Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by DrEvil » Tue Jul 11, 2017 11:26 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 11:31 am
by Iamwhomiam » Tue Jul 11, 2017 11:58 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 12:12 pm
A Simple, First Observation
JULY 11, 2017, 11:50 AM EDT
There are countless things to write about this morning’s revelation. I was already at work on that revised timeline I mentioned earlier when this was flagged for me while I was in a cab coming back from a meeting. For now I will just make a single observation. Donald Trump Jr. began this engagement with Rob Goldstone on the basis of this message. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
At a minimum Don Jr. and likely (though this is as yet unproven) all high level members of the Trump team knew about this more than a year ago. Ergo, all the total and aggressive denials about Russia’s role supporting Trump, law-breaking for Trump, etc. etc were all the most total and abject lies.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/profile/josh-m
by liminalOyster » Tue Jul 11, 2017 1:13 pm
seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 5:12 pm wrote:A Simple, First Observation
JULY 11, 2017, 11:50 AM EDT
There are countless things to write about this morning’s revelation. I was already at work on that revised timeline I mentioned earlier when this was flagged for me while I was in a cab coming back from a meeting. For now I will just make a single observation. Donald Trump Jr. began this engagement with Rob Goldstone on the basis of this message. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
At a minimum Don Jr. and likely (though this is as yet unproven) all high level members of the Trump team knew about this more than a year ago. Ergo, all the total and aggressive denials about Russia’s role supporting Trump, law-breaking for Trump, etc. etc were all the most total and abject lies.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/profile/josh-m
"This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Sweden and its government’s support for Mr. Obama.”
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 1:24 pm
Grant Stern
Miami based columnist and radio broadcaster, and professional mortgage broker.
Jul 10
PROOF: Trump Knows Agent Who Setup Russian Meeting With Trump Jr.
Photos from the Las Vegas Trump Hotel where Emin Agalarov (center of both images) met with Donald Trump. Agalarov’s manager Rob Goldstone is highlighted with a red arrow, to his left is Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen.
Donald Trump personally knows the agent and the Russian Oligarchs he represented, who set up a meeting with an unregistered Russian agent, whom the New York Times’ bombshell report uncovered offering a deal for stolen emails during last year’s presidential campaign.
This story’s cover photo proves conclusively that Donald Trump knows Rob Goldstone, the agent to Emin Agalarov who admitted to the Washington Post that he arranged the meeting.
Photos from closing the Miss Universe Moscow deal in 2013 are conclusive.
Donald Trump Jr. denied that his father knew about the secret meeting with a Russian agent offering stolen emails, but changed his story about the meeting from one day to the next.
Rob Goldstone on June 17th, 2013, the day he met with Donald Trump. Source: Facebook.
Then, Donald Trump Jr. shockingly admitted that it was “clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”
Furthermore, Trump Jr. said that the unregistered Russian agent brought up sanctions that Putin wants to be dropped, which started in 2012 when Congress adopted the Magnitsky Act.
This story is the first major smoking gun that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russia.
It’s also illegal for a campaign to knowingly solicit anything of value from a foreign agent, person or government under the FEC Act.
Based upon photographic evidence related to the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, we only know that Trump and his lawyer knew the Agalarovs.
Photo: Trump meeting with Emin Agalarov and Goldstone (left) Inset: Photo of Rob Goldstone from 2013 Miss USA Pageant where he was a judge.
Democratic Coalition co-founder Scott Dworkin found the photo of that meeting in late May of this year, and it went viral in an earlier story debunking the blanket alibi proffered by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen claiming he had no Kremlin connections.
Rob Goldstone is Emin Agalarov’s manager, whose father is a Russian oligarch who arranged Miss Universe Moscow.
Goldstone even posted a selfie on to Facebook publicly on June 17th, 2013, which visually confirms his personal acquaintance with Donald Trump.
Rob Goldstone
Rob Goldstone added a new photo.
http://www.facebook.com
Notably, Donald Trump Jr. was not present for their Las Vegas meeting to close the deal bringing the pageant to Moscow and he’s absent from official photos of that year’s Miss Universe contest as well.
Rob Goldstone was even a Miss USA 2013** pageant judge, according to the Las Vegas Sun, and he worked as a judge for the Miss Universe 2017 preliminaries earlier this year.
Donald Trump met Rob Goldstein, and his client Emin Agalarov — with whom he appeared in a music video (below) — and his oligarch father, Aras Agalarov in Las Vegas and published still photos of themselves working to close the deal to bring Miss Universe 2013 to Moscow along with the event announcement.Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
@AgalarovAras I had a great weekend with you and your family. You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next. EMIN was WOW!
10:39 AM - 11 Nov 2013
The AP reports that Donald Trump was at Trump Tower on the day of the meeting, Thursday, June 9th, 2016.
Trump was joined by 60 supporters, and then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus, to kick off his campaign’s lagging fund raising in the wake of his racial insults hurled at the federal judge presiding over the Trump University fraud and racketeering trial.
He sent this tweet about Hillary Clinton’s email that day.
[img]Donald J. TrumpVerified account
@realDonaldTrump
Follow
More
Donald J. Trump Retweeted Hillary Clinton
How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up--and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?[/img]
The Music Agent Admits Setting A Meeting With Trump Campaign And Russian Agent
Emin Agalarov’s father, Aras, is a Russian oligarch real estate developer nicknamed the Trump of Russia, and he’s a pop “star” and social media personality.
Vladimir Putin gave Aras Agalarov an Order of Honor award right before Miss Universe began in Moscow the next month.
The origin of the photo with Trump, Cohen and Goldstone is detailed here:
BUSTED: Trump’s Lawyer Michael Cohen Lied. He Does Have Russian Kremlin Contacts
Cohen baldly lied about his Kremlin ties when the Trump Russia dossier was released.
thesternfacts.com
A complete, unaltered set of the photos is below.
Donald Trump Jr. made a stunning admission/denial statement about his June 9th, 2016 meeting with the Russian spy which forcefully claimed that he was only interested in compromising material about Hillary Clinton.
Goldstone told the Washington Post that he’d arranged the meeting with a Russian lawyer, and he even published a public check in at the Trump Organization onto Facebook on June 9th, 2016.
Even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is pursuing enforcement the criminal complaint against Natalia Veselnitskaya under America’s spying laws, which was made last summer by the ex-American — who surrendered his citizenship to become a British subject — William Browder.
Browder’s Hermitage investment fund was persecuted extralegally in Russia, touching off the Magnistky affair. Sergio Magnitsky was Browder’s lawyer, uncovered a tax fraud, and was thrown into a Russian prison and mistreated until he died.
Sergio Magnitsky was Browder’s lawyer, uncovered fraud, and was thrown into a Russian prison and mistreated until he died. Putin’s government tried Browder in absentia and in a stunning move, they tried his lawyer Sergey Magnitsky posthumously.
Cyprus-based company Prevention, run by Denis Katsyv was accused of being the beneficiary of the massive tax fraud and buying up luxury US real estate in Manhattan, linked to Magnitsky’s death and identity theft against his client Hermitage.
The scam caused Russia’s government to disgorge a $230 million dollar tax refund to Hermitage entities that were delivered instead to Prevezon’s owners.
They blamed the fraud on Browder.
This kind of exotic multi-national real estate and money laundering fraud is actually commonplace in the brutal billionaire brawls common to Russian oligarchs, like this murderous dispute over who owned Fischer Island, a refuge island for the ultra-wealthy located off of Miami Beach — basically reserved for the global top 0.01% of earners — and home to America’s highest per capita income.
Fischer Island was once the wealthiest city in the entire world.
RAILROADED: Prevezon Laundered Its Ill Gotten Gains Into New York Luxury Real Estate
It turns out that the Prevezon story is actually closely linked to Russian Railways, a group of whose executives were deeply involved in railroading Browder and stashing the loot.
So is Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
She’s literally in bed with the public employee railway barons of Russia.
Natalia Veselnitskaya is married to a former-Russian Deputy Transportation Minister in charge of the Moscow region.
A search of New York public records about her client Denis Katsyv — who controls the Prevezon holding companies — yielded numerous, profitable real estate deals. (see results below)
Katsyv’s father Pyotr is the Vice President of Russian Railways, who made his son wealthy and destroyed whistleblowers in his path.
Pyotr Katstv even called the met with the FBI in Rome tried to become an informant, so long as his son got to keep the money. Trump’s former business partner Felix Sater — illegally according to Law360 — obtained a similar deal to keep ill gotten gains in exchange for testimony and cooperation in a secret prosecution. (full article)
The US Attorney’s office nixed the deal when informed of the FBI meeting.
Veselnitskaya was denied a regular entry visa, but gained entry to the US on parole — which is a one time, non-visa entry for humanitarian reasons— solely to defend the criminal case against Denis Katsyv of US vs. Prevezon, which was recently settled in New York’s Southern District after the office spent years pushing to try the case.
Fake NGO Run As An Illegal Lobbying Shop
By February 2016, Veselnitskaya had setup a Delaware non-profit called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGI) and lobbied Congress in person last May against the “Global Magnitsky Act” in the House, after it had already passed the Senate.
It’s illegal to lobby Congress without registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.
But HRAGI did not register.
Its bare bones website says this:
Officially, the Russian law was passed following outrage over the 2008 death of Chase Harrison (original Russian name Dima Yakovlev) — a toddler adopted by a Virginia family, left to die in a car on a sweltering summer day. Unofficially, Russia passed the law in retaliation for the 2012, passage of the US “Magnitsky Act” by the U.S. Congress, which imposed sanctions on Russia and on individuals blamed for the death of the Russian citizen, Sergei Magnitsky.
HRAGI is dedicated to overturning the Russian adoption ban.
Which is revised from last year when TDB said this was on the website:
HRAGIF claims to be “working on analyzing legal and legislative options to help overturn this adoption ban,” according to its site. “We would like to present our findings to the members of U.S. Congress, Administration and U.S. public and is planning to brief them on possible ways of resolution of this stalemate on adoptions.”
That Global Magnitsky Act would enshrined the name of 2012 sanctions against Russia, into a new, global anti-corruption bill.
Rep. Rohrabacher’s aides also told The Daily Beast last May that his office had received documents about the legislation from the Russian government when he led a Congressional Delegation (CODEL) to Russia at the end of April 2016.
Putin’s Favorite House Republican Gets Taken For A Ride In Russia
Sanctioned Russian Railways boss Vladimir Yakunin with Vladimir Putin via Getty Images (CNBC).
While in Russia on the CODEL, Rohrabacher met with the former state-owned Russian Railways boss Vladimir Yakunin, who happened to be previous boss Pyotr Katsyv’s boss, who is the man whose son Veselnitskaya was defending from prosecution in New York City.
According to Politico’s reporting after the election, the Republican legislator confirmed his meeting with the sanctioned Russian rail baron and the story of the mysterious documents:
Last April, Rohrabacher traveled to Moscow on an official congressional trip with four other members of Congress and two staffers. Rohrabacher and his senior aide, Paul Behrends, met privately with Vladimir Yakunin, a Putin confidant whom the Treasury Department blacklisted in 2014 to punish Russia for invading Ukraine, according to an itinerary reviewed by POLITICO and confirmed by Rohrabacher.
There was nothing illegal about talking to Yakunin, but the rest of the delegation steered clear. At this meeting, one of the topics Yakunin, Rohrabacher and Behrends discussed, according to Rohrabacher, was the Magnitsky affair.
Later that day, Rohrabacher rejoined the rest of the delegation to meet with Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the International Affairs Committee in the Federation Council (Russia’s counterpart to the Senate). At that meeting, Kosachev urged Rohrabacher to consult with Russian prosecutors about the Magnitsky affair. Rohrabacher did and received a document questioning Magnitsky’s story, Rohrabacher told POLITICO.
“[Kosachev was] the one who asked, would I accept information from the prosecutors and look at what they had to say on this particular case,” he said.
The document, which is marked “Confidential” and was obtained by POLITICO, blamed Magnitsky and his employer, an American-born investor named Bill Browder, for orchestrating the tax fraud. The letter proposed that if more members of Congress followed Rohrabacher’s lead in questioning the Magnitsky story, Russia would reconsider its ban on American adoptions, which Putin imposed in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act in 2012.
Vladimir Yakunin served as a UN Diplomat for the USSR in the 1980s, prompting rumors of having KGB training, and resigned under pressure from his government job running the rails in 2015, after his son was exposed for profiteering on the father’s position, and Andrei Yakunin — the son — applied for British citizenship.
Canadian media noted that their government refused to sanction him because of the relationship he built with train manufacturer Bombardier to supply his railway, serving 1 billion annual trips. Yakunin created a company named Multiserv Overseas Ltd. in Britain that acted as a middleman in the Bombardier deals.
Years earlier, Congressman Rohrabacher was warned by the FBI that Russian agents of influence were recruiting him, but apparently, none of this tipped off the Republican legislator that this activity or his particpation may have been illegitimate.
Natalia Veselnitskaya’s lobbying apparently ‘succeeded’ in convincing Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) — best known as Putin’s favorite Congressman — to offer an amendment to drop the name in a House Foreign Relations Committee meeting on May 18th, 2016 (see video below).
It’s illegal to represent a foreign power in a policy matter without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a federal law mainly used to catch spies.
Natalia Veselnitskaya did not register under FARA.
Ultimately, House Foreign Relations Committee rejected Rohrabacher’s amendment and his extensive arguments, approving the anti-corruption bill over his objections.
As an unregistered agent of the Russian state, Veselnitskaya could have carried out any number of other covert activities during her time in New York and DC.
Veselnitskaya later returned to Washington, D.C. just four days after her June 9th, 2016 meeting with the Trump Campaign.
First, she attended an anti-Magnitsky propaganda film screening at Washington’s Newseum, which had been cancelled in a major political flap when EU Parliament members had scheduled a screening in Brussels only six weeks earlier.
The following day, Veselniskaya attended a House Foreign Relations Committee meeting entitled “U.S. Policy Towards Putin’s Russia” (transcript) and was featured that week in a Sputnik News story about the Congressional hearing and the film.
Two days after the House Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Vladimir Yakunin publicly announced his support for Donald Trump’s campaign for President. The Russian billionaire told CNBC:
“It was always Republicans when, in the old days, some of kind of bridges were constructed. If Mr Trump is coming into power, that will be more facilitative to faster establishing new kinds of relations.”
The Global Magnitsky Act was later added to a major defense bill and passed last December.
Last month, Vladimir Yakunin gave a lengthy interview to BBC claiming to be solely a strongly pro-Putin private citizen, and around the 8 minute mark, he reversed course on his CNBC endorsement of Trump.
Meanwhile, the Agalarovs have been crowing very publicly about their access to the President of the United States.
Conclusion
Donald Trump Jr.’s incriminating public statements about the campaign’s meeting with Russian agents present an apparent violation of election laws and pretty clear evidence that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russian agents of influence.
It’s not clear who translated for Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at her Trump Campaign meeting, because none of the participants Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. speak Russian and she told a Federal court that she does not even speak English, according a sworn statement in the Prevezon case uncovered by the Democratic Coalition.
What is clear is that the new head of the Trump Organization looks like he will be facing fresh scrutiny by Special Prosecutor Mueller’s probe this week as the President’s painful attempts to normalize Russian interference in America’s elections just failed miserably.
And that his father definitely has a relationship with the middle man who brokered the deal, which should lead the media to ask firmly what the President knew about this meeting and when he knew it.
Donald Trump already admitted on national television that he fired the FBI Director to try and disturb the investigation into his campaign’s Russian ties.
Even worse, these disclosures link the Trump Campaign directly to an ongoing prosecution by a US Attorney who was unexpectedly fired right before a case directly impacting the Russian government was set to go to trial.
Even Russia’s Attorney General admitted that “the judgment undoubtedly would have precedential value in many countries.”
The Prevezon case was instead settled unexpectedly, shortly thereafter, in a major victory for the Russian state.
Now judgement day will have to wait for those fighting public corruption abroad.
But for those seeking to prove that America’s president and his family are not above the law, judgement day seems to be drawing ever closer.
Original photos of June 17th, 2013 meeting in Las Vegas between Trump Organization and Agalarovs
Original photo of Donald Trump meeting with Emin Agalarov, Goldstone, Michael D. Cohen and others.
U.S. vs. Prevezon real estate transactions and charts by prosecution:
Prevezon real estate transactions.
Left: Prosecutors show the money trail from Russia’s treasury to Prevezon’s Swiss bank account. Right: Prevezon entities named in the criminal case.
House Foreign Relations Committee meeting about Global Magnitsky Act on 5/18/2016, begins at minute 59.
Emin Agalarov’s music video with Donald Trump. Ironically, the music video mirrors his real life meeting with Trump in Las Vegas.
**Rob Goldstone’s 2013 Miss America page has been wiped out, but publicists used his 2013 photo in this year’s Miss Universe promotional according to a Google Images search.
Special thanks to Bryan Frydenborg for his indispensable report “U.S. Settlement of Prevezon Case Raises More Questions on Trump/Russia Ties; Bharara Led Case Before Trump Fired Him” which provided the background linking former Russian Railways boss Vladimir Yakunin with the Prevezon case and the Katsyv family.
https://thesternfacts.com/proof-trump-k ... 68fd2621b8
by liminalOyster » Tue Jul 11, 2017 1:48 pm
seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 6:24 pm wrote:I AM AN AMERICAN ...not an indignate dem
it is a CRIME for a campaign to solicit or take anything from a foreign government
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 2:27 pm
Oh Boy
By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 11, 2017 1:26 PM
Philip Bump at the Post just flagged this Trump speech from June 7th, four days after Don Goldstone’s first contact with Don Jr and two days before the meeting at Trump Tower on June 9th.
Trump promises big news about Hillary Clinton’s crimes in a speech on “probably” June 13th.”
The video is set to start at the key moment. If that doesn’t work, jump forward to the 7:00 minute timestamp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIZ80Oqxxo
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 3:31 pm
The Most Gobsmacking Details From Trump Jr.’s Russian Meeting Email Chain
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JULY 11, 2017 2:37 PM
After months of incremental reports about meetings and business dealings that President Donald Trump’s associates had with Russian operatives over the course of the 2016 campaign, the motherlode of news bombshells dropped on Tuesday morning.
Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted out what he said was his full email exchange with a family acquaintance who wanted to connect him with a “Russian government attorney” who could provide him dirt on his father’s likely presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton.
The answers to swirling questions about what Trump Jr. knew going into the June 2016 sit-down with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, came into crystal-clear focus. The emails revealed that the President’s eldest son, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, attended a meeting that had been expressly billed to Trump Jr. as an opportunity to obtain damaging information about Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help the Trump campaign.
Here are the most arresting details from Trump Jr.’s email exchange with that acquaintance, the music publicist Rob Goldstone.
The promised Clinton dirt was part of a larger Russian government effort to help Trump
Goldstone unequivocally says the “sensitive” information his contact has to share with Trump Jr. comes from the Russian government in their initial email exchange on June 3.
“Emin just called and asking me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote. “The Crown 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.”
There is no “Crown prosecutor” in Russia, and Goldstone may have been referring to that country’s Prosecutor General.
“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Goldstone continued.
When news of the meeting first broke over the weekend, Trump Jr. said his discussion with Veselnitskaya focused primarily on a program allowing U.S. citizens to adopt Russian children before admitting the next day that he’d attended the meeting because he was promised negative information about Clinton. Until he released these emails over Twitter, Trump Jr. had not acknowledged publicly that he knew ahead of time the person he met with was connected to Vladimir Putin’s government.
Trump Jr. said he’d “love” the oppo, “especially later in the summer”
If Trump’s eldest son was concerned about the source of the information he would receive, he gave Goldstone no indication.
“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” Trump Jr. told Goldstone in response to his initial email, expressly noting that it would be more useful to have after the conventions were wrapped and Clinton was formally named as the Democratic nominee.
Trump Jr. also repeatedly thanked Goldstone for his role in orchestrating the meeting, saying he appreciated his “help” and his assistance “helping set it up.”
Goldstone made clear the meeting would be with a “Russian government attorney”
Goldstone identifies the lawyer’s country of origin in two separate emails. In one June 7 email, he calls her “The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.” In an emails sent the following day, he refers to her as “the Russian attorney.”
Trump Jr. has said he did not know the name of the lawyer before the meeting, and Veselnitskaya is not named in the emails he released. But he certainly knew where she was from.
Manafort and Kushner were forwarded an email outlining the meeting’s purpose
Manafort and Kushner were forwarded the entire email chain detailing the purpose and timing of the meeting, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Their names are visible on one exchange that Trump Jr. tweeted. That email updated them on the time of the gathering, with the subject line “FW: Russia – Clinton – private and confidential.”
Manafort and Kushner both confirmed to the Times that they attended the meeting, but declined to answer additional questions about it.
Trump Jr. also highlighted their expected attendance in his exchange with Goldstone, writing, “It will likely be Paul Manafort (campaign boss) my brother in law and me.”
Goldstone was open to sharing the dirt with Donald Trump himself
Goldstone apparently considered routing the Clinton dirt sourced from the Russian government to the presumptive Republican nominee himself. In that same June 3 exchange, he proposed passing the compromising information along to Trump through his longtime secretary, Rhona Graff.
“I can also send this info to your father via Rhona, but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first,” Goldstone wrote to Trump Jr.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/stunnin ... yer-emails
Look At The Timeline
Patrick Semansky/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 11, 2017 12:56 PM
Over the weekend, as the import of the Donald Trump Jr meeting became clear, but before this morning’s emails release, I started going back through my notes to piece together the timeline of events and whether they looked different in the light of the new revelations. And? Good guess! They look a lot different. For the moment, look at the timeline after the jump starting in April and running through August. That is the critical part. The critical addition of the Don Jr meeting fits right into a critical period when what we understand were Russian intelligence operatives were trying various vehicles to surface emails that were stolen during the spring. Look at the timeline after the jump – again, go ahead to April 2016.
June 16th, 2015: Donald Trump announces his candidacy for President of the United States.
Circa Summer 2015: The US government alleges that Russian hackers first gain access to DNC computer networks.
Circa August 2015: Trump staff arranges first meeting between Trump and General Flynn, according to Flynn’s account in an August 2016 interview with The Washington Post. “I got a phone call from his team. They asked if he would be willing meet with Mr. Trump and I did. … In late summer 2015.”
August 8th, 2015: Roger Stone leaves formal role in Trump campaign. Whether he quits or was fired is disputed. Stone will continue as a key, albeit informal advisor, for the remainder of the campaign.
December 10th, 2015: Michael Flynn attends conference and banquet in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of RT (formerly Russia today). Flynn is seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the concluding banquet.
March 19th, 2016: Hackers successfully hack into Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s email.
March 21st, 2016: In a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board, Trump provides a list of five foreign policy advisors. The list includes Carter Page but not Michael Flynn. The list is Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg.
March 28th, 2016: Trump campaign hires Paul Manafort to oversee delegate operations for campaign. Manafort becomes the dominant figure running the campaign by late April and takes over as campaign manager on June 21st with the firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
February-April 2016: Flynn advisory relationship with Trump appears to have solidified over the Spring of 2016. In late January Flynn is mentioned as an advisor who has “regular interactions” with Trump. There are similar mentions in February and March. Yet as late as mid-March, Flynn appeared to downplay his ties to Trump. By May Flynn is routinely listed as an advisor and by late May is even being mooted as a possible vice presidential pick.
April 2016: DNC network administrators first notice suspicious activity on Committee computer networks in late April, 2016, according to The Washington Post. The DNC retains the services of network security firm Crowdstrike which expels hackers from the DNC computer network. Crowdstrike tells The Washington Post it believes hackers had been operating inside the DNC networks since the Summer of 2015.
April 19th, 2016: “DCLeaks.com” url/address registered.
May 3rd, 2016: Donald J. Trump becomes becomes presumptive nominee after Ted Cruz and John Kasich withdraw from race.
May 26th, 2016: Donald J. Trump officially secure majority of GOP delegates, officially clinching the nomination of the Republican party.
June 3rd, 2016: First email contact between Rob Goldstone and Donald Trump Jr. about meeting with “Russian government lawyer” with damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
June 7th, 2016: Donald J Trump gives speech in which he promises a major speech about Hillary Clinton’s crimes on June 13th. “I am going to give a major speech on … probably Monday [June 13th] of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”
June 8th, 2016: First tweet posted to “DCLeaks” Twitter account.
June 9th, 2016: Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort meet with Natalia Veselnitskaya. Trump agreed to take the meeting after being told by Trump associate Rob Goldstone that Veselnitskaya had damaging information about Hillary Clinton which came from a Russian government operation to help his father Donald J. Trump.
June 12th, 2016: Julian Assange first announces that Wikileaks has Clinton emails which are soon to be released. “Wikileaks has a very big year ahead … We have emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”
June 14, 2016: Washington Post publishes first account of hacking of the DNC computer networks, allegedly by hackers working on behalf of the Russian government.
June 15th, 2016: “Guccifer 2.0”, later identified by US government officials and other private sector analysts as a fictive persona created by Russian intelligence operatives, contacts The Smoking Gun to take credit for hacking the DNC.
June 27th, 2016: First hacked DNC emails posted to “DCLeaks” website.
July 11th-12th, 2016: Trump campaign officials intervene to remove language calling for providing Ukraine with lethal aid against Russian intervention is Crimea and eastern Ukraine. It is, reportedly, the only significant Trump campaign intervention in the platform in which the Trump campaign has allowed activists a free hand.
July 12th, 2016: Official publication date, The Field of Fight by Michael Flynn and Michael Ledeen.
July 22, 2016: Wikileaks releases first tranche of DNC emails dating from January 2015 to May 2016.
July 27th, 2016: Donald Trump asks Russia to hack Clinton’s email to find 33,000 alleged lost emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find the 33,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
August 1st, 2016: Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort denies Trump campaign changed GOP platform on Russia and Ukraine.
August 8th, 2016: Trump Advisor Roger Stone tells Southwest Broward Republican Organization “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”
August 14th, 2016: The New York Times publishes story detailing handwritten ledgers showing “$12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau.”
August 17th, 2016: Nominee Donald Trump receives his first intelligence briefing with Gen. Michael Flynn and Gov. Chris Christie in attendance.
August 19, 2016: Paul Manafort resigns from Trump campaign.
August 21, 2016: Trump advisor Roger Stone tweets: “Trust me, it will soon [sic] the Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
September 26th, 2016: Trump Russia-Europe Policy Advisor Carter Page steps down from campaign while disputing allegations that he engaged in private communications with Russian government officials. A Yahoo News article from three days earlier reported that US intelligence officials were probing whether he met privately with Russian officials in Moscow in July, including an alleged meeting with close Putin ally Igor Sechin, Chairman of Russian oil company Rosneft.
September 26th, 2016: At first presidential debate, Donald Trump casts doubt on Russian role in hacking campaign: “It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
October 7, 2016: A “Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence” officially accuses the Russian government of being behind hacking of the DNC “to interfere with the US election process.”
October 7, 2016: Wikileaks releases first batch of Podesta emails – one hour after release of Access Hollywood Trump tape.
October 12th, 2016: Stone says he has been in contact with Assange through an intermediary.
October 30th, 2016: In response to FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress about new developments in the Clinton email server probe, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid writes a public letter to Comey in which he claims: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government.”
December 9th, 2016: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) hand delivers a selection of memos (aka ‘the Steele dossier’) to FBI Director James Comey.
December 29th, 2016: President Barack Obama outlines a wave a sanctions and expulsions of Russian diplomat in response to Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
December 29th, 2016: Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov vows retaliation for sanctions.
December 29th, 2016: Incoming National Security Michael Flynn has multiple phone conversations with Russian Sergey Kislyak. It is later reported that the calls covered US sanctions and suggestions that Obama’s punitive actions could be undone in a matter of weeks. Trump administration officials had repeatedly denied that the conversations involved more than pleasantries and logistics about future meetings.
December 29th-30th, 2016: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announces preliminary plans to expel American diplomats.
December 30th, 2016: Russian President Vladimir Putin says he will not retaliate against sanctions and expulsions but await presidency of Donald Trump.
January 19th, 2017: The New York Times reports that the FBI is leading an interagency task force probing ties between Russia and three close Trump associates: Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Roger Stone.
January 26th, 2017: Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and a senior intelligence official visit to White House Counsel Donald McGahn to deliver the message that National Security Advisor Flynn has deceived the Vice President about the subject matter of his calls and may be subject to Russian blackmail.
February 13th, 2017: Michael Flynn resigns as National Security Advisor.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/loo ... e-timeline
by liminalOyster » Tue Jul 11, 2017 3:40 pm
seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 7:27 pm wrote:I am a pissed off American
and I am sorry if I come across as rude I really don't mean to
I am no fan of Clinton or Obama but they are not president now...ever hear of Benghazi....emails? or birth certificate?.......they got their share
if you find any evidence that either of them even came close to committing treason let me know and you could start a thread on Clinton/Obama Treason thread
I am not a fan of what about isms
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 3:58 pm
by liminalOyster » Tue Jul 11, 2017 4:21 pm
seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 8:58 pm wrote:you mentioned Obama......I did not mean to accuse you of disrupting this thread..
apologies for misunderstanding you
by stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jul 11, 2017 4:26 pm
6 Signs That the Russia Investigation Could Blow Up the Trump White House
The revelation about Donald Trump Jr. takes the president’s predicament from bad to worse.
By Jefferson Morley / AlterNet
July 10, 2017, 10:38 AM GMT
The New York Times report that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer last June in expectation of receiving damaging information on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is a blow for a White House already saddled with sinking poll numbers and a stalled legislative agenda.
After a few weeks of political news dominated by the fate of the Senate health care bill and Trump’s trip to Europe, the Russia investigation has resurfaced with a vengeance.
The Times' revelations disclose six new dangers facing Trump’s presidency.
1. What did Trump know about the meeting?
The meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya occurred on June 9, 2016. Trump Jr.’s first explanation was the meeting only concerned U.S.-Russian adoption policies that had been disrupted by congressional approval of the Magnitsky Act, a law imposing sanctions on the Russian government and certain officials. In response, Russian president Vladimir Putin but the brakes on all American adoptions of Russian orphans.
When confronted with a second story saying Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting because Veselnitskaya had offered incriminating information on Clinton, the president’s son changed his tune. He admitted the subject had come up, but said Veselnitskaya offered no specifics, so he lost interest and the conversation returned to adoption.
In a sarcastic tweet, Trump Jr. said the talk “went nowhere.”
Was the substance of the Russian offer relayed to his father? Donald Trump was at Trump Tower, the site of the meeting that day on June 9. He is known to have lunched with campaign manager Paul Manafort, who attended the meeting along with Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law.
Keith Olbermann points out that it was the afternoon of June 9 when Trump sent out his first tweet about Clinton’s emails.
2. Evidence of collusion.
From Matt Taibbi on the left to Sean Hannity on the right, some pundits have complained that there is no evidence to support allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Yes, there were meetings, these critics say. Yes, they were unusual and perhaps even improper. Yes, the Trump campaign denied the meetings and then admitted them. But nothing about the meetings points to collusion—meaning “secret cooperation”—to influence the 2016 election.
Left or right, that argument is now much less credible.
If the June 9 discussion covered the Magnitsky Act, which Putin wanted repealed, and damaging information about Clinton, which Trump wanted revealed, then one has to wonder if there was a meeting of the minds, a quid pro quo, an exchange of favors in which the two sides agreed to secretly help the other. In a word, if there was collusion.
Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer for the Bush White House, said Trump Jr.'s behavior qualifies as criminal.
“If this story is true, we’d have one of them if not both of them in custody by now, and we’d be asking them a lot of questions,” Painter told MSNBC
3. Manafort sings.
A close reading of the Times story about the June 9 meeting indicates that Paul Manafort is talking to investigators about previously undisclosed meetings between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
Manafort, the Times reports, “recently disclosed the meeting, and Donald Trump Jr.’s role in organizing it, to congressional investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to people familiar with the events.”
Manafort, a political consultant who recently acknowledged his consulting firm received $19 million from pro-Putin forces in Ukraine, ran Trump's campaign from May to August 2016.
Last month, Nancy LeTourneau of the Washington Monthly made the case that Manafort has already turned state’s witness. The Times' story lends credence to that theory.
4. The 'modified limited hangout.'
During the Watergate scandal of the 1970s that brought down President Richard Nixon, adviser John Ehrlichman suggested the president respond to a round of damaging revelations with what he called a “modified limited hangout." This is the “strategy of mixing partial admissions with misinformation and resistance to further investigation.”
The Trump White House is now in modified limited hangout mode. The Times story did not come from the president's enemies or anonymous sources in the intelligence community. It was attributed to “three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.”
Unable to deny the substance of the story of the June 9 meeting, all the president’s men are confirming it, the better to assert that the president was not involved.
“My father knew nothing of these meetings and these events,” Trump Jr. said in a statement.
What Manafort has to say about his June 9 meetings with the Russian lawyer and with Trump is not known—yet.
5. Allies retreat.
As the “no evidence of collusion” argument collapses, the president’s allies are retreating to a new line of defense: collusion is not a crime. Hannity started offering this argument last week, as did Fox News anchor Brit Hume.
“Can anybody identify the crime?” Hume said. “Collusion, while it would be obviously alarming and highly inappropriate for the Trump campaign, of which there is no evidence by the way, of colluding with the Russians. It's not a crime."
The argument is not legally implausible. Secret cooperation with a foreign government isn’t, by itself, a violation of the law. But the changing defense is a sign that the president’s case is failing factually.
As the old courtroom adage holds, "If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell."
Or in the 21st century: pound the media and tweet like hell.
6. Family implicated.
Until now the Russian investigation has illuminated the curious actions of Trump’s outer ring of advisers.
Michael Flynn, the fired national security adviser, lied about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Attorney General Jeff Sessions failed to disclose his own meetings with Russian officials during the campaign. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner failed to disclose meetings with Russians after the election when applying for a security clearance.
Now that the scandal has touched Trump’s son, his own flesh and blood, the Russia investigation has drawn blood for the first time.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 6:43 pm
New details emerge on Moscow real estate deal that led to the Trump-Kremlin alliance
Michael Isikoff
Chief Investigative Correspondent
Yahoo NewsJuly 11, 2017
View photos
Donald Trump, Aras Agalarov and Rob Goldstone. (Photos: Sean Gallup/Getty Images; Sergei SavostyanovTASS via Getty Images; Adriel Reboh/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
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While in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in November 2013, Donald Trump entered into a formal business deal with Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, to construct a Trump Tower in the Russian capital. He later assigned his son, Donald Trump Jr., to oversee the project, according to Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who arranged the controversial 2016 meeting between the younger Trump and a Kremlin-linked lawyer.
Trump has dismissed the idea he had any business deals in Russia, saying at one point last October, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”
But Goldstone’s account, provided in an extensive interview in March in New York, offers new details of the proposed Trump project that appears to have been further along than most previous reports have suggested, and even included a trip by Ivanka Trump to Moscow to identify potential sites.
According to the publicist, the project — structured as a licensing deal in which Agalarov would build the tower with Trump’s name on it — was only abandoned after the Russian economy floundered. The economic downturn resulted in part from sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
Goldstone’s version of events implies a possible explanation for Trump’s interest in lifting sanctions on Russia — a policy move his administration quietly pursued in its first few weeks until it ran into strong opposition from members of Congress and officials within the State Department.
Goldstone placed Donald Trump Jr. at the center of the Trump Tower deal, saying that his father assigned his eldest son the job of moving the project to fruition after the signing of a “letter of intent” between the Trump Organization and Agalarov’s company, the Crocus Group. It is not clear if the future president personally signed the “letter of intent,” but Michael Cohen, a longtime lawyer for Trump, told Yahoo News Tuesday that it would have been standard practice for Trump, as president of the Trump Organization, to do so.
View photos
Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 18, 2016. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
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Goldstone also said that Ivanka Trump flew to Moscow in 2014 and met with Emin Agalarov, the oligarch’s son, a pop singer and a vice president of the Crocus Group, to identify sites for the project.
Trump “put Donald Jr. in charge and then Ivanka went to Moscow to look around for what the location would be,” Goldstone said. But the plans for a Trump Tower fell apart because “the economy tanked in Russia’’ after the imposition of Western sanctions, he said.
Goldstone, a British-born publicist who once did worked for Michael Jackson, represents Emin Agalarov in his music career and was present in Moscow during the Miss Universe pageant when the Trump Tower project was discussed by Trump and Aras Agalarov. His role has gotten new attention this week after the New York Times disclosed that Goldstone emailed Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 urging him to meet with a Russian lawyer to receive damaging information from the Russian government about Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. released his email exchange with Goldstone on Tuesday, confirming the key role of the publicist and, more significantly, the Agalarovs, in offering negative information about Clinton on behalf of the Kremlin. “Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote Trump Jr. on June 3, 2016.
A chief prosecutor in Russia “offered to provide the Trump campaign some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and would be very useful to your father. This is very high-level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin.”
Alan Garten, the chief lawyer for the Trump Organization, did not respond to requests for comment. In a telephone interview, Cohen, who is Trump’s personal lawyer, did not dispute any specific details of Goldstone’s account but offered to check them. He did not later respond. But Cohen adamantly rejected the idea there was anything improper about meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, given that Trump Jr. was told she might have information helpful to Trump’s campaign. “The purpose of the election is to win,” said Cohen, adding, “Why is this any different?” than the unverified “dossier” on Trump’s ties to Russia prepared by a former British spy working for a Washington research firm hired by his political opponents.
Trump Jr., accompanied by then campaign manager Paul Manafort and senior adviser Jared Kushner, met with the Russian lawyer at Goldstone’s request to review the information she purported to have. “He met with her face-to-face to determine” the validity of the advertised documents and “no information was provided.”
Goldstone had played a key role in helping to broker the initial decision by the Miss Universe pageant — then owned by the Trump Organization and NBC — to hold its 2013 contest in Moscow.
View photos
According to Goldstone, he pitched the idea to Paula Schugart, then chief executive of Miss Universe, as a way to promote the music career of Emin Agalarov. Schugart was initially hesitant because of concerns about red tape in Moscow. “What if you had a partner who owns the biggest venue in Moscow?” Emin Agalarov responded, according to Goldstone’s account. “Between myself and my father, we can cut through the red tape. You have a new partner.”
The plans to bring Miss Universe to Moscow was announced by Trump in Las Vegas in June 2013 during the Miss USA contest. Trump at the time quickly expressed hope that it would lead to a meeting with Putin. “Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump had tweeted at the time.
A meeting with Putin never came off during Trump’s Moscow trip; the Kremlin expressed regret that the Russian president wouldn’t be able to fit it into his schedule on the day in question because he had a meeting with the King of Holland. But the trip gave Trump an opportunity to discuss the plans for the Trump Tower in Moscow with Agalarov, a billionaire who has been called “the Trump of Russia” and “Putin’s builder” because of massive construction projects he has done on behalf of the Kremlin. Just 10 days before the Miss Universe pageant, Putin had given Agalarov a prestigious award at a ceremony at the Kremlin: Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.
In an interview with Forbes this March, Emin Agalarov confirmed the plans for Trump Tower in Moscow. “We thought that building a Trump Tower next to an Agalarov tower — having the two big names — could be a really cool project to execute,” Emin Agalarov told the magazine. Agalarov blamed the abandonment of the project on Trump’s decision to run for president, rather than the imposition of sanctions. “He ran for president, so we dropped the idea,” Agalarov said. “But if he hadn’t run, we would probably be in the construction phase today.”
But Emin Agalarov said he and the now president have continued to stay in touch, saying that Trump sent a handwritten note to the Agalaovs in November after they congratulated him on his victory. “Now that he ran and was elected, he does not forget his friends.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/new-details- ... 26219.html
‘Category 5 hurricane’: White House under siege by Trump Jr.’s Russia revelations
Play Video 2:38
What we know about Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia meeting
Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton during his father's presidential campaign, after being told the information was "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump." (Video: Elyse Samuels, Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker July 11 at 10:17 PM
The White House has been thrust into chaos after days of ever-worsening revelations about a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a lawyer characterized as representing the Russian government, as the president fumes against his enemies and senior aides circle one another with suspicion, according to top White House officials and outside advisers.
President Trump — who has been hidden from public view since returning last weekend from a divisive international summit — is enraged that the Russia cloud still hangs over his presidency and is exasperated that his eldest son and namesake has become engulfed by it, said people who have spoken with him this week.
The disclosure that Trump Jr. met with a Russian attorney, believing he would receive incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Kremlin’s effort to boost his father’s candidacy, has set back the administration’s faltering agenda and rattled the senior leadership team.
Even supporters of Trump Jr. who believe he faces no legal repercussions privately acknowledged Tuesday that the story is a public relations disaster — for him as well as for the White House. One outside ally called it a “Category 5 hurricane,” while an outside adviser said a CNN graphic charting connections between the Trump team and Russians resembled the plot of the fictional Netflix series “House of Cards.”
Even Vice President Pence sought to distance himself from the controversy, with his spokesman noting that Trump Jr.’s meeting occurred before Pence joined the ticket.
What you need to know about Donald Trump Jr.'s ties to Russia. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
Inside a White House in which infighting often seems like a core cultural value, three straight days of revelations in the New York Times about Trump Jr. have inspired a new round of accusations and recriminations, with advisers privately speculating about who inside the Trump orbit may be leaking damaging information about the president’s son.
This portrait of the Trump White House under siege is based on interviews Tuesday with more than a dozen West Wing officials, outside advisers, and friends and associates of the president and his family, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.
[The Take: Trump Jr.’s emails offer a revelation unlike any other in the Russia probe]
The makeup of Trump’s inner circle is the subject of internal debate, as ever. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser; Jared Kushner, her husband and another senior adviser; and first lady Melania Trump have been privately pressing the president to shake up his team — most specifically by replacing Reince Priebus as the White House chief of staff, according to two senior White House officials and one ally close to the White House.
The three family members are especially concerned about the steady stream of unauthorized leaks to journalists that have plagued the administration over the nearly six months that President Trump has been in office, from sensitive national security information to embarrassing details about the inner workings of the White House, the officials said.
Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director, said: “Of course, the first lady is concerned about leaks from her husband’s administration, as all Americans should be. And while she does offer advice and perspectives on many things, Mrs. Trump does not weigh in on West Wing staff.”
Lindsay Walters, a deputy White House press secretary, disputed reports about Priebus’s standing. “These sources have been consistently wrong about Reince, and they’re still wrong today,” she said.
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner walk together during the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on June 22. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
After this story first published, Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman, said in a statement on behalf of Kushner and Ivanka Trump: “Jared and Ivanka are focused on working with Reince and the team to advance the President’s agenda and not on pushing for staff changes.”
Trump recently publicly praised Priebus’s work ethic, and the chief of staff’s allies note that Priebus has done as good a job as can be expected under the unique circumstances of this administration. Defenders of Priebus have long said they expect him to make it to a year in the position, and Trump is said to be hesitant to fire him or any other senior staffer amid the escalating Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The mind-set of Trump Jr. over the past few days has evolved from distress to anger to defiance, according to people close to him. He hired a criminal defense attorney but maintains that he is innocent of any wrongdoing. After his tweets commenting on the matter drew scrutiny, he agreed to his first media interview — with his friend Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity on his show on Tuesday night.
One friend of Trump Jr.’s said the presidential son saw the Hannity appearance as an opportunity to give his version of Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, a 1952 address in which the then-vice-presidential candidate defended himself against accusations of financial improprieties.
[Trump Jr. could be in legal jeopardy, but analysts said more would be required for a criminal case]
Trump has had no public events since returning Saturday night from Germany but has been closely monitoring developments with his eldest son in the news.
Trump continues to view the Russia controversy as an excuse used by Democrats for losing an election they thought they would win — and an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his victory, aides said. They said that the president’s frustration is based on the media coverage of his son’s actions, as opposed to the actions themselves.
“He just looks at this as the continuum of taking a group of unrelated facts and putting them together in concentric circles and saying, ‘Aha — look what happened!’ ” said Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a longtime friend of the president who was chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee. “With Don Jr., whatever set of facts there are may not lead to the conclusion that the establishment media is making.”
Trump and his advisers are deeply frustrated that the disclosure by Trump Jr. has overshadowed the positive coverage they expected to receive from the president’s trip abroad, as well as other issues they hoped to spotlight this week, such as the Senate health-care bill and trade.
A handful of Republican operatives close to the White House are scrambling to Trump Jr.’s defense and have begun what could be an extensive campaign to try to discredit some of the journalists who have been reporting on the matter.
Their plan, as one member of the team described it, is to research the reporters’ previous work, in some cases going back years, and to exploit any mistakes or perceived biases. They intend to demand corrections, trumpet errors on social media and feed them to conservative outlets, such as Fox News.
But one outside adviser said a campaign against the press when it comes to Trump Jr.’s meeting could be futile: “The meeting happened. It’s tough to go to war with the facts.”
In the West Wing, meanwhile, fear of the Mueller probe effectively paralyzed senior staffers as they struggled to respond.
No official has yet delivered a robust defense of Trump Jr., although Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the principal deputy press secretary, told reporters Monday, “I would certainly say Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election.”
At Tuesday’s press briefing, Sanders read a brief statement from the president — “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency” — but declined to speak further on the issue, referring all questions to Trump Jr.’s attorney.
[Donald Trump Jr.’s emails about the meeting with a Russian lawyer, annotated]
Other senior White House officials were hesitant to talk about Trump Jr. — even on the condition of anonymity — for fear of exposing themselves legally.
Some top officials, as well as outside advisers, had earlier suggested that the White House conduct its own internal review to identify any potential problem areas related to Russia so that it can release the information on its own rather than be caught unaware by news reports. But that notion went nowhere, in part because officials were afraid to discuss any potential Russia interactions that could make them targets of Mueller’s probe.
One White House official went so far as to stop communicating with the president’s embattled son, although this official spoke sympathetically about his plight, casting Trump Jr. as someone who just wants to hunt, fish and run his family’s real estate business.
“The kid is an honest kid,” said one friend of Trump Jr. “The White House should’ve never let that story go out on the president’s son. . . . What he’s upset about was that it was a minor meeting and the media glare — anything that’s Russia-related, gets picked up the way roaches get caught in a roach motel.”
Eric Trump, another son of the president, defended his older brother Tuesday night by retweeting a message from British politician Nigel Farage, who said Trump Jr. was under attack because he is “the best public supporter” of the president. Eric Trump tweeted: “This is the EXACT reason they viciously attack our family! They can’t stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other.”
Critics of Trump Jr. counter that he should have known better than to accept a meeting with someone who was explicitly described in an email as a “Russian government attorney.”
“It wasn’t naivete,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration. “It was, ‘Oh, they have some dirt on our opponent and I’m eager to receive it.’ Nobody thought to think, ‘Well, how did they obtain that? Is this coming from the Russian government, Russian intelligence?’ Those are the kinds of obvious questions that should have been asked, in my opinion.”
Pence found out about Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian attorney Friday evening in advance of the first Times story, said one person familiar with the discussions. Both Pence and his team view the Russia coverage as a distraction, and are working to keep the vice president clear of it and focused on Trump’s policy goals — such as health care, the subject of his scheduled visit to Kentucky on Wednesday.
“The vice president is working every day to advance the president’s agenda, which is what the American people sent us here to do. The vice president was not aware of the meeting,” Pence’s press secretary, Marc Lotter, said in a statement. “He is not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about the time before he joined the ticket.”
On Capitol Hill — where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday that he is delaying his chamber’s August recess by two weeks — Republican senators were becoming increasingly frustrated with the White House, which they blame for Congress’s inability to pass any major legislation.
A growing number of senators believe that the widening Russia probe — as well as the Trump-fueled tumult that seems to dominate nearly every news cycle — have stalled their legislative agenda, leaving them nothing to offer their constituents by way of achievements when they head home over the break.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 901f7c6d90
Most notably, Veselnitskaya represented Denis Katsyv, the son of a senior government official and owner of Russian real estate firm Prevezon, which was sued in 2013 by then-Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara on charges of laundering money in a massive Russian government tax scam.
Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016, is best known in the US for defending a Russian businessman accused by the US government of laundering millions.
http://www.businessinsider.com/natalia- ... -jr-2017-7
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 12, 2017 7:34 am
The Vipers and the Derp
By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 12, 2017 2:27 AM
There are two noteworthy articles out tonight, one from the Times and another from the Post. They are both of the ‘President is enraged about X and turning on Y’ genre which has become a staple of over the last six months. On that front, the kicker for me is a point noted in both articles but with more detail from the Post: with the White House figuratively burning to the ground around them, Ivanka, Jared and Melania Trump are pushing the President to solve the problem by firing Reince. Clearly, Reince Priebus is the problem. But the three specific, factual points I want to reference come from the article in the Times.
First we learn that the initial response from Donald Trump Jr to the Saturday (first) Times article was crafted by the a group of the President’s advisors on Air Force One on the return from Europe. The President signed off on the final version. The President’s son is purportedly set apart from the daily affairs of the White House running the President’s business empire. Why is the President’s White House team answering press stories on his behalf? That seems like a pretty good question. More practically though, if nothing else, this appears to implicate the President in the false claims made to the Times for the first story. Let’s set it aside for the moment. It’s hardly the weirdest thing in the article.
Second, we get more details on the origins of Trump Jr conflagration.
The emails were discovered in recent weeks by Mr. Kushner’s legal team as it reviewed documents, and the team amended his clearance forms to disclose it, according to people briefed on the developments, who like others declined to be identified because of the sensitive political and legal issues involved.
Similarly, Mr. Manafort recently mentioned the meeting to congressional investigators looking into possible collusion, according to the people briefed on the matter.
Clearly it was out of Kushner’s legal process that the story emerged, though hints of it came up in parallel through Manafort’s discussions with congressional investigators. (A separate Times piece notes that it was Kushner’s initial failure to note two critical meetings – one with the Russian Ambassador and another with that Russian state banker – which led to the more searching scrutiny which uncovered this meeting.)
Did Kushner himself or those acting on his behalf more affirmatively push this story into press to aide Kushner in some way? I do not know the answer to this. But I have reason to believe he or those working with him were part of pushing forward story #2, the one that first revealed that dirt on Hillary Clinton was the premise of the meeting with the Russian lawyer.
Why would he do that?
What I’m lead to understand is that he might think that putting Don Jr in the spotlight, at the center of the story, would in some way help him, push him into the background and thus take pressure off him. Does that make any sense? Not really. But remember, Kushner thought firing James Comey was a good idea. With Kushner, Don Jr and the rest of these guys, I have a persistent sense that they don’t quite grasp the seriousness of the situation they’re in. This is not like a media war in New York City where you can land a blow by placing a nasty story in The New York Post or bludgeon your enemies by buying your own paper. Big, sprawling criminal investigations of this sort rumble on in perfect indifference to whether or not you won the morning or killed it in ten different news cycles.
This brings us to the third passage where we learn that President Trump is losing faith with his longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz and that Kasowitz, frustrated with the President, may resign. (As the President finds himself unable to escape his own actions there’s always a new person who is at fault.)
Advisers said the president was annoyed not so much by his son as by the headlines. But three people close to the legal team said he had also trained his ire on Marc E. Kasowitz, his longtime lawyer, who is leading the team of private lawyers representing him. Mr. Trump, who often vents about advisers in times of trouble, has grown disillusioned by Mr. Kasowitz’s strategy, the people said.
The strain, though, exists on both sides. Mr. Kasowitz and his colleagues have been deeply frustrated by the president. And they have complained that Mr. Kushner has been whispering in the president’s ear about the Russia investigations and stories while keeping the lawyers out of the loop, according to another person familiar with the legal team.
The president’s lawyers view Mr. Kushner as an obstacle and a freelancer more concerned about protecting himself than his father-in-law, the person said. While no ultimatum has been delivered, the lawyers have told colleagues that they cannot keep operating that way, raising the prospect that Mr. Kasowitz may resign.
Let me add some additional detail which sheds some light on this. You can see here that Kasowitz and the President’s legal team believe Kushner is trying to protect himself at the President’s expense. Yet, despite this, Kushner is preventing them from adequately defending the President by using familial proximity to influence him.
What I can add is that when Kasowitz was brought on board as the President’s personal attorney in the Russia matter (he’d been a go to lawyer in other matters for years), he had in mind easing Kushner out of the White House.
Part of this would be simply to get Kushner away from the President. After all, before the last few days focus on Don Jr., Kushner was the guy. He had had meetings with various Russia probe players, reportedly tried to get Russian secure communications devices to have secure communications with people in Russia, perhaps hit up a Russia state banker for a multi-hundred-million dollar loan to save his family business. Kushner is by any reasonable measure radioactive. Having him in the White House, with a security clearance and his hand in every decision endangers everyone. Any lawyer or capable political advisor would try to separate the President from that danger.
But there’s another part of it as well. Kasowitz and at least some other Kushner foes seem to have believed that if Kushner could be pushed out the President could finally be freed from the Russia albatross. Imagine it this way. They put the life boat into the water, make Jared get inside, hand him the Russia scandal and then push him off into the open sea.
This never struck me as a terribly realistic proposition. Until a few days ago I was just barely ready to believe there might never be a true smoking gun in the Russia story. But if there was, if there was a story, there’s no way it would only involve Jared Kushner. So the idea that Kushner could simply be made to take the fall for the whole thing just never added up. It makes as much sense as Kushner thinking he can help himself by destroying his brother-in-law.
This is all a hall of mirrors. It’s impossible to tell with any real reliability who is doing what to whom. What’s clear is that this is a notional ‘team’ which appears to be in some key ways as afraid of each other as they are of the prosecutors on their trail. That clearly is not a good recipe for any kind of concerted action that could limit legal exposure. At the end of the day though these folks are in trouble because, almost certainly, they have various kinds of misconduct to hide. So all the musical chairs and mutual knifing probably won’t over time prevent their wrongdoing from being revealed.
I’ve written this many times. But I will say it again. We have all heard the old saw, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” This is not true. People break laws to cover things up because they are covering up grave wrongdoing. This is both logical and accurate. It can seem like it’s the coverup and not the crime because often the cover up succeeds, at least in part. Indeed, usually it does. That’s why people do it. So you may think the cover up got people in more trouble than the crime. But that’s almost certainly because the cover up was largely successful. You never really learned the whole story. At the end of the day people may be stupid but they ain’t dumb. You cover up because the danger of complete exposure must be avoided at all costs. They’re all sitting on secrets and all the mutual knifing and musical chairs will not change that.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the ... re-1069798
TPM LIVEWIRE
Senate Judiciary Dem: Trump Jr.’s Emails ‘Clearly Show Intent To Collude’
By ESME CRIBB Published JULY 11, 2017 6:49 PM
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, on Tuesday said Donald Trump Jr.’s emails arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer “clearly show intent to collude.”
“This email chain, and particularly connecting in both Manafort and Kushner, shows clearly an intent by the leadership of the Trump campaign to try to collude with Russians to get opposition research,” Whitehouse said on CNN.
Trump Jr. on Tuesday morning published his email exchange with Trump family acquaintance Rob Goldstone, who told him a “Russian government attorney” could give Trump Jr. alleged compromising information on Hillary Clinton as as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Whitehouse said there is “a good case to be made” that opposition research is “actually a thing of value under the American campaign finance laws, which makes this a potential conspiracy to violate the campaign finance laws’ prohibition on receiving a thing of value from a foreign government.”
“It clearly shows intent to collude. Going in, they knew that this was Russian information, that a Russian attorney was flying over to deliver it, that it was intended for political purposes, that the campaign was going to be involved,” he said. “They even talked about the timing of it, that it would be better to come out later in the summer, presumably closer to the election.”
Trump Jr. on Tuesday night offered his first defense of his decision to hold the meeting: He wanted to “play it out.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/s ... to-collude
This law might explain why a Russian lawyer wanted to meet with Trump
By Anne Applebaum July 11 at 12:50 PM
Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to a journalist in Moscow on Nov. 8, 2016. (Yury Martyanov /Kommersant Photo via Associated Press)
I don’t want to exaggerate: There is a lot we still don’t know. Also, I still believe that the most shocking, disqualifying aspects of the Trump/Russia relationship — President Trump’s hero worship of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his admiration for Russian dictatorship — are the ones that are already public. Nevertheless, the entry of Natalia Veselnitskaya into the Trump/Russia story is dramatic. This is not just because of what her role tells us about Trump and his entourage, but because of what it tells us about the possible motives of interested Russians.
To explain why, you need a few paragraphs of background. Veselnitskaya is a lawyer who has worked for many years to overturn the Magnitsky Act, a piece of U.S. legislation named after a very different Russian lawyer. Sergei Magnitsky was working for an American investor, Bill Browder, when he accidentally stumbled upon an incredible, almost unbelievable scam: Russian tax officials and police were secretly changing the ownership of companies, hijacking their names and bank accounts, and then using them to claim fake tax rebates and other payments. In effect, they were stealing vast sums of money from the Russian state.
Magnitsky learned too much about the scam, and in 2008 he was arrested. In jail he was reportedly deprived of medical care and beaten — until he died. In the wake of Magnitsky’s death, Browder launched an extraordinary crusade against the officials who had been involved in the original scam as well as Magnitsky’s death. In 2012 he convinced Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that has now forbade 44 people, including bureaucrats and tax officials associated with Magnitsky’s death, from entering the United States or doing business with U.S. banks.
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The Magnitsky Act bothered the Russian leadership — in fact, it really, really bothered them, far more than it should have. In part that may have been because it focused attention on the real source of so much Russian wealth: theft from the state. In part it may have been because the powerful officials involved, like all powerful officials in Russia, care a lot about being able to travel freely to the West in order to buy property, to go skiing, to hide their money.
It also set a precedent. Suddenly there was a way to target all of those gray bureaucrats, the men behind the scenes who give the orders to loot the state and kill citizens. The Magnitsky Act was the template for the sanctions that the Obama administration placed more broadly on Russian individuals and businesses in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As in the Magnitsky case, those sanctions were also very specific: They did not target Russians in general but rather prevented particular people and companies from interacting with the West, traveling and doing business here. At the time, the U.S. government explained that the sanctioned people and companies were selected for their proximity to Putin.
Play Video 2:38
What we know about Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia meeting
Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton during his father's presidential campaign, after being told the information was "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump." (Video: Elyse Samuels, Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By contrast, Putin’s response to the Magnitsky sanctions was designed to hit ordinary Russians, especially ordinary Russian children: He banned Americans from adopting them. His response to the Ukraine sanctions was similar: He banned Western food products, which led to higher prices for ordinary Russians, too.
Nevertheless, a lot of very rich, very influential Russians remained angry. They deployed Veselnitskaya — she represented one of the companies accused of laundering the Magnitsky money in the United States — to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, to attack Browder personally, to even make a scandalous film about him and his crusade. Given how far they went and how much money they spent, it’s not at all hard to imagine that they would deploy her in a far more audacious project: an offer to help Donald Trump become president, and to ask him to lift sanctions in exchange.
As I’ve argued before, the primary motive for Russian intervention in the U.S. election, like Russian interventions in politics all across Europe, remains geopolitical: to undermine U.S. leadership in the world, to weaken Western alliances and to damage Western democracy so that it will not seem attractive to Russians. But a small but powerful group of men might have had an additional, personal motive: to help elect a U.S. president who would lift the Magnitsky sanctions as well as the Ukraine sanctions, allowing them the freedom to travel and do business. They would have had a very strong motivation to contact the Trump team, to organize hacking, even to help pay for a social-media campaign.
Right now, both Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Jr. are denying that they did any such deal, although that is hardly surprising. Both Veselnitskaya and the Kremlin are also denying that they have anything to do with each other, and it is important to note that this is perfectly plausible: Like the American state, the Russian state is not monolithic.
As I’ve said, much is not proved. But do note this: President Trump really did seek to lift sanctions within days of the inauguration. His team really has sought to block Congress from passing a law reinforcing the sanctions. He and his secretary of state really have issued conflicting accounts of whether sanctions were discussed with Putin in Hamburg. Does he feel he owes somebody a favor? And if so — why?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/glo ... 50f9aa90ef
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