Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 17, 2017 12:19 pm

Longtime Trump business partner ‘told family he knows he and POTUS are going to prison’: report
David Edwards DAVID EDWARDS
17 AUG 2017 AT 08:31 ET



Felix Sater, one of Donald Trump’s shadiest former business partners, is reportedly preparing for prison time — and he says the president will be joining him behind bars.

Sources told The Spectator‘s Paul Wood that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s deep dive into Trump’s business practices may be yielding results.

Trump recently made remarks that could point to a money laundering scheme, Wood reported.

“I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something, so, you know, I sell a lot of condo units, and somebody from Russia buys a condo, who knows?” the president said.

Sater, who has a long history of legal troubles and is cooperating with law enforcement, was one of the major players responsible for selling Trump’s condos to the Russians.

And according to Wood’s sources, Sater may have already flipped and given prosecutors the evidence they need to make a case against Trump.

For several weeks there have been rumours that Sater is ready to rat again, agreeing to help Mueller. ‘He has told family and friends he knows he and POTUS are going to prison,’ someone talking to Mueller’s investigators informed me.
Sater hinted in an interview earlier this month that he may be cooperating with both Mueller’s investigation and congressional probes of Trump.

“In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colourful character you have ever talked about,” Sater told New York Magazine. “Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.”

Sater is not the only one rumored confidante to have turned against Trump. An attack on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort by the National Enquirer — a friendly outlet for the president — suggests that he may have already turned over damaging evidence to authorities.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/longti ... on-report/



Newly Leaked Emails Just Revealed Trump Family Implicated In $350 Million Fraud Investigation
BY GRANT STERN
POLITICS | PUBLISHED ON AUGUST 16, 2017

It’s beginning to look like Special Counsel Mueller will catch President Trump and his three eldest children committing the first ever reality TV show assisted financial crime, all collaborating in a $350 million dollar bank fraud related to the Trump SoHo Condominium Hotel.

The fraud-riddled Trump SoHo project ultimately failed and was foreclosed upon by lenders in 2014, but its legacy lives on in a byzantine web of lawsuits.

We’ve obtained leaked copies of those emails related to a key lawsuit related to the Trump SoHo – which are embedded below – that outline the Trump family’s complicity in a major financial crime.

They show that Donald Trump and his three eldest children participated in a cover up in order to keep borrowing massive construction loans on the hotel they pitched on NBC’s Apprentice from failing during the financial downturn. The Trump Organization earned $3 million dollars from the fraud just last year alone, even as the hotel’s fortunes have sunk post-election.

Three weeks ago, Bloomberg News reported that Mueller is focusing on the lower Manhattan Trump Soho Hotel deal and Vanity Fair reported recently that new emails reveal the Trump family’s participation in a criminal enterprise there.

The Russian money trail leads right through the president’s troubled project in downtown Manhattan. A series of e-mails reveals new details.
Now, the newly leaked email chain also confirms a major German public television report (ZDF) on the Trump SoHo hotel.

ZDF interviewed an American national financial fraud expert Professor William Black, who was told the sordid tale of the Trump SoHo frauds without being told the names of the participants.

He concluded that based on their thorough reporting that the First Family participated in a business that was committing bank fraud in a pattern and a practice of illegal conduct which violated the federal racketeering laws known as the RICO Act.

RICO Act cases are subject to enforcement in both civil lawsuits with tripled damages and criminal law, with jail and restitution to the victims as the penalty.

Trump SoHo’s Developers Screwed Their Employees, So They Sued For Racketeering

A lawsuit by Trump’s former development partners Bayrock, the company led by a mafia associate & Russian-emigre Felix Sater, has already exposed a direct tie between Donald Trump’s New York City development activities at Trump SoHo and Vladimir Putin’s money.

Former Bayrock executive Jody Kriss sued his former employer and Sater – who was Trump’s business partner and longtime advisor – for operating a criminal enterprise (RICO), committing bank fraud and refusing to pay employee-related bonuses he had earned.

Bank obligations forbid loans to known felons or the companies they operate.

As both a manager and member of Bayrock’s limited liability company which borrowed the money, Felix Sater both owned and operated the Trump SoHo project.

Anyone in the transaction who knew participated in the enterprise and hid that material fact from the bank if they knew about it, becomes the party to a criminal enterprise.

In mid-December 2007, New York Times publicly revealed that Felix Sater had secretly entered financial felony plea deal in the late 1990s, and was also convicted of a felony assault against the mafia associate from a bar fight.

Hiding a Sater’s involvement in Bayrock and the Trump SoHo project is a form of criminal bank fraud.

Newly leaked emails from an attorney for one of the Bayrock partners named the Sapir Organization – documents an urgent “time sensitive and should not be pushed back” detail a meeting which all of the Trumps demanded with Sater and Bayrock on January 21st, 2008.

Donald Trump, his daughter Ivanka and sons Don Jr. and Eric collectively demanded and presumably attended the important meeting to chew out Bayrock about the project, and specifically Felix Sater about his felony past.

Instead of informing banks and buyers about Sater’s criminal past, as was the Trump Organization’s obligation, the Trump family proceeded to keep the felony secret as Sater engaged in a scheme to hide his interests in the deal.

We know because Sater wrote to Bayrock’s investors in Iceland (who laundered Putin’s money) complaining that his own company wanted to fire him over his felony convictions after meeting the Trumps.


Here is the smoking gun email explaining that the Trump family and all partners in the venture wanted to attend the meeting (full chain embedded below) to discuss Sater’s felony past, which they then kept secret:

The Trump family’s urgent request for meeting is conveyed by lawyers for his partners in Trump SoHo, the Sapir Organization
Trump family’s urgent request for meeting is conveyed by lawyers for his partners in Trump SoHo, the Sapir Organization
The Trumps Stood To Benefit Financially From Participating In A Criminal Enterprise

Donald Trump had a lot to lose by removing his name from the SoHo project if the construction loans were canceled. Bloomberg reports:

The hook at Bayrock, for Trump, was an 18 percent equity stake in what became the Trump Soho hotel, a steady stream of management fees on all Bayrock projects and the ability to plaster his name on properties without having to invest a single dollar of his own.
So, instead of doing the right thing, the Trump family proceeded to squeeze their partner through Bayrock, Felix Sater, to take his financial stake in the deal. (email)



Sater’s after-action report was discovered in court in the form of a smoking gun email in Forbes that described the meeting with the Trump family in detail and cemented his involvement in a scheme to defraud using Trump SoHo.

The email message completely revealed Trump’s future Senior Advisor describing in great detail the finer points of his scheme to defraud the banks to his project’s Icelandic equity investors from Stodir (aka FL Group), who themselves went bankrupt only 9 months later.

Sater even intricately recounted the story of Bayrock’s General Counsel Julius Schwarz’s attempt to immediately force him out of Bayrock over the revelation of his felony conviction which he described as “damaging.”

The Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is America’s top anti-mafia federal law and the threshold for violating the law is merely participating in a business which engages in a pattern of illegal or fraudulent behavior.

New York state also has a RICO law, which is not subject to the powers of the Presidential pardon and could be enforced by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, alongside any federal investigation.

“The statute of limitations on RICO acts lasts for ten years from the last known act,” for RICO based upon bank fraud, according to lawyer Joshua Gold, who is licensed to practice in New York since 1999. “These emails are less than ten years old.”

Even though Trump’s participation in the project dates back to far more than ten years ago — and was far more than just licensing the family’s brand name — only criminal acts like hiding his partner’s felony count, start the clock ticking on the ten years a prosecutor could call forth a criminal case on the matter.

Hawking the Trump SoHo Hotel on NBC’s The Apprentice

During Season 5 of NBC’s “The Apprentice” Donald Trump awarded a job at the Trump SoHo Hotel to winner Sean Yazbek in February 2006.

Later, Donald Trump pitched the Trump SoHo Condo Hotel project on The Apprentice in early September 2007. He launched the boxy tower shortly thereafter according to the New York Daily News with “servers in masks pour champagne while Cirque du Soleil performed. The reigning Miss USA attended.”

Trump’s development group borrowed $350 million of the $450 million cost of building Trump SoHo from banks, they apparently couldn’t swallow their pride, risk a very high profile foreclosure, and tell their bank lenders the truth and suffer the consequences.

The following year two major Wall Street firms failed killing real estate lending markets for years, and Donald Trump stopped hawking the Trump SoHo deal on NBC.

Story continues below:


Trump SoHo Crashed And Never Recovered

By the end of 2009, the New York Times reported that the condotel market had been dead as far back as 2007, which would’ve given Donald Trump, even more of an incentive to conceal material information that would cause his lenders to repossess his tower during the crash.

Eventually, lenders did foreclose on the property and sold off the Trump SoHo condo after 2/3rds of the units remained unsold in 2014.

The information about Trump and Sater defrauding banks has come to light only because attorneys Fred Oberlander and Richard Lerner refused to back down. They filed and are litigating two of the civil cases against the Trump SoHo’s developers.

Federal judges and prosecutors threatened them with prosecution for revealing that Sater was given an illegally light sentence for his crime, in secret. The judges even issued an order that gagged them from telling Congress about the judges’ own misconduct, but the attorneys persisted and are pursuing a civil law claim against the developers of Trump SoHo.

The attorney Richard Lerner has since written an extensive, fact-checked article about the harmful effects of secret sentencing in Law360 based on his wild experiences in the Trump SoHo case with Sater, who became an FBI informant against his mafia partners in the scheme.

Conclusion

Special Counsel Mueller will have his hands full unraveling all of the Russian money connections to the Trump SoHo project.

It’s increasingly looking like there is substantive proof of criminal ties between the Trump family and Felix Sater, which may deliver the evidence of crime prosecutors seek to flip witnesses against larger targets.

Even worse for the Trump family, the criminal liability triggered by their ill advised bank fraud cover up can be prosecuted in both federal court – where the President could pardon his children – and in state court, where he cannot pardon crimes.

Theoretically, even Donald Trump’s children could turn into the state’s witnesses against their father, the President because he recklessly dragged them into the Trump SoHo bank fraud scheme and cover up of their shady real estate deal partners’ financial crimes.
http://washingtonjournal.com/2017/08/16 ... stigation/
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 Aug 17, 2017 10:48 pm

Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump
Explore our updated, comprehensive Trump/Russia timeline — or select one of the central players in the Trump/Russia saga to see what we know about them.

BY STEVEN HARPER | AUGUST 14, 2017


From the outset, Donald Trump has called the search for the truth about connections between his 2016 campaign and Russia a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Along the way, he has taken unprecedented steps to stop it. As President Trump foments chaos and confusion about what actually happened — and what continues to happen — this Trump/Russia timeline seeks to offer order and clarity.

Since we first launched it in February, the timeline has grown from 24 entries to more than 400 — and the saga is far from over. Reading it from start to finish is a daunting task, so we’ve added tools that enable users to narrow its content by individual. And, of course, we’ll continue updating it.

Are several congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller wasting their time on a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”? Review the timeline, follow updates as they appear and decide for yourself.
......

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 17, 2017 11:33 pm

seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 16, 2017 9:26 am wrote:
In Ukraine, a Malware Expert Who Could Blow the Whistle on Russian Hacking
By ANDREW E. KRAMER and ANDREW HIGGINSAUG. 16, 2017

KIEV, Ukraine — The hacker, known only by his online alias “Profexer,” kept a low profile. He wrote computer code alone in an apartment and quietly sold his handiwork on the anonymous portion of the internet known as the Dark Web. Last winter, he suddenly went dark entirely.

Profexer’s posts, already accessible only to a small band of fellow hackers and cybercriminals looking for software tips, blinked out in January — just days after American intelligence agencies publicly identified a program he had written as one tool used in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

But while Profexer’s online persona vanished, a flesh-and-blood person has emerged: a fearful man who the Ukrainian police said turned himself in early this year, and has now become a witness for the F.B.I.

“I don’t know what will happen,” he wrote in one of his last messages posted on a restricted-access website before going to the police. “It won’t be pleasant. But I’m still alive.”

It is the first known instance of a living witness emerging from the arid mass of technical detail that has so far shaped the investigation into the D.N.C. hack and the heated debate it has stirred. The Ukrainian police declined to divulge the man’s name or other details, other than that he is living in Ukraine and has not been arrested.

There is no evidence that Profexer worked, at least knowingly, for Russia’s intelligence services, but his malware apparently did.

That a hacking operation that Washington is convinced was orchestrated by Moscow would obtain malware from a source in Ukraine — perhaps the Kremlin’s most bitter enemy — sheds considerable light on the Russian security services’ modus operandi in what Western intelligence agencies say is their clandestine cyberwar against the United States and Europe.

It does not suggest a compact team of government employees who write all their own code and carry out attacks during office hours in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but rather a far looser enterprise that draws on talent and hacking tools wherever they can be found.

Also emerging from Ukraine is a sharper picture of what the United States believes is a Russian government hacking group known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28 or Fancy Bear. It is this group, which American intelligence agencies believe is operated by Russian military intelligence, that has been blamed, along with a second Russian outfit known as Cozy Bear, for the D.N.C. intrusion.

Rather than training, arming and deploying hackers to carry out a specific mission like just another military unit, Fancy Bear and its twin Cozy Bear have operated more as centers for organization and financing; much of the hard work like coding is outsourced to private and often crime-tainted vendors.

Photo

Kiev’s main thoroughfare. Ukraine has been used for years by Russia as a testing ground for politicized cyberoperations that later cropped up in other countries. Credit Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Russia’s Testing Ground

In more than a decade of tracking suspected Russian-directed cyberattacks against a host of targets in the West and in former Soviet territories — NATO, electrical grids, research groups, journalists critical of Russia and political parties, to name a few — security services around the world have identified only a handful of people who are directly involved in either carrying out such attacks or providing the cyberweapons that were used.

This absence of reliable witnesses has left ample room for President Trump and others to raise doubts about whether Russia really was involved in the D.N.C. hack.

“There is not now and never has been a single piece of technical evidence produced that connects the malware used in the D.N.C. attack to the G.R.U., F.S.B. or any agency of the Russian government,” said Jeffrey Carr, the author of a book on cyberwarfare. The G.R.U. is Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the F.S.B. its federal security service.

United States intelligence agencies, however, have been unequivocal in pointing a finger at Russia.

Seeking a path out of this fog, cybersecurity researchers and Western law enforcement officers have turned to Ukraine, a country that Russia has used for years as a laboratory for a range of politicized operations that later cropped up elsewhere, including electoral hacking in the United States.

In several instances, certain types of computer intrusions, like the use of malware to knock out crucial infrastructure or to pilfer email messages later released to tilt public opinion, occurred in Ukraine first. Only later were the same techniques used in Western Europe and the United States.

So, not surprisingly, those studying cyberwar in Ukraine are now turning up clues in the investigation of the D.N.C. hack, including the discovery of a rare witness.

Security experts were initially left scratching their heads when the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 29 released technical evidence of Russian hacking that seemed to point not to Russia, but rather to Ukraine.

In this initial report, the department released only one sample of malware said to be an indicator of Russian state-sponsored hacking, though outside experts said a variety of malicious programs were used in Russian electoral hacking.

The sample pointed to a malware program, called the P.A.S. web shell, a hacking tool advertised on Russian-language Dark Web forums and used by cybercriminals throughout the former Soviet Union. The author, Profexer, is a well-regarded technical expert among hackers, spoken about with awe and respect in Kiev.

He had made it available to download, free, from a website that asked only for donations, ranging from $3 to $250. The real money was made by selling customized versions and by guiding his hacker clients in its effective use. It remains unclear how extensively he interacted with the Russian hacking team.

After the Department of Homeland Security identified his creation, he quickly shut down his website and posted on a closed forum for hackers, called Exploit, that “I’m not interested in excessive attention to me personally.”

Soon, a hint of panic appeared, and he posted a note saying that, six days on, he was still alive.

Another hacker, with the nickname Zloi Santa, or Bad Santa, suggested the Americans would certainly find him, and place him under arrest, perhaps during a layover at an airport.

“It could be, or it could not be, it depends only on politics,” Profexer responded. “If U.S. law enforcement wants to take me down, they will not wait for me in some country’s airport. Relations between our countries are so tight I would be arrested in my kitchen, at the first request.”

In fact, Serhiy Demediuk, chief of the Ukrainian Cyber Police, said in an interview that Profexer went to the authorities himself. As the cooperation began, Profexer went dark on hacker forums. He last posted online on Jan. 9. Mr. Demediuk said he had made the witness available to the F.B.I., which has posted a full-time cybersecurity expert in Kiev as one of four bureau agents stationed at the United States Embassy there. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

Profexer was not arrested because his activities fell in a legal gray zone, as an author but not a user of malware, the Ukrainian police say. But he did know the users, at least by their online handles. “He told us he didn’t create it to be used in the way it was,” Mr. Demediuk said.

A member of Ukraine’s Parliament with close ties to the security services, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the interaction was online or by phone and that the Ukrainian programmer had been paid to write customized malware without knowing its purpose, only later learning it was used in the D.N.C. hack.

Mr. Gerashchenko described the author only in broad strokes, to protect his safety, as a young man from a provincial Ukrainian city. He confirmed that the author turned himself in to the police and was cooperating as a witness in the D.N.C. investigation. “He was a freelancer and now he is a valuable witness,” Mr. Gerashchenko said.

Photo

The headquarters of the F.S.B. in Moscow. The Americans believe Russian military intelligence operates Advanced Persistent Threat 28, or Fancy Bear. Credit Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press
A Bear’s Lair

While it is not known what Profexer has told Ukrainian investigators and the F.B.I. about Russia’s hacking efforts, evidence emanating from Ukraine has again provided some of the clearest pictures yet about Fancy Bear, or Advanced Persistent Threat 28, which is run by the G.R.U.

Fancy Bear has been identified mostly by what it does, not by who does it. One of its recurring features has been the theft of emails and its close collaboration with the Russian state news media.


Tracking the bear to its lair, however, has so far proved impossible, not least because many experts believe that no such single place exists.

Even for a sophisticated tech company like Microsoft, singling out individuals in the digital miasma has proved just about impossible. To curtail the damage to clients’ operating systems, the company filed a complaint against Fancy Bear last year with the United States District Court for eastern Virginia but found itself boxing with shadows.

As Microsoft lawyers reported to the court, “because defendants used fake contact information, anonymous Bitcoin and prepaid credit cards and false identities, and sophisticated technical means to conceal their identities, when setting up and using the relevant internet domains, defendants’ true identities remain unknown.”

Nevertheless, Ukrainian officials, though wary of upsetting the Trump administration, have been quietly cooperating with American investigators to try to figure out who stands behind all the disguises.

Included in this sharing of information were copies of the server hard drives of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission, which were targeted during a presidential election in May 2014. That the F.B.I. had obtained evidence of this earlier, Russian-linked electoral hack has not been previously reported.

Photo

A polling station outside Kiev during the 2014 Ukrainian election. The server hard drives of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission were targeted by a cyberattack. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Traces of the same malicious code, this time a program called Sofacy, were seen in the 2014 attack in Ukraine and later in the D.N.C. intrusion in the United States.

Intriguingly, in the cyberattack during the Ukrainian election, what appears to have been a bungle by Channel 1, a Russian state television station, inadvertently implicated the government authorities in Moscow.

Hackers had loaded onto a Ukrainian election commission server a graphic mimicking the page for displaying results. This phony page showed a shocker of an outcome: an election win for a fiercely anti-Russian, ultraright candidate, Dmytro Yarosh. Mr. Yarosh in reality received less than 1 percent of the vote.

The false result would have played into a Russian propaganda narrative that Ukraine today is ruled by hard-right, even fascist, figures.

The fake image was programmed to display when polls closed, at 8 p.m., but a Ukrainian cybersecurity company, InfoSafe, discovered it just minutes earlier and unplugged the server.

State television in Russia nevertheless reported that Mr. Yarosh had won and broadcast the fake graphic, citing the election commission’s website, even though the image had never appeared there. The hacker had clearly provided Channel 1 with the same image in advance, but the reporters had failed to check that the hack actually worked.

“For me, this is an obvious link between the hackers and Russian officials,” said Victor Zhora, director of InfoSafe, the cybersecurity company that first found the fake graphic.

A Ukrainian government researcher who studied the hack, Nikolai Koval, published his findings in a 2015 book, “Cyberwar in Perspective,” and identified the Sofacy malware on the server.

The mirror of the hard drive went to the F.B.I., which had this forensic sample when the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike identified the same malware two years later, on the D.N.C. servers.

“It was the first strike,” Mr. Zhora said of the earlier hack of Ukraine’s electoral computers. Ukraine’s Cyber Police have also provided the F.B.I. with copies of server hard drives showing the possible origins of some phishing emails targeting the Democratic Party during the election.

In 2016, two years after the election hack in Ukraine, hackers using some of the same techniques plundered the email system of the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, which had accused Russian athletes of systematic drug use.

Photo

A website announced that WADA had been hacked by a group calling itself the “Fancy Bears’ Hack Team.” Credit Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
That raid, too, seems to have been closely coordinated with Russian state television, which began airing well-prepared reports about WADA’s hacked emails just minutes after they were made public. The emails appeared on a website that announced that WADA had been hacked by a group calling itself the “Fancy Bears’ Hack Team.”

It was the first time Fancy Bear had broken cover.

Fancy Bear remains extraordinarily elusive, however. To throw investigators off its scent, the group has undergone various makeovers, restocking its arsenal of malware and sometimes hiding under different guises. One of its alter egos, cyberexperts believe, is Cyber Berkut, an outfit supposedly set up in Ukraine by supporters of the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014.

After lying dormant for many months, Cyber Berkut jumped back into action this summer just as multiple investigations in Washington into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow shifted into high gear. Cyber Berkut released stolen emails that it and Russian state news media said had exposed the real story: Hillary Clinton had colluded with Ukraine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/worl ... tness.html






Renato Mariotti‏
@renato_mariotti

Renato Mariotti Retweeted The Hill
THREAD: Why does it matter that a Ukrainian hacker is cooperating with Mueller's investigation?
Renato Mariotti added,

The HillVerified account @thehill
Ukraine hacker cooperating with FBI in Russia probe: report http://hill.cm/BPkp0fJ
1:36 PM - 16 Aug 2017

Replying to @renato_mariotti
2/ Although the media has focused on "collusion," that term has no legal meaning, as I discussed in


3/ The way that "colluding" with Russians is illegal is if you conspire with them. "Conspiracy" is a fancy legal term that means


4/ you agreed to break the law. You can also commit a crime by "aiding and abetting" someone else's crime. That's when you know about

5/ criminal activity and help it succeed in some way. It is also a crime to actively conceal a crime. The common thread among all of these

6/ things is that you have to prove that there was an underlying agreement to commit a crime or that the person knew about a crime.

7/ That brings us back to the Ukrainian hacker. One crime that nearly everyone can agree happened is that servers in the United States were

8/ hacked and emails were stolen from the DNC. That is a federal crime that is frequently charged--I worked on those cases myself.

9/ For Mueller to charge an American with a crime for working with Russia, he has to prove the crime. Hacking is an obvious crime for him

10/ to try to prove up. Even if all of us have read stories about Russian hacking, Mueller needs to prove that the crime occurred in order

11/ to charge an American with aiding and abetting that crime or with conspiring to commit that crime. Mueller could use this hacker's

12/ testimony to prove that the crime occurred, who was responsible for it, and how it happened. It's important to note that an American

13/ could be charged with being a member of a conspiracy regarding the DNC backs even if the American did not know everyone


14/ in the conspiracy or everything that happened in the conspiracy. Once you agree to break the law, you're "all in" and responsible for

15/ foreseeable acts of co-conspirators. So an American who aided hackers or helped distribute or use stolen material could be charged

16/ without proof that they worked directly with hackers. But Mueller would need to prove that they knew that a crime had been committed and

17/ either agreed to join the conspiracy or to aid the criminals.





Once you agree to break the law, you're "all in" and responsible for foreseeable acts of co-conspirators.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 21, 2017 9:06 am

Lobbyist at Trump Campaign Meeting Has a Web of Russian Connections
By SHARON LaFRANIERE, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and KENNETH P. VOGELAUG. 21, 2017

Rinat Akhmetshin at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on United States policy toward Russia in June 2016. He is under scrutiny by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. Credit Hermitage Capital
WASHINGTON — Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian immigrant who met last summer with senior Trump campaign officials, has often struck colleagues as a classic Washington mercenary — loyal to his wife, his daughter and his bank account. He avoided work that would antagonize Moscow, they suggested, only because he profited from his reputation as a man with valuable connections there.

But interviews with his associates and documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that Mr. Akhmetshin, who is under scrutiny by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, has much deeper ties to the Russian government and Kremlin-backed oligarchs than previously known.

He has an association with a former deputy head of a Russian spy service, the F.S.B., and a history of working for close allies of President Vladimir V. Putin. Twice, he has worked on legal battles for Russian tycoons whose opponents suffered sophisticated hacking attacks, arousing allegations of computer espionage. He helped federal prosecutors bring corruption charges against an American businessman in the former Soviet Union who turned out to be working for the C.I.A.

He also helped expose possible corruption in government contracting that complicated American efforts to keep troops at an air base in Kyrgyzstan — an American presence that the Russians fiercely opposed.

In short, Mr. Akhmetshin’s projects over two decades in Washington routinely advanced the Kremlin’s interests, especially after he became an American citizen in 2009. American counterintelligence agents took notice of his activities, but drew no conclusions about where his allegiances lay, according to a former law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing government secrecy rules.

Mr. Akhmetshin’s meeting with Trump campaign officials is of keen interest to Mr. Mueller, who is investigating the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Of all the visitors who attended the June 2016 session at the Trump Tower, he appears to have the most direct ties to Russian intelligence. The session was arranged by a Russian businessman close to Mr. Putin whose emissary promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Mr. Akhmetshin, who did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this article, has said he was a last-minute guest at an inconsequential get-together. Trump campaign officials have dismissed the meeting as part of an effort to amend an American law that placed sanctions on Russians for human rights abuses. The 2012 law, known as the Magnitsky Act, infuriated Mr. Putin, whose government retaliated by restricting adoptions of Russian children by Americans.

Ronald J. McNamara, a former staff member of the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe who met with Mr. Akhmetshin about Central Asian issues, said Mr. Akhmetshin openly alluded to involvement with Russian intelligence. “My understanding was that he had come from the security agencies in the Soviet Union-Russian Federation,” Mr. McNamara said. “He did not make it a secret.”

Mr. Akhmetshin, 49, said he is no Russian spy. “I am the target of a well-coordinated and financed smear campaign,” he said last month in a text message to The Times.

Keenly intelligent, relentlessly charming and assiduously opaque about his work, Mr. Akhmetshin sometimes referred to his contacts by pseudonyms and collected his salary in stacks of hundred-dollar bills. A trained biochemist who speaks four languages, he described himself on one official document as a “househusband. ” He identified himself as the head of a Washington think tank for years after it was officially dissolved.

“I think he works for us. I don’t think he works for them,” said Lanny Wiles, a veteran Republican political operative who has worked with Mr. Akhmetshin for more than 15 years. “But I don’t know what he really does.”

Rise of an Influence Peddler

Born in Kazan, Russia, about 500 miles west of Moscow, Rinat Rafkatovitch Akhmetshin was drafted at age 18 into the Soviet army’s war against Afghanistan. He served from 1986 to 1988 and again in 1991. He described himself on his visa application for the United States as a sergeant who rose to the rank of lieutenant in the military police, specializing in communications. He told some journalists that he worked with a military counterintelligence unit, but said he never joined Russian intelligence services — unlike his father, sister and godfather.

In 1992 he graduated with honors from Kazan Federal University, and two years later arrived in Washington as a graduate student in chemistry at the Catholic University of America. He married a fellow Russian chemistry student and received his Ph.D. But he immediately abandoned his esoteric study of mechanistic enzymes and burrowed into Washington’s foreign lobbying scene, promoting clients from Russia and former Soviet states.

He never formally studied English, he said, or owned a car: He pedaled about Washington on a bright orange bicycle. But he was witty and erudite, a lover of literature, opera and snowboarding. Matthew Bryza, a former staff member in charge of Central Asia issues at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, remembers Mr. Akhmetshin as “very smart, slick guy” serving as “the paid drone of unsavory, out-of-fashion former Soviet leaders looking to launder their reputations.”

“He would boast about ties and experience in Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence to give himself some cachet and make himself a mystery man,” he said.

Photo

Mr. Akhmetshin, center, on a training exercise in Russia while he was in the Soviet Army service in the 1980s. Credit via Rinat Akhmetshin
Mr. Akhmetshin’s gateway to Washington was Edward Lieberman, a lawyer with corporate and political clients in former Soviet countries who was married to President Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, Evelyn S. Lieberman, who died in 2015. He called Mr. Lieberman, who could not be reached for comment, a personal adviser.

Together the two started the Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research. Supposedly set up to promote democratic reforms in former Soviet states, it was essentially a vehicle to burnish the reputation of one client, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, an ex-K.G.B. officer and the former prime minister of Kazakhstan. Mr. Kazhegeldin had fled under a cloud of corruption charges and was seeking Washington’s support to challenge his rival, Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Mr. Akhmetshin worked to undercut his client’s rival by funneling information to American prosecutors pursuing bribery charges against James Giffen, an American businessman close to the Kazakh president, according to people involved with the case. The prosecutors discovered only belatedly that Mr. Giffen had worked for the C.I.A. in the former Soviet Union.

By 2005 the government of another former Soviet republic, Kyrgyzstan, had hired Mr. Akhmetshin to investigate whether Washington had bribed the family of the country’s former president to keep an American air base there. The Manas base, established as a staging ground for American forces in Afghanistan, was a major source of friction with the Russians.

The Kyrgyz ambassador to Washington at the time, Zamira Sydykova, said Mr. Akhmetshin arranged an interview with a Times reporter and escorted her to it. The resulting article helped set off a Washington controversy and ultimately, a congressional investigation. Kyrgyzstan finally forced the United States to abandon the base in 2014.

In an affidavit that year, Mr. Akhmetshin said he worked closely with the American government about the location of the base. But Thomas Graham, the National Security Council’s Russia specialist from 2002 to 2007, said the controversy put Washington on the defensive. “Looking into allegations of fraud or bribery — anything that would complicate our presence at that air base — was in Russia’s interests,” he said.

Mr. Akhmetshin’s work took him back and forth to Europe more than once a month, on trips lasting a few days each. Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has sought to determine whether his travel pattern raised concerns among immigration officials who approved Mr. Akhmetshin’s application for American citizenship in 2009.

Once naturalized, Mr. Akhmetshin began traveling regularly to Moscow and taking on more overtly pro-Russian projects. The new work led him into legal entanglements, the halls of Congress and eventually Trump Tower.

Photo

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Akhmetshin has a history of working for Mr. Putin’s close allies. Credit Pool photo by Alexei Druzhinin
The Hacking Campaigns

Few episodes from Mr. Akhmetshin’s past seem more relevant to Mr. Mueller’s investigation than his work for two Russian billionaires accused of infiltrating their adversaries’ computers during nasty legal battles.

The Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 took place less than a week before revelations that hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee’s computers and obtained a trove of emails. Investigators have traced digital espionage to Russian spy agencies. There is no public evidence that Mr. Akhmetshin played any role in the D.N.C. hack.

The first hacking case, which has not previously been reported, began when Mr. Akhmetshin served an alliance of businessmen led by Suleiman Kerimov — a financier close to Mr. Putin in a commercial and political dispute with a Russian competitor, Ashot Egiazaryan.

In early 2011, two London lawyers on Mr. Egiazaryan’s team separately received suspicious emails and hired forensic experts to scrutinize them, according to people involved in a Scotland Yard investigation. The experts found that the messages concealed spyware meant to infiltrate their computers, and they fed traceable documents into the spyware that were then opened by computers registered at the Moscow office park of one of Mr. Kerimov’s companies.

After an inquiry of more than 18 months, Scotland Yard investigators concluded in January 2013 that they lacked sufficient evidence to bring any charges, a spokesman said. Representatives of the lawyers targeted declined to comment.

Mr. Akhmetshin has said in court papers that he was paid only by one businessman in the alliance with Mr. Kerimov, but coordinated with Mr. Kerimov’s team.

Two years later, hacking accusations arose in another case, this time lodged directly against Mr. Akhmetshin. He worked as a consultant to a law firm representing EuroChem, a fertilizer and mining company controlled by another Russian billionaire close to Mr. Putin — Andrey Melnichenko. Mr. Akhmetshin’s target was a rival mining company, International Mineral Resources.

Within months, documents stored in International Mineral Resources’s computer systems began surfacing outside the company, leaked to journalists and others. The company concluded that its computers had been hacked, and replaced its servers. In lawsuits filed in federal court in Washington and state court in New York, the company accused EuroChem and Mr. Akhmetshin of computer espionage.

Photo

The grave of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in custody after he uncovered a tax fraud tied to Russian officials. The Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on Russians for human rights abuses, was named for him and infuriated Mr. Putin. Credit James Hill for The New York Times
EuroChem’s information technology chief, Vladimir Chibisov, previously worked in the Russian government. He had written a book promoted as “a hacker’s Bible,” which he described as a book “about us — about Russian programmers, men of the ’80s and ’90s” who “had done programming, and even a bit of hacking.”

Mr. Akhmetshin personally handed a thumb drive containing stolen documents to a lawyer engaged in another matter potentially damaging to the rival company, according to a person familiar with the matter. The same thumb drive was later obtained by investigators, and someone using the initials “R.A.” had gained access to its contents, according to court papers.

A spokesman for Mr. Melnichenko said in a statement that he has never condoned hacking or other illegal activity, nor had he ever met or known Mr. Akhmetshin. The spokesman said Mr. Chibisov’s book was “tongue in cheek” and “cannot possibly be taken seriously.”

An investigator for the targeted company also testified that he had followed Mr. Akhmetshin in January 2014 to a meeting at London’s Cafe Royal and watched him hand over an external hard drive to another individual. He said he had overheard Mr. Akhmetshin claim that he had paid a team of Russian hackers “a lot of money” for the records.

Mr. Akhmetshin acknowledged in a deposition that he had turned over a hard drive with information about the firm’s owners. But he said he had obtained the data from a Kazakh contact through a loose network he called the “London Information Bazaar.” Asked about computer hacking, he replied, “I do not know a single person who could do that.”

International Mineral Resources dropped the lawsuits without explanation in early 2016, withdrawing all allegations before they could be adjudicated. The company said in a statement Friday that it dropped the charges “after careful consideration.”

A Key Kremlin Contact

During the same period that Mr. Akhmetshin was accused of being involved in various hacking schemes, he appears to have been nurturing a relationship with Viktor Ivanov, once the deputy head of Russia’s intelligence service, the F.S.B., and until last year a top aide to Mr. Putin.

From 2009 to 2014, Mr. Ivanov led the Russian side of a joint effort with the Americans to combat drug trafficking in Afghanistan, part of an early Obama administration initiative to improve relations between Moscow and Washington.

Photo

Donald J. Trump Jr. has said the Trump campaign was just another target for the anti-Magnitsky lobbyists, and that nothing came from his June 2016 meeting taht included Mr. Akhmetshin. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
When Mr. Ivanov traveled to Washington to promote the effort in October 2010, Mr. Akhmetshin helped shepherd him around town. In a deposition filed in one of the hacking cases, Mr. Ahkmetshin testified that he helped facilitate the Washington visit with one of Mr. Ivanov’s aides, with whom he had served in the Red Army.

In an affidavit in that same case, Mr. Akhmetshin said he had been in email contact with Mr. Ivanov on matters ranging “from narco-trafficking and terrorism in Afghanistan to surveillance of undercover agents, suspected undercover agents and their identities.”

Reporters who encountered Mr. Akhmetshin during his travels to Afghanistan said he grew a beard and wore a skullcap to blend in with the local population. He never identified whom he worked for, but two former American officials involved with the counternarcotics program said the American side did not hire him.

Mr. Ivanov, who retired early last year, could not be reached for comment about whether Mr. Akhmetshin was on the Russian government’s payroll.

Russia ended the counternarcotics cooperation in 2014 after the United States imposed sanctions on Mr. Ivanov and other Putin allies in retaliation for Russia’s invasion and seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

There, too, Mr. Akhmetshin had tried to ally with Ukraine’s pro-Moscow elements. Before the 2014 invasion, he told reporters, he unsuccessfully sought consulting work with the political party dominated by the nation’s pro-Putin president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. A popular revolt forced Mr. Yanukovych to flee to Russia.

Mr. Akhmetshin told journalists that he was a longtime acquaintance of Paul J. Manafort, who served as a high-paid consultant to Mr. Yanukovych for years before becoming chairman of the Trump campaign. Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort, said, “Paul doesn’t know and hasn’t worked with the man.”

Last year, Mr. Akhmetshin took on a new project high on the Kremlin’s agenda: a $240,000 lobbying campaign to amend the Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on Russians for human rights abuses. The law was named after Sergei L. Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who died in custody after he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud allegedly tied to Russian officials. Several wealthy Russian businessmen financed a nonprofit group to spearhead the campaign, which was represented by Mr. Akhmetshin and a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Donald J. Trump Jr. has said the promise of damaging information about Hillary Clinton was just an excuse for Ms. Veselnitskaya to get into Trump Tower to talk about why the law should be changed. Mr. Akhmetshin, a Washington resident, has told reporters that he just happened to be lunching with Ms. Veselnitskaya in Manhattan that day when she spontaneously invited him to the meeting with the president’s son, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Manafort. He did not explain why she wanted him there.

After Mr. Akhmetshin’s presence came to light, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters: “We don’t know anything about this person.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/us/r ... eting.html
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 Aug 22, 2017 11:11 am

Why Did a Russia-Friendly Icelandic Fund Want To Invest In Trump Projects?

The Trump Soho hotel is seen in New York, Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016. The Cavaliers have made other arrangements for players who do not want to stay at a New York hotel branded by President-elect Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Seth Wenig/AP
By SAM THIELMAN Published AUGUST 22, 2017 10:51 AM


When reporters combed through the Panama Papers last year, they recognized a familiar name cropping up: the FL Group, a now-defunct Icelandic bank that in 2013 had been accused in a lawsuit of developing a scheme, ultimately never realized, to avoid $250 million in taxes on a $2 billion investment in real estate projects, many of them tied to President Donald Trump.

The bank began as a holding company for two airlines based in the little Nordic nation, Flugfélag Íslands and Loftleiðir—hence the name—until 2005, when it became its own financial institution with a surprisingly large number of Russian clients. After that, the firm became the leading equity fund in Iceland, according to James S. Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Co. and a reporter for the Panama Papers’ Icelandic working group.

FL Group was one of a number of Icelandic banks with surprisingly deep ties to the Russian billionaire class ascendant in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet system, according to Henry. The wealth of the post-USSR oligarch class was so directly tied to the Icelandic economy, in fact, that Russian president Vladimir Putin offered $5.4 billion to bail out Iceland’s banks during the global financial crisis, though the deal never went through.

The Icelandic bank managed to seal a deal to invest $50 million with the developer Bayrock Group, a firm run by two men convicted of stock fraud in the 1990’s, Felix Sater and Salvatore Lauria, alongside a former Soviet official named Tevfik Arif. A former finance director at Bayrock, Jody Kriss, sued the company in 2013 for allegedly misrepresenting Sater’s role. In an interview with Bloomberg, Kriss said another Icelandic bank called offering a counter investment to FL Group’s proposed $50 million, and Sater and Arif told him to stick with that firm because it was “closer to Putin.”

The $50 million payment was unusual, to say the least. According to Kriss’s complaint, FL Group bought 62 percent of four Bayrock properties, which was the developer’s entire stake. Those properties were a development called Waterpointe on a blighted 20-acre property in Whitestone, New York that Bayrock had agreed to detoxify; Trump SoHo; a Trump tower in Phoenix, Arizona; and the Trump Merrimac in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The deal would have left FL Group with profits from the four properties, but structured the investment as a loan. That way, the firm could avoid taxes on the dividends and call them “contingent interest,” a process Henry described as “asset stripping.” That process is so complex, and the offshore finance rules so arcane, that all Henry would say was that it “has been illegal.” It’s a deal Trump would have had to sign off on.

Kriss charged in his lawsuit that the deal was illegal, and that both Bayrock and FL Group were fully cognizant of that fact. The suit alleged that Bayrock and FL Group also colluded to keep the deal secret from the other firms that worked with Bayrock on its various projects, and agreed to pursue as much as $2 billion more in future projects. From the lawsuit:

The exchange was part of a larger deal whereby FL became Bayrock’s new partner. The new partners agreed to work together on the existing Four Projects and on so much of $2,000,000,000 worth of new projects as they might “agreed to agree” to develop together.

All this was to the exclusion of Plaintiffs and other minority members in the Subs, who should have shared the millions of dollars of the $50,000,000 and a share of the new projects.

The small size of the Icelandic economy means that most people who work in the financial sector in that country know each other. Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, the wealthiest man in Iceland, claimed FL had been infiltrated and taken over by pro-Russian interests, Henry noted. “He ended up owning about 30% of FL Group, and he claimed it had been taken over by hostile people who were channelling Russian money through it,” he recalled.

Another bank owned in large part by FL, Kaupthing, had made loans to Alexander Shnaider, the Russian-Canadian billionaire who financed the failed Trump tower in Toronto, which he used to buy a yacht. It also had other wealthy Russians on the books, among them Smirnoff Vodka magnate Yuri Shefler.

Ultimately, Bayrock never got that $2 billion. The global financial crisis, which eventually sunk both Kaupthing and FL Group, exposed the banks to scrutiny by regulators and law enforcement officers who aren’t usually privy to the inner workings of the financial system without a search warrant. Now that the companies had to declare bankruptcy, they had to open their books; almost as soon as they did, though, the loan books were shut.

“All three [major Icelandic] banks had three big private banking arms and they were based in Luxembourg,” Henry explained. “When the banks failed, Luxembourg authorities went in and immediately nationalized the subsidiaries of the Icelandic banks and then they were immediately resold and privatized.” Putin, whose concern for the Icelandic economy was also concern for exposed Russian oligarchs, immediately became less enthusiastic about his offer of a bailout, said Henry, who’d spoken to people who tried to negotiate the loan.

Of the three projects Bayrock planned with Trump and that FL Group allegedly wanted a cut of, the Phoenix development was completely scuttled and the Ft. Lauderdale hotel-condo went on to lose the Trump name. But the Trump SoHo was built and emblazoned with the name of the man who went on to the presidency.

In his complaint, Kriss contended that “a confidential source” said Bayrock was already awash in funds from “cash accounts at a chromium refinery in Kazakhstan” belonging to the family of Bayrock principal Tevfik Arif and that the firm was concealing the source of the cash. Among financiers like these, both the suit and Henry contend, the FL Group was right at home.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... properties
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 23, 2017 12:03 am

That Russian Guy Who Attended the Trump Tower Meeting Is Almost Definitely a Spy
By
Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait

Donald Trump. Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AFP/Getty Images
A month and a half ago, the New York Times obtained emails in which Donald Trump Jr. set up a meeting in Trump Tower with Russian officials who were promising him sensitive information, on his father’s opponent, that would help the Trump campaign. A few days later, it emerged that the meeting also included Rinat Akhmetshin, a figure whose name was not included in the first stories about the meeting, but who is a key figure in the meeting because he is almost certainly a Russian spy.

Today’s Times has a follow-up story on Akhmetshin, with three reporters sharing a byline. The story does not call Akhmetshin a Russian spy, because that is not a charge that a newspaper can prove, short of extraordinary evidence like an email from Akhmetshin saying, “By the way, I’m a Russian spy.” (And that email does not exist because — unlike, say, Donald Trump Jr. — Akhmetshin is not a complete idiot.) Instead, the headline cautiously calls Akhmetshin a “Lobbyist” who has a “Web of Russian Connections.”

But this massively understates the story’s conclusions. Donald Trump has a web of Russian connections. Akhmetshin is (again, almost certainly) a Russian spy. The shadiness of Akhmetshin’s cover story comes through over and over in the report. Akhmetshin “told some journalists that he worked with a military counterintelligence unit, but said he never joined Russian intelligence services — unlike his father, sister and godfather,” the Times reports, skeptically. He founded a “think tank” with the ostensible purpose of promoting democratization, but which was, in reality, “essentially a vehicle to burnish the reputation of one client, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, an ex-K.G.B. officer and the former prime minister of Kazakhstan.”


Meanwhile, Akhmetshin’s résumé contains gaping voids:

A trained biochemist who speaks four languages, he described himself on one official document as a “househusband. ” He identified himself as the head of a Washington think tank for years after it was officially dissolved.
And his explanation for how he ended up in the meeting is just a tad bit suspicious:

Mr. Akhmetshin, a Washington resident, has told reporters that he just happened to be lunching with Ms. Veselnitskaya in Manhattan that day when she spontaneously invited him to the meeting with the president’s son, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Manafort. He did not explain why she wanted him there.
So, there was a lot of traffic in Dupont Circle that day, and long story short, he wound up in Manhattan, got hungry for lunch, coincidentally ran into another Kremlin agent, and decided to tag along to a meeting in Trump Tower.

It has previously been reported that Akhmetshin hacked into the emails of a firm his clients were fighting in court. Today’s story documents a second attempted hacking:

The first hacking case, which has not previously been reported, began when Mr. Akhmetshin served an alliance of businessmen led by Suleiman Kerimov — a financier close to Mr. Putin in a commercial and political dispute with a Russian competitor, Ashot Egiazaryan.

In early 2011, two London lawyers on Mr. Egiazaryan’s team separately received suspicious emails and hired forensic experts to scrutinize them, according to people involved in a Scotland Yard investigation. The experts found that the messages concealed spyware meant to infiltrate their computers, and they fed traceable documents into the spyware that were then opened by computers registered at the Moscow office park of one of Mr. Kerimov’s companies.
Of all the facts in the Russia scandal, this one seems the most underplayed. Email hacking is one of Akhmetshin’s basic methods of operation. The Trump campaign met with a Russian spy who is known for pulling the exact kind of crime that was committed in this case.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... a-spy.html


British spy Christopher Steele has given FBI the names of his sources for Trump dossier: report
Travis Gettys TRAVIS GETTYS
22 AUG 2017 AT 11:41 ET


A former British spy has reportedly given FBI agents the names of his sources for an explosive 35-page dossier linking President Donald Trump to Russian efforts to interfere with the election.

Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele hasn’t yet spoken to congressional investigators about his findings, but he has met with FBI agents to discuss how he had learned about Trump’s alleged activities involving Russia, reported ABC News.

Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to look into Trump’s background after wealthy Republicans paid the Washington, D.C.-based business about $1 million, and then later worked for Democrats who sought additional damaging information.

He was so troubled by his findings that he continued the investigation at his own expense after the election.

Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who specialized in money laundering and Russian organized crime, was scheduled to appear in a closed session with congressional investigators to discuss the dossier.

A recent U.S. court ruling could compel Steele to testify before lawmakers.

Russian tech mogul Aleksej Gubarev, who was named in the dossier, has sued Buzzfeed — which published the unverified dossier shortly before Inauguration Day — for libel, and his attorneys want to question Steele under oath about his findings.

A U.S. District Court judge in Florida recently ruled that Gubarev’s U.S.-based attorneys could seek British approval to force Steele’s testimony.

Attorneys for Fusion GPS have argued that their client relationships are confidential.

Watch this video report for information about Steele’s meetings with the FBI:
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/british ... er-report/
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 23, 2017 12:48 pm

Fusion GPS guy that hired Steele to do the dossier ...

40,000 documents handed over to Senate

10 hour meeting with Senate Intel Committee today

"Fusion GPS is proud of the work it has conducted and stands by it," Levy, Simpson's lawyer, said in a statement.

He said the "investigation into Mr. Simpson began as a desperate attempt by the Trump campaign and its allies to smear Fusion GPS because of its reported connection to the Trump dossier."



Committee Hears From Founder of Firm Tied to Trump Dossier
The co-founder of a Washington opposition research firm that produced a dossier of salacious allegations involving President Donald Trump met for hours with congressional investigators Tuesday in a closed-door appearance that spanned into the evening.

Aug. 22, 2017, at 8:47 p.m.

Committee Hears From Founder of Firm Tied to Trump Dossier



By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The co-founder of a Washington opposition research firm that produced a dossier of salacious allegations involving President Donald Trump met for hours with congressional investigators Tuesday in a closed-door appearance that spanned into the evening.

Glenn Simpson's lawyer emerged from the daylong private appearance and said his client had "told Congress the truth and cleared the record on many matters of interest."

The lawyer, Josh Levy, noted that Simpson appeared voluntarily and has so far been the only witness to be interviewed by the Senate Judiciary Committee as it looks into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The sheer length of Simpson's appearance — far longer, for instance, than Trump's son-in-law spent earlier this summer with Senate and House intelligence committees — reflected the intrigue on Capitol Hill surrounding the dossier and the origins of the document.

Simpson's firm, Fusion GPS, hired a British intelligence officer who produced a dossier containing allegations of ties between Trump and his associates and Russia. Simpson kept the identities of the firm's clients confidential during his appearance before Congress, his lawyer said.

The document attracted public attention in January when it was revealed that FBI Director James Comey had briefed Trump about its existence soon before he was inaugurated as president. It's unclear to what extent the allegations in the dossier have been corroborated or verified by the FBI since the bureau has not publicly discussed it.

"Fusion GPS is proud of the work it has conducted and stands by it," Levy, Simpson's lawyer, said in a statement.

He said the "investigation into Mr. Simpson began as a desperate attempt by the Trump campaign and its allies to smear Fusion GPS because of its reported connection to the Trump dossier."

Leaders of the Judiciary Committee said last month that they were negotiating private appearances for Donald Trump Jr., who has attracted scrutiny for accepting a June 2016 meeting with Russians at which he expected to receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton, and for Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman. Yet no dates have been announced for their appearances.

"Following up on comments from certain Senate Judiciary Committee members who have noted Mr. Simpson's cooperation with this investigation," Levy said, I would like to add that he is the first and only witness to participate in an interview with the Committee as it probes Russian interference in the 2016 election."

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/ar ... mp-dossier

................................

Trump Dossier Analysis:
Corroborating Evidence in the Trump/Russia Dossier

Scott J. Dworkin
Co-Founder & Senior Advisor
The Democratic Coalition

February 20, 2017


Page 1

Item to note:
Dossier claims Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov had a file on Hillary Clinton

Image

Photos: Dmitry Peskov is the spokesman for the Kremlin as described in the dossier (middle) with Aras Agalarov-the Russian billionaire who paid Trump to have Miss Universe in Moscow.
Image
Items to note:
Dossier claims Paul Manafort & Carter Page were colluding w/Russians
Dossier claims Wikileaks is a front for the Kremlin
Dossier claims Russia had moles within the Dem Party

Image

Former Trump Adviser Carter Page was in Russia multiple times during & after the campaign
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Carter Page did an interview with ABC News in February 2017 during which he denies he's the middleman in Russia
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Photo: Carter Page on the Russia Today network-Russia’s propaganda network
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Items to note:
Dossier claims Carter Page met with CEO of Russian oil company Rosneft Igor Sechin & with Igor Diveykin-a Russian intelligence officer

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Yahoo News confirms Carter Page met with Russian oil CEO of Rosneft, Igor Sechin-as described in the dossier
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Carter Page wrote a blog post defending Russian oil company Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin-the same person as in dossier
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Items to note:
Dossier claims Kremlin funded trips for Michael Flynn, Dr. Jill Stein & Carter Page
Dossier claims Kremlin underestimated liberal reaction to DNC Hack

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Video: General Flynn was paid by Russia Today, the propaganda network-he confirms and defends the payment in this video:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-suppor ... 11942.html
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Video: Gen Flynn gave Putin standing ovation-Flynn was paid by Putin to be there-as in dossier
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CGh1b_tmj0

Photos: Michael Flynn, Dr. Jill Stein & Putin at an event in Moscow that they were paid by Russia Today Network to be at. Exactly how it’s described in the dossier.
Image
Item to note:
Dossier claims ex-Ukrainian President Yanukovych told Putin he paid Manafort money

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Paul Manafort was paid $12.7 million in cash by pro-Russian, Ukrainian leaders-as alleged in the dossier-below is a ledger presented by the country of Ukraine as evidence against Manafort
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Item to note:
Dossier claims Russian diplomat was sent back to Russia because of his links to the US election hack by Russia


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Russian diplomat in dossier-Mikhail Kulagin-was sent back to Russia in August of 2016
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Items to note:
Dossier claims Alpha Group/Bank is close w/Putin
Dossier claims Mikhail Fridman & Petr Aven advise Putin on US
Dossier claims Putin traveled with Oleg Govorun to Uzbekistan
Dossier claims Alpha Group hasn’t given Russia the money it was supposed to after their TNK oil sale to Rosneft

Image
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Alpha Group/Bank is VERY close with Putin-just as described in dossier
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The Alpha/Alfa Bank in the dossier-is the same bank with an alleged Russian server communicating with Trump Towers
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ussia.html

Photos: Mikhail Fridman & Putin; Petr Aven of the Alpha Group & Putin-mentioned in dossier as advisors on US issues to Putin. They are indeed advisors to Putin

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Putin went to Uzbekistan in the same timeframe as described in the dossier
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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uzbek ... SKCN11C0ZA

Alfa Group ran TNK Oil sale as described in dossier & sold it to Rosneft-the Russian oil company
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tem to note:
Dossier claims Russian Aras Agalarov is close to Trump
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Trump is close to Aras Agalarov just as described in the dossier.
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Trump was paid $20,000,000 by Russian Aras Agalarov- in the dossier it said Agalarov was close to Trump.
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Item to note
Dossier claims Rosneft CEO offered Carter Page 19% of Rosneft sale if sanctions lifted

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Rosneft sold 19.5% of the company & the dossier stated it would be sold for 19% if Trump lifted Russian sanctions
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... 11-billion

One of the companies Rosneft sold to is the Qatar Investment Authority which via Qatar Airways had offices in Trump Towers for years
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https://thinkprogress.org/trump-makes-a ... .dhyuts5d7
Photos: Trump/Ivanka/Melania w/CEO of Qatar Airways-owned by Qatar Investment Authority which bought part of Rosneft months ago
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https://www.swfinstitute.org/swf-news/q ... investors/

Item to note:
Dossier claims Oleg Solodukhin runs Russian NGO in Prague

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Oleg Solodukhin does indeed run the NGO in the dossier out of Prague, Czech Rep.
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rbp ... Xs/preview
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Aug 23, 2017 3:12 pm

It's all quite damning, and should bring the culprits to justice.
However, the video claiming Flynn gave Putin a standing ovation, is blatantly false. He only stands after Putin approached him and he remained seated while others at the table stood to applause and greet Putin.

Imo, Stein was incredibly foolish to attend this function and by doing so has ruined her any future opportunity to be elected to high public office.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby SonicG » Wed Aug 23, 2017 9:48 pm

Not sure where else to put this...

Russian ambassador to Sudan found dead, no foul play suspected
...
This is the ninth death of a Russian diplomat within a year.

In July Denis Voronenkov, 45, was gunned down outside a hotel in Kiev. Voronenkov and his wife both spoke out against Putin after they left Russia for Ukraine in October.

Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin, at the United Nations September 25, 2016 in New York.

Alexander Kadakin, 67, the Russian ambassador to India, died after a short illness on January 26.

Andrey Malanin, a senior diplomat at the Russian embassy in Greece, was found dead in early January.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/m ... -dead.html

A Former intelligence official, Oleg Erovinkin, was found dead sitting in his car on December 26 in Moscow.

In the highest profile killing, Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, 62, was assassinated in Ankara on December 20. He was shot at point-blank range by a gunman while speaking at an art exhibition.

On the same day as Karlov’s killing, Petr Polshikov, 56, a senior Russian diplomat, was shot to death in his Moscow home, according to Moscow newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets.

On November 8, Sergei Krivov, 63, a Russian diplomat at the Russian Consulate in New York was found dead. Krivov served as duty commander involved with security affairs, according to Russian news reports.

"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby stefano » Thu Aug 24, 2017 7:11 am

This is a really interesting short read on Russian Twitter operators working to advance the cause of the European/American right

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status ... 9884955648

Here's an interesting observation - David is posting 8 AM - 8 PM every day, Moscow time. Almost like it's his job or something.

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What's he tweeting about? This figure illustrates the volume of DavidJo52951945's tweets mentioning various topics over the years.

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Some interesting post-Charlottesville tweets from DavidJo52951945 to round out the story. #TrumpRussia #AltWankers #MAGA

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:03 pm

Thoughts About the New Trump-Russia Email

Trump deputy chief of staff for policy, Rick Dearborn, left, and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, right, walk down the steps of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Friday, Jan. 13, 2017, following a meeting. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Susan Walsh/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 24, 2017 2:08 PM

I wanted to note briefly the news of this new Russia-related email in the news today. The email is from Rick Dearborn, a key Trump staffer, whose role in the drama we’ll return to in a moment. We don’t have the email itself but rather descriptions of it. And it appears to reference an effort by an individual from West Virginia (who knows?) to set up a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Vladimir Putin. Notably, the email dates from June 2016, around the time of the notorious Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr and just as Russian intelligence operatives were kicking their election disruption campaign into high gear.

Now, who is Rick Dearborn? This is the critical point. Dearborn was Senator Jeff Sessions’s right hand man. For a dozen years before the the 2016 campaign Dearborn had been Sessions’ Senate Chief of Staff. Those Senate chief of staff positions are extraordinarily powerful. If you’ve been in the job for a dozen years you’re a big deal – certainly with that senator and really in the entire world of capitol hill.

Remember, Sessions was a critical figure for Trump. He was far, far right in the Senate. But he was a sitting US senator who endorsed Trump when virtually no one of any standing in the GOP would back him. That was a big deal in symbolic terms. But almost as important it was a big deal in terms of having people on board who had some basic grasp of policy issues and how to run a real campaign. On this front, Sessions brought not just himself but his people. Rick Dearborn was the most important of those people. And he was quickly seconded to the campaign. The other key Sessions staffer? Stephen Miller. But we’ll return to him later.

For our present purposes what is important to note is that Dearborn was charged with putting together Trump’s policy shop and the armada of advisors and wonks who surround and work for every presidential campaign once it seems to have a real shot of winning a nomination. These people are critical not just because you need to generate positions on almost countless issues and start recruiting people who are likely to get appointments if you win the White House, but because doing these things is a key indicator for elite stakeholders – journalists, business, the foreign policy community, the think tank world, campaign donors, etc – that you’re really a serious campaign.

That was Dearborn’s job. And you’ll remember that of the five men Trump announced as his original foreign policy adviser team in March 2016, two have been identified as key figures in the Trump Russia probe. The five were Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg. Carter Page you know about. Papadopoulos, we now know, spent most of his adviser time trying to connect Trump officials up with people from Russia. It’s been claimed that another guy, Sam Clovis, a right wing talk radio show host who Trump recently installed at the USDA, is actually the guy who chose Page. I don’t think we really know who did. I think it’s altogether possible that Dearborn did. But it all took place under Dearborn’s charge.

There’s also Jeff Sessions meeting with Russian officials, most notably the one he had in his Senate office. It’s never been quite clear how or why Sessions got tangled up in these Russia meetings. Dearborn would be an obvious explanation.

In any case, I would say this email is the rare case where the old cliche is true: it raises more questions than it answers. But Dearborn does connect together a number of the Russia threads through the 2016 Trump campaign. And this email – whatever the details behind it and whatever came of it – comes right in the critical period when Russian operatives appear to have been probing for multiple points of contact and entry into the Trump campaign.

I doubt we’ve heard the last of this.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/tho ... re-1078799
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 25, 2017 6:03 pm

:P :P :P :P :P


Hillary Clinton’s Emails May Bring Down Trump As Focus Turns To Trump/Russia Hack Collusion
By Jason Easley on Fri, Aug 25th, 2017 at 5:50 pm
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is looking at Mike Flynn's role in trying to get Hillary Clinton's emails from the Russians for the Trump campaign.


Hillary Clinton’s Emails May Bring Down Trump As Focus Turns To Trump/Russia Hack Collusion
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is looking at Mike Flynn’s role in trying to get Hillary Clinton’s emails from the Russians for the Trump campaign.

The Wall Street Journal reported, “Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining what role, if any, former national security adviser Mike Flynn may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, according to people familiar with the matter. The effort to seek out hackers who were believed to have stolen Mrs. Clinton’s emails, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was led by a longtime Republican activist, Peter W. Smith. In correspondence and conversations with his colleagues, Mr. Smith portrayed Mr. Flynn as an ally in those efforts and implied that other senior Trump campaign officials were coordinating with him, which they have denied. He also named Mr. Flynn’s consulting firm and his son in the correspondence and conversations.”

If the Trump campaign worked with the Russians, or actively tried to obtain the hacked emails from the Russians, it would be a direct link and proof of collusion between Trump and Russia. There are two big questions about the Russia investigation. Did the Trump campaign collude with Russia during the presidential election, and did Donald Trump obstruct justice when he fired James Comey?

Behind all of the chaos caused by Trump and his administration on a nearly daily basis, the Russia scandal continues to churn forward every day.

It is pretty easy to see why Trump is doing everything that he can to shut this investigation down. Special Counsel Mueller and his team are leaving no stone unturned. Anyone who has followed the Russia investigation understands that it is complex. It has dozens of moving parts and figures, and that is without including the examination of potential Trump financial crimes. It is going to take a long time for this investigation to be completed, which is a good sign for the American people because the longer this investigation takes, the better the odds that the true events of the 2016 election will be exposed.
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/08/25/ ... usion.html




Mueller Seeks Grand Jury Testimony from PR Execs Who Worked With Manafort
by KEN DILANIAN, CAROL E. LEE and TOM WINTER

WASHINGTON — Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued grand jury subpoenas in recent days seeking testimony from public relations executives who worked on an international campaign organized by Paul Manafort, people directly familiar with the matter told NBC News.

This is the first public indication that Mueller's investigation is beginning to compel witness testimony before the grand jury — a significant milestone in an inquiry that is examining the conduct of President Donald Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, among others.

It is also further indication that Manafort, Trump's onetime campaign chairman, could be in serious legal jeopardy.

According to one executive whose firm received a subpoena, Mueller's team is closely examining the lobbying campaign, which ran between 2012 and 2014. Some of the firms involved in the campaign received subpoenas for documents weeks ago, the executive said, and now the Mueller team is seeking testimony.

"We think they are trying to figure out, was this a legitimate project?" the executive said. "From our perspective it was — we did a lot of work. We took it seriously."

Manafort, whose Alexandria, Virginia, apartment was raided by FBI agents last month, has emerged as a key figure in the Mueller probe. The inquiry into the lobbying campaign appears to be part of a larger investigation into his work for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party, his offshore banking transactions, his tax compliance and his real estate dealings, people familiar with the probe have told NBC News.

Manafort also was present at a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lobbyist and a Russian lawyer, along with Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner. NBC News has previously reported that Kushner is under scrutiny by investigators, and that Mueller is examining whether President Trump obstructed justice.

The executive said six firms participated in the public relations effort that Manafort coordinated, paid for by a Brussels-based non-profit called the European Center for a Modern Ukraine. The stated goal was to build support for Ukraine's entry into the European Union.

Two of the firms, Podesta Group and Mercury LLC, worked in Washington with Manafort partner Rick Gates, according to lobbying disclosure records. Three other firms worked in Europe, the executive said. NBC News could not confirm the identity of those three.

At the time, Ukraine was run by a pro-Russian political party that had paid Manafort $17 million for consulting in 2013 and 2014, according to Manafort's latest foreign lobbying disclosure filing, which he filed belatedly under Justice Department pressure.

The party's leader, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia during a popular uprising in 2014.

Manafort's spokesman, Jason Maloni, declined to comment.

The Associated Press first revealed the pro-Ukraine lobbying campaign in August 2016, while Manafort was still running the Trump campaign.

The report said the campaign was designed to sway public opinion and included attempts to solicit favorable press coverage in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Related: Trump Surprised by FBI Raid on Manafort Home: 'Pretty Tough Stuff'

At the time, neither Manafort nor the firms had registered as foreign agents. The executive told NBC News that was because the non-profit said that it was not funded by a government or a political party.

In recent months, the Justice Department told the Mercury and Podesta firms that they should have registered as foreign agents, and they did so.

Under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments, leaders or political parties must file detailed disclosures about their spending and activities to the Justice Department. Willful failure to file the forms violation is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison — but such prosecutions are extremely rare.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mu ... rt-n796066


CIA keeps wary eye on director Mike Pompeo, an ardent Trump supporter

CIA Director Mike Pompeo testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee in May. The former Kansas congressman has played down Russia's interference in the 2016 election and demonstrated a willingness to engage in political skirmishes for President Donald Trump. (Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post)
Greg Miller
Washington Post

As CIA director, Mike Pompeo has taken a special interest in an agency unit that is closely tied to the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, requiring the Counterintelligence Mission Center to report directly to him.

Officials at the center have, in turn, kept a watchful eye on Pompeo, who has repeatedly played down Russia's interference in the 2016 election and demonstrated a willingness to engage in political skirmishes for President Donald Trump.

Current and former officials said that the arrangement has been a source of apprehension among the CIA's upper ranks and that they could not recall a time in the agency's history when a director faced a comparable conflict.

"Pompeo is in a delicate situation unlike any other director has faced, certainly in my memory," said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a CIA official for 23 years who served in Russia and held high-level positions at headquarters, "because of his duty to protect and provide the truth to an independent investigation while maintaining his role with the president."

The Russia issue has complicated Pompeo's effort to manage a badly strained relationship between the agency and a president who has disparaged its work and compared U.S. intelligence officials to Nazis. Amid that tension, Pompeo's interactions with the counterintelligence center have come under particular scrutiny.

The unit helped trigger the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia by serving as a conduit to the FBI last year for information the CIA developed on contacts between Russian individuals and Trump campaign associates, officials said.

The center works more closely with the FBI than almost any other CIA department does, officials said, and continues to pursue leads on Moscow's election interference operation that could factor in the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller III, a former FBI director.

Pompeo has not impeded that work, officials said. But several officials said there is concern about what he might do if the CIA uncovered new information potentially damaging to Trump and Pompeo were forced to choose between protecting the agency or the president.

"People have to watch him," said a U.S. official who, like others, requested anonymity to speak frankly. "It's almost as if he can't resist the impulse to be political."

A second former CIA official cited a "real concern for interference and politicization," saying that the worry among some at the agency is "that if you were passing on something too dicey [to Pompeo] he would go to the White House with it."

Pompeo has attributed his direct supervision of the counterintelligence center to a desire to place a greater emphasis on preventing leaks and protecting classified secrets - core missions of the center that are also top priorities for Trump.

Having the center report to him was designed "to send a signal to the workforce that this was important and we weren't going to tolerate misbehavior," he said at a security conference in Aspen, Colorado, last month.

CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani described the suggestion that Pompeo might abuse his position as "ridiculous."

Executive-order guidelines prohibit the CIA from passing information to the White House "for the purpose of affecting the political process in the United States," Trapani said. "The FBI and special counsel's office are leading the law enforcement investigation into this matter - not CIA. CIA is providing relevant information in support of that investigation, and neither the director nor CIA will interfere with it."

Pompeo, 53, arrived as director at the CIA just days after Trump delivered a self-aggrandizing post-inaugural speech at agency headquarters. Appearing before a wall of carved granite stars that commemorate CIA officers killed in the line of duty, Trump used the occasion to browbeat the media and make false claims about the size of his inauguration crowds.

Pompeo has worked to overcome that inauspicious start, winning over many in the CIA workforce with his vocal support for aggressive intelligence gathering, his command of complex global issues and his influence at the White House. Pompeo spends several hours there almost every day, according to officials who said he has developed a strong rapport with the president.

But Pompeo is also known for berating subordinates, aggressively challenging agency analysts and displaying the fierce partisanship that became his signature while serving as a GOP member of Congress.

When asked about Russian election interference, Pompeo often becomes testy and recites talking points that seem designed to appease a president who rejects the allegations as "fake news" conjured by Democrats to delegitimize his election win.

"It is true" that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, Pompeo said at Aspen, "and the one before that, and the one before that . . . "

The phrasing, which Pompeo has repeated in other settings, casts last year's events as an unremarkable continuation of a long-standing pattern, rather than the unprecedented Kremlin operation described in a consensus report that the CIA and other agencies released in January.

Russia's intervention in 2016 represented "a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort," the report concluded. Its goal went beyond seeking to discredit U.S. democratic processes, the report said, and in the end was aimed at trying "to help President-elect Trump's election chances."

Pompeo has taken more hawkish positions on other areas of tension with Russia, saying that Moscow intervened in Syria, for example, in part because "they love to stick it to America."

Almost all CIA directors have had to find ways to manage a supposedly apolitical spy agency while meeting the demands of a president. But Trump, who has fired his FBI chief and lashed out at his attorney general over the Russia probe, appears to expect a particularly personal brand of loyalty.

"It is always a balancing act between a director's access to the president and the need to protect CIA's sensitive equities," said John Sipher, a former senior CIA official who also served in Russia. "Pompeo clearly has a more difficult challenge in maintaining that balance than his predecessors given the obvious concerns with this president's unique personality, obsession with charges against him, lack of knowledge and tendency to take impulsive action."

Pompeo has shown a willingness to handle political assignments for the White House. Earlier this year, he and other officials were enlisted to make calls to news organizations - speaking on the condition of anonymity - to dispute a New York Times article about contacts between Russians and individuals tied to the Trump campaign. Pompeo has never publicly acknowledged his involvement in that effort.

He has also declined to address whether he was approached by Trump earlier this year - as other top intelligence officials were - to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion with Russia or to intervene with then-FBI Director James Comey to urge the FBI to back off its investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Pompeo has, by all accounts, a closer relationship with Trump than others who did field such requests, including Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers.

Pompeo was exposed to Trump's wrath over the Russia investigation on at least one occasion, officials said. He was among those present for a meeting at the White House earlier this year when Trump began complaining about the probe and, in front of Pompeo and others, asked what could be done about it.

Trapani, the CIA spokesman, declined to address the matter or say whether Pompeo has been questioned about it by Mueller. Pompeo's conversations with Trump "are entitled to confidentiality," Trapani said, adding that "the director has never been asked by the president to do anything inappropriate."

Pompeo spends more time at the White House than his recent CIA predecessors and is seen as more willing to engage in policy battles. In interviews and public appearances, Pompeo has advocated ousting the totalitarian regime in North Korea, accused the Obama administration of "inviting" Russia into Syria and criticized the nuclear accord with Iran.

Pompeo has also come under scrutiny on social issues. As part of an effort to expand chaplain services to CIA employees - which Trapani said was in response to requests from the agency workforce - Pompeo has consulted with Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled an anti-gay hate group. Perkins has described that characterization as "reckless."

When Trump came under criticism for failing to specifically condemn Nazi sympathizers taking part in protests in Charlottesville - instead lamenting violence by "many sides" - Pompeo defended the president in a CBS interview, saying that Trump's condemnation of bigotry was "frankly pretty unambiguous."

Pompeo inherited an agency that had undergone a major reorganization under his predecessor, combing analysts and operators in a constellation of "centers" responsible for geographic regions, as well as transnational issues such as terrorism.

Pompeo's alterations have been minimal. He added two centers - one devoted to North Korea and the other to Iran. All but the counterintelligence unit fall under Pompeo's deputy on the CIA organizational chart.

Pompeo, who met with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow in May, would have been entitled to full briefings from the counterintelligence center even without making that bureaucratic tweak. But asserting more control of the unit responsible for preventing leaks probably pleased Trump, who has accused U.S. spy agencies of engaging in a smear campaign to undermine his presidency.

U.S. intelligence officials have disputed that spy agencies are behind such leaks but acknowledge broader concerns about security issues, pointing to episodes including the CIA's loss of a vast portion of its hacking arsenal, which was obtained this year by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

A descendant of the unit led by legendary CIA mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton, the counterintelligence center is run by a veteran female CIA officer who has served extensively overseas in Europe, East Asia and Russia. She was also one of the main authors of the CIA's internal review of a deadly suicide bombing that killed seven agency employees in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009.

"I think she's wary about the administration," said a former colleague who also described her as "someone who would not fall in line" if she suspected interference in the center's role. Preventing the center from sharing information with the bureau would be difficult - an FBI official serves as head of the center's counterespionage unit.

Last year, the center played an important part in detecting Russian efforts to cultivate associates of the Trump campaign. Former CIA director John Brennan testified in May that he became "worried by a number of the contacts that the Russians had with U.S. persons" and alerted the FBI.

The center has since been enlisted to help answer questions about key moments in the timeline of Trump-Russia contacts, officials said, possibly including the meeting that Donald Trump Jr. held in June with a Russian lawyer.

"Who sent her on the mission - was it Russian intelligence or on her own initiative?" a former official said, referring to the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. "Mueller can't do anything on that without the agency."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... y,amp.html





Ban transgender troops. Pardon a racist criminal. Wish "good luck" to hurricane victims. Take off early for Camp David. What a disgrace.
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 Aug 27, 2017 10:03 pm

Trump’s business sought deal on a Trump Tower in Moscow while he ran for president
Image
Donald Trump during a 2005 visit to Colorado to speak at a business convention. At his right is Felix Sater, a Russian-born real estate developer. (Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post)
By Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman August 27 at 8:48 PM
While Donald Trump was running for president in late 2015 and early 2016, his company was pursuing a plan to develop a massive Trump Tower in Moscow, according to several people familiar with the proposal and new records reviewed by Trump Organization lawyers.

As part of the discussions, a Russian-born real estate developer urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the proposal and suggested that he could get President Vladimir Putin to say “great things” about Trump, according to several people who have been briefed on his correspondence.

The developer, Felix Sater, predicted in a November 2015 email that he and Trump Organization leaders would soon be celebrating — both one of the biggest residential projects in real estate history and Donald Trump’s election as president, according to two of the people with knowledge of the exchange.

Sater wrote to Trump Organization Executive Vice President Michael Cohen, “something to the effect of, ‘Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?’ ” said one person briefed on the email exchange. Sater emigrated from what was then the Soviet Union when he was 6 and grew up in Brooklyn.

Trump never went to Moscow as Sater proposed. And although investors and Trump’s company signed a letter of intent, they lacked the land and permits to proceed and the project was abandoned at the end of January 2016, just before the presidential primaries began, several people familiar with the proposal said.

Nevertheless, the details of the deal, which have not previously been disclosed, provide evidence that Trump’s business was actively pursuing significant commercial interests in Russia at the same time he was campaigning to be president — and in a position to determine U.S.-Russia relations. The new details from the emails, which are scheduled to be turned over to congressional investigators soon, also point to the likelihood of additional contacts between Russia-connected individuals and Trump associates during his presidential bid.

White House officials declined to comment for this report. Cohen, a longtime Trump aide who remains Trump’s personal attorney, and his lawyer have also declined to comment.

In recent months, contacts between high-ranking and lower- level Trump aides and Russians have emerged. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a U.S. senator and campaign adviser, twice met Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Donald Trump Jr. organized a June 2016 meeting with campaign aide Jared Kushner, campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer after the president’s eldest son was promised that the lawyer would bring damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help the campaign.

Internal emails also show campaign adviser George Papadopoulos repeatedly sought to organize meetings with campaign officials, including Trump, and Putin or other Russians. His efforts were rebuffed.

The negotiations for the Moscow project ended before Trump’s business ties to Russia had become a major issue in the campaign. Trump denied having any business connections to Russia in July 2016, tweeting, “for the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia” and then insisting at a news conference the following day, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

Discussions about the Moscow project began in earnest in September 2015, according to people briefed on the deal. An unidentified investor planned to build the project and, under a licensing agreement, put Trump’s name on it. Cohen acted as a lead negotiator for the Trump Organization. It is unclear how involved or aware Trump was of the negotiations.

As the talks progressed, Trump voiced numerous supportive comments about Putin, setting himself apart from his Republican rivals for the nomination.

By the end of 2015, Putin began offering praise in return.

“He says that he wants to move to another, closer level of relations. Can we really not welcome that? Of course, we welcome that,” Putin told reporters during his annual end-of-the year news conference. He called Trump a “colorful and talented” person. Trump said afterward that the compliment was an “honor.”

Though Putin’s comments came shortly after Sater suggested that the Russian president would speak favorably about Trump, there is no indication that the two are connected.

There is no public record that Trump has ever spoken about the effort to build a Trump Tower in 2015 and 2016.

Trump’s interests in building in Moscow, however, are long-standing. He had attempted to build a Trump property for three decades, starting with a failed effort in 1987 to partner with the Soviet government on a hotel project.

“Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment,” he said in a 2007 court deposition.

“We will be in Moscow at some point,” he promised in the deposition.

Sater was involved in at least one of those previous efforts. In 2005, the Trump Organization gave his development company, the Bayrock Group, an exclusive one-year deal to attempt to build a Moscow Trump Tower. Sater located a site for the project — an abandoned pencil factory — and worked closely with Trump on the deal, which did not come to fruition.

In an unrelated court case in 2008, Sater said in a deposition that he would personally provide Trump “verbal updates” on the deal.

“When I’d come back, pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal.’ And he would say, ‘All right,’ ” Sater said.

In the same testimony, Sater described traveling with Trump’s children, including joining Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. on a trip to Moscow at their father’s request.

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

Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, told The Washington Post last year that Sater happened to be in Moscow at the same time as Trump’s two adult children. “There was no accompanying them to Moscow,” he said.

Neither Sater nor his attorney responded to requests for comment.

Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Sater, who served time in jail after assaulting a man with the stem of a broken margarita glass during a 1991 bar fight and then pleaded guilty in 1998 to his role in an organized- crime-linked stock fraud. Sater’s sentencing was delayed for years while he cooperated with the federal government on a series of criminal and national security-related investigations, federal officials have said.

During that time, Sater worked as an executive with Bayrock, whose offices were in Trump Tower, and brokered deals to license Trump’s name for developments in multiple U.S. and foreign cities. In 2010, Trump allowed Sater to briefly work out of Trump Organization office space and use a business card that identified him as a “senior adviser to Donald Trump.”

Still, when asked about Sater in 2013 court deposition, Trump said: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” He added that he had spoken with Sater “not many” times.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ab2dc31d20


More on Trump Tower Moscow

By JOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 27, 2017 10:17 PM
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The Washington Post has a piece up tonight reporting that during the 2016 campaign Donald Trump was trying to put together a deal to build a Trump Tower Moscow. I would not be doing right by TPM’s crack reporting staff if I didn’t note that TPM’s Sam Thielman reported these details in this piece on August 1st. The Times was the first to reference this deal in February, though only obliquely. But in a series of conversations with Theilman, Sater provided considerably more detail about this key project.

From Thielman’s August 1st piece …

“My last Moscow deal [for the Trump Organization] was in October of 2015,” Sater recalled. “It didn’t go through because obviously he became President.” Sater had told the New York Times that he was working on the deal that fall, but over the course of several conversations with TPM, he gave a slightly more detailed timeline. “Once the campaign was really going-going, it was obvious there were going to be no deals internationally,” Sater said. “We were still working on it, doing something with it, November-December.”

That deal was for “The Trump Tower, to develop in Moscow.” It was a similar proposition to the one Trump himself tried to broker with the Agalarovs, a family of vastly wealthy Russian oligarchs who brought Miss Universe 2013 to Moscow and were behind the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting between the President’s oldest son and an attorney said to work for the Russian government.

Sater said he never worked with the Agalarovs on a Moscow deal for Trump: “I don’t work with them and I’ve never worked with them.” When asked who he was working with, Sater chuckled. “A couple of people I’d like to continue working with, and that’s why I don’t want their names in the newspaper. People say, ‘I care about you and love you but why do I need my name in the press?’”

The Post doesn’t reference the Times or TPM. But it does add two important new details. The first is that Michael Cohen was the negotiator on the Trump Organization’s side of the detail. This is not a surprise. It makes sense. Sater and Cohen show up together again and again through the Russia story. And as Thielman was first to report in July, the two knew each other as kids, having a personal relationship long before they both became key business associates of Donald Trump. (Both men grew up in the Russia/Ukrainian emigre world of Brighton Beach and surrounding areas, though Cohen was born in the US.) It was, remember, Cohen and Sater who had that meeting in February of this year where that Ukrainian parliamentarian pitched his ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine and handed over a dossier of documents which Cohen then hand delivered to Mike Flynn at the White House.

Again, it makes perfect sense that Cohen would be the contact in the Trump Organization. But we didn’t know that, at least not the best of my knowledge. As I’ve explained before, Cohen was brought into the Trump Organization because he was conduit for money from the countries of the former Soviet Union. It makes sense.

The other detail is that this information comes from what appear to be subpoenaed Trump Organization emails which the Post says “which are scheduled to be turned over to congressional investigators soon.”

As we noted when we reported this a month ago, the fact that Trump was actively trying to secure a deal to build a major development in Moscow during the early months of the campaign is a big, big deal. This was happening months before Russia became a charged campaign issue in the late summer of 2016. But it was while Trump was making various public comments praising Putin and Putin was, on a more limited basis, doing the same in return. With these emails now in the process of being handed over to investigators we are likely to get much more detail not only about on-going communications between Trump Organization officials and people in Russia because on-going business negotiations. The money negotiations were going through Michael Cohen at the same time he was acting as a key spokesman for Trump’s campaign.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/mor ... re-1079252



Trump-McConnell Feud Sets The Stage For A September From Hell

AP/TPM
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Published AUGUST 28, 2017 6:00 AM

As White House spokespeople blithely insist that everything is fine between the Republican president and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, the relationship continues to deteriorate—with vague sniping in the press escalating into screaming private phone calls and public call-outs at rallies and on Twitter.

Always one who thrives on attacking a real or invented enemy, President Donald Trump, whose party controls every level of power in Washington, has targeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for ridicule, blaming him for just how little Republicans have been able to accomplish in 2017.

The president has also gone after individual lawmakers in his own party, threatening to primary some of the Senate’s most vulnerable GOP members and publicly and privately berating others.

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The attacks could not come at a worse time.

Because Congress ate up so much of the year with a failed push to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they have an extremely narrow time frame left to pass a budget, raise the debt ceiling, reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Flood Insurance Program and appropriate funding to stabilize Obamacare’s marketplaces. This would be a challenge even with full support from the White House, but it becomes nearly impossible with a president whose spasms of rage, loose grasp of policy, and itchy Twitter finger threaten to derail the delicate deal-making process.

Here comes the September from hell.

The House and Senate return from recess Sept. 5, the day after Labor Day, and will only be in session for 12 days in September. During that time, they must negotiate and pass a slew of bills to keep the government running and avoid defaulting on the national debt.

Besides raising the debt ceiling and approving either a short- or long-term budget by the end of September, Congress must also reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program before their funding expires.

Republican leaders on the Hill have already conceded that, given the tight deadline, their promises of a return to “regular order” budget votes will have to wait, and the best they can hope for is a short-term continuing resolution to stave off a government shutdown for a few more months.

Trump lobbed a grenade into this tense process by calling publicly for a government shutdown if Congress is unwilling to spend billions on the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico—a cost he repeatedly promised would not fall on U.S. taxpayers.

Republican leaders immediately poured cold water on the president’s threats, with House Speaker Paul Ryan offering assurances that a shutdown was not “necessary” or in anyone’s interest. Many rank-and-file Republicans have agreed, showing no eagerness to back the president’s hard line on border funding, while Democrats remain staunchly opposed and emboldened to make their own demands.

In addition to the looming shutdown showdown, Trump and McConnell are fighting one another in proxy wars in Republican primaries in Alabama and Arizona—with McConnell mobilizing to defend incumbents Jeff Flake and Luther Strange against attacks from Trump and Trump-allied PACs.

As lawmakers scramble over the coming weeks to craft a grand bargain that both sides of the aisle can live with, the escalation of this Republican civil war could prove disastrous.

During the last round of budget negotiations in the spring, Trump’s bluster about border wall funding and other issues fizzled quickly, and he ended up signing a bill that met essentially none of his demands.

Since then, Republicans have only shown themselves more willing to ignore and defy him—on everything from Russia sanctions to taking their traditional August recess to protecting the special counsel’s investigation of Trump.

Lawmakers have similarly waved away the president’s repeated demand that the Senate kill the legislative filibuster and move to a simple majority vote on all bills—a move McConnell and most Republicans firmly oppose, knowing it could backfire if and when Democrats take back the upper chamber.

The president’s ham-handed negotiating tactics during the multi-month health care fight will likely make lawmakers even less willing to risk their own necks to advance his agenda. Holding an over-the-top Rose Garden celebration when the House passed the deeply unpopular Obamacare repeal bill, only to call that bill “mean” weeks later, gave members of Congress whiplash.

And whether he was demanding swing vote Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) promise to vote for a bill she’d never seen before riding on Air Force One, or dispatching a cabinet member to threaten Alaska’s Republican senators with cuts to their state’s funding, or generally treating lawmakers like his underlings instead of a co-equal branch of government, Trump proved himself unable to use carrots or sticks to get any bill across the finish line.

Now, still bruised from the health care debacle, lawmakers say they will turn their attention to passing tax cuts—a goal they originally pledged to meet by August and now say, dubiously, that they will accomplish by the end of the year. The president will reportedly not contribute any policy proposals of his own.

With a marked uptick in the number of Republicans willing to buck the president’s priorities, and even openly question his fitness for office, Trump may lash out and potentially veto whatever legislation Capitol Hill manages to produce. The famed deal-maker appears far more interested in making sure Congress shoulders the blame for any future failures than avoiding those failures altogether.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/trump-m ... -from-hell


Trump Associate Boasted That Moscow Business Deal ‘Will Get Donald Elected’
By MATT APUZZO and MAGGIE HABERMANAUG. 28, 2017

Donald J. Trump with Felix H. Sater, right, and Tevfik Arif at the official unveiling of Trump SoHo in September 2007. Credit Mark Von Holden/WireImage
WASHINGTON — A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.

The associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin and predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Photo

A portion of an email Felix Sater sent to Michael Cohen on Nov. 3, 2015.
The emails show that, from the earliest months of Mr. Trump’s campaign, some of his associates viewed close ties with Moscow as a political advantage. Those ties are now under investigation by the Justice Department and multiple congressional committees.

A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates FEB. 19, 2017
American intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 presidential election to try to help Mr. Trump. Investigators want to know whether anyone on Mr. Trump’s team was part of that process.

Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow.

“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote.

Mr. Sater said he was eager to show video clips to his Russian contacts of instances of Mr. Trump speaking glowingly about Russia.

There is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had stalled. But Mr. Sater did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.

The project never got government permits or financing, and died weeks later.

“To be clear, the Trump Organization has never had any real estate holdings or interests in Russia,” the Trump Organization said Monday in a statement.

The Trump Organization on Monday turned over emails to the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian meddling in the presidential election and whether anyone in Mr. Trump’s campaign was involved. Some of the emails were obtained by The Times.

Photo

A portion of an email Mr. Sater sent to Mr. Cohen on Nov. 3, 2015.
None of the emails obtained by The Times include any responses from Mr. Cohen to Mr. Sater’s messages.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Cohen suggested that he viewed Mr. Sater’s comments as puffery. “He has sometimes used colorful language and has been prone to ‘salesmanship,’” the statement said. “I ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.”

The emails obtained by The Times make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the hacking of Democrats’ emails. Mr. Trump has said there was no collusion with Russian officials. Previously released emails, however, revealed that his campaign was willing to receive damaging information about Mrs. Clinton from Russian sources.

Mr. Sater was a broker for the Trump Organization at the time of his messages to Mr. Cohen, which means he was paid to deliver real estate deals and had an incentive to overstate his business-making acumen. He presents himself in his emails as so influential in Russia that he helped arrange a 2006 trip that Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, took to Moscow.

“I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,” he said.

Ms. Trump said she had no involvement in the discussions about the Moscow deal. In a statement, she said that during the 2006 trip, she took “a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin” as a tourist. She said it is possible she sat in Mr. Putin’s chair during that tour but she did not recall it. “I have never met President Vladimir Putin,” she said.

The Times reported earlier this year on the plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow, which never materialized. On Sunday, The Washington Post reported the existence of the correspondence between Mr. Sater and Mr. Cohen but not its content.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/p ... ubz=0&_r=0


I told you last night’s Trump Tower Moscow bombshell was merely a teaser. It just got much, much bigger.
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 3:06 pm EDT Mon Aug 28, 2017
Home » Politics

Last night the Washington Post reported that Donald Trump was trying to build Trump Tower Moscow during the election. The story stood out, not only because it’s a major bombshell, but because it had been rushed out in seemingly in half finished fashion – and published while the public was instead focused on Hurricane Harvey flooding. I pointed out last night that this had to be nothing more than a teaser, with more to come. And sure enough, the story got much bigger today.


Now we know why the WaPo was in such a hurry to publish what it had last night: it was racing the New York Times, which was working on a much bigger version of the same story. Now the Times has published its own version today, and it’s nothing short of stunning. Not only were Donald Trump and convicted Russian mafia figure Felix Sater trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, they’d been trying to pull it off dating back to 2006, when Sater took Ivanka Trump to the Kremlin. But that’s just the beginning.


During the 2016 election cycle Sater sent an email to Donald Trump’s longtime attorney Michael Cohen, stating “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it” and “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process” (NY Times). This may help explain why Cohen has since hired an attorney of his own. The infamous Trump-Russia dossier has asserted that Cohen played a key role in negotiating the terms of the Kremlin’s blackmail over Trump, though Cohen has long denied this. Now he’s allegedly right back to being in the thick of it. But there’s more.

Sater also says that “I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.” Ivanka has responded by admitting she toured the Kremlin but insisting that she never met Putin. This is getting deeper by the minute. Remarkably, this is probably still just the warmup act. It’s clear the Washington Post and New York Times are racing each other to unearth the details of this story in real time.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/bo ... gger/4552/
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 28, 2017 4:59 pm

Michael Cohen has been cooperating with the probe into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal



Top Trump Organization executive asked Putin aide for help on business deal


Michael Cohen, attorney for The Trump Organization, arrives at Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 17. (© Stephanie Keith / Reuters/REUTERS)

By Rosalind S. Helderman, Carol D. Leonnig and Tom Hamburger August 28 at 2:16 PM
A top executive from Donald Trump’s real estate company emailed Vladi­mir Putin’s personal spokesman during the U.S. presidential campaign last year to ask for help advancing a stalled Trump Tower development project in Moscow, according to documents submitted to Congress Monday.

Michael Cohen, a Trump attorney and executive vice president for the Trump Organization, sent the email in January 2016 to Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s top press aide.

“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower - Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote Peskov, according to a person familiar with the email. “Without getting into lengthy specifics the communication between our two sides has stalled.”

“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote.

Cohen’s email marks the most direct interaction yet documented of a top Trump aide and a similarly senior member of Putin’s government.

Team Trump’s ties to Russian interests VIEW GRAPHIC
The email shows the Trump business official directly seeking Kremlin assistance in advancing Trump’s business interests, in the same months when Trump was distinguishing himself on the campaign trail with his warm rhetoric about Putin.

In a statement Cohen submitted to congressional investigators, he said he wrote the email at the recommendation of Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who was serving as a broker on the deal.

In the statement, obtained by The Washington Post, Cohen said Sater suggested the outreach because a massive Trump development in Moscow would require Russian government approval. He said he did not recall receiving a response from Peskov and the project was abandoned two weeks later.

Cohen has been one of Trump’s closest aides for more than a decade. He did not take a formal role in the campaign however sometimes spoke to reporters on Trump’s behalf and appeared on television as a surrogate while Trump was running.

“It should come as no surprise that, over four decades, the Trump Organization has received and reviewed countless real estate development opportunities, both domestic and international,” Cohen said in a statement to the Post. “The Trump Moscow proposal was simply one of many development opportunities that the Trump Organization considered and ultimately rejected.”

He said he abandoned the project because he lost confidence the Moscow developer would be able to obtain land, financing and government approvals to complete the project. “It was a building proposal that did not succeed and nothing more,” he said.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Cohen had been in negotiations with Sater to attempt to build a Trump Tower in the Russian capital from September 2015 through the end of January 2016, as Trump was competing for the Republican nomination for president.

Cohen told congressional investigators that the deal was envisioned as a licensing project, in which Trump would have been paid for the use of his name by a Moscow-based developer called I.C. Expert Investment Co. Cohen said that Trump signed a letter of intent with the company on Oct. 28, 2015 and began to solicit designs from architects and discuss financing.

However, he said government permission was not forthcoming and the project was abandoned “for business reasons.”

“The Trump Tower Moscow proposal was not related in any way to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign,” Cohen wrote in his statement to congressional investigators. “The decision to pursue the proposal initially, and later to abandon it were unrelated to the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign.”

Cohen told congressional investigators that Sater “constantly” pushed him to travel to Moscow as part of the negotiations, but that he declined to do so. He claimed Sater, who has attempted to broker Trump deals for more than a decade, was “prone to ‘salesmanship,’” and, as a result, he did not routinely apprise others in the company about their interactions and never considered asking Trump to go to Moscow, as Sater had requested.

Lawyers for the Trump Organization, Sater and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 3fa1af7c36


Boom! Taking Stock of the Wild New Michael Cohen News

Kathy Willens/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 28, 2017 3:59 PM

Much as the first reports of the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr., last night’s report about Trump Tower Moscow seems to be the tip of a very large iceberg. As I noted last night, the first Post report was substantially the same as our report on Trump’s 2015 Trump Tower Moscow effort published a month ago. The key point – the significance of which will become more apparent – is that they were working from different sources. We had TPM Investigations Desk reporter Sam Thielman’s series of interviews with Felix Sater. The Post was working from accounts of what seems to be a large cache of emails which the Trump Organization is in the process of turning over to Congress.

That was only the first hint.

The Times, not surprisingly got access to some more of those emails early this afternoon. Now the Post has followed up with a new report which dramatically expands the story. The Post is now reporting that in January 2016, on the eve of the earliest primary voting and some six months into the Trump presidential campaign, the Trump Tower Moscow deal had “stalled”. Michael Cohen – Trump’s nominal “lawyer” who is actually his dealmaker with channels into Russia and Ukrainian cash – emailed Vladimir Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov asking for assistance in pushing the deal forward.

Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of what this means. Cohen was running the deal from Trump’s side. He was also acting as Trump’s part-time press spokesman. When talks broke down Cohen contacted Putin’s Press Security – his equivalent of Sean Spicer or Josh Earnest – to get the deal back on track.

I’d wager that most people don’t have Peskov’s email for starters. I don’t. Cohen apparently did. Cohen now says he did so at the urging of Felix Sater, the Russian emigre convicted fraudster who spearheaded numerous Trump building projects and who Trump later said he would barely recognize.

We have been told – not credibly – for more than a year that Donald Trump doesn’t have any properties or business interests in Russia. But for the first six months of his presidential campaign he was actively trying to secure a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and in early 2016 a top Trump business executive solicited the assistance of one of Vladimir Putin’s top aides in making the deal happen. This of course was happening while Trump was singing Putin’s praises on the campaign trail.

This is, to put it mildly, a big deal.

A few more points to consider. I’ve noted a number of times that if there was a real Trump-Russia story that Michael Cohen would be at the heart of it. Why? Because Cohen was one of two or three key players building the Trump/Russia money channel over the last decade. Here are three stories (one and two and three and four) from earlier in the year which give critical background on Cohen, his personal and business background and how he came into the Trump orbit.

Trump brought Cohen into the Trump Organization circa 2006 because he realized Cohen was a conduit for money from countries of the former Soviet Union. Part of how he found that out was that Cohen and his extended family were buying up numerous apartment units in Trump properties. TPM’s Sam Thielman reported exclusively last month that Cohen and Felix Sater, the other guy in this latest drama, actually grew up together. Though Cohen was born in the US, both men grew up in the Russian (and Ukrainian) emigre world of Brighton Beach and surrounding areas. Both had family connections to the world of Russian organized crime. Cohen married a Ukrainian emigre and so did his brother. They had extensive business interests with Ukrainian emigres and in Ukraine itself through his extended family and several business partnerships that extend back into the 1990s. Somehow both men – Cohen and Sater – ended up working for Donald Trump decades later. It’s no surprise that Cohen turns out to be at the heart of this. He was at the center of the Russia money channel which any 2016 collusion almost certainly grew out of.

Second point to consider.

Why is this all coming out now? The Post stories are quite clear on this. The Trump Organization had what seems to have been a deadline to turn over lots of Trump Organization emails in response to congressional requests or subpoenas. These leaks seem to be coming from the Trump Organization or at least from that direction if not literally from there. At least in yesterday’s Post report, the emails were referred to as in the process of being turned over. If I’m understanding the language, they had not been turned over yet. That means they couldn’t have come from Congress and strongly suggests they were leaked by lawyers on the Trump Organization. That would mean they were trying to get the story out with the best possible spin in advance of congressional investigators getting their hands on them.

What does this mean? Hard to say. But it would seem that this was an effort to get the bad stuff out early and on the Trump Organization’s own terms. In other words, this is the most generous possible take on what these emails show. I can only imagine what they’ll look like on an adverse view.

We’ll probably hear a lot more after investigators start working through these emails.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDZxA09Stiw
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 Aug 29, 2017 8:37 am

AUG 28 2017, 6:26 PM ET
Mueller Team Asking If Trump Tried to Hide Purpose of Trump Tower Meeting
by JULIA AINSLEY and TOM WINTER

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller are keenly focused on President Donald Trump's role in crafting a response to a published article about a meeting between Russians and his son Donald Jr., three sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The sources told NBC News that prosecutors want to know what Trump knew about the meeting and whether he sought to conceal its purpose.

The meeting occurred at Trump Tower in June 2016 and was attended by Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. The meeting, which was first reported by The New York Times, also involved Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya and former Soviet intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin.

At the time, the White House confirmed that Trump had "weighed in" as the response to the Times report was drafted aboard Air Force One on July 8 as the president returned to the U.S. from Germany. The Washington Post reported that Trump had "dictated" the response.

White House under pressure amid new details of Trump Tower meeting

The initial response by Donald Trump Jr. that was drafted aboard Air Force One described the 2016 meeting as "a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up."

According to The Times, he added: "I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand."

By the next day the paper reported that the meeting was scheduled in order to convey damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign — an account that Trump Jr. would confirm in a follow-up statement and in emails that he released publicly.

Related: Former Soviet Counterintelligence Officer at Trump Tower Meeting With Trump Jr.

In a June 3, 2016, email, publicist Rob Goldstone told Trump Jr. that a Russian prosecutor had "offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] … and would be very useful to your father."

The Meeting: The Latest in the Trump-Russia Saga Play Facebook Twitter Embed

Trump Jr. responded, "[I]f it's what you say, I love it."

Emails show that the following day, Goldstone and Trump Jr. began arranging the Trump Tower meeting.

A person familiar with Mueller's strategy said that whether or not Trump made a "knowingly false statement" is now of interest to prosecutors.

"Even if Trump is not charged with a crime as a result of the statement, it could be useful to Mueller's team to show Trump's conduct to a jury that may be considering other charges."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mu ... er-n796746



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all dressed up to view the suffering of the little people in Texas
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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