stefano » Mon Jan 30, 2017 12:41 pm wrote:Saw this today, quite good. Feels overblown, but a lot of that is because the US hasn't had a constitutional problem since Nixon and not a real crisis since 1877, so it feels like 'it couldn't happen here', but of course it could.
Snippets, my bold, links in the original.Yonatan Zunger
Trial Balloon for a Coup?
Analyzing the news of the past 24 hours
The theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why it happened the way it did.
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(3) CNN has a detailed story (heavily sourced) about the process by which this ban was created and announced. Notable in this is that the DHS’ lawyers objected to the order, specifically its exclusion of green card holders, as illegal, and also pressed for there to be a grace period so that people currently out of the country wouldn’t be stranded — and they were personally overruled by Bannon and Stephen Miller. Also notable is that career DHS staff, up to and including the head of Customs & Border Patrol, were kept entirely out of the loop until the order was signed.
(4) The Guardian is reporting (heavily sourced) that the “mass resignations” of nearly all senior staff at the State Department on Thursday were not, in fact, resignations, but a purge ordered by the White House. As the diagram below (by Emily Roslin v Praze) shows, this leaves almost nobody in the entire senior staff of the State Department at this point.
As the Guardian points out, this has an important and likely not accidental effect: it leaves the State Department entirely unstaffed during these critical first weeks, when orders like the Muslim ban (which they would normally resist) are coming down.
(5) On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy for 2020. Beyond being unusual, this opens up the ability for him to start accepting “campaign contributions” right away. Given that a sizable fraction of the campaign funds from the previous cycle were paid directly to the Trump organization in exchange for building leases, etc., at inflated rates, you can assume that those campaign coffers are a mechanism by which US nationals can easily give cash bribes directly to Trump. Non-US nationals can, of course, continue to use Trump’s hotels and other businesses as a way to funnel money to him.
(6) Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed. On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the most that can be said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the government’s official bank), even though it’s highly unclear who, if anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies.
Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier (the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And 19.5% sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”
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That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.
Combining all of these facts, we have a fairly clear picture in play.
Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.
The regime’s main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this.
The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterday’s moves should be read as the first part of that.
The aims of crushing various groups — Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press — are very much primary aims of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off each other.
If you’re looking for estimates of what this means for the future, I’ll refer you back to yesterday’s post on what “things going wrong” can look like. Fair warning: I stuffed that post with pictures of cute animals for a reason.
As others have pointed out, those of us who typically follow Arab and African politics start speculating about the army's loyalties at this point.
The Reuters piece about the Rosneft stake sale:Commodities | Wed Jan 25, 2017 | 12:05pm EST
How Russia sold its oil jewel: without saying who bought it
By Katya Golubkova, Dmitry Zhdannikov and Stephen Jewkes | MOSCOW/LONDON/MILAN
More than a month after Russia announced one of its biggest privatizations since the 1990s, selling a 19.5 percent stake in its giant oil company Rosneft, it still isn't possible to determine from public records the full identities of those who bought it.
The stake was sold for 10.2 billion euros to a Singapore investment vehicle that Rosneft said was a 50/50 joint venture between Qatar and the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore.
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Unveiling the deal at a televised meeting with Rosneft's boss Igor Sechin on Dec. 7, President Vladimir Putin called it a sign of international faith in Russia, despite U.S. and EU financial sanctions on Russian firms including Rosneft.
"It is the largest privatization deal, the largest sale and acquisition in the global oil and gas sector in 2016," Putin said.
It was also one of the biggest transfers of state property into private hands since the early post-Soviet years, when allies of President Boris Yeltsin took control of state firms and became billionaires overnight.
But important facts about the deal either have not been disclosed, cannot be determined solely from public records, or appear to contradict the straightforward official account of the stake being split 50/50 by Glencore and the Qataris.
For one: Glencore contributed only 300 million euros of equity to the deal, less than 3 percent of the purchase price, which it said in a statement on Dec. 10 had bought it an "indirect equity interest" limited to just 0.54 percent of Rosneft.
In addition, public records show the ownership structure of the stake ultimately includes a Cayman Islands company whose beneficial owners cannot be traced.
And while Italian bank Intesa SanPaolo leant the Singapore vehicle 5.2 billion euros to fund the deal, and Qatar put in 2.5 billion, the sources of funding for nearly a quarter of the purchase price have not been disclosed by any of the parties.
"The main question in relation to this transaction, as ever, still sounds like this: Who is the real buyer of a 19.5 percent stake in Rosneft?" Sergey Aleksashenko, a former deputy head of Russia's central bank, wrote in a blog last week.
Glencore would not comment on the identity of the Cayman Islands firm or give a further explanation of how ownership of the 19.5 percent stake was divided.
The Qatari Investment Authority said it would not comment on the deal, beyond confirming that it has participated in it.
Rosneft declined to respond to questions posed by Reuters, including a request for comment on how ownership of the 19.5 percent stake was divided, information about the identity of the Cayman Islands buyer, or details of the source of any undisclosed sources of funds.
The Kremlin did not respond to a list of questions about the deal sent by Reuters.
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Following the trail of ownership leads to a Glencore UK subsidiary and a company that shares addresses with the Qatari Investment Authority, but also to a firm registered in the Cayman Islands, which does not require companies to record publicly who owns them.
Reuters asked Intesa whether it knew who the beneficial owners of the Cayman company were. The bank replied with a statement: "Intesa Sanpaolo does not comment on the details of its client operations. But we wish to reiterate that the financing was completed with strict adherence to the regulations applicable to embargoes. Italian authorities found nothing that would prohibit such an operation."
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Rosneft is the world's biggest listed oil company by output and, along with natural gas export monopoly Gazprom, one of two crown jewels of the Russian state.
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Glencore, one of the main buyers of Rosneft's crude, has Qatar's $335 billion sovereign wealth fund, the QIA, as its largest shareholder.
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The Rosneft board learned about the sale from Sechin himself only on Dec. 7, several hours after Sechin recorded his televised meeting with Putin announcing it, the source said.
I'm sure readers here will be familiar with Qatar's role in geopolitics in recent years. If you're unfamiliar with Glencore, check them out. CE is Tony Hayward, formerly of BP; the founder was the late Marc Rich; the big boss is Ivan Glasenberg, a South African, and they've lately been in the news (in Africa at any rate) in connection with the adventures of cowboys like Dan Gertler, Beny Steinmetz and Arkady Gaydamak.
Memos: CEO of Russia's state oil company offered Trump adviser, allies a cut of huge deal if sanctions were lifted
A dossier with unverified claims about President Donald Trump's ties to Russia contained allegations that Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russia's state oil company, offered former Trump ally Carter Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19% stake in the company in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on Russia.
The dossier says the offer was made in July, when Page was in Moscow giving a speech at the Higher Economic School. The claim was sourced to "a trusted compatriot and close associate" of Sechin, according to the dossier's author, former British spy Christopher Steele.
"Sechin's associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page and his associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft," the dossier said. "In return, Page had expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted."
Four months before the intelligence community briefed Trump, then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and the nation's top lawmakers on the dossier's claims — most of which have not been independently verified but are being investigated by US intelligence agencies — a US intelligence source told Yahoo's Michael Isikoff that Sechin met with Page during Page's three-day trip to Moscow. Sechin, the source told Yahoo, raised the issue of the US lifting sanctions on Russia under Trump.
Page was an early foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign. He took a "leave of absence" in September after news broke of his July trip to Moscow, and the campaign later denied that he had ever worked with it.
Page, for his part, was "noncommittal" in his response to Sechin's requests that the US lift the sanctions, the dossier said. But he signaled that doing so would be Trump's intention if he won the election, and he expressed interest in Sechin's offer, according to the document.
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump suggested the sanctions could be lifted if Moscow proved to be a useful ally. "If you get along and if Russia is really helping us," Trump asked, "why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?”
Page has criticized the US sanctions on Russia as "sanctimonious expressions of moral superiority." He praised Sechin in a May 2014 blog post for his "accomplishments" in advancing US-Russia relations. A US official serving in Russia while Page worked at Merrill Lynch in Moscow told Isikoff that Page "was pretty much a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did."
Page is also believed to have met with senior Kremlin internal affairs official Igor Diveykin while he was in Moscow last July, according to Isikoff's intelligence sources. The dossier separately claimed that Diveykin — whom US officials believe was responsible for the intelligence collected by Russia about the US election — met with Page and hinted that the Kremlin possessed compromising information about Trump.
It is unclear whether Isikoff's reporting is related to the dossier, which has been circulating among top intelligence officials, lawmakers, and journalists since mid-2016.
A scramble for a foreign investor
After mid-October, the dossier said, Sechin predicted that it would no longer be possible for Trump to win the presidency, so he "put feelers out to other business and political contacts" to purchase a stake in Rosneft.
Rosneft then scrambled to find a foreign investor, holding talks with more than 30 potential buyers from Europe, the US, Asia, and the Middle East. The company signed a deal on December 7 to sell 19.5% of shares, or roughly $11 billion, to the multinational commodity trader Glencore Plc and Qatar's state-owned wealth fund. Qatar's sovereign wealth fund is Glencore's largest shareholder.
The "11th hour deal" was "so last minute," Reuters reported, "that it appeared it would not close in time to meet the government's deadline for booking money in the budget from the sale."
The purchase amounted to the biggest foreign investment in Russia since US sanctions took effect in 2014. It showed that "there are some forces in the world that are ready to help Russia to circumvent the [West's] sanction regime," said Lilia Shevtsova, an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House.
Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin attends a briefing dedicated to the signing of a contract between Rosneft and Essar Oil Ltd. companies in Ufa, Russia, July 8, 2015. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin
Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin at a briefing dedicated to the signing of a contract between Rosneft and Essar Oil Ltd.Thomson Reuters
"In Russia we have a marriage between power and business, and that is why all important economic deals need approval and the endorsement of the authorities," Shevtsova said. "This was a very serious commercial deal that hardly could have succeeded without the direct involvement of the Kremlin."
The privatization deal was funded by Gazprombank, whose parent company is the state-owned Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Page holds investments in Gazprom, though he claimed in a letter to FBI Director James Comey in September that he sold his stake in the company "at a loss." His website says he served as an adviser "on key transactions" for the state-owned energy giant before setting up his energy investment fund, Global Energy Capital, in 2008 with former Gazprom executive Sergei Yatsenko.
There is no evidence that Carter played any role in the Rosneft deal. But he was back in Moscow on December 8 — one day after the deal was signed — to "meet with some of the top managers" of Rosneft, he told reporters at the time. Page denied meeting with Sechin, Rosneft's CEO, during that trip but said it would have been "a great honor" if he had.
The Rosneft deal, Page added, was "a good example of how American private companies are unfortunately limited to a great degree due to the influence of sanctions." He said the US and Russia had entered "a new era" of relations but that it was still "too early" to discuss whether Trump would be easing or lifting sanctions on Moscow.
Page's extensive business ties to state-owned Russian companies were investigated by a counterintelligence task force set up last year by the CIA. The investigation, which is reportedly ongoing, has examined whether Russia was funneling money into Trump's presidential campaign — and, if it was, who was serving as the liaison between the Trump team and the Kremlin.
The dossier claims that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort asked Page to be the liaison. That claim has not been verified. Manafort served as a top adviser to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine from 2004 to 2012 and emerged as a central figure in both the dossier and the intelligence community's early inquiries into Trump's ties to Russia.
http://www.businessinsider.com/carter-p ... ier-2017-1
Mystery surrounds death of former KGB chief linked to lurid Trump report
BY ADAM DARBY
A former KGB chief suspected of helping British spy Christopher Steele compile his lurid dossier on President Donald Trump was found dead late last month in the back of his car in Moscow.
The Dec. 26 death of Oleg Erovinkin set off a firestorm of speculation this weekend in local media and British tabloids about possible Kremlin involvement and a cover-up.
At the time of Erovinkin’s death, the Russian state-run RIA Novosti news agency said his body was found in a black Lexus and that a major investigation was underway, according to the Daily Mail.
His body was sent to the morgue, which returned no cause of death, and the investigation continues.
Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, according to The Telegraph. Erovinkin has been described as a key liaison between Sechin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-w ... rylink=cpy
