Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 6:01 pm

oh please it is just getting started

oh is it ok to c/p in GD now?

I didn't get the memo

you have been wrong about everything so far Nordic why should anyone believe you now?

like this from just a few hours ago

Image
http://www.people-press.org/2017/04/17/ ... gop/0_1-3/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 19, 2017 4:59 pm

$500 Billion at Stake for Russia

Exxon Seeks U.S. Waiver to Resume Russia Oil Venture
Exxon Mobil applied to Treasury for exemption to resume venture with Rosneft forged in 2012 by Rex Tillerson
Image
In June 2012, Russia's President Vladimir Putin (center), watched by Rosneft Chief Executive Igor Sechin, shook hands with Rex Tillerson, who was then Exxon Mobil chief executive and is now U.S. secretary of state, at a signing ceremony at a Rosneft refinery in the Black Sea town of Tuapse..
PHOTO: MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/REUTERS
By Jay Solomon and Bradley Olson
Updated April 19, 2017 3:53 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON— Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM -0.69% has applied to the Treasury Department for a waiver from U.S. sanctions on Russia in a bid to resume its joint venture with state oil giant PAO Rosneft, according to people familiar with the matter.
......

https://www.wsj.com/articles/exxon-seek ... 1492620677


Rosneft offered to sell a 19% share of itself to Carter Page


Exclusive: Putin-linked think tank drew up plan to sway 2016 U.S. election - documents


By Ned Parker, Jonathan Landay and John Walcott | WASHINGTON
A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-r ... SKBN17L2N3



THE CONTINUING FALLOUT FROM TRUMP AND NUNES’S FAKE SCANDAL
By Ryan Lizza April 18, 2017
Representative Devin Nunes is under investigation for possibly leaking classified information, but the bigger scandal is the coördinated effort to manufacture an excuse for President Trump’s wiretapping allegation.

Recently, several members and staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russia’s role in the Presidential election, visited the National Security Agency, in Fort Meade, Maryland. Inside the enormous black glass headquarters of America’s largest spy agency, the congressmen and their aides were shown a binder of two to three dozen pages of highly classified intercepts, mostly transcripts of conversations between foreign government officials that took place during the Presidential transition. These intercepts were not related to the heart of the committee’s Russia investigation. In fact, only one of the documents had anything to do with Russia, according to an official who reviewed them.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizz ... ke-scandal



Revisiting the Golden Showers
by Martin Longman April 19, 2017 12:06 PM POLITICAL ANIMAL BLOG

When BuzzFeed broke the media blackout on January 10th and published the Christopher Steele dossier on Donald Trump, the headlines were all focused on the most salacious allegation it contained. It’s worth revisiting that allegation because it’s been mischaracterized from the very beginning.

Steele’s topline allegation was that a “Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP [whose] conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.”

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/04/19 ... n-showers/


Data Dump for full articles
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 » Thu Apr 20, 2017 9:50 am

I am going to post this from Feb-26-04 for two reasons....one to show why I post full articles because in this all links are bad now and of course the other is quite evident

Alex Kantarovich makes all the hardware for touchscreen machines
Edited on Thu Feb-26-04 10:39 AM by seemslikeadream
Vikant Corp., a Chicago area company owned by Alex Kantarovich of Minsk, Belorussia, supplied the control cards to ES&S. When The Spotlight inquired where Vikant cards are produced, Kantarovich said, "I cannot disclose where the cards are made," but admitted that they are not made in American.

Kantarovich told The Spotlight that he has been in America for 11 years but declined to discuss his employment prior to running Vikant Corp., saying "I don't want to disclose that information.

Kantarovich said he obtained his degree in the Soviet Union and initially refused to answer questions about how his company was chosen for the ES&S voting equipment.

It is inside information that I cannot disclose, "he added. Kantavovich said later that his firm was chosen over larger firms like IBM and Panasonic because Vikant was able to meet the specific requirements of ES&S and provide the cards on short notice.

http://www.voxpolitics.com/weblog/archives/000186.html

If you'd like to see what he looks like I think this may be the same person?

http://research.aton.ru/themes/research ... ls-index...

The article ends with Bollyn's astounding revelation that America's largest company's software is being programmed by a Russian born businessman, Alex Kantarovich of Vikant Corporation, who came to the US from Russia 11 years ago, who refuses to say what line of work he was in before he came here, and who refuses to say where his "control boxes" which power the new election computers' brain are made, but he did confirm that they are not made in the USA.

http://global-conspiracies.com/death_th ... ter_vote...


https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 04x1163749



and JohnOneillsMemory where ever you are I think of you all the time..wish you were here :)
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
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 24, 2017 4:41 pm

Report: The Senate's investigation into Trump's Russia ties has descended into a 'standoff'

Natasha Bertrand

The Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election and whether President Donald Trump's campaign team played any role in it has stalled amid partisan bickering and staffing problems, according to two new reports.

Sens. Richard Burr and Mark Warner, the committee's top-ranking Republican and Democrat, respectively, told reporters last month that the panel would "look at any campaign contacts with the Russian government ... that might have influenced, in any way, shape, or form, the election process."

Burr, the chairman of the committee, said the investigation "overrides any personal beliefs that I have or loyalties I might have.

"Mark and I might look at politics differently — we don't look at the responsibilities we have on the committee differently," he said then.

But more than three months into the committee's investigation, however, it has descended into a "standoff," according to Yahoo's Michael Isikoff. The committee hasn't issued any subpoenas or requested any key documents such as emails, memos, and phone records from the Trump campaign, in part because Burr "has so far failed to respond to requests from the panel's Democrats to sign letters doing so," Isikoff reported.

Democrats and Republicans also can't agree on who should be able to view the raw intelligence compiled by the US intelligence community about Russia's interference. The CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and 14 other intelligence agencies in January released a declassified version of their report about Russia's election-related meddling.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) speaks with reporters as he arrives for the weekly Democratic Caucus policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol in Washington June 2, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst - RTR4YK2C
Sen. Ron Wyden. Thomson Reuters
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden "demanded" that all intelligence committee aides, rather than just a select few staffers, be allowed to review the raw intelligence, according to Yahoo. Burr, however, "who has long feuded with Wyden, refused to go along, resulting in a standoff that has badly divided the committee."

The partisan feud was foreshadowed in February when Burr, who said he voted for Trump, acknowledged that he had called reporters at the White House's request to dispute damaging reports in The New York Times and CNN about the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia during the election.

A representative for Burr declined to comment. Representatives for Warner and Wyden did not respond to requests for comment.

The committee's Russia investigation is also severely understaffed. The seven staffers who are working on it are doing so part-time, both Yahoo and The Daily Beast reported, and none has relevant legal or investigative experience.

"The biggest obstacle now for a serious investigation into Trump-Russia ties is dedicated resources for staffing," a source with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast.

A brand-new approach?
The partisan bickering and lack of resources — problems that have plagued both the House and Senate intelligence committees — have fueled calls from legal and intelligence experts to establish an independent select committee to look into Russia's election interference and whether Trump campaign associates played a role in it.

The Senate Intelligence Committee "already has a full-time oversight role" as well as "major ongoing legislative projects" and is "simply not staffed at the level or in the manner necessary to also conduct a highly complex and time-consuming investigation" like the Russia probe, Susan Hennessey, a former NSA lawyer, and Benjamin Wittes, a national-security expert at the Brookings Institution, wrote in February for Lawfare.

Congress "has a duty to publicly address major questions the political system is struggling with now in a fashion the public can absorb and process," they wrote.

"What is the president's relationship with Russia? And is there reason to be concerned about it?" they wrote. "The essential problem is that there is no current congressional mechanism with the investigative scope, staffing, and will to answer these questions in a serious fashion."

A bipartisan commission would not require Trump's consent, they added, and the congressional committees' investigations wouldn't need to be disbanded. Warner has said he would "support empowering whoever can do it right" if it became clear his committee could not "properly conduct an independent investigation."

The membership of a select committee, according to Hennessey and Wittes, "should reflect an even partisan split — or as close to it as is politically doable."

"It is essential that the committee be chaired by a person whose commitment to a serious investigation is not subject to reasonable question," they wrote. "Our nominee: Lindsey Graham."

Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has said he would be open to forming a select committee to examine reports that US intelligence officials intercepted calls between Trump's associates and Russian nationals during the campaign.

"I want to make sure myself that these intercepts exist, that the communications are outside the norm," Graham told "Good Morning America" in February. "If that's the case, it's time for Congress — in my view, the Senate — to do a joint select committee where we can look at it holistically."
http://www.businessinsider.com/senate-i ... urr-2017-4


Claude Taylor‏
@TrueFactsStated

Claude Taylor Retweeted Counterchekist
I'm told by a source in the legal community (former prosecutor) "the number of individuals indicted will stagger most observers".


Counterchekist‏
@counterchekist

Replying to @DrDenaGrayson @lauferlaw and 2 others
IC is in possession of a lot of tapes with Team Treason on them. #FVEY #NATO


Trump Reportedly In Danger Of Blackmail By Organized Crime Elements (DETAILS)
By Tyler - April 23, 2017

In addition to numerous conflicts of interest and a lack of qualifications, Donald Trump may have brought something else to the White House. Namely, links to organized crime that, if true, could undermine his presidency and the integrity of the office itself.

The dispute concerns two of Trump’s longtime business associates, Felix Sater and his boss Tevfik Arif. Trump and Sater had partnered together to build Trump Soho and the project was partially funded by Arif.

The issue, unsurprisingly, began over money. In a letter written to Arif’s attorney regarding $3.5 million in legal fees, Sater’s attorney warned that a public lawsuit might damage both Arif and Trump’s reputation.

‘Clearly, if this matter between Mr. Sater and Mr. Arif escalates to public litigation, the media spotlight will be negatively cast on Mr. Arif and his past relationship with President Trump and the Republic of Kazakhstan.’

Later on in the letter, which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Sater warned that he might file a second lawsuit which would focus on Arif’s crimes related to his metals businesses in Kazakhstan. Most interesting of all, however, was Sater’s threat regarding Trump. “The headline will be, ‘The Kazakh Gangster and President Trump.'”

While none of the charges have stuck, Arif is no stranger to arrests or the media attention that tends to follow them. In 2010, he and five others were arrested for their alleged involvement in prostitution ring while in Turkey. Arif maintained his innocence and was eventually acquitted.

Arif and his brother, who was an official in the Soviet government, secured the rights to a chromium plant. The two men eventually entered into a lucrative partnership with Alexander Mashkevich, who controls a large part of Kazakhstan’s mineral and mining sectors.

Sater, on the other hand, has had less success in avoiding prison. In 1993, he was convicted of assault after he stabbed a commodities broker with a piece of a broken margarita glass. After the margarita incident, he was arrested due to his involvement in a $40 million dollar stock manipulation scheme run by the Gambino and Bonanno crime families. In exchange for immunity from prosecution, he turned state’s witness and was set free. From there, he met Arif and the two eventually became involved in Trump’s real-estate empire.

Their partnership was so successful that by 2007, Sater had an office in Trump Tower and openly boasted of his relationship with the future president.

‘Anybody can come in and build a tower. I can build a Trump Tower, because of my relationship with Trump.’

Their relationship was so close that when Trump’s children were going to Moscow for the first time, Trump allegedly asked Sater to show them around the city and keep an eye on them because Trump was worried. Sater said:

‘They were on their way by themselves, and he was all concerned. He asked if I wouldn’t mind joining them and looking after them while they were in Moscow.’

Despite this apparently close relationship, Trump has, in recent years, claimed to not know Sater very well. While speaking under oath at a hearing in 2013, Trump said that he wouldn’t recognize Sater if he were sitting in the room with him.

Obviously, someone isn’t telling the truth. If someone is close enough with you that you’ll ask them to keep an eye on your children in a foreign country, then we find it hard to believe you wouldn’t recognize them. Some might argue that Sater’s involvement in organized crime makes him a less than trustworthy source and we’d agree. However, we’d also question the integrity of a man who willingly does business with someone like Sater.
http://bipartisanreport.com/2017/04/23/ ... s-details/




seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 21, 2017 1:00 pm wrote:
Claude Taylor‏ @TrueFactsStated 14h14 hours ago
This story is not about Carter Page. This story began 20plus years ago when the Trump Organization crawled into bed with the Russian Mafia.




It looks like House Democrats just won a big victory in the Trump-Russia investigation

Natasha Bertrand
U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence ranking member Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) speaks with reporters about the Committee's Russia investigation on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 30, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence ranking member Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) speaks with reporters Thomson Reuters
The House Intelligence Committee announced on Friday that it had extended invitations to three former officials with knowledge of Russia's interference in the US election to testify in an open hearing in May, over a month after the committee's chairman first scrapped the session.

"Yesterday, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence sent two letters related to its investigation into Russian active measures during the 2016 election campaign," Emily Hytha, a spokesperson for Republican Rep. Mike Conaway, wrote on Friday.

"The first letter was sent to FBI Director James Comey and National Security Advisor Admiral Mike Rogers, inviting them to appear at a closed hearing on May 2, 2017," Hytha wrote. "The second letter was sent to former CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates inviting them to appear at an open hearing to be scheduled after May 2nd."

The letters appear to mark the end of an impasse that emerged late last month, when the committee's chairman, Devin Nunes, accused Democrats of not signing a letter inviting FBI Director James Comey to testify before the committee in a closed session. The Democrats said that they did not support substituting an open hearing with a closed one, and had been pushing to reschedule the open session with Yates, Brennan, and Clapper that Nunes had canceled.

"The chairman [Nunes] requested that in lieu of a public hearing we have a closed hearing with James Comey and Mike Rogers," Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, who sits on the committee, told Business Insider late last month. "I did not support having one substitute for another."

Sally Yates
Sally Q. Yates, then the US deputy attorney general, speaks during a press conference at the Department of Justice on June 28, 2016 in Washington, DC. Pete Marovich/Getty Images
In the end, the committee agreed to hold both the closed session with Comey and Rogers that Republicans wanted, and the open hearing with Yates, Brennan, and Clapper that Democrats had been pushing for.

The compromise is arguably a bigger victory for the Democrats, however, who have been eager to publicly question Yates in particular about her knowledge of former national security adviser Michael Flynn's relationship to Russia.

Yates was fired as acting Attorney General after refusing to enforce Trump's first immigration order in late January. Earlier that month, she reportedly traveled to the White House to warn Trump administration officials that Flynn could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

Interest in Yates' testimony grew even more last month after the Washington Post reported that the White House had tried to prevent her from testifying publicly. The White House has denied the charge.

Brennan, the former CIA Director, has also come back into the spotlight recently amid reports that he established a counterintelligence task force last summer to examine improper contact between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The investigation was based on intelligence that was handed to the CIA by foreign intelligence agencies beginning in late 2015, The Guardian reported earlier this month.

Clapper's testimony, meanwhile, will be of interest to those who feel that Trump's Russia ties have been overblown: the former Director of National Intelligence told MSNBC's Chuck Todd in early March that he had seen "no evidence" of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Rep. Devin Nunes
Rep. Devin Nunes J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The break in the committee's partisan impasse comes a few weeks after Nunes recused himself from the committee's Russia investigation. He stepped down on April 6 and handed the probe over to Conaway amid questions about his ability to lead an unbiased investigation into President Donald Trump's ties to Russia.

Nunes, who served on Trump's transition team, came under intense scrutiny last month for his decision to bypass the rest of his committee and brief Trump on classified executive-branch documents which he said showed that members of Trump's transition team had been swept up in government surveillance.

R eports have said he obtained those documents from White House officials — despite Nunes' earlier claims that he had gotten them from an intelligence source — fueling speculation that administration officials had orchestrated the stunt to distract the press from Comey's revelation that various Trump associates were being investigated for their ties to Russia.

Nunes' vice-chair, Rep. Adam Schiff, criticized Nunes for bypassing the committee, calling on him to either share the documents with his colleagues or recuse himself.

"I don't know how to conduct a credible investigation if you have even one person, let alone the chairman, of a committee saying, 'I've seen evidence, but I won't share it with anyone else,'" Schiff told CNN late last month. "We can't conduct an investigation this way. That's not sustainable. It's not credible."
http://www.businessinsider.com/house-in ... ing-2017-4



Top House Oversight Democrat Warns That The Truth On Russia Is Coming To Get Trump
By Jason Easley on Fri, Apr 21st, 2017 at 12:56 pm
During an interview on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) warned Donald Trump that the truth is going to catch up to him on Russia.


Top House Oversight Democrat Warns That The Truth On Russia Is Coming To Get Trump
During an interview on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) warned Donald Trump that the truth is going to catch up to him on Russia.

Video:

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


Rep. Cummings disagreed with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) on refusing to work with Trump on everything, but he added, “Many of the things that Maxine is talking about she’s absolutely right. We are finding out more and more every day. There will come a time, Andrea, where the truth will come in contact with these false statements made by Donald Trump, President Trump, and others, and then a judgment call will have to be made. In the meantime, I’ve got to go down both of these tracks. I’ve got to represent my constituents, but I’ve also got to do a fair investigation.”

The point that Rep. Cummings made about the Russia scandal is very true. Time is the enemy of the Trump administration. Eventually, the truth is going to be revealed, but each member of the House also has a duty to represent their constituents. Rep. Waters has argued that her constituents don’t want her to work with Trump, but I think that the decision is up to each member of the House and their constituents.

The truth is coming for Trump. The White House has nowhere to run. They have nowhere to hide. The false statements are piling up, and the reason why the administration is working so hard to derail the Russia investigations is that the truth behind the lies is likely enough to destroy the Trump presidency.

Rep. Cummings is right. There is inevitable collusion becoming between Donald Trump’s Russia lies and reality.
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/04/21/ ... trump.html


Trump's Organized Crime Ties Bring Blackmail to the White House
Says one former business partner, "The headline will be ‘The Kazakh Gangster and President Trump.'"
By Jefferson Morley / AlterNet April 21, 2017

The words were positively polite, at least for a man convicted of assault and racketeering. It was the implied target of his blackmail threat that was unusual: the president of the United States.

The threat came from Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who partnered with Donald Trump in launching the Trump Soho, a hotel-condominium project in New York City. The building was funded by Sater’s boss, Tevfik Arif, a mogul from Kazakhstan. In 2007, Trump's children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka attended the unveiling ceremony for the 46-story luxury tower in Manhattan.

Trump, Arif and Sater were photographed standing next to one another at that event. Since then, the three men have parted ways in a haze of recriminations, lawsuits and amnesia.

The Threat

Sater’s attorney came right to the point in a February 2 letter to Arif’s attorney about $3.5 million in disputed legal fees, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

“Clearly, if this matter between Mr. Sater and Mr. Arif escalates to public litigation, the media spotlight will be negatively cast on Mr. Arif and his past relationship with President Trump and the Republic of Kazakhstan,” the attorney wrote.

In the correspondence reviewed by the Journal, Sater warned he might file another lawsuit in which he would allege wrongdoing in Arif’s dealings in the post-Soviet metals business in Kazakhstan. “The headline will be, ‘The Kazakh Gangster and President Trump,’” Sater warned.

The Back Story

Both Arif and Sater know something about the media spotlight.

In October 2010, Turkish news outlets headlined the arrest of Arif and five other men for alleged involvement in a prostitution ring following a raid on a yacht once used by the country’s founder. Police stormed the 136-meter luxury yacht Savarona after a seven-month investigation. They also detained 10 Ukrainian and Russian women.

Arif had rented the yacht at a daily rate of $50,000, according to Turkish news reports. Arif denied all charges, saying he had only been entertaining friends aboard the Savarona. Nine of the women were deported, and Arif was later acquitted.

Also questioned, but not arrested in the raid, according to Israel’s YNet News was Alexander Mashkevich, an Israeli-Kazakh billionaire who, along with two partners, dominates Kazakhstan’s lucrative mineral sector, according to Wikipedia.

Sater’s recent threat implicitly links Arif’s relationship with Mashkevich to his dealings with Trump.

Tevfik and his brother Refik Arif, former Soviet government officials, achieved success after Kazakh independence in 1991 by gaining ownership of a chromium plant. The Arifs became close with Mashkevich and his partners, who operated large-scale mining projects in Kazakhstan, according to the Diplomat news site. The details of Arif's business empire emerged when he tried to buy a share of Milan AC, the storied football franchise.

Felix Sater too has some notoriety. In 1993, Sater was convicted and sent to prison for stabbing a commodities broker in the face with a broken margarita glass. He then became involved in a $40 million stock manipulation scheme run by members of the Gambino and Bonanno organized crime families. In return for his “cooperation” as a government informant, he was allowed to plead guilty and get on with his life. He partnered with Arif, who had developed luxury properties in Turkey, and they joined forces with Trump.

The Partnership

By 2007, Sater had an office on the 24th floor of Trump Tower, according to the Washington Post. In sworn testimony reviewed by the Post, Sater said he popped into Trump’s office frequently over a six-year period to talk business. He recalled flying to Colorado with Trump and said Trump once asked him to escort Donald Jr. and Ivanka around Moscow.

At the time, Arif also extolled Trump.

"He's been very helpful to us from the beginning and he's been very helpful in opening some doors," he told Real Estate Weekly.

Donald Trump would prefer to forget such matters. In a 2013 deposition for a court case related to Trump Soho, Trump claimed he only met Sater a couple of times and would not recognize him.

Sater seems to feel the relationship is closer. In February, he and Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen prepared a Ukraine peace proposal for the president, although it's not clear it ever reached the Oval Office.

The Washington vocabulary of scandal, corruption and sleaze does not quite do justice to the state of affairs that exists when the White House receives a foreign policy proposal from a felon who threatens to blackmail a former business partner (once detained in a prostitution investigation) of the president.

Some might see a moral swamp in need of drainage. In the Trump White House, it's called business as usual.
http://www.alternet.org/trumps-organize ... hite-house




Image
I ‘Absolutely’ Voted To Cut Funding For Embassy Security

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, leading Clinton Benghazi critic


Claude Taylor‏
@TrueFactsStated
A Utah source now confirming that Chaffetz resignation expected as early as tomorrow.



Claude Taylor‏ @TrueFactsStated 14m14 minutes ago
The election/collusion was the crime. Chaffetz/Nunes were part of the coverup. Also a crime.


Chaffetz considering early departure from Congress
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/32971 ... m-congress


Yes, the Jason Chaffetz bombshell is coming
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 4:23 pm EDT Thu Apr 20, 2017 | 0

When Jason Chaffetz announced yesterday that he won’t be seeking reelection in 2018 and won’t be running for any office, some pundits posited that he’s merely looking to avoid losing in the anti-Trump landslide expected in the midterms. But that doesn’t even make sense. No, this is all about a Chaffetz scandal that’s about to hit the fan.
Last week Palmer Report brought you the story the intel community sources who claim the FBI has learned that Russia has been holding blackmail material over Jason Chaffetz, in order to make sure the House Oversight Committee that he chairs will never investigate Donald Trump’s Russian election collusion scandal (link). Chaffetz’s announcement yesterday fits in line with this. The Republican Party does not need twenty months to find a suitable replacement in a district that red. So if he were merely afraid of losing reelection in 2018, he’d have waited awhile before making this announcement to see if the overall political winds might change direction in the mean time.
The only reason for Jason Chaffetz to announce this early that he’s not running again is if he’s sitting on a scandal that he knows is about to explode. By taking himself off the table for 2018, he’s hoping those with the dirt on him will be appeased into not releasing it after all. Who’s about out him? Russia? The FBI itself? We don’t know which of these entities is forcing his hand this week, but he does. There’s widespread buzz on Twitter that not only won’t he finish out his term, but that he might resign tomorrow. This buzz is spreading so quickly that it’s difficult to even parse where it originated from. But there’s a reason for all this smoke.
Jason Chaffetz is surely trying to figure out whether his announcement yesterday is enough to keep the scandal from becoming public, or if he now needs to resign immediately in order to improve his odds. So the buzz you’re hearing is likely the result of the trial balloons Chaffetz himself is floating behind the scenes. Will he resign tomorrow? Next week? Will he finish out his term? Who knows. This is too chaotic to predict the particulars. But it’s precisely that chaos, that panic coming from Chaffetz, that tells us this is such a bombshell that it’s coming out one way or the other. It always does. The only question is whether the Chaffetz scandal explodes before or after he’s vacated his seat.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/yes ... ming/2367/


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
Location: into the black
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 25, 2017 11:03 am

Sally Yates to testify at May 8 Senate hearing
CNN Digital Expansion 2017
By Tom LoBianco and Laura Jarrett, CNN
Updated 10:35 AM ET, Tue April 25, 2017
Sally Yates, James Clapper to testify

Sally Yates was originally expected to speak to lawmakers last month
That hearing was abruptly postponed amid accusation the White House didn't want her to testify
(CNN)Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates is set to testify May 8 before a Senate judiciary investigation into Russia's interference in last year's elections, her second congressional hearing at which she's scheduled to testify within the span of a week.

Yates' appearance before the Sen. Lindsey Graham-led Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism would mark her second time when the former Obama appointee has been called to the Hill to testify on Russia's meddling. Yates has been invited to testify at a public hearing of the House intelligence committee to be scheduled after May 2. A date has not been confirmed yet.


Yates was originally expected to tell lawmakers last month about phone calls between President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. But House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes abruptly postponed that hearing as part of a maneuver with the White House, which ultimately ended in him stepping away from the Russia investigation two weeks later and becoming the subject of a House ethics probe himself.
The Washington Post reported last month that the White House sought to block Yates' testimony, citing attorney-client and presidential communications privileges -- but White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump had no objection to Yates testifying.

The House and Senate intelligence committees have been running the primary investigations into Russia's meddling in the election and possible coordination with Trump campaign aides. But other investigators, including Graham, have been probing those connections as well.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to accurately reflect the timing of Yates' appearance before the House intelligence committee.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/25/politics/ ... l?adkey=bn


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

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 25, 2017 12:04 pm

COVER UP: Trump Denies House Request For Flynn Docs
By Frances Langum

4/25/17 8:13am
COVER UP: Trump Denies House Request For Flynn Docs


White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short outlined in a letter to the House oversight committee how it would not complete the request from the panel, referring some requests to the Department of Defense, saying the office doesn't have custody of some of the other documents or simply stating "we are unable to accommodate" others.

Whether Flynn properly disclosed payments from foreign governments on his security clearance application is the subject of a House oversight committee meeting Tuesday, as members are set to review the first batch of documents related to the investigation coming from the Pentagon.

The White House lawyers don't have a copy of Flynn's security clearance application?

And a reminder this is a request for very specific documents. Sure the Trump White House doesn't HAVE to comply with this request but they are just asking for a subpoena.

Given that Flynn resigned based on disclosures of this intel...

... and that he registered as a foreign agent months after the fact, but that White House Counsel has acknowledged they knew he was a foreign agent for Turkey during the transition....

...and that he has requested (and been denied for now) immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony in this affair.

The Trump White House is just buying time. This is a cover up.
http://crooksandliars.com/2017/04/cover ... uest-flynn


House Oversight set a Michael Flynn document trap, and Donald Trump just stepped in it
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 3:09 pm EDT Tue Apr 25, 2017 | 0

Congress is back in session today after a long recess, and it took just a few hours for the fireworks to get going in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. But those fireworks came from an unlikely place – and they’ve delivered a perceptual blow to Trump that may have altered how an already skeptical public views the Trump administration. Today’s happenings may have also offered additional insight into what’s really going on with Jason Chaffetz behind the scenes.
Last night word leaked out to the media that the House Oversight Committee is going on the offensive against Michael Flynn (link). This is the committee chaired by Jason Chaffetz, who up to this point had seemingly been trying to protect Trump by not allowing his committee to carry out a serious investigation. But during the recess, reports surfaced that the FBI may be onto Chaffetz for having been caught up in the Russia scandal himself. Then days later Chaffetz announced he won’t seek reelection and he may not even finish his current term. And now, in a move that’s left many scratching their heads, the Chaffetz-led committee just delivered a striking blow to Trump.
Here’s perhaps the best way to summarize today’s events. The House Oversight Committee had requested that Trump’s White House turn over documents about Michael Flynn. The White House responded by saying that it can’t turn over some of the documents in question, because some are located at other agencies, and one document exceeds the clearance level of even the ranking members of the committee. It’s not yet clear whether the White House is being truthful or not in its response. But because the Trump administration is so widely seen as dishonest, having already been caught lying about everything from inauguration crowd size to the location of the USS Carl Vinson, Trump and team are not being given the benefit of the doubt today.
Suddenly major headlines are appearing that say things like “Trump White House Refuses to Give Key Flynn Documents to Congress” (Mother Jones) and “White House rejects Oversight request for Flynn documents” (The Hill). These headlines are accurate. But by default, they’ll steer the public toward concluding that the White House is now trying to cover up Flynn’s crimes.
It’s fairly evident in hindsight that the House Oversight Committee strategically requested these particular Flynn documents, knowing that Trump’s White House would probably say no, in order to allow the resulting media narrative to form. Jason Chaffetz and ranking Democratic member Elijah Cummings are both savvy enough to know how these things work, and had to have known this is how things would play out. And there they were today, side by side in a televised press conference, both ripping into Flynn in equal measure. Notably, the committee letter demanding the documents was dated March 22nd (PDF link). So was this truly a month long trap in the making?
The question now is why Chaffetz seems to be playing for the anti-Trump team, working with Cummings to set this trap in order to prompt the media to paint Donald Trump and White House as being in desperate cover-up mode. Is Chaffetz truly in legal trouble behind the scenes, as reports have been asserting (link) for the past ten days? Is that why he just announced he’s ending his career in Congress? Are we seeing him carrying out the bidding of the FBI in order to insulate himself?
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/hou ... n-it/2438/
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
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 26, 2017 7:19 pm

The Curious Tale of Michael Cohen

FEATURED ~ PANSAPIENSBLOG
Michael Cohen may well have gone to Prague. But that may not have been his most interesting trip during the campaign.



When the Steele dossier broke in January, much of the initial public focus was on the salacious tales of prostitutes and peeing, and the possibility of blackmail based on videos of those titillating scenes. But one of the first responses from the Trump camp was a picture of a passport cover, with the caption “I have never been to Prague in my life.”
Image
MC twitter passport crop med

This was, of course, the well-known tweet by Michael Cohen, then an Executive VP in the Trump organization, and now the personal lawyer of Trump. Cohen tweeted it to disprove (in the Trump organization’s view) the claim in the Steele dossier that Cohen had met with Russian agents in Prague in late August or early September, to deal with issues related to hacking, hackers, payment, and cover-ups.

The Steele dossier contained, of course, many allegations beyond the scatological ones that received so much initial attention, and some of them are, as we now know, quite serious, and supported by information that has subsequently emerged. But after Buzzfeed’s controversial publication of the dossier, the alleged Prague meeting seemed to be first on the Trump team’s agenda, as the passport tweet came very shortly thereafter. And that tweet was then widely derided and parodied, because, of course, the cover of a passport doesn’t prove that you have, or haven’t, been anywhere. After the tweet, Cohen supposedly showed some pages of the passport to a Yahoo Reporter (over Skype,) took the passport on Hannity (but didn’t open it,) and even trotted it over to Trump Tower to show it to Bannon (who might not be fully objective,) who then told Trump that he saw no evidence that Cohen had been to Prague (because the word of Cohen, a loyal long-time employee, wasn’t good enough, apparently.)

None of this seemed especially convincing, of course. Moreover, it seemed notable that the Trump team was trying so hard to disprove this allegation–and especially this one allegation, out of all those in the dossier. And, to my eye, it all happened so fast, and felt so scripted, that I felt sure the entire charade had been pre-planned. This seems entirely possible, given what we subsequently became aware of, i.e., that the dossier had been known to many people in Washington for months. But why the focus on this particular allegation? Was it especially important to disprove? Or was it a good place to try to get ahead of the narrative, and distract from the other allegations? I still have no firm opinion about this issue.

Of course, most skeptics were no more convinced than I by the passport sleight of hand. So Cohen offered “incontrovertible” proof that he could not have gone to Prague–a picture in his daughter Samantha’s Instagram feed, of him out with her in Santa Monica around the time of his birthday in late August.
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SBC and MC santa monica Aug 25 med

This was ostensibly taken during a trip he made to Los Angeles with his son to look at schools, and around the time he was alleged to be off in Prague paying Putin’s hackers; thus, he would have had us believe, he couldn’t have done what the dossier claimed. And, furthermore, the whole dossier was therefore “fake news.”

There were, of course, many problems with this. First, the dossier gave no specific date for the Prague meeting, only that it was in late August or early September—one photo hardly rules out that whole time period. Second, it was striking that Cohen had to rely on a chance post by his daughter, and did not point his accusers to his own social media—say, his Twitter feed, as he is a prolific tweeter, especially during the campaign. In addition, for most of the time in question, his tweets are geotagged, so would seem to be a great way to prove one’s whereabouts. He did not, however, direct people to them as evidence of his innocence. Noting this, many did start looking at his Twitter timeline, and noticed something striking—there were many gaps in it, and occasional brief periods where there was no geotagging. Examining his timeline made it clear why Cohen avoided pointing people to it—it raises many more questions than it provides answers. There were, people saw, multiple gaps in it throughout the months of August, September, and October, a number of which could accommodate a trip to the EU for some coordination with his “business” partners.

These revelations led to an intensive search, on the part of many (myself included,) for what plane or planes he may have taken for such a trip. That search has unfortunately produced nothing definitive, though I suspect there are FBI and CIA personnel who have that information in great detail. For the open-source investigators, however, the ability of private plane owners to block the data for their planes on public tracking sites has largely thwarted the search for the means of Cohen’s illicit peregrinations.

I was nonetheless so personally convinced of Cohen’s involvement in the dealings outlined in the Steele dossier—convinced especially by the machinations they undertook to disprove the allegations—that I was compelled to begin my own search for information that could shed light on the situation. In particular, I began combing through the Cohens’ social media, looking for clues that might prove that Cohen had visited the EU during the relevant period. Other than the aforementioned gaps in his Twitter feed, I found nothing—except for one small clue. Going through his daughter’s Instagram account, I found a picture she had posted from London on October 2, 2016, celebrating her birthday. Among the comments on that post is one from her father: “See you soon LuLu.”
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SamCohenbday with date MC circled

I was immediately struck by two odd things about that comment. First, Cohen did not use his comment to wish his own daughter a happy birthday, even though she was (probably) on the other side of the Atlantic. But let’s suppose that he wished her one in some more direct and personal way. In that case, he was merely using her birthday post as an easy way to communicate with “Lulu,’ whoever she was, who he knew he would be seeing soon. But therein lay the second odd thing—there was no comment from any “Lulu” on the post. And it’s not especially effective to send a person a message via someone else’s Instagram post if they haven’t commented on it.

Curious about whom “LuLu” was, I explored Samantha Cohen’s social media more. Her Facebook profile did indeed show two “Lulu”s. The first resides in London, and I am fairly certain does not figure in this story. She occasionally comments on Samantha’s Instagram posts, and those comments are there to see. If she had commented on the birthday post, I think it is safe to assume that comment would still be visible.

The second “Lulu” is Lulu Lucella Agapova—her friends and mother usually refer to her simply as “Lucille” in their social media. This Lulu’s mother is Oxana Agapova, a former model, and her father is Andre Agapov, the founder and chief executive of Rusoro Mining—he has also held numerous other executive positions. The Agapovs appear to split their time between Moscow and London, though are frequently traveling around the world, as one can see on their social media (Oxana’s Instagram was until recently public.) Lulu herself was recently a bridesmaid in the London wedding of Valery Kogan’s granddaughter (Elton John and Mariah Carey performed.) Oxana is apparently friends with the mother of the bride, Darina Lozovsky, Kogan’s daughter. Kogan is reported to be either tight with Putin, or on the outs with him, depending on the source, and there are suspicions that he is laundering large amounts of money out of Russia, possibly to Israel, where he recently built the largest private home in the Mideast (and is a neighbor of Netanyahu.) What is most clear about Valery Kogan’s business dealings, as well as the Agapov’s, is that there is nothing clear about them. (What is also clear is that Cohen’s assertions that he has no Russian connections seem suspect—but of course, it may only be Russia-leaning Ukrainians that he associates with.)

To go back to Cohen’s message to LuLu, and why I feel confident that he was messaging her: first, from older posts of Oxana’s, we can see that Lulu had an Instagram account, @lucilleagapova, which Oxana had linked to in some comments. Those links are now grayed out and inactive. Later we see she has a new account, @lucille, with only 27 posts, but 220 followers. In the gap between these accounts, at the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017, her mother merely tags her as #lucille, and another friend actually tags her as #lucillewithoutinstagram! It seems safe to assume that she deleted her old account (and it is, of course, interesting to speculate about why she may have done so,) and with it the comment on Samantha’s birthday post, and later started a new account. Michael Cohen had responded to the now-deleted comment from Lulu—which she had made from the old account—because he anticipated seeing her soon after October 2, 2016.

As it turns out, Cohen in fact has a lengthy gap in his Twitter timeline around then—he has two posts on October 4, and then none until October 12—one of the longest gaps in his timeline during the election. Given the message to Lulu, it seemed reasonable to assume that he had indeed gone to wherever she was in that gap. Though we do not know for sure where Lulu was, we know Oxana was in London during that time, at numerous art events, and that Lulu was with her at some point in October, and with her father at others, though where is unclear. Oxana did post one picture of father and daughter on October 17, which appears to be in an airport. During early October, the jet the Agapovs frequently use, VQ-BKI, basically flitted back and forth between Russia and Switzerland, and then to London.

Given the information I had, I assumed that Lulu was probably in the EU or Russia, and began to look for how Cohen might have gotten to where she was. I further assumed that he left shortly after his last post from New York on October 4. Eventually, my search led to some analysis of flight data of private planes leaving the New York area in that time frame and crossing the Atlantic. I did in fact identify a plane of interest. I will include information about it here—though I cannot have any confidence it was involved in Cohen’s movements, for reasons that will soon be explained—in part because it is still possible that the particular flight I identified was indeed how Cohen crossed the Atlantic, and in part because the timing of its movement pointed to other important information about Cohen and the timing of his travels, and, possibly, his attempts to hide them. That plane is a Bombardier BD-700, tail number N288DG, owned by Paulson and Company in New York, an investment company founded by John Paulson. Paulson is a major early supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential run, and a current advisor to Trump.

The ownership of the plane got my interest, needless to say, but there was one problem: the plane did indeed take off from Teterboro airport and fly to Hamburg, Germany, in early October (how Hamburg might be important I cannot say, though as will see, Berlin might be.) It then stayed less than 14 hours in Hamburg—presumable the crew had to sleep—before returning to Teterboro. (In general, one will not find data on the movement of this plane on popular tracking sites; it is listed as blocked by the owner. There are, however, other, more arduous systems, for tracking plane movements, which I will not go into here. Suffice it to say that there is indeed a picture of this plane in Hamburg on October 4 on the internet.) But here was the problem—it left Teterboro at 5:34 PM on October 3—the day before Cohen’s final tweets from New York City—thus seeming to rule it out. And there were no other planes in that time period which seemed likely candidates for taking someone across the Atlantic.

Being nevertheless convinced that Cohen had to have left New York to go to wherever Lulu was in early October, I started looking at Cohen’s tweets more carefully, and noticed something odd about his timeline in that period. First, though there are those two tweets on October 4, there are in fact no tweets before that for several days—the last ones before October 4 are several on September 30. Moreover, the tweets on October 4 are atypical—they show Cohen at a restaurant “soft opening” with several of his friends. If one goes through Cohen’s timeline, one will notice that he virtually never tweets anything about his personal life, or pictures of himself—in this time period, it is all cheerleading for his boss Trump, bashing Hillary, thanking supporters of Trump, or dismissing “trolls.”
Image
MC Oct4 comp med

Looking deeper at those two tweets, there was something else very striking: several people who commented on them asked Cohen if he was watching “the debate,” for that was, in fact, the night of the vice-presidential debate. And Cohen makes no comment about it, and does not respond to any of the people asking him about it. Looking at the social media of the friends in the pictures with him, none of them posted photos of that night. And I can find nothing online about a “soft opening” of the restaurant, which is, incidentally, run by a chef who has multiple posts of himself at Trump-owned restaurants.

It dawned on me that these pictures could well be fake, perhaps taken at a soft opening that happened at some other time, and posted on October 4 specifically to give Cohen an alibi for his whereabouts at that time. They include something very unusual for him to post—images of himself at a specific location—that would provide just such an alibi. Perhaps he took a night off from politics to hang out with some friends–but then not even a single comment later about the debate? If one browses through his Twitter timeline from that period, it just seems so very unlikely that he would behave that way.

And then, even more interestingly, I realized that he had also not commented, during the October gap in his timeline, on two other important events. One was the second presidential debate—again, it is difficult to believe he had nothing to say about his boss after a critical event like that (and, in fact, he had tweeted a picture of himself at the first debate.) And the second event he did not comment on was Julian Assange’s October 4 announcement, via video in Berlin, of the impending release of more hacked Democratic emails, and the subsequent October 7 release of Podesta’s emails by Wikileaks.

So we would have to believe that Cohen did not find any of these events—all major events in the campaign of his boss for president, including the email release, one of the most widely discussed events of the election—worth commenting on. I think this is so very, very unlikely. Wherever he was, he was unable to comment on the major political events of that week—clearly he had to be careful to not betray his location, as there is no other conceivable reason for him leaving such meaty political topics untouched. Perhaps he was even overseas because of the Wikileaks events, though that is speculation. But what seems likely is that the October 4 tweets were designed to provide an alibi for him for something. He must have left his phone with someone trustworthy to post those pictures at the agreed upon time—but then that person did not behave like him for the rest of the following week. No doubt it is good tradecraft to leave your phone—one of the primary ways people are tracked in the modern world—at home when on a secret mission. But someone like Cohen’s social media behavior is almost like a fingerprint, and here it doesn’t match.

In retrospect, one wonders if the Trump camp’s initial focus on the passport and Prague meeting was because there was a much more explosive issue that people might accidentally wander into—an issue that is one of the actual reasons for all the hacking and payoffs and cover-ups to begin with. And the passport charade was misdirection, keeping everyone focused on one small piece of the puzzle, so that they miss the bigger picture.

Now, it would still be nice to know how Cohen got to the EU. If we assume the October 4 tweets are deceptive, the time window is different. His last regular tweet is at 3:39 pm EDT on September 30. His message to Lulu is at 9:12 PM EDT on October 2. That message could have been sent from somewhere in the EU, of course, if he was already there and stayed up till the wee hours that evening, with a plan to move again soon to where Lulu was. And let us assume that he moved before the October 4 tweets. That gives us the time window for when he would have had to cross the Atlantic.

One last tidbit: the focus on Cohen has primarily been on the alleged trip to Prague in August or September, as that was the most specific piece of information in the dossier. But there was another brief mention of Cohen in the dossier page dated October 18:
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Dossier Cohen Role

And note that Cohen’s involvement was being referred to in the present tense as of mid-October.

Perhaps the crowd-sourced OSINT world will have contributions to make on these fronts. I am putting this information, and my theory, out in the public sphere to see what other data may be turned up by the many energized investigators that Trump has inspired. And let me stress: it is only a theory. I could be wrong about any or all of the assumptions I made above. I will leave the reader to make up their own mind about that, and investigators to dig into the details. And maybe new information will emerge that will prove that I am just another conspiracy nut in an America that is rife with them of late. Or not.
https://pansapiensblog.wordpress.com/20 ... f-m-cohen/
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 » Wed Apr 26, 2017 9:15 pm

Bribe Cases, a Secret
Jared Kushner Partner
and Potential Conflicts

President Trump’s son-in-law, a top adviser,
had help building a real estate empire from a
member of one of Israel’s wealthiest families.

By JESSE DRUCKERAPRIL 26, 2017

It was the summer of 2012, and Jared Kushner was headed downtown.

His family’s real estate firm, the Kushner Companies, would spend about $190 million over the next few months on dozens of apartment buildings in tony Lower Manhattan neighborhoods including the East Village, the West Village and SoHo.

For much of the roughly $50 million in down payments, Mr. Kushner turned to an undisclosed overseas partner. Public records and shell companies shield the investor’s identity. But, it turns out, the money came from a member of Israel’s Steinmetz family, which built a fortune as one of the world’s leading diamond traders.

A Kushner Companies spokeswoman and several Steinmetz representatives say Raz Steinmetz, 53, was behind the deals. His uncle, and the family’s most prominent figure, is the billionaire Beny Steinmetz, who is under scrutiny by law enforcement authorities in four countries. In the United States, federal prosecutors are investigating whether representatives of his firm bribed government officials in Guinea to secure a multibillion dollar mining concession. In Israel, Mr. Steinmetz was detained in December and questioned in a bribery and money laundering investigation. In Switzerland and Guinea, prosecutors have conducted similar inquiries.

The Steinmetz partnership with Mr. Kushner underscores the mystery behind his family’s multibillion-dollar business and its potential for conflicts with his role as perhaps the second-most powerful man in the White House, behind only his father-in-law, President Trump.

Trump Couple, Now White House Employees, Can’t Escape Conflict Laws APRIL 1, 2017

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Still Benefiting From Business Empire, Filings Show MARCH 31, 2017
Although Mr. Kushner resigned in January from his chief executive role at Kushner Companies, he remains the beneficiary of trusts that own the sprawling real estate business. The firm has taken part in roughly $7 billion in acquisitions over the last decade, many of them backed by foreign partners whose identities he will not reveal. Last month, his company announced that it had ended talks with the Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese financial firm linked to leading members of the ruling Communist Party. The potential agreement, first disclosed by The New York Times, had raised questions because of its favorable terms for the Kushners.

Image

Beny Steinmetz (center, with gray tie) and his brother, Daniel, (gold tie) at a Vanity Fair party at the Natural History Museum in London in 2005. Credit Dafydd Jones
Dealings with the Steinmetz family could create complications for Mr. Kushner. The Justice Department, led by Trump appointees, oversees the investigation into Beny Steinmetz. Even as Mr. Kushner’s company maintains extensive business ties to Israel, as a top White House adviser, he has been charged with leading American efforts to broker peace in the Middle East as part of his broad global portfolio.

“Mr. Kushner continues to work with the Office of the White House Counsel and personal counsel to ensure he recuses from any particular matter involving specific parties in which he has a business relationship with a party to the matter,” said Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman.

‘A Terrific Partner’

Representatives for Mr. Kushner and the Steinmetzes put distance between Raz Steinmetz and his uncle, Beny. Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for the Kushner Companies, called Raz “a terrific partner,” and added: “He is the only Steinmetz that we have done business with.”

In a statement provided by his attorney, Raz Steinmetz said: “None of my investment entities has invested in any transactions with Beny Steinmetz or any of his interests.” Louis Solomon, an attorney at Greenberg Traurig LLP, who represents one of Beny Steinmetz’s companies, said any business relationships between Raz and Beny were two decades old, and said the two men had not had contact since 2013.

Image
The Complicated Ties That Bind
How a lattice of intersecting investments, obligations and interests connected the Steinmetz family over the years.

Jared
Kushner
Guinean
government
officials
Current connection
Buys property with
Past
Subject of
investigation for
alleged bribes to
Connected
via Swiss
account
with
Connected
via Swiss
account
with
Daniel
Steinmetz
Raz
Steinmetz
Beny
Steinmetz
Controlled
Worked for
Invests and
buys property
with
Controlled
Worked for
Shlomo
Meichor
Rebar
British Virgin Islands
investment vehicle
Co-founded
Assisted
the operation of
Co-founded
Works at
Gaia
Investment
firm
The Steinmetz family
diamond business
Troy Griggs/The New York Times
The two men, as well as Daniel Steinmetz, who is Beny’s brother and Raz’s father, have controlled their own companies. But some of their financial interests — ranging from diamonds to real estate — have been entwined over the years. Records reviewed by The Times show that they have shared offshore investment vehicles, employed the same company director and were once connected to the same Swiss bank accounts.

Alan M. Dershowitz, a criminal defense attorney for Beny Steinmetz in the United States, also said his client was not involved in the Kushner properties. He predicted that the businessman would be vindicated overseas and said he believed the federal investigation of Mr. Steinmetz and his companies was no longer active.

The Justice Department would not comment on the inquiry. But more information about the bribery investigation may be disclosed by federal prosecutors at a trial that began Monday in New York. Mahmoud Thiam, Guinea’s former minister of mines, is facing corruption charges involving a Chinese company. An affidavit from a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent made public in the case last month said that the minister bribed a fellow government official “on behalf of” one of Mr. Steinmetz’s companies in 2009. The F.B.I. is also examining an alleged bribery episode involving a prominent Guinean — the late president’s wife — and a Steinmetz company a year earlier.

A Billionaire’s Legal Troubles

Until a few months ago, when he was arrested in Israel, Beny Steinmetz, 61, was a globe-trotting billionaire. One of the country’s richest men, he split his time between France, Geneva, Antwerp and his enormous house outside Tel Aviv, on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean.

Image

Raz Steinmetz and his wife, Or, at a Bulgari jewelry event in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 2015. Credit Venturelli/Getty Images
He teamed up with his brother Daniel, now 79, to create the Steinmetz Diamond Group in the 1990s. The business, which sells under the brand Diacore, has become one of the world’s biggest buyers of diamonds from De Beers. In April, a 59.6 carat pink diamond cut by Diacore was sold by Sotheby’s for $71.2 million, an auction record for a gem.

Beny Steinmetz expanded his business interests into steel, gold, nickel, oil and iron ore, and built a global real estate empire, with properties in cities including London, New York and St. Petersburg. Two decades ago, he made a move into Russia, becoming an early investor in newly privatized state enterprises as a co-founder of the hedge fund Hermitage Capital.

Mr. Steinmetz rarely grants interviews and often incorporates his multiple companies in tax havens like Guernsey, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands that offer secrecy. Although he is the public face of his firms, he holds no executive position. Instead, they are typically owned by a Liechtenstein foundation — similar to a trust in the United States — that names him and his wife as beneficiaries. Officially, he is an “adviser” to his firms.

His legal problems stem from a huge deposit of iron ore in Guinea, in West Africa. In 1997, the Australian mining firm Rio Tinto was awarded exploration rights. But by 2008, the Guinean government was complaining that the project had taken too long, and it awarded half the rights to a Steinmetz firm, BSG Resources. In 2010, BSG sold half of that share, cutting a $2.5 billion deal with the Brazilian mining giant Vale.
Image

A Kushner property at 143 First Ave. in Manhattan. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times
In 2014, the Guinean government alleged that Mr. Steinmetz’s company had obtained the rights through corrupt practices, paying more than $8 million in cash through a representative to Mamadie Touré, then the wife of the dictator Lansana Conté. The Department of Justice had already opened an investigation the year before into Mr. Steinmetz’s firms for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, claiming jurisdiction because some of the alleged payments were transmitted through American banks.

This month, lawyers acting on behalf of two of Mr. Steinmetz’s firms sued the billionaire financier George Soros in federal court in New York, asserting that he had directed a smear campaign against the companies. Mr. Soros has funded a portion of the Guinean government’s investigation, as well as work by the nonprofit Global Witness.

The Buying Spree

In 2012, Jared Kushner’s company went on a buying spree, snapping up about 11,000 apartments around the country, roughly doubling its inventory. The firm, founded by his father, Charles, also made its first Steinmetz deal that summer.

The younger Mr. Kushner has traveled repeatedly to Israel, where he has gotten funding to fulfill his ambitions. Kushner Companies has taken out at least four loans from Israel’s largest bank, Bank Hapoalim. It joined with Harel, one of Israel’s largest insurance companies, on one deal. Mr. Kushner’s firm was introduced to the Raz Steinmetz team “by a third-party broker in the United States,” said Kenneth Henderson, a New York attorney for Raz Steinmetz.

Image
Beny Steinmetz and his wife, Agnes, in Tel Aviv in 2010. Credit David Bachar/Associated Press
In August of 2012, the Kushner business made a significant move into downtown Manhattan’s residential market, spending about $60 million on eight apartment buildings in the East Village and the West Village. The low-rise buildings are undistinguished but offer steady income streams.

The deal was arranged by Gaia Investments Corporation, headquartered outside of Tel Aviv. No Steinmetz names appear in Gaia’s public filings. Instead, the shareholders and officers include some Steinmetz lieutenants. One of them, Shlomo Meichor, was a former vice president for finance at an investment firm once run by Raz and Daniel Steinmetz, and is a director for at least three Gaia Delaware entities created for the Kushner deals, records show. (Gaia is an ancient Greek word for earth goddess.)

Gaia’s representatives have told prospective partners that the firm invests money for Daniel as well, according to two people familiar with those conversations. Mr. Henderson, the attorney, said Daniel Steinmetz was not involved in the Kushner investments.

The deals came amid an unprecedented flow of overseas cash into American properties, much of it through opaque corporations and limited liability companies that make the funds difficult to trace.
Image
A Concerted Push for New York Area Property
Jared Kushner and the Steinmetz family have purchased numerous properties in the New York City area together, spending around $188 million for about two dozen buildings in Manhattan and New Jersey.



Beny Steinmetz’s legal problems began to surface a few weeks after the first investment with the Kushner company. In November 2012, The Financial Times reported on the Guinea bribery investigation, setting off coverage around the world.

The Kushner Companies made an even bigger deal with the Raz Steinmetz team a few months later, in January 2013, spending about $130 million on a portfolio of 17 apartment buildings across Lower Manhattan.

A few weeks later, a BSG Resources representative named Frederic Cilins — meeting in a diner at the Jacksonville, Fla., airport — urged Ms. Touré, by then the widow of the Guinean president, to destroy paperwork documenting the alleged bribes. She was cooperating with the F.B.I., though, and wearing a wire. Mr. Cilins pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal criminal investigation and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Beny Steinmetz has said he had no knowledge of Mr. Cilins’ activities.

In October 2013, a few days after Guinea moved to revoke its iron ore contracts with Mr. Steinmetz’s firms, his company’s representatives wrote their lawyers that he had transferred his diamond company stakes to his brother Daniel’s foundation in Liechtenstein. That disclosure is in the so-called Panama Papers, the trove of documents obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and reviewed by The Times through a collaboration organized by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

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Corporate and bank records point to interlocking financial relationships among the Steinmetz family members in the past. Raz once managed the family’s real estate investments and participated in the family diamond business. As part of the bribery investigation involving Beny, Swiss prosecutors searched the offices of a company used by Daniel Steinmetz. The three men were once connected to at least two Swiss bank accounts at HSBC, according to bank records obtained by the French newspaper Le Monde and shared by the journalist consortium.

Mr. Solomon, the attorney for Beny Steinmetz’s firm, said that there was no current connection to Raz through any Swiss bank account. He said an Israeli investment vehicle that public records show Raz, Daniel and Beny still own jointly is “dormant.”

Risa Heller, the Kushner Companies spokeswoman, declined to discuss any due diligence the firm may have performed ahead of the investments.

The Kushner Companies appear to have carried out a public scrubbing of its Steinmetz associations. In late 2014, the Gaia name and logo disappeared from the Kushner website’s list of partners, where it had appeared since early 2013.

But the Kushners have not stopped making deals with the Steinmetz family. Around the time Gaia was dropped from the website, it invested in yet another Kushner building: a Trump-branded luxury high-rise in Jersey City. The $200 million project, known as Trump Bay Street, is at 65 Bay Street.

Jared Kushner’s ethics disclosure filed last month revealed a stake in a company called 65 Bay L.L.C. The entity was originally called GAIA JC LLC.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/us/p ... .html?_r=0
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.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 27, 2017 10:14 am

APRIL 27, 2017 | DAN WISE AND RUSS BAKER
GOVERNMENT MUST TELL IF TRUMP ASSOCIATE HAD RUSSIAN MOB TIES

Image
Todd Kaminsky, Felix Sater, Donald Trump
Photo credit: 591J / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), The New York Senate and The White House.
Several weeks ago, WhoWhatWhy published an investigative story on Donald Trump, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Russian mob. It addressed challenges the FBI faces in fully investigating and reporting to the public what it knows about Trump’s past and his relationships.

One of the figures in that story — and in a followup piece — is a former Trump business associate named Felix Sater. Our article pointed out that Sater, a man with a criminal past, had become a “cooperating witness” for the FBI and had been so while he worked in Trump Tower. He had been highly valued by the FBI — as best as we could determine both for providing information about international terrorism and gangsters from countries of the former Soviet Union.

We were unable at the time to reach Sater for comment, but since publication, we have heard from him. He claimed that he had done no work for the FBI relating to “Russian organized crime,” and that, moreover, he had never even heard of the legendary godfather of the Russia-based crime network, Semion Mogilevich. We have appended his remarks to our original article in an Editor’s Note.

We also added an interesting revelation from the Wall Street Journal that Sater, who says he knows none of those gangsters, has, separately, in a legal action against the man who was his business partner in a deal with Donald Trump, referred to the man as a “Kazakh gangster.”

Without splitting hairs about the differences in meaning between “former Soviet Union,” “Russian,” and “Eastern European” when referring to criminals with roots and ties in various parts of the former Eastern bloc, the question of whether organized crime was a factor in Sater’s usefulness to the FBI while he was a business associate of Donald Trump needs to be resolved.

Someone who could help solve this puzzle and clarify Sater’s connections to the Russian mob is Todd Kaminsky, a former federal prosecutor and now an elected official in New York State. But Kaminsky seems reluctant to press for disclosure.

This is what we do know:

In a secret proceeding in 2011, federal prosecutor Kaminsky praised Sater for providing valuable information on “Russian organized crime.” This information had been hidden in the previously sealed transcript of an argument before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which is based in Manhattan. It was first published on the law blog of Dan Wise, one of the co-authors of this article. (Sater did not respond to two email requests seeking comment on Kaminsky’s statement about him, beyond seeking to know in which venue Kaminsky made that statement.)

***

Clearly, getting to the bottom of the close relationship between the FBI and Sater is essential if the public is to trust the FBI to fully investigate Trump’s relationships to a wide network of Russian-orbit-connected figures, including Vladimir Putin, various billionaire oligarchs, and a crime network widely believed to be closely enmeshed with the Russian leadership.

Aside from speaking with Sater, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees should also speak with the federal prosecutors and FBI agents who worked with Sater, praised his cooperation as an informant, and sought leniency at his sentencing hearing after he was convicted on a charge of securities fraud.

Beyond whatever action Congress takes as a result of its investigations, there are court files that could shed light on the Trump-Russia connection. But getting them unsealed has not been easy. Nor has it been easy to get anyone to talk about Sater’s work. This includes Kaminsky, a former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, which encompasses Brooklyn and Long Island, and one of the prosecutors present at Sater’s sentencing. He is now a New York state senator representing Long Island (9th District, South Shore).

Kaminsky’s office ignored repeated requests for comment on whether he believes the remaining material in Sater’s court files should now be unsealed — considering the paramount national interest in uncovering any connections between the Trump campaign and Russian mobsters, oligarchs, and political leaders, including Putin.

Many news organizations, including WhoWhatWhy, have reported that in today’s Russia, the criminal class, the monied elite, and the political leadership are closely intertwined. Kaminsky, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

The reason Kaminsky’s now-public 2011 statement is so important is that it makes clear Sater had enough credibility with the Russian mob that he could gather “valuable” information from Russian-language gangsters operating in New York City.

This connection was reinforced in February when Sater emerged as the linchpin of an extremely pro-Russian proposal to halt the fighting in Ukraine. Sater, working with a rogue Ukrainian legislator, Andril V. Artemenko, and Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, would have laid the groundwork for ending US financial sanctions against Russia. Further, it would have given Russia unquestioned control of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, for another 50 to 100 years.

The proposal landed on the desk of Trump’s then-national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who has since been forced to resign, ostensibly for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US before Trump’s inauguration. The Sater-Artemenko-Cohen proposal has not been acted upon.

Sater’s role emerged against a steady escalation of concern that Russia had been behind the hacking of both the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Indeed, just three days before the WiseLawNY story ran, on March 23, FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that his agency had begun a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in July 2016.

Todd Kaminsky 2016 campaign video for NY state senate:



It seems beyond question that Kaminsky and other Eastern District prosecutors and law enforcement agents with whom Sater “cooperated” during his years as an informant have a great deal of information about his work with the Russian mob. (The Eastern District includes Brooklyn, long the center of Russian-speaking immigrants in New York.)

Sater, who pled guilty to one count of racketeering in 1998 in connection with an organized-crime “pump-and-dump” stock fraud, was not sentenced until 2009, and he served the FBI as a “cooperating witness” during the intervening eleven years. It was during this period that Sater worked at Bayrock, the real estate development company with offices in Trump Tower that partnered with the Trump Organization on numerous projects, including the Trump SoHo. In pending litigation, Bayrock is alleged to have served as a large-scale criminal operation, laundering vast sums from the former Soviet Union.

Thanks to his efforts as an informant, Sater was given a slap on the wrist for defrauding investors: no jail time, no probation, no restitution, and just a $25,000 fine. It was Kaminsky who represented the government at Sater’s sentencing hearing. Prosecutors had determined that the pump-and-dump operation in which Sater took part in the mid-1990s had fleeced its victims of at least $40 million.

All the information that Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents gathered while supervising Sater’s work as an informant in the 11-year span between his guilty plea in 1998 and sentencing in 2009 may be available (or generally known) to certain agents conducting the counterintelligence probe.

As WhoWhatWhy exclusively reported, one of Sater’s FBI handlers, Gary Uher, was part of Trump’s security team during the campaign. The same story reported that two former Eastern District prosecutors represented Sater at his sentencing hearing in 2009 as attorneys with the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. One was Leslie R. Caldwell, who had been a senior trial counsel in the Eastern District’s Business and Securities Fraud Section; the other was Kelly Anne Moore, who had headed the office’s Violent Crimes and Terrorism Section. President Barack Obama tapped Caldwell to become the number three official in the Department of Justice in 2013. Loretta Lynch worked with both Caldwell and Moore when she was a prosecutor in the Eastern District; in fact, she signed Sater’s cooperation agreement in 1998.

“Highly Sensitive Matters”
.
The vehemence with which prosecutors and judges have acted to block the public airing of information from Sater’s file suggests that prosecutors may have cut a deal with Sater so they could catch even bigger fish: the Russian-based mob and its “boss of bosses,” Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI would later declare a serious national security threat. (As noted above, Sater has denied even having heard of Mogilevich.)

The court battle over whether Sater’s criminal file in his original case should remain sealed continues, six years after the Second Circuit barred two lawyers from talking to anyone, including Congress and arguably even investigators, about the contents of that file. The lawyers were Frederick Oberlander, who had disseminated sealed information from Sater’s file, and Richard E. Lerner, who had defended Oberlander. (Oberlander had initiated the litigation against Bayrock that sought to unseal Sater’s file.)

Indeed, the veil of secrecy had grown so thick by 2011 that in response to a petition from the Associated Press, a judge appointed by the Second Circuit to enforce its orders refused to allow Oberlander and Lerner to even discuss the contents of the materials the judge himself had just ordered unsealed.

Since then, parts of Sater’s criminal file have become public — although the government remains extraordinarily tight-lipped. The reason for the continuing secrecy can probably be found in the 2015 confirmation hearings of Loretta Lynch, who succeeded Eric Holder as US Attorney General under Obama. In a letter responding to a written question from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she made it clear that there was much sensitive information in Sater’s criminal file. “The majority of the materials that remain sealed go to the heart of Sater’s cooperation in several highly sensitive matters,” Lynch wrote to Hatch.
Image
Felix Sater
Photo credit: See complete attribution below.

The public has no idea of what the remaining sealed files contain, other than Lynch’s tantalizing remark.

The nation and world are now riveted by investigations into the Trump campaign’s putative role in Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The issues raised go to the heart of the integrity of the electoral process.

The traditional rationale for cloaking information about an informant’s identity or the scope of his disclosures is to protect the informant’s safety. But Sater’s own behavior suggests that he does not fear for his own safety as a consequence of cooperating with law enforcement officials.

In this vein, it is worth noting that Sater undertook the Ukrainian “peace proposal” mission, which carried with it a reasonable possibility of generating headlines — as it did. Further, if the government feared the exposure of Sater’s mission, it is hard to imagine that his handlers would not have reined him in. The involvement of Cohen, Trump’s personal counsel, is even more inexplicable.

Perhaps Kaminsky, recognizing that the voting public has a deep interest in these matters, will reconsider whether the government’s interest in protecting Sater, the informant, takes priority over determining whether the Trump campaign was complicit in any Russian effort to undermine the 2016 election. Of course, Kaminsky himself may be bound by an obligation not to disclose classified information.

Nonetheless, in 2018, Kaminsky will be running for a second term as state senator representing a swing district in the southwestern corner of Long Island. If he doesn’t budge on the question, it could become an issue on the campaign trail.

The people of the United States — and the world — must have confidence in the conclusions of the ongoing investigations into the Trump-Russian connection. Given the importance of these investigations, continued court secrecy may no longer be in the national interest.
http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/27/govern ... -mob-ties/
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 Apr 27, 2017 12:17 pm

Do Trump's Murky Financial Ties to Russia Connect to Money Laundering?
Investigators have only begun to follow the money.

BILL BUZENBERGAPR. 26, 2017 6:00 AM

Federal investigators continue to dig into Russia's cyberattack on the US election and the Trump administration's possible involvement—but as bad as that intrusion and collusion may be, Trump's opaque financial dealings could prove even more perilous for the president.

Trump has blazed a decades-long trail of questionable financial dealings with Russian sources that could provide investigators with the grist they need for legal action. A wide array of Russian oligarchs with links to Vladimir Putin have invested tens of millions of hard-to-explain dollars in Trump properties. And Trump professes never to know who these people are or where they got the big bucks for their mostly cash deals.

Court cases and other legal documents show Trump and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering.
Money laundering is the process of taking proceeds from criminal activity (dirty money) and making them appear legal (clean). Although the news didn't make much of a splash during the 2016 campaign, Trump paid a $10 million fine to the U.S. Treasury in 2015 for his bankrupt Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City because it failed to meet anti-money-laundering requirements. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Regulators said the casino failed to establish and implement an effective anti-money-laundering program, failed to implement an adequate system of internal controls, and failed to properly file currency transaction reports or keep other required records."

It is already a matter of public record that several Trump-affiliated businesses and associates are connected to alleged Russian money-laundering operations.

Banks

Many of Trump's business dealings involve Deutsche Bank or the Bank of Cyprus—both known for their connections with Russian oligarchs. Deutsche Bank is also Trump's biggest lender; he owes the bank some $300 million, as first reported by Mother Jones' Russ Choma and David Corn. The Guardian reported that Deutsche Bank paid $630 million in fines for failing to prevent $10 billion in Russian money laundering between 2012 and 2015.

The Bank of Cyprus is also well known as a money-laundering haven for Russian oligarchs. Trump's Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has invested heavily in the Bank of Cyprus (some $424 million in 2014, giving him an 18% stake) and he was once vice-chairman of the bank, according to the Guardian. Ross presided over deals that raise questions about his tenure at the bank and his ties to politically connected Russian oligarchs.

Ross shared his vice-chairman post at the bank with a deposit holder-turned-shareholder, Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, referred to in Russian media as a former KGB official and Putin ally.

Russian Oligarchs

The Washington Post has described Trump's 30-year history of business dealings with Russian oligarchs and government officials, which began when there was still a Soviet Union. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Trump's son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

"You're looking for transactions that are unusually or unnecessarily complicated, and make no business sense," said a former DOJ official.
According to an investigation by USA Today, wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics invested extensively in Trump's real estate developments over the years. Court cases and other legal documents show President Trump and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering, including:

Felix Sater, a major player in the Bayrock group that developed the Trump SoHo Hotel in New York and a twice-convicted felon who spent a year in prison for stabbing a man. Sater later scouted for Trump investments in Russia.
Alexander Mashkevich, a Kazakh mining billionaire,was another source of funds for Bayrock financing and the SoHo project, and was accused by Belgian authorities in 2011 in a $55 million money-laundering scheme.
Anatoly Golubchik, Vadim Trincher and Michael Sall are three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan who were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.
Viktor Khrapunov, a former Kazakhstan energy minister and mayor of Almaty, owns three units in the Trump SoHo through shell companies and was accused in a federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in 2014 of hiding millions of dollars looted from his city, some of which was spent on three Trump SoHo units.
Peter Kiritchenko, a Ukrainian owner of two Trump condos in Florida, who was indicted in a money-laundering scheme involving a former prime minister of Ukraine.
According to USA Today, such dealings with Russian oligarchs concern law enforcement because many are suspected of corrupt practices intertwining Russia's business elite, government security services and criminal gangs. Real estate in London, New York and Miami is an attractive option for parking stolen money.

Besides banks and oligarchs, many of Trump's Russian transactions involve various shell companies– the kinds of business deals that attract law enforcement's attention.

"You're looking for transactions that are unusually or unnecessarily complicated, and make no business sense," a former Justice Department official told McClatchy recently. "In general, if someone is conducting transactions in a complicated way, using shell corporations, using offshore bank accounts or using accounts in countries where they otherwise aren't doing any business, it suggests that there may be a motive to conceal of disguise something."

Paul Manafort

McClatchy and the New York Times have both written about the convoluted financial transactions of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman who was let go last August because of questions about his financial dealings.

According to McClatchy, "The FBI, Justice Department and Treasury Department are examining whether any of Manafort's millions of dollars in consulting income from pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs were laundered from corrupt sources, whether he properly disclosed all his foreign bank accounts each year to the U.S. government and whether he paid taxes on all foreign income," two sources familiar with the inquiry said.

The day Manafort left the Trump campaign he created a shell company that he controlled that soon received $13 million in loans from two businesses with ties to Trump.
Between 2006 and 2007, Manafort paid nearly $8 million in cash for three high-end homes, including a $3.7 million condominium in New York's Trump towers, McClatchy reported. In some cases he used shell companies and corporate names for the purchases. Manafort also reportedly had some 10 businesses and 15 bank accounts in Cyprus.

Manafort has not yet registered as a foreign agent, although the New York Times says he is now considering registering retroactively for his lobbying work on behalf of a pro-Russian government in Ukraine. He has not been charged with money laundering and he has defended his use of offshore accounts and his other business transactions as perfectly normal.

The Times also reported that the day Manafort left the Trump campaign (August 19th) he created a shell company that he controlled that "soon received $13 million in loans from two businesses with ties to Mr. Trump, including one that partners with a Ukrainian-born billionaire and another led by a Trump economic adviser."

Russian financial ties to Trump are a complex picture that will keep investigators busy for a long time trying to unravel normal business practices from potentially illegal dealings. But one thing is already crystal clear: Trump was lying when he said last summer, as quoted by CNN: "No, I have nothing to do with Russia. How many times do I have say that? I have nothing to do with Russia."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... s-manafort
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby Heaven Swan » Thu Apr 27, 2017 10:06 pm

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"When IT reigns, I’m poor.” Mario
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 28, 2017 9:27 pm

UK was given details of alleged contacts between Trump campaign and Moscow
In December the UK government was given reports by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele on possible collusion between Trump camp and the Kremlin


Reports of possible collusion between the Trump administration and the Kremlin have led to a political storm in the US.


Julian Borger in Washington
Friday 28 April 2017 13.23 EDT Last modified on Friday 28 April 2017 16.56 EDT

The UK government was given details last December of allegedly extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow, according to court papers.

Reports by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer, on possible collusion between the the Trump camp and the Kremlin are at the centre of a political storm in the US over Moscow’s role in getting Donald Trump elected.

It was not previously known that the UK intelligence services had also received the dossier but Steele confirmed in a court filing earlier this month that he handed a memorandum compiled in December to a “senior UK government national security official acting in his official capacity, on a confidential basis in hard copy form”.

The court papers say Steele decided to pass on the information he had collected because it was “of considerable importance in relation to alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election”, that it “had implications for the national security of the US and the UK” and “needed to [be] analysed and further investigated/verified”.

The December memo alleged that four Trump representatives travelled to Prague in August or September in 2016 for “secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers”, about how to pay hackers secretly for penetrating Democratic party computer systems and “contingency plans for covering up operations”.

Between March and September, the December memo alleges, the hackers used botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs and steal data online from Democratic party leadership. Two of the hackers had been “recruited under duress by the FSB” the memo said. The hackers were paid by the Trump organisation, but were under the control of Vladimir Putin’s presidential administration.

Trump has rejected the allegations of collusion as a smear campaign. His lawyer, Michael Cohen, one of Trump representatives named in the memo, has described the claims in the memo as “totally fake, totally inaccurate”, and has said he had never been to Prague.


Since the memo became public in January, Steele had not spoken about his role in compiling it but he and his company, Orbis Business Intelligence Limited, have filed a defence in the high court of justice in London, in a defamation case brought by Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian venture capitalist and owner of a global computer technology company, XBT, and a Dallas-based subsidiary Webzilla.

Gubarev, who was named along with his company in the December memo as being involved in hacking operation, has denied any such involvement and is also suing Buzzfeed in the US courts for publishing the December memo alongside Steele’s earlier reports on election hacking.

A statement by Steele’s defence lawyers, endorsed by the former MI6 agent, said Orbis was hired between June and November last year by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research consultancy to look into Trump’s links with Russia.

In that period, Steele produced 16 memoranda citing mostly Russian sources as describing a web of alleged contacts and collusion between Trump aides and Russian intelligence or other Kremlin representatives.

The document said that he passed the memos to Fusion on the understanding that Fusion would not disclose the material to any third parties without the approval of Steele and Orbis. They did agree to Fusion providing a copy to Senator John McCain after the veteran Republican had been told about the existence of Steele’s research by Sir Andrew Wood, a former UK ambassador to Moscow and an Orbis associate, at a conference in Canada on 8 November.

After delivering these reports, the court papers say Steele and Orbis continued to receive “unsolicited intelligence” on Trump-Russia links, and Steele decided that to draw up another memo with this new information which was dated 13 December.

He handed one copy over to the senior British national security official and sent an encrypted version to Fusion with instructions to deliver a hard copy to Senator McCain.

The defence argues that Steele and Orbis were under a duty to pass on the information “so that it was known to the United Kingdom and United States governments at a high level by persons with responsibility for national security”.

Steele and Orbis say they never gave any copies to news organisations although Steele said he gave off-the-record briefings about the dossier to a small number of journalists in late summer and early autumn 2016. The defence brief argues that neither Steele nor Orbis is liable for Buzzfeed’s decision to print the document.

The Steele dossier was referred to in an intelligence briefing provided by the FBI and US intelligence agencies to Obama and Trump in January. Comey has confirmed that counter-intelligence investigations are under way into possible links between Trump associates and Moscow, and CNN has reported that the FBI used the dossier to bolster its investigations.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... are_btn_tw
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 » Sun Apr 30, 2017 4:25 pm

Foreign Agents Registration Act

FARA


Claude Taylor‏
@TrueFactsStated
2) The FARA case loops in the Russians in Trump Tower, is larger and also does involve RICO.



During the course of the weekend Palmer Report has been bringing you updates on the multiple grand juries underway in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal, which have now been separately confirmed by both Republican insider Rick Wilson and Democratic insider Claude Taylor (link). Now come additional details regarding the two grand juries, which offer hints at who the targets are.
According to a new update from Taylor, one of the two grand juries is centered around the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and it’s the larger of the two. The most likely targets of a FARA case are Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, the two Donald Trump campaign advisers who have since been exposed as paid foreign agents. But Taylor adds that the case “loops in the Russians in Trump Tower” (link), and that it also invokes the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
The second Trump-Russia grand jury is based entirely around RICO, but does not involve the election. Instead it’s a money laundering case (link). Palmer Report has previously reported that the State of New York busted Deutsche Bank earlier this year for laundering billions of dollars in Russian money into the hands of clients in places like New York City (link). In turn, Deutsche Bank has given more than a billion dollars in loans and loan guarantees to Donald Trump.
Grand juries nearly always return indictments, allowing prosecutors to move forward with their cases. As a judge once famously quipped, a good prosecutor could convince a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. It’s also notable that one grand jury can return any number of indictments. So the two grand juries don’t mean two indictments are coming; they mean two or more indictments are coming. In other words, the Trump-Russia scandal is just getting started.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/new ... gets/2513/


This is what Pence knew and when he knew it...he is lying and is part of the cover up

Image

Maxine Waters: Evidence of Collusion Between Trump and Russia Could Lead to Impeachment
by Lindsey Ellefson | 2:50 pm, April 30th, 2017
http://www.mediaite.com/online/maxine-w ... peachment/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 02, 2017 6:54 pm

Entire Senate Intel Committee charters a bus, heads to CIA headquarters for Trump-Russia briefing
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 6:38 pm EDT Tue May 2, 2017 | 0

Barely a week ago, various reports were leaking out that the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee had grown dissatisfied with Republican Chairman Richard Burr’s handling of the committee’s investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. The resulting pushback against Burr from the public looks to have worked, as the entire committee took a major step forward today.
The entire membership of the Senate Intel Committee chartered a bus and headed down to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia today for a Trump-Russia briefing. CNN spotted them boarding the bus and tried to inquire further, prompting Burr to ask if it was a “slow news day” (link). The briefing was almost surely classified, and the Senators couldn’t have commented on its nature even if they’d wanted to. But it shows that, whatever all that noise was a week ago, the committee’s investigation is properly moving ahead. And this is not the only committee gaining steam on Trump-Russia.
The House Intelligence Committee, whose Trump-Russia investigation was indeed in tatters after Republican Chairman Devin Nunes tried to sabotage it on Trump’s behalf, now looks to be back on track since Nunes was forced to step away. House Intel will be holding closed hearings with FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers this Thursday, May 4th (Newsweek), after having previously suggested the hearings would take place on May 2nd. House Intel has also announced that it will be holding public hearings with Sally Yates and other witnesses once it concludes with Comey and Rogers. But Yates won’t have to wait that long.
As Palmer Report reported last night (link), Sally Yates is set to publicly testify on May 8th before the Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her testimony will be streamed live on the committee’s website, and will probably air live on cable news as well.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/ent ... fing/2552/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed May 03, 2017 8:48 am

:)

Claude Taylor‏
@TrueFactsStated
IC source: They have Trump on tape talking about trying to shut down investigation. My source wouldn't be held to more specifics. 1/2



Counterchekist‏
@counterchekist
Replying to @TrueFactsStated
There are reams of SIGINT on all of Team Treason. France as Eric and Don Jr. Portugal has Nunes. @GCHQ cleaned up.


Counterchekist‏ @counterchekist Apr 30

Counterchekist Retweeted Tea Pain
Bipartisanship exists. @TheRickWilson & I are GOP. @TrueFactsStated is a Democrat. I'm proud to stand with both.


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THE DUBIOUS FRIENDS OF DONALD TRUMP: THE RUSSIANS
DINSDAG 2 MEI 2017 DOSSIER: SUBTITLED


De omstreden vrienden van Trump (ANP)
Although still in its early days, Donald Trump’s presidency is coming under fire. The Russians are alleged to be in possession of sensitive information about Trump. And that exposes Trump to blackmail. Fake news, tweets Trump: “I have nothing to do with Russia – no deals, no loans, no nothing!” Trump swears he has no ties with the Russians. But is that actually the case?

For months, the FBI have been investigating Russian interference in the American presidential elections. ZEMBLA is investigating another explosive dossier concerning Trump’s involvement with the Russians: Trump’s business and personal ties to oligarchs from the former Soviet Union. Powerful billionaires suspected of money laundering and fraud, and of having contacts in Moscow and with the mafia. What do these relationships say about Trump and why does he deny them? How compromising are these dubious business relationships for the 45th president of the United States? And are there connections with the Netherlands? ZEMBLA meets with one of Trump’s controversial cronies and speaks with a former CIA agent, fraud investigators, attorneys, and an American senator among others.


ZEMBLA: ‘The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump: The Russians’ Wednesday 3 May 2017, 9:10pm, VARA on NPO 2 and on this page.
https://zembla.vara.nl/dossier/uitzendi ... e-russians
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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