Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 20, 2017 6:37 pm

The Twitter Comes In Handy
By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 20, 2017 4:22 PM
Remember I explained on Monday how the Trump team’s obsession with getting hacked emails from Clinton’s (allegedly hacked but very likely not hacked) private email server may have spurred the Russian intelligence effort to hack and disclose the DNC and Podesta emails.

Look what this top Trump campaign official was looking at a month before the Don Jr. meeting …


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Kremlin has Hillary’s emails. Russia has 20,000 emails stolen from her secret home server. @IngrahamAngle #Trump2016

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Kremlin Has Hillary’s Emails

Russia has 20,000 emails stolen from her secret home server

by Edmund Kozak | Updated 11 May 2016 at 5:01 PM

The Kremlin is considering whether or not to release some 20,000 hacked Clinton emails reportedly in its possession.

Russian security services apparently obtained the emails as part of their investigation into the Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, known as “Guccifer” — now in U.S. custody in relation to the Clinton email scandal.

“Guccifer” hacked into the former secretary of state’s email. “For me, it was easy.”
“There’s a debate going on in the Kremlin between the Foreign Ministry and the Intelligence Services about whether they should release the 20,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that they have hacked into,” Judge Andrew Napolitano told Megyn Kelly on Monday.

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) began monitoring Lazar after a failed attempt in 2011 to hack into RT, a news service funded by the Russian government. While it hasn’t been confirmed publicly by its government that Russia is in possession of the emails, there is ample evidence which suggests the Russians do indeed have Clinton’s emails.

Lazar has stated publicly that he knows he is not the only hacker who was able to — and did — gain access to Clinton’s private server. “For me, it was easy … easy for me, for everybody,” he said in an interview with Fox News. Everybody included “up to 10, like, IPs from other parts of the world,” that were active on the server while Lazar had access.

Furthermore, RT published portions of Clinton’s emails on its website in March 2013, claiming they were supplied by “Guccifer” himself. But given the existence of websites like Wikileaks, it’s difficult to imagine a hacker like Lazar personally giving such sensitive information to a news agency that is a de facto branch of the Russian government.


The Obama-Clinton Three-Card Monte
The closer the email investigation gets to the truth, the more evidence seems to disappear
Indeed, RT's proximity to the Russian government suggests it's more likely the agency received the emails, not from Lazar himself, but from Russian authorities monitoring Lazar or Russian hackers themselves. In October 2015, The Associated Press reported that Russian authorities may have hacked Clinton's server on at least five separate occasions.

The existence of these emails is a significant problem for Clinton. Despite the ongoing FBI investigation growing larger and more serious by the day — it was revealed last week that her closest aides from the State Department had all been interviewed, some more than once — Clinton seems no closer to being indicted.

Indeed, the FBI's investigation has at times seemed almost farcical. On Monday, the State Department said it had apparently lost four years' worth of emails from Brian Pagliano, Clinton's IT head who set up the private server.

"Such records might shed light on his role in setting up Clinton's server, and why he was granted immunity by the FBI," said Republican National Committee Deputy Communications Director Raj Shah. "But it seems that his emails were either destroyed or never turned over, adding yet another layer to the secrecy surrounding his role."

But if the State Department is unable (or unwilling) to provide materials to the FBI pertinent to its investigation, then perhaps the Russian government will oblige.
http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/krem ... ry-emails/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby norton ash » Thu Jul 20, 2017 6:38 pm

The Consul » Thu Jul 20, 2017 4:15 pm wrote:It's a good thing he doesn't read, or have complex comprehensions skills, because if he did and someone showed him this, and said it was the NYT and it was him mumbling those words, he would have to order the Hemlock straight away and use it as a chaser for a live grenade.

What an embarrassing nightmare.


He has no shame whatsoever, and he would never off himself. And if there's a hell he'd spend his whole time blaming someone else.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 20, 2017 9:29 pm

Trump team seeks to control, block Mueller’s Russia investigation

President Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the Russia probe, according to a person familiar with the effort. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)

By Carol D. Leonnig, Ashley Parker, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger July 20 at 9:10 PM

Some of President Trump’s lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president’s authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort.

Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the probe, according to one of those people. A second person said Trump’s lawyers have been discussing the president’s pardoning powers among themselves.

Trump’s legal team declined to comment on the issue. But one adviser said the president has simply expressed a curiosity in understanding the reach of his pardoning authority, as well as the limits of Mueller’s investigation.

“This is not in the context of, ‘I can’t wait to pardon myself,” a close adviser said.

With the Russia investigation continuing to widen, Trump’s lawyers are working to corral the probe and question the propriety of the special counsel’s work. They are actively compiling a list of Mueller’s alleged potential conflicts of interest, which they say could serve as a way to stymie his work, according to several of Trump’s legal advisers.

A conflict of interest is one of the possible grounds that can be cited by an attorney general to remove a special counsel from office under Justice Department regulations that set rules for the job.

The president is also irritated by the notion that Mueller’s probe could reach into his and his family’s finances, advisers said.

Trump has been fuming about the probe in recent weeks as he has been informed about the legal questions that he and his family could face. His primary frustration centers on why allegations that his campaign coordinated with Russia should spread into scrutinizing many years of Trump dealmaking. He has told aides he was especially disturbed after learning Mueller would be able to access several years of his tax returns.

Breaking a tradition that began with President Jimmy Carter, Trump has repeatedly refused to make his tax returns public after first claiming he could not do so because he was under audit or after promising to release them after an IRS audit was completed.

Further adding to the challenges facing Trump’s outside lawyers, the team’s spokesman, Mark Corallo, resigned on Thursday, according to two people familiar with his departure. Corallo did not respond to immediate requests for comment.

“If you’re looking at Russian collusion, the president’s tax returns would be outside that investigation,” said a close adviser to the president.

Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s private lawyers, said in an interview Thursday that the president and his legal team are intent on making sure Mueller stays within the boundaries of his assignment as special counsel. He said they will complain directly to Mueller if necessary.

“The fact is that the president is concerned about conflicts that exist within the special counsel’s office and any changes in the scope of the investigation,” Sekulow said. “The scope is going to have to stay within his mandate. If there’s drifting, we’re going to object.”

Sekulow cited Bloomberg News reports that Mueller is scrutinizing some of Trump’s business dealings, including a Russian oligarch who purchased a Palm Beach mansion from Trump for $95 million in 2008.

“They’re talking about real estate transactions in Palm Beach several years ago,” Sekulow said. “In our view, this is far outside the scope of a legitimate investigation.”

The president has long called the FBI investigation into his campaign’s possible coordination with the Russians a “witch hunt.” But now, the president is coming face-to-face with a powerful investigative team that is able to study evidence of any crime they encounter in the probe — including tax fraud, lying to federal agents and interference in the investigation.

“This is Ken Starr times 1,000,” said one lawyer involved in the case, referring to the independent counsel who oversaw an investigation that eventually led to House impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. “Of course, it’s going to go into his finances.”

Following Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey — in part because of his displeasure with the FBI’s Russia investigation — Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel in a written order. That order gave Mueller broad authority to investigate links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” and any crimes committed in response to the investigation, such as perjury or obstruction of justice.

Mueller’s probe has already expanded to include an examination of whether Trump obstructed justice in his dealings with Comey, as well as the business activities of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

Trump’s team could potentially challenge whether a broad probe of Trump’s finances prior to his candidacy could be considered a matter that arose “directly” from an inquiry into possible collusion with a foreign government.

The president’s legal team has also identified what they allege are several conflicts of interest facing Mueller, such as donations to Democrats by some of his prosecutors.

Another potential conflict claim is an allegation that Mueller and Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia had a dispute over membership fees when Mueller resigned as a member in 2011, two White House advisers said. A spokesman for Mueller said there was no dispute when Mueller, who was FBI director at the time, left the club.

Trump also took public aim on Wednesday at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein, whose actions led to Mueller’s appointment. In an interview with the New York Times Wednesday, the president said he never would have hired Sessions if he knew he was going to recuse himself from the case.

Some Republicans in frequent touch with the White House said they viewed the president’s decision to publicly air his disappointment with Sessions as a warning sign that the attorney general’s days were numbered. Several senior aides were described as “stunned” when Sessions announced Thursday morning he would stay on at the Justice Department.

Another Republican in touch with the administration described the public steps as part of a broader effort aimed at “laying the groundwork to fire” Mueller.

“Who attacks their entire Justice Department?” this person said. “It’s insane.”

Law enforcement officials described Sessions as increasingly distant from the White House and the FBI because of the strains of the Russia investigation.

Traditionally, Justice Department leaders have sought to maintain a certain degree of autonomy from the White House as a means of ensuring prosecutorial independence.

But Sessions’s situation is more unusual, law enforcement officials said, because he has angered the president for apparently being too independent while also angering many at the FBI for his role in the president’s firing of Comey.

As a result, there is far less communication among those three key parts of the government than in years past, several officials said.

Currently, the discussions of pardoning authority by Trump’s legal team is purely theoretical, according to two people familiar with the ongoing conversations. But if Trump pardoned himself in the face of the ongoing Mueller investigation, it would set off a legal and political firestorm, first around the question of whether a president can use the constitutional pardon power in that way.

“This is a fiercely debated but unresolved legal question,” said Brian C. Kalt, a constitutional law expert at Michigan State University who has written extensively on the question.

The power to pardon is granted to the president in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, which gives the commander in chief the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That means pardon authority extends to federal criminal prosecution but not to state level or impeachment inquiries.

No president has sought to pardon himself, so no courts have reviewed it. Although Kalt says the weight of the law argues against a president pardoning himself, he says the question is open and predicts such an action would move through the courts all the way to the Supreme Court.

“There is no predicting what would happen,” said Kalt, author of the book, “Constitutional Cliffhangers: A Legal Guide for Presidents and Their Enemies.” It includes chapters on the ongoing debate over whether presidents can be prosecuted while in office and on whether a president can issue a pardon to himself.

Other White House advisers have tried to temper Trump, urging him to simply cooperate with the probe and stay silent on his feelings about the investigation.

On Monday, lawyer Ty Cobb, newly brought into the White House to handle responses to the Russian probe, convened a meeting with the president and his team of lawyers, according to two people briefed on the meeting. Cobb, who is not yet on the White House payroll, was described as attempting to instill some discipline in how the White House handles queries about the case. But Trump surprised many of his aides by speaking at length about the probe to the New York Times two days later.

Some note that the Constitution does not explicitly prohibit a president from pardoning himself. On the other side, experts say that by definition a pardon is something you can only give to someone else. There is also a common-law canon that prohibits individuals from serving as a judge in their own case. “For example, we would not allow a judge to preside over his or her own trial,” Kalt said.

A president can pardon an individual at any point, including before being charged with a crime, and the scope of a presidential pardon can be very broad. President Gerald Ford pardoned former president Richard M. Nixon preemptively for offenses he “committed or may have committed” while in office.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... df86abc14b




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His attacks on Mueller tell me a lot. He KNOWS how bad it is. His "warning" to Mueller tells me finally understands how bad it is.



spokesman for trump's legal team has resigned

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jul 21, 2017 9:07 am

The Russia Probe Is Headed Toward Places Trump Doesn’t Want It To Go

Christine Frapech
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JULY 21, 2017 6:00 AM

President Donald Trump seems to be headed for a rude awakening.

Though he has dismissed the special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election as a partisan “political witch hunt,” new reports on the probe’s progress indicate it could dig into what Trump told the New York Times that he views as a “violation” of its parameters: his and his family’s finances unrelated to Russia.

In just the past 24 hours, Bloomberg reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office was investigating a number of Russia-related business transactions Trump has carried out in recent years, from his involvement in a failed SoHo condo development deal with a mob-linked Russian businessman to the 2013 Miss Universe contest he hosted in Moscow.

Separately from the Russia probe, the Times reported that banking regulators were digging through hundreds of millions of dollars in loans Deutsche Bank made to Trump, and that the German financial institution expects to eventually have to provide information to Mueller’s team.

Unfortunately for the President, legal experts and former DOJ officials say, this is just how large-scale government investigations work.

“The problem is you don’t really know what is Russian,” Nick Akerman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Watergate investigation, told TPM. “A lot of stuff could be hidden in companies and under names of other people, you just don’t know. You’ve got to look at everything to determine what really relates to the Russia connection here.”

“It’s not up to him as to what the scope of this probe is, that’s for sure,” Akerman added, saying investigators are “not going to ignore stuff that is criminal.”

Financial transactions are well within the wide purview Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein laid out in his May memo appointing Mueller as special counsel, as legal observers have noted.

Susan Hennessey, a former attorney at the National Security Agency’s Office of General Counsel and managing editor of the Lawfare blog, wrote on Twitter that the “Trump family finances are absolutely, 100% fair game.”

“The financial arrangements or dealings, those could be related to why there was collusion or incentive or motive to collude,” Tracy Schmaler, a former Justice Department spokesperson during President Obama’s first term, told TPM. “So I wouldn’t say it’s out of bounds so much as filling in the picture.”

“The relationship with Russia and Russian officials predates his run for the presidency,” Schmaler added.

Rosenstein’s memo granted Mueller sweeping authority to look into any links between the Trump campaign and Russia; “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”; and any matters within the scope of federal regulation 600.4(a), which includes obstruction of justice and other matters pertaining to efforts to derail the special counsel probe.

Although Trump told the Times that he is “not under investigation” and “didn’t do anything wrong,” the Washington Post previously reported that Mueller’s team had taken control of a federal investigation into whether the President obstructed justice by abruptly firing James Comey as FBI director because of the “Russia thing,” as Trump put it.

And as Comey testified before Congress in June, it’s possible that in the course of its work the special counsel could uncover crimes unrelated to Russia’s interference in the U.S. election or the Trump campaign’s potential coordination with those efforts.

“In any complex investigation, when you start turning over rocks, sometimes you find things that are unrelated to the primary investigation, that are criminal in nature,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Mueller’s powerhouse team of more than a dozen attorneys has experience in national security, fraud, money-laundering, organized crime, espionage, cybercrime and public corruption, offering an indication of just how wide-ranging the investigation may be.

A previous federal probe centered around a president’s private dealings took a winding path of a different sort. Independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr was appointed in 1994 to investigate a decades-old failed Arkansas real estate involving Bill and Hillary Clinton; the impeachment report he filed four years later focused instead on Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

All that special counsel investigators are required to do is follow the threads presented to them, wherever they might lead, as Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) affirmed Thursday to CNN. Any topic related to Russia, Trump and his campaign associates is fair game.

“If they were investigating Donald Trump when he was five years old and ran a lemonade stand in Queens, I’d say, yeah, that’s probably beyond the scope,” Akerman, the former Watergate prosecutor said. “But if it turns out that the lemonade stand was done a year ago and was in Moscow and related to the same characters who showed up at the meeting with his son [Donald Trump Jr.], well I might feel a little differently about it.”

The looming, unanswered question, then, is whether a President who has fired his FBI director, scorned an attorney general who was his campaign’s most loyal supporter, and offered a national newspaper his view on the acceptable scope of a sprawling federal investigation that now touches on his own business dealings would go as far as to fire the man leading it—again.

Asked by the Times if he would fire Mueller for exceeding what he felt were the boundaries of the special counsel probe, Trump said only, “I can’t answer that question because I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... probe-goes
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jul 21, 2017 9:16 am

Were Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner Hoping to Get Clinton’s Emails From Putin?
Before they met with a Russian lawyer, Trump’s campaign promoted a report suggesting the Kremlin had them.
DAVID CORN
JUL. 20, 2017 6:00 AM

Image

James West/Mother Jones

When Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort were told in early June 2016 that the Putin regime had dirt on Hillary Clinton and wanted to share the material secretly with them to help Donald Trump win the White House, they quickly moved forward with a meeting with a Russian go-between. Trump Jr.’s email at the time—”I love it”—suggests that Trump’s top aides were keen to get their hands on any negative information the Russians had. But one possible reason for such eagerness might have been an online report that the Kremlin had somehow obtained Hillary Clinton’s personal emails. At least one top Trump campaign official had embraced this story and circulated it on social media—even though the report, which was highlighted on Fox News and disseminated by a conservative website founded by Laura Ingraham, lacked any sources and was first posted on a pair of bizarre conspiracy sites, including one associated with neo-Nazis.

Clinton’s emails were the Holy Grail of Clinton-haters during the 2016 campaign. After using a private email server as secretary of state, Clinton had been asked by the State Department to provide to the agency copies of her emails related to her work at Foggy Bottom. As part of that process, her lawyers vetted all the emails from the private server, sent about 30,000 to the department, and destroyed another 30,000 they deemed personal and unrelated to her stint as secretary of state. Trump and other Clinton antagonists denounced her for obliterating these emails, suggesting they contained evidence of assorted nefarious activity. Her foes also pushed the idea that hackers from Russia or other governments might have penetrated her server and swiped her emails, gaining all sorts of national security secrets and negative information. (There was no evidence any such hacks occurred.)

Trump often tweeted about Clinton’s destroyed emails—he referred to them as “missing”—and, most famously, called on Moscow to hack Clinton to find those messages: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

In the weeks before the meeting between the Russian emissary and the top Trump advisers, hope was burning brightly on the right that Russia somehow had obtained Clinton’s personal emails and would release material that would ruin her campaign. A senior Trump aide was publicly spreading this tale—and another suggested he believed it. But this story was just crap cooked up by a conspiracy site.

On May 6, an article appeared on two sites—the European Union Times and WhatDoesItMean.com—claiming the Kremlin was hotly debating whether or not to release tens of thousands of Clinton emails it supposedly possessed:

An intriguing Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today suggests that a “war of words” has broken out between the Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov and Chairwoman of the Council of Federation Valentina Matviyenko over the issue of releasing to the Western media tens-of-thousands of top secret and classified emails obtained by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) from the private, but unsecured, computer (email server) belonging to former US Secretary of State, and present American presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

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The reports said that Russian intelligence had broken into the computer of an infamous hacker who used the alias Guccifer. This prodigious Romanian hacker—his real name was Marcel Lazar Lehel—had been arrested in early 2014 and extradited to the United States. In May 2016, he pleaded guilty to two criminal charges and was later sentenced to 52 months in prison. In a May 4, 2016, interview with Fox News, Guccifer asserted he had penetrated Clinton’s server—but there was no evidence he had done so. (In 2013, he had hacked the email account of Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton confidante.) These two sites claimed the Russians had stolen from Guccifer the Clinton emails that the hacker supposedly had swiped, and they provided supposed details of the ongoing debate within the Russian government on whether to pass the Clinton emails to media outlets that would reach the United States.

Neither site was a credible source of information. Both were well-known promoters of wild conspiracy theories. In 2009, after the European Union Times posted a story claiming that President Barack Obama had ordered 200,000 troops to be redeployed to prepare for a civil war within the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center investigated the site and discovered it was “registered to the wife of a racist skinhead gang member.” Her husband, according to SPLC, was “a former member of the neo-Nazi group National Alliance who more recently has been active in Volksfront, a racist skinhead group.” She told the SPLC that the she was a “white racialist,” but that the site was registered to her only because she was providing web hosting for “a European who lives abroad.”

Snopes.com, the conspiracy theory-busting site, has referred to WhatDoesItMean.com as a “notorious conspiracy-pushing outlet” and has debunked many of its claims, including posts noting that Clinton was seriously injured in a secret airplane crash and that a doctor who had leaked Clinton’s medical records was found dead.

Despite the questionable provenance of the Russia-has-Clinton’s-emails story, this blockbuster revelation soon was being disseminated by right-wing media. It appears to have started with Fox News.

Three days after these two sites posted this phony story, Andrew Napolitano, a former judge and regular commentator on Fox News (and a Trump favorite), appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show on Fox and asserted that the Clinton email server controversy had become a “perfect storm.” He added, “There’s a debate going on in the Kremlin between the foreign ministry and the intelligence service about whether they should release the 20,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that they have hacked into and received and stored.”

Other right-wing outlets jumped on this assertion. The next day, Gateway Pundit published a post headlined, “REPORT: Hillary’s Emails Hacked by Russia – Kremlin Deciding Whether to Release 20,000 Stolen Emails.” It cited WhatDoesItMean.com. On May 11, LifeZette, a site started by conservative radio host and Trump champion Laura Ingraham, posted a story with this headline: “Kremlin Has Hillary’s Emails: Russia has 20,000 emails stolen from her secret home server.” It asserted, “The Kremlin is considering whether or not to release some 20,000 hacked Clinton emails reportedly in its possession. Russian security services apparently obtained the emails as part of their investigation into the Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, known as ‘Guccifer’—now in U.S. custody in relation to the Clinton email scandal.” It did not refer to any sources for this information. The post added that Napolitano had also said this on Fox.

Two days later, on May 13, Frontpage Mag, a site started by longtime conservative provocateur David Horowitz, reported, “Thousands of e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private, unsecured server, created while she served as Secretary of State, are reportedly in the possession of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).” It linked to the European Union Times story.

This fake news story was legitimized by the Trump campaign. On May 11, Dan Scavino Jr., the social media director of the Trump campaign, tweeted: “Kremlin has Hillary’s emails. Russia has 20,000 emails stolen from her secret home server.” He linked to the LifeZette article.

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Dan Scavino Jr. ✔ @DanScavino
Kremlin has Hillary’s emails. Russia has 20,000 emails stolen from her secret home server. @IngrahamAngle #Trump2016 http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/krem ... ry-emails/
7:44 PM - 11 May 2016 · Trump Tower
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Kremlin Has Hillary’s Emails
The Kremlin is considering whether or not to release some 20,000 hacked Clinton emails reportedly in its possession. Russian security services apparently obtained the emails as part of their invest...
lifezette.com
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Now it was official: The Trump camp was spreading the false information. (Scavino is now the White House director of social media.) A few days later, retired General Michael Flynn, then Trump’s top national security adviser, posted a tweet suggesting he, too, accepted this phony story: “Count on Russia & China having her emails and unsecure calls.”

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General Flynn ✔ @GenFlynn
Astonished would be a much better word than surprised. Count on Russia & China having her emails and unsecure calls. https://twitter.com/jason_c_howk/status ... 5160165376
6:55 PM - 15 May 2016
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And Trump continued to issue tweets slamming Clinton for her “missing” emails.

Meanwhile, Trump fans on Twitter and elsewhere pushed this story fiercely, with some calling on Putin to release the emails to end Clinton’s campaign and save the Untied States. Joe the Plumber, a conservative activist who gained a fleeting moment of fame during the 2008 election, tweeted out a version. Conservative author Janie Johnson tweeted, “DO it Putin! Hillary’s Emails Hacked by Russia – Kremlin Deciding Whether to Release 20,000 Stolen Emails.”

There’s no public indication yet what Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort specifically hoped to receive from the Russians. But if they were aware of (and believed) these conspiracy-theory reports regarding the Russians and Clinton’s emails—real-life fake news that had been bolstered by right-wing media and Trump’s own social media guru—they probably would have been particularly excited to sit down with a Russian lawyer whom they were told was bearing derogatory material on Clinton.

In any event, following this meeting, Trump continued to make Clinton’s emails a key campaign issue. Her personal emails, though, were never uncovered and used as ammo. This conspiracy theory was bunk. But there was actual skullduggery afoot. The Putin regime had managed to steal and exploit other emails to damage Clinton and help Trump. And as the Trump Jr. meeting now shows, Trump’s advisers played a key role in that plot. Even though the Trump campaign had been told the Kremlin wanted to assist Trump secretly, Trump and his aides constantly denied the Russian assault on the election was happening and provided cover for Putin’s covert operation. That was the real conspiracy.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... rom-putin/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jul 21, 2017 11:00 am

Ex Trump associates helped fugitive Kazakhs in visa scheme
BY BEN WIEDER, GABRIELLE PALUCH AND KEVIN G. HALL

Two former associates of Donald Trump helped a family of wealthy Kazakh fugitives make extensive investments in the United States, some aimed at helping family members obtain legal residency here, a McClatchy investigation shows.

Felix Sater, an ex-con and one-time senior adviser in the Trump Organization, helped the Trump family scout deals in Russia. He led an effort that began in 2012 to assist the stepchildren of Viktor Khrapunov, who that year had been placed on an international detention request list by the global police agency Interpol.

Viktor Khrapunov
Former Kazakh Energy Minister Viktor Khrapunov, shown in this photo from an Interpol notice in 2012, faces civil lawsuits in the United States alleging that he and his family laundered stolen money through property in the United States and elsewhere.
Interpol
Khrapunov is the former Kazakh energy minister and ex-mayor of Almaty, that nation’s most populous city. He fled to Switzerland a decade ago, after Kazakhstan’s leaders accused him and his wife of stealing government funds. They are now accused in civil lawsuits of laundering money through luxury properties, including Trump-branded condos in the Soho neighborhood New York.

McClatchy’s probe reveals that with the help of Sater and his then-business associate Daniel Ridloff, also formerly affiliated with the Trump Organization, the Khrapunov family invested millions in a short-lived company that sought to place biometrics machines in airports across the country.

The real aim of Khrapunov’s investment was obtaining US residency for at least one member of the family; the company submitted, with the help of the onetime Trump associates, at least three requests to obtain visas for foreign workers.

The McClatchy investigation reveals a deeper relationship than previously known between the former Trump Organization figures and the fugitive Khrapunovs — underscoring how little is known about many of those involved with the Trump Organization.

There is no evidence that Trump himself participated in the courting of the Khrapunovs, but the affair sheds light on the often murky activities of the associates with whom he did deals at home and abroad.

What Ties?

On paper, Donald Trump’s business relationship with Sater ended almost a decade ago. But earlier this year, Sater re-entered Trump’s orbit when he and Michael D. Cohen, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, were involved with a Ukraine-Russia peace proposal that was presented to Michael Flynn, then Trump’s national security advisor.

Sater, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as a senior adviser to Trump in 2010 and 2011, also gave more than $10,000 to Trump’s presidential campaign and a joint Trump-Republican National Committee fund in 2016, and at least $6,000 this year, according to Federal Election Commission records.


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The web connecting the Trump administration to Russia

From Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to former campaign director Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's allies have business and personal connections to Russia. As Congress and the FBI look into Russia's involvement with the 2016 election, those connect
Natalie Fertig and Patrick Gleason McClatchy
This as Bloomberg reported Thursday that Trump Soho in New York, where the Khrapunovs invested, were among several Trump businesses being looked at by former FBI Director Robert Mueller in his probe of possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016.

“Do not know,” said John M. Dowd, an outside lawyer for Trump, said of the report in response to questions from McClatchy.


Several key people in Trump’s orbit did business with the Kazakh clan, including the law firm of Trump campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani and the Bayrock Group, which developed Trump-branded projects in New York, Florida and Arizona and was founded by Tevik Arif, a politically-connected former Soviet official from Kazakhstan.

Lincoln Mitchell, a political consultant who specializes in Russia and its neighboring countries, said virtually any investment from Kazakhstan warrants scrutiny.

"It would be hard to imagine getting Kazakh investment that wasn't close to the ruling family," Mitchell said in a telephone interview from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Nursultan Nazarbayev has ruled resources-rich Kazakhstan since 1989, placing his children and their spouses in top government posts. Some of his family assets have been frozen in Switzerland, and a U.S. Justice Department settlement in 2015 spotlighted how bribes paid to senior Kazakh officials ended up in offshore accounts belonging to the Kazakh government.

Both Sater and Ridloff had worked for Bayrock before joining the Trump Organization, Sater being one of its managing partners. Later, the two men facilitated the purchase in 2013 of three condos in the Trump SoHo for $3.1 million by companies tied to the Khrapunov children, Ilyas Khrapunov and Elvira Kudryashova.

In 2012 and 2013 alone, Sater and Ridloff worked with the Khrapunovs on more than $40 million in real estate and investment deals. All came after Kazakhstan added Viktor to the Interpol wanted list in February 2012.

Later, the former Trump associates and their Kazakh investors appeared to have a falling out, becoming mired in acrimonious lawsuits that ended in secret sealed settlements. Yet their business relationship appears to have continued after the settlements, and they continue to maintain a friendship via social media.

Viktor Khrapunov’s wife, Leila, would be added to the Interpol wanted list later in 2012, and stepson Ilyas was added in May 2014.

Ilyas Khrapunov
Ilyas Khrapunov, shown in a photo from an Interpol notice, faces civil lawsuits alleging that he and his father, Viktor, a former energy minister and mayor in Kazakhstan, laundered stolen money through property in the United States and elsewhere.
Interpol
The Khrapunovs – who declined to answer detailed questions from McClatchy — maintain that they are the victims of political persecution by the despotic Nazarbayev, who once offered Viktor the post of prime minister before their falling out.

“This is about a dictator trying to silence his political opponents,” Marc Comina, a Khrapunov family spokesman in Switzerland, said in an emailed statement. “Kazakhstan is using the legal systems of Western countries to harass, wear down and destroy political opponents.”

From Almaty to the Big Apple

On the surface, a multimillion dollar investment by the Khrapunovs in a New York-based health technology company would appear to make little sense.

World Health Networks was formed from the ashes of a failed firm that had created health monitoring kiosks placed in pharmacies. The new company aimed to put similar devices in airports across the world, but first it needed capital.

Enter Sater. He was representing the Khrapunovs, who were looking for US investments, and was introduced to executives of World Health Networks through an intermediary who attended the same synagogue on Long Island, according to a person with intimate knowledge of the deal.

Company executives made a pitch to the Khrapunovs in April 2012, according to documents reviewed by McClatchy, and court documents show that the money started flowing into the New York firm soon after.

World Health Network’s business model evolved over the course of its short existence, from an early plan to attract sponsorships from health insurance companies to a later plan to sell advertising space on the machines.

“It was definitely a real company,” said Ken Williams, who helped develop the firm and sat on its board.

Sater installed Ridloff as the company’s chief operating officer, according to former employees who demanded anonymity because of several ongoing lawsuits.

Silence and Denials

McClatchy reporters knocked on Sater’s door in wealthy New York suburb of Sands Point on July 17. He declined comment when asked about World Health Networks and other dealings with the Khrapunovs, saying he was late for a golf outing. McClatchy returned later in the day, prompting Sater to email that he’d call police if reporters came back again.

His attorney, Robert S. Wolf, declined to meet with McClatchy a day later when reporters went to his office in Manhattan’s Chrysler Building seeking comment.

A Port Washington address Sater has listed multiple times as his place of business turned out to be a UPS store.

“He comes in here once in a blue moon,” said Nagasar Lachman, owner of the store.

This much is known: Ridloff submitted three visa applications for highly skilled workers on the company’s behalf between March 2013 and March 2014, all seeking to hire foreign budget analysts.

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Stopped on the street as he left his Manhattan office, Ridloff confirmed to McClatchy that the investment by the Khrapunovs – ultimately $6 million, according to court records -- was aimed at securing Kudryashova, Viktor’s stepdaughter, legal residence in the United States.

The company partnered with the Swiss-based World Heart Federation and managed to place its machines in several airports, including Detroit, San Jose and Sacramento, Calif. But former employees confirmed its revenue couldn’t keep pace with expenses.

The company spent liberally on international travel and a bloated payroll, they said, and it folded soon after funding from the Khrapunovs dried up in late 2014.

It’s unclear the visas were ever issued, or whether the Khrapunovs obtained legal U.S. residence through any other means. The State Department and Homeland Security did not immediately provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act about World Health Networks’ visa applications.

Elvira Kudryashova listed a Newport Beach, Calif., address on a 2016 incorporation document for an upscale toy store she owned called Anthill shopNplay. The property in Newport Beach was sold later the same year.

Mall Brawl

Sater and Ridloff also worked with the Khrapunovs on nearly $35 million in U.S. real estate purchases during the same time period.

They started with several acquisitions in N.Y., including the three condos in the Trump SoHo for which they spent $3.1 million.

Then in June 2013, Sater and Ridloff helped a Khrapunov-linked company purchase the debt on the Tri-County Mall in the Cincinnati suburbs for $30 million. A month later, they sold their interest in the mall for $45 million to a U.S. company whose website lists Neil Bush, son of former President George H. W. Bush, on its board of directors.

Sater and Ridloff were owed a $1.6 million commission for their work arranging the Ohio deal, but a lawsuit filed in December 2013 alleged that they took nearly the entire $45 payment.

The lawsuit was settled, remarkably, in one day’s time, on Dec. 20, 2013, and the terms are secret. That might have been expected to be the end of the business relationship between the Khrapunovs and Sater.

But documents and social media suggest a seemingly amicable alliance extending beyond the 2013 lawsuit.

On Feb. 19, 2014 – two months after the lawsuit was filed – Ridloff submitted the third, final visa application on behalf of World Health Networks.

Ridloff incorporated World Health Networks in Kansas in March 2014, 10 days before the company was approved to enter into a contract with the Kansas City Airport in Missouri.

A Khrapunov-linked company made payments of at least $250,000 to World Health Networks in 2014, according to court records in a U.S. civil lawsuit brought against the family, with a payment of $80,000 made in September of 2014.

And Ridloff’s Facebook page shows that he is currently “friends” with Ilyas Khrapunov – years after the lawsuit alleging Sater helped orchestrate a multi-million dollar heist from a Khrapunov-connected company.

Bayrock Origins

Sater first began working with Trump while the Russian emigre was at Bayrock, which developed projects with Trump in Phoenix and Fort Lauderdale in addition to the Trump SoHo in New York.

Trump had given Bayrock exclusive rights in 2005 to develop a Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow. Court documents show Sater claims to have led a scouting trip in Russia with Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump in 2006.

Sater and Ridloff appear to have first become acquainted with the Khrapunovs during their time at Bayrock; in 2007 and 2008, companies tied to the Kazakh family entered into several deals with Bayrock, including a joint energy extraction venture in Kazakhstan called Kazbay and the development of a luxury building in Switzerland overlooking Lake Geneva.

Bracewell & Giuliani, the law-firm co-founded by former New York City Mayor and Trump surrogate Rudolph Giuliani, was retained to handle legal matters for the joint Bayrock-Khrapunov energy venture, according to documents obtained by Dutch broadcaster Zembla. Giuliani left the partnership in 2016 and Bracewell officials did not respond to numerous calls.

The Giuliani law firm’s Kazakh office was also behind the placement of more than $1 billion in corporate debt for Bank Turanalem, or BTA. Its top shareholder was Mukhtar Ablyazov, another fugitive Kazakh, whose daughter is married to Ilyas Khrapunov.

Kazakhstan’s president ordered BTA seized in 2009 and soon after accused Ablyazov of absconding with billions. Lawsuits in Los Angeles, New York and across the globe accuse of the Khrapunovs of co-mingling funds with Ablyazov and laundering the money, which is also the basis for the Interpol request by Kazakhstan. Lawyers for both the Khrapunovs and Ablyazovs deny this.

The Kazbay deal would ultimately fail and the Bayrock Group imploded soon after, in part as revelations emerged about Sater’s past. He had done prison time in the mid-1990s after being convicted of stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass during a bar brawl. Later, Sater pleaded guilty to racketeering in a securities fraud case but avoided prison by becoming a U.S. government informant.

Those revelations didn’t end Sater’s relationship with Trump – he and Ridloff both worked as advisers to the Trump Organization in 2010.

While Sater has said he was scouting potential Russia projects for the Trump Organization as late as 2015, Trump has played down their relationship.

“If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump said in a Florida deposition in 2013.



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

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jul 21, 2017 5:30 pm

THE RUSSIA CONNECTION

How White House Threats Condition Mueller’s Reality

By Jane Chong, Quinta Jurecic, Benjamin Wittes Friday, July 21, 2017, 3:41 PM


FBI Director Robert Mueller leads a briefing for the President on the Boston Marathon bombings, April 2013 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
What does the world look like today if you’re Robert Mueller?

You’ve got a huge, sprawling, immeasurably complicated job, and the President of the United States has just put you on notice of what you already have long suspected: You may not have much time.

A pair of stories published last night by the New York Times and Washington Post announced that the White House is looking to “undercut” Mueller’s investigation and is “scouring” for information on potential conflicts of interest on the part of Mueller’s team. The stories describe a systematic effort to comb through the backgrounds of Mueller and his office in the hope of finding material damaging enough to merit firing Mueller, requesting the recusal of members of his team, or at the very least discrediting the independent investigation in the eyes of the public.

The White House is also examining the possible scope of the president’s pardon power and pushing the argument that the special counsel investigation should be sharply limited to exclude Trump’s finances. The attacks on Mueller and his office have been going on for a while now, but this new wave of hostility from the White House appears to have been instigated by concerns that Mueller’s probe will widen to include Trump’s business transactions—or that it already has.

These reports follow Trump’s own sharp criticism of Mueller in his extensive interview with the Times on Wednesday, along with his attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for appointing Mueller following Sessions’ recusal. After expressing his belief that “a special counsel should never have been appointed in this case,” Trump suggests that Mueller’s having met with the White House to discuss coming on as FBI Director following Comey’s dismissal constitutes a conflict of interest. He also hints darkly at other, unnamed improprieties on Mueller’s part: “There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.” And he seems to call into question the integrity of Mueller’s staff as well, presumably in reference to the fact that some of them have donated to Democrats: “[T]here are so many conflicts that everybody has.” The White House has also tried to discredit Mueller as a close friend of Comey, which Trump himself described as “very bothersome.”

Beyond attacking the integrity of the investigators, Trump’s aides are also seeking to cramp the scope of the investigation itself. While the new head of Trump’s personal legal team, John Dowd, has denied any discussion of the pardon power within the White House, the Post writes that both the president and his lawyers have inquired about Trump’s ability to pardon aides, family members, and himself.

Likewise, the White House is doing its best to telegraph its intent to police the boundaries of the special counsel’s activities. When asked by the Times how he would react to Mueller’s investigating the Trump family finances “unrelated to Russia,” the president declared that such a step would be “a violation.” And Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the next day that, “The president’s making clear that the special counsel should not move outside the scope of the investigation.” In an interview with the Post, Trump’s private counsel Jay Sekulow declared, “The scope is going to have to stay within [Mueller’s] mandate. If there’s drifting, we’re going to object.” Sekulow pointed to the president’s past real estate dealings as an example of material off limits to the special counsel.

It all adds up to a systematic push-back on the independence and integrity of the special counsel investigation. As one “Republican in touch with the administration” quoted in the Post suggests, the White House may well be “laying the groundwork to fire” Mueller.

So now put yourself in Mueller’s shoes. You are both a highly-experienced investigator (you’ve run the FBI for 12 years) and a highly-experienced prosecutor (you’ve headed the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, served as a U.S. Attorney, and prosecuted murder cases as perhaps the most overqualified assistant U.S. attorney in American history). You have staffed your investigation with a group of lawyers of remarkable depth and range of experience. You have on your staff Russian language capability. You have truly remarkable appellate capacity. And you have first class expertise in money laundering, campaign finance, organized crime, and other relevant areas.

But it all may not matter, because the President may decide either to issue a bunch of preemptive pardons or to try to either fire you or rein in your jurisdiction. And the talent you have collected is under attack.

How do you play it? Here are six broad areas to which Mueller may be giving some thought as he considers how to do his job under these highly unusual conditions. To be clear, the following is not based not on any communication with Mueller or his staff but on our own assessment of the law, the problems Mueller faces, and the incentives the White House’s activities create for someone in his position. We assume in everything that follows that there are serious matters under investigation. If, by contrast, L’Affaire Russe is all nonsense, the situation is far easier: Mueller can wrap up the investigation and go back to his law firm.



Investigative Design: Mueller’s mandate is broad. Under the terms of his appointment letter from Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, he has jurisdiction not merely over “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” but also over “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” He also has jurisdiction over any crimes that may arise as a result of interactions with the investigation itself: perjury, obstruction of justice, and the like.

It is only if wholly new matters arise that require “additional jurisdiction beyond that specified in [this] original jurisdiction” that, according to the regulations that govern his service, Mueller must “consult with the [acting] Attorney General, who will determine whether to include the additional matters within [his] jurisdiction or assign them elsewhere.” The regulations elsewhere specify that the special counsel is not “subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the [Justice] Department,” and while Rosenstein can “request that [Mueller] provide an explanation of any investigative or prosecutorial step” and rescind it if it is patently “inappropriate or unwarranted” under department policy, he must affirmatively seek that explanation; Mueller does not have to go to him for permission. Moreover, Rosenstein is obliged to give “great weight” to Mueller’s views—and notify Congress should he decide to countermand Mueller’s proposed course of action.

In other words, as long as Mueller can reasonably conclude that the new matters in question either arose or are arising out of his original investigation, he doesn’t need anyone’s okay to look into them. And at least under the current rules, the burden is entirely on Rosenstein to come to him, ask for an explanation, and then object to the expansion. By contrast, if Mueller wants to look at something that cannot be said to have arisen out of the existing investigation, the burden is on him to seek out the authority. Given Rosenstein’s own precarious posture with respect to Trump, and his less than honorable behavior towards James Comey, making sure all expansions fall into that first category will likely be the attractive alternative for Mueller.

This observation has two implications: The first is that we should expect Mueller to be cautious about new investigative opportunities that walk in with no relationship to the earlier mandate. Don’t anticipate Mueller latching onto Monica Lewinsky-type matters that may find their way to his door. Rather, look for him to be disciplined and take on such matters only if Rosenstein refers them to him.

The second implication is that Mueller will likely interpret broadly the phrase in Rosenstein’s appointment letter “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” Trump seems to be furious that Mueller might look at his business transactions. But of course Mueller will. If you’re trying to understand “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with” Trump’s campaign, looking at the business ties between those individuals and Russian interests is a no-brainer; it would be malpractice not to do so. If along the way, Mueller finds evidence of criminal activity unrelated to that those links or coordination, he will surely interpret that evidence as constituting a “matter that arose . . . directly from the investigation” and thus will not feel the need to consult with Rosenstein before taking on such a matter. Mueller may well consult with the acting attorney general anyway in the general course of keeping Rosenstein informed and assured that the investigation is proceeding appropriately, but given his mandate and the language of the regulations, he’s very likely to regard that consultation as a courtesy, not as an obligation.



Inverting the Pyramid: In a normal complex criminal investigation, the prosecutor starts at the bottom of the organizational pyramid and works his or her way up. The prosecutor indicts the drug runners, flips them, goes for the middle managers, flips them, and continues to use each layer to go after the one above—eventually targeting the people at the very top.

A prosecutor investigating the President of the United States, who’s threatening in two ways to nuke the investigation, might not feel the luxury of working up from the bottom of the pyramid. Such an approach takes time, after all. The bottom of the pyramid involves a lot of people whom the president, unlike a crime boss, can pardon. Notwithstanding the fact that pardoned individuals can be compelled to testify, a broad pardon eliminates much of the prosecutor’s leverage in obtaining the truth—leverage that relies on the criminal jeopardy of the underlings. And quite uniquely among criminal investigative subjects in the federal system, the President can also fire his own prosecutor, meaning that time may not be an available commodity. In an environment in which Trump is openly toying with both of these steps, the prosecutor may be tempted to invert the pyramid and focus on presidential conduct first.

To be clear, Mueller might well not do this. He might decide that his job requires him to act exactly as he normally would and leave the consequences of his removal or any pardons to the political process.

But there is another approach, too: a focus first on the conduct of Trump himself, particularly with respect to obstruction of justice. That is, Mueller could—for now, anyway—deemphasize or relegate to the background the components of the investigation that rely most on underlings whom Trump might pardon. Or he could conclude relatively quick (and that means generous) plea deals with those underlings, securing their cooperation along the way. This could insulate the investigation, to some degree anyway, against the possibility of pardons.



Speed: An investigation of this type is enormously complicated and takes a lot of time. Under normal circumstances, the order of the day would be a very long, methodical slog. In an environment, however, in which Mueller doesn’t know if he’s going to be there tomorrow or if he might lose leverage over his potential witnesses, look for him to act as quickly as possible. That means focusing on the portions of the investigation that are less complicated. It also might militate towards relatively generous plea deals. The goal would be to lock in now what he can before the President steps in to wreck things.

Note that this point is also a choice. Again, Mueller might well decide that his job is to carry out the investigation exactly as he would under all other circumstances, accepting that the investigation may never be completed. But he also might decide to bifurcate things, creating a fast track and a longer-term track. In other words, a reasonable prosecutor would run this investigation very differently if he knew he only had three months than he would if he knew he had three years. Mueller might well choose to operate on both assumptions simultaneously.



The Impeachment Referral: If Mueller is contemplating acting quickly, inverting the pyramid and focusing early on presidential conduct, a major problem will quickly confront him: it’s at least a serious question whether the President can be indicted while in office, and present Justice Department policy is that he cannot. This puts a huge premium on a question to which Mueller has probably, as a consequence, given some thought: What authority does he have to refer potential evidence for impeachment to Congress?

The Justice Department regulations governing Mueller’s appointment and investigation do not specifically detail what should be done regarding information related to possible impeachment. This is clearly by design. It marks an obvious departure from the previous Independent Counsel statute, which Congress allowed to expire in 1999. That statute, widely reviled by the time of its demise for permitting runaway investigations—even Kenneth Starr, the prosecutor who headed the Clinton investigation, testified in favor of its expiration—included a provision, 28 U.S.C. § 595(c), that explicitly granted independent counsel the authority to directly advise the House of "any substantial and credible information . . . that may constitute grounds for an impeachment."

Starr's expansive understanding of the type of report that this provision authorized him to provide to Congress was the subject of great contention in the run-up to Clinton’s impeachment. His interpretation prompted a battle between Starr's office and the White House, which expressed the view that any report filed by independent counsel under § 595(c) should stick to the facts and stay away from recommendations, and that it would be inappropriate and at odds with “fundamental fairness” for the document to "purport[] to summarize or analyze evidence.” Starr firmly disagreed with this "narrow formulation," arguing in a letter to President Clinton’s attorney that the language of the statute did not limit him to providing Congress with factual evidence alone.

Starr made good on his defense of an elaborate and argumentative impeachment report. The baroque document he eventually produced was entirely unlike the report prepared by Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, which has never been made public but is known to have been highly restrained—containing “no accusatory conclusions[,] . . . no recommendations, advice or statements that infringe on the prerogatives of other branches of government . . .[and] no moral or social judgments.”

The fact that the current special counsel regulations make no mention of impeachment referral authority in part reflects the historical consensus that Starr went too far. The existing regulation reporting requirements are written in such a way as to confine the special counsel to his or her mandate. Specifically, the regulations require the special counsel to report to the attorney general for purposes of determining budgeting needs and in the case of “Urgent Reports,” and to provide the attorney general at the conclusion of the investigation “a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.” (As a matter of normal Justice Department practice, "Urgent Reports" are brief updates that must be submitted to the attorney general and deputy attorney general to notify them of "(1) major developments developments in significant investigations and litigation, (2) law enforcement emergencies, and (3) events affecting the Department that are likely to generate national media or Congressional attention.”) It is then the Attorney General’s obligation to notify both the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees of the investigation’s close and to provide an explanation of any instances where he has concluded that the special counsel’s proposed action should not be pursued. In short, to the extent any information about the president’s conduct with bearing on impeachment arises out of the special counsel’s investigation, identifying it as such lies with Congress.

But for Mueller, the absence of any reporting provision for impeachment material creates a strange lacuna that now requires a strategic judgment. What if he amasses evidence that Congress needs to know about pursuant to its impeachment authorities yet the President pardons the people through whose prosecutions that information would normally emerge? What if there’s no basis for anyone’s prosecution but there is damning evidence of an abuse of power? What happens if he develops evidence that would support an impeachment but his office is suddenly shut down?

One possibility is for Mueller to take the view that the absence of authorization for such a referral does not preclude it. That is, he can do exactly what Jaworski did: dump information in Congress’s lap without telling Congress how to analyze it.

But Mueller may also take the view that he can’t do that, or that he has to go through Rosenstein to make any kind of referral to Congress. In any event, the sword of Damocles Trump dangling over his head—both in the form of potential pardons and in the form of removal threats—could make Mueller think hard about how he wants to handle a possible impeachment referral, and to do that thinking much earlier than he would otherwise. After all, if something’s got to be done and one doesn’t know whether one will be there tomorrow to do it, the temptation is to do it today.



Defending His Staff: The White House’s attacks on Mueller and his staff are disgusting, but they are also par for the course. Bill Clinton’s White House did the same thing with Starr and his staff. Attacking the prosecutor is as American as apple pie in criminal defense. And as long as the attacks are no more than criticisms of campaign contributions by a number of Mueller’s staffers, the best approach may be to ignore it. With Starr, however, the attacks turned into something much more than griping: ethics complaints, litigations, leak charges (at least one of which had merit), and other matters that actually took a lot of time and energy to respond to. It’s reasonable to anticipate that the allegations against Mueller and his staff will end up going that direction as well. For Mueller, that means both running an investigation that is utterly beyond reproach and being prepared to respond to whatever comes. This may well involve having a wing of the investigation that is itself devoted to defending the investigation.



Resisting Removal: The regulations provide the special counsel some measure of protection against removal by specifying three conditions for it. The special counsel may be removed only by the (acting) attorney general for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause, including violation of Departmental policies,” and "the specific reason" for his termination must be laid out in writing. As Jack Goldsmith has highlighted, although the regulations purport to give the attorney general alone removal power, it remains an open question whether as a constitutional matter Trump may nonetheless fire Mueller himself—for example, if Rosenstein refuses to do it (as he has vowed to in the absence of good cause). Both Jack and Marty Lederman have explained that there is case law to support the principle that regulations are binding so long as they are in force and the president has not sought to revoke them, along with good arguments that only the agency head who appoints the officer, not the president, can remove that officer.

That said, Trump might revoke the regulation itself and in so doing obliterate Mueller’s whole office. So one way or another, a president who really wants to get rid of Mueller could probably do so.

In any event, Mueller has to operate on the assumption that Trump could get it done. And that means he’s probably given some thought to how he would handle a removal. What does that consist of? There’s actually not that much Mueller can do about it. The protection against removal is ultimately a political one, not a regulatory or legal one, and that means Mueller can’t do much more than to try to condition the politics so as to make the constraints on the president as binding as possible. That means having the sort of relationships with the relevant committees in Congress such that any firing would be considered politically unacceptable. Here Mueller’s reputation is key, but liaison with Congress—without, of course, discussing the substance of the investigation—is probably going to be important as well. It’s crucial not merely that Congress be unwilling to tolerate a disruption of the investigation, but that Trump knows that it is unwilling to do so.

Finally, being prepared for a removal probably requires contingency planning for what happens if Trump pulls the trigger. One would assume, for example, that Mueller and his staff have documented everything they’ve done, that they are creating work product that Congress could demand in the event the office ceased to exist, and that there is some mechanism—if only the calling of Mueller to testify—by which Congress could learn what it needs to know.

If you’re Robert Mueller today, you’re probably thinking about how to make sure that even if you are fired, critical information finds its way to where it needs to go.
https://lawfareblog.com/how-white-house ... rs-reality
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jul 21, 2017 7:10 pm

Jeff Sessions just got in more trouble — and now he’s put Trump in a box, too
By Aaron Blake July 21 at 6:55 PM

Sessions discussed Trump campaign matters with Russian ambassador, according to U.S. intercepts

Attorney General Jeff Sessions's bad week just got worse. And while his new problems would appear to threaten his job, they also put President Trump in a box when it comes to his apparent desire to be rid of Sessions.

The Washington Post is reporting that Russia's ambassador has said he and Sessions discussed the 2016 campaign during two meetings last year. That is contrary to multiple public comments made by Sessions in March, when he recused himself from oversight of the Russia investigation.

Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller report that Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's accounts of those meetings were intercepted by U.S. intelligence, and in them he suggested that the two men spoke substantively about campaign issues. Yet Sessions said March 1 that he “never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign,” and the following day, while announcing his recusal, he said it again: “I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign.”

This is now the second time that Sessions's accounts of his meetings with Russians have been seriously called into question. During his confirmation hearings this year, he denied having met with any Russians during the campaign. When the Kislyak meetings came to light, he clarified that he thought the exchange was in the context of the campaign only. He would then quickly recuse himself.

That flub was highlighted this week by none other than Trump. In a New York Times interview, Trump openly suggested that he wouldn't have nominated Sessions in the first place had he known he would recuse himself. Then Trump turned to Sessions's “bad answers” at his confirmation hearings:

TRUMP: So Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: You mean at the hearing?

TRUMP: Yeah, he gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.

If Trump does want to get rid of Sessions, it would seem that more of Sessions's “bad answers” about his meetings with Kislyak are on the table to justify it. The problem for Trump is that using that justification would also lend credence to the idea that there was something untoward about those meetings. Trump has repeatedly suggested that the entire Russia investigation is a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” so the idea that he's suddenly that concerned about Sessions's Russia contacts would be difficult to reconcile.

It would also be difficult to square with other top Trump allies and family members who have failed to acknowledge or be transparent about their meetings with Russians. How could Trump take issue with Sessions's failures to correctly characterize his meetings with Russians, but not with Donald Trump Jr., whose meeting seeking opposition research about Hillary Clinton allegedly from the Russian government came to light this month? And then what about Jared Kushner's meetings, which include that one, a meeting with Kislyak and a meeting with the head of a Russian state-owned bank. None of them were disclosed on his security clearance form when he joined the White House. Trump would need to explain why Sessions's failures were bad and his own son's and son-in-law's weren't.

But Trump nonetheless seemed to get the ball rolling on that front in his New York Times interview. And given that more of Sessions's comments have come into question now, we'll see if Trump keeps using that as justification for continuing to undermine one of his earliest supporters and top Cabinet officials.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... 16fdf781f9
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 24, 2017 4:50 pm

IRAKLY KAVELADZE — THE EIGHTH PERSON IN TRUMP TOWER MEETING
Irakly Kaveladze
Image
Shell Master at Shell Heaven Photo credit: Twitter / Oliver Dunkley / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Editor’s note: Martin J. Sheil is a retired branch chief of the IRS Criminal Investigation division.

Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze is, or at least has been, a suspected money launderer in the employ of one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs. His boss is Aras Agalarov, a Russian real estate mogul known in some circles as the “Russian Donald Trump,” reputedly the 57th richest person in Russia and a close friend of Vladimir Putin. Ike is currently a senior VP in charge of real estate/finance in Agalarov’s firm Crocus Group, where he started working in the early 90s.

In a 2013 Las Vegas videotape of Donald Trump talking with Agalarov’s son Emin — a pop singer in Russia — there is Ike lurking behind Emin, listening in. Tall, thin, wearing glasses and unremarkable-looking in every way, Ike serves as Aras Agalarov’s operative. In so doing, he serves as a Russian government operative, which means Putin’s operative.

Clearly, the American bank accounts were being used as a conduit to move money out of Russia during a period of upheaval in that country.
Aras paid Trump $14M to bring the Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013, and engaged in multiple discussions and plans to enter into a partnership with Trump to build Trump-type towers in Moscow. Ivanka made several trips to Moscow to explore appropriate sites.



Ike was born in Georgia, which was then a province of the Soviet Union. He immigrated to the US in 1991 after earning his college degree from the Moscow Finance Academy. Once in the US he opened a corporation in Delaware called International Business Creations (IBC) and served as its president. He also opened a sister Delaware corporation called Euro-American Corporate Services in 1996.

Delaware requires little identification and provides some ownership anonymity for its corporations, making it the perfect state to form corporate shells for folks and entities that want to cloak their financial maneuvers with a veil of secrecy.

After creating an estimated 2,000 shell Delaware corporations under anonymous ownership, Ike opened up bank accounts for approximately 50 Moscow-based Russian “brokers,” using the shell companies already established in Delaware. Ike also opened 236 bank accounts at Citibank and Commercial Bank of San Francisco. Almost immediately upon the opening of the accounts, funds started moving in via wire transfer.

… the early use of Latvian bank accounts to secrete monies out of Russia likely portended what has become known as “the Russian Laundromat” — the conduit that funneled a reported $20 billion-plus out of Russia and into banks in Latvia and Moldova between 2010 and 2014.
As quickly as the money came in from Russia and Eastern Europe, it moved on to bank accounts in places like Latvia, according to a GAO report filed in 2000. This report accounted for over $1.4B moving through accounts set up by IBC and Euro-American under shell-company names between 1991 and 2000. Clearly, the American bank accounts were being used as a conduit to move money out of Russia during a period of upheaval in that country.

Multiple Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) were filed with the Treasury Department by Commercial Bank of San Francisco due to the lack of information provided by their customers, and the movement of large volumes of currency through their accounts. Ultimately, Commercial Bank of San Francisco shut down its International Banking Department in 2000 and the bank was sold.

Delaware Corporations
Welcome to Shellaware LLC Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Ken Lund / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

While a criminal investigation was recommended with regard to the above-noted suspicious financial activity, no criminal indictments were issued. Ike was never indicted or convicted of any criminal financial wrongdoing. The entire case shined a spotlight on the inadequacy of the involved bank’s Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols.

So what was a guy like Ike doing in a meeting at Trump Tower on the 25th floor in June 2016 in the offices of Donald Trump Jr.?
The identity of the Russian brokers who sourced so much money through the 236 shell-corporation bank accounts that Ike had set up was never established. But Ike maintained employment with Aras Agalarov’s Crocus Group throughout this time. It should also be noted that the early use of Latvian bank accounts to secrete monies out of Russia likely portended what has become known as “the Russian Laundromat” — the conduit that funneled a reported $20 billion-plus out of Russia and into banks in Latvia and Moldova between 2010 and 2014.

Akhmetshin allegedly specialized in “active measures campaigns,” i.e., subversive political influence operations often involving disinformation and propaganda…
After immigrating to the US in 1991, Ike became an American citizen, received his MBA from the University of New Haven and was promoted to senior vice president at Crocus International in Moscow by the Russian Trump — Aras Agalarov.

So what was a guy like Ike doing in a meeting at Trump Tower on the 25th floor in June 2016 in the offices of Donald Trump Jr.? Remember that the stated purpose of this meeting was for the Russians to provide information to the Trump team regarding the “flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee.”

In fact, Natalia Veselnitskaya left with Trump Jr. a folder of “corporate stuff, lawyerly stuff,” about those purported “illicit funds.” Veselnitskaya is the mysterious Russian lawyer with alleged ties to the “Crown Prosecutor,” according to Goldstone, Emin Agalarov’s agent who initiated the Trump Tower meeting with his infamous emails to Trump Jr.

At the time of the Trump Tower meeting, Trump’s campaign was far behind in the polls to Hillary Clinton and in dire need of financial support. Clinton’s campaign war chest far exceeded that of her opponent.
In fact, Veselnitskaya alleges that she has won 300 cases in Russian courts without suffering defeat, which seems to confirm her close association with Yuri Chaika, Russia’s Prosecutor-General, who is also known to be closely associated with Aras Agalarov. Chaika is part of the bloc in Russia known as “siloviki,” or people allied with security services — literally the people who settle disputes through force inside the Kremlin.

At least eight people attended the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower: Donald Trump Jr; Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner; Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; Rob Goldstone — Emin Agalarov’s agent; a Russian attorney close to Russia’s Chief Prosecutor, Natalia Veselnitskaya; her translator, Anatoli Samochornov; Rinat Akhmetshin, who has admitted to having been a Soviet counterintelligence officer and reportedly worked for Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU — the country’s largest foreign intelligence unit; and Ike.

It is possible that Ike was at the meeting as a representative of Aras Agalarov to facilitate the transfer of funds from the oligarch and the Russian government to the campaign of Donald Trump.
Akhmetshin allegedly specialized in “active measures campaigns,” i.e., subversive political influence operations often involving disinformation and propaganda, according to a letter Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent to Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Radio Free Europe described Akhmetshin as a Russian gun-for-hire and Bill Browder, an American businessman with extensive experience in Russia, filed a formal complaint with the US Department of Justice noting that Akhmetshin was acting as an unregistered agent for Russian interests.
Image
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner. Photo credit: Watch the video on C-SPAN, Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs / Flickr.

Why was Ike at the Trump Tower meeting? We need to scrutinize Rob Goldstone’s emails with regards to the purpose of the meeting which Goldstone also attended. The key email of course was dated June 3, 2016 @ 10:36AM, when Rob Goldstone wrote to Donald Trump Jr.:

Emin [Agalarov] just called and … the Crown [sic] Prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.

The above sentence has gotten most of the media attention and for good reason, along with Donald Trump Jr.’s response: “if true love it.” But I draw the reader’s attention to the next sentence of the email:

This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government support for Mr. Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin. (emphasis added)

At the time of the Trump Tower meeting, Trump’s campaign was far behind in the polls to Hillary Clinton and in dire need of financial support. Clinton’s campaign war chest far exceeded that of her opponent. While the campaign was going a “hundred miles an hour,” Trump and his amateur-hour consiglieres were desperate for both dirt and dollars to catch up to Hillary.

Given the appearance of Rinat Akhmetshin at this meeting, it is possible that the inflammatory quote in Goldstone’s email, “information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia…” was actually disinformation and misdirection. Providing dirt on Clinton was the pretext for the meeting, which prompted Trump Jr.’s “love it” response; and this pretext was at first dragged out of Donald Trump Jr., but then he dismissed that aspect of the meeting as “vague and meaningless” and claimed the entire meeting was just about “adoption,” and the Russian children who need homes.

But as The NY Times has pointed out, when “the Kremlin talks about ‘adoption’ they mean ‘sanctions.’” (In retaliation for the Magnitsky Act — a 2012 American law that freezes all assets held in the US by Russian officials responsible for human rights abuses — the Russians halted all adoption of Russian children by Americans.)

It is easy to see the hand of Rinat Akhmetshin here, but what was the real purpose of Irakly Kaveladze’s attendance at this meeting? The recent excuse offered, that he showed up because he thought he would translate for the Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, is pretty lame. But some illumination is possible if we focus on the second sentence of the Goldstone email “…but is part of Russia and its government support for Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin.”

It is possible that Ike was at the meeting as a representative of Aras Agalarov to facilitate the transfer of funds from the oligarch and the Russian government to the campaign of Donald Trump. Ike has demonstrated expertise in creating shell companies with anonymous ownership, then creating bank accounts in the names of these shell companies, and subsequently moving millions of dollars through these accounts quickly and anonymously from Russia and Eastern Europe.

Trump had just secured the Republican nomination and was badly out-funded by Clinton at the time, with the presidential campaign looming. What better way to show the Russian government’s support for Trump, helped along by Aras and Emin, than by offering substantial financial support in an untraceable, concealed manner — while accusing Clinton of doing that very thing?

Perhaps this support comes, as Rinat Akhmetshinov described, “in a plastic folder” of “corporate stuff, lawyerly stuff,” e.g., bank accounts in corporate shell names full of untraceable funds? How ironic. How very Russian!
https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/07/24/irakl ... r-meeting/
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Jul 24, 2017 5:24 pm

EXCLUSIVE: “8th Man was part Putin-Bush ‘Oligarch’s Ball’
Posted on July 24, 2017 by Daniel Hopsicker

When Russian Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze became the eighth and last participant identified last week attending Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Russians in Trump Tower, many wondered if there might be a reason he’d been fingered last.

Turns out, there is. His “legend,” or cover story, cannot withstand close scrutiny. Kaveladze’s lawyer Scott Balber said last week his client attended the Trump Junior meeting with the Russians “just to make sure it happened.”

That would have been an odd mis-use of his talents. Because when Ike Kaveladze attended Donald Trump’s Jr’s meeting with the Russians last year, he brought to the table with him abundant experience with putting together oligarch-to-oligarch deals.

Was that why he was at Trump Towers?


Fake news is not just what gets reported, but what gets left out

In dozens of media profiles of Kaveladze which have appeared since he was identified last Tuesday, a big chunk of his known activity while in the U.S. has somehow been redacted.

Stories profiling Kaverladze begin with the extraordinary tale of congressional investigators discovering his money laundering in 2000.

“Seventeen years ago congressional investigators looking into money laundering stumbled upon an obscure Soviet-born financier who offered ‘special services’ to his Russian clients.”

That’s Ike. Citing a November 2000 Government Accountability Office report, the reports indicated that Kaveladze laundered $1.4 billion through more than 2,000 bank accounts he opened at two U.S. banks for Russian oligarchs.

Back in 2000, Kaveladze had blasted away at investigators using the same “Russian witch hunt” characterization President Trump uses 17 years later.

Now here’s the ‘tricky part. The timeline of Kaveladze’s history in the U.S leaps directly and inexplicably ahead from 2000 to the present. But there is something wrong here.

Kaveladze’s timeline doesn’t match his tick-tock.

“On Tuesday that man, Irakly Kaveladze, resurfaced as the latest foreign ‘guest’ on the ever-expanding list of participants to last year’s June 2016 meeting where Donald Trump Jr was hoping to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton.”

We don’t pretend to know why, but news report to date about the last man identified as being in the room with Donald Trump Jr and Russians and folders with TOP SECRET stickers on them, have all left out Kaveladze’s attendance at The Oligarch’s Ball.

The part they left out

Three years after successfully laundering $1.4 billion for the Russian Mob, Ike Kaveladze surfaced again in 2003. This time he was playing an important role in the sale of a U.S. company, Stillwater Mining, to Russia’s huge Norilsk Mining, which produces nickel, palladium, platinum, copper and cobalt.

In November 2002, Norilsk of Siberia, which is apparently located at the back-end of nowhere, even though its listed as one of the world’s most polluted places, announced its intention to buy Stillwater Mining of Montana—the U.S.’s only producer of palladium, used in catalytic converters, and found in only three places on the planet: the U.S. Russia, and South Africa— for $341 million.

Surprisingly, they were very quickly successful in purchasing controlling interest in the company.

The Norilsk-Stillwater deal was unprecedented in its scope and significance. It required strong lobbying in the U.S. with the Federal Trade Commission, and with an inter-agency body called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which reviews foreign transactions which may have an effect on U.S. national security.

To help make it happen, President Bush flew to St Petersburg Russia on June 3, 2003 to help his friend Vladimir Putin celebrate his hometown’s 300th birthday. In a lunch in the Konstantin Palace the two men huddled over the terms of the deal.

Along with former Bush officials in the Carlyle Group, the sweetheart deal Kaveladze helped put together nearly passed unnoticed, because of the Iraq War.

But it outraged many industry observers. One of them, Andrew Meier, writing in Harpers magazine in April 2004, called what transpired “The Oligarch’s Ball.”

The subhead: “Washington’s plutocrats court their Russian counterparts.”

Thirst for oil, etc etc.

Washington-based private equity fund Carlyle Group, which boasted former Bush alumni like James Baker, as well as the former President himself, lost Arab investors after the 9/11 attack, who either withdrew their money or saw it returned when it became impolitic to hang on to.

Among them, Meier explained, was Shafiq Bin Laden, one of Osama’s numerous brothers.

America’s thirst for non-Arab oil was increasing exponentially at the same time. It prompted a fundamental shift in U.S. policy towards Russia. The oligarchs came alive, and quickly learned to thrive.

“They need the oligarchs now more than ever,” said a Moscow financier who has had longtime dealings with Carlyle. “They’re replacing the Bin Laden’s with the Potanin’s and the Khodorkovsky’s.”

The “Potanin’s” refers to the Kremlin’s favorite oligarch at the time, Vladimir Potanin, a 42-year old banker who, with a second Russian billionaire, Mikhail Prokhorov, jointly controlled the Norilsk metals empire.

Speaking as one oligarch to another

Mikhail Prokhorov has gone on to become the most famous Russian in Brooklyn, no mean feat. He currently owns the NBA’s also-ran Nets.

Donald Trump’s oligarch-to-oligarch deals may be more brazen, but oligarch-to-oligarch collusion under cover of government diplomacy has apparently been going on longer than many suspected.

“On the subject of oligarchs—the clutch of Russian ‘entrepreneurs’ who had seized the spoils of the Soviet state and become preposterously rich overnight—the governor of Texas railed against their contributions to Russia’s twin epidemics of crime and corruption,” Meier writes in the Oligarch Ball.

“The real fundamental question for Russia,” Bush told Jim Lehrer in 2000, “is what will Russian look like? A market economy? Or one of those economies where a favored few elite are able to put money in their own pockets? And it’s something that we need to be concerned about; something we need to watch very carefully.”

“That approach to the Bush Administration’s dealings with the oligarchs seems not to have lasted long. The administration, its corporate proxies, and even the president’s own father have been waging a campaign to charm the oligarchs, the same “favored few elite” candidates Bush had earlier discerned were the clear and present danger in the Russian morass.”


“Out of an abundance of caution.”

To ensure the historic union, Norilsk hired Baker Botts, the Houston-based law firm run by James A. Baker III. Andrew Meier called it “an instructive example of the oligarch’s new clout in Washington.”

Norilsk engaged two U.S. lobbyists to smooth the way for federal approval of the deal in the U.S. The men became two of the five nominees to the new Stillwater board of directors.

Atop the list was Craig Fuller, former chief of staff to George H.W. Bush, co-chair of the presidential transition team, and chairman of the 1992 Republican convention.

Largely unknown outside Washington, D.C. Fuller has been called one of the “most important Republicans alive.”

In addition to Fuller, the others were former Democratic Senator Donald W. Riegle Jr., Jack E. Thompson, Vice Chairman of Barrick Gold Corporation; and two experienced lawyers, Steven S. Lucas and Todd D. Schafer.

But not Ike Kaveladze. A Russian language press release headlined “Norilsk offers Steve Lucas to replace Ike Kaveladze on Stillwater Board” explained why.

“US citizen Irakly Kaveladze, a former classmate of the general director of Norilsk, Mikhail Prokhorov, was mentioned in 2000 in connection with money laundering through the Bank of New York. Therefore the Company decided not to take risks.”


“It’s a theater of financiers.”

Norilsk and Stillwater controlled over 50% of the palladium in the world. Yet U.S. Federal agencies rolled over and immediately signed off on the deal. The FTC even granted early termination of the waiting period for the transaction, and it closed on June 23, 2003.

About the only disgruntled parties were locals in Montana, where the Stillwater mines were located, along with many mining industry analysts. “Just ten years after the Cold War ended, our once-mortal enemy now stands to control half of the world’s supply of palladium with its foot right in America’s heartland,” wrote one.

In The Oligarch’s Ball” Meier wrote, “Since the days of the Romanov’s trade and commerce, Russia has followed a patriarchal model, in which courtiers who wish to succeed must “kiss the ring,” as Russians like to say.”

“The success of the Russian oligarchs abroad delivers a bitter and familiar lesson. Business and politics have always been inseparable in Russia…

“In America these days, things are not so very different.”


“Ecoutez and repetez!”

Since Kaveladze is a name we’ll be hearing often, getting it’s pronunciation right— it’s Kah-veh-LAHD’-zeh—may well separate the cognoscenti from those occupying cheaper seats in the coming circus.

Kaveladze’s lawyer Scott Balber said last week that his client attended the Trump Junior meeting with Russians “just to make sure it happened.”

Attorney Balber also said his client was “cooperating fully with investigators.”

But there is reason to doubt both statements. Ike himself was incommunicado. Or maybe he’d already fled the country. And attorney Balber often works for Donald Trump. He threatened to sue, on Donald’s behalf, HBO host Bill Maher for likening Trump to an orangutan. Cooler head prevailed.

As to the wheraqbouts of Ike, it certainly sounds as if he left town in a hurry.

“No one answered the door or the phone at Kaveladze’s three-story home in Huntington Beach,” reported the L.A. Times. “A dresser and other small pieces of furniture sat on the front lawn.”
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 24, 2017 9:20 pm


Justice Dept. Nominee Says He Once Represented Russian Bank
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and ADAM GOLDMANJULY 24, 2017

An Alfa Bank branch in Moscow. President Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department’s criminal division, Brian A. Benczkowski, has disclosed that he did work for the bank, whose owners have ties to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. Credit Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s criminal division, Brian A. Benczkowski, has disclosed to Congress that he previously represented Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions, whose owners have ties to President Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Benczkowski, a partner at the Kirkland & Ellis law firm and a former Bush administration Justice Department official, in June, and he is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

Alfa Bank was at the center of scrutiny last year over potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia after computer experts discovered data suggesting a stream of communications between a server linked to the Trump Organization and a server linked to the bank. Reports about the mysterious data transmissions fueled speculation about a back channel.

The F.B.I. investigated the matter, however, and concluded that the servers’ interactions were not surreptitious exchanges between the campaign and Russia, according to current and former law enforcement officials. Experts have argued that the server linked to the Trump Organization appeared to be controlled by a marketing firm, Cendyn, that was sending emails promoting Trump hotel properties.

DOCUMENT
Benczkowksi Discloses He Represented Alfa Bank
In a letter obtained by The New York Times, President Trump's nominee to run the Justice Department criminal division, Brian A. Benczkowski, disclosed to Congress that he previously represented Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions.


OPEN DOCUMENT
Ahead of the Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Benczkowski told the panel that he had previously been forbidden by his firm’s confidentiality agreement from disclosing his work for Alfa Bank, but had obtained a waiver.


“Your staff has indicated that the committee may wish to question me at my hearing regarding the fact and scope of my work for Alfa Bank,” Mr. Benczkowski wrote, saying his waiver would permit him “to discuss the fact and scope of the representation at the hearing. As I am sure you understand, ethical considerations prohibit me from disclosing confidential legal advice or any other information protected by the attorney-client privilege under any circumstances.”

Mr. Benczkowski’s law firm has offices around the world, and it represents many foreign clients. But his association with Alfa Bank in particular could be awkward in this period of heightened scrutiny on ties between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

Mr. Benczkowski’s disclosure comes at a time of tremendous political and legal scrutiny over those ties, including a special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded in that effort.

Photo

Brian A. Benczkowski sat behind Senator Jeff Sessions during a hearing on Capitol Hill in 2009. Credit Harry Hamburg/Associated Press
On Monday, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, spoke to congressional investigators about his own contacts with Russian officials throughout the campaign, even as bipartisan majorities in Congress were poised to enact a bill that would strip Mr. Trump of the ability to unilaterally lift sanctions against Russia.

Mr. Benczkowski and his associates portrayed his representation of Alfa Bank as benign.

Along with Mr. Benczkowski’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kirkland & Ellis submitted to lawmakers a letter on Friday by Viet Dinh, a partner at the firm and another former Bush administration Justice Department veteran, denouncing rumors that Alfa Bank had been a conduit for illicit communications between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government.

Mr. Dinh attached two reports by independent cybersecurity experts — one by Mandiant, which looked at data transmissions in 2016, and another by Stroz Friedberg, which looked at another set in 2017 — and concluded that the data were not evidence of substantive contact between the bank and the Trump organization. The Mandiant report was spurred in part by records submitted to Alfa Bank by The Times last year as it investigated the data transmissions.

“As the victim of an apparent malicious hoax, Alfa Bank remains eager to get to the bottom of the false allegations against it, and stands ready to assist the committee and all other government authorities as needed,” Mr. Dinh wrote.

But Mandiant’s investigation of Alfa Bank was, at best, cursory. According to people familiar with Mandiant’s review, its experts were shown largely metadata, the information that travels along with a message, for the communications that took place. The contents of the messages — if there were any — were not available.

Without a much deeper forensic examination, the company could not determine the purpose of the communications. Its resulting report was carefully hedged, noting that without more study, it could not give the bank a clean bill of health. But the bank used that report, however limited, to make the case that it had been exonerated.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/us/p ... -bank.html




Christie's Hiring of FBI Nominee as Bridgegate Attorney Raises Questions


FBI director nominee Christopher Wray's retention agreement was signed 11 months after he actually started working for Gov. Christie.

Jul 24, 2017 · by Matt Katz

President Trump's nominee for FBI director, Christopher Wray, represented Gov. Chris Christie as his personal, publicly-funded Bridgegate attorney for 11 months before signing a mandatory retainer agreement, according to new documents provided to WNYC through a public records request.

Wray began working for Christie as his personal, publicly-funded attorney, according to bills submitted to the state, in September 2014. But it wasn't until August 2015, 11 months later, that Wray and Christie formally agreed to the arrangement.

Several lawyers who work with the government said the extended delay was extraordinarily unusual, possibly unethical, and could indicate that Christie, who was preparing to run for president at the time, was keeping it hidden from the public that he had a taxpayer-funded criminal attorney. Indeed it wasn't until the summer of 2016 that it was revealed that Wray was holding onto a piece of potential evidence — one of Christie's cell phones that his former aides, charged in the Bridgegate affair, unsuccessfully sought to subpoena.

Wray and his colleagues would ultimately bill taxpayers more than $2 million in fees and expenses, including meals, hotel rooms, cab fare and flights. They continued working — and being paid — even after the Bridgegate trial ended and those convicted were sentenced to prison. It is unclear what work was done, since the governor was neither charged nor called to testify.

Shortly thereafter Christie recommended Wray to his friend, President Trump, for the job of FBI director.

Emails and legal bills obtained through a public records request show that Wray first started billing the New Jersey treasury for representing Christie on Sept. 25, 2014, nine months after the federal Bridgegate investigation began. Wray and his associates got to work immediately, billing the state daily, including weekends, on all but three days through Christmas 2014.

The following March, Wray reviewed a draft retention agreement for his role as outside counsel, emails show. Over the course of the next few months an employee from Wray's firm, King & Spalding, had questions about the state rules restricting the hiring of political donors as government contractors. Wray was not a political contributor in New Jersey, according to state records.

The following August 5, 2015, documents were finally exchanged to affirm the deal. A rate of $340-an-hour for Wray and his colleagues was agreed upon. Christie himself signed a document designating King & Spalding as special counsel. This was 11 months after work had actually begun.

"Eleven months is a little on the long side — and in the very least, it's kind of sloppy," said Jim Eisenhower, a Philadelphia attorney and former federal prosecutor who has previously been retained by the governor's office in Pennsylvania. He said some lag time is expected due to bureaucracy, or because attorneys may be needed immediately before paperwork can be signed. But in 30 years of practicing law he said he had never heard of such a significant length of time before the signing of a retention agreement.

American Bar Association guidelines on client-lawyer relationships and New Jersey Supreme Court rules say that the terms of an attorney's retention should be communicated in writing "before or within a reasonable time after commencing the representation."

WNYC sought an explanation from a spokeswoman for Attorney General Chris Porrino, the Christie appointee in charge of retaining outside attorneys for employees, nearly two weeks ago. Last week she left a voicemail requesting a call back and saying she could offer little explanation. But she did not return two subsequent messages.

Christie's spokesman, Brian Murray, also did not return an email for comment.

Wray's nomination as FBI director has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. He awaits conformation from the full Senate.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/ethics-questi ... -attorney/


MEET TRUMP’S PICK FOR FBI DIRECTOR, CHRIS WRAY


Republicans and Democrats found something they could agree on this week: Chris Wray, President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to advance Wray’s confirmation to the full Senate.

Sweeping bipartisan approval is expected, although only 51 votes are needed to confirm his appointment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said he intends to hold the vote before senators leave for August recess.

Wray’s nomination is of heightened interest in the wake of former FBI director James Comey’s abrupt dismissal while overseeing the Russia investigation. If confirmed, Wray would have no involvement in the ongoing investigation, which has since been handed over to a special counsel.

During Wray’s confirmation hearing last week, the nominee was quick to reassure senators of his independence from Trump, saying he “will never allow the FBI’s work to be driven by anything other than facts, the law, and the impartial pursuit of justice.” Later, he added, “No one asked me for any kind of loyalty oath at any point during this process and I sure as heck didn’t offer one.”

Wray is currently a partner at King & Spalding, where he has practiced law for over a decade. Before joining the firm, he worked for the Justice Department under Comey, who was deputy attorney general at the time.

Learn more about Wray’s background and see his testimony for yourself in the videos below.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 25, 2017 8:05 pm

Trump’s Conduits For Capital From The Former Soviet Bloc Are Actually Old Pals

By SAM THIELMAN Published JULY 25, 2017 4:28 PM

Two very different men have been instrumental in introducing financiers and clients from Russia and the former Soviet bloc to the Trump Organization’s real estate machine: Felix Sater, Donald Trump’s former business partner and a convicted felon, and Michael Cohen, Trump’s brash, longtime personal attorney.

And TPM now has learned from conversations with both Sater and Cohen that the two men know each other dating back to their teenage years, when they were acquaintances from nearby towns on Long Island. Both went on to make their fortunes in real estate, eventually working with the same big-name businessman—although they insist that neither helped the other land his gig with the Trump Organization.

“It itsn’t a family atmosphere kind of thing,” Sater said of the several years he told TPM he worked directly for Trump scouting deals, some as far afield as Moscow. “You sort of ran around and did your own deals.”

The two men say they arrived in business with Trump through different avenues. While Cohen declined to speak broadly about Sater, he agreed to confirm or deny some of Sater’s statements and add slightly to Sater’s explanation of how the two men entered the Trump orbit independently of each other.

“The family knew about me because I purchased several Trump apartments over the years and Don, Jr. had sold me multiple apartments at one of the properties and was combining them [into a single deal] for me,” Cohen explained.

Sater’s tale is a little more dramatic and harder to confirm in its particulars. In his telling, he began working with one of his neighbors, a Kazakh real estate developer named Tevfik Arif, at a new firm called Bayrock, the offices of which were downstairs from the Trumps. That’s how Sater said he landed a meeting with Trump.

“I walked in and knocked on his door and told him I was going to be the biggest developer—this is 2000, 2001—first in the United States and then worldwide,” Sater said of the President. His braggadocio paid off, he said: “We got along very, very well.”

But the Russian money didn’t begin to flow immediately. “There were no Russian investors at that point,” he told TPM. “1998, ’99, 2000—Russians did not have any money.” The reason, Sater said with a laugh: “$8-a-barrel oil!”

He pegged the date to when Russians finally had money to spend abroad around 2005, the same year Bayrock signed a one-year deal to explore developing a Trump Tower in Moscow. The group even proposed the site of an old pencil factory for the building, but the deal never closed.

Long before they were seeking such deals, Cohen and Sater were running in the same circles, in the area where Brooklyn bleeds into Long Island. Cohen is from Five Towns, the informal name for a few tony suburban hamlets—more than five, less than eight—in Nassau County, east of Jamaica Bay. Sater hails from the less genteel Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Coney Island, west of the bay.

“It was an emigrant enclave of Jews from the former Soviet Union,” Sater recalled. “Coney Island was kind of tough. I was one of the white kids on the block, which led to lots of beatings. It was difficult growing up but it toughens you up.”

His toughness didn’t always serve him well. A bar fight with a fellow Wall Streeter ended when Sater stabbed the other man in the face with a margarita glass; the injured man needed 110 stitches and suffered nerve damage. Sater went to prison for a year, which he describes as “the worst time in my life,” and a few years after his release, he became embroiled in a stock fraud scam.

Sater said he most clearly remembers the beginning of his relationship with Cohen from the time the former Trump Organization attorney began dating his now-wife, whom Sater describes as a girl from his neighborhood of Jewish Soviet expatriates. Cohen told TPM the pair had known each other before then, in their teenage years, and that he hadn’t yet begun dating his wife, reportedly a Ukrainian émigré, when he was in his teens.

“He wasn’t one of my close friends, just a guy dating a girl in the neighborhood and we had a bunch of mutual friends,” Sater said. “We eventually both started working at Trump Org. Prior to that, again, lots of mutual acquaintances.”

Sater said he and Cohen still speak to each other, even if they seem a bit loath to speak about each other.

“We did not own real estate together, but certainly looked at a bunch of stuff together, during Trump and post-Trump,” Sater says. “After I left there, I was still looking at deals for Trump, but I would think about real estate with Michael. [It] was just two real estate guys talking.” Sater starts to say something more, but cuts himself off and ends almost bashfully: “I would be more than happy to do a deal with Michael,” he says.

Cohen was less forthcoming than his acquaintance. “I don’t give profile pieces on people,” he told TPM when asked about Sater. When asked why not, he answered, “I just don’t want to.”

Still, the two men appear to know each other well enough for there to be considerable trust. They were both involved in a scheme to deliver a “peace plan” to the White House that proposed letting Ukrainian voters decide whether to lease Crimea to Russia in hopes that the move would lead to the relaxation of international sanctions.

Sater told TPM he called the now-notorious meeting with Cohen and Ukrainian politician Andrii Artemenko in February to discuss the future of Ukraine. Cohen took the meeting, and told the New York Times that he ultimately left the proposal on the desk of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (Cohen would later give several contradictory interviews in which he walked back his involvement).

Nothing ever came of the plan, but it caused outcry from all corners of the diplomatic world—who were these men, and what were they doing?

Asked why he arranged the meeting, Sater told TPM “Because I could!” Trump had distanced himself from Sater—in a 2013 deposition, he claimed not to know what Sater looked like—but he had Cohen’s ear, and the issue at hand pertained to a region of the world of interest to both men.

In conversation, Sater framed his pursuit of the deal as deep concern for the region of his birth. “Everyone in the proposal, all three sides would have won,” he said. “As a side note, some civilians wouldn’t have been killed and shelled. In hindsight, I’m glad I did it. Anybody can paint it any way they want, but it was a peace deal.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... ganization
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 26, 2017 9:26 am

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Satire from The Borowitz Report
Girl Scouts Obtain Restraining Order Against Trump

By Andy Borowitz
July 25, 2017

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In an extraordinary rebuke of the President of the United States, the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. have obtained a restraining order against Donald J. Trump.
The order, which the Girls Scouts were granted on Monday night, prevents Trump from coming within three hundred feet of any gathering of the Scouts’ organization.
Carol Foyler, a Girl Scouts spokesperson, said that while the G.S.U.S.A. sought the restraining order “out of an abundance of caution,” the girls themselves were “in no way, shape or form” afraid of President Trump.
“They’re prepared to deal with bobcats and bears,” she said. “They can handle a malignant narcissist.”
Trump wasted little time responding to the Girl Scouts’ action, lashing out at the organization in a blistering early-morning tweet storm.
“Failing Girl Scouts bad (or sick) guys,” Trump wrote. “Mints, cookies terrible. Sad!”
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz ... inst-trump


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

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:35 pm

BI Doc on Russian Mafia Mogilevich Org Tied to Tochtachunov, Genovese – All Tied to Trump, At Least Indirectly (Mogilevich Org Planned to Dump Waste at Chernobyl Too)

miningawareness
4 months ago

Trump has ties, at least indirectly, to Mogilevich via Trump Tower Toronto (Shnaider employer and father-in-law, Birshtein) and the alleged mafia protector (Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov) of the gambling ring run, at least in part, out of Trump Tower 5th Ave., and via the Genovese Crime Family (Trump lawyer and friend Roy Cohn represented for them). All of whom are alleged by the FBI as working with Mogilevich, as shown in the document pages (about 1/2 main text) below. Further details of the ties are found below the screen shots. Interesting the mention of vodka, since Trump has or had a vodka brand. Also, trafficking in nuclear materials; the mention of KGB; the mention of fraudulent Israeli passports. Recall that his first wife, mother to Ivanka, is supposed to be from the Czech Republic. Chernobyl mentioned on p. 13. It does not say if it was carried out.

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http://www.larryjkolb.com/file/docs/fbimogilevich.pdf

Genovese
“Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump, Mafia figures Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti, Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager“. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn

“Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (August 15, 1911 – July 27, 1992) was a New York mobster who served as underboss and front boss of the Genovese crime familyfrom 1981 until his conviction in 1986… He controlled S&A, a concrete contracting company—one of the two major concrete suppliers in Manhattan. Salerno served as consigliere, underboss, and acting boss of the Genovese family“. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Salerno

Washington Post reports re Trump advisor Roger Stone: “Mr. Stone, I want you to meet Tony Salerno,” Cohn said. There Stone was, standing before the future boss of the Genovese crime family.” “The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear Lawyer and adviser Roy M. Cohn was a master of the attack and counterattack.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... story.html

HALF ITALIAN AND HALF HUNGARIAN ROGER STONE COULD THEORETICALLY BE A LINK BETWEEN ITALIAN ORGANIZED CRIME AND MOGILEVICH. Stone is Catholic and denies being Jewish, though Stone clearly isn’t a Hungarian name and it is most likely ethnic German or ethnic Jewish Stein from the Buda side of Budapest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buda The Jewish newspaper Forward .com wrote an article that he was Jewish and retracted it, apparently because he is baptized Catholic.

https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2 ... -manafort/

Trump Tower Inhabitant(s) Gambling Ring
“The Taiwanchik-Trincher Organization operated under the protection of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, who is known as a “Vor,” a term translated as “Thief-in-Law,” that refers to a member of a select group of high-level criminals from the former Soviet Union. Tokhtakhounov used his status as a Vor to resolve disputes with clients of the high-stakes illegal gambling operation with implicit and sometimes explicit threats of violence and economic harm…” (US DOJ, April 30, 2014). Tokhtakhounov is still at large in Moscow. https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2 ... zed-crime/

Trump Tower Toronto

According to the Office of Congressman Swalwell: “Alex Shnaider: Born in Russia, Shnaider co-financed a real estate project with Trump. Shnaider’s father-in-law, Boris J. Birshtein, was a close business associate of Sergei Mikhaylov, the head of one of the largest branches of the Russian mob.” https://swalwell.house.gov/issues/russi ... ion-s-ties.
The reference given is James S. Henry, “The Curious World of Donald Trump’s Private Russian Connections”, which has a section called “The Case of the Trump Toronto Tower and Hotel—Alex Shnaider”

According to “The Globe and Mail”, May 27th 2005, Shnaider took the majority stake in Trump Tower hotel and condo Toronto. Shnaider started working for the man who became his father-in-law, Boris Birshtein, in 1991. They had “met through family connections“. “Birshtein introduced him to the world of steel trading, which would become the foundation of his fortune.” They say that there have been no allegations of wrong-doing by Schnaider. See “The Invisible Man” by Michale Posner, December 5, 2016 in the Globe and Mail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Shnaider

According to the above FBI document, Birshtein attended a Russian organized crime meeting in Israel in October 1995.

Possible Hungarian PM Orban link
In a manner similar to Jeff Sessions, Orban flipped from harsh critic of Putin’s Russia to being his foremost ally in Europe: “… in 2007, Orbán harshly lambasted the Government for being “blind” to the “growing influence” Russia wields via its vast energy giants,… In 2008, he continued to criticize the Kremlin,…Suddenly in 2009, everything changed. Orban unexpectedly showed up at the “United Russia” convention in Saint Petersburg, where he met Putin. He immediately ceased criticizing Russia, and a year later, when Orbán became the Hungarian Prime Minister, he became one of the key Putin apologists in Europe. Whatever happened to Orbán in such a short period of time? Could it be the arrest of criminal kingpin Semion Mogilevich in Moscow, that influenced the Hungarian leader? …. one of the reasons for his loyalty might be a video with compromising info on Orbán, filmed back in the mid 1990s by crime kingpin Semion Mogilevich…” Read the article here: http://www.4freerussia.org/a-suitcase-f ... an-leader/

“The Russian mafia in Israel began with the mass immigration of Russian Jews to Israel in 1989.[12] The Russian mafia saw Israel as an ideal place to launder money, as Israel’s banking system was designed to encourage aliyah, the immigration of Jews, and the accompanying capital. Following the trend of global financial deregulation, Israel had also implemented legislation aimed at easing the movement of capital. Combined with the lack of anti-money laundering legislation, “Russian” organised crime found it an easy place to transfer ill-gotten gains. In 2005, police estimated that Russian organised crime had laundered between $5 and 10 billion in the fifteen years since the end of the Soviet Union. Non-Jewish criminals such as Sergei Mikhailov sought to get Israeli passports, using fake Jewish documentation.[13]

Russian and Ukrainian Jewish criminals have also been able to set up networks in the United States, following the large migration of Russian Jews to New York City and Miami, but also in European cities such as Berlin and Antwerp. Many of these Russian gangsters have Israeli passports as well.[14] Infamous Russian-Jewish mobsters include Marat Balagula, Evsei Agronand their respective criminal gangs in the United States. Soviet-Jewish criminal groups in the United States are involved in racketeering, prostitution, drug trafficking, extortion, and gasoline fraud as well as murder.[15]“. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_m ... sian_Mafia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mi ... usinessman)
Up until 1999, extradition of Jewish nationals from Israel wasn’t allowed. Because of abuses, if a non-resident Israeli commits a crime abroad they can be extradicted, but they can be sentenced and punished in Israel.

“Alleged Russian mafia boss cleared ”
Saturday, December 12, 1998 Published at 05:37 GMT
“The 15-day trial featured 90 witnesses, with many receiving police protection after one was shot dead in Amsterdam last year.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/233604.stm

“Putin was a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before retiring in 1991 to enter politics in Saint Petersburg. He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin’s administration, rising quickly through the ranks and becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999, when Yeltsin resigned.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2 ... l-too/amp/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 27, 2017 10:38 am

The Darkness and the Rot

By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 26, 2017 10:44 PM

We’ve discussed at some length how President Trump destroys everything he touches. Trump’s own damaged, malignant personality is no great mystery. The world has no shortage of malicious predators or others who are so damaged that they sow chaos and hurt wherever they go. It’s our national misfortune that Trump has attained such power. But the existence of such a person is no mystery. There’s no shortage of them. What is difficult to understand, what requires some explanation is the way Trump is able to destroy those around him. Not once or twice but again and again, repeatedly, in a pattern so consistent that it becomes more inexplicable over time as new victims appear insensible to the unmistakeable pattern they have seen unfold along with us.

This may be unremarkable with the toadies and acolytes. But Trump is able to take people of some apparent substance and attainment and destroy them as well. The key though is that he doesn’t destroy them. In his orbit, under some kind of spell, he makes them destroy themselves. It is always a self-destruction. He’s like a black hole. But for this there’s no ready explanation. Because what is the power? The force?

I puzzled over this for some time. Eventually I sensed that Trump wasn’t inducing people’s self-destruction so much as he was acting like a divining rod, revealing rot that existed already but was not apparent. It may seem like an odd comparison. But I’m reminded of the effect in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series where the cursed pirates appear to be flesh and blood bodies. But the moonlight reveals them as desiccated skeletons, animated but undead. The rot was there but hidden. Trump is the moonlight. Perhaps better to say, to invert our metaphor, Trump is the darkness.

FILE - In this Jan. 31, 2016, file photo, Pastor Joshua Nink, right, prays for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, as wife, Melania, left, watches after a Sunday service at First Christian Church, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The list of prominent evangelicals denouncing Trump is growing, but is anyone in the flock listening? The bloc of voters powering the real estate mogul through the Republican primaries is significantly weighted with white born-again Christians. As Trump’s ascendancy forces the GOP establishment to confront how it lost touch with so many conservative voters, top evangelicals are facing their own dark night, wondering what has drawn so many Christians to a twice-divorced, profane casino magnate with a muddled record on abortion and gay marriage. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
FILE – In this Jan. 31, 2016, file photo, Pastor Joshua Nink, right, prays for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, as his wife, Melania, left, watches after a Sunday service at First Christian Church, in Council Bluffs, Iowa.(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
This seems most palpably the case with the political evangelical community with which Trump has maintained, since early in his campaign, a profound and profoundly cynical mutual embrace. Here I use the term advisedly: I don’t mean evangelical Christians or even conservative evangelical Christians but the evangelical right political faction, which is distinct and different. Nothing I have seen before has more clearly revealed this group’s moral rot than the adoration of Trump, an unchurched hedonist with the moral compass of a predator who is lauded and almost worshipped purely and entirely because he produces political deliverables.

But it’s not just them. It’s a general malady. Trump is exposing our collective rot. The rotten flock to him. And there’s so much rot to go around.

TELL CONGRESS: INVESTIGATE.
It’s time to put country over party. We need an independent, bipartisan commission into Trump’s ties to Russia.

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Trumpocalypse: A Nightmare From Which There’s No Normal Exit
The attempted purging of Jeff Sessions indicates that Trump meant nothing he said about American sovereignty and economic well-being
By John R. Schindler • 07/26/17 10:18am

Ever since inauguration day just over six months ago, Donald Trump’s White House has been beleaguered by allegations of nefarious—and possibly illegal—ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign. For half a year now, those allegations have gradually grown more specific and more serious, while Team Trump’s inept handling of these weighty accusations has only rendered them politically more cancerous.

Months of denials from the president and his retinue that they had any ties with Moscow were unwise, since we now know of numerous hush-hush meetings in 2016 between core members of Team Trump and Kremlin representatives. Hence present White House efforts to brush off these mysterious rendezvous with protests that it’s all no big deal and “everybody does it” ring hollow—since for months the president and his spokespeople repeatedly denied there had been any such meetings.


The recent appointment of Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director indicates where this scandal is headed. A hedge-funder billionaire and media gadfly, Scaramucci has traits which the president admires, above all his well-honed willingness to lie baldly and loudly—if not always convincingly—on camera.

Trump was dissatisfied with Sean Spicer, his initial spokesman, from day one. While Spicer was willing to lie for the president, his efforts sometimes seemed half-hearted, TV comedy depictions to the contrary. A veteran Republican National Committee staffer, Spicer is a rather normal Washington type and he clearly was never fully at home in the Trump lie factory. Hence his gradual replacement at press briefings by the more ethically malleable Sarah Huckabee Sanders, followed by his recent departure when Scaramucci was appointed to shake up White House messaging.

Based on his initial forays as Trump’s media guru—complete with anticipated bluster about shaking things up and firing leakers—Scaramucci seems to be functioning more as de facto White House chief of staff than the president’s communications director. That said, “The Mooch” is ideally suited to a job which will require ever grander public deceptions of mounting implausibility as multiple investigations into President Trump’s 2016 relations with the Kremlin start to bear fruit.

Scaramucci has already indicated the White House position there with his pronouncement that the president still refuses to accept the united judgement of our Intelligence community that Russian spies interfered in our 2016 election. In a unintentionally comedic twist, Scaramucci further stated on CNN, “You know, somebody said to me yesterday—I won’t tell you who—that if the Russians actually hacked this situation and spilled out those e-mails, you would have never seen it.” A few moments later, Scaramucci admitted that the anonymous source for this bombshell intelligence assertion was in fact the president himself!


Trump’s battle royal with our Intelligence community, which the president initiated in his first days in the Oval Office, continues unabated and promises to deliver his political undoing. The position of America’s most senior and experienced spies on the 2016 election is abundantly clear. Last week, John Brennan, CIA director from 2013 to 2017, declared Trump’s unwillingness to admit the obvious about the Kremlin’s role “disgraceful,” while Jim Clapper, the most experienced American spymaster of his generation and Director of National Intelligence from 2010 to 2017, explained that the president’s actions amount to “making Russia great again.”

For his part, Mike Hayden, a retired Air Force general who headed both NSA and CIA, a veteran spymaster who’s nobody’s idea of liberal, termed Russia’s interference in last year’s election “the most successful covert influence operation in history.” Hayden subsequently explained that the early June 2016 meeting between Don Trump, Jr. and Russian representatives to obtain kompromat on Hillary Clinton was a classic Kremlin intelligence operation. “My God, this is just such traditional tradecraft,” Hayden stated about that controversial meeting. Let me add that every IC veteran I know agrees with Hayden in all his statements about Team Trump in 2016.

This, then, is what the White House is up against. What the IC knows about 2016 has been shared with investigators in Congress and, most importantly, with prosecutors working for Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who’s been appointed special counsel to get to the bottom of Trump’s ties to the Kremlin. It’s obvious, based on his increasingly angry and hysterical tweets, that the president is terrified of what Mueller and his investigators will find.


This explains Trump’s unprecedented public harassment of Jeff Sessions, his own attorney general. Of late, the president has repeatedly castigated Sessions in interviews and on Twitter for the attorney general’s recusal from the Russia investigation—a decision in which Sessions really had no choice. Operating on the novel premise that the attorney general is his personal lawyer, rather than the nation’s top law enforcement officer, Trump has smeared Sessions as “beleaguered” and “VERY weak” for his alleged unwillingness to protect the president from his own decisions.

This outrageous conduct has shocked and dismayed even some of Trump’s staunchest allies, who seem to be slowly realizing that the president will stop at nothing to protect himself and his kin from the unmasking of their ties to Moscow. The case of Jeff Sessions ought to be a warning sign to the entire Republican Party that Trump has no loyalty to anyone but himself, and is perfectly happy to sacrifice anyone at any time to safeguard himself.

The defenestration of Jeff Sessions—who, let it be said, so far shows no signs of stepping down as attorney general—is particularly significant, since the longtime Alabama senator was the first Washington Republican of any stature to join Team Trump, which he did with gusto in the spring of 2016, when the GOP still considered Trump’s candidacy to be a bad joke.

To be clear: Donald Trump ran an insurgent campaign which, to almost everyone’s surprise, garnered the Republican presidential nomination and then, somehow, the White House itself. The GOP establishment was deeply opposed to Trump and everything he stood for, but the reality TV star triumphed, in no small part because he enthusiastically embraced three issues which the Republican Party didn’t want discussed yet which deeply resonated with voters. These were uncontrolled illegal immigration, job losses and wage stagnation, and endless losing wars in the Middle East.

Trump rode these hot-button issues right to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the horror of establishment Republicans as much as Democrats. And, importantly, Jeff Sessions was the prime mover of the populist nationalism which inspired endless Trumpian rhetoric about shutting our borders and saving American jobs. It’s no exaggeration to state that, without Jeff Sessions, Trumpism would barely be recognizable.

His public humiliation by the White House therefore raises uncomfortable questions. Since it’s now evident that Trump has no intention of actually ending our seemingly eternal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and Syria too), the sincerity of his campaign message there must be in grave doubt. The attempted purging of Jeff Sessions indicates that Trump meant nothing which he said about American sovereignty and economic well-being either.

In that case, Trumpism now stands for nothing more than the president and his coterie and their continuing power. His 2016 campaign must then be judged a fraud on the voters, some of whom continue to display a cult-like devotion to Trump, ignoring his actual policies.

Regardless, the president has now created an utterly self-made political crisis which promises to surpass Watergate in its damage to our democratic system. Unlike President Nixon, who ultimately demurred from a scorched-earth political death-match, Donald Trump plans to fight for his survival, whatever the cost—to himself, to his fans, and to our country.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
http://observer.com/2017/07/donald-trum ... s-purging/


Total Trump chaos: Anthony Scaramucci asks FBI and DOJ to open felony investigation into Reince Priebus
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 11:59 pm EDT Wed Jul 26, 2017

In just his fifth day on the job, Donald Trump’s new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci has already decided to set the entire administration on fire. Late this evening, Scaramucci announced via Twitter that he’s asking the FBI and Department of Justice to open a felony investigation into his own boss, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Somehow this is really happening.



Here is the exact text of what Anthony Scaramucci tweeted at 10:41pm eastern time on Wednesday night: “In light of the leak of my financial disclosure info which is a felony. I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp @Reince45” (link). If there’s any doubt as to what Scaramucci meant, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker helped spell it out: “In case there’s any ambiguity in his tweet I can confirm that Scaramucci wants the FBI to investigate Reince for leaking.” (link)



Scaramucci’s financial disclosure information leaked out earlier this evening, and he quickly decided that Priebus was the one who had leaked it. However, he did not tweet any evidence to support his assertion, meaning that he’s now publicly calling for a felony investigation into his own boss without explaining why he thinks his boss is guilty. In any case, this is likely to bring things to an immediate head, which could result in the firing or resignation of Reince Priebus as soon as tomorrow morning, assuming Trump sides with Scaramucci as expected.



It’s also noteworthy that while Scaramucci is asking the FBI and the DOJ to investigate Priebus, the FBI currently has no Director (because Trump fired the last one), and the DOJ is in imminent danger of having no Attorney General (because Trump is considering firing the current one). But before even getting that far, it’s clear Donald Trump’s White House has now slipped fully into its own civil war. We’re still awaiting Reince Priebus’ response to Scaramucci’s felony accusation.


It's the peyote presidency


trump too immature to trust with a Twitter account but luckily he's got the nuclear codes

for NINE MINUTES yesterday top military brass under the impression trump was launching PREEMPTIVE STRIKE AGAINST N. KOREA

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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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