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Presidential Pardons Might Not End Russia Prosecutions
by ARI MELBER

President Donald Trump’s unusual pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, issued before his federal case was even finished, has sparked a debate over whether the president could end Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe with a spate of pre-emptive pardons.

But even mass pardons of all suspects in the Russia case would not close the door to potential prosecutions.

While presidential pardons can halt the federal case, local prosecutors could then pursue any Americans suspected of aiding Russia’s election meddling. In fact, legal experts say presidential pardons could make that prospect more likely.

According to a new MSNBC legal analysis, federal pardons could open the door to local criminal investigations in several states.


MSNBC exclusive: Trump Russia pardons may spark new inquiry 13:08
Why So Many States Might Have a Case

The most likely places are New York, Virginia and Illinois, three states where there is evidence that election-related crimes occurred — though it is unclear if any Americans assisted with those Russian efforts.

Beyond the three main states, the legal arguments for potential criminal jurisdiction are even broader, extending to many of the 39 states that were subject to Russian hacking.

Image: FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee
FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee during the annual open hearing on worldwide threats on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 12, 2013. Susan Walsh / AP file
According to U.S. intelligence and public accounts, Russian efforts included criminal hacking into Democratic National Committee emails, a conspiracy to distribute that stolen material, and separate computer intrusions into state election systems. That activity could form the basis of felony cases in several states, and conspiracy charges if any Americans were found to be involved.

Local prosecutors have not disclosed investigations of such conduct. Typically, state and local prosecutors defer to federal investigators, especially in national security cases. But pardons could change that.

According to a source with knowledge of one state attorney general’s preparations, the office is already studying its potential state jurisdiction for Russia-related crimes. The source told MSNBC that state investigators typically defer to federal inquiries, but there is a perception the Russia inquiry may not turn out to be a typical situation.

NBC News previously reported that Mueller tapped multiple grand juries to gather evidence in the ongoing federal inquiry into alleged links between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia, and that former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn are under scrutiny by Mueller.

Trump has denied that he or any members of his team colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, and Mueller's probe goes beyond the conduct of Trump and his advisers and includes the entire international hacking plot.

The breadth of that plot widens the net of criminal exposure.

According to legal scholars and former prosecutors surveyed by MSNBC, the case for local Russia prosecutions would be stronger if the federal case is prematurely shut down.

"If there were to be a pre-emptive pardon," says former New York Chief Deputy Attorney General Harlan Levy, local prosecutors "would look at the facts and law, and do the right thing and protect the rule of law the best they can."

"There’s absolutely a stronger local case if the federal case is shut down," says former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman.

Flynn, Manafort under scrutiny by Mueller Play Facebook TwitterEmbed

Flynn, Manafort under scrutiny by Mueller 4:07

Jed Shugerman, a historian and Fordham law professor, says the very nature of the Russian plot strengthens the case for local prosecution.

"Given how widespread these crimes were," Shugerman says, "there are lots of different avenues for jurisdiction, and New York is the easiest one."

P.S. Ruckman Jr., a pardon scholar and author of "Pardon Me, Mr. President," notes that a federal pardon does not give a potential defendant legal protection in state court.

"There is nothing about a federal pardon that prevents state offenses from being prosecuted," he said.

In a landmark 1959 case, the Supreme Court ruled states have the lawful authority to separately prosecute an individual regardless of what occurs in the federal system, and "even in the aftermath of federal acquittal."

Local Jurisdiction for Russian Crimes
While the U.S. government concluded Russia was behind criminal activity in the 2016 election, no government body has accused Americans of being involved.

Legal experts say prosecutors must follow evidence, and it is too early to conclude whether any Americans (or Trump associates) conspired with Russians to a criminal degree. If Americans were in on the plot, though, there could be jurisdiction to pursue them in the states.

"You would have to find that one of those [election] crimes occurred in New York," says Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor in New York. "I don’t think that’s a huge stretch, given that Trump’s people are here — this is where he lived, and his inner-circle lived."

For jurisdiction, Rodgers says a prosecutor would need evidence that the planning or commission of a crime occurred in the state.

"If Donald Jr. meets with Russian lawyers," she says, "you could argue that the act was in furtherance of an underlying crime, and there is jurisdiction in New York."

Rodgers adds that while the federal probe continues, local prosecutors are taking a back seat. "I don’t think anyone is out there aggressively investigating this — they are not issuing subpoenas," she says.

Beyond New York, Virginia might be able to pursue anyone involved in the DNC hack, given that much of Washington's technical support is located there. Virginia law bars computer trespass and computer invasion of privacy, and it has a felony conspiracy law targeting "any person" who conspires to commit a felony in the Commonwealth.

Illinois is one of the few states that has been publicly identified as a victim of Russian hacking. Its state law bars computer fraud and tampering, and criminalizes aiding and abetting such crimes.

New revelations come to light in Trump Jr. meeting Play Facebook TwitterEmbed

New revelations come to light in Trump Jr. meeting 7:53

Experts say the legal case against the hackers working for Russia may be solid — but that is irrelevant if the defendants cannot be identified or apprehended.

For example, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan might have a case, but no defendants.

"Russians aren’t going to come into her court," says former Maine Attorney General Jim Tierney.

That has not always stopped prosecutors. The DOJ has indicted Chinese and Russian hackers for attacks on American companies, even though they are fugitives abroad.

Prosecuting agents of a foreign power, however, is different than making a potential case against agents of the United States.

"It could happen," Tierney says. "If the [district attorney] of Baltimore wants to go after the president, is that destabilizing? Yes it is."

Tierney, who now teaches about the role of state attorneys general at Harvard Law School, adds, "The actual legal and practical obstacles to bringing this kind of case are very high."

On the federal level, the Justice Department holds the view that it cannot indict a sitting president. (The idea is that only Congress can charge and remove a president, through House impeachment and Senate trial). At the local level, prosecutors do not generally patrol federal government officials on their government service — and certainly not the president.

That line does not preclude prosecution of other individuals who happened to work for the president. Experts say the entire issue is murky.

"This is kind of uncharted territory," says Rodgers, the former federal prosecutor.

Feds Go First, Except When They Don't
Apart from any pardons or interference with Mueller, the typical state deference to federal investigations is a tradition, not a rule.

In 2003, Oklahoma’s Attorney General, W.A. Drew Edmondson, jumped ahead of a major federal investigation, indicting several former Worldcom executives on state securities charges before DOJ could act.

Edmondson says he alerted the lead federal prosecutor, then-U.S. Attorney James Comey, but decided to act because the federal inquiry dragged on with no indictments. The move broke with tradition, but was lawful.

Federal court rules also provide a formal mechanism for state prosecutors to pick up where federal investigations end.

Under the U.S. Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, federal grand jury materials, which are secret, may be requested by local prosecutors if the evidence shows a "violation of state law."

If the special counsel probe ended prematurely, local prosecutors could request that material, from interviews with every witness Mueller brings before the grand jury to other secret evidence it reviewed.

If Mueller or his investigators were no longer working for the Justice Department, states could also consider hiring them as special prosecutors or investigators to work the state case.

Double Jeopardy
According to an MSNBC review of state laws, the timing of any potential Trump pardons could be a key factor in potential state investigations.

That is because state laws protecting people from double jeopardy — being tried twice for the "same crime" — kick in at specific points during a federal prosecution.

In several states, if Trump pardoned people pre-emptively, before federal prosecution, it would be easier for the states to pursue prosecutions. The double jeopardy protection would not be triggered, because the pardons came before any federal prosecution.

By contrast, if Trump waited until later in a federal prosecution, and then pardoned defendants, they might be protected from state prosecution for the same conduct.

For example, Virginia bars state prosecutions for acts that already faced "prosecution under the federal statute." So people pardoned after facing federal charges for election hacking could argue they were facing the same charges if pursued for hacking under Virginia law.

New York also bars state prosecutions for acts that already faced federal "prosecution," though there is an exception for criminal conspiracies involving another state to commit a crime in New York.

Schiff notes Trump Jr in Russia hack timeline Play Facebook TwitterEmbed

Schiff notes Trump Jr in Russia hack timeline 7:14

The details vary by state, and have not been tested in a case like the Russia probe. The legal landscape suggests, however, that an early or impulsive set of pardons by Trump might make state prosecutions easier, while pardons issued late in a federal prosecution could prevent prosecutions for the same underlying conduct in many states. (Complicating matters further, most of the 39 states subject to election hacking have not been publicly identified, and the analysis depends on their respective double jeopardy laws.)

Ultimately, the president’s federal pardon power is absolute. As Trump’s legal defenders emphasize, there is clear precedent for issuing presidential pardons, even long before a criminal trial and for the president’s own staff.

The Supreme Court has long held federal pardons may be issued at "any time," a precedent that dates to the 19th century. President George H.W. Bush demonstrated the breadth of that power with his controversial pardons for six former Reagan-Bush officials, who were charged with Iran-Contra crimes by the independent counsel in 1992. The move included a full pardon for former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger — just 10 days before his trial was set to begin. Weinberger was charged with making false statements to the federal government, a federal offense.

The Russia probe may be different in one important respect: Unlike lying to Congress, the underlying actions may qualify as both federal and state crimes.

Legal experts agree that effective prosecutions of such crimes are far more likely to prevail at the federal level, but if that door is closed by pardons, another door may remain ajar.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politi ... ns-n797266

Here Are Trump’s 3 Biggest Lies About the Russia Scandal


Each one is an outrage.

DAVID CORN
AUG. 30, 2017 10:24 AM


Donald Trump
Evan Vucci/AP

Since the eruption of the Russia scandal, Donald Trump and his allies have consistently lied and deceived regarding assorted aspects of the controversy. Recent news stories revealing that Trump pursued a tower project in Moscow while running for president—despite his repeated insistence that he has no business dealing in Russia—are a reminder of how brazen these untruths have been. Overall, Trump has amassed a serious record of prevarication. But he and his gang have outdone themselves when lying about the Russia investigation. So much so that one can well wonder, with full suspicion, why Trump and his crew have resorted to such huge lies.

Here’s a brief review of the top three falsehoods they have attempted to sell.

No collusion

Trump has declared over and over that there was no collusion between his campaign and Vladimir Putin’s regime, which, according to the US intelligence community, mounted a covert operation to subvert the 2016 election to help Trump become president. On May 8, Trump tweeted, “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?” He maintained he was the victim of Democratic conspiracy-mongering: “Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election.” At a May news conference, he proclaimed, “The entire thing has been a witch hunt. And there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself — and the Russians, zero.” The next month, he tweeted, “After 7 months of investigations & committee hearings about my ‘collusion with the Russians,’ nobody has been able to show any proof. Sad!” He claimed that any talk of collusion was unfair to him: “There is no collusion & no obstruction. I should be given apology!”

There is no question collusion occurred. The only question is if there was any other collaboration.
Yet there was collusion. The proof is Donald Trump Jr.’s emails. In July, Trump Jr., racing to beat a New York Times story that was about to appear, posted emails showing that he and his father’s campaign had tried to plot with a top Kremlin official to acquire dirt on Hillary Clinton. The emails revealed that Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch developer and Trump business partner, informed Trump Jr. (via his son Emin Agalarov, a pop singer, and Emin’s manager, Rob Goldstone) that the prosecutor general of Russia, a Putin ally, wished to provide the Trump campaign with information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton. The emails noted this effort would be part of the Putin regime’s hush-hush “support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. quickly and eagerly arranged a meeting with a Russian emissary supposedly bearing the Clinton information, and on June 9, 2016, Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law; and Paul Manafort, the Trump’s campaign top official, met with several Russians to receive the anti-Clinton information. After this meeting was exposed a month and a half ago, the Trump camp maintained that nothing had come out of the meeting between the Trump advisers and the Russians. No dirt was snagged. But there can be no denying (in a reality-based world) that the Trumpers were colluding with Russians. They just—in their account—didn’t get what they wanted. But given that the Trump camp initially lied about the nature of the meeting and its attendees, only a sucker would accept their account at face value. Whatever the outcome of the get-together, this is a solid instance of conspiring between Trump’s top lieutenants and prominent Russians. There is no question collusion occurred. The only question is if there was any other collaboration.

Nothing to see here

From the moment the news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been penetrated by hackers associated with Russian intelligence—a story that hit the headlines a mere five days after Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort met with the Russians—Trump and his aides immediately challenged the notion that Moscow was behind this break-in. The Trump campaign’s first response to the DNC breach was to blame the victim. It released an absurd statement: “We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader.” And in the weeks and months ahead, Trump and his mouthpieces regularly maintained there was no evidence the Russians were hacking the election. But Trump’s most senior advisers had been informed (see above) that Putin’s regime was aiming to intervene secretly to hurt Clinton and benefit Trump. More than anyone, they knew their claim that Russia was not involved in political skullduggery was hollow.

More than anyone, Trump’s advisers knew their claim that Russia was not involved in political skullduggery was hollow.
In August 2016, Trump, as the GOP nominee, received an intelligence briefing and was reportedly told the US intelligence community by then had concluded Moscow was behind the DNC hack and the subsequent dissemination of information stolen from the Democrats. Still, Trump kept denying Russian involvement. At the first presidential debate, he quipped that the DNC hacker “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”

He has essentially continued this line ever since. The few times he has acknowledged Russia was the perp, he has quickly added that it could also have been another bad actor. So though his own campaign had direct, firsthand evidence that Putin’s government intended to muck about in the campaign to boost Trump’s chances, Trump has cast doubt on whether anything of the sort happened. This lie was rather consequential, for it made it tougher for Republicans to join President Barack Obama and other Democrats in fashioning a non-partisan response to Putin’s clandestine operation. With Trump insisting there was no Russian connection, it was difficult for any GOP leader, in the heat of a presidential campaign, to say otherwise. Trump’s deployment of this false assertion muddied the public narrative and provided cover for Russian intelligence’s assault on American democracy.

No business with Russia

Trump has repeatedly proclaimed he has no commercial interactions with Russia. One example: Nine days before moving into the White House, he tweeted, “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”


At the time of the tweet, there was already ample evidence in the public record that Trump had endeavored for three decades to strike major business deals in Russia. He had made a bundle of money marketing and selling properties to Russians. He had pocketed at least $12 million in income from the Miss Universe contest he held in Moscow in 2013. And after that event, he and Aras Agalarov signed a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower in the Russian capital—a project that fizzled out.

This week, the Washington Post reported that Trump signed a letter of intent on October 28, 2015—the same day he participated in a GOP primary debate—with a Russian firm to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow. While he was campaigning for president, he was, in a way, moonlighting in Moscow. Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime private lawyer and adviser, even sent an email to Putin’s office looking for assistance with the project. (In a statement provided to the House intelligence committee, Cohen said he never heard back from the Kremlin). Like the earlier deal with Agalarov, this project stalled and was over by the end of January, according to Cohen. But here was Trump trying to cook up a huge project in Moscow as he was seeking the White House. This certainly supplies one explanation for the many Putin-friendly statements Trump made on the campaign trail and his refusal to criticize Putin. A developer hoping to strike it big in Russia could not afford to tick off the Russian strongman.

When President Bill Clinton was under investigation for having lied about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, he was asked about a statement he had made under oath insisting “there’s nothing going on between us.” To explain this remark, he said, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”—suggesting that his comment had been true because he was not having sex with Lewinsky at the time he was queried about it. And for that, Clinton has been soundly derided for almost two decades. Trump’s oft-stated claim that he has no business involvement with Russia is not as juicy a lie as the famous Clinton whopper. But it falls into the same category. Trump knew he had tried to pull off a major business deal—one that could not happen without support from Putin and the Kremlin—yet he made it sound as if he was a virgin when it came to financial relations with Russia.

There have been other instances of Trump swilling faleshoods related to the Russia scandal. He has issued contradictory statements about whether he has ever met or communicated directly with Putin. He also claimed that he fired FBI director James Comey because of how he had handled the Hillary Clinton email server investigation. (Then Trump conceded the Russia investigation was part of the reason for his abrupt dismissal of Comey—which special counsel Robert Mueller might be investigating as possible obstruction of justice.) But his biggest lies are foundational: There was indeed active collusion between the senior ranks of Trump’s campaign and Russia; Trump and his campaign aides falsely insisted Russia was not intervening in the campaign when they had reason to know otherwise; and Trump had business connections to Russia from the 1980s through the first half of his presidential campaign.

Any one of these lies ought to be a major scandal in and of itself. Each one is a hoax. None should get lost in the quick shuffle of news cycles and the cascade of fresh outrages. They provide cause to disbelieve and distrust any utterance Trump or a surrogate makes about the Russia investigation—an investigation that at its core is about the credibility of the commander in chief and the legitimacy of his presidency.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... a-scandal/

Meet the Russian developer Trump tapped for Moscow tower
IC Expert has developed large mixed-use projects in Russia for over a decade
By Will Parker | August 28, 2017 06:11PM
[img]https://s12.therealdeal.com/trd/up/2017 ... -Cohen.jpg[/img]
From left: IC Expert’s “Novokosino-2,” Felix Sater, Michael Cohen and Donald Trump (Credit: Twitter and Getty Images)
Despite President Trump’s claims during the presidential campaign that he has “nothing to do with Russia” including “no deals,” emails obtained by the Washington Post and the New York Times show that former Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen and former Bayrock Group executive Felix Sater were actively working on a licensing deal with a Moscow-based developer as recently as last year.
In one January 2016 correspondence, Cohen reportedly emailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aide, Dymytry Peskov, to ask for his help pushing the project forward.
The Trump Organization had even secured a letter of intent with a developer, IC Expert Investment Co., but had not yet had success obtaining building permits from the Russian government, according to the Washington Post.
In a statement submitted to congressional investigators, Cohen said he could not recall receiving a response from Peskov and claimed the project was abandoned two weeks later, the Washington Post reported.
IC Expert appears best known for building a large-scale suburban real estate development in Reutov, a town just east of Moscow.
According to its website, the firm was founded in 2005 and has since developed millions of square feet of mixed-use property around Moscow. Most notably, the real estate firm developed the “Novokosino” and “Novokosino-2” complexes in Reutov, a more than 4 million-square-foot “micro district” with 17 residential buildings and thousands of apartments.
However, according to Russian news reports from last year, construction at “Novokosino-2” has taken much longer than many expected, drawing protests from apartment buyers, some of whom complained that the company is not employing enough construction workers. Some buyers haven’t been able to move in for over a year, according to the reports.
Nearby, IC Expert also developed Reutov Park, a 1 million-square foot shopping mall. The mall was co-developed with Amma Development, a company reportedly founded by former executives in the Russian division of IKEA.
Other development and banking partners listed on IC Expert’s website include Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender. Sberbank is embroiled in a federal gravel quarry dispute that landed in a New York court earlier this year, and it’s hired Trump’s former personal attorney Marc Kasowitz. At the time he was hired by Sberbank, Kasowitz was also working for Trump on matters related to Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
A subsidiary of VTB Bank is another of IC Expert’s listed partners. According to an email obtained by the Times this week, Sater said he had already lined up financing for the Trump Moscow project with VTB as a lender.
Both Sberbank and VTB are majority state-owned and were placed under U.S. sanctions following Russia’s annexation of the Crimea region in Ukraine in 2014.
Representatives for IC Expert could not immediately be reached.
https://therealdeal.com/2017/08/28/meet ... cow-tower/

Mueller teams up with New York attorney general in Manafort probe
The cooperation is the latest sign that the investigation into Trump's former campaign chairman is intensifying.
By JOSH DAWSEY 08/30/2017 07:26 PM EDT
Robert Mueller. | AP
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has been looking into Paul Manafort’s lobbying work and financial transactions, including real estate deals in New York. | Jeff Chiu/AP

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is working with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on its investigation into Paul Manafort and his financial transactions, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The cooperation is the latest indication that the federal probe into President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman is intensifying. It also could potentially provide Mueller with additional leverage to get Manafort to cooperate in the larger investigation into Trump’s campaign, as Trump does not have pardon power over state crimes.


The two teams have shared evidence and talked frequently in recent weeks about a potential case, these people said. One of the people familiar with progress on the case said both Mueller’s and Schneiderman’s teams have collected evidence on financial crimes, including potential money laundering.

No decision has been made on where or whether to file charges. “Nothing is imminent,” said one of the people familiar with the case.

Manafort has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has previously denied it. A spokesman for Manafort didn’t return phone calls seeking comment.

A representative for Mueller’s office declined to comment, as did the New York attorney general’s office.

People close to Manafort say the team has pressured him by approaching family members and former business partners. A number of other firms and people who have worked with him have received subpoenas.

Federal agents also conducted an early-morning raid at Manafort’s home in late July, seizing documents and other items.

Manafort did not resist the search, his spokesman Jason Maloni said at the time of the raid.

State and federal prosecutors believe the prospect of a presidential pardon could affect whether Manafort decides to cooperate investigators in the federal Trump investigation, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

While Trump has not signaled any public intention to pardon Manafort or anyone else involved in the Russia investigations, the president has privately discussed his pardon powers with his advisers.

Mueller’s team has been looking into Manafort’s lobbying work and financial transactions, including real estate deals in New York.

Schneiderman has a contentious history with Trump. The president has mocked him relentlessly on social media and TV, denouncing him as a “hack” and “lightweight.”

The attorney general won a $25 million settlement last November after a lengthy investigation into fraudulent practices at Trump University. The president said he settled just to have the matter behind him, though his previous mantra was never to settle cases.

The New York prosecutor’s office also is looking into some of Trump’s business transactions and could potentially share those records with Mueller’s team, one of these people said. Those inquiries are in the preliminary stage.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/3 ... ral-242191

Russiagate's Second Smoking Gun
"Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it," a Trump associate wrote last year

Donald Trump with Felix Sater (far right) in 2007. Mark Von Holden/WireImage
By Bob Dreyfuss
10 hours ago

Ever since he glided down the escalator at Trump Tower two years ago to announce his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has said it again and again. "I have nothing to do with Russia, folks," he proclaimed at a campaign rally last fall. A few months ago, in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt, he said, "I have nothing to do with Russia. I have no investments in Russia, none whatsoever. I don't have property in Russia." And, just in case anyone missed the point, last January he tweeted in all caps, "NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!"


A bombshell 'New York Times' report shows Trump campaign figures were willing to accept assistance from the Russians
Well, not exactly. For three decades, Trump, key members of his family and several first-rank aides to the Trump Organization sought repeatedly to strike deals with top Russian banks and billionaires to build Trump-branded properties in Russia, and Trump's real estate properties have engaged nonstop with Russian oligarchs who've bought lavish houses and apartments in New York, Florida and elsewhere. And now we know, thanks to bombshell revelations by The New York Times and The Washington Post this week, that the most recent effort by Trump & Co. came last year, at the height of his campaign for president. In late 2015 and early 2016, just as the Republican primary was gearing up, two key aides – his top lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a shady business partner, Felix H. Sater – were deep in talks with Russian investors about building what The Post called a "massive Trump Tower in Moscow."

Sater, a career criminal who'd been convicted of slashing someone's face in a bar with the broken stem of a margarita glass and who'd also been found guilty in a $40 million stock fraud case, emailed Cohen positively giddy about his real estate negotiations in Russia – and in terms that, were you Robert Mueller, the dogged special counsel investigating Russiagate, you might consider a smoking gun. "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it," emailed Sater. "I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this, I will manage this process."

If we're counting smoking guns, this one should be Number Two. Number One, of course, was the revelation last month that in June 2016 three Trump intimates – Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort – had met in Trump Tower with a Russian delegation promising to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton that came straight from Russian intelligence and the Russian state prosecutor. ("I love it!" responded Trump Jr.) Both are being folded into Mueller's high-powered inquiry, along with parallel investigations by Senate and House intelligence committees, which are looking to determine not whether Russian spies meddled in the 2016 election – that's taken for granted now, and was conclusively verified by the U.S intelligence community in a January report – but whether Trump and his allies cooperated or colluded with Russian efforts to throw the election to him.

Ever since Mueller empaneled a Washington, D.C., grand jury and ordered a predawn raid on Manafort's stately Virginia home, revelations have been piling up. (Though not from Mueller's office, which is notoriously tight-lipped, doesn't have a website and issues no press releases.) No one knows the full story yet, since what we know consists of scattered media reports and incomplete testimony from some of those involved. But for Trump, who's intervened at least seven times to slow down or obstruct justice in the investigation – not least by firing FBI Director Jim Comey in May – the Mueller investigation must look not unlike the Terminator: unstoppable. There's no timetable for its conclusion yet, but in the end Mueller's report could lead to indictments of top Trump allies, a devastating report on Trump-Russia collaboration and even a recommendation that the president be impeached. Yes, it's that serious.

Among the recent revelations:

—A series of reports in the Wall Street Journal reveal that Peter W. Smith, a GOP operative who claimed to be working with General Mike Flynn, actively sought cooperation with Russian hackers to obtain Clinton emails in 2016. (Flynn, of course, was Trump's chief national security aide during the campaign, and he served as the president's national security adviser for less than a month before being fired, in February, because of undisclosed conversations with Russia's ambassador to the United States.) "We knew the people who had these [emails] were probably around the Russian government," Smith – who committed suicide two weeks later – told the Journal. Mueller, says the paper, is investigating the report.

—The Washington Post revealed that George Papadopoulos, an eager young Trump aide, repeatedly offered to set up meetings between Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, and Trump campaign officials in 2016. One email, to seven Trump aides, was titled "Meeting with Russian Leadership – Including Putin." Apparently, Papadopoulos' work got no takers from the campaign, although investigators working with the congressional committees are looking into it. "Putin wants to host the Trump team when the time is right," wrote Papadopoulos.

—CNN reported that top Trump official Rick Dearborn, who now serves as deputy chief of staff in the White House, sought to arrange a meeting between Putin and Trump campaign officials in June 2016, around the time Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort were meeting with Russians in New York. Dearborn and an unnamed Republican in West Virginia sought to bring Trump and Putin together over their "shared Christian values," CNN reported. Many American conservatives, who support Trump's overtures toward Moscow since taking office, believe Putin's reputed strong Russian Orthodox Christian ties make him a likely partner against external enemies, including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

While any one of these leads – plus, no doubt, many more that have yet to surface from inside the Mueller investigation – could prove not to be incriminating, taken together they make a convincing case that Team Trump knowingly had multiple contacts with Russia in 2016 even as the Obama administration began to uncover evidence that Russia's GRU spy service was involved in the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Among the other officials under scrutiny – besides Flynn, Manafort, Cohen, Sater, Kushner, Trump Jr., Dearborn and Papadopoulos – there's also Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had to recuse himself from overseeing the Russiagate inquiry after it was revealed that he had a series of still unexplained meetings with Sergei Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador. Dearborn served as Sessions' chief of staff.

Mueller has unleashed a flurry of subpoenas since establishing his grand jury last month, aimed at many of those Trump officials and their aides and associates. And Mueller is not restricting himself to collusion with Russia alone, but he's digging deep into the Trump-Kushner real estate and financial empire. In addition, he's investigating whether President Trump tried to obstruct justice by blocking the investigation, firing Comey, threatening to dismiss Sessions and asking U.S. intelligence officials to defend him against Russiagate charges. Most recently, according to NBC, Mueller is "keenly focused" on reports that Trump help craft a misleading statement issued by Trump Jr. when reports of the Trump Tower meeting first surfaced.

And Sater, the convicted felon who worked with Trump over a period of years to find deals in Moscow, could be a prime target. "Michael," Sater wrote to Cohen, Trump's attorney, "I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin's private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected."

And maybe impeached.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fe ... un-w500294

Russian lobbyist testifies to Mueller grand jury

Rinat Akhmetshin was at controversial meeting with Donald Trump Jr


2 HOURS AGO by: Katrina Manson in Washington
Rinat Akhmetshin, the lobbyist and former Soviet army officer who met senior Trump campaign aides at a controversial meeting last year, has given evidence before a grand jury investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

Mr Akhmetshin gave testimony under oath for several hours on Friday August 11, in a sign that special counsel Robert Mueller is looking at the 2016 meeting as part of his investigation into links between Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russia.

The meeting on June 9, 2016 at Trump Tower in New York has been at the centre of a political storm since it was revealed that Mr Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr, was promised information and documents that would “incriminate” his father’s rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Mr Trump Jr replied to an email offering the meeting.

Appointed in May, Mr Mueller has a broad mandate from the justice department to investigate possible links or co-ordination between Mr Trump’s election campaign and the Russian government, and to pursue issues that might arise as a result. He is also able to press criminal charges. The president has characterised the investigation as a “witch hunt”. 

Mr Trump Jr was told the offer of incriminating evidence on Mrs Clinton was part of Russian government support for his father’s bid for the presidency. The Trump team has been criticised for not reporting the offer to the FBI.

The June 9 meeting was also attended by Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law who is now a senior White House official, among others. Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney, and Mr Akhmetshin, a naturalised US citizen who retains his Russian passport and regularly visits Moscow, were among the Russians present.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Akhmetshin refused to comment on the grand jury appearance.

“I don’t know what you're talking about . . . I'm not commenting on anything,” he said, adding he has “deference” for Mr Mueller’s probe and promises “full co-operation” with any investigations. Peter Carr, spokesman for the special counsel’s office, also declined to comment.

Mr Akhmetshin set out details of the meeting, saying that Ms Veselnitskaya brought with her a dossier about “how bad money ended up in Manhattan and that money was put into supporting political campaigns”.

He said that Ms Veselnitskaya discussed a Kremlin ban on Americans adopting Russian children. The ban was introduced by Moscow after the US passed the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned some Russian officials and incensed the Kremlin so much that they promised retaliation.

Both Mr Akhmetshin and Ms Veselnitskaya have been vocal critics of that law.


Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney, carried a dossier of evidence on how "bad money" was ending up in US political campaigns, according to Rinat Akhmetshin © AP
He said that he briefly brought up US-Russia relations in the meeting, arguing that the US government had “never checked” the details of the case underlying the Magnitsky law.

Mr Trump Jr initially said the meeting focused “primarily” on adoptions, but other accounts — including later statements by him — cast doubt on that. He subsequently said there was “no meaningful information” about Russian support for Mrs Clinton. In Senate testimony on July 24 this year, Mr Kushner described the short meeting as “a waste of our time” and that he had “no knowledge” of any documents being offered or accepted.

Grand juries in the US are typically used to extract evidence and to determine whether a prosecution should go ahead. Mr Akhmetshin is unlikely to know himself whether he might be a focus of Mr Mueller’s inquiries or a witness in an investigation focused on others. 

“He went into the court for hours,” said one of the people familiar with the matter. “It can’t be fun in the bull’s-eye.”

Mr Akhmetshin had attracted attention on Capitol Hill even before it was disclosed that he attended last year’s Trump Tower meeting. The Senate judiciary committee, led by Chuck Grassley, is investigating Mr Akhmetshin’s US citizenship, his military background and whether he improperly lobbied for Russian interests. 

Friends and colleagues describe Mr Akhmetshin as someone for “hire” rather than a Russian spy, although they say they cannot be sure. Mr Akhmetshin described himself to the FT as “a mercenary”, and denied being a Russian spy or working for the Kremlin.

“I spend other people’s money here to achieve other people's goals,” he said, adding that he works neither for nor against the Russian government.

He said he was working for a Russian-funded, US-registered foundation dedicated to overturning Moscow’s ban on US adoptions of Russian children at the time. Ms Veselnitskaya, meanwhile, worked for Prevezon, whose shareholder Denis Katsyv part funded the foundation.

The US justice department accused Prevezon of laundering money from a $230m fraud that the US says was conducted with the assistance of Russian officials. They settled out of court for $6m earlier this year.

That case is linked to the Magnitsky Act, named after Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian accountant who reported the fraud, was arrested and eventually died in a Russian jail in suspicious circumstances. The law imposes asset freezes and travel bans on Russian officials the US says are associated with his death.

Mr Magnitsky’s employer, the US-born fund manager Bill Browder, campaigned vociferously for the law. A former champion of Vladimir Putin who managed $4.5bn in assets in Russia before he fell out of favour in 2005, Mr Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital Management, wrote to the US justice department in July 2016 saying he believed Mr Akhmetshin violated lobbying disclosure requirements and was working “under the direction of the Russian government”. 

Mr Akhmetshin said he had complied with all disclosure requirements and was not working at the direction of the Russian government.
https://www.ft.com/content/eb36aed6-8d8 ... 6f43c5825d

SPOTLIGHT ON MICHAEL COHEN — TRUMP’S MYSTERIOUS LAWYER WITH UKRAINE TIES

What Can Investigators Learn from Trump’s Long-Time Confidant?

Michael Cohen, Trump Tower_Entrance
Michael Cohen, attorney. Photo credit: IowaPolitics.com / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Preston Kemp / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn … all members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle — past and present — have been scrutinized by the media, and their various Russia ties are being investigated by the press and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. One figure, however, managed to fly largely under the radar until very recently: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former right-hand man and in-house attorney.

Cohen, who came out of nowhere to occupy a prominent spot in Trump’s orbit, has his own unique links to Russia and Ukraine. In fact, he might be one of the missing links that ties the president to shady figures and shady money from the former Soviet Union (familiarly known as FSU).

The following story, in documented detail, lays bare Cohen’s dealings, his ties to the FSU, and how he could trigger a world of trouble for the president if he ever decided to reveal what he knows about Trump’s business empire.

Among the points illustrated below:

— Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, two key figures in Trump’s businesses in recent years, both have backgrounds tied to the FSU

— Both men knew each other; both began entering Trump’s orbit around the same time with money that may have come from FSU sources — and in a period when Trump came to increasingly depend on such monies

— Putin appears to have launched a full-court press on the United States in this time frame through surrogates, and eventually took an interest in Trump as someone who could help advance Russian interests

— Both Cohen and Sater showed up recently as intermediaries to Trump on behalf of pro-Putin policy initiatives

— While Trump has a history of sticking with supporters, even controversial ones, his loyalty does not extend to Cohen, Sater, Manafort (who managed his campaign for a time) and Flynn, who briefly served as National Security Advisor. What do they all have in common? Ties to Russia. Ties that are part of the public record.

Cohen is scheduled to testify before the House Intelligence Committee in early September; although Committee staff have not confirmed this, Cohen said in June that it will be on September 5.

While Manafort and Flynn played only specific and short-lived roles with Trump, Cohen has served as confidant, spokesperson and liaison between his boss and powerful foreign agents over the past decade.

Of all the people Trump could have tapped to function as his main man, the lawyer who is always around him, his legal rottweiler, why Michael Cohen?

The story behind Cohen’s pre-Trump connections to an avalanche of dubiously sourced money from the FSU offers a possible explanation — and the tantalizing prospect of new insight into the president’s curious co-dependence with the Kremlin.

The “art of the deal” seems to be about knowing people who need to move money, and getting them to move it through you.
As WhoWhatWhy previously reported, the crux of Trump’s relationship with Moscow goes beyond the presidential campaign to prior dealings that were central to his business empire.

Those dealings concern investors and business partners from various parts of the FSU. Tied into this network of influence are Russian President Vladimir Putin, wealthy FSU businessmen (“oligarchs”), and allied members of organized crime. And, improbably, Cohen, Trump’s own attorney.

Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at the 2017 G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. Photo credit: President of Russia / Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)

Enter Cohen, the Ultimate Groupie
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In 2007, the little-known Cohen, suddenly became visible in the Trump camp. Positioned close to the throne, he became executive vice president of the Trump Organization and special counsel to Donald Trump.

Cohen told a reporter that he first got hooked on Trump after reading his book, The Art of the Deal, twice, cover to cover. If so, he is the ultimate groupie.

“Over the years I have been offered very lucrative employment opportunities, which I summarily dismissed,” he said. “To those of us who are close to Mr. Trump, he is more than our boss. He is our patriarch.”

Indeed, Cohen has a reputation for being a kind of Trump Mini-Me. In July 2015, he vowed to “mess up” the life of a Daily Beast reporter who brought up the decades-old allegation that Trump assaulted his first wife, Ivana. And he tweeted about his desire to “gut” then-Fox anchor Megyn Kelly when she challenged Trump. Cohen’s bravado has earned him comparisons — from Trump Organization colleagues — to Tom Hagen, Vito Corleone’s consigliere in the Godfather movies.

Trump values fiercely protective loyalists, and none has proven more loyal than Michael Cohen.

With the exception of a quixotic run for New York City Council as a Republican in 2003, Cohen had been a lifelong Democrat, voting for Obama in 2008. So it was a quite a change when he decided to formally join the GOP — after Trump’s inauguration.

But neither that switch nor years of devoted service to the Trump Organization could win Cohen a post in the president’s administration, though he had reportedly yearned for and expected to occupy one. And why was that?

Possibly because by the time Trump took office, Cohen’s name had surfaced in headline-grabbing, Russia-related stories — and that is the one kind of publicity from which Trump has tried to distance himself.

Cohen and the Dossier
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To begin with, the name “Michael Cohen” showed up in the controversial “dossier” put together last year by a former UK foreign intelligence officer doing private research on Russia connections for Trump opponents. The 35-page collection of memos, published in its entirety by Buzzfeed, comprises precise but unverified documentation of continuous contact between Trump associates and Russian operatives during the presidential campaign.

Cohen’s name appeared on page 18 of the dossier, which claimed that he met with Kremlin representatives in Prague last August to conduct damage control on a pair of “western media revelations”: Manafort’s “corrupt relationship” with Ukrainian President Yanukovych and campaign adviser Carter Page’s meeting with “senior regime figures” in Moscow a month earlier.

Cohen has forcefully rejected the notion that he was the man referenced in the dossier. To prove this, he made public his own passport stamps, which indicate he could not have been in the Czech Republic last August.

Shortly after the inauguration, Cohen’s name was in the news again, this time for meeting in late January with a Moscow-connected Ukrainian politician, and in this case his involvement is not in dispute. The Ukrainian had come bearing a “peace agreement” intended to lift punishing economic sanctions that had been imposed on Russia after Putin’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

Cohen, Felix Sater, and the Russians
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Cohen purportedly attended the meeting at the urging of Felix Sater, a one-time mob-connected businessman who went on to work with Trump, and about whom WhoWhatWhy has written extensively.

According to The New York Times, as a result of that meeting, Cohen joined other Trump associates already under scrutiny in the FBI’s counterintelligence inquiry related to Russia.

Why was Cohen even in a meeting about US foreign policy at all? As Cohen himself noted, his role as “special counsel” with Trump was limited to representing Trump personally, not as president.

Since the January meeting, Cohen has become even more ghostlike, and his boss has remained conspicuously quiet as Cohen landed in the crosshairs of both the media and Mueller’s investigative unit — two entities Trump hasn’t been shy about lambasting. Though he retains his official title as the president’s personal advisor and attorney, Cohen appears to have been exiled from Trump’s inner circle. Neither the White House Press Office nor the Trump Organization responded to WhoWhatWhy’s inquiry about Cohen’s current role in the Trump orbit.

Trump is not one to banish someone just because he or she is run-of-the-mill controversial. Witness such highly polarizing, risky figures as Stephen Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller who, though relative latecomers to the Trump camp, were kept on long after they were political liabilities, albeit popular with his ever-shrinking base. (And Miller is still on board.)

So why does Michael Cohen’s fate resemble that of Manafort and Flynn, who were ditched when their Russia-related activities drew unwelcome national attention?

In the Spotlight
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This spring, when it became apparent that members of Congress might wish to question him, the typically brash Cohen declared that he would only testify if he received a subpoena. Which is just what happened — he is now slated to testify before the House Intelligence Committee right after Labor Day.

Compared to some others in Trump’s entourage, he is largely unknown to the public. Notwithstanding those brief moments in the limelight, the media overall (with a few notable exceptions including Talking Points Memo and Buzzfeed) has devoted little attention to him.

But a new development thrust Cohen back into the limelight Monday, when the Washington Post reported that Cohen and Sater had worked together closely in the early months of Trump’s presidential campaign on a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

At Sater’s suggestion, Cohen had emailed Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s personal spokesperson, to solicit the Kremlin’s approval of the lucrative project while Trump, stumping on the campaign trail, was lavishing the Russian president with praise at debates and rallies. The real estate deal, Sater suggested in a string of emails to Cohen, would be a win-win: Trump would look like a great negotiator, and Putin would be boosting the prospects of the candidate he preferred.

“Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote to Cohen. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”

The tower never materialized, but their “boy,” of course, did ascend to the presidency. And the Trump Organization renewed ownership of the TrumpTowerMoscow.com domain this July — before the latest controversy, though it has since gone dark.

Cohen’s Own Ukrainian Connections
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The son of a Long Island physician, Michael Dean Cohen received his law degree from a low-ranked Michigan school, the Thomas M. Cooley Law School — a “diploma mill” according to some, which later rebranded as Western Michigan University. The school, which, like Trump, doesn’t hesitate to sue its critics, has highlighted Cohen as an illustrious alumnus.



Cohen was admitted to the New York Bar in 1992 and became a personal injury lawyer.

He soon began assembling a portfolio of businesses outside the legal profession, virtually all involving Ukrainian immigrants — many of whom were, or became, immensely wealthy.

Perhaps the earliest was a taxi business in partnership with the Ukraine-born Simon Garber, who was at one time involved with a Moscow cab company, and now has huge stakes in cab ownership in New York, Chicago and New Orleans.

By 2003, Cohen and Garber were running more than 200 taxis in New York, allowing Cohen to pull in $90,000 a month in 2011. The partnership imploded in 2012 after a nasty legal dispute, after which Cohen went his own way and entrusted his 15 medallion companies to Evgeny Friedman, a Russian immigrant who holds the single largest collection of medallions in New York.

In partnership with two other Ukrainian immigrants, Cohen went into the casino boat business. His partners, Leonid Tatarchuk and Arkady Vaygensberg, were associated with a man who allegedly had FSU mob ties, and with a lawyer indirectly connected to the late mob legend Meyer Lansky.

The gambling venture was besieged by lawsuits from unhappy workers and investors. Cohen has had other legal problems. He could not explain what had become of $350,000 held in a trust account he managed, according to court documents obtained by Buzzfeed News.

Victory Casino Cruises
Victory Casino Cruises. Photo credit: Rusty Clark ~ 100K Photos / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

In 1998 Michael Cohen incorporated two entities: Ukrainian Capital Partners LP and Ukrainian Capital Growth Fund Corp. The Growth Fund was dissolved in 2002, but, according to New York Department of State records, Capital Partners is still active.

Towering Trump Investments
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Shortly after the turn of the century, Cohen took a new direction. He began buying — as did his relatives — properties in buildings with the Trump name.

He obtained his first in 2001: a unit in Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza. And he kept on buying.

Some years later, the Trump-friendly New York Post profiled Cohen and his passion for Trump developments in a real-estate-porn article headlined “Upping the Ante.”

Once some buyers go Trump, they never go back. Take Michael Cohen, 40, an attorney and partner at Phillips Nizer. He purchased his first Trump apartment at Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in 2001. He was so impressed he convinced his parents, his in-laws and a business partner to buy there, too. Cohen’s in-laws went on [to] purchase two more units there and one at Trump Grande in Sunny Isles, Fla.

Cohen then bought at Trump Palace at 200 E. 69th St., and Trump Park Avenue, where he currently resides. He’s currently in the process of purchasing a two-bedroom unit at Trump Place on Riverside Boulevard – so, naturally, Cohen’s next step is to purchase something at Trump Plaza Jersey City. He’s now in negotiations for a two-bedroom unit there.

“Trump properties are solid investments,” says Cohen, who’s also looking at the new Trump SoHo project.

By the time he entered Trump’s employ, Cohen, his relatives and his business partner had already purchased a combined 11 Trump properties.

Why did Cohen and company begin buying all those Trump properties? Where did the money come from? And did Cohen use this spending spree to gain an entrance into Trump’s inner circle?

The answers to these questions may lie in what at first appears to be a mere coincidence: Around the time Cohen began buying these properties — 2000-2001 — the aforementioned Felix Sater apparently first approached Trump.

It is interesting to learn that when Cohen was growing up, he had known and run in the same circles as Sater when both lived on Long Island.

Sater and Cohen would go on to play intriguingly interconnected roles in the saga linking Donald Trump to vast supplies of dubiously sourced money from the FSU.

Sater’s family immigrated to the US in the 1970s, landing in the Coney Island-Brighton Beach area, a part of Brooklyn heavily populated by Soviet emigres — and an area where the Trump family owned lots of buildings.

In addition to the Trump units, Cohen owns entire buildings around New York City. In 2015, while working for Trump, he bought a $58 million apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. According to the New York real estate news site The Real Deal, Cohen also holds multiple luxury apartment units and other buildings on the Lower East Side and in the Kips Bay section of Manhattan.

Trump buildings
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Rustycale / Wikipedia, Leandro Neumann Ciuffo / Flickr (CC BY 2.0), Americasroof (talk) / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0), Alex Proimos / Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0) and Stepanstas / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Cohen has a seemingly limitless appetite for real estate, and his younger brother Bryan, also a lawyer, entered the real estate trade and is now Chief Administrative Officer of DE Development Marketing, part of the prominent Douglas Elliman real estate brokerage.

More Businesses, More Ukrainians
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That Cohen buys luxury Trump apartments like others buy shoes — and that he has a seemingly inexhaustible budget — could conceivably be explained, at least in part, by his ties to people who, as noted earlier, became extremely wealthy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There are any number of perfectly legitimate ways for Cohen to amass the funds necessary to purchase entire buildings. Usually, however, the source of such wealth can be ascertained. In Cohen’s case, the source is unclear— and Cohen refused to discuss the origin of those funds with WhoWhatWhy.

It should be noted that Russians and others from the former Soviet Union seeking to move funds West are among the biggest buyers of New York real estate.

But Cohen’s Ukrainian ties run even deeper. His wife, Laura, is from the Ukraine. So is Bryan Cohen’s wife, Oxana.

From here we follow a trail through a somewhat complicated cast of characters. At the end, you will see how all of these people are connected to one another as well as to Trump — and to Russia.

The trail begins with Bryan Cohen’s father-in-law, Alex Oronov, born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, who emigrated with his family to the United States in 1978. He ran a Manhattan art gallery, and eventually, and surprisingly, managed to convince the old-school communist government to partner with him to sell lithographs based on the collection of the State Russian Museum. His influence or skills of persuasion were so good that he even persuaded Kremlin authorities to permit him to open a gift shop at the museum, a rarity in the USSR.

Following Ukrainian independence in 1994, Oronov spotted a far more lucrative opportunity: Ukraine’s privatized bounty of grain. Ukraine has some of Europe’s largest acreage of arable land — and it is highly fertile and productive, making it the “breadbasket of Europe.”

He founded an agribusiness firm, Harvest Moon (later rebranded as Grain Alliance); Bryan Cohen notes in his own online biography that he served as General Counsel and Executive Vice President for Grain Alliance, Americas. It’s not clear where the funding for the enterprise, which had more than 100,000 acres in production at one point, came from.

The firm seems to have benefited from the lack of strong central authorities in the Ukraine. According to a brochure from a Kiev-based law firm, “Foreign Investment in Ukrainian Agriculture,” prepared for a 2010 seminar on investment, “Grain Alliance… expanded rapidly over the last five years when Ukraine had no control from any government officials.”

In this and similar ventures Oronov, from a modest start, became wildly wealthy, working with a network of well-connected Ukrainian politicians and businessmen with alleged mob ties. One of his partners was Viktor Topolov, a wealthy Ukrainian closely associated with figures the FBI has identified as “well known” members of the Russian and Ukrainian underworld. A Ukrainian court document obtained by Buzzfeed reveals that Topolov ignored subpoenas and lied about his role in a money-laundering and fraud investigation in the late 1990s.

Semion Mogilevich
FBI Wanted Poster for Semion Mogilevich. Photo credit: FBI

To follow the Trump money trail further requires a brief dip into Ukraine’s recent history, which turns out to be crucial to Michael Cohen’s story.

Ukraine in Tug of War Between East and West
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Starting around 2000, Ukraine increasingly became the subject of a tug of war between the West and Russia. Ukraine was once one of the most valuable parts of the USSR. Since gaining independence in 1991, it has been drawn closer to the West, and has even toyed with the ultimate snub to Russia: joining NATO, the Western military alliance.

The struggle to control Ukraine, its political leaders and its resources, played a major role in Russia’s decision to enter Ukraine militarily in the summer of 2014. This led the West to impose sanctions that have severely harmed Russia’s economy. Putin has made no secret of his desire to get the sanctions lifted.

Also at stake for Russia in its relations with Ukraine is the future of the pipelines that pass through Ukraine, bringing Russian natural gas to Western Europe. Russia is not happy that its lucrative gas exports, the source of much of its foreign exchange, must be transported across the territory of its now-adversary.

Going head to head in the battles to control the future of this resource are sovereign nations, international corporations, shadowy public-private entities, and shady figures like the Ukrainian-born Semion Mogilevich. The reputed “boss of bosses” of organized crime in today’s Russia is believed to be the most powerful mobster in the world. His sub-boss, Vyacheslav Ivankov, was sent to America, and discovered by the FBI living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower, and later, having fled Manhattan, in a Trump casino in Atlantic City.

Mogilevich was identified as the secret majority owner of the Ukrainian stake in a mysterious intermediary company, half-owned by Russian energy giant Gazprom. Ivankov later stated that Mogilevich and Putin were close; soon after, the man was gunned down on a Moscow street.

One beneficiary of the Ukrainian pipeline situation was future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was paid millions of dollars by prominent players in the natural gas scramble.

While questions swirled about the international ramifications of the pipeline battle, Sater, then an FBI informant, traveled to Ukraine and Russia — ostensibly searching for properties to develop with the Trump Organization.

Alex Oronov
Alex Oronov. Photo credit: Facebook / TPM

In the past, Cohen has downplayed his connections to the FSU. In a January 2017 interview with Yahoo News, he averred that he had only been to Ukraine twice — “either 2003 or 2004.” The reason? His “brother’s father-in-law [i.e., Oronov] lives in Kiev.”

However, Cohen seemingly would not have to travel to see his relative. Oronov had homes in the US — including one on Long Island and one at the Trump Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida; he was even registered to vote in Florida.

The Cohens said that they knew nothing about Topolov when they pitched the project. But if they didn’t know the background of Bryan Cohen’s father-in-law’s famous longtime business partner, they’re unusually ill-informed, and certainly failed to do due diligence in a situation well-known to be rife with financial criminals.

Cohen and Sater and Trump….Together
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The Trumps themselves have stated that their company came to depend increasingly over the years on monies tied to the FSU. Thus, it would not be illogical to wonder whether Michael Cohen was brought into the Trump Organization because of his ability to help in that regard.

But there’s more here. As mentioned above, Cohen dovetails in interesting ways with another FSU-tied figure who entered Trump’s orbit in roughly the same period: Felix Sater, the one-time mob-connected businessman who worked with Trump in the past, and about whom, as noted earlier, WhoWhatWhy has written extensively. Both bring ostensible ties to people who themselves have links to organized crime, and to those whose interests coincide with those of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchic network.

Take Topolov, with whom Cohen and his brother have done business. Via a conglomerate of his, Topolov employed three executives the FBI have described as members of a violent Russian organized-crime network: one, a mob enforcer closely associated with Mogilevich, the powerful organized crime boss, was reportedly responsible for at least 20 murders.

We previously reported about Mogilevich’s associates’s ties to Trump Tower, dating back to the 1990s. We noted how, from its inception, Trump Tower was a popular place with people having organized crime connections. We noted the various people connected with the FSU, with FSU organized crime, and the ties between those organizations and the Putin regime.

We told the story of Sater, a USSR-born felon who had cut a deal to serve as a confidential source for the FBI in return for leniency after he was caught participating in a major financial fraud with a group of men including one with American organized crime ties.

We explained that tackling FSU influence in Wall Street had become one of the FBI’s highest priorities.

We described how, circa 2001, Sater joined Bayrock, a real estate development company run by FSU emigres in Trump Tower, and eventually began working directly with Donald Trump. Sater and Bayrock were supplying Trump with income during a period when his other investments had been suffering.

Trump Tower
Trump Tower. Photo credit: baba_1967 / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The money spigot was apparent to all. In a 2008 deposition, Sater even testified that, upon Trump’s request, he accompanied Donald Jr. and Ivanka on business trips to the FSU. Donald Jr. would later declare that the region had become the family’s main source of investment.

While Sater was moving up in the Trump orbit, Cohen’s status as a mysterious Trump real estate mega-investor of uncertain wealth and an undistinguished legal practice changed, seemingly overnight.

In 2006, the year before he went to work fulltime for Trump, Cohen suddenly went big-time, becoming, briefly, a partner at a prominent New York firm, Phillips Nizer, where, according to a profile, “he counted [Trump] as one of his many high-profile wealthy clients.”

He was then offered a job by the developer. The reason? “I suspect,” Cohen said, “he was impressed with both my handling of matters as well as the results.”

According to cached images of the Phillips Nizer website found in the Internet Archive, he was first listed as partner in October 2006. By May 2007, about the time he was hired by Trump, Cohen’s title was changed from partner to counsel. He remained in the Phillips Nizer directory as counsel until some time in late 2008.

What exactly did this obscure former personal injury lawyer bring to the firm? It has become increasingly common for law firms to bring on board anyone who can bring business with them. Interestingly, Cohen’s practice there was described as including distressed debt — which certainly could have described Trump’s frequently unstable situation. Mark Landis, managing partner at the firm, declined to comment, saying it is policy not to discuss current or former colleagues.

But in an interview with WhoWhatWhy, Bryan Cohen said that both he and his brother came to Phillips Nizer as part of a merger between Nizer and their entity, the Cohen Law Firm. Asked why Nizer wanted to combine with the much smaller Cohen operation, Bryan Cohen declined to say, terming the question “irrelevant.”

Phillips Nizer
Photo credit: baba_1967 / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Whatever one is to make of Cohen’s sudden affiliation with Phillips Nizer, just as abruptly as he appeared, he moved on. So did Bryan Cohen, who joined the real estate firm, Douglas Elliman.

Michael Cohen officially joined Trump’s organization in a top position — as Executive Vice President and Special Counsel.

With Sater already working with Trump, this meant that for much of 2007, two of Trump’s key people were decidedly unusual fellows with major ties to the FSU.

Thus we see a fascinating pattern in which two childhood acquaintances began entering the Trump orbit at the same time, circa 2000-2001 (with Cohen making his extraordinary string of Trump property purchases and Sater moving into business in Trump Tower) and, by 2007, both were working near each other inside the Trump empire itself.

In this period, we see a third figure who would later become highly controversial for his links into the FSU: Paul Manafort.

It was in 2006 that the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, long a close Putin associate, signed a whopping $10 million a year contract with Manafort based on what Manafort had presented as efforts inside the United States that would “greatly benefit the Putin government.” (As the Daily Beast reported, few have noted that Deripaska soon partnered with Manafort and the Ukrainian alleged gangster Dmytro Firtash in acquiring New York’s Drake Hotel.)

That same year, Manafort himself bought an apartment…. In Trump Tower.

A Whirlwind in the Former Soviet Union
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In September 2007, Trump, Sater and another partner posed for a photo at the opening of their Trump SoHo Hotel in New York.

The celebration would be brief. In December, the Times revealed that Sater had a criminal past.

Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater
Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater attend the Trump Soho Launch Party on September 19, 2007 in New York. Photo credit: Mark Von Holden / WireImage

This potentially put Trump in a very difficult spot. If Trump were to admit that he knew Sater was a convicted felon but did business with him nonetheless, he, the Trump Organization, and anyone within the company who knew of it would be potentially liable for sky-high sums. This was especially true for the Trump-Bayrock projects (as noted, many of them financed by FSU figures), as so many of them ended terribly, with multiple lawsuits across many states.

Bayrock unraveled. Trump SoHo went into foreclosure in 2013, after just three years of operation, leaving a slew of unoccupied units in the hands of a new developer. It was the firm’s final deal. As is now well known,Trump, who would later claim to barely know Sater, kept him on in the building and, if anything, he and Sater grew even closer. Indeed, Sater was soon working directly for Trump himself, with an office, business cards, phone number and email address all provided by the Trump Organization. The cards identified him as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.”

In this period, Trump Organization activities in the countries of the former Soviet Union appear to have accelerated.

In 2010 and 2012, while working for Trump, Cohen traveled to the former Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan and Georgia. It’s worth noting that Bayrock had earlier received large infusions of cash from the ultra-corrupt Kazakhstan, and other funds from Georgia, also awash in ill-gotten fortunes.

In 2013, leading up to the Russian-hosted winter Olympics in Sochi, a close Putin ally reached out to Trump.

Aras Agalarov, an Azerbaijani billionaire real estate developer with Russian citizenship who is known as the “Donald Trump of Russia,” paid Trump millions of dollars to bring Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow.


An Instagram post by Agalarov’s son shows Cohen with Trump and Agalarov at the Trump Vegas around the time the deal was inked.

Right around this time, Putin awarded Agalarov a state medal for his entrepreneurial and philanthropic contributions to Russia.

The Third American Political Party: Russia
.
As Trump’s relationship to the former Soviet Union intensified, so, seemingly, did Russian interest in the American political system and the presidency.

In 2014, we now know, US intelligence secretly identified what it determined was a Russian effort to sow doubt and chaos in the US elections system.

By then, Trump was widely recognized for his long-standing presidential ambitions — he ran for the office as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, garnering more than 15,000 votes in the California primary before abruptly dropping out. The Russians understood that he also had mass appeal, and a personality, temperament and history associated with provoking strong and divisive reactions.

Also, in a GOP primary field with a crowd of lackluster candidates, Trump was guaranteed to draw considerable public and media interest. At a time when Hillary Clinton, an antagonist of Putin, was viewed as virtually a shoo-in, Trump was a dark horse and a wild card, but one with plenty of outside potential to shake things up.

By February, 2015, Trump had already recruited staff in early voting states; a month later, he formed a presidential exploratory committee and delayed the production of “The Apprentice,” the still-running reality television show that established Trump as a pop culture icon in the mid-2000s. Trump officially announced his candidacy for president on June 16, 2015.

The date of the first campaign-related contacts between Trump’s people and the Russians is not clear, though as time passes, we are learning of earlier and earlier interactions.

Matters seem to have come to a head in June 2016, when, at the request of Russians, Donald Trump Jr. convened a meeting in his office.

Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner. Photo credit: Watch the video on C-SPAN, Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs / Flickr.

When the meeting was revealed in July 2017, a panicked Donald Trump Jr. sought to downplay it, claiming it was to discuss policy toward adoptions of Russian children. Further revelations forced him to gradually disclose bits of information that cumulatively make clear the meeting was in response to Russian offers to help Trump’s candidacy by providing intelligence on Clinton that could be used against her.

Among those attending were Manafort, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and publicist Rob Goldstone — who works for the son of the previously mentioned Russian real estate mogul Aras Agalarov and who brokered the meeting. Also present was Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, a fervent opponent of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on certain Russian officials following the imprisonment, and subsequent death, of a Russian tax accountant investigating fraud. Veselnitskaya claimed to hold incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.

Another participant was Rinat Akhmetshin, whose past activities and associations led some to wonder whether he was or is a spy. Sen. Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley, a Republican, speculated that the meeting itself was a classic ploy of Russian intelligence, intended to draw the Trump people into a potentially incriminating relationship. That, perhaps paradoxically, would likely make Trump even more vulnerable and beholden to Putin.

And of course the meeting was arranged via Goldstone, who works for the Agalarovs — who performed such valuable services to Russia that, as noted, Putin gave Aras Agalarov a medal.

Cozier and Cozier
.
To sum up, Trump’s financial fortunes seem — both by appearance and by statements from the Trumps themselves — to have been heavily dependent on money from the former Soviet Union. Besides the Cohen retinue buying at least 11 apartments in Trump buildings, the money that came in through Felix Sater was also from the FSU.

How much of the funds that kept Trump’s shaky financial empire afloat in those lean years had its origins in the part of the world dominated by the Kremlin? Well, how much did not? Even Donald Trump, Jr. declared in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

As for Trump, he has repeatedly tweeted and declared that he has no loans “from Russia” and no “deals” in Russia. While that may be technically true, what’s more important is that money that originated in the FSU has played a crucial role in his business career. The “art of the deal” seems to be about knowing people who need to move money, and getting them to move it through you.

Felix Sater, FBI
Felix Sater and Trump business card superimposed over FBI building. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Cliff / Flickr (CC BY 2.0), 591J / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Boing Boing (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

Sater appears to have been an FBI asset for many years, including at least some of the years when Cohen was working with Trump.

Sater denied to WhoWhatWhy that any of his reports to the FBI from Trump Tower concerned organized crime figures in Russia, and asserted that he had never even heard of Mogilevich, though his own father was said to be a Mogilevich underling.

In any case, the FBI agents running Sater were extremely focused on the FSU underworld. It is likely that they would take an interest in the partner of Cohen’s in-law, and all the partner’s ties to organized crime. And they would surely have been interested in how Donald Trump fit into this underworld web all around him.

The Ukraine “Peace Deal”
.
Yet Cohen remained mostly out of the public eye, even as myriad Trump associates (including Manafort) ended up in the hot seat for their business dealings in the FSU.

That changed with the report of the January 27, 2017, meeting between Cohen, Sater and Ukrainian politician Andrii V. Artemenko at a luxury hotel in New York.

The three men discussed a proposed Russia-Ukraine peace agreement that would result in the lifting of economic sanctions against Russia. Artemenko told The New York Times that Cohen delivered the proposal to Michael Flynn, who was then Trump’s national security advisor. Cohen has told different stories about his role, but in one interview he confirmed that he delivered a bundle of documents containing the proposal to Flynn’s office while Flynn was still part of the Trump administration. Cohen has insisted he was not aware of any Kremlin involvement.

In bragging about his role in getting such material into the White House, Artemenko comes across as clumsy and artless, seemingly oblivious to how devastating the revelation could have been to Trump had the media and, say, influential congressmen made more of it. But was he naive? Or was this actually a House of Cards-type scenario, where the Russians were deliberately publicizing another bit of incriminating material on Trump in order to gain yet more leverage over him and control over his fate?

The Artemenko “peace plan” was — importantly — accompanied by documents that purported to reveal corruption on the part of Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, which could be used to weaken (and potentially topple) the Ukrainian regime led by an enemy of Putin.

This of course made the current Ukrainian authorities go ballistic. No more has emerged on the document bundle, or what, if anything, resulted from its arrival in the White House. But the intent was clearly to advance Russia’s interests, and that of a pro-Russian Ukrainian politico with historic ties to Manafort.

Andrii V. Artemenko , Michael Cohen
Andrii V. Artemenko superimposed photo of Michael Cohen. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from IowaPolitics.com / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and A. V. Artemenko / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Although Felix Sater was present at the meeting as a supposed intermediary, he wouldn’t have been needed for that. Artemenko had known Cohen for years. Cohen’s brother’s father-in-law was, as mentioned earlier, tied to Artemenko through business. Artemenko was also closely tied to Topolov, the allegedly money-laundering Ukrainian politician in business with Oronov, Bryan Cohen’s father-in-law. (Oronov died March 2 after suffering from what Bryan Cohen described to WhoWhatWhy as an “incredibly aggressive” cancer diagnosed three months earlier.)

Artemenko said that his Russia-Ukraine sanctions proposal had been discussed with Cohen and Sater back during the primaries in early 2016, just as Trump was emerging as the frontrunner.

Western sanctions have delivered some crushing blows to Russia’s economy, slashing both its GDP and ruble value by 50 percent in three years, according to a 2017 Congressional Research Service report. Though the economy is expected to resume modest growth, getting out from under the stifling sanctions is for Putin still a national security concern of the highest possible priority. And the Trump camp had been all about lifting the sanctions.

During the 2016 Republican Convention, the party surprisingly removed from its platform a condemnation of Russia over its incursion into Ukraine. Initially, both Donald Trump and campaign manager Paul Manafort denied any knowledge of the platform change. Much later, though, we learned that Trump’s platform chairman, J. D. Gordon, had met with the Russian ambassador during the convention.

In an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta, Gordon said he had promoted the softening of the language on Ukraine — a softening that Trump himself had advocated earlier in the year, in a meeting with Gordon. Later still, Gordon would attempt to walk back the admission in a parsing reminiscent of Bill Clinton: “I mean, what’s the definition of pushed for the amendment, right? It’s an issue of semantics.”

Semantics or no semantics, the platform was changed.



Trump himself has been very kind to Russia. As a candidate, he worked strenuously to avoid criticizing Russia. He wouldn’t even acknowledge that Russia had seized Crimea, or that it had military units in eastern Ukraine. Even after he was nominated, he told a reporter,

“Just so you understand: [Putin] is not going to go into Ukraine, all right?,” as if that had not already happened two years earlier.

This seeming quid pro quo with Russia suggests the extent to which Russia has compromised the Trump White House.

Having Cohen and Sater deliver the sanctions “peace proposal” to Flynn, a trusted figure with his own Russia connections, keeps Trump himself out of the loop, something Cohen would well understand — that’s one of the core things lawyers do understand, and a role they often play.

We also know that Artemenko’s role in the meetings with Cohen and Sater led Ukraine’s chief prosecutor to open a treason investigation.

Why would Cohen go to such a meeting? It seems crazy. But then the Trump team’s defining trait has been its reckless bravado, and a brash disregard for troubling appearances.

As for Artemenko’s seemingly bumbling admission about the meeting, it is reminiscent of the “indiscretion” of Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the US, who went to the Republican convention to meet with Manafort about softening the GOP’s stance toward Russia. Although Trump and Manafort vigorously denied it, Kislyak then went public with his own account of the meeting.

In the complex game being played by Putin, with Russia’s (and Putin’s) future at stake, Trump seems to have been cornered into a precarious dependence on Russian “good will.” As we noted months ago, the FBI has long known much of this. What former FBI director and Special Counsel Robert Mueller will do about it remains to be seen.

WhoWhatWhy sought an interview with Cohen, but he declined. When we offered to send him questions, he wrote back: “You can send questions but not committing to respond.” We did send questions. And he did not respond.

https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/08/30/spotl ... aine-ties/

Stephen Miller, James Comey and the Mystery of the Secret Hour

By JOSH MARSHALL Published SEPTEMBER 1, 2017 1:12 PM

With the news that Robert Mueller has a copy of the original letter on James Comey’s firing written by Trump aide Stephen Miller and Trump himself, we need to return to the great mystery of that lost hour on the tarmac on Air Force One.

What am I talking about? Well, with a touch of dramatic flair I’m talking about this odd and increasingly odd over time mystery about what was happening the night President Trump came back from his Bedminster villa after a weekend of stewing about James Comey and then fired Comey 36 hours later.

At the time, it just seemed like another Trump era weirdness. Air Force One landed. Jared got off the plane, put Ivanka and the kids in an SUV and then got back on the plane. And then Trump and a group of his closest aides were apparently arguing on the plane for about an hour while the traveling press cooled its heels and wondered what was going on. They never got an explanation. But after about an hour a rather disheveled President Trump got off the plane and went back to the White House. Who was there on the plane with Trump? Stephen Miller.

Here’s the key portion from my rundown from early June on the details …

4. What happened that Sunday night on Air Force One? What am I talking about? Let’s look at the timeline. We know from abundant reporting that in early May (May 6th-7th) President Trump spent the weekend at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. He apparently stewed over that weekend about Comey and came back to Washington Sunday night determined to fire him. He proceeded to do just that. He called in Rosenstein and Sessions the next day (Monday), got Rosenstein’s recommendation memo and promptly fired Comey on Tuesday (May 9th).

This we all know. But that Sunday evening return flight from New Jersey was also the night something kind of odd happened. Air Force 1 left Morristown at 8:02 PM and landed at Andrews at 8:40. But unlike what normally happens, the President didn’t get off the plane. Just before 9 PM Jared and Ivanka got off the plane with their kids. Jared put Ivanka and the kids into a silver minivan and got back on the plane. He got off the plane again at 9:07 and then got back on the plane a couple minutes later. The press pooler for that night filed an update at 9:18 PM updating colleagues and noting that there’d been no explanation what the hang up was or why the President was still on the plane.

Finally, at 9:24 PM the cabinet room opened and the president emerged. Here’s the pool report filed a few minutes later.

Cabinet door opened at 9:24 pm, and POTUS, sans tie, emerged at 9:26,
46 mins after wheels down. He was followed a moment later by Hope
Hicks, Jared Kusher, KT McFarland, Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino.

No immediate explanation from press shop for the delay.

Kushner walked by the press corp, and stopped briefly in front of
reporters. “Every is good. He was just working on something,” Kushner
said.

One reporter asked if he would do any more briefings. “I don’t think
so. I’m not as good as Sean.”

A few minutes later the press cool got this from the press office: “On background, the President was finishing a meeting.”

Here’s a mini-collage I put together the next evening (Monday evening), along with photos posted to Twitter by Mark Knoller of CBS news.



Not a great deal got made of this after that evening. That’s understandable and largely correct. Any number of things could have happened. Maybe they just wanted to finish a meeting. Maybe the President was eating or needed a bathroom break. It was only 45 minutes. Let me also clearly bound my own questions and speculations. I don’t think anything horrible or shocking happened in that 45 minutes. But given the oddity of the event and the fact that Trump returned to the White House and immediately put in process one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency – firing Comey – I think it is highly, highly likely that the two things are connected. As you can see from the pool report, Trump was traveling with what I would call five of his most aggressive and enabling advisers: Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner, KT McFarland, Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino. We know from subsequent reporting that Kushner was a major proponent, perhaps the most voluble proponent of firing Comey. I strongly suspect that the hold up was some on-going discussion, perhaps a heated discussion, of the decision to fire Comey.

However that may be, I think Kushner’s role in all of the entire Trump/Russia story is bigger and more central than most of us have understood. One day will find out what happened in that 45 minutes. And I’ll be happy that day.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ste ... ecret-hour

Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MAGGIE HABERMANSEPT. 1, 2017

James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May, less than a week before he was fired by President Trump. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has obtained a letter that President Trump and a top political aide drafted in the days before Mr. Trump fired the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, which explains the president’s rationale for why he planned to dismiss the director.

The May letter had been met with opposition from Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, who believed that some of its contents were problematic, according to interviews with a dozen administration officials and others briefed on the matter.

Mr. McGahn successfully blocked the president from sending Mr. Comey the letter, which Mr. Trump had composed with Stephen Miller, one of the president’s top political advisers. A different letter, written by the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, and focused on Mr. Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, was ultimately sent to the F.B.I. director on the day he was fired.

Photo

Stephen Miller, one of Mr. Trump’s top advisors, helped the president draft a letter explaining the rationale for firing Mr. Comey. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
The contents of the original letter appear to provide the clearest rationale that Mr. Trump had for firing Mr. Comey. The Times has not seen a copy of the letter and it is unclear how much of Mr. Trump’s rationale focuses on the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump told aides at the time he was angry that Mr. Comey refused to publicly say that Mr. Trump himself was not under investigation, something Mr. Comey had told the president privately.

Comey’s Writing a Book, and Publishers Are Eager to Pay Big Money for It JULY 15, 2017
Mr. Comey later confirmed in testimony to Congress in June that he had told the president that he was not under investigation, but said he didn’t make that public because the status could change in the future.

Mr. Mueller is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into Russia and associates of Mr. Trump, including whether the president obstructed justice when he dismissed the F.B.I. director.

The Justice Department turned over a copy of the letter to Mr. Mueller in recent weeks.

Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer, declined to discuss the letter or its contents. “To the extent the special prosecutor is interested in these matters, we will be fully transparent with him,’’ he said.

Mr. Miller drafted the letter at the urging of Mr. Trump during a weekend in May, when Mr. Trump and his team were at the president’s private golf club in Bedminster, N.J. During that same weekend, as Mr. Trump and a small group of aides were in Bedminster devising a rationale for Mr. Comey’s dismissal, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein were working on a parallel effort to fire Mr. Comey.

During testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May, Mr. Comey gave the first detailed explanation for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton, saying “it makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election.”

His conduct during the hearing added to concerns held by Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein that the F.B.I. director had botched the Clinton investigation and had overstepped the boundaries of his job.

Two days after Mr. Comey’s testimony, Mr. Rosenstein had a meeting with a White House lawyer at the Justice Department, where Mr. Rosenstein expressed concern about how the F.B.I. director had handled the Clinton investigation. The White House lawyer relayed the details of the conversation to his bosses at the White House.

Mr. Comey was fired on May 9.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/p ... ml?mcubz=0

A Putin-Friendly Oligarch’s Top US Executive Donated $285,000 to Trump

The head of Viktor Vekselberg’s American subsidiary helped finance Trump’s inauguration.

DAVID CORN AND DAN FRIEDMANAUG. 17, 2017 6:00 AM



Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Renova Group Board Chairman Viktor Vekselberg at the Russia-USA Business Dialogue panel in St. Petersburg in June.Metzel Mikhail/ZUMA

Earlier this year, as Donald Trump, then the president-elect, was trying to counter news reports that Russia had hacked the 2016 election to help him win, the head of the American subsidiary of a Russian conglomerate owned by a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin made a huge donation to Trump.

On January 6—the day the US intelligence community reported that Putin had approved a covert operation to subvert the presidential campaign to assist Trump—Andrew Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Intrater is the CEO of Columbus Nova, the lone American subsidiary of Renova Group, a giant holding company owned by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg with interests in the metals, mining, chemical, construction, transport, energy, telecommunication, and financial sectors in Russia and abroad. Intrater, an American citizen, is Vekselberg’s cousin, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In June, Intrater also made a $35,000 contribution to a joint fundraising committee for Trump’s reelection and the Republican National Committee.

Intrater has no public history as a major political funder; his Trump donations dwarf his previous contributions. According to Federal Election Commission records, his only past political donations were $2,600 in 2014 to a business associate running as a Republican for Congress, $1,200 to Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s 2008 presidential campaign, and $250 to the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts in 1995. Intrater’s hefty gift to the inauguration fund earned him special access to inaugural events, including a dinner billed as “an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees,” according to a fundraising brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Vekselberg is one of Russia’s richest men. Bloomberg recently estimated his net worth at $15.5 billion. The same month that Intrater pumped that quarter of a million dollars into Trump’s inauguration bank account, Vekselberg publicly expressed hope for the lifting this year of the tough US and European economic sanctions imposed on Russia after it annexed Crimea and supported pro-Russian separatists fighting in Ukraine.

Vekselberg, one of Russia’s richest men, seems to be on good terms with Putin and the Kremlin.
During the campaign, Trump advisers hinted at the possibility of easing or removing the sanctions. After Trump took office, his administration reportedly considered unilaterally lifting sanctions on Russia and returning diplomatic compounds seized in December as retaliation for Russian interference in the 2016 election, moves Trump aides hoped would improve relations with Moscow. The White House also unsuccessfully opposed a congressional measure to bar Trump from undoing sanctions without approval from Capitol Hill lawmakers.

Vekselberg seems to be on good terms with Putin and the Kremlin. He heads a major Russian initiative to bring high-tech businesses into the country. In December 2015, he attended a gala dinner featuring Putin that celebrated the 10th anniversary of RT, the English-language, Kremlin-cozy media outlet. (Retired Gen. Michael Flynn, then an adviser to Trump, was an honored guest at the dinner and was paid $45,000 to speak at a conference that was part of this RT celebration.) In March, Vekselberg had a one-on-one meeting with Putin to discuss infrastructure projects involving his business. (Renova is constructing an airport in southern Russia as part of the nation’s preparations to host the 2018 soccer World Cup.)

Vekselberg certainly scored points with Putin with a pet project: his acquisition and repatriation to Russia of Fabergé eggs. In 2013, Vekeslberg told an interviewer he had spent more than $100 million to obtain the eggs, which once were owned by the late Malcolm Forbes. He noted that Putin personally thanked him for this: “I’ve seen the emotion of our president. It’s important to him that a Russian citizen has brought back this important collection.”

Like many Russian oligarchs, Vekselberg has faced accusations of corruption. One lawsuit claimed he used gunmen to gain control of a Siberian oil field. Two senior executives at firms controlled by Vekselberg were imprisoned last year in Russia on charges that they bribed regional officials.

Republicans were previously eager to highlight Renova and Vekselberg’s political contributions—to Hillary Clinton.
In 2014, Vekselberg’s Renova Group became a partner with American billionaire investor Wilbur Ross in the takeover of the Bank of Cyprus, which had held billions in deposits from wealthy Russians—some of it presumably dirty money or funds deposited there to avoid Russian taxation. The bank had failed in 2013. Ross went on to become Trump’s secretary of commerce. During his confirmation hearings in February, Democratic senators sent Ross a list of questions regarding his relationship with Vekselberg. Ross has yet to answer them.

Columbus Nova, the Renova American subsidiary headed by Intrater, is a New York-based investment firm that claims more than $2 billion in investments in a variety of industries, including biofuels, real estate, health care, insurance, telecommunications, and construction.

Intrater and Renova and the Republican National Committee did not respond to requests for comment. Asked about Intrater’s donations to Trump, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “You would need to contact inaugural.” The Trump inaugural committee did not respond to a subsequent inquiry.

Republicans were previously eager to highlight Renova and Vekselberg’s contributions—but to another candidate. During the 2016 election, the Trump campaign and conservatives blasted Hillary Clinton for a link with Vekselberg because the Renova Group had donated between $50,000 an $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The Trump campaign issued a press release claiming that this contribution was evidence Clinton was actually the candidate in the race with “close ties” to Putin and had “sold out American interests to Putin in exchange for political and financial favors.” (That press release is no longer available online.) Conservative groups and media outlets—including the National Review, Investors Business Daily, and the Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed page—have cited this relatively modest Renova donation as proof the Clintons were chummy with Putin’s regime. In 2015, David Bossie, a conservative activist who went on to serve as deputy campaign manager for Trump, said the Clinton Foundation’s connection to Vekselberg was “just another example of how the Clintons will take money from any source, good, bad, or ugly.”

Besides Intrater’s $250,000 donation—which has not previously been reported—Trump’s inaugural committee accepted other Russia-related contributions. Russian American businessman Alexander Shustorovich and Access Industries, a firm owned by Len Blavatnik, a Soviet-born American citizen and Vekselberg’s longtime business partner, each gave $1 million to finance Trump’s inauguration.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -to-trump/

Josh Marshall wrote:

I strongly suspect that the hold up was some on-going discussion, perhaps a heated discussion, of the decision to fire Comey.

Labor Day Bombshell Dropped As Congress Is Investigating Trump For Seeking Russia Business
By Jason Easley on Sun, Sep 3rd, 2017 at 2:36 pm
During an interview on CNN's State Of The Union, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed that Congress is investigating Trump for seeking business in Russia during the 2016 election.


Labor Day Bombshell Dropped As Congress Is Investigating Trump For Seeking Russia Business
During an interview on CNN’s State Of The Union, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed that Congress is investigating Trump for seeking business in Russia during the 2016 election.

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stW-kiQSMyo


Rep. Schiff said, “I think it’s very significant. We had requested documents from Mr. Cohen, and not being satisfied, we subpoenaed Mr. Cohen for whatever records were relevant to our investigation. It means, among other things, the President was dishonest when he said during the campaign that he had no business in Russia, was pursuing no business in Russia, so yet another misleading statement by the Administration about their relationship with Russia. It’s also significant because if they were pursuing business in Russia during the campaign that might have influenced the positions the candidate took in a more pro-Russia direction. After all, if they were going to be criticizing Putin, criticizing Russia, that would diminish the chances that this deal would go through. We obviously want to get to the bottom of it, and we expect at some point, we’ll have Mr. Cohen come in and testify. We’ll also expect Mr. Sater to come in and testify so we can understand this more fully.”

As soon as Trump and his lawyers warned investigators not to look into the family business dealings, every single investigator began doing exactly that. The money is the connection which the Trump/Russia relationship was built on. After his third bankruptcy, US banks would no longer lend to him, so Trump funded projects like his golf courses with Russian cash. Trump has lived his entire life to make money, so it should be a surprise to no one that money will be at the heart of the Russia scandal.

The Russia investigation isn’t taking a holiday. It is a complicated scandal with dozens of potential threads. It will take time for both Congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert Mueller to connect the dots, but there is a pattern taking shape where it is possible that Trump obstructed justice, because election collusion may only be a byproduct of the financial crimes at the heart of the Russia scandal.
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/09/03/ ... iness.html

seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 07, 2017 12:37 am wrote:

Donald and Ivanka Trump’s phony Baku Azerbaijan hotel was front for Iranian money laundering
By Bill Palmer | March 6, 2017 | 0

Shortly after taking office, Donald Trump abandoned a bizarre hotel project in Azerbaijan which never made any sense to begin with. It was built in an industrial part of town where a hotel wouldn’t be needed. The roads being built to the hotel didn’t even lead to it. And now it turns out the entire hotel project appears to have been little more than an excuse to illegally launder money coming from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku project was spearheaded by Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who repeatedly visited the property and posted photos of herself touring it, even though as best anyone can tell the hotel was never going to open or do any business. It appears in hindsight that Ivanka had merely been doing all of this in order to create the outward appearance that the hotel was a legitimate project.

But as it turns out, the hotel deal had been struck with Ziya Mammadov, the corrupt Transportation Minister of Azerbaijan, who has a history of arranging shady real estate projects as money laundering fronts. Mammadov and his family have deep financial connections to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, making it almost certain that the Trumps were knowingly and illegally doing business with Iran. It also seems likely that Trump shuttered the project upon taking office in the hope it wouldn’t be investigated.

Based on established precedent explained this evening on the Rachael Maddow show, the legal responsibility falls on U.S. citizens to be aware of which foreigners they’re doing business with. So even if Donald and Ivanka Trump try to claim ignorance in this instance, it wouldn’t legally get them off the hook. This new revelation comes from The New Yorker today. It may explain why Senator Sherrod Brown asked the U.S. Treasury late last week to investigate the legality of Trump’s foreign financial connections.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/az ... iran/1812/

Other deals Trump has said he has ended, but are still noteworthy
Until recently, Trump had a deal with the son of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister

Trump Entities Foreign Entities Foreign Power
Trump Donald J. Trump has ownership in a holding company called THC Baku Services LLC, which was incorporated on December, 10, 2014 in Delaware.

That company has ownership in a holding company called THC Baku Services Member Corp. Tap icon which has a management deal with a company in Azerbaijan called Baku-XXI Century LLC. Mammadov That company is run by Anar Mammadov Z mammadov who is the son of Ziya Mammadov, the transportation minister of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
Ivanka azerbaijan 420
In 2015, Trump brokered a licensing deal for a luxury hotel tower in Baku with the son of the Azerbaijan’s transportation minister, Ziya Mammadov. The younger Mammadov, Anar, is viewed by Western intelligence services and analysts as a proxy for his father and the Azerbaijani ruling elite.

Leaked State Department cables described the elder Mammadov as "notoriously corrupt, even for Azerbaijan" and accused him of involvement in highway contracts awarded to a former senior Iranian military official in the Republican Guard. "We assume Mammadov is a silent partner in these contracts," a cable said.

“If you did your due diligence, you’d learn that the minister of transport was one of the more corrupt public officials in Azerbaijan and his son was only in business because of his father,” Richard Kauzlarich, a former ambassador to Azerbaijan, told ProPublica.

The Baku-Trump hotel was not completed, but Trump earned more than $2.8 million in hotel management fees between 2015 and 2016, according to federal financial disclosures.

Trump Organization officials told ProPublica in a statement that the project was plagued with delays for more than a year, prompting Trump to end his “association with this project and reallocate our resources.” (Full statement here.) The Mammadovs did not respond to requests for comment.

(Photo: Trump Hotel Collection)
https://projects.propublica.org/trump-conflicts/

Trump Hotel in Baku Partnered With ‘Notoriously Corrupt’ Oligarch Family With Ties to Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
BY ROBBIE GRAMERMARCH 6, 2017 - 2:28

Trump Hotel in Baku Partnered With ‘Notoriously Corrupt’ Oligarch Family With Ties to Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps

Conflicts of interest have been a permanent fixture of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency. But a new report from the New Yorker shines a damning spotlight on one of Trump’s most ethically hazy deals, and one that may leave the Trump Organization open to federal prosecution: The Trump Organization’s work to build and manage a hotel in Azerbaijan in partnership with corrupt oligarchs, themselves apparently linked to individuals tight with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

To build the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku — a project conceived in 2008, and nearly finished, but never opened to the public — the Trump Organization worked with the family of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister and a powerful oligarch, Ziya Mammadov. The project has plenty of problems — it’s in the wrong part of town, and can’t compete with existing high-end hotels there — but seems likely to have fallen prey to the notoriously lax local ethics for business dealings.

Adam Davidson describes in great detail in his investigative report how Mammadov was known as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan,” in a U.S. diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks years ago. He and his family also have close ties to a prominent Iranian business family, the Darvishis, whose members headed Revolutionary Guard-controlled firms that the U.S. government accused of sponsoring terrorism abroad and engaging in illicit activity including drug trafficking and money laundering.

With the Baku hotel deal, the Trump Organization may have violated federal corruption laws, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the New Yorker notes. The heart of the problem seems to be little due diligence before Trump jumped into the project, even though the country is known for being corrupt, his partners were billionaires on a $12,000-a-year-government salary, and corrupt practices were so commonly talked about they litter the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks and featured prominently in a 2014 Foreign Policy piece, “The Corleones of the Caspian.”

“The entire Baku deal is a giant red flag — the direct involvement of foreign government officials and their relatives in Azerbaijan with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Corruption warning signs are rarely more obvious,” Jessica Tillipman, an FCPA expert and assistant dean at George Washington University Law School, told the New Yorker.

“The Trump Organization’s Baku project shows the lack of ‘extreme vetting’ Mr. Trump applied to his own business dealings in corruption-plagued regimes around the globe…. Congress — and the Trump Administration itself — has a duty to examine whether the President or his family is exposed to terrorist financing, sanctions, money laundering, and other imprudent associations through their business holdings and connections,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said in an email to New Yorker.

The Baku hotel isn’t of course the only conflict of interest Trump faces with his sprawling business empire that spans over 20 countries. He pledged to divest himself from his business, ceding oversight of day-to-day operations to his sons Don Jr. and Eric, but retains financial interest in the company. But ethics experts, including the Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub, said Trump wasn’t doing enough to divest his business interests while serving as president. Critics fear Trump could weigh his company’s profits in making policy.

People pay a $200,000 initiation fee to join the Trump-owned Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, and rub elbows with top Trump officials and cabinet members as he installs the White House there every weekend thanks to taxpayer largesse. (Lucky club members can watch real-time national security briefings on an open-air terrace.)

Foreign diplomats are flocking to stay at Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. Several administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, even live there during the week, feeding more money to the Trump brand. The Trump Organization pledged to scrap foreign business dealings in January, but it it’s already violating that deal. Eric Trump flew to Uruguay in January for a business trip that cost the taxpayers nearly $100,000 in security. And Don Jr. was likely paid at least $50,000 to speak at an event in France, an event organized by friends of the Russian government.

American taxpayers aren’t the only ones shouldering the cost of Trump’s business empire. According to the New Yorker, the Azerbaijani government forcibly evicted 30 families from their homes in 2011 to build a project of “crucial government significance.” That project was the still-never-opened Trump Hotel.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/06/tru ... -mammadov/

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UK at centre of secret $3bn Azerbaijani money laundering and lobbying scheme
Exclusive: Leaked data reveals thousands of covert payments, including to European politicians and journalists
Mehriban and Ilham Aliyev
Some of the money went towards an international lobbying operation to deflect criticism of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, pictured with his wife Mehriban outside 10 Downing Street. Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Luke Harding, Caelainn Barr and Dina Nagapetyants
Monday 4 September 2017 13.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 4 September 2017 17.00 EDT
Azerbaijan’s ruling elite operated a secret $2.9bn (£2.2bn) scheme to pay prominent Europeans, buy luxury goods and launder money through a network of opaque British companies, an investigation by the Guardian reveals.

Leaked data shows that the Azerbaijani leadership, accused of serial human rights abuses, systemic corruption and rigging elections, made more than 16,000 covert payments from 2012 to 2014.

Some of this money went to politicians and journalists, as part of an international lobbying operation to deflect criticism of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, and to promote a positive image of his oil-rich country. There is no suggestion that all the recipients were aware of the original source of the money. It arrived via a disguised route.

Analysis The Scottish firms that let money flow from Azerbaijan to the UK
Billions of pounds came through two Glasgow-based companies using obscure structure that let owners hide identities

But the revelations once again highlight the use of the lightly regulated British corporate landscape to move large sums of money around, beyond the purview of regulators and tax authorities. Seven million pounds was spent in Britain on luxury goods and private school fees.

The cash, contributed by an opaque array of paymasters in Azerbaijan and Russia, travelled to the British companies – all limited partnerships registered at Companies House in London – via the western financial system without raising red flags. One of Europe’s leading banks, Danske, processed the payments via its branch office in Estonia.

Danske Bank said “money laundering and other illegal practices” had taken place. It first noticed the irregular payments in 2014. Estonia’s financial regulator said systems designed to stop money laundering at the branch had failed.


The scheme has been nicknamed the Azerbaijani Laundromat. Confidential banking records were leaked to the Danish newspaper Berlingske and shared with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the Guardian, and other media partners. The data covers a 30-month period. It may show the tip of an iceberg.

The politicians
The leaked bank records show multiple payments to several former members of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, Pace. One is Eduard Lintner, a German ex-MP and member of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrats. Another is the Italian former chair of the centre-right group in Pace, Luca Volontè.

The payments came at a time when Azerbaijan was under fire for arresting human rights activists and journalists, and for holding rigged elections. The regime sought to blunt criticism from Europe and the US by allegedly bribing delegates in what has been called “caviar diplomacy”.

This intensive lobbying operation was so successful that Council of Europe members voted against a 2013 report critical of Azerbaijan.


Everything you need to know about the Azerbaijani Laundromat
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Lintner stood down as an MP in 2010, but remained a firm supporter of Azerbaijan. He founded the Society for the Promotion of German-Azerbaijani Relations in Berlin, which received €819,500 (£755,000). One €61,000 payment was made two weeks after Lintner returned to Berlin from a trip to Azerbaijan where he monitored the country’s 2013 presidential election. He said the poll was up to “German standards” – in direct contrast to official election observers who found “significant problems”.

Lintner says he received the money for his society, did not personally benefit, and was not an MP or Council of Europe member at the time. An Azerbaijani NGO paid for his election trip, he says. He says he has no knowledge of the original source of the payments received.

Luca Volontè.
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Luca Volontè. Photograph: Vano Shlamov/AFP/Getty Images
Details of cash given to Volontè emerged in 2016 and caused outrage. He received more than €2m in instalments via his Italian-based Novae Terrae foundation. Prosecutors in Milan have indicted him for money laundering and corruption.


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Volontè denies wrongdoing. He is seeking to have the case thrown out.

The data also shows money being paid via the British companies to Kalin Mitrev, a Bulgarian appointed last year to the board of the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Mitrev received at least €425,000 for private consulting work from a local Azeri company, Avuar Co. He acknowledges the payments and says they were for legitimate business consultancy. He denies all knowledge of the conduit used to execute them or the original source of the funds.

“All the income, generated by activities in different countries, was duly reported and taxed in my country of residence, Bulgaria,” Mitrev said. His consultancy work stopped when he joined the London bank, he said.

The revelation that her husband consulted for an Azeri company might prove awkward for Mitrev’s wife, Irina Bokova, who is the director general of Unesco. Bokova has bestowed one of Unesco’s highest honours, the Mozart Medal on Azerbaijan’s first lady and vice-president, Mehriban Aliyeva. She also hosted a photo exhibition at Unesco’s headquarters in Paris, entitled Azerbaijan – A Land of Tolerance. The Heydar Aliyev foundation organised the event.


Asked by the Guardian whether there was a conflict between her husband’s work and her UN role, she strongly denied this, saying she had no knowledge of her husband’s business affairs. “As a director general of a UN agency, my duty is to develop sound working relations with all members of the organisation in conformity with the policies set by member states. Azerbaijan is not an exception in this respect.”

“I am immensely proud of my determined pursuit of the mandate of Unesco, including in the area of human rights, freedom of expression and the safety of journalists.”

The lobbyists
Large sums from the scheme were spent on lobbying. In 2014 Eckart Sager, a former CNN producer based in London, received nearly €2m from the British companies. His PR company is linked to articles that promote the Azerbaijani government and its views. One piece denies wrongdoing by Baku in the Volontè case. Sager did not comment.

Another beneficiary is a London-based Azeri, Jovdat Guliyev, who received 25 payments totalling almost £400,000. Guliyev is a member of the Anglo-Azerbaijani Society, a lobby group co-chaired by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord German. Guliyev did not respond to repeated messages asking him for a comment.

The British connection
The four firms at the centre of the Azerbaijani Laundromat were all limited partnerships registered in the UK. They were: Metastar Invest, based at a service address in Birmingham; Hilux Services and Polux Management, set up in Glasgow; and LCM Alliance, from Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. Their corporate “partners” are anonymous tax haven entities based in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles and Belize.

Glasgow, where two of the four firms at the centre of the Azerbaijani Laundromat were set up.
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Glasgow, where two of the four firms at the centre of the Azerbaijani Laundromat were set up. Photograph: Mark Liddell#118848/Flickr Vision
L Burke Files, an international financial investigator, said these company structures were “purposefully opaque”. Foreign criminals used Scottish limited partnerships, or SLPs, he said. In June the government announced SLPs would have to name their significant owners, or pay fines, amid evidence of growing fraud.

“No one suspects Scotland. It’s never been on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) list of non-compliant countries,” Files said. “If you are going to launder money it’s probably best not to run it between Russia, Malta and the Cayman Islands. Does Scotland raise a red flag in your mind? No.”

All four British companies are named as payment channels in the Italian prosecution case against Volontè. They have since been dissolved.

Luxury services
The banking data shows that the Azerbaijani fund was used for a wide variety of purposes. More than $2.9bn went to companies, with about $50m paid out to individuals. Many beneficiaries were retail and service firms in western Europe. In all probability, they would have been unaware of the origins of the payments they were receiving.

Some of the 200 money transfers to the UK concerned education. In 2014 £89,800 was transferred to Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate, a private boarding school in York. The school would not identify the pupil or pupils involved or comment.

Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate.
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Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate. Photograph: PR
There were payments to the tuition college Bellerbys and to the ICS international school in London. Bellerbys said it was investigating. The data suggests there were a number of relatively modest bursaries to regime-connected Azerbaijani students studying in Britain, as well as rental deposits on upmarket London flats. Other purchases included designer dresses, luxury cars and legal fees. There is no suggestion the UK recipients should have known about the provenance of the money.

Azerbaijan’s ruling family is not directly named. But the evidence of a connection is overwhelming. Large sums come via the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan. This is the largest bank in an oil-wealthy country, and yet earlier this summer it filed for bankruptcy protection in New York. The defence and emergency situations ministries in Baku all chip in cash.

The scheme was used to pay for the government’s incidental expenses including the medical bills of Yaqub Eyyubov, Azerbaijan’s first deputy prime minister. There were separate payments to Eyyubov’s son Emin, Azerbaijan’s EU ambassador, and to the president’s press secretary, Azer Gasimov.

Business partners of the US president, Donald Trump, in a project to build a luxury Trump Tower in Baku also appear in the Laundromat scheme.

The hotel’s local developer was Anar Mammadov, the billionaire son of Azerbaijan’s ex-transport minister Ziya Mammadov. At the time the scheme operated, the Mammadovs were one of the country’s most powerful and wealthy families. The Mammadovs’ Baghlan holding company is linked to Laundromat transactions.


Anar Mammadov posts a picture of himself with Ivanka Trump after her father’s US election win
In 2012 the Trump Organisation signed a deal with the Mammadovs to build a 33-floor, 130-metre-high “ultra-modern” skyscraper. In October 2014 Ivanka Trump toured Trump Tower Baku, posting photos of the unfinished building on her Instagram account. The hotel never opened. Trump has since cut his connection with the project. The Laundromat scheme does not link to Trump but raises questions about his choice of business partners.

The paymasters
It is not entirely clear where the money used in the scheme comes from. The Russian government paid $29.4m into the Laundromat via its main weapons company, Rosoboronexport. Several transactions link to another $20bn money-laundering scheme, which operated out of Moscow between 2010 and 2014. The scheme, the Global Laundromat, was exposed in March by the OCCRP, Novaya Gazeta and the Guardian.

A mysterious private firm in Baku, Baktelekom MMC, pays in more than $1.4bn. The firm is what fraud experts call a doppelganger entity. It sounds like the state telecoms firm with the same name but bears no relation to it. It doesn’t have a website. Its function is unclear. According to the OCCRP, Baktelekom MMC is linked to Mehriban Aliyeva. In January the company was let off a $17.4m tax bill.

The Danish bank Danske said it had not been good enough at monitoring suspicious transactions at its Estonian branch. The bank has since “tightened procedures and controls” and “terminated relationships” with some customers.

“We will not accept Danske being exploited for money laundering or other criminal purposes. We will do everything to prevent it from happening again,” it said.

Madis Reimand, the head of Estonia’s financial intelligence unit, said his office had come across the suspicious Azerbaijani cash flows in 2013 while analysing a separate case. “From there we followed the tracks,” he said. “We tried to cooperate with the source country in order to ascertain where the money came from. This, however, didn’t work out.”

Reimand said Estonia’s financial supervisory authority had identified what had gone wrong and taken steps to prevent similar fraud in the future.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ing-scheme

Azerbaijan hits back over 'scandalous' money laundering claims
Baku attacks Guardian reporting as smear as National Crime Agency looks at evidence and considers investigation
Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and his wife Mehriban
Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, and his wife, Mehriban. Photograph: Sergei Grits/AP

Rowena Mason, Rajeev Syal and Luke Harding
Tuesday 5 September 2017 12.11 EDT First published on Tuesday 5 September 2017 05.30 EDT
The government of Azerbaijan has responded angrily to revelations that it ran a secret $2.9bn (£2.2bn) fund which was used to pay prominent Europeans, run lobbying operations, and launder money via a group of opaque British companies.

Azerbaijan’s presidential aide, Ali Hasanov, said the stories by the Guardian and other media partners were a smear. In the first official reaction from Baku, Hasanov said the regime was the victim of a “scandalous” campaign organised by British intelligence, the Armenian diaspora and the US.

“When did the Guardian write about the truth about Azerbaijan? This newspaper has been known for decades for being against Azerbaijan,” Hasanov told the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. The reports were “biased, groundless and provocative,” he said.

On Tuesday, the authorities blocked access from inside Azerbaijan to the website of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The OCCRP published details of the scheme, nicknamed the Azerbaijani Laundromat, following a leak of data to the Danish newspaper Berlingske.

The use of British companies in the Laundromat has prompted calls for Theresa May to investigate. On Tuesday May’s official spokesman said that the National Crime Agency would now examine the information from the Guardian and other media sources. The agency will “look at whether they would need to progress [to] an investigation”, the spokesman said.

This is the second time this year that British corporate entities have been found to be at the heart of a large-scale money laundering operation run from a former Soviet state. In March, a similar scheme run from Moscow, the $20bn Global Laundromat, was exposed.

Analysis The Scottish firms that let money flow from Azerbaijan to the UK
Billions of pounds came through two Glasgow-based companies using obscure structure that let owners hide identities
Read more
Opposition politicians urged the government to act to prevent the abuse of company vehicles. Four offshore-owned British companies – based in Glasgow, Birmingham, and Potters Bar in Hertfordshire – were used to funnel money into the western financial system. It went via the Estonian branch of a Danish bank, Danske.

Tim Farron, the former Liberal Democrat leader, led calls for an inquiry, saying this was what happened “when the corporate landscape is too lightly regulated”.

“Thanks to the Guardian investigation we learn of something called the Azerbaijani Laundromat,” he said. “But now is the time to wash some fairly dirty laundry in public and find out exactly who paid money to whom and why.

“We need a full investigation to see that dirty money has not been used to buy influence in the UK. The Azerbaijani government is guilty of systematic human rights abuses and it would appear the regime has been making payments on an industrial scale.”

Margaret Hodge, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for responsible tax who uncovered the use of tax havens as chair of the public accounts committee, added to calls for more transparency.


Everything you need to know about the Azerbaijani Laundromat
Read more
“Yet again a whistleblower has lifted the lid on some unconscionably awful behaviour,” she said. “It would seem that Britain and British overseas territories are facilitating alleged corrupt practices by refusing to introduce the full transparency the Conservatives promised but failed to deliver.

“Until we know who owns companies and properties in Britain and in the tax havens we control, such unacceptable practices will continue and Britain will be culpable because of the government’s failure to act.”

One London-based beneficiary of the Laundromat, Jovdat Guliyev, resigned on Monday from the Anglo-Azerbaijani Society. Guliyev received nearly £400,000 from the scheme. A former BP employee, he works for Azerbaijan’s state oil company.

The society’s co-chair, Liberal Democrat peer Lord German, said Guliyev quit nine minutes after the Guardian’s story went online. His name has now been removed from the Society’s website, German said, adding that none of the Laundromat payments went to the Society.

In an email to German, Guliyev did not explain why he had got the money but said it was legitimate and for his “personal use”.

Peter Dowd, Labour’s chief secretary to the Treasury, said: “Money laundering hurts our economy, steals from others and corrupts our society. The financial system should effectively and efficiently provide investment that benefits the whole economy, not boost the offshore bank balances of plutocrats and criminals here and abroad.

“We have seen too many of these shocking scandals in recent years because the Tories are incapable of taking on the rigged system, which hurts the many to support the very few.”

Molly Scott Cato, a Green MEP who sits on the European parliament’s economics and monetary affairs committee and inquiry into the Panama Papers, said the revelations were shocking and reveal “once again that British claims to be a leader in transparency conceal a far grubbier reality”.

“The relationship between UK companies and our murky offshore tax havens permit the world’s corrupt elite to indulge their extravagant lifestyles at public expense,” she said. “They then use these ill-gotten gains to buy political influence that prevents them from being held to account for human rights abuses and bad government.”

The four firms at the centre of the Azerbaijani Laundromat were all limited partnerships registered in the UK. They were: Metastar Invest, Hilux Services, Polux Management, and LCM Alliance. Their corporate “partners” are anonymous entities based in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles and Belize.

Some of the cash from the £2.2bn fund was used to pay for luxuries such as cars, interior design and dentistry, while other sums went to European politicians and prominent figures linked to the promotion of Azerbaijan. Seven million pounds was spent directly in the UK, including on private school fees.

Azerbaijan’s ruling family is not directly named in the leaked documents. But evidence of a connection was overwhelming. Large sums came via the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan, which is the largest bank in an oil-wealthy country, and yet earlier this summer it filed for bankruptcy protection in New York. The defence and emergency situations ministries in Baku all contributed cash.

The scheme was used to pay for the government’s incidental expenses including the medical bills of Yaqub Eyyubov, Azerbaijan’s first deputy prime minister. There were separate payments to Eyyubov’s son Emin, Azerbaijan’s EU ambassador, and to the president’s press secretary, Azer Gasimov.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ing-scheme

Trump Confronts Accelerating Russia Probes on Multiple Fronts
By Chris Strohm , Jennifer Jacobs , Billy House , and Lauren Etter
September 5, 2017, 3:00 AM CDT
Fired FBI chief Comey as well as Trump’s son may testify
President continues to call Russia probes ‘fake news’

Special counsel Robert Mueller and key congressional committees are tightening their focus on some of President Donald Trump’s family members and campaign associates as probes into Russia’s interference with the 2016 election enter a new and more aggressive phase.

Even fired FBI Director James Comey is aware that he may return to Capitol Hill to follow up on his explosive testimony from earlier this year, according to a source familiar with his thinking. Comey, who was dismissed by Trump in May, has not received a subpoena or any official indication he’ll be summoned to again testify.

Both Mueller and congressional investigators are also eager to learn more from the growing roster of recently departed White House staff, including former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and strategist Stephen Bannon.

Interviews with more than a dozen lawyers and officials involved in aspects of the Russia probes hint at the intensity of what lies ahead in an investigation the president continues to rail against as “fake news” and a “witch hunt.”

That intensity is intended to put a strain on major characters as well as bit players who are under investigation, as they jockey for advantage and it becomes clearer who’s cooperating with investigators and who is resisting.

Read a QuickTake Q&A on the Trump-Russia saga

“In any criminal investigation it is in the government’s interest to magnify conflicts between the various people they’re looking at," said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who’s now a partner at Thompson Coburn LLC. “When the subjects of an investigation are pitted against each other the government can exploit those conflicts to induce some of the individuals to cooperate against others.”

Expanding Investigation

Although much of what Mueller is doing remains secret, there have been signs recently that his investigation is expanding, said two U.S. officials. That includes issuing subpoenas to a former lawyer and current public relations spokesman for Manafort, whose Virginia home was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last month.

Manafort, who directed Trump’s campaign during six critical months last year, has emerged as a central figure because of his past financial dealings and his work for a Russian-backed party in Ukraine. Manafort’s financial transactions are also under scrutiny by New York’s attorney general, Politico reported Aug. 30, adding that the former campaign chairman hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who earned Trump’s ire when he recused himself from the Russia probe, is also expected to testify in the Senate in the coming weeks for the second time since his January confirmation hearing. While Sessions may want to focus on his anti-crime agenda, senators will demand details about his role in firing Comey, who had led the Russia probe.

‘Complex Crimes’

“The investigations are becoming more active," Mariotti, who led prosecutions in a range of white-collar crimes including securities fraud and tax evasion, said in an interview. Mueller is “conducting an extremely thorough and wide-reaching investigation into what are complex crimes” while Congress is holding hearings and releasing details that Mueller might not, he added.

Mueller also will submit a list of his expenditures to the Justice Department soon after Sept. 30, which may provide insight into the scope of his investigation. The department is expected to make the document public.

Besides Manafort, one focus of investigators on Capitol Hill is the president’s eldest son.

Donald Trump Jr. has come under scrutiny for arranging a meeting in June 2016 with Russians who were promising damaging material on Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.

With congressional committees competing to hear from key witnesses, the Senate Judiciary Committee appears to be first in line to hear from Don Jr., though no firm date has been set.

Fusion GPS

“In late July, Donald Trump Jr. agreed to provide the Judiciary Committee with documents and a transcribed interview prior to a public hearing," Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and the panel’s top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, said in a joint statement Aug. 29. "Shortly thereafter, a date for that interview was set and agreed to by both the committee and Trump Jr.”

The Judiciary Committee also might vote this month on whether to release a transcript from a 10-hour closed hearing in August with Glenn Simpson, founder of the political consulting firm Fusion GPS that helped create a dossier with salacious and unverified material about Trump.

“The committee has a transcript of the interview," Simpson’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, said in a statement. "We are not permitted to have a copy. The committee has the right to disclose the transcript, if it wishes to do so.”

Russian Ambassador

The House Intelligence Committee issued subpoenas in June seeking testimony and documents from Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, as well as Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn was removed after lying about communications he had with Russia’s then-ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, before Trump took office.

Cohen has come under scrutiny because of allegations about him contained in the dossier linked to Fusion GPS and made public in January.

Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, sent the House Intelligence Committee last month a point-by-point rebuttal of what he described as “sensational allegations" contained in the 35-page dossier. Ryan’s letter described that document’s allegations of ties between Cohen and Russian officials as false.

Cohen confirmed in an interview that he will testify before the House panel in September, after which he plans to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He added that he hasn’t received any communication from Mueller and has not been asked to appear before a grand jury.


Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was interviewed behind closed doors by the Senate and House intelligence committees, on July 24 and 25. Since then, Kushner hasn’t received any requests to testify in private or public before any congressional committee, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. He also hasn’t received any formal requests or subpoenas from Mueller’s team, the person said.

‘Not Normal Times’

But Democrats say they continue to focus on details surrounding a meeting Kushner had in December -- a month before Trump took office -- with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian state-owned bank known as Vnesheconombank, according to Representative Adam Schiff, the intelligence panel’s top Democrat.

Schiff cited the bank’s “reported ties to the Kremlin, that the meeting was taken at the request of Russian Ambassador Kislyak, and that Gorkov is a graduate of the FSB’s finishing school,” a reference to Russia’s premier spy agency.

"These are not normal times and things are about to heat up" for Trump and his associates, said Jeffery Cramer, a former federal prosecutor. “The clock is ticking.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ple-fronts

Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election

Facebook says it discovered Russian ad sales from the 2016 election

By Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman September 6 at 3:59 PM
Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that it has discovered it sold ads during the U.S. presidential election to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.

Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.

A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said. Most of the ads focused on pumping politically divisive issues such as gun rights and immigration fears, as well as gay rights and racial discrimination.

The acknowledgment by Facebook comes as congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller are probing Russian interference in the U.S. election, including allegations that the Kremlin may have coordinated with the Trump campaign.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded in January that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election to help elect Trump, including by using paid social media trolls to spread fake news intended to influence public opinion.

Play Video 3:30
The fight for control over the special counsel's Russia investigation
President Trump has weighed in on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election time and time again. Here's a look at how he can limit the probe, and what Congress is trying to do about it. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Even though the ad spending from Russia is tiny relative to overall campaign costs, the report from Facebook that a Russian firm was able to target political messages is likely to fuel pointed questions from investigators about whether the Russians received guidance from people in the United States — a question some Democrats have been asking for months.

“I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots. Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware really raises some questions. I think that’s a worthwhile area of inquiry,” Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a May airing of the podcast Pod Save America. “How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”

An official familiar with Facebook’s internal investigation said the company does not have the ability to determine whether the ads it sold represented any sort of coordination.

The acknowledgment by Facebook follows months of criticism that the social media company served as a platform for the spread of false information before the November election. In a statement posted days after the election, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to explore the issue but said that 99 percent of information found on Facebook is authentic and only “a very small amount” is fake or hoaxes. In December, however, the company announced that it would begin flagging articles that had been deemed false or fake, with the assistance of fact-checking organizations.

Facebook discovered the Russian connection as part of an investigation that began this spring looking at purchasers of politically-motivated ads, according to people familiar with the inquiry. It found that 3,300 ads had digital footprints that led to the Russian company.

Facebook teams then discovered 470 suspicious and likely fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages that it believes operated out of Russia, had links to the company and were involved in promoting the ads.

A Facebook official said “there is evidence that some of the accounts are linked to a troll farm in St. Petersburg, referred to as the Internet Research Agency, though we have no way to independently confirm.” The official declined to release any of the ads it traced to Russian companies or entities.

Who’s who in the government’s investigation into Russia ties VIEW GRAPHIC
“Our data policy and federal law limit our ability to share user data and content, so we won’t be releasing any ads,” the official said. The official added that the ads “were directed at people on Facebook who had expressed interest in subjects explored on those pages, such as LGBT community, black social issues, the Second Amendment, and immigration.”

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, said in a statement that the company is committed to continuing to protect the integrity of its site and improve its ability to track fraudulent accounts. He said Facebook has shut down the accounts that remained active.

“We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform,” he said.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced technology improvements to detect fake accounts and more recently announced it would no longer allow Facebook pages to advertise if they have a pattern of sharing false news stories. Over the past few months, Stamos said, the company has also taken action to block fake accounts tied to election meddling in France and Germany.

The Internet Research Agency has received attention in the past for its activity.

In 2013, hackers released internal company documents showing it employed 600 people across Russia. Ex-employees who have gone public with their experiences at the company in Internet postings and in media interviews have said their work entailed creating fake Twitter and Facebook accounts and using them to circulate pro-Kremlin propaganda. They said Internet Research Agency employees, for instance, spread derogatory information about Putin critic Boris Nemtsov in the days after his 2015 murder.

In 2015, the New York Times Magazine reported that social media accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency had launched social media campaigns in the United States, including a sophisticated hoax that spread false news of a chemical leak in Louisiana in 2014, apparently to sow chaos and fear.

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In its unclassified report in January, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Internet Research Agency’s “likely financier” is a “close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.”

In May, Time Magazine reported that U.S. intelligence officials had discovered evidence that Russian agents had purchased ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. A Facebook spokesman told the magazine that the company had no evidence of such buys.

Under federal law and Federal Election Commission regulations, both foreign nationals and foreign governments are prohibited from making contributions or spending money to influence a federal, state or local election in the United States. The ban includes independent expenditures made in connection with an election.

Those banned from such spending include foreign citizens, foreign governments, foreign political parties, foreign corporations, foreign associations and foreign partnerships, according to the FEC. (Permanent residents who hold green cards, however, are not considered foreign nationals.) Violators face civil penalties, as well as criminal prosecution if they are found to have knowingly broken the law.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 81c69a3679

From their digital headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, the Trump campaign placed between 70,000-175,000 different pieces of content on Facebook every day specifically targeting profiles provided from Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company was until recently owned by a British-Iranian businessman with ties to Putin-linked Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash who is wanted for bribery by the U.S. and was allegedly involved in a racketeering scheme with Paul Manafort.

More importantly, the way Cambridge Analytica gained access to some 30 million Facebook accounts without users’ consent, along with private voting records, raises serious privacy concerns.

“What were Facebook and Google and YouTube people actually doing here? Why were they here?” She responds by saying “They were helping us, you know. They were basically our hands-on partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible.”

PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy

THE SECRET STORY OF HOW AMERICAN MINDS WERE MANIPULATED DURING THE 2016 ELECTION CAMPAIGN AND HOW DONALD TRUMP’S BACKERS ARE MAKING MONEY OFF IT.
Psychologist Michal Kosinski switched on the TV in his Zurich hotel room on the morning of November ninth. The headlines were all about Donald Trump’s against-all-odds win in the U.S. presidential election. The news filled the Polish-born academic with dread, Kosinski told Das Magazine. The 34-year-old psychologist was sure of one thing: the scientific model he had created helped elect Trump.

Kosinski is a pioneer in the field of psychometry. It’s the science of predicting behavior using a psychological profile gleamed from social media activity. There are five criteria which analysts use to define your personality called the OCEAN model.

Openness to new ideas and learning.
Conscientiousness is a measure of your reliability, promptness and organization.
Extraversion measures openness and sociability.
Agreeableness refers to your kindness, empathy and warmth.
Neuroticism measures your emotional stability and rate of negative emotions.
In a 2012 study, Kosinski and two colleagues at Cambridge University were able to predict any person’s race, political affiliations and sexual orientation by analyzing someone’s social media activity.

While at Cambridge, Kosinski met fellow researcher Aleksandr Kogan. Russian-born Kogan asked about using Kosinski’s method for election manipulation. “The whole thing began to stink,” Kosinski told German Das Magazine.

Kosinski wanted nothing to do with using his research for malevolent means and broke off contact with Kogan. Since then, Kosinski has travelled the world lecturing about the dangers of ‘big data’ manipulation warning it can “threaten the welfare, freedom, or even the lives of men.”

Kogan, who has since changed his name to Alexandr Specter, had very different plans for his colleagues’ research.

The secret story of how American minds were manipulated during the 2016 election and how Donald Trump’s backers are making money off it.
Dr. Michal Kosinski (left) met Dr. Aleksandr Spectre (middle) at Cambridge University where they both studied Psychometry. Spectre launched a research study of American voters using Facebook for the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, whose CEO is Alexander Nix (right).

After the invasion of the Ukraine, a Russian born researcher at Cambridge University began harvesting private data of 30 million U.S. Facebook users for Cambridge Analytica.

In 2014, Kogan founded “Global Science Research”, which was funded by London-based Scientific Communications Laboratory (SCL) and its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Kogan’s company hired 185,000 Americans to take an online survey and download a Facebook app. Once downloaded, the app gave Kogan information on 30 million unsuspecting Facebook users who were Facebook friends with the original survey-takers, according to The Intercept. Kogan has used Kosinski’s model to build an an algorithm to profile American voters.

In 2015, Kogan’s app was shut down because of complaints about privacy concerns. By then Kogan had gathered data on millions of Americans. “No one in this larger group of 30 million knew that “likes” and demographic data from their Facebook profiles were being harvested by political operatives hired to influence American voters,” according to The Intercept.

SCL has since distanced itself from the use of this data and Kogan’s GSR. “We do not do any work with Facebook likes,” Cambridge Analytica spokesman Lindsey Platts, said in a statement. The company “has no relationship with GSR,” Platts said.

The secret story of how American minds were manipulated during the 2016 election and how Donald Trump’s backers are making money off it.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix explains how his company can profile and target any voter in the U.S.

The Trump Campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $6 million for a database of 220 million U.S. voters including private details of their personality and activities.

In 2016, Cambridge Analytica, under the leadership of CEO Alexander Nix and vice-president Stephen Bannon helped manipulate the British electorate to vote for Brexit. The previously unknown company had achieved the unthinkable in breaking up the E.U. and then began to turn its attention to U.S. politics.


Donald Trump even tweeted on Aug 18: The secret story of how American minds were manipulated during the 2016 election and how Donald Trump’s backers are making money off it.


Every time you take one of those Facebook quizzes, you know the ones, which celebrity are you most like? Which Game of Thrones character are you? What country are you really from? You may think you’re taking an innocuous quiz, but what you’re really doing is giving a data mining firm like Cambridge Analytica, “express consent” to profile you. The company then cross-references that information with other data and creates an OCEAN profile of you which is even more accurate than a partner or family member could provide.

Donald Trump paid Cambridge Analytica $6 million for work on his 2016 campaign. The company’s data scientists were able to figure out Trump voters who were “very low in neuroticism, quite low in openness and slightly conscientious.” Once profiled, Cambridge Analytica could target their specific interests with tailor-made election messages and specific news content (real or fake) to work on their emotions, interests and regional location.

Think of it as a digital soapbox where the speaker is digitally crafted to appeal to your every fear and desire and pinpoint exactly where you live. Take for example, Donald Trump’s focus on the Opioid crisis and immigration during the 2016 election campaign. All of the messages were designed to surgically target voters with these seemingly “local” concerns in important swing states.




As Russian hackers targeted state voters rolls, Cambridge Analytica provided the Trump campaign with private voting history.

Cambridge Analytica assembled a database for the Trump campaign of 220 million voters known as Project Alamo. The data set included voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, internet viewing history, car purchases and information from data-mining companies like Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom Corporation.

Theresa Hong was a key digital officer for the Trump campaign. Hong told the BBC the data-set also included information about voting history. “Some of the attributes would be when was the last time they voted, who did they vote for.” In response to a question on how Cambridge Analytica would know all that information, Hong replied, “that’s their secret sauce.” (video above).

You’ll recall Russian hackers were able to infiltrate voters rolls in almost every state before the election. “We had to assume that they actually tried to at least rattle the doorknobs on all 50, and we just happened to find them in a few of them.” Michael Daniel, who led the Obama White House effort to secure the vote against Russian intrusions, told Time Magazine.

Add to this, a mysterious server in Trump Tower which is suspected of compiling a massive database of hacked voter information with Russia’s Alfa Bank and the DeVos family-owned Spectrum Health, and you begin to see a clearer picture of how Cambridge Analytica may have gotten all this data. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company was until recently owned by a British-Iranian businessman with ties to Putin-linked Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash who is wanted for bribery by the U.S. and was allegedly involved in a racketeering scheme with Paul Manafort.

From their digital headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, the Trump campaign placed between 70,000-175,000 different pieces of content on Facebook every day specifically targeting profiles provided from Cambridge Analytica. Trump’s digital advertising chief, Gary Coby, likened the effort to “high-frequency trading” and says Trump used Facebook “like no one else in politics has ever done.” In fact, all of Trump’s $85 million digital budget went into Facebook coffers.

Much of the targeted content that was delivered to voters was news created by Cambridge Analytica’s sister company Breitbart and Russian sponsored sites like Wikileaks, Sputnik and Russia Today. The FBI is investigating the role these news organizations played in Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections, according to McClatchy.

The secret story of how American minds were manipulated during the 2016 election campaign and how Donald Trump’s backers are making money off it.
Donald Trump’s key donor owns Cambridge Analytica, Stephen Bannon, Trump’s Former Senior Strategist was VP of CA and Michael Flynn former National Security Adviser was an advisor to the company.


Trump Administration inked a $496,000 deal with Cambridge Analytica while Michael Flynn and Stephen Bannon were still in office which presents a possible conflict of interest.

Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by New York hedge fund manager and major Trump donor Robert Mercer, according to Politico. Donald Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen Bannon was until recently the company’s vice-president and owned a stake in the company which could be worth as much as $5 Million. Trump’s former National Security Adviser Lt-Gen Michael Flynn, a compromised Russian asset, also disclosed he played an advisory role for Cambridge Analytica.

On February 17, the Trump Administration paid $496,000 upfront to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL in a contract with the U.S. State Department. SCL’s role at the State Department is to “assess the impact of foreign propaganda campaigns and provide intelligence agencies with predictions and insight on emerging threats,” according to the Washington Post.

SCL is also working a deal with the Pentagon to teach them “how to conduct effective psychological operations,” says the Post. SCL has hired new staffers and opened a new office just up the street from the White House. SCL’s effort is being driven by a “former aide to now-departed national security adviser Michael Flynn, who served as an adviser to the company in the past,” says the Post.

Considering the senior roles Mercer, Bannon and Flynn held within Cambridge Analytica, the new Washington operation of SLC and the State Department deal could well indicate a conflict of interest.

More importantly, the way Cambridge Analytica gained access to some 30 million Facebook accounts without users’ consent, along with private voting records, raises serious privacy concerns.

The office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating all aspects of a possible conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the election. “That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,” Former FBI Director James Comey testified before a congressional committee in March.

Facebook sent its employees to Donald Trump’s campaign office to help with online marketing
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 2:55 am EDT Thu Sep 7, 2017
Home » Politics

Facebook is finally admitting that it allowed fake Russian accounts to run paid political ads during the election (link). Although Facebook says it’s now cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the revelation is bringing new attention to the relationship between Facebook Incorporated and the Donald Trump campaign. That relationship involved Facebook sending its employees to help out at the Trump campaign office in charge of digital marketing. The source of this information: one of Trump’s own people.

In an online BBC video, Theresa Hong, the Donald Trump campaign’s Digital Content Director, has made a number of startling confessions that she seems to think were bragging points. She’s revealed that Cambridge Analytica, the company suspected of having used voter data stolen by the Russian government to plot its online marketing strategy on Trump’s behalf, ran its operations out of the same offices where the Trump campaign itself was plotting its paid Facebook ad strategy. But the truly shocking revelation is who else she admits was in the building, which Trump’s people called “Project Alamo.”

The BBC interviewer asks Hong, “What were Facebook and Google and YouTube people actually doing here? Why were they here?” She responds by saying “They were helping us, you know. They were basically our hands-on partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible.” Shen then bragged “When you’re pumping in millions and millions of dollars to these social platforms, you’re going to get white glove treatment. So they would send people, you know, representatives to the Project Alamo to ensure that all our needs were being met.” Watch the shocking BBC video below (link):

This raises a number of questions. First, why did Facebook think it was appropriate to send employees to “help” a presidential campaign so thoroughly that the campaign ended up describing them as partners? What “needs” were being met, and how far did Facebook go to help the Trump campaign plot its strategy? Was Facebook aware of what Cambridge Analytica was doing in the next room? How does this connect to Facebook’s decision to allow fake Russian accounts to run paid ads? We suspect Robert Mueller will be targeting these Facebook employees soon, if he hasn’t already.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/fa ... fice/4784/

Don Jr.’s Tale

Richard Drew/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published SEPTEMBER 7, 2017 2:26 PM

I’ve just read through Donald Trump Jr’s account of the now-notorious June 2016 meeting with that Russian lawyer in Trump Tower. Here are my thoughts.

Big picture, this is pretty much the same as the comments Don Jr. made earlier in the summer. He insists he in no way colluded with Russia or any foreign government to affect the 2016 presidential election and then, in the same breath, describes what sounds pretty clearly like an attempt to collude with the Russia government. It’s almost an insult to our collective intelligence. But that’s the entire Trump era. What’s new? He also repeats the general explanation that he was a political neophyte and (by implication though not stated explicitly) wasn’t sophisticated enough to know that taking the meeting would be a problem. Again, this is pretty much the sum and substance of what he said a couple months ago.

But there are nonetheless some new details and some key omissions which are notable.

Don Jr. says that he really had no idea what the meeting was about or more importantly who would attend the meeting in advance. In other words, someone said he might have dirt on Hillary, why not take a meeting?

This (no doubt intentionally) leaves out critical information that is in the plain text of the emails. In his emails Goldstone very conspicuously noted that this wasn’t just some information he could pass Trump’s way. He went out of his way to say explicitly that it came from the Russian government and was part of the Russian government’s support for and efforts to elect Donald Trump. He wrote: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

That makes all the difference in the world.

The specific identity of just who Trump was going to meet with is beside the point. The name would have meant nothing to him. The relevant point is that Trump Jr was told in advance that he was dealing with the Russian government and that the Russian government was supporting and trying to elect his father. I don’t care how naive you are. Unless you were raised by ferrets in the Catskills, you’re going to know this is a problem. Trump Jr took the meeting. This is the critical omission. My recollection is that Don Jr also forwarded those emails to Kushner and Manafort. So they knew that information too, or could have. We will return to the significance of this in a moment.

The next key is that Don Jr. says his phone records show “three very short phone calls” between Don Jr. and Emin Agalarov (the pop star son of the oligarch) over the two days (June 6th and 7th) just prior to the meeting on June 9th. He says he doesn’t remember those calls and that they may have traded voicemails. That seems dubious. Voicemails leave recordings and records. I’m not sure if the phone records reflect when a call goes to voice mail or not. But how short were the calls? This seems quite significant. Why are we hearing this? Almost certainly because you can’t hide the records that the phone calls happened. I don’t think investigators even need a warrant for those. What was discussed if anything was is another matter. There may be no record of that at all. So Don Jr. would be in the clear saying he didn’t remember.

Don Jr. also says that Jared Kushner left not long after the meeting began. What about Paul Manafort? As I wrote earlier, Kushner was not an experienced professional either in politics or intelligence work. Don Jr. is a buffoon. I’m willing to believe that they didn’t get the full significance of what was happening in this meeting. That doesn’t apply to Manafort. He’s been in politics for four decades. His foreign work – even if you assume zero bad acts of any sort – would routinely bring him into contact with spies, both American and foreign ones. That’s how it works. There’s no question Manafort knew what was happening in this meeting and that it was a problem. When did he leave? What did he do and say? Big questions.

Don Jr. also says he has no recollection that any dossier was left in the office or given to him. Again, dubious. But is there proof?

Let’s assume for the moment that the meeting went down more or less as described. Many intelligence professionals have noted that this looks like a classic ‘dangle’. The Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, wasn’t there to do business or share information. She was there to test the campaign’s openness to doing business with the Russian government. Once Don Jr. and his colleagues showed they were very interested, her job was done. She is involved in the Magnitsky law lobbying. So she may have taken the opportunity to chat him up about that too. The point is that, as described, there’s nothing mysterious about the description of the meeting. Intelligence professionals say this is a standard gambit. The very specific reference to Russian government support in the original Goldstone email is likely part of the dangle. It’s too conspicuous and otherwise inexplicable.

There are other contradictions to Don Jr.’s story. The upshot is that it includes some tantalizingly new details (which likely had to be divulged) because there are records that investigators can easily access. The phone calls with Emin is the key example of that. The document also makes a number of misleading or even false statements, ones clearly contradicted by the emails themselves.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/don ... re-1081507

Why Investigators Are So Interested In Facebook Ads Bought By Russian Firm


ASSOCIATED PRESS
By SAM THIELMAN Published SEPTEMBER 7, 2017 2:52 PM

After months of denial, Facebook told Congress and the public on Wednesday that a Russian “troll farm” had bought $100,000 worth of political ads on its site from 2015- 2016. That development was catnip for investigators looking into whether U.S. persons helped Russians target voters through social media.

Facebook reportedly handed over copies of the ads themselves to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is looking into whether the Trump campaign’s data operation, which was led by the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, helped guide that targeting. Various congressional committees are also interested in whether the Trump campaign was involved in the upsurge in apparently foreign-controlled propaganda news and advertising that favored Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election.

In July, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told CNN that he felt foreign actors had been so effective in their efforts to influence the election that they likely needed domestic assistance to do so. “If the Russians know, how are the Russians smart enough to target in areas where the Democrats weren’t knowledgeable enough?” Warner said at the time. “I don’t feel like I have run that to ground yet.”

And as the Facebook news broke, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, echoed Warner’s question: How could the Russians possibly have outsmarted the Democrats?

The question Schiff wants answered is whether “they were at a level of sophistication where [the ad buyers] would have needed help or assistance from the campaign,” he told Wolf Blitzer.

It’s easy to see how the Facebook news plays right into that line of inquiry: Facebook traced the ad sales to the infamous Internet Research Agency, the Russian propaganda team that faked an environmental disaster in South Carolina in 2015, according to the New York Times. And Facebook’s own public statement is a dramatic reversal from the tech company’s previous position, stated as recently as July 20, that its internal investigation had come up with “no evidence that Russian actors bought ads on Facebook in connection with the election.”

The company tried to downplay the amount of ad money the Russian firm spent, observing that $100,000 is a drop in the bucket for most political campaigns. But Facebook’s ability to target an audience, both geographically and by preference, means that as political advertising it is far undervalued, according to Gordon Borrell, CEO of ad industry analytics firm Borell Associates, which produces a detailed annual report on political advertising.

“It’s probably worth ten million dollars of TV advertising because of what you can do with that advertising,” Borell said. “You can take a very particular segment of the population and move them an inch this way or that way in a way you can’t do with a sort of mass media spray.”

As Darcy Bowe, senior vice president and media director at media-buying agency Starcom, puts it, “Where else in the world do we know so much about you?”

But Borrell expressed skepticism that the help of knowledgeable Americans was necessary to target a Russian propaganda enterprise. The highly polarized nature of American politics, he said, may actually give foreign actors the upper hand.

“I think it’s actually easier for observers, those outside, to manipulate,” he said. “We’re so ensconced and have been for decades—maybe a century or more—in a machine that just says ‘Things work a certain way.'”

Because it is an internet company, Facebook presents a soft target to foreign operators. Its ad sales operations are largely automated and is exempt from the kinds of controls that the Federal Election Commission has over broadcast ads—where Hillary Clinton’s campaign focused its media efforts.

Of course, it’s still illegal for a foreign entity to try to influence an election in the United States, irrespective of the medium. Watchdog group Common Cause immediately filed complaints with the Justice Department and the FEC related to the Facebook ad buys, urging both to sanction the purchasers of the ads.

And there may be more material for this piece of the various Russia probes coming down the pipeline: That other politically significant social media platform, Twitter, is performing a similar analysis of its ad buys and also is expected to brief investigators, according to Warner.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... -targeting

RUSS BAKER ON TRUMP LAWYER MICHAEL COHEN: CONSIGLIERE OR STOOGE?
Michael Cohen, Trump Tower, Felix Sater
Michael Cohen and Felix Sater superimposed over Trump Tower entrance. Photo credit: IowaPolitics.com / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0), 591J / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), nestor ferraro / Flickr (CC BY 2.0) and Boing Boing (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).
In the original “Godfather” movie, Tom Hagen, the consigliere to the Corleone family, responds to a movie executive who has never heard of his law practice by saying “I have a special practice. I handle one client.” Vito Corleone reminds Hagen early on that “a lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”

In many ways Michael Cohen has served that role for Donald Trump. An undistinguished lawyer, his Russian and Ukrainian links from the earliest days of his career make him the perfect lawyer for Trump. He became a kind of Trump groupie, admiring and fawning over Trump’s ghostwritten book, and buying more condos in Trump properties than almost anyone else. Unblushingly, he referred to Trump as his “patriarch.”

As a central figure in the Trump/Russia story, Cohen is among a cast of characters involved in Trump’s murky Russian dealings: Felix Sater, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and a number of Russians with names worthy of a Dostoevsky novel.

Last week, in WhoWhatWhy, Russ Baker delivered an 8,000-word deep dive into Cohen and his activities. In this week’s podcast, Russ talks to Jeff Schechtman about Cohen, Russia, Ukraine and where all of this might be headed.



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Full Text Transcript:



As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to resource constraints, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like, and we hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman.
Saturday morning a story appeared on how Congress needed to get its act together regarding its investigation of the president’s Russia connection as it relates to Michael Flynn and counterintelligence issues. The reason is that to many it’s becoming clear that Mueller’s investigation is focused entirely on the money; that Mueller and his team are following screenwriter William Goldman’s advice to follow the money. Tax crime, money laundering, offshore funds, and illegal real estate transactions seem to be the fuel powering the Mueller investigation. In that story, Felix Sater and Michael Cohen may be the bookends holding up a complete superstructure of financial crimes.
Several months ago, WhoWhatWhy ran what’s come to be considered the definitive story on Felix Sater. This week, Michael Cohen, the president’s one-time consigliere, is in the spotlight. In an 8,000-word story, Russ Baker makes the case that could almost be a follow-the-dots picture for Mueller and his team. To talk about this, I’m joined by the editor and publisher of WhoWhatWhy and the author of the story, Russ Baker.
Russ, thanks so much for doing this.
Russ Baker: Always my pleasure, Jeff.
Jeff Schechtman: Well, it’s good to talk about this. It is getting murkier and murkier. At the same time, it is getting clearer in so many respects. It’s pretty remarkable. I want to talk first of all about just the Russian connection in general. When you look at Sater, Michael Cohen that you write about this week, Manafort, Kushner’s dealing with Russian banks, Trump Jr. saying that they get a lot of their money from Russia, all of this coming back to the same set of Russia connections. Talk about it first in a general sense.
Russ Baker: I mean it is striking. It’s interesting how Trump has been able to sort of make the argument at least to his base that he has no interests in Russia and that sort of famous saying he says, “I’ve got no investments there,” I’ve got no this, I’ve got no that. It’s quite interesting when you go from there, which I assume some percentage of Americans accept at face value to what we find, which is almost kind of all Russia all the time in every respect of this man’s life going back many, many years.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk about who Michael Cohen is, how he came to be involved with Trump and the Trump organization.
Russ Baker: Sure. Well, as you mentioned, we profiled Michael Cohen recently and found him very, very interesting and neglected in the narrative about Trump and these many, many different Russia strands. Let me just pause to say that I understand and commiserate with everybody on how confusing these stories are, because there are so many names. There are so many strands and the pace has quickened and so there seem to be stories coming out not just by the day but even almost by the hour on these kinds of things and so it’s very hard to sort of decide where to focus. We did focus very early on Felix Sater because we found him extremely compelling. This was a fellow who had a background and association with some criminal acts and some organized crime figures who ended up in Trump Tower and ended up being a business associate and essentially kind of partnering with Trump on some very big real estate deals, including the Trump SoHo Hotel and Towers as well as projects all over the world. So we understood that Felix Sater was very important. We needed to know a lot more about him and that relationship.
Then we gradually also began paying attention to Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen was Trump’s in-house counsel. He was a vice president and the top lawyer inside the Trump organization for quite a number of years coming in there about a decade ago. He became sort of famous as Trump’s sort of Rottweiler, this fellow who would stand everybody down from people who were trying to collect payment from Trump to people who are writing things about him that he didn’t like. Very interesting and colorful, controversial figure. He became more interesting to us when we began seeing that Michael Cohen himself had his own connections to Russia, to the former Soviet Union, to Ukraine predating by quite a number of years when he first came to work for Trump. So we thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” There’s all this Russia stuff. There’s all this talk about Russia trying to get its cause into Trump trying to influence him, trying to help him become president.
We know that Trump has been sort of strikingly kind to Russia and to Vladimir Putin taking a very soft line on Russia and kind of the tables were turned, because traditionally the Republicans were always very aggressive toward first of all the Soviet Union and later a resurging Russia. The Democrats typically were more let’s say diplomacy-minded and then of course this began to shift with Hillary Clinton taking a hard line on Putin. Then we see Donald Trump downplaying, minimizing or even denying some of the actions by Russia that are seen as being most aggressive and most problematical. So when we find out that Trump brings in as his in-house lawyer a sort of fearsome fellow, someone who himself had these ties to the former Soviet Union predating his coming in to Trump, we say, “Well, what is going on here?” You got Felix Sater who comes from Russia. He enters Trump’s orbit circa 2000, 2001. Then we find Michael Cohen who enters later on and around 2007 you got both Cohen and Sater as basically sort of intimates of Donald Trump.
So we begin looking more closely at Cohen and we discover all kinds of interesting things. One of the things we discovered is that he starts buying all these units in Trump buildings all over the place. He and his relatives are buying just an extraordinary number of these very expensive units in New York City, in Florida and so forth, all Trump starting again around 2000 the same timeframe that we see all this increasing kind of Russia-related activity around Donald Trump. So we find that very interesting. Then we learn that Michael Cohen is married to a Ukrainian-born woman; that his brother also married into a Ukrainian family; that the brother’s father-in-law is a man who came out of the former Soviet Union Ukraine, seemingly modest resources and then somehow gets into this big business with grain from Ukraine. He becomes very, very wealthy and then he starts partnering with all these oligarchs. They seemed to have – according to the FBI – organized crime connections back to the former Soviet Union. So as you can imagine, my eyes are widening and widening as I’m looking at this.
We dig and so we’ve been looking at all of that for months. What I’ve told you is really just the tip of the iceberg.
Jeff Schechtman: You mentioned Michael Cohen being married to a Ukrainian woman and his brother also married to a Ukrainian woman. In fact, some of Michael Cohen’s early investments in New York before he even got involved in buying all these Trump properties involve the taxicab business and being involved with Russians and Ukrainians yet again.
Russ Baker: That’s right. In fact, as we look at Michael Cohen and I don’t want to judge this, I mean, he may… Perhaps his family was independently wealthy. I found no signs of that. He grew up I believe middle class on Long Island. He becomes a lawyer, goes to a frankly very low rank law school, little known law school of no particular distinguishing characteristics. He then becomes a personal injury lawyer, a particular kind of law. Again, nothing really stands out at all, any particularly notable successes. I don’t think he gets anywhere near higher levels of that field where I guess you can make quite a lot of money. Then suddenly we see him just spending money like a drunken sailor on all of these businesses. They’re all, whether with his family or as you say with his taxi business, another with the casino boat — all of these people, all of the money seems to have originated back in the former Soviet Union.
That’s so important because it is well-known — I am not saying there’s a connection here because there may be none — but it is well-known that the moneys in the former Soviet Union massively transferred to a small number of so-called oligarchs as well as figures involved with organized crime there, and that of course it became a priority on everyone’s part to get that money out of there to move it west. The United States has always been seen as a sort of a safe haven, a great place to put your money. Of course, if that money is ill-gotten or they just don’t want to pay taxes on it, it then gets laundered. Of course, real estate is just about I guess number one in terms of the most popular vehicles for laundering money.
Jeff Schechtman: You mentioned all these apartments and Trump properties that Cohen was buying. He was even spending bigger than that in buying whole buildings in New York, 50, 60, 70 million dollars. It is completely unclear as you mentioned earlier where any of this money came from.
Russ Baker: That’s right, I mean, even if you take the top lawyers and top lawyers make quite a bit of money. They can make five million or 10 million dollars a year something like that. Even those people would not have the resources to make those kinds of purchases and so it is a legitimate question. Now I do want to emphasize that we reached out to Michael Cohen and had some communication with him. We asked him that question: what was the source of the moneys for all of these purchases? He declined to answer.
Jeff Schechtman: What is the connection and when did Felix Sater and Cohen come together?
Russ Baker: It turns out that they knew each other growing up on Long Island. There are different accounts of that. It has been confirmed that they knew each other. Whether they were friends or you want to say acquaintances or “ran in the same circle”, they definitely knew each other way back when. We actually see importantly the two of them coming together in a particularly striking affair let’s call it, which got a lot of attention very briefly and then sort of vanished from the news. Back in January of this year, there was a meeting at a luxury hotel in New York with a Ukrainian politician and businessman who came supposedly bearing a peace proposal. This was an attempt, we are led to believe, to find a way to settle the dispute between the Ukraine and Russia with the goal of getting the crippling sanctions imposed upon Russia for its incursions into Ukraine to getting those lifted. This politician who turns out to have his own connections to these people was at this meeting with Felix Sater and Michael Cohen.
That’s very, very interesting because, of course, Felix Sater, this was intended to pass a message to Donald Trump. It’s quite interesting, of course, this sort of highly unconventional and unusual sort of diplomacy if that’s what it was. We’re not sure that was the real purpose of the meeting but that’s what we are told was the purpose of the meeting that this Ukrainian brought this portfolio of papers that they wanted delivered to the White House. It’s interesting, of course, that Michael Cohen is a lawyer. I don’t know how that all works or whether they can claim any kind of confidentiality and privilege by passing something through a lawyer. It’s also striking that Michael Cohen doesn’t work for the Trump administration. He was an employee of the Trump organization. It’s unclear to us what his status is at the moment. He had said various things. He had said that he expected to have a job in the Trump administration. They did not give him a job there. He has also said that he is now Trump’s personal lawyer.
We’re not sure exactly what that means, because we see other personal lawyers very much in the news and sort of spokespersons for Trump on questions about his refusing to release his income tax as about conflicts of interest, about other things and, of course, about the current investigation by Mueller. So we don’t know exactly what Michael Cohen does, but we’ve been struck by the fact that he seems to have virtually vanished from public view around the time of this meeting with this Ukrainian on the so-called peace deal. We are certainly wondering whether that turned him into a particular liability for Trump and that he had to distance himself from him just as he has done with Paul Manafort, just as he has done with you can name them the three or four other people. The National Security Adviser Flynn he had to get rid of and there are others as well that he sort of pushed overboard. That’s all very striking because Trump is known for being loyal to those who are loyal to him. He kept on for a very long time some extremely controversial and I would say fairly unpopular figures around him in the White House. He took a really long time to get rid of those people, but seems to have moved much more quickly with anybody who could tie him to Russia.

Jeff Schechtman: Of course, with Felix Sater, he denies even knowing and denies he can’t even recognize him in the room.
Russ Baker: Well, that was really… We had a good laugh about that, because if you go to our articles on WhoWhatWhy, you can see the image of the business card “Felix Sater”, whatever it is, special account adviser or something to Donald Trump, had an office close to Trump’s. He was in Trump’s office all the time, letterhead, special phone number there, so he obviously knew the fellow extremely well. We’ve also published a picture of the two of them standing next to each other.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about how Cohen and Trump actually came together. There’s the official story where Cohen talks about he read Trump’s book Art of the Deal twice and he was just blown away by it and they had to get together. What do we know about how they really came together?
Russ Baker: Well, we don’t have that whole story yet. Our effort I think is a sort of seminal one in moving the ball forward on all of this, but we still have a lot of questions. What we’re interested in is this period where he began acquiring so many Trump properties, because we know that Trump — like I think most business people — likes to know his biggest customers. I can’t say for sure but I’ve seen no indication that there was anyone who was a bigger customer for Trump than Michael Cohen, I mean, 11, maybe even more properties. That’s a lot of properties to buy from one person. We know and we describe in our earlier article on Felix Sater how Trump would sit down personally with some of these people and close the deal himself. Maybe they sit there with the stack of cash for the down payment but, I mean, he would do this personally. So the likelihood that Cohen did not get on his radar around 2000 when he began buying all these properties seems to me very, very remote.
So what we’re wondering is why was he buying all these properties. Is it true that Trump ran with so much of a better investment than anything else? I mean, I think usually when you buy property you look at the inherent quality of the property, the location, the value. He seems to be one of the few people I could see that think that it’s a wise and careful investment to put so much of your money into stuff because it’s got one person’s name on it. It seems to me a very risky strategy. Anyway, at a minimum, Jeff, he got himself we believe he got Trump’s attention. What happened after that we don’t know. We do see that this man who was a personal injury attorney who seems to spend a lot of his time on non-legal matters including this casino boat and the taxicab medallions and so forth, he suddenly is in a relatively major New York law firm, Phillips Nizer. He shows up in there in the mid-2000s.
We found out that he and his brother both together joined that firm. The brother described it to us as a merger although they were this nothing firm and Phillips Nizer is a major firm with hundreds of attorneys. There was some reason, why did Phillips Nizer want these little known attorneys to come in and so-called merge with them? They wouldn’t tell us, but we do know that law firms like to bring people in who are able to secure business, to bring in valuable clients. It’s interesting to note that at that point he was we believe pretty thick with Trump already and Trump had a problem getting lawyers because we understand that there were issues about paying the bills with a lot of these firms and just like a lot of banks didn’t want to deal with him anymore. He may not have had that many options but there comes Michael Cohen already Trump’s perhaps biggest or one of his biggest customers in real estate. He moves into the Nizer firm. For some reason they wanted him. We wonder whether that was that he brought Trump in as a client and handled him.
Then he does that for a year or two and then he moves on to work with Trump himself. The other thing that’s very interesting is there’s the brother and the brother also goes into the firm at the same time. Then the brother leaves and goes into… are you ready dot, dot, dot, the real estate business where he joined one of the biggest real estate brokers in New York.
Jeff Schechtman: It’s also worth noting that Michael Cohen shows up in the Christopher Steele dossier.
Russ Baker: That’s right. Now that dossier is very controversial. That was the dossier prepared by the former MI6 British Intelligence Officer Christopher Steele who was supposedly doing some sort of research or perhaps opposition research on Trump and had worked in the former Soviet Union and went there to do this research. In that dossier, he includes Michael Cohen and that in his allegation that Michael Cohen traveled to the Czech Republic to try to massage some problems that Trump was having vis-a-vis Russia and want to point out that Cohen denies that he was in the Czech Republic in that period or that he did that or had that meeting. It’s hard to know what to make of that. The whole issue of whether he was in Czech Republic is complicated because he produced a passport showing that there were no stamps from the Czech Republic. Also, you don’t have to, thanks to the Schengen community of Europe. You’re able to pass across borders without getting your passport stamped. So we don’t know what to make of that but that’s certainly something else that I assume would be of interest to investigators.
Jeff Schechtman: Not to make this anymore complicated and you’ve already talked about how complicated this story is. Other characters that populate the story beyond Cohen and Sater, I mean, Manafort comes into the picture and a whole slew of kind of Russian gangsters, Russian mob guys that are all part of the equation at one point or another.
Russ Baker: That’s right, a very interesting bunch. I think those of us who enjoyed watching the movies or reading the books over the years about the La Cosa Nostra in the United States will find this cast every bit as colorful if not much more so. Particularly Semion Mogilevich, the so-called boss of bosses, considered by many law enforcements to be the most powerful gangster in the world. Born in the Ukraine, shows up throughout the story and in our Felix Sater piece you find quite a bit about him, about Mogilevich. He was a major target of the FBI when he began moving operations into the United States. His people were believed to be involved with, among other things, Wall Street and trying to get into many aspects of the financial trade. We also know that Mogilevich sent his deputy Ivankov to the United States. The FBI was trying to track this man down, because they had gotten a tip that he was here. Couldn’t find him, couldn’t find him, suddenly he shows up. Where is he? He is living in a luxury condo in, wait for it, Trump Tower.
Then as soon as they identified him there, I don’t know if he gets another tip or offer but he takes off and they don’t hear about him again for a little while until there’s another sighting of him. This time he is in New Jersey at, wait for it, a Trump casino. So this is all very, very interesting. Sater’s own original activity that landed him with a criminal conviction involved the Wall Street pump-and-dump scheme targeting the elderly and other people who were taken advantage of. It was Sater’s cutting a deal with the US Attorney’s Office that turned him into an FBI informant. He was essentially an FBI informant for years while in Trump Tower. Of course, we’re very, very interested in that and I would send listeners back to our first piece about Sater in Trump Tower. The question, which I think is very important here, which is what did the FBI know, because they were running Felix Sater when he was in there doing all this stuff with Donald Trump when Michael Cohen was buying all these apartments.
What was that all about, because now you’ve got former FBI Director Bob Mueller running the investigation. I mean, what does he know and what can he tell and will we ever be able to get to the bottom of all of this.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit, personally, as someone that has looked at this story, written about this story, perhaps dug deeper into all aspects of this story as it relates to the Russian money connection than almost anyone else, the fact that so much of this just can’t be coincidence.
Russ Baker: It seems like it can’t be coincidence. In our latest piece, the one about Michael Cohen, we do lay some of this out. I mean, I think it is a fact that the United States is important to other countries. I think it is a fact that the United States is very important to Russia. That the United States is very important to Putin and is both an entity to cooperate with but also an adversary and a competitor for all kinds of things, including resources around the world. There’s a lot there. All we have to do is look at Rex Tillerson to see when he was running ExxonMobil, now all the effort he made to go to Russia and cultivate Putin. So there’s all of this very intense sort of bilateral cooperation and competition.
Then, of course, there’s a whole issue of Ukraine. Ukraine becomes important as it begins moving more and more into the western orbit. This is a huge problem for Putin, because Ukraine was arguably the most important former Soviet Republic. It is considered the breadbasket of Europe. It has its own tremendous natural resources. It is also the place through which Russia runs its pipelines with its natural gas, which is tremendously important to the Russian economy. It runs through the Ukraine to major markets in Western Europe. For many, many different reasons Ukraine for its ports, locations that Russia needs for its navy and so forth. There are many, many reasons that the Ukraine is tremendously important to Russia. Russia knew that when Ukraine went independent, it went independent at a point where Russia could not stop it. Putin is not about to have what he perceives as an enemy on his doorstep. Any more than the United States would be okay with Mexico going in an unfavorable direction. These countries are tremendously important to major powers. So we’ve got to keep our eye on Ukraine.
So that I think is one of the big factors here that Putin was looking at with his relationship with the United States and I think they’re always. I think all intelligence services are studying these foreign leaders and figuring out what they’re up to. They’re trying to infiltrate their circles. They’re trying to ensure that they get as many advantages as they can and interacting with them. We do see what looks like some recognition by the Russians that Donald Trump is a person, way before he was elected president, who they could do business with. Trump had serious financial problems and by their own admissions the Trumps turned increasingly to projects related to the former Soviet Union, of people and moneys related to the former Soviet Union as major sources of funding during some tough years. So I think it makes sense that they were aware of Donald Trump at least as a major American figure, a famous person with a lot of influence.
Trump had made it known long before going all the way back to the 1980s that he was interested in politics, that he was interested in the presidency. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Russians realize that Donald Trump was somebody, a horse to bet on.
Jeff Schechtman: It is also hard to imagine with all of this money going back and forth, with all of these real estate transactions, with all of the banking transactions that somehow all of this is perfectly clean that in the course of this investigation that’s going on now we’re not going to find an awful lot of money that was laundered somehow or taxes that weren’t quite right. There’s just so much opportunity here for things to go wrong.
Russ Baker: Well, that’s right and, of course, these tremendous amounts of money pouring out of the former Soviet Union. You have to keep in mind that the vast majority of the people in those countries are struggling. Many of them are poor. I mean, former Soviet Union, a communist country where supposedly everybody had shelter and something to eat. I mean, people were certainly not rich but they weren’t in what you would call poverty that now 20% of the Russian population is said to live in poverty now. That’s I guess comparable to the United States, but we have a very different system than they had. So that means that even that the moneys are not going to them, they’re going somewhere else. They’re going to the so-called oligarchs and friends of Putin, and that money is coming out of the country. So yes, I mean, there is at least a 1% versus 99% factor there. I don’t think that you could say that all wealthy people are people that become wealthy in the former Soviet Union are problematical, but by the estimations of law enforcement a fairly significant share of that money is dirty, absolutely.
Jeff Schechtman: Of course, the political overlay to all of this that kind of brings it into a kind of contemporaneous aspect is the degree to which so many people in the Trump orbit have lied about their connections to Russia.
Russ Baker: That is staggering, Jeff. It is staggering how many have ties to Russia. It’s staggering what they’ve said about them. I mean, another figure we didn’t even mention is this Carter Page who is over there doing financial work and then became a foreign policy adviser to Trump. We didn’t talk about the fact that at the Republican convention they had meetings with Russians. They worked assiduously to soften the Republican platforms, criticism of Russia over Ukraine. Boy, I mean, they have had to reverse themselves individually and collectively again and again and on every front. It really is sort of jaw dropping. I have to say when you consider the scandals that people like say Hillary Clinton faced over having her emails on a private server and the White Water, all these kinds of scandals over the years that frankly I’m not sure anybody ever fully understood exactly what was wrong or exactly what the magnitude of the wrongdoing was or the harmful intent behind these things that, Benghazi. I mean, my gosh, you look at Fox News. They go on forever just venting about these things.
Yet if you were to interview the most avid of viewers and ask them what is this thing actually about, they kind of get irritated by the question because they don’t know. Here we know what’s going on. We can see it. It’s unprecedented, I think, in history, this notion that one country – a nemesis of another country – has sunk its claws into it to this extent. I have to say by the way I am not somebody who is in favor of beating up on Russia. Our website WhoWhatWhy was very, very careful. We took a long time in looking at this stuff. I mean, I, myself get invited on and appear from time to time on RT, a Russian news channel. So we’re not advocating the creation of a new cold war here. Business is business, but I think the American people deserve the truth and deserve to know what is going on and to understand the magnitude and the potential ramifications of what we’re seeing.
Jeff Schechtman: Russ Baker, his recent spotlight on Michael Cohen could be found at WhoWhatWhy.org as can many other stories about this including the story about Felix Sater. Russ, thanks so much for doing this.
Russ Baker: Jeff, thank you very much.
Hi, this is Russ Baker. If you like that podcast, please feel free to share it and help others find it by rating it and reviewing it on iTunes. Also, if you’d like to see us continue to do this kind of hard-hitting investigative journalism, we need your help. Please support our work. Go to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/09/07/russ- ... re-stooge/

The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election
By SCOTT SHANESEPT. 7, 2017


Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, above. On Facebook and Twitter, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that posted anti-Hillary Clinton messages. Credit Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
Sometimes an international offensive begins with a few shots that draw little notice. So it was last year when Melvin Redick of Harrisburg, Pa., a friendly-looking American with a backward baseball cap and a young daughter, posted on Facebook a link to a brand-new website.

“These guys show hidden truth about Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other leaders of the US,” he wrote on June 8, 2016. “Visit #DCLeaks website. It’s really interesting!”

Mr. Redick turned out to be a remarkably elusive character. No Melvin Redick appears in Pennsylvania records, and his photos seem to be borrowed from an unsuspecting Brazilian. But this fictional concoction has earned a small spot in history: The Redick posts that morning were among the first public signs of an unprecedented foreign intervention in American democracy.



A Facebook post, by someone claiming to be Melvin Redick, promoting a website linked to the Russian military intelligence agency G.R.U. Credit The New York Times
The DCLeaks site had gone live a few days earlier, posting the first samples of material, stolen from prominent Americans by Russian hackers, that would reverberate through the presidential election campaign and into the Trump presidency. The site’s phony promoters were in the vanguard of a cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.

The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.

An investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had leaked. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign.

On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages. Many were automated Twitter accounts, called bots, that sometimes fired off identical messages seconds apart — and in the exact alphabetical order of their made-up names, according to the FireEye researchers. On Election Day, for instance, they found that one group of Twitter bots sent out the hashtag #WarAgainstDemocrats more than 1,700 times.

The Russian efforts were sometimes crude or off-key, with a trial-and-error feel, and many of the suspect posts were not widely shared. The fakery may have added only modestly to the din of genuine American voices in the pre-election melee, but it helped fuel a fire of anger and suspicion in a polarized country..

A Times investigation reveals missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of a campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.
Given the powerful role of social media in political contests, understanding the Russian efforts will be crucial in preventing or blunting similar, or more sophisticated, attacks in the 2018 congressional races and the 2020 presidential election. Multiple government agencies have investigated the Russian attack, though it remains unclear whether any agency is focused specifically on tracking foreign intervention in social media. Both Facebook and Twitter say they are studying the 2016 experience and how to defend against such meddling.

“We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform,” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, wrote on Wednesday in a post about the Russia-linked fake accounts and ads. “We believe in protecting the integrity of civic discourse.”

Critics say that because shareholders judge the companies partly based on a crucial data point — “monthly active users” — they are reluctant to police their sites too aggressively for fear of reducing that number. The companies use technical tools and teams of analysts to detect bogus accounts, but the scale of the sites — 328 million users on Twitter, nearly two billion on Facebook — means they often remove impostors only in response to complaints.

Though both companies have been slow to grapple with the problem of manipulation, they have stepped up efforts to purge fake accounts. Facebook says it takes down a million accounts a day — including some that were related to the recent French election and upcoming German voting — but struggles to keep up with the illicit activity. Still, the company says the abuse affects only a small fraction of the social network; Facebook officials estimated that of all the “civic content” posted on the site in connection with the United States election, less than one-tenth of one percent resulted from “information operations” like the Russian campaign.

Twitter, unlike Facebook, does not require the use of a real name and does not prohibit automated accounts, arguing that it seeks to be a forum for open debate. But it constantly updates a “trends” list of most-discussed topics or hashtags, and it says it tries to foil attempts to use bots to create fake trends. However, FireEye found that the suspected Russian bots sometimes managed to do just that, in one case causing the hashtag #HillaryDown to be listed as a trend.

Clinton Watts, a former F.B.I. agent who has closely tracked Russian activity online, said that Facebook and Twitter suffered from a “bot cancer eroding trust on their platforms.” But he added that while Facebook “has begun cutting out the tumors by deleting false accounts and fighting fake news,” Twitter has done little and as a result, “bots have only spread since the election.”

Asked to comment, Twitter referred to a blog post in June in which it said it was “doubling down” on efforts to prevent manipulation but could not reveal details for fear of tipping off those trying to evade the company’s measures. But it declared that Twitter’s “open and real-time nature is a powerful antidote” to falsehoods.

“This is important because we cannot distinguish whether every single Tweet from every person is truthful or not,” the statement said. “We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth.”

Leaks and Counterfeit Profiles

Russia has been quite open about playing its hacking card. In February last year, at a conference in Moscow, a top cyberintelligence adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin hinted that Russia was about to unleash a devastating information attack on the United States.

“We are living in 1948,” said the adviser, Andrey Krutskikh, referring to the eve of the first Soviet atomic bomb test, in a speech reported by The Washington Post. “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having something in the information arena that will allow to us to talk to the Americans as equals.”

Mr. Putin’s denials of Russian meddling have been coy. In June, he allowed that “free-spirited” hackers might have awakened in a good mood one day and spontaneously decided to contribute to “the fight against those who say bad things about Russia.” Speaking to NBC News, he rejected the idea that evidence pointed to Russia — while showing a striking familiarity with how cyberattackers might cover their tracks.

“IP addresses can be simply made up,” Mr. Putin said, referring to Internet protocol addresses, which can identify particular computers. “There are such IT specialists in the world today, and they can arrange anything and then blame it on whomever. This is no proof.”

Photo

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in June. His denials of Russian meddling have been coy, though he said that “free-spirited” hackers might have spontaneously contributed to “the fight against those who say bad things about Russia.” Credit Sputnik, via Reuters
Mr. Putin had a point. Especially in the social media realm, attributing fake accounts — to Russia or to any other source — is always challenging. In January, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency concluded “with high confidence” that Mr. Putin had ordered an influence operation to damage Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and eventually aid Donald J. Trump’s. In April, Facebook published a public report on information operations using fake accounts. It shied away from naming Russia as the culprit until Wednesday, when the company said it had removed 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages that were “likely operated out of Russia.” Facebook officials fingered a St. Petersburg company with Kremlin ties called the Internet Research Agency.

Russia deliberately blurs its role in influence operations, American intelligence officials say. Even skilled investigators often cannot be sure if a particular Facebook post or Twitter bot came from Russian intelligence employees, paid “trolls” in Eastern Europe or hackers from Russia’s vast criminal underground. A Russian site called buyaccs.com (“Buy Bulk Accounts at Best Prices”) offers for sale a huge array of pre-existing social media accounts, including on Facebook and Twitter; like wine, the older accounts cost more, because their history makes chicanery harder to spot.

The trail that leads from the Russian operation to the bogus Melvin Redick, however, is fairly clear. United States intelligence concluded that DCLeaks.com was created in June 2016 by the Russian military intelligence agency G.R.U. The site began publishing an eclectic collection of hacked emails, notably from George Soros, the financier and Democratic donor, as well as a former NATO commander and some Democratic and Republican staffers. Some of the website’s language — calling Mrs. Clinton “President of the Democratic Party” and referring to her “electional staff” — seemed to belie its pose as a forum run by American activists.

DCLeaks would soon be followed by a blog called Guccifer 2.0, which would leave even more clues of its Russian origin. Those sites’ posts, however, would then be dwarfed by those from WikiLeaks, which American officials believe got thousands of Democratic emails from Russian intelligence hackers through an intermediary. At each stage, a chorus of dubious Facebook and Twitter accounts — alongside many legitimate ones — would applaud the leaks.

During its first weeks online, DCLeaks drew no media attention. But The Times found that some Facebook users somehow discovered the new site quickly and began promoting it on June 8. One was the Redick account, which posted about DCLeaks to the Facebook groups “World News Headlines” and “Breaking News — World.”

The Redick profile lists Central High School in Philadelphia and Indiana University of Pennsylvania as his alma maters; neither has any record of his attendance. In one of his photos, this purported Pennsylvania lifer is sitting in a restaurant in Brazil — and in another, his daughter’s bedroom appears to have a Brazilian-style electrical outlet. His posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview.

Melvin Redick’s Facebook Profile
Inconsistencies in the contents of Mr. Redick’s Facebook profile suggest that the identity was fabricated.


1 2 3
Neither Central High School nor Indiana University of Pennsylvania has any record of Mr. Redick attending.
According to his profile, Mr. Redick was born and raised in Pennsylvania, but one image shows him seated in a restaurant in Brazil, and another shows a Brazilian-style electrical outlet in his daughter’s bedroom.
Mr. Redick’s posts were never of a personal nature. He shared only news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview.
The same morning, “Katherine Fulton” also began promoting DCLeaks in the same awkward English Mr. Redick used. “Hey truth seekers!” she wrote. “Who can tell me who are #DCLeaks? Some kind of Wikileaks? You should visit their website, it contains confidential information about our leaders such as Hillary Clinton, and others http://dcleaks.com/.”

So did “Alice Donovan,” who pointed to documents from Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations that she said showed its pro-American tilt and — in rather formal language for Facebook — “describe eventual means and plans of supporting opposition movements, groups or individuals in various countries.”

Might Mr. Redick, Ms. Fulton, Ms. Donovan and others be real Americans who just happened to notice DCLeaks the same day? No. The Times asked Facebook about these and a half-dozen other accounts that appeared to be Russian creations. The company carried out its standard challenge procedure by asking the users to establish their bona fides. All the suspect accounts failed and were removed from Facebook.

Mobilizing a ‘Bot’ Army

On Twitter, meanwhile, hundreds of accounts were busy posting anti-Clinton messages and promoting the leaked material obtained by Russian hackers. Investigators for FireEye spent months reviewing Twitter accounts associated with certain online personas, posing as activists, that seemed to show the Russian hand: DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, Anonymous Poland and several others. FireEye concluded that they were associated with one another and with Russian hacking groups, including APT28 or Fancy Bear, which American intelligence blames for the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails.

Some accounts, the researchers found, showed clear signs of intermittent human control. But most displayed the rote behavior of automated Twitter bots, which send out tweets according to built-in instructions.

The researchers discovered long lists of bot accounts that sent out identical messages within seconds or minutes of one another, firing in alphabetical order. The researchers coined the term “warlist” for them. On Election Day, one such list cited leaks from Anonymous Poland in more than 1,700 tweets. Snippets of them provide a sample of the sequence:

@edanur01 #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:54

@efekinoks #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:54

@elyashayk #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:54

@emrecanbalc #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:55

@emrullahtac #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:55

Lee Foster, who leads the FireEye team examining information operations, said some of the warlist Twitter accounts had previously been used for illicit marketing, suggesting that they may have been purchased on the black market. Some were genuine accounts that had been hijacked. Rachel Usedom, a young American engineer in California, tweeted mostly about her sorority before losing interest in 2014. In November 2016, her account was taken over, renamed #ClintonCurruption, and used to promote the Russian leaks.

Photo

Rachel Usedom’s Twitter account was taken over and used to post political leaks.
Ms. Usedom had no idea that her account had been commandeered by anti-Clinton propagandists. “I was shocked and slightly confused when I found out,” she said.

Notably, the warlist tweets often included the Twitter handles of users whose attention the senders wanted to catch — news organizations, journalists, government agencies and politicians, including @realDonaldTrump. By targeting such opinion-shapers, Mr. Foster said, the creators of the warlists clearly wanted to stir up conversation about the leaked material.

J. M. Berger, a researcher in Cambridge, Mass., helped build a public web “dashboard” for the Washington-based Alliance for Securing Democracy to track hundreds of Twitter accounts that were suspected of links to Russia or that spread Russian propaganda. During the campaign, he said, he often saw the accounts post replies to Mr. Trump’s tweets.

Mr. Trump “received more direct replies than anyone else,” Mr. Berger said. “Clearly this was an effort to influence Donald Trump. They know he reads tweets.”

The suspected Russian operators at times lacked sophistication. “They are not always Americanophiles who know every nuance of U.S. politics,” said Mr. Foster, the FireEye researcher.

For instance, last October, hundreds of Anonymous Poland Twitter accounts posted a forged letter on the stationery of the conservative Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, purporting to show that it had donated $150 million to the Clinton campaign. The foundation denied any such contribution, which would have been illegal and, given its political leaning, highly unlikely.

‘A Battle of Information’

Only a small fraction of all the suspect social media accounts active during the election have been studied by investigators. But there is ample reason to suspect that the Russian meddling may have been far more widespread.

Several activists who ran Facebook pages for Bernie Sanders, for instance, noticed a suspicious flood of hostile comments about Mrs. Clinton after Mr. Sanders had already ended his campaign and endorsed her.

John Mattes, who ran the “San Diego for Bernie Sanders” page, said he saw a shift from familiar local commenters to newcomers, some with Eastern European names — including four different accounts using the name “Oliver Mitov.”

“Those who voted for Bernie, will not vote for corrupt Hillary!” one of the Mitovs wrote on Oct. 7. “The Revolution must continue! #NeverHillary”

While he was concerned about being seen as a “crazy cold warrior,” Mr. Mattes said he came to believe that Russia was the likely source of the anti-Clinton comments. “The magnitude and viciousness of it — I would suggest that their fingerprints were on it and no one else had that agenda,” he said.

Both on the left and the pro-Trump right, though, some skeptics complain that Moscow has become the automatic boogeyman, accused of misdeeds with little proof. Even those who track Russian online activity admit that in the election it was not always easy to sort out who was who.

“Yes, the Russians were involved. Yes, there’s a lot of organic support for Trump,” said Andrew Weisburd, an Illinois online researcher who has written frequently about Russian influence on social media. “Trying to disaggregate the two was difficult, to put it mildly.”

Mr. Weisburd said he had labeled some Twitter accounts “Kremlin trolls” based simply on their pro-Russia tweets and with no proof of Russian government ties. The Times contacted several such users, who insisted that they had come by their anti-American, pro-Russian views honestly, without payment or instructions from Moscow.

“Hillary’s a warmonger,” said Marilyn Justice, 66, who lives in Nova Scotia and tweets as @mkj1951. Of Mr. Putin, she said in an interview, “I think he’s very patient in the face of provocations.”

Ms. Justice said she had first taken an interest in Russia during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, while looking for hockey coverage and finding what she considered a snide anti-Russia bias in the Western media. She said she did get a lot of news from Sputnik and RT but laughed at the notion that she could have Kremlin connections.

Another of the so-called Kremlin trolls, Marcel Sardo, 48, a web producer in Zurich, describes himself bluntly on his Twitter bio as a “Pro-Russia Media-Sniper.” He said he shared notes daily via Skype and Twitter with online acquaintances, including Ms. Justice, on disputes between Russia and the West over who shot down the Malaysian airliner hit by a missile over Ukraine and who used sarin gas in Syria.

“It’s a battle of information, and I and my peers have decided to take sides,” said Mr. Sardo, who constantly cites Russian sources and bashed Mrs. Clinton daily during the campaign. But he denied he had any links to the Russian government.

If that’s so, his prolific posts are a victory for Russia’s information war — that admirers of the Kremlin spread what American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.

But if Russian officials are gleeful at their success, in last year’s election and beyond, they rarely let the mask slip. In an interview with Bloomberg before the election, Mr. Putin suggested that reporters were worrying too much about who exactly stole the material.

“Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?” he said, in a point that Mr. Trump has sometimes echoed. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/p ... &smtyp=cur

Trump Jr. tells Senate he wanted Russian dirt on Hillary to judge if she was ‘fit’ to be president
Brad Reed
07 SEP 2017 AT 11:26 ET

Donald Trump Jr. met behind closed doors with Senate investigators on Thursday, where he told them that he met with Russian government officials in 2016 to seek damaging information on Hillary Clinton because he was concerned she might not be fit for the office of the presidency.

“To the extent they had information concerning the fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential candidate, I believed that I should at least hear them out,” said Trump Jr., whose statement was leaked to the New York Times. “Depending on what, if any, information they had, I could then consult with counsel to make an informed decision as to whether to give it further consideration.”

Trump Jr. said that nothing came out of his June 2016 meeting with Russian officials, and he denied that he colluded with the Russian government to undermine Clinton’s candidacy. He also argued that he was too overwhelmed and inexperienced to show better judgement about meeting with a officials from a rival government whose goal was to meddle in the American political process.

“I had never worked on a campaign before and it was an exhausting, all-encompassing, life-changing experience,” he said. “Every single day I fielded dozens, if not hundreds, of emails and phone calls.”

Trump Jr. took the meeting with Russian government officials after being contacted by Rob Goldstone, a publicist for the Kremlin-linked Agalarov family that has worked with Trump for years. Goldstone billed the meeting as involving a “Russian government lawyer” who wanted to give him damaging information on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s efforts to help his father’s campaign.

Trump Jr. responded enthusiastically to Goldstone’s meeting proposal by saying, “I love it!”

During his testimony, Trump Jr. defended saying that he “loved” the idea of Russia helping his father’s campaign spread dirt on Hillary Clinton.

“As much as some have made of my using the phrase ‘I love it,’ it was simply a colloquial way of saying that I appreciated Rob’s gesture,” he said.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/trump-j ... president/

Felix Sater’s letter to Michael Cohen surfaces, directly incriminating Donald Trump
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 12:00 pm EDT Fri Sep 8, 2017
Home » Politics

Last week it was revealed that Donald Trump was trying to build Trump Tower Moscow during the election, and that his attorney Michael Cohen and business partner Felix Sater were leading the way in trying to make it happen. It was also revealed that Trump signed a letter of intent to build it, erasing any shot at deniability. Now an email from Sater to Cohen has surfaced regarding the project, and it directly incriminates Donald Trump.


The email in question has been obtained by the Daily Beast, and it’s brief but stunning. Felix Sater wrote the following to Michael Cohen, verbatim with some missing apostrophes and a missing word or two: “Attached is the signed LOI by Andrey Rozov. Please have Mr. Trump counter-sign, signed and sent back. Let’s make this happen and build a Trump Moscow. And possibly fix relations between the countries by showing everyone that commerce & business are much better and more practical than politics. That should Putins message as well, and we will help him agree on that message. Help world peace and make a lot of money, I would say thats a great lifetime goal for us to go after.” (link). That’s the full text of the email, and it tells us a lot.


There are a few key details that stand out. “LOI” refers to letter of intent. It’s been previously reported that Trump did in fact sign the letter. This means that Cohen, and by extension Trump, agreed with Sater’s premises laid out in the email. In other words, the Trump Tower Moscow was partly an attempt at conspiring with a foreign government to influence the outcome of the election, and partly and effort at making foreign profits from the election. These are both crimes. Trump’s decision to sign the letter of intent, after the project was framed to him in this manner, directly incriminates him.

In addition, the email reveals just how thoroughly the Trump and Putin camps were colluding during the election. It documents that Trump’s camp was even willing to help frame Putin’s messaging on the project so he could sell the idea that Trump should be president. If Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t already have this incriminating email, he does now.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/sa ... rump/4808/

BIG HAUL

Russia’s Facebook Fake News Could Have Reached 70 Million Americans

Facebook acknowledged that Russian propagandists spent $100,000 on election ads. It neglected to mention how many millions of people those ads reached.

BEN COLLINS
KEVIN POULSEN
SPENCER ACKERMAN
09.08.17 1:00 AM ET
Russian-funded covert propaganda posts on Facebook were likely seen by a minimum of 23 million people and might have reached as many as 70 million, according to analysis by an expert on the social-media giant’s complex advertising systems. That means up to 28 percent of American adults were swept in by the campaign.
On Wednesday, Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, revealed that Russia had “likely” used 470 fake accounts to buy about $100,000 worth of advertising promoting “divisive social and political messages” to Americans. It was Facebook’s first public acknowledgment of the role it unwittingly played in the Kremlin’s “active measures” campaign. Stamos’ statement was also conspicuous by what it omitted: Facebook has refused to release the ads. More significant, it hasn’t said what kind of reach Russia attained with its ad buy.
There may be a reason for that. On the surface, $100,000 is small change in contemporary national politics, and 3,000 ads sounds like a drop in the pond when Facebook boasts 2 billion monthly users. But it turns out $100,000 on Facebook can go a surprisingly long way, if it’s used right. On average, Facebook ads run about $6 for 1,000 impressions. By that number, the Kremlin’s $100,000 buy would get its ads seen nearly 17 million times.
But that average hides a lot of complexity, and the actual rate can range from $1 to $100 for 1,000 impressions on an ad with pinpoint targeting. Virality matters, too. Ads that get more shares, likes, and comments are far cheaper than boring ads that nobody likes, and ads that send users to Facebook posts instead of third-party websites enjoy an additional price break. Finally, there are network effects, which can vastly multiply the number of users who see a promoted Facebook post.
“If they got a super high engagement rate, they’re not only going to get the traffic that you get from paying, but you get this viral factor that can multiply it,” said Dennis Yu, CTO and co-founder of BlitzMetrics, an ad agency that deals exclusively with Facebook ads. “You buy one impression and you get 20 additional impressions.”
Politically charged posts—especially salacious ones—draw high engagement, said Yu. “With certain topics it’s kind of hard to lose. ‘Hillary Clinton got caught hiding something!’ Well, OK. I already believe she hides stuff.” Yu said he suspects Russia maximized its impact with a basic strategy practiced by Facebook marketers: Seed a new Facebook post with a tiny buy as low as $1 a day, then watch Facebook’s ad console and see if the post catches fire. If it doesn’t, write it off and start on the next post. But if people begin engaging with the post in a serious way, you go all in.
“One out of every 100 posts, you’re going to get that home run,” said Yu, whose clients include GoDaddy and the Golden State Warriors. “Then you’re going to boost the heck out of that sucker. You’re going to put $10,000 on it. And Facebook’s algorithm already knows who to show it to, like the friends of the people who already liked it… It’s a risk-free lottery. The minimum cost is $1 per day.”

One now-shuttered Facebook page provides evidence Russia was following this strategy. Called SecureBorders, the page positioned itself as the work of a group of Americans concerned about U.S. border security. “America is at risk and we need to protect our country now more than ever, liberal hogwash aside,” read the tagline. But a March article by the respected Russian news outlet RBC revealed the page was created and run by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Association, identified by a January U.S. intelligence report as a farm of “professional trolls” financed by a Vladmir Putin ally.
It’s unclear how many pages like SecureBorders Russia ran, but that group alone had 133,000 followers before it disappeared last month, almost certainly as part of Facebook’s purge of 470 deceptive Russian accounts and, reportedly, 25 Facebook communities with a cumulative 3 million subscribers.
Though it’s gone from Facebook, web caches still provide a limited view of the page, and it’s clear there’s a lot of nasty dirt hiding behind Facebook’s sanitary “divisive social and political messages” talk. The page spewed a steady stream of alt-right political memes and fake news, nearly always accompanied a gif or a video and a explicit or implicit call for users to engage with the post.
“This woman is a crook. A sociopath. A heartless, cold b*tch,” reads one of the posts from election season, above a photoshopped image of Hillary Clinton standing for a mugshot. “We’ve had more than enough traitors and crooks in the White House already! Don’t you agree?”
Clinton, or “Killary,” as the page preferred to call her, was a frequent target of the page, while Donald Trump drew consistent praise before the election and since. Other posts railed against U.S. Muslims, who the page claimed falsely are busily indoctrinating American grade-school students.

Some posts went after undocumented immigrants, implying they cross into the U.S. from Mexico to commit crimes and vote Democratic by the thousands. Syrian refugees were routinely painted as freeloaders who mostly “really hate America.” One refugee smear got 3,000 “likes,” more than 200 comments, and was shared 1,300 times, while videos tended to draw higher numbers, starting in the low thousands and climbing to 30,000.
According to RBC’s investigation, SecureBorders had bigger hits, like a single post boosted through Facebook ads that was seen by 4 million people, shared 80,000 times, and accrued 300,000 likes. The torrent of posts with meager numbers were likely just a means to achieve the occasional jackpot post like this, one worth boosting with ad money, said Yu. “You can see the evidence of their testing. They’re putting out a lot of stuff.”
If Russia is following that strategy, the impact could be huge. Yu provided a possible range for Russia’s $100,000 spend. At the Facebook average rate of $6 for 1,000 ad impressions, Russia’s ads would have displayed 16.7 million times.
At the other end of the spectrum, if Russia took full advantage of the intricacies of Facebook’s ad-bidding system, it might have driven those costs as low as $2 for 1,000 impressions, Yu said, giving it 50 million impressions. Assuming the promoted posts enjoyed a 20-factor viral boost—less than a thrilling sports moment, more than a cosmetics ad—that would translate to between 333 million and 1 billion impressions for Russia’s propaganda, he said.
The pool of distinct people who saw those posts would be much lower, because of Facebook’s targeting algorithm. If someone engages with an anti-Muslim ad, Facebook is more likely to send them the anti-immigrant ad that followed. The collective reach of the ads would be about 7 percent of the impressions, Yu said, for a range of 23 million to 70 million people touched by Russia’s Facebook campaign.
Those numbers are just an estimate. The exact reach of Russia’s campaign remains a mystery that only Facebook can solve. Then there’s the question of targeting. Stamos said a quarter of the 3,000 ads—approximately 750—were “geographically targeted” to audiences in specific places. Most of the geo-targeting occurred in 2015, rather than 2016, Stamos said. It’s worth pointing out that as an ad giant, Facebook’s advertising systems in 2017 have evolved from what they were in June 2015, when the company’s review began.
But Stamos was silent on which physical areas—and audiences—were targeted, particularly as the election loomed. Clinton lost Michigan by 11,612 votes and Wisconsin by just over 27,000.
Knowledgeable Facebook sources who would not speak on the record indicated that Facebook continues to review potential misuse of its platform. Part of that study includes examining the reach of the fraudulent accounts pushing inflammatory or propagandistic content. In a statement, a company representative told The Daily Beast: “We are continuing to cooperate with the relevant investigative authorities. We don’t have more to share about this now.”
It’s possible that Russia also used less overt tactics on Facebook that have yet to be discovered. It is also unclear which of Facebook’s demographic-targeting features were used to push ads to specific people and voting blocs.
Facebook allows advertisers to boost posts only to users with basic signifiers like age and gender, and more complex indicators like interests and probable income, which it can infer by collected marketing data and a user’s internet speed. The social-media juggernaut’s algorithm can even target specific people, for example in swing states, vulnerable districts, or parts of cities.
For his part, Yu doubts that Russia, or anyone else, did much data crunching. “Facebook’s AI is super intelligent now. You don’t have to import email addresses and phone numbers, ZIP Codes and names,” he says. “Five years ago I was the Man. People used to come to me for targeting. Now, there’s nothing better than Facebook’s data.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/russias-fa ... via=mobile