Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 21, 2017 10:40 am

catch up time with Felix Sater Senior Advisor to Donald Trump

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Trump, Russia and a Shadowy Business Partnership
An insider describes the Bayrock Group, its links to the Trump family and its mysterious access to funds. It isn't pretty.
By Timothy L. O'Brien
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June 21, 2017, 3:00 AM CDT

Trump, Arif and Sater, at right, Trump Soho launch party, 2007 Photographer: Mark Von Holden/WireImage
The special counsel’s investigation of the White House has come more sharply into focus.

Robert Mueller is examining whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice when he fired James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Washington Post recently reported. As we've heard for months now, there is also a probe of possible collusion between Trump's campaign team and the Kremlin to tilt the 2016 election in the president's favor.

But the Justice Department inquiry led by Mueller now has added flavors. The Post noted that the investigation also includes "suspicious financial activity" involving "Russian operatives." The New York Times was more specific in its account, saying that Mueller is looking at whether Trump associates laundered financial payoffs from Russian officials by channeling them through offshore accounts.


Trump has repeatedly labeled Comey's and Mueller's investigations "witch hunts," and his lawyers have said that the last decade of his tax returns (which the president has declined to release) would show that he had no income or loans from Russian sources. In May, Trump told NBC that he has no property or investments in Russia. "I am not involved in Russia," he said.

But that doesn't address national security and other problems that might arise for the president if Russia is involved in Trump, either through potentially compromising U.S. business relationships or through funds that flowed into his wallet years ago. In that context, a troubling history of Trump's dealings with Russians exists outside of Russia: in a dormant real-estate development firm, the Bayrock Group, which once operated just two floors beneath the president's own office in Trump Tower.

Bayrock partnered with the future president and his two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, on a series of real-estate deals between 2002 and about 2011, the most prominent being the troubled Trump Soho hotel and condominium in Manhattan.

During the years that Bayrock and Trump did deals together, the company was also a bridge between murky European funding and a number of projects in the U.S. to which the president once leant his name in exchange for handsome fees. Icelandic banks that dealt with Bayrock, for example, were easy marks for money launderers and foreign influence, according to interviews with government investigators, legislators, and others in Reykjavik, Brussels, Paris and London. Trump testified under oath in a 2007 deposition that Bayrock brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow, and said he was pondering investing there.

"It's ridiculous that I wouldn't be investing in Russia," Trump said in that deposition. "Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment."

One of Bayrock's principals was a career criminal named Felix Sater who had ties to Russian and American organized crime groups. Before linking up with the company and with Trump, he had worked as a mob informant for the U.S. government, fled to Moscow to avoid criminal charges while boasting of his KGB and Kremlin contacts there, and had gone to prison for slashing apart another man’s face with a broken cocktail glass.

In a series of interviews and a lawsuit, a former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, claims that he eventually departed from the firm because he became convinced that Bayrock was actually a front for money laundering.

Kriss has sued Bayrock, alleging that in addition to laundering money, the Bayrock team also skimmed cash from the operation, dodged taxes and cheated him out of millions of dollars. Sater and others at Bayrock would not comment for this column; in court documents they have contested Kriss's charges and describe him, essentially, as a disgruntled employee trying to shake them down.


Jody Kriss in a luxury unit in a building he is developing in New YorkPhotographer: Jeff Brown for Bloomberg
But Kriss's assertion that Bayrock was a criminal operation during the years it partnered with Trump has been deemed plausible enough to earn him a court victory: In December, a federal judge in New York said Kriss's lawsuit against Bayrock, which he first filed nine years ago, could proceed as a racketeering case.

(I have my own history in court with the president. Trump sued me in 2006 when I worked at the New York Times, alleging that my biography, “TrumpNation,” had misrepresented his business record and his wealth. Trump lost the suit in 2011; my lawyers deposed him and Sater during the litigation. Trump's representatives didn't respond to repeated interview requests for this column.)

Trump has said over the years that he barely knows Sater. In fact, Sater -- who former Bayrock employees say met frequently with Trump in the Trump Organization's New York headquarters, once shepherded the president's children around Moscow and carried a Trump Organization business card -- apparently has remained firmly in the orbit of the president and his closest advisers.

Sater made the front page of the New York Times in February for his role in a failed effort — along with Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen — to lobby former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on a Ukrainian peace proposal.

Comey was still Trump's FBI director when he testified before the House Intelligence Committee in March about Russian interference in the 2016 election. During that hearing, Comey was asked if he was "aware of" Felix Sater, his criminal history and his business dealings with the Trump Organization. Comey declined to comment.

It's unclear whether Sater and Bayrock are part of Mueller's investigation. But Mueller has populated his investigative team with veteran prosecutors expert in white-collar fraud and Russian-organized-crime probes. One of them, Andrew Weissmann, once led an FBI team that examined financial fraud leading to the demise of Enron. Before that, Weissmann was a prosecutor with the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn and part of a team that prosecuted Sater and mob associates for investment scams in the late 1990s.

However the Mueller probe unfolds, a tour of Trump's partnership with Bayrock exposes a number of uncomfortable truths about the president's business history, his judgment, and the possible vulnerabilities that his past as a freewheeling dealmaker — and his involvement with figures like Sater — have visited upon his present as the nation's chief executive.

Zegna Suits and Luxury Cars

Sater was born in the Soviet Union in 1966 and emigrated with his parents to the heavily Russian enclave of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, when he was about eight years old. He attended Pace University before dropping out when he was 18, then found his way to Wall Street where he worked as a stockbroker.

His early years on Wall Street, according to the recollections of his one-time business partner, Salvatore Lauria, were flush. By his mid-20s, Sater was collecting expensive watches, spending thousands of dollars on Zegna suits and buying luxury cars. That all came to a brief halt in 1993 when he was sent to prison for using the stem of a broken margarita glass during a bar fight two years earlier to attack another stockbroker; Sater’s victim needed 110 stitches to hold his face together.

When Sater emerged from prison 15 months later, he found his way back into trouble. With a group that included Lauria (who admits to having had ties to organized crime figures and grew up in New York as a close friend of a prominent Mafia boss), Sater opened an investment firm on the penthouse floor of 40 Wall Street, a Trump-owned building in Manhattan. From there, according to federal prosecutors, Sater and his team set about laundering money for the mob and fleecing about $40 million from unwitting and largely elderly investors, a number of whom were Holocaust survivors.

By the time law enforcement authorities eventually caught on to the 40 Wall Street operation, Sater had fled to Russia. Lauria visited him there.

Sater "was always hustling and scheming, and his contacts in Russia were the same kind of contacts he had in the United States," Lauria wrote in a 2003 memoir, "The Scorpion and the Frog." "The difference was that in Russia his crooked contacts were links between Russian organized crime, the Russian military, the KGB, and operatives who played both ways, or sometimes three ways."

Sater, who had been charged with racketeering and money laundering by the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn in connection with the 40 Wall Street scam, eventually decided to return to America and face those charges. He had a card to play, however: his knowledge, gleaned from contacts in Russia, about a small stock of Stinger antiaircraft missiles loose on the black market in Afghanistan that were of interest to U.S. intelligence officials.


"We were hoping for a free ride or a get-out-of-jail-free card for our crimes on Wall Street," Lauria wrote of Sater's maneuvering with U.S. officials.

Sater told authorities that he could use his Russian contacts to buy the Stingers and, according to court filings in Kriss's lawsuit and other accounts, a deal was struck in December, 1998. Sater pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges and then entered into a cooperation agreement with the government that sealed court records in the case and allowed his sentencing to be postponed for 11 years. (Sater would ultimately only pay a $25,000 fine and never go to prison.)

Many years later, as part of her confirmation hearings to become President Barack Obama's attorney general, Loretta Lynch would note that the cooperation deal she made with Sater when she was the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn lasted for a decade -- from 1998 to 2008 -- and that Sater gave the government "information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra."

At some point after becoming an informant, Sater also recast himself as a real-estate savant. He made his way to a Manhattan real-estate investment firm, APC Realty, where he raised money for deals and where he met Kriss in 2000.

Kriss, a native of Miami and a business graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, was an aspiring real-estate developer who was in his early 20s when they met. He says he was initially captivated by Sater.

“Felix knew how to be charming and he knew how to be brutally nasty,” says Kriss. “He has a talent for drawing people in. He has charm and charisma. But that’s what con men do.”

After APC began to fall apart in 2002, Kriss decided to strike out on his own back home in Miami, doing real-estate deals. Sater made his way to a small Hong Kong investment bank that used him as a New York-based rainmaker for real-estate deals.

In addition to his new life as a real-estate investor and government informant, Sater owned a comfortable home in Sands Point, Long Island, a toney New York suburb that was a setting for “The Great Gatsby.” He also had a wife and three daughters and was a member of an Orthodox synagogue in neighboring Port Washington. On one occasion Sater brought his rabbi with him to meet U.S. intelligence officials in New York, where, the rabbi said, agents praised Sater's service to the country.

When Sater received a community service award at his synagogue on another occasion, a band played "Hail to the Chief." Sater gave an acceptance speech in which he noted that he was "not a very religious person" but that his goal in life was to "repair the world or make it a better place."

'Air of Success'

About a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Sater joined Bayrock, a company that marketed itself as a property developer and had opened Manhattan offices on the 24th floor of a well-known building at 725 Fifth Avenue: Trump Tower.

In late 2002, Sater phoned Kriss and invited him to consult at Bayrock, bragging about a deep-pocketed investor, Tevfik Arif, who was partnering with him in search of bigger deals.

Arif, born in Kazakhstan, was a former Soviet official who had relocated to Turkey to make his fortune. He ran several upscale, seaside hotels there that catered almost exclusively to Russians, according to Kriss, and he had also redeveloped a shopping center in Brooklyn. At one point in his post-Soviet years, Arif also reportedly took over a former Kazakh state-owned chromium producer with his brother.

Like Sater, Arif had a home in Sands Point and Kriss says that Arif brought his children there from Turkey to learn English. (Arif's representatives declined to respond to a list of questions about his business history, including how he met Sater and brought him to Bayrock, citing ongoing litigation.)

Bayrock was initially funded, in part, with a $10 million investment transferred to the firm by Arif's brother in Russia, who, according to Kriss's lawsuit, was able to tap into the cash reserves of a Kazakh chromium refinery. (A spokeswoman for Arif declined to comment on that allegation.)

A marketing document Bayrock once circulated to prospective investors noted that Alexander Mashkevich, an oligarch born in the former Soviet Union, was one of Bayrock's primary sources of funding. Mashkevich's firm, the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, was based in Kazakhstan and elsewhere and had interests in chromium, aluminum, coal, construction, and banking. (A person close to Mashkevich, who requested anonymity because of the Kriss-Bayrock litigation, said Mashkevich never invested in Bayrock.)

Bayrock never seemed to be short of money, however. According to Kriss’s lawsuit, the team running the little development firm in Trump Tower could locate funds "month after month, for two years, in fact more frequently, whenever Bayrock ran out of cash." If times got tight, Bayrock's owners would "magically show up with a wire from 'somewhere' just large enough to keep the company going."

Kriss says that Sater and Arif wooed him to Bayrock by offering him 10 percent of the firm's profits. Bayrock’s Trump Tower offices gave “an air of success to it,” Kriss says. Bayrock also gave Kriss, then 28 years old, the opportunity to work with Trump.

It was Sater who initially developed the relationship with Trump, according to Kriss and court records from Trump's lawsuit against me. Sater had made the acquaintance of three Trump Organization executives who then introduced him to their boss. When the Bayrock team met Trump in 2002, the future president was enduring a long stretch in the financial wilderness, having narrowly escaped personal bankruptcy in the early 1990s.

He eventually emerged from that mess as a pariah among big banks. He was also a determined survivor and tireless self-promoter and he parlayed those skills into recreating himself as a branding machine and golf course developer in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Kriss says that it was Arif and Sater who pitched the future president on the idea of launching an international chain of Trump-branded, mixed-use hotels and condominiums. And Bayrock got to Trump at a time when his “brand” could help get a little extra attention for a condo project, but didn’t amount to much more than that.

“Trump was trying to build his brand and Bayrock was trying to market it,” Kriss recalls. “It wasn’t clear who needed each other more. This was before the show, remember.”

The “show,” of course, was “The Apprentice.” It aired for the first time on Jan. 8, 2004, and became a sensation that vaulted Trump into reality TV stardom. In the real world, Trump's casinos were faltering. But on reality TV, Trump posed as a successful leader and dealmaker who embodied a certain kind of entrepreneurial flair and over-the-top billionairedom -- an impression that stuck with tens of millions of TV viewers.

The popularity of "The Apprentice" also gave the Bayrock-Trump partnership added zing.

“That put Bayrock in a great position once the show debuted,” Kriss says. “The show did it for Trump, man. Nobody was interested in licensing his name before that.”

The hook at Bayrock, for Trump, was an 18 percent equity stake in what became the Trump Soho hotel, a steady stream of management fees on all Bayrock projects and the ability to plaster his name on properties without having to invest a single dollar of his own.


The Trump SoHoPhotographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
It’s not clear how carefully Trump vetted his Bayrock partners. But his lack of concern about their backgrounds – and the potential risk to his own reputation from dealing with them - was part of a pattern. In Atlantic City, he had partnered with men with organized crime ties. Later, he and his children struck deals in Brazil and Azerbaijan with partners who had murky backgrounds or unusual legal entanglements.

Sater said in court filings that he disclosed his securities fraud conviction to members of the Trump Organization. He assumed they had told Trump, but he wasn't sure.

"It's not very hard to get connected to Donald if you make it known that you have a lot of money and you want to do deals and you want to put his name on it," Abe Wallach, who was the future president's right-hand man at the Trump Organization from 1990 to about 2002, told me in an interview. "Donald doesn't do due diligence. He relies on his gut and whether he thinks you have good genes."

Given Arif's halting English, it was Sater and Kriss who interacted most frequently with the Trump family—and Sater the most often with Trump himself. Kriss says that most of his own contacts were with the elder Trump children, Don Jr. and Ivanka, and included drafting contracts and occasional nights on the town.

While Trump’s kids were involved in the back-and-forth with Bayrock, it was Trump himself who always had the final say.

“Donald was always in charge,” says Kriss. “Donald had to agree to every term of every deal and had to sign off on everything. Nothing happened unless he said it was okay to do it. Even if Donald Jr., shook your hand on a deal, he came back downstairs to renegotiate if his father told him to.”

The Trumps, Kriss says, saw Sater "frequently" and valued the relationship because “Felix demonstrated that he was loyal to them.” He says that at one point Sater was meeting with the future president in his Trump Tower office multiple times a week. Sater, according to a later court deposition, said that his business conversations with Trump in that office were wide-ranging and frequent — “on a constant basis."

The pair had what Sater described as "real-estate conversations," and they talked about "gathering intelligence, gathering know-how, general market discussions," and also chatted about using Sater's Russian connections to build a "high-rise, center of Moscow” that would be a “great opportunity, megafinancial home run."

Although Sater socialized with Trump, "I wouldn't call him my friend," he said in the 2008 deposition. Still, Sater said he traveled with Trump to look at deals and was proud of Bayrock's relationship with the famous developer. "Anybody can come in and build a tower," he said. "I can build a Trump Tower because of my relationship with Trump."

Bayrock and the Trumps then began laying the groundwork for domestic and international hotel-condo projects, eventually exploring deals in Turkey, Poland and Ukraine. Sater escorted Ivanka and Don Jr. on a trip to Moscow, where they looked at land for a Trump-branded hotel.

None of those overseas projects got past the planning stages. In the U.S., Bayrock and Trump projects moved forward haltingly.

In Phoenix, a one-story mall that Bayrock bought out of bankruptcy was meant to be the site of a Trump-branded tower. It became ensnared in zoning debates and then the national real-estate downturn and never got built.

Sater's dealings in Phoenix later landed him in court with a local developer who had invested in the Phoenix project, Ernest Mennes. Mennes said in a lawsuit that when he threatened to reveal Sater's criminal record, Sater told him that he would have a cousin "electrically shock Mr. Mennes’ testicles, cut off Mr. Mennes’ legs, and leave Mr. Mennes dead in the trunk of his car."

In Mennes's suit against Bayrock and Sater, he alleged that Sater also skimmed money from the Phoenix development. Bayrock and Sater settled the suit (which was later sealed and its terms left undisclosed; Sater's lawyer, in an interview with ABC News, denied Mennes's allegations).

The next project Trump and Bayrock pursued was the Trump International Hotel and Tower, a mixed-use hotel and condominium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Announced in 2005, it later went into foreclosure.

The third and final major project Bayrock and Trump worked on together was their most high-profile effort, the 46-story Trump Soho hotel in lower Manhattan.

Trump, Sater and Arif were all photographed together at a splashy launch party for the Trump Soho in 2007. Trump also pitched the Trump Soho on an episode of "The Apprentice," promising that "this brilliant, $370 million work of art will be an awe-inspiring masterpiece."

Helping Trump and Bayrock fund that masterpiece was a fresh influx of money from an Icelandic investment bank called the FL Group. Sater and Lauria, his longtime mob associate, had jointly recruited FL, introducing the firm to Bayrock and the Trump Organization. (I’ll have more on the FL Group and Bayrock in a future column; the firm's former leaders, one of whom was later convicted of tax and accounting fraud, declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests for this column.)

Yet again, the Trump Organization — even though it signed off on the FL investment — appeared to care little about vetting a firm that came into the partnership through Sater. FL operated in a country with a porous, vulnerable banking system, and some investigators who scrutinized other Icelandic banks at the time said they suspected those banks of being conduits -- unwitting or otherwise -- for dirty funds from outside Iceland. (The FL Group collapsed a little over a year after it invested in Bayrock. The firm itself was never prosecuted; the leaders of a number of other Icelandic banks were prosecuted or jailed for crimes including money laundering).

Kriss said in an interview that an Icelandic competitor of the FL Group also contacted him to invest in Bayrock. When he took that offer to Sater and Arif they told him, he says, that the money behind Icelandic banks “was mostly Russian” -- and that they had to take FL’s funds for deals they were doing with Trump because the investment firm was “closer to Putin."

“I thought it was a lie or a joke when they said Putin,” Kriss recalls. “I didn’t know how to make sense of it at all.”

(Kriss says he doesn't have financial records showing that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a connection to the FL Group and that his own knowledge is purely anecdotal. A Kremlin spokesman said via email that Putin had no connection to the FL Group or Bayrock.)

'Somebody Said That He Is in the Mafia'

Kriss says that in the wake of the FL deal he was owed a payout that could have ranged from about $4 million to $10 million, but that Bayrock reneged. When he persisted, he claims, Sater threatened him.

So Kriss says he accepted a $500,000 payment instead and then eventually quit. Sater, as it turns out, didn’t have much time left at Bayrock either.

In December, 2007 the New York Times published an article detailing some of Sater’s past run-ins with the law and some of his ties to organized crime (the article also noted that Sater had begun using “Satter” as an alternate spelling for his last name so he could try to “distance himself from his past” if people Googled him).

Two days after the Times story ran, Trump sat for a deposition with my attorneys as part of the libel lawsuit he had filed against me for “TrumpNation.” They asked him whether he planned to sever his relationship with Sater because of Sater's organized crime ties. Trump said he hadn't made up his mind.

"Have you previously associated with people you knew were members of organized crime?" one of my lawyers asked.

"No, I haven't," Trump responded. "And it's hard to overly blame Bayrock. Things like that can happen. But I want to see what action Bayrock takes before I make a decision." (In fact, Trump had partnered in the past in Atlantic City's real-estate business with men he knew were mobbed up.)

Whenever he was asked in later years about his relationship with Sater, Trump routinely misrepresented it as distant. In a 2013 deposition taken as part of litigation surrounding Trump and Bayrock’s failed Fort Lauderdale project, Trump was asked again about his partnership with Sater.

"He was supposedly very close to the government of the United States as a witness or something," Trump said. "I don't think he was connected to the Mafia. He got into trouble because he got into a barroom fight."

"I don't know him very well," Trump added, saying that he hadn't conversed very often with Sater. "If he were sitting in the room right now I really wouldn't know what he looked like."

Trump also said that he didn't think that questions about Sater’s background meant that he should have ended his business partnership with him: “Somebody said that he is in the Mafia. What am I going to do?”

Shortly after my lawyers asked Trump about Sater, Bayrock began discussing the best way for him to resign, according to company email and court records. By 2008, Sater had left the firm.

The Trump Soho ended in failure. It opened in 2010, but many units failed to sell and early condo purchasers sued Bayrock and the Trumps. Three years later, the Trump Soho went into foreclosure with most of its units still unsold, and a new company took control of the property. Bayrock hasn’t done another deal since then. (A spokeswoman for Bayrock attributed the failures of the Trump partnerships to fallout from the 2008 financial meltdown.)

'He Seems to Have Unlimited Funds'

After Kriss left Bayrock, he set up his own development firm in New York and then sued Sater, Arif, Trump and Bayrock in Delaware in 2008, alleging that Bayrock was a criminal enterprise and demanding to be paid in full for his work there.

When the case moved to New York in 2010, it came with a twist. Sater had left a copy of his cooperation deal with the government – the one dating back to his Stinger missile and mob informant days – on the hard drive of his Bayrock computer. A Bayrock employee leaked it to Kriss’s attorney, who promptly filed it as an exhibit in court.

Trump was eventually dropped from the case and Sater began carpet-bombing Kriss with his own lawsuits, ultimately filing several separate actions that claimed, among other things, that Kriss has used the courts to prosecute him maliciously.

Sater also apparently kept busy outside of the courtroom.

Kriss says that about three years ago he started receiving threatening email from websites carrying versions of his name (“JKrissInfo.com,” for example). He soon discovered there were hundreds of other new websites that also contained false, disparaging information about him.

Kriss sued the anonymous authors of the websites for defamation and when the court ruled in his favor he was able to get a large portion of the sites delisted from Google. He says he also was able to use the court order to untangle the provenance of the websites, discovering that their registration tracked back to Sater’s home address in Sands Point.

Kriss says that goons once showed up at real-estate developments he was overseeing in Brooklyn, asking his employees if they knew the true story about their boss. Waves of letters questioning his bona fides have arrived at his office and in the mailboxes of every resident in two separate buildings where Kriss kept apartments.

Kriss says investors in his new company, East River Partners, have stood by him, but he's worried that Sater's digital vendetta may be hard to overcome. His new lawyer, Bradley D. Simon, says that he's mystified by how Sater has managed to stay afloat all these years.

“Sater was a cooperating witness for the Eastern District of New York and he continued going on a crime rampage,” says Simon. “He’s filed all kinds of frivolous lawsuits, but that’s what he does. He seems to have unlimited funds.”

For his part, Sater continues to wear many hats. A couple of years after he left Bayrock, the Trump Organization hired him briefly as a consultant to prospect for real-estate deals, giving him company business cards with his name engraved on them.

More recently, Sater got enmeshed in litigation again, this time around the sale of an Ohio shopping mall -- and the alleged disappearance of tens of millions of dollars -- in a court case that was settled in 2013.

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Sater has also entered into a war of words with his former Bayrock partner, Tevfik Arif. Sater claims, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, that Arif owes him money -- and that if he isn't paid he'll publicize what he describes as Arif's ties to organized crime and to tainted dealings in Kazakhstan’s metals business. (A Bayrock spokeswoman says that Sater's claims about Arif are baseless.)

Meanwhile, Trump is mired in a probe that now pivots off sensitive topics for him and his family: their money, their deals and Russia – all of which will test his promise to testify under oath to Mueller and his investigators.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... at-bayrock


How Felix Sater — Former Mob-linked Hustler And Ex-Trump Adviser — Sought To ‘Protect’ Ukraine’s Nuclear Plants

May 25, 2017 3:10 pm
How Felix Sater — Former Mob-linked Hustler And Ex-Trump Adviser — Sought To ‘Protect’ Ukraine’s Nuclear Plants


The saga of Felix Sater — a twice-convicted one-time Mafia associate, real estate developer, sometime partner and former “senior adviser” to Donald Trump — continues to grow more complicated and bizarre. Details have now emerged of a second attempted diplomatic intervention by Sater, supposedly to prevent a possible nuclear power plant conflagration in Ukraine.

In a recent investigation for DC Report, (reprinted here by The National Memo), I explored a series of controversial financial transactions that involved Sater and another former Trump Organization associate named Daniel Ridloff, which involved accusations that the two men had absconded with nearly $43 million from the sale of an Ohio shopping mall to Neil Bush, son and brother of the former presidents.

While that case was settled (with Sater and Ridloff receiving roughly half of the contested money), and there was no evidence implicating Trump in those transactions, the president’s business appears to have benefited from them. Several condominiums in his troubled Trump Soho building were purchased with $3.1 million in cash that may have come from the same sources, with roots in Kazakhstan. Investigators have long suspected that figures seeking to hide illicit cash have used Trump businesses, including his casino and real estate holdings, whether or not Trump or his executives were cognizant of such suspicious transactions.

Aside from Sater’s criminal past, which was cited by Trump critics during the 2016 election, he drew front-page attention last February, just one week before Michael Flynn resigned as national security adviser over his concealed discussions with the Russian ambassador, when news outlets revealed that Sater had hand-delivered a Kremlin “peace proposal” for Ukraine to Flynn’s office. The proposal suggested a way that President Trump could lift sanctions against Russia as part of a negotiated settlement

between Kiev and Moscow.


Behind that proposition, according to the New York Times, were the Russian-born Sater; Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer; and Andrii Artemenko, a Ukrainian parliament member leading a political opposition movement that was forged in part by former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

According to the Times, Sater, Cohen and Artemenko met in January in private conference rooms and the restaurant bar at New York’s Regency hotel to discuss the plan before it was delivered to the White House.

Now I have learned that Sater and Artemenko met last October 7 for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in New York to discuss another major problem in Ukraine: Its aging cohort of nuclear power plants, which may pose safety risks as grave as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The meeting was convened a month before the U.S. presidential election. Sater declined to comment and Artemenko — whose parliamentary status and citizenship were revoked by the Ukraine government after the “peace plan” fiasco –could not be reached.

Evidently Sater and Artemenko were seeking the assistance of a third person who attended the breakfast, Robert Armao — a well-connected international businessman who served as labor counsel to the late Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in the early 1970s. Armao says that Sater, whom he’d never met or spoken with prior to last fall, reached out to him through a mutual friend.

“He said that Artemenko was in Washington meeting with members of Congress because of the worldwide effort to deal with nuclear power plants in Ukraine,” recalls the former Rockefeller aide. “Many are falling apart, like at the Chernobyl-level, and the plants need to be refurbished.”

Armao was invited to the New York meeting because he’s a longtime expert on Ukraine. He says he once advised individuals who were working with former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution protests of 2004-2005. During the October 7 breakfast, Armao says he was asked whether he could intercede with Ukraine’s current energy minister in an attempt to revive a contract that Kiev had signed with South Korea to bring the nuclear plants up to global standards.

Armao has also enjoyed close dealings in the past with the government of the Republic of Korea, he says, and has done business there for decades. “I said, have you officially asked [the Ukraine energy minister]?,” recalls Armao, but “[Artemenko] was sketchy on that. I told Sater and Artemenko that I’d find out what’s going on.”

According to Armao, he reached out to sources and learned that the Ukrainian government was “in discussion with the Koreans and all was under control. So that was it.”

In fact, just five weeks before the breakfast meeting, Korea’s state-controlled nuclear power utility reached an agreement with Ukraine to resume construction of two reactors. But it’s unclear whether that deal involves the servicing of the existing reactors that apparently concerned Sater and Artemenko.

Armao admits that he was impressed by the former Trump associate. “When you talk to the guy, he wants to save the world. He said, ‘You know, [Ukrainian nuclear plant safety] is a big Washington concern.’ I do say, the man is brilliant. You sit with him, he talks about real estate, he talks about everything. And he can charm the pants off you, Sater.”

Not always, perhaps. In 1993, Sater served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven “pump-and-dump” stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant. From 2002-2008, he ran the day-to-day operations for Bayrock Group, one of Trump’s biggest real estate development partners during that period. (In his current Linked-In bio, he refers to himself as Bayrock’s co-founder and vice-chairman.) The Bayrock offices were located a floor below Trump’s own office in the Trump Tower. In 2010, Sater was given an office down the hall from Trump and made his “Senior Advisor.”

Sater and Trump have been doing an odd dance around each other during the past few years, regarding how much they’ve interacted. Trump consistently has testified in civil cases that he barely knew Sater, barely dealt with him and “wouldn’t recognize him if he was sitting in this [deposition] room.” However, Sater, in a different civil case, testified that he would often pop his head into Trump’s office to give him updates on a Moscow hotel deal they had in the works. (It doesn’t appear that project ever came to fruition.) Last September, I half-joked to Sater that he must have a photo album filled with pictures of himself with Trump. “A photo album?” he responded. “How about six!”

The Trump-Sater relationship is likely to receive sharp scrutiny soon in Washington, both in Congressional probes and perhaps even by special counsel Robert Mueller, who will investigate possible collusion between Russia officials and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.

In late March, then-FBI director James Comey was asked about Sater’s relationship with the FBI when he appeared before the House Intelligence Committee. Comey declined to comment, presumably because Sater spent a decade as a secret government cooperator for both the FBI and at times, the CIA. But in 2015, during her confirmation hearing for the post of U.S. Attorney General, Loretta Lynch offered a teaser. In response to a written question about Sater by Senator Orrin Hatch, she stated that his [decade-long] assistance as a federal cooperator was “crucial to national security.”

For national security reasons, it is now crucial that the public learn all the details of Sater’s work for the government– and much more.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/felix-sater ... ar-plants/



Senate Russia investigators promised access to key Treasury data

By Tom LoBianco, CNN
Updated 1:21 PM ET, Tue June 20, 2017


Sen. Ron Wyden had placed a hold on a Trump's Treasury nominee for the files
The Senate took a procedural step Tuesday by voting to advance the nomination

(CNN)Members of the Senate intelligence committee said Tuesday they were promised access to data from the Treasury Department's financial crimes unit, as they dig into potential ties between the campaign of President Donald Trump and Russian financiers.

"The stack of press reports gets higher every day regarding financial connections between Trump associates and Russia, and Trump's own business dealings with Russian interests," Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the committee told CNN. "This morning, Treasury briefed me on documents that are being transmitted to the Senate. I believe these documents will be sufficient to start following the money."
First on CNN: House Russia investigators get access to Treasury data
Wyden had placed a hold on Trump's nominee to oversee the Treasury Department's financial crimes unit, FinCEN, after seeking access to the data. He said Tuesday that he lifted that hold on Sigal Mandelker, the nominee.
The Senate took a procedural step Tuesday by voting to advance Mandelker's nomination.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, told CNN last month that Senate investigators requested access to documents from Treasury's FinCEN as they look for possible connections between Trump's aides and Russian banks and oligarchs.
FinCEN investigates money laundering and has previously examined violations by Trump's casinos.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/20/politics/ ... index.html




Laurence Tribe ✔@tribelaw
#Collusion watch: Trump/Russia link includes digital director Parscale of Trump's campaign, who may have helped Putin weaponize hacked info





Chuck Cooper Confirms: He's AG Jeff Sessions' Lawyer
Katelyn Polantz, The National Law Journal
June 20, 2017 | 0 Comments

Charles Cooper, second from right, sat behind his friend and client Jeff Sessions at the attorney general's Congressional testimony last week.
Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM
Charles Cooper, the well-known Republican lawyer, wasn't simply in attendance at U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' congressional hearing one week ago to support his friend. Cooper is Sessions' personal lawyer, he confirmed in an email Tuesday.
Cooper didn't provide additional details on the nature of the representation—including whether it extends to the criminal inquiry into Trump campaign affiliates' involvement with Russia.
Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the Justice Department's investigation, declined to comment because the probe is ongoing. Spokespeople for Sessions didn't immediately respond to requests Tuesday.
Cooper's involvement isn't that surprising given his public appearance with Sessions on Capitol Hill. Lawyers typically consult counsel before testifying, so that they can prepare adequately.
Charles Cooper of Cooper & Kirk addressing the media after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a same-sex marriage case challenging California
Charles Cooper of Cooper & Kirk addressing the media after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a same-sex marriage case challenging California's Prop 8. March 26, 2013.
Photo by Diego M. Radzinschi/THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL.
But a continuing attorney-client relationship between the attorney general and a private lawyer could signal they expect additional perilous legal questions—including from Robert Mueller III's special counsel investigation.
Last month, 11 Democratic senators and the American Civil Liberties Union called for investigations into whether Sessions violated his recusal from the Russia investigation and committed perjury during his nomination hearings.
Cooper is a natural choice from outside the Justice Department to counsel Sessions. The two have been close for decades. Cooper, a former head of Main Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, has his own firm, Cooper & Kirk. Earlier in his career he was a partner at McGuireWoods and at Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge.
He often handles appellate cases, such as his work defending California’s since-overturned gay marriage ban, Proposition 8. Earlier he represented the NRA's campaign finance fund in cases against Federal Election Commission regulations.
Cooper also counseled Sessions when the then-senator prepared for his attorney general confirmation hearings.
The Trump administration later considered Cooper for the solicitor general job. He withdrew from consideration in February, citing the Senate's questioning of Sessions.
“After witnessing the treatment that my friend Jeff Sessions, a decent and honorable man who bears only good will and good cheer to everyone he meets, had to endure at the hands of a partisan opposition that will say anything and do anything to advance their political interests, I am unwilling to subject myself, my family, and my friends to such a process," Cooper said upon withdrawing.
http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=12 ... 0520165116



Jeff Sessions hires attorney whose connections suggest he’s trying to cut a deal against Donald Trump
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 7:10 pm EDT Tue Jun 20, 2017 | 2
Home » Politics

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has hired an attorney of his own, a sign of just how serious Donald Trump’s Russia scandal has become, and how many people it now threatens to take down. This makes Sessions the eleventh person in the Trump administration who is known to have hired an attorney in the scandal. But what stands out here is whom Sessions hired, and how he’s connected to the investigation itself.
Jeff Sessions has hired Charles Cooper as his attorney. But Cooper’s former colleague is Rachel Brand, who currently serves as the number three at the Department of Justice (link). With Sessions already having recused himself from the DOJ’s Trump-Russia investigation, and with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in danger of having to do the same, it would leave Brand in charge of the investigation.
Although Brand and Cooper no longer work together, it would be difficult to imagine them wanting to be on opposite sides of the same investigation, particularly one this crucial and nation-defining. So it’s difficult to imagine that Cooper would be willing to represent Jeff Sessions in this matter, unless Sessions is planning to cooperate with the investigation – in which case it would be very easy to understand why Cooper has taken him on as a client.
But Jeff Sessions is facing multiple felonies (lying under oath, lying on his security clearance forms, plus whatever crimes he may have been plotting with the Russian Ambassador during the meetings he lied about). And the only way for him to gain himself any legal leniency for himself would be to flip on Donald Trump. So while there are different ways to interpret any given hiring, Sessions’ decision to hire Charles Cooper of all people – and Cooper’s willingness to take him on as a client – suggest that Sessions is aiming to cut a deal against Trump.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/je ... rump/3540/





FBI Hammered in Court for Pre-Election Records on Trump
June 20, 2017
WASHINGTON (CN) – Bashing the FBI for equivocating on whether it has pre-election records on President Donald Trump, a government-transparency group brought a federal complaint to spur action.

Ryan Shapiro filed the June 18 lawsuit in Washington with his group, Property of the People Inc., and with investigative reporter Jason Leopold.

The men say they faxed the FBI on March 16, 2017, a request under the Freedom of Information Act for any records dating back to June 14, 1946 — the day of Trump’s birth — to June 15, 2015.

With the FBI refusing to confirm or deny the existence of such records, Shapiro and Leopold appealed to the Office of Public Information. They say the OIP missed the 20-day window to respond, so a federal judge should intervene.

Calling the FBI’s silence improper, Shapiro and Leopold argue that Trump’s privacy interest is minimal, both as the president and his prior status as a celebrity real estate mogul.

“Additionally, Mr. Trump has further diminished his privacy interest by speaking publicly about contacts he has had with the FBI,” the complaint states. “For example, in an article describing his connections with organized crime, Mr. Trump told The Washington Post that he met with FBI agents in April 1981.”

Shapiro and Leopold also call the public interest in such records enormous, saying it “clearly outweighs any embarrassment [Trump] might suffer from his name being associated with FBI investigation.”

“The FBI has a statutory duty to investigate criminal conduct, and the existence or nonexistence of records about Mr. Trump prior to the election would indicate whether or not the FBI was as diligent in investigating Mr. Trump as it was of less prominent citizens,” the complaint states. “The FBI’s substantive law enforcement policy is also a matter of great public concern.”

More to the point, the men claim, the FBI has previously released responsive records in answer to previous requests, and some of those records even contained Trump’s name unredacted.

“The FBI has not only unreasonably withheld the responsive records, but has unreasonably refused to even confirm the existence of responsive records,” the complaint states.

In addition to the general request for records on Trump, Shapiro and Leopold also identified five FBI case numbers and asked for the associated files.

The FBI missed the deadline to respond to requests about three of those case numbers, while it issued what is known as a Glomar response for the other two, refusing to confirm or deny the existence of these records. When put to a simple Google search, however, those two file numbers produce an FBI memorandum about Trump dated 1981.

How the 5-page document became public is unclear. Leopold and Shapiro’s attorney Jeffrey Light said in a phone interview that his clients want to see the full files in case they contain more information about Trump.

A press release about the lawsuit from Operation 45, which is dedicated to the transparency and accountability of the Trump administration, claims the lawsuit will “shed new light on already known investigations linking Trump to organized crime and will provide new information about Trump’s engagements with the bureau.”

Shapiro, a historian who is working for his doctoral degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a member of Operation 45, as is Light.

The attorney said access to the documents will also shed light on the FBI’s role and function.

“The goal is to find out over the years what the relationship with the FBI has been like, as well as to find out what the FBI’s priorities have been,” Light said.

A representative for the Justice Department declined to comment on pending litigation.

Attorney Light said the bureau’s Glomar response is inappropriate. “That’s why we’re suing,” Light said.
http://www.courthousenews.com/fbi-hamme ... rds-trump/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jun 22, 2017 11:32 am


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqJ0_pwMWzY


A New Lawsuit Just Revealed Trump’s Cash Trail From Putin

BY GRANT STERN

PUBLISHED ON JUNE 21, 2017

President Trump is the first person to be sued over 3,000 times before entering the nation’s highest office. Now, the lawsuit by his former development partners Bayrock – led by a mafia associate, Russian emigre Felix Sater – has just exposed a direct tie between Donald Trump’s New York City development activities and Vladimir Putin’s money.

The failed Trump SoHo condominium-hotel project yielded a lawsuit by former Bayrock executive Jody Kriss sued his former employer and Sater – who was Trump’s business partner and longtime advisor – for refusing to pay employee-related bonuses he had earned. Kriss told Bloomberg News that Sater financed the operations, and he had a strange method of determining whose money to borrow for projects:

Kriss said in an interview that an Icelandic competitor of the FL Group also contacted him to invest in Bayrock. When he took that offer to Sater and Arif they told him, he says, that the money behind Icelandic banks “was mostly Russian” — and that they had to take FL’s funds for deals they were doing with Trump because the investment firm was “closer to Putin.”

“I thought it was a lie or a joke when they said Putin,” Kriss recalls. “I didn’t know how to make sense of it at all.”
Felix Sater’s controversial presence became front page news earlier this year when the New York Times busted him conducting a secret diplomatic “peace plan” mission with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, resulting in a document being ultimately hand delivered to disgraced General Michael Flynn in the White House before he was fired.

Right after last year’s election, Sater told a Russian news media outlet that he had contacted or advised the Trump Campaign. A former senior advisor to the Trump Organization, Sater was involved in multiple deals ending in litigation, and the failed Fort Lauderdale Trump Tower project resulted in his sealed felony conviction for racketeering with New York’s La Cosa Nostra being revealed.

Ironically, Sater’s criminal past was only revealed because he left a copy of the paperwork on a Bayrock hard drive after stepping down from his duties. A sympathetic whistleblower at the company shared that information with Jody Kriss to help his case.

Donald Trump has testified under oath about Sater but mostly pretends like he doesn’t know the convicted felon:

“He was supposedly very close to the government of the United States as a witness or something,” Trump said. “I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia. He got into trouble because he got into a barroom fight.”

“I don’t know him very well,” Trump added, saying that he hadn’t conversed very often with Sater. “If he were sitting in the room right now I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”



Senate investigators are demanding records related to Trump’s money laundering violations from FinCEN (the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network). While FinCEN holds the records and settles fines for the US Treasury Department, it is the IRS which has Special Agents that investigate money laundering, and it was their work which led to a Trump’s Taj Mahal casino being fined twice for 20 years worth of money laundering violations.


There’s a high likelihood that some of Donald Trump’s tax returns could be part of the files that Senator Wyden (D-OR) wants to review. The nature of these offenses raises the specter that Donald Trump isn’t under IRS audit, but that he could be under investigation by the IRS’ criminal enforcement unit.

BBC interviewed Donald Trump in 2013 and when he asked about the Trump SoHo project, the developer became very defensive and ended the interview. Later, the Trump Organization put out their own secretly recorded copy of the interview and used very obvious editing to excise the questions about Felix Sater.

A New York federal judge granted part of a petition to unseal more of Sater’s records due to his relationship with the President, but the records aren’t available yet.

Just watch Donald Trump run away when questioned about Felix Sater and his ties to the mob:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N5Kun2sJPA

http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/06/21/n ... ail-putin/




Image


Intel chiefs tell investigators Trump suggested they refute collusion with Russians
By Dana Bash, Evan Perez and Manu Raju, CNN
Updated 7:48 AM ET, Thu June 22, 2017
(CNN)Two of the nation's top intelligence officials told Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team and Senate investigators, in separate meetings last week, that President Donald Trump suggested they say publicly there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians, according to multiple sources.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers described their interactions with the President about the Russia investigation as odd and uncomfortable, but said they did not believe the President gave them orders to interfere, according to multiple sources familiar with their accounts.
Sources say both men went further than they did in June 7 public hearings, when they provided little detail about the interactions.
The sources gave CNN the first glimpse of what the intelligence chiefs said to Mueller's investigators when they did separate interviews last week. Both men told Mueller's team they were surprised the President would suggest that they publicly declare he was not involved in collusion, sources said. Mueller's team, which is in the early stages of its investigation, will ultimately decide whether the interactions are relevant to the inquiry.

Coats and Rogers also met individually last week with the Senate intelligence committee in two closed briefings that were described to CNN by Democratic and Republican congressional sources. One source said that Trump wanted them to say publicly what then-FBI Director James Comey had told the President privately: that he was not under investigation for collusion. However, sources said that neither Coats nor Rogers raised concerns that Trump was pushing them to do something they did not want to do. They did not act on the President's alleged suggestion.
Trump has said repeatedly that no collusion occurred. "After 7 months of investigations & committee hearings about my 'collusion with the Russians,' nobody has been able to show any proof. Sad!" he tweeted June 16. The White House did not comment for this story. The DNI, NSA and Mueller's office also did not comment.

Because the meetings were classified, sources shared limited details. But they said the two intelligence leaders recounted conversations that appeared to show the President's deep frustration that the Russia allegations have continued to cloud his administration. The question of what the President said to Coats and Rogers has been hanging over the administration since The Washington Post reported the interactions in late May.
CNN has confirmed the March interactions between the intelligence chiefs and the President in which he made the requests. These came a few days after Comey publicly confirmed for the first time the existence of the federal investigation of potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

In a public Senate intelligence hearing earlier this month in which both men testified, senators in both parties grew frustrated and angry after neither would agree to clear up exactly what the President said to them. Rogers and Coats said they did not feel pressured to do anything but would not describe any details of their conversations with Trump.
"In the three-plus years that I have been the director of the National Security Agency, to the best of my recollection, I have never been directed to do anything I believe to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate, and to the best of my recollection during that same period of service I do not recall ever feeling pressured to do so," Rogers said during the public hearing.

Coats offered a similar response. "In my time of service, which is interacting with the President of the United States or anybody in his administration, I have never been pressured — I have never felt pressured — to intervene or interfere in any way with shaping intelligence in a political way or in relation to an ongoing investigation," he said.
The reason for their public reticence, one congressional source told CNN, is that Coats and Rogers had asked the White House for guidance on whether their conversations with the President were protected by executive privilege, which meant they would not be allowed to discuss it. They did not get an answer from the White House before testifying and did not know how to answer the committee. The result was an awkward and contentious public hearing.

In classified follow-up meetings with the Senate intelligence committee, they were more forthcoming, according to sources familiar with the closed-door session.
One congressional source expressed frustration that Coats and Rogers didn't answer the questions in public, especially since what they ended up expressing in private was that they did not feel that the President pressured either of them to do anything improper.
Rogers' interaction with the President is also documented in a memo written by his deputy at the NSA, Richard Ledgett.

One congressional source who has seen the memo tells CNN that it is one page and, unlike memos written by former FBI Director James Comey, does not have many details of the conversation. Instead, it simply documents that the interaction occurred -- and makes clear that Rogers thought it was out of the ordinary.
Coats did not document his conversations with the President about the issue, the source said.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/politics/ ... index.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 23, 2017 11:16 am

Laurence Tribe‏Verified account
@tribelaw

Trump's failed bluff "endeavored to impede the due administration of justice" in criminal violation of 18 USC 1503:


Hey, Mueller, You Should Check Out Iceland

That's where a shady Trump associate got some of his money. And where some investigators heard Russian footsteps.
By Timothy L. O'Brien
24
June 23, 2017, 6:30 AM CDT

Land of opportunities. Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Earlier this week I wrote about the Bayrock Group, a property developer that did business deals for a decade with President Donald Trump.

Felix Sater -- a Bayrock principal who was a career criminal with American and Russian mob ties and who has remained in the Trump orbit -- helped reel in funds of murky origin that Bayrock and Trump used for projects such as the Trump Soho hotel in Manhattan. And one of Bayrock's biggest financial backers was an Icelandic investment bank, the FL Group.

Iceland would seem like an unlikely place for U.S. Justice Department investigators to look as they probe Trump connections with Russia and related matters. Yet there are trails to pursue there.



When Sater convinced FL to invest in Bayrock in 2007, Iceland was a font of easy money caught up in a financial binge so frenzied that it would cause the country's economy to implode in 2008.

Prior to that collapse, a handful of hard-driving financiers -- Icelanders dubbed them "The Vikings" -- took control of Iceland's three main banks following a series of controversial privatizations.

The Vikings pulled in piles of money from overseas and then went about making global acquisitions. Some of them loaned recklessly, had interlocking business relationships, produced glossy and misleading financial statements, made end runs around unsophisticated regulators and at the peak of their powers controlled assets worth 10 times more than Iceland's gross domestic product.

FL -- an investment firm that owned the largest stake in one of Iceland's three big banks -- was controlled by Jon Asgeir Johannesson, who once described himself as "more rock star than businessman."

FL drew funds from all three of Iceland’s major banks and then invested in a wide range of businesses: insurers, airlines, real estate, gambling, a brewery, retailers, commercial shipping, a fruit juice maker -- and Trump’s partner, Bayrock.

When Iceland's bubble burst in 2008 and an island of just 320,000 people was left reeling, FL was the first major firm to collapse. The big banks soon followed. Amid the political and economic upheaval that followed, Iceland let its banks fail and sent some of the bankers responsible to prison. (Johanneson was eventually convicted of tax and accounting fraud and fined, but received suspended prison terms; he didn’t respond to interview requests.)

To pursue the bankers, Iceland appointed a local prosecutor and a well-known Norwegian fraud investigator to oversee what evolved into a team of more than 100 people.

The special prosecutor, Olafur Hauksson, was a former police chief of a small town near Reykjavik who had no prior experience probing financial fraud. A friendly, dedicated and bear-sized man who took on a job that few in Iceland wanted because of the powerful players involved, Hauksson still secured more than two dozen fraud convictions against Icelandic financiers.

Hauksson, whom I interviewed at his Reykjavik office, said he didn't see evidence of Russian funds moving through the banks he has investigated for the last nine years. He qualified that observation by pointing out that he was tasked with narrowly examining financial and managerial malfeasance, and that his work didn't include a deep, global probe into financial dealings outside the country.

Hauksson was joined early in his investigation by Eva Joly, whom Iceland brought on for advice and to elevate the sophistication and breadth of the probe. She has a decidedly darker view than Hauksson of outside influence on Iceland’s banking system.

Born in Norway, Joly later moved to France and eventually became a French judge specializing in financial crimes and public corruption. After that, she served as a prominent prosecutor and spearheaded a number of major European fraud investigations. She's now a member of the European Parliament.

When I asked her during an interview in her Brussels office about ways in which the FL Group, Bayrock and Russian money might have intersected, she brightened: "I have been waiting almost 10 years for a journalist to walk into my office and ask me these questions."

Joly said that she had to prod the Icelandic government to commit resources to an investigation that implicated many of the country's most powerful political and business leaders. (She also likes to point out how many Icelanders -- along with a former prime minister -- surfaced as owners of off-shore accounts in the Panama Papers document trove: "600.")

Like Haukkson, Joly said that she never uncovered evidence that Russian money was moving through Iceland's banks. Unlike Haukkson, she was interested in the global funds washing in and out of Iceland's lightly regulated banks and wanted to explore that vigorously. But she says she needed greater cooperation from authorities in other countries to uncover the source of the funds, and that didn’t happen.

"There was a huge amount of money that came into these banks that wasn't entirely explained by central bank lending," she said. "Only Mafia-like groups fill a gap like that."

Another Icelander involved in the country's fraud investigations said that substantial Russian funds are likely to have moved through the banks there, but that it’s a subject Icelanders prefer to avoid -- even though the first country that offered financial aid to Iceland when the 2008 meltdown occurred was Russia, and even though legions of Russian oligarchs frequently jetted in and out of Reykjavik.

The late Boris Berezovksy, once one of the wealthiest and wiliest of Russia's oligarchs, thought the Russia-Iceland connection was obvious. He told a SkyTV interviewer in 2009 that if you wanted to look for where "Putin and his cronies" might be laundering money, well, "the best example, definitely, is Iceland."

Berezovsky and Russian President Vladimir Putin were well acquainted. Putin helped Berezovsky get an automobile dealership launched in St. Petersburg, Russia and Berezovsky later played a pivotal role in Putin’s political ascent.

When Berezovsky broke into the car market in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, the city was a notoriously difficult place to do business. The Russian Mafia held sway and the city’s struggling economy was still dominated by the Russian state. The city’s mayor had placed his young deputy –- Putin -- in charge of economic and business development there.

“Putin took a long view and operated a kind of favor bank –- doing something for someone today, calling upon them for something tomorrow,” says Stephen Kotkin, director of the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies and a leading authority on Russia. “Given what was at stake, how Putin did his job, and how Russia works, it is unimaginable that anything of significance could have happened in St. Petersburg without Putin’s direct involvement or subsequent blessing.”

Berezovsky and Putin’s relationship later fell apart. When the Russian president began nationalizing the oligarch’s holdings, Berezovsky grew vigilant about where his funds went after the Kremlin got its hands on them.

"Russian top-level bureaucrats like Putin, like others, and oligarchs, together they create a system," for buying assets outside of Russia, Berezovsky told the SkyTV interviewer. Iceland, he noted, was part of that "system."

A prominent European financier who met with Felix Sater when Sater was doing deals with Bayrock and the Trump Organization told me that Sater bragged about his own relationship with Berezovsky. (Sater did not respond to repeated interview requests.)

Berezovsky wasn't the only Russia connection Sater bragged about. A former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, said in a series of interviews and in a lawsuit that Sater claimed that funds the FL Group invested in Trump-Bayrock projects were tied to Putin. The Kremlin told me that no such connection existed, and no documentation has surfaced indicating otherwise.

Russian roots were also represented in Iceland’s banks through Thor Bjorgolfsson, a prominent Reykjavik banker and businessman. He and his father made hundreds of millions of dollars in the bottling and brewery businesses in St. Petersburg during the Putin years there from 1990 to 1996, and after selling those assets they later got control of one of Iceland’s most prestigious banks. (Bjorgolfsson declined to be interviewed. In his autobiography, he mentions two personal meetings with Putin -- one in St. Petersburg when Putin was a deputy mayor and another, a decade later, in the Kremlin after Putin became president.)

At the height of Iceland’s banking boom, Bjorgolfsson tried to outflank the FL Group to make his own investment in Bayrock. Kriss, the former Bayrock insider, said he met with Bjorgolfsson to discuss the bid at the Mercer Hotel in Manhattan – but that Sater brushed off that offer, saying that FL was preferable because of its proximity to Putin.

Even if Putin had nothing to do with FL, FL had a lot to do with Bayrock – it agreed to invest $50 million in the developer. And Bayrock was the future president's business partner. Where Bayrock’s and FL’s money came from, exactly, may be a useful question for the Justice Department’s investigators to answer.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... ut-iceland



Adam Schiff Drops A Bomb And Confirms There Is Evidence That Trump Colluded With Russia
By Jason Easley on Sun, Jun 18th, 2017 at 10:40 am
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) confirmed during an interview on ABC's This Week that there is evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and that the President obstructed justice.


Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) confirmed during an interview on ABC’s This Week that there is evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and that the President obstructed justice.

Video:


Transcript via ABC’s This Week:
RADDATZ: Well, you said recently you thought there was evidence of collusion. What kind of evidence have you seen? What can you tell us?

SCHIFF: Well, I think there is evidence. I can’t go into the particulars of our closed investigation. But I also think there is also evidence of obstruction. But in both cases, I would say, whether there is some evidence doesn’t mean there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The same people that say that there’s no evidence of collusion say there’s no evidence of obstruction. And that the president, indeed, cannot commit obstruction. I don’t buy that. If you look at James Comey’s testimony and we were trying this in a court of law, no judge would exclude that. That would all be relevant evidence as to potential obstruction.

And the fact that the president can fire someone for good cause, or can fire someone with no cause, doesn’t mean that he can fire someone for malicious cause. The fact that an employer can terminate an employee at will doesn’t mean that he can fire an employee because the employee rejected his sexual advances. So I —



Rep. Schiff stated that he is not prepared to call it the kind of proof that could be taken to a jury, but it is the sort of evidence that merits deeper investigation. The problem for Trump is that the legal standards for collusion and obstruction of justice don’t apply to a political proceeding like impeachment.

Bill Clinton was impeached for much less than the legal standard in the House.

Schiff has gradually moved his description of the investigation to indicate that the committee is seeing evidence that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia and that the President is obstructing justice. These are small statements that equal big developments. Time is not on the side of Donald Trump, and the more investigators dig, the more they appear to be uncovering about Trump and Russia.
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/06/18/ ... ussia.html


Image


JUST IN: Ivanka Trump Put Under Immediate Investigation, Administration Crumbling
By Friday Foster - June 17, 2017

One of the many problems with Donald Trump’s decision to run the White House like a family business is that in the midst of all of his alleged wrongdoings, those closest to him are easily seen as complicit for no reason other than relation. However, in the case of his daughter, Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, they seem to have created independent messes of their own.
http://bipartisanreport.com/2017/06/17/ ... crumbling/



Trump’s bluff is called, revealing another self-inflicted legal wound
By Jennifer Rubin June 22 at 5:15 PM

President Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
It’s not clear whether President Trump, on the day the Senate health-care bill was released, fessed up that he has no tapes of conversations of then-FBI Director James B. Comey (“I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings”) because he wanted to avoid intense media coverage of his embarrassing bluff or because the health-care bill is so bad that any distraction is welcome. Either way, no communications strategy can hide a bad health-care bill and another legal misstep that special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III can use to ensnare him.

The Post reports:

On May 12, a day after details of a one-on-one dinner he had with Comey were reported by the New York Times, Trump issued an apparent threat to the former FBI director, whom he had recently fired. “James B. Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump tweeted.

To make matters worse, his confidant and media attention hog Newt Gingrich conceded, “I think he was, in his way, instinctively trying to rattle Comey. He’s not a professional politician. He doesn’t come back and think about Nixon and Watergate. His instinct is: ‘I’ll outbluff you.’ ” Aside from the fact that he is now president (how long will his supporters trot out the incompetence excuse?), being a professional politician has nothing to do with it. Knowingly making a false statement to affect the testimony under oath of a witness can be a crime. The federal criminal code states that a person who “knowingly uses intimidation, threatens, or corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, or engages in misleading conduct toward another person, with intent to influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding” has committed a federal offense punishable by up to 20 years in prison. (Constitutional lawyer Larry Tribe also points me to the federal statute that prohibits sending a “threatening letter or communication” that “endeavors to influence … the due administration of justice.”)


Trump admits he never had tapes of Comey conversations

President Trump tweeted on June 22 that he doesn't possess — and didn't record — tapes of his private conversations with former FBI director James B. Comey. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
“The original tweet was in my view an important piece of evidence in the pattern of Trump’s possible obstruction of justice and witness intimidation,” says ethics guru Norman Eisen. “The fact that Trump has now admitted it was misleading adds to that evidence.” He explains, “Remember, obstruction is a crime of corrupt intent. Dishonesty of this kind further documents that intent. Moreover, today’s admission eliminates more benign explanations, such as that Trump really believed Comey was lying and had evidence to prove it. By process of elimination, what is left is the intent to impede the investigation by harassing the main witness against Trump.” He concludes: “Bottom line: Another tweet has landed in Mueller’s exhibit file, which is already bulging with them.”

The effort to intimidate Comey with a threat about nonexistent tapes did not occur in a vacuum. He told Comey, after clearing the Oval Office of witnesses, that he would “hope” Comey would let his fired national security director, Michael Flynn, go. Purportedly Trump asked Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Mike S. Rogers to weigh in with Comey as well. He then concocted a phony rationale for firing Comey. He sent aides out to lie in order to support that cover story (before confessing he had Russia in mind when he fired Comey). Those facts suggest an effort to obstruct justice, to prevent the prosecution of Flynn and potential discovery of incriminating or embarrassing information about him or his campaign. Lawyers who have been wrongly arguing that firing Comey cannot be the basis for an obstruction-of-justice charge have a problem: It’s not just the firing that is at issue.

Recall that in 1974, House Judiciary Committee members drew up an article of impeachment against Richard Nixon for abuse of power, which, among other things, cited his approval of a plan to misuse the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation of the Watergate burglary (“interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees”). Trump has the benefit of subservient Republicans in Congress with regard to impeachment. Mueller, however, is a whole other matter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ri ... 1cb543c57a


seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 05, 2017 9:40 am wrote:
99 "coincidences" connecting Trump and Putin
Mar 27, 2017 5:00am CDT by Psimpsonuml
Image

Check out my site for everything.
http://thegopwatchdog.com/

I started writing this because I thought it was important to have a clear understand of what the hell is going on with the Trump - Russia connections. Some of these are just rumors or probably mean nothing (1, 22, 25, 31) but the sheer number of Russian mobsters who have lived at Trump tower and the fact that 5 people have had to resign over connections to Putin is alarming.


Honestly the discovery that surprised me the most is the Abramoff connection. I'm beginning to think that the Russians partnered with the Republican party in the 1990s to build an alliance for reasons not yet known.

Trump's son in Law is Jared Kushner, the former owner of the Observer. The Observer received the DNC hacks from Guccifer 2.0 who is rumored to be a Russian agent.
Guccifer 2.0 and Roger Stone were apparently in contact up to 16 times during the 2016 campaign.
Jared Kushner's parents were friends with Netanyahu. He has forged an alliance with Putin.
His Chief Strategist is Steve Bannon. Bannon is the CEO of Breitbart, with the Mercer family having majority ownership. The Mercers, along with Bannon are heavily involved in Cambridge Analytica a data gathering firm. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company is SCL Group, which lists Dmitry Firtash as a board member. Breitbart and Bannon have extensive ties to the far right movement in Europe which is also funded by Putin.
His second campaign manager was Paul Manafort. He had to resign in August due to having questionable Russian ties like Dmitry Firtash and the former Ukrainian President. Manafort lives in Trump tower, along with Kellyanne Conway and her husband.
Hacked Texts reveal that it looks like Serhiy Leshchenko reached out to Manaforts daughter in an effort to blackmail him. She was not happy about the “blood money’
Mike McSherry, former Delegate strategist for the Trump campaign also lobbied for the same Ukrainian presidential candidate as Paul Manafort.
Rick Gates, Manaforts top aide also lobbied for Pro-Putin Ukrainian candidate.
Per Politico, Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik multiple times during the campaign. The first time appears to be in April, maybe when Trump gave that speech? Kilimnik is thought to be part of Russian intelligence.
They worked Oleg Deripaska on investment funds in Ukraine. Oleg paid Manafort 10 million dollars a year to lobby for Putin.
Oleg Deripaska obtained a VISA to enter this country, after previously being barred from entry due to the lobbying activities of Bob Dole.
Firtash worked with Russian Mob Semion Moglivech boss to help Gazprom oversee Natural Gas distribution to Ukraine.
Trump advisor J.D. Gordon is claiming that he was the advisor who had the Ukraine language softened at the Republican National Convention, at the request of Donald Trump
Kellyanne Conway's husband has business dealings with the Russian government and deleted tweets about it once Conway was chosen. (Conway, Bannon, and the Mercers are part of the "Council on National Policy" a secretive far right think tank group.
George Conway represented a firm that bribed the Russian government.
Trump sold his condo to Dmitry Rybolovev, whose private plane keeps showing up where Trump is. Rybolovev is a Russian billionaire with ties to Putin.
Rybolovev also had his Yacht placed in Croatia at the same time Ivanka and Jared were vacationing there, and his plane landed there around the same time too.
There is a Pro-Russian Think tank called the Center for the National Interest (CNI). CNI Board Member Henry Kissinger, former US Diplomat and current Putin confidante, has gotten close to Trump.
Kissinger suggested both Tillerson and KT McFarland to Trump.
Secretary of State Tillerson has many Russian business dealings through Exxon with Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft.
CNI Board Member Drew Guff runs a Russian Private Equity firm, attended the April Speech by Trump, and also sits on the International Council at the Belfour Center with Oleg Deripaska
The Dossier Christopher Steele created said that Igor Sechin along with Oleg Orovinkin were working on a deal to sell 19.5% of Rosneft to Trump in exchange for dropping sanctions. This deal relied on Carter Page, who resigned as a Trump advisor in September. After the election, a 19.5% deal went through, Oleg Orovkin was found dead in his car and the guy behind the Russian Hacking was arrested for treason in Russia.
Carter Page allegedly met with Igor Diveykin, a former Russian security official in charge of collecting US election information, when he went to Russia.
After the election, Kaspersky labs Ruslan Stoyanov was arrested for investigation of Treason. Once Michael Flynn was ousted as National Security advisor, it also came out that he was working for Kaspersky last year.
The Rosneft deal is linked to Trump through a vast network of holding companies. The 19.5% was through a Singapore company using Caymans offshore accounts. QHG shares was the holding company of the 19.5% sale. QHG's disclosure form stated that it used to be called CATALPO PTE, but no such company existed. Perhaps they did that to confuse people. Anyways, a company with the same information called CATALPA PTE did exist though. Catalpa shared an address with the Intertrust Group. Intertrust’s filing shows an affiliation with Walkers Global which is the affiliation used to incorporate QHG. Intertrust is owned by the Blackstone Group. If that name seems familiar, it is because Blackstone CEO is Stephen Schwarzman, one of Trump's senior economic advisors. Uncovered thanks to this amazing Twitter user
The Blackstone Group was cofounded by Stephen Schwarzman and CNI Board Member Peter Peterson.
The Dossier also claims Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to meet with Russians, which he denied. Recently, it came out that he was working with Felix Sater to broker a Ukrainian-Russia peace deal.
Cohen, Sater, and a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, Andreii Artemenko sat down for dinner to discuss Ukraine, Russia, and sanctions.
Alex Oronov, working with Cohen and Artemenko, developed the plan which they planned on leaving on Michael Flynn’s desk until he had to resign. Oronov mysteriously died at the beginning of March.
Felix Sater claimed to be a Senior Advisor to Trump , which Trump claimed not to remember. Sater had his own office in Trump Tower. Sater has been connected to organized crime and his father is in the Russian Mafia
To finance Trump SoHo, the Bayrock Group formed a tax evading partnership with Icelandic FL-Group. Trump had to sign off on this deal.
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross invested 500 million in the Bank of Cyprus and is on the board of directors. This is where Putin launders his money. Dmitry Rybolovev (7) is the largest shareholder at this bank, and another Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg is the second largest shareholder.
Deutsche Bank, under Ackerman was the only bank willing to loan money to Trump after he declared bankruptcy four times. Josef Ackerman left Deutche Bank to join the Bank of Cyprus after Wilber Ross engineered his takeover.
Putin's propaganda news station Russia Today has frequently had Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and Sebastian Gorka on it.
Carter Page was named as a foreign policy advisor because Jeff sessions Chief of Staff, Rick Dearborn found him.
Stephen Miller is Jeff Sessions former aide and is friends with Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Spencer has ties to European far right groups and was married to a Russian Propaganda mouthpiece with ties to Putin.
Trump friend Roger Stone is in contact with Julian Assange who runs WikiLeaks, who also hacked the DNC and provided leaks to Russia today. Stone is also partner in a lobbying firm with Paul Manafort
Secretary of Education Betsy Devos is the sister of mercenary Erik Prince. Erik Prince is running all over the world helping dictators suppress Muslims. He is a Breitbart contributor, a Pence supporter and a Trump advisor.
Prince also used to work for House Rep Dana Rohrabacker, also known as Putin's Favorite Congressman and one time considered to be Trumps secretary of State.
Prince is connected to John Ashcroft through Constellis Holdings, as Constellis owns Princes old company, Blackwater. Ashcroft has defended Lord of War Victor Bout, a Russian connected to Igor Sechin.
Vadim Trincher, who lived in Trump tower ran a gambling ring out of Trump tower on behalf of Russian mafia don Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov.
Preet Bhahara was fired by the President, along with the other U.S. Attorneys in what is a common move when a new party take power. The odd thing is that Trump had previously asked him stay on. Bhahara is the Attorney responsible for putting Victor Bout and the Russian gambling ring in jail. He also prosecuted one Russian for drug trafficking, a dozen Russian spies, and a Russian Banker. 3 days before being fired, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington requested that he investigate Trump Tower.
Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn violated the Logan Act by discussing lifting sanctions with The Russian Ambassador pre-inauguration.
He also met with Austrian Neo-Nazis working with Putin
Michael Flynn initially chose Monica Crowley to be on the national security council before she had to withdraw due to plagiarism scandal. She recently registered as a lobbyist for Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a Trump (and Clinton) foundation donor with ties to Carter Page.
Trump Tower housed an office of Alfa Bank which had a private server communicating with companies like Spectrum Health, which lists members of the Devos Family as Board Members.
Richard Burt, a Republican Lobbyist and CNI Board Member sat on the board of Alfa Bank. He worked for the Trump Campaign while lobbying for Russian State owned Gazprom
Burt was an advisor to Textron Inc, a financial company help finance some of Trump's international golf course deals.
In recent years, Gazprom has hired the lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs to lobby for it. Lobbyist and Trump supporter Jack Kingston visited Russia the same week as former Gazprom lobbyist Carter page. Totally a coincidence.
Trump threw Miss Universe with Putin-Connected Oligarch Aras Agalorov and had Alex Sapir/Rotem Rosen as guests
Alex Sapir is the son of Tamir Sapir, and they own condos in Trump tower. Sapir and his organization partnered with Bayrock on plenty of Trump condo projects. Alex's sister married Rotem Rosen, a former lieutenant for Lev Leviev
The Bayrock Group was founded by Tevfik Araf, and housed in Trump Tower. Araf hired Felix Sater as his C.O.O.
Michael Caputo, who helped run Trump's NY primary, lived in Russia in the 90's and was Contracted by Gazprom to improve Russia’s image in the United States.
Michael Caputo works for Trump apologist Chris Collins now, and learned everything he knew from Roger Stone.
Ivanka Trump is close friends with Putin's rumored girlfriend Wendi Deng.
Ivanka is also close with Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich and his wife. Here is a photo of them together (also with Wendi Deng)
Abramovich owns the steel company building the pipelines recently approved by the Trump administration
Abramovich's Millhouse Capital merged with Oleg Deripaska's aluminum holdings to form RUSAL
in 2007, Rusal merged with the Aluminum side of Glencore to form an even larger company. Glencore is one of the companies involved in the Dossier - Ross
The Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin died on 2/20. He invited Trump to Russia in 1986.
Lev Leviev is a Putin friend. Not only has he had multiple business dealings with Jared Kushner and the Bayrock group (Felix Sater and Tamir Kapir) but he also works with Netanyahu on settlements.
Russian-Canadian Alex Shnaider partnered with Trump on a building project in Toronto. Shnaider partnered with Ukrainian Billionaire Eduard Shifrin to form a holding company called the Midland Group. Shiftin was recently given Russian Citizenship by a Putin presidential decree. Alex's father in law Boris Birshtein is associated with the Russian Mafia.
Semion Mogilevich is the head of the Russian mafia. In the 1990's, he started a fake company with Jacob Bogatin as the CEO. Jacob's brother David owned 5 separate condos in Trump tower at one point and is well known as part of Mogilevich's key members.
Mogilevich key lieutenant Vyacheslav Ivankov also lived at Trump tower.
Jack Abramoff may be where it all starts. Russian Oil and Gas company NAFTAsib formed a shell company called Chelsea Commercial, which only listed Abramoff and Patrick Pizzella as lobbyists when it was created. The purpose of Chelsea was to promote Russian oil and trade interests in the United States. It also underwrote the trip Tom Delay and Ed Buckham made to Russia with Abramoff. Pizzella also happens to work for Trump. Buckham formed the Alexander Strategy Group to help the US Family Network funnel its money received from Naftasib. The US Family network was primarily a vehicle consisting of Buckham, Delay, Ralph Reed, CNI Board Member Grover Norquist and Abramoff. These people have been members of the Council on National Policy over the years.
In November 1998, Jack Abramoff organized a meeting between Sergei Kiriyenko and Republican lawmakers. Kiriyenko is the former prime minister, and is also featured in the Dossier as part of the Trump scandal.
Bob Ney had a young aide working for him during this time. When he was caught, his aide, some young unknown named Corey Lewandowski wrote a letter to the judge praising him as a father figure.
Don McGahn, White House Counsel defended Tom Delay on charges of a Russian Pay . Delay, along with Jack Abramoff, Buckham, and Ney met with Viktor Chernomyrdin, former head of Gazprom in the 1990s.
Mcgahn also happened to start working for Squire Patton Boggs, the lobbyists representing Gazprom in 2013. SPB, he moved on to Jones Day.
Jones Day opened a Moscow office in 2013 after it successfully worked with AlfaBank (MIkhail Fridman) and Renova Group (Viktor Vekselberg) to create an oil producer with BP, called TNK-BP. It has since been bought out by Rosneft. From there, Mcgahn signed on to work for the Trump Presidential Campaign.
Former Senator Conrad Burns was also taken down by the Abramoff Scandal, and he had positive things to say about Putin. Burns passed away weeks before Trump announced his presidential run.
Patrick Pizzella was recently named Acting President of the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Pizzella and Abramoff organized many trips for conservatives to the Marianas. During one trip, Pizzella had Kellyanne Conway show up . If that is not enough, Conway and Pizzela are both on the Center for National Policy board
Alexander Strategy Group's main lobbyist was Paul Behrends, former National Security Advisor to Dana Rohrabacker and family friend of Erik Prince. He is the Current Staff Director for the House Foreign Affairs committee.
Dana Rohrabacker and Jack Abramoff are long time friends.
Abramoff partnered with Charlie Black (of the lobbying firm Black, (Paul) Manafort and (Roger) Stone) in the 80s to work with brutal African dictators.
Sebastian Gorka worked for Viktor Orban, a Hungarian authoritarian leader close to Putin, before moving to the United States to work for the Republicans. Now he works for the Trump White House.
Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, widely regarded as Russia's top spy, was revealed to have met with Attorney General Sessions twice last year in his capacity as a Senator. He also met with Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn in December. Also, when the Republicans removed anti-Russia language from the Platform at the convention? It was because Trump advisors Carter Page and JD Gordon met with Kislyak.
Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani lobbied for Rosneft
Jim Baker lobbied Trump to nominate Tillerson as Secretary of State, possibly because of the fact that his firm represents both Exxon and Gazprom/Rosneft
The Former head of Yukos is a Trump backer and campaign donor.
CNI Board Member David McCormick is an executive at Bridgewater Associates where James Comey served as General Counsel prior to joining the FBI. They also both worked Din the Bush administration, albeit in different cabinet departments.
CNI Board Member Jon Huntsman was tapped to be ambassador to Russia.
CNI Board Members Dmitri K. Simes and Paul Saunders have hosted events Trump has spoken at, and Simes has been referred to by Putin as his American Friend
Donald Trump met with Ambassador Kislyak during the Presidential Campaign, which looks like nothing until you remember he had previously denied any such meetings.
Trump ally David Clarke visited Moscow the same week as Michael Flynn. His trip was paid for by a Russian gun rights group headed by Maria Butina and included several NRA heads. Butina is close with long time Republican strategist Paul Erickson
Sergei Millian, a Russian born real estate developer has close ties to Trump and to Michael Cohen. It is also said that he may have been behind some of the dirty claims in the dossier.
Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn is a Russian born Pro-Putin immigrant, who has spent a lot of time talking about Crimea on television. He resigned on 3/25/17.
Secretary of the Air Force nominee Heather Wilson founded Keystone International in order to foster business relations Between the United States and Russia
Mark Burnett helped remake Trumps image into a successful reality star, ran his inauguration festivities and has worked with Putin on reality television. Grant Stern does a fantastic job laying out the case that Burnett could have been the guy in the middle of all of this.
Edward Lozansky is a controversial figure at the heart of US-Russia relations over the past 30 years. He openly advocates for a closer alliance in order to bring down Isis. Lozanky is the creator of the annual US-Russia Forum, and founder of American University in Moscow.
Lozansky fled here in 1986, and Bob Dole and Jack Kemp helped him undermine the Soviet Union in order to get his wife over to the United States.
Once the Soviet Union fell, Lozanky created the American University in Moscow, with offices right next door to Paul Weyrich’s heritage foundation new Moscow office.
Lozanky started the Sakharov Institute in Russia in order to fight for the activists freedom, while Richard Burt actively worked on the U.S side for Sakharov’s freedom. Both are now actively working to create a Trump-Putin alliance.
Paul Weyrich, founder of the Council for National Policy and the Free Congress Foundation helped organize the World Russia forum after the downfall of the Soviet Union. In 2003, a who's who of Republican Congressman favorable to Russia including Weldon, Delay, and Rohrabacker were in attendence.
Trump's former lawyer Marc E. Kasowitz has signed on to defend a Russian Bank with ties to Putin.
Trump Transition member and head of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes has his entire net worth sunk into part ownership of a winery in California, which happens to have Russian ties.
The Republican National Committee paid Hamilton Trading Group large sums of money to dig up information on Hillary during the election. Hamilton is co-owned by a former Soviet Spy, Gennady Vasilenko
Nigel Farage is close with Russia and possibly looked the other way while they helped fund Brexit. He is also an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump.
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2017/3/27/1 ... -and-Putin
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 23, 2017 6:35 pm

I will say this again Brad Parscale will be a household name in the near future

He got paid around 90 million for his work 20 million of which can't be accounted for.

He is Kushner's BFF but I doubt he'll go to jail for Jared

Image
A long-overlooked player is emerging as a key figure in the Trump-Russia investigation

Natasha Bertrand


Brad Parscale was the director of the Trump campaign's digital operations. Screenshot/Fox
A congressional committee wants to interview President Donald Trump's digital director as part of its investigation.

Investigators are probing whether voter information stolen by Russian hackers made its way to the Trump campaign.
A top official said Russia targeted election systems in at least 21 states.
The House Intelligence Committee plans to interview the digital director for President Donald Trump's campaign, Brad Parscale, as it continues to investigate whether any collusion occurred between the campaign and Russia, according to a recent CNN report.

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, would not confirm whether Parscale had been invited to testify as part of the congressional investigation.

But Schiff told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow this week that he is "very interested in finding out" whether there was "Russian funding or support" for the Trump campaign's data analytics operation, "or Russian assistance in any way with gathering data" that was then used by the campaign.

Congressional investigators are now probing whether voter information stolen by Russian hackers from election databases in several states made its way to the Trump campaign, Time reported on Thursday. The data operation Parscale directed was supervised by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is now being scrutinized by the FBI over his contacts with Russia's ambassador and the CEO of a sanctioned Russian bank in December.

"If any campaign, Trump or otherwise, used inappropriate data the questions are, how did they get it? From whom? And with what level of knowledge?" the former top Democratic staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, Michael Bahar, told Time. "That is a crux of the investigation."

Kushner, a person familiar with the campaign's inner workings told Business Insider, "was Parscale's patron."

"Jared got [Brad] hired, despite the fact that a number of people in the campaign wondered whether he had any idea what he was doing," the person said. "He's Jared's boy. I had [campaign] deputies telling me they couldn't question anything the guy did or said, and they were unhappy about that."

Parscale did not respond to a request for comment. He is now the digital media director for America First Policies, a nonprofit group whose aim is to bolster Trump's agenda.

Kushner also did not respond to a request for comment.

Parscale's firm, Giles-Parscale, was paid a whopping $91 million by the Trump campaign, which famously shunned television ads. According to CNN, the data operation "helped the Trump campaign figure out where the candidate's message was resonating in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, places where conventional political wisdom suggested they would be wasting time and money."

A senior GOP strategist who worked with Parscale on the Republican National Committee's digital operations last year denied that he oversaw or was even aware of any nefarious collaboration between hackers and the campaign.

"When it was reported that they'd be calling up Parscale, I knew there was a 0% chance that they had anything," the strategist said, referring to the House Intelligence Committee. "The questions they want to ask him are apparently some of the most basic digital marketing questions, and other simple ones like 'how would the Russians have known which precincts to target?'"

At least one Republican operative, however, made use of voter data stolen by Russian hackers last year: Florida political strategist Aaron Nevins.

Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks on the USS Iowa in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California, United States September 15, 2015. Reuters
Guccifer 2.0, the self-described hacker that US intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts have linked to Russian military intelligence, sent 2.5 gigabytes of voter analysis data compiled by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to Nevins late last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported late last month.

The documents provided to Nevins, who then posted them on his blog, analyzed districts in Florida, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. They showed "how many people were dependable Democratic voters, how many were likely Democratic voters but needed a nudge, how many were frequent voters but not committed, and how many were core Republican voters — the kind of data strategists use in planning ad buys and other tactics," the Journal said.

The exposure of that voter data, which Nevins remarked was worth "millions of dollars," led at least one Republican campaign consultant, Anthony Bustamante, to "adjust" the voting targets of the campaign he was advising at the time, according to the Journal.

"Basically if this was a war, this is the map to where all the troops are deployed," Nevins told Guccifer 2.0 in a text message, according to the Journal.

Nevins said he had no regrets in using the "map," even if it had been handed to the Russians.

"If your interests align, never shut any doors in politics," he told The Journal.

The theft of sensitive voter data by Russian-linked hackers like Guccifer 2.0 has left upcoming elections vulnerable to manipulation, experts say. Virginia and New Jersey will hold gubernatorial elections later this year, and all 435 seats in the House and one-third of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested in the 2018 midterm elections.

Jeanette Manfra, a top official in the DHS's National Protection and Programs Directorate, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that Russian hackers targeted election systems in at least 21 states last year. Bloomberg reported last week that as many as 39 states were targeted.

Sam Liles, the DHS's top cyber official, told lawmakers on Wednesday that the Russians probed election infrastructure and successfully infiltrated a "small number of networks." According to Time, the hackers successfully altered voter information in at least one election database and stole thousands of voter records containing private information like Social Security numbers.

Bill Priestap, Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division at the FBI, testifies about Russian interference in U.S. elections to the Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington, U.S., June 21, 2017. Joshua Roberts/Reuters
The cyberattacks continued right up to the election, according to a top-secret National Security Agency document leaked to the Intercept and published earlier this month. The document revealed that hackers associated with Russia's military intelligence agency targeted a company with information on US voting software days before the election, and used the data to launch "voter-registration-themed" cyberattacks on local government officials.

Bill Priestap, one of the FBI's top counterintelligence officials, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that the type of data can be used "in a variety of ways," including to manipulate future elections and target individual voters. As Nevins, the Florida Republican operative, had said, the data is also extremely valuable — politically and financially.

Earlier this week, it emerged that data-analytics firm hired by the Republican National Committee last year to gather political information about US voters accidentally leaked the sensitive personal details of roughly 198 million citizens earlier this month, as its database was left exposed on the open web for nearly two weeks.

Upon reviewing the exposed data — which included names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details, as well as proprietary information based on predictive models of voters' behavior — Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology said simply: "This data is worth a s---load of money."

Archie Agarwal, the founder of the cybersecurity firm ThreatModeler, agreed that the data was a "gold mine" for anyone looking to target and manipulate voters. The security researcher who discovered the leaked database, Chris Vickery, said it was the kind of information "you can use to steal an election at the state and local level. It tells you who you need to advertise to to swing votes."
http://www.businessinsider.com/brad-par ... ion-2017-6


WaPo: CIA Intel Showed Putin Directly Ordered Operation To Get Trump Elected

ASSOCIATED PRESS
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JUNE 23, 2017 10:30 AM

Intelligence obtained by the CIA last summer found that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered a cyber campaign intended to help elect Donald Trump and damage the electoral chances of Hillary Clinton, according to an exhaustive Washington Post report out Friday into the Obama administration’s response to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 campaign.

This explosive information was first delivered to former president Barack Obama in Aug. 2016, according to the newspaper.

The Post investigation details how Obama and his team struggled to develop a response to this unprecedented interference by a foreign country, worrying that they would be seen as trying to tip the scales in the presidential race. By the time the CIA’s warning arrived, the Obama White House knew that Russian hackers were behind cyberattacks on Democratic Party operatives and the Democratic National Committee, and that the FBI had launched an investigation into ties between Russian officials and Trump campaign staffers.

Trump, who has repeatedly cast doubt the extent of Russia’s interference, has criticized the Obama administration for not doing more to “stop them.”

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Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
By the way, if Russia was working so hard on the 2016 Election, it all took place during the Obama Admin. Why didn't they stop them?
8:22 AM - 22 Jun 2017
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Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before the House Intelligence Committee this week that Trump’s repeated insistence that the election would be “rigged” against him stymied their response.

For now, the only action the U.S. has taken in response to Russia is an Obama administration package involving the expulsion of 35 diplomats, closure of two Russian diplomatic compounds, and imposition of new, narrowly targeted economic sanctions.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/c ... et-elected
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 25, 2017 1:37 pm

Evidence is mounting that Russia took 4 clear paths to meddle in the US election
Sonam Sheth and Natasha Bertrand
Jun. 24, 2017, 8:02 AM 164,433

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

US President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Mark Wilson/Getty Images; Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Business Insider
It was September 2015 when the FBI first noticed that Russian hackers had infiltrated a computer system belonging to the Democratic National Committee.

It was the first sign that Moscow was attempting to meddle in the presidential election.

Nearly a year later, further reporting and testimony from current and former intelligence officials have painted a portrait of Russia’s election interference as a multifaceted, well-planned, and coordinated campaign aimed at undermining the backbone of American democracy: free and fair elections.

Now, as FBI special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional intelligence committees continue to investigate Russia's election interference, evidence is emerging that the hacking and disinformation campaign waged at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin took at least four separate but related paths.

The first involved establishing personal contact with Americans perceived as sympathetic to Moscow — such as former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and early Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page — and using them as a means to further Russia's foreign-policy goals.

The second involved hacking the Democratic National Committee email servers and then giving the material to WikiLeaks, which leaked the emails in batches throughout the second half of 2016.

The third was to amplify the propaganda value of the leaked emails with a disinformation campaign waged predominantly on Facebook and Twitter, in an effort to use automated bots to spread fake news and pro-Trump agitprop.

And the fourth was to breach US voting systems in as many as 39 states leading up to the election, in an effort to steal registration data that officials say could be used to target and manipulate voters in future elections.

[Un]witting agents
AP_17157670241072
James Comey. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Former FBI Director James Comey confirmed in a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March, two months before he was fired, that the bureau was investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. That probe included an examination of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow to undermine Hillary Clinton, Comey testified at the time.

Restrictions on disclosing classified information in an open setting precluded Comey from naming names; but reports surfaced before he testified that certain members of Trump’s campaign had communicated with Russian officials in ways that raised red flags.

Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Jared Kushner, and Roger Stone were among those being looked at by federal investigators, reports said, amid the FBI and congressional probes into whether any Trump associates acted as agents of the Kremlin, wittingly or not.

Flynn was forced to resign as national-security adviser in February after it emerged he had discussed US sanctions with Russia's ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, during the transition period. The White House said Flynn resigned because he misled Vice President Mike Pence about his conversation with Kislyak.

It was later reported that the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, had warned the White House in January that Flynn could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail, because US intelligence knew Pence had publicly mischaracterized Flynn’s interactions with Kislyak.

Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, worked to advance Russian interests for over a decade. Beginning in 2004, Manafort served as a top adviser to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian strongman whom Manafort is widely credited with helping win the presidency in 2010. Between 2006 and 2009, Manafort was paid millions to lobby on behalf of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. AP reporter Jeff Horwitz told Fox News that Manafort was "a gun for hire" who was willing to work explicitly "on behalf of Russian interests."

Carter Page, an early foreign-policy adviser to Trump's campaign, has also become a subject of FBI and congressional investigations. His trip to Moscow in July 2016 raised red flags at the FBI, which was granted a warrant by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page's communications on suspicion that he was communicating with Russian officials.

Jared Kushner
Jared Kushner. Getty Images

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, became a subject of the investigation after US intelligence officials intercepted communications suggesting he had proposed setting up a secret backchannel to Moscow using Russian diplomatic facilities on US soil. Kushner met with both Kislyak and Russian banker Sergey Gorkov in December and failed to disclose it on his security-clearance form.

And Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump, communicated with a self-described hacker, Guccifer 2.0, in August 2016 who US intelligence officials believe was a Russian prop.

Former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts told the Senate Intelligence Committee in May that the Trump campaign itself may have been an unwitting agent of Russia.

“Part of the reasons active measures have worked in the US election is because the commander-in-chief has used Russian active measures at times against his opponents,” Watts said, pointing to Manafort and Trump’s citations of fake-news stories pushed out by Russian-linked entities last year.

“[Trump] denies the intel from the United States about Russia, and he claimed the election could be rigged — that was the number one claim pushed by RT, Sputnik News, all the way up until the election,” Watts said. “Part of the reasons Russian active measures work is because they parrot the same lines.”

Indeed, the Trump transition team released a statement in December that appeared to cast doubt on the CIA’s findings that Russia had meddled in the election with the specific purpose of damaging Clinton’s candidacy and swinging voters towards Trump.

“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the statement said.

The DNC, WikiLeaks, and Guccifer 2.0
In July 2016, the Democratic National Committee announced that Russian hacking groups known as “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear” had infiltrated its servers. The intrusions came after federal investigators warned the DNC in September 2015 that its servers had been breached, but the DNC failed to take action.

After gaining access to the DNC’s system in 2016, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear disseminated thousands of emails via hacker Guccifer 2.0, who leaked the information to WikiLeaks. US intelligence agencies believe Guccifer 2.0 was created by Fancy Bear, or a Russian organization affiliated with the group. WikiLeaks published the first batch of DNC emails on July 22, one day before the Democratic National Convention.

julian assange
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Carl Court/Getty Images

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Fox News’ Sean Hannity during a January interview that the Russian government did not provide the hacked DNC emails to him. But US intelligence agencies believe WikiLeaks has become a Kremlin propaganda tool.

Cybersecurity experts at the intelligence firm ThreatConnect also linked Guccifer 2.0 back to Russia and concluded the hacker was the product of a Russian disinformation campaign. The New York Times reported in December that Guccifer 2.0 had also hacked into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and released the information to reporters covering competitive House districts.

A little over two months later, on October 7, WikiLeaks released a batch of emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s account. The hack of Podesta’s emails came after Trump confidant Roger Stone tweeted in August, “Trust me, it will soon the [sic] Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary”

WikiLeaks continued releasing Podesta’s emails and published nearly 60,000 messages leading up to Election Day. Podesta said after the initial breach that Russian intelligence was responsible.

Roger Stone
Roger Stone. Hollis Johnson
"A big difference to me in the past was, while there was cyberactivity, we never saw in previous presidential elections information being published on such a massive scale that had been illegally removed both from private individuals as well as organizations associated with the democratic process both inside the government and outside the government," Adm. Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, told the House Intelligence Committee in March.

It soon emerged that Russian hackers had also accessed the Republican National Committee’s servers and accounts belonging to Republican officials, but had chosen not to release the information. This development appeared to confirm intelligence findings that Russian meddling was done specifically to hurt Clinton and aid Trump.

The US intelligence community “is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and the Department of Homeland Security said in a joint statement shortly after the first batch of Podesta’s emails were first leaked.

During a January hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee with other intelligence chiefs, Clapper reaffirmed that finding. “We stand more resolutely on that statement,” he said.

Fake news, trolls, botnets
In early January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report documenting the results of the investigation former President Barack Obama had requested into Russian election interference.

Vladimir Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Adam Berry/Getty Images

The report said that while Russian operatives did not change vote tallies, Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an elaborate effort to propel Trump to the presidency — not only via hacking but also through the dissemination of “fake news” aimed at undermining Clinton and boosting Trump.

The Russians, Comey said in March, were also “unusually loud” in their intervention, leaving digital footprints on the DNC and John Podesta email hacks that were sloppy and easily linked back to the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, state-sponsored Russian news agencies like RT and Sputnik, openly backed Trump. And automated Twitter accounts — many of them linked to Russia and aided by professional trolls paid by the Kremlin — flooded the social-media platform with pro-Trump rhetoric and made-up news throughout the campaign and especially in the days leading up to the election.

The bots favored Trump by five-to-one, according to Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute's computational propaganda institute.

Russian internet trolls — paid by the Kremlin to spread false information on the internet — have been behind a number of "highly coordinated campaigns" to deceive the American public, journalist Adrian Chen found when researching Russian troll factories in St. Petersburg in 2015.

It's a brand of information warfare, known as "dezinformatsiya," that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one "active measure" tool used by Russian intelligence to "sow discord among," and within, nations perceived as hostile to Russia.

From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs "was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.

"Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history," Chen wrote. "And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space."

In a telling case study of how widespread and pervasive fake news was during the election, Oxford University researchers found that nearly half of the news Michigan voters were exposed to on Twitter leading up to Election Day was fake. They found that the proportion of “professional to junk news” was “roughly one-to-one,” and that “fully 46.5% of all content presented as news” about politics and the election fell under “the definition of propaganda” when unverified WikiLeaks content and Russian-origin news stories were factored in.

donald trump
President Trump. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

As many as 39 state-election systems targeted
In January, President-elect Trump issued a statement after he was briefed on the intelligence community’s classified report on Russia’s election interference.

“While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat [sic] National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.”

As it turns out, that was not entirely true.

Bloomberg reported in June that election systems in as many as 39 states could have been attacked, though voting tallies are not believed to have been altered or manipulated in any way.

"In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data," Bloomberg said. "The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database."

The report was bolstered by a leaked NSA document published by The Intercept earlier this month detailing how hackers connected to Russian military intelligence had attempted to breach US voting systems days before the election.

National-security experts were floored by the document and said it was the clearest evidence so far that Russia interfered in the election.

Department of Homeland Security official Jeanette Manfra confirmed to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 21 that Russian hackers targeted at least 21 states’ election systems in 2016, successfully exploiting a small number of networks and stealing voter registration data. Time reported on Thursday that the hackers successfully altered voter information in at least one election database and stole thousands of voter records containing private information like Social Security numbers.

The exposure of that data has left upcoming elections vulnerable to manipulation. Virginia and New Jersey will hold gubernatorial elections later this year, and all 435 seats in the House and 33 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested in the 2018 midterm elections.

Putin has consistently denied the Kremlin had anything to do with the hacking or disinformation campaigns waged in 2016 to bolster Trump and hurt Clinton. But he acknowledged a potential Russian role for the first time earlier this month when he said that “patriotically minded” Russian citizens might have taken it upon themselves "to fight against those who say bad things about Russia.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/evidence ... ion-2017-6



‘Trump Is What Happens When a Political Party Abandons Ideas’

As surprising as Trump’s young presidency has been, it’s also the natural outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics.
By BRUCE BARTLETT June 24, 2017


‘Trump Is What Happens When a Political Party Abandons Ideas’
Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Politico endorsing Donald Trump for president. It was a tongue-in-cheek effort—I “supported” Trump only because I thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously, and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.

Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the party’s demise. In the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency would fix much of what ails our country. On November 8, I voted for Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.

Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max Bialystock was by the success of “Springtime for Hitler.” For two months after Trump won, I couldn’t read any news about the election, and considered abandoning political commentary permanently. It wasn’t just that Trump disgusted me; I was disgusted with myself for being so stupid. I no longer trusted my own powers of observation and analysis.

Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the inverse of what I’d imagined. Trump didn’t lose; he won. The Republican Party isn’t undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling, perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.

Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trump’s proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.

And if those policies weren’t enough, conservatives—who, after all, believe in liberty and a system of checks and balances to restrain the government to its proper role—have plenty of reason to be upset by those actions Trump has taken that transcend our traditional right-left ideological divide. He’s voiced not only skepticism of NATO, but outright hostility to it. He’s pulled America back from its role as an international advocate for human rights. He’s attacked the notion of an independent judiciary. He personally intervened to request the FBI to ease up on its investigation of a former adviser of his, then fired FBI Director James Comey and freely admitted he did so to alleviate the pressure he felt from Comey’s investigation. For those conservatives who were tempted to embrace a “wait-and-see” approach to Trump, what they’ve seen, time and again, is almost unimaginable.

And yet as surprising as this all has been, it’s also the natural outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics. Trump is what happens when a political party abandons ideas, demonizes intellectuals, degrades politics and simply pursues power for the sake of power.

***

In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, many conservatives concluded that their philosophy was insufficiently well-grounded in the social sciences and lacked an empirical foundation. For example, Goldwater talked about privatizing Social Security, but had no plan whatsoever for how to do it. Hearing his rhetoric on the subject, those receiving Social Security assumed, not unreasonably, that they would just be cut off.

Conservative leaders like William F. Buckley, the editor of National Review, the leading conservative publication, took to heart progressive historian Richard Hofstadter’s critique of widespread paranoia on the right. Buckley purged the extreme libertarians like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, anti-Semites like Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, and the conspiracy-obsessed John Birch Society. And he made peace with the civil rights movement, as historian Al Felzenberg has documented.

In the 1970s, the conservative movement became receptive to moderate conservatives, called “neoconservatives,” such as Irving Kristol (father of Bill, the prominent anti-Trump conservative), who had been turned off by the anti-intellectualism of movement conservatism in the Goldwater era. Irving Kristol established an important journal, The Public Interest, which brought intellectual rigor and sophisticated policy analysis to the conservative table. Politicians like my former boss, Representative Jack Kemp, began reading it religiously. Others, like Rep. Dave Stockman, wrote for it and made names for themselves in the process. Eventually, this crowd found a powerful leader in Reagan, who appointed important neoconservatives like Stockman and Jeane Kirkpatrick to high-level positions.

The Heritage Foundation, established in 1973, was formed in part to provide policy analysis that was conservative, deeply studied and concisely digestible. When I worked there in the mid-1980s, it was a genuine think tank, an intellectual institution that did academic-quality research. We saw our job as putting policy flesh on the bones of Reagan’s conservative rhetoric, helping plow the ground for conservative initiatives too radical to be proposed by the administration just yet. In this era, important work was done at Heritage on reforming the tax system, welfare, Social Security and the health system—work that has stood the test of time.

When I became active in the Republican Party in the mid-1970s, it was the party of thoughtful men and women who were transforming America’s domestic policies while strengthening its moral leadership on the global stage. As Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in a July 1980 New York Times article, “the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

And then, everything began to change.

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Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 after nationalizing the election into broad themes and catchphrases. Newt Gingrich, the marshal of these efforts, even released a list of words Republican candidates should use to glorify themselves (common sense, prosperity, empower) and hammer their opponents (liberal, pathetic, traitors); soon, every Republican in Congress spoke the same language, using words carefully run through focus groups by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Budgets for House committees were cut, bleeding away policy experts, and GOP committee chairs were selected based on loyalty to the party and how much money they could raise. Gone were the days when members were incentivized to speak with nuance, or hone a policy expertise (especially as committee chairs could now serve for only six years). In power, Republicans decided they didn’t need any more research or analysis; they had their agenda, and just needed to get it enacted. Only a Democratic president stood in their way, and so 100 percent of Republicans’ efforts went into attempting to oust or weaken Bill Clinton and, when that failed, elect a Republican president who would do nothing but sign into law bills passed by the GOP Congress.

President George W. Bush didn’t realize he was supposed to just be a passive bill-signing machine; he kept insisting that Republicans enact his priorities, which, often, were not very conservative—No Child Left Behind Act, steel tariffs, a tax cut with few supply-side elements. His worst transgression, for me, was the budget-busting Medicare Part D legislation, which massively expanded the welfare state and the national debt, yet was enthusiastically supported by a great many House conservatives, including Congressman Paul Ryan, who had claimed to hold office for the purpose of abolishing entitlement programs. Republican hypocrisy on the issue caused me to become estranged from my party.

In the 14 years since then, I have watched from the sidelines as Republican policy analysis and research have virtually disappeared altogether, replaced with sound bites and talking points. The Heritage Foundation morphed into Heritage Action for America, ceasing to do any real research and losing all its best policy experts as it transformed from an august center whose focus was the study and development of public policy into one devoted mainly to amplifying political campaign slogans. Talk radio and Fox News, where no idea too complicated for a mind with a sixth-grade education is ever heard, became the tail wagging the conservative dog. Conservative magazines like National Review, which once boasted world-class intellectuals such as James Burnham and Russell Kirk among its columnists, jumped on the bandwagon, dumbing itself down to appeal to the common man, who is deemed to be the font of all wisdom. (For example, the magazine abandoned the ecumenical approach to immigration of Reagan, who granted amnesty to undocumentedimmigrants in 1986, to a rigid anti-immigrant policy largely indistinguishable from the one Trump ran on.)

One real-world result of the lobotomizing of conservative intellectualism is that when forced to produce a replacement for Obamacare—something Republican leaders had sworn they had in their pocket for eight years—there was nothing. Not just no legislation—no workable concept that adhered to the many promises Republicans had made, like coverage for pre-existing conditions and the assurance that nobody would lose their coverage. You’d think that House Speaker Ryan could have found a staff slot for one person to be working on an actual Obamacare replacement all these years, just in case.

With hindsight, it’s no surprise that the glorification of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism that has been rampant on the right at least since the election of Barack Obama would give rise to someone like Trump. Anyone who ever read Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” which imagined a fascist dictator taking power in 1930s America, recognizes that Trump is the real-life embodiment of Senator Buzz Windrip—a know-nothing populist who becomes president by promising something for everyone, with no clue or concern for how to actually accomplish it. Windrip was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic,” Lewis wrote. “Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only the wings of a windmill.”

Conservatives are starting to accept that Trump is not the leader they had hoped for and is more of a liability for their agenda than an asset. They are also starting to recognize that their intellectual infrastructure is badly damaged, in need of repair, and that the GOP and intellectual conservatism are not interchangeable. The Heritage Foundation recently fired its president, former Senator Jim DeMint, in part because he had allowed its research capabilities to deteriorate. The journal National Affairs aspires to be the serious, conservative policy-oriented journal that The Public Interest was. And some leaders, like Bill Kristol, have courageously stood up against the GOP’s pervasive Trumpism (“I look forward to the day when American conservatism regains its moral health and political sanity, and the David Horowitz center is back on the fringe, where I’m afraid it belongs,” Kristol recently told the Washington Post).

These are small steps, and promising—you have to start somewhere, after all—but what conservative intellectuals really need for a full-blown revival is a crushing Republican defeat—Goldwater plus Watergate rolled into one. A defeat so massive there can be no doubt about the message it sends that Trumpian populism and anti-intellectualism are no path to conservative policy success. In the meantime, there are hopeful signs that the long-dormant moderate wing of the GOP is coming alive again. In Kansas, Trumpian Governor Sam Brownback was recently rebuked when a Republican-controlled Legislature overrode his veto to raise taxes after the cuts previously enacted by Brownback proved disastrous to the state’s finances. And although their efforts have been modest thus far, moderate Republicans in Congress have helped soften Republican initiatives on health, the budget and gays.

The implementation of long-term, successful policy change cannot be short-circuited, it must be built on a solid foundation of thinking, analysis and research by smart, well-educated people. Listening to the common man rant about things he knows nothing about is a dead-end that leads to Trump and failure because there is no “there” there, just mindless rhetoric and frustration.

Having so badly miscalled the 2016 election, I’m not going out on a limb here and predicting a 1974-style defeat for GOP members of Congress next year, and I am fully aware that Democrats are always capable of seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. But the preconditions are falling into place for a political transformation between 2018 and 2020 that could result in the type of defeat that I think is necessary for my old party and the conservative movement to rebuild themselves from the ground up.

Ideally, I’d like to see an intellectual revival on the right such as we saw after the Goldwater defeat and the Watergate debacle. Freed from the stultifying strictures and kowtowing to know-nothing Trumpian populists—perhaps building on new outlets and institutions that celebrate intellectual rigor and reject shallow sound bites—a few conservative thinkers can plow a path toward sane, responsible conservative governance, just as people like Irving Kristol and Jack Kemp did during the Carter years. (Some conservative thinkers, such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, speculate that Mitt Romney may emerge as the leader of a sane, modern, technocratic wing of an intellectually revitalized GOP.) If a leader doesn’t emerge, moderate Republicans—many of whom did not and will not support Trump—could be lost to the Democratic Party for good.

If the Republican Party and the conservative movement abandon populism, mindless appeals to the electorate’s lowest common denominator, and the pursuit of power for the sake of power and instead pursue a fully formed policy agenda based on solid analysis and research, then I don’t think it will take very long for a Republican revival. If it takes a Trump debacle to make that happen, it will have been worth it.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ump-215259



Russian tanks motor through the Victory Parade marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of the Nazis in World War II, in Moscow’s Red Square, in 2015. Igor Zorin, a Russian government official involved in the logistics of the parade, owns valuable South Florida property holdings. Alexander Zemlianichenko AP
MIAMI-DADE COUNTY
JUNE 22, 2017 12:00 PM

Russian official linked to South Florida biker club spent millions on Trump condos
BY LILY DOBROVOLSKAYA AND NICHOLAS NEHAMAS
nnehamas@miamiherald.com

Out-of-town money pouring into South Florida real estate is as old as Henry Flagler.

But the tale of Igor Zorin offers a 21st-century twist with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia’s powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.

Zorin is a Russian government official who has spent nearly $8 million on waterfront South Florida homes, hardly financially prudent given his bureaucrat’s salary of $75,000 per year. He runs a state-owned broadcasting company that, among other duties, operates sound systems for the annual military parade that sends columns of soldiers and tanks rumbling through Moscow’s Red Square.

Zorin has other Miami connections, too: His local business associate, Svyatoslav Mangushev, a Russian intelligence officer turned Miami real-estate investor, helped found a biker club called Spetsnaz M.C. Spetsnaz is a group of motorcycle-loving South Florida expatriates who named themselves after the Russian equivalent of Delta Force or Seal Team Six.

Spetsnaz members once asked for official recognition from Russia’s biggest biker gang, the Night Wolves, an infamous group that has strong ties to Russia’s security services. The Night Wolves played a role in the Ukrainian uprising, once had their flag flown in outer space by Russian cosmonauts and are under U.S. sanctions.

Russia Victory Parade R(2)
Russian army soldiers march along Red Square during a general rehearsal for the 2015 Victory Day military parade to celebrate 70 years since the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II.
Ivan Sekretarev AP
Zorin and Mangushev have ties in both Russia and the United States: In Russia, security firms that have been linked to Mangushev have won $2.4 million worth of contracts from Zorin’s agency since 2015. In Miami, Mangushev once transferred a Florida company that owned a $1.5 million condo out of his name and into Zorin’s. No deed of sale was recorded, meaning the price paid — if any — is unknown.

The condo is one of three units Zorin owned at Trump Palace, a ritzy tower in Sunny Isles Beach built by a local developer and branded by the Trump Organization. Their total value? $5.4 million. Zorin still owns two condos there, plus a $3.3 million home in Bal Harbour.

IT’S LIKE [ZORIN] OWNED A PLACE IN HELL.
Ilya Shumanov, Transparency International

But back in Russia, none of those properties appear in the public disclosure forms Zorin is required to fill out as a government official. That’s illegal under Russian law and would trouble Zorin’s bosses, according to Ilya Shumanov, deputy director of the Russian chapter of Transparency International, a global anti-graft watchdog.

Given the contentious state of U.S.-Russia relations, owning properties in the United States is considered a black mark against officials like Zorin, according to Shumanov.

“It’s like he owned a place in Hell,” he said.

Igor Zorin 2
Igor Zorin

Zorin was not an original buyer at Trump Palace, meaning his funds would not have gone to the Trump Organization, which signed lucrative deals to brand several condo towers in South Florida in the early 2000s. The Trump name is attractive to Russian buyers and helped turn Sunny Isles Beach into a high-rise condo haven sometimes called “Little Moscow.”

Mangushev is a former officer in Russia’s security service, the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. He first appeared in Miami around 2010.

In Russia, he ran a group of companies called Alpha-Anticriminal that provided security for some of Russia’s biggest state-owned companies and government agencies. The Alpha-Anticriminal companies were listed under the name of a relative until 2014, according to Russian corporate records.

Alpha Team is an elite Spetsnaz counter-terrorism unit that operates within Russia’s security service. Mangushev told Russian media that he is a former Alpha Team officer and that many of his employees are veterans of Russia’s security service.

The web connecting the Trump administration to Russia

From Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to former campaign director Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's allies have business and personal connections to Russia. As Congress and the FBI look into Russia's involvement with the 2016 election, those connections are increasingly under a microscope.
Natalie Fertig and Patrick Gleason / McClatchy
Zorin would not comment for this story. A Miami attorney for Mangushev, Olesia Belchenko, declined to answer a list of written questions, except to say that her client sold his Russian security firms in 2013 and has no business relationship with Zorin.

But publicly available records suggest Zorin and Mangushev are connected. In 2011, Zorin wrote a letter of recommendation for Alpha-Anticriminal, posted on the group’s website. While Mangushev’s attorney said he no longer owns Alpha-Anticriminal and its related entities, Russian corporate records still list him as the majority owner of one Alpha-Anticriminal company that is in the process of being dissolved. In addition, he manages a U.S. company called Alpha-Anticriminal. And the website for his South Florida realty firm, Alpha Realty, lists Alpha-Anticriminal as a “partner.”

Mangushev and his affiliated companies own nearly $10 million in South Florida real estate, including a Brickell condo, a Hollywood office building, an Aventura boat slip and a vacant residential lot near Liberty City, according to property records. Court records show that he once tried to evict his wife from a unit at the Trump Palace that charged $9,000 per month in rent. The eviction case began one year after he was arrested on a charge of misdemeanor battery and she filed a domestic violence injunction against him, later dropped.

‘Putin’s biker’

Military veterans are a growing part of America’s biker culture. But few clubs can brag of an association with Russia’s special forces.

Spetsnaz M.C. was founded two years ago by Mangushev and other Russian expatriates, including a decorated Broward Sheriff’s deputy.

Spetsnaz is a broad term in the Russian military that encompasses counter-terrorism strike teams, elite assault forces and special units of the FSB. Veterans of Russia’s security services often rise to high positions in business and government, including President Vladimir Putin, a former director of the FSB.

Zorin is not listed as a Spetsnaz bike club member. However, his disclosure form states that he owns two motorcycles, one made by BMW, the other by Honda. It’s not known whether he served in the special forces.

The political views of Spetsnaz club members veer toward nationalism.

In a 2010 interview with a Russian media outlet, Mangushev criticized immigration and its potential to wreak the “rapid destruction of national and cultural identity.” In 2014, the future president of the Spetsnaz club wrote to Russia’s most notorious biker group, the Night Wolves, asking to become an official affiliate.

zaldostanov putin
Vladimir Putin (L), then Russia's Prime Minister, walks side by side with Alexander Zaldostanov (R), nicknamed "the Surgeon", the leader of the group of Russian bikers called the Night Wolves, near Sevastopol in Ukraine's Crimea, in 2010.
ALEXEY DRUZHININ AFP
The letter was penned by German Bickbau, a Broward Sheriff’s deputy who has received several commendations for his law enforcement work, according to his personnel file.

“There’s a spirit in the Night Wolves,” Bickbau wrote in Russian in 2014, according to the Night Wolves website. “There’s something that’s not in the other groups. There’s the spirit of Russia. That is why we are awaiting [your] decision.”

During the invasion of Crimea and uprising in Ukraine, the Night Wolves took their hogs to the road to join Russian-backed separatist fighters. Their leader, Alexander Zaldostanov, a plastic surgery specialist nicknamed “the Surgeon,” has been decorated by Putin. He is considered a close ally of the Kremlin. In 2015, Russian cosmonauts flew the Night Wolves’ flag above the International Space Station.

The United States has a less charitable view: In 2014, the Treasury Department put Zaldostanov and the Night Wolves under sanction for their role in the Ukrainian conflict. U.S. officials said the Night Wolves had abducted a Ukrainian border guard, stormed a Ukrainian naval base and smuggled a senior Ukrainian official out of the country.

In addition, “the Night Wolves have been closely connected to the Russian special services [and] have helped to recruit separatist fighters,” a Treasury news release said.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration unveiled new Ukraine-related sanctions against 38 individuals and groups, including two Night Wolves administrators and two organizations affiliated with the gang.

It’s not known whether the group ever agreed to recognize Spetsnaz.

Mangushev
Svyatoslav Mangushev was arrested for misdemeanor battery in 2014.
Miami-Dade County of Corrections & Rehabilitation. Courtesy
In South Florida, Spetsnaz members have performed charity work and ridden up and down the East Coast, according to the group’s website. They met with New York City Russian-American law enforcement officers and have opened a Moscow chapter. Corporate paperwork filed in Florida says Spetsnaz members are “family-oriented motorcycle enthusiasts from [the] former Soviet Union who served in [the] armed forces and like-minded individuals” who wish to promote motorcycle safety in Russia and the United States.

Mangushev repeatedly hung up the phone when contacted by reporters at a Miami number. He is involved in civil litigation with his business partners, Gennady Alekseenko and Inessa Pozdnyakova, over his local real-estate company.

Bickbau, who resigned as president last year, did not return calls.

Home away from home

Corruption is a major problem in Russia, sparking massive opposition-led protests in March. And South Florida figures big as a hiding place for mysterious funds. Russian organized crime groups are known to operate in the region.

“If a person needs to hide dirty money, my bet is that this person is going to South Florida,” said Shumanov of Transparency International. “It is an ideal place for … laundering money through luxury real estate. The prices are rising, the investment is protected and there are dozens of ways to hide the beneficial owner of an expensive condominium, house or villa.”

All that money rushing into Miami has helped push home prices far beyond what most locals can afford.

U.S. law enforcement is taking note of Miami’s reputation as a lock box for suspect money. Among the highest-profile incidents that have left the local real-estate industry feeling under siege: unprecedented federal monitoring of shell companies buying pricey homes in cash. A wave of disclosures from the release of the secret offshore files known as the Panama Papers. And now a special prosecutor-led investigation that could focus on potential links between Russian operatives and President Donald Trump’s business empire, with its large South Florida footprint.

None of Zorin’s property purchases used bank financing, meaning he most likely paid cash. He made roughly $75,000 in 2015 and $159,000 in 2016, according to his latest disclosure forms.

The Trump unit he got from Mangushev was later sold to a woman who appears to be Mangushev’s relative for $1.5 million, Florida records show.

Meanwhile, Alpha-Anticriminal has won dozens of contracts from Zorin’s government firm, according to official records examined by the Herald in Russia. In his disclosures, Zorin failed to mention his South Florida business connection with Mangushev.

“It is a conflict of interest that should have been reported to [Zorin’s] superior,” Shumanov said.

Spetsnaz Moscow 2
Spetsnaz M.C., a South Florida motorcycle club founded by Russian expatriates, has opened a Moscow chapter, according to its website.
Spetsnaz M.C. Courtesy
Russian government officials are supposed to report any properties they own overseas, thanks to anti-corruption reforms signed by Putin. Starting in July, a new law will ban officials from owning shares of foreign businesses, such as the Florida limited liability companies Zorin used to buy his Miami-area homes or a used-tire business that Miami-Dade court records show he once tried to purchase. Officials are already prohibited from owning foreign bank accounts.

Zorin did not respond to questions in Russian about his Florida assets that were hand-delivered to his Moscow office by a reporter. His agency, the state-owned Russian Broadcasting and Alert Network (RSVO), did not respond to an email.

RSVO broadcasts state radio programs, operates emergency alert networks, provides infrastructure for telecommunication firms and handles acoustic technology for major government events, according to its website. That includes the famous Victory Day parade through Red Square celebrating the Soviet Union’s role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

On Tuesday of this past week, as the Herald was attempting to contact Spetsnaz members in advance of publication, the motorcycle club filed paperwork with the state to shut down.

DOBROVOLSKAYA REPORTED FROM MOSCOW. NEHAMAS AND MIAMI HERALD WRITER OLGA YAKOVLEVA REPORTED FROM MIAMI.

Nicholas Nehamas: 305-376-3745, @NickNehamas

Transparency International

The Russia chapter of Transparency International obtained the Russian public records referenced in this story and provided them to the Miami Herald. Transparency International is a global nonprofit that advocates for anti-corruption measures in government. In 1999, it opened a Moscow office and now has 40 employees around the country. Globally, the group has more than 100 chapters with a main office in Berlin.

“Russian public officials hide their property in foreign jurisdictions and we want to raise awareness to this huge problem,” said Ilya Shumanov, the group’s deputy director in Moscow. “We try to achieve three main goals: transparency, accountability and integrity of civil society, business and government.”

German Bickbau, a Broward Sheriff’s deputy listed as the former president of Spetsnaz M.C.
German Bickbau, a Broward Sheriff’s deputy listed as the former president of Spetsnaz M.C. Spetsnaz M.C. Courtesy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/c ... rylink=cpy



You’d Be Scared if You Were Donald Trump, Too

The president is obsessed with the investigation into his relationship with Russia. He should be.

BY MAX BOOTJUNE 22, 2017facebooktwittergoogle-plusredditLinkedIn email
You’d Be Scared if You Were Donald Trump, Too
Donald Trump has been having a meltdown about former FBI Director Robert Mueller pretty much ever since the special counsel was appointed on May 17. On Twitter he has been fulminating that he is a victim of “the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history — led by some very bad and conflicted people!” Behind the scenes, the Associated Press reports, he is “yelling at television sets in the White House carrying coverage and insisting he is the target of a conspiracy to discredit — and potentially end — his presidency.” So irate has Trump become that he reportedly gave serious thought to firing Mueller when his investigation has hardly begun — and may still do so despite all of the advice he is receiving to the contrary.

It’s not hard to see why Trump would be so terrified: Mueller is universally respected for his integrity and doggedness, and he has been assembling a hunter-killer team of crack investigators and lawyers to help him. Together they have over a century of experience at the Justice Department unraveling complex, white-collar conspiracies. One of them even speaks Russian. Trump’s attack dogs have been desperately trying to discredit the rebooted Untouchables, but the best they could come up with is that three of Mueller’s hires contributed to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. If that’s disqualifying for government service, then Trump himself should resign; he has donated at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, far more than any of Mueller’s staff gave to her campaign.

What worries Trump is not that Mueller may be a Democratic partisan — the very idea is ludicrous, given that he was appointed to run by the FBI by President George W. Bush — but that the Marine combat veteran cannot be bought off or intimidated. This has always been Trump’s M.O. — witness his attempts to win pledges of “loyalty” from James Comey in return for allowing him to stay on as FBI director. Comey wouldn’t play ball, and neither will Mueller. So that right there is enough reason for Trump to be scared now that he is being investigated by Mueller for obstruction of justice — a crime which he essentially admitted on national television when he said that he fired Comey to shut down the investigation into the “Russia thing.”

Actually, Trump has even more cause for concern because, like previous investigations, this one won’t be narrowly limited. Recall that the Whitewater independent counsel began by probing an Arkansas land deal and wound up nailing Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his sex life. To get the truth about Kremlingate, Mueller will need to investigate any possible financial ties between Trump, his associates, and Russia — and that, in turn, will lead Mueller to probe just about every financial transaction in which Trump and his cronies have been involved.

The Washington Post reported that investigators are “looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates,” while the New York Times wrote: “A former senior official said Mr. Mueller’s investigation was looking at money laundering by Trump associates. The suspicion is that any cooperation with Russian officials would most likely have been in exchange for some kind of financial payoff, and that there would have been an effort to hide the payments, probably by routing them through offshore banking centers.”

Did someone say money laundering? For some strange reason that reminded me of this NBC News report that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, “was associated with at least 15 bank accounts and 10 companies on Cyprus, dating back to 2007,” and that “At least one of those companies was used to receive millions of dollars from a billionaire Putin ally.”

Of course Trump would be exceedingly lucky if the investigation were limited only to the finances of Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and other former aides from whom he will try to distance himself. He will have a harder time disowning Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and White House aide, who is undoubtedly being probed for his meeting with Sergey Gorkov, a former Russian intelligence officer and Putin associate who runs Russia’s bank for development and foreign economic affairs. Vnesheconombank has been sanctioned by the Treasury Department on several occasions since 2014.

Worst of all for Trump, the investigation is likely to shine a spotlight on his own dubious business practices. In March, for example, USA Today wrote that “the president and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering.”

It appears that Trump and his associates have been trying to cover their tracks because a more recent USA Today scoop reported that “Since President Trump won the Republican nomination, the majority of his companies’ real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers’ identities.” But, despite these attempts at concealment, Reuters reported “at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida.” Eric Trump reportedly bragged in 2014 that Russian investors were funding Trump’s golf courses.

Such reports, partial and incomplete as they are, make a mockery of Trump’s carefully worded non-denial: “I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.”

One person with whom Trump undoubtedly did have deals was Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who has been convicted of assault for stabbing a man in the face with a broken glass and for racketeering because of his involvement in a mafia-linked stock fraud scheme. A criminal turned government informant, Sater was one of the principals of the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm located in Trump Tower that partnered with the Trump Organization to build the Trump SoHo hotel and other properties. According to Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien, a veteran Trump chronicler, “a former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, claims that he eventually departed from the firm because he became convinced that Bayrock was actually a front for money laundering.”

O’Brien quotes another former insider, Abe Wallach, “who was the future president’s right-hand man at the Trump Organization from 1990 to about 2002,” as saying: “It’s not very hard to get connected to Donald if you make it known that you have a lot of money and you want to do deals and you want to put his name on it. Donald doesn’t do due diligence. He relies on his gut and whether he thinks you have good genes.”

If this were your business background, would you want Bob Mueller and his untouchables investigating you? The only wonder is that Trump hasn’t already tried to fire Mueller before he starts turning over more Bayrocks.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/22/you ... trump-too/



This Top Mueller Aide Once Worked on an Investigation of a Trump Associate Tied to the Russian Mob

Andrew Weissmann helped oversee the bizarre Felix Sater case.

CHERYL COLLINS AND DAVID CORNJUN. 23, 2017 11:44 AM


Andrew Weissmann
Andrew Weissmann led the Enron prosecutions in 2004.Tony Gutierrez/AP

While President Donald Trump fumes about the expanding Russia investigation, the man in charge of the probe has been busy assembling a murderer’s row of experienced prosecutors boasting backgrounds in government corruption, fraud, cybersecurity, corporate crime, and organized crime. One of the first hires made by special counsel Robert Mueller was Andrew Weissmann, the leader of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud division. And in a curious twist, Weissmann once played a role in an unusual case—involving the Mafia, the Russian mob, and securities fraud—that is now oddly linked to Trump.

Weissmann has a reputation as a fierce prosecutor, having headed up the Justice Department’s Enron Task Force. Before that, as an assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of New York, he pursued cases targeting Mafia wise guys and Russian organized crime members.

Weissmann played a role in an unusual case—involving the Mafia, the Russian mob, and securities fraud—that is now oddly linked to Trump.
As a prosecutor in the Eastern District, Weissmann signed a 1998 cooperation agreement between the US government and Felix Sater, a violent felon and securities trader who had pleaded guilty to financial crimes. Sater went on to become a confidential informant for the FBI and a Trump business partner. During the years in which Sater was secretly cooperating with the Feds, he was also engaging in key real estate ventures with Trump. This included scouting for deals in Russia and Eastern Europe, projects that never materialized. Trump has consistently claimed that his business empire has “nothing to do with Russia.” Yet Sater’s intriguing tale represents at least one important Russia connection for Trump.

Though Weissmann served in various positions of authority within the Eastern District, it is unclear how closely involved he was with the Sater case. A spokesman for Mueller says, “Apart from his role as an office supervisor in 1998, Mr. Weissmann does not recall any direct involvement.” Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Weissmann had a role in the Sater case. But might Weissmann, who left the Eastern District in 2002 to join the Enron probe, have any inside information—or insight—into the Trump-Sater matter and how it relates to Trump’s decades-long effort to forge ties in Russia?

The Sater episode has raised serious questions for Trump, who has denied knowing much about Sater. There are unresolved mysteries: what Sater did as a confidential informant and what Trump knew, if anything, of Sater’s criminal activity.

Sater’s business dealings with Trump appear to have faded several years ago, but he has maintained his ties to the Trump camp. In August 2016, Sater told Politico that he had visited Trump Tower the previous month, but he declined to disclose with whom he had met or the visit’s purpose, saying only that it was “confidential.” At the start of the Trump administration, Sater joined with a Ukrainian legislator and Michael Cohen, a personal lawyer for Trump, to develop a Putin-friendly Ukrainian peace plan that they presented to Michael Flynn, then Trump’s national security adviser.

Regardless of the extent of his direct involvement in the Sater case, Weissmann’s participation on Mueller’s team ought to concern Trump’s lawyers. He is an expert on financial crime and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. (He served as Mueller’s general counsel when Mueller was FBI chief.) Recently, the Justice Department fraud section he oversaw helped pursue a case against VimpelCom, a Russian telecom company registered in Bermuda with headquarters in the Netherlands that was charged with bribing an Uzbek official identified in news reports as Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Weissmann’s investigators helped disentangle the extremely complicated financial chicanery of that company, which was originally headquartered in Russia.


Sater lived a strange life before encountering Trump. He was born in 1966 in what is now Russia and came of age in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn. He became a licensed stockbroker, and his criminal record began in 1991, when he attacked a man with a broken margarita glass during a bar fight and ended up serving about a year on a felony assault conviction. Sater was barred from working with securities after his felony conviction, but soon he and others took over a brokerage that set about scamming customers through “pump and dump” and other stock manipulation schemes and then laundered the proceeds—more than $40 million dollars. The operation included members of various Italian crime families and the Russian mob.

In 1998, the FBI was on the trail of this criminal enterprise, but Sater had left for Russia, working there as a consultant for AT&T. He returned to the United States and surrendered himself to the FBI. A subsequent indictment named Sater as an “unindicted co-co-conspirator.”

“I’d come back, pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal.’”
Sater quickly cut a deal with the federal government. He signed a cooperation agreement and pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering in exchange for agreeing to provide information about his co-conspirators. The agreement noted that he faced up to 20 years in prison, at least $250,000 in fines, and up to $60 million in restitution. Sater promised to provide prosecutors “complete, truthful and accurate information” and vowed not to reveal his cooperation to anyone.

In return, the US attorney for the Eastern District agreed not to file any additional criminal charges against Sater for his “criminal activity involving fraudulent securities transactions, and the unlawful laundering and structuring of proceeds therefrom…false tax reporting…threats of violence in connection with securities transactions…and unlawful possession of firearms.” And the prosecutors agreed to recommend a reduced sentence for Sater if he held up his end of the bargain. The agreement also noted the possibility that Sater might be placed in the federal witness security program.

The agreement was signed by Sater and his lawyer, Myles Malman (who is now deceased), assistant US attorney Jonathan Sack, and Weissmann, who was listed as a supervising assistant US attorney. (Sater’s original indictment was signed by Loretta Lynch, then an assistant US attorney in the Eastern District. Lynch later served as attorney general during the Obama administration.)

Sack did not reply to a request for comment. Neither did Sater.

Sater was now an FBI informant, and he provided information that helped the bureau’s investigation of that $40 million stock scheme linked to both the Mafia and the Russian mob. In 2000, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the New York Police Department announced the indictments of 19 people involved in this caper.

Afterward, Sater continued to cooperate with the government, living a double life as a secret informant and a real estate developer. By early 2002, he was working at Bayrock, a real estate development and investment firm with offices in Trump Tower and run by Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet official from Kazakhstan.

Soon Bayrock was doing deals with Trump. In 2003, Bayrock announced it would develop with the Trump Organization a 19-story condominium tower and hotel in Phoenix. (The project never went through.) Bayrock licensed the Trump name for a hotel and condominium complex in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (That project went bust and sparked lawsuits claiming fraud.) Bayrock and Trump also developed the Trump SoHo condominium-hotel in New York City, the only Bayrock project for which Trump put up any of his own money. Sater and Trump both appeared at the launch party for this project. (The Trump SoHo deal prompted a lawsuit in which buyers of units there claimed they had been defrauded by Trump, his adult children and others. Trump and his co-defendants settled the case in 2011, agreeing to refund 90 percent of $3 million in deposits but admitting no wrongdoing.)

As Bloomberg recently reported, “During the years that Bayrock and Trump did deals together, the company was also a bridge between murky European funding and a number of projects in the US to which the president once lent his name in exchange for handsome fees…Trump testified under oath in a 2007 deposition that Bayrock brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow, and said he was pondering investing there.” In that deposition, Trump said, “It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia. Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment.”

In one court case, Sater testified he had a “friendly” relationship with Trump and often met with him and his staff to discuss deals. One of those included a project in Moscow that Sater tried to develop for Trump. And Sater testified that during this time he would visit Moscow and upon his return, “I’d come back, pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal.’ And he would say, ‘All right.’” Sater and Trump traveled in Colorado together in 2005, along with Melania Trump. Sater was working with Trump on a project in Denver that never came to be. That year, Trump wrote Arif, “I am delighted at having the opportunity to partner with Bayrock Group LLC on yet another world-class development. Moscow is one of the fastest growing cities in the world and offers the best location for a Signature Donald J. Trump development.” According to Sater, Trump asked him to squire Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. when they visited Moscow in 2006.

“Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it. I’m not that familiar with him.”
In December 2007, the Sater-Trump relationship hit a major bump when the New York Times revealed that Trump was in business with a man who had been accused of “conspiring with the Mafia to launder money and defraud investors.” With Sater’s status as a felon now publicly revealed, anyone doing business with him would be in a tough spot. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for a project involving Sater to secure funding. The newspaper also noted that Sater, as a government informant, had become involved “in a plan to buy antiaircraft missiles on the black market for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Trump told the newspaper he knew nothing of Sater’s past.

During a deposition in an unrelated case days later, Trump insisted that he had only had “limited” interactions with Sater. “Have you severed your ties with the Bayrock Group as a result of this?” Trump was asked. He replied, “Well, I’m looking into it, because I wasn’t happy with the story.”

Trump apparently did not sever his ties to Sater. By 2010, Sater, who left Bayrock after the Times story ran, was reportedly handing out business cards bearing a Trump Organization phone number and email address and describing him as a “senior advisor to Donald Trump.” (A former Bayrock official named Jody Kriss has sued the firm charging that it engaged in money laundering and cash-skimming and stole millions from him. Bayrock has replied in court documents that he is a disgruntled employee looking to make a fast buck. A federal judge in December ruled that Kriss’s lawsuit, filed nine years ago, could proceed as a racketeering case. And McClatchey recently reported that Bayrock has been implicated in lawsuits alleging Kazakhstan money laundering.)

In 2009, after more than a decade of cooperating with prosecutors, Sater was sentenced for his racketeering conviction related to his crimes of the mid-1990s. At the sentencing hearing, four FBI agents with whom he had worked appeared on his behalf. Sater, his lawyer said, was “deserving of the full measure of leniency that this court can impose, given the extraordinary circumstances of his cooperation.”

Todd Kaminsky, an assistant US attorney and now a Democratic New York state senator, told the court that Sater “was one of the best cooperators we worked with. There was nothing he wouldn’t do. No task was too big.” FBI agent Leo Taddeo said, “Without his cooperation, it would have been a few more years where the FBI would have effectively removed La Cosa Nostra from the penny stock business.” The judge in the case, noting that Sater had already forfeited a house in the Hamptons as part of his cooperation agreement, sentenced Sater to a fine of $25,000 and no prison time. Sater’s sentence did not include any restitution.

Parts of the transcripts of Sater’s sentencing hearing were redacted before they were publicly released—perhaps because these portions included references to work he did related to national security. In 2015, at her confirmation hearings for US attorney general, Lynch noted that Sater had provided “information crucial to national security.” His lawyer, Robert Wolf, told the Los Angeles Times that Sater had worked with “numerous US national security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies” and helped pursue “America’s greatest enemies” in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Through the years Sater worked with Trump—and served as a government informant—his status as a financial criminal was hidden from public view, including from those who entered into contractual agreements with Bayrock. For Trump and the Trump Organization, Sater posed a knotty problem: Was Trump aware of Sater’s felonious and fraudulent past? Such knowledge could taint any business deal the Trump Organization made involving Bayrock and could create a legal liability.

In later years, Trump would make conflicting statements about how well he knew Sater. In a 2011 deposition, Trump acknowledged that he used to speak to Sater “for a period of time.” Yet in a 2013 deposition, Trump said, “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” During the presidential campaign, when Trump was asked by a reporter about Sater, he replied, “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it. I’m not that familiar with him.”

The Sater affair is a winding and shadowy saga still full of secrets. This week, there was a hearing in a federal court in Brooklyn for a lawsuit aimed at unsealing records in the Sater case that could reveal details of his work as an informant and perhaps more information about his interactions with Trump.

The nature of Sater’s relationship with Trump and Trump’s inner circle is a puzzle. It may be a key part of Trump’s Russia connection—or merely a sideshow. Yet one thing is certain: Trump has not been straight about his dealings with Sater, and the Trump-Sater link remains a topic deserving of scrutiny. Should it become part of Mueller’s investigation, Weissmann would be well positioned to dig into it.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -weissman/



The Most Dangerous Mobster in the World
by ROBERT I. FRIEDMAN

MAY 26, 1998
In two posh villas outside the small town of Ricany, near Prague, one of the most dreaded mob families in the world savagely murders its terrified victims. The mob’s young enforcers, trained by veterans of the Afghanistan war, are infamous for their extreme brutality. Their quarry, usually businessmen who have balked at extortion demands, are repeatedly stabbed and tortured, then mutilated before they are butchered. The carnage is so hideous that it has scared the daylights out of competing crime groups in the area.

The torture chambers are run by what international police officials call the Red Mafia, a notorious Russian mob family that in only six years has become a nefarious global crime cartel. Based in Budapest, it has key centers in New York, Pennsylvania, Southern California, and as far away as New Zealand.

The enigmatic leader of the Red Mafia is a 52-year-old Ukrainian-born Jew named Semion Mogilevich. He is a shadowy figure known as the ”Brainy Don”–he holds an economics degree from the University of Lvov–and until now, he has never been exposed by the media. But the Voice has obtained hundreds of pages of classified FBI and Israeli intelligence documents from August 1996, and these documents–as well as recent interviews with a key criminal associate and with dozens of law enforcement sources here and abroad–describe him as someone who has become a grave threat to the stability of Israel and Eastern Europe.

”He’s the most powerful mobster in the world,” crows Monya Elson, who is listed in classified documents as one of Mogilevich’s closest associates and partners in prostitution and money laundering rings. The Brighton Beach­based Elson, who once led a pack of thugs and killers known as Monya’s Brigada, is currently in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan awaiting trial for three murders and numerous extortions.

In July 1993, after Elson was grievously wounded by rival mobsters in a bloody shoot-out outside his Brooklyn apartment building, Mogilevich spirited him out of the country. Mogilevich then set up his Russian Jewish refugee friend in an alleged massive money-laundering scheme in Fano, Italy, where he was eventually arrested and extradited back to America. Elson, an integral part of the Red Mafia, had been one of the most feared mobsters in Brighton Beach, ground zero for Russian organized crime in America, which has exploded here following perestroika.

”If I tell on Mogilevich, Interpol will give me $20 million,” boasted Elson. ”I lived with him. I’m his partner, don’t forget. We are very, very close friends. I don’t mean close, I mean very, very close. He’s my best friend.” Nevertheless, after extensive interviews over the course of the last six months, Elson ultimately confirmed some of the details about Mogilevich contained in the classified FBI and Israeli documents.

Allegations of Mogilevich’s devilish array of criminal activities are extensively detailed in the reports:The FBI and Israeli intelligence assert that he traffics in nuclear materials, drugs, prostitutes, precious gems, and stolen art. His contract hit squads operate in the U.S. and Europe. He controls everything that goes in and out of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, a ”smugglers’ paradise,” says Elson. Mogilevich bought a bankrupt airline in a former Central Asian Soviet republic for millions of dollars in cash so he could haul heroin out of the Golden Triangle. Most worrisome to U.S. authorities is Mogilevich’s apparently legal purchase of virtually the entire Hungarian armaments industry, jeopardizing regional security, NATO, and the war against terrorism.

In one typical criminal deal, Mogilevich and two Moscow-based gangsters sold $20 million worth of pilfered Warsaw Pact weapons from East Germany, including ground-to-air missiles and 12 armored troop carriers, according to the classified Israeli and FBI documents. The buyer was Iran, says a top-level U.S. Customs official who requested anonymity.

In another deal, an FBI informant told the bureau that one of Mogilevich’s chief lieutenants in Los Angeles met two Russians from New York City with Genovese crime family ties to broker a scheme to dump American toxic waste in Russia. Mogilevich’s man from L.A. said the Red Mafia would dispose of the toxic waste in the Chernobyl region, ”probably through payoffs to the decontamination authorities there,” says a classified FBI report.

Mogilevich is particularly intrigued by art fraud. In early 1993, he reached an agreement with the leaders of the powerful Solntsevskaya crime family in Moscow to invest huge sums of money in a joint venture: acquiring a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest. The business, according to classified FBI documents, was to serve as a front for the acquisition of jewelry, antiques, and art, which the Solntsevskaya mob had stolen from churches and museums in Russia, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The gangsters also robbed the homes of art collectors and even broke into synagogues in Germany and Eastern Europe to steal rare religious books and Torahs.

Mogilevich’s operation, again in collusion with the Solntsevskaya mob, also purchased a large jewelry factory in Budapest. Russian antiques, such as Faberge eggs, are sent to Budapest for ”restoration.” Mogilevich’s men ship the genuine Faberge eggs to an unwitting Sotheby’s auction house in London for sale, then send fake Faberge eggs as well as other ”restored” objects back to Moscow.

Mogilevich’s early years are murky. Soviet authorities first learned of his criminal activities in the 1970s, when he was a member of the Liubertskaya crime group that operated in the Moscow suburb of the same name. He was involved in petty thefts and counterfeiting.

But Mogilevich made his first millions fleecing fellow Jews. In the mid 1980s, when tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were hurriedly immigrating to Israel and America, Mogilevich made deals to buy their assets–rubles, furniture, and art–cheaply, promising to exchange the goods for fair market value and send refugees the proceeds in ”hard” currency. Instead, he sold their valuables and pocketed the considerable profits.

In the 1980s, he established a petroleum import-export company, Arbat International, and registered it in Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, which is known to be a tax haven. One of his partners–with a quarter share of the company–was Vyacheslav Ivankov, the legendary Russian criminal who in March 1992 became Godfather of the Russian mob in America. Ivankov was convicted in 1996 of extorting two Russian-born Wall Street stockbrokers. He now resides in Raybrook, a Federal prison in upstate New York.

In early 1990, Mogilevich fled Moscow, as did many other dons, to avoid the gangland wars that were then roiling the capital. Mogilevich and his top henchmen settled in Israel, where they received Israeli citizenship. He ”succeeded in building a bridgehead in Israel” and ”developing significant and influential [political] ties,” says an Israeli intelligence report.

Mogilevich is married to a Hungarian national, Katalin Papp. That marriage allowed him to legally emigrate to Budapest, Hungary, in 1991, where he began to build the foundations of his global criminal empire. He bought a string of nightclubs in Prague, Riga, and Kiev–called the ”Black and White Clubs”–that has become one of the world’s foremost centers of prostitution. Monya Elson is a partner in the clubs, according to his own admission and classified FBI documents. The Black and White Club in Budapest became the hub of Mogilevich’s operations. He quickly built a highly structured criminal organization, in the mode of a traditional American mafia family. Indeed, many of the organization’s 250 members are his relatives.

To the consternation of international law enforcement officials, Mogilevich began to legally purchase much of Hungary’s arms industry. The legitimate companies he bought include:

Magnex 2000: a giant magnet manufacturer.
Digep General Machine Works: an artillery shell, mortar, and fire equipment manufacturer, which was financed by a $3.8 million loan from the London branch of Banque Francaise De L’orean.
Army Co-op: a mortar and anti-aircraft gun factory. Army Co-op was established in 1991 by two Hungarian nationals, both in the local arms industry, who were looking for a partner. Mogilevich has bought 95 per cent of Army Co-op through another Channel Island holding company, Arigon, Ltd., and also deals extensively with the Ukraine, selling oil products to the Ukrainian railway administration.
These transactions enabled the Mogilevich organization to become a direct owner of the Hungarian armaments industry. In 1994, he purchased a license enabling him to buy and sell weapons. Now a legitimate armaments manufacturer, one of his companies participated in at least one arms exhibition in the U.S., where it displayed mortars modified by Israel.

Like mob bosses everywhere, Mogilevich couldn’t sustain his empire without the help of corrupt police and politicians. There is one documented example of a criminal associate of Mogilevich mingling with American politicians. In March 1994, Vahtang Ubiriya, one of Mogilevich’s top lieutenants, was photographed by the FBI at a tony Republican Party fundraiser in Dallas, says an FBI report. Ubiriya, a high-ranking official in the Ukrainian railway administration, has a prior conviction for bribery in the Ukraine.

In Europe and Russia, the ”corruption of police and public officials has been part of the Semion Mogilevich Organization’s modus operandi,” says a classified FBI document. ”The corruptive influence of the Mogilevich organization apparently extends to the Russian security system. During 1995, two colonels from Department of the Russian Presidential Security Service . . . traveled to Hungary under commercial cover to meet with Mogilevich . . . seeking information for use in the Russian political campaign.” An Israeli associate of Mogilevich met with the two colonels and provided intelligence. Mogilevich also paid off a Russian judge to secure Vyacheslav Ivankov’s early release from a Siberian prison, where he was doing hard time for robbery and torture, according to U.S. court records and classified FBI documents.

On April 28, the German national television network ZDF reported that the BND (the German intelligence agency) had entered into a secret contract with Mogilevich to provide information on the Russian mob. The charges were made by several sources, including Pierre Delilez, a highly regarded Belgium police investigator who specializes in Russian Organized Crime. Because of this deal with the BND, police in Belgium, Germany, and Austria have complained that it is now impossible to investigate the ”Brainy Don.” If the television report is accurate, one possible motive for BND’s deal, says a U.S. law enforcement expert on the Russian mob, is that the Germans recently ”pulled their people out of Moscow because they didn’t like the level of cooperation they were getting from the Russian authorities on the Russian mob.” Gangsters, said this source, often talk to intelligence agencies about their rivals.

Mogilevich’s main activity in the U.S. appears to be money laundering, says a classified FBI report. He has set up companies in Los Angeles–FNJ Trade Management–and Newton, Pennsylvania–YBM Magnex International–as well as dozens of shell companies, which have received more than $30 million from Arigon, Ltd., the center of Mogilevich’s financial operations.

Last Friday, U.S. Attorney Robert Courtney, head of the organized-crime strike force, led a a joint FBI, IRS, INS, and Customs raid of YBM’s offices in Newton. Cartons of documents were seized, with Canadian and U.S. police citing the company’s alleged ties to Russian organized crime. YBM is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and two days before Friday’s raid, trading in its stock was suspended by Canadian authorities.

The president and CEO of YBM is Jacob Bogatin, a professor of physical metallurgy. In May 1996, he contacted the FBI in Philadelphia to find out why the INS had denied visas to YBM employees arriving from Hungary and the Ukraine. When he was rebuffed, he had intermediaries step forward and pester the FBI. The State Department has banned Mogilevich himself from obtaining a U.S. visa because he’s on the department’s watch list of international organized-crime figures. Nevertheless, he has surreptitiously entered America under aliases and on visitor visas issued in Tel Aviv to visit Elson and Ivankov.

Bogatin admitted during a telephone interview that Mogilevich owns his company. When asked if he knew that numerous law enforcement agencies here and abroad considered Mogilevich to be a leader of one of the most ruthless organized-crime families in recent times, Bogatin replied, ”We have an investors relations guy. You want to talk with him about this stuff.” He added that he had read allegations in the Eastern European press that his boss was a Mafia don, but didn’t believe them. YBM vehemently denies that it is connected to Russian organized crime or has engaged in any criminal activities.

Bogatin is no stranger to the mob, however. His brother, David, a top Russian crime figure who once served in North Vietnam for the Soviets in an anti-aircraft unit, is now serving an eight-year term in a New York State prison for a multimillion-dollar gasoline tax fraud scheme. Just prior to trial, he had jumped bail, fleeing to Poland. There he set up the first commercial banks, which moved vast sums of money controlled by Russian wiseguys. (This after handing over his mortgages for five pricey Trump Tower apartments to a Genovese associate. The mortgages were liquidated and the funds were moved through a mafia-controlled bank in Chelsea.) Eventually he was caught and returned to the U.S. In the meantime, he lived like royalty in a five-star Viennese hotel, surrounded by a praetorian guard of 125 Polish parachutists, some of them bedecked in shiny gold uniforms.

Mogilevich has not refrained from associating with known killers in America, prime among them Elson and Ivankov. A confidential informant told the FBI that Vladimir Berkovich, an L.A. resident, is a chief lieutenant in Mogilevich’s organization and has arranged contract killings here, supplying the weapons and spiriting the killers out of the country. The visas, says the report, were obtained through the Palm Terrace restaurant, a watering hole for Russian gangsters, which Berkovich owns. Berkovich told the Voice that he is aware of the government’s charges, and that they are ”total bullshit.” Although he has no criminal record in the U.S., Berkovich’s son, Oleg, was convicted in Los Angeles of solicitation to commit murder on October 11, 1989. He was sentenced to four years. Oleg’s business card identified his employer as Magnex, Ltd., a company owned by Mogilevich in Budapest. Oleg was recently arrested in Hungary on unspecified charges but was released.

Oleg’s uncle, the colorful Lazar Berkovich, whose last known address was New York City, arrived in the Big Apple after having survived a shootout with Italian gangsters, says his brother Vladimir. The FBI report claims that Lazar was head of Russian criminal activities in Italy prior to his coming to America to recuperate from his wounds, though Vladimir Bercovich denies that Lazar was ever connected to the Russian mob.

Israeli and U.S. law enforcement sources agree that the Red Mafia, though in existence for a mere six years, has become one of the most formidable Russian organized-crime families in the world. Strongest in the Ukraine, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the U.S., Mogilevich has increased his strength by forging ties with other powerful Russian mob groups as well as with the Italian Camorra. His reported ties to the German BND and ex­police officers in Hungary keep him informed of police efforts to penetrate his organization. ”He also ingratiates himself with the police by providing information on other [Russian crime] groups’ activities, thus appearing to be a cooperative good citizen,” says a classfied FBI report. This, along with his strong leadership qualities, his acute financial skills, his talented and highly educated associates, and his use of cutting-edge technology, has so far made the ”Brainy Don” impervious to prosecution.
https://www.villagevoice.com/1998/05/26 ... the-world/



U.S. LEGAL NEWS | Thu Jun 22, 2017 | 12:13pm EDT
U.S. House Dems reject Deutsche Bank privacy claim in Trump query

By Tom Sims | FRANKFURT
U.S. House Democrats rejected an assertion by Deutsche Bank that privacy laws prevent it from sharing information about President Donald Trump's finances, as they investigate possible collusion between his campaign team and Russia.

In a letter to the bank's lawyers made public on Thursday, five Democrats who have been seeking financial information about Trump argued U.S. federal laws protecting banking customers' confidentiality did not apply to requests from Congress.

The bank could also circumvent privacy concerns by obtaining disclosure consent from the president and his family, they said.

"Given President Trump's repeated assertions that he does not have ties to Russia, such disclosure would ostensibly be in his interest," they wrote.

Deutsche Bank said on Thursday that its lawyers would respond "in due course."

"We reiterate that while we seek to cooperate, we must obey the law," the bank said in an emailed statement.

Investigations are underway in Washington into claims of collusion between Trump's inner circle and Russia during his 2016 presidential campaign - which both the president and Moscow have denied.

Public records show Deutsche Bank loaned Trump millions of dollars for real-estate ventures.

As well as details about those transactions, the lawmakers are seeking information about a Russian "mirror trading" scheme that allowed $10 billion to flow out of Russia.

In January, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $630 million in fines over the scheme, which could have been used to launder money out of Russia.

NO POWER TO COMPEL

In the letter, dated Wednesday, Maxine Waters, ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, and four peers reiterated requests for information and gave Deutsche Bank until June 29 to respond.

They first asked the bank in May to share what it might know about Trump's real-estate business and whether the president had financial backing from Russia.

Deutsche Bank's Washington-based external counsel responded to that request earlier this month by saying it was barred from sharing information about Trump's finances.

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"We hope that you will understand Deutsche Bank's need to respect the boundaries that Congress and the courts have set in an effort to protect confidential information," the bank's law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, wrote.

A disclosure document posted on the U.S. Office of Government Ethics website last week showed liabilities for Trump of at least $130 million to Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, suggesting the German bank is one of Trump's biggest lenders.

They included one exceeding $50 million for the Old Post Office, a historic Washington property where Trump has opened a hotel.

The Democrats do not have the power to compel Deutsche Bank to comply with their request. The Financial Services Committee has subpoena power but Republican committee members, who are in the majority, would have to cooperate.

No Republicans signed any of the letters to Deutsche Bank.

The Russian "mirror" trades involved, for example, buying Russian stocks in roubles for a client and selling the identical value of a security for dollars for a related customer.

Deutsche Bank has provided the Democrats with copies of settlements regarding the trades.
http://www.reuters.com/article/deutsche ... SL1N1JJ0SW



Trump is struggling to stay calm on Russia, one morning call at a time

Storm clouds roll in over the West Wing at the White House as staff members walk outside on June 19, 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker June 23 at 5:00 AM

President Trump has a new morning ritual. Around 6:30 a.m. on many days — before all the network news shows have come on the air — he gets on the phone with a member of his outside legal team to chew over all things Russia.

The calls — detailed by three senior White House officials — are part strategy consultation and part presidential venting session, during which Trump’s lawyers and public-relations gurus take turns reviewing the latest headlines with him. They also devise their plan for battling his avowed enemies: the special counsel leading the Russia investigation; the “fake news” media chronicling it; and, in some instances, the president’s own Justice Department overseeing the probe.

His advisers have encouraged the calls — which the early-to-rise Trump takes from his private quarters in the White House residence — in hopes that he can compartmentalize the widening Russia investigation. By the time the president arrives for work in the Oval Office, the thinking goes, he will no longer be consumed by the Russia probe that he complains hangs over his presidency like a darkening cloud.

It rarely works, however. Asked whether the tactic was effective, one top White House adviser paused for several seconds and then just laughed.

Trump’s grievances and moods often bleed into one another. Frustration with the investigation stews inside him until it bubbles up in the form of rants to aides about unfair cable television commentary or as slights aimed at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein.

Play Video 2:26
'Witch hunt, fake news, phony': Trump's defenses against the Russia probe
President Trump has repeatedly lashed out with insults to defend himself as the Russia investigation unfolds. His latest attacks on Twitter appear to confirm he's being investigated for obstruction of justice. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
And, of course, it emerges in fiery tweets about the “WITCH HUNT” — or, as he wrote Thursday morning, shortly before an event promoting leadership in technology, “a big Dem HOAX!”

The morning calls reflect another way that Trump’s tumultuous administration is adapting to an unremitting season of investigations and to the president’s seemingly uncontrollable reactions to them. Interviews with 22 senior administration officials, outside advisers, and Trump confidants and allies reveal a White House still trying, after five months of halting progress, to establish a steady rhythm of governance while also indulging and managing Trump’s combative and sometimes self-destructive impulses.

The White House is laboring to prevent the Russia matter from overtaking its broader agenda, diligently rolling out a series of theme weeks, focusing on topics including infrastructure and workforce development. West Wing aides are working to keep the president on schedule, trotting him around the country in front of the supportive crowds that energize him. Trump is also planning several big announcements on trade in the coming weeks, before jetting off to Poland and Germany in early July.

“This is not astrophysics,” chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon said. “You solidify your base and you grow your base by getting things done. That’s what people want to see.”

[Inside Trump’s climate decision: After fiery debate, he ‘stayed where he’s always been’]

Senior officials have also been devising an overhaul of the White House communications operation to better meet the offensive and defensive demands of the president they serve, as well as the 24-hour cycle of tweet-size news.

“As his detractors suffer from this never-ending ‘Russian concussion,’ the president has been tending to business as usual — bilateral meetings, progress on health care, tax and infrastructure reform, and job creation,” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president. “Conjecture about the mood and momentum of the West Wing is inaccurate and overwrought. The pace is breakneck, the trajectory upward.”

A look at President Trump’s first year in office, so far
View Photos Scenes from the Republican’s first months in the White House.
Inside and outside the White House, advisers and friends are also engaging in quiet, informal conversations about when it makes sense for embattled Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to step aside — and who his replacement should be. Some of Priebus’s most senior colleagues speak ill of his leadership abilities, with one tagging him “the most imperiled person here,” although others insist Priebus is in solid standing with the president.

Some in the White House fret over what they view as the president’s fits of rage, and Trump’s longtime friends say his mood has been more sour than at any point since they have known him. They privately worry about his health, noting that he appears to have gained weight in recent months and that the darkness around his eyes reveals his stress.

But others who interact with Trump each day have a more positive interpretation of his behavior, saying his mood is far sunnier than news reports would suggest. Hope Hicks, Trump’s director of strategic communications, who sits at a desk just outside the Oval Office, said the president is optimistic and expressing the fighting spirit that appeals to voters.

Citing his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” Hicks said, “Perhaps President Trump said it best many years ago when he wrote, ‘My general attitude all my life, has been to fight back very hard. . . . [A]s far as I’m concerned, if they had any real ability they wouldn’t be fighting me, they’d be doing something constructive themselves.’ The president promised the American people they elected a fighter and he embodies that with his instincts, spirit and energy.”

Many Republicans observing from the outside, however, voice dismay about the president’s behavior.

“What’s playing out is a psychological drama, not just a political drama or a legal drama,” said Peter Wehner, who was an aide in George W. Bush’s White House and has frequently been critical of Trump. “The president’s psychology is what’s driving so much of this, and it’s alarming because it shows a lack of self-control, a tremendous tropism. . . . He seems to draw psychic energy from creating chaos and disorder.”

[Inside Trump’s anger and impatience — and his sudden decision to fire Comey]

After Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director in May and scrutiny over Russia intensified from investigators and journalists, the president and his inner circle settled on a combative strategy to discredit critics, undermine the probe itself and galvanize his most loyal supporters.

The approach also put Bannon on firmer ground after a rocky patch just weeks earlier, in part because of feuds with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Trump views Bannon as his wartime consigliere — the sort of political street fighter he wants as his presidency is threatened.

“This is a train that’s coming,” said Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser and longtime confidant, referring to the investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. “These guys are going to move on him despite the fact that they don’t have a case. The question on the table is what is he going to do about it, and that is a legal and political question.”

Trump and his top aides have tried to partition the Russia matter away from official White House business. Although the president’s personal lawyers and communications strategists have counseled him and manage inquiries from the outside the White House, they nonetheless visit the West Wing for meetings and coordinate some matters with administration officials.

There is disagreement within the Trump circle about how large the outside legal team should be. It currently is led by Marc E. Kasowitz, a New York-based lawyer who has worked with Trump off and on for several decades. Jay Sekulow, a Washington lawyer with deep ties to the Christian conservative movement, is the public face of the team. Some White House officials said they felt Sekulow got roughed up in a series of television interviews last Sunday, but noted that Trump admires Sekulow’s aggression and polished appearance.

“Having worked for both of them, the president and Jay have a lot of similarities — media savants, quick on their feet, fighters, and I think the president would, of course, appreciate Jay’s many connections and past experiences in D.C.,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser.

Two other lawyers — Michael J. Bowe of Kasowitz’s firm and John Dowd, a veteran of D.C. legal circles — as well as communications strategist Mark Corallo are part of the outside team.

White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn — who has been trying to separate himself and his office from the Russia probe so that they can concentrate on the official business — has advocated for the outside team to retain additional lawyers, according to officials inside and outside the White House. But Kasowitz maintains that at this point he has the appropriate legal strategy and sees no need to enlist additional help, the officials said.

Trump is most bothered by what he views as the one-sided portrayal and overall unfairness of the Russia investigation, senior White House officials said. He thinks media reports automatically treat Comey’s version of events as superior to his own and have not focused enough on Mueller’s hiring of some investigators who have donated to Democratic candidates. He is angry that Comey’s reputation has not been tarnished by his admission that he asked a friend to leak a private memo of his interactions with Trump to the news media. And he is irritated that — as he tweeted — Rosenstein penned a memo outlining possible justifications to fire Comey and then appointed Mueller to investigate Trump, in part, for doing just that.

The president has also seemed at times to regret his decision to fire his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, after Flynn misled Vice President Pence about his contacts with the Russians. Shortly after dismissing Flynn, the president mused privately that maybe he could bring him back — despite understanding, said a senior White House official, that Flynn faced other challenges within the administration and realistically could not rejoin the team.

Still, the president continues to privately praise Flynn, calling him a “nice guy” who “served the country well” and accusing the news media of bringing him down.

“The president just has to get it out of his mind, stop tweeting and focus on running the government, and let the investigation go on, because without that, he’ll always have this problem,” former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg told CNN this week.

[Pence’s balancing act as Trump’s No. 2 shows signs of strain amid White House turmoil]

The president’s senior aides, including Priebus, who have tried for months to wean Trump from his Twitter habit, have resigned themselves to managing — rather than curtailing — his almost-daily missives.

But inside and outside the White House, patience is running thin with Priebus, who many perceive as looking out only for himself and as having failed to bring order and discipline to a White House that often appears to lack both.

Priebus allies say they think the chief of staff’s tenure will last at least a year. Indeed, news reports about Priebus’s imminent demise often only heighten the president’s sense of loyalty toward his chief of staff, whom he views as hardworking.

Those frustrated with Priebus stir rumors of an earlier departure, possibly as soon as the congressional recess in August. If a health-care bill passes the Senate, they say, and tax reform is up next on the docket, Priebus can plausibly save face by leaving as the White House appears on the way to notching a few legislative achievements.

“For somebody who was rumored to be on his way out week one, if he lasts six or seven months, it is a success,” one senior White House official said.

Several White House aides and Trump confidants say that, for his next chief of staff, they expect the president to choose someone whom he views as more of a peer or someone with more governing experience.

Two names being floated are Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.).

Lindsay Walters, a White House spokeswoman, said Priebus is committed solely to helping Trump succeed. “Reince’s only priority is moving the president’s agenda forward, and he works day and night toward that goal,” Walters said. “He is keeping the entire administration, from the White House to the agencies, focused on the president’s top policy objectives: repealing and replacing Obamacare, significant tax reform and rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure.”

Last month, White House communications director Mike Dubke resigned from his post, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer — who has taken on many of Dubke’s responsibilities as officials try to recruit a replacement — is expected to transition into a more behind-the-scenes strategic messaging role.

The White House is also considering a communications “brain trust” — basically, a media team equipped to handle incoming and outgoing issues, as well as everything from surrogate response to regional and national media. Conway has been asked to play a larger role on the communications team, where she could possibly oversee surrogacy and other areas.

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Trump is hungry to see his spokesmen and spokeswomen more aggressively defend him and take the fight directly to his critics, people familiar with his thinking said.

“I don’t care if it’s Mickey Mouse, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon or Donald J. Trump, you have to have a communications strategy to defend the president,” said one friend of the president’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly.

Barry Bennett, a former Trump campaign adviser, said he understands why the president seems “horribly frustrated.”

“He’s being called a traitor and he knows none of it is true,” Bennett said, “and no one seems able to stop the stories.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... cc60ff468e
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby Elvis » Sun Jun 25, 2017 2:57 pm

US has Interfered in More Elections Than Any Other Nation

Published on Mar 21, 2017

Glen Ford says that even if the US does prove that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections, the actions don't match the scale of America's interference in elections across the world



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytYsRQ9Zgc




A 2016 study by Levin found that, among 938 global elections examined, the United States and Russia combined had involved themselves in about one out of nine (117), with the majority of those (68%) being through covert, rather than overt, actions. The same study found that "on average, an electoral intervention in favor of one side contesting the election will increase its vote share by about 3 percent," an effect large enough to have potentially changed the results in seven out of 14 US presidential elections occurring after 1960. According to the study, the U.S. intervened in 81 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, while the Soviet Union or Russia intervened in 36.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_e ... tervention


The study examined election interventions only; it did not include interventions by outright coup, assassination and other means.


The study (behind ivy-covered paywall):

https://academic.oup.com/isq/article-abstract/60/2/189/1750842/When-the-Great-Power-Gets-a-Vote-The-Effects-of?redirectedFrom=fulltext

When the Great Power Gets a Vote: The Effects of Great Power Electoral Interventions on Election Results
Dov H. Levin
Int Stud Q (2016) 60 (2): 189-202.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqv016
Published: 13 February 2016
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 25, 2017 3:43 pm

so you think the Russian mobsters could do better with their juice guy at the wheel?


Alayna Treene May 17
Funding for Trump hotel traces back to Russian bank

Charles Rex Arbogast / AP
Alexander Shnaider, a Russian-Canadian developer who partnered with Trump to build the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto, used hundreds of millions of dollars that can be traced back to Vnesheconombank (VEB), a Russian government-run bank under investigation in the U.S., to help finance the project, reports the WSJ.

Why this matters: A Trump Organization spokesman told the WSJ that the company had no financial dealings with VEB. Trump has also repeatedly stated that he has no ties to Russia. Meanwhile, federal investigators are looking into the links between Trump's staff and Russian financial institutions. This all comes as Trump has been under fire for sharing Israeli intelligence with top Russian officials.

The breakdown:

Midland Resources, a holding company then owned by Shnaider and a partner, acquired a stake in Zaporizhstal, a Ukranian steel mill, for roughly $70 million after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 2010, Shnaider and his partner sold Midland Resources' stake in the steel mill for roughly $850 million to an unnamed buyer, who used funds from VEB to make the purchase.
Midland Resources transferred ownership of its share to the unknown investor through 5 offshore companies
"Two people with knowledge of the deal" told the WSJ that the buyer was "an entity acting for the Russian government" and that VEB initiated the sell and financed the purchase.
Shnaider, now hundreds of millions of dollars richer, used about $15 million to help finance The Trump Toronto Hotel, which in turn paid licensing fees to Donald Trump.
The Putin link: At the time Shnaider sold his stake in the steelmaker, Vladimir Putin was serving as the chairman of VEB's supervisory board. As the WSJ points out, any major deals would have needed his approval first. The U.S. later sanctioned the bank after Russia invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea in 2014.

The Jared Kushner link: Trump's son-in-law met with VEB's chairman in December. Sean Spicer said Kushner was simply fulfilling his role as the "primary point of contact with foreign government officials."
https://www.axios.com/funding-for-trump ... 91253.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby Elvis » Sun Jun 25, 2017 5:18 pm

If anyone's curious, here's some more info on the Levin study I linked above—this NPR interview with Levin, replayed the other day, is what prompted me to share the information.

Listen at link or transcript below:

Database Tracks History Of U.S. Meddling In Foreign Elections


December 22, 20164:28 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Carnegie Mellon University researcher Dov Levin about his historical database that tracks U.S. involvement in meddling with foreign elections over the years.



ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

This is hardly the first time a country has tried to influence the outcome of another country's election. The U.S. has done it, too, by one expert's count, more than 80 times worldwide between 1946 and 2000. That expert is Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University. I asked him to tell me about one election where U.S. intervention likely made a difference in the outcome.

DOV LEVIN: One example of that was our intervention in Serbia, Yugoslavia in the 2000 election there. Slobodan Milosevic was running for re-election, and we didn't want him to stay in power there due to his tendency, you know, to disrupts the Balkans and his human rights violations.

So we intervened in various ways for the opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. And we gave funding to the opposition, and we gave them training and campaigning aide. And according to my estimate, that assistance was crucial in enabling the opposition to win.

SHAPIRO: How often are these interventions public versus covert?

LEVIN: Well, it's - basically there's about - one-third of them are public, and two-third of them are covert. In other words, they're not known to the voters in the target before the election.

SHAPIRO: Your count does not include coups, attempts at regime change. It sounds like depending on the definitions, the tally could actually be much higher.

LEVIN: Well, you're right. I don't count and discount covert coup d'etats like the United States did in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. I only took when the United States is trying directly to influence an election for one of the sides. Other types of interventions - I don't discuss. But if we would include those, then of course the number could be larger, yeah.

SHAPIRO: How often do other countries like Russia, for example, try to alter the outcome of elections as compared to the United States?

LEVIN: Well, for my dataset, the United States is the most common user of this technique. Russia or the Soviet Union since 1945 has used it half as much. My estimate has been 36 cases between 1946 to 2000. We know also that the Chinese have used this technique and the Venezuelans when the late Hugo Chavez was still in power in Venezuela and other countries.

SHAPIRO: The U.S. is arguably more vocal than any other country about trying to promote democracy and democratic values around the world. Does this strike you as conflicting with that message?

LEVIN: It depends upon if we are assisting pro-democratic side - could be like in the case of Slobodan Milosevic that I talked about earlier. I believe that that could be helpful for democracy. If it helps less-nicer candidates or parties, then naturally it can be less helpful.

SHAPIRO: Obviously your examination of 20th century attempts to influence elections does not involve hacking because computers were not widespread until recently.

LEVIN: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: In your view, is technology - the way that we saw in the November election - dramatically changing the game? Or is this just the latest evolution of an effort that has always used whatever tools are available?

LEVIN: I would say it's more the latter. I mean the Russians or the Soviets before unfrequently did these type of intervention, just, you know, without the cyber-hacking tools - you know, the old style people meeting in the park in secret giving out and getting information and things like that, so to speak.

SHAPIRO: Dov Levin is with the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Thanks for joining us.

LEVIN: Thank you very much.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 26, 2017 8:17 am

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Kushner dealings with Deutsche Bank may draw scrutiny from special counsel

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Michael Kranish June 25 at 9:04 PM
One month before Election Day, Jared Kushner’s real estate company finalized a $285 million loan as part of a refinancing package for its property near Times Square in Manhattan.

The loan came at a critical moment. Kushner was playing a key role in the presidential campaign of his father-in-law, Donald Trump. The lender, Deutsche Bank, was negotiating to settle a federal mortgage fraud case and charges from New York state regulators that it aided a possible Russian money-laundering scheme. The cases were settled in December and January.

Now, Kushner’s association with Deutsche Bank is among a number of financial matters that could come under focus as his business activities are reviewed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining Kushner as part of a broader investigation into possible Russian influence in the election.

The October deal illustrates the extent to which Kushner was balancing roles as a top adviser to Trump and a real estate company executive. After the election, Kushner juggled duties for the Trump transition team and his corporation as he prepared to move to the White House. The Washington Post has reported that investigators are probing Kushner’s separate December meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, and with Russian banker Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, a state development bank.


The Deutsche Bank loan capped what Kushner Cos. viewed as a triumph: It had purchased four mostly empty retail floors of the former New York Times building in 2015, recruited tenants to fill the space and got the Deutsche Bank loan in a refinancing deal that gave Kushner’s company $74 million more than it paid for the property.


The White House, in response to questions from The Post, said in a statement that Kushner “will recuse from any particular matter involving specific parties in which Deutsche Bank is a party.” Kushner and Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

Deutsche Bank loans to Trump and his family members have come under scrutiny. As Trump’s biggest lender, the bank supplied funds to him when other banks balked at the risk. As of last year, Trump’s companies had about $364 million in outstanding debts to the bank.

Democrats from the House Financial Services Committee wrote on March 10 that they were concerned about the “integrity” of a reported Justice Department investigation into the Russian money-laundering matter “given the President’s ongoing conflicts of interest with Deutsche Bank,” citing “the suspicious ties between President Trump’s inner circle and the Russian government.” The Justice Department did not respond to a question about whether it is following up on the money-laundering settlement that Deutsche Bank reached with New York state regulators in December.


On May 23, the Democratic members asked Deutsche Bank to disclose what it had learned in its internal review about whether Trump may have benefited from the improper Russian money transfers. The bank refused, citing U.S. privacy laws. The Democratic letter also raised the possibility that the bank had conducted a similar review of Kushner — without mentioning his name — by referring to a review of accounts “held by family members, several of whom serve as official advisers to the president.”

The Democrats wrote that it was important to learn more about Deutsche Bank loans to Trump and family members to determine whether they were “in any way connected to Russia.”

The refinancing loan with Deutsche Bank is mentioned in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a public offering of ­mortgage-backed securities. It states that Kushner and his brother, Joshua, “will be guarantors” under what was called a “nonrecourse carve-out.” Such guarantees require more than a loan default to kick in. They are commonly known as “bad boy” clauses, a reference to how a lender could seek to hold the guarantor responsible for the debt under circumstances that might include fraud, misapplication of funds or voluntary bankruptcy deemed inappropriate. The terms of the guarantee, which generally are not secured by collateral, are negotiated between lender and borrower.


“The way to look at this is, so long as you’re not a ‘bad boy’ and don’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” said James Schwarz, a real estate lawyer who is an expert in such clauses. “To the extent you would do something fraudulent, then you have things to worry about.”

The corporate loan and Kushner’s personal guarantee are not mentioned on his financial disclosure form, filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Blake Roberts, a lawyer who represented Kushner on the matter, said in a statement to The Post that Kushner’s form “does not list the loan guarantee” because the disclosure relied on “published guidance” from OGE that he said “clearly states that filers do not have to disclose as a liability a loan on which they have made a guarantee unless they have a present obligation to repay the loan.”

The Post sent the language cited by Kushner’s lawyer to Don Fox, a former general counsel and acting OGE director. After reviewing the wording, he said in an interview that he would have advised Kushner to disclose the personal guarantee of the $285 million corporate loan because of its size and possible implications.

“If I were still at OGE and somebody came to us with that set of facts, I would say, ‘By all means, disclose it,’ ” he said, referring to “the spirit of the law.”

After being informed of Fox’s statement, Roberts contacted Fox to present his view that no disclosure was required. Fox said in a follow-up email to The Post that even if OGE “advised there was no requirement to disclose,” he would not have argued that point but “I would have nonetheless recommended Jared over report in this instance given the magnitude of the contingency and the public interest in liabilities — actual and potential — to Deutsche Bank.”

Separately, Kushner disclosed that he and his mother have a personal line of credit with Deutsche Bank worth up to $25 million.

The Deutsche Bank deal was one of the last Kushner orchestrated before joining the White House. It is among the dozens of complex transactions that he was involved with during his decade in the real estate business.

Although Kushner divested some properties in an effort to address potential conflicts, he retains an interest in nearly 90 percent of his real estate properties, including the retail portion of the former New York Times headquarters, and holds personal debts and loan guarantees.

The deal that led to the Deutsche Bank loan is rooted in a holiday party held in late 2014 at the Bowlmor bowling alley, which is located in the retail portion.

At the party, Kushner decided that the four retail floors of the building, while rundown, could be transformed into a thriving tourist destination, according to his associates.

The building passed through several owners after the newspaper sold the property for $175 million in 2004 to Tishman Speyer. Tishman sold it three years later for $525 million to a company called Africa-Israel Investments. (Those transactions prompted Trump a few months ago to poke fun at the Times, tweeting that the “dopes” at the newspaper “gave it away.”)

Africa-Israel’s decision to purchase the building was made by its chairman, an Uzbek-born Israeli citizen, Lev Leviev. He is one of the world’s wealthiest men, known as the “King of Diamonds” for his extensive holdings in Africa, Israel and Russia. He was then expanding his real estate holdings in New York City.

Leviev told the New York Times shortly after the building’s purchase that he was a “true friend” of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, largely through his work with an influential Jewish organization in the former Soviet Union. The newspaper wrote that he kept a photo of Putin in his office in Israel. Leviev’s company said in a statement to The Post that Leviev “does not have a personal relationship” with Putin but has met him “on a few occasions.” Leviev’s statement said he was referring to his belief that “Mr. Putin has been a ‘true friend’ to the Jewish people in Russia.”

In 2008, a year after the building’s purchase, Leviev invited Trump to his Madison Avenue store, an ultra-high-end establishment called Leviev Jewelry, where they were photographed together, according to the Leviev statement. Leviev hoped to work with Trump on Moscow real estate deals, according to an article in Kommersant, a Russian newspaper. The Leviev statement said that the two “never had any business dealings with one another, contrary to speculation.”

Six years later, Kushner saw an opportunity for his own company.

Leviev, whose company was having financial difficulties, according to an Israeli press account, sold the building’s 12-floor office portion for $160 million, a transaction that did not involve the four retail floors.

Leviev’s daughter, Chagit, took charge of her father’s U.S. subsidiary and set out to find a buyer for the retail portion of the building. The company said it would entertain offers no lower than $300 million.

Kushner’s company offered $265 million, which was rejected. Kushner himself then negotiated with Chagit Leviev and others in 2015 and succeeded with a $296 million offer, according to an official involved in the matter.

“It was a very hard back-and-forth New York negotiating style,” said Kushner’s broker, Lon Rubackin. Leviev’s partner in the deal, Five Mile Capital, did not respond to a request for comment.

Few knew it at the time, but the negotiations were nearly consummated when Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, ran into Chagit Leviev on May 4, 2015, at an after-party for a Metropolitan Museum of Art gala — an encounter that was memorialized in a picture posted on Instagram.

“Such a pleasure seeing ­@jaredckushner and his stunningly beautiful wife @ivankatrump last night [at] the #metball­afterparty,” Chagit Leviev wrote.

The deal was signed a week later and closed in October 2015. The Leviev company said in a statement to The Post that Kushner simply made the highest offer and “there was no political element to the transaction.”

Kushner took over a property that was only 25 percent leased, according to a company official. His company recruited tenants, offering some a year’s free rent to lock in long-term contracts, according to an SEC filing. As a result, the building was nearly fully leased, with higher rents, including new tenants such as National Geographic.

The strategy paid off when Kushner’s company went to Deutsche Bank for refinancing. An appraisal cited in SEC filings for the package of mortgage-backed securities placed the value at $470 million, a 59 percent increase in a year. The bank declined to release the appraisal, but a person involved in the deal said that such a rapid increase was unusual when New York real estate was rebounding from recession, and credited Kushner for finding stellar tenants.

In a statement, Kushner Cos. President Laurent Morali said the property’s value increased sharply “for a simple reason: the building’s dramatic turnaround. We had a vision for the property when we purchased it that no one else had, and are proud to say that we executed on it.”

Kushner’s company took out $370 million in new loans in October 2016, giving it $74 million more than the purchase price a year earlier. Along with $285 million from Deutsche Bank, Kushner’s firm received $85 million from SL Green Realty, where Kushner had once worked as an intern. SL Green spokesman Rick Matthews said the deal made sense because the building has been mostly leased, giving it “increased value.”

The Deutsche Bank loan was delivered just before the bank — which has long been under investigation by federal and state authorities — agreed to pay a $7.2 billion U.S. penalty in December for mortgage securities fraud in its packaging of residential mortgages. The bank also paid a $425 million New York state fine in January for failing to properly track large transfers from Russia.

Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee wrote in their March 10 letter that because “press reports indicate” the Justice Department is continuing to investigate the money- laundering case, they are “concerned about the integrity of this criminal probe” in light of Trump’s “ongoing conflicts of interest with Deutsche Bank.” Bloomberg News has reported that the Justice Department has requested records related to money laundering from Deutsche Bank as part of a probe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... a96038ffcf


Africa-Israel’s decision to purchase the building was made by its chairman, an Uzbek-born Israeli citizen, Lev Leviev. He is one of the world’s wealthiest men, known as the “King of Diamonds” for his extensive holdings in Africa, Israel and Russia. He was then expanding his real estate holdings in New York City.

Leviev told the New York Times shortly after the building’s purchase that he was a “true friend” of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, largely through his work with an influential Jewish organization in the former Soviet Union. The newspaper wrote that he kept a photo of Putin in his office in Israel. Leviev’s company said in a statement to The Post that Leviev “does not have a personal relationship” with Putin but has met him “on a few occasions.” Leviev’s statement said he was referring to his belief that “Mr. Putin has been a ‘true friend’ to the Jewish people in Russia.”


Donald trump and the King of Diamonds Lev Leviev

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ZEMBLA - The dubious friends of Donald trump: King of Diamonds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvd7PqI_Lx0

In the second part of our programme about Donald Trump’s controversial friends, we will set our sights on the Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, who is controversial because he is suspected of trading in blood diamonds. He is one of the world’s biggest diamond traders and owns prestigious stores in New York and Moscow, but he is also the owner of Siebel, the Netherlands’ biggest jewellery chain. Leviev has ties with Russian president Putin, US president Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. Trump, however, claims he hardly knows this “King of Diamonds” . Zembla investigates Lev Leviev’s business empire.

The Israeli-American diamond cartels involved in Congo are seeking to displace the diamond interests in Angola run by Israel-American Lev Leviev and Maurice Tempelsman, top-level partners of the Angolan state diamond companies.
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... ev#p300490


In another stunning blow to Israeli settlement-builder Lev Leviev, the Israeli business magazine Globes Online has reported that BlackRock Inc., one of the world's largest investment management firms, has divested from Leviev's Africa-Israel Investments. The Globes article follows a similar report by the Norwegian news service Norwatch. The move comes after a nearly two-year-long global boycott campaign of Leviev's businesses that developed in response to the billionaire's construction activities in at least four Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, all of which violate international law, and his abusive labor practices in the diamond industry in Angola and Namibia.
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... ev#p283902


THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2008
Hiding Leviev
The Village of Bil'in in the West Bank in Occupied Palestine is suing two Canadian corporations in Quebec Superior Court for committing war crimes connected with the construction of illegal settlements. The interesting aspect is that the Canadian companies, Green Mount International Inc. and Green Park International Inc., are allegedly fronts, through an elaborate series of holding companies, nominees and trustees, for none other than our old friend Lev Leviev, the guy who sells blood diamonds and uses the proceeds to fund the building of illegal settlements:
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2008/07/hiding-leviev.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jun 29, 2017 9:33 pm

WSJ: Claiming To Rep Flynn, Late GOPer Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers


By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JUNE 29, 2017 5:35 PM

In the midst of the 2016 campaign, a veteran GOP opposition researcher who said he had ties to ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn contacted hackers hoping to obtain emails that he believed Russian operatives had hacked from Hillary Clinton’s personal server, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Peter W. Smith reached out to computer security experts in the hopes of gaining access to the email trove and explicitly outlined his connection with Flynn in his recruiting emails, according to the report.

Smith, who died at the age of 81 just 10 days after the Journal interviewed him, told the newspaper that he never explicitly said that Flynn was involved with the project. Flynn and the White House did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment, and a Trump campaign representative said Smith had no involvement in the campaign.

In one recruiting email reviewed by the newspaper, Smith said Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, was helping with the effort. In another, Jonathan Safron, a law student who worked for Smith, included Flynn’s consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, at the top of a list of websites of people working with the team.

“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” Eric York, one computer security expert who said he searched hacker forums on Smith’s behalf to try to dig up the emails, told the Journal.

What Smith hoped to unearth were the 33,000 emails that Clinton has said she deleted from her private email server because they were personal in nature, and which Trump infamously urged Russia to find and release during a July 2016 campaign rally.

Trump and his defenders in the media and his administration have referred to the federal investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election as a “witch hunt” intended to hurt his presidency. They insist there is no evidence of collusion between Russian operatives and Trump campaign associates.

Smith acknowledged that the emails, if they existed, would likely have been hacked by Russian operatives. He ultimately received some emails from hacker groups prior to the election, he told the Journal, but urged those groups to pass the emails along to WikiLeaks so he would not have to personally vouch for their authenticity. Those emails have never surfaced, according to the report.

Though the bulk of the 2016 cyberhacking efforts focused on Democratic targets, some Republicans, including Smith himself, were apparently hacked as well.

Smith told the New York Times last December that he was unaware his emails had been hacked and published on the website DCLeaks.com until the newspaper’s reporter informed him.

“I’m not upset at all,” he said in a phone call with the Times. “I try in my communications, quite frankly, not to say anything that would be embarrassing if made public.”

Smith, a Chicago investment banker, has had his hand in previous messy political dealings involving the Clintons. During the 1990s, he helped subsidize a large-scale effort led by conservative donors to procure and publish damaging information about then-President Bill Clinton.

The Texas Observer reported at the time that Smith spent “$80,000 on private detectives and to subsidize American Spectator reporters in a hunt for the black baby that Clinton was rumored to have sired.”

He was a collaborator on what came to be known as the “Arkansas Project,” in addition to multimillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, its main funder, and David Brock, then a reporter for the Spectator. Brock has since become one of the Clintons’ most ardent public defenders.

This post has been updated
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/gop-ope ... ton-emails


Republican operative sought emails stolen by Russian hackers, promised to give them to Michael Flynn
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 6:10 pm EDT Thu Jun 29, 2017 | 0
Home » News

Michael Flynn and his former boss Donald Trump find themselves in a new heap of trouble tonight with regard to election collusion with the Russians. A Republican political operative named Peter Smith has been exposed as having sought emails he believed were stolen by Russian hackers – and he promised his associates that he would give the stolen emails to Michael Flynn.

The stunning revelation comes by way of the Wall Street Journal (link), which is reporting that Smith – who was in his eighties at the time he sought the stolen emails – is now deceased. His private communications with other operatives have now leaked. Those communications don’t prove that Michael Flynn was working with him, only that Smith claimed Flynn was working with him, but they do put Flynn in a position of looking more guilty than ever – and of having an even deeper legal hole to climb out of.

The key development here will be the communications Smith and Flynn had with each other. Did Smith tell Flynn he was going to try to get him the stolen emails? Did Flynn ask Smith to get him the emails? Either would prove attempted collusion. Smith was attempting to obtain emails he believed the Russians had stolen from Hillary Clinton. As it turns out none of her emails were ever stolen, as her private email server was just about the only thing that wasn’t hacked during the election. But if Flynn was using associates like Smith to try to get his hands on those emails that he mistakenly thought were stolen by the Russians, he was likely also trying to obtain other emails that the Russians did steal from the DNC and others.

The deeper the trouble Michael Flynn finds himself in, the more likely he’ll be to flip on Donald Trump in exchange for leniency. This new attempted collusion revelation would seem to sharply increase the odds of him flipping, if he hasn’t already.
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/republ ... lynn/3665/



Uher & Taddeo were Felix Sater’s former FBI handlers when Sater worked w Trump. They founded XMark w Ed Deck and employed Keith Schiller

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https://twitter.com/counterchekist





Inside Trump's 'privatized mercenary force'
The security team that patrols the billionaire's rallies has a history of rough tactics, allegations of profiling.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and BRIANNA GURCIULLO 04/05/2016 05:16 AM EDT

A security team stands guard as Donald Trump heads to a press conference following a rally on July 25, 2015, in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Trump's privately funded security and intelligence force supplements the Secret Service’s protection.
POLITICO MAGAZINE

JANESVILLE, Wis. — One night last week, dozens of chanting activists filed into the lobby of a hotel here, demanding that it cancel a Donald Trump town hall set for the following day. Within minutes, three members of Trump’s advance security team were in the lobby, and things escalated quickly.

An official with the Trump advance security team, a 61-year-old former FBI agent named Don Albracht, began circling the room, putting his phone in the faces of protesters and filming them. As they chanted “build communities, not walls,” Albracht ripped a sign out of one protester’s hands, jutting his phone within inches of her face, as her comrades shouted objections.

When some of the protesters tried to return the favor by filming Albracht at close range, one of Albracht’s associates pulled a protester away, screaming at her and wagging a finger in her face, an exchange captured in a video taken by activists with the group Showing Up For Racial Justice.

Neither the Trump campaign nor Albracht would comment on the protest or the role of private security personnel like Albracht on Trump’s campaign. After a Trump speech on Wednesday in Appleton, Wisconsin, Albracht explained “our policy is that we’re not going to comment, because you just never know whether you’re going to get a fair shake.”

The fracas in Janesville was only one example of the aggressive tactics Trump’s security has been using to tamp down even peaceful protests. A POLITICO investigation revealed that Trump has assembled a privately funded security and intelligence force with a far wider reach than other campaigns’ private security operations: tracking and rooting out protesters, patrolling campaign events and supplementing the Secret Service protection of the billionaire real estate showman during his nontraditional campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.

The investigation ― which utilized Federal Election Commission reports, state licensing records, court filings and interview accounts or testimony from more than a dozen people who’ve crossed paths with Trump’s security ― found that the tactics of Trump’s team at times inflamed the already high tensions around his divisive campaign, rather than defusing them.


The Trump campaign could be forced to publicly justify its security tactics in June when a New York state court is set to evaluate the evidence-collection process in a little-noticed case brought by a handful of protesters who allege they were assaulted by five Trump security officials during a raucous protest outside the campaign’s Manhattan headquarters in September. The protesters’ lawyers have asked the Trump campaign to release its contracts for security, its guidelines for use of force, its security team’s personnel records, and complaints against its members ― including for excessive force, assault, battery or “violation of any federal or state constitutional right.”

Among Trump critics who’ve had run-ins with his security, complaints include unnecessary force, discriminatory profiling and removing people from events based on little more than their appearance. Some question whether the force’s members are properly trained and certified for the work they’re doing, while others assert that the force acts as if it has the power of the law behind it.

“It was this privatized mercenary force that seemed to have state sanctioning, and that’s something that I haven’t seen before,” said Josh Jenkins, a Madison, Wisconsin, auto mechanic and veteran protester who served as the liaison with police at the Janesville hotel protest.

The Janesville Police Department eventually cleared the lobby, arresting six of the protesters and towing another’s car, which was filled with supplies for planned protests the next day, deeming it suspicious because of an 8-pack of D batteries visible in the backseat. The department’s deputy chief did not respond to questions about the role or conduct of Trump’s security at the protest, or about why the car was towed.

But Jenkins, 45, said that Janesville police officers came across as the personification of professionalism and accountability, compared to Trump’s security forces. The police officers introduced themselves to protesters almost as soon as they arrived on the scene and remained in communication throughout the four-hour protest. In contrast, Albracht and his associates did not identify themselves or give their affiliation, Jenkins said, adding that “their goal did not seem to be to de-escalate. Their goal was to escalate.”

In fact, after watching the video of the Janesville protest, Steve Amitay, executive director of the National Association of Security Companies, concluded that Trump’s team handled the situation poorly. “Ripping the sign was inappropriate and potential battery,” he said, though he added that the filming of protesters “may be obnoxious and seem inappropriate, but [it’s] perfectly legal and a tactic used by a lot of different groups.”


While official Trump campaign events begin with a staffer’s announcement urging supporters “please do not touch or harm the protesters,” the candidate himself has sent conflicting messages. He has promised to consider paying the legal bills of a supporter who sucker punched a protester, expressed a desire to punch a different protester himself and suggested that his team needed to physically intervene at one rally because local police were “a little bit lax” with protesters. At a January rally in Vermont, Trump called on security to confiscate protesters’ coats and “throw them out into the cold,” prompting cheers from the crowd. And he has warned of riots at the Republican National Convention if he doesn’t emerge with the nomination.

The behavior of Trump’s security team seems to echo the confrontational rhetoric of the candidate and the approach taken by his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was charged last week with simple battery for grabbing a female reporter. Jenkins deemed it “a type of politics that is paranoia-inducing and condoning of violence from the top down.”

Don Albracht, a member of Donald Trump’s private security force, is captured on video filming anti-Trump protesters inside a Janesville, Wis., hotel March 28. | Courtesy Brenda Konkel
Don Albracht, a member of Donald Trump’s private security force, is captured on video filming anti-Trump protesters inside a Janesville, Wis., hotel March 28. | Courtesy Brenda Konkel
At a Trump rally at the Tucson, Arizona, convention center last month, a group of Trump’s private security officers wearing street clothes walked amid a raucous crowd, looking for protesters. The head of the group, a retired FBI agent named Eddie Deck, homed in on a transgender college student named Jaqueline Dowell who was not protesting. She said Deck “grabbed my arm and angrily pulled me through the crowd. I was then escorted by a security officer. When I asked why I was being kicked out, the guard told me, ‘because it was requested that you leave.’” But she told POLITICO “I genuinely believe I was kicked out because I am transgender.”

That rally was marred by several violent clashes, including the punching and stomping of a protester as he was being escorted out by security. At another point, Deck was captured on video aggressively confronting a protester alongside Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager. Lewandowski, who also has a law enforcement background, can be seen grabbing hold of the collar of the protester, who is then forcefully pulled backwards.

After the rally, campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the pulling was not done by Lewandowski, but rather by Deck, though she did not identify him by name, or even as a member of the campaign’s security detail, only as “the man to Corey's left.” Hicks suggested that Deck and Lewandowski were justified in confronting the protester and his associates.

The protesters were “holding signs laced with profanity. These are private events paid for by the campaign and while we do not condone violence or interactions of any kind, that kind of language is not acceptable for the families and television cameras in attendance,” said Hicks in a statement to POLITICO and other media outlets. “We will be dedicating additional security resources to larger events in the future to prevent staff from having to intervene.”

She declined to respond to follow-up questions from POLITICO about who would be providing the additional security, or to comment on the role of Deck, Albracht or other private security, and directed inquiries to the Secret Service.

A Secret Service spokesman did not respond to questions about how agency personnel work with Trump’s private security.

But at a number of rallies last week, Deck and Albracht could be seen directing Secret Service agents, local police and employees of a security company hired for specific events. Before a town hall last week at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, Deck could be overheard introducing himself to a college administrators by saying “We work with Mr. Trump. We kind of handle security for him.”

Shortly thereafter, Deck huddled with his team and could be heard telling another private security official to be on the lookout for any potential protesters who might stand in the aisles. “Right away they should be ejected, because it’s a fire hazard,” he said.

At the Trump rally the day after the hotel lobby protest, Albracht and his associates spent hours patrolling a line of several thousand people snaking around the hotel parking lot, waiting to get into the hotel to hear Trump. Several people deemed suspicious-looking were pulled out of the line and told they weren’t welcome. Others waited hours only to be turned away at the door, where security closely scrutinized people for any signs they might be planning a protest. Security could be overheard asking some attendees whether they were Trump supporters. A few anti-Trump activists made it into the rally, only to be flagged as suspicious before things got started.

Nathan Royko Maurer, 43, said he was approached by a man in a suit who turned out to be Trump’s head of advance, George Gigicos, and told that he’d have to leave because he had “been seen in videos of other protests,” Royko Maurer recalled. Separately, his wife, Amelia Royko Maurer, said she was escorted out of the hotel by a team of security personnel, including Albracht, who shouted at her to leave the hotel’s property, she said.

Trump’s security even flagged a New York Times reporter as suspicious partly because he had been spotted at the protest the night before. The reporter, John Eligon, who is African-American, eventually was allowed inside the hotel to cover the rally, and he could be overheard explaining to Trump security officials that he had been present at the preceding night’s protest because he was covering it, not participating in it.

Ultimately, only one person protested inside the event, standing up to unveil a pair of signs he had smuggled in. One featured a photo of Trump in clown face with the words “White Flour” and the other included a photo and quote from a man asserting he “was scammed” by Trump’s since-aborted Trump University real estate courses. The protester was quickly escorted out by Albracht and local police.

Tensions have been building for months around Trump’s campaign events, as groups supporting the rights of immigrants and religious and racial minorities have mobilized to protest the GOP front-runner’s incendiary rhetoric. Arrests and clashes outside his rallies have spiked in recent weeks, and several dangerous situations have been chronicled, including an incident outside the Janesville rally in which a teenage girl protesting Trump got into an altercation with his supporters, one of whom pepper-sprayed her in the face.

But lately, the fireworks have been on the decline inside Trump’s events, which seems partly a testament to the new, more aggressive efforts by Trump’s private security detail to identify protesters ahead of time, and to bar or eject them before they can disrupt the candidate, partly by deploying private security in plainclothes to intermix with the crowds before and during speeches.

In all, the Trump campaign has paid at least $247,000 to individuals and firms for security-related services between June, when the campaign launched, and the end of February, which is the period covered by the most recent FEC filings. A small fraction of that went to a number of different local police departments, off-duty police officers and security firms to patrol specific events, but the overwhelming majority — $168,000 — went to a core group of five former law enforcement officers or their firms who travel with Trump’s campaign from state to state providing services that are typically handled by local law enforcement or the Secret Service.


Albracht’s firm, ASIT Consulting, last year was paid $27,000, though he said he’s still working for the campaign and quipped that its accounting software “takes forever” to process payments. Trump’s longtime director of security, Keith Schiller, a retired New York City police detective who drew attention last year when he removed Univision’s Jorge Ramos from a Trump news conference, has been paid $57,000 for campaign security work.

Schiller shadows the candidate alongside a phalanx of Secret Service agents, and appears to be paid at least partly through Trump’s corporate or personal accounts, with his payroll payments sometimes recorded in the campaign’s FEC reports as in-kind donations. A further $110,000 has been paid by the campaign to Deck, his security company — XMark, LLC — and a pair of other officials associated with the company: former FBI agent Gary Uher and former New York City police officer Michael Sharkey.

XMark’s website features photos of law enforcement personnel in tactical combat gear brandishing assault rifles. It boasts that its employees have expertise in surveillance, “close quarter battle” and “tactical shooting skills: Combat pistol; Instinctive shooting,” among other talents. On a page detailing its executive protection services, XMark features photos of Trump with his security detail and explains that in the months after the billionaire launched his campaign, the firm “provided all PPD [personal protection detail] for Mr. Trump’s campaign travel to include all advance work and coordination with local Law enforcement agencies, in support, throughout the country, until being relieved by the United States Secret Service in mid-November of 2015.”

Deck and Uher continue to travel with the campaign, though neither they nor the campaign would comment on their role or that of XMark. Deck did not respond to multiple messages left by POLITICO. Uher, reached by phone, said, “I don’t feel comfortable talking to you. … I don’t understand why you’re calling me.”

At the rally in Appleton, Schiller declined to answer questions about the balance between his work for Trump’s campaign and corporate entities, the campaign security team’s relationship with the Secret Service or in what way the campaign is increasing its security. “I really can’t comment on that,” he explained apologetically.

If presidential campaigns can afford it, it makes sense for them to supplement Secret Service protection, said Josh King, who worked on advance for former President Bill Clinton. The Service is “not, or shouldn’t be, in the business of neutralizing a disruption to an event, one typically aimed at souring the day’s optics, unless that disturbance poses a genuine threat to the candidate’s life and limb,” said King, author of a forthcoming book on presidential advance. “It’s hard to fault a campaign for taking out its checkbook to rent some reasonably priced extra crowd control when the alternative is allowing a small posse of bullhorn-wielding infiltrators to upend your optics for a news cycle or two.”

Still, Trump has spent far more proportionally on security — which accounts for more than 0.7 percent of his overall spending — than the other candidates left in the race, according to a POLITICO analysis of FEC filings.

Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Ted Cruz, who is Trump’s closest rival for the GOP nomination, each have allocated about 0.2 percent of their overall spending to security.

While Clinton has spent slightly more than Trump on security-related expenses, her overall campaign spending dwarfs his. And her $267,000 in security-related spending appears to have gone mostly toward the protection of her campaign offices, of which she maintains many more than Trump, and to local police departments and security companies to patrol her events.

Cruz’s $135,000 in security spending mostly went to a pair of security companies. And Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination has spent just $29,000 on security.

Clinton and Sanders seem to rely mostly on the Secret Service for their primary traveling security, while long-shot GOP candidate John Kasich, as the sitting governor of Ohio, has a traveling security detail from the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

To be sure, Trump had maintained some level of personal protection well before he decided to throw his hat into the political ring, and private sector security for the super-rich is a booming cottage industry.

Deck and Uher, in affidavits filed in the lawsuit over the scuffle with protesters outside Trump’s headquarters in September, explained that their duties for the campaign included utilizing their “extensive experience and training in law enforcement to assist in protecting the Campaign’s headquarters, its property and its personnel.”

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During the September protest, Deck was photographed pulling on the neck and arm of a male protester, while an unidentified member of Trump’s detail stands accused in the lawsuit of “forcefully” grabbing a female protester “by the wrist and thrust[ing] her down the sidewalk.”

The members of Trump’s security team contend in their court filings that they acted appropriately and that the protesters were at fault in the scuffle that led to the lawsuit, which also names Trump, his campaign and his company as defendants.

In his affidavit, Uher recalls: “I politely asked just one of the demonstrators (who was dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit) to move away from the main entrance of the Premises and then escorted him a short distance so that pedestrian traffic in and out of the Premises would not be obstructed.”

Schiller, meanwhile, acknowledges in his affidavit that he struck one of the protesters in the head. But he says that was because he felt the protester “physically grab me from behind and also felt that person’s hand on my firearm, which was strapped on the right side of my rib cage in a body holster. Based on my years of training, I instinctively reacted by turning around in one movement and striking the person with my open hand.”

But the protester’s lawyers, who did not respond to requests for comment, argue in their filings that Schiller, Deck and Uher “have not obtained the licenses required” by New York State law to serve as security guards outside Trump’s headquarters or anywhere in the state. The three are not listed in a state directory of security guards. As such, the lawsuit alleges, there “is absolutely nothing that would permit ostensible security guards who lack legally required licenses to take over the functions of the New York City Police Department in regulating conduct on public sidewalks.”

Amitay, the National Association of Security Companies official, said that personnel who guard a building should be licensed as security guards if such licensing exists in the state in question. “I don't doubt that the persons in charge of Trump’s security have law enforcement backgrounds and that the security plans are adequate. However, the people actually performing the security work should be licensed,” he asserted.

While he noted that traveling executive protection detail work seldom requires a license, he argued that in an ideal regulatory environment, “anyone who foreseeably could get physical with someone as part of their job, and that job is security-related, should be licensed — meaning screened, trained and bonded.”

Albracht noted to POLITICO that he is, in fact, licensed as a private detective in his home state of Kansas. But he asserted of the security services he and his associates provide to the Trump campaign, “for what we do, we don't need to be licensed.”

Trump has taken an active interest in his security at his events, often pointing out protesters for removal from the stage and taunting them as they’re escorted out. But he contended in a previously unreported affidavit filed last month that he didn’t know much about the security operations at his campaign or his company, and, as such, should not be compelled to testify in the pending case related to the September protest.

“Given the breadth and scope of the business, I have delegated full responsibility and authority for the hiring and supervision of all security personnel and related security operations to Matthew Calamari, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Trump Org,” Trump said in the court filing.

A source close to the campaign said Calamari had done some logistics work for the campaign early on, including traveling with Trump to the Mexican border, though the campaign hasn’t reported paying him. The campaign did not make Calamari available for an interview, nor would it answer questions about his role.

Trump in his affidavit, said “because I have delegated full responsibility to Mr. Calamari on these matters, I was not involved with any of the decision-making with regard to either the hiring or supervision of any of Defendants’ security personnel.”


http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/i ... aut-221543


trump had a fake Time magazine cover of himself hanging in many of his hotels so tweeter went nuts :P

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

Postby Harvey » Mon Jul 03, 2017 3:14 pm

I had a notion to write a novel set in a bleak near future after another more catastrophic American civil war leads to it's virtual disengagement with the rest of the world, the upshot being each chapter is a story from various victim nations of the American will to 'freedom,' (read resource war) but nobody gives America a second thought, they're all too busy getting on with their actual lives, they almost didn't notice, except to the degree they weren't being bombed by America or her allies. Might still be an interesting idea...

The Stink Without a Secret

3 Jul, 2017, Craig Murray

After six solid months of co-ordinated allegation from the mainstream media allied to the leadership of state security institutions, not one single scrap of solid evidence for Trump/Russia election hacking has emerged.

I do not support Donald Trump. I do support truth. There is much about Trump that I dislike intensely. Neither do I support the neo-liberal political establishment in the USA. The latter’s control of the mainstream media, and cunning manipulation of identity politics, seeks to portray the neo-liberal establishment as the heroes of decent values against Trump. Sadly, the idea that the neo-liberal establishment embodies decent values is completely untrue.

Truth disappeared so long ago in this witch-hunt that it is no longer even possible to define what the accusation is. Belief in “Russian hacking” of the US election has been elevated to a generic accusation of undefined wrongdoing, a vague malaise we are told is floating poisonously in the ether, but we are not allowed to analyse. What did the Russians actually do?

The original, base accusation is that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC and Podesta emails and passed them to Wikileaks. (I can assure you that is untrue).

The authenticity of those emails is not in question. What they revealed of cheating by the Democratic establishment in biasing the primaries against Bernie Sanders, led to the forced resignation of Debbie Wasserman Shultz as chair of the Democratic National Committee. They also led to the resignation from CNN of Donna Brazile, who had passed debate questions in advance to Clinton. Those are facts. They actually happened. Let us hold on to those facts, as we surf through lies. There was other nasty Clinton Foundation and cash for access stuff in the emails, but we do not even need to go there for the purpose of this argument.

The original “Russian hacking” allegation was that it was the Russians who nefariously obtained these damning emails and passed them to Wikileaks. The “evidence” for this was twofold. A report from private cyber security firm Crowdstrike claimed that metadata showed that the hackers had left behind clues, including the name of the founder of the Soviet security services. The second piece of evidence was that a blogger named Guccifer2 and a websitecalled DNC Leaks appeared to have access to some of the material around the same time that Wikileaks did, and that Guccifer2 could be Russian.

That is it. To this day, that is the sum total of actual “evidence” of Russian hacking. I won’t say hang on to it as a fact, because it contains no relevant fact. But at least it is some form of definable allegation of something happening, rather than “Russian hacking” being a simple article of faith like the Holy Trinity.

But there are a number of problems that prevent this being fact at all. Nobody has ever been able to refute the evidence of Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA who designed its current surveillance systems. Bill has stated that the capability of the NSA is such, that if the DNC computers had been hacked, the NSA would be able to trace the actual packets of that information as those emails travelled over the internet, and give a precise time, to the second, for the hack. The NSA simply do not have the event – because there wasn’t one. I know Bill personally and am quite certain of his integrity.

As we have been repeatedly told, “17 intelligence agencies” sign up to the “Russian hacking”, yet all these king’s horses and all these king’s men have been unable to produce any evidence whatsoever of the purported “hack”. Largely because they are not in fact trying. Here is another actual fact I wish you to hang on to: The Democrats have refused the intelligence agencies access to their servers to discover what actually happened. I am going to say that again.

The Democrats have refused the intelligence agencies access to their servers to discover what actually happened.

The heads of the intelligence community have said that they regard the report from Crowdstrike – the Clinton aligned private cyber security firm – as adequate. Despite the fact that the Crowdstrike report plainly proves nothing whatsoever and is based entirely on an initial presumption there must have been a hack, as opposed to an internal download.

Not actually examining the obvious evidence has been a key tool in keeping the “Russian hacking” meme going. On 24 May the Guardian reported triumphantly, following the Washington Post, that

“Fox News falsely alleged federal authorities had found thousands of emails between Rich and Wikileaks, when in fact law enforcement officials disputed that Rich’s laptop had even been in possession of, or examined by, the FBI.”


It evidently did not occur to the Guardian as troubling, that those pretending to be investigating the murder of Seth Rich have not looked at his laptop.

There is a very plain pattern here of agencies promoting the notion of a fake “Russian crime”, while failing to take the most basic and obvious initial steps if they were really investigating its existence. I might add to that, there has been no contact with me at all by those supposedly investigating. I could tell them these were leaks not hacks. Wikileaks. The clue is in the name.

So those “17 agencies” are not really investigating but are prepared to endorse weird Crowdstrike claims, like the idea that Russia’s security services are so amateur as to leave fingerprints with the name of their founder. If the Russians fed the material to Wikileaks, why would they also set up a vainglorious persona like Guccifer2 who leaves obvious Russia pointing clues all over the place?

Of course we need to add from the Wikileaks “Vault 7” leak release, information that the CIA specifically deploys technology that leaves behind fake fingerprints of a Russian computer hacking operation.

Crowdstrike have a general anti-Russian attitude. They published a report seeking to allege that the same Russian entities which “had hacked” the DNC were involved in targeting for Russian artillery in the Ukraine. This has been utterly discredited.

Some of the more crazed “Russiagate” allegations have been quietly dropped. The mainstream media are hoping we will all forget their breathless endorsement of the reports of the charlatan Christopher Steele, a former middle ranking MI6 man with very limited contacts that he milked to sell lurid gossip to wealthy and gullible corporations. I confess I rather admire his chutzpah.

Given there is no hacking in the Russian hacking story, the charges have moved wider into a vague miasma of McCarthyite anti-Russian hysteria. Does anyone connected to Trump know any Russians? Do they have business links with Russian finance?

Of course they do. Trump is part of the worldwide oligarch class whose financial interests are woven into a vast worldwide network that enslaves pretty well the rest of us. As are the Clintons and the owners of the mainstream media who are stoking up the anti-Russian hysteria. It is all good for their armaments industry interests, in both Washington and Moscow.

Trump’s judgement is appalling. His sackings or inappropriate directions to people over this subject may damage him.

The old Watergate related wisdom is that it is not the crime that gets you, it is the cover-up. But there is a fundamental difference here. At the centre of Watergate there was an actual burglary. At the centre of Russian hacking there is a void, a hollow, and emptiness, an abyss, a yawning chasm. There is nothing there.

Those who believe that opposition to Trump justifies whipping up anti-Russian hysteria on a massive scale, on the basis of lies, are wrong. I remain positive that the movement Bernie Sanders started will bring a new dawn to America in the next few years. That depends on political campaigning by people on the ground and on social media. Leveraging falsehoods and cold war hysteria through mainstream media in an effort to somehow get Clinton back to power is not a viable alternative. It is a fantasy and even were it practical, I would not want it to succeed.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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

Postby Rory » Mon Jul 03, 2017 4:17 pm

Good read, Harvey. Murray is a cogent and organized writer - always refreshing to see someone effectively cut through the mountain of bullshit #TheResistance have put together
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 03, 2017 4:54 pm


HOW DONALD TRUMP AND ROY COHN’S RUTHLESS SYMBIOSIS CHANGED AMERICA

In 1973, a brash young would-be developer from Queens met one of New York’s premier power brokers: Roy Cohn, whose name is still synonymous with the rise of McCarthyism and its dark political arts. With the ruthless attorney as a guide, Trump propelled himself into the city’s power circles and learned many of the tactics that would inexplicably lead him to the White House years later.
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‘Donald calls me 15 to 20 times a day,” Roy Cohn told me on the day we met. “He is always asking, ‘What is the status of this . . . and that?’ ”

It was 1980. I had been assigned to write a story on Donald Trump, the brash young developer who was then trying to make a name for himself in New York City, and I had come to see the man who, at the time, was in many ways Trump’s alter ego: the wily, menacing lawyer who had gained national renown, and enmity, for his ravenous anti-Communist grandstanding.

Trump was 34 and using the connections of his father, Brooklyn and Queens real-estate developer Fred Trump, as he navigated the rough-and-tumble world of political bosses. He had recently opened the Grand Hyatt Hotel, bringing life back to a dreary area near Grand Central Terminal during a period when the city had yet to fully recover from near bankruptcy. His wife, Ivana, led me through the construction site in a white wool Thierry Mugler jumpsuit. “When will it be finished? When?,” she shouted at workers as she clicked through in stiletto heels.

The tabloids couldn’t get enough of the Trumps’ theatrics. And as Donald Trump’s Hyatt rose, so too did the hidden hand of his attorney Roy Cohn, always there to help with the shady tax abatements, the zoning variances, the sweetheart deals, and the threats to those who might stand in the project’s way.

Cohn was best known as a ruthless prosecutor. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, he and Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, the fabulist and virulent nationalist crusader, had hauled dozens of alleged “Communist sympathizers” before a Senate panel. Earlier, the House Un-American Activities Committee had skewered artists and entertainers on similar charges, resulting in a trail of fear, prison sentences, and ruined careers for hundreds, many of whom had found common cause in fighting Fascism. But in the decades since, Cohn had become the premier practitioner of hardball deal-making in New York, having mastered the arcane rules of the city’s Favor Bank (the local cabal of interconnected influence peddlers) and its magical ability to provide inside fixes for its machers and rogues.
“You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil,” said lawyer Victor A. Kovner, who had known him for years. Cohn’s power derived largely from his ability to scare potential adversaries with hollow threats and spurious lawsuits. And the fee he demanded for his services? Ironclad loyalty.
Trump—who would remain loyal to Cohn for many years—would be one of the last and most enduring beneficiaries of Cohn’s power. But as Trump would confide in 1980, he already seemed to be trying to distance himself from Cohn’s inevitable taint: “All I can tell you is he’s been vicious to others in his protection of me,” Trump told me, as if to wave away a stench. “He’s a genius. He’s a lousy lawyer, but he’s a genius.”

On the day I arrived at Cohn’s office, in his imposing limestone town house on East 68th Street, his Rolls-Royce was parked outside. But all elegance stopped at the front door. It was a fetid place, a shambles of dusty bedrooms and office warrens where young male assistants made their way up and down the stairs. Cohn often greeted visitors in a robe. On occasion, I.R.S. agents were said to sit in the hallway and, knowing Cohn’s reputation as a deadbeat, were there to intercept any envelopes with money.
Cohn’s bedroom was crowded with a collection of stuffed frogs that sat on the floor, propped against a large TV. Everything about him suggested a curious combination of an arrested child and a sleaze. I sat on a small sofa covered with dozens of stuffed creatures that exploded with dust as I tried to move them aside. Cohn was compact, with a mirthless smile, the scars from his plastic surgeries visible around his ears. As he spoke, his tongue darted in and out; he twirled his Rolodex, as if to impress me with his network of contacts. The kind of law Cohn practiced, in fact, needed only a telephone. (The New Yorker would later report that his longtime switchboard operator taped his calls and kept notes of conversations.)

Who did not know Roy Cohn’s backstory, even in 1980? Cohn—whose great-uncle had founded Lionel, the toy-train company—grew up as an only child, doted on by an overbearing mother who followed him to summer camp and lived with him until she died. Every night he was seated at his family’s Park Avenue dinner table, which was an unofficial command post of the Favor Bank bosses who’d helped make his father, Al Cohn, a Bronx county judge, and later a State Supreme Court judge. (During the Depression, Roy’s uncle Bernard Marcus had been sent to prison in a bank-fraud case, and Roy’s childhood was marked by visits to Sing Sing.) By high school, Cohn was fixing a parking ticket or two for one of his teachers.

After graduating from Columbia Law School at 20, he became an assistant U.S. attorney and an expert in “subversive activities,” allowing him to segue into his role in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. (Cohn persuaded the star witness, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, to change his testimony; in Cohn’s autobiography, written with Sidney Zion, Cohn claimed that he had encouraged the judge, already intent on sending Julius to the electric chair, to also order Ethel’s execution, despite the fact that she was a mother with two children.) Come 1953, this legal prodigy was named McCarthy’s boy-wonder chief counsel, and the news photos told the tale: the sharp-faced, heavy-lidded 26-year-old with cherubic cheeks, whispering intimately into the ear of the bloated McCarthy. Cohn’s special skill as the senator’s henchman was character assassination. Indeed, after testifying in front of him, an engineer with the Voice of America radio news service committed suicide. Cohn never showed a shred of remorse.

Despite McCarthy’s very public demise when the hearings proved to be trumped-up witch hunts, Cohn would emerge largely unscathed, going on to become one of the last great power brokers of New York. His friends and clients came to include New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Cohn would become an occasional guest at the Reagan White House and a constant presence at Studio 54.

By the time I met with Cohn, he had already been indicted four times on charges ranging from extortion and blackmail to bribery, conspiracy, securities fraud, and obstruction of justice. But he had been acquitted in each instance and in the process had begun to behave as if he were somehow a super-patriot who was above the law. At a gay bar in Provincetown, as reported by Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman, a friend described Cohn’s behavior at a local lounge: “Roy sang three choruses of ‘God Bless America,’ got a hard-on and went home to bed.”

Cohn, with his bravado, reckless opportunism, legal pyrotechnics, and serial fabrication, became a fitting mentor for the young real-estate scion. And as Trump’s first major project, the Grand Hyatt, was set to open, he was already involved in multiple controversies. He was warring with the city about tax abatements and other concessions. He had hoodwinked his very own partner, Hyatt chief Jay Pritzker, by changing a term in a deal when Pritzker was unreachable—on a trip to Nepal. In 1980, while erecting what would become Trump Tower, he antagonized a range of arts patrons and city officials when his team demolished the Art Deco friezes decorating the 1929 building. Vilified in the headlines—and by the Establishment—Trump offered a response that was pure Roy Cohn: “Who cares?” he said. “Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement.”


For author Sam Roberts, the essence of Cohn’s influence on Trump was the triad: “Roy was a master of situational immorality . . . . He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.” As columnist Liz Smith once observed, “Donald lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn.”
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WHEN DONALD MET ROY
Let’s go back further still, to 1973. Trump, 27, was living in a rent-controlled studio, wearing French cuffs, and taking his dates to the Peacock Alley, the bar in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. At the time, the lockbox of Establishment New York was tightly closed to the Trumps of Queens, despite their mansion in Jamaica Estates.

Riding around Brooklyn in a Rolls-Royce, Trump’s mother, Mary, collected quarters from laundry rooms in various Trump buildings. Trump’s father, Fred, had already beaten back two scandals in which he was accused of overcharging and profiteering at some of his government-financed apartment complexes, and was now facing an even more explosive charge—systemic discrimination against black and other minority tenants. The Trumps, however, were connected to Favor Bank politicians in the Brooklyn Democratic machine, which, in tandem with the Mob bosses, still influenced who got many of the judgeships and patronage jobs. It was twilight in a Damon Runyon world, before the reformers moved in.

As Donald Trump would later tell the story, he ran into Cohn for the first time at Le Club, a members-only nightspot in Manhattan’s East 50s, where models and fashionistas and Eurotrash went to be seen. “The government has just filed suit against our company,” Trump explained, “saying that we discriminated against blacks . . . . What do you think I should do?”

“Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated,” Cohn shot back. The Trumps would soon retain Cohn to represent them.

The evidence was damning. At 39 Trump-owned properties, according to the Department of Justice lawsuit, widespread practices were used to avoid renting to blacks, including implementing a secret code. When a prospective black renter would apply for an apartment, the paperwork would allegedly be marked with a C—indicating “colored” (a charge that, if true, would constitute a violation of the Fair Housing Act). Nevertheless, the Trumps countersued the government. “It just stunned me,” the lawyer and journalist Steven Brill recently recalled. “They actually got reporters to appear for a press conference where they announced that they were suing [the Justice Department] for defamation for $100 million. You couldn’t get through your second day of law school without knowing it was a totally bogus lawsuit. And, of course, it was thrown out.”

A race-discrimination case of this magnitude might have sunk many a developer, but Cohn persisted. Under his guidance, the Trumps settled by agreeing to stipulations to prevent future discrimination at their properties—but came away without admitting guilt. (With that, a Trump strategy was launched. Decades later, when questioned about the case in one of the presidential debates, Trump would declare, “It was a federal lawsuit—[we] were sued. We settled the suit . . . with no admission of guilt.”)

Cohn continued to go on the attack for the Trumps. “I was a young reporter just starting my first job, at the New York Post [in 1974],” book publisher David Rosenthal told me. “I was working on illegal campaign contributions and I started looking at the records that had come from a group of buildings in Brooklyn, which showed massive donations to [Democrat] Hugh Carey, then running for governor of New York. They had all come from buildings that I had traced to Fred Trump . . . . My story was published and my editors were thrilled.

“The next day, my phone rang and it was Roy Cohn. ‘You piece of shit! We are going to ruin you! You have a lot of fucking nerve!’ ” Shaken, Rosenthal, then 21, went to his editors. “Their jaws dropped. I thought I was finished. I was sure Cohn’s next call would be to Dolly Schiff, the owner of the paper. Of course, the call never came. The story was true. They had skirted the New York finance laws.”

For about a decade, the tax abatements and legal loopholes that Trump was able to finesse came about, in large part, because of Cohn. The time he spent on Trump matters was not reduced to “billable hours,” wrote the late investigative journalist Wayne Barrett in Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth. Instead, Cohn asked for payment only when his cash supply ran low.

Steve Brill again saw Cohn’s stamp when Trump struck back, defending the case against Trump University. It was, Brill asserted, “a scam against the very people who [eventually] voted for Trump—the middle and lower middle class . . . . The first thing Trump does is sue one of the plaintiffs. She wins and the judge awards her $800,000 in legal fees, and Trump appeals, and in that decision he’s compared to Bernie Madoff . . . . This strategy was pure Cohn: ‘Attack your accuser.’ ”

After Brill’s investigation was published, Brill said, he received a call from one of Trump’s lawyers. “I understand you may do a follow-up,” he told Brill, adding a bit of advice: “Just be careful.” “Thanks,” Brill replied. “And let me give you some advice: ‘You better get the check because this guy is never going to pay you.’ Being a deadbeat was also pure Cohn.” (A White House spokesperson says this claim is totally false.)

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BOYS FROM THE BOROUGHS
How to explain the symbiosis that existed between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump? Cohn and Trump were twinned by what drove them. They were both sons of powerful fathers, young men who had started their careers clouded by family scandal. Both had been private-school students from the boroughs who’d grown up with their noses pressed against the glass of dazzling Manhattan. Both squired attractive women around town. (Cohn would describe his close friend Barbara Walters, the TV newswoman, as his fiancée. “Of course, it was absurd,” Liz Smith said, “but Barbara put up with it.”)

Sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign, Brill noticed that Donald Trump was using Cohn’s exact phrases. “I began to hear, ‘If you want to know the truth,’ and ‘that I can tell you . . .’ and ‘to be absolutely frank’—a sign that the Big Lie was coming,” Brill said.

Cohn—possessed of a keen intellect, unlike Trump—could keep a jury spellbound. When he was indicted for bribery, in 1969, his lawyer suffered a heart attack near the end of the trial. Cohn deftly stepped in and did a seven-hour closing argument—never once referring to a notepad. He was acquitted. “I don’t want to know what the law is,” he famously said, “I want to know who the judge is.”

When Cohn spoke, he would fix you with a hypnotic stare. His eyes were the palest blue, all the more startling because they appeared to protrude from the sides of his head. While Al Pacino’s version of Cohn (in Mike Nichols’s 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America) captured Cohn’s intensity, it failed to convey his child-like yearning to be liked. “He was raised as a miniature adult,” Tom Wolfe once observed.

Cohn liked to throw parties crowded with celebrities, judges, Mob bosses, and politicians—some of whom were either coming from or on their way to prison—causing Cohn’s close friend the comedian Joey Adams to remark, “If you’re indicted, you’re invited.” But it was Cohn’s circle of legal aides and after-hours pals that also held sway. “Roy loved to surround himself with attractive straight men,” said divorce attorney Robert S. Cohen, who, before taking on clients such as Michael Bloomberg—and both of Trump’s ex-wives (Ivana Trump and Marla Maples)—began his career working for Cohn. “[Roy had] a coterie. If he could have had a relationship with any of them, he would have.”

Cohn’s cousin David L. Marcus concurred. Soon after graduating from Brown in the early 80s, Marcus recalled, he sought Cohn out. While they had encountered each other over the years at family gatherings, Marcus’s parents had despised Cohn since his McCarthy days, and a chill had set in. But Cohn, intrigued by the attention of his long-lost cousin, welcomed him. Marcus, a journalist who would later share a Pulitzer Prize, recently said that he was astonished by the atmosphere of creepy intimacy that, in those days, seemed to perfume Cohn’s attitude toward his acolytes, including one in particular. “There was a party in the mid-1980s, where Mailer was, and Andy Warhol, [when] in walked Trump,” recounted Marcus. “Roy dropped everyone else and fussed over him . . . Roy had that ability to focus on you. I felt that Roy was attracted to Trump, more than in a big-brotherly way.

“Donald fit the pattern of the hangers-on and the disciples around Roy. He was tall and blond and . . . frankly, über-Gentile. Something about Roy’s self-hating-Jewish persona drew him to fair-haired boys. And at these parties there was a bevy of blond guys, almost midwestern, and Donald was paying homage to Roy . . . I wondered then if Roy was attracted to him.”

“Thwarted loves obsessed Roy Cohn’s life,” added a lawyer who first met Cohn in the 60s, characterizing some of the men, both gay and straight, in Cohn’s orbit. “He would become sexually obsessed with cock-tease guys who would sense his need and not shun him. These were unrequited relationships. The way he would expiate the sexual energy was possessive mentoring. Introducing them to everyone in town and taking them places.”

Seeing Trump and Cohn enter a room together had a hint of vaudeville. Donald, standing six feet two inches, would typically enter first, with a burlesque macho-man’s gait, walking as if he led from his toes. A few feet behind would be Cohn, skinny, eyes darting, his features slightly caved in from plastic surgery. “Donald is my best friend,” Cohn said back then, shortly after he had thrown a 37th-birthday party for Trump. And over the years, several who knew Cohn would remark on Donald Trump’s resemblance to the most infamous of Roy Cohn’s blond, rich-boy obsessions: David Schine.

Image

PATRIOT GAMES
Consider the episode—and the compulsion—that ended Roy Cohn’s time in the capital and Joe McCarthy’s Senate career. In the mid-50s, Cohn was in the headlines for the malicious circus of the hearings. Scores of witnesses were being bullied by Cohn or McCarthy or both. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?,” Cohn demanded in his nasal honk, a spectacle replayed in the evenings on TV and radio.


It was amid this high drama that a young man had come into Cohn’s life. The heir to a hotel-and-movie franchise, the feckless David Schine had reportedly pulled D’s in his first year at Harvard. But in 1952, he wrote a pamphlet on the evils of Communism and was soon introduced to Cohn. It was, for Cohn, a coup de foudre, and Schine came on the McCarthy committee as an unpaid “research assistant.” Dispatched on a tour of Europe to investigate possible subversion at army bases and American Embassies—which included ridding the consular libraries of “subversive literature” (among them works by Dashiell Hammett and Mark Twain)—the pair were dogged by rumors that they were lovers. (Cohn told friends that they were not.) Whispers also began to swirl about McCarthy’s sexual orientation.

In lavender Washington, Cohn was known as both a closeted homosexual and homophobic, among those leading the charge against supposedly gay witnesses who he and others believed should lose their government jobs because they were “security risks.” When Schine was drafted as a private and not a commissioned officer, Cohn threatened he would “wreck the army.” McCarthy even mentioned to Robert T. Stevens, the secretary of the army, that “Roy thinks Dave ought to be a general and operate from a penthouse in the Waldorf Astoria.” President Dwight Eisenhower, meanwhile, angered by McCarthy’s attacks and fearful that the senator’s zealotry was severely damaging the president’s agenda and the G.O.P. itself, sent word to the army counsel to write a report on Cohn’s harassment tactics. According to historian David A. Nichols, the president secretly ordered the document to be released to key legislators and the press, and the revelations were explosive, resulting in the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Over 36 days, 20 million Americans watched. It was all there: Cohn and Schine’s jaunt to Europe, Cohn’s ultimatums, McCarthy’s smears. The high point came when the army’s sly Boston lawyer, Joseph Welch, shook his head in pained disbelief at McCarthy’s attempt to slander one of Welch’s own assistants, imploring the senator, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last . . . ?” Within weeks, Cohn was banished and McCarthy was soon censured.

Cohn played it as a win. After the debacle, he returned to New York and attended a party thrown in his honor at the Hotel Astor. It would be the first example of his ability to project victory from defeat and induce moral amnesia upon a mesmerized New York—a gambit not dissimilar to those later utilized by his confrère Donald Trump.

Another of Cohn’s tactics was to befriend the town’s top gossip columnists, such as Leonard Lyons and George Sokolsky, who would bring Cohn to the Stork Club. He was irresistible to tabloid writers, always ready with scandal-tinged tales. “Roy would be hired by a divorce client in the morning and be leaking their case in the afternoon,” New Yorker writer Ken Auletta recalled. Columnist Liz Smith said she learned to distrust most items he gave her. A similar reliance on the press would also become a vital component of the young Trump’s playbook.

“[Roy] would call me up and it was always short—‘George, Roy,’ ” said former New York Post political reporter George Arzt, who was later Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. “He would drop a dime on someone, hoping I would print it.”

My initiation to the louche world of Roy Cohn came in 1980—at a lunch with Trump in the room upstairs at the ‘21’ Club, the first time I had been there. “Anybody who is anybody here sits between the columns,” Trump told me. I was expecting our meal to be one-on-one, but a guest joined us that day. “This is Stanley Friedman,” Trump said. “He is Roy Cohn’s law partner.” The lunch agenda, not surprisingly, turned into a sales pitch, with Friedman offering a monologue on what Roy Cohn had already done for Trump. (Friedman, in pure Tammany Hall style, worked for the city while assisting Cohn, and would later go to prison for taking kickbacks in a parking-ticket scandal.)

“Roy could fix anyone in the city,” Friedman told me that day. “He’s a genius . . . . It is a good thing Roy isn’t here today. He would stab all the food off your plate.” A Cohn quirk was to rarely order food and, instead, commandeer the meals of his dining partners. I wrote then about the moment when hotel titan Bob Tisch came by the table. “I beat Bob Tisch on the convention site,” Trump said loudly. “But we’re good friends now, good friends. Isn’t that right, Bob?”

Trump, at the time, was developing a sullen moxie that rivaled Cohn’s. The lawyer Tom Baer, for instance, did not know what to expect when he got a call one day to meet with Trump. Baer had been recently appointed by Mayor Koch to represent the city in all aspects of what was to become its new convention center, and Baer was trying to line up possible partnerships. “Donald said, ‘I would be willing to contribute the land,’ ” Baer would remember. “ ‘I think it is only fair that it be named Trump Center’ ”—after his father.

“I called Ed Koch, and he said, ‘Fuck him! Fuck him.’ I said, ‘I don’t talk that way.’ He said, ‘I don’t care how you talk! Fuck him!’ So, I used my best lawyer-ese, and I called him back and said, ‘The mayor is so grateful for your offer. But he is not inclined to agree.’ ” Some time later Trump went to Deputy Mayor Peter Solomon and reportedly proposed a deal entitling him to a $4.4 million commission. (He eventually got $500,000.) Recalled Baer, “He spoke to the representatives of the governor [too]. He wasn’t going to be deterred because pisher Tom Baer told him he couldn’t do it . . . . Koch [just shook his head and] thought, This guy is ridiculous.”

Image

“YOU NEED TO SEE DONALD”
‘Come and make your pitch to me,” Roy Cohn told Roger Stone when they met at a New York dinner party in 1979. Stone, though only 27, had achieved a degree of notoriety as one of Richard Nixon’s political dirty-tricksters. At the time, he was running Ronald Reagan’s presidential-campaign organization in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and he needed office space.


Stone appeared on East 68th Street to find Cohn, just awakened, in his robe, sitting with one of his clients, Mob boss “Fat Tony” Salerno, of the Genovese crime family. “In front of [Roy] was a slab of cream cheese and three burnt slices of bacon,” Stone remembered. “He ate the cream cheese with his pointing finger. He listened to my pitch and said, ‘You need to see Donald Trump. I will get you in, but then you are on your own.’ ”

“I went to see him,” Stone told me, “and Trump said, ‘How do you get Reagan to 270 electoral votes?’ He was very interested [in the mechanics]—a political junkie. Then he said, ‘O.K., we are in. Go see my father.’ ” Out Stone went to Avenue Z, in Coney Island, and met Fred Trump in his office, which was crowded with cigar-store Indians. “True to his word, I got $200,000. The checks came in $1,000 denominations, the maximum donation you could give. All of these checks were written to ‘Reagan For President.’ It was not illegal—it was bundling. Check trading.” For Reagan’s state headquarters, the Trumps found Stone and the campaign a decrepit town house next to the ‘21’ Club. Stone was now, like Donald Trump, inside the Cohn tent.

And Stone soon seized the moment to cash in. After Reagan was elected, his administration softened the strict rules for corporations seeking government largesse. Soon Stone and Paul Manafort, Trump’s future campaign manager, were lobbyists, reaping the bonanzas that could flow with Favor Bank introductions. Their first client, Stone recalled, was none other than Donald Trump, who retained him, irrespective of any role Manafort might have had in the firm, for help with federal issues such as obtaining a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the channel to the Atlantic City marina to accommodate his yacht, the Trump Princess.

“We made no bones about it,” Stone recently said. “We wanted money. And it came pouring in.” Stone and Manafort charged hefty fees to introduce blue-chip corporations—such as Ronald Perelman’s MacAndrews & Forbes and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—to their former campaign colleagues, some of whom were now running the Reagan White House. It was all cozy and connected—and reminiscent of Roy Cohn.

By 2000, Stone had offered his talents to a new candidate: Trump himself. That year Stone traveled the country to help Trump explore the viability of running as a Reform Party candidate. But at a stop in Florida, things halted abruptly. “I’m tired,” Stone recalled Trump telling him. “Cancel the rest of this. I am going to my room to watch TV.” In Stone’s view, “His heart was never in it.” (A White House spokesperson disputes this account.)

“You have to let Donald be Donald,” Stone explained. “We have been friends for 40 years . . . . Look what happened with the ‘birther’ push. You don’t want to hear this, but when he started that campaign 7 out of 10 Republicans at the time believed that Obama was born in Kenya. And, let’s face it, many still question it. Donald still believes it.” (In fact, candidate Trump released an official statement two months before Election Day asserting, unequivocally, that “Barack Obama was born in the United States.”)

Stone’s modus operandi, even to this day, has seemed to be vintage Cohn. Fired by Trump for what one of his spokesmen called Stone’s desire “to use the campaign for his own personal publicity,” Stone went into overdrive, fighting back and scheduling interviews in which he praised candidate Trump. (Stone denied he was fired and says he resigned.) Stone recently expressed concern that Jared Kushner’s inexperience and façade of centrist policies might very well scuttle the already beleaguered Trump presidency. And he fretted about Trump’s daughter Ivanka as well, saying that he found it “disturbing” when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in May, pledged $100 million to a World Bank women’s entrepreneurial fund—a project she had promoted.

Yet Stone would not concede that his decades-long relationship with Trump had become strained, even though Stone, along with some members of the administration, are facing allegations that they’ve had questionable contacts with a variety of Russian nationals. (All have denied any wrongdoing.) “There is nothing to any of this,” Stone claimed. “Donald knows he has my loyalty and friendship. I leave a message when I want to speak with him.”

All along there had been something deeper connecting Stone and Trump and Roy Cohn: the climate of suspicion and fear that had helped bring all three to power. Although Stone, like many around Cohn in the 70s and 80s, was too young to have observed how Cohn helped poison America in the McCarthy years, Stone had learned at the feet of Richard Nixon, the ultimate American paranoid. And the politics of paranoia that Cohn and Stone had cynically mastered would eventually make them kindred spirits. Just as the two of them had come to prominence by exploiting a grave national mood (Cohn in the 50s, Stone in the 70s), it was this same sense of American angst, resurgent in 2016, that would ultimately help elect Donald Trump.

“Pro-Americanism,” Stone said, “is a common thread for McCarthy, Goldwater, Nixon, [and] Reagan. The heir to that tradition is Donald Trump. When you combine that with the bare-knuckled tactics of Roy Cohn—or a Roger Stone—that is how you win elections. So Roy has an impact on Donald’s understanding of how to deal with the media—attack, attack, attack, never defend.”

THE LONG GOOD-BYE
Roger Stone was there in 1982 when Roy Cohn was at his peak. At the time, Cohn was trying to help Trump realize his dream of opening casinos in Atlantic City. Crucial to his success would be a sympathetic New Jersey governor. And Cohn and Stone were working hard to elect their candidate: Republican Tom Kean. Stone, as it turned out, was Kean’s campaign manager, and after Kean won in a close race, Stone would remain as an unofficial adviser.

Trump began to purchase boardwalk real estate. He built one casino and bought another. His prospects looked bright. But Cohn’s downfall was imminent. Word would soon begin to circulate that Cohn was battling AIDS. He denied it. He was also battling disbarment—under a cloud of fraud and ethical-misconduct charges. (Cohn, along with other misdeeds, had stiffed a client on a loan and altered the terms of a virtually comatose client’s will—in his hospital room—making himself its co-executor.)

Cohn tried to keep up a good face. But Trump, among other clients, began to shift his business elsewhere. “Donald found out about [Cohn’s condition] and just dropped him like a hot potato,” Cohn’s personal secretary, Susan Bell, was quoted as saying. (A White House spokesperson says this claim is totally false.)

Cohn sensed his growing isolation. And for whatever reason, he decided, according to journalist Wayne Barrett, to help the efforts of Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry, who was seeking an appointment to the federal bench. “Maryanne wanted the job,” Stone would recall. “She did not want Roy and Donald to do anything. She was attempting to get it on her own.”

Stone remembered that when it appeared someone else was in line for the job Cohn approached Reagan’s attorney general, Ed Meese, for help. In the end, Barry got the plum post. “Roy can do the impossible,” Trump reportedly said when he heard the news. The next day, Barrett noted, Barry called Cohn to thank him. (According to the Times, Trump, when asked in 2015, said his sister “got the appointment totally on her own merit.” For herself, Barry admitted to Trump-family biographer Gwenda Blair, “There’s no question Donald helped me get on the bench. I was good, but not that good.”)

Image

By 1985, Cohn was seriously ill—“I have liver cancer,” he contended—and he started calling in his last markers. He phoned New York Times columnist William Safire, whom he’d known since Safire’s days as a publicist. And, sure enough, Safire ran a piece attacking the “buzzards of the bar” who had “dredged up” fraud charges to get even with Cohn, “[the] hard-hitting anti-legal-establishment right-winger at a time when he is physically unable to defend himself.” Roger Stone would recall Trump phoning him and asking, “ ‘Have you seen Bill Safire’s column?’ He called me to point it out to me. He said, ‘This is going to be terrific for Roy.’ “

Cohn also had asked a favor of Trump: Could he give him a hotel room for his lover, who was dying of AIDS? A room was found in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel. Months passed. Then Cohn got the bill. Then another. He refused to pay. At some point, according to The New York Times’s Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, Trump would present Cohn with a thank-you gift for a decade of favors: a pair of diamond cuff links. The diamonds turned out to be fakes.

Tensions between the two became progressively strained. And the dying Cohn, as Barrett would describe him in those waning days, would say, “Donald pisses ice water.”

That said, Trump did come out to testify on Cohn’s behalf at his 1986 disbarment hearing, one of 37 character witnesses, including Barbara Walters and William Safire. But none of it mattered. Cohn, after putting up a four-year fight, was kicked out of the New York Bar for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.” Cohn’s nefarious practices had finally caught up with him.

Trump, by then a presence in Atlantic City, was setting his sights on a third casino. Roy Cohn, in contrast, would die almost penniless, given how much he owed the I.R.S. And his funeral made it clear what Cohn and his friends and family had felt, in the end, about Trump. The real-estate developer was not one of the speakers. He was not asked to be a pallbearer. Trump, in Barrett’s account, did show up, however, and stood in the back.

Thirty years later, on the day after Donald J. Trump was elected president, Roger Stone was one of the callers who got through to his old friend at Trump Tower. “Mr. President,” said Stone. “Oh please, call me Donald,” Stone remembered Trump saying.

A few moments later, Trump sounded wistful. “Wouldn’t Roy love to see this moment? Boy, do we miss him.”

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 03, 2017 4:58 pm

This Is Big

By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 1, 2017 12:27 AM

This is big.

As you may have heard, this evening The Wall Street Journal published a major follow-up to its story from Thursday which described the work of a GOP money man and oppo research guy, the late Peter W. Smith, who was trying to get hacked emails from Russia and held himself out to be in contact with disgraced Trump advisor Michael Flynn. On its face, the big new break in this follow-up story is a new document from Smith. The document is from what is described as a package of recruiting materials Smith was using to enlist cybersecurity talent in his operation. The document listed key officials in the Trump campaign. These were apparently people Smith claimed he was in touch with or working with, though precisely how or why they were mentioned is not entirely clear.

Here’s the key passage from the Journal article …

Officials identified in the document include Steve Bannon, now chief strategist for President Donald Trump; Kellyanne Conway, former campaign manager and now White House counselor; Sam Clovis, a policy adviser to the Trump campaign and now a senior adviser at the Agriculture Department; and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who was a campaign adviser and briefly was national security adviser in the Trump administration.

A few caveats are in order.

From the Journal reporting at least it is not totally clear what Smith intended by listing these people. It’s also possible that Smith was freelancing. There are lots of people in the orbit of major campaigns puffing up their connections to top players. The Journal article has Bannon denying any knowledge of Smith. Conway says she knew Smith from GOP politics over the years but was never in contact with him about this.

That’s the story as presented in the Journal.

What is also clear in the Journal article is that the source of the new information was almost certainly a British national and cybersecurity expert named Matt Tait. I would go through why this seems clear. But about an hour after the Journal article was published, Tait himself followed up with what I would say is the big piece of the night in the Lawfare blog.

Tait provides a much more detailed first-person account of his dealings with Smith. You’ll want to read it yourself. But the gist is that he’s a cybersecurity expert, he got press attention with some online analysis he did about the DNC hacking. He later got contacted by Smith – apparently because Smith was looking for someone to authenticate purported, hacked Clinton emails he’d been offered. Tait didn’t at first know just what Smith was after or who he was. But once he got into a conversation with Smith and found out someone was offering him the Clinton emails, he wanted to know more.

One critical part of the story is that Tait never saw the purported emails, genuine or not. So he is not in a position to say what they were or who was offering them to Smith.

The critical points Tait reveals are these. 1) That in his conversations with Smith and his associates it was clear that they did not care if the sources of the emails were Russian intelligence officers or if the emails had been hacked by Russian intelligence. They were entirely indifferent to this reality. They didn’t care. 2) Smith discussed what seemed to be highly detailed and confidential information about the inner workings of the Trump campaign, details that made Tait think that Smith wasn’t just some name dropper freelancing but actually had deep ties into the campaign and especially with Mike Flynn.

Let me excerpt two key passages …

Over the course of our conversations, one thing struck me as particularly disturbing. Smith and I talked several times about the DNC hack, and I expressed my view that the hack had likely been orchestrated by Russia and that the Kremlin was using the stolen documents as part of an influence campaign against the United States. I explained that if someone had contacted him via the “Dark Web” with Clinton’s personal emails, he should take very seriously the possibility that this may have been part of a wider Russian campaign against the United States. And I said he need not take my word for it, pointing to a number of occasions where US officials had made it clear that this was the view of the U.S. intelligence community as well.

Smith, however, didn’t seem to care. From his perspective it didn’t matter who had taken the emails, or their motives for doing so. He never expressed to me any discomfort with the possibility that the emails he was seeking were potentially from a Russian front, a likelihood he was happy to acknowledge. If they were genuine, they would hurt Clinton’s chances, and therefore help Trump.

The second passage is in regards to Smith’s knowledge of the inner-workings of the Trump campaign …

Although it wasn’t initially clear to me how independent Smith’s operation was from Flynn or the Trump campaign, it was immediately apparent that Smith was both well connected within the top echelons of the campaign and he seemed to know both Lt. Gen. Flynn and his son well. Smith routinely talked about the goings on at the top of the Trump team, offering deep insights into the bizarre world at the top of the Trump campaign. Smith told of Flynn’s deep dislike of DNI Clapper, whom Flynn blamed for his dismissal by President Obama. Smith told of Flynn’s moves to position himself to become CIA Director under Trump, but also that Flynn had been persuaded that the Senate confirmation process would be prohibitively difficult. He would instead therefore become National Security Advisor should Trump win the election, Smith said. He also told of a deep sense of angst even among Trump loyalists in the campaign, saying “Trump often just repeats whatever he’s heard from the last person who spoke to him,” and expressing the view that this was especially dangerous when Trump was away.

Later in the piece, Tait returns to the point when discussing the aforementioned document reported by the Journal.

As I mentioned above, Smith and his associates’ knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign were insightful beyond what could be obtained by merely attending Republican events or watching large amounts of news coverage. But one thing I could not place, at least initially, was whether Smith was working on behalf of the campaign, or whether he was acting independently to help the campaign in his personal capacity.

Then, a few weeks into my interactions with Smith, he sent me a document, ostensibly a cover page for a dossier of opposition research to be compiled by Smith’s group, and which purported to clear up who was involved. The document was entitled “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016,” and dated September 7. It detailed a company Smith and his colleagues had set up as a vehicle to conduct the research: “KLS Research”, set up as a Delaware LLC “to avoid campaign reporting,” and listing four groups who were involved in one way or another.

The first group, entitled “Trump Campaign (in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure)” listed a number of senior campaign officials: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn and Lisa Nelson.

The largest group named a number of “independent groups / organizations / individuals / resources to be deployed.” My name appears on this list. At the time, I didn’t recognize most of the others; however, several made headlines in the weeks immediately prior to the election.

My perception then was that the inclusion of Trump campaign officials on this document was not merely a name-dropping exercise. This document was about establishing a company to conduct opposition research on behalf of the campaign, but operating at a distance so as to avoid campaign reporting. Indeed, the document says as much in black and white.

The combination of Smith’s deep knowledge of the inner workings of the campaign, this document naming him in the “Trump campaign” group, and the multiple references to needing to avoid campaign reporting suggested to me that the group was formed with the blessing of the Trump campaign. In the Journal’s story this evening, several of the individuals named in the document denied any connection to Smith, and it’s certainly possible that he was a big name-dropper and never really represented anyone other than himself. If that’s the case, Smith talked a very good game.

As you can see, a good bit of this is how Tait interpreted what Smith and Smith’s associates told him. Tait is a British national. So it is not unreasonable to assume he may not have a perfect grasp of all the nuances of US politics, just as you or I wouldn’t of British politics. But if the facts he alleges are broadly accurate – and I have no reason to think they are not – he at least makes a pretty good case that Smith had some pretty strong lines into the highest echelons of the Trump campaign and held himself out as operating on the campaign’s behalf.

What apparently prompted Tait to come forward was what we noted yesterday was likely the biggest news in the first of the two Journal pieces: the report that the US government had intelligence showing Russian operatives discussing passing hacked emails to Michael Flynn via an intermediary.

Now what does this all mean?

This reads to me like the kind of story that rapidly shakes out a lot of new information. Every big press outfit in the country must be yanking on all the dangling threads even as I write. This certainly sounds like just the kind of attempt to work with the Russian subversion campaign that many have long suspected. It connects up with people at the highest level of the Trump campaign. It looks like strong evidence of attempted collusion by people at least in the orbit of the Trump campaign and quite likely in communication with people at the highest echelons of the campaign.

But did it succeed? Did they make contact? If there was a big picture quid pro quo between Russia and the Trump campaign why were they reaching out to Smith by such circuitous methods, ones that left Smith – if we can credit his account – feeling he needed to authenticate the emails? One thing that is worth noting, though it can be hard to keep track of in all these details, is that emails purportedly hacked from Clinton’s personal email server never appeared during the campaign or since. So at least in this specific regard, what Smith and his cronies were up to didn’t pan out, for whatever reason.

To be clear, the questions I’m raising here don’t mean this didn’t happen or doesn’t matter. Far from it. They are just basic questions anyone trying to get to the bottom of this would need to ask. It is possible that the big overarching story turns out to be something we’ve discussed here on several occasions: a scenario in which Trump himself didn’t cross any lines but he knew others near him did or tried. Or maybe it’s much more. What we can say now is that the Trump/Russia collusion story just moved dramatically closer to the Trump inner circle.

I suspect we’re about to learn quite a bit more about this very soon.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby conniption » Thu Jul 06, 2017 9:14 pm

Thanks for the article I was about to post, Harvey. You beat me to it.
There are a number of comments following the Craig Murray piece and embedded links throughout.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... ut-secret/

Also, these relevant articles in case you missed it: (I know CNN missed it, because they're still going on about the "17 intelligence agencies")

NYT retracts claim that ‘17 US intelligence agencies’ verified Russian DNC email hack
Published time: 30 Jun, 2017
https://www.rt.com/viral/394821-nyt-int ... im-debunk/


AP latest to retract claim that ‘17 US agencies’ confirmed Russian DNC email hack
Published time: 1 Jul, 2017
https://www.rt.com/viral/394917-associa ... mp-russia/


and today, from MoA:

July 06, 2017
The Undeniable Pattern Of Russian Hacking

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/07/th ... cking.html

_____

Harvey » Mon Jul 03, 2017 12:14 pm wrote:I had a notion to write a novel set in a bleak near future after another more catastrophic American civil war leads to it's virtual disengagement with the rest of the world, the upshot being each chapter is a story from various victim nations of the American will to 'freedom,' (read resource war) but nobody gives America a second thought, they're all too busy getting on with their actual lives, they almost didn't notice, except to the degree they weren't being bombed by America or her allies. Might still be an interesting idea...

The Stink Without a Secret

3 Jul, 2017, Craig Murray

After six solid months of co-ordinated allegation from the mainstream media allied to the leadership of state security institutions, not one single scrap of solid evidence for Trump/Russia election hacking has emerged.

I do not support Donald Trump. I do support truth. There is much about Trump that I dislike intensely. Neither do I support the neo-liberal political establishment in the USA. The latter’s control of the mainstream media, and cunning manipulation of identity politics, seeks to portray the neo-liberal establishment as the heroes of decent values against Trump. Sadly, the idea that the neo-liberal establishment embodies decent values is completely untrue.

Truth disappeared so long ago in this witch-hunt that it is no longer even possible to define what the accusation is. Belief in “Russian hacking” of the US election has been elevated to a generic accusation of undefined wrongdoing, a vague malaise we are told is floating poisonously in the ether, but we are not allowed to analyse. What did the Russians actually do?

The original, base accusation is that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC and Podesta emails and passed them to Wikileaks. (I can assure you that is untrue).

The authenticity of those emails is not in question. What they revealed of cheating by the Democratic establishment in biasing the primaries against Bernie Sanders, led to the forced resignation of Debbie Wasserman Shultz as chair of the Democratic National Committee. They also led to the resignation from CNN of Donna Brazile, who had passed debate questions in advance to Clinton. Those are facts. They actually happened. Let us hold on to those facts, as we surf through lies. There was other nasty Clinton Foundation and cash for access stuff in the emails, but we do not even need to go there for the purpose of this argument.

The original “Russian hacking” allegation was that it was the Russians who nefariously obtained these damning emails and passed them to Wikileaks. The “evidence” for this was twofold. A report from private cyber security firm Crowdstrike claimed that metadata showed that the hackers had left behind clues, including the name of the founder of the Soviet security services. The second piece of evidence was that a blogger named Guccifer2 and a websitecalled DNC Leaks appeared to have access to some of the material around the same time that Wikileaks did, and that Guccifer2 could be Russian.

That is it. To this day, that is the sum total of actual “evidence” of Russian hacking. I won’t say hang on to it as a fact, because it contains no relevant fact. But at least it is some form of definable allegation of something happening, rather than “Russian hacking” being a simple article of faith like the Holy Trinity.

But there are a number of problems that prevent this being fact at all. Nobody has ever been able to refute the evidence of Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA who designed its current surveillance systems. Bill has stated that the capability of the NSA is such, that if the DNC computers had been hacked, the NSA would be able to trace the actual packets of that information as those emails travelled over the internet, and give a precise time, to the second, for the hack. The NSA simply do not have the event – because there wasn’t one. I know Bill personally and am quite certain of his integrity.

As we have been repeatedly told, “17 intelligence agencies” sign up to the “Russian hacking”, yet all these king’s horses and all these king’s men have been unable to produce any evidence whatsoever of the purported “hack”. Largely because they are not in fact trying. Here is another actual fact I wish you to hang on to: The Democrats have refused the intelligence agencies access to their servers to discover what actually happened. I am going to say that again.

The Democrats have refused the intelligence agencies access to their servers to discover what actually happened.

The heads of the intelligence community have said that they regard the report from Crowdstrike – the Clinton aligned private cyber security firm – as adequate. Despite the fact that the Crowdstrike report plainly proves nothing whatsoever and is based entirely on an initial presumption there must have been a hack, as opposed to an internal download.

Not actually examining the obvious evidence has been a key tool in keeping the “Russian hacking” meme going. On 24 May the Guardian reported triumphantly, following the Washington Post, that

“Fox News falsely alleged federal authorities had found thousands of emails between Rich and Wikileaks, when in fact law enforcement officials disputed that Rich’s laptop had even been in possession of, or examined by, the FBI.”


It evidently did not occur to the Guardian as troubling, that those pretending to be investigating the murder of Seth Rich have not looked at his laptop.

There is a very plain pattern here of agencies promoting the notion of a fake “Russian crime”, while failing to take the most basic and obvious initial steps if they were really investigating its existence. I might add to that, there has been no contact with me at all by those supposedly investigating. I could tell them these were leaks not hacks. Wikileaks. The clue is in the name.

So those “17 agencies” are not really investigating but are prepared to endorse weird Crowdstrike claims, like the idea that Russia’s security services are so amateur as to leave fingerprints with the name of their founder. If the Russians fed the material to Wikileaks, why would they also set up a vainglorious persona like Guccifer2 who leaves obvious Russia pointing clues all over the place?

Of course we need to add from the Wikileaks “Vault 7” leak release, information that the CIA specifically deploys technology that leaves behind fake fingerprints of a Russian computer hacking operation.

Crowdstrike have a general anti-Russian attitude. They published a report seeking to allege that the same Russian entities which “had hacked” the DNC were involved in targeting for Russian artillery in the Ukraine. This has been utterly discredited.

Some of the more crazed “Russiagate” allegations have been quietly dropped. The mainstream media are hoping we will all forget their breathless endorsement of the reports of the charlatan Christopher Steele, a former middle ranking MI6 man with very limited contacts that he milked to sell lurid gossip to wealthy and gullible corporations. I confess I rather admire his chutzpah.

Given there is no hacking in the Russian hacking story, the charges have moved wider into a vague miasma of McCarthyite anti-Russian hysteria. Does anyone connected to Trump know any Russians? Do they have business links with Russian finance?

Of course they do. Trump is part of the worldwide oligarch class whose financial interests are woven into a vast worldwide network that enslaves pretty well the rest of us. As are the Clintons and the owners of the mainstream media who are stoking up the anti-Russian hysteria. It is all good for their armaments industry interests, in both Washington and Moscow.

Trump’s judgement is appalling. His sackings or inappropriate directions to people over this subject may damage him.

The old Watergate related wisdom is that it is not the crime that gets you, it is the cover-up. But there is a fundamental difference here. At the centre of Watergate there was an actual burglary. At the centre of Russian hacking there is a void, a hollow, and emptiness, an abyss, a yawning chasm. There is nothing there.

Those who believe that opposition to Trump justifies whipping up anti-Russian hysteria on a massive scale, on the basis of lies, are wrong. I remain positive that the movement Bernie Sanders started will bring a new dawn to America in the next few years. That depends on political campaigning by people on the ground and on social media. Leveraging falsehoods and cold war hysteria through mainstream media in an effort to somehow get Clinton back to power is not a viable alternative. It is a fantasy and even were it practical, I would not want it to succeed.
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