Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 23, 2018 6:31 pm

Allen Weisselberg, Trump Organization CFO, granted immunity by prosecutors in Michael Cohen investigation



Fernand R. Amandi


Holy moly. I just learned that Weisselberg wasn’t just granted “use immunity” but rather “complete immunity from prosecution” - which my legal pal @KatiePhang will surely confirm only happens when you’ve got ALL the goods



emptywheel


With the news that Trump's Pecker was sitting on a whole safe full of kompromat can we dispense with the fiction that only Russians blackmail people?



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FUN FACT: Trump's had a bad 72 hours. They've flipped his fixer, turned his accountant and fingered his Pecker. :P

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PECKER GRABS TRUMP BY THE BALLS

"Pecker sticks it to Trump"

Pecker Gets In Trump's Face

Pecker's No Softee

Pecker Stiffs Trump

Pecker Avoids Hard Time

Pecker Goes Hard On Trump

“Spit? they should have swallowed that one !”

Pecker going to get HARD time

Trump tweets- "Pecker's a stiff."


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TRUMP’S PECKER AND HIS RAT-FUCKER’S “PERVY TED”

August 23, 2018/7 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

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According to Michael Cohen’s criminal information, he and David Pecker started conspiring to protect Trump from scandals pertaining to his extramarital affairs and alleged sexual assault starting in August 2015.

In or about August 2015, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Corporation-1 ( “Chairman-1”), in coordination with MICHAEL COHEN, the defendant, and one or more members of the campaign, offered to help deal with negative stories about Individual-l’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided. Chairman-1 agreed to keep COHEN apprised of any such negative stories.


That means Cohen and Pecker were conspiring to help Trump’s electoral chances when Trump’s rat-fucker, Roger Stone, planted a story in Pecker’s pages on March 23, 2016, accusing Ted Cruz, who was running on his Evangelical brand, of having affairs with five different women. (h/t Allen Smith for remembering this incident)

The National Enquirer published an article Wednesday alleging that the Texas senator had five secret mistresses. While it did not identify the alleged mistresses by name, the article included headshots of five women that were pixelated with black bars over their eyes.

The article also quoted Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser who is still close to the real-estate mogul. “These stories have been swirling about Cruz for some time,” Stone said in the National Enquirer. “I believe where there is smoke there is fire. I have to believe this will hurt him with his evangelical Christian supporters.”


Cruz unsurprisingly accused Trump of planting the story. To which Trump claimed he does not surround himself with political hacks … then pretend total innocence.

“And I would note that Mr. Stone is a man who has 50 years of dirty tricks behind him. He’s a man whom a term was coined for copulating with a rodent. Well let me be clear, Donald Trump may be a rat but I have no desire to copulate with him. And this garbage does not belong in politics,” Cruz said.

Trump issued a statement Friday afternoon denying any involvement with the National Enquirer.

“I have no idea whether or not the cover story about Ted Cruz in this week’s issue of the National Enquirer is true or not, but I had absolutely nothing to do with it, did not know about it, and have not, as yet, read it,” Trump said.

“I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman (sic) and then pretend total innocence. Ted Cruz’s problem with the National Enquirer is his and his alone, and while they were right about O.J. Simpson, John Edwards, and many others, I certainly hope they are not right about Lyin’ Ted Cruz,” he added.


The timing of all this is quite interesting for several reasons. First, because Mueller has asked witnesses against Stone about meetings they had with Stone and Rick Gates in the spring, meaning we know the scope of his investigation into Stone extends back into the primary timeframe. The story came out just before Trump formally announced the hiring of Paul Manafort to manage his convention.

More interesting, still, the story came out even as Stone and his ally Pamela Jensen were ramping up attacks on Hillary for Bill’s philandering — the same kind of projection this Enquirer story entailed. The story came weeks after Stone first tweeted out his Stop the Steal campaign. Not long after, Stone started to shift money from his PAC, Committee to Restore America’s Greatness (CRAG in the timeline below), to his 527, Stop the Steal.

February 1, 2016: Pamela Jensen sends out fundraising letter to World Net Daily pushing Kathleen Wiley’s mortgage fundraiser

February 4, 2016: Jensen & Associates loans $2,610 to CRAG

February 10, 2016: Loans from Jensen & Associates repaid

February 19, 2016: Roger Stone tells Alex Jones that Donald Trump has donated to the Kathleen Willey fundraiser, even though it had raised less than $4,000 at that time

March 1, 2016: John Powers Middleton Company donates $150,000 to CRAG

March 6, 2016: First tweet in spring Stop the Steal campaign

March 9, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $50,000 to CRAG

March 11, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $25,000 to CRAG

March 14, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $25,000 to CRAG

March 23, 2016: Ted Cruz National Enquirer smear

March 29, 2016: Trump announces hiring of Paul Manafort

April 6, 2016: Stone (Sarah Rollins) establishes Stop the Steal in same UPS post box as CRAG

April 6, 2016: CRAG gives $50,000 to Stop the Steal

So there’s good reason to believe that Mueller is reviewing Stone’s actions from this time period.

As numerous outlets have reported, prosecutors have given Pecker immunity to testify (at least) about the Cohen matter. The NYT reported that the Enquirer’s Chief Content Officer, Dylan Howard, also keeps a recording device in his office.

Though several people familiar with American Media’s operations have said that the company keeps a strict records policy that ensures that emails are deleted regularly, it is not clear the same held for encrypted communications or recordings; Dylan Howard, the company’s chief content officer, who is also said to be cooperating, was known to have a recording device in his office, according to people familiar with his operations. American Media would not comment.

In court documents filed on Tuesday federal prosecutors cited “encrypted” communications among Mr. Pecker, Mr. Howard and Mr. Cohen regarding the payoff to Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic actress known as Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had a brief affair with Mr. Trump.


Perhaps the Pecker participation in this conspiracy goes beyond just hush payments?
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/08/23/t ... pervy-ted/


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=8EsUNOIYyKg



The Manhattan DA is considering pursuing criminal charges against the Trump Organization and 2 senior company officials in connection with Michael Cohen’s hush money payment to Stormy Daniels



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUIZnqF92j8


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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 24, 2018 7:03 pm

The Ghost Companies Connected To Suspected Money Laundering, Corruption, And Paul Manafort

“This adds to the growing evidence that UK companies are being used to aid financial crime on an industrial scale.”

August 23, 2018, at 1:04 a.m.
A vast web of shell companies is operating freely in Britain despite flagrant warning signs and documented ties to suspected money laundering, alleged bribery, and even Donald Trump’s convicted former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

The network of more than 100 firms shows that despite promises by successive British prime ministers to crack down on financial crime and corruption, UK authorities are still failing to stop suspected money launderers from pumping millions of pounds through the Western financial system — even when the red flags are glaringly obvious.

The 127 companies in this network are registered to the same handful of London offices, where no signs identify the businesses and staff on duty said they had never heard of them. Some of these companies’ accounts are so brazenly bogus that they simply list annual income as the year the accounts were due: £2,015 for 2015, £2,016 for 2016. These British firms have been run — at least on paper — by a succession of companies that are based in notorious offshore tax havens and controlled by businesspeople in Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet states. One person whose name appears on all the British companies’ corporate filings is not some corporate titan but a dentist living in a humble Brussels neighbourhood who told BuzzFeed News that he has nothing to do with the companies — though he did acknowledge signing “many things, many times” for his friends in Latvia, a country rocked by money laundering scandals.

The government has recently introduced a raft of anti–money laundering laws and policies aimed at stamping out Britain’s reputation as a safe haven for dirty money. New legislation makes companies criminally liable if they fail to prevent tax evasion, and authorities can force suspects to prove their wealth comes from legitimate origins.

But the law is only as good as its enforcement — and experts say it is failing. “They’ve just made some good political announcements, but they're not actually doing anything,” said Richard Brooks, a former tax inspector who is now a Private Eye journalist. “They’re not resourcing anyone to police their own rules.”

The network of companies highlighted by BuzzFeed News continues to operate freely in the UK — and has done for years. A spokesperson for the National Crime Agency — Britain’s FBI — said it is “aware of allegations relating to the company structures identified”, but said it does not “routinely confirm nor deny the existence of investigations”.

The company linked to Manafort was involved in a now-soured offshore financial deal that the former Trump campaign manager struck with one of Russia’s most famous oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska. Manafort was found guilty this week of fraud.

Around a third of the shell companies in the network face allegations — some in criminal courts — of large-scale tax evasion, fraud, or corruption. Others are subject to international sanctions, and some have been blacklisted by the United Nations over fraud allegations.

Among those with ties to the network:

A businessman under US sanctions for his links to a Ukrainian “terrorist organisation” accused of human rights violations;

A Ukrainian member of parliament accused of accepting millions in bribes;

Two companies in the network that were banned by the United Nations for suspected fraud after promising to deliver crucial medical supplies; and

An oligarch whose assets were frozen by a UK court last year based on evidence he had stolen billions from Ukraine’s state bank.

“This adds to the growing evidence that UK companies are being used to aid financial crime on an industrial scale,” said Rachel Davies Teka, of anti-corruption group Transparency International.

Both prime minister Theresa May and her predecessor David Cameron have promised to crack down on the torrent of money — up to an estimated £90 billion — that is laundered through the country each year. Parliament has created a registry of beneficial property owners and introduced tougher punishments for some financial crimes. And in the wake of this spring’s Novichok attack in Salisbury — which hospitalised former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, and killed an innocent bystander — May’s government pledged further action, especially toward money coming from Russia.

A Home Office spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that “the UK has taken a leading role in the global fight against illicit finance” and said it is “determined to drive dirty money and the money launderers out of the UK” using “all the powers we have to clamp down on those that threaten our security”.

Yet some of the companies in the network highlighted by BuzzFeed News have been in operation for at least a decade and almost all remain active today — despite clear warning signs and the fact that many of the allegations of illegality are in the public domain. It is not known if the companies in the network actively operate together, but they share common characteristics. For example, all of the companies in it are limited liability partnerships registered to one of four UK addresses — sleepy office parks and industrial estates on the outskirts of London.

BuzzFeed News visited all four locations and could find no evidence that any of the companies in the network conduct active business there. An employee at one of the addresses said a lot of Ukrainian and Russian companies receive letters, but she didn’t know anything about those businesses. Another said the people who own the businesses are “millionaires” who would be impossible to find: “You just find some small people who work for them and they don’t know nothing,” she added.

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The London addresses the network of shell companies are registered to.
BuzzFeed News


Graham Barrow, an independent money laundering investigator working for banks and financial regulators, said these specific addresses are a “huge warning sign”. “These are UK addresses that consistently appear in global laundromat investigations,” he told BuzzFeed News, noting that two of them popped up in the Deutsche Bank mirror trades scandal and the Russian and Azerbaijani laundromat cases.

The network of shell companies also share identical corporate structures, marshalled through the same series of offshore firms. First they were set up and run by two firms based in the British Virgin Islands — Ireland & Overseas Acquisitions and Milltown Corporate Services. They were replaced by two others 8,000 miles away in the Seychelles, Intrahold AG and Monohold AG. Finally, two more companies took over in the Caribbean island of Nevis, one of the most secretive offshore havens in the world — Tallberg Ltd. and Uniwell Inc. None of the offshore firms responded to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.

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The corporate structure of the network of shell companies.
Tim Lane / BuzzFeed


“In money laundering it’s called layering,” Barrow explained. “It’s having this incredibly complex structure which makes it really hard to prosecute — not only in terms of which country should do it, but it’s also really hard to get your head round what is going on.”

Another suspicious sign: Despite working in various industries across different countries, the companies all report similar incomes — usually under £10,000 a year. Barrow said that in 25 years working in the financial sector he had never come across such similar accounts for so many different companies. “Their accounts are nonsense,” he said.

The final link connecting the companies is a mysterious figure named Ali Moulaye. He represents the offshore firms behind the network, and paperwork for the 127 British companies bears his name — spelled seven different ways but with the same distinctive signature. Yet his true role has been unclear and his whereabouts unknown — until BuzzFeed News tracked him down in Brussels this month.

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Ali Moulaye and his family in 2012.


Moulaye, 54, hardly fits the mold of a business kingpin running more than a hundred companies. He uses different first names, including Nick and Bahram; works as a dentist; and lives in an unassuming apartment block in Schaerbeek, a multicultural district west of the city, with his wife and two children.

Shown the corporate documents, Moulaye at first claimed not to recognise his signature — despite it being almost identical to that on a courier receipt Moulaye had signed 30 minutes before the interview. Later, he said that his signatures on the company filings were a “forgery”. He insisted, “I have no clue what these companies are, where they are based, and what’s their business.”

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Left: Moulaye's signature on the courier receipt. Right: Moulaye's signatures on company filings.


But he also said he used to live in Latvia, where “some people do some money laundering”, which “could be in connection somehow”. At that point in the interview, BuzzFeed News had not mentioned Latvia or money laundering.

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Ali Moulaye

But the tiny Baltic nation has a separate connection to the network bearing Moulaye’s name. One of the offshore firms that set up each of the 127 companies has a history of using Latvian proxy directors — two of whom reportedly became “legendary” among law enforcement investigators because so many of the companies they signed off on were involved in crimes.

At some point, Moulaye’s name started appearing on the company accounts. Whoever made that happen did so without his consent, Moulaye told BuzzFeed News. “I have been used,” he said. “They abused me.”

Moulaye told BuzzFeed News that when he was living in Latvia he signed “many things, many times” for his friends, and even gave his passport to a neighbour who worked for the Latvian government, for an immigration matter. He declined to name any of these individuals, saying they are “good friends”.


THE MANAFORT CONNECTION

As Paul Manafort has been investigated, tried, and convicted, one of his associates has drawn particular public interest: Oleg Deripaska, a multibillionaire aluminium tycoon who is close to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Manafort and Deripaska rubbed shoulders until they had a falling out culminating in a Cayman Islands lawsuit in which Deripaska accused Manafort of defrauding him out of millions. In that tangled dispute is a Manafort company that belongs to the network exposed by BuzzFeed News.

One day, Manafort pitched Deripaska a new investment, a telecoms company called Chorne More — Ukrainian for “Black Sea”. Court filings show the pair hatched a plan to transfer the funds through offshore companies to avoid having to pay tax.

Deripaska would send his money in the form of a “loan” to a Cyprus company Manafort controlled. Then Manafort would use a connected UK firm to make the actual purchase.

That company had a British parent company called Colberg Projects LLP. Colberg has the same byzantine structure involving corporate owners in the Caribbean and in the Seychelles as the others in the network. Its company documents also bear Ali Moulaye’s name.

Court documents argue that Manafort’s companies never actually bought the rights to Chorne More or any of its affiliates. It is unclear exactly where the money ended up, but Deripaska claims that he got nothing in return for the $26.25 million he gave Manafort to purchase the company.

The Chorne More deal is dead, and Manafort faces sentencing. But in Britain, Colberg Projects LLP remains alive. In January this year the company filed documents saying it has just over £250,000 in the bank.

Neither Manafort or Deripaska responded to a request for comment.

Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump.
Bloomberg / Getty Images
Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump.


THE PRO-RUSSIAN SEPARATISTS

Oleksandr Melnychuk is a big figure in coal exports across Russia and Eastern Europe. He is also under US sanctions for his work on behalf of the Luhansk People's Republic, an eastern Ukrainian separatist group which declared independence from the country in 2014 with what is widely believed to be assistance from the Kremlin. Melnychuk is the breakaway group’s deputy minister of energy.

The Ukrainian government has called the Luhansk People’s Republic a “terrorist organisation”, and the United Nations has documented a number of human rights abuses apparently carried out by groups including LPR — targeted killings, torture, and abduction. The UN has also detailed threats, attacks, and abductions of journalists and international observers.

Despite the sanctions, Melnychuk retains a foothold in the West through a company in the network. It’s called Renton Resources LLP, and it is nominally based in an industrial park in North London. The company claims to trade in coal and heating oil.

Renton Resources forms part of a Ukrainian Security Service investigation into the illegal smuggling of coal out of the war-riven regions of eastern Ukraine and into Russia — adding further strain on Ukraine’s fuel shortage crisis.

Renton Resources remains active. It reported making £8,400 last year. BuzzFeed News tried to contact Melnychuk though the company but did not receive a response.


FRAUDULENT DEALS AND MISSING MILLIONS

Many of the companies in the network highlighted by BuzzFeed News stand accused of corruption or fraud.

One of the firms, Inlord Sales LLP, is front and centre in the corruption trial of a Ukrainian MP named Mykola Martynenko. Prosecutors have accused him of taking €6.4 million in bribes from a Czech company angling to supply equipment for Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.

Nearly €2 million of that money went through Inlord. Inlord then sent money to another company that is the focus of a different criminal case, centering on extortion in the Ukrainian timber market.

Inlord Sales remained active when the criminal case against Martynenko was made public, but was dissolved this past June for being inactive.

Two other companies in the network were banned by the United Nations earlier this year after the UN uncovered suspected scams. They had promised to deliver health and medical supplies and were barred for “fraud with aggravating circumstances”.

Other firms in the network have filed questionable paperwork. Filings for Profbond LLP report an annual income of no more than £15,000 in the same year that it was widely reported that the company had lent another firm $30 million. And a court judgment for another firm stated that it was owed over £1 million, yet its accounts showed an annual income of only £10,000 for the same year.


TAXING OLIGARCHS

Ihor Kolomoisky, one of Ukraine’s richest people, has what one British judge referred to as “a reputation of having sought to take control of a company at gunpoint”. He has been accused in court of using “quasi-military forces” to enforce hostile takeovers, including a team of “hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws” sent in 2006 to a Ukrainian steel plant he wanted to own. That $2 billion case was settled just before the trial was due to start.

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Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky
Mykhaylo Markiv / Mykhaylo Markiv/Epa/REX/Shutterstock


In 2015 the Ukrainian authorities accused Kolomoisky’s company of evading nearly $400,000 in taxes using a company in the network called Creditrade LLP. But Ukraine’s Supreme Court ruled that Kolomoisky’s firm is not required to pay out the sum, because the oligarch’s company successfully argued that he had already paid tax in the UK. A criminal tax evasion case against one of Kolomoisky’s Ukrainian companies is ongoing.

In December 2017 an English court froze $2.5 billion of Kolomoisky’s assets based on evidence he had stolen billions from Ukraine’s state bank. Six months later, the company was dissolved for being inactive. Neither Kolomoisky or Creditrade could be reached for comment.

Another oligarch, the Russian railway magnate Yury Korotchenko, was named in last year’s Paradise Papers scandal for using an offshore company to buy a £13.5 million private jet, apparently to avoid paying tax on it. His case illuminates how people can use shell companies for actions that are perfectly legal but have faced strong criticism.

According to Private Eye, Korotchenko bought the Gulfstream G200 using an account at a Latvian bank held by Intertrade Continental. That company features all the same hallmarks of every other firm in the network — the UK address, the offshore incorporation agents, the signature bearing Ali Moulaye’s name.

Around the time that Intertrade made the multimillion-pound purchase, it filed paperwork with the UK government saying that it was a “trade agent for industrial equipment” with revenues of £4,600 a year. Intertrade is still in operation today.

While avoiding tax is legal, Brooks said the UK remains an attractive destination for money launders because of the “layer of legitimacy” it provides and the “ready supply of people” proficient at setting up shell companies.

“They should be shutting people down, ultimately,” he told BuzzFeed News. “The mechanics of laundering have now been pretty obvious for getting on a decade and it's appalling that it's still so easy.” ●
https://www.buzzfeed.com/janebradley/sh ... .gfDmgo36z
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 24, 2018 7:28 pm

Jailed Russian of Interest in U.S. Election Probe, Official Says

Kartikay Mehrotra
August 24, 2018, 5:16 PM CDT


By
Lawyers say Russian embassy keen on visting accused hacker

Judge questions pychiatrist chosen to examine Yevgeniy Nikulin

A Russian charged with hacking LinkedIn is of great interest in a U.S. probe of election meddling, according to a Justice Department official, even as his own lawyers complain he hasn’t cooperated with them since landing in a California jail in March.

The mystery around Yevgeniy Nikulin deepened Friday when a federal judge asked why his lawyers, who want him evaluated for possible mental illness, chose a San Francisco psychiatrist with a troubled past at California’s medical board.

And Nikulin’s defense team -- led by a New York-based attorney seasoned in representing Russians and Eastern Europeans charged with serious crimes in the U.S. -- say Russian officials have shown unusually strong interest in his case, arranging at least once to visit him in jail when the attorneys weren’t present.

The lead attorney, Arkady Bukh, said he remains concerned, maybe ”paranoid,” over Nikulin’s safety after a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned earlier this year in England with a nerve agent.

“They are very active, by far more active than any other case," Bukh said of Russian embassy officials. “Now it’s less frequent, but earlier in the case they were calling almost every day. I have no duties to them. They’re not my client.”

Bukh said Nikulin probably didn’t cooperate when officials from the Russian consulate visited him at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of San Francisco. Representatives of the Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nikulin is accused by the U.S. of hacking LinkedIn and Dropbox in 2012, one of the largest data breaches in the country’s history when some 117 million login codes were stolen. His extradition to the U.S. from the Czech Republic in March heightened diplomatic tensions with Russia, which has been accused by American intelligence officials of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email server while interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

Moscow had a dueling request with Prague officials to extradite Nikulin to Russia, which said when he was first arrested in 2016 that the U.S. was “hunting for Russian citizens across the world.”

U.S. Sanctions Russians Charged by Mueller for Election Meddling

Prosecutors are as eager to find out what, if anything, Nikulin knows about election meddling as they are to get to the bottom of the LinkedIn and Dropbox hacks, said the U.S. Justice Department official, who declined to be identified without authorization to discuss the case.

Federal marshals said that when Nikulin first arrived in San Francisco he physically confronted guards and tried to escape from custody -- and he was shackled for his next court appearance.

‘Starts Laughing’

Ever since, his attorneys have said, he’s been unwilling to work with them. Valery Nechay, a lawyer helping Bukh, said Nikulin often “just stares off blankly or starts laughing at very serious moments.”

The lawyers won court approval this month, with no objections from prosecutors, for a psychological evaluation of Nikulin to determine whether he’s mentally incompetent to assist in his own defense.

But two days after the defense lawyers submitted the name of their chosen psychiatrist, Alexander Grinberg, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered Bukh and prosecutors to provide him with more information on Grinberg’s “probationary status with the California Medical Board arising out of complaints of unprofessional conduct and gross negligence.” The judge set an Aug. 27 deadline for both sides to comment.

Bukh said he’s not aware of the complaints against Grinberg, who has a 2-star rating on Yelp and a 4.5-star rating on healthgrades.com. Grinberg, whose voicemail has greetings in English and Russian, didn’t immediately respond to a phone call seeking comment.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... n-meddling


HOW YEVGENIY NIKULIN MIGHT PLAY INTO THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION

April 14, 2018/57 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Cybersecurity, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
For three reasons, Yevgeniy Nikulin, the Russian hacker alleged to be behind massive breaches of the LinkedIn and MySpace hacks, is in the news of late.

The report that Michael Cohen was tracked traveling from Germany to Czech Republic in 2016 has raised questions about whether both Cohen and Nikulin were in Prague at the same time, Mohammed Atta-like
Nikulin was suddenly extradited from Prague some weeks ago
His (Russian-provided) lawyer says he’ll entertain a plea deal
All of which provides a good opportunity to lay out what role he may have (or may be said to have) played in the DNC hack-and-leak.

THE MICHAEL COHEN IN PRAGUE STORY

The McClatchy report describing Robert Mueller receiving evidence of Cohen traveling from Germany to Czech Republic and some unknown date in 2016 seems to derive from outside investigators who have shared information with Mueller, not from Mueller’s team itself (which is consistent with his locked down shop). As such, it falls far short of being a confirmation of a meeting, or even validation that Mueller has confirmed any intelligence shared with his investigators. Moreover, the report has little detail as to timing, either of the visit or when Mueller actually got this intelligence.

And while it took a bit of time (Cohen can be forgiven for the delay because he apparently has very urgent business hanging with his homies smoking cigars), he did deny this report, offering the same partial story he offered last year.

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That said, given the claimed timing, any coincidental presence in Prague by both Cohen and Nikulin is unlikely. Cohen’s presence in Prague is said to have roughly aligned with that reported in the dossier, so August or September. According to the FBI’s arrest affidavit for Nikulin he passed from Belarus into Poland on October 1, 2016, and probably was still there when posting from Warsaw on October 3; Nikulin was arrested in Prague on October 5. So unless Cohen went to Prague during his known October 2016 trip to England (definitely a possibility, but inconsistent with the dossier reporting), then they would no more have met in Prague (or planned to) than Mohammed Atta and Iraq’s Ahmad Samir al-Ani did.

THE SUDDEN NIKULIN EXTRADITION

That said, I do think the sudden Nikulin extradition, even as pro-Russian Czech President Milos Zeman fought with Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan over it — even to the point of threatening to replace him — is worth noting. That’s true, first of all, because it appears Paul Ryan — purportedly on vacation with his family, but making appearances with everyone but Zeman — had a hand in it.

During a visit to the Czech Republic, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said on March 27 that “we have every reason to believe and expect that Mr. Nikulin will be extradited to America.”

“The United States has the case to prevail on having him extradited, whether it’s the severity of the crime, which is clearly on the side of U.S., or the timing of the request for the extradition,” he told reporters.

In an interview with RFE/RL in Prague on March 26, Ryan said that the “case for extraditing [Nikulin] to America versus Russia is extremely clear.”

Ryan, who met with Prime Minister Andrej Babis and other Czech officials during his visit, told RFE/RL that he would raise the issue in those talks.

“He did violate our laws, he did hack these companies…. So the extradition claim is very legitimate,” he said. “And I just expect that the Czech system will go through its process, and at the end of that process, I am hopeful and expecting that he’ll be extradited.”


Nikulin was extradited just days later, even as the decision looked like it would be reviewed.

Zeman has since made very bizarre comments criticizing Ryan for his involvement.

Zeman said he had a different view of the Nikulin case than Justice Minister Robert Pelikan (ANO), who had given consent to the extradition of this Russian citizen to the USA, but that he fully respected the minister’s right to decide on this matter.

Apart from the United States, Russia was seeking Nikulin’s extradition, too, based on a suspected online theft.

“When Donald Trump was elected American president, (U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul) Ryan wore a black tie. The same Mr Ryan arrived in the Czech Republic (last week). He publicly stated that he had arrived basically in order to get Mr Nikulin to the United States, in which he succeeded. Well, one of the versions is that Mr Nikulin may in some way serve as a tool of the internal American political fight – to which the black tie served as well,” Zeman said.

“I do not consider this a very good solution if Czechs were to meddle in the American political situation,” Zeman added.

Ryan, who appreciated the Czech government for the extradition of Nikulin, did not meet Zeman during his recent visit to Prague without citing the reasons.


It may be that Ryan was doing the bidding of Trump. Or, more likely, Ryan may have made the move in what appears to be fairly unified NATO response to the attempted Sergei Skripal assassination.

NIKULIN’S RUSSIAN-PROVIDED LAWYER MAKES IT CLEAR THEY WILL NEGOTIATE

That said, I find it very interesting that Nikulin’s lawyer, whom the Russians asked to get involved, is explicitly already talking about a plea deal.

The legal team for Yevgeniy Nikulin, the Russian hacker accused of stealing data from LinkedIn and other American tech firms, will explore a plea deal with the U.S. government, according to Nikulin’s lawyer, Arkady Bukh.

“The likelihood of a trial is not very high,” Bukh said. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where Nikulin’s trial would occur, “has over a 99 percent conviction rate. We are not throwing clients under the bus,” Bukh said.

[snip]

Bukh was first contacted by the Russian consulate and asked to help on the case. He was approved on Wednesday to act as a lawyer for Nikulin by the court. Although Bukh has been in regular and sustained contact with both Nikulin’s family and the Russian consulate, he had yet to speak with his client as of Wednesday night.

The Russian consulate has expressed concerns about Nikulin’s mental condition, and Bukh said he “appears to be depressed.”


Perhaps Bukh is taking this route because the Feds have Nikulin dead to rights and a plea is the most logical approach. Perhaps Russia has learned its lesson from Roman Seleznev, the son of a prominent Duma member, who has been shipped around to different jurisdictions to have additional onerous sentences added to his prison term; I’m fairly certain there are other sealed indictments against Nikulin besides the one he was charged under that DOJ could use similarly.

Or perhaps Russia has reason to want to bury any public airing of evidence regarding what Nikulin has done or could be said to have done.

HOW NIKULIN MIGHT BE INVOLVED IN THE 2016 OPERATION

I’ve long suggested that Nikulin may have had a facilitating role in the 2016 operation. That’s because credentials from his LinkedIn hack were publicly sold for a ridiculously small amount just before May 18, 2016, rather inexplicably making them available outside the tight-knit group of Russians who had been using the stolen credentials up to that point.

Almost all of the people whose email boxes were sent to Wikileaks were affected by the LinkedIn (and/or MySpace) breach, meaning passwords and emails they had used became publicly available in the middle of the Russian operation. And those emails were exfiltrated in the days immediately following, probably May 19-25, the public release of those credentials.

In other words, it is possible that stolen credentials, and not GRU hacks, obtained the emails that were shared with WikiLeaks.

None of that is to say that Russia didn’t steal the emails shared with Wikileaks or arrange that handoff.

Rather, it’s to say that there is a counter-narrative that would provide convenient plausible deniability to both the Russians and Wikileaks that may or may not actually be how those emails were obtained, but also may be all wrapped up ready to offer as a narrative to undercut the claim that GRU itself handed off the emails.

Note, too, how that timing coincides with the public claims Konstantin Kozlovsky made last year, which I laid out here.

April 28, 2015: FSB accesses Lurk servers with Kaspersky’s help.

May 18, 2016: LinkedIn credentials allegedly stolen by Yevgeniy Nikulin made widely available.

May 18, 2016: Kozlovsky arrest.

May 19-25, 2016: DNC emails shared with WikiLeaks likely exfiltrated.

October 5, 2016: Yevgeniy Nikulin arrest in Prague.

October 20, 2016: Nikulin indictment.

November 1, 2016: Date of Kozlovsky confession.

December 5, 2016: Arrest, for treason, of FSB officers Dmitry Dokuchaev and Sergey Mikhailov.

February 28, 2017: Indictment (under seal) of FSB officers, including Dmitry Dokuchaev, Alexey Belan, and Karim Bartov for Yahoo hack.

March 15, 2017: Yahoo indictment unsealed.

August 14, 2017: Kozlovsky posts November 1 confession of hacking DNC on Facebook.

November 28, 2017: Karim Baratov (co-defendant of FSB handlers) plea agreement.

December 2, 2017: Kozlovsky’s claims posted on his Facebook page.

March 30, 2018: Extradition of Nikulin.

April 2, 2018: Report that Dokuchaev accepted a plea deal.

April 17, 2018: Scheduled court appearance for Nikulin.

With each new hacker delivered into US custody, something happens in Russia that may provide an alternate narrative.

And consider that in the wake of Nikulin’s extradition, Dmitry Dokuchaev and another of the people accused of treason in Russia have made a partial confession that will, like any Nikulin plea, serve to bury much of the claimed evidence against them.

Two of the four suspects in a Russian treason case, including a former agent in the FSB’s Information Security Center, have reportedly signed plea bargains where they confess to transferring data to foreign intelligence agencies. Three sources have confirmed to the magazine RBC that former FSB agent Dmitry Dokuchaev and entrepreneur Georgy Fomchenkov reached deals with prosecutors.

One of RBC’s sources says the two suspects claim to have shared information with foreign intelligence agencies “informally,” denying that there was anything criminal about the exchange. Dokuchaev and Fomchenkov say they were only trying to help punish cyber-criminals operating outside Russia and therefore outside their jurisdiction. Lawyers for the two suspects refused to comment on the story.

As a result of the plea bargains, the two men’s trials will be fast-tracked in a special procedure where the evidence collected against them isn’t reviewed. Dokuchaev and Fomchenkov will also face lighter sentences — no more than two-thirds of Russia’s maximum 20-year sentence for treason, says one of RBC’s sources.

The other two suspects in the treason case, former FSB Information Security Center agent Sergey Mikhailov and former Kaspersky Lab computer incidents investigations head Ruslan Stoyanov, have reportedly turned down plea bargains, insisting on their innocence.

All of which is to say that Nikulin offers at least a plausible counter-explanation for the DNC hack-and-leak, one that might shift blame for the operation to non-state actors rather than GRU, which is something Vladimir Putin has been doing since Nikulin’s extradition first became likely, even if he has changed his mind about whether such non-state Russians will be celebrated or demonized upon their roll-out.

Rolling out plea deals here and in Russia may be an effort to try to sell that counter-narrative, before Robert Mueller rolls out whatever he will about the hack-and-leak in coming days.

Update: A reader notes correctly that all the dossier’s reporting on Cohen, especially that describing a meeting in Prague, post-dates the Nikulin arrest. See this post for more on the timing of the Cohen reporting, piggy-backing off of PiNC’s analysis.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/04/14/h ... stigation/




Search found 15 matches: +Yevgeniy +Nikulin

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
well now maybe there is an explanation for Paul Ryan hand in Mr. Nikulin will be extradited to America something did not smell right about his place in this story HOW YEVGENIY NIKULIN MIGHT PLAY INTO THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION April 14, 2018/2 Comments/in ...

Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves
... Kosachev speaks for the Kremlin.........another fact: Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin was also in Prague at this time. ..... The dossier alleges that Cohen, two Russians ...
by seemslikeadream

Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land
... about whom Dokuchaev shared information was alleged Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin ” who was extradited to California on Friday and has pleaded not guilty https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZ0T7qrWAAAuNAD.jpg ...
by seemslikeadream

Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves
... maybe he was trying to mask it? Dokuchaev guilty plea and connection to Nikulin is really important Russian cyber spy wanted by FBI admits intel ... about whom Dokuchaev shared information was alleged Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin. On Friday, it became public that the United States had ...

Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves
... maybe he was trying to mask it? Dokuchaev guilty plea and connection to Nikulin is really important Russian cyber spy wanted by FBI admits intel ... about whom Dokuchaev shared information was alleged Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin. On Friday, it became public that the United States had ...

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... about whom Dokuchaev shared information was alleged Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin” who was extradited to California on Friday and has pleaded not guilty https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZ0T7qrWAAAuNAD.jpg ...

Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves
... about whom Dokuchaev shared information was alleged Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin. On Friday, it became public that the United States had succeeded in its attempt to ...

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
‘Red Warrant’ for Nikulin https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZn5Bi5X0AAc_RO.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZjk2BbVoAAQbQN.jpg names mentioned in the article above that I posted Yevgeniy Nikulin Barack Obama Paul Ryan Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis Mueller Anthony Weiner ...


Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... intelligence officials and cyber security experts are just what Nikulin knows and who he might have worked with. The indictment mentions ... 2016 U.S. elections. The Justice Department announced Friday afternoon Yevgeniy Nikulin’s sudden appearance in a San Francisco federal courtroom ...


Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... accused credit card thief Roman Seleznev and alleged LinkedIn hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin. Seleznev, the son of a Russian legislator, was arrested on vacation in the Maldives ...


Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject
... been obtained by reusing credentials allegedly stolen by Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin and made publicly available. I spent months testing that theory against public claims ...


Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru
... A prison guard walks outside a courtroom during an appeal by Yevgeny Nikulin, who faces charges of hacking computers of American companies, in ... YEVGENIY NIKULIN WRITES THE DONALD July 19, 2017/15 Comments/in 2016 Presidential ...


Re: Why Do People Apologize For Russia?
... occurred amid a protracted wrangle over an alleged Russian hacker, Yevgeniy Nikulin, currently being held in the Czech Republic while officials debate an extradition request ...


Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... in-dropbox SWAP MEET Will Donald Trump Free This Russian Superhacker? A Putin ...


Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... hacker behind LinkedIn breach at centre of US-Russia legal tussle Yevgeniy Nikulin faces extradition requests from both countries amid lingering disquiet over Moscow’s ...

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Aug 25, 2018 10:06 am


Sonia Moghe

EXCLUSIVE: the former Trump World Tower doorman who claims to know about an affair Trump had with a former housekeeper that resulted in a child, was “recently” let out of his contract with AMI, allowing him to speak about the “catch-and-kill” contract. http://www.cnn.com/2018/08/24/politics/ ... index.html
Image


Ex-Trump World Tower doorman releases 'catch-and-kill' contract about alleged Trump affair

CNN obtains copy of ex-doorman's agreement
(CNN)A former Trump World Tower doorman who says he has knowledge of an alleged affair President Donald Trump had with an ex-housekeeper, which resulted in a child, is now able to talk about a contract he entered with American Media Inc. that had prohibited him from discussing the matter with anyone, according to his attorney.

On Friday, Marc Held -- the attorney for Dino Sajudin, the former doorman -- said his client had been released from his contract with AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, "recently" after back-and-forth discussions with AMI.

CNN has exclusively obtained a copy of the "source agreement" between Sajudin and AMI, which is owned by David Pecker.
Why the Allen Weisselberg immunity deal may be the biggest news of this bananas week
The contract appears to have been signed on Nov. 15, 2015, and states that AMI has exclusive rights to Sajudin's story but does not mention the details of the story itself beyond saying, "Source shall provide AMI with information regarding Donald Trump's illegitimate child..."

The contract states that "AMI will not owe Source any compensation if AMI does not publish the Exclusive..." and the top of the agreement shows that Sajudin could receive a sum of $30,000 "payable upon publication as set forth below."

But the third page of the agreement shows that about a month later, the parties signed an amendment that states that Sajudin would be paid $30,000 within five days of receiving the amendment. It says the "exclusivity period" laid out in the agreement "is extended in perpetuity and shall not expire."
The amendment also establishes a $1 million payment that Sajudin would be responsible for making to AMI "in the event Source breaches this provision."

Trump's hideous legal landscape just got even worse
"Mr. Sajudin has been unable to discuss the circumstances regarding his deal with American Media Inc. and the story that he sold to them, due to a significant financial penalty," Held told CNN. "Just recently, AMI released Mr. Sajudin from the terms of his agreement and he is now able to speak about his personal experience with them, as well as his story, which is now known to be one of the 'catch and kill' pieces. Mr. Sajudin hopes the truth will come out in the very near future."

In April, Sajudin told CNN he claims to have knowledge of a relationship Trump had with his former housekeeper that resulted in a child.
At the time, AMI called Sajudin's story "not credible" and denied any connection between the story and Trump and his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen.

The White House did not respond to CNN's requests for comments in April.

CNN has contacted AMI to clarify whether Sajudin has now been released from the contract to be able to speak on terms of the agreement and to seek reaction on this latest development, but has yet to receive a response.

Former staffer: Pecker could turn on Trump

Sajudin's allegation that Trump fathered a child out of wedlock has not been independently confirmed by any of the outlets that have investigated the story.

Held said he cannot give the exact date the agreement was terminated, per another agreement the attorney made with AMI in order to get his client out of the contract.

Held said that now that Sajudin has been released from the agreement with AMI, he would no longer be liable for a payment for speaking out.

"He's a blue-collar worker and a million dollars would have ruined him for life," Held told CNN.

What the doorman claims to know


When the story surfaced in April, Sajudin told CNN about the alleged relationship in a statement:

"Today I awoke to learn that a confidential agreement that I had with AMI (The National Enquirer) with regard to a story about President Trump was leaked to the press. I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trump's former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump, which produced a child."

The Associated Press reported in April that Cohen "acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin's story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it. He said he was acting as a Trump spokesman when he did so and denied knowing anything beforehand about the Enquirer payment to the ex-doorman."
Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges of tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to his work for Trump.

In that deal, he pleaded guilty to paying $130,000 to former adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, to conceal her story of an alleged affair with Trump. He also pleaded guilty to working with AMI to pay off former Playboy model Karen McDougal in a similar "catch and kill" agreement in order to keep her allegations of an affair with Trump from being published. Trump has denied an affair with both women.

Pecker has received immunity in the Cohen case for providing details of the payments to prosecutors, a source confirmed to CNN on Friday.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/24/politics ... index.html



Jerry George, former LA Bureau Chief w National Enquirer says he’s personally seen stories on “marital discord” & “infidelities” on part of trump that are stashed in pecker’s safe



Image


Tim O'Brien

It's been busy, but this also happened recently: The Justice Department sued Ivanka Trump’s former business partner, Moshe Lax, for allegedly defrauding the IRS and others of $60 million in tax payments.

Emily Jane Fox


Lax was the one who introduced Ivanka and Jared. It is also worth noting that we're at the point in this arc at which the spokesperson for Ivanka and her brand asked not to be identified my name in this story.


DOJ Sues Ivanka’s Ex-Business Partner for Massive Fraud

Moshe Lax and members of his family allegedly conspired to deprive the U.S. of $60 million.

BEN SCHRECKINGERAugust 17, 2018
Moshe Lax and Ivanka Trump
The Justice Department is suing a friend and former business partner of Ivanka Trump for his alleged role in schemes to defraud the federal government out of millions of dollars in tax liabilities on his father’s estate.

Filed last month and reported here for the first time, the lawsuit follows an August 2017 POLITICO investigation of alleged financial wrongdoing by New York businessman Moshe Lax and glaring irregularities in the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of a $27 million lien on his father’s estate.

The suit, which seeks more than $60 million in unpaid tax liabilities, was brought in the Southern District of New York by lawyers in the Justice Department’s tax division. It alleges that Lax, his sister Zlaty Schwartz, and his late father, Chaim Lax, engaged in a series of complex “sham transactions” designed to fraudulently evade tax liability. The government alleges the family members undertook 10 separate schemes “designed to hide the Lax family assets from the IRS and other creditors and make it appear as though the Estate was insolvent.”

At a time when Democrats are working to make corruption a midterm campaign issue and a jury deliberates over whether to convict President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager for tax fraud, the suit threatens to further the perception that the Trump family and their closest associates operate in a corrupt milieu.

Though the complaint does not mention the president's daughter or accuse her of wrongdoing, Madison Avenue Diamonds, the business that she helped run for years under the name Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, figures prominently in the government’s case.

One of the 10 schemes outlined in the complaint is Lax’s alleged transfer of a roughly $21 million interest in Madison Avenue Diamonds from his father’s estate to a holding company for nothing in return.

A lawyer for Schwartz, Megan Brackney of Kostelanetz & Fink, declined to comment. Lax did not respond to requests for comment and court records do not list an attorney for him. The White House referred requests for comment to a firm that handles PR for Trump’s brand. “The issues in this case have nothing to do with Ivanka or the Ivanka Trump brand,” said a spokesperson for the brand, who asked not to be identified by name. “These licensing arrangements were terminated by the Ivanka Trump brand in 2016, prior to Ivanka entering government service.”

But the government alleges that Lax fraudulently transferred a portion of equity in Madison Avenue Diamonds at some point between 2008 and 2012. During that period, Trump remained involved with the business. At one point, Trump also had an ownership stake in Madison Avenue Diamonds, according to a deposition she gave in an unrelated case that was obtained by POLITICO last year.

Madison Avenue Diamonds is not named as a party in the complaint, but the holding company to which Lax allegedly transferred part of the company is.

In the complaint, the government names private creditors of Madison Avenue Diamonds as parties because they may have competing claims on the assets the government wants to seize.

Although no Trump entities are named as parties, Trump Organization General Counsel Alan Garten told POLITICO last summer that the Trump family business was “still owed a significant amount of money” by Lax from the jewelry venture.

It is not clear whether Lax has paid out on the debt since then. Neither Garten nor Trump Organization spokeswoman Amanda Miller responded to questions about whether Lax still owes money to Trump or any Trump family entities. The spokesperson for Trump’s brand said the brand would not be going after Lax or Madison Avenue Diamonds for any outstanding debt but did not address a question about whether any debt had been repaid.

The suit alleges that Lax’s father began the schemes in the years before his death in 2008 so that his heirs could inherit his fortune without paying his unmet tax obligations. Lax and his sister are accused of continuing the schemes with a series of elaborate transactions meant to keep the assets from their father’s estate hidden from the government and other creditors.

Lax, Trump’s partner in her first independent business venture, was once close to the Trump family. He introduced Trump to her future husband, Jared Kushner, at a gathering of real estate heirs he convened in New York a decade ago. Trump writes at length of meeting Lax and creating Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry with him in her 2010 memoir, “The Trump Card.”

“My new associate was an entrepreneur through and through,” she wrote of Lax in her memoir. “I admired that about him.”

Lax has also told at least one associate that he has discussed financial strategy with Trump’s father, Donald Trump.

In November 2016, two days after he attended the Trump campaign’s invite-only election night victory celebration, Lax reportedly escorted one of his creditors past a throng of protesters outside of Trump Tower to a kiosk selling Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry in the building’s lobby. According to the creditor—who relayed the episode on the condition of anonymity because he said he feared retaliation from the Trump administration—Lax said he wanted to strike while Trump’s name was hot. Lax said he planned to take over a jewelry company in the suburb of White Plains, New York, and use it as a vehicle to turn Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry into a $500 million brand.

When the creditor expressed disbelief that Lax, who was then already dealing with serious financial problems, was plotting a major business expansion, Lax said he would not need to use his own money and explained that he had learned how to go through an “expedited bankruptcy” process without losing his own assets. Lax asked the creditor rhetorically who he thought had taught him how to do that, and then he pointed up to the upper floors of Trump Tower, indicating the president-elect, who has filed for bankruptcy six times.

The White House referred a request for comment about whether Trump has offered financial advice to Lax to the Trump Organization, which did not offer comment.

Lax’s plans for expanding Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry never came to pass. Trump’s team says she severed her licensing arrangement with Lax before she entered the White House. Her apparel ventures reportedly have suffered from her association with her controversial father — this summer, she shuttered her fashion company in an effort, she said, to focus more closely on her work in Washington.

But Lax’s relationship with the first family has continued.

Lax attended last January’s inauguration festivities and introduced himself to fellow attendees as a business partner of Trump’s, according to a Republican operative who interacted with him there. The operative recalled Lax that weekend showing off photos of the swearing-in ceremony on his phone that were taken from seats close to the front of the viewing area. “Judging by that, the level of access was pretty high,” the operative said.

The next month, Tiffany Trump attended a launch party for his latest venture, a retail business in Manhattan called Code.

Meanwhile, Lax’s government contacts during the Trump era have extended beyond the executive branch. Last year, Lax successfully sought an introduction to a senior member of Congress and used the meeting to advocate on behalf of Israeli mining billionaire Dan Gertler, according to the person who brokered the meeting. The person spoke on the condition that the lawmaker’s name and other details of the brief meeting be withheld because of the sensitivity of the conversation.

In December, the Trump administration went on to impose economic sanctions on Gertler under the Global Magnitsky Act for corrupt mining deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... lax-219369





The Rot at the Top

Charles J. Sykes


August 23, 2018 at 5:10 AM

The Republican Party will have to answer for Trump, Manafort, and Cohen.

Republicans have bet their future on the proposition that character does not matter, or at least not the character of Donald Trump.

So, perhaps too late, they are discovering that having a president who is a chronic liar is both morally and politically problematic. As a New Yorker, Trump is surely familiar with the hoary adage that “the fish rots from the head down.” As president, he has turned it into a governing principle.

The consequence is that Republicans now face a midterm election that is likely to turn less on tax cuts than on the miasma of sleaze and corruption that surrounds them.

Until now, Republicans have been able to comfort themselves by pointing to policy wins, a strong economy, and a political culture in which nothing matters. And maybe nothing does. But this feels like a turning point of sorts. This week was the worst of Donald Trump’s presidency. But it seems likely there will be worse still.

On a single afternoon, Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, became convicted felons and the president himself was implicated in the illegal payment of hush money to a porn star and a Playboy Playmate.

The significance of this cannot be overstated. For the first time, the president has been tied directly to a criminal act. If Trump knew about the payments in advance, noted former Department of Justice official Harry Litman, “he’s looking at liability as a conspirator for what is now a proven crime.” Or as Cohen’s new lawyer, Lanny Davis, asked with unwonted reasonableness: “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”

The stain is also spreading.

Within hours of Manafort’s conviction and Cohen’s plea, one of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters, California Representative Duncan Hunter was indicted for misusing $250,000 of campaign money for personal use and filing false campaign finance records with the Federal Election Commission. The charges came a few weeks after the indictment of another early Trump supporter, New York Representative Chris Collins, for insider trading.

The 60 count indictment against Hunter and wife detailed a remarkable pattern of greed and grifting including using campaign cash to pay for airfare for a pet rabbit, 30 shots of tequila, and “buying personal clothing items at a golf course so that the purchase could be falsely reported to the Treasurer as ‘balls for the wounded warriors'."

But the day before his arraignment, Hunter was defiant, explicitly tying himself to Trump. “This is the new Department of Justice. This is the Democrats’ arm of law enforcement, that’s what’s happening right now,” Hunter told a local television station. “It’s happening with Trump, and it’s happening with me.” (Actually, the DOJ is run by Republicans, appointed by Trump, but maybe Hunter was hoping to be taken seriously, not literally.)

Unfortunately for the GOP, this spreading stink of corruption has a cumulative effect, and the threats to Republicans seem to be intensifying almost daily. The Manafort verdict was a huge vindication for Robert Mueller’s investigation, even if it did not directly address charges of Russian collusion. Cohen knows details of Trump’s operation and appears anxious to unburden himself to prosecutors. Other Trump intimates are also cooperating with the probe, including White House counsel Don McGahn.

None of this is going away and it is likely to get worse. And perhaps the greatest immediate danger to Trump is . . . the president himself.

When he’s cornered, Trump’s instinct is to lash out, but as Jack Goldsmith has pointed out, the president could do more than rage on Twitter. He could go nuclear, by firing the special counsel or the leadership of the Department of Justice, or stripping more officials of security clearances, or deploying his virtually unlimited power to pardon.

Such steps would ignite a political firestorm and a constitutional crisis. But none of them seem far-fetched for a president so unmoored to prudence, much less to democratic norms or the rule of law.

The morning after Manafort’s conviction on eight felony counts, Trump tweeted out praise for his refusal to “break,” by cooperating with prosecutors. “Such respect for a brave man!” the president of the United States wrote of a man who faces 80 years in prison for committing federal crimes and defrauding the U.S. government.

In tone and substance, Trump sounded more like a mob boss than an occupant of the office once held by Abraham Lincoln. But in GOP circles, it merited scarcely a raised eyebrow. Whether because of cowardice or cynicism, Republican leaders have made their peace with Trump’s swamp.

Unfortunately for the GOP, that may be the fatal legacy of Trumpism.

Trump (and his many imitators) know that they can count on a supine party and sycophants in the conservative media to deflect or rationalize pretty much anything. It helps that there is an apparently infinite appetite for reputational self-immolation among Trump defenders.

Just as dangerous is Trump’s effect on others in his orbit who seem to have absorbed his arrogant amoralism and the smug conviction that they are immune from consequences.

Having convinced themselves that nothing matters, Republicans have encouraged the notion that they can get away with pretty much anything because their tribal allies will always provide them cover. The consequence has not only been an extraordinary tolerance for deception, corruption, and cruelty, but an embrace of a free-floating moral relativism that is wholly alien to the traditional notions of conservatism.

The congressional GOP is not simply collateral damage here. Their own invertebrate quiescence has not simply enabled Trumpism’s worst and most dangerous instincts, but actually has encouraged them.

Under Trump, the GOP is not merely tolerating swampiness, it has created the ideal, fetid environment for growing and multiplying swamp creatures. Worse, Trumpism has seemingly robbed Republicans of the capacity to confront the moral rot they have helped create. No GOP senator seems eager to play the role that Senator Howard Baker played in Watergate. There are no Barry Goldwaters willing to tell the president hard truths.

Of course, there may still be time for conservatives to remember who they used to be and what they used to believe. But if they fail to do so, they will lose more than an election.

Charles J. Sykes
https://www.weeklystandard.com/charles- ... -and-cohen



Novelist Claims Melania Trump Has Been Having An Affair With Head Of Security At Tiffany’s In Trump Tower For YEARS!
Read The Bombshell Accusations!
Home › Donald Trump › Novelist Claims Melania Trump Has Been Having An Affair With Head Of Security At Tiffany’s In Trump Tower For YEARS! Read The Bombshell Accusations!
no title

We’ve been waiting for this cup of tea to arrive!!!!

To those who have been closely watching, it’s no big secret that Melania Trump is perhaps the most miserable person in America.


FLOTUS has been seen slapping away Donald Trump‘s hand grabs, secretly liking anti-Trump tweets, and not-so-convincingly feigning happiness at every public event since the start of her husband’s campaign.

Not that we blame her, of course — but one novelist is making BOMBSHELL accusations that could shed some light on just how dire the First Couple’s relationship is!

Related: Melania Questions Kathy Griffin’s “Mental Health“

On Tuesday, Monica Byrne shared a string of tweets claiming Melania was having an affair with the head of security at Tiffany’s in the Trump Tower lobby for “many years” — and Donny allegedly knows all about it!

Whoa!!!!

Byrne, who does not name her source, shared the accusations in hopes of journalists exposing the alleged affair to “accelerate [Trump’s] rate of self-destruction.”

In her tweets, the author claimed Donald and Melania had an agreement that if he lost the election, they would get divorced. But since he won, the two were forced to renegotiate the agreement — imprisoning the 47-year-old in the marriage as long as her husband was president.

Related: Melania Doesn’t Mention Donald During Women’s Empowerment Speech!

We’re sure the Trump camp will write this off as nothing more than fake news, but Byrne makes it clear this is merely hearsay for reporters to investigate further.

It also explain why the First Lady looks so miserable and wants to stay in New York. Hmmm….

What do U think of these allegations? Read Byrne’s explosive claims (below)!

Is this the time for me to leak the gossip I know about Melania Trump or should I wait. (And I’m serious btw.)
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
OK, here goes. And I should say right off the bat: no, I can’t reveal my source. So I guess this is the kind of leak that’s more like a tip.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
As in: HEY JOURNALISTS WHO INVESTIGATE THIS SORT OF THING: look into it via other channels.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
Though I honestly don’t know how newsworthy it is?–given that Melania and 45’s marriage is obviously dead to begin with.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
But here it is: word is, for many years, Melania’s been having an affair with the head of security at Tiffany’s in the Trump Tower lobby.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
…with DT’s knowledge. They had an agreement (written, I think) that if DT lost the election, they’d get divorced. But then he won.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
So they had to renegotiate the agreement. She is imprisoned in that marriage for as long as he’s president.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
Again: this is kind of obvious already to anyone with eyes. Melania looks miserable. But this would be a broader illustration of why.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
Also it’s why she doesn’t leave New York.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
Aaaaanywaaaaay. YES this is hearsay. NO I can’t reveal my source. YES journalists should look into it.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
And YES I’m biased. I want 45 and his whole wretched family out of power. Not one of them is innocent, including the ones who are pretty.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
Let me be clear: in itself, DT’s marriage matters not at all next to the Paris Accord.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
But anything that would embarrass & therefore destabilize him, and accelerate his rate of self-destruction? Good. The sooner to impeachment.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
And this seems like the kind of thing that would embarrass him. So: have at.
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
Hi @realDonaldTrump! We’re all wondering if your wife @MelaniaTrump is having an affair with the head of security at Tiffanys or nah? pic.twitter.com/yaBpXsX0qd
Monica Byrne (@monicabyrne13) June 1, 2017
Damn.
https://perezhilton.com/2017-06-02-mela ... ne-report/
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 26, 2018 4:06 pm

Swamp Chronicles
Allen Weisselberg, the Man Who Knows Donald Trump’s Financial Secrets, Has Agreed to Become a Coöperating Witness

By Adam DavidsonAugust 24, 2018

The news that Weisselberg has accepted immunity suggests that the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer is ready to share whatever information he has. And he has a lot.Photograph by Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

In late 2016, I had lunch with a former high-ranking Trump Organization executive, a person who said he was happy to share dirt on his old boss, but who confessed to not having much dirt to share. This executive wrote a list of people whom I might contact to find out about anything potentially illegal or unethical that Donald Trump may have done. At the bottom of the list was the name Weisselberg. “Allen is the one guy who knows everything,” the person told me. “He’ll never talk to you.” I have had nearly identical conversations with different people who work or have worked for the Trump Organization many times since. They all described his role similarly: Allen Weisselberg, the firm’s longtime chief financial officer, is the center, the person in the company who knows more than anyone.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Weisselberg had been granted immunity by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York so that he could share information in the investigation of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and dealmaker. It is safe to say that the entire world of Trump watchers—those journalists, political folks, and advocates who carefully monitor every bit of Trump news—went bonkers. Weisselberg is the man to whom those people most want to speak. He is also the man who has, for decades, been the most circumspect.

As the C.F.O., Weisselberg tracked the money that came into the Trump Organization and the money that went out of it, former employees told me. I often found myself wondering what the Weisselberg part of the operation looked like. (I called and e-mailed him a few times, but, not surprisingly, never heard back.) Some told me he had a couple of bookkeepers, but that he personally handled most of the paperwork. Weisselberg knew who was paying or lending money to Trump, and he knew to whom Trump was giving money. When Trump became President, he placed his business interests in a revocable trust overseen by his son Donald Trump, Jr., and Weisselberg.

Weisselberg has been notoriously press-shy for decades. I recently conducted a search of Nexis, the news database, and found him mentioned only in a handful of articles before Trump’s Presidential campaign. Most were reviews of his staccato performance on the TV show “The Apprentice,” or mentions that Weisselberg declined to comment on this deal or that.

This summer, though, Weisselberg’s role in the organization came into sharper focus. In a recording that Michael Cohen made of a conversation he had with Donald Trump about a payment to keep secret an affair, Cohen described setting up a shell company to pay hush money during the 2016 campaign to Karen McDougal, a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Trump. This week, Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign-finance laws, in part by setting up this secretive payment. He said that he knew at the time that it was illegal to secretly make a payment for campaign-related activity, but he did so anyway at Trump’s direction. Strikingly, Cohen makes it clear on the tape that Weisselberg also knew about the shell company and payment. “I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” Cohen explains to Trump.

It is difficult to hear the tape and not wonder how Weisselberg developed this particular expertise and whether he had deployed it before. More importantly, it offers more justification for Robert Mueller and other federal, state, and local prosecutors to investigate the Trump Organization’s general business practices. The tape suggests that Weisselberg provided guidance for Cohen’s payment, an illegal act designed to influence the election. Since one of the Mueller investigation’s core aims is to understand whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia to sway the 2016 Presidential election, Weisselberg now seems to be a key witness. Worse, for Trump, if Weisselberg, fearing prosecution himself, tells prosecutors of other criminal activity in the organization, that information will likely be referred to other federal and state prosecutors, thus broadening the investigation of Trump’s business.

Weisselberg has worked exclusively for the Trump family for his entire adult life. Shortly after graduating from college, he began working for Fred Trump, in 1970, and then for the young Donald when he entered the business. Weisselberg’s son Barry works at the Trump-run Wollman Skating Rink, in Central Park; his other son, Jack, works at Ladder Capital, which has been a primary lender to the Trump Organization in recent years, when few other lenders would work with a company that had experienced several bankruptcies.

Last month, the New York State Attorney General, Barbara Underwood, sued the Trump Foundation. Weisselberg had been deposed and showed a surprising willingness to give answers that put the President in an unflattering light. In January, 2016, during Trump’s Presidential campaign, his foundation made a series of donations to veterans-advocacy organizations in Iowa that were explicitly designed to gain support for his candidacy. Weisselberg filled out the checks. In his deposition, he volunteered that the Trump Foundation had no procedures in place to insure it followed the law and that Trump himself knew of and directed Weisselberg’s participation in the scheme to pay those Iowa veterans groups. Were Weisselberg eager to protect his longtime boss, he could have answered the questions far more narrowly. It was an early hint that Weisselberg, like Cohen, may not jeopardize his own freedom to defend Trump. News that Weisselberg had accepted immunity so that he could share potentially damaging information in the Cohen case provides more support for the view that Weisselberg is ready to share whatever information he has. And he has a lot.


There are many open questions about how, precisely, the Trump Organization has made and spent its money in recent years. There is, for example, a question about where Trump got more than two hundred million dollars in cash to buy and lavishly upgrade a money-losing golf course in Scotland. In a deal in Azerbaijan, Trump knowingly did business with a family that is widely suspected of laundering money for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The F.B.I. has reportedly investigated the source of funds for a Trump-branded property in Vancouver, Canada; while the Trump hotel in Toronto also has suspicious funding. These are just a handful of the many business deals that Trump has conducted that have signs of possible money-laundering, tax evasion, sanctions violations, and other financial crimes. Many of the key questions about Donald Trump revolve around his funding sources and his business partners: Did he knowingly receive funds from criminals? Did he launder money for criminals? Did he receive remuneration to look the other way when his partners broke the law? Was much of his business built around selling his famous name to make illegitimate projects seem viable? More broadly, where did his money come from? Where did his money go? And how much questionable activity has he hidden from the world? Trump, himself, may not know the exact answers to all of these questions. Perhaps Allen Weisselberg does.

The Journal story and other news coverage suggest that Weisselberg has narrow immunity, related, solely, to the payments that Michael Cohen made to silence two women with whom Trump had affairs. With evidence of that crime in hand, prosecutors can subpoena other records from the company. If they have a reasonable basis to believe another crime has been committed, they can ask Weisselberg about it. Weisselberg, fearing jail time himself, could broaden his coöperation. The fact that Weisselberg has “flipped”— and may flip further—could shift the calculus of other figures in the Trump orbit as well. Weisselberg is a big fish—perhaps the biggest fish of all. Fearing that Weisselberg might implicate them in a crime, any cronies, dealmakers, attorneys, and others who might want to exchange information for leniency from prosecutors, will now do so.

There are now multiple investigations of the Trump Organization being conducted by the special counsel Robert Mueller, the New York Attorney General, The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, the Manhattan District Attorney, the Southern District of New York, and—quite likely—other jurisdictions. President Trump is unable to stop most of these investigations. With Cohen and, now, Weisselberg providing information, it is becoming increasingly certain that the American people will—sooner or later—have a far fuller understanding of how Donald Trump conducted business. That is unlikely to go well for him.
https://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/swa ... I1ODAyNQS2



ON USE IMMUNITY, PREDICTIONS OF DOOM FOR THE PRESIDENCY, AND THE VOLUNTARY WAIVER OF PRIVILEGE ON THE HUSH PAYMENT TAPE

August 25, 2018/24 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
Don’t get me wrong. I think Trump is in a whole heap of trouble (though remember that, wielded in the hands of a competent man or similarly competent advisors, the power of the presidency is an awesome force). I think the SDNY’s investigation of Trump Organization’s involvement in illegal hush payments and NYS’s investigation of the Trump Foundation pose the additional risk that the Trump business empire will collapse as people scrutinize both its legal shenanigans and its debt. And I think that risk will bring Trump to fear US law enforcement as much as he fears Russia (which I suspect could also bankrupt Trump Org if a few key oligarchs put their mind to it).

But I think people are getting slightly ahead of the story when they predict that “The significance of [what they call Weisselberg’s] flip, paired with Cohen’s recent plea deal, cannot be overstated.” That’s true, in part, because Weisselberg got only limited immunity tied to grand jury testimony implicating Michael Cohen.

The person briefed on the deal said that it was narrow in scope, protecting Mr. Weisselberg from self-incrimination in sharing information with prosecutors about Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to tax and campaign finance charges. The latter charges stemmed from payments during the campaign to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. It was not, the person said, a blanket immunity extending beyond the information he shared, and Mr. Weisselberg remains in his job at the Trump Organization.


While his testimony will be damaging to the Trump Org and, probably even more directly, Don Jr, Weisselberg in no way “flipped” on Trump. Indeed, there’s good reason to believe his cooperation may be an attempt to limit the fallout of the investigation of Cohen.

At the risk of proving my most recent post (in which I argued that the push for a Special Master didn’t gain the Trump camp very much) wrong, consider this detail. On July 23, Special Master Barbara Jones informed Judge Kimba Wood that “the parties” had withdrawn their privileged designation for 12 audio files, which she then released to the government.

On July 20, 2018, the parties withdrew their designations of “privileged” as to 12 audio items that were under consideration by the Special Master. Based upon those de-designations, the Special Master released the 12 items to the Government that day.


Those tapes are understood to include the tapes Cohen made in which he discussed the hush payments with Trump.

Two days later after that notice, Michael Cohen released a truncated version of the tape of him telling Trump he had spoken to Weisselberg about buying the rights of the Karen McDougal story, which unsurprisingly immediately preceded the news that prosecutors wanted to speak with Weisselberg.

Now, it may be that Cohen and Trump voluntarily waived privilege on those tapes to provide something to the press to get the titillated by the sex story and distracted from real financial graft. Or it may be that someone has a different plan of hanging out Cohen on the hush payments, limiting damage to Trump Jr and the organization, all in a bid to undercut Cohen’s value in a larger cooperation deal.

Or there may be some other explanation.

That being said, as of right now, the Trump camp is, as far as we know, dealing with three still separate investigations: SDNY, NYS, and Mueller. Don Jr is implicated directly in all of them and they have the possibility to collapse into one (with the added benefit of limiting the value of a Trump pardon of his son). Indeed, according to Vanity Fair, Mueller is very actively putting the squeeze on Junior in the more dangerous of those investigations.

Another theory for what’s motivating Trump’s increasingly unhinged tweets is that Mueller may be closing in on his son Don Jr. “A lot of what Trump is doing is based on the fact [that] Mueller is going after Don Jr.,” a person close to the Trump family told me. “They’re squeezing Don Jr. right now.”

Don Jr.’s lawyer said, “I’m not going to comment.” Another person briefed on the investigation disputed the term “squeeze,” but said the Mueller team continues to ask for documents.


Mueller may not wait for Junior to implicate Dad before he indicts the spawn (certainly, Senior and Rudy G have been laying the groundwork to exonerate Junior for his conspiring with Russians for at least three weeks, so they clearly expect that possibility). And to the extent that Don Jr gets in real legal trouble — something beyond a tax problem they can restate and a campaign finance violation that might be manageable — then Dad might be in real trouble.

But it’s quite possible Weisselberg and the Trump Org found a way to limit the damage of the Cohen investigation, for now, to things that don’t affect the core corruption of the Trump Organization business model, or the conspiracy with Russia to win the election, and along the way limited the damage to Don Jr.

The thing about Trump is there are so many bodies, it may actually take three or four people who know where the different kinds of bodies are buried — Weisselberg plus several others — to bring him down. And thus far, Weisselberg is not telling about most of those bodies.

Update: I’d like to add a point I meant to include before I went to yoga. One thing that’s going on with the hush payment story — one I’ve even seen reporters admit — is that it pertains to issues that reporters can understand. Sex! Scandal! Tax cheats!

Add in the fact that sources are talking here, whereas all the Mueller investigation sources, save those associated with Roger Stone and his band of rat-fuckers, have gone silent (and they were all defense witness sources anyway, and so unlikely to provide the full picture).

There’s nothing wrong with the possibility that reporters will make more of a story that they have sources for and can understand and sell to readers easily. For that reason, too, it may have more immediate impact on Congress, even while I highly doubt Republicans are going to ditch Trump for some hush payments (at least not until he becomes significantly more wounded). But it’s worth noting that some of that may be going on.

And if the focus on these hush payments buys Mueller some times — shifts Trump’s ire from Mueller to Sessions — that’s probably a benefit too.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/08/25/o ... residency/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 27, 2018 6:04 pm

The Ukrainian Who Sunk Paul Manafort

The politician and former journalist Serhiy Leshchenko says Ukraine needs its own Robert Mueller.

Elias Groll
August 27, 2018, 10:18 AM

The Ukrainian journalist and member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko points to a monitor displaying a page of an illegal shadow accounting book of the party of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which showed alleged payments to Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's presidential campaign chairman, during a press conference in Kiev on Aug. 19, 2016. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)


When a Virginia court convicted Paul Manafort, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, on charges of tax and bank fraud and concealing foreign bank accounts, a certain Ukrainian politician felt a surge of vindication. Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and a former journalist, revealed the existence in 2016 of the so-called “black ledger”—a list of secret payments made by Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions to Manafort and others. The list detailed the vast sums Manafort earned as a political consultant abroad, some of which he concealed from U.S. authorities. Foreign Policy caught up by phone recently with Leshchenko in Redondo Beach, California, where he is on a swing through U.S. national parks with his family. He talked about his efforts to purge Ukrainian politics of corrupt money, the significance of Manafort’s conviction, and the lingering questions about Manafort’s ties to Moscow.

Serhiy Leshchenko: Not a personal victory, but it is in the interest of truth and democracy to have such cases investigated. I wish we would have something like this in Ukraine. The American case demonstrated that with a properly working judicial system, we can prosecute corrupt people. Manafort could be the most influential gray cardinal in the Trump administration, but now he is found guilty. And this is an example of how a proper judicial system works. For Ukraine, this is a good case because political consultants helped very corrupt, even criminal, oligarchs come to power. Of course these people siphoned money from the state budget, from the government, from state companies. Since the Ukrainian revolution happened four and a half years ago, nobody was sentenced for crimes conducted by previous governments or by current governments.

FP: Do you think the Manafort prosecution and conviction will have an impact on anti-corruption work in Ukraine?

SL: It will have an impact in the sense of general public opinion because now our society has an example of how it works in a properly constructed judicial system. But I’m quite skeptical about possible investigations started after Manafort was prosecuted because we have had very poor results of investigations of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s cronies. There are some Ukrainian citizens mentioned in the American indictment, but these persons are so influential, I am quite skeptical about the possibility of prosecution in Ukraine.

FP: What is the current state of Manafort-related anti-corruption investigations in Ukraine?

SL: It was a very long story of how to block those investigations because President Petro Poroshenko was trying to gain the sympathy of President Trump. There was a criminal case started by investigative agencies, but then it was blocked and only in May of this year the investigation was officially launched again because of statements by U.S. senators criticizing the Ukrainian government for blocking that investigation. The current president, Poroshenko, would prefer to forget the name Manafort and just to be sympathetic to Trump.

FP: Did the relationship between Poroshenko and Trump improve after the Manafort-related investigations were blocked?

SL: I think so, yes. There is also a report that Poroshenko paid money through former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for a meeting. So Poroshenko is using different ways to get Trump’s sympathy. Instead of making reforms and making Ukraine a successful country, Poroshenko decides to pay money or to buy American goods and to block investigation of Manafort. But he would get the real sympathy of Americans if he made real reforms. But real reforms mean to stop corruption, which is unacceptable to him.

FP: What unanswered questions do you have regarding Manafort’s work in Ukraine?

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SL: It is still not clear if Manafort was working for Yanukovych as just a spin doctor or as, let’s say, an unofficial agent of Russian influence. We know there are some people from secret services who worked with him, such as Konstantin Kilimnik, a suspected Russian intelligence officer. How strong was this influence on Manafort? I think it has to be investigated further.

FP: Next month, Manafort faces another trial on separate charges, related to his lobbying work in Washington on Yanukovych’s behalf. Do you think this question about Manafort’s relationship to Russia will be answered at the next trial?

SL: I hope that special prosecutor Robert Mueller can prove it. I’m quite excited by the evidence he provided at the first trial. As a Ukrainian former journalist and now a member of parliament, I would never have such proof in my hands.

FP: What’s your understanding of the relationship between Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik?

SL: I think they were quite comfortable with each other. Kilimnik was not like a brilliant expert, not like somebody unusual. He was a very typical person. He was so deeply involved in Manafort’s business, so the question is: Why? Was he just useful for Manafort, or was he playing another role? Kilimnik was kind of a mediator between Manafort and Ukrainian clients. There is also another interesting story that Manafort and Kilimnik were trying to work in Kyrgyzstan. What the hell is Kyrgyzstan for them? There are not many rich people to pay for their political consulting there, but if they were involved in some geopolitical issues in Kyrgyzstan, it’s more proof that Manafort wasn’t just a spin doctor.

FP: Do you wish you had a Bob Mueller in Ukraine?

SL: I’m so excited by the work Mueller is doing in the United States. I think he’s brilliant as a prosecutor. At the same time, the Ukrainian prosecutor on Independence Day published a video of a celebration in his luxury mansion in a Kiev suburb, where he is trying to present himself as a big patriot, kissing a child, hugging his relatives, playing with a dog. I can’t imagine that prosecutor Mueller would publish such a video on the U.S. Independence Day. It signals that we have a politician in the prosecutor’s chair.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/27/th ... -manafort/
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 28, 2018 7:34 am

trump thinks google is filtering out good news stories about him

“Trump Is Nuts. This Time Really Feels Different”: Trump Rejects “War Council” Intervention, Goes It Alone


With his closest allies defecting, the president increasingly trusts only his instincts. He “got joy” from stripping former C.I.A. director John Brennan’s security clearance. And after betrayals by Allen Weisselberg and David Pecker, a former White House official says, Trump “spent the weekend calling people and screaming.”

GABRIEL SHERMAN
AUGUST 27, 2018 2:22 PM

After Michael Cohen’s plea deal last week, Donald Trump spiraled out of control, firing wildly in all directions. He railed against “flippers” in a rambling Fox & Friends interview, and lashed out on Twitter at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department, and Robert Mueller. In the wake of his outbursts, White House officials have discussed whether Trump would listen to his closest New York City friends in an effort to rein him in. Two sources briefed on the matter told me that senior officials talked about inviting Rudy Giuliani and a group of Trump’s New York real-estate friends including Tom Barrack, Richard LeFrak, and Howard Lorber to the White House to stage an “intervention” last week. “It was supposed to be a war council,” one source explained. But Trump refused to take the meeting, sources said. “You know Trump—he hates being lectured to,” the source added. (Spokespeople for LeFrak and Lorber say they have no knowledge of a meeting. A spokesperson for Barrack didn’t comment.)

More than ever, Trump is acting by feeling and instinct. “Trump is nuts,” said one former West Wing official. “This time really feels different.” Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Shine has privately expressed concern, a source said, telling a friend that Trump’s emotional state is “very tender.” Even Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are unsettled that Trump is so gleefully acting on his most self-destructive impulses as his legal peril grows. According to a source, Jared and Ivanka told Trump that stripping security clearances from former intelligence officials would backfire, but Trump ignored them. Kushner later told a friend Trump “got joy” out of taking away John Brennan’s clearance. His reaction to the death of John McCain—quashing a White House statement in praise of the senator, and restoring White House flags to full staff—falls into the same self-indulgent category.

The news of Cohen’s plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction, which were followed by revelations that Trump Organization C.F.O. Allen Weisselberg and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker are cooperating with federal prosecutors, have rattled Trump like few other turns in the investigation have, sources said. Flying on Air Force One to his West Virginia rally last week, Trump seemed “bummed” and “down and out,” a person briefed on his mood told me. “He was acting like, ‘I know the news is bad, but I don’t know what to do about it,’” the source said. At the rally, an uncharacteristically subdued Trump barely mentioned Cohen or Manafort.

By the weekend, though, his anger had returned. “He spent the weekend calling people and screaming,” one former White House official said. According to sources, the president feels cornered with no clear way out. His months-long campaign to get Sessions to resign—so that Trump could appoint a new A.G. who would shut down the Russia probe—not only failed to get Sessions to step down, but it’s caused him to dig in, as evidenced by Sessions’s rare statement asserting the independence of the Justice Department. “Trump knows at least through the midterms he won’t get another A.G.,” a former White House official said.

After Cohen effectively named Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in campaign-finance crimes with the payments to Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, Trump’s public posture was that the payments weren’t crimes. Privately, according to two sources, Trump attorneys suggested that a strategy for dealing with the issue could be for Trump to admit to having affairs with women and paying hush money to them for years. That way, he could assert that the payments to Daniels and McDougal were normal business—not campaign donations meant to influence the 2016 election. Trump, according to the sources, rejected this advice. “It was because of Melania,” one source said.

Inside the West Wing, a sense of numbness and dread has set in among senior advisers as they gird for what Trump will do next. “It’s a return to the abyss,” said one former official who’s in frequent contact with the White House. “This is back to being a one-man show, and everyone is on the outside looking in.”

Two sources told me that Trump continues to raise the possibility of a pardon for Manafort, his former campaign chairman. Trump has been clashing with White House counsel Don McGahn, who, sources said, is strongly against granting Manafort a pardon. (A lawyer for McGahn did not respond to a request for comment.) Trump has told people he’s considering bringing in a new lawyer to draft a Manafort pardon, if McGahn won’t do it. “He really at this point does not care,” a former official said. “He would rather fight the battle. He doesn’t want to do anything that would cede executive authority.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08 ... ssion=true



The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump

Everyone and everything he touches rots.

Aug. 25, 2018

By Peter Wehner

Mr. Wehner served in the previous three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.


President Trump speaking at the Ohio Republican Party state dinner in Columbus on Friday.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
There’s never been any confusion about the character defects of Donald Trump. The question has always been just how far he would go and whether other individuals and institutions would stand up to him or become complicit in his corruption.

When I first took to these pages three summers ago to write about Mr. Trump, I warned my fellow Republicans to just say no both to him and his candidacy. One of my concerns was that if Mr. Trump were to succeed, he would redefine the Republican Party in his image. That’s already happened in areas like free trade, free markets and the size of government; in attitudes toward ethnic nationalism and white identity politics; in America’s commitment to its traditional allies, in how Republicans view Russia and in their willingness to call out leaders of evil governments like North Korea rather than lavish praise on them. But in no area has Mr. Trump more fundamentally changed the Republican Party than in its attitude toward ethics and political leadership.

For decades, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, insisted that character counted in public life. They were particularly vocal about this during the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing against “compartmentalization” — by which they meant overlooking moral turpitude in the Oval Office because you agree with the president’s policy agenda or because the economy is strong.

Senator Lindsey Graham, then in the House, went so far as to argue that “impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”

All that has changed with Mr. Trump as president. For Republicans, honor and integrity are now passé. We saw it again last week when the president’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen — standing in court before a judge, under oath — implicated Mr. Trump in criminal activity, while his former campaign chairman was convicted in another courtroom on financial fraud charges. Most Republicans in Congress were either silent or came to Mr. Trump’s defense, which is how this tiresome drama now plays itself out.

It is a stunning turnabout. A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas — infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds — but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.

For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. (Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, refers to the president’s race-based comments as a “base stimulator.”) Mr. Trump’s corruptions are ingrained, the result of a lifetime of habits. It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president.

Some of us who have been lifelong Republicans and previously served in Republican administrations held out a faint hope that our party would at some point say “Enough!”; that there would be some line Mr. Trump would cross, some boundary he would transgress, some norm he would shatter, some civic guardrail he would uproot, some action he would take, some scheme or scandal he would be involved in that would cause large numbers of Republicans to break with the president. No such luck. Mr. Trump’s corruptions have therefore become theirs. So far there’s been no bottom, and there may never be. It’s quite possible this should have been obvious to me much sooner than it was, that I was blinded to certain realities I should have recognized.

In any case, the Republican Party’s as-yet unbreakable attachment to Mr. Trump is coming at quite a cost. There is the rank hypocrisy, the squandered ability to venerate public character or criticize Democrats who lack it, and the damage to the white Evangelical movement, which has for the most part enthusiastically rallied to Mr. Trump and as a result has been largely discredited. There is also likely to be an electoral price to pay in November.

But the greatest damage is being done to our civic culture and our politics. Mr. Trump and the Republican Party are right now the chief emblem of corruption and cynicism in American political life, of an ethic of might makes right. Dehumanizing others is fashionable and truth is relative. (“Truth isn’t truth,” in the infamous words of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.) They are stripping politics of its high purpose and nobility.

That’s not all politics is; self-interest is always a factor. But if politics is only about power unbounded by morality — if it’s simply about rulers governing by the law of the jungle, about a prince acting like a beast, in the words of Machiavelli — then the whole enterprise will collapse. We have to distinguish between imperfect leaders and corrupt ones, and we need the vocabulary to do so.

A warning to my Republican friends: The worst is yet to come. Thanks to the work of Robert Mueller — a distinguished public servant, not the leader of a “group of Angry Democrat Thugs” — we are going to discover deeper and deeper layers to Mr. Trump’s corruption. When we do, I expect Mr. Trump will unravel further as he feels more cornered, more desperate, more enraged; his behavior will become ever more erratic, disordered and crazed.

Most Republicans, having thrown their MAGA hats over the Trump wall, will stay with him until the end. Was a tax cut, deregulation and court appointments really worth all this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opin ... trump.html





Polly Sigh

When Russian mafia boss Semion Mogilevich [linked to Manafort, Trump, Putin] tried to cut a deal with FBI/DOJ on his 2006 money laundering charges, Bruce Ohr refused. Ohr also helped revoke Oleg Deripaska's visa. Now he's a target of Trump.

https://nyti.ms/2MNxhiz

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Also a Trump target: ex-Mueller team Lisa Page who has a serious record of going after the Russian mafia – particularly, Semion Mogilevich, whose associates owned Trump Tower condos. Father of Trump business partner Felix Sater was a Mogilevich Lt.

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IF MUELLER SHOWS TRUMP AND STONE CHEATED TO WIN THE PRIMARY, WILL REPUBLICANS TURN ON TRUMP?

August 28, 2018/12 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
Before you answer, “no,” hear me out.

I’ve been obsessing about what else — besides repeatedly entertaining offers of help from Russians and changing his opinion about whether Russia hacked the DNC on a dime and thereafter magnifying propaganda that helped Russia’s plausible deniability, even while claiming some knowledge of it — Mueller is investigating Roger Stone. The subpoena challenge of his sometime assistant, Andrew Miller, makes it clear that at least part of the investigation focuses on Stone’s dodgy 527 and PACs. I’ve shown how the second (general election) incarnation of Stone’s Stop the Steal 527 engaged in voter suppression that paralleled the efforts Russia was making.

But we know from the reports of witnesses, including Michael Caputo, that Mueller’s interest in Stone’s activities go back before the general election. For example, he’s interested (in the wake of Rick Gates signing a cooperation agreement) in meetings Stone had with Gates. According to Stone, the only meeting he had with Gates during the election happened shortly after April 19, 2016; Gates was there because Manafort had to cancel at the last minute.

“I only have a record of one dinner with Rick Gates,” he said, adding that the guest list included two other political operatives: Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign aide who was recently interviewed by Mr. Mueller’s investigators, and Paul Manafort, who soon after took over as chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign. But Mr. Manafort canceled at the last minute, and Mr. Gates, his deputy, attended in his place.

Mr. Stone said the conversation during the dinner, which fell soon after the New York primary in April 2016, was about the New York State delegate selection for the Republican National Convention. The operatives expressed concern about whether delegates, at a time of deep division among Republicans, would be loyal to Mr. Trump’s vision for the party, Mr. Stone said.


The suggestion, then, is that Mueller’s star witness, Rick Gates, told the special counsel about Stone and Manafort getting the old gang back together. Which would have started in March, as Manafort was wooing Stone’s longtime associate Donald Trump. During the same month, Stone-style rat-fucking was putting the finishing touches to Ted Cruz’ presidential ambitions. That was precisely the period when former Young Republican John Powers Middleton was loading up Stone’s Committee to Restore American Greatness (from which Stop the Steal would get its initial cash infusion). Stone was tweeting out his Stop the Steal campaign, even if he had not yet registered it with the IRS. And not long afterwards, Russian hackers would still be searching Democratic servers for dirt on Cruz, even after he had been mathematically eliminated.

[O]n or about April 15, 2016, the Conspirators searched one hacked DCCC computer for terms that included “hillary,” “cruz,” and “trump.”


The possibility that Mueller’s interest in Stone (and Manafort) extends back to the primary is all the more interesting given how centrally some of Stone’s core skill-sets played out in the lead-up to the Convention. There were veiled threats of violence (and in the home of his dark money, actual violence), a smear story projecting on Cruz the infidelity more typical of Trump, and lots of money sloshing around.

It’s not entirely clear what crime that would implicate — besides potential campaign finance violations (particularly, given Trump’s repeated disavowals of any times, coordination between Stone and his old buddy Manafort).

And, given how rabidly Republican base voters support Trump, I could see why Republicans would let bygones be bygones. It’s not like the Republican party has ever before shown distaste for Stone’s rat-fucking. Plus, no one likes Ted Cruz, and he may not even survive his race against Beto O’Rourke. So, no, Republicans won’t be any more disposed against Stone if he is shown to have helped Trump cheat in the primary.

All that said, if Mueller indicts Stone in other crimes that Republicans would like to distance themselves from, any allegations about the primary may provide cover.

So, no, whatever dark money slush Mueller is looking at implicates Trump’s victory over the mainstream party won’t, by itself, turn Republicans against Trump. But down the road it may provide cover for the moment Republicans would like to turn on him.

TIMELINE
September 2, 2011: Pamela Jensen registers Should Trump Run 527 with Michael D Cohen listed as President

October 1, 2015: Pamela Jensen registers STOP RAPE PAC by loaning it enough money to pay for a mailbox

November 10, 2015: Jensen & Associates loans $2,398.87 to CRAG

November 10, 2015: CRAG pays Entkesis 2373.87

December 17, 2015: Corey Lewandowski disavows CRAG

December 24, 2015: CRAG pays Newsmax 10803.55

December 31, 2015: CRAG pays Newsmax 1585.76

February 1, 2016: Pamela Jensen sends out fundraising letter to World Net Daily pushing Kathleen Wiley’s mortgage fundraiser

February 4, 2016: Jensen & Associates loans $2,610 to CRAG

February 10, 2016: Loans from Jensen & Associates repaid

February 19, 2016: Roger Stone tells Alex Jones that Donald Trump has donated to the Kathleen Willey fundraiser, even though it had raised less than $4,000 at that time

February 29, 2016: Paul Manafort pitches Trump on managing his convention

March 1, 2016: John Powers Middleton Company donates $150,000 to CRAG

March 6, 2016: First tweet in spring Stop the Steal campaign

March 9, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $50,000 to CRAG

March 11, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $25,000 to CRAG

March 14, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $25,000 to CRAG

March 23, 2016: National Enquirer publishes story, quoting Stone, claiming multiple Ted Cruz affairs

March 28, 2016: On recommendation of Tom Barrack and Roger Stone, Trump hires Manafort as convention manager, thereby bringing in “traditional” methods Stone resigned over in 2015

April 5, 2016: Stone threatens to send Trump supporters to disloyal delegates hotel rooms, also claims voter fraud in primaries Cruz won

April 6, 2016: Stone (Sarah Rollins) establishes Stop the Steal in same UPS post box as CRAG

April 6, 2016: CRAG gives $50,000 to Stop the Steal

April 6, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $11,000

April 6, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $9,000

April 6, 2016: Stone tweets Stop the Steal toll free line to “report voter fraud in Wisconsin” primary

April 8, 2016: Stone accused of menacing after threat of Day of Rage

April 12, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $60,000 to CRAG

April 13, 2016: Stop the Steal pays Sarah Rollins $386.72

April 14, 2016: CRAG pays Tim Yale $9,000

April 14, 2016: Stop the Steal pays Jim Baker $1,500 in “expense reimbursements for rally”

April 15, 2016: GRU hackers search “one hacked DCCC computer for terms that included “hillary,” “cruz,” and “trump”

April 15, 2016: Stop the Steal pays Sarah Rollins $500

April 15, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $15,000 to CRAG

April 15, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $2,000 to CRAG

April 15, 2016: $1,000 refunded to John Powers Middleton

April 18, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $1,000 to CRAG

April 18, 2016: CRAG pays Citroen Associates $40,000

April 19, 2016: CNN writes profile on “the Return of Roger Stone”

Shortly after April 19, 2016: Stone and Rick Davis meet in NY.

April 25, 2016: CRAG pays Paul Nagy $2,500

April 25, 2016: CRAG pays Sarah Rollins $500 plus $41.66 in expenses

April 28, 2016: Protest outside of Donald Trump rally in Costa Mesa turns violent

April 29, 2016: John Powers Middleton donates $50,000 to CRAG

May 1, 2016: Last Stone tweet in spring Stop the Steal campaign

May 2, 2016: CRAG pays Sarah Rollins $800

May 2, 2016: Stop the Steal fundraises and calls for march on Convention, even as Trump disavows any tie to it or other PACs/527s

May 4, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $5,000

May 13, 2016: CRAG pays Sarah Rollins 93.50

May 15, 2016: Stop the Steal pays Sarah Rollins $500

May 16, CRAG pays Andrew Miller $2,000

May 16, 2016: CRAG pays Citroen Associates $10,000

May 16, 2016: CRAG pays Sarah Rollins $400

May 16, 2016: CRAG pays Kathy Shelton $2,500

May 24, 2016: Stone PAC RAPE PAC, aka Women v Hillary, announced

June 2, 2016: Pamela Jensen sets up Women v Hillary PAC out of a different mailboxes location in Costa Mesa (again, this only ever showed enough money to pay for the mailbox used as its address)

June 7, 2016: FEC informs CRAG it must submit filings by July 12, 2016

June 7, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $4,790

June 8, 2016: Stop the Steal pays Paul Nagy $800 in “expense reimbursements for rally”

June 17, 2016: CRAG pays Andrew Miller $3,000

July 5, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $14,500

July 6, 2016: CRAG pays Michelle Selaty $10,000

July 6, 2016: CRAG pays Drake Ventures $12,000

July 11, 2016: CRAG pays Cheryl Smith $4,900

July 12, 2016: Stop the Steal gives $63,000 to CRAG

July 12, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $7,200

July 15, 2016: CRAG pays Jason Sullivan $1,500

July 18, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $7,500

July 20, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $3,000

July 29, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $6,000

August 1, 2016: CRAG pays Andrew Miller $4,000; Stone flies from JFK to LAX

August 2, 2016: Stone dines with Middleton at Dan Tanas in West Hollywood

August 3, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $9,500

August 3, 2016: CRAG pays Josi & Company $2,500

August 3-4, 2016: Stone takes a red-eye from LAX to Miami

August 4, 2016: Stone flip-flops on whether the Russians or a 400 pound hacker are behind the DNC hack and also tells Sam Nunberg he dined with Julian Assange; first tweet in the fall StopTheSteal campaign

August 5, 2016: Stone column in Breitbart claiming Guccifer 2.0 is individual hacker

August 9, 2016: CRAG pays Jason Sullivan $1,500

August 15, 2016: CRAG pays Jensen & Associates $19,500

August 29, 2016: CRAG pays Law Offices of Michael Becker $3,500

August 31, 2016: Robert Shillman gives $8,000 to CRAG

September 12, 2016: CRAG gives $8,000 to Donald Trump

September 14, 2016: CRAG pays $3,000 to Citroen Associates

September 21, 2016: Robert Shillman gives $8,000 to CRAG

September 22, 2016: CRAG gives $8,000 to Donald Trump

October 13, 2016: Stop the Steal pays Andrew Miller $5,000

October 23, 2016: Stone tweets out message saying Clinton supporters can “VOTE the NEW way on Tues. Nov 8th by texting HILLARY to 8888”

October 28, 2016: GRU officer Anatoliy Kovalev and co-conspirators visit websites of counties in GA, IA, and FL to identify vulnerabilities

October 30, 2016: Ohio Democratic Party sues Ohio Republican Party to prevent Stop the Steal voter suppression; Democrats also sue in NV, AZ, and PA

November 3, 2016: Filings in ODP lawsuit describing Stop the Steal (declaration, exhibits)

November 4, 2016: Judge James Gwyn issues Temporary Restraining Order against Trump, Stone, and Stop the Steal

November 4, 2016: Guccifer 2.0 post claiming Democrats may rig the elections

November 7, 2016: Sixth Circuit issues a stay in OH TRO

December 14, 2016: Women versus Hillary gives $158.97 to CRAG

December 19, 2016: Stop the Steal pays $5,000 to Alejandro Vidal for “fundraising expenses”

December 19, 2016: Stop the Steal pays $3,500 to C Josi and Co.

December 21, 2016: Stop the Steal pays $1,500 to The Townsend Group

December 27, 2016: Stop the Steal pays $3,500 to Kristen [sic] Davis

December 28, 2016: Stop the Steal gives $94 to CRAG

December 29, 2016: Stop the Steal pays Jerry Steven Gray $4,000 for “fundraising expenses”

December 30, 2016: Stop the Steal pays 2,692 total to unnamed recipients

January 19, 2017: Stop the Steal pays $5,000 for fundraising expenses to Alejandro Vidal

February 8, 2017: Stop the Steal pays Kristen [sic] Davis $3,500 for “fundraising expenses”

February 15, 2017: Stop Steal pays Brad Boeck $862 for sales consultant consulting fee

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/08/28/i ... rn-on-him/
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 29, 2018 10:03 am

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Devin Nunes’s Curious Trip to London

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee flew to London to gather intel on Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier alleging Trump-campaign ties with Russia. But MI5, MI6, and GCHQ didn’t seem interested.

Natasha Bertrand is a staff writer at The Atlantic where she covers national security and the intelligence community.
Aug 28, 2018

U.S. Representative Devin Nunes of CaliforniaJonathan Ernst / Reuters
Earlier this month, as all eyes were on the courtroom dramas unfolding in Virginia—where President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman was just convicted on bank- and tax-fraud charges—and in New York—where the president’s longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations and implicated Trump in a crime—the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was in London, seeking out new information about the former British intelligence officer and Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele.

According to two people familiar with his trip across the pond who requested anonymity to discuss the chairman’s travels, Devin Nunes, a California Republican, was investigating, among other things, Steele’s own service record and whether British authorities had known about his repeated contact with a U.S. Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. To that end, Nunes requested meetings with the heads of three different British agencies—MI5, MI6, and the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. (Steele was an MI6 agent until a decade ago, and GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, was the first foreign-intelligence agency to pick up contacts between Trump associates and Russian agents in 2015, according to The Guardian.)


A U.K. security official, speaking on background, said “it is normal for U.K. intelligence agencies to have meetings with the chairman and members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” But those meetings did not pan out—Nunes came away meeting only with the U.K.’s deputy national-security adviser, Madeleine Alessandri. The people familiar with his trip told me that officials at MI6, MI5, and GCHQ were wary of entertaining Nunes out of fear that he was “trying to stir up a controversy.” Spokespeople for Alessandri and Nunes did not return requests for comment, and neither did the press offices for MI5 and MI6. GCHQ declined to comment.

Steele, who authored a collection of memos sourced to Kremlin and campaign insiders alleging a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Moscow to win the 2016 election, has been a fixation for Nunes ever since the document was published slightly more than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Last summer, two of Nunes’s staffers, Kash Patel and Doug Presley, traveled to London—without the knowledge of the U.S. Embassy or British government—in search of Steele, whose lawyer denied the staffers access to his client. This time, Nunes sought a work-around, I’m told. His trip to London at such a precarious moment for the president, and the intelligence agencies’ decision to decline him a meeting, is emblematic of the political island on which Nunes finds himself—along with a handful of other Trump allies in Congress and the media—as he continues his search for wrongdoing by the Justice Department.

Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, has been conducting a parallel investigation into the FBI and the DOJ since March 2017, when he first began examining whether top officials improperly “unmasked” and then leaked the names of Trump associates who surfaced in intelligence reports during the transition period. The unmasking scandal lost steam as Nunes shifted his attention to alleged surveillance abuses by the DOJ—a probe that Democrats said they did not approve and had no control over, but to which a group of House Republicans were privy. Earlier this year, Nunes alleged in a memo that the FBI had used intelligence passed to them by Steele to bolster the bureau’s application for a surveillance warrant targeting an early Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, while failing to disclose “the political origins” of Steele’s research to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A copy of the FBI’s warrant application, however, directly contradicts that claim.

Ohr, a high-level Justice Department official whose wife works for the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS—the firm that hired Steele to research Trump’s Russia ties—has landed on Nunes’s radar, too. In an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity last month, Nunes said that Ohr “is at the heart” of the FBI’s alleged misconduct “because his wife was working for Fusion GPS.” There is no evidence that his wife’s work influenced his own, however. Ohr, who is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee panels on Tuesday, has known Steele since 2007, when Steele was still in MI6, according to The New York Times. With the FBI’s knowledge and approval, Ohr met with Steele repeatedly from late 2016 to early 2017 to debrief him on any new intelligence he may have obtained about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Steele, a 20-year MI6 veteran whose work focused mostly on Russia, has worked with the FBI on and off for years, offering valuable intelligence on Russian organized crime.

Still, both Steele and Ohr—along with former FBI high-ranking officials such as Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey, all of whom have been fired in the past year—have been targeted by the president and his allies, who have characterized the Russia investigation currently being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a “witch hunt” that was launched because of the dossier. As the Times has documented, however, it was a young Trump campaign aide’s drunken disclosure that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton that led the FBI to investigate the campaign’s Russia ties. There is much to investigate in London, including the trail left there by the mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud who told George Papadopoulos about the Russian dirt to begin with. Nunes, however, continues to focus his attention on the investigators themselves—all in the name, many argue, of protecting the president at all costs.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... on/568699/


Ex-Manafort Banker Robbed of iPad, Briefcase at NYC Home

By Jonathan Dienst
Published at 1:42 PM EDT on Aug 28, 2018 | Updated at 7:26 PM EDT on Aug 28, 2018
David Fallarino was one of three so-called key figures not called by Robert Mueller's office to testify at the trial of Paul Manafort

Paul Manafort's one-time banker had his Manhattan penthouse burglarized overnight, a mysterious break-in that saw a briefcase, iPad and sneakers stolen from the residence, law enforcement sources familiar with the case tell News 4. Jonathan Dienst reports.

(Published Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2018)

Paul Manafort's one-time banker had his Manhattan penthouse burglarized overnight, a mysterious break-in that saw a briefcase, iPad and sneakers stolen from the residence, law enforcement sources familiar with the case tell News 4.

David Fallarino, dubbed Manafort's "front office banker" at Citizens Bank by the Huffington Post, told authorities he left the terrace door of his West 58th Street home open before he went to sleep Monday, the sources say. The building is nine floors, city records show.

Fallarino, 38, said he heard a noise around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday and went out to find a crow bar on the terrace, the sources say. There were no apparent signs of forced entry, the sources say, but Fallarino reported his wine cabinet was open and there was a bottle of wine on the floor. The briefcase, iPad and sneakers were the only items missing; the contents of the first two were unknown.

The sources did not have any information on a possible suspect or suspects, who apparently entered from the balcony and left via the front door. Police are checking the building for potential surveillance video.

[NY] Ex-Manafort Banker Robbed of iPad, Briefcase at NYC Home
Paul Manafort's one-time banker, David Fallarino, had his Manhattan home burglarized; a briefcase, iPad and sneakers were stolen.
(Published Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2018)
Repeated attempts to reach Fallarino were unsuccessful; an assistant at Citizens Bank said he was on vacation and declined to comment. Citizens Bank also declined corporate comment, referring questions to the NYPD.

Fallarino was one of three so-called key figures not called by Robert Mueller's office to testify at the trial of the ex-Trump campaign chief, who was convicted on eight felony fraud-related counts earlier this month. A mistrial was declared on 10 other counts. Two of Fallarino's assistants testified at the trial, the first public test of Mueller's investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the election, regarding emails the banker had sent and received.

One of those assistants was Melinda James, a mortgage loan assistant at Citizens Bank who served as the loan assistant to Manafort when he applied for a cash-out refinance loan -- a loan that allows the owner to take the equity out as cash — on his property at 29 Howard Street, gathering all the requisite initial documentation. Manafort was required to list his monthly debts as part of that process; when he listed his other properties, he said he owned a home at 377 Union Street in Brooklyn "free and clear." Prosecutors said that wasn't true.

Prior to the Howard Street property appraisal, James found the property listed for rent online and relayed that to her supervisor, Fallarino, but testified that she did not know what he did after that.

Fallarino has not been charged with any crime. Also at trial, a vice president at Citizens Bank testified Manafort would not have received a $3.4 million loan against a condo had the bank been aware it was an investment property rather than a second residence, according to trade magazine American Banker.

Separately, the trade magazine reported another Citizens worker testified she found $1 million in loans outstanding on a property in Brooklyn that Manafort had not disclosed. Citizens Bank said in a statement prior to the start of the trial that said, "We believe the evidence will clearly show that Citizens Bank did not engage in any wrongdoing and that we followed appropriate procedures."
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigatio ... 04501.html




trump KNEW that Paul Manafort [along with your dad's former top aide Brad Zackson] had been named as co conspirators of Russian mafia boss Semion Mogilevich in a federal racketeering case a few years before the campaign but trump hired Manafort anyway.
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 29, 2018 1:19 pm

Sources: Second Trump Org employee discussed immunity deal

trump tower meeting tweeting acosta dnt tsr vpx_00003516
(CNN)A second Trump Organization employee discussed a potential immunity deal with the federal prosecutors who charged Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump, Sessions, Cohen and the taste of betrayal
That employee ultimately did not receive immunity after prosecutors in the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York decided against granting such protection. The person was not called to testify before the grand jury, the people familiar with the matter said.

The employee's identity couldn't be determined by CNN. Spokespeople for the US Attorney's office and Trump Organization declined to comment.

News of the second employee's talks with prosecutors comes after Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg was granted immunity for providing information about Cohen. Weisselberg's interview with prosecutors focused on Cohen and the payments Cohen made to silence women during the election cycle who claimed affairs with Trump.

Prosecutors also granted immunity to David Pecker, a longtime Trump ally and the CEO of tabloid publisher American Media Inc. Pecker told prosecutors that Trump had knowledge of Cohen's payments to women who had alleged sexual encounters with the then-presidential candidate, CNN reported.

Pecker, who was described in court filings as having struck a deal with Cohen to stymie potentially damaging stories and in one case pay $150,000 to one woman effectively to buy her silence, also provided investigators with details about payments Cohen made to the women.

Prosecutors didn't charge the Trump Organization or any of its executives, but court papers illustrate how Trump Organization executives were deeply enmeshed in efforts to reimburse Cohen for what prosecutors suggested the employees knew wasn't legitimate legal work.

In seeking to get reimbursed by the Trump Organization for the hush money Cohen paid, court filings say, he showed company executives a bank statement from a shell company identifying a $130,000 payment he made to quiet claims of an affair by a porn actress named Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels, as well as a wire fee and a $50,000 "claimed payment" for "tech services."

The executives then "'grossed up' for tax purposes" Cohen's requested reimbursement to $360,000, then added a $60,000 bonus, according to court filings, bringing Cohen's total to $420,000. "[E]xecutives of the Company also determined that the $420,000 would be paid to Cohen in monthly amounts of $35,000 over the course of twelve months, and that Cohen should send invoices for these payments."

Trump losing one of his allies: the Enquirer
Trump losing one of his allies: the Enquirer 04:24
When Cohen submitted an invoice for January and February 2017, for $35,000 for each of those months to "Executive-1," that person sent the invoice to "Executive-2," who approved it, according to court filings, and Cohen continued to send such invoices throughout that year.

In reality, they were not invoices for legitimate work, but rather to seek "reimbursement for election-related expenses" in the form of Cohen's payments to silence women to protect Trump, prosecutors said.

Last week, after Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts and implicated Trump by admitting in court that "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office" he kept information that would have harmed Trump from becoming public during the 2016 election, the President publicly lamented the practice of what he called "flipping."

"It's called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal," Trump told Fox News about suspects cooperating with prosecutors in exchange for a reduced sentence. "I know all about flipping -- 30, 40 years I have been watching flippers. Everything is wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is or as high as you can go."

Cohen's plea deal did not include a cooperation agreement.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/29/politics ... index.html



FBI pushes back on unfounded Trump claim that China hacked Hillary Clinton’s email

John Wagner
August 29 at 12:56 PM

The FBI on Wednesday pushed back on an unfounded claim by President Trump that Hillary Clinton’s emails were hacked by China, saying it had found no evidence that the private servers she used while secretary of state had been compromised.

Trump asserted early Wednesday, without citing evidence, that China had hacked Clinton’s emails, and he said the Justice Department and the FBI risked losing their credibility if they did not look into the matter further.

Writing on Twitter, Trump alleged that many of the emails that were purportedly hacked contained classified information and called it “a very big story.”

“Hillary Clinton’s Emails, many of which are Classified Information, got hacked by China. Next move better be by the FBI & DOJ or, after all of their other missteps . . . their credibility will be forever gone!” Trump wrote in a tweet posted shortly after midnight.

Trump provided no details about the alleged hacking, but his tweets came shortly after the online publication of a story by the Daily Caller asserting that a Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington area hacked Clinton’s private server while she was secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails. The publication cited “two sources briefed on the matter.”

Fox News, which is frequently watched by the president, aired a segment on the report Wednesday night, with a guest calling it a bombshell if true.

Asked about the president’s assertions, the FBI provided a statement Wednesday afternoon that simply said: “The FBI has not found any evidence the servers were compromised.”

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on Trump’s call for the bureau to make a “next move.” A spokesman for the Justice Department also declined to comment.



In an earlier tweet Tuesday night, Trump wrote: “Report just out: ‘China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server.’ Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)? What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information!”

[How Trump relies on his cable news cabinet as much as the real one]

Trump has long focused on Clinton’s use of private servers as secretary of state and contends that the FBI did not sufficiently investigate the matter.

During the 2016 campaign, in which Trump faced off against Clinton, then-FBI Director James B. Comey announced that the agency had found no basis to bring criminal charges against Clinton, the Democratic nominee.

In a July 2016 statement, Comey said the FBI “did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked.” But, he added: “Given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence.”

A lengthy Justice Department inspector general report released in June criticized the latter part of Comey’s statement, saying that while forensics agents could not say with 100 percent confidence that Clinton’s servers had not been compromised, they were “fairly confident” that there wasn’t an intrusion.

Trump’s calls to investigate Clinton and other real and perceived political adversaries have grown louder as the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election continues.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is probing whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia during the election and whether Trump has sought to obstruct the investigation.

Speaking in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said accusations about Chinese hacking were nothing new.

“This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard this kind of accusation,” Hua told a daily news briefing.

“China is a staunch defender of cybersecurity,” she added, without specifically mentioning Trump or Clinton. “We firmly oppose and crack down on any form of Internet attacks and the stealing of secrets. China advocates that the international community jointly respond to cybersecurity threats through dialogue and cooperation, on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 8fc292a586



U.S. Probing Whether Malaysian Fugitive Laundered Funds to Pay Chris Christie and Trump Lawyer

Jho Low under investigation for alleged embezzlement of $4.5 billion from 1MDB fund

Tom Wright in Hong Kong and Updated Aug. 29, 2018 12:20 p.m. ET

Malaysian financier Jho Low, now a fugitive, attending a ball in New York City in 2014. Photo: Debby Wong/Corbis

By
Bradley Hope in London,
Rebecca Davis O’Brien in New York
The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether a fugitive Malaysian financier laundered tens of millions of dollars through two associates and used the funds to pay a U.S. legal team that includes former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and a lawyer who represents President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

Jho Low, the Malaysian businessman, has been described in U.S. court filings as playing a central role in the alleged embezzlement of $4.5 billion from a Malaysian fund called 1Malaysia Development Bhd.

Malaysian authorities this week separately charged Mr. Low with money laundering in the case, which investigators suspect may be one of the biggest financial frauds in history. He has been moving around Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China in recent months, according to people with knowledge of his whereabouts.

Mr. Low was close to former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who unexpectedly lost an election in May and was arrested last month in Kuala Lumpur. Mr. Najib has pleaded not guilty to charges of money laundering and criminal breach of trust in connection with the 1MDB scandal.

The Justice Department, in July 2016 and last year, filed civil lawsuits in federal court in California seeking to recover assets from Mr. Low and others including mansions, artwork and a yacht allegedly bought with 1MDB funds. It is now pursuing a criminal investigation in which Mr. Low, who has U.S. assets, is a target, these people said.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is part of Mr. Low’s U.S. legal team.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is part of Mr. Low’s U.S. legal team. Photo: Julio Cortez/Associated Press
Since 2016, Mr. Low’s access to the global financial system has been sharply curtailed by banks wary of handling allegedly tainted funds, according to the people familiar with the matter. That has made it difficult for him to pay directly for a range of outlays, from lifestyle expenses to legal and advisory services, according to these people.

There is no indication that any of the people who ultimately received payments were aware the funds could have originated from money Mr. Low allegedly siphoned off from 1MDB. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Low’s potential use of two intermediaries to facilitate the payments through the international financial system, people familiar with the matter say. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Representatives for Mr. Low didn’t respond to a request for comment. He has previously denied wrongdoing.

The team of lawyers and consultants working for Mr. Low includes Mr. Christie, who briefly headed Mr. Trump’s presidential transition team; Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz ; Bobby Burchfield, a lawyer who has served as the Trump Organization’s outside ethics adviser; and Ed Rogers, a Washington lobbyist with close ties to the Republican Party.

Mr. Christie is representing Mr. Low in the asset-forfeiture cases in California, a spokesman for the former governor said. “There has been no communication by Governor Christie with any other area of government on Mr. Low’s behalf,” the spokesman said, adding there has been “no inquiry made to him by the Department of Justice with regard to any other investigation regarding funding or otherwise."

A spokesman for Kasowitz Benson Torres, Mr. Kasowitz’s New York law firm, confirmed the firm represents Mr. Low in Justice Department matters. “Here, as with all of our clients, our job as attorneys is to represent and vindicate our clients’ interests; and here, as with all of our non-pro-bono clients, we are paid for the legal services we provide,” the spokesman said in a statement.

Mr. Burchfield said, in an emailed statement, that Mr. Low retained his Atlanta-based firm, King & Spalding, to “advise him on the ongoing investigations,” adding that the law firm “performed appropriate due diligence on sources of payment.”

“Further, neither I nor King & Spalding has had contacts with any governmental entity, directly or indirectly, on behalf of Mr. Low, nor has King & Spalding received any inquiries from the Department of Justice regarding this engagement,” Mr. Burchfield said.

Mr. Rogers declined to comment.

The Justice Department is looking into whether a Thai businessman, Phengphian Laogumnerd, and American former rap artist Pras Michel, a founding member of the Fugees hip-hop group, played roles in helping Mr. Low make payments, the people familiar with the matter said.

For at least a year, these people say, Mr. Low has relied on Mr. Phengphian to pay accommodation expenses in Hong Kong and Macau, legal and advisory bills and to keep Mr. Low’s $250-million yacht, Equanimity, fully staffed and maintained until it was seized earlier this month. Justice Department investigators are examining records and money flows related to a series of companies controlled by Mr. Phengphian in Hong Kong and in offshore havens such as the British Virgin Islands to determine whether Mr. Low’s money was involved, the people said.

The Thai businessman also handled payments of tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Low’s lead law firm and advisers, New York-based Kobre & Kim LLP, and British reputation law firm Schillings International LLP, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

“We do not comment on any specific financial arrangements with our clients due to the commercial confidentiality and privileged nature of such information,” said Robin Rathmell, who has identified himself as Mr. Low’s global counsel at Kobre & Kim. Partners at Schillings didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A representative for Mr. Phengphian said his client “is an independently wealthy businessman. The source of his income is nothing to do with—and he has not received any money from—Mr. Low.”

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The representative added: “What he chooses to do with his own funds is his business alone. The Department of Justice has never contacted him about anything, neither have they ever asked him about the source of his funds.”

Mr. Michel was responsible for bringing on another consultant to work on Mr. Low’s behalf: Republican fundraiser and venture-capital executive Elliott Broidy, who was vice chairman of the Trump campaign’s joint fund with the Republican Party during the 2016 presidential campaign. The route of any payments to Mr. Broidy also are part of the Justice Department probe, the people said.

Mr. Broidy’s lawyer has previously said Mr. Broidy and his wife were hired by Mr. Michel “to provide strategic advice as part of a broader team to Mr. Low.”

A lawyer for Mr. Michel said: “I do not know what, if anything, the Department of Justice is currently reviewing, but I am confident that Mr. Michel has not done anything improper.”

The public-integrity section of the Justice Department is separately investigating some of the lobbying work on behalf of Mr. Low, including whether Mr. Broidy attempted to sell his influence in the Trump administration to Mr. Low, who in turn was allegedly acting as an agent of the Malaysian and Chinese governments, people familiar with the investigations said.

A lawyer for Mr. Broidy said: “Elliott Broidy has never agreed to work for, been retained by nor been compensated by any foreign government for any interaction with the United States Government, ever.”

Mr. Low has been seeking to influence the administration to drop its investigations into him and 1MDB, according to people familiar with Mr. Low’s dealings and the Justice Department investigations. The Justice Department investigations overlap and involve some of the same investigators, the people familiar with them said. The Washington Post first reported on the public-integrity investigation.

—Julie Bykowicz in Washington contributed to this article.

Write to Bradley Hope at bradley.hope@wsj.com, Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com and Rebecca Davis O’Brien at Rebecca.OBrien@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
The former Malaysian prime minister arrested in Kuala Lumpur last month is Najib Razak. An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled his name as Najib Rajak. (Aug. 29, 2018)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-probin ... 1535535000



"Suspicious" Transactions At Russian Embassy Sparked Deeper Bank Probe Than Previously Known

The former Russian ambassador received a salary payment twice as large as past years, and bankers blocked a $150,000 withdrawal.

Jason Leopold
Former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak
Mario Tama / Getty Images
Former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak

When BuzzFeed News reported earlier this year on dozens of suspicious financial transactions by Russian diplomats living in Washington, Kremlin officials objected with ferocity. A Russian foreign ministry spokesperson denounced the news organization as a “tool of the American intelligence services” and insisted the transactions were purely run of the mill.

But new documents show that American bank examiners delved deeper into the embassy's financial activity than was previously known — and reveal why they flagged two of the transactions as suspicious.

The first, made just 10 days after the US presidential election in 2016, was a $120,000 lump-sum check to then-ambassador Sergey Kislyak that was twice as large as any payment he’d received in the previous two years.

The second, just five days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, was a blocked attempt to withdraw $150,000 in cash that a bank official feared was meant for Russians the US had just expelled from the country.

In their investigations into 2016 election interference, special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI are scrutinizing the financial activity by the Russian embassy, according to three federal law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Last November, BuzzFeed News began revealing suspicious embassy transactions, including a $29,000 wire transfer to the embassy's US bank account to “finance election campaign of 2016”; $325,000 in payments to the Russian Cultural Centre in Washington; and $2.4 million paid to small home-improvement companies controlled by a Russian immigrant living in Virginia.

But former ambassador Kislyak looms over the Trump-Russia investigation. After failing to disclose during his confirmation hearings a meeting with Kislyak, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, discussed with Kislyak setting up a line of communication at the Russian Embassy. And Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about multiple calls to Kislyak during the transition.

In mid-2017, as US law enforcement stepped up its investigation of Russian interference, agents turned for help to Citibank, where the embassy was a customer. As bankers trawled through the embassy’s account and those of its diplomats, they hit upon a payment to Kislyak they found suspicious.

Ten days after the election, the embassy cut a check to the former ambassador for $120,000. The check was marked “payroll.” Kislyak deposited the money in his Citibank checking account, then wired the funds to his account in Russia in two $60,000 installments.

Now, new documents show that the $120,000 payment, purportedly his 2016 salary in a lump sum, was more than twice as large as any the embassy had given Kislyak in the past two years. In 2014, the embassy provided Kislyak a payment of $53,538, and in 2015 it gave him $50,000. Bankers were unable to determine what those funds were for, but Kislyak deposited both payments into his personal checking account in the US, then wired it to his accounts in Russia. A manager at the branch where Kislyak banks said that the former ambassador did not regularly deposit his salary into his personal account but rather allowed his pay to accumulate in the embassy’s account until it reached a large sum.

When bank officials asked about the much larger $120,000 lump-sum payment in November 2016, neither the embassy nor Kislyak responded, the documents show. While a manager at the embassy’s branch said the payment was for Kislyak’s 2016 salary, Citibank’s expert examiners were unable to confirm that the money was indeed his salary.

Kislyak, who has returned to Russia and now serves in the legislature of the Republic of Mordovia, did not return a detailed message seeking comment. A spokesperson for the embassy would not answer questions about the transactions, but sent a statement Tuesday that is identical to the one it sent when BuzzFeed News first began reporting on the matter in November.

“We are not going to comment on any concrete names and figures mentioned in BuzzFeed articles,” wrote Nikolay Lakhonin, the spokesperson. “All the transactions which have been carried out through the American financial system fully comply with the legislation of the United States. We consider the fact of such publications to be a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1961, which stipulates the basic principles of the receiving state’s commitments towards foreign missions.”

Citibank sent information that it compiled about Kislyak’s and the embassy’s accounts to the US Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit and the FBI in early 2017. As part of the bank’s review, Citibank officials focused on the embassy account used for day-to-day operations such as paying utilities and office expenses.

After Trump was inaugurated, the embassy made an unusual request concerning that account.

On Jan. 25, 2017, less than a week after Trump was sworn in, a Citibank relationship manager was visiting the diplomatic compound for an annual check-in when embassy officials asked to withdraw $150,000 cash. In the past, the embassy had withdrawn about $30,000 in cash each month. Now it was asking to take out five times that amount.

The money, embassy officials told the Citibank manager, was going to be used to pay the salaries of employees who had been transferred out of America in December 2016.

The bank officer was suspicious, because President Obama had recently expelled 35 Russian intelligence operatives in response to interference in the 2016 election. So the Citibank manager pressed the Russians for more information, documents show, asking for the names of the people who would be receiving the $150,000 and why they needed cash in America, given that the workers had already returned to Russia. Embassy officials never responded.

At the meeting, the Citibank account manager verbally rejected the request. The bank made several follow-up queries to learn more about how the embassy intended to spend the cash, according to the documents, but the embassy did not respond. In February 2017, the Russian Embassy pulled the withdrawal request, telling Citibank the matter had been “solved in Russia.”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ja ... sy-mueller



RED LETTER DAY


Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast


Maria Butina: Private Messages Reveal Accused Russian Spy’s True Ties to D.C. Wise Man

The head of the Center for the National Interest said his interaction with Butina was limited, but emails and direct messages show it was closer than previously understood.

When federal prosecutors charged Maria Butina with infiltrating the conservative movement on behalf of the Kremlin, questions began to swirl around a Washington think tank that had published her pro-GOP writing—and hosted then-candidate Donald Trump’s Russia-friendly first foreign-policy speech.

The executive director of the organization, the Center for the National Interest, insisted that its interaction with Butina was “very limited.”

But previously unreported emails and direct messages between Butina and officials at the Center show her relationship with the think tank’s president—former Richard Nixon adviser Dimitri Simes—was closer than previously understood. The two didn’t just make plans to have dinner together. According to emails and Twitter DMs reviewed by The Daily Beast, Simes looked to use his connections with Butina and her associate, Russian Central Bank official Alexandr Torshin, to advance the business interests of one of the Center’s most generous donors.

The Center’s executive director, Paul Saunders, declined to comment on the record for this story, as did Butina’s lawyer. An attorney for the donor—Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the one-time CEO of insurance and financial services giant AIG—said he did nothing inappropriate. Indeed, there’s no evidence that Greenberg requested the outreach or was even aware of it.

“The two didn’t just make plans to have dinner together. According to emails and Twitter messages, Simes looked to use his connections with Butina and Alexandr Torshin to advance the business interests of one of the Center’s most generous donors.”

Butina was arrested in July and charged with illegally operating as a foreign agent. Prosecutors filed court documents saying that she offered sex in exchange for a job in the conservative movement—a claim Butina’s lawyer vehemently denied last week. Butina has pleaded not guilty and is currently in jail in Alexandria, Virginia.

After Butina’s arrest, several reports discussed Butina and Torshin’s contacts with the Center, including a Reuters story reporting that the think tank organized a meeting between Treasury officials and the pair on April 7, 2015.

But the relationship went even further than that, as emails and Twitter direct messages reviewed by The Daily Beast reveal. These communications indicate that Simes tried to connect a top benefactor of his organization and one of the most powerful officials in the Kremlin.

The meeting never happened. But if anyone could have pulled it off, it might have been the Moscow-born Simes. A fixture of the D.C. foreign policy establishment, he worked at some of Washington’s most prestigious institutions—including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies—before being selected by Richard Nixon to lead the Center for National Interest. Simes is widely viewed as one of the Washingtonians with the closest Kremlin connections. And his think tank argues for foreign policy realism, including warmer relations between Washington and Moscow.

“They believe the U.S. and Russia ought to have a working relationship and they ought to put their differences aside,” said James Carafano, a foreign policy scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That’s unabashedly what they believe. They’ve consistently argued that.”

The backstory to these exchanges is important. In 2008, Greenberg’s investment company paid about $100 million for 20 percent of a Russian entity called Investtorgbank. By December 2014, Russia’s Central Bank had begun an audit of the firm; the prospect loomed that Greenberg’s investment might be seized by the Russian authorities.

In April 2015, Butina—who federal prosecutors allege broke U.S. law by secretly working as an agent of the Kremlin—reached out to Greenberg’s investment company and suggested he put in even more money in the bank, as The Daily Beast previously reported. Simes learned of her outreach and told her to drop it.

On June 7, 2015, Butina emailed Simes about his efforts to schedule meetings in Moscow between Greenberg and Kremlin officials—meetings that would have come as the Russian Central Bank was auditing the bank in which Greenberg had invested $100 million.

“You and I spoke about how Mr. Greenberg plans to travel to Moscow at the end of June,” she wrote in Russian. (The Daily Beast translated the email.) “Alexander [Torshin] expressed a desire to meet with Greenberg in Moscow, and also to lend assistance in organizing meetings in the Russian capital, if you need our help.”

Simes replied the next day, June 8, 2015, and indicated he was pleased by Butina’s offer to help facilitate his benefactor’s travel plans.

“It is always nice to hear from you,” he wrote. “Please of course also pass my best wishes to Alexander Torshin. We really appreciate his willingness to help with the Hank Greenberg visit to Moscow.”

Simes then added that he tried to set up a meeting for Greenberg with Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Russian Central Bank “some time ago” but that scheduling conflicts kept it from taking place. And he wrote that once Greenberg’s schedule was clear, he would reach out to Nabiullina’s chief of staff.

“However, of course, any help Mr. Torshin can offer would be most welcome,” he added.

Simes then said that while in Russia, Greenberg identifies himself as “an investor in the Russian economy,” with a controlling share in a Moscow office building and a major investment in Investtorgbank.

On June 10, 2015, Butina wrote back.

“A big thank you for the response and information,” she wrote. “I passed everything on to Alexander Porfiryevich [Torshin]. As soon as we know the exact dates of your arrival, we will absolutely help with your visit and the organization of meetings.”

In other words, Butina and Simes exchanged multiple emails discussing the logistics of what could have been high-level Moscow meetings between an American billionaire and a powerful Kremlin official whom The Wall Street Journal characterizes as a Putin ally.

Multiple sources told The Daily Beast that the discussed meetings never happened. An attorney for Greenberg provided the following statement: “Mr. Greenberg never had a meeting in Moscow with any of the people that you’ve referenced. Nothing that Mr. Greenberg did was ‘inappropriate.’”

But Marcus Owens, an attorney at Loeb & Loeb who formerly worked in the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division, told The Daily Beast it is atypical for a think tank president to go to such lengths to help a board member with his business interests.

“They suggest an unusual degree of attention being paid to a donor who apparently has a business issue,” he said. “The fact that it appears that the head of the charity was willing to travel to Russia to help resolve them, that would be truly extraordinary.”

The Moscow meetings weren’t the only topic of discussion between Simes and Butina.

Simes also paired Butina up with Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor-in-chief of the Center’s magazine, The National Interest.

“I will be mention [sic] to him that he may get a piece from you,” Simes added.

Butina then emailed Heilbrunn on June 10, 2015, writing that she had met Simes at the Center’s Washington office the previous month. She also sent a draft of an article titled “The Bear and the Elephant,” arguing that a Republican president could warm relations between the U.S. and Russia.

“Many thanks for your audacious essay,” Heilbrunn wrote. “I will be delighted to publish it and will edit it tomorrow. We will send you a final copy for your approval but I don’t anticipate any big changes.”

““Audacious’!!!” Erickson replied. “You’re on your way to becoming a notable on-line columnist!!! If Dmitri Simes’ editors are happy, DMITRI is happy - well done, my brilliant Siberian princess!!””

Butina then forwarded Heilbrunn’s email to Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican insider and her American love interest.

“‘Audacious’!!!” Erickson replied. “You’re on your way to becoming a notable on-line columnist!!! If Dmitri Simes’ editors are happy, DMITRI is happy - well done, my brilliant Siberian princess!!!”

The magazine published it two days later. About a week after its publication, Butina sent a thank-you email to Heilbrunn and Simes.

“Thank you very much for publishing my article,” she wrote. “It was translated by RT into Russian and really exploded Russian media. Now there are some political scientists that told that they agree with me. It makes me happy because before no one believed and at least talked that Russian-American relationships could be restored thanks to the future republican president.”

Butina then suggested writing another piece for the magazine about Russian oil projects.

“Dear Maria, I am pleased to hear that your piece had a real impact in Russia,” Simes replied. “I know Jacob was quite pleased to publish it. He is planning to be in touch with you regarding other possibilities. Please convey my regards to Alexandr Torshin. We are always glad to see him in Washington.”

Heilbrunn then emailed Butina and asked if she would write a piece for the magazine about her efforts to legalize guns in Russia. But a second piece never materialized.

In August 2015, Reuters reported that the Central Bank had seized control of Investtorgbank. Not long afterward, friction appears to have emerged between Simes, Butina, and Torshin. In a series of Twitter direct messages sent on Nov. 17, 2015, Torshin complained to Butina, claiming he was receiving lots of phone calls from Simes. The DMs were written in Russian and translated by The Daily Beast.

“Yes, incidentally, Simes is pressuring me about the interests of Greenberg,” Torshin wrote. “I really don't like that. Who knows what they will think in the Central Bank. Today I made it very clear that I am not their helper for these affairs in the Central Bank. I ask that you don't speak with anyone about banking in the Russian Federation. They may try to get you involved as well.”

“I’m not talking about it with anyone,” Butina replied. “You and I know that you are only talking to them because of an old friendship and not personal interests, but from the outside it will look different.”

Torshin then replied: “It’s necessary to know the limits: It’s one thing if Greenberg comes to invite him to lunch, that's fine, but these phone calls need to stop. What, are you their informant or something?! Screw them. The consequences could be very serious.”

“There is one nuance,” Torshin continued. “The chances of improving U.S.-Russia relations are increasing. We don't need a scandal (and Greenberg has a way of that). Scandal cuts down on chances for investment, although after today's latest announcement by Gref about the major banking crisis in Russia it would harm investments even more.”

Butina seemed to share Torshin’s concerns.

“Then it’s absolutely necessary to get permission for negotiations with them from the boss,” she replied. “It’s necessary to cover our rear. Later on no one will bother to try to get to the bottom of what your motives were. Don’t forget, Greenberg for some reason thinks you promised to protect his investments... You promised him NOTHING.”

Torshin then replied, “I stopped communications on this theme with Simes today. And I explained everything to him, the threats it carries to my reputation. There will be no more conversations about this topic. The boss is aware that they are appealing to me.”

“I fully support this approach,” Butina replied.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/maria-but ... c-wise-man



White House lawyer who may have incriminated Trump in extensive Mueller interviews is leaving the administration

Alex Lockie
Donald McGahn Trump
Don McGahn, the White House counsel, with President Donald Trump.
Andrew Harnik/AP
The White House counsel, Don McGahn, is leaving the Trump administration this fall, President Donald Trump said Wednesday.
McGahn is said to have cooperated extensively with the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing by Trump.
McGahn has reportedly clashed with Trump and may have incriminated him during 30 hours of interviews with Mueller's team.
After the news of McGahn's conversations with Mueller went public, Trump tweeted that McGahn was not a "RAT" like the White House counsel John Dean in the Watergate scandal.
The White House counsel, Don McGahn, is leaving the Trump administration in the fall, President Donald Trump said Wednesday.

His planned departure comes after he cooperated extensively with the special counsel's investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing from Trump.

Trump said McGahn would "hopefully" leave the administration after the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

"I have worked with Don for a long time and truly appreciate his service!" Trump said.

Trump was said to have clashed with McGahn after Trump openly pondered a pardon for Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman whom a jury last week found guilty of financial crimes unrelated to the campaign.

Vanity Fair reported on Monday that McGahn refused to participate in the pardoning process and that Trump considered bringing on a new lawyer.

McGahn was already reported to have extensively cooperated with the special counsel Robert Mueller in a way that could have incriminated Trump in the investigation into whether he obstructed justice in connection to the Russia investigation.

The New York Times reported earlier in August that McGahn had given 30 hours of interviews to Mueller over the past nine months. The report said that during those talks, McGahn and his lawyer focused on absolving McGahn of wrongdoing while candidly discussing inner-circle conversations with Trump related to the investigation.

These discussions reportedly touched on Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey and his focus on putting loyal officials in charge of the investigation, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump called The Times' story "Fake" because he said it implied that McGahn had become a "RAT" like John Dean, the White House counsel who cooperated with prosecutors in the Watergate scandal that helped end Richard Nixon's presidency.

Trump insisted that he actually allowed McGahn and others to cooperate with Mueller because he had "nothing to hide" and wanted to get to the end of the investigation.

More quietly, away from the scandals that dominate news coverage, McGahn helped Trump select a record number of conservative federal judges in what may prove to be one of Trump's more consequential moves as president.

Emmet Flood, a former Clinton administration official who joined the White House in May to help with the Russia investigation, is a likely replacement for McGahn, the news website Axios reported.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-l ... use-2018-8
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 30, 2018 9:03 am

‘Winter is coming’: Allies fear Trump has neither the staff nor strategy to protect himself from the gathering legal storm. Trump tells confidants that he wonders why he doesn’t have competent lawyers like Abbe Lowell, who represents Jared Kushner.
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‘Winter is coming’: Allies fear Trump isn’t prepared for gathering legal storm

Ashley ParkerAugust 29 at 8:11 PM
President Trump’s advisers and allies are increasingly worried that he has neither the staff nor the strategy to protect himself from a possible Democratic takeover of the House, which would empower the opposition party to shower the administration with subpoenas or even pursue impeachment charges.

Within Trump’s orbit, there is consensus that his current legal team is not equipped to effectively navigate an onslaught of congressional demands, and there has been broad discussion about bringing on new lawyers experienced in white-collar defense and political scandals.

The president and some of his advisers have discussed possibly adding veteran defense attorney Abbe Lowell, who currently represents Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, to Trump’s personal legal team if an impeachment battle or other fights with Congress emerge after the midterm elections, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump advisers also are discussing recruiting experienced legal firepower to the Office of White House Counsel, which is facing departures and has dwindled in size at a critical juncture. The office has about 25 lawyers now, down from roughly 35 earlier in the presidency, according to a White House official with direct knowledge.

Trump announced Wednesday that Donald McGahn will depart as White House counsel this fall, once the Senate confirms Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. Three of McGahn’s deputies — Greg Katsas, Uttam Dhillon and Makan Delrahim — have departed, and a fourth, Stefan Passantino, will have his last day Friday. That leaves John Eisenberg, who handles national security, as the lone deputy counsel.

Trump recently has consulted his personal attorneys about the likelihood of impeachment proceedings. And McGahn and other aides have invoked the prospect of impeachment to persuade the president not to take actions or behave in ways that they believe would hurt him, officials said.

Still, Trump has not directed his lawyers or his political aides to prepare an action plan, leaving allies to fret that the president does not appreciate the magnitude of what could be in store next year.

This account of the president and his team grappling with a potential crisis is based on interviews this week with 26 White House officials, presidential advisers, and lawyers and strategists close to the administration, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said he and the president have discussed the possibility that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III will issue a damning report to Congress.

“We’ve talked a lot about impeachment at different times,” Giuliani said. “It’s the only thing that hangs out there. They can’t [criminally] charge him.”

If Democrats control the House, the oversight committees likely would use their subpoena power as a weapon to assail the administration, investigating with a vengeance. The committees could hold hearings about policies
such as the travel ban affecting majority-Muslim countries and “zero tolerance” family separation, as well as on possible ethical misconduct throughout the administration or the Trump family’s private businesses.

White House officials defended Trump’s lack of preparation by saying he is focused squarely on helping Republicans preserve their majorities in the Nov. 6 midterm elections rather than, in the words of one senior official, “panicking about something that could happen.”

Any Democratic salvos would not happen until new members take office in January, which Trump advisers said seems like eons away in an administration juggling so many immediate problems. As a result, preparing for possible impeachment proceedings is not at the top of Trump’s to-do list.

“I don’t know if he’s really thought about it in depth yet,” Giuliani said.

One source of growing anxiety among Trump allies is the worry that the president and some senior White House officials are not anxious enough. Although Trump sometimes talks about impeachment with his advisers, in other moments, he gets mad that “the i-word,” as he calls it, is raised, according to his associates.

“Winter is coming,” said one Trump ally in close communication with the White House. “Assuming Democrats win the House, which we all believe is a very strong likelihood, the White House will be under siege. But it’s like tumbleweeds rolling down the halls over there. Nobody’s prepared for war.”

Trump has told confidants that some of his aides have highly competent lawyers such as Lowell, who represents Kushner, and William A. Burck, who represents McGahn as well as former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

“He wonders why he doesn’t have lawyers like that,” said one person who has discussed the matter with Trump.

Another adviser said Trump remarked this year, “I need a lawyer like Abbe.”

Giuliani said that he has not heard of Trump considering adding Lowell to the team but that he would be a great choice because of his thorough and aggressive style.

“This president might like that better,” Giuliani said. “If he thinks someone isn’t being tough enough, he has a tendency to go out to defend himself. And that’s not good.”

Lowell declined to comment, and people familiar with the talks said it was unclear whether he would have the time for or interest in working for Trump, considering that he already represents Kushner.

Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for Trump’s legal team, recommended that the president hire lawyers who are “real scholars of the Constitution” and who are well versed in history’s impeachment proceedings for Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson.

“I would think that the type of lawyer most able to handle the impeachment scenario would be someone from the appellate and Supreme Court bar — someone of the Ted Olson or Paul Clement or Andy Pincus level, someone who knows how to make the kind of arguments should it come to a vote in the Senate,” Corallo said.

Emmet Flood, a White House lawyer and McGahn ally who handles the special counsel’s Russia investigation, has long been considered a top prospect to replace McGahn. People close to Flood said that if Trump offers him the counsel’s job, he would have to evaluate how best he could continue his priority of serving as the White House’s chief strategist with the Mueller probe.

Flood, often described as a lawyer’s lawyer, is in many ways the opposite of Trump and Giuliani, yet the president has told advisers he is impressed by Flood’s legal chops and hard-line positions defending the prerogatives of the White House.

“The next White House counsel needs to be prepared for a lot of interactions on the Hill,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). “If the Democrats do take back the House, you can expect the White House counsel to be center stage in answering subpoenas and really in the middle of it all.”

White House officials said Trump is working hard on the campaign trail to prevent Democrats from winning a majority in either the House or the Senate.

“We don’t expect Democrats to take over,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “Democrats have no message other than to attack the president. . . . If they want to go backwards, they can vote for Democrats. If they want to continue moving forward under President Trump, they should vote for people that support his policies.”

White House aides, including deputy chief of staff Johnny ­DeStefano and political director Bill Stepien, have tried to ratchet down Trump’s expectations for the elections, saying that projections look grim in the House.

Some of Trump’s advisers, including recently departed White House legislative affairs director Marc Short, have said that Democrats winning the House could help the president’s reelection chances in 2020 if they overplay their hand going after Trump, as Republicans did in Clinton’s second term.

Trump has so far not accepted that argument, often saying that Republicans are going to keep the House, according to people familiar with the talks.

Many Trump associates inside and outside the government say the opposite. They warn that a Democratic House majority could all but paralyze the White House with investigations, requests for documents and calls to testify on any number of issues, including Trump’s businesses.

One adviser recalled recently telling Trump, “They will crush you if they win. You don’t want them investigating every single thing you’ve done.”

Another concern is that the White House, which already has struggled in attracting top-caliber talent to staff positions, could face an exodus if Democrats take over the House, because aides fear their mere proximity to the president could place them in legal limbo and possibly result in hefty lawyers’ fees.

“It stops good people from potentially serving because nobody wants to inherit a $400,000 legal bill,” said another Trump adviser.

Trump allies privately worry that the West Wing staff is barely equipped to handle basic crisis communications functions, such as distributing robust talking points to key surrogates, and question how the operation could handle an impeachment trial or other potential battles.

Trump sees the administration as having a singular focus — him — and therefore is less concerned with the institution of the presidency and not aware of the vast infrastructure often required to protect it, according to some of his allies.

During the impeachment proceedings against Clinton, the White House staffed a robust war room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that included scores of lawyers, as well as communications staffers and other strategists.

Jack Quinn, who served as White House counsel under Clinton, said his office had at least 40 lawyers and as many as 60 during key times. He estimated that he spent between half and three-quarters of his time dealing with investigations.

“I appreciate that Rudy Giuliani is doing a lot of the public speaking and perhaps some other things,” Quinn said. But, he added, “it’s a little bit of a mystery to me who is doing the outside legal work.”

“The president needs to have the very best lawyers he can get both in the White House and outside representing him personally,” Quinn said.

Trump allies lament that the current administration has no such infrastructure and fret that there are no indications it is building one.

“What he really has to get ready for is an onslaught from all of these committees,” Giuliani said of congressional inquiries. “Because what the Democrats want is death by a thousand cuts.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... f40596f0a7


Bruce Ohr Fought Russian Organized Crime. Now He’s a Target of Trump.

Aug. 27, 2018

The longtime Justice Department official Bruce G. Ohr, center, has come under fire from President Trump and his allies.Lucía Godínez/Agencia El Universal, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON — When a lawyer for one of Russia’s most powerful reputed crime bosses arrived at F.B.I. headquarters one day around 2006, he wanted to cut a deal. The Russian, Semion Y. Mogilevich, had been indicted three years earlier by the department on charges of defrauding a company outside Philadelphia out of $150 million and could not travel for fear of arrest.

As the lawyer made his pitch, a supervising F.B.I. agent and a senior career Justice Department official, Bruce G. Ohr, both listened intently, according to a former bureau official who described the meeting. The case was significant for American law enforcement. It had made headlines and laid the groundwork for Justice Department efforts to combat Russian organized crime overseas.

Finally, the F.B.I. agent spoke. No deal, he said; Mr. Mogilevich must surrender. Mr. Ohr said little, but his unwillingness to negotiate was signal enough: The Justice Department would not compromise with the Russian mafia.

“Occasionally you run across people from the Justice Department who have an air of superiority toward agents, and Bruce had none of that,” said Chris Swecker, a former senior F.B.I. official who worked with Mr. Ohr. “He was just the opposite. He was well liked at the F.B.I. and fought for their cases.”

In nearly three decades at the Justice Department, Mr. Ohr has made a career of supporting and facilitating important cases that targeted Russian organized crime. Now he is a target of President Trump, who has put his security clearance under review and attacked him publicly, and allies. They have cast Mr. Ohr and his wife — who worked as a contractor at the same research firm that produced a damaging dossier of information about Mr. Trump — as villains, part of a pro-Clinton cabal out to destroy the president.

But Mr. Ohr, 56, is far from corrupt, friends and former colleagues said. An experienced law enforcement official, he has a deep understanding of the underworld of Russian organized crime, they said, including raising concerns about at least one oligarch whose name has resurfaced amid the scrutiny of contacts between Trump associates and Russia.

As part of this work, Mr. Ohr met a British spy who specialized in Russia, Christopher Steele, and the two men developed a bond based on their shared expertise. Mr. Steele went on to investigate ties between Mr. Trump and Russia for the same research firm, Fusion GPS, where Ms. Ohr was a contractor.

Those connections have upended Mr. Ohr’s once relatively anonymous life, dragging him into the maelstrom of the Russia investigation. Justice Department officials transferred Mr. Ohr, an associate deputy attorney general, to a less powerful post last year after learning about his contacts with Mr. Steele and the scope of his wife’s work. If he loses his security clearance, he would probably be forced to leave federal law enforcement after nearly three decades.

“For him to be in the Justice Department, and to be doing what he did, that is a disgrace,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Ohr this month to reporters.

On Tuesday, Mr. Ohr is to appear before a closed hearing of the House Judiciary and House Oversight committees, jointly investigating F.B.I. and Justice Department activities related to the 2016 election. Republicans are likely to ask Mr. Ohr why he met with Mr. Steele even after the F.B.I. terminated its relationship with Mr. Steele for speaking to the news media and who approved the meetings.

Those who know Mr. Ohr seem perplexed that the president has singled him out. Co-workers and former associates describe him as a scrupulous government official who cares deeply about the Justice Department.

“He’s a small player in a bigger, broader stage here,” Mr. Swecker said. “I feel bad for him. I think he is well intentioned. I view him as someone who would never do anything malicious.”

Mr. Ohr’s lawyer, Joshua Berman, declined to comment for this article.

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Ohr joined the Justice Department in 1991 from a law firm in San Francisco. As a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, he twice won top awards and rose to be chief of the district’s violent gangs unit.

He had a knack for managing people and pushing cases forward, former associates said, which helped propel him to a job at the Justice Department in Washington in 1999 as the head of the organized crime and racketeering section. He provided the F.B.I. with resources to prosecute cases and navigated relationships with the intelligence community, brokering disputes and earning the respect of the F.B.I. and prosecutors.

As oligarchs and gangs flourished in Eurasia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mr. Ohr, his deputies, the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors tackled Russian crime syndicates, said J. Kenneth Lowrie, a former federal prosecutor who was Mr. Ohr’s longtime deputy.

“Until 9/11, organized crime was one of the main priority criminal programs at the Justice Department,” said Mr. Lowrie, who retired in 2008. “Russian organized crime was a focus. Bruce knew a lot of the Russia stuff and traveled there.”


Christopher Steele, the former British spy and F.B.I. informant, compiled a dossier that contained salacious material about the president.Victoria Jones/Press Association, via Associated Press
Mr. Ohr’s section supported the 2000 prosecution of Pavlo Lazarenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine, who was convicted of money laundering, wire fraud and extortion in a case brought by the office of the United States attorney in San Francisco at the time, Robert S. Mueller III, who is now the special counsel.

Mr. Ohr was a manager, not a litigator, who built bridges with law enforcement agencies around the world, former Justice Department officials said. He sent top deputies to Hungary to root out the nascent Russian mob in the early 2000s. F.B.I. agents viewed the commitment as a sign of his seriousness about combating Russian organized crime.

In 2006, Mr. Ohr was part of a group of government officials who revoked the visa of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and aluminum magnate. Officials were concerned that Mr. Deripaska might try to come to the United States to launder illicit profits through real estate, a former law enforcement official said.

Mr. Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, has been tied to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted last week of tax and bank fraud. In 2016, Mr. Manafort offered private campaign briefings to Mr. Deripaska, raising concerns about the prospect of Russians wielding influence inside the White House. In April, the United States imposed sanctions on Mr. Deripaska.

In 2007, Mr. Ohr met Mr. Steele, who was still with MI-6, the British spy service, according to a former senior American law enforcement official who knows both men. Both governments approved their contacts, the former official said.

Mr. Ohr moved on to other senior jobs, starting in 2010 as counsel for international relations in the Justice Department’s transnational organized crime and international affairs section, where he bolstered partnerships with foreign law enforcement agencies. In 2014, he became the director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, distributing grant money to bolster prosecutorial work.

He stayed in touch with Mr. Steele, meeting him in Rome in 2014 and in Washington in 2015.

For the F.B.I., their relationship would come in handy. A longtime informant who provided valuable tips on corruption, Mr. Steele violated his confidentiality agreement with the F.B.I. when he disclosed to a reporter in the months before the 2016 election that he had been working with the bureau. He had expressed frustration that his information about Mr. Trump, gathered for Fusion GPS, the research firm that hired him on behalf of Democrats to research the candidate, had gone seemingly nowhere in the F.B.I.

In early November 2016, the agent handling Mr. Steele told him not to obtain intelligence “on behalf of the F.B.I.”

That did not stop F.B.I. agents from collecting coveted information from Mr. Steele. While the F.B.I. could no longer consider him a confidential informant, former officials said, agents eager to assess the dossier as part of their counterintelligence investigation into links between Trump associates and Russia’s election interference could still document what he was telling a third party — Mr. Ohr.

And when Mr. Ohr approached the F.B.I. about his relationship with Mr. Steele, bureau officials saw an opportunity.

Mr. Ohr met with Mr. Steele almost a dozen times beginning in late 2016 through May 2017, according to congressional officials. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Ohr after the meetings and documented the information.

Republicans have seized on the meetings. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked the Justice Department to declassify the F.B.I.’s reports on them. “It seems like he is a key player,” Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a staunch supporter of the president, told Fox News this month.

But the arrangement was not unusual, former law enforcement officials said. Senior F.B.I. officials were aware of the Steele meetings, and those involved followed internal guidelines, a former official said.

Mr. Ohr’s contacts with Mr. Steele were one small part of a broader effort to determine whether the allegations in the dossier were true, a former official said. The F.B.I. also did not have all the reports that Mr. Steele had produced and agents were keen to get them.

Conservatives have also targeted Ms. Ohr, whose contract work at Fusion GPS involved monitoring Russian news media and compiling connections between Mr. Trump and Russia from public documents. She did not work on the dossier, according to a person familiar with her work for Fusion GPS.

Mr. Ohr still has a job at the Justice Department, though he is functionally no longer a manager. It is unclear how long that will last. Mr. Trump has called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire Mr. Ohr.

“It seems that Bruce had two sins: He met with Chris Steele and his wife worked for Fusion GPS. None of that seems wrong to me,” Mr. Lowrie said. “Bruce is a straight arrow. He was totally nonpartisan, as we all were expected” to be.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/us/p ... -smartlock



Stormy Daniels’ lawyer asks court for expedited deposition of President Trump


PHOTO: Stormy Daniels and her Attorney Michael Avenatti appear on "The View," April 17, 2018.Heidi Gutman/ABC
Coming upNews headlines today: Aug. 29, 2018

The time has come for Stormy Daniels to have her day in court, her lawyer said.

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"We want to get on with it," Michael Avenatti said. "There is no reason why the case should continue to be delayed."

One week after Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney to President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty to eight felonies —— including a violation of campaign finance law in connection with his role in negotiating a non-disclosure agreement with Daniels —— Avenatti is asking a federal judge to allow his client’s civil lawsuit against Cohen and Trump to move forward.

The attorney is also seeking to question the president under oath on an expedited schedule.

"I would be prepared to sit across from the president and take his deposition on 48-hours’ notice," Avenatti told ABC News. "I would literally take that deposition anywhere in the world."

Avenatti is not likely to get his wish without a fight from the president, who would likely resist any attempt to compel his testimony.

Daniels, an adult-film star whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, alleges that she had a sexual encounter with then-businessman Trump in 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Trump has denied the allegation.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump waits for the arrival of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to the West Wing of the White House in Washington, July 30, 2018.Susan Walsh/AP
President Donald Trump waits for the arrival of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to the West Wing of the White House in Washington, July 30, 2018.more +
(MORE: Sanders says Trump did 'nothing wrong' in wake of Cohen allegations)
She filed a lawsuit in March, arguing that the $130,000 hush money pact reached just prior to the 2016 presidential election is invalid. She claimed in court filings that the agreement violated federal election laws and was never legally formed because it lacked a signature from Trump.

PHOTO: Stormy Daniels speaks outside federal court in New York, April 16, 2018. Mary Altaffer/AP, FILE
Stormy Daniels speaks outside federal court in New York, April 16, 2018.
Following the April law enforcement raids of Cohen’s New York properties, U.S. District Court Judge S. James Otero placed the entire civil dispute on hold until at least mid-September. Cohen had informed the court that he would assert his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination if questioned about his role in the deal.

(MORE: Judge won't issue gag order for Stormy Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti)
But in a Manhattan federal courthouse on August 21, the president’s long-time fixer reversed course when he told a federal judge during a plea hearing that he made the payment to Daniels "in coordination with, and at the direction of" Trump. He did this, he said, "for the principal purpose of influencing the election."

"[N]ow that Mr. Cohen has admitted to his crimes under oath before the district judge in the Southern District of New York, there is no substantive justification for putting this case on hold," Avenatti wrote in a new court filing. "A myriad of litigation activities may occur in this case that would not disturb what remains of Mr. Cohen’s Fifth Amendment rights."

Not so fast, argued Cohen’s attorney Brent Blakely.

(MORE: Stormy Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti: 'I should be taken seriously' as possible presidential hopeful)
Blakely asked the court to extend the stay on the Daniels’ case until after the New York judge determines the length of any prison term for Cohen, because "[I]t is clear that the testimony or discovery he may provide in this case may be used against him at sentencing," according to court documents.

Cohen is scheduled to be sentenced on December 12.

(MORE: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, pleads guilty to illegal campaign contributions 'at the direction of a candidate for federal office')
"Until he is sentenced, it is not over," Blakely told ABC News. "My position is the entire case should be stayed until Mr. Cohen is sentenced at which time we can vigorously defend ourselves in court and pursue any claims Cohen may have."

Avenatti said he’s willing to delay questioning Cohen until immediately after his sentencing, but argued there is no longer any reason to keep the rest of the case on ice.

(MORE: Stormy Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti weighs in on her arrest and his possible 2020 aspirations)
"This was a case that was filed in March and we've been chomping at the bit to get this discovery completed," Avenatti said. "We'll wait until after the sentencing to take [Cohen’s] deposition, but that shouldn't preclude us from taking Trump's deposition. He's going to have to answer questions about what happened in connection with this payment and the cover up."

An attorney for Trump, Charles Harder, joined in Cohen’s arguments that the Daniels’ case should remain on hold. Harder did not immediately respond to a request from ABC News for comment on the new court filings.

Even if Judge Otero decides to restart Daniels’ case, it’s not a given that the president would be required to give personal testimony.

While the US Supreme Court has ruled – in the 1997 Paula Jones harassment case against President Bill Clinton - that a sitting president does not have broad immunity from civil lawsuits arising out of private actions, the justices also cautioned that lower court judges should use discretion to accommodate the president’s schedule and to give deference to the responsibilities of the office.

The next hearing in the case is scheduled for September 10 in Los Angeles.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/avenatt ... d=57480465
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 30, 2018 11:36 am

FBI rebuts Trump's tweet about China hacking Hillary Clinton's email [a conspiracy theory which seems to have originated from GOP Rep Louis Gohmert]: "The FBI has not found any evidence the [Clinton] servers were compromised."

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Suspicious Russian embassy transactions days after Trump took office led to bank probe: Kislyak was paid 2x the amount of past years; embassy officials tried to withdraw 5x the amount of their normal monthly withdrawal.

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https://twitter.com/dcpoll



Benjamin Wittes


Wow. This is a super-interesting story by @a_cormier_ and @JasonLeopold. It has a dozen interesting dimensions. I am going to mention only a few of them here. I urge people to read the whole thing, which I am still digesting.
6:56 AM - 17 Jan 2018 from Washington, DC


For starters, I want to stress that I don’t have a unified field theory to explain what the story means. But it reflects a pattern of highly interesting Russian government financial transactions that any serious investigation would be taking seriously.

And Robert Mueller is, at least according to the story, doing exactly that.

Before diving in, let me note that there are at least three reasons to take Cormier and Leopold seriously. The first is that they identified specific wire transfers to and from Paul Manafort as important in the days *before* his indictment.

The second is that their reporting—in that story, in one that followed this past fall, and in this one—seems to reflect actual law enforcement sources. That does not necessarily mean Mueller folks, but they do seem to have a line into some stream of actual information.

The third is that the subject of this story—and the one before it—is a remarkably interesting set of data: Treasury Department suspicious activity reporting by Citibank about Russian government banking activity.

Following the money is off the beaten track in the current reporting on L’Affaire Russe. And it may turn out to be not the most fruitful path in the long run. It is, however, a very interesting path. And if their information is good, it looks like an increasingly promising one.

Cormier and Leopold took a lot of criticism for their earlier story on wire transfers to the Russian embassy. Without rehashing the controversy, I will say that I said at the time that the story warranted more consideration than it was receiving. This followup emphasizes that.

All that said, the story raises more questions than it answers.

It is not obvious that this pattern of money movement has anything to do with L’Affaire Russe. It could be legitimate, though I’m not entirely sure how.

It could also be evidence of routine Russian graft of the type the Putin regime is known for.

It could also be evidence of intelligence activity that is unrelated to the U.S. election interference—though the coincidence in time of some of the transactions would be, well, coincidental.

But it also could be walking-around money that is connected to the broader Russian election interference. Bottom line, in my view, is that it’s probably time for other reporters to start taking this investigative line more seriously.

I’ve asked @a_cormier_ to join me today on the @lawfareblog Podcast to discuss the story, what we know, what we don’t know, and what it all means.

That’s all I got—for now.
https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/stat ... 4318082048
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 31, 2018 9:11 am


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnLyypuGG6o

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Understanding Trump vs. Bruce Ohr: Think Russia’s top crime boss, Semion Mogilevich

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Amidst President Donald Trump’s ongoing threats to revoke security clearances from various critics, perhaps the most mysterious person on his enemy list is Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department lawyer who has repeatedly been a Trump target for reasons that have never been clearly articulated. Ohr has never criticized Trump as far as anyone is aware, and has worked at the Justice Department as an award-winning civil servant for nearly thirty years in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

It has been noted that Ohr had ties to the notorious Christopher Steele dossier and that his wife worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Steele, a former British agent, to investigate Trump. But there is quite likely another reason which could trouble Trump even more: Ohr’s job in the Justice Department involved facing off against Russian crime boss Semion Mogilevich whose operatives have been using Trump branded properties to launder millions of dollars for more than three decades. If the FBI’s investigations turn toward Trump’s ties to Russian organized crime, which is entirely foreseeable, the president may be interested in trying to delegitimize those efforts as he has attempted with other aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. What the public should also understand is how Mogilevich has served as an agent for Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the United States and abroad.

If one tracks Trump’s ties to Russia, the name Mogilevich pops up more than any single name, beginning in 1984 when alleged Mogilevich operative David Bogatin bought five condos in Trump Tower for $6 million in cash. Over the years, no fewer than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold in all cash purchases to anonymous shell companies—the two criteria that set off alarm bells among anti-money laundering authorities. In 2002, after Trump had gone belly up in Atlantic City, Bayrock, a real estate development company that allegedly had ties to Mogilevich, moved into Trump Tower and partnered with Trump—in the process bailing out the bankrupt real estate mogul and putting him in a position to eventually run for the presidency.

And Ohr is not the only Mogilevich specialist who has been the subject of Trump’s ire. Last September, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page was fired from her position on Mueller’s probe into the Trump-Russia scandal after anti-Trump text messages exchanged between her and Peter Strzok came to light. (Strzok, a member of Mueller’s team with whom Page was having a relationship, was also fired.) However, little attention was paid to what may well be the most interesting item on Page’s resume—her considerable experience prosecuting money laundering cases involving Russian organized crime, including working with the FBI’s task force in Budapest to prosecute a money-laundering case against Dmitry Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch who partnered with both Paul Manafort and Semion Mogilevich.

“For him to be in the Justice Department, and to be doing what he did, that is a disgrace,” the President recently told reporters in reference to Ohr. Why go after Ohr, when many close observers assess that he was doing his duty by reporting Steele’s information to the FBI in late November 2017? Sitting on that information from the former British intelligence officer, who had his own track record helping the United States fight Russian organize crime, would have been a serious dereliction. And why does the president risk so much politically by even threatening to pull the security clearances of an active Justice Department official without any of the ordinary procedures for doing so?

In sum, a key to understanding Trump’s relationships with Russia goes through organized criminal syndicates. As I report on all this information and more in House of Trump, House of Putin, unlike the American Mafia, Russian mobsters operate as de facto state actors, with high-ranking crime bosses like Mogilevich working with and at the behest of Putin. All of which raises the question of whether Trump, by coming down on Ohr and perhaps also Page, is trying to keep the real story behind his many ties to Mogilevich operatives from unraveling.

https://www.justsecurity.org/60528/unde ... ogilevich/
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 31, 2018 12:16 pm

Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department lawyer, says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting 2 years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump "over a barrel," according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.

Patten, Cambridge Analytica contractor, business partner of suspected Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik indicted with Manafort, reaches plea deal.

AP sources: Lawyer Bruce Ohr was told Russia had ‘Trump over a barrel’


WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump “over a barrel,” according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.

The lawyer, Bruce Ohr, also says he learned that a Trump campaign aide had met with higher-level Russian officials than the aide had acknowledged, the people said.

The previously unreported details of the July 30, 2016, breakfast with Christopher Steele, which Ohr described to lawmakers this week in a private interview, reveal an exchange of potentially explosive information about Trump between two men the president has relentlessly sought to discredit.

They add to the public understanding of those pivotal summer months as the FBI and intelligence community scrambled to untangle possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. And they reflect the concern of Steele, a longtime FBI informant whose Democratic-funded research into Trump ties to Russia was compiled into a dossier, that the Republican presidential candidate was possibly compromised and his urgent efforts to convey that anxiety to contacts at the FBI and Justice Department.

The people who discussed Ohr’s interview were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the closed session and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Among the things Ohr said he learned from Steele during the breakfast was that an unnamed former Russian intelligence official had said that Russian intelligence believed “they had Trump over a barrel,” according to people familiar with the meeting. It was not clear from Ohr’s interview whether Steele had been directly told that or had picked that up through his contacts, but the broader sentiment is echoed in Steele’s research dossier.

Steele and Ohr, at the time of the election a senior official in the deputy attorney general’s office, had first met a decade earlier and bonded over a shared interest in international organized crime. They met several times during the presidential campaign, a relationship that exposed both men and federal law enforcement more generally to partisan criticism, including from Trump.

Republicans contend the FBI relied excessively on the dossier during its investigation and to obtain a secret wiretap application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. They also say Ohr went outside his job description and chain of command by meeting with Steele, including after his termination as a FBI source, and then relaying information to the FBI.

Trump this month proposed stripping Ohr, who until this year had been largely anonymous during his decades-long Justice Department career, of his security clearance and has asked “how the hell” he remains employed.

Trump has called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt” and has denied any collusion between his campaign and Moscow.

Trump and some of his supporters in Congress have also accused the FBI of launching the entire Russia counterintelligence investigation based on the dossier. But memos authored by Republicans and Democrats and declassified this year show the probe was triggered by information the U.S. government received earlier about the Russian contacts of then-Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

The FBI’s investigation was already under way by the time it received Steele’s dossier, and Ohr was not the original source of information from it.

One of the meetings described to House lawmakers Tuesday was a Washington breakfast attended by Steele, an associate of his and Ohr. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, who worked for the political research firm, Fusion GPS, that hired Steele, attended at least part of the breakfast.

Ohr also told Congress that Steele told him that Page, a Trump campaign aide who traveled to Moscow that same month and whose ties to Russia attracted FBI scrutiny, had met with more senior Russian officials than he had acknowledged meeting with.

That breakfast took place amid ongoing FBI concerns about Russian election interference and possible communication with Trump associates. By that point, Russian hackers had penetrated Democratic email accounts, including that of the Clinton campaign chairman, and Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign associate, was said to have revealed that Russians had “dirt” on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of emails, according to court papers. That revelation prompted the FBI to open the counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, one day after the breakfast but based on entirely different information.

Ohr told lawmakers he could not vouch for the accuracy of Steele’s information but has said he considered him a reliable FBI informant who delivered credible and actionable intelligence, including his investigation into corruption at FIFA, soccer’s global governing body.

In the interview, Ohr acknowledged that he had not told superiors in his office, including Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, about his meetings with Steele because he considered the information inflammatory raw source material.

He also provided new details about the department’s move to reassign him once his Steele ties were brought to light.

Ohr said he met in late December 2017 with two senior Justice Department officials, Scott Schools and James Crowell, who told him they were unhappy he had not proactively disclosed his meetings with Steele. They said he was being stripped of his associate deputy attorney post as part of a planned internal reorganization, people familiar with Ohr’s account say.

He met again soon after with one of the officials, who told him Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein did not believe he could continue in his current position as director of a drug grant-distribution program — known as the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force.

Sessions and Rosenstein, Ohr was told, did not want him in the post because it entailed White House meetings and interactions, the people said.

Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores declined to comment.
https://apnews.com/4ac772445073491aa7d3ca9e558e0144



Document: W. Samuel Patten Charged with Acting as an Agent of a Foreign Power

By Mikhaila Fogel Friday, August 31, 2018, 10:58 AM

Longtime Washington political operative W. Samuel Patten was charged on Friday for failing to register as an agent of a foreign power. The Justice Department alleges that between 2014 and 2018, Patten acted on behalf of the Ukrainian political party, Opposition Bloc, a Russia-allied political group. The case was reportedly referred to the Justice Department National Security Division by the special counsel's office. The criminal information against Patten is available in full below:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-w- ... eign-power



Man linked to Paul Manafort associate agrees to cooperate with prosecutors after being charged with violating foreign agent registration law
An associate of Konstantin Kilimnik, the Russian co-defendant of ex-Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, was charged Friday with failing to register with the federal goverment as an agent of foreign interests.
W. Samuel Patten allegedly did work for a Ukraine political party and a Ukraine oligarch, for whom he set up meetings with members of Congress, according to prosecutors.
Patten is connected to Konstantin Kilimnik, who was charged with Manafort in June by special counsel Robert Mueller with trying to tamper with potential witnesses against Manafort.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/feds-ch ... afort.html



AMONG OTHER THINGS, SAM PATTEN PLEA SIGNALS THAT MUELLER REFERRALS WILL INCLUDE FALSE CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY

August 31, 2018/7 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
As I noted in an update to this post, another sleazy influence peddler, Sam Patten, just pled guilty to a FARA violation. As his criminal information lays out, he pled to serving as an agent of Konstantin Kilimnik and Serhiy Lyovochkin without registering under FARA. His plea agreement (which notes he first made a proffer to Mueller’s team on May 22, meaning this is another investigation that has been going on months that is being finalized in the last days of August) included a cooperation agreement.

More interesting details, however, are the descriptions of the other crimes he is being excused from, which appear in the statement of the offense.

First, there’s a description of how he served as a straw purchaser for Lyovochkin for inauguration tickets.

To circumvent the foreign donation restriction, PATTEN, with the knowledge of Foreigner A, solicited a United States citizen to act as a “straw” purchaser so that he could conceal from the [Presidential Inauguration Committee] that the tickets for the inauguration were being paid for from a foreign source. The straw purchaser paid $50,000 for four inauguration tickets. The straw purchaser paid that sum one day after receiving from Company A a check signed by PATTEN in the sum of $50,000. In turn, Foreigner B had paid Company A for the tickets though a Cypriot account. [Kilimnik and Lyovochkin] another Ukrainian, and PATTEN were allocated the four inauguration tickets. Thereafter, PATTEN attended a PIC even in Washington, D.C. with Foreigner B.


I suspect we’ll see a lot more straw purchasers funneling money from foreigners who backed his campaign into Donald Trump’s pocket before this investigation is done.

Less sexy, but procedurally more important, is the revelation that Patten also lied to SSCI.

In or about January 2018, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) sought PATTEN’s voluntary testimony on various topics. In advance of that testimony, the SSCI sought various pertinent documents from PATTEN.

In or about January 2018, PATTEN testified before the SSCI. Both before and during his testimony, PATTEN misled the SSCI in that he intentionally did not provide SSCI certain documents that could lead to revelation of him causing and concealing the foreign purchase of the PIC tickets, described about, and gave false and misleading testimony to avoid disclosing that he had caused and concealed foreign money to be paid to the PIC. In addition, PATTEN provided misleading testimony about his representation of foreign principals in the United States, so as to conceal his violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Finally, after the interview, PATTEN deleted documents pertinent to his relationships with the above-described foreign principals.


As noted, this is one of the additional crimes that Patten will avoid being charged for by pleading to the FARA charge. Reportedly, SSCI made its own criminal referral, based off different comments.

All of this might concern people like Don Jr, who pretty clearly lied to multiple committees. Because it shows Mueller will use such crimes for leverage.

But Mueller probably has bigger things planned for Don Jr.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/08/31/a ... testimony/




Sam Patten, now facing criminal charges, was head of the International Republican Institute's Moscow office in the early 2000s & the boss of Russian GRU officer Konstantin Kilimnik, who later became Manafort's fixer in Ukraine & Patten's business partner in the US.


When news broke that Manafort associate Sam Patten had pleaded guilty, Rudy Giuliani claimed he'd never heard of Patten, which is unlikely. Patten ran the 2015 reelection campaign of Giuliani's longtime friend, Vitali Klitschko, Mayor of Kiev.
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: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 01, 2018 9:43 am

New Papadopoulos sentencing memo says when he suggested setting up a Trump-Putin meeting, Trump "nodded with approval," Sessions said "the campaign should look into it."

It says he told the Greek Foreign Minister the Russians had "dirt" on Clinton.

Papadopoulos Sentencing Document Out
By Josh Marshall
August 31, 2018 11:56 pm
The defense sentencing memorandum by lawyers for George Papadopoulos is out. You can read it here. I’ll have thoughts on it a bit later.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/pa ... cument-out



Papadopoulos' sentencing memo, in short:

I did not tell the govt I told the campaign about emails.

I did not tell the govt I told the campaign about emails.

I did not tell the govt I told the campaign about emails.

Even tho I told everyone else.
- Marci Wheeler

“YOUNG GEORGE” PAPADOPOULOS WANTS “MERCY AND COMPASSION” (FROM TRUMP) FOR SOMETHING HE BELIEVES IS TREASON

September 1, 2018/6 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
George Papadopoulos submitted his sentencing memo last night. Rather than writing an honest sentencing memo, he’s still working with co-conspirators, in this case, in hopes of getting a pardon from Trump. Reading it, I’d be shocked if the government doesn’t charge him as a knowing participant whenever they drop the conspiracy indictment.

PAPADOPOULOS CLAIMS HE TOLD TWO OTHER COUNTRIES RUSSIA WAS DEALING STOLEN EMAILS, BUT NOT HIS BOSSES
The most important sentences in the sentencing memo — which have no purpose in an actual sentencing memo — are his revelations that he kept denying that he had told the campaign that Russia was planning on releasing emails stolen from Hillary.

He told the agents he was unaware of anyone in the campaign knowing of the stolen Hillary Clinton emails prior to the emails being publicly released.

[snip]

If investigators wished to know what George did with the information from Professor Mifsud, they could have asked George during his interview. Indeed, they did ask if George provided the information to the campaign and George denied ever doing so. In his later proffer sessions, George reiterated that he does not recall ever passing the information along to the campaign.


The introduction to the second of these mentions in fact serves no other purpose than to provide an excuse to repeat, again in case Trump missed it the first time, that Papadopoulos lied and continued to lie about telling the campaign about the emails.

Rick Gates (among others) has surely told the FBI this is a lie, but Papadopolous repeats the lies for Trump’s benefit.

And Papadopoulos makes this claim in spite of the fact that he casually told Alexander Downer about Russia dealing stolen emails and, in the memo, he admits he also told the Greek Foreign Minister.

He detailed a meeting in late May 2016 where he revealed to the Greek Foreign Minister that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. He explained that this meeting took place days before President Vladimir Putin traveled to Greece to meet with Greek officials.


So for the entire month of May, Papadopoulos was telling complete strangers about Russia dealing stolen Hillary emails. And yet, even though he professes to have “unbridled loyalty” to the Trump campaign, at a time he was thrilled that “his career [was] skyrocketing to unimaginable heights” and “gidd[y] over Mr. Trump’s recognition,” he didn’t tell any of those people on the campaign with whom he was currying favor.

Again, the notice that he always denied telling the campaign about Russia’s offer of stolen emails has no purpose in a sentencing memo designed as a sentencing memo. The FBI knows he continued to claim he didn’t tell the campaign. The judge — the one legally entrusted to sentence Papadopolous, anyway — has no need to know it. Trump, on the other hand, surely wants to know it.

TEN PAGES, OF WHICH THREE ARE DRIVEL

And Trump is presumably the only audience Papadopolous cares about with this memo, or he would have spent more time talking about the case (indeed, he would have made an effort to be honest) and less time spouting drivel. Much of the first three pages, for example, lead up to a request for probation served with platitudes like this:

It is essential that a court’s sentencing decision be informed and guided by the fundamental doctrines of mercy and compassion. See United States v. Blarek, 7 F.Supp.2d 192, 210 (E.D.N.Y. 1998). While these principles are not specifically delineated as rationales for sentencing, they are evidenced by the federal sentencing statute’s mandate that the court impose the lowest possible punishment to accomplish the goals of sentencing.


Papadopoulos does this without making an honest case about his conduct, but I guess it makes sense to start pitching Trump with a request for mercy.

EVEN PAPADOPOULOS’ NARRATIVE ABOUT SERGEI MILLIAN IS (NECESSARILY) BOGUS

A key part of Papadopoulos’ bogus narrative is that he lied about Mifsud, in part, because FBI Agents started his interview by telling him they wanted to ask him some questions about Sergei Millian (even while making it clear that the FBI correctly linked his relationship with Millian with his earlier interactions with Mifsud).

The agents asked George to accompany them to their office to answer a “couple questions” regarding “a guy in New York that you might know[,] [t]hat has recently been in the news.” George thought the agents wanted to ask him about Russian businessman Sergei Millian. Wanting clarification, he asked the agents, “…just so I understand, I’m going there to answer questions about this person who I think you’re talking about.” The agents assured George that the topic of discussion was Mr. Millian who had been trending in the national media.

[snip]

The FBI agent confirmed that the Sergei Millian inquiry was just a ruse to get him in a room when he told George that:

… the reason we wanted to pull you in today and have that conversation because we wanted to know to the extent of your knowledge being an insider inside that small group of people that were policy advisors who, if anybody, has that connection with Russia and what, what sort of connections there were.


For the next two hours, George answered questions about Professor Mifsud, Olga, Carter Page, Sergei Millian and the “Trump Dossier,” and George’s interactions with other people working on the campaign.


He claims — impossibly — that he answered their questions about Millian honestly.

Seemingly as promised, the agents began their questioning about George’s relationship with Sergei Millian. George knew Mr. Millian only as a businessman pitching an opportunity to George in his personal capacity. The agents asked how they first met, what they discussed, how often they talked or met in person, if George knew whether Mr. Millian was connected to Russia or a foreign intelligence service, and who else on Mr. Trump’s campaign may have been in contact with Mr. Millian. George answered their questions honestly.


I can say with confidence that he didn’t answer them truthfully, first of all, because Millian’s business pitch was not limited to “his personal capacity.” As Simona blabbed to the press, Millian had already tied financial offers to Papadopoulos’ access to Trump.

According to Simona Mangiante, whose husband George Papadopoulos briefly served on the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor, Millian offered Papadopoulos a $30,000 monthly retainer on the condition he remain attached to the campaign. Papadopoulos declined, she said.


Millian wanted to pay Papadopoulos money as one entree into the Trump Administration.

More importantly, Papadopoulos couldn’t have answered truthfully because, in both his interviews with the FBI, Papadopoulos hid the conversation he had on Facebook with Ivan Timofeev about Millian, something the FBI noted on his arrest affidavit.

“If you know any background of him that is noteworthy before I see him, kindly send my way.”


Indeed, after his second interview, Papadopoulos deleted his Facebook account, in an apparent attempt to hide his relationship with Timofeev entirely, something he doesn’t mention at all in the sentencing memo.

THE SOMERSAULTS ABOUT PAPADOPOULOS’ MOTIVE

The sentencing memo is perhaps most interesting in its presentation of Papadopoulos’ motive, in which he continues the line Simona has been feeding to the press that he didn’t have corrupt motive in lying to the FBI. Remember that one of the few things he told Stefan Halper in September 2016 is that he believed being involved in the hack targeting Hillary amounted to treason (I don’t agree). If that’s remotely true, when the FBI first revealed they knew he had been told about the emails, he would have been worried about going to prison for a very long time (something he may yet manage).

Instead of admitting that, Papadopoulos describes telling the lies about Mifsud because he was trying to “distance” those activities from Trump.

George found himself personally conflicted during the interrogation as he felt obligated to assist the FBI but also wanted to distance himself and his work on the Trump campaign from that investigation.

[snip]

In his answers, George falsely distanced his interactions with these players from his campaign work.

The problem with this claim is that both before and after they asked about Mifsud, he told the FBI he was concerned about how talking to them would jeopardize his chances of getting a job with Trump.

En route to the FBI office, George voiced concern about the repercussions of his cooperation ever becoming public because the Wall Street Journal had just reported that Sergei Millian was a key source in the “Trump Dossier” controversy. George explained that he was in discussions with senior Trump administration officials about a position and the last thing he wanted was “something like this” casting the administration in a bad light.

[snip]

At one point, George told the agents that he did not want to “get too in-depth” because he did not know what it would mean for his professional future. He told the agents he was “trying to help the country and you guys, but I don’t want to jeopardize my career.”


In the motive section of the memo, Papadopolous pitches this as the “personal reason” of getting a job. But in the intro, Papadopoulos is more honest, including that detail but also admitting he lied because of “loyalty to his master.”

The Government’s claim, however, that Mr. Papadopoulos intended that his false statements harm the investigation is speculative and contrary to the evidence. His motives for lying to the FBI were wrongheaded indeed but far from the sinister spin the Government suggests. Caught off-guard by an impromptu interrogation, Mr. Papadopoulos misled investigators to save his professional aspirations and preserve a perhaps misguided loyalty to his master. [my emphasis]


The phrase suggests to Trump that he feels his lies have not been rewarded (yet), even while making it clear that (contrary to the way he spins it in this memo) he was doing it to protect Trump.

There are, as I’ll note in a follow-up, several interesting details (presumably offered to tell his co-conspirators what damaging information he did provide to the government) that only make it clearer that Papadopoulos was, and knows he was, a participant in the conspiracy.

But the overall purpose of this sentencing memo is to communicate to Trump that he’s still a loyal member of the conspiracy.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/09/01/y ... s-treason/



emptywheel

Those Sexy Details in the Papadopoulos Sentencing Memo Aren't Intended for Your Consumption

https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/09/01/t ... nsumption/

The detail (which we actually already knew) that Jeff Sessions lies as much as George Papadopoulos is not the most interesting detail George included for his co-conspirators.

We also learned that AT THE MEETING Mifsud told George the Russians wanted to help Trump by releasing emails, George expected to finalize a meeting.

Meeting <> emails



We also learned that just after George told Manafort the Russians were pushing for a meeting, George told Greece's Foreign Minister that Russia wanted to release emails to help Trump.



THOSE SEXY DETAILS IN THE PAPADOPOULOS SENTENCING MEMO AREN’T INTENDED FOR YOUR CONSUMPTION

September 1, 2018/4 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
In this post, I argued that George Papadopoulos’ sentencing memo was written to make a case to Donald Trump for a pardon, not to judge Randolph Moss for no prison time (even though that’s what he asks for).

It would follow logically, then, that the details of his testimony Papapdopoulos chose to highlight in a claim that “George provided investigators with critical information” — details that have attracted much of the press coverage of this memo — also aren’t intended for our benefit, but for Trump and other co-conspirators.

JEFF SESSIONS LIES AS MUCH AS “YOUNG GEORGE” PAPADOPOULOS

Consider the one that has attracted the most attention, revealing that (according to Papadopoulos), he told the government that Trump approved of his plan to pursue a meeting with Putin and — even more importantly — Jeff “Sessions … appeared to like the idea.”

On March 31, 2016, he joined Mr. Trump, Senator Jeff Sessions, and other campaign officials for a “National Security Meeting” at the Trump Hotel. George’s photograph at this meeting flashed around the world via Twitter. Eager to show his value to the campaign, George announced at the meeting that he had connections that could facilitate a foreign policy meeting between Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. While some in the room rebuffed George’s offer, Mr. Trump nodded with approval and deferred to Mr. Sessions who appeared to like the idea and stated that the campaign should look into it.


At a minimum, after 11 months of being prevented from sharing this detail, including it here tells all the other co-conspirators what Papadopoulos said. The allegation is not new; at least two other participants in the meeting offered a similar version to Reuters in March (and presumably to the FBI before that). Still, Papadopoulos provides the detail in such a way and at such a time that it’s sure to generate pressure on Sessions, just as Trump is trying to convince Republican members of Congress he should fire the Attorney General. Not to mention that Papadopoulos raises an example of a person who has thus far avoided all consequences for lying in official settings.

THE OFFER OF EMAILS CAME DURING A DISCUSSION FINALIZING A MEETING

An even more delicious mention is the specific description Papadopoulos gives of the meeting at which Joseph Mifsud told him the Russians had Hillary emails they planned to release to help Trump.

George strived to organize a meeting with the Russian government and help the Trump campaign promote its foreign policy objective: improve U.S. and Russian relations. He believed that such a meeting would be a boon for the campaign as Mr. Trump had not yet hosted any major foreign policy events with officials from other countries.

George joined Professor Mifsud for breakfast in London on April 26, 2016, with the intention of finalizing plans for the foreign policy meeting. It was during this breakfast meeting, however, that Professor Mifsud told George that individuals in Moscow possessed “dirt” on candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” Not knowing what to make of this comment, George continued his efforts to make the Trump – Russia meeting a reality. [my emphasis]


Papadopoulos’ statement of the offense had made it clear that Mifsud mentioned the emails in the context of Papadopoulos’ efforts to set up a meeting.

On or about April 25, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS emailed [Stephen Miller — see this story confirming Miller as the “Senior Policy Advisor” in the document]: “The Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr. Trump to meet him when he is ready []. The advantage of being in London is that these governments tends to speak more openly in “neutral” cities.

On or about April 26, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS met the Professor for breakfast at a London hotel. During this meeting, the Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that he had just returned from a trip to Moscow where he had met with high-level Russian government officials. The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that on that trip he (the Professor) learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on then-candidate Clinton. The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS, as defendant PAPADOPOULOS later described to the FBI, that “They [the Russians] have dirt on her”; “the Russians had emails of Clinton”; “they have thousands of emails.”

[snip]

[T]he day after his meeting at the hotel with the Professor, on or about April 27, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS emailed [Miller]: “Have some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right.”


Also on or about April 27, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS emailed a [Corey Lewandowski] “to discuss Russia’s interest in hosting Mr. Trump. Have been receiving a lot of calls over the last month about Putin wanting to host him and the team when the time is right.”

The Schiff memo and Alexander Downer have subsequently added the detail that Mifsud specifically told Papadopoulos that, “the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging,” to assist Trump’s campaign.

Remember, Papadopoulos worked with Lewandowski to draft Trump’s first foreign policy speech, delivered on April 27, which Papadopoulos reportedly told Ivan Timofeev (whose entire existence Papadopoulos’ lies had managed to hide from the FBI at first) was a signal to meet. That speech included these lines:

I believe an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries.

Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can’t make a deal under my administration, a deal that’s great — not good, great — for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. It’s as simple as that. We’re going to find out.


Obviously, the tie between Russia releasing stolen emails and foreign policy meetings was always implicit. But Papadopoulos has just revealed that Mifsud said Russia might release emails in the context of setting up a meeting, after having floated such a meeting with Miller the day before.

The breakfast meeting ties the release of the stolen emails to help the Trump campaign and foreign policy meetings together directly. And having just sat through such a meeting, Papadopoulos worked with Stephen Miller and Corey Lewandowski to send a message to Russian that Trump was willing to meet — and would pursue improved relations with Russia.

PAPADOPOULOS TELLS THE GREEKS OF THE DIRT OFFER JUST IN TIME TO PASS PUTIN A MESSAGE

I’m most interested, however, in the inclusion of Papadopoulos’ admission he told the Greek Foreign Minister about the Russian offer of dirt just before Putin came to town on May 27, 2016.

George provided investigators with critical information. George told investigators about his interactions and meetings with other members of the campaign. He detailed a meeting in late May 2016 where he revealed to the Greek Foreign Minister that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. He explained that this meeting took place days before President Vladimir Putin traveled to Greece to meet with Greek officials.


Remember, Natalia Veselnitskaya dates the idea for the June 9 meeting to a conversation she had with Aras Agalarov at “the end of May” 2016.

Around the end of May 2016, during a conversation with a good acquaintance of mine, being my client, Aras Agalarov on a topic that was not related to the United States, I shared the story faced when defending another client, Denis Katsyv, about how terribly misled the US Congress had been by the tax defrauder William Browder, convicted in Russia, who, through his lobbyists and his close-minded rank-and-file Congress staffers, succeeded in adopting the Act in the name of a person whom Browder practically hardly ever knew. I considered it my duty to inform the Congress people about it and asked Mr. Agalarov if there was any possibility of helping me or my colleagues to do this. I do not remember who of us was struck by the idea that maybe his son could talk about this with Donald Trump, Jr., who, although a businessman, was sure to have some acquaintances among Congress people.


But it’s not just the tantalizing possibility that Papadopoulos left some kind of message for Putin just before Aras Agalarov started setting up the June 9 meeting.

Papadopoulos’ statement of the offense describes him emailing Paul Manafort about Russia’s desire to set up a meeting, which Manafort forwarded to the government’s most important now cooperating witness, Rick Gates, telling him that the candidate wasn’t going to do such meetings himself — someone else in the campaign would.

On or about May 21, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS emailed another high-ranking Campaign official, with the subject line “Request from Russia to meet Mr. Trump.” The email included the May 4 MFA Email and added: “Russia has been eager to meet Mr. Trump for quite sometime and have been reaching out to me to discuss.”2

2 The government notes that the official forwarded defendant PAPADOPOULOS’s email to another Campaign official (without including defendant PAPADOPOULOS) and stated:

“Let[‘]s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”


The House Intelligence Majority Report, however, reveals that that Papadopolous sent that email from Greece.

(U) While on a trip to Athens, Greece in May 2016, Papadopoulos sent an email to Manafort stating that he expected to soon receive “an official invitation for Mr. Trump to visit Greece sometime this summer should his schedule allow.”183 In the same email to Manafort, Papadopoulos also forwarded a meeting Invitation from Ivan Timofeev, Director or [sic] Programs for the Russian International Affairs Council, and claimed that “Russia has been eager to meet Mr. Trump for quite sometime and have been reaching out to me to discuss. thought it would be prudent to send to you.”184

(U) As of May 2016, Manafort had not yet been elevated to campaign chairman, but had a long track record of work abroad. Manafort forwarded Papadopoulos’ email to his business and campaign deputy [Rick Gates] noting that we need someone to communicate that D[onald] T[rump] is not doing these trips.” 185 Manafort and [Gates] agreed to assign a response of a “general letter” to “our correspondence coordinator.” the person responsible for “responding to all mail of non-importance.”186


While it’s clear nothing in that email could have reflected a discussion of passing a message to Putin via Papadopoulos’ Greek contacts, it does show that Papadopoulos used the opportunity of a verbal offer from Greece to raise a Russian meeting with Manafort directly. Manafort responded by saying other campaign aides would do such meetings. Papadopoulos then somehow saw reason to tell Greece’s Foreign Minister that the Russians were offering dirt to help Trump just before Putin arrived. And that’s precisely the timeframe when the June 9 meeting setting up a Russian meeting with Trump’s senior-most campaign officials, including Manafort, got born.

Maybe it’s all a big fat coinkydink, but Papadopoulos seems to believe it important enough to tell all his co-conspirators (even while it makes his repeated claims not to have told the campaign itself laughable), possibly because he knows the FBI has evidence from the Greeks as well.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/09/01/t ... nsumption/



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90rEVAQl1do

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Is This the Documentary That Can Take Down Trump?

How Jack Bryan parlayed rich-kid know-how into Active Measures, the very first feature-length doc about Trump and Russia.
by TOM ROSTON
MAY 1, 2018 7:42 AM

Jack Bryan was your average Upper East Side-raised son of a millionaire trying to get his filmmaking career started when Donald Trump began persistently popping up in his life. In New York City’s social circuit, Bryan’s father, Shelby Bryan—a telecom mogul and Democratic donor—was friendly enough with Trump, perhaps because both are relative outsiders (Bryan being from Texas, and Trump being Trump). On vacation in Palm Beach in 2008, the Bryan family was immersed in the scuttlebutt about how a then financially strapped Trump had curiously managed to sell a Palm Beach estate he’d bought for $41 million to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million. Around 2012, Shelby Bryan shared a car to the U.S. Open with the real-estate tycoon, after which he told his son, “That guy sure does like Russia.” The elder Bryan (who is also the longtime partner of Condé Nast’s artistic director, Anna Wintour) also brought his sons, Jack and Austin, on a golfing trip to the United Kingdom, where Trump gave them early access to his Trump International Golf Links course in Scotland and chatted with them after their game.


To Jack, Trump registered as a “harmless clown who would appear in the tabloids.” But as Trump’s political ambitions solidified, the younger Bryan began to take notice. A self-described “pragmatic lefty,” he had often texted with his friend and fellow politics junkie Marley Clements about world affairs. When Clements proposed that Russians may have been involved in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the summer of 2016, Bryan expressed skeptical interest.

Then, in March 2017, former F.B.I. agent Clint Watts testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Trump himself had engaged in “active measures”—a term that describes the Russian propaganda tactic of using disinformation and manipulation of events to promote its foreign policy. That’s when Bryan said to Clements, “Somebody needs to make a film about this.”

Active Measures, a dizzying and rigorously researched documentary, premieres at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival this week, where C.A.A. is representing the film in its hunt for a distributor. It is 33-year-old Jack Bryan’s effort to connect the dots between Trump and Russia, including Vladimir Putin himself. “I want to alert people, and I knew no one else was going to do it in time for the midterm elections,” he said over beers at Williamsburg’s Radegast Hall recently. “I felt like I could.”

The story of Jack Bryan smacks like fiction. He’s an oddball rich kid, the vulnerable, good-looking scion of a well-connected Manhattan family, who got thrust into radically different circumstances when he used the powers at his disposal—filmmaking and access to friends-and-family financing—to realize the solemn words his father once said to him: “You are going to have advantages, and that means two things: you won’t have any excuses, and you will also have a responsibility to be of service.”

Bryan wrote his first film when he was 16—a fictional piece involving a kidnapping—and took classes at the New York Film Academy. His schooling included stops at Buckley School and the Kent boarding school in Connecticut, from which he dropped out before attending rehab (he said he had depression issues). He finished high school at Montana Academy, a self-described “therapeutic school.” After arriving home to New York to study media and film at the New School at the age of 23, Bryan made a documentary about the seedy, beloved Siberia Bar, landed a job at a production company, and directed two micro-budget indie dramas, one of which had a minor theatrical release in 2015. (The New York Times called it a “ mere genre exercise.”)

He was in pre-production on another small narrative film, this one a 24-hours-in-New-York-wild-ride drama, when he decided to pivot to Active Measures. The filmmaker moved to a friend’s house in Maryland—he called it “the bunker”—where he and Clements spent several weeks studying the evidence, scrawling their ideas on window glass and large sections of cardboard to help envision the web they were trying to connect. Also on the team was Laura DuBois, Bryan’s girlfriend and an experienced producer, whom Bryan calls “the boss of the movie.”

Bryan said that the thesis and main points of Active Measures haven’t changed much since they first sketched it out in the bunker—it’s just that their once apparently too-ludicrous-to-be-real collusion narrative has become more plausible. Audiences will see this in the film’s highlighted news clips and in-depth interviews with respected world leaders, think-tank wonks, former C.I.A. and State Department officials, academics, and Capitol Hill veterans, including Senator John McCain and former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton—who provides insight into Putin’s psyche, including a wry aside about the Russian leader’s tendency to manspread.

After a second beer at Radegast, Bryan was off to his apartment to review post-production on the film. Eventually, more accomplished documentarians will have Trump stories to tell. (Michael Moore is currently wrangling a release for his own big Trump film, Fahrenheit 11/9, which is currently stalled because of the Weinstein Company’s implosion.) But for now, Bryan is happy to be in front of the pack. “Until the cavalry comes, people need to know what’s going on,” Bryan said, brushing away the hair falling on his forehead. “Until the pros show up, I’m what you’ve got.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... jack-bryan




Agents Tried to Flip Russian Oligarchs. The Fallout Spread to Trump.

Sept. 1, 2018

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Justice Department officials tried to turn the oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska into an informant as they sought information on Russian organized crime and, later, on possible Russian aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign.Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
WASHINGTON — In the estimation of American officials, Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin, has faced credible accusations of extortion, bribery and even murder.

They also thought he might make a good source.

Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant. They signaled that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States or even explore other steps to address his legal problems. In exchange, they were hoping for information on Russian organized crime and, later, on possible Russian aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to current and former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska.

In one dramatic encounter, F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced and uninvited at a home Mr. Deripaska maintains in New York and pressed him on whether Paul Manafort, a former business partner of his who went on to become chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, had served as a link between the campaign and the Kremlin.

The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia’s richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said.

Two of the players in the effort were Bruce G. Ohr, the Justice Department official who has recently become a target of attacks by Mr. Trump, and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled a dossier of purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The systematic effort to win the cooperation of the oligarchs, which has not previously been revealed, does not appear to have scored any successes. And in Mr. Deripaska’s case, he told the American investigators that he disagreed with their theories about Russian organized crime and Kremlin collusion in the campaign, a person familiar with the exchanges said. The person added that Mr. Deripaska even notified the Kremlin about the American efforts to cultivate him.

But the fallout from the efforts is now rippling through American politics and has helped fuel Mr. Trump’s campaign to discredit the investigation into whether he coordinated with Russia in its interference in the election.

The contacts between Mr. Ohr and Mr. Steele were detailed in emails and notes from Mr. Ohr that the Justice Department turned over to Republicans in Congress earlier this year. A number of journalists, including some at conservative news outlets, have reported on elements of those contacts but not on the broader outreach program to the oligarchs or key aspects of the interactions between Mr. Ohr, Mr. Steele and Mr. Deripaska.

The revelation that Mr. Ohr engaged with Mr. Steele has provided the president’s allies with fresh fodder to attack the investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, casting it as part of a vast, long-running conspiracy by a “deep state” bent on undermining Mr. Trump. In their telling, Mr. Ohr and his wife — who worked as a contractor at the same research firm that produced the dossier — are villainous central players in a cabal out to destroy the president.

Mr. Trump himself has seized on the reports, threatening to pull Mr. Ohr’s security clearance and claiming that his family “received big money for helping to create the phony, dirty and discredited Dossier.”

While Mr. Steele did discuss the research that resulted in the dossier with Mr. Ohr during the final months of the campaign, current and former officials said that Mr. Deripaska was the subject of many of the contacts between the two men between 2014 and 2016.

A timeline that Mr. Ohr hand-wrote of all his contacts with Mr. Steele was among the leaked documents cited by the president and his allies as evidence of an anti-Trump plot.

The contacts between Mr. Steele and Mr. Ohr started before Mr. Trump became a presidential candidate and continued through much of the campaign.

Mr. Deripaska’s contacts with the F.B.I. took place in September 2015 and the same month a year later. The latter meeting came two months after the F.B.I. began investigating Russian interference in the election and a month after Mr. Manafort left the Trump campaign amid reports about his work for Russia-aligned political parties in Ukraine.

The outreach to Mr. Deripaska, who is so close to the Russian president that he has been called “Putin’s oligarch,” was not as much of a long shot as it might have appeared.

He had worked with the United States government in the past, including on a thwarted effort to rescue an F.B.I. agent captured in Iran, on which he reportedly spent as much as $25 million of his own money. And he had incentive to cooperate again in the run-up to the 2016 election, as he tried to win permission to travel more easily to the United States, where he has long sought more freedom to do business and greater acceptance as a global power broker.

Mr. Steele sought to aid the effort to engage Mr. Deripaska, and he noted in an email to Mr. Ohr in February 2016 that the Russian had received a visa to travel to the United States. In the email, Mr. Steele said his company had compiled and circulated “sensitive” research suggesting that Mr. Deripaska and other oligarchs were under pressure from the Kremlin to toe the Russian government line, leading Mr. Steele to conclude that Mr. Deripaska was not the “tool” of Mr. Putin alleged by the United States government.

The timeline sketched out by Mr. Ohr shows contacts stretching back to when Mr. Ohr first met Mr. Steele in 2007. It also shows what officials said was the first date on which the two discussed cultivating Mr. Deripaska: a meeting in Washington on Nov. 21, 2014, roughly seven months before Mr. Trump announced that he was running for president.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an initiative that remains classified. Most expressed deep discomfort, saying they feared that in revealing the attempts to cultivate Mr. Deripaska and other oligarchs they were undermining American national security and strengthening the grip that Mr. Putin holds over those who surround him.

But they also said they did not want Mr. Trump and his allies to use the program’s secrecy as a screen with which they could cherry-pick facts and present them, sheared of context, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation. That, too, they said they feared, would damage American security.

The program was led by the F.B.I. Mr. Ohr, who had long worked on combating Russian organized crime, was one of the Justice Department officials involved.

Mr. Steele served as an intermediary between the Americans and the Russian oligarchs they were seeking to cultivate. He had first met Mr. Ohr years earlier while still serving at MI6, Britain’s foreign spy agency, where he oversaw Russia operations. After retiring, he opened a business intelligence firm, and had tracked Russian organized crime and business interests for private clients, including one of Mr. Deripaska’s lawyers.

To facilitate meetings, the F.B.I. pushed the State Department to allow Mr. Deripaska to travel to New York on a Russian diplomatic passport as part of a Russian government delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. The State Department had previously rejected some of Mr. Deripaska’s efforts to secure visas to enter the United States — even as part of prior diplomatic delegations — but it approved diplomatic visa requests in 2015 and 2016.


One of the players in the effort to cultivate Mr. Deripaska was Bruce G. Ohr, the Justice Department official who has recently become a target of attacks by Mr. Trump over his ties to the former British spy Christopher Steele.Erin Schaff for The New York Times
Mr. Steele helped set up a meeting between the Russian and American officials during the 2015 trip. Mr. Ohr attended the meeting, during which the Americans pressed Mr. Deripaska on the connections between Russian organized crime and Mr. Putin’s government, as well as other issues, according to a person familiar with the events. The person said that Mr. Deripaska told the Americans that their theories were off base and did not reflect how things worked in Russia.

Mr. Deripaska would not agree to a second meeting. But one took place the next year, in September 2016, when F.B.I. agents showed up unannounced at his door in New York. By then, they were already investigating possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, and they pressed Mr. Deripaska about whether his former business partner, Mr. Manafort, had served as a link to the Kremlin during his time as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman.

It was not only the F.B.I. that was concerned about Russian interference in the final months of the campaign. American spy agencies were sounding an alarm after months of intelligence reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russians, and Moscow’s hacking of Democratic Party emails. (American intelligence agencies would later conclude that the interference was real and that Russia had acted to boost Mr. Trump’s candidacy.)

There was also a growing debate at the highest levels of the Obama administration about how to respond without being seen as trying to tip the presidential election toward Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Deripaska, though, told the F.B.I. agents that while he had no love for Mr. Manafort, with whom he was in a bitter business dispute, he found their theories about his role on the campaign “preposterous.” He also disputed that there were any connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to the person familiar with the exchange.

The Justice Department’s efforts to cultivate Mr. Deripaska appear to have fizzled soon after, amid worsening relations between the United States and Russia.

This past April, the Treasury Department imposed potentially crippling sanctions against Mr. Deripaska and his mammoth aluminum company, saying he had profited from the “malign activities” of Russia around the world. In announcing the sanctions, the Trump administration cited accusations that Mr. Deripaska had been accused of extortion, racketeering, bribery, links to organized crime and even ordering the murder of a businessman.

Mr. Deripaska has denied the allegations, and his allies contend that the sanctions are punishment for refusing to play ball with the Americans.

Yet just as it was becoming clear that Mr. Deripaska would provide little help to the Americans, Mr. Steele was talking to Mr. Ohr about an entirely new issue: the dossier.

In summer 2016, Mr. Steele first told Mr. Ohr about the research that would eventually come to make up the dossier. Over a breakfast in Washington, Mr. Steele said he believed that Russian intelligence had Mr. Trump “over a barrel,” according to a person familiar with the discussion. But the person said that it was more of a friendly heads-up, and that Mr. Steele had separately been in touch with an F.B.I. agent in a bid to get his work to investigators.

The research by that point was being funded by the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, and Mr. Steele believed that what he had found was damning enough that he needed to get it to American law enforcement.

F.B.I. agents would later meet with Mr. Steele to discuss his work. But former senior officials from the bureau and the Justice Department have said that the investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia was well underway by the time they got the dossier.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump and his allies have seized on the fact that Mr. Ohr and Mr. Steele were in touch about elements of the dossier to attack the investigation into Russian election interference as a “rigged witch hunt.”

Mr. Trump and his allies have cast Mr. Steele’s research — and the serious consideration it was given by Mr. Ohr and the F.B.I. — as part of a plot by rogue officials and Mrs. Clinton’s allies to undermine Mr. Trump’s campaign and his presidency.

The role of Mr. Deripaska has gotten less attention, but it similarly offers fodder for the theory being advanced by the president’s defenders.

Among the documents produced to Congress by the Justice Department is an undated — and previously unreported — note handwritten by Mr. Ohr indicating that Mr. Deripaska and one of his London-based lawyers, Paul Hauser, were “almost ready to talk” to American government officials regarding the money that “Manafort stole.”

Even after the concerted effort to cultivate Mr. Deripaska appeared to have broken down, and as he was emerging as a subject of increasing interest in inquiries into ties between Mr. Trump’s circle and Russia, both sides continued sporadic outreach.

Last year, Mr. Ohr asked someone who communicated with Mr. Deripaska to urge the oligarch to “give up Manafort,” according to a person familiar with the exchange. And Mr. Deripaska sought to engage with Congress.

The oligarch took out newspaper advertisements in the United States last year volunteering to testify in any congressional hearings examining his work with Mr. Manafort. The ads were in response to an Associated Press report that Mr. Manafort had secretly worked for Mr. Deripaska on a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin government” in the mid-2000s.

Mr. Deripaska deplored that assertion as “malicious” and a “lie,” and subsequently sued The A.P. for libel, though he later dropped his appeal of a judge’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit without receiving a settlement or payment.

Soon after the advertisements ran, representatives for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees called a Washington-based lawyer for Mr. Deripaska, Adam Waldman, inquiring about taking his client up on the offer to testify, Mr. Waldman said in an interview.

What happened after that has been in dispute. Mr. Waldman, who stopped working for Mr. Deripaska after the sanctions were levied, said he told the committee staff that his client would be willing to testify without any grant of immunity, but would not testify about any Russian collusion with the Trump campaign because “he doesn’t know anything about that theory and actually doesn’t believe it occurred.”

“I told them that he would be willing to talk about Manafort,” Mr. Waldman added.

Mr. Waldman said he did not hear back from the committee’s staff members, but he contends that they played a role in pushing the claim that the talks over Mr. Deripaska’s potential testimony had fallen apart because he demanded immunity.

“We specifically told them that we did not want immunity,” Mr. Waldman said. “Clearly, they did not want him to testify. What other conclusion could you possibly draw?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/us/p ... e-fbi.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Elec

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:19 pm

A Prime Minister, a Drug Pilot, an Oligarch, & RussiaGate

by Daniel Hopsicker · Published August 29, 2018 · Updated August 29, 2018

(WARNING: A long-ass read. But worth it)

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russiagateRussiaGate is all about the Mob, says the current meme. Not ‘The’ Mob, or just one Mob, but a gamut of players— Russian, American, British, Israeli, Saudi—belonging to a global criminal network connecting the forces of transnational organized crime across nation-states, time-zones, and continents.

‘Transnational organized crime’ doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘The Purple Gang’ or ‘Murder Inc.’ But the Obama Administration considered it enough of a threat to national security to issue an unusual 2012 warning.

Evidence of the network can be seen in some strange and unlikely places, like Sarasota, Florida; and some strange and unlikely people as well, like Omarosa Manigaul0t-Newman, whose connection to RussiaGate players was only recently revealed.

First to Sarasota, where two local grifters plied their ‘craft:’ Jonathan Curshen, currently serving 20 years in federal prison, and Andy Badolato, currently free as a bird. Curshen is a dual British-U.S. citizen who operated out of Sarasota and Costa Rica, after serving an internship in fraud and financial crime on Vancouver Canada’s wild-and-wooly stock exchange.

Badolato, Steve Bannon’s former chief lieutenant, surfaced in the media after Bannon switched his legal residence in a panic before the 2016 election to Badolato’s beach-front pad on Casey Key in Sarasota, to avoid a vote fraud rap while his candidate was strenuously decrying…vote fraud.

The ‘players’ in RussiaGate’s Sarasota thread

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curshen-badolatoAndy Badolato and Jonathan Curshen participated in a number of continuing criminal conspiracies together, along with a colorful cast of co-conspirators whose importance to RussiaGate is growing all the time.

Curshen and Badolato were partners in what’s known as a “hyena pack” engaged in stock fraud and related financial crime. Each was an officer in a number of dummy front companies, supposedly independent of one another, but acting in concert with interlocking ownership.

The crew was led by a wily 30-year veteran of scams and white collar crime, a man whose name was already famous from previous scandals, Adnan Khashoggi, Saudi arms dealer, long-time CIA ‘fixer’ and Iran Contra middleman.

Khashoggi, who died recently, was at the height of his powers in the early 2000’s, and pulled off an ingenious scam using a company he controlled called GenesisIntermedia to steal $300 million from investors with the help of Germany’s criminal Deutsche Bank. The bank later paid a fine of $270 million to the U.S. Government. Khashoggi walked.

Rounding out the hyena pack was Khashoggi’s long-time lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi—an Iran Contra figure in his own right—and an assortment of retired CIA and DIA assets including Glen Kovar, who once claimed that he had invented ‘Smokey the Bear’ while he was ‘sheep-dipped’ as an employee of the U.S. Forest Service whiler really working undercover for the CIA.

Moon rocks & Blue Moon

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kovar3Glen Kovar will eventually “settled down” into a career that includes peddling ‘unauthorized’ moon rocks while running up the stock price of a series of dummy companies which masqueraded as ‘national security plays’ in the wake of 9/11.

Kovar, Adnan Khashoggi, Ramy El-Batrawi and Jonathan Curshen all had a hand in a company called SkyWay Communications.

SkyWay provided the men with a cover story: testing an inflight wireless communications invention which didn’t exist as an excuse to buy a pair of DC-9 airliners, one of which will be busted in Mexico’s Yucatan in 2006 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.

Curshen and Badolato ran companies which owned, or were in business with, dummy companies that were fronted by a hapless Tampa Mobster named Mike Muzio, currently residing in federal prison until 2020.

BLUEMOON-1His Blue Moon Group, which operated under a number of different names and was into everything from music publishing to internet porn, was owned by Adnan Khashoggi.

Muzio and Blue Moon ran dozens of internet porn sites. Their biggest site was VoyeurDorm.com, where for $19.95 a month you could watch supposed co-eds frolicking in a dorm fitted out with cameras broadcasting their every sigh online.

In 2003-2004, Blue Moon Group shared a house in Howard Beach Queens and did business with a company owned by a Russian hacker named Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky. It represents the first pooling of computer coding resources by Russian and U.S. mobsters for mutual benefit.

Enter ‘Red Eye’

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pavel-red-eye-vrublevskyVrublevsky had founded a Russian version of PayPal called Chronopay, which helped monetize numerous online scams, like online pharmacies selling Viagra and sex toys through massive spam campaigns whose billions of spam emails began clogging the internet.

‘Red Eye’ handled the back end cash transactions for Muzio’s porn sites, a crucial step enabling the internet as we know it today.

Eleven years later Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky became the first Russian hacker the FBI fingered for involvement in the 2016 Presidential election.

Last but not least, there’s Semion Mogilevich, the Russian Mob’s boss of bosses. Mr Big-Ski.

Mogilevich was caught red-handed infiltrating Western capital markets utilizing a joint U.S.-Canadian company that supposedly made magnets called YBM Magnex. In a desperate ‘Hail Mary’ bid to stave off government seizure of the bankrupted company, a U.S. “investor” stepped up at the last minute offering to play the role of white knight and take the company private.

Mogilevich’s white knight was an unknown from Sarasota, Florida, who supposedly owned a supposed insurance company called “Southern Assurance.”

His name was Jonathan Curshen.

“Oma, meet Oprah. And Uma.”

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omarosaTo introduce this web of illicit connections, there’s probably no one better—in no small part because of her current notoriety—than Omarosa Manigaul0t-Newman.

Surprisingly, Omarosa’s connection to the criminal conspiracy isn’t through her ex-boss Donald Trump. It’s through her former lover, Michael Misick, whose affair with Omarosa was leaked in the middle of her scorched-earth book tour.

In an ‘exclusive report’ London’s Daily Mail trumpeted in bold headlines details of a torrid six-month affair in 2005 between Omarosa and the shady Prime Minister of the Turks and Caicos, a tiny Caribbean nation of low-lying islands 600 miles southeast of Miami.

“EXCLUSIVE: Omarosa’s secret romance with ‘corrupt’ politician!

“Fired Trump aide had six-month hook-up with Michael Misick, former prime minister of Turks and Caicos!”



Dished the tabloid, “The duo stayed at five-star hotels around the world, enjoyed yacht parties, and spent time at Misick’s home in the Turks & Caicos.

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misickSaid one source, ‘The physical attraction was obvious.’

Misick and Omarosa met at what the Daily Mail described as a ‘charity function’ in New York City. Misick was described as “busily courting celebrities in a bid to bring wealth and glamour to his sun-drenched archipelago.”

Who knew civic-mindedness could be so sexy?

Sparks flew. And that same night the duo checked in at the plush Four Seasons Hotel for an intimate tete-a-tete that stretched through the weekend.

Misick was so smitten he flew back a week later just to see her again.

“Omarosa clearly admired him,’ the paper reported. “And Misick was clearly aware of her ties with Trump.”

‘In New York they would meet at the Four Seasons, or the Mandarin Oriental, where Mike usually stayed,” the source told the Daily Mail. “Omarosa even accompanied Misick to Dubai for an investment conference, where they stayed at the One and Only Royal Mirage Hotel where suites cost up to $6,000 a night.”

The sex lives of the rich and semi-famous rarely intersect so directly with America’s national security. This happens to be one of those times.

Corrupt Prime Ministers. crooked pilots

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brass-misickThe Daily Mail’s scoop was probably an attempt to slow Omarosa’s Sherman’s March through Trump to the Sea, by embarrassing a woman who had recently married a Christian pastor. Because rather then pursuing the story any further, the tabloid seemed oblivious to the implications of its own reporting.

What implications? While Omarosa’s new beau the Prime Minister was squiring her around the world and staying at exclusive 5-star hotels, he was working overtime acquiring a massive fortune in a time span so brief it defied reason.

Right before Omarosa’s eyes, Michael Misick became a real life Caribbean Drug Kingpin whose wealth soon exceeded—by orders of magnitude—anything that could reasonably have been scraped together using the Caribbean’s standard fare of bribery and graft.

After he became Prime Minister Misick named an infamous Guyanese drug pilot named Michael Francis Brassington as his personal pilot.

What Brassington brought to the table was a small fleet of luxury jets supplied through his extensive criminal and covert contacts,including their favorite Gulfstream III (N165G) owned by a prominent Washington D.C. lobbyist.

As the head of a government recognized by the United Nations, Prime Minister Misick enjoyed diplomatic immunity. So his end of the deal presumably entailed carrying around over his shoulder a duffel-bag-sized diplomatic pouch.

The corrupt Prime Minister and the crooked Guyanese pilot crisscrossed the Caribbean, flew to Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S., where he had a fateful encounter with an honest (and scared) U.S. Customs Agent at Fort Lauderdale International Airport. The encounter ended with the Customs Agent losing his job, even though his immediate supervisor—while he was screening Brassington— ordered him to treat Brassington “as a grave threat to national security.”

‘Gangster Planet’ in the Caribbean

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Trouble in paradise(Shameless plug: There’s more on all of this in my new book, Gangster Planet, coming in January. )

Michael Misick’s blatant corruption eventually grew so egregious—even by the Caribbean’s less-than-rigid standards—that the former British Empire manned up and bit the bullet, announcing the formation of the dreaded British Commissions of Inquiry.

The wigs were laid out.

When he became Prime Minister in 2003, Misick net worth was less than $50,000.

Four short years later his net worth was $180 million.

The British Commission ventured no explanation for how Misick managed to rake in $40 million a year four years in a row. They had none that could be mentioned aloud. The Western taboo concerning discussion of elite involvement in the drug trade is too strong.

So an official explanation of sorts for how Misick got so rich so fast was mumbled, then quickly forgotten. To explain the unexplained, they floated the idea that Misick had just been astutely acquiring publicly-owned land before selling it off to developers.

“Mr. Misick is accused of offences including selling Crown land to developers for less than its true value,” the Commission reported.

It became painfully obvious that there are times when a dumb explanation is worse than no explanation at all.

Explained the Daily Mail, “Misick was forced out of office in 2009 after the British government accused him of corruption. He was put on trial over accusations he stole million from public coffers.”

To some observers, “stealing millions from public coffers” sounds a little like being caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

The Commissioners were tap-dancing in a stiff upper-lip sort of way. But they were forced to confirm the $180 million estimate of Misick’s private stash by Lisa Raye McCoy-Misick’s public testimony.

Politicians have sold favors to developers since the dawn of time. None ever salted away anything like $180 million dollars in just a few years. But then nobody had partnered with a drug pilot as well-connected as Michael Francis Brassington before.

Decapitation is an occupational hazard

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Plane Skids Off Runway And Crashes In New Jersey
TETERBORO, NJ – FEBRUARY 2: A CL-600 Challenger corporate jet sits partially inside a warehouse after crashing while trying to take off from Teterboro Airport in February 2, 2005 in Teterboro, New Jersey. The plane, with 11 aboard, skidded across Route 46 during the morning rush hour striking two cars before crashing into the building. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Brassington’s Platinum Jet air charter company flew Misick and Omarosa around the world even as the company was being enjoined by both the FAA and the NTSB—in strong language— to stop flying illegal charters on U.S. registered airplanes.

Even after Brassington’s company was charged with felonies in the crash of one its planes at Teterboro Airport outside New York City that nearly decapitated a bystander, testimony at a British Commission of Inquiry showed Brassington was flying illegal charter flights on American-registered planes for Turks & Caicos Premier Michael Misick.

Misick’s own testimony to the Inquiry revealed a shamelessly corrupt figure whose government was so broke that classrooms went without roofs, communication systems at government offices were disconnected, and government employees were forced to bring their own rolls of toilet paper to work.

Yet Misick thought nothing of sticking the impoverished island nation with a whopping $160,000 per month tab for two Gulfstream’s that was promptly paid each month to a lobbyist in Washington D.C. who had worked in the Clinton White House named Jeffrey Watson.

A timely ‘fizzle alert’

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lisarayeUltimately Omarosa had a rival for Michael Misick’s dubious affections which turned into the sort of cat fight that tabloids love. Misick began seeing actress Lisa Raye McCoy, already a well-known Hollywood sit-com star, whose life and romantic career were avidly chronicled by a surprising number of magazines and online publications.

Omarosa and Misick’s “tryst fizzled,” tabloids reported, “after McCoy allegedly confronted Omarosa over her continuing ‘friendship’ with Misick while both were at an NAACP event.

Lisa Raye was a “fizzle block.”

Omarosa and Misick stopped seeing each other. And just a few scant months later the ‘other woman’ in the love triangle became Premier Michael Misick’s next wife.

The rest is tabloid history.

Two years later the couple’s forever love became just another shocking celebrity break-up.

The pair divorced in 2008. But for Misick, the split came at the worst possible time, just as he was being ousted from power and forced to resign by Her Majesty’s representatives. Observers of the resulting political shake-up in the Caribbean got to witness something never before seen on Earth:

A former colonial power taking back the sovereignty of one of its former possessions for the first time in history.

The former colonial power, Great Britain, was embarrassed. The visuals were awful. Visions of manacles snapping back on the wrists of descendants of slaves. The Queen, reportedly, was not amused.

A woman’s revenge can be awesome to witness

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lisa raye mccoy Then—like an unexpected twist at the end of the second act in a Hollywood thriller—something happened which changed everything.

Lisa Raye had had enough of being dissed in divorce proceedings. So she sweetly offered to voluntarily return to the Turks & Caicos’ and testify before the British Commission of Inquiry about what she knew of her husband’s corrupt activities… which turned out to be a lot.

For tabloids and movie star blogs, it was like Christmas and Carnival rolled into one.

“Word on the street was that Premier Misick is a bit of a hoe.While Lisa Raye was in the U.S. on business, Misick had BET’s on-air personality Rocsi all draped up in his Turks & Caicos’ mansion, wearing only a bikini and a custom robe made for her visit.

To top it off, Rocsi was giving tours of the mansion.

‘You giving tours of another heffa’s house? Gaaaangster!!’

Lisa Raye returned to the island posthaste, and was filmed arriving at the Turks & Caicos airport, where she gave a brief interview to a local news station.

“You could almost see the crazy in her eyes,’ wrote one observer. “She just didn’t look right.”

She immediately confronted her cheating husband.

“Word on the streets was that Lisa Raye and her husband were beefing really hard.”

A physical altercation ensued, in the presence of a number of government officials. It resulted in both Mr. and Mrs. Misick seeking emergency medical attention. Not for broken bones, or black eyes. But for bites. Lisa Raye reportedly bit both her husband, and an innocent bystander.

It seems fairly certain that— even before the unfortunate bystander got in the way—the marriage was over.

Lisa Raye later returned to the island to voluntarily testify during the British Commission of Inquiry. Her appearance brought out a standing-room-only crowd.

Oleg the Oligarch

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oleg-the-oligarchBack in Guyana, drug pilot Michael Brassington’s prominent family was making some news of its own. The pilot’s father, also named Michael Brassington, was Guyana’s Minister for Privatization, which was—just like in Russia!—a really sweet job.

On behalf of his grateful nation (no doubt), Brassington Pere sold a billion dollar bauxite concession in Guyana to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who controlled Russia’s aluminum industry.

Oleg the Oligarch has recently become well-known in the U.S. for paying Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort a reported $60 million dollars.

There have been a number of corroborating reports in the mainstream media confirming reporting in this space about Michael Francis Brassington.

A “Caribbean News Now” feature from McClatchy-Tribune Business News on Dec 6, 2010 was headlined “Turks and Caicos aviation issues up in the air”

“Residents of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) have been largely kept in the dark regarding the aircraft used by former Premier Michael Misick, which was reportedly leased to the government for a large monthly fee.”

“Michael Brassington, who reportedly piloted the plane for Misick, was recently been found guilty in the US of offences stemming from a serious jet accident that occurred in New Jersey in 2005.

“Brassington, known as the “Heroin Pilot,” was charged with endangering passengers and the public. His plane failed to take off from a New Jersey runway and crashed through a fence at a high rate of speed smashing cars on a nearby highway and injuring occupants.’

Michael Brassington, 9/11 heroin pilot

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brass-sThe ‘heroin pilot’ designation hung on Michael Brassington by McClatchy is the result of dogged reporting in this space on his criminal exploits over a number of years.

Briefly, it involves a Lear jet belonging to Wally Hilliard, owner of the infamous Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice Florida which taught Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to fly, that was busted at Orlando Executive Airport on July 22 2000, three weeks after Atta began flight lessons at his school, carrying 43 lbs of heroin.

“Top ten stories of 2010 in the Turks and Caicos Islands”

More mainstream corroboration came in a Jan 1 2010 feature headlined “Top ten stories of 2010 in the Turks and Caicos Islands”

“Number Ten: Special Prosecutions and Civil Recovery” was all about Misick & Brassington’s illicit air carrier

“Michael Misick’s former pilot, Michael Brassington, was convicted in the US for violating numerous FAA regulations and may serve as much as 20 years in prison. It was also revealed that Brassington had been under surveillance by US authorities for drug trafficking.”

There’s one more mainstream corroboration of the story told about Brassington in this space, a story from the Caribbean News Agency (CANA) slugged GUYANA-SECURITY which came out just last month.

The headline read “Police detain chartered aircraft.”

A police statement read:

“A private chartered aircraft which arrived at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport (in Guyana) has been detained by the police who suspect that the plane has a false registration number and false documents. When customs and security officials carried out inspections, several irregularities were found.

‘Ranks of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit conducted a preliminary inspection of the aircraft and discovered certain irregularities which were promptly reported to higher Headquarters.’

The pilots and passengers had been invited to Guyana by a man who was at the airport to receive them, identified as Michael Brassington, who has served time in the U.S. on several charges.

‘Further enquiries revealed that the registration number on the aircraft may be false, since another aircraft also carries the same registration number. The data plate of the aircraft was also missing, said the statement.

Investigators say they plan to question Brassington about the plane.’

Later the report was fleshed out a little.

The plane landed with two Venezuelan pilots and four other Venezuelans, including two lawyers. There to greet the group was Captain Michael Brassington. They were here on a business trip, they said.

Online sources show a plane bearing the same registration markings —a Beechcraft, tail number YV-2493, serial # BL 23, registered to Aerocaribbean Corp—is owned by the Venezuelan military. Guyana Defense Forces spokesman Lt. Colonel Field was unable to say whether the plane that landed was the same plane.

And the beat goes on.
http://www.madcowprod.com/2018/08/29/a- ... ussiagate/





emptywheel

If a reality show star can tape EVERY conversation she had in the White House (including with Trump) what are the chances that lifetime Russia diplomats can do so too?




Omarosa secretly taped her victims using her personal cell phone - Axios

3 hours ago
Omarosa taped nearly every conversation she had while working in the White House, including ones with "all of the Trumps," a source who watched her make many of the tapes tells Axios. Omarosa did this with a personal phone, almost always on record mode.

Why it matters: Omarosa is far from the only White House staffer to exploit lax internal oversight and loose loyalties to collect damaging info on Trump and others. And we know of several staffers who took careful notes for future deployment.

Omarosa, whose book became a New York Times bestseller after she was fired from the White House, was also (perhaps rightly) paranoid:

The source said Omarosa "wouldn't write me on email or text me — many [conversations] happened on Facebook Messenger (she didn’t want what happened to Hillary Clinton and her emails to happen to her)."
How Omarosa made the tapes, according to the source:

She carried two phones, her personal phone and her government-issued one.
She would often put conversations she had on her work phone on speaker, then record those with her personal phone.
Before heading into meetings, she would often press "record" on her personal phone — which she carried in her pocket or in a small purse.
Omarosa said she recorded people so she could go back and refer to them later, the source said. But she also wanted to "cover her own butt."

Why it was so easy: People in the White House paid much less attention to personal phones before leaking became ubiquitous.
In January, chief of staff John Kelly instituted a ban on personal devices in the West Wing on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m.
Go deeper:
https://www.axios.com/trump-approval-ra ... 30756.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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