Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

[seemslikeadream]

White House Official Floated Withdrawing U.S. Forces to Please Putin

A member of Trump’s National Security Council staff had a radical notion: to pare back American troops in Europe as a way to curry favor with the Kremlin.


Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast


A senior National Security Council official proposed withdrawing some U.S. military forces from Eastern Europe as an overture to Vladimir Putin during the early days of the Trump administration, according to a former administration official in the room with him.

While the proposal was ultimately not adopted, it is the first known case of senior aides to Donald Trump seeking to reposition U.S. military forces to please Putin—something that smelled, to a colleague, like a return on Russia’s election-time investment in President Trump. The White House did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.

The official who offered the proposal, a deputy assistant to Trump for strategic planning, mused in February 2017 about withdrawing U.S. troops close to Russian borders as part of a strategy proposal to “refram[e] our interests within the context of a new relationship with Russia,” the former official told The Daily Beast, who heard this directly from the official, Kevin Harrington.

Harrington is the NSC’s senior official for strategic planning. He had neither military experience nor significant government experience before joining the White House. But he had an influential credential: As a managing director for the Thiel Macro hedge fund, he was close to Trump patron and ally Peter Thiel. Trump’s first national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, announced Harrington’s arrival in early February as part of a “talented group” ready to bring “fresh ideas to the table.”

“It’s the first known case where senior Trump aides sought to reposition U.S. military forces to please Putin.”

Among Harrington’s ideas were a fervent belief that economic sanctions, particularly those on Russia, were ultimately harmful to the United States. Early on in his tenure, Harrington prepared a paper for Flynn fleshing out those ideas into something approaching a grand strategy—and then going further than any gesture toward Russia thus far reported.

With a large map showing Europe hanging on a wall in a White House office, Harrington was dismissive of U.S. interests in the Baltics and wondered aloud about their importance in the context of U.S.-Russian relations. American forces have remained on the continent for 70 years to deter the Soviet Union and, later, to reassure allies nervous about a resurgent Russia near their borders. The map did not show those U.S. troop positions—but it did provide a symbolic backdrop to what Harrington’s one-time associate believed was a most disturbing proposal.

Harrington’s former colleague told The Daily Beast that Harrington asked about the prospect of withdrawing or repositioning U.S. forces from the Baltics—nations once part of the Soviet Union and periodically swallowed up by Russia ever since Peter the Great shattered Swedish hegemony in northern Europe in the early 18th century. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania gained NATO accession in 2004 to guarantee their independence, a measure stridently opposed by Vladimir Putin, who saw the transatlantic military alliance not only enlarged but encroached within what Russia considers its sphere of influence.

According to the ex-colleague, Harrington considered it a gesture to the Kremlin that would enable the nascent Trump administration to see if its desire for a friendly relationship with Russia would be reciprocated. It was included in a strategy paper that, conspicuously to the former official, made no mention of Russia as either a competitor or adversary.

The ex-colleague considered the idea dangerously naive. The Kremlin was far more likely to view a unilateral U.S. troop reduction from Eastern Europe as a green light from Washington for additional provocations, in Ukraine, Syria, or elsewhere. If that wasn’t enough, European allies were already alarmed at Trump’s tendencies to discuss the defense of Europe as a protection racket. Seeing the new administration pull back from Europe would prompt fear on the continent, and especially within the Baltics, that the U.S. was abandoning its allies to a resurgent Russia.

“I sensed we were giving something and it wasn’t clear what we were gaining in return,” said the former official.

Harrington’s proposal lacked granularity. It did not go into the merits of removing specific military units or curbing particular military activities in the Baltics. The former official considered that a side effect of Harrington’s ignorance of the military. Harrington was more interested in a self-styled blue-sky thinking that argued that decades of previous U.S. approaches to Russia were misguided than arguing the obsolescence of or harm caused by any specific Army brigade, Air Force fighter wing, or training exercise.

The U.S. military has augmented its focus on the Baltics after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. In June 2017, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined U.S. forces in a NATO cybersecurity war game aimed at protecting the Baltic allies’ digital infrastructure—the same month that over 50 allied ships and submarines participated in an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic Sea. Two months later, the 48th Fighter Wing and its seven F-15s arrived at Lithuania’s Siauliai air base to take command of NATO’s Baltic airspace patrols.

The former administration official who told The Daily Beast about Harrington’s proposal was incredulous that anyone on the NSC would treat U.S. forces and European allies as chess pieces in a greater game with the Kremlin. But the ex-official chalked it up to geopolitical inexperience and an enthusiasm for policy revisionism that characterized several on Flynn’s NSC.

Still, the former official said there was an urgency to Harrington’s exercise, and Flynn was Harrington’s primary audience for the proposal.

It was not Harrington’s only foray into unilateral gestures aimed at Russia. In March, Harrington proposed lifting U.S. sanctions on Russian oil, something an administration official justified to The Daily Beast as Harrington wondering, “if these sanctions are harming our economy without putting any pressure on Russia, what’s the point?”

In February, however, at a public forum, Harrington denied that the administration was looking to lift sanctions on Russia, saying “it’s smart to look at things from fresh angles, as it’s a fresh administration, but that doesn’t mean you should drop things for no improvement in behavior anywhere.”

In mid-December, The Washington Post reported that Harrington viewed U.S. closeness with Russia “as critical for surviving an energy apocalypse,” something his associates, the paper reported, said Harrington “discussed frequently and depicted as inevitable.”

This fit a pattern within the Trump administration, before and after Flynn’s White House tenure, of sidling up to Russia. Taken in sum, the pattern raises a question about whether Trump and his team are willing to pay Russia back for the Kremlin’s role in the election.

Flynn, who recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, admitted that he contacted Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late December 2016 to ensure the Kremlin would not retaliate for a new round of U.S. sanctions aimed at punishing Russia’s electoral interference. The implication of the discussion was that the Russians could expect a better deal from a Trump administration. Soon afterward, while in office, Flynn discussed with the Pentagon a plan to expand a communications channel in Syria to deepen U.S.-Russian military ties, against the wishes of Congress.

“I sensed we were giving something and it wasn’t clear what we were gaining in return.”

— former National Security Council official

Trump himself has said he believes Vladimir Putin’s assurances, in contradiction of an FBI-NSA-CIA intelligence assessment, that the Kremlin did not interfere in the 2016 election. At their first meeting, in July, Trump backed a Putin plan to conclude the Syrian civil war on terms favorable to Russian client Bashar al-Assad.

Before and during his presidency, Trump has equivocated on his commitment to the defense of European allies. He has called NATO “obsolete” and declined to endorse its critical Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense, only to walk those positions back under geopolitical pressure. Deputies like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have had to reassure nervous allies that Trump has an “ironclad” commitment to European security after the president says things like “having Russia in a friendly posture, as opposed to always fighting with them, is an asset to the world and an asset to our country, not a liability.”

Trump fired Flynn on Feb. 13, ostensibly for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about Flynn’s surreptitious conversations with Kislyak about lifting sanctions. The ex-official believed Harrington, who remains on the NSC, never actually pushed the proposal up the chain, as the current national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, would not countenance it.

Like other Flynn-era NSC aides, Harrington was the subject of speculation suggesting his departure soon after Flynn’s downfall. But, unlike so-called “Flynnstones” Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Derek Harvey, it didn’t happen. As recently as October, McMaster cited Harrington as leading the NSC strategy team as it prepared the administration’s National Security Strategy, released last month.

The document appears more influenced by McMaster’s relatively conventional view of Russia as a “revisionist power.” It does not include any mention of withdrawing U.S. forces. Yet in the light of Harrington’s abortive proposal to remove U.S. military power from the Baltics, a line in the National Security Strategy appears conspicuous, even as it points in the direction of conflict rather than withdrawal.

“Competitions” from Russia, China, and North Korea “require the United States to rethink the policies of the past two decades,” the document asserts, “policies based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners. For the most part, this premise turned out to be false.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-hou ... n?ref=home

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvPoJu5Cn64

Oh yes! When former NYT reporter Eric Lichtblau talked to “somebody at FBI” who said “Nope, no Russia, no Russia, YOU ARE THE RUSSIA!” and immediately copy/pasted whatever his “source” said and called it “reporting.” Meanwhile, rogue FBI people in the New York field office sure seemed like they were taking direction from Rudy Giuliani and Erik Prince and leaking that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted and they were going to LOCK HER UP! Of course, that was bullshit, as the FBI cleared her name a few days later, just in time for her to barely lose the Electoral College.

If we were Christopher Steele, we probably woulda stopped talking to the FBI right about then too. (By the by, it was just a bit before that when Steele got in touch with David Corn of Mother Jones, who published his story about the dossier mere hours before Lichtblau’s giant piece of shit. Steele was worried.)

https://wonkette.com/628053/lo-unto-us- ... Qu6oEUZ.99

[stillrobertpaulsen]

THREAD ON FUSION GPS. I spent the afternoon reading the transcript that Senator Feinstein released today. Here are the salient points, with citations. I am a lawyer and CEO. I was a securities fraud and human rights litigator in DC/NY for over 15 years. Read on for takeaways.

ElizabethCMcLaughlin


1/ First, thanks today for the bravery of @SenFeinstein. You're a heroine of the #Resistance.

2/ As I process the Fusion GPS transcript, I'll post significant points here in individual tweets. For starters: NO, Fusion GPS doesn't do hatchet jobs to try to get government agencies to start investigations against people. (Tr. 25)

3/ As well, Fusion GPS knows WTF it's doing. The descriptions of the investigation in the Prevezon case are deep and powerful and detailed and serious, and they do not mess around. (Tr. 38-49)

4/ Other items of note from the Fusion GPS background: Fusion has a deep background in understanding Russian money laundering. The Prevezon case got the into investigations of Russian organized crime, Cypriot banking, and the tax system in Russia. Serious business. (Tr. 38-49)

5/ On the Fusion GPS retention on Trump: "it evolved somewhat quickly into issues of his relationships to organized crime figures . . ." (Tr. 61-62)

6/ Fusion GPS concluded early in their investigation that Trump has serious ties to Russian organized crime, including money in his companies from "Kazakhstan, among other places, and that some of it you just couldn't account for." (Tr. 67-70)

7/ Fusion GPS hired Steele as a part of "drilling down" on specific areas of concern about Trump's business dealings internationally, and Steele was not the only subcontractor hired. (Tr. 76-78)

8/ Asked about Christopher Steele as an investigator, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS described him as a "quality" investigator in high profile situations and "a boy scout." (Tr. 81-82)

9/ Fusion sent Steele into Russia with a broad assignment to look into Trump's dealings in Russia. And what they found was that "it wasn't a giant secret" that "Donald Trump had a relationship with the Kremlin." “People were talking about it freely.” (Tr. 87-88)

10/ Now would be a good time to ask yourself why it is that @ChuckGrassley and others didn't want this transcript released. But keep going.

11/ Christopher Steele was trained as the lead Russianist in MI6 to spot disinformation from Russian intelligence. So what he found was not bullshit. What he found was real. (Tr. 88-89)

12/ What is clear in the questioning of Simpson from the Republican side of the fence is that they they were trying to set up a claim that Rinat Akhmetshin, who was present at the Trump Tower June 2016 meeting was an agent of Fusion and thereby HRC. (Tr. 109-110)

13/ This is plainly an attempt to try to claim that any Trump/Russia interactions were a democratic set-up—one that Simpson shot down hard. (Tr. 109-110)

14/ Glenn Simpson had dinner with Vesilnitskaya in New York the night before the Trump Tower meeting. Fusion was doing work on the Prevezon case, and it was a client dinner with the lawyers, of whom Vesiltnitskaya was one. This shit just gets weirder and weirder. (Tr.130-131)

15/ Asked by the Republicans whether he believes the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 was an effort by the Russian government to make contact with the Trump campaign, Simpson responded "I think that's a reasonable interpretation." (Tr. 134-135)

15/ Fusion sent Steele into Russia to learn more about Trump's business dealings. What they found was "very different and obviously more alarming, which had to do with . . . a political conspiracy . . . the government of Russia or someone was doing some hacking. . ."(Tr. 133-134)

16/ "there were rumblings at that time about whether there had been lot of hacking and there was going to be -- political digital espionage was going to be a component of the campaign." (Tr. 133-134)

17/ And so they set out to determine if what they were learning was credible. (I mean, Jesus. If he isn't impeached after this, America is toast.)

18/ Fusion evaluated the credibility of the information they received that the Trump campaign may be involved in digital espionage to throw the election. Steele is credible. The methods described are consistent with Russian intelligence. Nothing appears to be false. (Tr. 148-150)

18/ The very first memo within the dossier discusses that Trump and his inner circle accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin. (Tr. 154-155)

19/ In response to a question about election interference, Simpson stated "If you're getting help from a foreign government and your help is intelligence, then the foreign government's interfering," and that the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting is consistent with that. (Tr. 154-155)

20/ Only two memos in to the memos that make up the dossier, Fusion knew that what they were dealing with was a criminal attempt to influence the election, a conspiracy to violate campaign laws, and potentially the blackmailing of the @GOP candidate for President. (Tr. 158-160)

21/ "it's 26 July. So by this time Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been the subject of a very aggressive hacking campaign, weaponized hack, the likes of which, you know, have never really been seen." (Tr. 158)

22/ "We've seen hacking in politics before, but this kind of, you know, mass theft of e-mail and then to dump it all into, you know, the public sphere was extraordinary and it was criminal." (Tr. 158)

23/ "In [Steele's] mind this is already a criminal matter, there's already a potential national security matter here." (Tr. 159)

24/ "Chris said he was very concerned about whether this represented a national security threat and said he wanted to -- he said he thought we were obligated to tell someone in government, in our government about this information." (Tr. 159)

25/ "He thought from his perspective there was an issue -- a security issue about whether a presidential candidate was being blackmailed.” (Tr. 159)

26/ "From my perspective there was a law enforcement issue about whether there was an illegal conspiracy to violate the campaign laws, and then somewhere in this time the whole issue of hacking has also surfaced." (Tr. 159-160)

27/ So why did they go to the FBI? "[L]et's be clear, this was not considered by me to be part of the work that we were doing. This was -- to me this was like, you know, you're driving to work and you see something happen and you call 911, right.” (Tr. 164)

28/ 25/ It wasn't part of the -- it wasn't like we were trying to figure out who should do it. He said he was professionally obligated to do it. Like if you're a lawyer and, you know, you find out about a crime, in a lot of countries you must report that." (Tr. 164-165; 167-168)

29: "So it was like that. So I just said if that's your obligation, then you should fulfill your obligation." (Tr. 164-165; 167-168)

26/ What we can take from this is that the reporting of the dossier to the FBI was ETHICAL, HONEST, and NOT A HATCHET JOB. (Tr. 164-165; 167-168)

31/ (sorry for the screwy numbering of thread tweets, folks. this is a lot.)

32/ Simpson flagged how serious it got within the Fusion investigation when, post-reporting to the FBI, the hacking of the Democrats continued, the RNC platform as to Ukraine changed, and Trump continued to say bizarrely favorable things about Russia. (Tr. 169-170)

33/ And then Steele went to Rome, and met with the FBI, and gave them everything he had so far on Trump. Simpson says Steele's work was "really serious and really credible," and when he asked to go meet with the FBI and give them everything he had, Fusion said yes. (Tr. 171-172)

34/ And there is no question in the minds of Simpson or Steele that what they are dealing with is criminal espionage, a "crime in progress" by the Russians against the DNC and others. (Tr. 173)

35/ And then Simpson dropped a bomb: Steele went to Rome, gets debriefed by the FBI, and learns in the debriefing that the FBI, in September 2016, has a "voluntary" source inside the Trump campaign. (Tr. 175-176). READ THAT AGAIN.

36/ NOTE: that means this is not Papadopoulos. He was flipped when he lied to the FBI. This was also someone who was NOT also a source for Steele.

37/ @JamesComey sent the letter to the Hill concerning Hillary's emails after Fusion has reported espionage, election interference and the potential compromise of Trump to the FBI. (Tr. 178-179)

38/ Then the @nytimes reported that the FBI looked into Trump/Russia and found nothing. Simpson calls this cluster "a real Halloween special." (Tr. 178-179)

39/ And as a result, Steele stopped cooperating with the FBI. (Tr. 178-179)

40/ The FBI considered paying Steele to continue his work after the election, but did not. So all of this work by Steele was not on behalf of any US intelligence agency. (Tr. 214)

41/ And again, it's worth noting that this was not a hatchet job. No compensation to Fusion was conditioned on the FBI starting an investigation into Trump/Russia. (Tr. 217)

42/ After the election, Fusion was "obviously . . . as surprised as everyone else and Chris and I were mutually concerned about whether the United States had just elected someone who was compromised by a hostile foreign power . . ." (Tr. 219).

43/ " . . . more in my case whether the election had been tainted by an intervention by the Russian intelligence services, and we were, you know, unsure what to do.” (Tr. 219).

44/ They went to John McCain in the hope that McCain would share it with the highest levels of the FBI. (Tr. 219-221)

45/ And then there is this explosive bit: Steele and Simpson weren't sure that @Comey EVEN KNEW ABOUT THE ALLEGATIONS. Which would explain a lot. An awful lot. (Tr. 220-221)

46/ Just so there's no mistake about it, Simpson stated: "I was aware at the time (mid-2016) that the Russian mafia and Russian cyber crime was a subcontractor to the Russian intelligence services." (Tr. 233)

47/ Disinformation was a part of Steele's business training at MI6. He did not believe anything given to him that became a part of the dossier was disinformation. (Tr. 239)

48/ Carter Page lost money with the Russians, was really mad about sanctions, and apparently had been an espionage suspect under investigation by the FBI FOR YEARS preceding the election. Jesus. (Tr. 240-242)

49/ And add to that: Fusion had reason to believe that Page had been offered business deals in exchange for being compromised. (Tr. 240-242)

50/ Simpson was a solid witness generally. Asked about claims by SHS that the dossier was phony and Fusion took money from the Russians, he gave a scathing defense of his work and the work of Steele, concluding with he dossier "is not a fabrication." (Tr. 256-257)

51/ And then the really crazy stuff came out. Simpson was handed Manafort's contemporaneous notes from the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with the Russians. (Tr. 261-264)

52/ In those notes is a reference to a Cypriot holding company to engage in inward investment into Russia, the note "active sponsors of the RNC," Dick Cheney's press secretary, and finally, adoptions. (Tr. 261-264)

53/ But Cypriot holding companies, and "active sponsors of the RNC?" WTAF. There is something so deep and so corrupt here in the @GOP I'm nearly speechless. (Tr. 261-264)

54/ Fusion's conclusions were not influenced by the person paying them for their Trump research. (But Simpson did conclude on a personal level that Trump was unqualified for the job.) (Tr. 290-293)

55/ Fusion concluded that Trump had a long history of engagement in illegal activity with organized crime. (Tr. 293-294)

56/ More evidence of how good Simpson is as a witness. Asked about Fusion's investigations into the Trump Org in NYC, he denies direct criminal evidence of DJT the person being involved in crimes. The Trump Org of whom, of course, DJT is the head, is in deep. (Tr. 295-298)

57/ 49/ This is careful, careful testimony by this witness to preserve his credibility while still making his point, though Fox News will leap all over this as proof that DJT is not a criminal. The prior 295 pages of this transcript prove otherwise. (Tr. 295-298)

58/ Trump's golf courses are broke. (Tr. 299-300)

59/ And lastly, just in case you thought this wasn't as serious as it gets, one of Fusion GPS's sources has already been murdered by the Russians. (Tr. 279)

60/ Ok, people, that’s it. It's a bombshell of a day in America. And if Trump isn’t impeached after this, along with complicit members of the @GOP who have known this and tried to discredit Fusion and Steele and this dossier, there is no hope for our democracy. Period.

61/ @ChuckGrassley @TGowdySC @DevinNunes @Jim_Jordan @LindseyGrahamSC there is jail time in your futures, I suspect. #RESIST /end of thread
.@Alyssa_Milano thanks for the RT. We #ResisterSisters must stick together. XO

Aside from one typo I caught after reading and re-reading the transcript (the stuff on Trump-Russia "political conspiracy" is pages 142-144 in the transcript, not pages 133-134), I think McLaughlin's analysis of Simpson's testimony is pretty sharp. What do you think of her assertion that the "voluntary" source inside the Trump campaign is NOT Papadopolous? Seems like the noose is getting tighter.

[seemslikeadream]

thank you


Alfa bank server 2016 - 2017 is STILL being investigated

Cyber veteran joins Special Counsel Mueller’s team
By PIERRE THOMAS Jan 10, 2018, 4:01 PM ET

A longtime federal prosecutor who specializes in cyber crimes and fraud has joined Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election and alleged collusion between Trump associates and Russian operatives.

Ryan Dickey, who has worked for the Justice Department for several years, was added to the team in November, Mueller spokesman Peter Carr confirmed to ABC News. He recently served in the criminal division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.

The move was first reported by The Washington Post. Dickey is now working with about two dozen lawyers, investigators and administrative staffers who comprise Mueller’s office.

It’s unclear exactly why Mueller wanted a prosecutor with Dickey’s experience in cyber-related crimes, but it’s not unusual in such a wide-ranging investigation.

In 2016, Dickey helped prosecute the Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer,” who pleaded guilty to hacking into the emails and social media accounts of numerous high-profile victims.

“Guccifer” previously made headlines when he told reporters he had hacked into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but he later admitted to the FBI that he was lying.

His true victims, however, included former Secretary of State Colin Powell and family members of former President George W. Bush. According to prosecutors, Guccifer, whose real name is Marcel Lehel Lazar, hacked into the computers and social media accounts of about 100 Americans and then publicly released some of the information, including private email correspondence, medical and financial information and personal photographs.

He ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer and one count of aggravated identity theft. He was sentenced to 52 months in prison.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cyber-ve ... d=52266092

Mueller adds veteran cyber prosecutor to special-counsel team


Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has added a veteran cyber prosecutor to his team, filling what has long been a gap in expertise and potentially signaling a recent focus on computer crimes.

Ryan K. Dickey was assigned to Mueller’s team in early November from the Justice Department’s computer crime and intellectual-property section, said a spokesman for the special counsel’s office. He joined 16 other lawyers who are highly respected by their peers but who have come under fire from Republicans wary of some of their political contributions to Democrats.

[As Mueller builds his Russia special-counsel team, every hire is under scrutiny]

Dickey’s addition is particularly notable because he is the first publicly known member of the team specializing solely in cyber issues. The others’ expertise is mainly in a variety of white-collar crimes, including fraud, money laundering and public corruption, though Mueller also has appellate specialists and one of the government’s foremost experts in criminal law.

Zainab Ahmad and Brandon Van Grack have handled some cybercrime issues in the past, though they are recognized more for their work on terrorism and national security.

What the special counsel's team will want to ask Trump

With indications that special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking an interview with President Trump, here are some burning questions his team will want to ask. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Mueller was appointed in May to investigate any possible links or coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 election, and any matters that might arise out of that work.

He has charged or negotiated plea deals with four former Trump campaign or administration officials, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign manager Paul Manafort, though Manafort’s charges have nothing to do with his work for Trump.

Flynn and another former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, are now cooperating with the Mueller team. Mueller recently indicated to Trump’s legal team that his office is likely to seek an interview with the president, though Trump offered ambiguous comments Wednesday as to whether he would be willing to do that, saying, “It seems unlikely you’d even have an interview.”

[Trump declines to say whether he would sit for interview with Mueller’s team]

Mueller’s work has long had an important cybersecurity component — central to the probe is Russia’s hacking of Democrats’ emails in an effort to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system and help Trump win. The original FBI counterintelligence probe was launched in part because a Trump campaign adviser was said to have told an Australian diplomat that Russia had emails that could embarrass Democrats, and in July 2016, private Democratic messages thought to have been hacked by Russia began appearing online.

Mueller also is in possession of information from Facebook about politically themed advertisements bought through Russian accounts.

Legal analysts have said that one charge Mueller might pursue would be a conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, if he can demonstrate that members of Trump’s team conspired in Russia’s hacking effort to influence the election.

What we know about Russia's cyber tactics

Here's what we know about the Kremlin's playbook for creating division in the U.S. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Some in the legal world had wondered why Mueller had not previously tapped a cyber prosecutor to join his team.

Trump has long denied any wrongdoing and has decried the probe as a “witch hunt.” He tweeted Wednesday: “The single greatest Witch Hunt in American history continues. There was no collusion, everybody including the Dems knows there was no collusion, & yet on and on it goes. Russia & the world is laughing at the stupidity they are witnessing. Republicans should finally take control!”


Dickey, who previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, has participated in a number of high-profile computer-crime prosecutions — including the ongoing case against the file-sharing site Megaupload and the investigation of the Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer.”

Guccifer, whose real name is Marcel Lehel Lazar, penetrated email, Facebook and other online accounts of celebrities and political figures, including former secretary of state Colin Powell, former Bill Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal and a family member of George W. Bush. His hacking inadvertently revealed that Hillary Clinton was using a private email account when she was secretary of state.

Someone using the moniker Guccifer 2.0 in June 2016 claimed credit for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s network, though the intelligence community later assessed that the Russian spy agency GRU had used the persona and two websites to release data hacked from the Democrats. Lazar had long been in custody by that time; he was sentenced in September 2016 to four years and four months in U.S. prison
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... f78ae0a898

A comprehensive list of people hacked by Marcel Lazar (Guccifer 1.0)
wh1sks (51) in hacking • 2 months ago

I was looking for a list of people who were hacked by Marcel Lazar and was unable to find a single comprehensive list. So I decided to compile one.

This list is incomplete.
Just because someone appears on this list doesn't mean they were thoroughly pwned. In many cases, it was just an old inactive e-mail account that was hacked.
Lazar claims to have 30 GB of files in his archive, many of which still haven't been released.
The list is divided up into two parts. The first part is a list of targets that were mentioned in various publications.

The second part of the list are names I identified based on some .xls spreadsheets Lazar released. Specifically:

Guccifer 1.0: 16,397 Republican Contacts August 27, 2016
Guccifer 1.0: 14,573 Democrat Contacts August 27, 2016

which you can download here. These color-coded excel spreadsheets are first described in this 2014 TSG article.

Name Description Source
Sidney Blumenthal http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/sid ... mos-784091
Colin Powell http://nypost.com/2013/08/03/inside-col ... y-e-mails/
Corina Cretu Romanian official http://nypost.com/2013/08/03/inside-col ... y-e-mails/
Lisa Murkowski U.S. Senator http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Dorothy Bush Koch George W. Bush's sister http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Josh Gotbaum Director, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/guc ... ial-567983
Christopher Kojm Chairman, National Intelligence Council http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/guc ... ial-567983
Willard Heminway Bush family friend http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Scott Pierce Barbara Bush's brother http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Josephine Bush George Bush sister-in-law http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Patricia Legere Bush family friend http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Jim Nantz CBS sportscaster http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Joseph Verner Reed U.N. Under-Secretary-General http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
David Greenberg Intel analyst at Lockheed Martin http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Susan Malone Former FBI agent, Army supervisor http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Rex Evitts Military contractor http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ims-637098
Candace Bushnell Sex and the City author http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/can ... ck-1966283
Adam Posen Council on Foreign Relations http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/can ... ck-1966283
Karen Johnson Former Fed Reserve Board, Council on Foreign Relations http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/can ... ck-1966283
Jennifer Sosin Adam Posen's spouse, research strategist http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/can ... ck-1966283
Kitty Kelley Biographer http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Laura Manning Johnson DHS Official/CIA Analyst http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Steve Martin Comedian http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Tina Brown Editor http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
John Dean Nixon Aide http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Cantwell F. Muckenfuss III Gibson Dunn http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Carl Bernstein Journalist http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Rupert Everett Actor http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Julian Fellowes Actor http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Sir Francis Brooke http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Patricia Scotland UK Attorney General http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
George-Cristian Maior Romanian Intelligence Services http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
George Roche Former Secretary of Air Force http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Steven Kandarian Metlife CEO http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Dana McWhorter Author http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Denise Austin Fitness Instructor http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Robert Ballard Titanic Wreck search crew http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
Mariel Hemingway Actress http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ive-687543
John Doerr Venture capitalist http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/hac ... fer-098742
Ken Duberstein Reagan Chief of Staff http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/guc ... ein-687432
John Negroponte Former U.S. Ambassador to UN http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/fac ... ack-647903
Dennis Dwyer Rockefeller Family security http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/fac ... ack-647903
Jeffrey Tambor Arrested Development actor http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/guccifer-2014-2/
Mark Gatanas CEO VizorNet http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/guc ... ein-687432
Fraser Seitel PR Executive http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/guc ... ein-687432
Tyler Drumheller CIA Official http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/guc ... ein-687432
Marilyn Berns* Colin Powell's sister http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/guc ... ein-687432
Below is the more ambiguous part of the list based on the excel spreadsheets linked above. I included anyone who's password was in the spreadsheet, as well as anybody who's name was highlighted in orange. Based on my understanding of his color code, orange meant Lazar had hacked someone. I am not sure what red meant so did not include those people.

Some of these people may appear in articles as well, but I didn't find them for whatever reason.

Name Description
Laura Louise Bryer Unknown
Rose Reiman Doty Society
Barbara Muller Unknown
BK. Scharback Unknown
Andrei D. Terekhov Exec director UN Office of Justice
Lucy Waltezky Rockefeller family?
Marilyn Faeth Rockefeller family?
Calvin Fentress Unknown
James P. Brown Unknown
Alex Goldfarb Director, International Foundation for Civil Liberties
Carol Joynt Writer
Walter JP Curley Ambassador
Annette Bortot Office Manager, Round Hill Club
Angela Kane UN Official
Ann Veneman* Executive Director UNICEF
*These names were added after original post.

We also know he hacked someone at either the Clinton Foundation or Clinton Presidential Library.

I will continue updating this list. If you caught a mistake or you want to contribute, comment here, e-mail me wh1sks at keemail dot me, or hit me up on twitter.
https://steemit.com/hacking/@wh1sks/a-c ... ccifer-1-0

Is Rudy Giuliani The Mastermind Behind The Trump Russia Dossier’s Massive Oil Deal?

Rudy Giuliani meets the former Emir of Qatar in 2002. He would later become a security client of Giuliani Partners. Image via NY Times

Did Rudy Giuliani mastermind the massive oil privatization deal in the Trump Russia Dossier?
This factual report reveals the full extent of his Russian connections, and proves that his Kremlin relationships have reached directly to Vladimir Putin for a long time.

That’s probably why he’s gone nearly silent since Buzzfeed released Chrisopher Steele’s dossier.
Time Magazine once called Rudy Giuliani an “honorary Texas oil lawyer” but his drive, his New York political image and connections, and his reach inside both the Kremlin and the Persian Gulf is what elevated Bracewell & Giuliani to be considered the leading energy law firm of the last decade, and why continues to rack up awards from its peers.

Open source information shows that both the Emirate of Qatar and state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft are clients of Rudy Giuliani’s law and consulting firm, Giuliani Partners.
Russia’s Alfa Bank has also hired Rudy Giuliani as a paid speaker.

Giuliani is widely known to have extensive FBI, NYPD and Justice Department contacts. He has been hired by three of the major principals in the Trump Russia dossier oil privatization transaction and personally knows the current Russian Foreign Minister.

According to Giuliani’s former clients TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, the former Mayor met with Minister Lavrov in 2004 when he was newly hired, while employed by the venture capital firm.
Sergey Lavrov is still serving as Foreign Minister today.

The Giuliani/Lavrov relationship represents the highest level link possible between the Trump Campaign’s top surrogate and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

TriGlobal’s President Vitaly Pruss touted his relationship with Giuliani Partners on his firm’s website thusly:
From 2008 to 2011 Mr. Pruss worked closely with Giuliani Partners, LLC — international consulting company of former New york Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

According to TriGlobal’s website — which lists numerous events , many involving the former Trump campaign surrogate — in 2004 Giuliani also flew to meet with Russian billionaire Victor Rashnikov, and flew to his remote Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works.

TriGlobal also says that Giuliani spent time in Kiev, Ukraine that year — proximate to the Orange Revolution — meeting with world famous former boxing champion, and now-Mayor of Kiev Vitali Klitschko.
Rudy Giuliani’s infamous client list includes Russia’s Alfa Bank, in addition to the two main participants in the Trump Russia dossier oil deal, seller Rosneft and buyer, the Gulf Arab Emirate of Qatar’s sovereign investment fund.

Rudy Giuliani meeting with the heads of Alfa Bank in 2008.
Alfa Bank hired Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and he traveled to Moscow to give what one can only assume was a paid speech at their “Award for Excellence in Foreign Investment in Russia” which they presented to the Intel Corporation.

That’s the same Alfa Bank with whom it’s alleged that Donald Trump’s email server was stealthily communicating with through the election period, and which ultimately became a target of an FBI FISA warrant, which the BBC confirmed in January.
Rudy Giuliani is featured prominently on page 8 of the Alfa Bank Fellowship Brochure, meeting with Alfa Bank’s owners.

In late November 2014, Rudy Giuliani’s former law firm told Bloomberg News (archive.org link) that Russian state-run oil company Rosneft is one of its clients.

That was just a year after Rosneft had signed a massive deal with Exxon-Mobil — led by now-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — estimated to be worth half a trillion dollars, and after sanctions landed. Bloomberg noted:

The firm’s work for Russia’s state oil company didn’t stop the former Republican presidential candidate talking tough on sanctions against Russia.

Last year, Rosneft hired international law firm White & Case, LLP to represent them in their massive privatization transaction.

Coincidentally, Rudy Giuliani was a loss leader partner at White & Case for a brief time between his tenure in the US Attorney’s office prosecuting the Mafia, and during his first, failed campaign for Mayor of New York City in 1989.

Qatar has been a client of Giuliani Partners since 2005, when they hired the former New York Mayor — who became famous after 9/11 — to provide security tips to their Interior Ministry.

Giuliani also provided security services to the Qatari state-run oil company under that contract.
Notoriously, the former-Interior Minister of Qatar is both accused of sheltering Khalid Sheik Muhammad — who later became infamous for being a key planner of the attack that struck the Pentagon and brought down the World Trade Center towers — and of approving Giuliani’s work in the Gulf state.

The Center for Sanctions & Illicit Finance considers Qatar a major funder of ISIS in Syria.
Giuliani’s firm also worked with the largest Italian oil company Eni, who happens to be an unusually close partner of Roseneft, and just completed a new transaction in Egypt’s off-shore gas fields.

It’s another Italian-linked oil deal, which seems to circumvent current Western government-led sanctions against doing business with Roseneft.
Just like Ukraine-related sanctions against the state-run oil company have put Exxon’s 2012 Rosneft oil exploration deal on ice, as well as the Italian firm ENI’s 2013 venture with Rosneft to drill the Arctic Shelf.
ENI also executed a transaction with Rosneft last December, selling them a partial stake in an oil field in a deal that The Hill remarked represented a serious weakening of President Obama’s sanctions.

Bracewell & Giuliani represented Italy’s largest oil company, ENI, in a massive lawsuit, and won.
CNN revealed in 2007 that Giuliani’s firm represented Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s state-oil company PDVSA, lobbying for their American subsidiary Citgo Petroleum Corp. of Houston.

A month ago, CBS News reported that PDVSA arranged a $1.5 billion dollar loan from Russia’s Rosneft to avoid default on its other obligations, with 49.9% of the struggling company pledged as collateral. Unusually, the loan was booked in Delaware where Citgo is based, which means that US sanctions would — unless unexpectedly rolled back — prevent Rosneft from repossessing PDVSA’s Citgo shares.
PDVSA’s credit rating was just cut to junk status and ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has called their recent financial maneuverings “tantamount to default,” which means that a default and repossession event in the near future by Citgo to Rosneft is not unlikely.

Even if sanctions were released and PDVSA defaults, surrendering half of Citgo, because it would cede ownership of almost 5% of America’s oil refineries to Russia (not to mention Citgo’s gas stations and distribution deals), then Rosneft would need approval from CIFUS — a board of Cabinet members who review and must approve any major foreign asset purchases in the US — to sign off on the deal.
Rudy Giuliani’s extremely political list of foreign clients as a lawyer, a law partner or consultant is massive, global and chock full of terrorists, oligarchs and other infamous characters.
Here’s a small sample:
The former prosecutor has represented an Iranian group Mujahedin e-Khalq, that was closely affiliated with Sadaam Hussein.

Rudy Giuliani represents an Iranian terrorist group at the UN in 2012.
Giuliani gave a controversial speech in 2012 at the United Nations in New York, that some believe violated US sanctions against aiding terrorists. He’s also gone to Singapore to lobby for a casino for clients with North Korean connections.

Giuliani Partners listed TransCanada as a client in 2008, the company’s Keystone XL pipeline caused a nearly decade-long fight, but Donald Trump approved it quickly this year after President Obama declined the project, leading to a massive lawsuit against taxpayers, that the new President’s actions might have lost.
Rudy Giuliani has also represented Fox News, the government of Saudi Arabia and UST Tobacco.
And let’s not forget Guiliani’s lobbying in 2004 for private prison operator Cornell Company — whose financing caused former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay to be indicted — that was eventually bought by the public company Geo Group in 2010.

Bracewell changed its name when Rudy Giuliani joined the firm — concurrent to opening a Manhattan office to expand its practice which focuses on coal, natural gas and oil transactions — in a major push to use the exposure and political cover generated by its newest partner to vastly expand its business.
Notably, Giuliani’s former law firm did something unexpected for a law office in 2012.
That year, Bracewell & Giuliani it announced that its client Chesapeake Energy had closed an energy deal with Shell Oil

Later the Dutch oil conglomerate announced that they were also advised in a transaction with Chesapeake by… Bracewell & Giuliani.

Legal ethics typically prevent one firm from working on both sides of any transaction, but apparently those rules don’t apply to Rudy Giuliani’s former partners.

Rudy Giuliani went from being a vocal fan of Vladimir Putin since 2014, and the Donald Trump’s top surrogate — under formal consideration for the high office Secretary of State in November — to hiding under a rock ever since the Trump Russia dossier was published in January, making just a single appearance on Fox News to crow about influencing the Muslim Ban, which subsequently failed because of his racist comments.

Ironically, it was Rudy Giuliani who indicted the founder of Rosneft’s other new shareholder Glencore in 1983, because Marc Rich’s business evaded US sanctions.

But the former New York Mayor hasn’t retired, and he’s still taking more on more infamous foreign business arrangements — including his most recent job with Greenberg Traurig.

That job required Giuliani to fly for a meeting with Turkish autocrat Reçep Erdogan — to represent a Turkish gold trader accused of violating US sanctions.
But Giuliani hasn’t appeared in the mainstream media since the end of January when he bragged on Fox News about helping the Trump regime craft it’s unconstitutional Muslim Ban.

Former Bill Clinton White House staffer says that Rudy is asking prosecutors to cut a deal, but not getting a favorable response.
The rumor mill believes that Giuliani is in the FBI’s crosshairs and that his former protege James Comey has a smoking gun so obvious that he won’t give Rudy protection in exchange for testimony.
Internationally known American hacker The Jester recently said on Twitter that, “Rudy ‘Cyberman’ Giuliani is apparently in a legal quagmire and is desperate to ‘make a deal’. Comey isn’t interested.”
It’s impossible to know the validity of The Jester’s statement, but it is a fact that Trump’s former Campaign Manager Paul Manafort has said that he is registering as a foreign agent this week.

Manafort’s former partner Rick Davis was part of the Trump Campaign through election day — who served as John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign manager —and was also deeply involved in one of the specific transactions leading Trump’s former campaign manager to register as a Ukrainian foreign agent.

Public FBI activity and statements from former campaign advisors about wrongdoing related to foreign agents have steadily increased since FBI Director James Comey revealed the extent of his agency’s investigation last month.

The FBI Is Targeting Some Of Trump’s Known Associates
Ex-CIA Director James Woolsey recently told the Wall Street Journal that he attended a meeting with disgraced former-Trump NSA Gen. Mike Flynn, where he discussed circumventing legal due process to carry out an extraordinary rendition of Turkish President Erdogan’s political enemy Fethullah Gulen.
A week later, the FBI raided Woolsey’s casino in Saipan, which is located in a strip mall between a laundromat and a cellphone shop and rakes in massive amounts of cash, more than even the high stakes tables Chinese gamblers prefer in nearby Macao.

The South Pacific island of Saipan is a US Territory with about 50,000 residents, who just legalized casino gambling in 2014.
Woolsey’s casino was run by the former President of Trump’s casino empire.
It would seem that these two events are not disconnected, but rather show that Woolsey may be cooperating with authorities.

Also, the FBI recently conducted a massive arrest of New York mobsters with known ties to former Trump Organization senior advisor Felix Sater — himself a convicted racketeer who worked with both the Bonanno Family (who was targeted).

It’s uncertain if those arrests are directly related to the Trump Russia investigation, but Democratic Coalition Senior Advisor Scott Dworkin indicated that sources on capitol hill knew about the raid, and that it was connected to the President.

What is absolutely certain, is that Giuliani’s website has vanished since January 11th, after Trump named him Cyber Security Advisor in the wake of the Trump Russia dossier release, and after the media ripped both of them apart after discovering how horrifically un-secure his website was in all respects.
Rudy Giuliani made numerous highly unusual statements during the 2016 campaign, including sharing knowledge about Russian cyber attacks before they happened and bragging that he had foreknowledge of the FBI Director’s October surprise letter.
If he’s ultimately implicated in the Trump Russia Dossier, that should come as no surprise.
He’s been an international oil lawyer and security consultant to terror funders and consultant to oligarchs ever since leaving public office.

Giuliani has all of the relationships, and all of the connections to bring together disparate parties in a massively global real estate deal.
The former Mayor is a voluble speaker, filled with opinions and alternative facts, which makes his utter silence for the last three months even more remarkable.

When will Rudy Giuliani break his silence about the Trump Russia dossier and what was his true role in the Trump campaign?

Rudy Giuliani left Bracewell & Giuliani last year, which removed his name from the firm, and joined Greenberg Traurig as Senior Advisor to the Executive Chairman and as the Chair of the Cybersecurity, Privacy and Crisis Management Practice.

Now that the FBI’s Trump Russia investigation seems to be reaching critical mass, he’s going to be practicing Crisis Management full time, very soon.
His assistant at Greenberg Traurig did not answer a call seeking comment for this story or return voicemail at the time of publication.
https://thesternfacts.com/the-trump-rus ... 53876e789e

INDICTED Turkish Minister Former General Manager...GIULIANI?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40682&p=643336&hilit=Giuliani#p643336

Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS is still investigating Donald Trump’s Russia scandal and someone is paying for it

[seemslikeadream]

Happy Anniversary Dossier

at the hearing today ..it seems there is an active investigation

Comey wouldn't answer the question saying "we don't comment on on going investigations"

unless it is about Clinton


Is there an FBI investigation Trump campaign coordination with Russia ...stay tuned ....more to come

Spencer AckermanVerified account
‏@attackerman
Angus King to Comey: "The irony of your making that statement I can't avoid."

Spencer AckermanVerified account
‏@attackerman
Comey says, re FBI investign Trump/Russia contacts, "I wd never comment on investigations whether open or not in a public forum" EYES EMOJI

Spencer AckermanVerified account
‏@attackerman
Warner wants intel cmte to include in review "contact between the Russian government & its agents, & associates of any campaign & candidate"

Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/ ... index.html

James Comey refuses to tell Senate if FBI is investigating Trump-Russia links
FBI director: ‘I would never comment on investigations in an open forum’
Response stuns senators after his public remarks on Clinton’s email case
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ion-senate

Jan 10, 2017
I predict that someone in Trumpworld will be indicted

Michael Flynn charged in Russia investigation
December 08, 2017

Ex-Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos pleads guilty to making false statement
Tue October 31, 2017

Former Trump Aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates Charged as Prosecutors Reveal New Campaign Ties With Russia
OCT. 30, 2017

come on shit hit the fan already

Bombshell CNN report: Russia might have dirt on Trump
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Jan 10, 2017, 6:32pm EST

Late on Tuesday afternoon, CNN dropped an absolute bombshell of a story — the heads of America’s top intelligence agencies showed President-elect Donald Trump evidence that the Russian government may have “compromising personal and financial” information on him and that his campaign spoke directly with Kremlin intermediaries.

“The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible,” write CNN’s Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein (yes, that Carl Bernstein). After CNN’s report, BuzzFeed published the British officer’s full dossier, which you can read here.

This dossier, per CNN, has been around for some time. FBI Director James Comey was apparently aware of it when he announced that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Comey would have then announced an investigation into Clinton, which turned out to be nothingburger but profoundly affected the election, while sitting on far more significant allegations about her opponent.

But the allegations were only recently deemed credible — not proven, merely worth investigating — so are only recently getting top levels of scrutiny.

“Some of the memos were circulating as far back as last summer,” the CNN reporters explain. “What has changed since then is that US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect.”

The idea that Russian intelligence might be able to blackmail the next US president is almost too staggering to think through fully. But one angle that immediately raised eyebrows is a very simple one — what could the Russians possibly have on Trump that hasn’t already been made public? My colleague Matt Yglesias put this skepticism well in a tweet:


Matt’s point is a good one. But Trump’s history does suggest that there are some truly damaging things the Russians could have on him — things that, if they did come out, would embarrass him even further. These are four hypothetical examples, but they’re all based on public reporting:

Trump is not as rich as he says: Trump has repeatedly demonstrated extreme sensitivity over his net worth. In 2005, he sued journalist Tim O’Brien for claiming that he was “merely” worth between $150 million and $250 million. (During a deposition for the case, which he ultimately lost, Trump famously said he estimates his net worth based on his “feelings” at a given moment.) Before Trump’s 2011 Comedy Central Roast, his team reportedly laid out a list of acceptable and unacceptable topics to the comedians. Wanting to have sex with his daughter was in bounds, but jokes about his net worth being lower than he said weren’t. And then, of course, there’s the matter of him not releasing his tax returns like every other presidential candidate in history. If Russians have those tax returns, or a similar financial document, the potential release would be devastating for him.
Trump’s campaign directly coordinated with the Russian government: This, as I mentioned earlier, is a logical reading of an actual allegation in the memo. “The two-page synopsis also included allegations that there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government,” the CNN reporters write. That doesn’t clarify whether Trump’s team did it wittingly — or whether the Russians were Putin aides, hackers, oligarchs not officially in the government, or some combination — but either way, that kind of revelation would be damning for Trump’s legitimacy.
Sex tape: There is a persistent rumor in Washington intelligence circles that Russian intelligence “filmed Trump in an orgy while in Russia,” as one writer put it. These rumors get very lurid — we’re talking illegal sex stuff lurid. But they’ve been impossible to track down or verify and thus report in any meaningful sense. Expect to see a lot more speculation along these lines now that the CNN report is out.
Trump’s business holdings in Russia are way more extensive than we think: No one actually knows how much money Trump’s family makes from Russia. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. said that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." If it’s the case that Russian oligarchs or Russian government officials are major income sources for Trump, or that they secretly own large shares of his various companies, then that would be a concrete lever the Kremlin could hold over his head.
It’s also something Russia experts, including some who recently served in the government, have been openly worrying about for months. As my colleague Yochi Dreazen has written, Evelyn Farkas, formerly a top Pentagon official on Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, used an essay for Politico to explicitly suggest that the next inhabitant of the Oval Office may do Putin’s bidding because he owes the Russian leader and his allies money:

We know, per Donald Trump Jr., that Russia makes up a significant amount of the family business. What we don’t know is how much Russian money is involved, and what Russian money. How did Trump get out of debt? To whom does he owe money? Who provides the collateral for his loans? Is he beholden to Russian oligarchs and banks who are under the thumb of the Kremlin and Russian security services?
To be crystal clear: I have no reason to believe any of these theories are correct. We don’t even know if the British intelligence officer’s report, the one the intel community is currently tracking down, is accurate.

But the fact that we even have to talk about these things shows just how much Donald Trump has deformed American politics — and the notion of the presidency itself — before he even moves into the White House.
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/10/1423 ... -trump-cnn

These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia
A dossier, compiled by a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official, alleges Russia has compromising information on Trump. The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.

posted on Jan. 10, 2017, at 5:20 p.m.
Ken Bensinger

A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks.
The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Barack Obama and Trump.
Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.
The document was prepared for political opponents of Trump by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent. It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors. The report misspells the name of one company, “Alpha Group,” throughout. It is Alfa Group. The report says the settlement of Barvikha, outside Moscow, is “reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates.” It is not reserved for anyone, and it is also populated by the very wealthy.
The documents have circulated for months and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen them. Mother Jones writer David Corn referred to the documents in a late October column. Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson tweeted Tuesday that the outgoing Senate Democratic leader had seen the documents before writing a public letter to FBI Director James Comey about Trump’s ties to Russia. And CNN reported Tuesday that Arizona Republican John McCain a gave “full copy” of the memos to Comey on Dec. 9, but that the FBI already had copies of many of the memos.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/t ... .xkpexOdDz

BuzzFeed’s Bombshell

Why the site published the explosive memos about Trump and Russia—and why no one beat them to it.

By Will Oremus
BuzzFeed on Tuesday published a 35-page dossier comprising a series of memos, containing intelligence reportedly gathered by a former British intelligence agent as opposition research, about alleged ties between President-elect Donald Trump and Russia. It included claims that Russian authorities have been “cultivating and supporting” Trump for “at least five years” and obtained compromising material on Trump that included video of “perverted” sex acts in a Moscow hotel..

The dossier was not new. BuzzFeed and multiple other news organizations had obtained it well before Tuesday and had been investigating its various claims. Mother Jones wrote about it prior to the election, on Oct. 31, and published a handful of quotes from it. Key figures in Congress had also seen it and even publicly alluded to it, and the Guardian reported on Tuesday that Sen. John McCain had passed it to FBI Director James Comey last month. But no one had published its entire, stunning contents before Tuesday—partly because, as my colleague Joshua Keating put it, “nothing in the memos has been confirmed, and even their provenance is murky.”

BuzzFeed posted the dossier in full, prefacing it with a series of caveats about its veracity and updating it shortly afterward with a vehement denial from Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, about whom the memo makes several claims. Why did the site opt to publish what so many others had opted not to? And why now, in particular? The answers point to a media industry that still takes its “gatekeeping” functions more seriously than it sometimes gets credit for—even if it doesn’t always perform them.

BuzzFeed’s editor, Ben Smith, explained the decision in a memo to his staff, which he subsequently provided to me and then published on Twitter:


Smith didn’t address why BuzzFeed waited until now to publish the document, and he declined to comment further for this article. But the move came almost immediately after CNN reported Tuesday that top U.S. intelligence officials had shown Trump and President Obama a two-page synopsis of the dossier. The synopsis was presented as an unofficial appendage to the classified security briefings they gave Obama and Trump about Russian interference in the presidential election, CNN reported. Sources also told CNN that the “Gang of Eight” Congressional leaders had been provided a synopsis of the dossier as well.

That top U.S. intelligence officials saw fit to brief Trump and Obama on the dossier would seem to indicate that they took the claims at least somewhat seriously, even though they’ve been unable to verify them and, as BuzzFeed noted, the memos contain some “clear errors.” But CNN’s report suggests that the briefing was partly just about making Trump aware that the dossier existed and was circulating at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

CNN declined to disclose the substance of the claims, writing, “At this point, CNN is not reporting on details of the memos, as it has not independently corroborated the specific allegations.” Smith and BuzzFeed saw it differently. It’s possible that if they hadn’t published it Tuesday night, someone else would have.

(Slate, for its part, followed BuzzFeed’s lead and published the dossier later Tuesday as part of Keating’s blog post about it. Asked why Slate ran it, Editor in Chief Julia Turner told me, “The memos BuzzFeed published today are newsworthy documents, and Buzzfeed’s decision to publish was news too. In covering BuzzFeed’s scoop and its implications, we described the allegations in the memos and the questions about their veracity; we thought it served our readers best to republish the documents as well so readers could evaluate the memos for themselves.”)

BuzzFeed was acting in a tradition in which the notion of media as privileged gatekeeper of information is viewed with disdain.
What we have, with the memo, is a set of explosive charges against the president-elect that no one so far has been able to either verify or fully debunk. What’s remarkable, in a time of social media, blogs, polarized politics, hacks, and leaks, is that the dossier stayed private for so long, even as the Clinton campaign and Democrats saw their private communications splashed across the news. No doubt that was due at least in part to the claims’ sensational nature and the enormous impact they could have, if verified or even just widely believed.

David Corn, the Mother Jones journalist who wrote the magazine's comparatively circumspect Oct. 31 report on the allegations, tweeted Tuesday night that he did not publish the full memos at the time because he could not verify their allegations. For Corn—and for journalist Julia Ioffe, who tweeted that she was “approached with this story” but turned it down because it was “impossible to verify”—that call came down to ethics and standard operating procedure. Clearly the internet has not turned journalism into a shameless, traffic-thirsty free-for-all.


Yet the dossier did come out eventually, and it’s interesting to reflect on how and why it happened—and whether it was inevitable. It happened via a series of steps by various actors, each of who relied on the actions of those before them to justify their own decisions. BuzzFeed presumably published it in part because CNN was reporting on it. CNN was reporting on it because intelligence officials had briefed Trump on it. Intelligence officials briefed Trump on it because senior Congressional leaders were passing it around. Senior Congressional leaders may have been passing it around in part because Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid alluded to it in a letter blasting FBI Director James Comey for publicizing information harmful to Hillary Clinton, but not publicizing the dirt on Trump. Each act lowered the bar for those who followed to act on information that they knew might or might not be true.

Whether BuzzFeed was right or wrong to publish the memo—and whether it should have presented it with more critical commentary or context—is a question that will be debated in future classes on journalism ethics. For now I’ll just point out that, while Smith has at times proudly positioned BuzzFeed as a member of the “mainstream media,” he was acting here in a different tradition. It was the tradition of internet media and blogs—one pioneered by Matt Drudge, who famously broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal by reporting that Newsweek was sitting on it, and by the now-defunct Gawker. It’s a tradition in which the notion of media as privileged gatekeeper of information is viewed with disdain. It’s one in which sensitive and embarrassing information about public figures is readily disclosed, ostensibly out of respect for the public’s intelligence and right to know. It’s also one in which publishers are rewarded for publishing such bombshells, not with prestigious industry awards, but with notoriety, page views, and social media shares.

Smith’s defense of his decision evinces an understanding of this tradition and BuzzFeed’s place in it. “We have always erred on the side of publishing,” he writes. There is virtue in this posture among journalists, insofar as it serves as a societal counterweight to the tendency of people in positions of power to suppress information that could embarrass them. The question is just how far you’re willing to err in that direction, and Smith acknowledges that this was a particularly close call. It rings just a tad disingenuous, however, when BuzzFeed claims to have published the documents simply “so that Americans can make up their own minds” about the allegations. If America’s top intelligence agencies, Congressional staffs, and investigative journalists—including BuzzFeed’s own decorated investigative team—couldn’t make up their minds about the allegations, how do they expect the average reader to do so?

That doesn’t necessarily mean BuzzFeed’s decision was wrong. It’s at least theoretically possible for such a disclosure to both violate traditional journalistic norms and benefit society in ways that transcend journalistic ethics altogether. A reader may have little to go on in trying to evaluate the claims’ veracity, but now that they’re public, evidence proving or disproving them may soon surface. But it’s also possible for the publication of incendiary allegations to backfire in ugly ways, not only for the figures involved, but for BuzzFeed and the broader media—especially if they turn out not to be true.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... nd_no.html

SURPRISE! it wasn't 4ch

Ex-spy behind Trump intelligence dossier identified: report
BY MARK HENSCH - 01/11/17 03:22 PM EST 248


Ex-spy behind Trump intelligence dossier identified: report
© Getty Images
A former British intelligence officer who prepared a dossier about President-elect Trump’s ties to Russia has been identified, according to a new report.

Christopher Steele created the controversial document about the Russian government’s alleged power over Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The dossier, which alleges links between Trump's campaign and the Russian government, as well as the existence of compromising Russian-owned material on Trump, created a stir Tuesday. CNN reported that the dossier's contents came up in an intelligence meeting with Trump, and BuzzFeed later published the unverified document — two reports Trump and his staff denounced in a press conference today.

Steele is now a director at a private security and investigations firm in London, according to the Journal.

Steele, 52, is one of two directors at Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. The dossier's creator has been repeatedly described in reports as having a good reputation in intelligence circles.
Orbis was formed in 2009 by former British intelligence professionals, according to the firm’s website. The company mounts “intelligence-gathering operations” and conducts “complex, often cross-border investigations."

A source told the Journal that Steele created the dossier, which is a series of unsigned memos seemingly written between June and December 2016.

Steele also devised a plan for disseminating the document to U.S. and European law enforcement officials, they added, including the FBI.

Orbis’s other co-director is Christopher Burrows, 58, a former counselor in Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth office.

Burrows told the publication he would not “confirm or deny” Orbis had a role in the report.

“We have no political ax to grind,” he said, adding that Orbis “sees what’s out there first” when conducting an investigation and then performs a “stress test” on its results.

CNN reported Tuesday, meanwhile, that top intelligence officials presented Trump with a two-page synopsis of the dossier last week.

The synopsis was reportedly attached as an appendix to the intelligence community’s report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race.

The controversial dossier alleges the Russian government possesses compromising financial and personal information about Trump. It also claims that people close to Trump kept touch with Moscow during last year’s presidential campaign.

U.S. intelligence officials have not verified the dossier's details, however, and it remains unclear how reliable they are.

Trump on Wednesday fiercely criticized the dossier's leak to media outlets.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... ied-report

Alastair Reid
‏@ajreid
ICYMI: BBC correspondent says there's more than one source, more than one tape & more than one date of allegations in Trump intel dossier


https://twitter.com/ajreid/status/81922 ... 68/video/1

REMINDER

OCT. 31 2016 5:36 PM

Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?

This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.

By Franklin Foer
U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump gives a fist-pump to the ground crew as he arrives on his plane in St. Augustine, Florida, U.S. October 24, 2016.
Donald Trump gives a fist-pump to the ground crew as he arrives on his plane in St. Augustine, Florida, on Oct. 24.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Read Franklin Foer's follow-up story for new statements from the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank and analysis of the competing theories about the server and its activity.⁠⁠

The greatest miracle of the internet is that it exists—the second greatest is that it persists. Every so often we’re reminded that bad actors wield great skill and have little conscience about the harm they inflict on the world’s digital nervous system. They invent viruses, botnets, and sundry species of malware. There’s good money to be made deflecting these incursions. But a small, tightly knit community of computer scientists who pursue such work—some at cybersecurity firms, some in academia, some with close ties to three-letter federal agencies—is also spurred by a sense of shared idealism and considers itself the benevolent posse that chases off the rogues and rogue states that try to purloin sensitive data and infect the internet with their bugs. “We’re the Union of Concerned Nerds,” in the wry formulation of the Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp.

In late spring, this community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee, an attack persuasively detailed by the respected cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.

Hunting for malware requires highly specialized knowledge of the intricacies of the domain name system—the protocol that allows us to type email addresses and website names to initiate communication. DNS enables our words to set in motion a chain of connections between servers, which in turn delivers the results we desire. Before a mail server can deliver a message to another mail server, it has to look up its IP address using the DNS. Computer scientists have built a set of massive DNS databases, which provide fragmentary histories of communications flows, in part to create an archive of malware: a kind of catalog of the tricks bad actors have tried to pull, which often involve masquerading as legitimate actors. These databases can give a useful, though far from comprehensive, snapshot of traffic across the internet. Some of the most trusted DNS specialists—an elite group of malware hunters, who work for private contractors—have access to nearly comprehensive logs of communication between servers. They work in close concert with internet service providers, the networks through which most of us connect to the internet, and the ones that are most vulnerable to massive attacks. To extend the traffic metaphor, these scientists have cameras posted on the internet’s stoplights and overpasses. They are entrusted with something close to a complete record of all the servers of the world connecting with one another.

In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.

More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server’s DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues.

Trump Tower.
Trump Tower.
Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

(I communicated extensively with Tea Leaves and two of his closest collaborators, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, since they work for firms trusted by corporations and law enforcement to analyze sensitive data. They persuasively demonstrated some of their analytical methods to me—and showed me two white papers, which they had circulated so that colleagues could check their analysis. I also spoke with academics who vouched for Tea Leaves’ integrity and his unusual access to information. “This is someone I know well and is very well-known in the networking community,” said Camp. “When they say something about DNS, you believe them. This person has technical authority and access to data.”)

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. “I’ve never seen a server set up like that,” says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. “It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.” The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. “I get more mail in a day than the server handled,” Davis says.

“I’ve never seen a server set up like that.”
Christopher Davis of the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc.
That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. A small portion of the logs showed communication with a server belonging to Michigan-based Spectrum Health. (The company said in a statement: “Spectrum Health does not have a relationship with Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. We have concluded a rigorous investigation with both our internal IT security specialists and expert cyber security firms. Our experts have conducted a detailed analysis of the alleged internet traffic and did not find any evidence that it included any actual communications (no emails, chat, text, etc.) between Spectrum Health and Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. While we did find a small number of incoming spam marketing emails, they originated from a digital marketing company, Cendyn, advertising Trump Hotels.”)

Spectrum accounted for a relatively trivial portion of the traffic. Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. “It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,” Camp told me. “These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.”

Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.

* * *

While the researchers went about their work, the conventional wisdom about Russian interference in the campaign began to shift. There were reports that the Trump campaign had ordered the Republican Party to rewrite its platform position on Ukraine, maneuvering the GOP toward a policy preferred by Russia, though the Trump campaign denied having a hand in the change. Then Trump announced in an interview with the New York Times his unwillingness to spring to the defense of NATO allies in the face of a Russian invasion. Trump even invited Russian hackers to go hunting for Clinton’s emails, then passed the comment off as a joke. (I wrote about Trump’s relationship with Russia in early July.)

In the face of accusations that he is somehow backed by Putin or in business with Russian investors, Trump has issued categorical statements. “I mean I have nothing to do with Russia,” he told one reporter, a flat denial that he repeated over and over. Of course, it’s possible that these statements are sincere and even correct. The sweeping nature of Trump’s claim, however, prodded the scientists to dig deeper. They were increasingly confident that they were observing data that contradicted Trump’s claims.

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally at The Champions Center Expo in Springfield, Ohio, on October 27, 2016.
Donald Trump speaks at a rally at in Springfield, Ohio, on Thursday.
Paul Vernon/Getty Images

In the parlance that has become familiar since the Edward Snowden revelations, the DNS logs reside in the realm of metadata. We can see a trail of transmissions, but we can’t see the actual substance of the communications. And we can’t even say with complete certitude that the servers exchanged email. One scientist, who wasn’t involved in the effort to compile and analyze the logs, ticked off a list of other possibilities: an errant piece of spam caroming between servers, a misdirected email that kept trying to reach its destination, which created the impression of sustained communication. “I’m seeing a preponderance of the evidence, but not a smoking gun,” he said. Richard Clayton, a cybersecurity researcher at Cambridge University who was sent one of the white papers laying out the evidence, acknowledges those objections and the alternative theories but considers them improbable. “I think mail is more likely, because it’s going to a machine running a mail server and [the host] is called mail. Dr. Occam says you should rule out mail before pulling out the more exotic explanations.” After Tea Leaves posted his analysis on Reddit, a security blogger who goes by Krypt3ia expressed initial doubts—but his analysis was tarnished by several incorrect assumptions, and as he examined the matter, his skepticism of Tea Leaves softened somewhat.

I put the question of what kind of activity the logs recorded to the University of California’s Nicholas Weaver, another computer scientist not involved in compiling the logs. “I can't attest to the logs themselves,” he told me, “but assuming they are legitimate they do indicate effectively human-level communication.”

Weaver’s statement raises another uncertainty: Are the logs authentic? Computer scientists are careful about vouching for evidence that emerges from unknown sources—especially since the logs were pasted in a text file, where they could conceivably have been edited. I asked nine computer scientists—some who agreed to speak on the record, some who asked for anonymity—if the DNS logs that Tea Leaves and his collaborators discovered could be forged or manipulated. They considered it nearly impossible. It would be easy enough to fake one or maybe even a dozen records of DNS lookups. But in the aggregate, the logs contained thousands of records, with nuances and patterns that not even the most skilled programmers would be able to recreate on this scale. “The data has got the right kind of fuzz growing on it,” Vixie told me. “It’s the interpacket gap, the spacing between the conversations, the total volume. If you look at those time stamps, they are not simulated. This bears every indication that it was collected from a live link.” I asked him if there was a chance that he was wrong about their authenticity. “This passes the reasonable person test,” he told me. “No reasonable person would come to the conclusion other than the one I’ve come to.” Others were equally emphatic. “It would be really, really hard to fake these,” Davis said. According to Camp, “When the technical community examined the data, the conclusion was pretty obvious.”

It’s possible to impute political motives to the computer scientists, some of whom have criticized Trump on social media. But many of the scientists who talked to me for this story are Republicans. And almost all have strong incentives for steering clear of controversy. Some work at public institutions, where they are vulnerable to political pressure. Others work for firms that rely on government contracts—a relationship that tends to squash positions that could be misinterpreted as outspoken.

* * *

The researchers were seeing patterns in the data—and the Trump Organization’s potential interlocutor was itself suggestive. Alfa Bank emerged in the messy post-Soviet scramble to create a private Russian economy. Its founder was a Ukrainian called Mikhail Fridman. He erected his empire in a frenetic rush—in a matter of years, he rose from operating a window washing company to the purchase of the Bolshevik Biscuit Factory to the co-founding of his bank with some friends from university. Fridman could be charmingly open when describing this era. In 2003, he told the Financial Times, “Of course we benefitted from events in the country over the past 10 years. Of course we understand that the distribution of state property was not very objective. … I don’t want to lie and play this game. To say one can be completely clean and transparent is not realistic.”

To build out the bank, Fridman recruited a skilled economist and shrewd operator called Pyotr Aven. In the early ’90s, Aven worked with Vladimir Putin in the St. Petersburg government—and according to several accounts, helped Putin wiggle out of accusations of corruption that might have derailed his ascent. (Karen Dawisha recounts this history in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy.) Over time, Alfa built one of the world’s most lucrative enterprises. Fridman became the second richest man in Russia, valued by Forbes at $15.3 billion.

Alfa’s oligarchs occupied an unusual position in Putin’s firmament. They were insiders but not in the closest ring of power. “It’s like they were his judo pals,” one former U.S. government official who knows Fridman told me. “They were always worried about where they stood in the pecking order and always feared expropriation.” Fridman and Aven, however, are adept at staying close to power. As the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia once ruled, in the course of dismissing a libel suit the bankers filed, “Aven and Fridman have assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation.”
Unlike other Russian firms, Alfa has operated smoothly and effortlessly in the West. It has never been slapped with sanctions. Fridman and Aven have cultivated a reputation as beneficent philanthropists. They endowed a prestigious fellowship. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American-government funded think tank, gave Aven its award for “Corporate Citizenship” in 2015. To protect its interests in Washington, Alfa hired as its lobbyist former Reagan administration official Ed Rogers. Richard Burt, who helped Trump write the speech in which he first laid out his foreign policy, previously served on Alfa’s senior advisory board.* The branding campaign has worked well. During the first Obama term, Fridman and Aven met with officials in the White House on two occasions, according to visitor logs.

Fridman and Aven have significant business interests to promote in the West. One of their holding companies, LetterOne, has vowed to invest as much as $3 billion in U.S. health care. This year, it sank $200 million into Uber. This is, of course, money that might otherwise be invested in Russia. According to a former U.S. official, Putin tolerates this condition because Alfa advances Russian interests. It promotes itself as an avatar of Russian prowess. “It’s our moral duty to become a global player, to prove a Russian can transform into an international businessman,” Fridman told the Financial Times.

* * *

Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.

pol_161031_screenshotlarge
Start: DNS lookup history start date.

RFC from Alfa-Bank: Alfa-Bank rep provided with 2 ips, hostname, count.

Errors: 4:11 a.m. UTC: DNS lookup errors Trump-Email.com.

Errors: 1:12 a.m. UTC: DNS lookup errors Trump-Email.com.

Taken down: 9:53 a.m. EST USA time: Trump-Email.com deleted from Trump authoritative name server zone.
In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. (Lichtblau told me that Times policy prevents him from commenting on his reporting.)

The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. When the scientists looked up the host, the DNS server returned a fail message, evidence that it no longer functioned. Or as it is technically diagnosed, it had “SERVFAILed.” (On the timeline above, this is the moment at the end of the chronology when the traffic abruptly spikes, as servers frantically attempt to resend rejected messages.) The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”

As one of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”
Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”

According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold.

* * *

Last week, I wrote to Alfa Bank asking if it could explain why its servers attempted to connect with the Trump Organization on such a regular basis. Its Washington representative, Jeffrey Birnbaum of the public relations firm BGR, provided me the following response:

Alfa hired Mandiant, one of the world's foremost cyber security experts, to investigate and it has found nothing to the allegations. I hope the below answers respond clearly to your questions. Neither Alfa Bank nor its principals, including Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, have or have had any contact with Mr. Trump or his organizations. Fridman and Aven have never met Mr. Trump nor have they or Alfa Bank had any business dealings with him. Neither Alfa nor its officers have sent Mr. Trump or his organizations any emails, information or money. Alfa Bank does not have and has never had any special or exclusive internet connection with Mr. Trump or his entities. The assertion of a special or private link is patently false.
I asked Birnbaum if he would connect me with Mandiant to elaborate on its findings. He told me:

Mandiant is still doing its deep dive into the Alfa Bank systems. Its leading theory is that Alfa Bank's servers may have been responding with common DNS look ups to spam sent to it by a marketing server. But it doesn't want to speak on the record until it's finished its investigation.
It’s hard to evaluate the findings of an investigation that hasn’t ended. And of course, even the most reputable firm in the world isn’t likely to loudly broadcast an opinion that bites the hand of its client.

I posed the same basic questions to the Trump campaign. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks sent me this in response to my questions by email:

The email server, set up for marketing purposes and operated by a third-party, has not been used since 2010. The current traffic on the server from Alphabank's [sic] IP address is regular DNS server traffic—not email traffic. To be clear, The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.
I asked Hicks to explain what caused the Trump Organization to rename its host after the New York Times called Alfa. I also asked how the Trump Organization arrived at its judgment that there was no email traffic. (Furthermore, there’s no such thing as “regular” DNS server traffic, at least not according to the computer scientists I consulted. The very reason DNS exists is to enable email and other means of communication.) She never provided me with a response.

What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump adviser whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.

We don’t yet know what this server was for, but it deserves further explanation.

Update, Oct. 31, 2016: The article has been updated to make clear that the New York Times reporters learned of the logs independently, not from the Reddit thread. (Return.)

Correction, Nov. 1, 2016: The article originally stated that Richard Burt serves on Alfa’s senior advisory board. He no longer sits on that board. (Return.)

Read Franklin Foer's follow-up story for new statements from the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank and analysis of the competing theories about the server and its activity.⁠⁠

See more of Slate’s election coverage.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ussia.html

The law firm that spoke at Trump's Press Conference was named Russia's LAW FIRM OF THE YEAR.

https://www.morganlewis.com/news/chambe ... f-the-year

Alfa Bank

remember that name ...it will be back in the news again

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sues BuzzFeed for publishing Steele dossier
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tr ... er-n836331

move over Cohen

Lawsuit by top Russian oligarchs charges ‘dossier’ made them ‘collateral damage’ in war on Trump
By World Tribune on December 18, 2017


Three of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs have filed a libel lawsuit against Fusion GPS, claiming they were defamed by Fusion’s Trump dossier written by ex-British spy Christopher Steele.

The lawsuit filed by Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan, the three primary investors in Russia’s Alfa Bank, describes the three billionaires as international businessmen who became “collateral damage” in Fusion’s effort to take down the Trump campaign, Rowan Scarborough noted in a Dec. 17 report for The Washington Times.


Three top investors in Russia’s Alfa Bank are suing Fusion GPS for libel.
“This is a defamation case brought by three international businessmen who were defamed in widely disseminated political research reports commissioned by political opponents of candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election cycle,” says a Dec. 12 filing in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“The reports are gravely damaging in that, directly or by implication, they falsely accuse the plaintiffs – and Alfa, a consortium in which the plaintiffs are investors – of criminal conduct and alleged cooperation with ‘Kremlin’ to influence the 2016 presidential election,” says the complaint by the New York law firm Carter Ledyard & Milburn.

The dossier portrayed Fridman, Aven and Khan as corrupt bankers linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Fusion responded to the lawsuit by claiming the three Russian billionaires are public figures under U.S. law.

“Unlike private citizens, public figures face a high bar in libel lawsuits. In this case, the Russian businessmen, if deemed public figures, must prove that Fusion spread the dossier charges with malice – meaning the opposition research firm knew its accusations were untrue or showed reckless disregard for the truth,” Scarborough wrote.

On that basis, lawyers from Zuckerman Spaeder asked U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon to dismiss the lawsuit.

“Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan are three of the most prominent oligarchs in Russian history,” Fusion’s lawyers said in a court memo. “With their incredible wealth and political power, each has had a pronounced influence on the economic and political affairs of Russia. … Any search returns an avalanche of articles about their business endeavors, their wealth, their political and economic power, their close relationship with the Kremlin and their misconduct.”

Alfa bank lost a libel lawsuit in the 2000s on the same grounds. It had sued the Center for Public Integrity for an article that linked Alfa to organized crime. In 2005, a judge dismissed the case, saying that while the story was flawed, the center did not show malice in its reporting.

In the dossier, Steele wrote that Alfa Bank paid “illicit cash” directly from Fridman and Aven to Putin via Oleg Govorun, now a senior Kremlin figure, “throughout the 1990s.”

The Russians’ lawsuit says the dossier’s assertions “falsely accuse” the three and Alfa “of criminal conduct and alleged cooperation with the ‘Kremlin’ to influence the 2016 presidential election.” It says Fusion recklessly spread the charges to journalists.
http://www.worldtribune.com/lawsuit-by- ... -on-trump/

AMSTERDAM TRADE BANK RAIDED IN MONEY LAUNDERING INVESTIGATION
By Zack Newmark on December 14, 2017 - 17:00
B92-ECUCMAA9Z8t
Lady Justice (Picture: Twitter/@danvelton). Lady Justice (Picture: Twitter/@danvelton)
Amsterdam Trade Bank, the Dutch subsidiary of Russia's Alfa Bank, was raided as part of a money laundering investigation last week, Marieke van der Molen of the Public Prosecution Service confirmed to NL Times.
https://nltimes.nl/2017/12/14/amsterdam ... estigation

[seemslikeadream]

Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers

A BuzzFeed News review of every sale of a Trump-branded condominium in the United States provides the first comprehensive look at how many went to unidentified buyers who paid cash, an indication of possible money laundering.

Thomas FrankJanuary 12, 2018, at 8:36 a.m.
More than one-fifth of Donald Trump’s US condominiums have been purchased since the 1980s in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found.

Records show that more than 1,300 Trump condominiums were bought not by people but by shell companies, and that the purchases were made without a mortgage, avoiding inquiries from lenders.

Those two characteristics signal that a buyer may be laundering money, the Treasury Department has said in a series of statements since 2016. Treasury’s financial-crimes unit has, in recent years, launched investigations around the country into all-cash shell-company real-estate purchases amid concerns that some such sales may involve money laundering. The agency is considering requiring real-estate professionals to adopt anti-money-laundering programs.

All-cash purchases by shell companies do not by themselves indicate illegal or improper activity, and they have become more common in recent years in both Trump buildings and other luxury home sales across the United States. Developers such as Trump have no obligation to scrutinize their purchasers or their funding sources.

But federal investigations “continue to reveal corrupt politicians, drug traffickers and other criminals using shell companies to purchase luxury real estate with cash,” Treasury’s former financial-crimes chief Jennifer Shasky Calvery said at a Capitol Hill hearing in 2016.

Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) broadcast that concern in an August 2017 advisory to the real-estate industry warning that all-cash real-estate purchases by shell companies are “an attractive avenue for criminals to launder illegal proceeds while masking their identities.”

Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization responded to repeated requests for comment. A former longtime Trump Organization official who asked not to be named said that all-cash shell-company purchases are common among rich buyers, particularly foreigners trying to put their money in safe investments.

Trump condo sales that match Treasury’s characteristics of possible money laundering totaled $1.5 billion, BuzzFeed News calculated. They accounted for 21% of the 6,400 Trump condos sold in the US. Those figures include condos that Trump developed as well as condos that others developed in his name under licensing deals that pay Trump a fee or a percentage of sales.

Hundreds of Trump condo sales have characteristics that experts warn may be indicative of money laundering.
Some of the secretive sales date back more than three decades, long before recent worries that Russians tried to influence Trump by pouring millions of dollars into his businesses.

But a months-long BuzzFeed News examination of every Trump condominium sale in the US shows that such sales surged in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when some Trump businesses were in financial trouble and when Donald Trump Jr. made his now-famous remark about the Trump Organization seeing “a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The surge was driven by the opening of 11 Trump condo buildings between 2008 and 2010 as Trump shifted his real-estate business from developing high-rises to licensing them. Nine were Trump-licensed, and they drew hundreds of shell companies that paid an average of $1.2 million in cash for a condo. In six of the licensed buildings, cash-paying shell companies bought at least a third of the condos, records show.

It’s not clear how much Trump received from the sale of Trump-licensed condos, but when Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he said his “real estate licensing deals” and other brands were worth $3.3 billion.

At the Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium New York in Manhattan, 77% of the sales were to shell companies that paid cash. One of the project’s Russia-born developers was convicted of money laundering in the 1990s. A pending lawsuit calls Trump SoHo a “monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion,” though it says in a footnote that “there is no evidence that Trump took any part in, or knew of, their racketeering.”

Trump was a minority owner in the project, whose developers have denied any impropriety.

Hundreds of the secretive Trump condo sales contain additional characteristics that FinCEN and experts warn may be indicative of money laundering.

More than $205 million in sales were to corporations based in foreign jurisdictions known for keeping corporate records and banking information secret. The corporations were based mostly in the British Virgin Islands and Panama, two places the Treasury Department has linked to money laundering. Other jurisdictions include Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands Antilles, Switzerland, and St. Vincent and Grenadines.
Corporations registered in Delaware, which FinCEN says provides “the least transparency” with corporate records of any state, bought an additional 75 Trump condos in all-cash sales that totaled $129 million. “If the corporation is set up in places where there’s some level of confidentiality, which includes Delaware, that’s another red flag,” John Madinger, a retired Treasury official and IRS special agent who investigated financial crimes, said, speaking generally about property sales.
Eighty-three percent of the secretive sales occurred in markets that FinCEN is investigating for possible money laundering in real estate sales. In those markets – Manhattan, South Florida, and Honolulu – FinCEN is examining every luxury-home sale to a shell company that paid cash.
At least 28 shell companies resold their Trump properties within six months of buying them in cash. The National Association of Realtors says that immediate resales can indicate money laundering, “especially if the resale price is significantly higher or lower than the original purchase price.”
At the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Manhattan, a shell company bought a nine-room condo for $2.26 million on Sept. 10, 1997, and sold it eight weeks later to another shell company – for $3 million, a 33% gain.

In Miami-Dade County, Florida, a shell company bought a two-bedroom condo in a Trump-licensed building on Aug. 12, 2010, for $956,768. The company sold the condo to another shell company for $525,000 that same day.

Half of the secretive sales – with a total value of $769 million – were made to a particularly opaque type of shell company called a limited-liability company, or LLC, which FinCEN says is “inherently vulnerable to abuse.”
Thirty-nine secretive sales were for more than $5 million in current dollars – an amount that one anti-money-laundering advocate says should prompt a seller to scrutinize the buyer. All but four of the sales were in buildings that Trump developed, earning him $241 million.
“It’s not that common for someone to buy expensive real estate with cash, and if it’s a shell company, you want to find out who the buyer is and the sources of their funds,” said Shruti Shah, vice president of programs and operations at the Coalition for Integrity, an anti-corruption group. “It could be illicit money from foreign corruption, drug trafficking, human trafficking – all sorts of bad things.”

From left to right: Trump Tower in New York City, Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, and Trump International Hotel Las Vegas.
Getty Images; Alvesgaspar / Flickr; Lovelove17243875683 / Flickr
From left to right: Trump Tower in New York City, Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, and Trump International Hotel Las Vegas.

With their soaring glass facades, top-flight amenities and bold Trump logos, the condo buildings are the most visible symbol of the president’s multi-billion-dollar business empire. They’ve been a steady income source for Trump even when other enterprises such as casinos, an airline, and a pro football team foundered.

Nine of the buildings are in Manhattan, seven are in South Florida, and one each is in Chicago; Honolulu; Las Vegas; Jersey City, New Jersey; Stamford, Connecticut; and White Plains, New York.

New York City Properties

Note: Trump was the developer unless otherwise specified.
BuzzFeed News; Google Maps
Note: Trump was the developer unless otherwise specified.

BuzzFeed News’ months-long investigation is the first to examine sales of Trump condominiums for indicators of possible money laundering and the most comprehensive analysis to date of all 22 Trump condo towers in the US.

BuzzFeed News examined Trump condo sales using online property records to determine the original buyers of each unit and whether they obtained a mortgage or paid cash. For buyers that were legal entities and not people, BuzzFeed News analyzed them using corporation records, property records, and other online documents to determine whether they were established businesses or shell companies, which typically generate little economic value.

The investigation identified 1,326 all-cash sales – some involving more than one condo unit – to shell companies.

The property records analyzed by BuzzFeed News would not by themselves reveal money laundering – only warning signs. And Trump is not unique in selling condos to cash-paying shell companies. BuzzFeed News examined non-Trump buildings in Manhattan and South Florida and found that roughly the same percentage of units were sold to shell companies in all-cash transactions as in Trump buildings.

Such sales are increasingly common in the expensive real estate markets where Trump has operated such as Manhattan and Florida’s Miami-Dade County. Rich investors often buy expensive homes through shell companies for legitimate purposes such as tax advantages, legal protection, and privacy.

Florida Properties

Note: Trump was the developer unless otherwise specified.
BuzzFeed News; Google Maps
Note: Trump was the developer unless otherwise specified.

Trump has been selling condos to secretive buyers for decades, the property records show.

When the signature Trump Tower opened in Manhattan in 1983, shell companies based in secretive foreign jurisdictions such as Panama, Cayman Islands, and the British Virgin Islands bought 43 condos in cash, BuzzFeed News found. Delaware-based corporations bought another six condos in cash.

The State Department says the British Virgin Islands has “significant money laundering risks,” Panama is “an attractive target for money laundering,” and in Cayman Islands, money laundering mostly involves “fraud, tax evasion and drug trafficking.”

Delaware is “a haven for transnational crime,” according to the anti-corruption group Transparency International, because “extreme corporate secrecy enables corrupt people, shady companies, drug traffickers, embezzlers and fraudsters to cover their tracks when shifting dirty money from one place to another.”

Trump has not developed a condo building in Manhattan since 2003.
Trump himself signed the deed for each secretive sale at Trump Tower and collected $28 million.

Understanding how much Trump made from all-cash sales to shell companies is complicated by a shift in the way Trump did business. Before the shift, Trump developed the buildings himself, keeping the profits. But in the 2000s he began licensing the use of his name on buildings for a fee or a percentage of sales or both, leaving the construction and sales to others. Of the $1.5 billion in secretive sales documented by BuzzFeed News, $870 million – 58% – came from such licensing deals.

Despite his association with Manhattan, Trump has not developed a condo building there since 2003, when he opened the Trump Park Avenue. He has developed just two condo buildings in the US since 2003 – high-rises in Chicago and Las Vegas. At the same time, he has licensed 12 Trump-branded towers: seven in Florida, four in the New York City area and one in Hawaii.

Note: Trump was the developer unless otherwise specified.
BuzzFeed News; Google Maps
Note: Trump was the developer unless otherwise specified.

Neither Trump nor his licensees have disclosed terms of the agreements. Trump also has declined to release his tax returns, breaking a precedent followed by presidents since Richard Nixon.

Trump’s federally required financial disclosures for 2015 and 2016, however, give a glimpse into his real-estate licensing business and show that it generates significantly less revenue than his condo sales. The disclosures show that Trump received $69 million from condos that he sold and between $500,000 and $5 million from condos sold by licensees in the US.

Note: Trump was the developer unless otherwise specified.
BuzzFeed News; Google Maps
Note: Trump was the developer unless otherwise specified.

The developer of a Trump-licensed condo building in Hollywood, Florida, said there was nothing unusual about its sales, which occurred between 2009 and 2013. BuzzFeed News found 43% of the buyers there were cash-paying shell companies that spent $136 million buying 85 units.

“There are many reasons for setting up entities to own real estate, especially for estate planning and the purchase of a second home, which is extremely common in South Florida,” Betsy McCoy, general counsel of The Related Group, the Florida company that developed the project, told BuzzFeed News.

Trump International Hotel And Tower in New York City.
James D. Morgan / Getty Images
Trump International Hotel And Tower in New York City.

Secretive Trump condo sales surged initially in 1997 and 1998 as most Wall Street banks stopped lending to Trump after two of his Atlantic City casinos filed for bankruptcy. Trump reported $916 million in business losses in 1995, according to his 1996 tax return, which was leaked to the New York Times in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.

The surge occurred when Trump opened his fourth high-rise, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, in Manhattan in December 1996. Shell companies bought 92 of the building’s 322 units in cash – 29% – including eight of the 12 units that sold for more than $5 million, records show.

The sales amounted to $134 million – more than Trump had received in secretive sales from his three other buildings combined.

From 1999 through 2007, secretive sales leveled off at an average of $23 million a year – 11% of units sold – before rising starting in 2008 during a crucial period for Trump. BuzzFeed News found that in the five years from 2008 through 2012, shell companies spent $890 million buying 823 Trump condos in cash – 25% of units sold. That’s $178 million a year on average. More than 87% of those sales were in Trump-licensed buildings.

In 2008, as the Great Recession cooled real-estate markets, Trump could not make a payment on a bank loan that he had guaranteed personally for $40 million. Trump Entertainment Resorts, which owned the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, faced a $53-million payment to bondholders. Trump forestalled the bank payment by suing the lender, Deutsche Bank. The casino filed for bankruptcy in 2009.

At the same time, Trump became financially entwined with Russians. In March 2008, a Russian billionaire paid Trump $95 million for a Palm Beach, Florida, estate that Trump had bought four years earlier for $41 million. Donald Trump Jr. told a Moscow real-estate conference in June 2008 that his father’s company, the Trump Organization, was planning to build condos and hotels in Russia. And he told a New York conference in September 2008, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump Jr. was executive vice president of development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization, which opened two major condo towers in early 2008 after a four-year lull. By the time Trump Jr. made his now-famous comment in September 2008, cash-paying shell companies had bought $43 million worth of condos at the Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago and at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas.

At a Trump-licensed condo building in Miami-Dade, cash-paying shell companies had bought $32 million worth of condos.

During this time, the future president and his children also were heavily promoting the Trump SoHo, a lower Manhattan high-rise that has been mired in controversy. In his September 2008 remarks, Donald Jr. cited the project: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York.”

Trump SoHo hotel condominium building in New York City.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Trump SoHo hotel condominium building in New York City.

The Trump SoHo was a troubled project from its inception, as two Soviet-born developers envisioned a residential tower in a Manhattan neighborhood that did not allow such buildings. They signed on Trump as a minority partner in the mid-2000s to capitalize on his popularity, driven by his TV show “The Apprentice.”

The controversies have been widely publicized – including a criminal investigation – but it has not been disclosed until now that the Trump SoHo units were bought overwhelmingly by cash-paying shell companies.

Secretive sales generated $110 million between 2010 and 2013, records show. The buyers were largely LLCs with names such as 3002 Trump Soho Condo and Soho 3211 that were formed just weeks or days before buying a unit.

One real estate lawyer, Martin Jajan of Manhattan, handled more than half of the secretive sales, records show. As the buyers’ representative, Jajan signed deeds of transfer, created the shell companies and listed himself as the agent for the shell companies. The transactions provide little or no clues about the actual buyers – with a few exceptions.

On four of the deeds, the LLC listed Moscow addresses, which were crossed out with a pen. The address of Jajan’s Manhattan law office was written in their places.

Another three units were bought by a former oligarch from Kazakhstan with money he allegedly stole from the former Soviet republic, according to a California lawsuit filed in 2014 by Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty. The lawsuit says that a former mayor of Almaty, Viktor Khrapunov, and his family stole hundreds of millions of dollars in city assets during his tenure between 1997 and 2004, fled to Switzerland in 2007 and began buying property in New York City and California to launder the money.

The still-pending lawsuit says Khrapunov and his relatives bought three Trump SoHo units for $3.1 million in cash through newly formed LLCs in April 2013. Records show the LLCs sold all three units within a year or two at a slight loss. Khrapunov has denied any wrongdoing and says he is being persecuted for political reasons.

Jajan did not respond to requests for comment. In a 2014 New York magazine article, Jajan said it’s not uncommon for him to buy for clients he’s never met, and that a lot of his work involves setting up entities such as LLCs for buyers to avoid estate taxes, potential lawsuits, and public exposure.

The Trump SoHo sales alarmed Ross Delston, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and money laundering expert who has consulted for the Justice Department.

“The circumstances of the sales and the fact that three of the properties were allegedly related to money laundering in Kazakhstan raise questions about the process by which units were sold in the Trump SoHo,” Delston told BuzzFeed News. “Having 77% of the transactions to anonymous buyers raises the probability that there are red flags for money laundering and other financial crime.”

Trump did not develop Trump SoHo or sell its units. But as an 18% owner, Trump stood to profit from the 46-story tower and promoted the building so vigorously that some early purchasers accused him, his son Donald Jr., his daughter Ivanka, and others in a 2010 lawsuit of exaggerating the number of sales to boost prices.

The Manhattan District Attorney investigated the activity of Donald Jr. and Ivanka at the Trump SoHo in the early 2010s and brought no charges, according to news reports. Trump, abandoning his public posture of not settling lawsuits, agreed to refund $2.8 million in deposits to six purchasers, according to a news article.

The Trump SoHo deal was canceled in November, and the building is now called the Dominick Hotel and Spa.

From left to right: Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. pose for photos after a press conference, where their father Donald Trump announced the launch of Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium in New York in September 2007.
Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images
From left to right: Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. pose for photos after a press conference, where their father Donald Trump announced the launch of Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium in New York in September 2007.

The growing interest in Trump condo sales comes amid unprecedented scrutiny of possible money laundering through real estate. The Trump administration will likely face a decision on whether to crack down on the kind of all-cash, shell-company purchases that have enriched him.

Money laundering entails blending “dirty” money into the financial mainstream through a series of transactions and legal entities that conceal its origin. The United Nations estimates that $800 billion to $2 trillion is laundered each year.

The growing interest in Trump condo sales comes amid unprecedented scrutiny of possible money laundering through real estate.
“High-end real estate has effectively become a safety deposit box for laundered money because there is a no-questions-asked way of doing business,” said Clark Gascoigne, deputy director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, an international anti-corruption group.

That’s particularly true in the US, where surveys by the National Association of Realtors show that 21% of homebuyers were LLCs in 2016, up from 5% in 2007. For sales over $3 million, LLCs bought 42% of the homes in 2016, the Realtors found. The association doesn’t know how many of those purchases were cash.

Gascoigne calls the United States “the easiest place to set up an anonymous company to potentially launder your money.”

Manhattan real estate lawyer Adam Leitman Bailey, who filed the lawsuit over Trump SoHo sales, acknowledged as much. He said he does not ask where his clients, who include “heads of states,” get their money: “I don’t know where the money comes from. I don’t ask where the money comes from. If they’re trying to move money to hide it, I’m the last person they’re going to tell about it.”

“Unlike securities brokers, we do not have a know-your-customer rule,” Bailey added. “We’re just agents for how people buy homes — I’m sorry, buy investments.”

“Unlike securities brokers, we do not have a know-your-customer rule.”
The Treasury Department has been under pressure for years from Congress and international groups to crack down on money laundering that occurs through all-cash real-estate purchases. FinCEN has been considering a regulation since 2003 that would require people involved in real-estate closings, such as sales agents, lawyers, appraisers and title insurers, to scrutinize transactions for money laundering.

In a 2016 report on US anti-money laundering efforts, the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, the leading intergovernmental body fighting money laundering, said that without such scrutiny, “There is a significant risk that high-end real estate is used for money laundering purposes.”

FinCEN took a first step in March 2016 when it began to investigate all-cash shell-company purchases of luxury homes in Manhattan and Miami-Dade County, Florida, which are the two markets where Trump has been most active. The agency defined luxury homes as those selling for at least $3 million in Manhattan and $1 million in Miami-Dade.

In July 2016, FinCEN released a startling finding: more than a quarter of the people who controlled the shell companies in Manhattan and Miami-Dade had at one time engaged in “possible criminal activity.”

“That’s a lot,” said Pawneet Abramowski, a New York City financial-crimes expert who was an FBI intelligence analyst and a fraud investigator for the New York State Attorney General’s office.

FinCEN has expanded its investigation to Los Angeles, San Diego, Honolulu, San Antonio, the San Francisco area and other parts of South Florida and New York City. More than 5,000 Trump condos have been sold in the markets that FinCEN is targeting but it is unlikely FinCEN is analyzing any of the Trump sales because they occurred before the agency began its investigation.

Trump condo sales reportedly are under scrutiny by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose team includes Justice Department prosecutor Kyle Freeny, a money-laundering expert. Mueller is investigating Trump’s connections to Russia and Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. He charged former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in October with laundering millions of dollars he received for work in Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign.

A spokesperson for Mueller declined to comment.

Trump-Russia investigators in Congress also are interested in the timing of any money laundering and whether it coincided with periods when Trump could not get conventional loans.

“I’m focused on following the money. That’s where you connect the dots.”
The Senate intelligence committee has sought records in its Trump-Russia probe from FinCEN, which monitors possible money laundering. “Cash transactions are an increasingly important part of what needs to be examined,” Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m focused on following the money. That’s where you connect the dots.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, the House intelligence committee’s ranking Democrat, said BuzzFeed News’ findings “concern me a great deal.” The committee should investigate whether “financial entanglement was one of the active measures the Russians used in the United States,” Schiff said. “It was one of the measures they’ve used in other countries.”

Bloomberg News has reported that Mueller is investigating the Trump SoHo as well as “Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings.” Several news outlets have reported that one of the Trump SoHo developers, Russia native Felix Sater, who pleaded guilty to racketeering in a money laundering case in 1998, testified recently before the House intelligence committee but details of his testimony are unknown.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon is quoted in Michael Wolff’s new book saying that Mueller’s investigation “is all about money laundering.” And the two founders of a research firm that commissioned a controversial intelligence dossier wrote in a New York Times op-ed that their investigation of Trump found “widespread evidence” that Trump had worked with “dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering.”

At least two Trump Tower condos have been linked to money laundering, although there is no evidence that Trump or the Trump Organization was involved.

The Haitian government claimed in the 1980s that ousted dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier laundered stolen treasury funds when he bought Trump Tower apartment 54-K for $446,875 in August 1983. Duvalier used a Panama shell company called Lasa Trade and Finance to buy the apartment in cash. Trump signed the deed of sale.

In 1984, federal prosecutors charged a Russian native living in Brooklyn with taking part in a massive gasoline bootlegging operation and buying five Trump Tower condos for $4.9 million to launder the proceeds. The suspect, David Bogatin, pleaded guilty in 1987. He was released from federal prison in 1998.

In a separate matter, a Trump casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, was charged with violating anti-money-laundering regulations 106 times in 1990 and 1991 by failing to file timely reports identifying gamblers who bought or cashed out $10,000 or more in chips. The reports aim to spot gamblers who might be laundering money. The casino paid the Treasury Department a $477,000 fine in 1998 without admitting wrongdoing.

Stefan Cassella, a former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, said it’s difficult to discern secretive sales that are done for legal reasons from those that hide criminal activity.

“If a money launderer is doing his job well, he’s making the transaction look legitimate,” Cassella told BuzzFeed News.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/thomasfrank/se ... .qyP63aGLJ

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Exclusive: Trump’s 2015 Deal In Moscow Is Tied Directly to His Ocean Club Hotel in Panama

Law firms in Cyprus and Panama — both with links to allegations of money laundering — connect Trump, his Moscow developer, and his Panama Hotel

Scott StedmanJan 12

By: Scott Stedman and Erin Lankau


Newly obtained documents and open source information have revealed that Trump’s Ocean Club Hotel in Panama and the 2015 Trump Tower Moscow Letter-Of-Intent with Russian developer IC Expert both trace back to the same Cypriot lawyer, Christodoulos Vassiliades.

The shared connection is through Trump’s Panamanian law firm Alemán, Cordero, Galindo & Lee, or Alcogal for short. According to their investor relations brochure, Alcogal “advised the Trump Organization in connection with all matters associated with the acquisition of a casino and the operation of a hotel in Panama”. Alcogal can also be found as the registered agent for several anonymous LLCs that own condo units in Trump’s Ocean Club. On their website, Alcogal is described as an international law firm based in Panama with offices around the world. The firm’s co-founder, Jaime Aleman, is part of a well-connected family and once served as the ambassador to the United States under former President Ricardo Martinelli.


Click to enlarge
Aleman’s Cyprus office address has now been matched to the address for the law firm Christodoulos G. Vassiliades & Co. LLC, owned by its namesake Vassiliades. This is the same Cypriot lawyer who our reporting has revealed owns at least 60% of IC Expert, the Russian developer Donald Trump signed a letter-of-intent with in October 2015. Further, the financial trust for the Panamanian law firm is managed by Vassiliades through the Cyprus-based company Apex International. Vassiliades’ company Ionics Nominees serves as a director and secretary for the LLC, meaning Vassiliades has the power to oversee all of the firm’s assets. Official documents show that in 2014, Apex International received at least $4.2 million in dividends.


Click to enlarge
The connection between Vassiliades and Aleman doesn’t end there — it ties directly to the Trump Tower Moscow deal. As previously reported in our series about the 2015 LOI, IC Expert Chairman Andrey Rozov falsely certified that he owned 100% of IC Expert when he signed the agreement. Our reporting found that IC Expert is in fact owned by two companies in Cyprus and one in Marshall Islands. The Cyprus company with a 60% stake, Colinsen Trading Limited, is owned by Vassiliades through the same Ionic Nominees that manages Alcogal’s trust. New documents now show that the company with a 25% stake, Capilana Trading Limited, traces to the British Virgin Islands and is registered to Alcogal.


Click to enlarge
ALLEGATIONS OF MONEY LAUNDERING

This newfound connection between Trump, IC Expert, Vassiliades, and Alcogal adds to a multi-country web of various financial crimes including fraud and money laundering.

As detailed in our previous reporting, Christodoulos Vassiliades is a prominent lawyer who owns an international law firm based in Cyprus. After the 2013 crash that nearly wiped out Bank of Cyprus, Vassiliades was personally nominated by the Bank of Moscow to assume an 8.37% proxy share of the bank. The share represented, at least in part, the amount Vassiliades’ anonymous Russian clients had deposited in the bank. A source familiar with Cyprus’ banking system said that Vassiliades primarily functions as an “introducer” between wealthy Russians and Ukrainians and the Bank.

Panicos Demetriades, former Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus, and author of A Diary of the Euro Crisis in Cyprus: Lessons for Bank Recovery and Resolution — a book that explains how politically connected law firms facilitated financial flows between Russia and Cyprus — confirmed that Vassiliades was one of the most influential law firms in the country.


Christodoulos Vassiliades
Vassiliades has been connected to money laundering and embezzlement schemes involving oligarchs and businessmen from multiple countries — largely through his company Ionics Nominees. Vassiliades, who serves as the honorary consul to Belize and has in the past worked for the law firm owned by the President of Cyprus, is connected to these allegations of financial crimes by way of the anonymous LLCs he sets up for clients. The three most prominent allegations of money laundering and embezzlement come from Ukraine, Austria, and Romania. These three cases all allege that Ionics Nominees Limited helped wash money illegally obtained by businessmen and politicians.

Mokas, The Unit for Combating Money Laundering in Cyprus said they were aware of reports tying Vassiliades to these crimes. However, they stressed that Vassiliades “is not and never has been under investigation.” After providing additional details proving that Vassiliades owns Ionics Nominees Limited, Mokas said “This office does not intend to continue correspondence with you on this matter.”

Alcogal has been mired in money laundering investigations of their own. An investigation found that introducers contracting with BSI bank in Switzerland used Alcogal to move money out of the UK and into off-shores through a series of shell companies. Alcogal was fined in 2015 for failing to review and keep up to date customer due diligence information. Apart from this fine, Alcogal has been connected to numerous money laundering schemes. An ICIJ report in 2016 found that Alcogal set up at least five companies that were used by Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s former dictator. A Panama Papers report declared Alcogal, “an infamous Panamanian offshore provider that has…aided in the laundering of money for well-known criminals.”

TROUBLE IN PARADISE

Allegations of money laundering and other scandals associated with Trump’s Panama Ocean Club have been well-documented and reported on. However, the link between Trump’s law firm in Panama, the Ocean Club hotel, and the 2015 Moscow deal has never been made until now. The implications of the deal are better understood when evaluated within the context of Trump’s fledgling presidential bid.

Trump’s management company was fired by the Condo Board in Panama just one month into a campaign that Trump repeatedly claimed would be “self-funded”. Angry condo owners accused the Trump-installed team of mis-management, misuse of funds, and a refusal to share financial records.

At the time, the Ocean Club hotel was by far Trump’s most lucrative international licensing and management deal. Reports of Trump’s earnings have been estimated between $32 and $50 million since the deal was inked in 2006 and doors opened in 2011. In Trump’s 2015 financial disclosures, which have never been independently verified, Trump claimed earnings of at least $5.8M over the previous 18 months. One of his Panama companies claimed “$5M and above” in the document, meaning the true amount could really be anything.

While it is unclear how the firing affected Trump’s access to bank accounts and payments from the hotel at the time, what is clear is that Trump did not intend to walk away from the 40-year lease without a fight. An AP exclusive in November 2015 revealed that Trump had secretly filed a $75 million lawsuit against both condo owners and the developer.

We now know that at this same point in the campaign, work on the Trump Tower Moscow deal was already underway with a company owned by the same Cypriot lawyer who managed the trust and provided the Cyprus office address for Trump’s Panamanian law firm. As Michael Cohen has disclosed, the Trump Organization had already gotten to work picking out architects and designers, while Cohen himself was involved with financing discussions.

Earlier this year we learned that despite the July 2015 firing, the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit eventually allowed his company to retain management of the hotel. In Trump’s 2016 financial filings he declared earnings of $6.8 Million from the hotel. According to a press release from the Ocean Club sales agency, condo units that had remained unsold for years sold out completely during the 2015–2016 campaign season.


Given these revelations connecting Trump’s Moscow Deal to his existing business in Panama, it grows increasingly less credible that the deal would have fallen through for the reasons Michael Cohen publicly alleged — because he had “lost confidence [IC Expert] would be able to obtain the real estate, financing and government approvals necessary to bring the proposal to fruition.” Coupled with our exclusive reporting that shows that IC Expert received a loan of at least $184M from Sberbank three weeks after the LOI was signed, and that amnesty for negligent homicide was granted by the government to Chairman Andrey Rozov, Cohen’s statements appear misleading.

Congress must release the testimony from Michael Cohen. Given the breadth of knowledge gained from the Fusion GPS testimony, it is likely that Cohen’s testimony includes details that deserve to be seen by the public.

https://medium.com/@ScottMStedman/exclu ... dc1f8a7d1b

[seemslikeadream]

Mueller has tens of thousands of trump transition team emails that would be ALL the emails not just the ones they turned over

Trey Gowdy was on Donald Trump’s transition team.

Guess which pointy-headed Republican Congressman was on the Trump transition team?

Did Trey know about Gen. Yellowkerk's criminal ties with Russia?

Why would Trey be so upset with Mueller.....has he got some of your emails Gowdy?

Trey Gowdy has resigned from the House Ethics Cmte!

REPEAT

Trey Gowdy has resigned from the House Ethics Cmte!

Maybe it has to do with him taking bribes from anti-Hillary groups while leading the failed Benghazi witch hunt. Or just being a corrupt Republican in general. Or Mueller has he got some of Gowdy's emails

Adios.



and

Mueller’s latest court filings in the case against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, the Mueller team is now disclosing possession of eighty-seven electronic devices, as opposed to just thirty-six such devices a month ago. That means that in the past month, Mueller and his team have somehow come into possession of an additional fifty-plus laptops and cellphones from Trump’s people

[seemslikeadream]

“Of all the dictators of the world…”



Money laundering is what happens when corrupt dictators strip a country down.

trump is meeting with the dictator of Kazakhstan today at the White House ...that's the guy who gave the bank records to his son for safe keeping...I wonder if trump is going to tell him ....please don't give those to Mueller

How a Trump SoHo Partner Ended Up With Toxic Mining Riches From Kazakhstan
The long road from the old Soviet republic to the offshore financial centers of the Caribbean to London—and all the way to a partner in Midtown Manhattan's Trump SoHo.

A winter view of the Aktyubinsk Chromium Chemicals Plant on the outskirts of Aktobe, Kazakhstan.
Photographer: Konstantin Salomatin for Bloomberg

By Marc Champion
January 11, 2018, 4:00 AM CST
Green smoke paints the landscape on the outskirts of Aktobe, the hub of a Central Asian mining empire that produces a third of the world’s chromium — the essential ingredient in stainless steel.

Locals say that the air gets so bad in summer it’s hard to breathe. Industrial waste contaminates the groundwater.

All of this starts at the Aktyubinsk Chromium Chemicals Plant (AZXS), a Nikita Khrushchev-era complex. It shares an industrial zone with a vast smelting plant; together, they have yielded lavish private wealth since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In one sense, it’s a familiar snapshot of post-Soviet capitalism: state assets bought for a song, workers saying they were cheated out of shares and connected businessmen getting wildly rich.


Workers at the entrance of AZXS at the end of a shift, with a Soviet-era statue looming overhead.
Photographer: Konstantin Salomatin for Bloomberg
This story, however, carves a path from near Kazakhstan’s northern border with Russia to the offshore financial centers of the Caribbean, to London and all the way to Trump property in Midtown Manhattan.

How and why funds from former Soviet states flowed into Trump-branded real estate has been the focus of speculation since the start of the 2016 presidential campaign. One theory, propounded by opponents of President Donald Trump is that his admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin comes down to money, a suggestion Trump has forcefully denied.


Still, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is digging into Trump’s business dealings, and the scramble for Kazakhstan’s chromium riches may fill in a piece of that puzzle. Company records, court filings and interviews in Kazakhstan and London suggest millions of dollars from the Aktobe plant wound their way to the U.S. and a development company with which Trump partnered to build a controversial Trump SoHo hotel-condominium complex in Manhattan.

There’s no suggestion that the Kazakh money ties Trump to Putin. But the funds tell an important story of the future president’s insouciance toward due diligence and business partner choices at a time when unmonitored cash was flooding out of Russia and other former Soviet states.

It was on the 24th floor of Trump Tower that Kazakh businessman Tevfik Arif, a key figure in Aktobe chromium, established Bayrock Group LLC. The plant passed millions of dollars to Bayrock, which organized financing for the Trump SoHo high-rise that Trump once hailed as a “work of art.” Earlier last month, Trump Soho’s new owner bought the Trump Organization out of its management contract for the project.


(From left) Eric Trump, Tevfik Arif, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump attend the Trump SoHo press conference at the construction site on Sept. 19, 2007.
Photographer: Clint Spaulding/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
It’s unclear precisely how much money from the refinery might have coursed through Bayrock and to Trump SoHo and other Trump-branded projects that Bayrock planned or undertook, in Miami and Phoenix. A 2016 complaint for breach of contract against Arif said that in two years alone, at least $10 million arrived at Bayrock from the Kazakh plant. Jody Kriss, the Bayrock finance director who brought the suit, said in the complaint that he became convinced the company was a front for Russian and Kazakh money laundering. The case, approved in December 2016 to proceed to trial under a racketeering statute, is ongoing.

Arif, through a Bayrock spokeswoman, declined to comment on the case or a list of other questions.

In Aktobe, workers leaving their shift on a recent morning said they didn’t know who owned the chromium chemicals plant which exports the ingredients for anti-corrosive paints to about 30 countries and is known here by its Russian initials, AZXS. Inspirational Soviet-era statues of workers clutching a book and hardhat still stand over the entrance, 27 years after Kazakhstan declared its independence. Ruslan Kim, a smartly suited young ethnic Korean with a briefcase, who described himself as an AZXS representative, said he didn’t know, or ask, who owned the place.


Scrap metal collectors in Aktobe.
Photographer: Konstantin Salomatin for Bloomberg
There’s little doubt that Arif’s brother Refik has owned a controlling share of the plant since the early 1990s, when the pair started doing business with three men known collectively in Kazakhstan as the Troika, or trio. Today, the Troika own much of Kazakhstan’s metals industry, including the chromium smelter next to AZXS.

Audited 2016 accounts for AZXS show four shell companies as the plant’s main shareholders. According to the Panama Papers leak of offshore holdings, three of these were established in the British Virgin Islands and in turn were owned by shell companies, including one that shares a name with Tevfik Arif’s nephew, Polat Ali.

A 2011 leaked letter from Hamels Consultants, the London-based firm that organized the Arifs’ offshore holdings, said the annual profits from the chromium chemicals plant flowed into a further BVI entity, belonging to Refik Arif. In 2008, the most recent year cited in the letter, that profit was $44 million. (A spokeswoman for Hamels said the company could not comment on the affairs of its clients.)

Part of the chromium plant’s profits were then directed to Bayrock by issuing loans from a U.K. company registered in London as dormant. In one June 2005 instance, Tevfik Arif authorized Bayrock to borrow $2 million from the company at 6 percent a year. It isn’t clear whether the loan was repaid. The Bayrock spokeswoman declined to comment.


According to a 2007 Bayrock presentation, Arif was just one channel through which Kazakhstan’s chromium industry funded Bayrock. The other was the Troika’s multibillion-dollar metals empire and its chairman, Alexander Mashkevich.

Mashkevich and his two partners —Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov— arrived in Kazakhstan in the early 1990s, securing control over exports from a swathe of metals industries. When those assets were then put up for privatization auction, the Troika were well-placed to win.

As early as 1996, Belgian prosecutors accused the trio of laundering a $55 million bribe by purchasing property outside Brussels. The case was since settled for an undisclosed fine and no admission of fault.

By 2007, their holding company, Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation Plc, went public in London. It soon became embroiled in one of the biggest scandals the City had seen in years. Allegations ranged from corruption in Kazakhstan to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential bribes paid to acquire mines in Africa. A U.K. Serious Fraud Office investigation is still under way. A member of the ENRC board, Ken Olisa, characterized the company’s practices at the time as “more Soviet than City.”


Residential apartment blocks in Aktobe.
Photographer: Konstantin Salomatin for Bloomberg
ENRC denied all wrongdoing and said it had “a zero-tolerance policy to bribery.” But the adverse publicity crashed the company’s share price and in 2013 — just six years after listing — the Troika took their company private again. Now based in Luxembourg, Eurasian Resources Group Sarl., or ERG, accounts for 4 percent of Kazakhstan’s economy.

How did so much of Kazakhstan’s natural-resources wealth end up in the hands of a few businessmen?

That question troubles Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, a former Kazakhstani politician who has railed against what he sees as endemic corruption in his country. A critic of Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his regime, Dosmukhamedov lives in self-imposed exile in London.

“No civilized financial institution should even shake hands with them,” Dosmukhamedov said of the Troika.

The Troika, in a letter from ERG’s lawyers, declined to comment on a list of queries the letter described as “a patchwork of stale matters.” When listed on the London Stock Exchange, the letter said, ENRC’s “assets (including Kazchrome), and its founders, including Mr. Machkevitch, were subject to the detailed level of scrutiny to be expected of such a business, at the time of flotation and since.”

Bayrock spokeswoman Angela Pruitt said Mashkevich was never a partner or investor in the firm. She did not explain why Bayrock had named him, backed by ENRC, as a strategic investor in 2007.


Mashkevitch’s 91-meter (299-foot) yacht, among the word’s largest, off the coast of Mugla, Turkey on July 16, 2017.
Photographer: Ali Balli/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
In many ways, Mashkevich makes an unlikely tycoon. During the Soviet era, he was a professor of philology and mixed with some of Central Asia’s best-known writers. His brother became a globe-trotting orchestral conductor.

“He was a really nice kid” from a family of intellectuals, recalls Zamira Sydykova, who grew up with Mashkevich in Kyrgyzstan. Once he became rich, he was generous to friends back home, she said, placing them into jobs in his business in Kazakhstan and funding a Jewish school in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital.


Sydykova, a prominent journalist and former Kyrgyz ambassador to the United States, declined to comment on Mashkevich’s business dealings because she knows little about them. Speaking broadly, however, she said influence peddling was endemic in Central Asia. “What is the problem?” she asked of the focus on Mashkevich’s reportedly close ties to Nazarbayev, a relationship he has denied. “You can’t do business here without connections in the government.”

Today Tevfik Arif and Mashkevich enjoy the trappings of extreme wealth. Arif lives in Port Washington on Long Island’s North Shore. Mashkevich, an Israeli national since the 1990s, has homes in several countries including London, as well as a $30 million property near Buckingham Palace. He keeps a 300-foot-long superyacht, the Lady Lara. Mashkevich is worth at least $1 billion, according to Bloomberg data.


An old, non-functioning opencast mine in Xromtau, Kazakhstan.
Photographer: Konstantin Salomatin for Bloomberg
Others haven’t been so lucky.

In Xromtau, a dusty mining settlement 60 miles east of Aktobe, Natalya Ivanova recalls how in July 1999 she was ordered to sell her small stake in Kazakhstan’s lucrative chromium industry.

Under a state voucher privatization program, 10 percent of the shares in Kazchrome, a company that included the Troika’s chromium mine and two smelters, were earmarked for employees.

“My boss came and said, ‘Do you want to keep working here? If you do, you have to give up your shares,” Ivanova says.

Several of her neighbors, standing outside their drab concrete apartment blocks, tell similar stories. They say they were given three days; buses took them to Kazchrome’s headquarters in Aktobe; they were ordered to sign away their stock rights.


On the outskirts of Xromtau, children collect well water.
Photographer: Konstantin Salomatin for Bloomberg
Ivanova kept her signed copy of the sale agreement. It shows she transferred her stock to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. The price she was paid — the equivalent of $4 per share, or $316 in all — would have valued Kazchrome’s entire share issue at about $2.25 million.

It isn’t clear who owned the now-defunct BVI company, Essex Commercial Corporation. Given that the mine’s management worked for the Troika at the time, the workers assume it was one of them. When ENRC floated on the London Stock Exchange eight years later, it was valued at 6.8 billion pounds (then $13 billion). At the time, more than half of ENRC’s total revenue came from Kazchrome, suggesting a valuation in the billions.

Xromtau’s mine workers noticed. Hundreds combined to hire a lawyer, Bakhtygul Kanatov. He says government officials tried to bribe him to back off the class action suit he filed to seek redress. When he declined, police arrested him over a faked hit-and-run accident in a parking lot, and told him things would get worse if he didn’t drop the case, he says.


Kanatov, at his office in Aktobe.
Photographer: Konstantin Salomatin for Bloomberg
Kanatov dug a hole in the ground, buried his files and walked away. “One of the unhappiest times of my life,” he says.

What Kazakh shareholders and tax payers lost, Bayrock and other, much larger foreign recipients of funds extracted from the nation’s rich natural resource industry gained. According to one study, more than a quarter of Kazakh economic output slipped out of the country each year from 1995 to 2005.

There is no indication that the Trump Organization broke laws by working with Bayrock. Still, said former Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Baltash Tursunbayev, it was a mistake. Sitting in the lobby of Almaty’s Rixos hotel, a chain Arif also listed among Bayrock’s projects, Tursunbayev said that in the interest of transparency, Trump should order an inquiry into his former business associates.

“Who were these people?” Tursunbayev asked. “Who were you dealing with?”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... kazakhstan

WATCH: Rachel Maddow expertly connects the dots between Kazakhstan’s toxic mines and Trump’s NYC real estate developments
Bob Brigham BOB BRIGHAM
15 JAN 2018 AT 22:43 ET


On the eve of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbeyev’s planned visit to the White House, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow followed the flow of money from Kazakhstan’s toxic mines to President Donald Trump’s New York City real estate investments.

“President Donald J. Trump will welcome President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan to the White House on January 16, 2018. President Trump and President Nazarbayev will discuss ways to strengthen and enhance our strategic partnership on regional security issues and economic cooperation,” the White House announced.

Maddow explained the significance of the visit through the element chromium.

“This is chromium, atomic number 24,” Maddow noted at the beginning of her show. “You need chromium to make stainless steel, it’s a useful, necessary thing in modern life. Mining and processing it, though, tend to be very, very toxic enterprises.”

“Mark Champion at Bloomberg News just did a report on how toxic and dire the conditions are at that facility, but he also got the simple sad story of the finances of that place, and how the finances of that place — that produces a third of the chromium in the world — ended up connected to the President of the United States.”

Maddow explained how during the break up of the Soviet Union, the Aktyubinsk Chromium Chemicals Plant (AZXS) made the workers of the plant employee-owners, until the workers were forced to sell their shares.

“The entity on the other end of that forced transaction, the entity to which they were forced to sell their shares, was like a random no-name company registered in the British Virgin Islands?” Maddow asked.

“When you look at the pictures of this bleak, land-locked central Asian toxic site producing chromium for the world, British Virgin Islands? Really?” Maddow asked again. “Nothing against the British Virgin Islands, but international companies will often headquarter themselves there in-name-only as a scheme to avoid taxes and stay anonymous.”

“The people working at this chromium company were basically robbed of equity,” Maddow concluded. “They used to be employee owners, they used to have shares. They work in dire toxic conditions and efforts have been made, through the banking system, to obscure who really owns that place, who is reaping the financial rewards from that giant now that the people that work there aren’t.”

“These guys were so corrupt they embarrassed the stock market,” Maddow continued.

Maddow connected the dots by following the money to the new person in charge of the bank where evidence of impropriety may be retained.

“Specifically, the dictator of Kazakhstan put his son-in-law in control of that bank, which means if there is any problematic surviving evidence or participation in the big obvious money laundering schemes, if there is potential criminal liability for different dealings figures records of those transactions … they would be in the office safe of the son-in-law of the dictator of Kazakhstan,” Maddow observed.

“Guess who is coming to the White House tomorrow, invited to meet President Trump,” Maddow asked, rhetorically. “The dictator of Kazakhstan.”

“Really?” Maddow wondered. “Of all the dictators of the world…”





https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/watch- ... elopments/

Kazakhstan's President Heads To Trump's White House
Kenneth Rapoza, CONTRIBUTOR
Jan 12, 2018 12:03 PM 8,358

Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president
Their mobile internet is faster than Brazil’s, Russia’s and India’s; make that twice as fast as India’s. Their fixed broadband is faster than Australia’s, the Aussies lamented on Jan. 8, not to mention faster than Brazil’s and India’s once again. This is Kazakhstan, a frontier market on the oil and gas-rich Caspian Sea, led by a 77-year-old man named Nursultan Nazarbayev.



He is the only living former Soviet leader. Everyone else is either dead or has been kicked out of office with the purge of Communist Party officials in 1992. And he is coming to Washington on Jan. 16, the first and only ‘Stan president to meet with President Donald Trump at the White House.

When Trump got a December 2016 phone call from the elder statesmen, CBS News was quick to point out that the president-elect had reportedly congratulated a “dictator” for his “miraculous” post-Soviet success. Compared to every other leader in the region, Nazarbayev is best in class. Compared to nearly every other former Soviet state outside of the three Baltic states that have joined the European Union, Kazakhstan is in better shape and more politically stable than all of them.



“People could not have predicted how well all of this would turn out, but Nazarbayev opened Kazakhstan to the world,” says Washington’s first ambassador to the country, William Courtney, now a senior fellow and executive director of the Business Leaders Forum at the RAND Corporation. Courtney was ambassador to Kazakhstan between 1992 and 1995. He is now executive director of the U.S. Kazakhstan Business Association.

“We will set up a meeting with him,” Courtney says. “U.S. companies will want to talk energy, but also will want to see what he has in store for privatization plans finally. This is not a full democracy. It’s not like Ukraine. But it’s more stable. It’s not the kind of police state you once had in Uzbekistan until recently.”



Nazarbayev is more moderate in the way he runs the government. Shared power is important to him and that includes keeping with the long-standing post-Soviet tradition of a multi-vector approach to geopolitics, whereas Russia, China, and the West are important, but not played off each other, says Courtney. “The U.S. is not going to unseat Russia or China from Kazakhstan and Russia isn’t going to get U.S. energy companies and security strategy out of Kazakhstan either,” he says.

The White House confirmed the visit on Jan. 9.

In September, the White House said Nazarbayev backed Trump’s new South Asian strategy, which included fortifying the U.S. fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and penalizing Pakistan for harboring anti-Afghanistan militants within its borders. In that phone call, Trump “expressed appreciation for Kazakhstan’s regional and global leadership, including its upcoming tenure as chair of the United Nations Security Council in January.”

Nazarbayev isn’t the Angela Merkel of the former Soviet Union, but he is a man who has spent much of the last decade trying to repackage his country as an example of modernity to be used by neighboring countries of the vast and lonely Central Asia.

Kazakhstan has led the charge for banning nuclear weapons and has opened the capital city of Astana to Syrian peace talks on numerous occasions – what is known as the Astana peace process.

Nazarbayev wants to be seen as a power broker in Central Asia, and does not have any competition. His visit to the White House is likely to be used to make sure the U.S. defense budget includes Central Asia spending, and perhaps some time spent on the need for U.S. expertise to help pull all of the oil out of its portion of the Caspian Sea. The Kashagan and Tengiz fields have attracted billions from Chevron.



For 2018, Chevron announced a capital and exploratory spending program of $18.3 billion, of which $3.3 billion is going for the Permian basin in the U.S. and $3.7 billion is going to Kazakhstan, the company said. This year marks the company’s 25th in Kazakhstan.

“It’s been a privilege to play a supporting role in the growth of Kazakhstan to a nation of global prominence,” says Chevron spokeswoman Sally Ann Jones.

The country depends on oil. In 2013, before oil prices dropped by half, much of its exports and government revenues came from oil and gas. With a GDP per capita of just over $7,500, Kazakhstan could reach high-income country status within a decade thanks to Caspian Sea oil, according to a report by World Bank economists published last month by the Brookings Institute.

Despite the oil revenue, Nazarbayev has paid more than lip service to moving away from commodities. The government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on real estate projects and green energy initiatives. The biggest, most visible example is the Astana International Financial Center, something many say is an attempt to create a mini Dubai of Central Asia. Others call it pie in the sky.

“The current economic situation in Kazakhstan, with low oil prices and years of a weak Russian economy, has rolled back those plans quite a bit,” says Mariya Y. Omelicheva, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas. “They’ve had to devalue their currency significantly.”



The tenge is down 54% over the last five years.

“They’ve been on track to build their own stock market, and the new financial center is part of that plan, but I think they are still struggling to get back to where they were in 2014,” she says.


Russian President Vladimir Putin with Kazakh President
If all goes well with oil prices, the Tengiz and Kashagan fields stand to help Nazarbayev’s legacy of building out Kazakhstan. They’ll attract more foreign direct investment from energy companies, at least.

The Chinese will also help. China poured millions into Khorgos – one of the largest dry ports in the world located on the border of the two countries. The New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins wrote extensively about the Khorgos port this month, giving readers a glimpse into one of China’s biggest Belt and Road initiative (BRI) developments, and what that means to a frontier country like Kazakhstan.



In short, it has been like a shot in the arm to Nazarbayev.

“Kazakhstan has eagerly embraced China’s ambitious initiative to revive the centuries-old Silk Road,” says Nihad Ahmed, an economist with London-based Focus Economics. Most of the routes proposed under China’s BRI go through Kazakhstan. “It stands to be a real game-changer for them in helping maximize the advantages of its location, deepen economic ties to China, and diversify its economic structure away from dependency on oil by catalyzing a ‘third wave of modernization’ through the acquisition of advanced technologies and upgraded infrastructure,” Ahmed says.

General Electric is benefiting directly. They are building over 700 locomotives with Kazakhstan rail companies, of which half of the machinery will be made in the U.S., the company said. GE’s transportation division signed a deal with the government’s railway company in December to be the digital logistics systems provider for their entire network. More General Electric-Kazakhstan news is expected to come from Nazarbayev’s official visit.

Nazarbayev brings with him more positive baggage than negative ones. There is no fear of a Russian invasion, at least nothing compared to what one hears in Lithuania and Ukraine on a revolving basis. There are no color revolutions. Foreign capital, be it from China or Chevron, is going to Kazakhstan and not the other ‘Stans. And not yet to Ukraine, mainly due to civil strife in the nation’s southeast, pitting Russian backed separatists against the government.

Most of these projects, from BRI to the Caspian, are in line with the priorities set by the government in its multi-year investment strategy. The strategy targets a roughly 30% increase in foreign direct investment into Kazakhstan by 2022.



The main question on everybody’s mind is what happens to it all once Nazarbayev retires.

“There is no reason not to have a reasonable succession after Nazarbayev,” says Olga Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If he steps down into retirement, he might have more influence and control over new leadership. I would be shocked if they did not have a peaceful transition.”

Like Putin, and to some degree like the relative disrepute celebrity of Trump himself, Nazarbayev benefits from popularity at home. However people see him, one constant among Central Asia watchers is that Nazarbayev managed political stability throughout the fall of the Soviet Union. He has united the country for over 30 years.

“You have to hand it to him,” says Omelicheva. “You can criticize a lot of his policies, but he’s been a smart leader in many ways. I cannot think of another leader there who has invested so long into the education of managers and engineers to build their country. I think it’s paying off.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/ ... house/amp/

Ex Trump associates helped fugitive Kazakhs in visa scheme

By Ben Wieder, Gabrielle Paluch and Kevin G. Hallkhall
SANDS POINT, New York


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Ties?

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

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

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
This as Bloomberg reported Thursday that Trump Soho in New York, where the Khrapunovs invested, were among several Trump businesses being looked at by former FBI Director Robert Mueller in his probe of possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Almaty to the Big Apple

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence and Denials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mall Brawl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bayrock Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the country of origin for broadcaster Zembla.

Trump says there are ‘serious’ leaks and ‘leaks where people want to love me’
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... 89803.html

[seemslikeadream]

Investigators Are Scrutinizing Newly Uncovered Payments By The Russian Embassy

US authorities are poring over hundreds of newly uncovered payments from Russian diplomatic accounts. Among them are transactions by former ambassador Sergey Kislyak 10 days after the 2016 presidential election and a blocked $150,000 cash withdrawal five days after the inauguration.

January 17, 2018, at 8:47 a.m.

Nico Ortega for BuzzFeed News
Officials investigating the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election are scrutinizing newly uncovered financial transactions between the Russian government and people or businesses inside the United States.

Records exclusively reviewed by BuzzFeed News also show years of Russian financial activity within the US that bankers and federal law enforcement officials deemed suspicious, raising concerns about how the Kremlin’s diplomats operated here long before the 2016 election.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, charged with investigating Russian election interference and possible collusion by the Trump campaign, is examining these transactions and others by Russian diplomatic personnel, according to a US official with knowledge of the inquiry. The special counsel has broad authority to investigate “any matters” that “may arise” from his investigation, and the official said Mueller’s probe is following leads on suspicious Russian financial activity that may range far beyond the election.

The transactions reveal:

One of the people at the center of the investigation, the former Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak, received $120,000 ten days after the election of Donald Trump. Bankers flagged it to the US government as suspicious in part because the transaction, marked payroll, didn’t fit prior pay patterns.

Five days after Trump’s inauguration, someone attempted to withdraw $150,000 cash from the embassy’s account — but the embassy’s bank blocked it. Bank employees reported the attempted transaction to the US government because it was abnormal activity for that account.

From March 8 to April 7, 2014, bankers flagged nearly 30 checks for a total of about $370,000 to embassy employees, who cashed the checks as soon as they received them, making it virtually impossible to trace where the money went. Bank officials noted that the employees had not received similar payments in the past, and that the transactions surrounded the date of a critical referendum on whether parts of Crimea should secede from Ukraine and join Russia — one of Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy concerns and a flash point with the West.

Over five years, the Russian Cultural Centre — an arm of the government that sponsors classes and performances and is based in Washington, DC — sent $325,000 in checks that banking officials flagged as suspicious. The amounts were not consistent with normal payroll checks and some of the transactions fell below the $10,000 threshold that triggers a notice to the US government.

The Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, sent more than $2.4 million to small home-improvement companies controlled by a Russian immigrant living not far from there. Between 2013 and March 2017, that contractor’s various companies received about 600 such payments, earmarked for construction jobs at Russian diplomatic compounds. Bankers told the Treasury they did not think those transactions were related to the election but red-flagged them because the businesses seemed too small to have carried out major work on the embassy and because the money was cashed quickly or wired to other accounts.

Each of these transactions sparked a “suspicious activity report” sent to the US Treasury’s financial crimes unit by Citibank, which handles accounts of the Russian Embassy. By law, bankers must alert the government to transactions that bear hallmarks of money laundering or other financial misconduct. Such reports can support investigations and intelligence gathering — but by themselves they are not evidence of a crime, and many suspicious activity reports are filed on transactions that are perfectly legal. Intelligence and diplomatic sources who reviewed the transactions for BuzzFeed News said there could be justifiable uses for the money, such as travel, bonuses, or pension payouts.

The Treasury Department turned over the suspicious activity reports to the FBI after the bureau asked for records that might relate to the investigation into the election, according to three federal law enforcement officials with knowledge of the matter. The bureau did not respond to requests for comment on what, if anything, it has done to investigate the transactions.

Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com. To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own investigation into the election, requested suspicious activity reports on former ambassador Kislyak as far back as August. It is unclear whether senators have received those documents yet. The top Republican and Democrat on the committee each declined to comment.

“All the transactions which have been carried out through the American financial system fully comply with the legislation of the United States,” said Nikolay Lakhonin, a spokesperson for the Russian Embassy. “We are not going to comment on any concrete names and figures mentioned in BuzzFeed articles.” He added, “We see such leaks by US authorities as another attempt to discredit Russian official missions.”

Kislyak, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. The home improvement contractor said all the payments he received were aboveboard for legitimate work.

A Citibank spokesperson said the bank would not comment or confirm any particular report because they are confidential. “Consistent with our commitment to protect the integrity of the financial system,” wrote Jennifer Lowney, the spokesperson, “Citi is diligent in filing Suspicious Activity Reports with the US Treasury Department when appropriate.”


Former ambassador Kislyak left the US in 2017 and now serves in the legislature of the Republic of Mordovia, which is part of Russia. But his contacts with people in Trump’s inner circle have shaken the administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation largely because he failed to mention a Kislyak meeting when he was confirmed.

Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and adviser, drew criticism after he discussed setting up a secure communications channel at the Russian Embassy with Kislyak during the transition.

And Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about multiple calls with Kislyak during the transition, one of which Kushner apparently asked him to make.

Now, according to the US official with knowledge of Mueller’s inquiry, the special counsel’s team is examining two financial transactions from Kislyak’s final weeks in the US.

The first occurred on Nov. 18, 10 days after Americans went to the polls. The Russian embassy sent $120,000 to Kislyak’s personal bank account, marked for “payroll.” Employees at Citibank raised an alarm about the transaction because it didn’t fit with prior payroll patterns and because he immediately split the money in half, sending it by two wire transfers to a separate account he maintained in Russia.


BuzzFeed News
Then on Jan. 25, five days after Trump was inaugurated, someone attempted to withdraw $150,000 in cash from an embassy account. Citibank officials blocked that transaction. It is not clear why bankers stopped the withdrawal, but they flagged the attempt to the government as suspicious. Treasury officials then sent it on to the FBI, according to the three law enforcement sources with knowledge of the matter.

Kislyak, a nuclear scientist who became ambassador in 2008, was an affable figure in Washington who was known to throw lavish parties, including a 2010 bash with edible Fabergé eggs, baton twirlers, and a guest list that included a US Supreme Court justice and at least two senators.

As Russia annexes Crimea, checks get cashed

Now authorities appear to be digging into the entire Russian diplomatic corps operating in the US, with bank records dating back 10 years that show financial conduct flagged as suspicious. The official with knowledge of Mueller’s probe said it is examining a wide range of financial behavior by Russian diplomats.

One of Putin’s main strategic goals was the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, key to controlling the Black Sea and home to a large Russian naval base. He accomplished the takeover on March 18, 2014, two days after a widely disputed Crimean referendum in favor of joining Russia.

Around that critical period, from March 8 to April 7, 2014, Citibank officials flagged nearly 30 checks totaling about $370,000 to Russian Embassy employees, including military attachés, living in Washington. The checks, which were for nearly identical amounts, were all cashed as soon as they were received.


Bank officials noted that the employees had not received similar payments in the past, and that the timing of the transactions matched that of the Crimean referendum.

The embassy would not say what the money was used for. Capt. Vyacheslav Khlestov, in charge of the Russian Office of the Defense, Military, Air, and Naval Attachés, did not return an email seeking comment. Even though the transfers were first noted by American officials in 2014, it is not clear whether the Treasury Department or the FBI took further action to investigate.

But it wouldn’t be the last time a diplomatic financial transaction raised alarms.

In August of that year, Alexey Voronov, an assistant air attaché, made a cash deposit of $44,000 in his account and then sent the money to an unknown individual. Voronov did not return emails seeking comment.

In the fall of 2015, bankers noted deposits into an account identified as “Russian Cultural Center in New York.” No such entity could be found in public filings, but the banking records show its address as 9 East 91st Street in New York, the same address where the Russian Consulate General is located. The phone number listed in banking records is disconnected. Bankers noted that the cash deposits appeared to be “structured,” which means they were separated into small amounts that seemed designed to stay under the $10,000 daily threshold that would trigger an alert to authorities. For example, in a single afternoon, someone made ATM cash deposits into the “Russian Cultural Center in New York” account of $5,000, $4,400, and $600.

Bank employees also raised alarms about payments to a home improvement contractor. They reported that his companies didn’t appear to have the capacity to perform large construction projects such as those at the embassy.

Bankers flagged to the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit about 600 payments from the Russian Embassy to this contractor’s companies. The bankers found that those transactions did not appear connected to the presidential campaign but that they were suspicious for other reasons. For example, a company controlled by the contractor received multiple checks from the Russian Embassy for a total of about $320,000; he then withdrew cash in amounts below the level that would have triggered an alert to government watchdogs.

The Treasury, in turn, reported the transactions to the FBI, according to a law enforcement report shared with the bureau. The FBI declined to comment on what, if anything, it did with the information.

The contractor said the payments were normal for a small business like his and he had no idea why investigators would think the transactions were suspicious. He explained that he used multiple accounts at different banks to pay workers, vendors, and suppliers, and that he often deposited money in one account and immediately transferred it to another to make payments.

The contractor and his wife registered a computer company in the greater Washington, DC, area in June 2016. There is little else publicly available about this company, which was dissolved in late 2016. The contractor said the company sold computers to businesses and estimated the firm made only $400 in revenue during its brief life.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation

For the past five months, the bipartisan leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee has been trying to get records on any financial transactions involving Kislyak that the Treasury Department may have. It is unknown if they have received them or not.

In August, the committee sent a letter to the Treasury’s financial crimes unit requesting any suspicious activity reports or other “derogatory notification” the Treasury might have received from financial institutions on the former ambassador, as well as more than 30 other people and entities. The August letter, signed by the committee’s top Republican and Democrat, also asked for any records that the Treasury may have provided to the FBI, the intelligence community, and the Office of the Special Counsel.

The committee’s letter does not indicate that any financial institution has actually issued reports or other notifications to the Treasury about any of the people or entities named in the letter, or that the Treasury actually has records about them.

The senators made it clear they wanted the Treasury to turn over whatever records it might have to the committee before handing them over to special counsel Mueller.

“It is our expectation that these documents will be provided directly to the Committee, without pre-review by any outside entities, including the Office of Special Counsel,” said the letters, marked “committee sensitive,” meaning they are not intended to be made public. “Treasury is free to provide a copy of any documents provided to the Committee to the Office of Special Counsel for review in parallel to production to the Committee, but these documents should not be provided to the Office of Special Counsel prior to receipt by the Committee.”

In a follow-up letter sent in December, the committee leaders asked again for any records, as well as information that the Treasury might have on still more people. “We trust that your staff is working to provide those documents as soon as possible,” Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican and the committee’s chair, and Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat, wrote.

It is not clear why the Treasury had not fulfilled the original request for almost four months. “We generally refrain from providing specifics on requests related to committee investigations,” a spokesperson for the department said.

But the committee’s letters — not previously made public — raise a curtain on its secret investigation.

The senators requested financial information that the Treasury may have on a total of 45 people or entities. While most of the names in the Senate letters have been mentioned publicly in connection with the Trump–Russia investigation, at least three have not.

The committee also asked for financial information, if the Treasury has any, on Ivan Tavrin, a Putin ally who is the chief executive at telecom giant MegaFon and has a stake in the Russian social media site VKontakte. And the senators sought any records the Treasury might have on Bob Foresman, who once ran the Russia desk at Barclays bank and was in charge of Renaissance Capital, a Moscow-based investment firm. No suspicious activity reports on Tavrin or Foresman have been located, according to two law enforcement officials.

Got a tip? You can email tips@buzzfeed.com. To learn how to reach us securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
The senators also requested any records on Alisher Usmanov, one of the richest men in Russia and a close ally of President Putin. He has majority control of the Russian social media site VKontakte and was an investor in Facebook.

It is not known why the committee is seeking records on these individuals, and they did not return messages asking for comment.

In its December letter, the committee also asked for documents “connected in any way to funds, sent from Russia or Russian banks, that are designated to ‘finance election campaign of 2016.’”

That request came after BuzzFeed News reported in November that the FBI had been investigating those transactions. Almost 60 such transfers were flagged as suspicious after they were sent by the Russian foreign ministry to embassies across the globe, including nearly $30,000 to the compound in Washington.

Russian officials labeled the BuzzFeed News story “propaganda” and said the money, which totaled almost $380,000, was used to help Russian nationals living overseas vote in their country’s parliamentary election held last year.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/n ... .mp0504kD7

[seemslikeadream]

Alexander Torshin, the Russian bank exec and suspected mobster/organized crime boss who is now being investigated for potentially funneling $ through the NRA to help Trump's campaign



The NRA spent $30 million to support Trump — 3X what they gave to Romney's 2012 campaign


Torshin is described as a close ally of Putin & a "key figure for the Kremlin's outreach to the conservative movement in the U.S.”


In June 2015, Butina wrote: "It may take the election of a Republican to the WH in 2016 to improve relations btw" the Kremlin & the U.S.


IC says Torshin's trip to DC is part of an "aggressive Kremlin effort to forge alliances" w/top GOP figures, incl. those close to the WH.


Torshin & his "special assistant", Maria Butina, are part of a yrs-long campaign to build connections btw the Kremlin & top GOP figures.

FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump

By Peter Stone And Greg Gordon ggordon@mcclatchydc.comWASHINGTON
Donald Trump, at the April 2017 NRA convention, thanked the group for supporting him in 2016. “I am going to come through for you,” he told thousands of cheering NRA members.
Donald Trump, at the April 2017 NRA convention, thanked the group for supporting him in 2016. “I am going to come through for you,” he told thousands of cheering NRA members. Mike Stewart AP
The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy.

FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said.

It is illegal to use foreign money to influence federal elections.

It’s unclear how long the Torshin inquiry has been ongoing, but the news comes as Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sweeping investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including whether the Kremlin colluded with Trump’s campaign, has been heating up.

All of the sources spoke on condition of anonymity because Mueller’s investigation is confidential and mostly involves classified information.

A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined comment.

Disclosure of the Torshin investigation signals a new dimension in the 18-month-old FBI probe of Russia’s interference. McClatchy reported a year ago that a multi-agency U.S. law enforcement and counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s intervention, begun even before the start of the 2016 general election campaign, initially included a focus on whether the Kremlin secretly helped fund efforts to boost Trump, but little has been said about that possibility in recent months.

The extent to which the FBI has evidence of money flowing from Torshin to the NRA, or of the NRA’s participation in the transfer of funds, could not be learned.

However, the NRA reported spending a record $55 million on the 2016 elections, including $30 million to support Trump – triple what the group devoted to backing Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. Most of that was money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.

Two people with close connections to the powerful gun lobby said its total election spending actually approached or exceeded $70 million. The reporting gap could be explained by the fact that independent groups are not required to reveal how much they spend on Internet ads or field operations, including get-out-the-vote efforts.

During the campaign, Trump was an outspoken advocate of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, at one point drawing a hail of criticism by suggesting that, if Clinton were elected, gun rights advocates could stop her from winning confirmation of liberal Supreme Court justices who support gun control laws.

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks,” Trump said at a rally in August 2016. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Trump to NRA: ‘I will never ever let you down’

President Trump addressed the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention on Friday. He’s the first president to do so in more than 30 years. “The eight-year assault on your second amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end,” Trump said.

The White House
Spanish authorities tag Torshin for money laundering

Torshin, a leading figure in Putin’s party, has been implicated in money laundering by judicial authorities in Spain, as Bloomberg News first revealed in 2016. Spanish investigators alleged in an almost 500-page internal report that Torshin, who was then a senator, capitalized on his government role to assist mobsters laundering funds through Spanish properties and banks, Bloomberg reported

A summary obtained by McClatchy of the still-secret report links Torshin to Russian money laundering and describes him as a godfather in a major Russian criminal organization called Taganskaya.

Investigators for three congressional committees probing Russia’s 2016 operations also have shown interest in Torshin, a lifetime NRA member who has attended several of its annual conventions. At the group’s meeting in Kentucky in May 2016, Torshin spoke to Donald Trump Jr. during a gala event at the group’s national gathering in Kentucky in May 2016, when his father won an earlier-than-usual NRA presidential endorsement.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on the investigation.

The NRA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Torshin could not be reached for comment, and emails to the Russian central bank seeking comment from Torshin and the bank elicited no response.

Mueller’s investigation has been edging closer to Trump’s inner circle. This week, The New York Times reported that Mueller had negotiated an agreement under which Steve Bannon, who was recently ousted from his post as a senior White House adviser, would fully respond to questions about the Trump campaign. Bannon headed the campaign over its final weeks.

Since taking over the investigation last May, Mueller has secured guilty pleas from two former Trump aides, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, both of whom agreed to cooperate with prosecutors; and criminal charges against two other top campaign figures, former campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates.

$30 millionThe amount of money the National Rifle Association spent backing Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign – triple what the group spent on Republican Mitt Romney four years earlier

A year ago, three U.S. intelligence agencies signed off on a joint assessment that was the basis for the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and other sanctions against the Kremlin. The intelligence agencies concluded that what began as a sophisticated Russian operation to undermine Americans’ faith in democracy morphed into a drive to help Trump win.

Torshin is among a phalanx of Putin proxies to draw the close attention of U.S. investigators, who also have tracked the activities of several Russian billionaires and pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs that have come in contact with Trump or his surrogates.

Torshin was a senior member of the Russian Senate and in recent years helped set up a Moscow gun rights group called Right to Bear Arms. He not only spoke with Trump Jr. at the NRA convention, but he also tried unsuccessfully to broker a meeting between Putin and the presidential candidate in 2016, according to the Times. He further sought to meet privately with the candidate himself near the 2016 NRA convention.

Torshin’s ties with the NRA have flourished in recent years. In late 2015, he hosted two dinners for a high-level NRA delegation during its week-long visit to Moscow that included meetings with influential Russian government and business figures.

In their internal report, Spanish prosecutors revealed a web of covert financial and money-laundering dealings between Torshin and Alexander Romanov, a Russian who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2016 and was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.

The prosecutors’ evidence included 33 audio recordings of phone conversations from mid-2012 to mid-2013 between Torshin and Romanov, who allegedly laundered funds to buy a hotel on the ritzy island of Mallorca. Torshin had an 80 percent stake in the venture, the Spanish report said.

In the phone conversations, Romanov referred to Torshin as the “godfather” or “boss.” Torshin has denied any links to organized crime and said his dealings with Romanov were purely “social.”

The Madrid-based newspaper El Pais last year reported that Spanish police were on the verge of arresting Torshin in the summer of 2013, when he had planned to attend a birthday party for Romanov, but a Russian prosecutor tipped the banker to plans to nab him if he set foot in Spain, and Torshin canceled his trip.

Congress looking at Torshin, too

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee also have taken an interest in Torshin as part of their parallel inquiries into Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections.

In questioning Donald Trump Jr. at a closed-door hearing in mid-December, investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee asked about his encounter with Torshin at the NRA convention, according to a source familiar with the hearing.

Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump Jr., said his client and Torshin talked only briefly when they were introduced during a meal.

“It was all gun-related small talk,” Futerfas told McClatchy.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent letters in November to two senior Trump foreign policy aides, J.D. Gordon and Sam Clovis, seeking copies of any communications they had with or related to Torshin; the NRA; veteran conservative operative Paul Erickson; Maria Butina, a Torshin protege who ran the Russian pro-gun group he helped launch, and others linked to Torshin.

Erickson has raised funds for the NRA and is a friend of Butina’s. Shortly before the NRA’s May 2016 convention, he emailed Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn about the possibility of setting up a meeting between Putin and Trump during the campaign, according to the Times.

Erickson’s email to Dearborn bore the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” In it, Erickson solicited advice from Dearborn and his boss, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a top foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, about the best way to connect Putin and Trump.

Both Dearborn and Butina, who has been enrolled as a graduate student at American University since mid 2016, have been asked to appear before the Judiciary Committee, but so far Erickson has not, sources familiar with the matter said.

Bridges LLC, a company that Erickson and Butina established in February 2016 in Erickson’s home state of South Dakota, also is expected to draw scrutiny. Public records don’t reveal any financial transactions involving Bridges. In a phone interview last year, Erickson said the firm was established in case Butina needed any monetary assistance for her graduate studies — an unusual way to use an LLC.

Erickson said he met Butina and Torshin when he and David Keene, a former NRA president, attended a meeting of Right to Bear Arms a few years ago in Moscow. Erickson described the links between Right to Bear Arms and the NRA as a “moral support operation both ways.”

Torshin’s contacts with the NRA and the Trump campaign last year also came to the attention of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser. When Torshin tried to arrange a personal meeting with Trump near the NRA convention site last May, Kushner scotched the idea, according to emails forwarded to Kushner.

On top of Torshin’s efforts to cozy up to the Trump campaign, the Moscow banker has forged ties with powerful conservatives, including Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the Californian whom some have deemed Putin’s best friend in Washington. In a phone interview in 2016, Rohrabacher recalled meeting Torshin in Moscow a few years earlier and described him as “a mover and shaker.”

Last February when Torshin visited Washington, Rockefeller heir and conservative patron George O’Neill Jr. hosted a fancy four-hour dinner for the banker on Capitol Hill, an event that drew Rohrabacher, Erickson and other big names on the right. Rohrabacher has labeled Torshin as “conservatives’ favorite Russian,” Torshin was in Washington at the time to lead his country’s delegation to the National Prayer Breakfast, where Trump spoke. The banker also was slated to see the presidentat a meet-and-greet event prior to a White House breakfast, but Torshin’s invitation was canceled after the White House learned of his alleged mob connections, Yahoo News reported.

Torshin’s involvement with the NRA may have begun in 2013 when he attended the group’s convention in Houston. Keene, the ex-NRA leader and an avid hunter, was instrumental in building a relationship with the Russian, according to multiple conservative sources.

Keene also helped lead a high-level NRA delegation to Moscow in December 2015 for a week of lavish meals and meetings with Russian business and political leaders. The week’s festivities included a visit to a Russian gun company and a meeting with a senior Kremlin official and wealthy Russians, according to a member of the delegation, Arnold Goldschlager, a California doctor who has been active in NRA programs to raise large donations.

Others on the trip included Joe Gregory, who runs the NRA’s Ring of Freedom program for elite donors who chip in checks of $1 million and upwards, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke and Pete Brownell, a chief executive of a gun company and longtime NRA board member.

In a phone interview, Goldschlager described the trip as a “people-to-people mission,” and said he was impressed with Torshin — who, he noted, hosted both a “welcoming” dinner for the NRA contingent and another one.

“They were killing us with vodka and the best Russian food,” Goldschlager said. “The trip exceeded my expectations by logarithmic levels.”

Asked About Russia Sanctions, Donald Trump Says ‘We Ought to Get On With Our Lives’
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... 31139.html

[seemslikeadream]

When asked if the Russian government would be aware of the activities of Russian organized crime, Simpson replied that, “Russian mafia is essentially under the dominion of the Russian Government and Russian Intelligence Services. And many of the oligarchs are also mafia figures. [...] And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin now.”

Fusion GPS: Kremlin ‘Purged’ Suspected Spies After Trump Dossier Release

In an interview with House intel committee, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson claimed the Kremlin tried to eliminate U.S. intel sources after the Trump dossier went public.


Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast


Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, told Congress in November that the Russian government appeared to “purge” people after his firm’s research on President Donald Trump’s alleged Kremlin connections became public.

It’s one of a host of concerns Simpson shared late last year with members of the House intelligence committee in a closed-door hearing. The committee voted this morning to release the transcript of Simpson’s testimony. One of Simpson’s central arguments was that Trump and his associates appeared to be involved in money-laundering on behalf of Russian oligarchs and organized crime figures.

Trump’s allies have spent the last year working to undermine the credibility of Simpson, his controversial firm, and the dossier he produced—work which was funded in part by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Those efforts make a lot of political sense, given the eye-popping concerns Simpson shared about the president.

“[I]t gradually reached a point where it seemed like most of the people around Trump had a connection to Russian organized crime or Russia in one way or another,” Simpson said.

But one of Simpson’s most dramatic revelations was that the Kremlin used the publication of his firm’s dossier—which contains salacious and unsubstantiated allegations about Trump—as a pretext for a spate of arrests and killings, Simpson said. He also said some of those people who were purged may have been sources for the American intelligence community.

Simpson made this revelation when Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), a member of the House intelligence committee, asked him about sources for the dossier.

“And it appears that one of the sources was mysteriously killed?” she asked.

“That's not my information,” Simpson replied. “I mean there was a series of episodes where people were arrested or died mysteriously that came shortly after the disclosure of the existence of this information. And I do believe there was a bit of an old fashioned purge. And I think that—but to my knowledge, it wasn’t anyone that helped us. [I] think it was more likely people who were taking the opportunity to settle scores or were falsely accused, as often, you know, just like in the old days, and/or were sources of the U.S. Intelligence Community, not us.”

Besides concerns about a purge, Simpson went into great detail about his suspicions that Trump and his businesses had connections to money-laundering.

“I think we saw patterns of buying and selling that we thought were suggestive of money laundering,” he said.

One person Simpson mentioned was an accused Russian organized crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov, known as “Taiwanchik.” He allegedly ran organized crime network out of Trump Tower, as ABC News detailed, and is currently on the lam. Simpson

“[W]hen Mr. Trump went to the Miss Universe pageant in 2013, Taiwanchik was there in the VIP section with Mr. Trump and lots of other Kremlin biggies,” Simpson said. “So that kind of thing raised questions with us.”

Simpson said he also saw a pattern of unusual business deals involving Trump properties, especially projects in Panama and Toronto; both projects drew investment of Russian mobsters in a way that “smacks of fraud.”

Simpson specifically pointed to Irish and Scottish Trump golf courses as possible thoroughfares for Russian funds. Simpson explained that the Trump-owned golf-courses in Ireland and Scotland have financial statements that “don't, on their face, show Russian involvement, but what they do show is enormous amounts of capital flowing into these projects from unknown sources [...].” He elaborated that these payments amount to “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Simpson described how this was particularly suspect, considering that golf courses as “sinks” that “don't actually make any money.”

When asked if the Russian government would be aware of the activities of Russian organized crime, Simpson replied that, “Russian mafia is essentially under the dominion of the Russian Government and Russian Intelligence Services. And many of the oligarchs are also mafia figures. [...] And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin now.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fusion-gp ... er-release

[BenDhyan]

Republicans rally for public release of memo on FISA abuses

by Daniel Chaitin | Jan 18, 2018, 11:56 PM | Updated Jan 19, 2018, 12:19 AM

Republican lawmakers are calling for the public release of a memo they say contains revelations about U.S. government surveillance abuses after the report was made available to all members of the House.

The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday approved, by a party-line vote, to make the four-page memo available to all members of the lower chamber. Reports have suggested the memo could contain answers to the question of whether the FBI and Justice Department used the infamous "Trump dossier" to abuse the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The dossier, which was published in full by BuzzFeed in January of last year, contains a number of salacious and unverified claims about President Trump's ties to Russia, possibly opening him up to blackmail.

Several Republicans, unable to say more about the memo, have rallied for its release to the general public, in some cases using a "ReleaseTheMemo" hashtag on social media.



Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said he read the memo and implied there was some sort of bias in favor of Trump's 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

"I have read the memo," he tweeted. "The sickening reality has set in. I no longer hold out hope there is an innocent explanation for the information the public has seen. I have long said it is worse than Watergate. It was #neverTrump & #alwaysHillary. #releasethememo."

“You think about, ‘Is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That's how alarming it is,” Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., said, according to Fox News.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., called for the public release of the memo's information "to preserve our democracy."

“The House must immediately make public the memo prepared by the Intelligence Committee regarding the FBI and the Department of Justice," Gaetz said in a statement. "The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency. There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy."

Gaetz, who has previously called for the removal of special counsel Robert Mueller, said there could be "major changes" for people working in the DOJ and FBI as a result of the memo's release.

On Fox News Gaetz went further, saying he believes people could "go to jail" due to the contents of the memo and the Mueller-led investigation, which is examining possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, is "a lie built on corruption." He also said it became clear to him why Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recommended the Justice Department criminally investigate the author of the Trump dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele.

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows called the memo "alarming" and "shocking," respectively.

“Part of me wishes that I didn't read it, because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much," Meadows added.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/republicans-rally-for-public-release-of-memo-on-fisa-abuses/article/2646412

[seemslikeadream]

that's why they call it Faux News
if you want corroboration read Breibart or GatewayPundit


Russia-linked Twitter accounts are working overtime to help Devin Nunes and WikiLeaks

#ReleaseTheMemo has spiked 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to Hamilton 68, a website claiming to track Russian propaganda in near-real time.



Tucker Carlson's guest, Republican Congressman Scott Perry from PA, just said ISIS did the Vegas shooting

ISIS coming through the Mexican border, haven't heard that since Duncan Hunter

She’s a lawyer for the victims. She said after that if he has proof ISIS did Vegas that he owes it to the victims to provide it

He refused

Who among us hasn’t created a Delaware LLC to pay an adult film star hush money?


Florida Republican Matty Gaetz stuns MSNBC’s Chris Hayes by calling ‘disgusting’ Haiti ‘all sheetmetal and garbage’


Again, not one of the Republicans screaming most loudly to #ReleaseTheMemo voted the way you'd expect on 702 reauthorization if they really believed the FBI was abusing its power.

I found the memo!

STEVE KING JUST VOTED TO SUBJECT AMERICANS TO “WORSE THAN WATERGATE”

January 19, 2018/1 Comment/in FISA, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
Devin Nunes has launched the next installment of his effort to undercut the Mueller investigation, a “Top Secret” four page report based on his staffers’ review of all the investigative files they got to see back on January 5. He then showed it to a bunch of hack Republicans, who ran to the right wing press to give alarmist quotes about the report (few, if any, have seen the underlying FBI materials).

Mark Meadows (who recently called for Jeff Sessions’ firing as part of this obstruction effort) said, “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.”

Matt Gaetz (who strategized with Trump on how to undercut the Mueller investigation on a recent flight on Air Force One) said, “The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency. There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy.”

Ron DeSantis (who joined Gaetz in that Air Force One strategy session with Trump and also benefitted directly from documents stolen by the Russians) said it was “deeply troubling and raises serious questions about the [the people in the] upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI,” who of course largely remain in place in the Sessions DOJ and Wray FBI.

Steve King claimed what he saw was, “worse than Watergate.” “Is this happening in America or is this the KGB?” Scott Perry said. Jim Jordan (who joined in Meadows’ effort to fire Sessions) said, “It is so alarming.” Lee Zeldin said the FBI, in using FISA orders against Russians and facilities used by suspected agents of Russia was relying “on bad sources & methods.”



It all makes for very good theater. But not a single one of these alarmists voted the way you’d expect on last week’s 702 reauthorization votes if they were really gravely concerned about the power of the FBI to spy on Americans.

Indeed, Gaetz, DeSantis, and King — three of those squawking the loudest — voted to give the same FBI they’re claiming is rife with abuse more power to spy on Americans, including political dissidents. Nunes, who wrote this alarming report, also wrote the bill to expand the power of the FBI he’s now pretending is badly abusive.

Even those who voted in favor of the Amash-Lofgren amendment and against final reauthorization — Meadows, Jordan, and Perry, among some of those engaging in this political stunt — voted against the Democratic motion to recommit, which would have at least bought more time and minimally improved the underlying bill (Justin Amash and Tom Massie, both real libertarians, voted with Democrats on the motion to recommit). Zeldin was among those who flipped his vote, backing the bill that will give the FBI more power after making a show of supporting Amash’s far better bill.

In short, not a single one of these men screaming about abuse at the FBI did everything they could do to prevent the FBI from getting more power.

Which — if you didn’t already need proof — shows what a hack stunt this is.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/01/19/s ... watergate/

ON DESANTIS ATTEMPTING TO STOP CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION INTO THEFT THAT BENEFITTED HIM

August 28, 2017/5 Comments/in Mueller Probe, Russian hacks /by emptywheel
Florida Congressman Ron DeSantis has presented a bill that would defund the Robert Mueller investigation six months after the bill passed.

DeSantis has put forward a provision that would halt funding for Mueller’s probe six months after the amendment’s passage. It also would prohibit Mueller from investigating matters that occurred before June 2015, when Trump launched his presidential campaign.

The amendment is one of hundreds filed to a government spending package the House is expected to consider when it returns next week from the August recess. The provision is not guaranteed a vote on the House floor; the House Rules Committee has wide leeway to discard amendments it considers out of order.

It’s interesting that DeSantis, of all people, would push this bill.

After all, he’s one of a small list of members of Congress who directly benefitted from Guccifer 2.0’s leaking. Florida political journalist Aaron Nevins obtained a huge chunk of documents from Guccifer 2.0.

Last year, a Republican political operative and part-time blogger from Florida asked for and received an extensive list of stolen data from Guccifer 2.0, the infamous hacker known for leaking documents from the DNC computer network.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Aaron Nevins, a former aide to Republican state Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, had reached out to Guccifer through Twitter, asking to “feel free to send any Florida-based information.”

About 10 days later, Nevins received about 2.5 gigabytes of polling information, election strategy and other data, which he then posted on his political gossip blog HelloFLA.com.

“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins told the Journal.

After setting up a Dropbox account for Guccifer 2.0 to share the data, Nevins was able to sift through the data as someone who “actually knows what some of these documents mean.”

Among the documents stolen from the DCCC that Nevins published are five documents on the DCCC’s recruitment of DeSantis’ opponent, George Pappas. So effectively, DeSantis is trying to cut short the investigation into a crime from which he directly benefitted.

Call me crazy, but this seems like an ethical violation, and possibly a good reason to submit a bar complaint against DeSantis. And his constituents might want to ask why he’s trying to help Russia and its domestic enablers undermine democracy.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/08/28/r ... itted-him/

Wow, lots of hyperventilating going on. Could be Hannity knows all about that NRA-Russia connection. Caught a few minutes of his show today and the guy sounds like he's going into complete panic.

Matty Gaetz and L'il Jimmy Jordan would do well to go read the transcript released today by the House Intelligence Committee - (Yeah, I know... Intelligence.... scary stuff for two members of the Freedom from Facts Caucus, but...)...

the transcript of the testimony of the Fusion GPS founder Simpson....

the hearing that, if you read the transcript, it seems that all the Con members of the Committee up and left after about two hours, because for the remainder of the transcript, it seems only Democrats are asking questions.....guess the Cons had more important things to do, like make up false talking points about "palace coups"...

anyway, lots of important info, like Fusion originally being hired to do its research by the very conservative Washington Free- Beacon newspaper - not the DNC and Hillary - and being tasked to look into the Donald's business dealings.... which led to investigations in to the business ties he had with Russian oligarchs that he like sot deny.....

because lying that you have no business deals in Russia is not the same as saying you have no business deals with Russians....

and then there are all the strange purchases of Trump-owned real-estate by Russians in all cash deals, when they seemingly purposely over - pay for the properties..... also known as money- laundering.

So, there is no "palace coup", but there is an investigation into criminal activities, and the resulting obstruction of justice.

- RyansGdad

Democrats derided the release of the report as part of an attempt to discredit senior leaders of the agencies leading investigations into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and whether any of his associates aided Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.

“[T]he Majority voted today on a party-line basis to grant House Members access to a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement. “Rife with factual inaccuracies and referencing highly classified materials that most of Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they had never read, this is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI.”

Republicans authorize sharing of classified report on FBI, DOJ officials' conduct
By KYLE CHENEY 01/18/2018 07:45 PM EST Updated 01/18/2018 08:19 PM EST

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have authorized their colleagues to access a highly classified report that they say details their concerns with the conduct of top FBI and Justice Department officials, as well as the agencies’ handling of a controversial surveillance program.

“We have concerns — FISA concerns — that all members of the body should know,” said Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), a member of the committee, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Some of President Donald Trump’s allies in the House have argued that the program was inappropriately used to surveil a foreign policy aide to the Trump campaign.


Democrats derided the release of the report as part of an attempt to discredit senior leaders of the agencies leading investigations into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and whether any of his associates aided Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.

“[T]he Majority voted today on a party-line basis to grant House Members access to a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement. “Rife with factual inaccuracies and referencing highly classified materials that most of Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they had never read, this is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI.”

“This may help carry White House water, but it is a deep disservice to our law enforcement professionals,” he added.

Conaway noted that the classified report would probably remain off-limits to the public, though all members of the House are permitted to view it. But by releasing it to other House members, it gave Trump allies outside the Intelligence Committee a chance to batter FBI leadership and underscore complaints they’ve raised about the agency’s handling of its investigation of Trump associates’ contacts with Russia. Throughout the day Thursday, a handful of Trump’s top House allies began calling for the immediate public release of the report.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said the report must be released to “preserve our democracy.” Another conservative ally, Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), called the report “deeply troubling” and said the Intelligence Committee should dust off a little-used process to reveal classified information publicly in order to show the public. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) said the report would reveal “FISA abuse.”

“Releasing this classified information will not compromise good sources and methods,” Zeldin said in a statement. “It will, however, reveal the feds’ reliance on bad sources and methods.”

A source familiar with discussions between the leader of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), and House leadership — amid high-stakes negotiations over the government spending bill — said Meadows asked Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) explicitly to authorize a vote on releasing the report. The source said Ryan deferred to the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who has authority over whether to start the process on releasing the report.

Meadows, taking to the House floor late Thursday, said he was “shocked” by the contents of the report.

“It is time that we become transparent on all of this,” he said. “And I am calling on our leadership to make this available so that all Americans can judge for themselves.”

Conaway, though, told reporters he’d counsel his colleagues against revealing classified material.

“That’d be real dangerous,” he said, suggesting that a version of the committee’s findings could be made public without getting into the specifics of what drove Republicans’ decision to share the report with colleagues.

Another member of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), said he would like to release an unclassified version of the report “scrubbed” to protect classified information. He said that in addition to questions about FISA, the report would highlight concerns among Republicans about “the judgment of some members of the FBI or some members of the Department of Justice.”

The report appears to be the result of an inquiry by a subset of Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee, the details of which were revealed last month. That investigation, led by Nunes, focused on what some Republicans on the panel have come to view as abuses of the FISA process by senior FBI and DOJ officials, as well as the handling of a disputed Trump-Russia dossier by intelligence and law enforcement officials.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... fbi-348024

ROLL CALL: Trump’s Biggest Enablers In Congress On Russia Probe
By Allegra Kirkland | January 19, 2018 6:00 am

The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to derail, undermine, and distract from the federal investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has had some crucial help from the President’s enablers on Capitol Hill.

These Trump allies have turned public committee hearings with senior intelligence officials into debates about leaks to the media. They’ve proposed bills to decapitate special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, recasting the lifelong Republican former FBI director as a liberal hack. They’ve called for additional investigations into what they describe as anti-Trump bias at the FBI and DOJ. And of course, they’ve aimed to change the subject by attacking Hillary Clinton.

In doing all this, they’ve often appeared to put their loyalty to the president ahead of the need to conduct a full investigation into a major threat to national security.

In descending order, these are the GOP lawmakers who have most aggressively gone to bat for Trump.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA)


Nunes has used his powerful perch to cast doubt on the existence of any links between the Trump campaign and Russia, and to carry out shadow probes that better suit the administration’s storyline.

First, there was his one-man “unmasking” debacle last spring. The California Republican took to the press “evidence” he received directly from the White House, describing it as proof that Obama administration officials improperly revealed the identities of Americans caught up in classified intelligence reports. After Nunes’ claims were debunked by bipartisan lawmakers and national security experts, he found himself facing a House Ethics Committee probe for allegedly mishandling classified documents. In response, Nunes temporarily recused himself from his panel’s Russia probe.

That didn’t stop him from issuing a series of subpoenas to intelligence agencies and to Fusion GPS, the firm that assembled a dossier documenting Russia’s alleged coordination with the Trump campaign. He and other House Intelligence Committee Republicans are currently hunting for evidence that top DOJ and FBI officials improperly handled the dossier.

Nunes has also put himself on the frontline of two other issues the GOP has used as counterweights to the Russia probe. In October, he announced a new probe into the debunked Uranium One scandal involving the Obama administration’s approval of a deal selling part of a company that exports uranium to Russia’s government, a move said to have benefited a donor to the Clinton Foundation. And he threatened to hold DOJ leadership in contempt of Congress for allegedly withholding information about former top FBI official Peter Strzok, who was forced off of Mueller’s team after the discovery of text messages he’d sent disparaging Trump.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA)


Grassley began the new year by sending off Congress’s first criminal referral in the Russia probe. But the target wasn’t anyone accused of colluding with Putin’s government. Rather, it was Christopher Steele, the former British spy who put together the dossier detailing alleged collusion, and a favorite target of the right. Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) alleged that Steele lied to federal agents about his contacts with the media.

The Iowa Republican also wrote to the Justice Department suggesting that then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe may need to recuse himself from the Russia probe for matters related to his wife’s unsuccessful Democratic campaign for state office in Virginia. And he publicly questioned whether the FBI warned the Trump campaign about ties between some of its staffers and Russian officials. Both moves furthered the conservative storyline alleging anti-Trump prejudice at the bureau.

Grassley has also called for a special counsel to investigate Uranium One, and made much hay of the allegations against Strzok, announcing in December that he was opening a probe into the former FBI official’s “reported bias.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)


The freshman Florida congressman in November became the first lawmaker to openly demand Mueller’s firing.

After months of calling for a second special counsel, Gaetz led a group of GOP lawmakers in introducing a resolution calling for Mueller to step down immediately because he was the head of the FBI when the Uranium One deal was approved. Gaetz called Mueller’s impartiality “hopelessly compromised” and urged other Republicans to join his cause.

The outspoken Freedom Caucus member frequently appears on Fox to float allegations that it was the DNC that collaborated with Russia. And Gaetz has said he personally warned Trump about his concerns that Mueller’s probe is “infected with bias,” putting the country at risk of a “coup d’etat.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)


Jordan has leveraged his seat on the House Judiciary Committee to push conspiracy theories in public hearings with senior U.S. officials.

The Ohio Republican has called for a special counsel to investigate whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the FBI cooperated to promote the Steele dosser. And he offered FBI director Wray his “hunch” that Strzok was personally responsible for using the dossier as justification for the FBI to “spy” on the Trump campaign.

The Freedom Caucus member kicked off 2018 with an op-ed calling for Sessions to step down for failing to plug the steady stream of leaks emanating from the DOJ on the Russia probe.

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL)


DeSantis in August became the first lawmaker to propose a measure that would end Mueller’s investigation, which DeSantis has called a“fishing expedition.” It would have eliminated funding for the probe six months after the amendment’s passage, and prohibited Mueller from looking into matters that occurred prior to the June 2015 launch of Trump’s presidential campaign.

At the same time, DeSantis, who is running for governor of Florida, has argued that the dossier—which was initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon before the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign took over—proved “without a shadow of a doubt” that the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC)

UNITED STATES - JULY 28: Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the Capitol on July 28, 2017. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

The House Freedom Caucus Chairman co-wrote the Washington Examiner piece with Jordan calling for Sessions’ resignation over leaks.

But his op-ed campaign to change the conversation about Russia dates back far earlier. Last June, he lamented that the Democrat-led “hysterics surrounding Russia” were a concerted effort to derail Trump and Congress’ agenda. After all, Meadows reminded CNN’s readers, “no formal charge has been leveled against anyone.”

Meadows would make a similar case in a Fox News op-ed published just days before Mueller’s team announced its first charges, asserting “it’s time to move on” from investigations into Trump’s campaign and Russia. In the op-ed, he called for a special counsel to investigate matters involving Clinton and the Obama DOJ.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)


In early 2017, Graham, a long-time foreign policy hawk, was questioning Trump’s softness on Russia and mocking Nunes’ “Inspector Clouseau” investigations into classified leaks. By the end of the year, Graham had changed his tune.

The veteran South Carolina senator signed off on Grassley’s letter referring Steele for criminal investigation. He alleged that Trump’s “blindspot” on Russia is “changing for the better.” And he has lent weight to calls for a second special counsel with his loud, public calls for independent investigations of the Trump-Russia dossier, Uranium One deal, and alleged anti-Trump bias at DoJ.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC)


Gowdy has maintained his public support for the Russia probe and Mueller, but the House judiciary and intelligence committee member has done plenty to cast doubt on the investigation’s legitimacy.

The South Carolina lawmaker latched on to the leaks issue early on, and spent much of the House Intelligence Committee’s first hearing on Russia last March grilling then-FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers about how the press obtained classified information about Trump officials. Gowdy ran through a list of Obama officials who could have leaked ousted national security adviser Mike Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador, even suggesting that the former President himself could have been behind it.

Gowdy has dismissed calls for a second special counsel, but has railed against leaks from and bias on Mueller’s team, recently telling CNN it was “tone-deaf” that the special counsel was unable to “find prosecutors that don’t have an ‘I’m With Her’ T-shirt on.”

Gowdy came to national prominence as the chair of the special House committee created in 2014 to investigate the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attacks. Many Democrats described the panel as an effort to damage Clinton.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker ... estigation

and never forget

The details of the classified Israeli mission – the one Trump ruined by telling the Russians about it – have been spelled out by Vanity Fair.

Here’s the buried lede in that article:

“Trump’s disturbing choice to hand over highly sensitive intelligence to the Russians is now a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia, both before and after the election.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11 ... intel-slip


sounds a lot like treason

Russia-linked Twitter accounts are working overtime to help Devin Nunes and WikiLeaks

Natasha Bertrand

Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations have begun promoting the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo.
It's a reference to a document written by Rep. Devin Nunes that purports to show abuse by the Obama administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The frequency with which the accounts have been promoting the hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to an analysis.
The most-shared URL has been a link to WikiLeaks' "submit" page.

Republican lawmakers are pushing for the House Intelligence Committee to release a memo written by the panel's chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, that outlines purported surveillance during the transition period against President-elect Donald Trump by former President Barack Obama's administration.

And Russia-linked Twitter bots have jumped on the bandwagon.

#ReleaseTheMemo is the top-trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, according to Hamilton 68, a website launched last year that says it tracks Russian propaganda in near-real time.

The frequency with which the accounts have been promoting the hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to the site. The accounts' references to the "memo," meanwhile, have increased by 68,000%.

The most-shared domain among the accounts has been WikiLeaks, and the most-shared URL has been a link to WikiLeaks' "submit" page.

WikiLeaks said on Thursday that it would reward anyone with access to the "FISA abuse memo" who chooses to submit it to the site. The Russia-linked accounts have evidently been sharing the "submit" page to push the memo's release.


Hamilton 68 has been working to expose trolls — as well as automated bots and human accounts — whose main use for Twitter appears to be an amplification of pro-Russia themes. The site's mission is to monitor and illustrate the themes that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Americans to be thinking and talking about, including "the failure of democratic governance in the United States."

Bret Schafer, a communications coordinator at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy who tracks the Hamilton 68 accounts, said he "certainly can't remember" the last time the researchers had seen a topic "promoted to this level" by the Russia-linked bots and trolls.

"On a normal day, our top hashtag is typically used around 400 times in a 48-hour period by the network we track," he said in an email on Friday.

"As of right now, #ReleaseTheMemo has been used over 3,000 times (and five other related hashtags are in the top 10)," he said. "In total, they've easily shared more than 4,500 hashtags on the topic in the past two days, and our top URL is Assange's offer to pay for a copy of the memo. That certainly seems to be a sign of a coordinated effort by the bots and trolls."

Mueller's top critics want the memo out
matt gaetz
Rep. Matt Gaetz, right. Screenshot/CNN

Several Republican congressmen — many of whom have been highly critical of the special counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the investigation into Trump's ties to Russia — have released statements calling on the House Intelligence Committee to declassify and release Nunes' four-page memo.

The executive branch would have to review the document before it could be released to the public, but "this could happen real quick," Rep. Jim Jordan told Fox News on Thursday. "Chairman Nunes is committed to getting this information to the public."

The document purportedly describes classified information Nunes obtained from the FBI and Justice Department as part of his investigation into whether the Obama administration misused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Trump and his associates during the presidential transition.

"The House must immediately make public the memo prepared by the Intelligence Committee regarding the FBI and the Department of Justice," said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who has called on Mueller to resign. "The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency. There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy."

Rep. Ron DeSantis, who has introduced legislation that would curtail Mueller's mandate and budget, said in a statement on Thursday that "the classified report compiled by the House Intelligence is deeply troubling and raises serious questions about the upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI as it relates to the so-called collusion investigation."

'A profoundly misleading set of talking points'
Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA) speaks after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions attended a closed door interview with the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol in Washington, U.S., November 30, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
Rep. Adam Schiff. Thomson Reuters
Democrats, meanwhile, have called the Nunes memo grossly exaggerated and misleading.

"The Majority voted today on a party-line basis to grant House Members access to a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation," Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel's top Democrat, said in a statement on Thursday.

"Rife with factual inaccuracies and referencing highly classified materials that most of Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they had never read, this is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI," Schiff continued.

A source with knowledge of the memo told Business Insider that it was "a level of irresponsible stupidity that I cannot fathom," adding that it "purposefully misconstrues facts and leaves out important details."

Schiff said the document "may help carry White House water, but it is a deep disservice to our law enforcement professionals."

Nunes began investigating the Justice Department and FBI after he traveled to the White House to view classified information in March without telling his committee colleagues. There, he viewed classified information that he said showed FISA abuse by Obama administration officials.

Nunes would neither confirm nor deny that he got the information from the White House.

"We have to keep our sources and methods here very, very quiet," he told reporters at the time. He told Bloomberg later that the information had come from a "network of whistleblowers."

Nunes briefed Trump on the intelligence, which Nunes said showed that the president and his advisers may have had their communications "incidentally collected" — and their identities "unmasked" in intelligence reports — by the intelligence community after the election.

A source of concern has been why some of Trump's associates who had been caught up in the surveillance and later unmasked, such as Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, had their names leaked to the press.

But Republican and Democratic congressional aides told reporters in early April — after being briefed on the classified reports — that Obama administration officials did not act inappropriately.

Indeed, the committee under Nunes' leadership made at least five unmasking requests to US spy agencies between June 2016 and January 2017 related to Russia's election meddling, The Washington Post reported last year.

The report came days after Nunes, who would have had to sign off on any committee requests to reveal the identities of US persons mentioned in intelligence reports, called unmaskings "violations of Americans' civil liberties."
http://www.businessinsider.com/release- ... nts-2018-1

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The 270 people connected to the Russia probes

By Darren Samuelsohn, Sarah Frostenson and Jeremy C.F. Lin | 01/21/18 05:00 PM EDT

A POLITICO analysis of court documents, congressional letters, public testimony and media reports reveals that the investigations into the 2016 election and its aftermath now involve hundreds of people in Washington, Moscow and around the world.

Some names sound familiar, like Stephen Bannon and Donald Trump Jr., but most don’t. Taken together, they illuminate the way federal investigators are assembling the pieces of the Russia puzzle.

Great interactive graphs and breakdowns at the link.

[seemslikeadream]

thanks for that

George Papadopoulos is the ‘John Dean’ of the Russia investigation, his fiancee says

He has been mocked by President Trump as a “low level volunteer” and “proven to be a liar.”

But the fiancee of George Papadopoulos, the former Trump campaign adviser who pleaded guilty in October to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts and is cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, says he is being miscast.

“I believe history will remember him like John Dean,” said Italian-born Simona Mangiante, referring to the former White House counsel who pleaded guilty to his role in the Watergate coverup and then became a key witness against other aides to President Richard Nixon.

Dean told Nixon in 1973 that Watergate was a “cancer on the presidency,” warning him that it was an existential crisis that could imperil his term in office.

“George is very loyal. And he is on the right side of history,” added Mangiante, who got engaged to Papadopoulos in September.

A Trump campaign aide tried to arrange a meeting with Putin. Here’s what you need to know.

A low-level foreign adviser to Donald Trump passed along multiple requests for him to meet with Russian officials, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

[For ‘low level volunteer,’ Papadopoulos sought high profile as Trump adviser]

Mangiante said she was advised by Papadopoulos’s lawyers not to answer specific questions about his activities during the 2016 presidential campaign or what he has told the FBI.

But she indicated in an interview that she believes he ultimately will emerge as more than a bit player in the Russia probe — and that his decision to cooperate after he was arrested getting off an airplane at Dulles International Airport in July was a key turning point.

Without offering specifics, Mangiante said there is much more that has not yet been told publicly about Papadopoulos’ 10 months as an informal national security adviser to Trump and his interactions with a London-based professor who told Papadopoulos, according to court filings, that the Russians had “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

“There’s a lot to come,” she said. “He was the first one to break a hole on all of this.”

She said Papadopoulos was not a “coffee boy,” as he was once tagged by former Trump adviser Michael Caputo, a nickname she found especially galling. “I know what it means as a young person to do all the efforts you do to build your career and be dismissed as a coffee boy,” she said.

Despite restraints placed on her by the terms of Papadopoulos’ ongoing cooperation agreement with the special counsel, Mangiante said she has been speaking to reporters to defend his reputation and try to explain how the lives of her and the Chicago-born former energy consultant have been upended by the events of the last year.

Mangiante said she has been extensively interviewed by Mueller’s team, who asked about her own brief stint working for Joseph Mifsud, the same London professor who offered to connect the young Trump aide with the Russians.

[Trump campaign emails show aide’s repeated efforts to set up Russia meetings]

Mangiante, who was born near Naples and trained in law and international relations, said she met Mifsud while working with the European Parliament in Brussels.

Mifsud, a former Maltese government official who had an affiliation with an Italian university, was friendly with the head of the parliament’s socialist party and was often at receptions or events, she recalled. Eventually, Mifsud offered her a job at one of his London organizations.

Mangiante accepted in July 2016 but said she only worked for the group for three months, quickly concluding that it was “a facade for something else.”

She said she never heard Mifsud discuss Russians but quit when she was asked by his partner to attend a secret meeting to discuss Iraq in Tripoli. “I thought it was very suspicious,” she said.

Mangiante said she heard about Papadopoulos, who at the time was serving as a Trump adviser, during her brief time at Mifsud’s group. But she said did not meet him until the spring of 2017, after his involvement with Trump had ended. He sent her a message through LinkedIn, noting that they had both had connections to Mifsud’s group.

Soon, the two were communicating online and, after meeting in London, quickly fell into a romance, she said. They spent the spring and summer traveling together in Europe. Though Papadopoulos had been interviewed by the FBI in January and again in February, she said he did not seem concerned at the time about what could be coming.

Until his July arrest.

“We went from paradise to hell,” she said.

She said she was in Chicago with his family at the time and the following weeks were stressful and scary. His decision to make a deal with prosecutors and plead guilty to one felony while cooperating with the FBI, she said, was ultimately not a tough one.

“It was brave,” she said. “It wasn’t hard, but it was brave . . . It’s always easiest to say the truth about everything.”

Mangiante said she is now spending much of her time in the United States because Papadopoulos is barred from traveling by the terms of his agreement. The date of his sentencing has not been set yet.

“This has changed his life forever,” she said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 37febcc921