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by kelley » Wed Jul 12, 2017 8:05 am
by Iamwhomiam » Wed Jul 12, 2017 8:46 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 12, 2017 8:54 pm
Russian Oligarch Who Plotted to Aid Trump Was Named in Private Intelligence Dossier
Robert Mackey
July 11 2017, 8:38 p.m.
Photo: Victor Boyko/Getty Images
Last Updated: 12:04 p.m. EDT
IT TOOK FOUR years longer than he’d hoped, but on Tuesday the Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov finally succeeded in his aim of using Donald Trump to make his son Emin famous in the United States.
The plan was hatched in 2013, when the elder Agalarov paid Trump handsomely to bring his Miss Universe contestants to Moscow, where they were required to swoon in a music video intended to launch Emin’s singing career.
......
Steele reported that at least two sources said that information of some kind on Clinton had been provided to the Trump campaign by Russia. One of those sources, described as “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow,” reported in June 2016 “that this Russian intelligence had been ‘very helpful.'”
One of Steele’s sources also claimed that the theft of emails from Democratic officials, later provided to WikiLeaks, “had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.”
Stolen emails were not mentioned in the plot to help Trump described to Donald Jr. by Goldstone, but it was just three days after the June 9 meeting with Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, first revealed that he had obtained what turned out to be emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.
........
Later in his report, Steele said that two sources in another Russian city, St. Petersburg, claimed that Trump had illicit sexual encounters there during another trip. Both of those sources claimed that a business associate of Trump, Aras Agalarov, “will know the details.”
Among those entirely unsurprised by the revelation that Agalarov was named at the center of a plot to help the Russian government help Trump was Alexey Navalny, the opposition activist who hopes to run against Putin in the 2018 Russian presidential election.
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/11/rus ... e-dossier/
Trump’s Russia Lawyer Isn’t Seeking Security Clearance, And May Have Trouble Getting One
Colleagues say Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s attorney on the Russia investigation, has struggled with alcohol abuse and engaged in behavior that left employees uncomfortable.
by Justin Elliott and Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, July 11, 2017, 9:37 p.m.24
The ongoing investigations into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia involve reams of classified material. Yet Marc Kasowitz, the New York lawyer whom President Donald Trump has hired to defend him in these inquiries, told ProPublica through a spokesman that he does not have a security clearance — the prerequisite for access to government secrets. Nor does he expect to seek one.
Several lawyers who have represented presidents and senior government officials said they could not imagine handling a case so suffused with sensitive material without a clearance.
“No question in my mind — in order to represent President Trump in this matter you would have to get a very high level of clearance because of the allegations involving Russia,” said Robert Bennett, who served as President Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer. Like many Washington lawyers, Bennett has held security clearances throughout his career.
As the spotlight on Russia intensifies with new email disclosures that his son, son-in-law, and then-campaign manager met in June 2016 with a Russian attorney who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Kasowitz’s lack of a security clearance could hinder the president’s legal and political response to the scandal.
One possible explanation for Kasowitz’s decision not to pursue a clearance: He might have trouble getting one.
In recent weeks, ProPublica spoke with more than two dozen current and former employees of Kasowitz’s firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, as well as his friends and acquaintances. Past and present employees of the firm said in interviews that Kasowitz has struggled intermittently with alcohol abuse, leading to a stint in rehab in the winter of 2014-15.
Several people told ProPublica that Kasowitz has been drinking in recent months. (The vast majority of those who spoke to ProPublica for this article declined to be quoted by name, citing Kasowitz’s penchant for threatening lawsuits.)
Experts on federal security reviews told ProPublica that recent episodes of alcohol abuse are a major barrier to receiving clearance, a process that involves government agents poring over a person’s past and interviewing family, friends and colleagues. Investigators typically raise flags about behaviors that might make someone vulnerable to blackmail or suggest poor judgment.
Kasowitz’s spokesman said he doesn’t need a clearance. “No one has suggested he requires a security clearance, there has been no need for a security clearance, and we do not anticipate a need for a security clearance,” the spokesman said. “If and when a security clearance is needed, Mr. Kasowitz will apply for one with the other members of the legal team.”
Kasowitz’s spokesman did not directly respond to questions about whether he has struggled with alcohol abuse, but said the attorney is able to drink in moderation without a problem.
While not a government employee, Kasowitz has become a public face of the administration on the Russia case. Last month, he went before the cameras to deliver the president’s response to the landmark testimony of fired FBI Director James Comey. White House officials have regularly referred media inquiries about Russia-related matters, including queries about Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn, to Kasowitz.
In Washington, where every word and action of the president’s lawyer is scrutinized, Kasowitz is a neophyte. Instead of negotiating deals among the capital’s power brokers or fending off FBI investigations, Kasowitz, 65, built a lucrative practice in civil court suing banks and representing, among others, a leading tobacco company.
Kasowitz has been described by colleagues in the scrappy world of New York lawyers as the “toughest of the tough guys.” Bloomberg News called him a “Pit Bull Loyal to The Boss” while The New York Times described him as “the Donald Trump of lawyering.” His aggressive legal style has spurred rebukes from two judges.
For over 15 years, he represented Donald Trump, earning the president’s loyalty through his eager pugilism. Kasowitz has defended him in the Trump University fraud lawsuit. He fought to keep records from Trump’s 1990 divorce private, and threatened to sue The New York Times for publishing a story in which women accused Trump of unwanted touching and sexual assault. He also recently represented Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly after multiple women accused O’Reilly of sexual harassment.
Before representing Trump in the Russia inquiry, Kasowitz was informally advising the president. He has told friends he recommended firing Preet Bharara because the crusading prosecutor posed a danger to the administration. He has told people Trump wanted him to be attorney general.
Trump reportedly sought a classic Washington lawyer to represent him on Russia before choosing Kasowitz. Initially Kasowitz was reluctant to take it on. “He didn’t seek this,” said Joseph Lieberman, the former senator and Democratic vice presidential candidate who is now senior counsel at the firm. “In the end, the president said, ‘I need you. I know you and trust you.’”
Lieberman and Kasowitz grew up in the same neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. The future senator used to see Kasowitz’s father, who ran a scrap-metal business, walking through the neighborhood, greeting everyone as he went. Kasowitz went to Yale to study American history and then to Cornell Law School. After graduating in 1977, he started his law career in New York. In 1993, Kasowitz broke off from the prominent firm Mayer Brown to found his own firm.
As the firm met with early success, Kasowitz became wealthy. He brags to friends he makes anywhere from $10 million to $30 million per year. He owns an apartment in a white-glove building on Park Avenue and a mansion in Westchester County. He travels by private jet and, when in New York, is driven around in a black Cadillac SUV. He owns at least two horses, according to a lawsuit Kasowitz once filed against his daughter’s equestrian stable.
From the start, Kasowitz Benson had a hard-drinking culture that its leaders epitomized.
“It’s like a time warp,” said one former employee, citing the firm’s “macho, scotch-drinking, fist-fighting” ethos. Multiple former attorneys said they saw Kasowitz under the influence at the office, an accusation Kasowitz denies.
Associates would vie to join powerful partners in Kasowitz’s inner circle during the day at the Palm West Side, the steakhouse just across the street from the firm’s offices, and more recently, at another midtown steakhouse a couple of blocks away called Gallaghers. A framed magazine profile of Kasowitz hangs on the wall across from the bar at the Palm. Three former employees at the firm recall attorneys having to go across the street to the restaurant during the workday to consult Kasowitz on work matters, as he held court, drinking and eating. In response to questions, a spokesman for Kasowitz disputed that, saying he never had a drink during the day at the Palm outside of lunch and dinner and never handled firm business while at the restaurant.
Former employees pointed to reckless behavior by Kasowitz while drinking. ProPublica spoke with 10 people who attended the firm’s holiday party on Dec. 10, 2013, at the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan. Spouses and significant others were not invited.
Kasowitz, according to an attendee, was visibly inebriated, appearing to have a hard time standing on his feet without support. During the festivities, Kasowitz and a much younger woman not employed by the firm hit the dance floor. According to multiple eyewitnesses, they danced intimately in a way many employees felt was inappropriate for a work event. One person described it as “dirty dancing.” Some employees had seen Kasowitz’s dancing partner before: the then-25-year-old woman had been a hostess at the Palm. “It made women feel uncomfortable,” said one former female attorney who attended the party.
Kasowitz’s spokesman, Michael Sitrick, initially said Kasowitz “does not recall whether he danced with her at a holiday party over 3.5 years ago.” Later, he said that the descriptions of Kasowitz dancing at the party were “untrue.” Kasowitz said in a statement he never had “a romantic relationship” with the woman, “who many of us came to know (as we have many others) because she worked at the Palm Restaurant across the street from our offices.”
Kasowitz has been married for 25 years to Lori Kasowitz, a former Mayer Brown administrator and regular on the Manhattan charity circuit. The couple has one daughter.
Sitrick supplied eight statements from Kasowitz employees attesting to his character and behavior at the party and denying the allegations about the young woman. He said ProPublica could not quote the employees’ statements by name without their permission. ProPublica reached out to all of them. Two declined to be named, and six did not respond to requests to use their names.
That was not the only dramatic incident involving Kasowitz and the Palm hostess. Late one Thursday night in March 2013, the same woman was arrested for felony assault at Beauty & Essex, a lower Manhattan restaurant and club, after allegedly throwing a bottle that hit another woman in the head, according to NYPD records. A former partner in the law firm said that Kasowitz was with her and sustained an injury. Afterwards, Kasowitz walked around the office with two black eyes looking “like a raccoon,” according to the former partner.
Asked about that incident, Sitrick did not answer directly. He said Kasowitz attended a dinner at a restaurant where the woman was in attendance. As Kasowitz was leaving the restaurant, he was “assaulted by a total stranger,” Sitrick wrote in a statement. The Palm hostess was not involved in that assault and Kasowitz’s assailant was arrested, the spokesman said.
According to current and former attorneys at the firm, Kasowitz hit a low point in the winter of 2014-15. He abruptly left New York for Florida, where he owned a mansion at the Equestrian Club Estates in Wellington. Kasowitz sought alcohol treatment at the nearby Caron, a high-end rehab facility, according to two people who heard it from Kasowitz himself.
According to Sitrick, that winter had been difficult for Kasowitz because of the death of his father and that he had “sought out counseling” like “millions of Americans.” The spokesman did not answer directly whether Kasowitz was in rehab that winter but said he was not “at Caron in January 2015.”
Anyone whose job involves classified information, from White House officials to State Department diplomats to outside contractors, must get a security clearance. The applicant fills out paperwork disclosing where he or she has lived, worked and traveled abroad, as well as any contacts with foreign government officials. The form also asks about substance abuse, criminal history and mental health.
The government then undertakes an investigation that can take anywhere from weeks to over a year, depending on the position. In the case of White House positions, the FBI does the investigation. Agents comb through educational and financial records and speak to neighbors, former employers and associates. They then present a recommendation to the hiring agency, which makes the final call.
It’s not clear who currently makes decisions on clearances for White House hires. Spokeswoman Hope Hicks told ProPublica that the Trump administration does not comment on security clearance issues.
Alcohol abuse is one of many issues examined as part of the security clearance process. The standard form that those seeking clearance must fill out asks whether in the last seven years “your use of alcohol had a negative impact on your work performance, professional or personal relationships, your finances, or resulted in intervention by law enforcement.” According to the official security clearance guidelines, “Alcohol-related incidents at work, such as reporting for work in an intoxicated or impaired condition, [or] drinking on the job” can be a reason to withhold clearance.
While all clearance decisions are subjective, “You probably wouldn’t get your clearance if you had serious drinking problems in the last five years,” said Sheldon Cohen, a longtime Washington, D.C, security clearance lawyer.
The security clearance guidelines also flag personal conduct “that creates a vulnerability to exploitation, manipulation, or duress by a foreign intelligence entity.”
In 2016, over 1,100 people appealed their denial of security clearance. Alcohol and drug use were common reasons for such denials.
Attorneys representing clients in Washington frequently are required to seek security clearances in matters ranging from Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi hearings to employment disputes involving undercover CIA agents.
Already, there’s ample evidence that many aspects of the Russia case involve classified material. When former FBI Director James Comey testified about his interactions with President Trump, he said that he took notes after one classified briefing. “I wrote that on a classified device,” he said.
Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, testified last month of his interactions with Trump that could relate to the obstruction of justice issue: “Those conversations were classified.”
Meanwhile, congressional intelligence committees looking at the Russia issue have been scheduling hearings with key witnesses in classified sessions. A congressional meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller also took place in a classified setting.
In a statement, Kasowitz said that “we are unaware of and not involved in … any investigation involving ‘highly classified’ (or even classified) information.”
The firm has gone through multiple rounds of punishing layoffs. In the past six years, the number of lawyers has shrunk from around 370 to 260 today. Several major rainmakers have departed, including two of the most prominent women at the firm: Eleanor Alter, a well-known divorce lawyer, and Robin Cohen, who led Kasowitz’s insurance group.
Now its founder’s increasingly high-profile relationship with Trump has some partners worried that it could damage the firm’s brand and future business prospects.
Last year, with Election Day weeks away, Kasowitz fired off a letter threatening to sue The New York Times for a story in which women accused Trump of unwanted touching and sexual assault.
Kasowitz’s letter to the Times dismissed the women’s accounts as “false and malicious allegations” and demanded a retraction.
“People were embarrassed by the letter,” said one former attorney at Kasowitz’s firm.
The Times stood by its story. No lawsuit has been filed.
In February, several lawyers were upset when Michael Cohen, the former personal injury lawyer and real-estate investor who is best known as Trump’s former in-house attorney, arrived at the office.
“I came to see him because we were working on several matters together after the inauguration,” Cohen told ProPublica regarding his multiple visits to Kasowitz. Former employees say the firm briefly converted a conference room for Cohen to use as an office, with his nameplate on it.
Cohen said the “multitude of legal matters” he and Kasowitz were discussing included working as co-counsel for a client. Asked if anything came of those talks, Cohen said yes.
Sitrick, the Kasowitz spokesman, said, “Michael Cohen never worked for the firm or occupied any office at Kasowitz Benson.” He added: “They were working together on one civil matter for President Trump.” He didn’t specify what it was.
During roughly the same period that Cohen was visiting the firm, The New York Times reported that he was under FBI scrutiny in the Russia case. Cohen has denied wrongdoing.
One Kasowitz Benson partner, Zachary Mazin, departed in May for another firm, McKool Smith. In a private Facebook post, Mazin praised many of his former colleagues, but said that he and his wife concluded their family could not be associated with the firm. “As the extent of the Firm’s support for Trump’s presidency became clear, Amanda and I concluded that we would not be living our values if I stayed,” he wrote, adding: “Our most important consideration was the message that this choice sends to our daughters, both now and when they look back on this moment as adults.”
When Kasowitz traveled to Washington to respond to the Comey testimony, he brought at least two other lawyers from the firm with him.
In the rush to respond to the former FBI director’s testimony accusing President Trump of inappropriate meddling, a team of Kasowitz lawyers, along with another spokesman, Mark Corallo, drafted a statement that was riddled with errors. It started with the widely mocked misspelling, “Predisent Trump.”
Corallo said in an email that the statement went out to reporters with typos because of a technical glitch.
The day after the June 8 Comey hearing, sources linked to the Kasowitz team told reporters they would file a complaint against the former FBI director for giving what they described as “privileged information” to the press. Three weeks later, that plan fizzled entirely.
In recent weeks, employees say, Kasowitz has tried to calm fears within the firm, holding a series of town hall-style meetings.
“You can work toward steering this president toward the best possible decisions whether or not you agree with his politics,” Kasowitz said at one such event, according to a person familiar with his remarks.
President Trump selected Kasowitz Benson to represent him despite high-profile instances in which judges criticized the firm for ethically questionable tactics.
In one particularly heated case, the firm sued investors on behalf of a Canadian insurer, Fairfax Financial Holdings. The company accused the hedge funds and others of conspiring to release information that would send the stock lower. Michael Bowe, Kasowitz’s deputy on the Russia case, was the firm’s lead lawyer.
In 2006, employees of Kasowitz’s in-house investigative arm, KBTF Consulting, tried to ensnare employees of Morgan Keegan, a broker-dealer whose insurance analyst was publishing critical research on Fairfax, according to a court document. They wanted to find out if Morgan Keegan gave certain clients access to its analysis before making its reports public. Kasowitz employees, including two lawyers who worked for the investigative arm, created a fake hedge fund called Blackwood Group Capital Partners. Posing as investors, the Kasowitz private investigators met with the Morgan Keegan analyst who covered Fairfax, asking if they could have advance copies of his reports. He said no.
Trump’s Personal Lawyer Boasted That He Got Preet Bharara Fired
Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s lawyer in the Russia investigation, has bragged he was behind the firing of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Read the story.
Years later, Morgan Keegan hired a Rutgers law professor, John Leubsdorf, to assess whether the Kasowitz employees violated New Jersey ethical standards. The state bars attorneys from misrepresenting themselves. Leubsdorf called the firm’s conduct “inconsistent with the standards of professional responsibility.”
The Morgan Keegan attorneys tried to get Kasowitz’s firm thrown off the case, a request the judge rejected. But the judge said he was troubled by what the Kasowitz firm had done.
“I was brought up as a person and as an attorney to think you tell the truth, that that’s the only way you can deal with life. You tell the truth and, right, wrong, or indifferent, the truth will prevail. I don’t recall as an attorney ever participating in a deception such as [this] one,” Stephan Hansbury, a judge for the Superior Court of New Jersey, said at a 2011 hearing. “I don’t think that was an appropriate use of an investigator. I don’t think you’re supposed to go out and create evidence in order to justify a case. That’s not what the law allows.”
In 2007, Kasowitz had to defend his law firm from allegations of unethical conduct when another firm accused his team of violating a protective order in a legal proceeding. The order barred disclosure of bank records obtained during discovery in a federal shareholder lawsuit against Kasowitz’s client, a Canadian pharmaceutical company then known as Biovail.
But when Kasowitz’s law firm filed a separate complaint in New Jersey state court on behalf of Biovail, it used the bank records from the federal proceeding to bolster its case. Lawyers for the bank cried foul and in February 2007, Kasowitz had a testy conference call with Richard Owen, the U.S. district judge overseeing the federal case.
Owen was furious: “You get a whole bunch of the bank’s records and you’re sitting there drafting a complaint in New Jersey and you’re saying nobody ever said, ‘Where the hell did we get these records from, how come we have them?’” he asked Kasowitz, according to a court transcript of the call.
Kasowitz said his law firm did not know about the protective order and countered that the documents were not marked “confidential.” Owen did not see that as a good enough excuse and the two men went back-and-forth. Finally, Owen lost his temper.
“The record may show I hung up on Mr. Kasowitz,” said Owen, who has since died.
Kasowitz’s spokesman said the firm did nothing wrong in either case.
Eventually, Biovail fired Kasowitz’s legal team over the issue, only to rehire the firm a few months later. The firm was not sanctioned by Owen.
How Kasowitz’s aggressive style will play during the Russia inquiry is unclear — especially without a security clearance. On Monday, President Trump tweeted, “James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!”
If that allegation were true, Trump’s own lawyer wouldn’t be able to review the material.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trum ... -clearance
by seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 13, 2017 8:50 am
Justice Department Defies Court Deadline To Release Sessions' Contacts With Russians
July 13, 20176:28 AM ET
JAMES DOUBEK
Attorney General Jeff Sessions attends the National Summit on Crime Reduction and Public Safety on June 20 in Bethesda, Md.
In defiance of a court order, the Justice Department is refusing to release part of a security form dealing with Attorney General Jeff Sessions' contacts with the Russian government.
On June 12, a judge had ordered the agency to provide the information within 30 days, a deadline which passed on Wednesday.
A recently-launched ethics watchdog group called American Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March for sections of the Standard Form 86 relating to Sessions' contacts "with any official of the Russian government."
The group then filed a lawsuit in April after it said the government didn't provide the documents.
"Jeff Sessions is our nation's top law enforcement officer, and it is shocking one of his first acts after being named Attorney General was to mislead his own agency about a matter of national security," the group's executive director, Austin Evers, said in a statement.
He continued: "The court gave DOJ thirty days to produce Attorney General Sessions's security clearance form, DOJ has already confirmed its contents to the press and Sessions has testified about it to Congress, so there is no good reason to withhold this document from the public."
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Justice Department had told NPR that the documents would be released by the deadline, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly reports.
The Standard Form 86, more commonly called SF86, is a very detailed form required to be filled out for obtaining security clearance for certain government positions. It's the same form presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner has recently had to revise after omitting meetings with Russian officials.
Sessions has admitted to speaking with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, at least twice in 2016, which he did not disclose at his confirmation hearing. But in June Sessions testified to senators that the "suggestion that I participated in any collusion" with the Russian government "is an appalling and detestable lie."
American Oversight says it's nonpartisan, but its staff have connections to Democrats, according to USA Today.
A status conference in the case is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Democrats demand answers from Jeff Sessions on settlement with Russian lawyer
by Kelly Cohen | Jul 12, 2017, 4:20 PM Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Email this article Share on LinkedIn
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to answer questions about his "abrupt" 2017 settlement of a fraud case involving the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. in 2016, and whether those two events are somehow connected.
Trump Jr. met with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in 2016, and nearly a year later, the Justice Department settled with Prevezon Holdings, the company she represented.
The Democratic letter didn't explain how the two events might be connected, but said they are worried "the two events may be connected — and that the department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts."
The case brought against the Russian firm Prevezon Holdings was scheduled to go to trial in late May of 2017, but was settled just days prior. The $6 million settlement was roughly half of the amount originally sought by the Justice Department in the case, which had been brought against Prevezon in 2013 by former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.
The Democrats also note in their letter to Sessions that Prevezon never had to admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
The Obama administration's Justice Department accused the company of laundering "some proceeds of a $230 million Russian tax refund fraud scheme involving corrupt Russian officials."
Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met with Trump Jr. last June in Trump Tower, worked on the case defending Prevezon in the Southern District of New York in 2016. Trump Jr. released emails this week showing that he was told Veselnitskaya had damaging information on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Democrats said they want to know why the case was settled days before the trial was scheduled to begin, and asked for "prosecution files" and any other materials that could explain the decision.
They also want to know if President Trump, White House staff, the Trump family or anyone with the Trump presidential campaign contacted the Justice Department regarding the Prevezon case.
And finally, the Democrats want to know if Sessions discussed the Prevezon case with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, someone Sessions has said he met with two, possible three times prior to becoming attorney general.
The Democrats want answers soon: No later than July 26.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/democ ... le/2628454
Donald Trump Jr. Was Likely Paid at Least $50,000 for Event Held by Hosts Allied With Russia on Syria
October appearance by son of then-candidate is one of string of contacts between members of the president’s inner circle and individuals connected to Moscow
By Jay Solomon and Benoit Faucon
Updated March 2, 2017 11:59 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump’s eldest son was likely paid at least $50,000 for an appearance late last year before a French think tank whose founder and his wife are allies of the Russian government in efforts to end the war in Syria.
Donald Trump Jr. addressed a dinner on Oct. 11 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, hosted by the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs. Its president, Fabien Baussart, and his Syrian-born wife, Randa Kassis, have cooperated with Russia in its drive to end the Syrian civil war, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.
In December, Mr. Baussart formally nominated Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mrs. Kassis is a leader of a political faction endorsed by Russia in negotiations to end the war in Syria. The couple said they don’t represent Russia and are solely focused on ending the Syrian conflict.
The meeting in October represents one in a string of contacts over the past year between members of the president’s inner circle and individuals connected to Moscow and to Russian interests. The Wall Street Journal in November reported Donald Trump Jr.’s appearance at the event.
A U.S. counterintelligence investigation has examined contacts with Russia involving several associates of President Trump, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to people familiar with the matter. The outcome of the Sessions inquiry, and whether it is ongoing, is unclear. There has been no indication that the president’s son is under similar scrutiny.
The existence of a financial connection between the younger Trump and an entity associated with the Kremlin would likely add to questions involving Mr. Trump’s administration and Russia, following a campaign in which he was loath to criticize Russia’s leader and repeatedly called for better ties to Moscow.
The younger Mr. Trump’s appearance and his work as a paid public speaker also are likely to raise questions about possible efforts by outside parties to gain influence with the Trump family. Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton drew criticism for speakers fees and contributions involving her family’s charitable foundation, a practice President Donald Trump criticized during his campaign as a “pay to play” scheme.
Donald Trump Jr. serves as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, a real-estate company founded by his father, and was a top official in his father’s campaign.
The younger Trump was likely paid at least $50,000 for his Paris appearance by the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs. The Trump Organization didn’t dispute that amount when asked about it by The Wall Street Journal.
Randa Kassis, second from right, meets with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in foreground, and others in Vienna in May.
Randa Kassis, second from right, meets with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in foreground, and others in Vienna in May. PHOTO: SHARIFULIN VALERY/TASS/ZUMA PRESS
“Donald Trump Jr. has been participating in business-related speaking engagements for over a decade—discussing a range of topics including sharing his entrepreneurial experiences and offering career specific advice,” said Amanda Miller, the company’s vice president for marketing.
A talent booking agency called All American Speakers lists Donald Trump Jr. on its website as a client who commands a minimum of $50,000 per appearance.
People who have participated in events at the French think tank say it often pays speakers 20% to 30% above their going rate.
At a different event in October, the Center hosted James Rubin, a former State Department spokesman who served in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He was paid nearly $40,000 to attend, according to people briefed on the event.
Mrs. Kassis heads a political party, the Movement for a Pluralistic Society, which is part of a faction endorsed by Russia in international negotiations aimed at ending the six-year Syrian conflict.
She regularly visits Moscow to coordinate policy with Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said Arab and European officials. She has appeared more than once in photographs with Russian officials in Russian state media.
In interviews, Mrs. Kassis said she stressed to Donald Trump Jr. in October the need for the U.S. and Russia to cooperate in ending the Syrian conflict. She said she passed on Mr. Trump’s views to Russian diplomats in subsequent trips she made to Moscow.
Mrs. Kassis said she is optimistic about U.S.-Russia cooperation after meeting Donald Trump Jr. The couple said his talk at the think tank was about general campaign issues and the senior Mr. Trump’s platform.
The couple said they believe an end to the Syrian conflict can only be achieved through a political agreement between Washington and Moscow.
Mr. Baussart said his focus has been on finding a Syria solution in which Russia and the U.S. have key roles. “There’s never going to be peace in Syria if Russia and the U.S. don’t cut a broader deal,” Mr. Baussart said.
Mr. Baussart told Russian state media that Mr. Putin should be recognized for his efforts to end the Syrian civil war and combat international terrorism. The Obama administration, in contrast, accused Russia of committing war crimes in Syria.
“I believe that President Putin has deserved it,” Mr. Baussart told RIA Novosti, referring to the Nobel Peace Prize. “He is the only one who is truly fighting terrorism.”
Mrs. Kassis said her faction supports the eventual removal of President Bashar al-Assad, but only through a gradual political transition, a position shared by the Kremlin. She said any quick removal of Mr. Assad would result in Islamic extremists seizing control of Syria.
“We can’t have a radical transition,” she said. “We need to have a secure transition.”
Current and former U.S. and French officials said they have approached Mrs. Kassis and Mr. Baussart with caution due to their close contacts with the Kremlin. U.S. diplomats have met with the couple as part of the diplomatic process on Syria, but said they assumed they were largely representing the Russian position.
“They are very close to the Russians, and the French government warned us about them,” said Robert Ford, a former State Department official who coordinated U.S. policy toward Syria during the Obama administration and met the couple during peace talks.
Mr. Ford said he found meetings with Mrs. Kassis useful because she is representative of Syria’s Christian minority and had family links to the top tiers of the Assad regime.
Her first husband is the son of retired Gen. Mohammed al-Khouli, the former head of a powerful Syrian intelligence branch and a top aide to Mr. Assad’s father, the late President Hafez al-Assad. Mrs. Kassis said she has no current links to the Assad regime, and describes herself as part of the Syrian opposition.
The Center of Political and Foreign Affairs regularly hosts foreign diplomats, government leaders and intelligence chiefs to dinner, lunch and breakfast events in Paris and other cities, according to its website.
The meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in October was attended by French businessmen, bankers and diplomats, according to attendees, and focused on geopolitical issues.
The younger Mr. Trump regularly travels internationally to pursue Trump Organization real-estate projects, and has emphasized the importance of Russian business. President Trump has said that his companies wouldn’t make new business deals overseas while he is president.
“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” he said in a 2008 interview with a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-tru ... 1488473640
Russian Officials Overheard Discussing Trump Associates Before Campaign Began
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-of ... 4?mod=e2tw
by seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 13, 2017 7:32 pm
Peter W. Smith, GOP operative who sought Clinton's emails from Russian hackers, committed suicide, records show
In late June 2017, the Wall Street Journal published a story about a longtime Republican political operative from the Chicago area. His name was Peter Smith and the story focused on Smith’s possible connections to the Trump campaign and Russian hackers. Here’s how it unfolded. (Jonathon Berlin / Tribune)
Katherine Skiba, David Heinzmann and Todd LightyContact Reporters
A Republican donor and operative from Chicago's North Shore who said he had tried to obtain Hillary Clinton's missing emails from Russian hackers killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room days after talking to The Wall Street Journal about his efforts, public records show.
In a room at a Rochester hotel used almost exclusively by Mayo Clinic patients and relatives, Peter W. Smith, 81, left a carefully prepared file of documents, which includes a statement police called a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring.
Days earlier, the financier from suburban Lake Forest gave an interview to the Journal about his quest, and it published stories about his efforts beginning in late June. The Journal also reported it had seen emails written by Smith showing his team considered retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then a top adviser to Republican Donald Trump's campaign, as an ally. Flynn briefly was President Trump's national security adviser and resigned after it was determined he had failed to disclose contacts with Russia.
At the time, the newspaper reported Smith's May 14 death came about 10 days after he granted the interview. Mystery shrouded how and where he had died, but the lead reporter on the stories said on a podcast he had no reason to believe the death was the result of foul play and that Smith likely had died of natural causes.
However, the Chicago Tribune obtained a Minnesota state death record filed in Olmsted County that says Smith committed suicide in a hotel near the Mayo Clinic at 1:17 p.m. on Sunday, May 14. He was found with a bag over his head with a source of helium attached. A medical examiner's report gives the same account, without specifying the time, and a report from Rochester police further details his suicide.
In the note recovered by police, Smith apologized to authorities and said that "NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER" was involved in his death. He wrote that he was taking his own life because of a "RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017" and timing related "TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING."
One of Smith's former employees told the Tribune he thought the elderly man had gone to the famed clinic to be treated for a heart condition. Mayo spokeswoman Ginger Plumbo said Thursday she could not confirm Smith had been a patient, citing medical privacy laws.
The Journal stories said it was on Labor Day weekend in 2016 that Smith had assembled a team to acquire emails the team theorized might have been stolen from the private server Clinton had used while secretary of state. Smith's focus was the more than 30,000 emails Clinton said she deleted because they related to personal matters. A huge cache of other Clinton emails were made public.
Smith told the Journal he believed the missing emails might have had been obtained by Russian hackers. He also said he thought the correspondence related to Clinton's official duties. He told the Journal he worked independently and was not part of the Trump campaign. He also told the Journal he and his team found five groups of hackers — two of them Russian groups — who claimed to have Clinton's missing emails.
Smith had a history of doing opposition research, the formal term for unflattering information that political operatives dig up about rival candidates.
For years, Democratic President Bill Clinton was Smith's target. The wealthy businessman had a hand in exposing the "Troopergate" allegations about Bill Clinton's sex life. And he discussed financing a probe of a 1969 trip Bill Clinton had taken while in college to the Soviet Union, according to Salon magazine.
Investigations into any possible links between the Russian government and people associated with Trump's presidential campaign now are underway in Congress and by former FBI chief Robert Mueller. He is acting as a special counsel for the Department of Justice. Mueller spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment on the Journal's stories on Smith or his death. Washington attorney Robert Kelner, who represents Flynn, had no comment on Thursday.
Smith's death occurred at the Aspen Suites in Rochester, records show. They list the cause of death as "asphyxiation due to displacement of oxygen in confined space with helium."
Rochester Police Chief Roger Peterson on Wednesday called his manner of death "unusual," but a funeral home worker said he'd seen it before.
An employee with Rochester Cremation Services, the funeral home that responded to the hotel, said he helped remove Smith's body from his room and recalled seeing a tank.
Peter W. Smith
Peter W. Smith (Family photo)
The employee, who spoke on the condition he not be identified because of the sensitive nature of Smith's death, described the tank as being similar in size to a propane tank on a gas grill. He did not recall seeing a bag that Smith would have placed over his head. He said the coroner and police were there and that he "didn't do a lot of looking around."
"When I got there and saw the tank, I thought, 'I've seen this before,' and was able to put two and two together," the employee said.
An autopsy was conducted, according to the death record. The Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner's Office declined a Tribune request for the autopsy report and released limited information about Smith's death.
The Final Exit Network, a Florida-based nonprofit, provides information and support to people who suffer from a terminal illness and want to kill themselves.
Fran Schindler, a volunteer with the group, noted that the best-selling book Final Exit, written by Derek Humphry in 1991 and revised several times since, explains in detail the helium gas method.
"Many people obtain that information from his book," Schindler said. "It's a method that has been around for many years and is well known."
Smith's remains were cremated in Minnesota, the records said. He was married to Janet L. Smith and had three children and three grandchildren, according to his obituary. Tribune calls to family members were not returned.
His obituary said Smith was involved in public affairs for more than 60 years and it heralded him as a "quietly generous champion of efforts to ensure a more economically and politically secure world." Smith led private equity firms in corporate acquisitions and venture investments for more than 40 years. Earlier, he worked with DigaComm, LLC, from 1997 to 2014 and as the president of Peter W. Smith & Company, Inc. from 1975 to 1997. Prior to that, he was a senior officer of Field Enterprises, Inc., a firm that owned the Chicago Sun-Times then and was held by the Marshall Field family, his obituary said.
A private family memorial was planned, the obituary said. Friends posted online tributes to Smith after his death. One was from his former employee, Jonathan Safron, 26, who lives in Chicago's Loop and worked for Smith for about two years.
Safron, in an interview, said he was working for a tutoring firm when Smith became his client. His job entailed teaching Smith how to use a MacBook, Safron said. At the time Smith was living in a condominium atop the Four Seasons Hotel Chicago. Safron said Smith later employed him at Corporate Venture Alliances, a private investment firm that Smith ran, first out of the same condo and later from an office in the Hancock Building.
Safron, who said he had a low-level job with the Illinois Republican Party in 2014, said he had no knowledge of Smith's bid to find hackers who could locate emails missing from Clinton's service as secretary of state. In his online tribute to his former employer, he called Smith the "best boss I could ever ask for ... a mentor, friend and model human being."
Safron said he worked part-time for Smith, putting in about 15 hours a week. But the two grew close, often having lunch together at a favorite Smith spot: the Oak Tree Restaurant & Bakery Chicago on North Michigan Ave. He called Smith a serious man who was "upbeat," "cosmopolitan" and "larger than life." He was aware Smith was in declining health, saying the older man sometimes had difficulty breathing and told work colleagues he had heart problems. Weeks before he took his life, he had become fatigued walking down about four or five flights of stairs during a Hancock Building fire drill and later emailed Safron saying he was "dizzy," he said.
Smith's last will and testament, signed last Feb. 21, is seven pages long and on file in Probate Court in Lake County. The will gives his wife his interest in their residential property and his tangible personal property and says remaining assets should be placed into two trusts.
He was born Feb. 23, 1936, in Portland, Maine, according to the death record.
His late father, Waldo Sterling Smith, was a manufacturer's representative for women's apparel firms, representing them in department stores in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, according to the father's 2002 obituary. The elder Smith died at age 92 in St. Augustine, Fla., and his obit noted that he had been active in St. Johns County, Fla. Republican affairs and with a local Methodist church
Peter Smith wrote two blog posts dated the day before he was found dead. One challenged U.S. intelligence agency findings that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. Another post predicted: "As attention turns to international affairs, as it will shortly, the Russian interference story will die of its own weight."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... story.html
Russian 'Gun-For-Hire' Lurks In Shadows Of Washington's Lobbying World
July 17, 2016 18:27 GMT
Mike Eckel
In the controversial film The Magnitsky Act: Behind The Scenes, director Andrei Nekrasov (above) uses actors to reenact the arrest and death in prison of Russian lawyer and whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky.
WASHINGTON -- The hoots and jeers began the minute the movie ended and the lights went up on the seventh floor of the Newseum, a Washington museum dedicated to the free press. The film was a semifictionalized look at the story of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who helped to uncover a massive tax fraud and later died in a Moscow jail.
In the front of the room, a handful of Russian opposition activists shouted, “Shame!” at the director. In the back, out of the spotlight, was the event’s organizer -- a fast-talking, nattily dressed man in a dark blue, double-breasted suit standing at a small table, sipping bottled water and quietly watching the commotion.
The June 13 showing was the film's premiere. Other screenings had been canceled in Europe following protests by critics who say it is a crude attempt to smear Magnitsky's name and that of the Western financier who employed him, William Browder.
That it was shown at all was a small coup for Rinat Akhmetshin, the man at the back of the room who for nearly 20 years has worked the shadowy corners of the Washington lobbying scene on behalf of businessmen and politicians from around the former Soviet Union.
"I call him skilled because -- though I am certain that they exist -- I know of no Russian gun-for-hire who managed to run his campaigns so successfully, running circles around purportedly much more seasoned Washington hands,” says Steve LeVine, a veteran Washington reporter who explored some of Akhmetshin’s past work in his 2007 book The Oil And The Glory.
Barely registering in U.S. lobbying records, the 48-year-old Akhmetshin has been tied to efforts to bolster opponents of Kazakhstan's ruling regime, discredit a fugitive former member of Russia's parliament, and undermine a Russian-owned mining firm involved in a billion-dollar lawsuit with company information allegedly stolen by hackers.
But his most recent campaign has a qualitatively new dimension, thrusting him to the center of an issue that helped send U.S.-Russia relations to lows unseen since the Cold War: Magnitsky’s death in 2009, the alleged persecution by Russian officials he blew the whistle on, and the eponymous U.S. law that punished alleged Russian rights abusers and infuriated the Kremlin.
The grave of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky with his portrait on the tomb at the Preobrazhenskoye cemetery in Moscow.
The grave of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky with his portrait on the tomb at the Preobrazhenskoye cemetery in Moscow.
“You undermine Browder, you undermine Magnitsky. You undermine Magnitsky, you undermine the sanctions,” says one U.S. government official who has followed the Magnitsky saga closely but wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on it. “Then you undermine the entire sanctions regime.”
The Paper Trail
A bespectacled 48-year-old who holds dual Russian-American citizenship and is known to ride around downtown Washington on a retro orange bicycle, Akhmetshin has managed to fly largely under the radar in past campaigns. There are only a handful of records in the congressional lobbying database bearing his imprint.
But a small paper trail in U.S. court records offers an illustrative sampling of his work.
In 1998, he founded the Washington office of an organization called the International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research to “help expand democracy and the rule of law in Eurasia.”
His earliest clients included members of Kazakhstan’s opposition, who were angling against the longtime rule of President Nursultan Nazarbaev and his ruling elite. Years later, he ended up in a public-relations effort to undermine a former Nazarbaev son-in-law before he fell out with the regime and fled the country.
Rinat Akhmetshin
Rinat Akhmetshin
In 2011, Akhmetshin was accused of helping to organize a smear campaign against former Russian Duma deputy Ashot Egiazaryan, who had sought political asylum in the United States in the face of criminal charges in Russia related to a business dispute.
A lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in Manhattan charged that the campaign sought to persuade U.S. officials to revoke Egiazaryan's asylum status and force him to return to Russia, where he was involved in a heated dispute with a billionaire businessman over a Moscow hotel project.
Akhmetshin was not the target of the defamation lawsuit, but in court filings, lawyers allege he was enlisted, along with another Washington public-relations company and private investigators, to help publish articles in a Jewish newspaper accusing the deputy of anti-Semitism.
He also fought to keep his e-mails and computer files from being released to opposing lawyers.
“Some of my clients are national governments or high-ranking officials in those governments,” Akhmetshin said in an affidavit in August 2012. “My government clients have highly sensitive discussions in my e-mails concerning the location or relocation of American military bases in areas within the former Soviet Union.”
More recently, Akhmetshin was caught up in a particularly nasty $1 billion legal fight concerning a potash-mining operation in central Russia. While a Dutch court was the main venue, the dispute spilled into U.S. courts when lawyers for one of the companies accused their counterparts of organizing a scheme to hack their computers and other communications.
The man who masterminded the scheme was Akhmetshin, according to a suit filed in November in New York state court that also accused him of being a former Soviet military intelligence officer who "developed a special expertise in running negative public-relations campaigns."
In a related filing in federal district court in Washington, where lawyers sought to force him to turn over records and e-mails, Akhmetshin confirmed he was helping in an advisory capacity but denied the hacking allegations.
He also revealed his compensation rates. He said he was paid $45,000 up front; in a later declaration, he stated his normal billing rate was $450 an hour.
In an e-mail response to RFE/RL, Akhmetshin denied that he ever worked for Soviet military intelligence, something he would have had to declare when he applied for U.S. citizenship.
“I am an American citizen since 2009 who pays taxes, earned his citizenship after living here since 1994, and swore an oath of loyalty to the United States of America,” he wrote.
Russian Children, American Adoptions
Congressional lobbying records list other clients for Akhmetshin -- for example, the Azeri Democracy Initiative Foundation, registered in 2006 and 2007.
The newest client, called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation, was incorporated in Delaware in February and registered in lobbying records on April 3. But the initial entry was signed by Akhmetshin only two months later, on June 11, something that experts in lobbying laws and disclosures describe as unusual.
Its address is а shared “co-working” space on the fifth floor of a downtown Washington office building, just a few floors down from Baker Hostetler, a major U.S. law firm that represented the defendant in the Egiazaryan lawsuit.
Baker Hostetler is also the lead firm defending an offshore company called Prevezon that U.S. prosecutors have alleged received some of the $230 million in errant funds that Magnitsky uncovered. Prosecutors are trying to seize millions of dollars in assets in the United States and elsewhere, a case that is currently on appeal on a technical question.
William Browder
William Browder
Records list Akhmetshin as the lead lobbyist for the foundation, along with another man named Robert Arakelian, who could not be located for comment.
The disclosure form indicates no sources of foreign funding for the foundation. Nor does it indicate the issues the foundation intends to lobby on.
In fact, the only indication of its purpose comes from a related, largely unfinished website that states its main goal is to “to help restart American adoption of Russian children.” That is a reference to the Russian adoption ban the Kremlin pushed immediately following the adoption of the Magnitsky Act in 2012.
Akhmetshin has paid at least one visit to Congress in connection with new human rights legislation that builds on the earlier Magnitsky Act. Along with Ron Dellums, a former U.S. congressman from California and longtime Washington lobbyist, Akhmetshin visited House member offices on May 17 to meet with Dana Rohrabacher, another California congressman viewed as one of the most sympathetic U.S. officials to Russian causes.
According to The Daily Beast, the two told congressional officials said they were lobbying on behalf of Prevezon. But Dellums told RFE/RL that his involvement focused on resuming Russian adoptions by U.S. parents.
“I don’t know anything about the other stuff -- Prevezon or anything else,” Dellums said.
Moscow, meanwhile, has made no secret of its desire to undermine the Magnitsky Act and has waged open war against Browder as part of that effort. Browder had been barred entry in Russia even before Magnitsky’s death, and in 2013 he was convicted in absentia by a Russian court for tax evasion. Magnitsky was posthumously convicted on similar charges. A Council of Europe investigation concluded the conditions leading up to his death amounted to torture.
State-run Russian TV has aired investigations about Browder and the country’s top prosecutor has linked Browder to an investigative documentary exploring the shady business practices of the prosecutor’s sons.
But the most potent weapon to date may be the film that premiered at the Newseum, by Russian-born filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, whose previous films were critical of the Kremlin.
In the film, called The Magnitsky Act: Behind The Scenes, Nekrasov uses actors to reenact Magnitsky's arrest and death in a notorious prison. He then professes to find discrepancies in the narrative, ultimately suggesting that in fact it was Browder who masterminded the original tax fraud and that Browder lied about the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's death.
Browder, who is American-born but now lives in Britain, has aggressively fought to keep the film from being shown anywhere; a Norwegian film festival pulled the film after legal threats from Browder. A screening in April at the European Parliament was canceled after protests from Magnitsky relatives and a German lawmaker.
Browder, who had appealed to the Newseum not to show the film, charged that the screening was a part of an “intense lobbying campaign” to remove Magnitsky’s name from the new legislation before Congress.
“The Putin regime has embarked on a very ambitious and well-resourced international campaign to discredit me and Sergei Magnitsky in order to try to repeal the Magnitsky Act,” Browder told RFE/RL. “They work through their embassies, law-enforcement agencies, as well as through private individuals with strong government connections.”
A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington called Browder’s allegations “precarious and unfounded.”
The Screening
The June 13 event featured an open-bar reception beforehand and, in a notable choice for such a controversial event, traditional movie snacks -- popcorn, chocolate-covered caramels, and bottled water.
Invitees to the screening received notice via e-mail that included a disclaimer suggestive of a lobbying effort: “This event complies with congressional gift rules so that Members and staff of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives may attend.” A handful of congressional staffers did attend, along with at least one State Department official.
Who exactly is funding the film’s production, promotion, or the ongoing lobbying effort isn't entirely clear. Nekrasov has said the film is financed through grants from arts and film councils in Norway, where he’s partnered with a production company.
Nekrasov told RFE/RL he had originally planned to pay for the June 13 screening -- which the Newseum said cost at least $12,500 -- himself, but “the bill did not materialize and already in D.C. I was told it'd been taken care of.”
Akhmetshin, meanwhile, told RFE/RL in an e-mail on June 29 that he didn’t pay for the event but rather that Potomac Square Group, a Washington public-relations company that in the past had circulated news articles critical of Browder to reporters, did.
“Potomac Square Group was working on my instructions to pay for the event, and I understand that my client Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation will reimburse PSG for the expense,” Akhmetshin said.
Chris Cooper, one of Potomac Square Group’s principals, confirmed his company had been compensated by the foundation.
Akhmetshin said the foundation had no connection to Nekrasov, has given Nekrasov no money, and that “no funding or direction for the foundation comes from the Russian government at any level or its officials.” That would trigger reporting requirements under federal lobbying laws.
He also said the foundation’s stated goal -- to resume Russian adoptions by American parents -- “can be best obtained by Congress revisiting the Magnitsky Act and, in particular, its name.”
That's an issue not reflected anywhere in the lobbying disclosure records. In the meantime, revisiting, or even watering down, the Magnitsky Act would directly benefit another client of Akhmetshin’s who is also not listed on these or other lobbying forms: Prevezon.
Prevezon and the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation overlap in another way. In an e-mail sent in April to a Warsaw-based NGO that was hosting a speech by Browder, Russian Natalia Veselnitskaya identified herself as a lawyer working on behalf of the foundation and sought permission to attend, according to officials with the NGO, called the Open Dialog Foundation. Veselnitskaya is also a lawyer for Prevezon.
Akhmetshin did not respond to follow-up e-mail queries on whether Prevezon was the funding source for the foundation.
The day after the screening, Nekrasov and his film crew watched in person as a House committee voted to pass the updated Magnitsky legislation. And they met with Rohrabacher.
Movies And Motorcycles
At the end of the screening of the nearly two-hour film, organizers planned a discussion moderated by Seymour Hersh, the renowned U.S. investigative journalist known for blockbuster scoops. The taunts from opposition activists eventually gave way to a brief question-and-answer session that mainly featured audience members criticizing Nekrasov.
Before the screening, Hersh explained to RFE/RL that he had seen the film a few months prior at Akhmetshin’s behest and was intrigued enough by it that he agreed to host the discussion free of charge.
Hersh said he knew Akhmetshin through mutual acquaintances. He said he had allowed Akhmetshin to park “a couple” of antique motorcycles in the driveway of his Washington-area home -- motorcycles he said Akhmetshin had bought thinking they dated from World War II but in fact were of German manufacture and had been painted over to look like Soviet motorcycles. Akhmetshin confirmed he had a motorcycle parked at Hersh’s house.
At the conclusion of the June 13 event, as the discussion turned loud and rowdy, Hersh tried to get in a final word.
“This is the new truth,” he said.
https://www.rferl.org/a/rinat-akmetshin ... 63265.html
Russian-American lobbyist says he was in Trump son’s meeting
Rinat Akhmetshin confirmed his participation to The Associated Press on Friday. Akhmetshin has been reported to have ties to Russian intelligence agencies, though he denies those links.
https://apnews.com/dceed1008d8f45afb314aca65797762a
BAD LOOK
Trump Team Met Russian Accused of International Hacking Conspiracy
Rinat Akhmetshin allegedly stole sensitive documents from a corporation years before he joined Natalia Veselnitskaya to meet Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner.
KEVIN POULSEN
NICO HINES
KATIE ZAVADSKI
07.14.17 10:49 AM ET
The alleged former Soviet intelligence officer who attended the now-infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials last June was previously accused in federal and state courts of orchestrating an international hacking conspiracy.
Rinat Akhmetshin told the Associated Press on Friday he accompanied Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to the June 9, 2016, meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. Trump’s attorney confirmed Akhmetshin’s attendance in a statement.
Akhmetshin’s presence at Trump Tower that day adds another layer of controversy to an episode that already provides the clearest indication of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. In an email in the run-up to that rendezvous, Donald Trump Jr. was promised “very high level and sensitive information” on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Akhmetshin, who had been hired by Veselnitskaya to help with pro-Russian lobbying efforts in Washington, said the Russian lawyer brought a folder of documents to the meeting, which he thinks she left at Trump Tower.
He said the print-outs detailed an alleged flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee. According to Akhmetshin, Trump Jr. asked whether the lawyer had all the evidence to back up her claims and Veselnitskaya said the Trump campaign would have to do further research themselves.
In court papers filed with the New York Supreme Court in November 2015, Akhmetshin was described as “a former Soviet military counterintelligence officer” by lawyers for International Mineral Resources (IMR), a Russian mining company that alleged it had been hacked.
Those documents accuse Akhmetshin of hacking into two computer systems and stealing sensitive and confidential materials as part of an alleged black-ops smear campaign against IMR. The allegations were later withdrawn.
The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. was told in July 2015 that Akhmetshin had arranged the hacking of a mining company’s private records—stealing internal documents and then disseminating them. The corporate-espionage case was brought by IMR, which alleged that Akhmetshin was hired by Russian oligarch Andrey Melinchenko, an industrialist with a fortune estimated at around $12 billion.
A New York law firm paid Akhmetshin $140,000, including expenses, to organize a public-relations campaign targeting IMR. Shortly after he began that work, IMR suffered a sophisticated and systematic breach of its computers, and gigabytes of data allegedly stolen in the breach wound up the hands of journalists and human-rights groups critical of the mining company. IMR accused Akhmetshin of paying Russian hackers to carry out the attack.
IMR went so far as to hire a private investigator to follow Akhmetshin on a trip to London. That private eye, Akis Phanartzis, wrote in a sworn declaration to the court that he eavesdropped on Akhmetshin in a London coffee shop and heard Akhmetshin boast that “he organized the hacking of IMR’s computer systems” on behalf of Melinchenko’s fertilizer producer Eurochem. “Mr. Akhmetshin [noted] that he was hired because there were certain things that the law firm could not do,” Phanartzis said.
Akhmetshin denied the accusation, but admitted passing around a “hard drive” filled with data on IMR’s owners. He said the information was all open-source material that he’d gotten from the former prime minister of Kazakhstan, Akezhan Kazhegeldin. The private investigator, though, said he recovered a copy of the data on a thumb drive provided by an anonymous source, and found it consisted of gigabytes of private files stolen in the computer intrusion. A computer-forensics expert examined the thumb drive and found metadata indicating some of the files had last been opened by a user with the initials “RA.”
Lawyers acting for Akhmetshin deny that he allegedly confessed to hacking. They did not deny that he had bragged about his investigatory techniques in a public place, but claimed that his methods did not involve computer intrusion.
These court disputes came after IMR had originally filed an application in the U.S. in April 2014 requesting that Akhmetshin, a resident of Washington, D.C., give a deposition and share documents with the company as part of discovery for a case being heard in the Dutch courts. That case was won in the Netherlands without needing evidence from Akhmetshin.
That changed a year later, when the verdict was appealed and an American judge granted IMR’s request for a subpoena to be issued. During Akhmetshin’s deposition, he refused to answer a number of questions and declined to produce the 261 requested documents, citing attorney-client privilege and non-testifying expert-witness privilege.
IMR successfully argued that his claim of privilege should be reviewed by a judge—out of the courtroom, in the judge’s private chambers—because there was no such protection in a “crime-fraud” case.
In 2015, citing emails and records it obtained in the federal case, International Mineral Resources filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court directly accusing Akhmetshin of hacking the company. But early last year the company abruptly withdrew “all allegations made by it against Defendants in the Complaint,” according to a court document. The withdrawal included “allegations therein that Defendants [...] have engaged in any unlawful or improper acts against IMR, including but not limited to hacking any information from IMR’s computer systems, disseminating any information as part of a smear campaign against IMR.” The lead attorney in the case did not return a phone call from The Daily Beast about the lawsuit.
Akhmetshin’s tradecraft extends to U.S. politics. He is a registered congressional lobbyist who was paid $10,000 by Veselnitskaya’s nonprofit group, the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation. The group lobbies members of Congress against the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law designed to punish Russian officials believed to be responsible for the death of a financial investigator.
After Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya met the Trump team on June 9, 2016, they traveled to Washington, D.C. On June 13, they attended a screening of an anti-Magnitsky Act movie directed by Andrei Nekrasov. The screening at the Newseum was arranged by Veselnitskaya’s group and was open to members of Congress.
The following day, Akhmetshin, Veselnitskaya, and Nekrasov attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on “U.S. Policy Towards Putin’s Russia.” Veselnitskaya was photographed sitting behind former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, who was testifying. One top congressional aide said she was first in line to attend that hearing.
Later that night, the group convened at the Capitol Hill Club, an official Republican Party restaurant and meeting place. A top aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a pro-Russian Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee who also attended the dinner, confirmed the gathering.
Akhmetshin also met and lobbied Rohrabacher, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee for Europe, in Berlin in April.
Akhmetshin admitted to the AP on Friday that he was part of the Soviet military’s counterintelligence unit, but claims he was never formally trained as a spy and was not an intelligence officer. He said the meeting at Trump Tower had been disappointing. “I never thought this would be such a big deal to be honest,” he said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC the allegations that Akhmetshin "may have had a background in hacking information" is "another disturbing turn of events." He added: "But more importantly, this provides yet another conduit back to the Kremlin."
— with reporting from Kevin Poulsen in San Francisco, Katie Zavadski in New York, Nico Hines in London, and Sam Stein in Washington, D.C.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-team ... =DDMorning
by seemslikeadream » Fri Jul 14, 2017 10:52 pm
Trump’s Russian Laundromat
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
BY CRAIG UNGER
July 13, 2017
Illustration by Alex Nabaum
In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.
A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren. Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire. From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold in the first few months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices. The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.
If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.
In 1987, on his first trip to Russia, Trump visited the Winter Palace with Ivana. The Soviets flew him to Moscow—all expenses paid—to discuss building a luxury hotel across from the Kremlin.Maxim Blokhin/TASS
Since Trump’s election as president, his ties to Russia have become the focus of intense scrutiny, most of which has centered on whether his inner circle colluded with Russia to subvert the U.S. election. A growing chorus in Congress is also asking pointed questions about how the president built his business empire. Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for a deeper inquiry into “Russian investment in Trump’s businesses and properties.”
The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.
But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.
It’s entirely possible that Trump was never more than a convenient patsy for Russian oligarchs and mobsters, with his casinos and condos providing easy pass-throughs for their illicit riches. At the very least, with his constant need for new infusions of cash and his well-documented troubles with creditors, Trump made an easy “mark” for anyone looking to launder money. But whatever his knowledge about the source of his wealth, the public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians—including the dirtiest and most feared of them all.
Trump made his first trip to Russia in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invited by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was flown to Moscow and Leningrad—all expenses paid—to talk business with high-ups in the Soviet command. In The Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the lunch meeting with Dubinin that led to the trip. “One thing led to another,” he wrote, “and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.
Semion Mogilevich.
At the top of the sprawling criminal enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian was the key money-laundering contact for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Brotherhood, one of the richest criminal syndicates in the world. Before long, he was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide racket of his own. Mogilevich wasn’t feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. The FBI has credited the “brainy don,” who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says, “but to influence governments and their economies.”
In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.
Vyachelsav Ivankov.Sergey Ponomarev/AP
Mogilevich’s greatest talent, the one that places him at the top of the Russian mob, is finding creative ways to cleanse dirty cash. According to the FBI, he has laundered money through more than 100 front companies around the world, and held bank accounts in at least 27 countries. And in 1991, he made a move that led directly to Trump Tower. That year, the FBI says, Mogilevich paid a Russian judge to spring a fellow mob boss, Vyachelsav Kirillovich Ivankov, from a Siberian gulag. If Mogilevich was the brains, Ivankov was the enforcer—a vor v zakone, or “made man,” infamous for torturing his victims and boasting about the murders he had arranged. Sprung by Mogilevich, Ivankov made the most of his freedom. In 1992, a year after he was released from prison, he headed to New York on an illegal business visa and proceeded to set up shop in Brighton Beach.
In Red Mafiya, his book about the rise of the Russian mob in America, investigative reporter Robert I. Friedman documented how Ivankov organized a lurid and violent underworld of tattooed gangsters. When Ivankov touched down at JFK, Friedman reported, he was met by a fellow vor, who handed him a suitcase with $1.5 million in cash. Over the next three years, Ivankov oversaw the mob’s growth from a local extortion racket to a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. According to the FBI, he recruited two “combat brigades” of Special Forces veterans from the Soviet war in Afghanistan to run the mafia’s protection racket and kill his enemies.
Like Mogilevich, Ivankov had a lot of dirty money he needed to clean up. He bought a Rolls-Royce dealership that was used, according to The New York Times, “as a front to launder criminal proceeds.” The FBI concluded that one of Ivankov’s partners in the operation was Felix Komarov, an upscale art dealer who lived in Trump Plaza on Third Avenue. Komarov, who was not charged in the case, called the allegations baseless. He acknowledged that he had frequent phone conversations with Ivankov, but insisted the exchanges were innocent. “I had no reason not to call him,” Komarov told a reporter.
Trump Taj Mahal paid the largest fine ever levied against a casino for having “willfully violated” anti-money-laundering rules.
The feds wanted to arrest Ivankov, but he kept vanishing. “He was like a ghost to the FBI,” one agent recalls. Agents spotted him meeting with other Russian crime figures in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, and Toronto. They also found he made frequent visits to Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which mobsters routinely used to launder huge sums of money. In 2015, the Taj Mahal was fined $10 million—the highest penalty ever levied by the feds against a casino—and admitted to having “willfully violated” anti-money-laundering regulations for years.
The FBI also struggled to figure out where Ivankov lived. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around,” James Moody, chief of the bureau’s organized crime section, told Friedman. “We had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.”
There is no evidence that Trump knew Ivankov personally, even if they were neighbors. But the fact that a top Russian mafia boss lived and worked in Trump’s own building indicates just how much high-level Russian mobsters came to view the future president’s properties as a home away from home. In 2009, after being extradited to Russia to face murder charges, Ivankov was gunned down in a sniper attack on the streets of Moscow. According to The Moscow Times, his funeral was a media spectacle in Russia, attracting “1,000 people wearing black leather jackets, sunglasses, and gold chains,” along with dozens of giant wreaths from the various brotherhoods.
Throughout the 1990s, untold millions from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s luxury developments and Atlantic City casinos. But all the money wasn’t enough to save Trump from his own failings as a businessman. He owed $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with a mind-boggling $800 million of it personally guaranteed. He spent much of the decade mired in litigation, filing for multiple bankruptcies and scrambling to survive. For most developers, the situation would have spelled financial ruin. But fortunately for Trump, his own economic crisis coincided with one in Russia.
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet. Rising to 72 stories in midtown Manhattan, Trump World Tower would be the tallest residential building on the planet. Construction got underway in 1999—just as Trump was preparing his first run for the presidency on the Reform Party ticket— and concluded in 2001. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported earlier this year, it wasn’t long before one-third of the units on the tower’s priciest floors had been snatched up—either by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg.
Sunny Isles, Florida, became known as “Little Moscow,” thanks to Trump’s high-rises.Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty
Among the new tenants was Eduard Nektalov, a diamond dealer from Uzbekistan. Nektalov, who was being investigated by a Treasury Department task force for mob-connected money laundering, bought a condo on the seventy-ninth floor, directly below Trump’s future campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway. A month later he sold his unit for a $500,000 profit. The following year, after rumors circulated that Nektalov was cooperating with federal investigators, he was shot down on Sixth Avenue.
Trump had found his market. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in. Dolly Lenz, a New York real estate broker, told USA Today that she sold some 65 units in Trump World Tower to Russians. “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald.”
To capitalize on his new business model, Trump struck a deal with a Florida developer to attach his name to six high-rises in Sunny Isles, just outside Miami. Without having to put up a dime of his own money, Trump would receive a cut of the profits. “Russians love the Trump brand,” Gil Dezer, the Sunny Isles developer, told Bloomberg. A local broker told The Washington Post that one-third of the 500 apartments he’d sold went to “Russian-speakers.” So many bought the Trump-branded apartments, in fact, that the area became known as “Little Moscow.”
“Russians love the Trump brand,” said developer Gil Dezer, (left, with Trump). One Florida tenant, Anatoly Golubchik (right) was busted in a major money-laundering ring run out of Trump Tower. Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan/Getty; John Marshall Mantel/ New York Times/Redux
Many of the units were sold by a native of Uzbekistan who had immigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1980s; her business was so brisk that she soon began bringing Russian tour groups to Sunny Isles to view the properties. According to a Reuters investigation in March, at least 63 buyers with Russian addresses or passports spent $98 million on Trump’s properties in south Florida. What’s more, another one-third of the units—more than 700 in all—were bought by shadowy shell companies that concealed the true owners.
Trump promoted and celebrated the properties. His organization continues to advertise the units; in 2011, when they first turned a profit, he attended a ceremonial mortgage-burning in Sunny Isles to toast their success. Last October, an investigation by the Miami Herald found that at least 13 buyers in the Florida complex have been the target of government investigations, either personally or through their companies, including “members of a Russian-American organized crime group.” Two buyers in Sunny Isles, Anatoly Golubchik and Michael Sall, were convicted for taking part in a massive international gambling and money-laundering syndicate that was run out of Trump Tower in New York. The ring, according to the FBI, was operating under the protection of the Russian mafia.
The influx of Russian money did more than save Trump’s business from ruin—it set the stage for the next phase of his career. By 2004, to the outside world, it appeared that Trump was back on top after his failures in Atlantic City. That January, flush with the appearance of success, Trump launched his newly burnished brand into another medium.
“My name’s Donald Trump,” he declared in his opening narration for The Apprentice, “the largest real estate developer in New York. I own buildings all over the place. Model agencies. The Miss Universe pageant. Jetliners, golf courses, casinos, and private resorts like Mar-a-Lago, one of the most spectacular estates anywhere in the world.”
But it wouldn’t be Trump without a better story than that. “It wasn’t always so easy,” he confessed, over images of him cruising around New York in a stretch limo. “About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won. Big league. I used my brain. I used my negotiating skills. And I worked it all out. Now my company’s bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was.… I’ve mastered the art of the deal.”
The show, which reportedly paid Trump up to $3 million per episode, instantly revived his career. “The Apprentice turned Trump from a blowhard Richie Rich who had just gone through his most difficult decade into an unlikely symbol of straight talk, an evangelist for the American gospel of success, a decider who insisted on standards in a country that had somehow slipped into handing out trophies for just showing up,” journalists Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher observe in their book Trump Revealed. “Above all, Apprentice sold an image of the host-boss as supremely competent and confident, dispensing his authority and getting immediate results. The analogy to politics was palpable.”
Russians spent at least $98 million on Trump’s properties in Florida—and another third of the units were bought by shadowy shell companies.
But the story of Donald Trump, self-made business genius, left out any mention of the shady Russian investors who had done so much to make his comeback narrative possible. And Trump’s business, despite the hype, was hardly “stronger than it ever was”—his credit was still lousy, and two more of his prized properties in Atlantic City would soon fall into bankruptcy, even as his ratings soared.
To further enhance his brand, Trump used his prime-time perch to unveil another big project. On the 2006 season finale of The Apprentice, as 11 million viewers waited to learn which of the two finalists was going to be fired, Trump prolonged the suspense by cutting to a promotional video for his latest venture. “Located in the center of Manhattan’s chic artist enclave, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in SoHo is the site of my latest development,” he narrated over swooping helicopter footage of lower Manhattan. The new building, he added, would be nothing less than a “$370 million work of art … an awe-inspiring masterpiece.”
Trump SoHo was the brainchild of two development companies—Bayrock Group LLC and the Sapir Organization—run by a pair of wealthy émigrés from the former Soviet Union who had done business with some of Russia’s richest and most notorious oligarchs. Together, their firms made Trump an offer he couldn’t refuse: The developers would finance and build Trump SoHo themselves. In return for lending his name to the project, Trump would get 18 percent of the profits—without putting up any of his own money.
One of the developers, Tamir Sapir, had followed an unlikely path to riches. After emigrating from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, he had started out driving a cab in New York City and ended up a billionaire living in Trump Tower. His big break came when he co-founded a company that sold high-tech electronics. According to the FBI, Sapir’s partner in the firm was a “member or associate” of Ivankov’s mob in Brighton Beach. No charges were ever filed, and Sapir denied having any mob ties. “It didn’t happen,” he told The New York Times. “Everything was done in the most legitimate way.”
Trump, who described Sapir as a “great friend,” bought 200 televisions from his electronics company. In 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago, and later attended her infant son’s bris.
In 2007, Trump celebrated the launch of Trump SoHo with partners Tevfik Arif (center) and Felix Sater (right). Arif was later acquitted on charges of running a prostitution ring.Mark Von Holden/WireImage/Getty
Sapir also introduced Trump to Tevfik Arif, his partner in the Trump SoHo deal. On paper, at least, Arif was another heartwarming immigrant success story. He had graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. Practically overnight, Arif became a wildly successful developer in Brooklyn. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Trump worked closely with Bayrock on real estate ventures in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. “Bayrock knew the investors,” he later testified. Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me.” He boasted about the deal he was getting: Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. “It was almost like mass production of a car,” Trump testified.
But Bayrock and its deals quickly became mired in controversy. Forbes and other publications reported that the company was financed by a notoriously corrupt group of oligarchs known as The Trio. In 2010, Arif was arrested by Turkish prosecutors and charged with setting up a prostitution ring after he was found aboard a boat—chartered by one of The Trio—with nine young women, two of whom were 16 years old. The women reportedly refused to talk, and Arif was acquitted. According to a lawsuit filed that same year by two former Bayrock executives, Arif started the firm “backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people.” In addition, the suit alleges, Bayrock “was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated.” The company’s real purpose, the executives claim, was to develop hugely expensive properties bearing the Trump brand—and then use the projects to launder money and evade taxes.
The lawsuit, which is ongoing, does not claim that Trump was complicit in the alleged scam. Bayrock dismissed the allegations as “legal conclusions to which no response is required.” But last year, after examining title deeds, bank records, and court documents, the Financial Times concluded that Trump SoHo had “multiple ties to an alleged international money-laundering network.” In one case, the paper reported, a former Kazakh energy minister is being sued in federal court for conspiring to “systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets” and then purchasing three condos in Trump SoHo to launder his “ill-gotten funds.”
Felix Sater had a Trump business card long after his criminal past came to light.
During his collaboration with Bayrock, Trump also became close to the man who ran the firm’s daily operations—a twice-convicted felon with family ties to Semion Mogilevich. In 1974, when he was eight years old, Felix Sater and his family emigrated from Moscow to Brighton Beach. According to the FBI, his father—who was convicted for extorting local restaurants, grocery stores, and a medical clinic—was a Mogilevich boss. Sater tried making it as a stockbroker, but his career came to an abrupt end in 1991, after he stabbed a Wall Street foe in the face with a broken margarita glass during a bar fight, opening wounds that required 110 stitches. (Years later, in a deposition, Trump downplayed the incident, insisting that Sater “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”) Sater lost his trading license over the attack, and served a year in prison.
In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to racketeering—operating a “pump and dump” stock fraud in partnership with alleged Russian mobsters that bilked investors of at least $40 million. To avoid prison time, Sater turned informer. But according to the lawsuit against Bayrock, he also resumed “his old tricks.” By 2003, the suit alleges, Sater controlled the majority of Bayrock’s shares—and proceeded to use the firm to launder hundreds of millions of dollars, while skimming and extorting millions more. The suit also claims that Sater committed fraud by concealing his racketeering conviction from banks that invested hundreds of millions in Bayrock, and that he threatened “to kill anyone at the firm he thought knew of the crimes committed there and might report it.” In court, Bayrock has denied the allegations, which Sater’s attorney characterizes as “false, fabricated, and pure garbage.”
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By Sater’s account, in sworn testimony, he was very tight with Trump. He flew to Colorado with him, accompanied Donald Jr. and Ivanka on a trip to Moscow at Trump’s invitation, and met with Trump’s inner circle “constantly.” In Trump Tower, he often dropped by Trump’s office to pitch business ideas—“just me and him.”
Trump seems unable to recall any of this. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” he told the Associated Press in 2015. Two years earlier, testifying in a video deposition, Trump took the same line. If Sater “were sitting in the room right now,” he swore under oath, “I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” He added: “I don’t know him very well, but I don’t think he was connected to the mafia.”
Trump and his lawyers say that he was unaware of Sater’s criminal past when he signed on to do business with Bayrock. That’s plausible, since Sater’s plea deal in the stock fraud was kept secret because of his role as an informant. But even after The New York Times revealed Sater’s criminal record in 2007, he continued to use office space provided by the Trump Organization. In 2010, he was even given an official Trump Organization business card that read: FELIX H. SATER, SENIOR ADVISOR TO DONALD TRUMP.
In 2013, police burst into Unit 63A of Trump Tower and rounded up 29 suspects in a $100 million money-laundering scheme.
Sater apparently remains close to Trump’s inner circle. Earlier this year, one week before National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired for failing to report meetings with Russian officials, Trump’s personal attorney reportedly hand-delivered to Flynn’s office a “back-channel plan” for lifting sanctions on Russia. The co-author of the plan, according to the Times: Felix Sater.
In the end, Trump’s deals with Bayrock, like so much of his business empire, proved to be more glitter than gold. The international projects in Russia and Poland never materialized. A Trump tower being built in Fort Lauderdale ran out of money before it was completed, leaving behind a massive concrete shell. Trump SoHo ultimately had to be foreclosed and resold. But his Russian investors had left Trump with a high-profile property he could leverage. The new owners contracted with Trump to run the tower; as of April, the president and his daughter Ivanka were still listed as managers of the property. In 2015, according to the federal financial disclosure reports, Trump made $3 million from Trump SoHo.
In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called “the world’s largest sports book,” was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States. The entire operation, prosecutors say, was working under the protection of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whom the FBI identified as a top Russian vor closely allied with Semion Mogilevich. In a single two-month stretch, according to the federal indictment, the money launderers paid Tokhtakhounov $10 million.
Tokhtakhounov, who had been indicted a decade earlier for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only suspect to elude arrest. For the next seven months, the Russian crime boss fell off the radar of Interpol, which had issued a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he suddenly appeared live on international television—sitting in the audience at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, just a few seats away from the pageant owner, Donald Trump.
Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Dmitry Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty
After the pageant, Trump bragged about all the powerful Russians who had turned out that night, just to see him. “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” he told Real Estate Weekly. Contacted by Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov insisted that he had bought his own ticket and was not a VIP. He also denied being a mobster, telling The New York Times that he had been indicted in the gambling ring because FBI agents “misinterpreted his Russian slang” on their Trump Tower wiretaps, when he was merely placing $20,000 bets on soccer games.
Both the White House and the Trump Organization declined to respond to questions for this story. On the few occasions he has been questioned about his business entanglements with Russians, however, Trump has offered broad denials. “I tweeted out that I have no dealings with Russia,” he said at a press conference in January, when asked if Russia has any “leverage” over him, financial or otherwise. “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all.” In May, when he was interviewed by NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump seemed hard-pressed to think of a single connection he had with Russia. “I have had dealings over the years where I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian many years ago,” he said. “I had the Miss Universe pageant—which I owned for quite a while—I had it in Moscow a long time ago. But other than that, I have nothing to do with Russia.”
But even if Trump has no memory of the many deals that he and his business made with Russian investors, he certainly did not “stay away” from Russia. For decades, he and his organization have aggressively promoted his business there, seeking to entice investors and buyers for some of his most high-profile developments. Whether Trump knew it or not, Russian mobsters and corrupt oligarchs used his properties not only to launder vast sums of money from extortion, drugs, gambling, and racketeering, but even as a base of operations for their criminal activities. In the process, they propped up Trump’s business and enabled him to reinvent his image. Without the Russian mafia, it is fair to say, Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.
Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob’s “boss of bosses,” also declined to respond to questions from the New Republic. “My ideas are not important to anybody,” Mogilevich said in a statement provided by his attorney. “Whatever I know, I am a private person.” Mogilevich, the attorney added, “has nothing to do with President Trump. He doesn’t believe that anybody associated with him lives in Trump Tower. He has no ties to America or American citizens.”
Back in 1999, the year before Trump staged his first run for president, Mogilevich gave a rare interview to the BBC. Living up to his reputation for cleverness, the mafia boss mostly joked and double-spoke his way around his criminal activities. (Q: “Why did you set up companies in the Channel Islands?” A: “The problem was that I didn’t know any other islands. When they taught us geography at school, I was sick that day.”) But when the exasperated interviewer asked, “Do you believe there is any Russian organized crime?” the “brainy don” turned half-serious.
“How can you say that there is a Russian mafia in America?” he demanded. “The word mafia, as far as I understand the word, means a criminal group that is connected with the political organs, the police and the administration. I don’t know of a single Russian in the U.S. Senate, a single Russian in the U.S. Congress, a single Russian in the U.S. government. Where are the connections with the Russians? How can there be a Russian mafia in America? Where are their connections?”
Two decades later, we finally have an answer to Mogilevich’s question.
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/ ... ign=buffer
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 18, 2017 6:06 pm
The Master of ‘Kompromat’ Believed to Be Behind Trump Jr.’s Meeting
By ANDREW E. KRAMERJULY 17, 2017
Yuri Y. Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general, right, at a plenary meeting of the Russian Federation Council in April in Moscow. He is widely considered to have been the source of the incriminating information on Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump Jr. was promised. Credit Stanislav Krasilnikov\TASS, via Getty Images
MOSCOW — The salacious video, of a naked man in bed with two women, was one of the most prominent examples of “kompromat,” the Russian art of spreading damaging information to discredit a rival or an enemy, in recent Russian history.
It was made available to Russian state television in the late 1990s and authenticated in public by Yuri Y. Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general, who at 66 has a long and storied background in kompromat. Mr. Chaika benefited from the video, as it destroyed a predecessor as prosecutor general, Yuri I. Skuratov, who had been looking into suspicions of corruption by President Boris N. Yeltsin and his associates.
Mr. Chaika (pronounced CHIKE-uh) is also the man who is widely considered to have been the source of the incriminating information on Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump Jr. was promised at a meeting last June in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer and a Russian-American lobbyist. And yet, oddly, the accusations brought to New York fell flat, by the accounts of those present, despite their having originated from such a seasoned master of kompromat.
Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had offered him the information but that it “made no sense” and was not “meaningful.”
Trump advisers have often insisted that the campaign had no contact with various Russian insiders — claims that were later proved false. By THE NEW YORK TIMES on Publish Date July 12, 2017. Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York
Ms. Veselnitskaya has said that two others at the meeting, the Trump campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, and President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, paid little attention.
Continue reading the main story
That stands in sharp contrast to the video, which led to the ouster of Mr. Skuratov, helped Vladimir V. Putin establish himself as the successor to Mr. Yeltsin and, ultimately, enabled Mr. Chaika to ascend to the prosecutor general’s office.
In Russia, said Thomas Rid, a scholar of intelligence history at King’s College London, “there’s an appreciation that information is power, and having information that somebody considers very private information is even more powerful.”
Mr. Skuratov has insisted all along that he was not the man in the tape. But Mr. Chaika, after becoming acting prosecutor general in 1999, endorsed the video’s authenticity, saying it showed a “legal basis” to open an investigation.
News media coverage in Russia was relentless, with state television going so far as to interview one of the women in the video. “He is a good uncle,” she said, in a final twist of the knife. “I feel sorry for him.”
In the current case, Rob Goldstone, the former British tabloid journalist and music promoter who arranged the Trump Tower meeting, had written in an email to Donald Trump Jr. that Ms. Veselnitskaya would bring information from Mr. Chaika that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton.
What that information was is still not known. But at the time, Mr. Chaika was trying to push back against an American sanctions law, the Magnitsky Act, in part by trying to discredit an American-born businessman, William J. Browder, who had lobbied for its passage. At least some of the information seemed to concern accusations of tax evasion by prominent Democratic donors involved with Mr. Browder.
Mr. Chaika made the same accusations in a statement on his website and in documents handed to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, when he was in Moscow. In an interview, Mr. Rohrabacher said using the information in opposition research against the Democrats in the presidential campaign had never crossed his mind. “That’s a big zero,” he said.
Whether anything discussed at the Trump Tower meeting was as explosive as that long-ago video remains to be seen. But the Russian prosecutor’s subsequent experience with kompromat has shown that those who live by the sword may die from it — or at least feel the pain.
Mr. Chaika benefited enormously from the video, becoming acting prosecutor general after Mr. Skuratov was dismissed and then justice minister. He returned to the prosecutor general position in 2006 in another shake-up of the law enforcement and intelligence elite.
But in that capacity, Mr. Chaika made the surprising mistake of investigating suspected corruption at the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., a bit too enthusiastically.
So in 2007, Mr. Putin realigned the prosecutorial powers again, giving control of high-profile cases to a separate agency, the Investigative Committee. That created a fierce rival for Mr. Chaika — and compromising material started to spill into public view.
In 2011, the committee accused Mr. Chaika’s son, Artyom Chaika, of protecting illegal casinos operating in the Moscow region. He was never charged, but the publicity dented his father’s standing.
“Chaika has been masterful, but not every time and in every fight,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and founder of the National Strategy Institute, a think tank based in Moscow, said of the prosecutor general’s role in Russia’s kompromat wars.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/worl ... haika.html
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 19, 2017 8:37 am
$$$
Donald Trump Jr. Met Russian Accused of Laundering $1.4 Billion
Ike Kaveladze, who works for the oligarch who arranged the June 2016 in Trump Tower, he was found by the feds using shell companies to move money in the the ‘90s for Russians.
KELLY WEILL
KATIE ZAVADSKI
07.18.17 2:28 PM ET
An accused Russian money launderer representing a Kremlin-friendly oligarch has been reportedly identified as the eighth person at a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. last June.
Irakly Kaveladze was a guest of Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya when she visited Trump and other campaign members in Trump Tower last year, Trump’s lawyer told CNN. The meeting was proposed by billionaire Russian real-estate developer Aras Agalarov. The billionaire is friendly with President Donald Trump, having hosted his Miss Universe 2013 pageant in Moscow and discussed real-estate deals with Trump.
The June 9, 2016 meeting was originally characterized by Trump Jr. as "primarily...about the adoption of Russian children." It was then revealed to have aso been about Agalarov providing “damaging information” on Hillary Clinton from the Kremlin. Joining Trump in the meeting were his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
The eight visitors included Rob Goldstone, the manager of Agalarov’s pop-star son who reached out to Trump; Veselnitskaya, the lawyer with ties to Russian officials who lobbied the U.S. on behalf of Kremlin interests; her translator, Anatoli Samochornov; Veselnitskaya’s D.C.-based lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, who was once accused of an international hacking conspiracy; and Kaveladze.
Kaveladze is an executive of Crocus Group, Agalarov’s Russian-based development company. Kaveladze’s LinkedIn page says he began working for Crocus Group in 2004, but a Russian webpage for the Economic Chronicle says he started in 1992 as Crocus’ U.S. associate. Kaveladze immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 1991.
Federal investigators say Kaveladze immediately began laundering money for Russians.
Kaveladze was the president of International Business Creations, a Delaware corporation. Between 1991 and 2000, IBC and sister corporation Euro-American moved $1.4 billion from Eastern Europe through U.S. banks and back to Europe, the Government Accountability Office found in 2000. Kaveladze was not named in the report, but he was reportedly identified as its accused figure. “What I see here is another Russian witch hunt in the United States,'' Kaveladze told the New York Times in 2000 about the allegations.
IBC and Euro-American “created corporations for Russian brokers and established bank accounts for those corporations,” GAO said. The bank accounts were opened at Citibank and the Bank of New York.
Approximately 2,000 corporations were formed for Russian brokers, GAO found, and 236 bank accounts were opened at Citi and BONY. An employee of Euro-American told GAO the firm created about 10 corporations at a time for Russian brokers, sometimes making up names for the companies. (Euro-American charged a fee of $350 for each company it incorporated.)
“The president of IBC told us that the bank accounts were formed to move money out of Russia,” the GAO report reads, apparently referring to Kaveladze. It adds that he confirmed he’d misled the banks about the due dilligence he’d done in investigating the banks.
“He also told us that Euro-American is currently being liquidated due in part to concerns about money-laundering issues that were raised in 1999 when the media reported allegations that Russian organized crime had laundered billions of dollars through the Bank of New York,” the report said.
The report concluded that it is “relatively easy” for foreigners to hide identities and funnel money to the U.S., due in part to the failure of Citi and BONY’s failure to implement “know your customer” policies.
Kaveladze denied any wrongdoing. He later said he was the victim of an anti-Russian campaign, according to the Economic Press Review. (Attempts to contact him were unsuccessful.)
Robert Hast, then the managing director of the GAO, told The Daily Beast that at the time there were thousands of companies set up for money laundering. “And Delaware makes it easy,” he said.
“It was Russian organized crime that was mixed in with former KGB,” Hast added. “This wasn’t too long after the breakup of the USSR, and a lot of these people were out of work.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, recently hired Andrew Weissmann, the former head of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud unit, who is an expert on fraud, foreign bribery, and organized crime. Scott Balber, an attorney for the Agalarovs and Kaveladze, said his clients are cooperating with the investigation.
Scott Olson, a former FBI counterintelligence agent, told The Daily Beast that the meeting’s size and attendees would not make much sense as a Russian intelligence operation. “If you’re gonna have a covert meeting, it’s gonna be two people,” Olson said. “If you have more than two people, it becomes exponentially more difficult to keep the meeting confidential, and the content of the meeting confidential.”
And the people at the meeting, from Veselnitskaya to Ahkmetshin to Kaveladze, are not the sort of operatives intelligence agencies usually recruit.
“They’re not reliable, they’re too difficult to train,” Olson said. “I’m really seeing people who are trying to curry favor so they can leverage it into a political or business connection.”
Two months before the meeting in Trump Tower, Kaveladze joked on Facebook about meeting Donald Trump.
A colleague named Yuriy asked Kaveladze when he was returning to the U.S. and then told him they were Trump fans.
“The other candidates are opaque, who knows what to expect from them,” Yuriy added. “So pass that along to him.”
“I told him that I would try to pass it along, although I knew it was unlikely,” Kaveladze said.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-tru ... on-dollars
Rinat Akhmetshin: Low-Hanging Fruit for Trump-Russia Investigators
By Asha Rangappa
Tuesday, July 18, 2017 at 1:25 PM
Since last week’s revelation of Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and several of her associates, much of the legal focus has been on which crimes, if any, Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort may have committed. But this analysis is looking at the wrong people (for now). As a former FBI counterintelligence agent, I’d start with Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian émigré and naturalized U.S. citizen of over ten years, who may offer the lowest-hanging fruit in the next phase of the investigation.
Right now, the “It’s Not Illegal!” defense is based primarily on the assertion that in merely accepting the meeting, Don Jr. and his two Trump campaign compadres did not violate any laws. But we still don’t know what happened in the meeting, or if any subsequent meetings took place. The answers to both of these questions might provide more clarity into whether the Trump campaign “colluded” with the Russians in the months leading up to the election. That’s because depending on what was discussed, agreed to, exchanged, or developed in further meetings, various crimes may have, in fact, occurred. The key is to get someone to cough up the details.
Here’s where Akhmetshin comes in. Akhmetshin is a former Soviet military counterintelligence agent who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2009. Therein lies an opportunity for investigators: More on this in a moment. First, let’s look at his value as a source of information. I’ll leave aside for now the possibility (and indeed the probability) that as a trained counterintelligence agent, Akhmetshin might have recorded the meeting, either for his own protection or as kompromat against the Trump campaign. Even if he didn’t, he will have important information to offer about what took place at the meeting and what led up to it – including whether it was directed by the Russian government. So being able to squeeze Akhmetshin for information could be very helpful for the investigators on this case.
When I had a case with a naturalized U.S. citizen who was potentially working on behalf of a foreign intelligence service, I found that a good place to go digging was their U.S. citizenship application. The naturalization form, called the N-400, is a lengthy document with detailed questions covering all aspects of a person’s background. Poring over a subject’s answers to all the questions provided a useful starting point for conducting an interview with them. More importantly, it offered the possibility to leverage any information that came to light during the interview that was inconsistent with their application, since intentionally lying about material facts on the N-400 opens an individual up to charges of fraud or false statements and can even be the basis for revoking their U.S. citizenship. Needless-to-say, people who “forgot” to mention some important things on their N-400 would often become very cooperative sources for the U.S. government.
If I were going to interview Akhmetshin, I’d zone in on a few areas of his N-400. First, Part 8 of the naturalization form asks about previous employment. Importantly, the instructions for this part asks for “all military, police, and/or intelligence service” in the previous five years. Akhmetshin’s intelligence affiliation was ostensibly several decades ago, but I might check to see what he wrote down as his employment immediately before 2009 and verify it. I’d also cross check to see if any intelligence connections exist with his previous employment. Further, because Akhmetshin was a member of the Red Army during its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he would have still been required to disclose any official Communist affiliation, prior military and/or police affiliation, as well as any weapons training in Part 12 of the application. These are just some of the obvious places that I’d expect to find discrepancies, but the entire form is fair game.
It’s entirely possible that Akhmetshin was completely truthful on his N-400. After all, he speaks pretty freely about his Red Army past. But given the delays that would likely have resulted on his application by disclosing any or all of the above, he may have believed – as some people unwisely do – that the eyebrow-raising answers were far enough in the past not to be relevant, or he may have had continuing contacts with Russian intelligence that he wanted to keep off the radar of immigration authorities and the FBI. Either way, Akhmetshin may be the only one in the Russia meeting, apart from Kushner, who has already provided statements under penalty of perjury. He may also be the one most likely give Mueller and his team the information they need — especially if he finds himself on the brink of losing his comfortable new life here in America.
https://www.justsecurity.org/43272/rina ... stigators/
Jim GaffiganVerified account
@JimGaffigan
Everyone is overreacting to the Trump & Putin private meeting. Relax. It might have been Trump's performance review.
by Rory » Wed Jul 19, 2017 11:18 am
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 19, 2017 5:34 pm
On Trump and Russia, It’s Probably A Lot Worse Than We Thought
Evan Vucci/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 19, 2017 4:09 PM
I have never been convinced that our current policy of trying to unseat the Assad government in Syria is the only reasonable one for the US to pursue or even the correct one. A couple years ago I wrote that I wasn’t sure it made sense, or was even logical, to think we could battle ISIS in Syria and the Assad regime at the same time.
I know there are strong contrary arguments. The situation on the ground is now quite different with respect to ISIS and Assad than it was two years ago. But that’s not my point here. My point here is simply to grant that it is not inherently questionable or suspicious to end our covert support for anti-Assad rebels in Syria, as President Trump has just done, according to reports this afternoon. But it is highly, highly disquieting in the context of Trump’s extremely suspicious behavior with respect to Russia in general.
Yesterday we learned that President Trump had a second, undisclosed discussion with President Putin for as long as an hour with only Putin’s translator present. In other words, no other American citizen was there to make a record of or hear what was discussed.
It’s been noted that President Obama spoke for a few minutes one-on-one once with Dmitry Medvedev when he was President or Russia. My understanding is that Medvedev actually speaks decent English; so translation is less of an issue. But no one had any reason to believe that President Obama was compromised by the Russian government or somehow in league with it. We have plenty of reasons to believe that about President Trump. (Is this circular reasoning? No, as I’ll explain in a moment.) I see no plausible explanation for this latest revelation other than President Trump wanting to discuss things with President Putin that he does not want any other American citizen to hear.
I know that sounds ominous and even hyperbolic. But what is the alternative explanation – when all the other relevant evidence is considered? I can’t see any.
Add into the mix that even if you think that most or all of the Trump/Russia stuff is a bum rap, it is clearly the case that speaking privately with Putin for an hour – with no witnesses – would raise an insane level of suspicion. Why would you do that? You would only do that if you thought having the conversation was really, really, really important. It’s not circular reasoning because the suspicion is a fact; courting it for no reason is all but impossible to explain.
The mix of President Trump’s bizarre toadying to Russia and Putin himself, combined with the latest revelations about Don Jr and the rest make it no longer credible that there’s any innocent explanation to this mystery. I think a lot of higher-ups in government have not fully thought through and absorbed what this means.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/on- ... we-thought
‘CONFIDENTIAL’
GOP Lawmaker Got Direction From Moscow, Took It Back to D.C.
After being given a secret document by officials in Moscow, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher sought to alter sanctions legislation and tried to set up a virtual show trial on Capitol Hill.
Nico Hines
NICO HINES
07.19.17 1:00 AM ET
Members of the team of Russians who secured a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner also attempted to stage a show trial of anti-Putin campaigner Bill Browder on Capitol Hill.
The trial, which would have come in the form of a congressional hearing, was scheduled for mid-June 2016 by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a long-standing Russia ally who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe. During the hearing, Rohrabacher had planned to confront Browder with a feature-length pro-Kremlin propaganda movie that viciously attacks him—as well as at least two witnesses linked to the Russian authorities, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Ultimately, the hearing was canceled when senior Republicans intervened and agreed to allow a hearing on Russia at the full committee level with a Moscow-sympathetic witness, according to multiple congressional aides.
An email reviewed by The Daily Beast shows that before that June 14 hearing, Rohrabacher’s staff received pro-Kremlin briefings against Browder, once Russia’s biggest foreign investor, and his tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky from a lawyer who was working with Veselnitskaya.
Although House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) had prohibited Rohrabacher from showing the Russian propaganda film in Congress, Rohrabacher’s Capitol Hill office still actively promoted a screening of the movie that was held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., on June 13, 2016. Veselnitskaya was one of those handling the movie’s worldwide promotion.
Invitations to attend the movie screening were sent from the subcommittee office by Catharine O’Neill, a Republican intern on Rohrabacher’s committee. Her email promised that the movie would convince viewers that Magnitsky, who was murdered in a Russian prison cell, was no hero.
The invite, reviewed by The Daily Beast, claimed that the film “explodes the common view that Mr. Magnitsky was a whistleblower” and lavishes praise on the “rebel director” Andrei Nekrasov.
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“That invitation was not from our office. O’Neill was an unpaid intern on the committee staff. Paul denies asking her to send the invitations,” said Ken Grubbs, Rohrabacher’s press secretary, referring to the congressman’s staff director, Paul Behrends.
O’Neill went on to secure a job on the Trump transition team and then in the State Department’s Office of the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. She did not return a call for comment.
Rohrabacher’s office was given the film by the Prosecutor General’s office in Moscow, which is run by Yuri Chaika, a close associate of President Vladimir Putin who is accused of widespread corruption, and Viktor Grin, the deputy general prosecutor who has been sanctioned by the United States as part of the Magnitsky Act.
That same Prosecutor General’s office also was listed as being behind the “very high level and sensitive information” that was offered to Donald Trump Jr. in an email prior to his now infamous meeting with Russian officials at Trump Tower on June 9—just days before the congressional hearing. Veselnitskaya attended that meeting with Trump Jr. She also happens to have worked as a prosecutor in the Moscow region and is a close personal friend of Chaika.
The Daily Beast reviewed a copy of a document that was passed to Rohrabacher in Moscow in April 2016. The document, marked “confidential,” was given to Rohrabacher and Behrends. It lays out an alternate reality in which the U.S.—and the rest of the world—has been duped by a fake $230 million scandal that resulted in sanctions being imposed on 44 Russians linked to murder, corruption, or cover-ups.
The document, which was handed over by an official from the Prosecutor General’s office to Rohrabacher along with means of viewing the Russian propaganda movie, suggested that U.S. “political situation may change the current climate” and claimed that it was the ideal moment to foment a challenge to the Western narrative on Putin’s kleptocracy. A subcommittee hearing that would re-examine the sanctions placed on Russia, the paper claimed, would be appreciated in Moscow.
“Changing attitudes to the Magnitsky story in the Congress… could have a very favorable response from the Russian side,” the document said.
What the U.S. would get in exchange for holding a subcommittee hearing was not laid out in detail. But the document promised to help iron out “key controversial issues and disagreements with the United States.”
Grubbs said Rohrabacher had accepted the document but said the conversation with officials from the Prosecutor General’s office during the congressman’s April 2016 Moscow visit was “brief and formal.”
When Rohrabacher returned to the United States, he delayed the passage of the Global Magnitsky Act by holding it up in committee and tabled an amendment to remove Magnitsky’s name from its title, citing several of the claims found in the Russian document.
Next, Rohrabacher and Behrends, with the help of Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet army veteran and lobbyist who was also present at the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, put together a subcommittee event with witnesses including Veselnitskaya and Nekrasov, the director of the movie.
When Royce, the chair of the foreign relations committee, got wind of the hearing, he nixed Rohrabacher’s plan and offered instead to hold a full committee hearing on Russia relations. House aides conceded that he did so, in part, to avoid Rohrabacher staging an event that could have embarrassed the Republican Party—and Congress.
Rohrabacher was apparently still allowed to propose a witness for the full committee hearing who shared some of his pro-Russia views. Jack Matlock, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union who appeared, confirmed to The Daily Beast that he had been first approached by Rohrabacher.
A spokesman for Royce said that while Matlock and Rohrabacher did know each other from their days in the Ronald Reagan administration, his appearance at the hearing was ultimately cleared by the full committee’s Republican staff.
During Royce’s hearing, Rohrabacher approvingly compared Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. The congressman also submitted, for the congressional record, testimony that claimed Russia had not been behind the radioactive poisoning of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London.
Rohrabacher, Behrends, Akhmetshin, Veselnitskaya, and Matlock had dinner together later that night at the Capitol Hill Club, a private members’ establishment for Republicans. The evening was organized by Lanny Wiles, a veteran GOP operative.
The following day, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on tape telling Republican colleagues: “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” When some of the lawmakers laughed, he replied: “Swear to God.”
McCarthy later said the comment was meant as a joke. A close associate told The Daily Beast that McCarthy was, indeed, referencing Rohrabacher’s well known affinity for Russia, which, over the years, has been treated as an odd spectacle by fellow lawmakers on the Hill.
Foreign Soil
Whether they should take the spectacle more soberly is another matter.
Four years prior to the hearing, Rohrabacher was taken into a quiet room in Congress and warned by FBI agents that Russian intelligence operatives were trying to recruit him as an asset.
If he took the warning seriously, it certainly didn’t stop him from spending time with figures linked closely to the Russian state apparatus.
Earlier this year, Rohrabacher, who says he once arm-wrestled Putin, met Akhmetshin in Berlin. The congressman acknowledged to CNN that he suspected the former member of a Soviet counterintelligence unit might have links to the current Russian security service.
“I would certainly not rule that out,” Rohrabacher said. “[He has] an ulterior motive.”
That meeting in Germany apparently came about through sheer happenstance.
The same cannot be said of Rohrabacher’s congressional delegation trip to Moscow in the spring of 2016.
The itinerary for that three-day trip, reviewed by The Daily Beast, shows that Rohrabacher and Behrends attended a side meeting—without the other members of the delegation—with one of Putin’s closest confidants, Vladimir Yakunin.
A former head of the Russian Railways who has been sanctioned by the U.S., Yakunin has routinely accompanied Putin on domestic and international trips over the years. He owns a dacha near the president in an exclusive enclave on the shore of Lake Komsomolskoye.
Rohrabacher said at the time that he had agreed to the meeting at the request of Sergey Kislyak. “The Russian ambassador asked me if I would meet with him in Moscow,” he told BuzzFeed.
Kislyak has since gained notoriety in the U.S. after a series of Trump campaign associates failed to disclose their conversations with a man who has been described as “a top spy and recruiter of spies.”
There were no other meetings with Russian officials scheduled for Rohrabacher and Behrends alone. But after a delegation meeting with Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of Russia’s foreign affairs committee, at the Duma the two of them were asked to stay behind.
Once the other members of the delegation had left the room, Viktor Grin, a top Chaika deputy in the Prosecutor General’s office and one of the 44 Russians enduring a travel ban and asset freezes under U.S. sanctions, appeared with the document outlining Russia’s position on the Magnitsky sanctions. Rohrabacher and Behrends were also given access to the anti-Magnitsky movie.
‘He Wants to Pursue It’
A month after returning from Moscow with the Russian document, which is just over a page long, the congressman had already delayed the Global Magnitsky Act. His spokesman told National Review at the time: “The congressman came across some information that puts the Magnitsky narrative as we know it into some question, and he wants to pursue it.”
He refused to say where this new information had suddenly come from.
Two weeks later, Rohrabacher explained to colleagues on the House Foreign Affairs Committee why he had tabled an amendment to take Magnitsky’s name off the bill.
He did not say he was using the Russian document as the basis for his argument, but he did repeat five claims from the Moscow paper. He said Magnitsky was a financial adviser, not a lawyer; that Browder may have been trying to avoid millions in taxes, and that Browder had renounced his U.S. citizenship as a tax-saving measure.
Rohrabacher also advocated for an end to sanctions against Russia as a means of ending the ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans—which Putin had put into effect in as a response to the original Magnitsky Act.
In reality, Magnitsky reported the $230 million tax fraud to the authorities in 2008 shortly before he was detained. According to an investigation ordered by the former president Dmitry Medvedev, Magnitsky was then held illegally, beaten, and left to die in his pretrial jail cell in 2009.
As Rohrabacher pitched for support in the weeks after returning from Russia, Rinat Akhmetshin set to work on lobbying House members. A U.S. congressional staffer told The Daily Beast that former California Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA) and Akhmetshin showed up at their office without an appointment.
“They said they were lobbying on behalf of a Russian company called Prevezon and asked us to delay the Global Magnitsky Act or at least remove Magnitsky from the name,” the staffer said. “Mr. Dellums said it was a shame that this bill has made it so Russian orphans cannot be adopted by Americans.”
Prevezon’s lawyer at the time was Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was working to defend the Cyprus-based company against U.S. money laundering allegations related to the massive fraud uncovered by Magnitsky.
Several people on the Hill reported seeing Akhmetshin and Dellums being given highly unusual personal introductions to lawmakers. The man leading them around was Paul Behrends.
Ken Grubbs insisted that Behrends often escorted people around Congress.
Old Friends
Behrends first worked in Rohrabacher’s office more than 25 years ago. In 1990, when he was a foreign policy adviser, he met a disaffected former Naval Academy student named Erik Prince at a series of conservative functions. They got on well, and Prince was invited to come and work in their office as an intern.
After leaving Rohrabacher’s office, Prince joined the Navy SEALS before setting up a private military company called Blackwater in 1997. At the height of Blackwater’s notoriety—after 14 civilians were unlawfully killed in Iraq—Behrends, who was by then a lobbyist, did work for the company, for which his firm was reportedly paid $300,000 a year.
Rohrabacher also did his share of advocacy for his former intern. “Prince is on his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was,” he said in 2007 after a House investigation raised concerns about Blackwater’s conduct.
Behrends, who would later return to the more modestly remunerated world of public service, Prince, and Rohrabacher have remained close for years, in part because their paths continue to cross.
More recently, Prince has been described as an informal adviser to the Trump team. He was a regular guest on Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart satellite radio show before Bannon joined the White House as chief strategist to the president.
Prince also donated $250,000 in total to the Trump campaign and one of the pro-Trump super PACs. His sister, Betsy DeVos, is Trump’s education secretary.
In April, The Washington Post reported that Prince had arranged to meet a Russian official in the Seychelles. The newspaper reported that the FBI was probing allegations that the meeting was part of an effort to establish a direct communications back channel between Trump and Moscow.
Like his old boss had done with his hearing gambit six months earlier, Prince stood accused of privately doing Russia’s bidding.
Showtime
As Rohrabacher’s plan to hold that extraordinary June hearing with strong pro-Russian views developed, Andrei Nekrasov, who directed the anti-Magnitsky movie, said Behrends reached out to him to testify. Veselnitskaya was also approached.
It was Rohrabacher who put in the call to his old friend Matlock. “He and I share a view on the importance of getting along with the other nuclear power,” Matlock told The Daily Beast. “He asked me if I was willing to come to Washington and he was going to set up hearings at his subcommittee.”
“Rohrabacher did have a number of Russians who had done a film about the case in Moscow that had inspired the Magnitsky Act in Congress, and they had found that the story that was being pervaded here by Browder and his people was not the accurate one,” Matlock added. “I don’t know who’s right about that, but I do believe it’s wrong to suppress evidence.”
Matlock didn’t need to worry. Rohrabacher’s staff promoted the movie’s screening at the Newseum, which was attended by Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya, and the congressman from California entered a detailed statement from the director into the congressional record.
For Rohrabacher’s proposed hearing to be a success, Magnitsky skeptics needed the opportunity to challenge Browder directly. And on May 27, 2016, Behrends emailed Browder inviting him to be a witness.
Two weeks earlier, Behrends had been briefed on evidence gathered by the Russian authorities to tarnish Browder’s reputation, according to an email reviewed by The Daily Beast. The email was from Mark Cymrot to Behrends, a lawyer who was working for Prevezon at the time—just like Veselnitskaya.
Prevezon was facing a money-laundering trial in New York that alleged the company’s Russian owner had profited from the fraud Magnitsky had uncovered.
The email from Cymrot refers to a telephone call the day before and includes evidence and court papers to back up the Kremlin’s story that Browder was the one breaking financial laws in Russia.
When the Royce hearing did roll around, on June 14, one of the members of Congress on the committee was appalled by the litany of Kremlin lines being repeated by Rohrabacher and his friend Ambassador Matlock.
“I thought I’d just heard a presentation from RT,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) told The Daily Beast, referring to the Kremlin-funded English-language TV network.
Connolly said the rest of the committee had come to believe that evidence from a Russian source should be treated with considerable skepticism, as the country’s operatives are experts at disinformation and falsification of evidence.
He was alarmed to discover that Behrends had been taking briefings direct from Russia’s anti-Magnitsky operation.
“If that is corroborated, it is deeply disturbing,” Connolly said. “We are United States congressmen. Our job is to protect the interests of our country and our allies. It is not to collude with, excuse, dismiss, or, even worse, collaborate with a foreign adversary and its minions.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-lawmak ... back-to-dc
The Seven Circles of Donald Trump’s Russia Inferno
We now know that the president wasn’t ignorant of his campaign’s contacts with Moscow’s intelligence agents. But, on a scale, how complicit was he?
Back in May, Lawfare’s Jane Chong began compiling an annotated set of links to the known facts in the Donald Trump-Russia affair. At the same time, one of us co-authored a piece detailing seven possible theories that could explain the available evidence, ordered from least to most sinister. The first three theories included:
Theory #1: This is all a series of coincidences and disconnected events. Yes, Trump held positions favorable to Russia, which may have attracted supporters with Russian business interests. But that interest was unrelated to Trump himself, and each element is unconnected from every other element.
Theory #2: Trump attracted Russophiles. A variant of Theory #1, by this read, Trump’s many unsavory tendencies, including his solicitude for Vladimir Putin, meant the only people willing to work for him held similarly fringe views on the subject or had shady business ties to the Russians. The Russian hacking operation thus coexisted with a “largely unconnected incentive for people with untoward Russian business connections to attach themselves to Trump. The latter incentive may have resulted in individuals doing unsavory or even illegal things or acting on behalf of Russian interests, but it did not involve any Russian infiltration of the Trump campaign as such, much less Russian corruption of Trump himself.”
Theory #3: The Russian operation was not about helping Trump but instead about harming the more probable winner, Hillary Clinton.
With last week’s revelations regarding the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and multiple individuals they believed were connected to the Russian government, these theories seem less plausible. Those emails, after all, demonstrate that at least some central figures in the Trump campaign were, in fact, specifically informed — with almost comical explicitness — of the Russian government’s effort to interfere in the election. They were also informed that the Russian motivation was to assist Trump. And the Trump campaign welcomed and, at a minimum, attempted to participate in that effort.
So what’s left? Well, back in May, the remaining possibilities included:
Theory #4: Russian intelligence actively penetrated the Trump campaign, but Trump was not aware.
Theory #5: Russian intelligence actively penetrated the Trump campaign, and Trump did know or should have known.
Theory #6: There really is some kind of kompromat, or compromising material, and Trump’s uncharacteristic consistency in praising and supporting Putin was motivated by the fear that Russia would release negative information about him.
Theory #7: While implausible, the final theory that accounted for all known facts was that the president of the United States is a Russian agent.
Note that merely six months into Trump’s presidency, the likely explanations for his conduct now reside on the decidedly more sinister end of the spectrum. Or, at least, if you’re inclined to favor the less sinister side of the spectrum, you now have to account for the known actions of individuals at the center of the campaign that seem more consistent with the theories at the more sinister end of it.
To be sure, there is no more evidence today than there was before to support the very worst possibilities: the theory that the Russians have kompromat on Trump or that he is a true Manchurian candidate. There is, however, substantially more information to support the theory that Russian intelligence endeavored to, and in fact managed to, infiltrate the Trump campaign and that Trump knew or should have known it was happening. And there’s at least some evidence that the purpose of that infiltration was to help the campaign by giving it dirt on Trump’s opponent.
Remember that this is actually not the first story in which people associated with Team Trump got — or sought — help from Moscow. Before the New York Times broke the news on Don Jr., the Wall Street Journal reported that now deceased Republican operative Peter W. Smith sought to obtain emails purportedly hacked from Clinton’s private server, including from groups he suspected were linked to Russian intelligence. Smith claimed to have support from high-level Trump campaign staffers, including then future and now former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The story leaves ambiguous the extent of actual involvement or knowledge on the part of the Trump campaign of Smith’s activities, as well as whether Smith was in contact with real Russian intelligence operatives or merely imposters looking to take him for a ride.
But the Trump Jr. meeting leaves no such ambiguities. The participants were the tightest of Trump’s inner circle — his campaign manager, son, and son-in-law — and the disclosed emails spell out in black and white an account of the Russian government’s intent and its ambitions to assist the Trump campaign. If the younger Trump was surprised to learn of this, he did not demonstrate it with his response: “If it’s what you say I love it.” And if he had anxieties about guiding that involvement, he suppressed them when he suggested a specific time frame — later in the summer — for the disclosure of material.
The White House insists that Donald Trump was unaware of this meeting — held by his close family one floor beneath his office in Trump Tower while he was on the premises — though it appears the president himself has wavered on this particular talking point. He told the press pool on Air Force One that “in fact, maybe it was mentioned at some point,” though he said he was unaware that it was about possible derogatory information about Clinton.
Those looking to the behavior of the Trump campaign to tie together Smith’s efforts and Trump Jr.’s meetings in some sort of broader conspiracy may be looking in the wrong place. These revelations may well be further indication of “systemic, sustained, furtive” coordination not by the Trump team itself but by the Russians. As Moscow’s intelligence operatives sought to make inroads, they may have found receptivity in probing in different places at different times — from the inner circle to more tangential figures. Think of the coordination then not as some grand conspiracy on the part of the Trump camp but as a pervasive rot among those tied to Trump that created opportunities for the Russians to exploit. The unifying characteristic may not be some grand plan to “collude” but rather a lack of commitment to resisting intervention from hostile foreign adversaries in free and fair elections — a lack of resistance that gave a foreign adversary multiple opportunities to take advantage over time.
These newer revelations also raise more possible scenarios and theories that were not part of the original seven. One that has gotten a lot of attention is the speech Trump gave the same day his son first received the email, in which he promised to give a future speech revealing damaging information on Clinton. This suggests that the fundamental relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia may have been the opposite of espionage; typically, espionage is about exfiltrating information from a campaign, but this sought to inject information into it.
The public record actually has some other suggestive indications of a relationship along these lines. The very public elements of Trump’s tacit cooperation with the Russians have been widely noted. He welcomed the Russian release of Clinton’s emails; he proclaimed to love WikiLeaks; he denied Russian involvement in the whole affair; he enthusiastically used the fruits of Russia’s illicit efforts to attack his opponent; and he had a monthslong bromance with the Russian dictator, after all. There is, however, another part of the Russian operation that Trump publicly supported that has gotten far less attention — and now looks at least somewhat more sinister.
The U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of 2016 election interference noted that the Russian operation comprised two distinct elements. One part was helping Trump, but there was another part, too:
When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the presidency the Russian influence campaign focused more on undercutting Secretary Clinton’s legitimacy and crippling her presidency from its start, including by impugning the fairness of the election.
Before the election, Russian diplomats had publicly denounced the US electoral process and were prepared to publicly call into question the validity of the results. Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory, judging from their social media activity.
The identifiable efforts to discredit a possible Clinton victory were twofold: promoting the idea that the Democratic primary was “rigged” against Clinton’s opponent, Bernie Sanders, and creating uncertainty regarding the legitimacy of the election outcome. Trump heavily abetted both of these goals.
NPR notes that on March 4, 2016, a Russian political analyst with deep ties to the Kremlin posted a YouTube video that, among other charges, impugned the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system. Alexander Dugin called American vote counting “stupid and fake” and claimed (falsely) that while “the majority votes for Sanders,” Clinton won by “bribing the electors.” Between the time of the Dugin video and the inauguration, Donald Trump tweeted about a “rigged” election at least 29 times. At least eight of these tweets (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,specifically alleged that the Democratic primary was rigged against Sanders — which is to say that it closely hewed to the Kremlin’s talking point.
Trump had similar critiques of the Republican primary and of the U.S. election in general. At a campaign rally in August 2016 in Columbus, Ohio, he said, “I’m afraid the election’s going to be rigged. I have to be honest.” In a Fox News interview a day later, he claimed, “People are going to walk in. They’re going to vote 10 times, maybe.” That same month, his campaign website encouraged people to become “Trump Election Observer[s]” to “Help … Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!”
Furthermore, when it appeared overwhelmingly likely that Clinton would win the presidency, Trump openly and repeatedly floated the possibility that he would refuse to concede the election. When asked about doing so, he told the New York Times, “We’re going to have to see. We’re going to see what happens. We’re going to have to see.” He refused to offer a direct answer when asked at the third debate, saying, “I will look at it at the time. I will keep you in suspense.” Later, he pledged to accept the election results only “if I win.”
The relationship between Trump’s talking points over time and those pushed by the Kremlin does not mean that Trump was receiving secret, covert messaging help from Russian spies. The Russians were, after all, running RT and Sputnik and had a giant influence operation as part of their active measures campaign — an influence campaign that may have influenced the election, as well as some voters. Trump’s claims of a rigged outcome may have been preemptive attempts to balm his legendarily fragile ego in the event of defeat, attempts that may have dovetailed nicely with what Russia was putting out for reasons of its own. And the fact that Trump was, once again, directly mirroring the Kremlin’s talking points could well be just a coincidence — or it could be that the Kremlin was mirroring his talking points, though the Russian government does appear to have gotten there first.
But the degree of message compatibility here is worth noting if for no other reason than that the pattern thus far is that, as one bombshell revelation follows another, the more innocent explanations do seem to slip out of the realm of the plausible.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/19/the ... ign=buffer
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 19, 2017 10:07 pm
Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions
By PETER BAKER, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MAGGIE HABERMAN
JULY 19, 2017
Trump on Sessions’s Recusal From Russia Investigation: ‘Very Unfair’
In edited audio excerpts from an interview with New York Times reporters, President Trump discussed Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump Jr., Robert S. Mueller III and the newly disclosed conversation he had with Vladimir V. Putin. Publish Date July 19, 2017. Photo by Stephen
WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency, calling the decision “very unfair to the president.”
In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.
Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned investigators against delving into matters too far afield from Russia. Mr. Trump never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, nor would he outline circumstances under which he might do so. But he left open the possibility as he expressed deep grievance over an investigation that has taken a political toll in the six months since he took office.
Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”
While the interview touched on an array of issues, including health care, foreign affairs and politics, the investigation dominated the conversation. He said that as far as he knew, he was not under investigation himself, despite reports that Mr. Mueller is looking at whether the president obstructed justice by firing Mr. Comey.
“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” he said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
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Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in June. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times
Describing a newly disclosed informal conversation he had with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a dinner of world leaders in Germany this month, Mr. Trump said they talked for about 15 minutes, mostly about “pleasantries.” But Mr. Trump did say that they talked “about adoption.” Mr. Putin banned American adoptions of Russian children in 2012 after the United States enacted sanctions on Russians accused of human rights abuses, an issue that remains a sore point in relations with Moscow.
Mr. Trump acknowledged that it was “interesting” that adoptions came up since his son, Donald Trump Jr., said that was the topic of a meeting he had with several Russians with ties to the Kremlin during last year’s campaign. Even though emails show that the session had been set up to pass along incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, the president said he did not need such material from Russia about Mrs. Clinton last year because he already had more than enough.
The interview came as the White House was trying to move beyond the Russia story and regain momentum after the collapse of health care legislation in the Senate. Relaxed and engaged, the president sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, with only one aide, Hope Hicks, sitting in on the interview. The session was sandwiched between a White House lunch with Republican senators and an event promoting “Made in America” week.
Over the course of 50 minutes, the often-fiery Mr. Trump demonstrated his more amiable side, joking about holding hands with the president of France and musing about having a military parade down a main avenue in Washington. He took satisfaction that unemployment has fallen and stock markets have risen to record highs on his watch.
At one point, his daughter Ivanka arrived at the doorway with her daughter, Arabella, who ran to her grandfather and gave him a kiss. He greeted the 6-year-old girl as “baby,” then urged her to show the reporters her ability to speak Chinese. She obliged.
But Mr. Trump left little doubt during the interview that the Russia investigation remained a sore point. His pique at Mr. Sessions, in particular, seemed fresh even months after the attorney general’s recusal. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy and was rewarded with a key cabinet slot, but has been more distant from the president lately.
“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he added. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”
Mr. Trump also faulted Mr. Sessions for his testimony during Senate confirmation hearings when Mr. Sessions said he had not met with any Russians even though he had met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”
A spokesman for Mr. Sessions declined to comment on Wednesday.
The president added a new allegation against Mr. Comey, whose dismissal has become a central issue for critics who said it amounted to an attempt to obstruct the investigation into Russian meddling in the election and any possible collusion with Mr. Trump’s team.
Mr. Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Mr. Comey afterward pulled Mr. Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president, including supposed sexual escapades in Moscow. The F.B.I. has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.
In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,” Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”
The president dismissed the assertions in the dossier: “When he brought it to me, I said this is really, made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal.”
Mr. Comey declined to comment on Wednesday.
But Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials decided it was best for him to raise the subject with Mr. Trump alone because he was going to remain as F.B.I. director. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that he disclosed the details of the dossier to Mr. Trump because he thought that the news media would soon be publishing details from it and that Mr. Trump had a right to know what information was out there about him.
Mr. Trump rebutted Mr. Comey’s claim that in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, the president asked him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that Mr. Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Mr. Comey.
“I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”
Mr. Trump was also critical of Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, reprising some of his past complaints that lawyers in his office contributed money to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. He noted that he actually interviewed Mr. Mueller to replace Mr. Comey just before his appointment as special counsel.
“He was up here and he wanted the job,” Mr. Trump said. After he was named special counsel, “I said, ‘What the hell is this all about?’ Talk about conflicts. But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.”
The president also expressed discontent with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a former federal prosecutor from Baltimore. When Mr. Sessions recused himself, the president said he was irritated to learn where his deputy was from. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any,” he said of the predominantly Democratic city.
He complained that Mr. Rosenstein had in effect been on both sides when it came to Mr. Comey. The deputy attorney general recommended Mr. Comey be fired but then appointed Mr. Mueller, who may be investigating whether the dismissal was an obstruction of justice. “Well, that’s a conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said. “Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are?”
As for Andrew G. McCabe, the acting F.B.I. director, the president suggested that he, too, had a conflict. Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received nearly $500,000 in 2015 during a losing campaign for the Virginia Senate from a political action committee affiliated with Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is close friends with Hillary and Bill Clinton.
In his first description of his dinnertime conversation with Mr. Putin at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Trump played down its significance. He said his wife, Melania, was seated next to Mr. Putin at the other end of a table filled with world leaders.
“The meal was going toward dessert,” he said. “I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.”
He noted the adoption issue came up in the June 2016 meeting between his son and Russian visitors. “I actually talked about Russian adoption with him,” he said, meaning Mr. Putin. “Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting.”
But the president repeated that he did not know about his son’s meeting at the time and added that he did not need the Russians to provide damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.
“There wasn’t much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying,” he said. “Unless somebody said that she shot somebody in the back, there wasn’t much I could add to my repertoire.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/p ... ussia.html
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 19, 2017 10:56 pm
Big German Bank, Key to Trump’s Finances, Faces New Scrutiny
By BEN PROTESS, JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG and JESSE DRUCKERJULY 19, 2017
Trump family properties, clockwise from top left: Trump World Tower, New York; Trump National Doral in Miami; Trump International Hotel in Washington; Trump International Hotel in Chicago; 40 Wall Street in New York and the former New York Times building in New York. Credit The New York Times
During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump pointed to his relationship with Deutsche Bank to counter reports that big banks were skeptical of doing business with him.
After a string of bankruptcies in his casino and hotel businesses in the 1990s, Mr. Trump became somewhat of an outsider on Wall Street, leaving the giant German bank among the few major financial institutions willing to lend him money.
Now that two-decades-long relationship is coming under scrutiny.
Banking regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, which caters to an ultrarich clientele, according to three people briefed on the review who were not authorized to speak publicly. The regulators want to know if the loans might expose the bank to heightened risks.
Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators about the Trump accounts, according to two people briefed on the matter. And the bank is expecting to eventually have to provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Continue reading the main story
It was not clear what information the bank might ultimately provide. Generally, the bank is seen as central to understanding Mr. Trump’s finances since it is the only major financial institution that continues to conduct sizable business with him. Deutsche Bank has also lent money to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and to his family real estate business.
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Donald J. Trump in 1996 at the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. Two years later, he began a banking relationship with Deutsche Bank. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Although Deutsche Bank recently landed in legal trouble for laundering money for Russian entities — paying more than $600 million in penalties to New York and British regulators — there is no indication of a Russian connection to Mr. Trump’s loans or accounts at Deutsche Bank, people briefed on the matter said. The bank, which declined to comment, scrutinizes its accounts for problematic ties as part of so-called “know your customer” banking rules and other requirements.
And with one of its most famous clients headed to the White House, the bank designed a plan for overseeing the accounts of Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner and presented it to regulators at the New York State Department of Financial Services early this year. The plan essentially called for monitoring the accounts for red flags such as exceptionally favorable loan terms or unusual partners.
Additionally, the New York regulators recently requested information related to the hundreds of millions in loans Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management division provided Mr. Trump, one of the people said, paying particular attention to personal guarantees he made to obtain the loans. Those guarantees have declined as the loans were paid down and the property values increased, but it remains a source of interest to the regulators.
While there is no formal investigation of the bank — and personal guarantees are often required when people receive big loans from their wealth managers — the New York regulators have questioned whether the guarantee could create problems for Deutsche Bank should Mr. Trump fail to pay his debts. To collect, the bank would either have to sue the president, or risk being seen as cutting him a special deal.
It is not a hypothetical concern: Mr. Trump sued the bank in 2008 to delay paying back an earlier loan.
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Deutsche Bank expects it must eventually provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Credit Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Trump has had a complicated relationship with the bank over the past 20 years, which has included more than $4 billion in loan commitments and potential bond offerings, a majority of which were completed, according to a New York Times review of securities filings and interviews with people with knowledge of the deals. Despite all the risk-taking — and a brief loan default that spurred the 2008 litigation — Mr. Trump’s business has made the bank money, the people said.
A spokesman for the New York regulators declined to comment, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
A few years after Mr. Trump sued the bank in 2008, he moved his business from the bank’s commercial real estate lending division to its private wealth division, where executives were more willing to deal with him, according to the people briefed on the matter.
In the past six years, the private wealth unit helped finance three of Mr. Trump’s properties, including a golf course near Miami and a hotel in Washington, according to Mr. Trump’s most recent financial disclosures and the people with knowledge of the loans.
The size of the loans — totaling about $300 million — is somewhat unusual by Wall Street standards, according to former and current Deutsche Bank executives and wealth managers at other Wall Street firms.
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The Trump National Doral resort in Miami. Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
While it is not unheard-of for real estate developers to obtain large wealth management loans for projects deemed too risky for an investment bank, it differs from bank to bank, and those that do issue loans of that size typically do so for top clients known to pay their bills.
Mr. Trump’s wealth manager at Deutsche Bank, Rosemary Vrablic, has specialized in real estate lending and is known for taking risks on clients, two of the executives and wealth managers said. And her relationship with Mr. Trump is close enough that Ms. Vrablic attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration, according to a person who attended.
Mr. Kushner has established his own relationship with the bank. He and his mother have an unsecured line of credit from Deutsche Bank, valued at up to $25 million, and the family business he ran until January, Kushner Companies, received a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank last year.
Mr. Kushner’s dealings at the bank have included Ms. Vrablic. In 2013, he ordered up a glowing profile of her in the real estate magazine he owned, The Mortgage Observer, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The piece concluded with a disclaimer that her “past clients” included Mr. Kushner.
In an interview with The Times last year, Mr. Trump suggested reporters speak with Ms. Vrablic about his banking relationships.
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Trump International Hotel in Washington. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
“Why don’t you call the head of Deutsche Bank? Her name is Rosemary Vrablic,” he said. “She is the boss.”
A Relationship Is Born
It was 1998, and Mike Offit, fresh off the trading floor of Goldman Sachs for a new job at Deutsche Bank, was hired to put Deutsche Bank’s real estate lending business on the map. To do that, Mr. Offit knew he had to snag big name developers.
That moment arrived when Rob Horowitz, with the real estate firm Cooper-Horowitz, approached him with an idea: Would he work with Mr. Trump, who at the time had a tarnished reputation after several of his casinos landed in bankruptcy?
“My reaction was, why wouldn’t I?” Mr. Offit recalled in a recent interview.
To Mr. Offit, there was little downside to hearing Mr. Trump’s pitch. A short time later, Mr. Trump came by Mr. Offit’s Midtown Manhattan office to discuss a loan for renovations at his 40 Wall Street building. Unlike other developers who arrived with their entourages, Mr. Trump showed up alone, Mr. Offit said, and despite a reputation for bluster, he knew the financials of the deal cold.
“There was some resistance from management because of Donald’s reputation, but I told them that our loan would be wildly overly collateralized even in the worst-case scenario,” Mr. Offit said.
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Rosemary Vrablic of Deutsche Bank helped facilitate loans to Mr. Trump. Credit Michael Nagle
More deals followed. Later in the year, Mr. Trump needed $300 million to build Trump World Tower near the United Nations. But he required a construction loan, which, at the time, Deutsche did not have the right staff to manage. Determined to get the deal nonetheless, Mr. Offit found another German bank to make the loan with the commitment that Deutsche Bank would take possession once the building was constructed.
But as the deal was being finalized, the other German bank had second thoughts because of worries of a labor strike. Just as the deal seemed to be falling apart, Mr. Trump produced a signed commitment from all the major construction unions promising not to strike.
“We were all amazed he managed to get that,” said Mr. Offit, who retired from the bank in 1999.
In the mid 2000s, Mr. Trump was in need of another construction loan. But this time, the loan — up to $640 million to build Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago — did not go as well.
A few years after the project began, the 2008 financial crisis upended the global economy and Mr. Trump fell behind on loan payments. According to a person briefed on the deal, Deutsche Bank was discussing a possible extension, when Mr. Trump sued it to avoid paying $40 million that he had personally guaranteed.
His argument, as detailed in a letter to the bank, was novel: “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing,” Mr. Trump wrote.
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Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. Credit Nathan Weber for The New York Times
With the help of a lawyer — Steven Schlesinger of Garden City, N.Y. — Mr. Trump argued that the financial crisis allowed him to invoke the extraordinary event clause in his contract with the bank. Mr. Trump argued Deutsche Bank should pay him $3 billion in damages.
The bank filed its own action against Mr. Trump, demanding he make good on the loan. In a legal filing, Deutsche Bank, which had distributed the loan to a number of other banks, called the lawsuit “classic Trump.”
The standoff culminated with a meeting in Trump Tower, Mr. Schlesinger said.
At the meeting, Mr. Trump threatened to remove his name from the building if he did not get more time to pay. That move, Mr. Trump suggested, would reduce the value of the building.
Ultimately, the bank granted Mr. Trump additional time to repay. And when he did, it was through the Wall Street equivalent of borrowing from one parent to repay the other.
Mr. Trump received a loan from Deutsche Bank’s wealth management unit to pay off the debt he owed the bank’s real estate lending division, according to two people briefed on the transaction. The wealth management unit later issued another loan for the Chicago project that is valued at $25 million to $50 million.
Photo
The Puck Building in New York. Credit Aaron Zebrook for The New York Times
A Personal Banker
Ms. Vrablic, who helped facilitate the wealth management unit’s loans to Mr. Trump, has built a career lending to the rich and famous.
She got her start on Wall Street at Citibank’s private bank in the late 1980s and later worked at Bank of America before joining Deutsche Bank in 2006.
Ms. Vrablic, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has a reputation for being an aggressive advocate for her clients, according to two executives familiar with her work and profiles written in The American Banker and The Mortgage Observer.
In a 2013 Mortgage Observer article, one of her clients, Herbert Simon, owner of the Indiana Pacers, remarked that “when she came into the picture, it was a tough time to get money, and she was able to be very creative and get us what we needed.”
In a 1999 American Banker article, Ms. Vrablic described her clients as having “many homes, ex-wives, and many children.”
Photo
Josef Ackermann, Deutsche Bank’s former chief executive, now chairman of the Bank of Cyprus. Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch, was a large shareholder of that bank. Credit Thomas Peter/Reuters
Mr. Trump fit that mold, but he was far from her only client in the rarefied world of New York real estate. Others included Stephen Ross, the chairman and founder of the Related Companies in New York.
Mr. Ross extolled Ms. Vrablic’s ability to make deals happen. “She brings knowledge — and the fact is that if she tells you something, you know it’s going to get done,” he told The Mortgage Observer.
Ms. Vrablic was quoted in the same article as saying that real estate is her “deep dive.”
While Mr. Kushner has never disclosed the exact nature of his business with Ms. Vrablic, his financial disclosure shows a line of credit worth between $5 million and $25 million. And according to securities filings, Deutsche Bank provided a $285 million mortgage to Kushner Companies to help it refinance the loan it used to purchase several floors of retail space in the former New York Times building on 43rd Street in Manhattan.
Mr. Kushner’s company bought the space from Africa Israel Investments, a company owned by Lev Leviev, which has a sizable real estate portfolio in Russia.
Deutsche Bank, other securities filings show, is also involved in loans the Kushner Companies received for the Puck Building in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood and a property on Maiden Lane near Wall Street. The bank was responsible for either pooling those loans into mortgage-backed securities that were sold to investors, according to Trepp, a data and analytics firm, or distributing payments to the investors.
Photo
Mr. Rybolovlev in Monaco in 2015. He purchased Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida, Credit Benjamin Bechet for The New York Times
In the autumn of 2014, Ms. Vrablic and Mr. Kushner attended the Frick Collection’s dinner, a black-tie event where patrons dined among famous works of art by Manet, El Greco and Turner.
A picture of the pair appeared in the New York Social Diary. Mr. Kushner, dressed in a tuxedo, had his arm around Ms. Vrablic.
The Russia Question
There is no indication that federal investigators suspect a Russian connection to Mr. Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank, according to people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Horowitz, of the real estate firm Cooper-Horowitz, also saw no Russian ties in his many years of working with Mr. Trump.
“I’ve arranged financing for the majority of Mr. Trump’s transactions, and I’ve never once seen any money coming to him from Russia,” he said. Mr. Horowitz was not involved in any of the private wealth management loans from Ms. Vrablic.
Photo
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who was among the people who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential campaign. Credit Yury Martyanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But separate from Mr. Trump, the German bank has a host of Russian connections.
Soon after Mr. Trump took office, the bank settled allegations that it helped Russian investors launder as much as $10 billion through its branches in Moscow, London and New York. In May, the Federal Reserve reached its own settlement with the bank over the money laundering violations.
Deutsche Bank also had a “cooperation agreement” with the Russian state-owned development bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been swept up in the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election. And it had ties to VTB Bank, a far larger Russian bank facing sanctions in the United States and the European Union. The Russian firm’s investment banking arm, VTB Capital, was created by hiring dozens of bankers from Deutsche Bank’s Moscow office.
Some ties are less direct. Josef Ackermann, Deutsche Bank’s former chief executive, is now chairman of the board at the Bank of Cyprus. A large shareholder of that bank was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who purchased Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida.
And in May, federal prosecutors settled a case with a Cyprus investment vehicle owned by a Russian businessman with close family connections to the Kremlin.
The firm, Prevezon Holdings, was represented by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who was among the people who met during the presidential campaign with Donald Trump Jr. about Hillary Clinton.
Federal prosecutors in the United States claimed Prevezon, which admitted no wrongdoing, laundered the proceeds of an alleged Russian tax fraud through real estate. Prevezon and its partner relied in part on $90 million in financing from a big European financial institution, court records show.
It was Deutsche Bank.
Deutsche Bank expects subpoenas over Trump-Russia investigation
Source reveals Robert Mueller’s team and Trump’s exclusive bankers have established informal contacts and requests for information are forthcoming
Deutsche’s relationship with Trump and questions about hundreds in millions of loans have dogged the German bank and the White House for months. Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Oliver Laughland
Wednesday 19 July 2017 19.26 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 19 July 2017 20.13 EDT
Executives inside Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump’s personal bankers, are expecting that the bank will soon be receiving subpoenas or other requests for information from Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
A person close to the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said that Mueller’s team and the bank have already established informal contact in connection to the federal investigation.
Analysis How Donald Trump became Deutsche Bank's biggest headache
It’s no surprise the bank that likes to say yes to Trump is reviewing its arrangements with him now he is president
Deutsche’s relationship with Trump and questions about hundreds of millions in loans have dogged the German bank and the White House for months. They have also been the subject of intense scrutiny among some Democrats on Capitol Hill, who have demanded the bank turn over detailed information about the president’s accounts.
The requests for information from Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House financial services committee, have focused on whether any Russian entities may have provided financial guarantees for the loans that were made to the president or his immediate family members.
The Guardian reported in February that the bank launched a review of Trump’s account earlier this year in order to gauge whether there were any suspicious connections to Russia and did not discover anything suspicious.
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser in the White House; her husband, Jared Kushner, who is also a presidential adviser; and Kushner’s mother, Seryl Stadtmauer, are all clients of Deutsche Bank.
US media outlets have reported that Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign will include a close examination of the president’s finances and businesses. While Deutsche Bank did engage in banking transactions with Russian banks as late as 2005, including some loan activity, a person familiar with the matter said the activity was not related to Trump’s accounts or his family.
The president has decried that the investigation into his campaign is “fake news” and has vociferously denied that the campaign ever colluded with Russian government officials to try to gain an edge in his 2016 race against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Any move by Mueller’s team to pursue Trump’s personal financial record comes as the bank continues to negotiate a settlement with the Department of Justice over its so-called mirror trading scheme, in which the bank’s former Moscow branch is alleged to have allowed $10bn to flow out of Russia. Democrats on Capitol Hill have been demanding answers about who might have benefited from the scheme.
Deutsche has been fined more than $6bn in connection to compliance failures since 2015.
According to an analysis by Bloomberg, Trump now owes Deutsche, his biggest creditor, around $300m. He has four large mortgages, all issued by Deutsche’s private bank. The loans are guaranteed against the president’s properties: a new deluxe hotel in Washington DC’s old post office building, just around the corner from the White House; his Chicago tower hotel; and the Trump National Doral Miami resort.
A person close to the matter said other financial institutions with ties to Trump would also likely receive requests for information from Mueller’s team, including Bank of America.
Lawrence Grayson, Bank of America spokesman, declined to comment on whether the bank had received or was anticipating any subpoenas for records from Mueller’s investigation.
Deutsche Bank did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Mueller did not respond to a request for comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... -subpoenas
by seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 20, 2017 12:33 pm
by The Consul » Thu Jul 20, 2017 5:15 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 20, 2017 5:28 pm
DONALD TRUMP
The President vs. Federal Law Enforcement: Trump Attacks Everyone
By Benjamin Wittes Thursday, July 20, 2017, 8:17 AM
President Trump enters the White House (@POTUS)
President Trump yesterday issued a stunning vote of no-confidence in basically everyone currently in a leadership position in the Justice Department, the FBI, or the special counsel’s office—in other words, not just some federal law enforcement, but all of it. The President’s rebuke comes in a lengthy interview with the New York Times yesterday, and it reaches everyone from the attorney general to staff attorneys hired by Robert Mueller—whose investigation he pointedly did not promise not to terminate. His complaint? They’re all, in different ways, not serving him. And serving him, he makes clear, is their real job.
It’s a chilling interview—chilling because of the portrait it paints of presidential paranoia, chilling for its monomaniacal view of the relationship between the president and law enforcement, and chilling for what it says about Trump’s potential readiness to interfere with the Mueller investigation.
If Attorney General Jeff Sessions does not resign this morning, it will reflect nothing more or less than a lack of self respect on his part—a willingness to hold office even with the overt disdain of the President of the United States, at whose pleasure he serves, nakedly on the record.
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The president is evidently distraught at Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation “right after he gets the job.” (Sessions recused himself on March 2—three weeks after his swearing-in and fifteen weeks after his nomination.) The Attorney General gave the president “zero” heads up, Trump says. In Trump’s view: “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.” He twice describes Sessions’s decision as “unfair to the president,” seemingly unaware that his recusal was almost surely compelled by Justice Department recusal rules. That is, the President is openly expressing bitterness toward his attorney general for following the rules—because the rules don’t favor Trump’s interests. He wants an attorney general who will actively supervise the Justice Department, and the Russia investigation, in a fashion congenial to his interests, and he has no compunction about saying so explicitly. He made perfectly clear that he regrets appointing Sessions. He made equally clear that Sessions’s job is, in his mind, a personal service contract to him and that if Sessions couldn’t deliver on service to Trump, he shouldn’t have taken the position.
To add insult to injury, Trump also heaped scorn on the then-nominee’s inability to give satisfactory answers about his meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during his confirmation hearing—on which he blames the recusal. “Sessions gave some bad answers,” he said. The president went on: “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t. He then becomes attorney general, and he then announces he’s going to recuse himself. Why wouldn’t he have told me that before?”
Sessions has hardly shrouded himself in glory over the past few months, but it is wildly improper for the President to talk about the attorney general in this fashion. The attorney general serves at his pleasure. If he is dissatisfied with Sessions’s performance, Trump can remove him. Unlike the FBI director, Sessions does not have a ten-year term that creates some normative expectation of retention. It would be, of course, inappropriate to fire the attorney general for having the temerity to follow Justice Department recusal policies on the advice of career lawyers, but it’s also inappropriate to whine publicly about his conduct without removing him. For those who need a reminder, the proper thing for a President to say publicly about a recusal in a live investigative matter—one that involves him directly and personally—is nothing whatsoever.
But Trump was just getting started in his attacks on federal law enforcement with his comments about Sessions. Moving down the Justice Department chain of command, the President is also cool toward Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, describing Sessions’ recusal as causing the president to “end up with a second man.” He distances Rosenstein from both himself and Sessions: he declares that “Jeff hardly knew” Rosenstein and characterizes Rosenstein as “from Baltimore” before noting, “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any.” (Rosenstein did work in Baltimore in his capacity as the U.S. Attorney for Maryland, but he grew up in Pennsylvania.)
Trump’s beef with Rosenstein is, of course, the deputy attorney general’s appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. He points to “conflicts” in Rosenstein’s role: that Rosenstein both recommended Comey’s firing and now is “involved in the case.” This frustration seems to be long-running: Trump made a similar point on Twitter last month, writing, “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!” While Trump has previously admitted that Rosenstein’s memo criticizing Comey was pretextual and that the president would have dismissed the FBI director regardless, yesterday he hedged, saying, “Now, perhaps I would have fired Comey anyway, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have the letter, O.K.”
Then there’s Mueller himself. The president declares bluntly, “I have done nothing wrong. A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case.” And he regards Mueller as conflicted because he was briefly considered to replace Comey.
Trump describes his meeting with Mueller while interviewing him for the job of FBI Director as “wonderful” and says that “of course … he wanted the job.” And he seems to regard this as some kind of conflict of interest on Mueller’s part. Trump does not seem to understand or even be able to imagine that Mueller might have been talking to him out of a sense of public service, not personal interest, with respect to an agency he had led for a long time and treasures and which Trump had plunged into crisis.
“Talk about conflicts? But he was interviewing for the job.” Trump also hints at knowledge of additional, as-yet-unreported conflicts on Mueller’s part, stating, “There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.” Following his appointment as special counsel, ethics officials at the Justice Department declared Mueller free of conflicts on the matter of his prior work with WilmerHale, which also employs counsel for Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Paul Manafort.
Nor did the President stop at Mueller personally. He also went after his staff. In response to a question about whether he would consider dismissing Mueller, he declared, “Look, there are so many conflicts that everybody has.” Previously, the president has alleged that other members of the Mueller’s staff have conflicts of interest, stating last month on Fox & Friends that “the people that have been hired are all Hillary Clinton supporters, some of them worked for Hillary Clinton.” At least three members of the special counsel’s team have given money to Democrats and two gave the legal maximum to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, though Mueller himself was a registered Republican at the time of his FBI Directorship and has been widely described as apolitical.
And to top it off, the President apparently feels no compunction either about commenting on the proper scope of Mueller’s investigation substantively. When asked whether a potential investigation of the Trump family finances “unrelated to Russia” would constitute a “red line” in the investigation, Trump stated, “I think that’s a violation.” And he didn’t say no when asked whether such conduct would lead him to fire Mueller; rather, he hedged, stating that “I can’t answer that question because I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
Trump still wasn’t done. It’s not just the special counsel investigating him, his staff, the attorney general, and the deputy attorney general with whom the President of the United States has a beef. It’s also the FBI leadership—or that part of it, anyway, that he hasn’t already fired.
Trump was sharply critical of Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe on the grounds that McCabe’s wife received money from political organizations connected to Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, in support of her 2015 campaign for Virginia state Senate. The president uses this connection to suggest some partisan bias on McCabe’s part: “We have a director of the F.B.I., acting, who received $700,000, whose wife received $700,000 from, essentially, Hillary Clinton. ’Cause it was through Terry [McAuliffe]. Which is Hillary Clinton.”
The president’s point is somewhat unclear here, as he then jumps to a condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s conduct related to the FBI investigation into her private email server. But this is not the first time that he has used this line of attack against McCabe. In James Comey’s written statement provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee before his testimony, Comey describes a phone conversation in which the president informed Comey that “he hadn’t brought up ‘the McCabe thing’ because I had said McCabe [then Comey’s deputy] was honorable, although McAuliffe was close to the Clintons and had given him (I think he meant Deputy Director McCabe’s wife) campaign money.” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) voiced a similar criticism of McCabe during the confirmation hearing for Christopher Wray as FBI Director.
If, on reading this, it sounds like the President believes that law enforcement should be at his personal beck and call, that’s because that is, in fact, exactly what he believes. We know this because he made this belief perfectly clear in the interview as well. At one point, he offered an extraordinary account of the history of the FBI and its relationship to the Justice Department. He indicated that around the time of the Nixon administration, “out of courtesy, the F.B.I. started reporting to the Department of Justice.” He continued: “But there was nothing official, there was nothing from Congress. There was nothing — anything. But the FBI person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting. You know, which is interesting.”
Indeed.
Trump’s logic isn’t easy to follow here, but his core claim is unmistakeable—and “interesting” is a generous word for it: the FBI director serves the president. As a matter of constitutional hierarchy, this is of course true. But in investigative matters, the FBI director does not, or should not, serve the president by reporting to him. He serves the president by leading law enforcement in an independent and apolitical fashion. And it is fundamentally corrupt for any president to be asking him to do otherwise.
As for the convoluted rationale he uses to get to this corruption, well, suffice it to say that Trump’s suggestion that the FBI voluntarily began reporting to the Justice Department around the Nixon era betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the wave of critical Bureau reforms during that time. These were implemented shortly after Watergate and other scandals brought to light the FBI’s abusive and unlawful activities during the 48-year reign of Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Those reforms were, of course, designed to preclude exactly the kind of power relationship to which Trump now lays claim. In a foundational 1978 speech that has shaped subsequent Department policy, Jimmy Carter's attorney general, Griffin Bell, affirmed the independence of the Justice Department and its constituent entities, including the FBI. Bell declared, “it is improper for any Member of Congress, any member of the White House staff, or anyone else, to attempt to influence anyone in the Justice Department with respect to a particular litigation decision, except by legal argument or the provision of relevant facts.”
The astonishing implication of Trump’s view is that he believes the president may shut down an FBI investigation that displeases him. Indeed, Trump went so far as to say that too: when explaining why it would not be a problem even if he had told Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, he stated, “other people go a step further. I could have ended that whole thing just by saying—they say it can’t be obstruction because you can say: ‘It’s ended. It’s over. Period.’”
In an environment in which the President of the United States, in a single interview, expresses no-confidence in the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the special counsel, the acting FBI director, and the special counsel’s staff, and in which he makes clear that the FBI should be his personal force and that all of law enforcement should be about serving him, the principle protection is having people with backbone who are willing to do their jobs and stand up for one another in the elevation of their oaths of office over political survival.
Unfortunately, the signs are not particularly encouraging on this front. Even as the President was attacking him to the Times, Rosenstein was busy giving an interview to Fox News that won’t reassure anyone on Mueller’s staff that the acting attorney general is the man with whom to share a foxhole. After confirming that he stands by his recommendation to fire Comey and clucking about the confidentiality of memos, Rosenstein gave a lukewarm response to questions about Mueller’s staff. While Rosenstein defended his decision to appoint Mueller, he did not splash cold water on the notion that his staff may be compromised by political contributions. In response to MacCallum’s insinuation that “some of the attorneys he has hired ... have made donations to the Clinton campaign” and a question about whether this “bother[s]” him, Rosenstein passed up the chance to express confidence in a staff that ultimately reports to him. Instead, gave this ominously puzzling answer: “The Department of Justice, we judge by results. And so my view about that is, we'll see if they do the right thing.”
We are in a dangerous moment—one in which the President, with his infinite sense of grievance, feels entitled publicly to attack the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, and that apparatus, in turn, lacks a single person with the stature, the institutional position, and the fortitude to stand up to him. Sessions has not done so. While Rosenstein did the country an enormous service when he appointed Mueller, he acted as an enabler of the Comey firing in the first instance and did not do himself credit yesterday. Mueller certainly has the stature, but by the nature of his position he cannot say anything publicly; he is investigating the President and thus cannot also confront him. And McCabe, who has been both able and courageous in the aftermath of Comey’s firing, is in an acting capacity.
The man who had the stature, the institutional position, and the moral fiber to confront the President on such matters was Comey, who is no longer there and whom the President also slimed in his interview yesterday.
The result is an environment in which the President can say these things without obvious consequence, at least for now. Rosenstein or Sessions could change that today. If they were willing to be touched by greatness even for a moment, they would resign together with a strong statement in defense of the integrity of federal law enforcement, the men and women who carry it out, and the processes under which they work. That’s what people with honor would do in this situation.
Don’t hold your breath.
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