia swallow everything from the eastward expansion of nato to the invasion of its Slavic allies in the former Yugoslavia. This is a common narrative, but it ignores some stubborn facts. The West welcomed Russia into the G-8 economic alliance. The violence in the Balkans was the worst in Europe since the end of the Second World War and without intervention would likely have dragged on. And Russian security concerns were hardly the only issue at stake with respect to the expansion of nato; Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries in the region were now sovereign and wanted protection.

“It just felt to me grotesquely unfair, if that word can be used in geopolitics, that yet again the Central Europeans were going to be screwed,” Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s leading adviser on Russia and the region, said. “To tell them they had to live in a security limbo because the Russians would have hurt feelings and be frightened just didn’t hold water.” Nevertheless, American politicians did worry about how reordering the economic and security arrangements of Europe would affect a fallen power and would-be partner. Clinton and his advisers were aware that reactionary political forces in Russia—the so-called “red-brown coalition” of diehard Communists and resurgent nationalists—viewed the United States as exploitative and triumphalist and hoped to gain control of the state.

In 1996, during a summit meeting in Moscow, Clinton went for an early-morning run with Talbott in the Sparrow Hills, near Moscow State University. Clinton had known Talbott since they were students at Oxford, and confided his anxiety. He did not regret the expansion of nato or the decision, at last, to battle Serbian forces in Bosnia. But he knew that he was making Yeltsin’s political life excruciatingly difficult.

“We keep telling ol’ Boris, ‘O.K., now, here’s what you’ve got to do next—here’s some more shit for your face,’ ” Clinton told Talbott as they ran. “And that makes it real hard for him, given what he’s up against and who he’s dealing with.”

Earlier that year, Yeltsin had summoned Talbott. “I don’t like it when the U.S. flaunts its superiority,” he told him. “Russia’s difficulties are only temporary, and not only because we have nuclear weapons but also because of our economy, our culture, our spiritual strength. All that amounts to a legitimate, undeniable basis for equal treatment. Russia will rise again! I repeat: Russia will rise again.”

When the 1996 election season began, Yeltsin was polling in the single digits. Much of the country held him responsible for economic measures that seemed to help only those close to Kremlin power. For millions, reform—including the “shock therapy” pushed by Western advisers and politicians—meant a collapse in basic services, hyperinflation, corruption, kleptocratic privatization, and an economic downturn as severe as the Great Depression. Most Russians blamed not the corrosion of the old system but, rather, the corruptions of the new. Demokratiya (democracy) was popularly referred to as dermokratiya (shit-ocracy). Yeltsin, benefitting from the support of both the oligarchs and the International Monetary Fund, managed to eke out a victory against his Communist opponent, but he continued to drink heavily, despite a history of heart attacks, and, in his final years in power, was often a sorry, inebriated spectacle.

On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Yeltsin appeared on national television sitting in front of a Christmas tree. Looking blocky and moribund, he said that he was resigning. “I am sorry that many of our dreams failed to come true,” he said. “I am sorry that I did not live up to the hopes of people who believed that we could, with a single effort, a single strong push, jump out of the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past and into a bright, wealthy, civilized future. I used to believe that myself.”

A man who had resisted a coup eight years earlier no longer had the endurance for office or the political imagination to advance the cause. “I have done all I could,” he said. “A new generation is coming.” With that, he appointed as his successor Vladimir Putin, a relatively obscure intelligence agent who had been accelerated through the ranks because he had proved himself disciplined, shrewd, and, above all, loyal to his bosses.

One of Putin’s first decrees was to protect Yeltsin from future prosecution. Then he set out to stabilize the country and put it on a course of traditional Russian autocracy. “As Yeltsin started to withdraw, the old system reconsolidated, and Putin finalized this regression,” Andrei Kozyrev, the foreign minister between 1990 and 1996, said. “The fundamental problem was an inability to complete the economic and political reforms, and so we slipped back into confrontation with the West and nato.”

Putin revealed his distrust for an open system almost immediately. He saw a state that had become barely functional, and he set about restoring its authority the only way he knew how: manually, and from the top. He replaced the freewheeling anarchy of Yeltsin’s rule with something more systematized, casting aside or coöpting the oligarchs of the nineteen-nineties and elevating a cast of corrupt satraps loyal to him—an arrangement that became known as Kremlin, Inc. Every aspect of the country’s political life, including the media, was brought under the “vertical of power” that he constructed. When Yeltsin held office, privately owned television stations, such as NTV, reported on the horrific war in Chechnya and even satirized Yeltsin and other Kremlin leaders on a puppet show called “Kukly.” NTV, which was owned by an oligarch named Vladimir Gusinsky, seemed to test Putin in the beginning, airing discussions about corruption and human-rights abuses; “Kukly” added a puppet depicting the new President. Putin was not amused. Within five months of taking power, he dispatched armed Interior Ministry troops to raid Gusinsky’s headquarters; by 2001, Gusinsky had been forced to give up NTV to more obedient owners and had fled the country. Ever since, television has been under strict federal control.

Putin, in his first few years in office, was relatively solicitous of the West. He was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. When he spoke at the Bundestag, later that month, he addressed its members in German, the language that he had spoken as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden. He even entertained the notion of Russian membership in nato.

America’s invasion of Iraq, which Putin opposed, marked a change in his thinking. Bush had made some progress with him on bilateral issues such as nuclear-arms proliferation, but by 2007 Putin had grown deeply disenchanted and came to feel that the West was treating Russia as a “vassal.” Robert Gates recalls a security conference, in Munich, in 2007, at which Putin angrily charged that the United States had “overstepped its national borders in every area” and that the expansion of nato was directed against Russian interests. “People were inclined to pass it off as a one-off,” Gates said. “But it was a harbinger.”

For Putin, it was a story of misplaced hopes and rejection: he became convinced that, no matter how accommodating he might try to be, Western powers—the United States, above all—had an innate disinclination to treat Russia as a full partner and a respected member of the international order. At home, Putin was increasingly drawn to an authoritarian, nationalist conception of the Russian state. He knew that the fall of Communism and Soviet power had left a vacuum—the lack of a “national idea” to replace Marxism-Leninism. When Putin returned to the Presidency for a third term, in 2012, he felt the need to develop a Russian ideology of his own, and called on currents that run deep in Russian political culture: nationalism, xenophobia, and social conservatism. When, four years ago, Putin endorsed anti-gay legislation, for instance, he was playing to entrenched conservative prejudices that predate Soviet Communism—perhaps not for Western-oriented intellectuals and the urban middle class but for many millions of others.

Putin was hardly surprised by the liberal umbrage voiced by the Obama Administration and other Western governments. That confrontation was the point, a means of cementing his authority at home by playing up the notion of an encircled, perpetually menaced Russian state. Although Putin grew up under Soviet atheism, he nonetheless decried secular Americans and Europeans for “rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization.” His conservatism, he insisted, “prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”

He was alarmed by the Obama Administration’s embrace of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. And he was infuriated by the U.S.-led assault on Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. In early 2011, as Libyans challenged Qaddafi, Putin was ostensibly offstage, serving as Prime Minister; his protégé Dmitry Medvedev was President, and made a crucial decision not to veto an American-backed U.N. Security Council resolution in favor of military action in Libya. In a rare public split, Putin condemned the decision, comparing the resolution to a “medieval call to the crusades.” In October, 2011, a crowd of Libyans found Qaddafi hiding in a culvert with a gold-plated 9-mm. pistol, dragged him out, and killed him—a gruesome event that was broadcast worldwide. From Putin’s perspective, this was a case study in Western intervention: stir up protests, give them rhetorical support and diplomatic cover, and, if that doesn’t work, send in the fighter jets. The epilogue comes in the form of uncontrollable violence and an inglorious end for the country’s leader. According to Mikhail Zygar, the former editor-in-chief of the independent Internet station TV Rain and the author of “All the Kremlin’s Men,” Putin absorbed the death of Qaddafi as an object lesson: weakness and compromise were impermissible. “When he was a pariah, no one touched him,” Zygar wrote. “But as soon as he opened up he was not only overthrown but killed in the street like a mangy old cur.”

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Putin also regarded the anti-Kremlin, pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow, which started in 2011, as a rehearsal for an uprising that had to be thwarted. Together with the upheavals abroad, they compounded his grievances against the West. Obama’s national-security adviser at the time, Tom Donilon, observed that Putin’s concerns were then focussed on domestic political stability and perceived foreign threats to it. He was convinced that “there were efforts under way to undermine his regime,” Donilon said. “From the outset of his second run as President, in my judgment, he was bringing Russia to a posture of pretty active hostility toward the United States and the West.” In September, 2013, after Putin declined requests to turn over Edward Snowden, Obama cancelled a planned summit in Moscow. “The communication really broke after that,” Donilon said. He saw Putin steadily remove non-intelligence personnel from his orbit. “In sharp contrast to the Chinese situation, there’s not a Russian national-security ‘system,’ ” he said. “He works with a very small group of individuals, namely, former K.G.B. and F.S.B. people.”

Dissent has now been effectively marginalized. Opposition candidates are frequently kept off the ballot on legal technicalities, and, when they do make it on, they are denied media coverage, let alone the “administrative resources” enjoyed by pro-Kremlin politicians. Some thirty journalists have been murdered in Russia in the past decade and a half; human-rights groups that receive funding from abroad are registered in Moscow as “foreign agents.” And contemporary Russian television is not only compliant but celebratory. “Imagine you have two dozen TV channels and it is all Fox News,” Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister under Putin and now a critic, said.

Yet those channels bear little resemblance to the dreary Soviet broadcasts with their stilted language and shabby production values. Just as Putin no longer fills prison camps with countless “enemies of the people,” as Stalin did, but, rather, makes a chilling example of a famous few, like the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky or the group Pussy Riot, his propagandists have taken their cue from foreign forms: magazine shows, shout-fests, game shows, and reality shows. There are many figures in public life who are not permitted to appear on any talk show or news program. Russians can still find independent information on Facebook and various Web sites; critical books and magazines are available in stores and online; Echo of Moscow, a liberal radio station, hangs on. But, even in the Internet era, more than eighty per cent of Russians get their news from television. Manipulation of TV coverage is a crucial factor in Putin’s extraordinarily high popularity ratings, typically in excess of eighty per cent—ratings that Donald Trump both admires and envies.

In October, 2012, on the occasion of Putin’s sixtieth birthday, Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of “News of the Week,” a favorite TV show of Putin’s, delivered a long encomium to the President: “In terms of the scope of his activities, Putin can be compared to only one of his predecessors in the twentieth century—Stalin.” NTV aired a documentary, “Visiting Putin,” that sent a broadcaster to his office and his house on the outskirts of Moscow. Although well-informed critics have said that Putin is worth tens of billions of dollars and has twenty residences at his disposal, the program portrayed him as a near-ascetic, who wakes at eight-thirty, lifts weights, swims long distances, eats a modest breakfast (beet juice, porridge, raw quail eggs), and works deep into the night.

“All these TV genres emphasize the stature of Putin, as being above everybody and everything—not just the ultimate boss but the embodiment of Russian statehood,” Masha Lipman, the editor of the journal Counterpoint, said. The most important political space is not the grounds of the Kremlin. It is the space within the President’s skull.

“A well-known person once said, ‘You can get much farther with a kind word and a Smith & Wesson than you can with just a kind word,’ ” Putin says in “President,” a long documentary that aired on state television in 2015. “Unfortunately, he was right.” Later in the documentary, the host asks Putin if he thinks that the West fears Russia, because a “once failing state” is now “suddenly a powerful political player.” He calls Putin “the leader, if I may say, of the conservative part of both European and American society.”

Putin accepts both premises. “The so-called establishment, the political and economic élites of these countries, they like us only when we are poor and standing there with a beggar’s bowl,” he says. “As soon as we start talking about our interests and they start feeling some element of geopolitical competition, well, they don’t like that.”

In February, 2014, hours after President Victor Yanukovych of Ukraine, weakened by months of protests, fled Kiev, Putin made the decision to invade Crimea. He feared that Ukraine would turn its back on Russia and gravitate toward Europe. It was a way for Putin to signal, loudly and rudely, that he was finished going along with the Western-led order. It was personal as well. Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., said that the fall of Yanukovych led Putin to worry about his own power and well-being. “It happened in the heart of the Slavic world, and he could not allow it to become a precedent for a similar movement in Russia against him,” Morell said. “He had to crush it.”

Putin and members of his circle also saw the Syrian civil war as an opportunity to halt a trend that had started with the invasion of Iraq and continued through the downfall of dictators in Egypt and Libya. A former senior U.S. official who has interacted with Russians said, “There was this period of time when the United States, in Putin’s view, was able to use international institutions to take on regimes that we found offensive, right through Libya, and Putin was determined to put a stake in the ground in Syria, to have Russia be at the table, and be able to resist the international community’s efforts to continue this pattern of conduct.” As Russia’s Defense Minister, Sergey Shoigu, remarked last month, Russia’s intervention in Syria “helped solve the geopolitical task of breaking the chain of ‘color revolutions.’ ” Russian television, of course, covered the siege of Aleppo as an enlightened act of liberation, free of any brutality or abuses.

In the United States, the issue of what to do about Russia was a growing point of contention between the Pentagon and the White House. Ukraine’s government wanted advanced weaponry to help battle Russian-backed rebels. Evelyn Farkas, the Pentagon’s most senior policy officer for Russia, strongly supported the request; Obama and others on his national-security team turned it down. Instead, the U.S. provided “nonlethal” aid, including vehicles, radar, and body armor. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 2014, Farkas argued for greater American force, calling Russia’s actions “an affront to the international order that we and our allies have worked to build since the end of the Cold War.”

The Administration believed, with considerable justification, that escalating the conflict would provoke retaliation from Russia, push Putin into a corner, and—since Putin would never let the rebels suffer a battlefield defeat—prove costly for Ukraine. But Farkas disagreed: “We just ignore everything the Russians do in Ukraine because, well, that’s Ukraine and the stakes are so high for Russia there. They wouldn’t risk it in the U.S.” Finally, she gave up trying to convince Obama. “I was so done,” she said. “I was so tired of fighting.” She resigned in October, 2015, and eventually became a foreign-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton, who had sometimes favored the use of military force when Obama did not. “The crazy thing was, when I joined the Clinton campaign, I was, like, Great, I’m not going to have to fight anymore, because she got it on Russia,” Farkas said. “Then it just got worse.”


General Valery Gerasimov was an exponent of Moscow’s “hybrid war” strategy.

4. HYBRID WAR

Putin rarely uses a computer, but he has moved his country into the digital age. Russia was once a technological laggard: the Soviets did not connect to the global Internet until 1990, and the state security services were so befuddled by the technology that, according to “The Red Web,” by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, agents demanded that Relcom, Russia’s first commercial Internet Service Provider, print out every communication that crossed its network. (Engineers rebelled, and the order was abandoned.) By 1996, however, a new generation of hackers in Russia had achieved the first state-directed penetration of America’s military network, pilfering tens of thousands of files, including military-hardware designs, maps of military installations, and troop configurations. In 2008, according to “Dark Territory,” a history of cyberwar by Fred Kaplan, Russian hackers accomplished a feat that Pentagon officials considered almost impossible: breaching a classified network that wasn’t even connected to the public Internet. Apparently, Russian spies had supplied cheap thumb drives, stocked with viruses, to retail kiosks near nato headquarters in Kabul, betting, correctly, that a U.S. serviceman or woman would buy one and insert it into a secure computer. In the past decade, cyber tactics have become an essential component of Russia’s efforts to exert influence over its neighbors.

Late one evening in the spring of 2007, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia was at home using his laptop computer. He had trouble getting online. The news sites were down. The banks were down. Government sites were down. The President figured that it must be some kind of technical glitch. “The first reaction is not ‘We’re under attack,’ ” he said recently. But, after a few calls, he realized that someone was attacking one of Estonia’s core assets.

The birthplace of Skype and the home of other tech firms, Estonia is known in technology circles as “eStonia”; it is one of the most wired countries in the world. But Estonia was involved in a conflict with Russia over plans to move a Second World War-era statue of a Soviet soldier out of the center of Tallinn, the capital. Estonians regarded it as a symbol of occupation. The Russian government had warned publicly that moving it would be a grave offense to history and “disastrous for Estonians.”

On April 27th, the statue was moved. Almost immediately, commentators in Russian-language chat rooms posted instructions on how to become a “script kiddie,” an amateur hacker. The attackers did not need to “hack” Estonia’s sites, exactly; they simply swamped them with a “distributed denial of service”—DDoS—assault, which continued for two weeks. Investigators never pinpointed the source of the attack, but Ilves, who left the Presidency in October, 2016, believes that it was an alliance between members of the Russian government and organized crime. “I call it a public-private partnership,” he said wryly. “It was a state actor that paid mafiosos.”

Although the incident barely registered in international headlines, it was a landmark event: a state-backed cyberattack for political purposes. “What Estonia showed was that Russia was going to react in a new but aggressive way to perceived political slights,” Michael Sulmeyer, a senior Pentagon official in charge of cyber policy under Obama, said. “What was the offending act? The Estonians moved a statue.”

Russia was acquiring a reputation, in defense circles, for ambition, technical acumen, and speed. Barely a year after the Estonia attack, during a conflict with Georgia over the territory of South Ossetia, Russian tanks and planes crossed into the disputed territory at the same moment that hackers broke into fifty-four Web sites serving the government, media, and banks. They stole military information and immobilized the nation’s Internet. Georgian officers struggled to send orders to troops, and bewildered citizens had no way to find out what was happening.

The Georgia campaign was “one of the first times you’ve seen conventional ground operations married with cyber activity,” Sulmeyer said. “It showed not just an understanding that these techniques could be useful in combined ops but that the Russians were willing to do them. These guys implemented.”

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And yet Russian military planners and officials in the Kremlin regarded Georgia as a failure in the realm of international propaganda. Although Russia prevailed militarily, its narrative was overshadowed by the Georgian one from the first minutes of the campaign. For Russia, the five-day conflict represented a “total defeat in the information space,” said Pavel Zolotarev, a retired major general in the Russian Army, who is now a professor at the Academy of Military Sciences. “Our television showed how the shelling started, the incursion of Georgian forces, and so on,” Zolotarev, who helped draft Russia’s national-security doctrine in the nineteen-nineties, said. “These pictures were shown in the West two days later—but as if Russia were doing the shelling, attacking Georgia.” Russian generals took this lesson to heart, and began to study how to use the media and other instruments to wage “information war,” later putting what they learned into practice in Ukraine and then Syria.

The United States, meanwhile, had its own notable cyberwar success. In 2008, in tandem with Israeli intelligence, the U.S. launched the first digital attack on another country’s critical infrastructure, deploying a “worm,” known as Stuxnet, that was designed to cause centrifuges in Iran to spin out of control and thereby delay its nuclear development.

Yet diplomatic concerns inhibited some of the United States’ active measures. The Obama Administration had a “reset” policy with Russia, forging agreements and coöperating on select issues, despite an over-all increase in tension. “Cyber was an area where we were trying to work with Russia,” Evelyn Farkas, the Pentagon official, said. “That’s the irony. We were meeting with their big spies, trying to develop some kind of arms control for cyber.”

When Robert Knake arrived as the director of cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council, in 2011, the White House had a formal initiative to combat Chinese hacking, known as the Counter-China strategy. Knake recalled, “The question was: ‘O.K., now, what’s the counter-Russia plan? And the counter-Iran plan?’ ” The difficulty was that, in the aftermath of Stuxnet, the U.S. needed Iran’s coöperation on diplomatic priorities. From 2011 to 2013, Iranian-backed hackers waged a sustained DDoS attack on dozens of American banks and financial-services companies, but the U.S. didn’t respond in kind, partly because the Administration was negotiating with Iran to curb its nuclear program. “If we had unleashed the fury in response to that DDoS attack, I don’t know if we would have gotten an Iran deal,” Knake said. In other cases, the Administration declined to respond forcefully so that it could retain the option of deploying similar means on other countries. “As long as we think we’re getting more value from this set of rules than we’re losing, then this is the set of rules we want to promote,” Knake said.

A new doctrine was taking shape, under which Russia sought to study the nefarious tools of the West, as it understood them, so as to counteract them at home and put them into practice abroad. One indication of what that might look like came in February, 2013, when, in the pages of the Military-Industrial Courier—a journal with a tiny yet influential readership of Russian military strategists—Valery Gerasimov, the Russian chief of general staff, published an article with the anodyne title “The Value of Science in Prediction.” The article identified and urged the adoption of a Western strategy that involved military, technological, media, political, and intelligence tactics that would destabilize an enemy at minimal cost. The strategy, which came to be known as “hybrid war,” was an amalgam that states have used for generations, but the text took on the status of a legend, and is now known in international military circles as the Gerasimov doctrine.

Gerasimov is sixty-one years old, and is always photographed in a stiff, forest-green military uniform and with a perpetually sagging frown. He trained as a tank commander, and then climbed the military hierarchy; he led the Fifty-eighth Army during the Second Chechen War. In the article for Military-Industrial Courier, Gerasimov suggested that, in the future, wars will be fought with a four-to-one ratio of nonmilitary to military measures. The former, he wrote, should include efforts to shape the political and social landscape of the adversary through subversion, espionage, propaganda, and cyberattacks. His essay, written in the shadow of the Arab Spring, cited the anarchy and violence that erupted in Libya and Syria as proof that, when faced with the combination of pressure and interference, a “perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months, and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.”

Such events were “typical of warfare in the twenty-first century,” he wrote. “The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”

Pavel Zolotarev, the retired Russian general, explained that, when Gerasimov’s essay was published, “we had come to the conclusion, having analyzed the actions of Western countries in the post-Soviet space—first of all the United States—that manipulation in the information sphere is a very effective tool.” Previously, one had to use “grandfather-style methods: scatter leaflets, throw around some printed materials, manipulate the radio or television,” Zolotarev said. “But, all of a sudden, new means have appeared.”

Gerasimov’s prescriptions began to look prophetic a year later, when Russia annexed Crimea in a quick operation that caught U.S. officials by surprise and contravened international law. Russian-made propaganda whipped up pro-Moscow sentiment in a population that was already wary of Ukrainian political leaders in Kiev and had deep, historical ties with Russia. Unidentified soldiers (the so-called “little green men”) surrounded Ukrainian bases in Crimea, and within days Russia had pulled off a hastily organized, stage-managed referendum.

Even with the rise of new technologies, the underlying truth about such operations hasn’t changed. They are less a way to conjure up something out of nothing than to stir a pot that is already bubbling. In the U.S., a strategy like the alleged hacking of the Democrats was merely an effort to deepen an existing state of disarray and distrust. “For something to happen, many factors have to come together at once,” said Alexander Sharavin, the head of a military research institute and a member of the Academy of Military Sciences, in Moscow, where Gerasimov often speaks. “If you go to Great Britain, for example, and tell them the Queen is bad, nothing will happen, there will be no revolution, because the necessary conditions are absent—there is no existing background for this operation.” But, Sharavin said, “in America those preconditions existed.”

As tensions with Russia rose over the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, in early 2014, the U.S. was stung by a tactic common in Moscow politics: the weaponized leak. While the U.S. and the European Union discussed the details of a potential transitional government in Ukraine, an aide to the Russian deputy prime minister tweeted a reference to part of a wiretapped conversation, posted soon afterward to YouTube, between Victoria Nuland, a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, and her colleague Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. Ambassador in Ukraine. Nuland is heard saying “Fuck the E.U.”—a line that the Russians knew would cause difficulties between the Americans and their E.U. counterparts. The State Department called the leak “a new low in Russian tradecraft.” Asked what form of penalty was extracted from Russia, Michael McFaul, the Ambassador to Moscow during the Obama Administration, said, “To the best of my knowledge, there was none. I think that was a mistake.”

Obama’s adviser Benjamin Rhodes said that Russia’s aggressiveness had accelerated since the first demonstrations on Maidan Square, in Kiev. “When the history books are written, it will be said that a couple of weeks on the Maidan is where this went from being a Cold War-style competition to a much bigger deal,” he said. “Putin’s unwillingness to abide by any norms began at that point. It went from provocative to disrespectful of any international boundary.”

In the fall of 2014, a hacking group known as the Dukes entered an unclassified computer system at the U.S. State Department and gained enough control so that, as one official put it, they “owned” the system. In security circles, the Dukes—also referred to as Cozy Bear—were believed to be directed by the Russian government. Very little is known about the size and composition of Russia’s team of state cyberwarriors. In 2013, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it was forming “scientific” and “information operations” battalions. A defense official later explained their purpose as “disrupting the information networks of the probable enemy.” Oleg Demidov, an expert on information security and cybercrime, and a consultant at the PIR-Center, a research institute in Moscow, said, “At the time, this idea was met with laughter. But this was something real, these units were indeed formed, and staffed by graduates of the country’s leading technical universities.” The next year, the Russian military expanded its public recruitment of young programmers; social-media ads for the “Research Squadron of the Russian Federation” depicted a soldier putting down a rifle and turning to a keyboard, accompanied by a heavy-metal soundtrack.

A retired K.G.B. colonel recently told the magazine Ogonyok that Russia had about a thousand people working in military and security operations online. According to a detailed report that appeared last November in the well-regarded online publication Meduza, several hundred technical specialists have left commercial firms to work for state-run cyber teams. A Defense Ministry spokesperson refused to confirm any details, telling a Meduza correspondent that the topic is secret, “so no one can see how we might apply these methods,” and warning against publication: “Don’t risk doing anything further—don’t put yourself in the crosshairs.”

After penetrating the State Department, the Dukes moved on to the unclassified computer network that serves the executive office of the President. (The network manages, for instance, details of his movements.) By February, 2015, the increasing intensity of Russian intrusions into sensitive political targets had raised alarms in Washington, and Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told a Senate hearing that the “Russian cyberthreat is more severe than we have previously assessed.”

European officials voice similar concerns. The Directorate-General for External Security, the French spy agency, is reportedly worried that Russian spies, hackers, and others are working to help Marine Le Pen, the Presidential candidate of the far-right National Front Party. Russian state media have suggested that one of her opponents, Emmanuel Macron, is a tool of American banks and has a secret gay lover. Le Pen, whose party has received loans from a Russian bank, has toed the Kremlin line on Crimea, saying that the territory was always part of Russia.

Bruno Kahl, the head of Germany’s foreign-intelligence agency, has expressed concern that Russian hackers are also trying to disrupt the German political scene, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is standing for reëlection as a stalwart supporter of nato and the E.U. Citing Russian interference in the American elections, Kahl told the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, “The perpetrators are interested in delegitimizing the democratic process, as such, regardless of whom that ends up helping.” The director of Germany’s domestic-intelligence agency has since warned of “growing evidence for attempts to influence the federal election.” He told the Times that there has already been an increase in “aggressive cyberespionage” aimed at German politicians.

When the Dukes turned their attention to the Democratic National Committee, in 2015, the evident goal was to exploit divisions among Party members. In September, an F.B.I. agent called the D.N.C. and said that its computer network appeared to have been hacked. The agent was transferred to the help desk, where a tech-support contractor jotted down the information, checked Google for information on “the Dukes,” and ran a basic check for evidence of hacking. The F.B.I. agent left follow-up messages in October but never visited the office, and the D.N.C. leadership failed to mount a full-scale defense.

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By March, 2016, the threat was unmistakable. Cybersecurity experts detected a second group of Russian hackers, known as Fancy Bear, who used “spear-phishing” messages to break into accounts belonging to John Podesta and other Democratic officials. Like Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear had left a trail around the globe, with its technical signature visible in cyberattacks against the German parliament, Ukrainian artillery systems, and the World Anti-Doping Agency. “I’ve never seen a group that doesn’t change its style of work after it has been detected,” Ilya Sachkov, who runs a leading cybersecurity firm in Moscow, said. “What logic led them to not adjust their methods?” Charles Carmakal, a specialist at FireEye, a cybersecurity organization that had previously studied the hacking groups implicated in the election operation, said that sophisticated hackers often leave forensic trails. “Even the best teams make mistakes, and, a lot of times, the guys who are great at hacking are not forensics guys who also know how to do investigations and understand all the artifacts that they’re leaving on a machine.”

Ultimately, the attack didn’t require an enormous amount of expertise. Gaining access to an e-mail account through spear-phishing is more akin to breaking into a car with a clothes hanger than to building a complex cyberweapon like Stuxnet. Oleg Demidov, the information-security expert, said that, from a technical perspective, the hacking was “mediocre—typical, totally standard, nothing outstanding.” The achievement, from Demidov’s perspective, was the “knowledge of what to do with this information once it had been obtained.”

On July 22nd, three days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released nearly twenty thousand e-mails, the most damaging of which suggested that the D.N.C., though formally impartial, was trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s campaign. In one e-mail, the D.N.C. chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, said of Sanders, “He isn’t going to be President.” Her resignation did little to tamp down public anger that was fuelled by the themes of secrecy, populism, and privilege—already a part of Trump’s arsenal against Clinton. Months later, Wasserman Schultz reproached the F.B.I. for not reacting more aggressively to the hacking. “How do they spend months only communicating by phone with an I.T. contractor?” she said in an interview. “How was that their protocol? Something has to change, because this isn’t the last we’ve seen of this.”

The interim chair of the D.N.C., Donna Brazile, had worked on seven Presidential campaigns, but she was unprepared for the level of anger, including death threats, directed toward D.N.C. staff and donors. “I’m from the South, and I’ve been through the traditional kind of campaigns where everybody got to call you the N-word, the B-word, or the C-word,” she said. “But this was not the usual kind of antipathy that you find in American politics. It was something else.” Someone created a fake e-mail account in her name and sent messages to a reporter at the Times. “It was psychological warfare at its best,” she said. (CNN, where Brazile had been a commentator, cut ties with her when hacked e-mails revealed that, after attending network strategy sessions, she shared potential debate questions with the Clinton campaign.)

While officials in the Obama Administration struggled with how to respond to the cyberattacks, it began to dawn on them that a torrent of “fake news” reports about Hillary Clinton was being generated in Russia and through social media—a phenomenon that was potentially far more damaging. “The Russians got much smarter since the days of rent-a-crowds and bogus leaflets,” one Obama Administration official said. “During the summer, when it really mattered, when the Russian social-media strategy was happening, we did not have the whole picture. In October, when we had it, it was too late.”

In the weeks after WikiLeaks released the D.N.C. e-mails, John Mattes, a Bernie Sanders organizer who ran a Facebook page for supporters in San Diego, noticed a surge of new adherents with false profiles. One “Oliver Mitov” had almost no friends or photographs but belonged to sixteen pro-Sanders groups. On September 25th, Mitov posted to several pro-Sanders pages: “new leak: Here Is Who Ordered Hillary To Leave The 4 Men In Benghazi!—USAPoliticsNow.” It was a baseless story alleging that Clinton had received millions of dollars from Saudi royals. Mattes said, “The fake news depressed and discouraged some percentage of Bernie voters. When I realized it, I said, ‘We are being played.’ ”

A post-election study by two economists, Matthew Gentzkow, of Stanford, and Hunt Allcott, of New York University, found that, in the final three months of the campaign, fabricated pro-Trump stories were shared four times as often as fabricated pro-Clinton stories. The researchers also found that roughly half the readers of a fake-news story believed it. A study led by Philip N. Howard, a specialist in Internet studies at Oxford University, found that, during the second debate of the general election, automated Twitter accounts, known as “bots,” generated four tweets in favor of Trump for every one in favor of Clinton, driving Trump’s messages to the top of trending topics, which mold media priorities. Internet researchers and political operatives believe that a substantial number of these bots were aligned with individuals and organizations supported, and sometimes funded, by the Kremlin.

On October 7th, WikiLeaks released the first installment of a total of fifty thousand e-mails from Podesta’s account. In the years since WikiLeaks gained prominence, in 2010, by posting secret U.S. government documents, its founder, Julian Assange, had taken refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid a Swedish rape investigation that he considers a pretext for an American effort to extradite him. He has remained politically outspoken, hosting a show on Russian television for a time and later criticizing Clinton’s candidacy, writing, in February, 2016, that she “will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism.”

WikiLeaks put out a new batch of the e-mails nearly every day until the election. Reporters covered the contents of the messages—gossipy asides, excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s highly paid Wall Street speeches, internal discussion about Clinton’s statements on Benghazi, infighting at the Clinton Foundation over the political risks of foreign donations—and Podesta believes that the impact of individual stories was magnified by manipulation on social media. The Clinton campaign tried to shift focus from the details in the e-mails to the fact that they had been hacked. That argument was largely futile. “You don’t see the full extent at the time,” he said. “But it’s corrosive and it’s eating away underneath.”

Some Clinton aides suspect that Roger Stone, an on-again, off-again adviser to Trump, counselled WikiLeaks on the optimal timing for its disclosures. Six days before the leaks began, Stone tweeted, “@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” Stone said that he was “flattered” by the suspicion but denied that he had given the group advice. He said that he was merely alerted to the leaks by a “mutual friend” of his and Assange’s: “And I was told that the information he had would be devastating to Hillary. I was not told the subject matter.” Stone was among those named in news reports about evidence that Trump associates had had exchanges with Russian intelligence officials. According to Stone, he has not been contacted by the F.B.I., and such suspicions are unfounded. (“If they have evidence of a crime, indict somebody,” he said. “I have not been in touch with anybody in Russia. I’ve never been to Russia. I don’t know any Russians.”)

The Clinton campaign was making plenty of tactical errors, without foreign assistance, and Trump was reaching white working-class voters far more effectively than the media recognized. But, in Podesta’s view, hacked e-mails did heavy damage to the campaign, because they revived a preëxisting liability, the unconnected story about Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server. “It shaped the Facebook newsfeed,” he said. “It kept ‘e-mails’ front and center, even at a very slow boil. There was just a dark cloud under the banner of ‘e-mails.’ ”

On Friday, October 28th, the F.B.I. director, James Comey, announced that new e-mails from Clinton had surfaced, in an unrelated case. Podesta said, “It’s not until that Friday, eleven days out, that you see a major movement of public opinion. The group in the electorate that was moving around the most was non-college-educated women. I think particularly the pushing of the fake news in the last couple of weeks was important in the places that mattered. When you lose by a total of seventy thousand votes in three states, it’s hard to say if any one thing made the difference. Everything makes a difference. I think it definitely had an impact. The interaction between all of this and the F.B.I. created a vortex that produced the result.”



5. TURBULENCE THEORY

Russia’s political hierarchy and official press greeted Trump’s Inauguration with unreserved glee. An old order had crumbled and, with it, an impediment to Putin’s ambitions. “In 1917, armed supporters of Lenin stormed the Winter Palace and arrested capitalist ministers and overthrew the social political order,” the lead article in the daily Moskovski Komsomolets read. “On January 20, 2017, nobody in Washington planned to storm Congress or the White House and hang prominent members of the old regime from lampposts, but the feeling of the American political élite, especially the liberal part of it, is not different from that of the Russian bourgeoisie one hundred years ago.”

On “News of the Week,” Dmitry Kiselyov, the host, dismissed charges that Trump was a racist as “unfounded myth,” and the new President’s sexist and predatory remarks as nothing more than a “minute’s worth of impulsivity.” Trump, Kiselyov said, “is what we call in our country a muzhik,” a real man. “On the first day of his Presidency, he removed from the official White House Web site the section protecting the rights of gays and lesbians. He never supported that. He was always behind the values of the traditional family.”

No reasonable analyst believes that Russia’s active measures in the United States and Europe have been the dominant force behind the ascent of Trump and nationalist politicians in Europe. Resentment of the effects of globalization and deindustrialization are far more important factors. But many Western Europeans do fear that the West and its postwar alliances and institutions are endangered, and that Trump, who has expressed doubts about nato and showed allegiance to Brexit and similar anti-European movements, cannot be counted on. Although both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis have expressed support for traditional alliances, Trump remains entirely uncritical of Putin. “Trump changes the situation from a nato perspective,” General Shirreff said. “The great fear is the neutering of nato and the decoupling of America from European security. If that happens, it gives Putin all kinds of opportunities. If Trump steps back the way he seemed to as a candidate, you might not even need to do things like invade the Baltic states. You can just dominate them anyway. You’re beginning to see the collapse of institutions built to insure our security. And if that happens you will see the re-nationalizing of Europe as a whole.”

“How long will Angela Merkel hold out against Donald Trump?” Stephen Sestanovich, who was an adviser on Russia to both the Reagan and the Clinton Administrations, asked. “She is already by herself in Europe. Putin is going to look like the preëminent power in Europe.” Der Spiegel published a startling editorial recently that reflected the general dismay in Europe, and the decline of American prestige since Trump’s election. The new President, it said, is becoming “a danger to the world” that Germany must stand up in opposition to.

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Strobe Talbott, the former Clinton adviser, said, “There is a very real danger not only that we are going to lose a second Cold War—or have a redo and lose—but that the loss will be largely because of a perverse pal-ship, the almost unfathomable respect that Trump has for Putin.” Talbott believes that Trump, by showing so little regard for the institutions established by the political West in the past seventy years, is putting the world in danger. Asked what the consequences of “losing” such a conflict would be, Talbott said, “The not quite apocalyptic answer is that it is going to take years and years and years to get back to where we—we the United States and we the champions of the liberal world order—were as recently as five years ago.” An even graver scenario, Talbott said, would be an “unravelling,” in which we revert to “a dog-eat-dog world with constant instability and conflict even if it doesn’t go nuclear. But, with the proliferation of nuclear powers, it is easy to see it going that way, too.”

Andrei Kozyrev, who served as foreign minister in the Yeltsin government, now lives in Washington, D.C. He left Russia as it became increasingly authoritarian; he now sees a disturbingly similar pattern in his adopted country. “I am very concerned,” he said. “My fear is that this is probably the first time in my memory that it seems we have the same kind of people on both sides—in the Kremlin and in the White House. The same people. It’s probably why they like each other. It’s not a matter of policy, but it’s that they feel that they are alike. They care less for democracy and values, and more for personal success, however that is defined.”

Although the evidence for Russia’s interference appears convincing, it is too easy to allow such an account to become the master narrative of Trump’s ascent—a way to explain the presence of a man who is so alien and discomforting to so much of the population by rendering him in some way foreign. In truth, he is a phenomenon of America’s own making.

At the same time, Trump’s management style as President has been so chaotic, so improvisational, that the daily bonfire sometimes obscures what has been put in place. “Putin likes people like Tillerson, who do business and don’t talk about human rights,” one former Russian policy adviser said. The Trump Administration, notably, said nothing when a Russian court—the courts are well within Putin’s control—found Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and Putin’s only serious rival in next year’s Presidential election, guilty of a fraud charge that had already been overturned once, a conviction that may keep him out of the race. The Russians see friendly faces in the Administration. Tillerson, as the chairman of ExxonMobil, did “massive deals in Russia,” as Trump has put it. He formed an especially close relationship with Igor Sechin, who is among Putin’s closest advisers, and who has made a fortune as chief executive of the state oil consortium, Rosneft. Trump’s first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, took a forty-thousand-dollar fee from the Russian propaganda station RT to appear at one of its dinners, where he sat next to Putin.

The Obama Administration, in its final days, had retaliated against Russian hacking by expelling thirty-five Russian officials and closing two diplomatic compounds. The Kremlin promised “reciprocal” punishment, and American intelligence took the first steps in sending new officials to Moscow to replace whoever would be expelled. “People were already on planes,” a U.S. intelligence official said. But on December 30th Putin said that he would not retaliate. To understand the abrupt reversal, American intelligence scrutinized communications involving Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s Ambassador to the U.S., and discovered that Flynn had had conversations with him, which touched on the future of economic sanctions. (Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, met with Kislyak in Trump Tower during the transition; the aim, according to the White House, was to establish “a more open line of communication in the future.”) Flynn was forced to resign when news broke that he had lied to Vice-President Mike Pence about these exchanges.

Trump has given risibly inconsistent accounts of his own ties to Russia. When he was in Moscow for the Miss Universe contest in 2013, and an interviewer for MSNBC asked him about Putin, he said, “I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today”; at a subsequent National Press Club luncheon, he recalled, “I spoke indirectly and directly with President Putin, who could not have been nicer.” During the Presidential campaign, he said, “I never met Putin, I don’t know who Putin is.” Trump has tweeted that he has “nothing to do with Russia”; in 2008, his son Donald, Jr., said that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” At a news conference on February 16th, Trump was asked, again, if anyone in his campaign had been in contact with Russia, and he said, “Nobody that I know of.” He called reports of Russian contacts “a ruse,” and said, “I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia.” The next day, the Senate Intelligence Committee formally advised the White House to preserve all material that might shed light on contacts with Russian representatives; any effort to obscure those contacts could qualify as a crime.

By mid-February, law-enforcement and intelligence agencies had accumulated multiple examples of contacts between Russians and Trump’s associates, according to three current and former U.S. officials. Intercepted communications among Russian intelligence figures are said to include frequent reference to Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman for several months in 2016, who had previously worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. “Whether he knew it or not, Manafort was around Russian intelligence all the time,” one of the officials said. Investigators are likely to examine Trump and a range of his associates—Manafort; Flynn; Stone; a foreign policy adviser, Carter Page; the lawyer Michael Cohen—for potential illegal or unethical entanglements with Russian government or business representatives.

“To me, the question might finally come down to this,” Celeste Wallander, President Obama’s senior adviser on Russia, said. “Will Putin expose the failings of American democracy or will he inadvertently expose the strength of American democracy?”

The working theory among intelligence officials involved in the case is that the Russian approach—including hacking, propaganda, and contacts with Trump associates—was an improvisation rather than a long-standing plan. The official said, “After the election, there were a lot of Embassy communications”—to Moscow—“saying, stunned, ‘What we do now?’ ”

Initially, members of the Russian élite celebrated Clinton’s disappearance from the scene, and the new drift toward an America First populism that would leave Russia alone. The fall of Michael Flynn and the prospect of congressional hearings, though, have tempered the enthusiasm. Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of a leading foreign-policy journal in Moscow, said that Trump, facing pressure from congressional investigations, the press, and the intelligence agencies, might now have to be a far more “ordinary Republican President than was initially thought.” In other words, Trump might conclude that he no longer has the political latitude to end sanctions against Moscow and accommodate Russia’s geopolitical ambitions. As a sign of the shifting mood in Moscow, the Kremlin ordered Russian television outlets to be more reserved in their coverage of the new President.

Konstantin von Eggert, a political commentator and host on Russian television, heard from a friend at a state-owned media holding that an edict had arrived that, he said, “boiled down to one phrase: no more Trump.” The implicit message, von Eggert explained, “is not that there now should be negative coverage but that there should be much less, and more balanced.” The Kremlin has apparently decided, he said, that Russian state media risked looking “overly fawning in their attitude to Trump, that all this toasting and champagne drinking made us look silly, and so let’s forget about Trump for some time, lowering expectations as necessary, and then reinvent his image according to new realities.”

Alexey Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, and a figure with deep contacts inside the Russian political élite, said, “Trump was attractive to people in Russia’s political establishment as a disturber of the peace for their counterparts in the American political establishment.” Venediktov suggested that, for Putin and those closest to him, any support that the Russian state provided to Trump’s candidacy was a move in a long-standing rivalry with the West; in Putin’s eyes, it is Russia’s most pressing strategic concern, one that predates Trump and will outlast him. Putin’s Russia has to come up with ways to make up for its economic and geopolitical weakness; its traditional levers of influence are limited, and, were it not for a formidable nuclear arsenal, it’s unclear how important a world power it would be. “So, well then, we have to create turbulence inside America itself,” Venediktov said. “A country that is beset by turbulence closes up on itself—and Russia’s hands are freed.” ♦

*An earlier version of this passage wrongly indicated that the U.S. is known to have funded Russian political parties.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/ ... w-cold-war
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 01, 2017 11:13 am

James Comey failed to disclose that FBI was planning to hire author of MI6 Trump-Russia dossier
By Bill Palmer | February 28, 2017 | 0

In a stunning new revelation which lends significant credibility to the famous “Trump-Russia dossier” and its author, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, it turns out the FBI had been planning to hire him before the election so he could continue his investigation. The plan only broke down when word of the dossier leaked publicly. This casts further scrutiny on why FBI Director James Comey failed to notify the public of the Trump-Russia scandal before election day.

Christopher Steele was originally hired by a private client to begin his investigation into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. When the client ceased paying him for his work, he felt it was so important that he continued doing the research anyway. But at some point he worried about running out of money, and thus he ended up entering into a tentative agreement in which the FBI would begin paying him to continue his research. But word of the existence of the dossier leaked publicly around that time, effectively compromising Steele’s ability to continue clandestinely digging, even though the dossier itself didn’t publicly surface until January.

According to the Washington Post, which broke this latest development, the agreement took place a “few weeks” before the election. This makes it unlikely that Steele could have gotten to the bottom of Trump-Russia by election day even if he had been hired. But it demonstrates the seriousness with which the FBI was taking Trump-Russia by October. So where was Comey in all of this?

The Washington Post timeline places the tentative deal between the FBI and Christopher Steele in mid to late October. FBI Director James Comey decided to keep this information from the public. However he did send a letter to Congress in late October in which he created the false appearance that Hillary Clinton was being newly investigated over her emails – only to subsequent admit in another letter two days before the election that this was not the case.

This means that even as the FBI was concluding that the Trump-Russia dossier was credible enough that it wanted to fund the continued research, James Comey decided to keep this information from the public while simultaneously inventing a phony new scandal about Hillary Clinton. In other words, why isn’t Comey in prison?
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/jam ... -fbi/1708/



FBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial Trump dossier

How the FBI is linked to the author of the controversial Trump dossier Play Video2:54
Washington Post reporters Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman explain the latest development in the story behind a controversial dossier on President Trump. (Video: Jason Aldag, Sarah Parnass/Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
By Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman February 28 at 4:08 PM
The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement.

The agreement to compensate former MI6 agent Christopher Steele came as U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the Russians had interfered in the presidential election by orchestrating hacks of Democratic Party email accounts.

While Trump has derided the dossier as “fake news” compiled by his political opponents, the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that the bureau considered him credible and found his information, while unproved, to be worthy of further investigation.

Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials, according to the people familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The headquarters of Orbis Business Intelligence, the company run by former intelligence officer Christopher Steele, in London. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
At the time of the October agreement, FBI officials probing Russian activities, including possible contacts between Trump associates and Russian entities, were aware of the information that Steele had been gathering while working for a Washington research firm hired by supporters of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to the people familiar with the agreement. The firm was due to stop paying Steele as Election Day approached, but Steele felt his work was not done, these people said.

[Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Putin]

Steele was familiar to the FBI, in part because the bureau had previously hired him to help a U.S. inquiry into alleged corruption in the world soccer organization FIFA. The FBI sometimes pays informants, sources and outside investigators to assist in its work. Steele was known for the quality of his past work and for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for British intelligence. The Washington Post was not able to determine how much the FBI intended to pay Steele had their relationship remained intact.

The dossier he produced last year alleged, among other things, that associates of Trump colluded with the Kremlin on cyberattacks on Democrats and that the Russians held compromising material about the Republican nominee.

These and other explosive claims have not been verified, and they have been vigorously denied by Trump and his allies.

The FBI, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee, is investigating Russian interference in the election and alleged contacts between Trump’s associates and the Kremlin.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters that he had seen “no evidence so far” of Trump campaign contacts with Russia but said a bipartisan House inquiry would proceed so that “no stone is unturned.”

The revelation that the FBI agreed to pay Steele at the same time he was being paid by Clinton supporters to dig into Trump’s background could further strain relations between the law enforcement agency and the White House.

A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment. Steele’s London-based attorney did not respond to questions about the agreement.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to comment.

Steele, 53, began his Trump investigation in June 2016 after working for another client preparing a report on Russian efforts to interfere with politics in Europe.

U.S. intelligence had been independently tracking Russian efforts to influence electoral outcomes in Europe.

Steele was hired to work for a Washington research firm, Fusion GPS, that was providing information to a Democratic client. Fusion GPS began doing Trump research in early 2016, before it hired Steele, on behalf of a Republican opposed to the businessman’s candidacy. The firm declined to identify its clients.

Steele’s early reports alleged a plan directed by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin to help Trump in 2016.

“Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years,” Steele wrote in June.

Steele’s information was provided by an intermediary to the FBI and U.S. intelligence officials after the Democratic National Convention in July, when hacked Democratic emails were first released by WikiLeaks, according to a source familiar with the events. After the convention, Steele contacted a friend in the FBI to personally explain what he had found.

As summer turned to fall, Steele became concerned that the U.S. government was not taking the information he had uncovered seriously enough, according to two people familiar with the situation.

In October, anticipating that funding supplied through the original client would dry up, Steele and the FBI reached a spoken understanding: He would continue his work looking at the Kremlin’s ties to Trump and receive compensation for his efforts.

But Steele’s frustration deepened when FBI Director James B. Comey, who had been silent on the Russia inquiry, announced publicly 11 days before the election that the bureau was investigating a newly discovered cache of emails Clinton had exchanged using her private server, according to people familiar with Steele’s thinking.

Those people say Steele’s frustration with the FBI peaked after an Oct. 31 New York Times story that cited law enforcement sources drawing conclusions that he considered premature. The article said that the FBI had not yet found any “conclusive or direct link” between Trump and the Russian government and that the Russian hacking was not intended to help Trump.

After the election, the intelligence community concluded that Russia’s interference had been intended to assist Trump.

In January, top intelligence and law enforcement officials briefed Trump and President Barack Obama on those findings. In addition, they provided a summary of the core allegations of Steele’s dossier.

[Intelligence chiefs briefed Trump, Obama on unconfirmed Russia claims]

News of that briefing soon became public. Then BuzzFeed posted a copy of Steele’s salacious but unproven dossier online, sparking outrage from Trump.

“It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” Trump told reporters in January. “It was a group of opponents that got together — sick people — and they put that crap together.”

He later tweeted that Steele was a “failed spy.”

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The development marked the end of the FBI’s relationship with Steele.

After he was publicly identified by the Wall Street Journal as the dossier’s author, Steele went into hiding. U.S. officials took pains to stress that his report was not a U.S. government product and that it had not influenced their broader conclusions that the Russian government had hacked the emails of Democratic officials and released those emails with the intention of helping Trump win the presidency.

“The [intelligence community] has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions,” then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said in a statement in January.

The owner of a technology company identified in Steele’s dossier as a participant in the hacks is now suing Steele and BuzzFeed for defamation. BuzzFeed apologized to the executive and blocked out his name in the published document.

Comey spent almost two hours this month briefing the Senate Intelligence Committee. Democrats in the House have informally reached out to Steele in recent weeks to ask about his willingness to testify or cooperate, according to people familiar with the requests. Steele has so far not responded, they said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 4ebf11550b
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 01, 2017 5:16 pm

"Says Who?" - Piecing Together the Michael Cohen Story

Kathy Willens
ByJOSH MARSHALL
PublishedMARCH 1, 2017, 3:01 PM EDT
4846Views
Image
I wanted to take a moment to put together some of the different pieces of the emerging story of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's lawyer and right-hand-man for the last decade. For months we have seen reports that the communications and in some cases financial transactions of a small group of President Trump's associates are being scrutinized by federal law enforcement and intelligence for ties to and communications with Russian nationals and/or government officials during the 2016 campaign. Those reports usually focus on Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Carter Page. But Cohen comes up on this list, too. In mid-February, The New York Times reported that Cohen "is one of several Trump associates under scrutiny in an FBI counterintelligence examination of links with Russia, according to law enforcement officials."

While each of the first four men has consistently denied any wrongdoing, there is at least a logic to why they would come up in such a probe. Manafort and Page have long public histories of work in the former Soviet Union. Flynn is known for his support of a rapprochement with Russia, his communications with the Russian ambassador and more. Stone has his cagey statements about being in communication with Julian Assange during the election and he certainly seems to have been foreknowledge of the release of John Podesta's emails. Despite being mentioned rather extensively in the Trump "dossier"— claims that he vociferously denies and which remain unsubstantiated —Cohen has always seemed like the odd man out in that group, the last guy in the Trump world you'd expect to come up in the context of a counterintelligence investigation or or for having channels into the Russian government.

That is one of the many reasons I was surprised earlier this month when Cohen popped up as the go-between, along with Felix Sater, for Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Artemenko, passing on a pro-Russian "peace plan" and compromising dossier on the current President of Ukraine to President Trump. But looking at Cohen's background, I am surprised he had not already garnered attention for his numerous connections to Ukraine, the center point of ongoing tensions between Russia and the United States.

As I noted over the weekend, published reports and my own reporting suggest Cohen first came to the attention of Donald Trump because he and his extended family were buying up numerous Trump apartment units in New York, New Jersey and Florida. Cohen's Ukrainian in-laws purchased at least four units by the middle of the last decade. By that time, Cohen was already purchasing his fifth Trump apartment. But this only scratches the surface of the numerous ways in which Cohen's personal wealth and professional life appear to have been shaped by a series of friendships, and familial and business partnerships with Ukrainian immigrants, either operating businesses in the United States or Ukraine.

By his late 30s, when he came into Trump's orbit (circa 2006-07), Cohen was by all appearances already a very wealthy man. He had already compiled an extensive New York area real estate portfolio, mainly tied to New York City residential properties. But the original source of his wealth appears tied to a series of non-real estate business partnerships. The one common thread connecting these partnerships in businesses ranging from taxis to gambling to energy is that each involved a partnership with immigrants from Ukraine.

The earliest of these businesses appears to be the taxi business with partner Simon Garber, a now fantastically successful taxi entrepreneur who owns hundreds of taxi medallions in New York as well as huge stakes in the taxi industry in Chicago, New Orleans and (formerly) Moscow (Garber left the Moscow market after the market collapse in 1998.) Garber is a larger-than-life figure who founded the International Polo Club of Colts Neck near his estate in Colts Neck, New Jersey. To give a sense of perspective, during the time Cohen was in the taxi business with Garber, the price of an individual medallion was about a quarter of a million dollars and starting a massive run up that would reach roughly $1 million before a steep drop off in recent years because of Uber and Lyft. In 2003 Cohen listed himself as a co-owner of a fleet of "more than 200 taxis." What Cohen's stake was and how leveraged the business was is not clear. But this a highly lucrative and incredibly capital intensive business.

Cohen says he sold his share of the business to Garber in the early 2000s, though Cohen continues to own substantial taxi medallion holdings. Cohen's medallions are now managed by Evgeny Friedman, an Russian emigre from St Petersburg who owns more taxi medallions than any other person in New York City (more than 800 out 13,605).

Cohen also got into the business of casino boats. Cohen was the CEO of MLA Cruises, a Florida-based casino company which took patrons out of US territorial waters to gamble legally. This partnership was with two other Ukrainian immigrants, Arkady Vaygensberg and Leonid Tatarchuk. When Cohen made an unsuccessful run for the New York City Council in 2003 he listed his occupations as "Co-owner of Taxi Funding Corp. and a fleet of more than 200 taxis, and CEO of MLA Cruises, Inc., and of the Atlantic Casino." MLA Cruises was incorporated in 2002 and dissolved in 2006.

Then there was a venture into the Ukranian ethanol business. Here Cohen's where family relationships came most clearly to the fore. Michael Cohen's wife, Laura, is from Ukraine. Michael's younger brother Bryan is also married to a Ukrainian woman, Oxana Cohen. Oxana's father, Alex Oronov, is a naturalized US citizen who was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 1948. He is the founder of a Ukrainian agribusiness company called Grain Alliance, which is based in Sweden.

It was Oronov's farming business in the Ukraine that brought Michael and Bryan Cohen into the ethanol business. In 2006, Cohen incorporated International Ethanol of Ukraine, Ltd., along with his Bryan Cohen and Oronov, according to Delaware state records. A year later the group incorporated Ukrethanol LLC, a company which appears to be involved in, among other things, exporting used farm equipment from the U.S. to Ukraine on behalf of Grain Alliance. Cohen's only comments tied to this phase of his business career came in a January 2017 interview with Yahoo News in which Cohen said he had only been to Ukraine twice “either 2003 or 2004,” because his “brother’s father-in-law [i.e., Oronov] lives in Kiev.” Oronov is registered to vote in Florida (he maintains a residence at the Trump Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida) and appears to have a residence in Long Island, New York. He may also maintain a residence in Kiev.

It is not clear precisely how these two companies figure in the Ukrainian ethanol business. But the Kyiv Post reports that it is these two companies which are the basis of the the Cohen brothers' involvement in the Ukraine ethanol industry.

Oronov immigrated to the United States in 1978, according to a 1991 Associated Press article, and ran an art gallery in Manhattan at the time the story was published. Oronov began scouting out possible art-based joint ventures in the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era. Eventually he found a big one.

From the AP ...
Four years ago, Alex Oronov, an art dealer who immigrated to the United States in 1978, approached the museum looking for a joint venture: He wanted to print catalogs and sell lithographs using the museum's collection.
Last year, after two years of red tape, Oronov, his U.S. partners and the museum launched the State Russian Museum Publishing Co., with offices and a gallery in the trendy Manhattan neighborhood Soho.

This June, it broke ground by opening a museum shop - a Soviet rarity - in Leningrad. The city will officially return to its prerevolutionary name, St. Petersburg, next month.

And its palaces exhibit, which opens at a gallery Thursday for a three-week run, prefaces a show of Russian avant-garde art, mostly from the State Russian Museum, at New York's Guggenheim Museum.

It was only in the aftermath of Ukrainian independence in 1994, according to his professional biography, that Oronov became involved in the newly independent country's agricultural sector.

The taxi, gambling and ethanol businesses show up most clearly in news reports and public records. Other Ukraine-related ventures are more difficult to track down. For instance, in 1998 a "Michael D. Cohen" incorporated Ukrainian Capital Partners LP and Ukrainian Capital Growth Fund Corp, according to New York Department of State records. The latter was dissolved in 2002. But the former remains active, according to state records.

From all evidence Cohen is a very wealthy man. In addition to the other businesses and real estate holdings noted above, as recently as 2015 he purchased a $58 million apartment building on Manhattan's Upper East Side. This is in addition to numerous luxury apartment units and other buildings on the Lower East Side and Kips Bay, according to the New York real estate news site The Real Deal.

The various business ventures noted above, especially the taxi business, appear to have been the source of the wealth that allowed Cohen to start buying up New York real estate at the beginning of the century. Cohen is a lawyer and passed the New York state bar in 1992, the year after he graduated from Thomas M. Cooley Law School. But from an early age he seems to have functioned at least as much as an entrepreneur and businessman as a practicing lawyer.

Given these extensive ties to individuals in the Ukrainian-American community and Ukraine, it seems much less surprising that Cohen figured into the mix when the Ukrainian MP Artemenko wanted to bring his "peace plan" to President Trump. (What has gotten less attention and may have been more central to Artemenko's plans was the dossier of allegedly damaging information about Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko which Artemenko says was also part of the materials he gave Cohen. Artemenko has said he believed those would lead to Poroshenko's fall from power, a necessary first step in bringing his plan to fruition.) Indeed, as I noted over the weekend, Artemenko says he's known Cohen for years and began discussing his peace plan with him last year. Artemenko has now backed off those claims or at least made inconsistent statements. But if that is true, it suggests that Cohen's business ties in this world have built relationships with a political dimension as well.

Cohen did not return a call requesting comment on Artemenko's assertions about a longstanding relationship or discussions of the "peace plan" during the 2016 GOP primaries.

We know from public records that in the last decade Trump became highly dependent on money from the former Soviet Union, both to finance mega-projects like Trump SoHo but also as a source of buyers of apartment units at Trump high-rises in New York City, Florida and other locales (The Cohen brothers and their families are purchasers of at least 12 apartments in Trump buildings - 11, according to a 2006 article in The New York Post and one owned by the Oronovs, according to Florida public records.) Donald Trump, Jr. said famously in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia”.

Cohen and his extended family appear to have been part of that flow of luxury apartment purchases from people from the former Soviet Union. And Cohen himself joined the Trump Organization in the period when Trump's reliance on investment capital from the former Soviet Union for projects like Trump Soho moved into high gear.

Trump has repeatedly insisted he has no loans from the Russia and no 'deals' in Russia. There is no specific evidence to refute his claims. But Trump's real need has been for investment capital and wealthy people to purchase units in his luxury projects or those to which he licenses his name. And there is voluminous evidence for both.

Press attention has tended to focus on people like Carter Page and Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn. But Cohen plays a far more central role in this era of Trump's business history than these others. He is also the only one who shows up clearly acting as a go-between to the President for someone trying to shift administration policy to reduce or eliminate sanctions on Russia. Carter Page has very little connection with Trump. It's not entirely clear the two men have ever met. Trump's relationship with Paul Manafort goes back to the 2006-07 period, well before the campaign. But they were at best acquaintances for the last decade. It's Cohen who has a had a decade-long and very close working relationship with Trump.

If we are looking for the trail of money from the former Soviet Union into The Trump Organization and a key player during the era when that capital became far more central to Trump's business, Cohen seems like a much more logical place to look than Manafort, Page, Flynn or any of the others.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/say ... ohen-story
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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