HEADLINES
MAJOR AP SCOOP: Manafort had $10m contract from Russia billionaire to aid Putin in US, Europe politics
Ukrainian lawmaker calls for former Trump aide Paul Manafort to face graft probe
Manafort has been accused of receiving more than $12 million in cash from an off-the-books account tied to a Kremlin-backed Ukranian political party
Former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort wanted for questioning in Ukraine corruption case
Trump:Manafort
Eric:Manafort
Kellyanne:Manafort
Sean:Manafort
Pence:Manafort
Trump Jr:Manafort
Corey:Manafort
Russian thrown out window before he could testify for Putin’s nemesis; Donald Trump connected
By Bill Palmer | March 21, 2017 | 0
Research by Karen Fehlker for Palmer Report
Russian attorney Nikolai Gorokhov was thrown out of the window of his fourth floor apartment in Moscow today, just before he was set to testify on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s longtime foe Sergei Magnitsky tomorrow. Magnitsky was murdered eight years ago but Putin has him posthumously on trial anyway, in an apparent attempt at sabotaging the “Magnitsky Act” which was named after him. And as it turns out, the Magnitsky Act has direct ties to Mar-a-Lago and Donald Trump.
Nikolai Gorokhov has somehow survived his steep fall today, and is currently in intensive care. As we reported an hour ago, Gorokhov was a key witness in the New York based investigation into Russian financial crimes led by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was summarily fired by Donald Trump just days ago. But the Kremlin’s primary motivation for wanting Gorokhov dead may be more directly tied to the Magnitsky Act.
Sergei Magnitsky’s murder in 2009 led to the passing of the Magnitsky Act in the United States in 2012, which placed automatic sanctions on any Russian officials who killed any Russian citizen for political reasons. Those sanctions have gone on to cost Vladimir Putin and his allies as much as $80 billion per year (source: Defend Democracy). If Donald Trump gets the Magnitsky Act repealed, the Kremlin will be able to cash in immediately. As such, the current posthumous criminal trial against Magnitsky appears to be an attempt at smearing his legacy and laying the groundwork for making the Magnitsky Act more easily repealed by Trump. But Trump has a much more direct personal connection to the Magnitsky Act.
Russia hired former Ronald Reagan aide Ken Duberstein to lobby against the passing of the Magnitsky Act in the United States (source: government filing). And it turns out Duberstein is a longtime member of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach (NY Times). So even as the Kremlin has apparently thrown Nikolai Gorokhov out of a window today to prevent him from testifying in defense of Sergei Magnitsky, in a trial whose purpose is to give Trump cover for repealing the Magnitsky Act, the Kremlin’s original lobbyist against the act already has close personal to ties to Trump.
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/russia ... cted/2009/
Insider the Alt-Right/All-Russia Nexus
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedMARCH 21, 2017, 7:17 PM EDT
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Now that we've learned that Breitbart and Infowars have somehow figured into the FBI's counter-intelligence probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, I want to return to a topic we discussed late last summer and into the fall. At the time we saw a disconcerting pattern. Trump friends, associates and staffers would go on TV make some wild claim that no one had heard before. Then it would turn out that the only other place the story had appeared was on RT or SputnikNews or even some Russian language propaganda mill.
One example came in mid-August when campaign chief Paul Manafort went State of the Union with Jake Tapper told a story about how US troops at the NATO base at Incirlik, Turkey had been repeatedly attacked by terrorists. This was part of the campaign message of Obama weakness, which Trump could repair. The only problem was that nothing like this had happened. (This was relatively soon after the failed coup in Turkey.) So where had Manafort gotten this? It turned out that the only other publications which had reported anything remotely like this were RT and Sputnikness. Hayes Brown caught this at the time in Buzzfeed.
If you're of a conspiratorial mind you might say, wow, Russian disinformation and propaganda keeps ending in the mouths of top Trump staffers. That's kind of weird. Is Russia somehow supplying this disinformation directly to the Trump campaign? That seems a bit hard to figure. But as I explained in this post at the time, there was another explanation.
We know that at the time Donald Trump's Twitter feed, which was clearly where he got a lot of his information, was positively lousy with alt-right Twitter feeds, often of the harshest racist and neo-Nazi variety. The whole Trump crew, which was still fairly small at the time, was awash in this stuff. For whatever reason these streams were filled with stories from RT, Sputiknews and other rightist-European news sites which themselves often picked up stories.
Was rooted in ideological affinity? Were these streams being targeted by Russian propagandists? Or, important to consider, were these streams actually filled with "alt-right" Russian bots and sock-puppets presenting themselves feral Trumpers on Twitter? Who knows? But whatever the reason, if you spent a lot of time on alt-right Twitter (which we know Trump and his crew was) you'd see this stuff a lot.
Why were Trump surrogates always pitching Russian propaganda? Because it was filling their Twitter feeds. This was likely the main reason Trump kept getting in trouble for RT'ing tweets from notorious white supremacists.
The fact that these sites and their audiences were apparently targeted as vectors for spreading pro-Trump and anti-Hillary propaganda, although perhaps unwittingly, is probably the best explanation of why they're coming up in these probes.
But here's another thing to consider, something I knew nothing about at the time.
That Manafort interview above was on August 14th, 2016. We now know that only five days earlier top Trump foreign policy advisor Mike Flynn had signed a $500,000 deal to advocate for the Turkish government. He was actually retained by a Dutch firm, Inovo, owned by a Turkish-American business man Ekim Alptekin. But his job was to advocate for the Republic of Turkey, particularly its demand that the US extradite a Muslim cleric in exile in the US who the Erdogan government blamed for the coup.
I'd have to refresh my memory on all the ins and outs of that moment, whether this might have been something Flynn told Manafort, whether it might have seemed helpful to his advocacy. So this may have figured into this bizarre moment to. But the use of these far-right and alt-right sites as vectors for pro-Trump Russian propaganda was clear at the time. Little surprise that is being scrutinized today.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ins ... ssia-nexus
Paul Manafort, Former Trump Campaign Chief, Faces New Allegations in Ukraine
By ANDREW E. KRAMERMARCH 20, 2017
Paul Manafort speaking to reporters during the Republican National Convention last year. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
KIEV, Ukraine — After his name surfaced last August in a secret ledger listing millions of dollars in payments from a pro-Russian party in Ukraine, Paul Manafort not only lost his job running Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign but also assumed center stage in a bizarre internecine struggle among Ukrainian political forces.
On Monday, the intrigue took another turn, when a member of Parliament in Ukraine released documents that he said showed that Mr. Manafort took steps to hide the payments, which were tied to Mr. Manafort’s work for former President Viktor F. Yanukovych. The documents included an invoice that appeared to show $750,000 funneled through an offshore account and disguised as payment for computers.
Mr. Manafort, who denied the latest allegations, has asserted that the ledger is a forgery and that the member of Parliament, Serhiy A. Leshchenko, was involved in a scheme to blackmail him. Mr. Leshchenko insists that a letter appearing to show him threatening Mr. Manafort with the release of damaging information was itself a fake, and he denies any involvement in blackmail.
The latest development unfolded against the backdrop of a congressional hearing on Monday in which the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was asked about Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine. Mr. Comey declined to talk specifically about Mr. Manafort or any other individuals under scrutiny in the bureau’s investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence.
Paul Manafort Quits Donald Trump’s Campaign After a Tumultuous Run AUG. 19, 2016
Ukraine Releases More Details on Payments for Trump Aide, Paul Manafort AUG. 18, 2016
Trump Campaign and Its Chief, Paul Manafort, Try to Move Past Ukraine Report AUG. 15, 2016
How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump JULY 31, 2016
Trump Aide Paul Manafort Promoted to Campaign Chairman and Chief Strategist MAY 19, 2016
Mr. Manafort worked for more than a decade for Russian-leaning political organizations in Ukraine before taking the helm of the Trump campaign over the summer. But he was pushed out after anticorruption authorities in Ukraine disclosed that Mr. Manafort may have been paid $12.7 million from an illegal slush fund maintained by his client, the Party of Regions.
A handwritten accounting document for the fund, known in Ukraine as the Black Ledger, showed entries for Mr. Manafort’s advisory work. Mr. Manafort has dismissed the ledger as fraudulent.
On Monday, Mr. Leshchenko released an invoice that he said was recovered from a safe in Mr. Manafort’s former office in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, that seems to corroborate one of the 22 entries in the ledger from 2009. The invoice billed a shell company in Belize, Neocom Systems Limited, for $750,000 for the sale of 501 computers.
Mr. Leshchenko said the invoice, along with computer disks and debit cards belonging to former employees of Mr. Manafort, was found by a tenant who rented the space last year. A signature appearing to match Mr. Manafort’s as it appears in open sources can be seen on the four-page invoice printed on Davis Manafort letterhead, with an address in Alexandria, Va.
The invoice bills Neocom Systems Limited for the computers. The invoice listed detailed specifications, for example, one as coming equipped with “Intel Core 2 Duo E6300.” The contract specifies, “Payment under the contract is performed by means of bank transfer to the account of the seller.”
This was not the first time Neocom Systems had surfaced in a corruption probe. In a 2012 money laundering and stock fraud case in Kyrgyzstan, the Central Bank listed it as a shell company used for payments by AsiaUniversalBank, a lender seized by Kyrgyzstan’s Central Bank amid money laundering allegations.
Ukrainian money laundering through AsiaUniversalBank and its affiliated shell companies was extensive and “very well known” in Kyrgyzstan, Edil Baisalov, a former presidential chief of staff, said in a telephone interview. “Our country was a laundry machine.”
To Mr. Leshchenko, the payment through Neocom Systems Limited, “shows how corruption schemes work and why they should be exposed. This was corruption linked to Ukraine, and American law enforcement should investigate.”
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort, referring to the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, dismissed Mr. Leshchenko’s allegations as “baseless, as reflected by the numerous statements from NABU officials who have questioned the validity of the so-called ledger evidence against Mr. Manafort.”
The statement continued, “Any new allegations by Serhiy Leshchenko should be seen in that light and summarily dismissed.”
Officials of NABU say they have never questioned the validity of the ledger evidence against Mr. Manafort. In fact, one corruption case has gone to court in Ukraine based on such evidence. The officials have said that their mandate is to prosecute only Ukrainian government officials.
American federal investigators are already scrutinizing Mr. Manafort’s compensation for his consulting work in Ukraine, which followed a four-decade career that included work in the United States for Republican politicians, starting with President Gerald R. Ford, and abroad for dictators, including Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mr. Manafort is also one of a number of people associated with the Trump campaign whose contacts with Russians are under investigation by the F.B.I. and congressional committees into Russian meddling in the American presidential election.
Mr. Manafort has acknowledged remaining in close touch with a former office manager of his business, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a Russian military interpreter who was investigated in Ukraine last fall over possible ties to Russian intelligence. That investigation closed without any charges. Mr. Manafort has denied knowingly contacting Russian intelligence officials during the campaign.
The ledger and the circumstances surrounding its discovery appear to factor into a bizarre incident last month when a website used by Ukrainian computer hackers released some 280,000 text messages hacked from the cellphone of one of Mr. Manafort’s daughters, Andrea.
Among those was one asking her to relay to her father a message that appeared to be from Mr. Leshchenko. The message addressed Mr. Manafort as “Honorable Count!” – a reference to an old nickname — and the writer claimed to have “bulletproof facts” regarding illicit payments to Mr. Manafort in Ukraine.
The note threatened to turn the information over to American and Ukrainian law enforcement unless Mr. Manafort found a way “to work things out.”
Mr. Manafort has said that he believes Mr. Leshchenko sent the message and was trying to blackmail him. Mr. Leshchenko has denied ever having contacted Mr. Manafort or members of his family, or seeking payments to withhold information.
With the congressional and F.B.I. investigations moving ahead, President Trump has defended Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine as a legitimate pursuit for a campaign adviser.
“People knew that he represented various countries, but I don’t think he represented Russia, but represented various countries,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in February. “That’s what he does. People know that. That’s Mr. Manafort, by the way, a respected man, a respected man, but I think he represented the Ukraine or Ukraine government or somebody, but everybody knew that.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/worl ... .html?_r=0
Paul Manafort just got nailed for Russian money laundering; will likely have to flip on Donald Trump
By Bill Palmer | March 21, 2017 | 0
We may now have the answer as to why Donald Trump and his White House tried to distance themselves from Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort yesterday. Manafort ran the campaign of Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, and has long been alleged to have illegally taken millions in Kremlin cash for it. But now Manafort’s signature has been discovered on Russian money laundering paperwork, all but proving his guilt – and it sets him up to flip on Trump.
The new revelation, released by the government of Ukraine and first published reported on by the New York Times, helps to confirm that Paul Manafort was indeed illegally on the take from Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. In fact, unless he can demonstrate that his signature on the newly uncovered paperwork was somehow forged to frame him, he’s essentially finished. Immediately after FBI Director James Comey and and members of the House Intelligence Committee briefly discussed Manafort during public hearings yesterday, Trump sent his spokesman Sean Spicer to the podium to try to minimize the role that Manafort played in the Trump campaign, but that effort was largely laughed off.
I took that development as a sign that that as Trump was watching the hearings, something that was said about Paul Manafort made clear to him that the FBI had Manafort nailed. And so Trump tried to claim that Manafort had only had a brief and small role in the campaign, in the hope of insulating himself. Of course Manafort was Trump’s campaign chairman for much of the election cycle, meaning he was in charge of the campaign. So there’s no minimizing the ties between the two of them.
But now that we know how thoroughly screwed Paul Manafort is, it suggests that he’ll end up having to flip on Donald Trump in exchange for leniency considerations. It’s nearly a given that the FBI already knew about Manafort’s money laundering and has been privately pursuing him over it. Ukraine publicly released the evidence today (New York Times), in a seeming attempt at ratcheting up the pressure on the heels of the House hearings. No wonder Trump unsuccessfully tried to throw Manafort under the bus yesterday
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/la ... rump/2008/
According to notes of Krutskikh’s speech, he told his Russian audience: “You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President Harry] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.”
Krutskikh continued, “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”
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