rigorousintuition.ca

Polly Sigh

CIA's Aug 2016 “intelligence bombshell” from GCHQ was NOT Christopher Steele's Dossier: "Head of UK's intelligence service flew to DC & briefed Director @JohnBrennan on an *intercepted stream of illicit communications* btwn Trump’s team & Moscow.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... mp-dossier …



10:36 AM - 5 Mar 2018

via @JaneMayerNYer: Christopher Steele wrote another memo in Nov 2016 that said the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial Sec of State choice, Mitt Romney & asked him to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Russian sanctions.

The Trump administration was three weeks late on the Russia sanctions deadline. But it’s killed the office that coordinates them.

State Department Scraps Sanctions Office
The Trump administration was three weeks late on a Russia sanctions deadline. But it’s killed the office that coordinates them.

BY ROBBIE GRAMER, DAN DE LUCE | OCTOBER 26, 2017, 7:26 PM

The State Department shuttered an office that oversees sanctions policy, even as the Donald Trump administration faced criticism from lawmakers over its handling of new economic penalties against Russia.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson eliminated the Coordinator for Sanctions Policy office, which had been led by a veteran ambassador-rank diplomat with at least five staff, as part of an overhaul of the department, former diplomats and congressional sources told Foreign Policy.

Instead, the role of coordinating U.S. sanctions across the State Department and other government agencies now falls to just one mid-level official — David Tessler, the deputy director of the Policy Planning Office. The Policy Planning Office, which previously operated as a small team providing strategic advice to the secretary but did not manage programs or initiatives, has grown in power under Tillerson’s “redesign” of the department.

While the sanctions office was dissolved, the administration missed a key Oct. 1 deadline to implement new penalties against Russia adopted by Congress in August. The move reinforced concerns among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers that the Trump White House is mismanaging the State Department and undercutting the role of U.S. diplomacy.

The “elimination of the sanctions coordinator appears to be part of the larger reorganization debacle underway at the State Department,” said Sean Bartlett, spokesman for Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

A State Department spokesperson told FP they notified Congress last month the office would be shutting down and moving to the policy planning office. “No movement of funds or personnel has taken place,” the spokesperson added.

Both Cardin and Republican Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had blasted the administration over its failure to implement new sanctions against Russia enacted by Congress. After blowing past the Oct. 1 deadline, the State Department finally issue belated guidance for the measures, identifying entities and officials linked to Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Thursday this came after a call between Corker and Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, who updated the committee chairman on their progress.

“A lot of you had had questions about why the delay, why it’s taken a bit of time for the State Department to deliver this information to Congress, and that is because it’s complex, complicated, and industry needs to know what will happen if they engage in certain activities,” she told reporters at a press briefing on Thursday.

Former officials and experts are torn on whether or not eliminating the Coordinator for Sanctions Policy office will undercut the State Department’s ability to oversee sanctions. Sanctions have become a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy toward adversaries such as Iran and North Korea.

Daniel Fried, a now-retired career diplomat who served as the coordinator for sanctions policy through February 2017, cautioned against misinterpreting the move.

“You can’t read into that a lack of commitment to sanctions,” he told FP, adding as long as State devotes staff to the issue, their title or bureaucratic placement in the department wasn’t important. “It’s not as if [the administration] is gutting sanctions altogether.”

Other former officials said scrapping the office and putting the job on the shoulders of only one policy planning official was a mistake, particularly at a time when the administration seems to be struggling to manage an array of foreign-policy issues and to articulate its stance.

“They messed up on this. They scrapped this when they could’ve taken it further,” said a former State Department official. “They said, ‘We’re just going to back to the point where there’s no clear coordination.’”

Another former government official familiar with sanctions said, without the office, there’s a danger of bureaucratic turf battles cropping up inside the State Department and with other agencies on sanctions. “This could be a real problem,” the former official said.

The Treasury Department takes the lead on the technical aspect of sanctions, but implementing punitive measures requires elaborate coordination with allies, particularly the European Union, to build diplomatic support and to ensure a unified approach. As a result, the State Department plays a crucial role in making sanctions effective.

As secretary of state under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton created the coordinator for sanctions policy role. Fried said during his tenure, the office worked hand in glove with Treasury to carry out tasks such as working with Asian allies to push North Korea sanctions and identifying individual Russians trying to evade targeted U.S. sanctions.

The office kept the trains running on time, said Edward Fishman, a former sanctions policy official in the Obama administration. But for State to pack the biggest punch on sanctions, it needs a full-fledged and permanent bureau to coordinate sanctions issues, he said. Sanctions issues are currently scattered across a slew of offices including the Burea of Economic and Business Affairs, the International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau, and the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.

The move also highlights the growing influence of the Policy Planning Office under Tillerson. Some State Department employees and lawmakers have widely criticized Tillerson for expanding the office, historically used as an in-house think tank for long-term strategic issues and speechwriting. Under Tillerson, it’s grown in scope and influence, prompting concern he’s creating what one senior State Department official described as a “miniature fiefdom” to sidestep the wider department and legislative oversight.

The move, critics say, both cuts off department-wide input on key policy decisions and bottlenecks the department’s overall work as policy planning staff are stretched to the brink with an array of new responsibilities.

Sanctions have become a pillar of U.S. foreign policy, and the Trump administration has touted them as a pivotal tool to counter regimes in North Korea and Iran. Wherever sanctions policy is managed inside Foggy Bottom, the State Department has a pivotal role in determining whether sanctions actually work.

“You can churn out all the sanctions you want,” Fishman said. “But if you don’t have diplomats around the world pounding the pavement every day to get allies on board, they won’t be effective.”

Update: This article was updated to include information on guidance on Russian sanctions and reflect the fact that the State Department informed Congress about the closure of the office last month
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/26/sta ... ns-office/.

Ever since Rex Tillerson scrapped the sanctions coordination office last year, the US Gov't has faced a critical ‘Brain Drain’ of sanctions experts. The State Dept’s most experienced UN-based sanctions expert stepped down on Friday.




Russian gas defies US sanctions to reach New England this weekend, making it the first shipment of gas from Russia to ever reach the US. The ship's circuitous route drew attention from energy traders.
Treasury & State Dept had no comment.

Russian gas defies U.S. sanctions to reach New England

BEN LEFEBVRE01/26/2018 06:35 PM EST

The ship Gaselys is pictured. | Rama, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr/Wikimedia Commons
The Treasury Department expanded its sanctions Friday to include 21 people and nine entities in Russia and Ukraine.
As the Trump administration slaps fresh sanctions on Russian energy companies, a cargo of Russian gas is set to power homes near Boston.

A tanker of liquefied natural gas from a Russian company on the Treasury Department’s sanctions list is scheduled to unload the fuel this weekend, making it the first shipment of gas from the country to ever reach the United States. It’s arriving just after the U.S. announced increased economic penalties Friday against Moscow-linked people and businesses because of Vladimir Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

Technically, the gas shipment does not appear to violate the prohibitions that the Obama administration imposed four years ago — it’s owned by a French energy trader and arriving on a French-owned vessel. But it shows the difficulty of enforcing sanctions involving energy cargoes, which can change hands frequently and are often mixed with fuel from multiple locations.

The Treasury Department expanded its sanctions Friday to include 21 people and nine entities in Russia and Ukraine.

The cargo is aboard the French LNG vessel Gaselys, which has been anchored in Massachusetts Bay since Wednesday while it undergoes safety and environmental inspections, according to Chief Petty Officer Luke Pinneo at the Coast Guard’s First District in Boston. It is headed to the Everett LNG import terminal a few miles north of Boston.

“They are expected to be in port sometime this weekend,” Pinneo said.

The circuitous route that the ship took to the U.S. during the past few weeks drew attention from energy traders, and French energy trader Engie confirmed Russian gas was part of the cargo. Gas from other European sources was also included, a spokeswoman said.

The fuel shipment originated at a new $27 billion terminal on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic Circle operated by Yamal LNG, a joint venture among Russian gas company Novatek, France's Total and China's CNPC. Russian oil and gas shipments are not subject to U.S. sanctions put in place after Moscow's annexation of Crimea, but Yamal LNG and its majority owner Novatek have been on the sanctions list since 2014.

Novatek's designation under Directive 2 of the sanctions prohibits U.S. citizens from dealing in the company's debt instruments that stretch out longer than 90 days.

Engie loaded the Gaselys at the Isle of Grain LNG terminal in the United Kingdom, according to an Engie spokeswoman. That terminal received the first shipment of gas from Yamal, which Putin inaugurated last month.

Engie bought the gas in a one-off deal in response to the winter cold snap that has plunged much of the Northeast into freezing temperatures and sapped the region's fuel supplies. The gas was to be delivered to the Mystic Power Generation plant in Massachusetts and other local utilities, spokeswoman Julie Vitek said.

”We have communicated the fact that there is a mixture of gas aboard this cargo — we communicated that to a variety of authorities,” Vitek said. “I don’t believe they’ve flagged the Russian gas as a concern.”

The Treasury Department declined to comment on shipment, citing departmental policy, and the State Department did not respond to inquiries.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... mes-312866

The Russian gas is aboard a French vessel, which has been anchored in Mass Bay since Wed, undergoing inspections. "We alerted authorities there's a mixture of gas aboard this cargo. I don’t believe they’ve flagged the RU gas as a concern."




The Russian fuel shipment arriving in New England this weekend originated at a new $27B terminal which was inaugurated by Putin last month & is operated by Yamal LNG, a company that has been on the Treasury Dept’s sanctions list since 2014.

A SECOND tanker carrying Russian natural gas may be on the way to the US [due to dock Feb 15], following in the footsteps of a ship now docked near Boston Harbor carrying similar cargo – the first shipment of gas from Russia to ever reach the US.



Deadine for implementing latest round of Russian sanctions is TODAY. Treasury is required to begin imposing sanctions against entities doing business with Russia’s defense & intel sectors and produce a list of oligarchs with close ties to Putin.

Deadline looms for Trump and Russia sanctions

The president has until Monday to implement stiff penalties targeting the Kremlin — and lawmakers aren’t sure he’ll comply on time.

ELANA SCHOR01/28/2018 06:54 AM EST
President Donald Trump’s willingness to crack down on Russia will be seriously tested come Monday.

Trump faces a major deadline to use the Russia sanctions power that Congress overwhelmingly voted to give him — and it’s anybody’s guess as to whether he’ll comply on time after missing the last deadline.

Scrutiny is high, amid lingering suspicion of Trump’s eagerness to mend fences with Russia and with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation still digging into election meddling by Moscow. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle remain keen to get tough on Vladimir Putin’s government.

And they have reason to worry about whether the popular sanctions package Trump reluctantly signed in August will be implemented just as hesitantly. The Russia provisions of the bill were designed as a response to Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election, which the president himself has downplayed.

Furthermore, the last time Trump’s administration confronted a deadline to set in motion penalties against Putin’s government, it took more than three weeks — and a nudge from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) — for Trump’s team to comply.

An even more critical moment arrives Monday. The Treasury Department is required to begin imposing sanctions against entities doing business with Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors as well as to produce a hotly anticipated list of oligarchs maintaining close ties to Putin. Implementing the law robustly would risk harming the relationship Trump has tried to cultivate with Putin — and any delay would mean snubbing Congress’ authority.

Lawmakers in both parties don’t want the White House to drag its feet this time.

“Am I confident [that Trump will meet the deadline]"? asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “I’m hopeful.”

The administration “should follow the law as it was passed by Congress,” he added.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, also said he holds out hope for speedy compliance from the administration.

“But so far,” Coons complained to reporters, “the president has not used tools the Senate gave him, 98 to 2, to send a clear and unmistakable sign to Vladimir Putin and Russia” about the consequences for meddling in other countries’ elections.

While Trump has resisted the conclusion reached by multiple U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to assist his campaign, some in his administration acknowledge that the Kremlin is preparing to attempt to replicate its success.

White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster publicly acknowledged last month that Russia is showing signs of trying to upend this May’s Mexican election, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified in November that preventing Russian disruption of the 2018 midterm elections is an “important” goal.

Whether the administration can be persuaded to use the full extent of the authority Congress gave it last year, however, is another matter. The sanctions due Monday under the bill that Trump signed in August can be delayed or waived, but any waiver would have to come with a certification to lawmakers that Russia has made major progress in cutting back on cyber-meddling.

Trump called Corker in July to blast it as a bad deal. When Trump did ultimately sign the bill into law, the president added a statement warning that it included “a number of clearly unconstitutional provisions.”

Those signals kept Democrats on high alert for slow-walking of the Russia penalties. Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations panel, joined House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and two other senior Democrats on Friday in a public reminder to Trump about the full extent of Monday’s sanctions deadline.

In addition to the report on Putin-linked oligarchs and imposition of sanctions on those doing business with Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors, they noted, the Treasury Department is also expected to release a report on the consequences of adding sanctions to Moscow’s sovereign debt.

The peril that Russian “actions pose to our democratic institutions and those of our allies is growing in intensity and urgency,” Cardin and Hoyer warned in a letter also signed by the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, New York Rep. Eliot Engel.

“You have a constitutional responsibility to defend those institutions,” they told Trump.

Cardin, whose staff released an extensive report this month slamming Russia for subverting democracies across Europe, vowed in an interview to keep pressing the issue if the Trump administration doesn’t comply on time with Monday’s deadlines.

“We’ve been doing informal conversations” with the administration, focused primarily on the defense and intelligence sanctions, as well as public pressure, Cardin said. “So you can rest assured that if we don’t have a satisfactory response by Monday, I will be out there asking ... to get something done. And I’d expect to have Sen. Corker’s help.”

Corker — a sometime antagonist of Trump who praised the president’s “unpredictability” last week in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — has made clear he won’t let the Russia sanctions bill he helped author drop off the radar.

When the administration missed its October deadline, the Tennessean told reporters he would “get on the phone with someone” at the State Department within 24 hours to shake loose the information — and did. The day after Corker made his vow, the administration released guidance on entities potentially subject to the sanctions due Monday.

"We remain in close communication with the administration regarding implementation of this important legislation and are in the process of scheduling a briefing with State and Treasury officials," a Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide said by email.

The State Department referred a question on Monday’s sanctions deadlines to the Treasury Department, which did not return a request for comment.

Treasury took one key step forward on Friday by broadening sanctions against Russia imposed in the wake of its annexation of Crimea, hitting 21 individuals and nine entities. Those penalties, first imposed before the passage of last year's sanctions bill, were then codified into law by it.

Cardin described the October sanctions holdup as a consequence of “a younger administration” finding its footing. “Now they’ve had more experience on these things,” he said.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... ine-373106

State Dept: "Trump admin has notified Congress that last year’s bipartisan Russia sanctions bill is serving as a 'deterrent' and as such, SPECIFIC SANCTIONS AREN'T NEEDED AT THIS TIME. When & if we have sanctions to announce, we will do so." WTAF?

The Trump admin has notified Congress that last year’s bipartisan Russia sanctions bill is serving as a “deterrent” and as such, specific sanctions aren’t needed at this time. From a State Dept spox:



According to Chris Steele's Nov 2016 memo [NOT published in Buzzfeed], the Kremlin intervened to block Trump’s initial Sec of State pick, Mitt Romney, & asked him to appoint someone ready to lift Russian sanctions & cooperate w/ RU security issues.

https://twitter.com/dcpoll

Elvis » Mon Mar 05, 2018 9:27 pm wrote:Nobody cares.

Nader serves as an adviser to the United Arab Emirates' Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan and attended two meetings with President Donald Trump's associates that have invited intense FBI scrutiny.

In particular, investigators are focused on a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles islands between Nader, Trump associate Erik Prince, and Kremlin ally Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a sanctioned Russian investment fund.

The crown prince traveled to New York during the transition period in December 2016 and reportedly met with former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon at Trump Tower.


Among many other things, this "man of mystery" news means that Erik Prince lied repeatedly to Congress and can likely be charged with a felony. He said his trip had nothing to do with Trump and left George Nader entirely out of his testimony, clearly deliberately.

Seth Abramson

What else connects Trump, Prince, Deripaska, Russia, and the UAE? Aluminum. Prince's business is aluminum, as was Deripaska's (through 2017). The UAE/Russia are 2 of America's 3 biggest aluminum importers. Trump suddenly announced aluminum tariffs (much lower than for steel).

The simple version: Russia wanted Trump to drop sanctions so it could build nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia (and maybe UAE). A gaggle of Trump aides/allies seem to have been working *both* ends of that equation: Russian sanctions and cutting energy deals in the Middle East.


Remember: Erik Prince was central to the "Trumplandia" plot as well as the Trump-Russia scandal. So if you want to know what motivated Prince to spread psyops pre-election via Bannon's Breitbart (with RTs from Flynn and Don Jr.), don't sleep on Russia.

1. ANOTHER PUZZLE PIECE
31 minutes ago

NYT: Emirates Adviser With Ties To Trump Aides Now Cooperating With Mueller

YURI GRIPAS
George Nader, an adviser to the United Arab Emirates who has ties to some current and previous Trump aides gave testimony to a grand jury last week and is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. According to the report, Mueller has been asking witnesses whether it's possible that Nader could have funneled money from the Emirates in order to help President Trump. Nader also reportedly attended a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles at which a Russian investor close to Russian president Vladimir Putin and Erik Prince, an informal adviser to the Trump transition team, were also in attendance.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nyt-emira ... th-mueller

REVEALED: Kushner's United Arab Emirates point man is now cooperating with Mueller probe

An adviser to the United Arab Emirates who met with Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon during the presidential transition is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, the New York Times reports.

George Nader, who attended a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with informal Donald Trump adviser and Blackwater founder Erik Prince (the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos), gave testimony to the grand jury last week. Mueller is reportedly looking into whether Nader “funneled” money from the UAE to Trump’s political campaign, according to the Times.

Nader is an adviser to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. As the Times reports, Nader “represented” bin Zayed Al-Nahyan during a meeting in the Seychelles shortly before Trumps inauguration. The Times reports: “At the meeting, Emirati officials believed Mr. Prince was speaking for the Trump transition team, and a Russian fund manager, Kirill Dmitriev, represented Mr. Putin, according to several people familiar with the meeting.”

Nader also attended meetings in the White House with Kushner and Bannon. He’s been questioned “numerous times” by the special counsel’s team.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/reveal ... ler-probe/

This Seems Quite Noteworthy
By Josh Marshall | March 6, 2018 7:35 pm

on June 21, 2017 in Washington, DC.Alex Wong/Getty Images North America
CNN just moved a story about George Nader. We heard about him last week. He’s a Lebanese-American businessman with some history in Washington. But he’s been sort of off the radar for more than a decade. He was involved in some way as an intermediary between Trump family members and people in the Persian Gulf. Now we hear this from CNN. He was met at Dulles airport by the FBI in January on his return from abroad. “Since then, he has been talking to Mueller’s investigators and providing information to the grand jury.”

Here’s the last paragraph from the CNN story …

Nader attended a December 2016 meeting in New York between Emirati officials and members of Trump’s inner circle, and another in January 2017 in the Seychelles islands between the Emiratis and Erik Prince, a Trump associate. Nader was also in the Seychelles when Prince met with a Russian banker, the sources said.

Almost as a rule, Mueller’s probe just doesn’t leak. It seems likely that this information comes from people tied to Nader, most likely his lawyers.

Late Update: The New York Times has its own, considerably more detailed version of this story. Here’s the more bracing version of the Dulles Airport encounter …

Mr. Nader was first served with search warrants and a grand jury subpoena on Jan. 17, shortly after landing at Washington Dulles International Airport, according to two people familiar with the episode. He had intended to travel on to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, to celebrate the president’s first year in office, but the F.B.I. had other plans, questioning him for more than two hours and seizing his electronics.

Since then, Mr. Nader has been questioned numerous times about meetings in New York during the transition, the Seychelles meeting and meetings in the White House with two of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers, Jared Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, who has since left the administration.

I’m still trying to make sense of the various moving pieces in these two articles. But Nader appears to bring together several key pieces of the far-flung Russia probe as well as elements of the story tied the Gulf which were not clearly tied to the Russia probe at all. What is key to note about the Times article is the sheer level of detail. Someone very close to Nader or with incredibly detailed knowledge of his actions and travel spoke to CNN and the Times.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/th ... noteworthy

Mueller Sees Cooperation of Witness to Erik Prince Meeting With Russian Government Banker

By Graham Lanktree On 3/7/18 at 7:19 AM
A Lebanese-American businessman who witnessed a meeting between a Trump adviser and a Russian investor is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller for his investigation into the Trump campaign, according to a New York Times report.

George Nader, a top adviser to the United Arab Emirates, gave testimony to a grand jury convened in Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign last week, two sources told The Times Tuesday.

Nader was witness to the January 2017 meeting between American businessman and unofficial Trump adviser Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian investor close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and CEO of the Kremlin’s Russian Direct Investment Fund. The meeting took place in the Seychelles islands after Nader introduced the two men to each other.

Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

03_07_ErikPrince Then Blackwater Chief Executive Erik Prince testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on security contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 2, 2007. Larry Downing/Reuters

According to The Times, the meeting was convened by UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, who Nader advises.

U.S., European and Arab officials told The Washington Post last April that the meeting was part of an effort to set up back-channel communications between the Kremlin and then President-elect Donald Trump.

Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign aided Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election. Last month the special counsel indicted 13 Russians for operating a campaign of “information warfare” against the U.S. stretching back to 2014.

During an interview with the House Intelligence Committee last November, Prince confirmed that he met with Dmitriev in the Seychelles and that the two discussed U.S.-Russia relations, including trade. Prince denied representing the Trump campaign and incoming administration during the meeting, which he characterized as a chance encounter over a beer that lasted no more than 30 minutes.

Read more: Erik Prince told Russian banker that Trump and Putin should be like Roosevelt and Stalin

Prince was interviewed as as part of several ongoing congressional investigations into the matter of Russian election interference.

Nader is also a former consultant for Prince’s firm Blackwater, which controversially provided mercenaries to the U.S. during the Iraq War. The firm has since rebranded under the name Academi and Prince no longer heads it.

Although Prince had no official role in the Trump transition team, The Intercept—citing a former senior U.S. official that advised the transition—reported in January 2017 that he had weighed in on Defense and State Department candidates and provided advice on intelligence and defense. Prince visited the transition team’s New York City office in December 2016.

Prince is the brother of Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and contributed $100,000 during the election to a Political Action Committee run by Rebekah Mercer. Her family played a large role in former White House advisor Steve Bannon becoming head of the Trump campaign in August 2016.

The meeting between Prince and Dmitriev was originally probed by the FBI as part of its investigation of the Trump campaign’s Russia ties before Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey in May 2017.
http://www.newsweek.com/mueller-witness ... ker-833835

Mueller has secured sworn testimony from a little-known but pivotal witness in the Russia investigation


The special counsel Robert Mueller has secured sworn testimony from George Nader, a little-known but critical witness in the Russia investigation.

Nader serves as an adviser to the United Arab Emirates' Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan and attended two meetings with President Donald Trump's associates that have invited intense FBI scrutiny.

In particular, investigators are focused on a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles islands between Nader, Trump associate Erik Prince, and Kremlin ally Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a sanctioned Russian investment fund.


George Nader, a Middle East expert connected to several associates of President Donald Trump, is now cooperating with the special counsel Robert Mueller and has testified before a grand jury in the Russia investigation, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

FBI investigators approached Nader when he landed at Washington Dulles International Airport in January and served him with search warrants and a grand jury subpoena, the report said. At the time, Nader was en route to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President Donald Trump and his associates to celebrate the anniversary of Trump's first year in office.

Nader's inclusion in the Russia probe stems from his involvement in two meetings he attended as an adviser to and representative of the United Arab Emirates' Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. The first meeting took place in New York in December 2016, and the second in the Seychelles islands in January 2017.

New details about the meetings and Nader's involvement contained in the Times report provide critical clues about the timeline of Trump-Russia contacts, as well as the degree to which the president's closest and highest-ranking associates were involved.

December 2016 Trump Tower meeting

The crown prince traveled to New York during the transition period in December 2016 and reportedly met with former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon at Trump Tower.

The meeting was said to have raised red flags within the US intelligence community because the government was not notified of Crown Prince Mohammed's visit. The Obama administration felt misled by the UAE as a result, which prompted then-national security adviser Susan Rice to request that Trump associates' names be unmasked in intelligence reports detailing the meeting.

A senior Middle East official acknowledged to CNN last year that the UAE did not inform the US of the crown prince's visit in advance but denied that the UAE had misled the Obama administration. The official said that the December Trump Tower meeting was merely part of an effort to build a relationship with the incoming administration.

Mueller's prosecutors have repeatedly questioned Nader about the meeting, as well as his meetings in the White House with Kushner and Bannon following Trump's inauguration.

That same month, Kushner met with Sergei Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador to the US, and reportedly proposed setting up a secure back-channel of communication between Trump and Moscow using Russian facilities.

Shortly after, Kushner had a separate meeting with Sergei Gorkov, the CEO of the sanctioned Russian state-owned bank Vnesheconombank, which was reportedly orchestrated by Kislyak. The interaction piqued investigators' scrutiny as the FBI began examining whether Russian officials suggested to Kushner that Russian banks could finance Trump associates' business ventures if US sanctions were lifted or relaxed.

Kushner's meeting with Gorkov came as he was looking for investors to shore up financing for a building on Fifth Avenue in New York that his family's real-estate company had purchased.

Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser, listens during a county sheriff listening session with U.S. President Donald Trump, not pictured, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017.
Andrew Harrer/AP
January 2017 Seychelles meeting

In addition to Nader's meeting with Kushner, Bannon, and Flynn in December 2016, investigators are also keenly interested in another meeting he attended that took place in the Seychelles islands shortly after the Trump Tower gathering.

Following that meeting, Blackwater founder and Trump associate Erik Prince approached the crown prince and told him he was authorized to act as an unofficial surrogate for Trump, according to The Washington Post. He then asked Crown Prince Mohammed to set up a meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a US-sanctioned Russian investment fund who is closely allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The meeting took place on January 11, 2017 in the Seychelles islands. While Nader attended the meeting as Crown Prince Mohammed's representative, Emirati officials believed Prince represented the Trump team and that Dmitriev represented Putin.

The meeting's purpose was to create a back-channel of communication between Trump and Russia, and UAE officials also participated in the hopes of helping to encourage Russia to distance itself from Iran, a major Kremlin ally, according to The Post.

The Trump administration has often expressed skepticism toward Iran and Trump has pushed hard to scrap the US's nuclear deal with Iran.

Nader's presence at the January 2017 Seychelles meeting is what landed him in the crosshairs of the special counsel, who is investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 US election and whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow to tilt the race in his favor. Nader, according to The Times, also once worked as a consultant to Blackwater.

Prince told the House Intelligence Committee last year that he knew Dmitriev was a Russian fund manager but did not know it was a sanctioned fund that was controlled by the Russian government.

Prince also denied that he attended the meeting as an official representative of the incoming administration, saying instead that he traveled to the Seychelles to meet with potential business customers from the UAE. During the meeting, Prince told lawmakers on the panel, the customers "mentioned a guy who I should also meet who was also in town," who turned out to be Dmitriev.

When he met Dmitriev, they discussed a range of topics, and Dmitriev stressed that he wished Russia and the US could resume normal trade relations, Prince said.

After the Seychelles meeting, Dmitriev also met with Anthony Scaramucci, who would later become the White House communications director, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Russian state media quoted Scaramucci as saying, after his meeting with Dmitriev, that the Obama administration's new sanctions on Russia — which were imposed that month to penalize it for interfering in the 2016 election — were ineffective and detrimental to the US-Russia relationship.

Win McNamee/Getty Images
US softens its stance on Russia sanctions

Russia's economy was dealt a stinging blow in 2014, when the US imposed sweeping sanctions to punish Russia for its aggression toward neighboring Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea.

Dmitriev's company, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, was included on the list of Russian economic entities that were penalized as part of that decision.

The UAE, meanwhile, holds a significant stake in the company, which it invested in as part of an effort to foster closer ties to Russia, The Times reported.

The Obama administration announced another round of sanctions in December 2016, as a penalty for Russia's meddling. The US government also shuttered two Russian diplomatic facilities in the country and expelled 35 Russian diplomats.

After Obama left office, Congress overwhelmingly voted to impose new sanctions on Russia last summer, which Trump signed into law after facing public pressure from lawmakers and critics who accused him of catering to Putin's wishes.

However, the White House declined to enforce the law this year. The State Department said that the law's mere existence was enough to penalize Russia, because it had already made a dent in Russian defense sales.

"From that perspective, if the law is working, sanctions on specific entities or individuals will not need to be imposed because the legislation is, in fact, serving as a deterrent," a State Department spokesperson said.
http://www.businessinsider.com/george-n ... sia-2018-3

seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 01, 2018 8:55 pm wrote:THE TRADE WAR IS HERE: Trump sets off a chain reaction with massive tariff announcements as countries vow to retaliate

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-ta ... ?r=UK&IR=T

U.S. Trade Partners Threatening Retaliation If Proposed Tariffs Go Through
https://www.npr.org/2018/02/20/58737573 ... go-through

China threatens to retaliate against US metals tariffs
https://www.ft.com/content/07946634-146 ... 6390addb44


we have a war.....we have a distraction.......and this brilliant trump move could push the world somewhere


tariff announcement wiped out stock market year's gains

who's in aluminum, and for our purposes, it's Deripaska and Prince.

Seth Abramson
‏
1/ This is just a note to say Erik Prince a) is known to secretly lobby Trump, b) is a Trump "shadow advisor," c) had a secret Russia meeting on Trump's behalf, d) is a Russia-probe witness, e) said the following to Congress (apropos of Trump's sudden, bizarre aluminum tariff):


9:43 PM - 1 Mar 2018

2/ Is there a connection? Who knows. But I thought someone should register this. Prince says he talked aluminum on his secret trip to the UAE; the UAE is one of four nations that plotted to exploit Kushner. If you dealt in bauxite, and knew Trump's tariff was coming beforehand...

3/ I'm activated by the new tariffs because Trump is "going rogue"—taking an action no one is publicly advising, so you begin to ask who advises him privately, who could benefit from insider trading (as it were), who's in aluminum, and for our purposes, it's Deripaska and Prince.

4/ Given Trump has implied Manafort can take him down (per NBC), Manafort owes Deripaska money, theoretically Deripaska is dangerous to Trump, Manafort offered insider Trump info to Deripaska during the campaign—well, you can see why I say someone must at least register all this.

5/ Russia and the UAE are two of the three largest aluminum importers to the U.S., so this hurts them. That said, I don't doubt that if you're a Russian aluminum magnate or a bauxite-slinger you could turn foreknowledge of the timing of this sudden announcement to your *benefit*.

6/ Prince admits he talked aluminum with the UAE on a secret trip to the Seychelles during which we know he was acting as a Trump envoy—on the same trip he met an RDIF Russian who naturally would've wanted to talk aluminum with Prince also. Now we have a surprise aluminum tariff.

7/ These events may be unconnected, but I at least hope that some investigator somewhere is seeing these connections and at least considering how the Trump-Russia investigation could extend to unusual policy decisions made by a president with a lot of potential enemies right now.

8/ The news the UAE—interested in talking aluminum with a Trump envoy/advisor as part of setting up and hosting a secret Trump-Russia meetup—plotted and acted to exploit Kushner's weaknesses (and Kushner himself had a clandestine meeting with Putin's banker) adds a new dimension.

9/ The other thing to note is even if you look at it from a different view—and say instead anyone could've known this was coming because Trump discussed it on the campaign—you'll note that the aluminum tariff that hurts Russian aluminum magnates is a fraction of the steel tariff.

10/ Is it worth investigating if the UAE used brokering a secret Trump-Russia meeting as a chance to lobby Trump for a lower aluminum tariff—or that Russia so lobbied—in advance of Trump inevitably (in this view) announcing new tariffs on aluminum and steel? Yes, it sure is. /end
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 7360939008

trump can fight trade wars and take on Alec Baldwin at the same time. Truly amazing.

How a Russian-Linked Shell Company Hired An Ex-Trump Aide to Boost Albania’s Right-Wing Party in DC

Did Russians use the US political system to fuel political discord in the Balkans?

David Corn, Hannah Levintova and Dan FriedmanMar. 6, 2018 10:59 AM


A former Trump campaign aide working as a lobbyist, a half-million-dollar payment, a conservative Albanian political party, four Republican congressmen, Breitbart News, a kosher restaurateur in New York City, an online dating service that promotes “beautiful” Ukrainian women, and Russian-linked shell companies—these are some of the elements in a bizarre tale of influence-peddling that spurs the suspicion that Russians covertly used Republicans in Washington in an effort to foment political conflict in the Balkans.

It’s a complicated story of international political skullduggery with a dizzying plot: A year ago, a sketchy Scottish firm called Biniatta Trade, which was formed by two Belize-based shell companies, paid a Republican lobbyist and former Trump campaign aide named Nick Muzin for work in the United States to help the Democratic Party of Albania. At the time, a parliamentary election was underway, and the right-wing DPA was challenging a government run by the Socialist Party. That government was led by Prime Minister Edi Rama, who was steering Albania into the European Union and warning of the rise of Russian influence in the Balkans. Coincidentally—or not—the two Belizean shell companies behind Biniatta Trade were both connected to firms controlled by Russians.

The bottom line: It appears that Russian-related entities secretly meddled in the United States in order to meddle in an election in Albania.

“Make Albania Great Again”

Last spring, shortly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, Muzin, the veteran GOP operative at the center of this intrigue, embarked on a new career as a lobbyist. Muzin has a law degree from Yale and a medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, but in recent years he held a succession of political jobs. In the early 2010s, Muzin worked for then-Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and the House Republican leadership. He went on to become deputy chief of staff for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and a senior adviser for Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. After Cruz’s White House bid flamed out, Muzin joined the Trump campaign. Following the election, according to his online bio, he “worked with” the Trump transition team to recruit officials for the incoming administration. But Muzin did not enter the Trump administration. Instead, on March 31, 2017, he registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. His client: the Democratic Party of Albania. The contract between Muzin and the party, signed by Lulzim Basha, the DPA’s chairman, called for Muzin to promote the Democratic Party of Albania and the country’s conservative movement within the United States and around the world. It noted that Muzin would be paid $25,000 on the 22nd of the months of March, April, and May.

Muzin contacted Stephen Bannon, then a senior White House adviser, and several other White House officials on Basha’s behalf. And he arranged for Lulzim Basha to be interviewed by Breitbart News.
At the time, Albania was undergoing a bitter political campaign. For weeks, Basha’s DPA, which led the opposition, had been mounting protests against the ruling coalition headed by Prime Minister Rama and his Socialist Party. There was talk the DPA and its allies would boycott the June parliamentary elections. It seemed that Albania could be heading toward serious turmoil. And the DPA was turning to Republicans in Washington for assistance.

In late March 2017, Muzin set up a visit to Washington for Basha that included meetings with three GOP congressmen: Ed Royce of California, who chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee, and Michael McCaul and Pete Sessions of Texas. Basha also met with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who has been dubbed “Putin’s favorite congressman.” Basha attended the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner, which featured Trump as the big-draw speaker. Muzin also contacted Stephen Bannon, then a senior White House adviser, and several other White House officials on Basha’s behalf. And Muzin arranged for Basha to be interviewed by Breitbart News, the right-wing site that Bannon had managed before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.

If Basha could round up support in the United States, he could trumpet that in Albania. And Basha was a natural for American conservatives. He was positioning himself as Albania’s Trump and pushing the slogan “Make Albania Great Again.” At one point, Basha even attended a ceremony in a central Albania town during which a street called Liria (“Liberty”) was renamed in honor of Trump.

Though Albanians are widely regarded as pro-Europe and pro-West, Basha was flirting with a nationalistic populism. Albania, a Muslim-majority nation that joined NATO in 2009, was under consideration for EU membership. But one condition the EU had set was that Albania’s government had to vet all its judges and prosecutors to address the significant corruption within its judiciary system—a move opposed by the DPA and denounced by Basha as the EU interfering with Albanian sovereignty. “Basha has been critical of the vetting,” says Fred Abrahams, author of Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe. “But no politician can stray too far from the pro-Europe position. So I would call what he was doing ‘toying’ with anti-Europe populism.”


While Basha reveled in Trump’s rise, Rama, the prime minister, took the opposite stance. During the 2016 campaign, he declared, “God forbid Trump being elected as president, as he would be a president who would damage America a lot and one who would be a real threat to the relations between Albania and America.”

While on his trip to Washington, Basha pushed his message that Albania’s democracy was threatened by the left-wing Rama and that international financier George Soros was the power behind Rama. Not surprisingly, Breitbart enthusiastically publicized Basha’s warnings about Rama and Soros. “I have been viciously attacked by [Soros] and his people and also the international media because I am a Trump supporter,” Basha told Breitbart. (Years earlier, Rama had served on the board of a Soros foundation that had promoted democratic reforms in Albania and clashed with a government led by the DPA.)

There was nothing unusual about a foreign politician looking for juice in Washington and hiring a plugged-in fixer, who set up a handful of meetings with ideologically friendly influencers and orchestrated positive media coverage. Muzin registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent, in accordance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and was using his GOP street cred to pocket up to $75,000—a modest fee for a Washington lobbyist. (In April 2017, the DPA also retained the lobbying firm of Barnes & Thornburg, agreeing to pay it $150,000 for work in the United States related to the Albanian election. And Rama’s Socialist Party hired Ballard Partners, a firm run by a longtime lobbyist for Trump in Florida, with former Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler handling the account for $20,000 a month.)

Basha went back to Albania, and eventually he and Rama worked out an agreement that permitted the Albanian parliamentary election to proceed. A week and a half before the June 25 voting, Basha returned to the United States—in search of more political assistance from Muzin and the lobbyist’s Republican contacts. According to a Republican political operative, Muzin brought Basha to a fundraiser in Milwaukee for Republican Gov. Scott Walker, and Trump was the featured speaker there. At this event—where a $20,000 contribution to Walker earned an attendee a VIP seat and a photograph with Trump—Basha managed to have his photo taken with the president. In Albania, the DPA widely disseminated the picture, showing a smiling Basha and a grinning Trump each flashing a thumbs-up. And Basha claimed he’d had an “extraordinary meeting” with Trump.

Muzin declined to answer questions about this photo op or any of the particulars of his work for Basha and the DPA. Basha and the Democratic Party of Albania did not respond to an email requesting comment.

The Trump magic didn’t work for Basha and his party. In the election, Rama’s Socialist Party gained seats and won a full majority of the Parliament—the first time since the end of communism in Albania in 1991 that a single party had assumed control without having to form a coalition.

Muzin’s efforts on behalf of the DPA appear to have ended around this time. He soon picked up another client: the government of Qatar, for $50,000 a month. But on November 14, 2017, Muzin notified the Justice Department that he needed to amend the paperwork he had sent it nearly eight months earlier regarding his toils for the DPA. (Two weeks earlier, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, two former Trump campaign officials, had been indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller on charges that included failing to disclose their work as foreign agents for a Ukrainian political party.) It turned out there was more to the Albania story than Muzin had initially reported to the Justice Department.

A $500,000 mystery

Lobbyists working for overseas governments, parties, or other entities have to identify in their reports to the Justice Department their foreign clients and the fees they are paid, and they have to describe—if somewhat minimally—the work they are doing for these clients. But Muzin had not reported all the details when he first registered as a foreign agent for the Democratic Party of Albania.

In his amended filing, Muzin noted that he had been paid $675,000 for his three months of work for the DPA. This included a $25,000 payment on March 27 and a $500,000 payment on June 9 from the Albanian party. Muzin banked this whopping $500,000 fee just days before he arranged for Basha to have that important photo op with Trump in Milwaukee.

Yet according to this new filing, another source also paid Muzin for his DPA project. Muzin’s filing reported that on March 24, 2017, Biniatta Trade, a company based in Edinburgh, had “compensated” Muzin “for activities undertaken on behalf of the Democratic Party of Albania.” The payment was $150,000.

This filing included an unsigned contract dated March 20, 2017 between Biniatta Trade and a Muzin company called Stonington Strategies. (The agreement referred to the company as “Biniatt Trade,” and though it was not signed, Muzin’s filing said it “reflects the terms under which the registrant preceded with the representation.”) The contract called for Muzin to promote the “Albanian-American business community’s role in the US economy” and “Albanian history month in the US.” It did not mention the DPA or Basha and stated “this consultation is not on the behalf of any government or political party.” Under this contract, Biniatta was to pay Muzin three installments of $150,000 each—and a $500,000 “onetime payment” for setting up a series of events and meetings in Washington in the first month of the project.

The March 24 payment from Biniatta Trade and Muzin’s contract with Biniatta Trade each predated his original submission to the Justice Department. This raises the question of why he did not include Biniatta Trade in that initial registration. A spokesman for Muzin says “it later became evident” to Muzin that his work under the Biniatta Trade contract actually “benefited the DPA and not commercial interests”—and this led Muzin to conclude he needed to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for Biniatta Trade. Muzin, though, declined to explain what changed regarding his work for Biniatta Trade. (Muzin on May 8, 2017, did register with Congress as a lobbyist for Biniatta Trade. According to his spokesman, he filed to preserve the ability to do future lobbying for the firm.)

Biniatta Trade, the company that signed a nearly $1 million contract with Muzin, has not left much of a public trail. Its website was registered by a resident of Odessa, Ukraine.
To break it down: Muzin reported he had received $675,000 for his DPA job—much more than the $75,000 in the original contract with DPA. But part of Muzin’s amended registration form was at odds with the attached contract between his firm and Biniatta Trade. The filing reported that the Democratic Party of Albania (not Biniatta Trade) was the outfit that had made the $500,000 payment to Muzin. Yet it was the contract with Biniatta Trade (not the contract with the DPA) that included a $500,000 fee. And to make matters murkier, shortly after Muzin submitted his amended filing, the DPA told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network that it had no “financial relationship” with Biniatta Trade and had only paid Muzin $25,000—meaning the $500,000 had not come from the party. Muzin’s spokesman says the lobbyist reported the payment accurately.

But who is behind Biniatta Trade, the Scottish shell company? This is the heart of the mystery. There is little information in the public record about the firm, but a review of available records reveals ties to Russia.

Biniatta Trade has a generic-looking website that, in poor English, says it is “world top class of Agro industry, textile and artificial fur material supplier specialising in high quality textile products for sportswear.” The site notes that the company serves “more than 300 businesses world widely.” Yet a Google search produced no accounts of any commercial activity of this sort on the part of Biniatta Trade. Its website does feature a list of clients, including Nightwood, a small business in Brooklyn that sells handcrafted home furnishings and textiles. But Ry Scruggs, the co-owner of Nightwood, says she has never heard of Biniatta Trade. The company named in a nearly $1 million contract with Nick Muzin has not left much of a public trail.

According to British corporate records, Biniatta Trade is located at an address in Edinburgh that is used by 727 other companies. The British phone number listed on its website does not work. But this phone number is also listed as the contact number for a website called 2Love.Club, an “international online dating service” that offers “beautiful Ukrainian women for dating and marriage.” (This is not a traditional matchmaking site; it features women, mainly described as being in their 20s and 30s, for male customers to choose from.) When a Mother Jones reporter called the Ukrainian phone number for the 2Love.Club, the man who answered, speaking in Russian, said the number was for a private individual, not a dating service. An email request for information sent by Mother Jones to the Biniatta Trade site was not answered.

The website for Biniatta Trade, according to the WHOIS directory of websites, was registered by a resident of Odessa, Ukraine, named Alexey Nikitin. His listed email is globaldeltatrade.host@gmail.com. As it happens, a company named Global Delta Trade that says it is based in Dubai has a website that looks much like the site for Biniatta Trade and uses nearly identical language to describe itself as a “world top class textile and artificial fur material, auto parts, electronics devices” supplier that serves “more than 300 businesses world widely.” Its client list is nearly identical to that of Biniatta Trade. Another company, Blackshire United, which is based in Edinburgh, has a website that resembles those of Global Delta Trade and Biniatta Trade and includes the same wording and a similar client list. Scruggs says her home furnishings firm—which is also listed as a client by Global Delta Trade and Blackshire United—has no connections to those firms. A Google search produced no information about either Blackshire United or Global Delta Trade other than their corporate registrations. And there are two other Scottish-based companies with similar websites—Contoform LP and West Berton Impex LP—that also do not seem to have a record of actual public commerce.

So it looks as if Biniatta Trade has been part of a group of companies that set up websites on which they claim to be involved in commercial trade yet do not engage in any business that leaves public traces. And recently, the Herald newspaper of Glasgow reported that Biniatta Trade “has failed to comply [with] anti-money laundering laws under which it had until last August to reveal its owners or face daily fines of £500.” (Last year, Margot James, a conservative member of the House of Commons, noted that 28,100 Scottish companies had failed to comply with a new law requiring them to declare “persons of significant control.”)

Muzin’s spokesman says Muzin believed Biniatta Trade was a private company owned by supporters of the Democratic Party of Albania. But Muzin declined to explain how he had first come into contact with Biniatta Trade. And here’s the important question: Who does own this company that funded Muzin’s efforts for the DPA?

The Russia connection

British corporate records provide a tough-to-track trail that offers clues but no definitive answers. According to its own filings in the British registry of corporations, Biniatta Trade is a partnership created by two companies: the Asverro Corp. and Liminez Commerce. Each of these firms was incorporated in Belize and lists an address in Belize City associated with various shell companies. There is no public record of any commercial activity for either Asverro or Liminez Commerce. Neither appears to have a website. Both Asverro and Liminez Commerce, though, are corporate officers for two British companies controlled by Russian nationals. That means the available public record appears to link—albeit indirectly—Biniatta Trade to only two people, and each one is Russian.

One of these two firms connected to the Belizean shell companies that set up Biniatta Trade is called KF Global Management. It’s not obvious what this limited liability partnership does. It maintains no website. Its corporate listing in the United Kingdom contains no telephone contact. When it was created in 2014, its two officers were shell companies based at the same address in the Seychelles. Last year, it filed a document with the British corporate registry noting that a Russian national named Konstantin Ferulev had “significant influence or control” over the firm. Another UK corporate filing includes an address for Ferulev at a business center in downtown Moscow, noting that his office was on the seventh floor. Mother Jones sent a Russian reporter to this address, and building administrators said there were no offices on the seventh floor. (The elevator only goes to the sixth floor.)

“I would be shocked if the Russians didn’t see this as an opportunity to stir things up.”
Ferulev, according to Russian business records, has been listed as a general director and major shareholder of several now-defunct Russian businesses. (He could not be reached for comment.)

The second British company that has Asverro and Liminez Commerce—the two shell companies behind Biniatta Trade—as officers is Babyonica. According to British corporate records, Evgeny Sheremetyev, a Russian with a Moscow address, controls 75 percent or more of the voting rights of Babyonica. The firm has a website promoting a product line of organic health products for infants. But the phone number it lists for its Moscow office goes unanswered when called. And when a Mother Jones reporter called the phone number for Babyonica in London, a man with a Russian-sounding accent—who would only identify himself as “Frank”—first said the number was for Babyonica’s customer support line in Winnipeg, Canada. The Mother Jones reporter asked how to reach Sheremetyev, and Frank said that there was no one there by that name, that the reporter had the wrong number, and that this was not in fact an office or call center for Babyonica. After refusing to name the company the reporter had reached, Frank offered to send her the company’s website, but only via email. He instructed her to write to a customer support email address at a .su email address. “Su” is the internet suffix assigned decades ago to the Soviet Union, and today this old and poorly regulated domain has become a haven for cybercrime. (An email sent to that address was not answered.)

According to Russian corporate records, Sheremetyev owns a legal services company that won at least one Russian government contract. He also is a shareholder in two Russian firms involved in franchising Subway sandwich shops. On his Instagram account, Sheremetyev has posted one image of Babyonica’s products. In another post, he said he had the ability to organize business deals with contacts in the United States and told followers to message him directly for further information. A request for information sent to him from Mother Jones drew no reply. In December, Babyonica filed a request with the British corporate registry to be dissolved. On January 2, the Registrar of Companies reported the firm was slated to be dissolved on March 2.

To recap: The two shell companies that formed Biniatta Trade—which underwrote the lobbying efforts of a top Republican operative working for the conservative opposition party of Albania—are officers of two other companies controlled by Russian nationals.

What else is known about Asverro and Liminez Commerce? Not much. They have formed other shell companies that share the same Edinburgh address as Biniatta Trade. One partnership these two firms formed in 2016 had an especially peculiar feature. This Edinburgh shell company, called Talanta Business LP, submitted a filing to the British corporate registry noting that as of mid-June 2017, 75 percent or more of its assets and voting rights were controlled by Leryam Dvorkin, an American citizen living in San Francisco.

Dvorkin does not seem a natural choice to control an overseas shell company. According to a personal profile he posted on a Russian social-media site called Odnoklassniki, Dvorkin, who was born in the Soviet Union, is 75 years old and once worked in Belarus for Gazprom, the large natural gas company partly owned by the Russian government. And his LinkedIn page notes he was an estimator for a small, local San Francisco company called Svala Construction. (His photos on Odnoklassniki mainly show him and a woman who seems close to his age in typical tourist shots.) When a Mother Jones reporter called a phone number listed for Dvorkin, a woman who said she was his wife answered. She sounded surprised when informed that he had been registered as the person controlling an overseas shell company. “In Scotland?” she asked in Russian. “He has no companies in Scotland.” Then she became angry, demanded the reporter not call her again, and hung up. Another relative of Dvorkin told Mother Jones that Dvorkin and his wife were once victims of identity theft and did not want to talk to reporters.

Asverro and Liminez last year each became a partner of a Glasgow-based firm called AFG International LP, which reported its voting rights were controlled by a 35-year-old Russian national named Iurii Ivanov of St. Petersburg.

From the scant public record, it is hard to tell what the Belize-based Asverro and Liminez Commerce do beyond forming shell companies in Scotland and serving as officers for at least two British firms controlled by Russians. The available corporate records do not identify the person or persons who control Asverro and Liminez Commerce.

The Russian links of Asverro and Liminez Commerce, though, may well be relevant to the Biniatta Trade-Albania connection.

Russia has long been at odds with Albania, refusing to recognize the independence of Kosovo, which in 2008 broke away from Serbia, Moscow’s ally, and which has a majority of ethnic Albanians. And Vladimir Putin’s government has been no fan of the EU and its expansion. The government of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama is one of the most pro-EU and pro-Western in the Balkans—and not on good terms with Putin’s regime. In February 2017, Rama warned of increasing Russian influence in the Balkans, noting, “Russian policies do not correspondent [sic] with Balkan ambitions to join the EU.” Weeks later—shortly before Muzin was retained by the Democratic Party of Albania and Biniatta Trade—Moscow accused Rama of conspiring with NATO and the EU to impose a pro-Albanian government in neighboring Macedonia. The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that Rama’s government was attempting to expand its influence in Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece as part of a plot to create a Greater Albania.

Soon after, Basha, the DPA leader, held a much-publicized meeting with the Russian ambassador to Albania, and that caused a row. “It was a shift for a major politician to openly engage with Russia,” notes Fred Abrahams. “Because of the rampant pro-Americanism in Albania, it would have been unthinkable for a politician to do that before.” Rama accused the opposition of being supported by foreigners.

With the incumbent prime minister decrying Russian influence in the Balkans and his lead opponent attempting, even if cautiously, to stoke anti-EU sentiment, Moscow certainly had an interest in the Albanian election. “I would be shocked,” Abrahams says, “if the Russians didn’t see this as an opportunity to stir things up.” And Jasmin Mujanović, an expert on Balkan politics, notes that any Moscow involvement in the Albanian campaign would have been consistent with its efforts to intervene in elections to try to support lawmakers considered useful for its interests. “In the last few years, the Russians have been sort of poking and prodding even among nontraditional allies, sort of seeing what will give,” she says. “This is a regional story.” (In June—shortly before Rama decisively defeated Basha—Brian Hoyt Yee, then the US deputy assistant secretary of state, testified to a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that Russia “is intent on thwarting efforts by countries in the [Balkans] region to pursue their Euro-Atlantic path.”)

The Biniatta Trade payment to Muzin raises an obvious possibility: a Russia-connected source provided money through a shell company to help the Democratic Party of Albania and to fuel the ongoing political discord in Albania. That is, Russians might have used the American political system—and Washington’s swamp—to intervene in Albania. Muzin’s spokesman says no Russian connection of any sort came up during his work for the DPA.

“It’s consulting. That’s all I can say.”

There is another unusual aspect of the amended filings Muzin submitted to the Justice Department in November 2017. The documents noted that as part of the Albania project Muzin had paid $52,000 to Joseph Allaham the previous April. And in the amended filing, Allaham retroactively registered as a foreign agent. (Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a person must register within ten days of agreeing to become an agent and before performing any activities for the client.)

Allaham was a curious pick for this project. He had no experience as a lobbyist. Born in Syria in 1974 to a family of kosher butchers and now an American citizen living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Allaham had built a business empire of high-end kosher restaurants in New York City that in recent years had collapsed amid a series of legal disputes. He now runs the Allaham Consultancy, which he describes as a “diversified real estate consultancy.” On his website, Allaham boasts of brokering a 2010 meeting between Syrian President Bashar Assad and Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. There is no mention of any expertise related to the Balkans.

Muzin’s filings did not detail what Allaham did to earn that $52,000 payment. (According to the Justice Department registration, Allaham “assisted with promoting the visions and goals of the Democratic Party of Albania to business and political leaders in the United States.”) In a brief phone interview with Mother Jones, Allaham said he had been hired by Muzin as a consultant. Asked what he had done for the Democratic Party of Albania in that role, he said, “Consulting, that’s what I did.” What kind of consulting? Did he set up meetings? Talk to members of Congress? “It’s consulting,” Allaham replied. “That’s all I can say.” Had he ever done any lobbying before? “No,” he said, “never done any lobbying.” Did he have any familiarity with Albania? “No,” he answered, “never been there.” And did he know whether the money he received had come from the Democratic Party of Albania or Biniatta Trade? At that point in the interview, Allaham declined to answer any other queries and asked that further questions be emailed to him so his lawyer could review them. He did not respond to a subsequent email.

Muzin’s amended filings reported that for the Albanian project he also retained other contractors. This included Brandon Wheeler, the executive director of the Freedom Research Foundation, who was paid $27,500. Wheeler’s conservative organization was founded in 1984 by his father, Jack Wheeler, a prominent cold warrior at the time who is described on the group’s website as the “architect of the Reagan Doctrine.” And Muzin paid $20,000 to Baron Public Affairs. The filing did not specify precisely what Wheeler or Baron Public Affairs did for the Democratic Party of Albania. The contract between Baron Public Affairs and Muzin stated the company was to “produce strategy, written documents and recommendations…about foreign political figures and foreign policy issues.” Wheeler did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Baron Public Affairs says, “Generally, our policy is we don’t talk to any press.”

Muzin declined to answer questions about his contractors on this project.

The purpose of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which was passed in 1938 to counter Nazi propaganda, was to make sure that lobbyists for overseas governments and entities provide information that allows Americans to know what foreign players are doing within the United States to influence the US government and public. In this curious case, the documents submitted to the Justice Department stir more questions than they answer. The big one: Who financed Muzin’s effort in the United States to help the Democratic Party of Albania? The available evidence suggests a troubling scenario: Russian-connected outfits clandestinely messed about in Washington in order to pursue a covert agenda in Albania.

The US intelligence community last year concluded that Putin intervened in the 2016 election with hack-and-dump operations and other underhanded and illegal measures. Mueller recently issued an indictment of 13 Russian nationals that described how Moscow waged a secret propaganda campaign to affect the election and help Trump via social media. The Biniatta Trade-Albania caper is a possible warning that Russian undercover political warfare might go even deeper.

Additional reporting by Anna Levinsky of RBC (in Moscow).
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... rty-in-dc/

Kremlin propagandist who claimed he coordinated with Trump team was previously appointed as Putin’s “trusted confidant”
Konstantin Rykov boasted about his four year plan to “free America and make it great again.”

In his November 2016 Facebook post, Rykov said he worked with a team of hacker groups and Wikileaks.
New evidence paints a picture of Rykov not as a Putin-supporting blogger but a plausibly deniable asset for the the Kremlin.
During the 2012 election, Vladimir Putin appointed Rykov as a “trusted confidant”, granting him access to the President and indicating a level of trust by Russian government.
By: Scott Stedman
The Kremlin propagandist who boasted on his Facebook page that he worked with Trump, WikiLeaks, and a team of hackers to influence the 2016 US election was appointed in 2012 as one of Putin’s “trusted confidants”. Konstantin Rykov was personally summoned by Putin’s election campaign chief Stanislav Govorukhin to serve in this role as a trusted representative of the Putin campaign.
Days after the 2016 US election, Rykov posted on Facebook a detailed story of how he received a Direct Message from Trump in 2012, the beginning of a four year plan to elect Trump to the Presidency.
It’s time for wonderful stories. I’ll tell you about (now it’s possible) how Donald Trump and I decided to free America and make it great again. This took us as much as 4 years and 2 days…
At the beginning of the brave and romantic [story] was not very much. A pair of hacker groups, civil journalists from WikiLeaks and political strategist Mikhail Kovalev.
The next step was to develop a system for transferring tasks and information, so that no intelligence and NSA could burn it.
Since the moment Trump announced his candidacy, Rykov was an ardent public supporter. In the Washington Post, Rykov was described as a “Putin supporter”, in The Atlantic he’s portrayed as a “ pro-Kremlin blogger.” A fuller picture paints a different story of Rykov — an asset utilized by the Kremlin to do its dirty work with a level of deniability.

Elections of the Premier of the Russian Federation on March 4, 2012 CERTIFICATION OF Konstantin I.RYKOV trusted confidant of V. Putin- Candidate for the post of President of the Russian Federation 2012
In order to drum up support and promote his message, Putin created an institution of trusted representatives — in Russian “trusted faces” — according to Ilya Zaslavskiy, the Head of Research at the Free Russia Foundation, a US non-profit. Zaslavskiy said that the group of trusted confidants usually consists of around five hundred “cultural figures and celebrities who meet [Putin] and get televised as his supporters.” These representatives are trusted by Putin himself and are often rewarded with “various small and not so small privileges after elections,” according to Zaslavskiy.
Personally appointed by Putin’s election chief, Rykov was one of the most important members of the 2012 group of trusted confidants. His boisterous, unwavering support of Putin was broadcast daily to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
The revelation about Rykov’s proximity to Putin during the 2012 election is the most stark example of the internet guru’s significance to the Russian government. From the mid 2000s through 2014 there are multiple instances of Rykov interacting with and on behalf of the Kremlin.

In 2007, the Washington Post identified Rykov as a blogger from whom the Russian government took direction on internet-issues. “The pearl of Rykov’s media empire is the two-year-old Vzglyad (“View”) online newspaper, the Post wrote, “which features a serious-looking news section with stories toeing the Kremlin line and a lifestyle section that covers the latest in luxury cars and interior design. Surveys rank Vzglyad as one of Russia’s five most-visited news sites.”
Anton Nossik, a Russian journalist who wrote about corruption in Putin’s Russia, said that Vladislav Surkov — Putin’s personal political adviser — organized private funding for Rykov. Nossik died suddenly in 2017 of an alleged heart attack.
In 2009, Rykov was “rewarded” with a position in the Russian government at the State Duma. Two years later, as Rykov was preparing to leave his position at the Duma, renowned political/tech scientist Evgeny Morozov explained that, “Russian leaders follow [Rykov’s] lead.” Morozov went onto write that Rykov shaped the Kremlin’s online propaganda machine.
During Marine Le Pen’s rise in France in 2014, the Kremlin again relied on Rykov to negotiate on behalf of the Russian government. Leaked text messages revealed that influential Kremlin adviser Timur Prokopenko was in communication with Rykov, who supposedly had access to Le Pen. The messages detail an alleged quid-pro-quo wherein Le Pen would recognize the annexation of Crimea in exchange for financial support from Russia.
“She hasn’t betrayed our expectations,” the Kremlin official replied.
“It will be necessary to thank the French in one way or another … It’s important,” [Rykov] said.
“Yes. Super!” the Kremlin official responded.
Le Pen publicly recognized Crimea as part of Russian territory and subsequently received over 40 million euros in Russian-backed loans to her Front National party. She denies that the two events are related.
This series of events portray Rykov not as simply a pro-Kremlin blogger, but instead as a strategic asset working for Putin. For the better part of a decade Rykov has allegedly received funding from senior Russian government officials and acted with their blessing.
Former senior US officials with whom I knew had knowledge of Rykov were not interested in discussing him. Rykov did not immediately return requests for comment.
Russian experts with whom I’ve spoken put varying levels of credibility behind Rykov’s claims of working with Trump; none were particularly convinced. There was more of a consensus in the plausibility of Rykov being part of the information warfare campaign that Russia launched against the 2016 US election. Nearly all agreed that Rykov’s claims were not frivolous or without meaning. Whether accurate or not, Vladimir Putin wanted the United States population to see these claims.
A spokesman for special counsel Robert Mueller declined to comment on Rykov. Mueller continues to investigate if the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in their US election interference campaign.
https://medium.com/@ScottMStedman/kreml ... c5f83298e5

STORMY DANIELS
Trump Used Alias and
NEVER SIGNED OUR 'HUSH' PACT
1
44 3/6/2018 5:14 PM PST
Stormy Daniels Sues Trump Over Confidentiality Agreement

Stormy Daniels is suing President Trump over a "hush" pact she says they drew up days before he was elected -- but he refused to sign.
In the lawsuit, Stormy claims Trump did her dirty by not signing the agreement, which intended to keep her from talking about their alleged 2006 affair, and hurting his presidential campaign. Stormy says she signed on the dotted line, as did Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen.
She says Trump used an alias -- David Dennison -- on the document to maintain his confidentiality, but still never signed the deal. According to docs, obtained by TMZ, Cohen contacted the ex-porn star shortly after the Access Hollywood tape came out. Stormy says Trump and Cohen caught wind she might go public, and "aggressively sought to silence" her with the "hush agreement."
As for her signing bonus ... the now infamous $130k -- Stormy says it was routed through an entity called Essential Consultants LLC. She says the company was created right before the election purely to hide the source of the payment. Cohen has claimed he used his own personal funds to pay her.
She's suing to get a judge to rule the agreement is invalid ... which, presumably, would clear the path for her to tell all about her alleged relationship with Trump.
NBC News first reported the lawsuit.
http://www.tmz.com/2018/03/06/stormy-da ... agreement/

Seth Abramson

BREAKING NEWS: Deripaska Mistress Nastya Rybka Was in Athens on the Same Day As George Papadopoulos and Vladimir Putin

(Papadopoulos was there on a secret, as-yet unexplained trip for the Trump campaign, and Putin was there to talk sanctions with men we know Papadopoulos met.)

3/ Note: the day before, Rybka was on Crete—across the water from Athens. Note: Deripaska has a yacht. Note: Deripaska has secret meetings on his yacht we know Rybka sometimes attended. Note: Rybka says she saw Americans meet Deripaska. Note: Papadopoulos is working with Mueller.

4/ And where did Rybka go—with Deripaska? on his yacht?—*right after* she was in Athens while Papadopoulos and Putin were there? Wait for it...

...the UAE!

The chances she was with Deripaska—an aluminum magnate (and the UAE was dealing with Russia on aluminum)—just skyrocketed.

5/ And what happened *right in the middle* of the 10 days between Papadopoulos, Putin, Rybka, and maybe Deripaska being in Athens and Rybka's sudden appearance in the UAE? Rob Goldstone suddenly emailed Don Jr. saying the Kremlin had dirt on Clinton that they wanted Trump to see.

6/ And you know who the Trump campaign's point-man on Clinton dirt was on May 27, 2016—while Papadopoulos and Putin and Rybka and maybe Deripaska were in Athens?

Papadopoulos.

And Papadopoulos wanted to meet Putin in Athens. And a week later Putin offered Clinton dirt to Trump.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 4772590592

ROGER STONE’S RAT-EATING SWISS CHEESE DENIALS

March 7, 2018/2 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe, Russian hacks, WikiLeaks /by emptywheel
Back when Roger Stone leaked his September testimony to HPSCI, I noted that it misrepresented the key allegations against him, meaning he never denied the important parts.

I’m even more interested in how he depicts what he claims are the three allegations made against him.

Members of this Committee have made three basic assertions against me which bust be rebutted her today. The charge that I knew in advance about, and predicted, the hacking of the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email, that I had advanced knowledge of the source or actual content of the WikiLeaks disclosures regarding Hillary Clinton or that, my now public exchange with a persona that our intelligence agencies claim, but cannot prove, is a Russian asset, is anything but innocuous and are entirely false.

In point of fact, this tripartite accusation is actually a misstatement of the allegations against him (though in his rebuttal of them, he is helped immensely by the sloppiness of public statements made by Democrats, especially those on the panel, which I’ve criticized myself). Generally, the accusation is more direct: that in conversing with both Julian Assange (though a cut-out) and Guccifer 2.0, Stone was facilitating or in some way helping the Trump campaign maximally exploit the Russian releases that were coming.

The same is true of his interview with Chuck Todd yesterday.

I’m most interested in the way how Stone addresses his direct exchange with Guccifer 2.0, then restricts the rest of his denials to Wikileaks. When Todd asks Stone why he reached out to both Guccifer and Wikileaks, Stone focuses his attention on the former.

Todd: Why did you reach out to Guccifer? Why did you reach out to Wikileaks?

Stone: First of all, my direct messages with Guccifer 2.0, if that’s who it really is, come six weeks, almost six weeks after the DNC emails had been published by Wikileaks. So in order to collude in their hacking, which I had nothing whatsoever to do with, one would have needed a time machine. Secondarily, I wrote a very long piece, you can find it still at the Stone Cold Truth. I doubt that Guccifer is, indeed, a Russian operative. I also once believed that he had hacked the DNC. I don’t believe that anymore either. I believe it was an inside job and the preponderance of evidence points to a load to a thumb drive or some other portable device and the device is coming out the back door. But, Chuck, ten days ago, the Washington Post that based on the Democratic minority that the Russians had sent documents to me for review. I never received any documents from the Russians or anybody representing them. I never had any contact with any

Todd: Did you receive any documents and you didn’t know it was a Russian?

Stone: I never received any documents from anyone purporting to be a Russian or otherwise, and I never saw the Wikileaks documents in advance.

In his response he does the following:

Raises doubts that he was actually talking to Guccifer 2.0 (even though Guccifer 2.0’s only identity was virtual, so Stone’s online interactions with any entity running the Guccifer Twitter account would by definition be communication with Guccifer 2.0)
Repeats his earlier doubts that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian operative
Emphasizes that he couldn’t have couldn’t have been involved in any hack of the DNC Guccifer 2.0 had done because he first spoke to him six weeks after the email release (in reality, he was speaking to him three weeks after the Wikileaks release)
Admits he once believed Guccifer 2.0 did the hack but (pointing to the Bill Binney analysis, and giving it a slightly different focus than he had in September) claims he no longer believes that
Invents something about a WaPo report that’s not true, thereby shifting the focus to receiving documents (as opposed to, say, information)
Denies he received documents from anyone but not that he saw documents (other than the Wikileaks ones) before they were released
This denial stops well short of explaining why he reached out to Guccifer. And it does nothing to change the record — one backed by his own writing — that Stone reached out because he believed Guccifer, whoever he might be, had hacked the DNC.

At the time Stone reached out to Guccifer (as I pointed out, he misrepresented the timing of this somewhat in his testimony), he believed Guccifer had violated the law by hacking the DNC.

He never does explain to Todd why he did reach out.

Guccifer 2.0 never comes back in the remainder of the interview. The first time Todd asks Stone if there had been “collusion” with the Russians, Stone answers it generally, insisting Trump needed no help to beat Hillary.

Todd: You have made the case here that there was no collusion here that you’re aware of. Would it have been wrong to collude with a foreign adversary to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign?

Stone: Well, there’s no evidence that this happened, you’re asking me to answer a hypothetical question. It seems to me that Mr. Steele was colluding with the Russians.

Todd: Let me ask you this. Do you think it’s fair game to get incriminating evidence from a foreign government about your political opponent?

Stone: But that didn’t happen, Chuck, so I’m not going to answer a hypothetical question. It was unnecessary. The idea that Donald Trump needed help from the Russians to beat Hillary Clinton it’s an excuse, a canard, a fairy tale. I don’t believe it ever happened.

The next time — when Stone first labels then backs way the fuck off labeling conspiring with the Russians as treason — Stone then focuses on how such conspiring would only be treason if you believed that Assange was a Russian agent.

Stone: Chuck I’ve been accused of being a dirty trickster. There’s one trick that’s not in my bag. That’s treason. I have no knowledge or involvement with Russians–

Todd: And you believe

Stone: And I have no knowledge of anybody else who does.

Todd: Let me establish something. You believe, if unbeknownst to you, there is somebody on the Trump campaign who worked with the Russians on these email releases, that’s a treasonous act?

Stone: No, actually, I don’t think so because for it to be a treasonous act, Assange would have to be provably a Russian asset, and Wikileaks would have to be a Russian front and I do not believe that’s the case.

Todd: Let me back you up there. You think it’s possible Wikileaks and the Trump campaign coordinated the release?

Stone: I didn’t say that at all. I have no knowledge of that and I make no such claim.

Todd: No, I understand that. You just issued that hypothetical. So what you’re saying is had that occurred you don’t believe that’s, you don’t believe, you don’t believe that that’s against the law?

Stone: This is all based on a premise that Wikileaks is a Russian front and Assange is a Russian agent. As I said I reject that. On the other hand I have no knowledge that that happened. It’s certainly did not happen in my case. That isn’t something I was involved in.

When asked whether it would be illegal to work with Wikileaks (Stone’s contacts with Guccifer at a time he believed Guccifer to have hacked the DNC go unmentioned) Stone again focuses on whether Wikileaks was Russian, not on the conspiracy to hack and leak documents.

This focus on Wikileaks instead of Guccifer 2.0 carries over to the statement Stone issued to ABC:

I never received anything whatsoever from WikiLeaks regarding the source, content or timing of their disclosures regarding Hillary Clinton, the DNC or Podesta. I never received any material from them at all. I never received any material from any source that constituted the material ultimately published by WikiLeaks. I never discussed the WikiLeaks disclosures regarding Hillary Clinton or the DNC with candidate or President Donald Trump before during or after the election. I don’t know what Donald Trump knew about the WikiLeaks disclosures regarding Hillary or the DNC if anything and who he learned it from if anyone.

No one, including Sam Nunberg is in possession If any evidence to the contrary because such evidence does not exist … This will be an impossible case to bring because the allegation that I knew about the WikiLeaks disclosures beyond what Assange himself had said in interviews and tweets or that I had and shared this material with anyone in the Trump campaign or anyone else is categorically false. Assange himself has said and written that I never predicted anything that he had not already stated in public.

There’s very good reason Stone would want to focus on Wikileaks rather than Guccifer.

Even by his own dodgy explanation, at the time he reached out to Guccifer, he believed that Guccifer had hacked the DNC. While it’s true that the public record shows Stone stopping short of accepting documents from Guccifer (all this ignores Stone’s reported involvement in a Guccifer-suggested Peter Smith effort to obtain Hillary’s Clinton Foundation emails), Stone’s interest in coordinating with the hack-and-leak is clear.

And it seems Sam Nunberg may fear that his past testimony and communications with Stone would document that interest. If he knows Stone did have non-public communications with Guccifer, but didn’t believe Guccifer to be Russian, it would also explain why Nunberg said he thought Putin was too smart to collude with Trump, but that his testimony might hurt Stone.

Adding one more point to this: early in the interview, Stone goes to some lengths to say that he proved he had actually separated from the Trump campaign by contemporaneously showing two reporters his resignation letter. This is akin to something Carter Page did in his HPSCI testimony. But given how many of those conspiring with Russia on the Trump campaign (Carter Page — especially after his departure, George Papadopoulos, and Paul Manafort) didn’t have formal roles, it’s not clear that letter would be definitive. Indeed, it might be the opposite, one of a group of people who arranged plausible deniability by getting or staying off the campaign payroll.

Update: Fixed my misrepresentation of Stone’s claim about the six week delay, and fact-checked it to note it was only three weeks.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/03/07/r ... e-denials/

Deripaska’s private jet: Newark-Moscow-Molde for secret yacht meeting
Konstantin Kilimnik, the Ukrainian political consultant who has ties to Russian intelligence, said the two discussed unpaid bills and current news.

By: Scott Stedman
As Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik met for a private dinner in Manhattan in August 2016, the private jet of the Russian oligarch to whom Manafort owed millions was crossing the Atlantic en route to Newark, New Jersey.
Kilimnik, who has been assessed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as having ties to Russian intelligence, wrote in an email days prior, “I met today with the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar several years ago,” in an apparent reference to Deripaska’s loans to Manafort, “We spent about 5 hours talking about his story, and I have several important messages from him to you,” Kilimnik wrote before setting up an August 2 meeting with the Trump campaign chief
“I need about two hours,” Kilimnik said in the July 31 email, “because it is a long caviar story to tell.” Kilimnik did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a 52 hour time period beginning on August 2, Deripaska’s private jet went from Newark, NJ — minutes from the meeting location of Manafort and Kilimnik — to Moscow to pick up the Russian Deputy PM, to Norway to accommodate the secret yacht meeting where US-Russian relations were discussed.
As the Manafort dinner with Kilimnik was taking place at 666 Fifth Avenue, owned by Jared Kushner, one of three private jets owned by Deripaska (call-sign M-ALAY) was en route to New Jersey from Moscow. It landed hours after the dinner concluded and took off back to Moscow the next evening. It is unclear who was aboard the jet and why the flight was chartered. A spokeswoman for Deripaska did not respond to a request for comment.

M-ALAY landing in Newark at 6:21 UTC (1:21 am EST)
Kilimnik told the Washington Post that the two “discussed unpaid bills and current news,” but not the presidential campaign of which Manafort was chairing. The next evening, Deripaska’s plane took off from Newark en route back to Moscow. It would soon carry one of the most influential Russian political leaders — Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko — to secretly take him to the Russian oligarch’s private yacht in Norway where the billionaire was waiting.

According to Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who first discovered the yacht video on the Instagram of Deripaska’s mistress Nastya Rybka, Deripaska likely flew from his villa in Montengro to Molde on his other private jet, M-UGIC. Flight logs confirm that this plane flew from Montengro to Molde on August 5. Almost assuredly, according to Navalny, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister was on the Moscow-Molde M-ALAY flight, hours after it landed from Newark.


M-ALAY, Newark to Moscow 8/3–8/4




M-ALAY, Moscow-Molde-Moscow 8/5
The secret yacht meeting uncovered by Navalny was documented by Deripaska’s mistress Nastya Rybka. Rybka was jailed in Thailand for attending a “sex seminar” and remains behind bars for the foreseeable future. She and her associates have asked for political asylum from the United States in exchange for what she claims is evidence of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump team.
Rybka asserts that she and her group have 16+ hours of audio, video, and photographic evidence that would implicate the Russian government. If deported back to Moscow she fears for her life, telling the Washington Post, “I can say something only when I will be in a safe place, sorry, because I am worried about my life.”
In an interview with CNN, Rybka said that she “witnessed several meetings in 2016 and 2017 between Deripaska and at least three un-named Americans.” It is unclear if any Americans were on the yacht in August, 2016 though flight records strongly suggest that it is a possibility.
The newly discovered flight logs of Deripaska’s private jet in August 2016 raises new questions not only about his relationship with Trump’s campaign manager, but about his role as a possible facilitator between the Russian government and Trump associates.

https://medium.com/@ScottMStedman/derip ... 0494a6cb48

seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 12:28 pm wrote:Now that it is crystal clear you are not going to answer my queations...because you can't we will move on to DeVos and her brother


Please link to where I have EVER said "let's attack Russia" that was Nordic's talking point if Clinton WON the election

Games are being played. Fuck 'em. nobody 'wants war w/Russia'. Its stupid and purposefully missing the point.
Jimmy Dore is a stooge. Fuck him too.

If people cannot appreciate Americans/citizens wanting our elections 'fair', and not rigged - FUCK THEM.

As I posted several weeks ago, I am suspicious of those who still deny what is happening.

EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT. Western democracy is under an EXISTENTIAL THREAT.

Fascist orRrussian mob apologists can go fuck themselves.

THE NSA CONFIRMS IT: RUSSIA HACKED FRENCH ELECTION ‘INFRASTRUCTURE

May 09 2017

TWO DAYS BEFORE France's recent presidential election, hackers leaked nine gigabytes of emails from candidate Emmanuel Macron's campaign onto the web. Since then, the Kremlin has once again emerged as the likeliest culprit. But while public evidence can't definitively prove Russia's involvement, NSA director Michael Rogers suggested to Congress today that America's most powerful cybersecurity agency has pinned at least some electoral interference on Moscow.

In a hearing of the Senate's Armed Forces Committee, Rogers indicated that the NSA had warned French cybersecurity officials ahead of the country's presidential runoff that Russian hackers had compromised some elements of the election. For skeptics, that statement may help tip the balance towards credibly blaming Russia for the attacks.

"If you take a look at the French election ... we had become aware of Russian activity," Rogers said in response to questions from senator Kirsten Gillibrand about the allegations of Russia hacking the Macron campaign. "We had talked to our French counterparts prior to the public announcements of the events publicly attributed this past weekend and gave them a heads-up: 'Look, we’re watching the Russians, we’re seeing them penetrate some of your infrastructure.'"

more: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/nsa-direc ... structure/

The Latest: France says no trace of Russian hacking Macron

Jun. 01, 2017

The head of the French government’s cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, says they found no trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack.

In an interview in his office Thursday with The Associated Press, Guillaume Poupard said the Macron campaign hack “was so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone.”

He said they found no trace that the Russian hacking group known as APT28, blamed for other attacks including on the U.S. presidential campaign, was responsible.

Poupard is director general of the government cyber-defense agency known in France by its acronym, ANSSI. Its experts were immediately dispatched when documents stolen from the Macron campaign leaked online on May 5 in the closing hours of the presidential race.

Poupard says the attack’s simplicity “means that we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country.”

https://www.apnews.com/fc570e4b400f4c7db3b0d739e9dc5d4d

Mueller ‘has the documents’ on agreement between Trump and Russian interests during the 2016 campaign: GOP strategist

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Republican strategist Mike Murphy on Monday made his contribution to “Russia speculation night,” telling NBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell an “international businessman” said special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into an agreement Donald Trump had with Russian interests during the 2016 campaign.

“I was walking around [Beverly Hills] and an international businessman I know pretty well, swore me to secrecy said ‘You can say this on TV. A friend of mine got pulled in by Mueller asking about a MOU, a memorandum of understanding, that Trump had with Russian interests during the 2016 campaign and Mueller has the documents,’” Murphy told O’Donnell.

Last week, CNN reported Mueller is probing Trump’s business dealings as he considered running for president. As CNN reported, “Investigators for special counsel Robert Mueller have recently been asking witnesses about Donald Trump’s business activities in Russia prior to the 2016 presidential campaign as he considered a run for president.”

The “international businessman” who spoke with Murphy would seem to track with CNN’s reporting about Mueller’s shifting focus in the Russia probe.

Watch below, via MSNBC:
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/muelle ... egist/amp/

CHATTY
Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen Received Inside Info From Russia Probe
Closed-door testimony before the House Russia probe is supposed to stay behind closed doors. Somehow, it got into the hands of another witness—and key Trump confidante—instead.

BETSY WOODRUFF
SPENCER ACKERMAN
03.06.18 1:56 PM ET
On Dec. 19, 2017, a former staffer for Sen. John McCain named David Kramer testified before the House intelligence committee behind closed doors. He’d played a role in bringing the salacious and unverified Steele dossier to the FBI’s attention, and members peppered him with questions about it.

Then something unusual happened. Word of Kramer's testimony got out—to the lawyer of another witness.

The following, based on conversations with multiple sources familiar with the matter, illuminates the extraordinary breakdown of trust between committee investigators and the witnesses they call. It also suggests that some people working on the committee investigation may be trying to covertly assist one of the president’s closest allies—when the president’s inner circle is ostensibly a focus of their probe.

A few days after Kramer’s testimony, his lawyer, Larry Robbins, got a strange call. The call was from Stephen Ryan, a lawyer who represents Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen. Cohen is facing scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigators regarding potential coordination between Trump’s team and the Kremlin. He featured prominently in the Steele dossier—the document that Kramer handled—and is currently suing Buzzfeed for publishing it.

“Yes, Cohen did testify, and yes, we actually had the opportunity to ask him those questions. What we have not had the opportunity to do is determine whether he was telling us the truth”
— Rep. Adam Schiff
Ryan told Robbins he reached out because someone from the House told him that Robbins’ client, Kramer, had information about the Steele dossier that could help Cohen.


Robbins declined to help. Ryan then asked Robbins not to tell the House intelligence committee about their conversation.

Robbins told the committee anyway. CNN reported in February that Robbins wrote a letter to the committee complaining about leaks to another client’s lawyer. The Daily Beast can now confirm that this letter was regarding Stephen Ryan and Michael Cohen.

Michael Cohen is both the president’s longtime personal attorney and one of his most unflagging loyal admirers. He has a history of using every trick in the book—from intimidation to hush-money—to keep negative stories about Trump from coming to light, as The New York Times detailed last month. Cohen personally paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her commitment not to discuss an affair she allegedly had with Trump. According to the Wall Street Journal, the future president did not reimburse Cohen for his efforts.

Emily Hytha, a spokesperson for Rep. Michael Conaway, who is supervising the probe, said witness testimony was not shared improperly. (The testimony was deemed committee-sensitive, according to a committee source, but not classified.)

“Any accusation that a witness's testimony was shared with another witness or their lawyer is unequivocally false,” she said.

Robbins and Kramer declined to comment for this story. Ryan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Witnesses who voluntarily testify before the House intelligence committee generally do so under assurances that members and staff will not share their testimony with the public or with other witnesses. Many witnesses are less likely to cooperate with sensitive Congressional investigations if they believe the information they share will get out publicly.

“Any time information leaks out that’s given to the committee behind closed doors—whether it’s classified or committee-sensitive or otherwise protected from public disclosure—it makes it harder for the committee to do its investigative job and get honest and open testimony from the witnesses before it,” said Jamil Jaffer, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and former senior counsel on the House intelligence committee.

This isn’t the only leak accusation leveled against House intelligence committee officials. The president has repeatedly skewered the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, for supposedly sharing sensitive information with reporters; it’s a charge that Schiff denies. Last week, The New York Times reported that leaders of the Senate intelligence committee believe House investigators leaked text messages that Sen. Mark Warner sent. Warner and Sen. Richard Burr, the Democrat and Republican who lead the Senate committee, met with Speaker Paul Ryan to share their concerns. Accusations of improper coordination with the White House have dogged Nunes, who was part of Trump’s presidential transition team, since the investigation’s inception.

“Any time information leaks out that’s given to the committee behind closed doors... it makes it harder for the committee to do its investigative job and get honest testimony from the witnesses before it.”
— Jamil Jaffer
Last March, Nunes suggested a whistleblower from within the intelligence agencies informed him that the name of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who subsequently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, was improperly “unmasked” in internal reports. It subsequently emerged that Nunes was fed that story not by any whistleblower, but by White House officials close to both Nunes and Flynn—prompting an ethics inquiry into Nunes himself that briefly derailed his leadership of the Russia probe.

More recently, Nunes gave an evasive and equivocal answer to committee Democrats who asked if Nunes or his staff collaborated in any way with the White House on his memo, which presented a counternarrative on Russia highly convenient for Trump.

And committee Democrats have signaled that they still seek to verify Cohen’s testimony.

At a recent closed-door committee meeting on February 5, a discussion of the Steele dossier pivoted to an aspect of it concerning Cohen—specifically, ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s claim that Cohen had visited Prague to meet with a Russian operative during the summer of 2016.

“All the evidence we have seen is that Michael Cohen has never been in Prague, never in the Czech Republic, and indeed, was in California with his son at a campus in California at a time when he was supposed to be meeting with this Russian agent,” said Peter King, a Long Island Republican, according to a hearing transcript. (PDF)

Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and former prosecutor, shot back: “Would you support subpoenaing Mr. Cohen’s bank records, travel records, communications logs, so we are not just taking him at his word but we could actually verify that through a third party?”

King said he would, but “when Mr. Cohen was here, he was under oath, and you had your opportunity to ask him then.”

Schiff replied, “Yes, he did testify, and yes, we actually had the opportunity to ask him those questions. What we have not had the opportunity to do is determine whether he was telling us the truth, because we have made requests to get documents, the subpoenaed documents, and the majority has been unwilling to support those requests to subpoena documents. When that is the case, then we have no way of verifying or disproving information.” (Schiff declined comment for this piece.)

The exchange happened weeks after Ryan contacted Robbins concerning Cohen’s testimony.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-law ... ssion=true

Mueller looking into incidents involving Trump's lawyer: report
BY BRETT SAMUELS - 03/06/18 02:48 PM EST 297

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is looking into incidents involving one of President Trump’s attorneys as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Mueller has reportedly sought documents and spoken to witnesses about Michael Cohen’s involvement in negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen was reportedly in contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesman about moving forward on the project, but did not receive a response.

Negotiations for a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow started in 2015, but were cut off in early 2016.

Mueller’s team has also looked into Cohen’s involvement in a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine that favored Russia and was proposed one week after Trump took office, The Washington Post reported.

Cohen’s own attorney, Stephen Ryan, denied to the Post that Cohen is a focus of Mueller’s investigation.

Cohen is not necessarily a target of the investigation himself.

Mueller’s investigation has reportedly expanded in recent weeks to focus on Trump’s inner circle and his past financial dealings.

Four former Trump campaign associates have thus far pleaded guilty or been indicted as part of Mueller’s investigation. Mueller also filed charges last month against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations for allegedly meddling in the 2016 election.

Cohen has come into the public eye after it was reported he arranged a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement related to an alleged affair she had with Trump.

Cohen has acknowledged he made the payment, but denied it violated any campaign finance laws and said it was done with his own money.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... mps-lawyer

Robert Mueller’s Russia Probe Just Got a Lot Weirder

A mysterious Middle East fixer, the founder of Blackwater, an Emirati prince, and a secret meeting in the Seychelles are now under investigation as Robert Mueller uncovers a nexus of foreign influence on the Trump campaign.

Abigail TracyMarch 7, 2018 2:18 pm
Mueller Investigation

Last night, as the White House was dealing with the resignation of Gary Cohn and new allegations in the Stormy Daniels saga, The New York Times published a labyrinthine story centered on a man named George Nader, an adviser to the United Arab Emirates whose involvement with the Trump campaign appears to cast new light on what has been a dark frontier of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Last year, The Washington Post reported on a secret meeting between representatives for the United Arab Emirates, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and a Russian investor with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, which took place on a remote Seychelles island just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was unknown at the time what Prince and the Russian envoy discussed. Sources told the Post that the goal was to open a dialogue with the Russian government outside of traditional diplomatic channels. The U.A.E. reportedly agreed to broker the meeting in hopes of convincing Russia to scale back its relationship with Iran.

As we now know, the meeting was also arranged with the help of Nader, who the F.B.I. picked up at Dulles International Airport in January. According to the Times, he was immediately served with search warrants and recently testified before a grand jury. Here’s what we know about Nader, why Mueller is interested in the Trump campaign’s contacts with the U.A.E., and what the Seychelles meeting could mean for the Russia investigation.

Who is George Nader?

A Lebanese-American businessman, Nader currently serves as an adviser to Emirati Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, who has developed a close relationship with Jared Kushner. For years, Nader has been a well-known, if somewhat off-the-radar, figure in certain political circles. According to the Times, Nader worked with the Bill Clinton administration in its attempt to broker a peace deal between Syria and Israel, convincing the White House that he could leverage his influential contacts with the Syrian government. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Nader worked with Prince’s private security company, Blackwater—which is now known as Academi—as a “business-development consultant,” according to a 2010 deposition. At the time of the 2016 election, he was serving as an adviser to Prince Mohammed, and was a frequent visitor to the White House during the early months of the Trump administration, where he met with Kushner and former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

How is Prince connected to Trump?

Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, never held a formal role in the Trump campaign, the transition team, or the administration, but has been a vocal supporter of Trump nonetheless. According to the Post, Prince donated $250,000 to the Trump campaign after the Republican National Convention and developed a close relationship with Bannon. The Intercept has reported that Prince later lobbied contacts inside the Trump administration to set up a private network of intelligence contractors for the C.I.A., an idea that U.S. officials and the White House appeared to reject.

When he was first asked about the Seychelles meeting, on CNN, Prince told anchor Erin Burnett that he had been there “on business” to meet with Emirati officials and that he only had a brief meeting with “some fund manager—I can’t even remember his name” over a beer. (“The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump,” a spokesman for Prince said at the time. “Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they should be hunting terrorists?”)

Why is Mueller interested in Nader?

Nader appears to have been a key player in the Seychelles meeting, whose attendees included Nader, Prince, and Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian investor with ties to Putin. Nader reportedly arranged the meeting on behalf of Prince Mohammed, while Prince allegedly served as a Trump transition envoy, and Dmitriev was there representing the Kremlin. According to the Times, Mueller has also asked witnesses about any attempts by the Emirates, through Nader, to buy political influence by supporting the Trump campaign, suggesting that the special prosecutor is examining the influence of foreign money on the president and his policies. The investigation could shed light on the Trump administration’s decision to back the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia in the blockade of Qatar—a critical U.S. military ally in the Middle East—which broke with decades of American foreign policy and put the president at odds with his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.

According to CNN, Mueller is also interested in a Nader’s presence at a December 2016 meeting in New York, between the crown prince and members of the Trump campaign, including Bannon and Kushner. The Obama administration was not made aware of the meeting—an unusual breach of diplomatic protocol for travel involving a high-level foreign official.

What’s the deal with Dmitriev?

Dmitriev is the C.E.O. of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, one of several official sovereign wealth funds tied to the Russian government. R.D.I.F., which invests public money in private projects, was targeted by the Obama administration in 2014 when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia. Until recently, R.D.I.F. was a subsidiary of Vnesheconombank, the Russian bank whose C.E.O., Sergey Gorkov, met with Kushner during the transition.

According to the Times, Abu Dhabi committed to invest $6 billion in Dmitriev’s fund after Prince Mohammed met with Putin 2013. Dmitriev subsequently became a “frequent visitor” to Abu Dhabi, and was seen by Emirati officials as a direct conduit to Putin.

What has Prince said about the Seychelles meeting?

During his congressional testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last December, Prince came under fire from Democrats over the meeting. While Prince dismissed the narrative that he acted as a Trump envoy, he did concede that Bannon had informed him of Prince Mohammed’s 2016 New York meeting before the Seychelles encounter. When pressed by Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Prince denied that either meeting had anything to do with the Russians. “The Emiratis I’d just met with previously said, ‘There’s an interesting guy from Russia you should meet, if you have any business in the commodity space,’ which I do,” Prince said. “I look at minerals and oil and gas. He said, ‘You should meet him. So I met him in the bar and had a drink.’” Schiff was reportedly unpersuaded.

So what does this mean for Trump?

The revelation that Nader is cooperating with Mueller suggests that the special prosecutor is continuing to dig into the foreign and financial ties of the Trump family. Last week, CNN reported that Mueller had opened lines of inquiry into Trump’s Russian business ties, including the timing of his decision to run for office, the funding of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and the failed Trump Tower Moscow deal. Kushner has come under similar scrutiny, according to NBC News. Federal investigators have reportedly questioned witnesses about Kushner’s efforts to secure financing for his family’s real-estate properties from representatives of Qatar, Turkey, Russia, China, and the United Arab Emirates. The Post reported that at least four countries have discussed leveraging his political inexperience and the financial troubles of Kushner Cos., which recently received two loans totaling more than $500 million after Kushner met with the lenders’ executives in the White House. (Kushner and Kushner Cos. have denied any wrongdoing.)
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03 ... estigation

peartreed » Wed Mar 07, 2018 6:48 pm wrote:
As a Canadian I don’t have the same access to all U.S. media news coverage,

Scott Stedman
‏
Breaking: The Telegraph is reporting that one of Christopher Steele's employees is a longtime associate of the poisoned Russian double-agent. The Telegraph suspects that Colonel Skripal may have been involved in the Trump dossier.

Poisoned Russian spy Sergei Skripal was close to consultant who was linked to the Trump dossier

Sergei Skripal, left, and Christopher Steele, right, who compiled the notorious dossier on President Trump that detailed his allegedly corrupt dealings with Vladimir Putin

Robert Mendick, chief reporter Hayley Dixon Patrick Sawer, senior reporter
7 MARCH 2018 • 10:24PM
A security consultant who has worked for the company that compiled the controversial dossier on Donald Trump was close to the Russian double agent poisoned last weekend, it has been claimed.

The consultant, who The Telegraph is declining to identify, lived close to Col Skripal and is understood to have known him for some time.

Col Skripal, who is in intensive care and fighting for his life after an assassination attempt on Sunday, was recruited by MI6 when he worked for the British embassy in Estonia, according to the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency.

The Telegraph understands that Col Skripal moved to Salisbury in 2010 in a spy swap and became close to a security consultant employed by Christopher...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/0 ... nt-linked/

"If the Kremlin believed that Col Skripal might have helped with the compilation of the dossier, it could explain the motive for the assassination attempt"

This comes on the heels of Valery Morozov claiming that Colonel Skripal was still working as a double agent. “Every month [he was] going to the embassy to meet military intelligence officers."

Sergei Skripal: Former spy was in 'regular contact with Russian embassy', ex-Kremlin officer claims

Shehab KhanWednesday 7 March 2018 20:48 GMT
Sergei Skripal, the double agent attacked with nerve agent in Salisbury, was in “regular contact with the Russian embassy”, a former Kremlin official has claimed.

Valery Morozov, who was an associate of Mr Skripal after he too was exiled to the UK, said that he believes that while living in retirement the former spy was still working in cyber security.

He also claimed Mr Skripal was keeping “dangerous” company, which is why he later chose to distance himself.

“Every month [he was] going to the embassy to meet military intelligence officers”, Mr Morozov told Channel 4 News.

“For me being political refugee it is either certain danger or, frankly speaking, I thought that this concept is not very good for me. It can be bring some questions from British officials.”

The Russian embassy said it was not aware of any meetings.

Mr Morozov also said he was sure that Russian President Vladimir Putin had nothing to do with the alleged poisoning.

“Putin can’t be behind this. I know how the Kremlin works, I worked there. Who is Skripal? He is nothing for Putin. Putin doesn’t think about him”, he said.

“There is nobody in Kremlin talking about former intelligence officer who is nobody. There is no reason for this. It is more dangerous for them for such things to happen.”

Mr Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia were found on a bench in Salisbury after being falling ill.

They are currently fighting for their lives in hospital.

A police officer, who was one of the first at the scene, is also in hospital and is believed to be in intensive care.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 44926.html

PAGE 1 of the dossier: "A former top level Russian intelligence officer" - this fits Colonel Skripal to a T.



I don’t want to go too far down a conspiracy hole, but it’s worth noting that the distance between where Steele now lives and where Skripal was poisoned is fairly close. About 52 miles.



Source B could very well be Erovinkin as well. Think they might both be sources for the dossier. We know Sergei Millian was most likely source D as well.

Was This Russian General Murdered Over the Steele Dossier?

The notorious dossier on Trump that Republicans want to discredit may well have been credible enough in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes to get at least one person killed.

The dossier on Donald Trump compiled by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele—which made headlines for its salacious, unconfirmed passage about Trump and some hookers performing for him in a Moscow hotel room—has been denounced by the president’s people as fake news, of course.

But the document was a mixed collection of information and allegations far more precise than the rumors about compromising sexual activities, and some of what’s in it may have unnerved not only Trump, but the Kremlin, where the hunt for leakers can take a fatal turn.

During his recently released August 2017 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Glenn Simpson was asked about sources for the sensational dossier, which Simpson’s firm, Fusion GPS, commissioned. Responding for him, Simpson’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, blurted out a surprising warning: “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier.”

In his subsequent November testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, which was made available last Thursday, Simpson denied knowing specific cases of people being killed because of the dossier, but he then noted cryptically that “people literally risked their lives to tell us some of this stuff.”

In fact, there is evidence that at least one Russian was murdered because of Steele’s revelations: Gen. Oleg Erovinkin of Russia’s State Security Service (FSB). On the morning of Dec. 26, 2016, Erovinkin, age 61, was found dead in his car in central Moscow. Life News, known to be a Kremlin mouthpiece, first claimed on its website that Erovinkin had been “killed,” but then quickly changed its story, saying simply that Erovinkin had “died.” FSB investigators were called immediately to the death scene, and news outlets soon reported that Erovinkin had succumbed to a heart attack. There was no more official Russian mention of him.

Erovinkin, who joined the KGB (the FSB’s predecessor) in 1976, had in the mid-1990s worked in the Russian Presidential Administration, where his job was to monitor compliance with security procedures. (He was known as “the keeper of the Kremlin’s secrets.”) He then served under Igor Sechin when the latter was deputy premier and subsequently followed Sechin to Rosneft in 2012, after Sechin became CEO of the state oil giant.

Of all the officials who serve under Putin, Sechin is the most powerful. Erovinkin, as chief administrator at Rosneft, was Sechin’s right-hand man and must have known everything about Sechin’s contacts with Americans. Those included the former head of ExxonMobil, now Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. (Sechin once said he felt thwarted by U.S.-imposed sanctions that kept him from riding motorcycles in America with his friend Tillerson.)

More importantly, in terms of allegations made by the Steele dossier and currently the focus of multiple investigations in Washington, Erovinkin was in a position to keep track of contacts with Trump advisers in considerable detail.

“Erovinkin was known as 'the keeper of the Kremlin’s secrets.'”

Steele wrote in his dossier that “a Russian source close to Rosneft President [sic] Igor Sechin” had confided details of a secret July 2016 meeting in Moscow between Sechin and Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. The two had allegedly discussed bilateral energy cooperation between the United States and Russia, along with the lifting of Ukraine-related economic sanctions against Russia. As a quid pro quo, Sechin was said to have offered Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19 percent stake in Rosneft, which was due to be privatized. Page reportedly indicated that Trump, if elected president, would lift sanctions.

Known to be sympathetic to the Kremlin, Page was apparently viewed by the Russian security services as a key object for advancing their interests with Trump. (In 2013, an agent from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, SVR, met Page in New York City and engaged in several communications with him as part of a recruitment attempt.)

The Steele dossier mentions that Page also met on this same Moscow trip with Igor Diveikin, an FSB colonel who was at the time a senior official in the Internal Political Department of the Russian Presidential Administration. Diveikin, who had previously served in the Presidential Security Service, the agency with the crucial responsibility of guarding the Russian president, reportedly told Page about compromising material the Russians had on Hillary Clinton and also conveyed to Page that the Kremlin had kompromat on Trump, which Trump should consider in his dealings with Russia.

When questioned by the House Intelligence Committee in November, Page denied knowing either Sechin or Diveikin. But he also claimed that he met with no senior Russian officials while he was in Moscow in July 2016, and that turned out to be untrue.

After Rep. Adam Schiff reminded Page of his July 8, 2016, email from Moscow to members of the Trump campaign saying that he had received “incredible insights and outreach” from senior members of Putin’s administration, Page backtracked. He reluctantly admitted meeting with Russian vice premier Arkady Dvorkovich and also with Andrei Baranov, who is head of investor relations at Rosneft, a top management position that would put Baranov in frequent contact with Sechin. (Significantly, Baranov was awarded a medal “for service to his country” by Putin in March 2017.)

After insisting to the committee that he and Baranov only got together because they were old friends, Page was forced to acknowledge that the two may have discussed sanctions and also the potential sale of Rosneft’s stock, which makes one wonder whether Sechin was at the meeting as well.

The plan to privatize part of Rosneft was not known outside of Rosneft’s top management at this time and it was a contentious issue, as was the proposed purchase by Rosneft of controlling shares in the oil company Bashneft, which occurred in October. (The sale of 19.5 percent of Rosneft shares to Qatar and the commodities giant Glencore was announced in early December.)

All of these negotiations were fraught, and the subject of high-level infighting among senior Russian officials.

One who initially opposed both of these transactions was Minister of Economic Development Aleksei Ulyukaev, who was arrested in November 2016 on charges of taking a $2 million bribe from Sechin. It was a classic sting operation, with Sechin in charge, and after a sensational trial Ulyukaev was sentenced in December to eight years in a strict regime labor camp. Sechin had been called to appear as a witness, but refused. In his stead, Page’s friend Baranov appeared to testify against Ulyukaev.

Erovinkin would have known about all these intrigues in great detail, and thus could have exposed not only links to the Trump campaign, but internal corruption—all of which would put him in danger if he were thought to be leaking information.

According to the recent book by British journalist Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, Steele denied that Erovinkin was a direct source for his report. But, as Harding told me recently, the information could nonetheless have originated with Erovinkin. (Steele refers to "a senior member of Sechin's staff" as confirming the Sechin-Page meeting to his source.) And even it did not come from Erovinkin, he would have borne responsibility for the leaks, since he was the head of Rosneft’s administration, with security part of his purview. The fatal question ultimately is not what he did, but what he was thought to have done.

While the Ulyukaev case and the Rosneft transactions certainly contribute to the air of conspiracy around Erovinkin’s death, it is more than likely that the Steele dossier did him in.

Although the dossier was not published on the web until two weeks after Erovinkin died, the Kremlin was doubtless aware of its contents well before this. Simpson had conveyed much of the material to American journalists in the autumn of 2016, and, according to the Harding book: “For months, reporters on the national security beat and Moscow correspondents had been working feverishly to substantiate the allegations.”

In fact, the arrests in December of high-level FSB officers responsible for cyber operations were widely assumed to be set off by Steele’s revelations that the Trump campaign had colluded in the Russian cyber attacks against the Clinton campaign that were revealed by U.S. intelligence agencies.

However much Trump’s defenders want to dismiss the dossier as a fake concocted by the president’s enemies, the fallout from it in Russia, including at least one highly probable murder, suggests that much of what Steele reported is fact.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/was-this- ... le-dossier

Trump considered firing WH counsel if he didn't deny threatening to resign: report
BY BRANDON CARTER - 03/07/18 07:30 PM EST 209

President Trump reportedly considered firing White House counsel Don McGahn if he didn’t deny a report that he threatened to resign after Trump ordered him to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, according to The New York Times.

In January, the Times reported that Trump ordered Mueller to be fired last year, but was stopped after McGahn threatened to resign rather than carry out Trump’s order.

In the days after the Times published its report, former White House staff secretary Rob Porter reportedly told McGahn that Trump wanted him to release a statement denying that Trump wanted Mueller to be fired and that McGahn threatened to resign over the order.

According to the Times, Porter told McGahn that Trump had suggested he might “get rid of” McGahn if he didn’t issue the statement.

Trump later confronted McGahn in the Oval Office after he didn’t release a statement denying the Times report. During the meeting, which chief of staff John Kelly also attended, Trump told McGahn he ordered him to fire Mueller, people familiar with the meeting told the newspaper.

The Times reports McGahn told Trump he was wrong, and that he did ask McGahn to see that Mueller was removed from his post. Trump reportedly said he did not remember the conversation that way.

Trump’s conversation with McGahn was one of two conservations Trump had with witnesses interviewed by Mueller, according to the Times. Trump also asked former chief of staff Reince Priebus about his interview with Mueller’s investigators and whether they had been “nice.”

Mueller found out about Trump’s attempt to have him fired as his team began interviewing top current and former Trump officials, the Times reported in January.

McGahn interviewed with Mueller’s team in December as part of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... atening-to

About That Russia Indictment: Robert Mueller's Legal Theory and Where It Takes Him Next

The news cycle has moved on from the recent indictment of 13 Russians over that country’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We, however, have been spending some quality time with it.

The legal theory used by Special Counsel Robert Mueller turns out to be worth pondering in some detail, as it offers considerable insight into where he may be headed next. When news of the indictment broke, a number of commentators—including one of us—suggested that the legal theory was novel. On closer inspection, however, it doesn’t seem new. Still, the indictment is rather clever, drawing on a venerable and well-trodden theory of criminal liability in a fashion that Mueller may be able to leverage into a powerful instrument with respect to both foreign and domestic actors.

Let’s unpack it.

The indictment works like this: It is a crime to conspire to “obstruct the lawful functions of the United States government through fraud and deceit.” The Federal Election Commission, the Justice Department and the State Department are charged with enforcing U.S. laws, including laws that prohibit foreign nationals from making expenditures to influence federal elections, that require agents of foreign entities to register as foreign agents and that require truthful disclosure on visa applications. According to the facts alleged in the indictment, the defendants created false U.S. personas to operate social media accounts designed to influence the 2016 presidential election while hiding the Russian origin of their activities. In addition, several of the defendants “traveled to the United States under false pretenses for the purpose of collecting intelligence” to aid the Internet Research Agency’s influence operations. In so doing, defendants are alleged to have conspired to obstruct agencies of the U.S. government “by making expenditures in connection with the 2016 U.S. presidential election without proper regulatory disclosure; failing to register as foreign agents carrying out political activities within the United States; and obtaining visas through false and fraudulent statements.”

The crime of conspiracy to defraud the United States is not new. It has been sitting in plain sight in the general conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. §371, since 1948 (and an earlier provision with substantially similar language dates to 1867). The statute makes it illegal for two or more persons to “conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”

Unlike conspiracy to commit an offense, conspiracy to defraud the United States need not be connected to a specific underlying crime, and “defraud” is not defined. In the 1910 case Haas v. Henkel, the Supreme Court interpreted the provision broadly to include “any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing, or defeating the lawful function of any department of government.”

Notably, there is no requirement that the government be cheated out of money or property.

A decade after Haas, the high court narrowed this interpretation slightly in Hammerschmidt v. United States, clarifying that conspiracy to defraud the United States includes conspiracy “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft, or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.” In other words, to prove a claim under the defraud prong of §371, the government must show that the defendant (1) entered into an agreement (2) to obstruct a lawful function of a government agency (3) by deceitful means and (4) committed at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

In essence, the crime is conspiring to, by “deceitful” means, make it harder for the government to do what it is statutorily bound to do. Often, these dishonest means constitute crimes in and of themselves, and a charge under §371 can be accompanied by charges of other substantive offenses. But a charge of conspiracy to defraud can stand on its own, a fact that has attracted criticism, particularly in response to the government’s use of §371 to prosecute tax crimes under what’s known as the Klein conspiracy doctrine.

In United States v. Klein, a 1957 case in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the government charged both tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud the United States by impeding the function of the IRS. The tax-evasion counts were dismissed, and the jury convicted on the conspiracy count alone. The Second Circuit upheld the convictions anyway, holding that there was sufficient evidence of conspiracy to conceal the nature of defendants’ business activities and income. This count of the indictment was not doomed by the court’s finding that, because of the structure of defendants’ business operations, the counts of direct tax evasion could not proceed. As the Ninth Circuit later acknowledged in an opinion expressing considerable discomfort with the breadth of activity covered by the conspiracy-to-defraud prong, “Neither the conspiracy’s goal nor the means used to achieve it need to be independently illegal.”

Notably for present purposes, §371 has been deployed in the context of election law specifically. The Justice Department’s manual on federal prosecution of election offenses explicitly contemplates bringing charges of conspiracy to defraud based on campaign finance offenses. It explains the theory as follows:

To perform [its] duties, the FEC must receive accurate information from the candidates and political committees that are required to file reports under the Act. A scheme to infuse patently illegal funds into a federal campaign, such as by using conduits or other means calculated to conceal the illegal source of the contribution, thus disrupts and impedes the FEC in the performance of its statutory duties.

Several federal circuit courts have heard cases brought under §371 based on this theory and have not found fault with its application to behavior that may also violate the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). The defendants in United States v. Hopkins, decided by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1990, were officers and directors of savings-and-loan institutions, which are prohibited under the FECA from making political contributions. They were accused of arranging for individual officers and employees to make such contributions, for which they were given reimbursements disguised as pay raises or legitimate business expenses. Citing the Hammerschmidt formulation, the Fifth Circuit upheld their convictions under §371 for conspiring to defraud the FEC. A showing that the defendants had specific knowledge of Federal Election Campaign Act provisions they conspired to frustrate was not required; the jury could infer from the evidence that defendants’ actions were “designed to evade the FEC’s reporting requirements.” Moreover, the court directly considered whether it was proper for the government to bring conspiracy charges based on alleged violations of the act in the absence of substantive FECA charges. It held that the prosecutor was within his discretion to charge the defendants with felony fraud and concealment under Title 18, rather than with misdemeanor election-law violations, because “when an act violates more than one criminal statute, the Government may prosecute under either.”

The defendant in the 1994 Third Circuit case of United States v. Curran made a related argument in his appeal of a conviction for conspiracy based on a similar scheme. Although the alleged facts included FECA violations, the government did not bring charges under election law because the statute of limitations had elapsed. Defendant Curran argued unsuccessfully that the statute of limitations for election-law offenses should apply instead of the longer statute of limitations for felony conspiracy. As in Hopkins, the court found no problem with a decision to charge under Title 18 rather than under the Federal Election Campaign Act, though it granted a new trial for other reasons.

In short, though the use of §371 in the campaign context is not particularly prevalent, neither the Third nor the Fifth Circuits found reason to question the underlying theory. (The D.C. Circuit has heard a similar case but determined that the conspiracy count was not yet properly on appeal.) Indeed, in cases such as Curran, counts with more burdensome and specific requirements garnered substantially more attention from the court. Finally, in at least one D.C. district court case, part of the alleged conspiracy charged under §371 involved impeding the FEC specifically by concealing the foreign sources of contributions. It is not too big a leap from these cases to the recent indictment.

Russia’s sustained, many-front effort to interfere in the 2016 election—a glimpse of which was shown in the indictment—is undoubtedly more complex and far-reaching than the plots that have previously been prosecuted as conspiracies to defraud the United States. But that makes Mueller’s theory richer, not more novel. After all, he is alleging not merely a conspiracy to defraud the FEC but also a conspiracy to defraud the Justice Department in its regularly capacity with respect to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as well as one to defraud the State Department in its role issuing visas. Even if, for whatever reason, some portion of Mueller’s theory did not have legs under the Klein conspiracy doctrine, the diversity of regulatory functions inhibited by the fraud alleged in the indictment gives prosecutors a bunch of bites at the apple, assuming of course that the alleged facts are provable.

So why is Mueller’s use of this theory interesting? Because at least in principle, it could do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of others who might be involved—who might have, say, colluded with—this alleged plot. For months, commentators have been talking about “collusion” as though it is something of a puzzle what laws collusion would violate. It wasn’t that long ago that one of us, along with Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey, wrote this piece noting that “collusion, in and of itself and to the extent it took place, is a political problem, not a legal one,” suggesting that the criminal question depends on “the manner of any collusion and how that activity maps onto the criminal code,” and imagining various means of colluding that might imply criminal liability. Suffice it to say that neither we nor anyone else writing at the time had been thinking in terms of §371.

But assume for a minute that the legal theory in this indictment has legs and that Mueller has alleged a viable conspiracy to defraud the United States. To allege that a new conspirator had joined such a conspiracy, Mueller would have to allege only that such a person—presumably a new defendant—had agreed to participate in a scheme of deceit by which the FEC, the Justice Department or the State Department was deprived of its regulatory authority and committed some act in furtherance of the agreement.

Well, hmmm. Who might such a person be?

What about someone who, say, knowingly gave any hacked emails to the Internet Research Agency with the understanding that the troll farm would spread them around key segments of the U.S. voting population? The hacking of the emails, of course, is a separate crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But what about a person or organization who—aware of the Internet Research Agency’s underlying activity—injected information into this allegedly fraudulent media ecosystem? Such a person might be a foreign intelligence actor or might be, say, a nominally independent cutout for such an actor. Under Mueller’s §371 theory, it wouldn’t much matter. As long as this person agreed to take part in the scheme to influence the U.S. election behind the back of the U.S. government and took a step to aid it, that person or entity would be guilty of a crime.

Which brings us to people on this side of the Atlantic—say, people who knowingly facilitated or participated in the distribution of emails through this mechanism or people who knowingly helped guide the activities of Internet Research Agency trolls. Such people might be inside or outside of the Trump campaign or organization. Their specific activities could all be, in and of themselves, perfectly legal. It’s an interesting question whether they would even need to know their interlocutors were Russian, much less acting at the behest of a foreign intelligence actor. As we read Mueller’s theory under §371, as long as they acted knowingly to join a scheme to deceive the U.S. government to frustrate its enforcement authority and took some action in pursuit of that scheme, they too would be guilty.

To be clear, without knowing details of the conduct of any specific individual, it would be irresponsible to speculate as to how a reasonable prosecutor would evaluate that person’s conduct with respect to this particular alleged conspiracy. For present purposes, our point is twofold: Mueller’s theory involves a well-established legal doctrine that has been deployed in roughly analogous situations, and it is potentially extremely powerful.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/about-russi ... s-him-next

13 Russian Nationals Indicted by Grand Jury
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40854

Mueller Reportedly Has Evidence Blackwater Founder Tried to Set Up a Trump-Putin Back Channel

Eric Prince has previously denied allegations of a scheduled meeting with a Russian close to the Kremlin.

Edwin RiosMar. 7, 2018 9:17 PM

Last April, the Washington Post reported that Blackwater founder Erik Prince had a secret meeting with a Russian close to Vladimir Putin to establish back channel communications between the Kremlin and then-President-elect Donald Trump in advance of the inauguration. Prince denied the allegations, but now, it sounds like special counsel Robert Mueller has evidence.

The Washington Post reports:

In January 2016, Erik Prince, the founder of the private security company Blackwater, met with a Russian official close to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and later described the meeting to congressional investigators as a chance encounter that was not a planned discussion of U.S.-Russia relations.

A witness cooperating with Mueller has told investigators the meeting was set up in advance so that a representative of the Trump transition could meet with an emissary from Moscow to discuss future relations between the countries, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

George Nader, a Lebanese American business who helped organize and attended the Seychelles meeting, has testified on the matter before a grand jury gathering evidence about discussions between the Trump transition team and emissaries of the Kremlin, as part of Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.

Nader began cooperating with Mueller after he arrived at Dulles Airport in mid-January and was stopped, served with a subpoena and questioned by the FBI, these people said. He has met numerous times with investigators.

A spokesman for Prince “referred to his previous statements to the committee and declined further comment” when asked about the allegations by The Washington Post.

Prince, an outspoken Trump supporter whose sister, Betsy DeVos, serves as Trump’s education secretary, previously told the House Intelligence Committee that the meeting in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, who oversees a wealth fund controlled by the Russian government, was not planned and that he had been discussing business possibilities at a hotel with United Arab Emirates officials. The Washington Post reported last year that the secret meeting had been arranged by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and his brother, shortly after Zayed visited the United States, to “explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... k-channel/

Trump donor Elliott Broidy named in Ukraine criminal probe

Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy under scrutiny over alleged deal with sanctioned Russian bank VTB.

Will Thorne2 hours ago

In  2009, Broidy pleaded guilty for bribing New York state pension officials [Getty Images]

The Prosecutor General of Ukraine has launched an investigation into claims surrounding an alleged multi-million dollar lobbying contract that names one of US President Donald Trump's most influential fundraisers, Elliott Broidy.

The 12-page document, which appears to have been signed by Broidy, outlines his role as providing "political advocacy" on behalf of a now sanctioned Russian bank, VTB.

The deal was  apparently  dated June 12, 2014, just weeks before VTB Bank was blacklisted by the US and EU as a key Kremlin asset following Russia's invasion of Crimea. Russian President Vladimir Putin is guest of honor at VTB Bank's investor conference every year.

The document raises serious questions about whether Broidy is in breach of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law that has gained prominence following the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller into foreign meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his aide Rick Gates have both been charged as a result of their work in Ukraine.

The document, obtained by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit, also suggests that Broidy, a national deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, would provide the same services to Investment Capital Ukraine (ICU), a Ukraine brokerage that has acted as financial advisors to President Petro Poroshenko.

"If this is a bonafide document, it is very troubling," says the Washington-based organisation Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

"Broidy appears to be an unregistered agent of a foreign principal in violation of federal law," says spokesman Jordan Libowitz.


The document obtained by Al Jazeera raises serious questions about whether Broidy is in breach of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act [Al Jazeera]

US law requires American citizens involved in lobbying on behalf of foreign governments or parties to register with the US Department of Justice on their Foreign Registered Agents (FARA) database. Al Jazeera found no evidence that Broidy is registered despite mounting evidence of multiple foreign clients.

Details of the alleged consultancy first emerged in Ukraine in January. The files were handed to Ukraine's Prosecutor General, who has ordered the Kiev Prosecutor's office to investigate further.

Ukraine's Institute of Law and Society submitted the documents to authorities, and the reform group is now calling for a thorough investigation in both Ukraine and the US.

The document outlines the work to be undertaken by Broidy, which includes "regular political and business analysis, political advocacy, investment advice, and money management" to VTB Bank and ICU.


Russian President Vladimir Putin is a regular guest of honor at the annual investor conference of VTB Bank, whose chairman is Yuri Soloviev [File: EPA]

The consultancy work was apparently to be paid in five annual payments of $2.5m from an offshore company, Quillas Equities SA, which is registered in the British Virgin Islands, but with an address in Dubai.  According to the Panama Papers, a massive leak of offshore documentation, Quillas Equities SA's shareholder is Yuri Soloviev, chairman of VTB Bank.

The document names Broidy as a consultant who has "many years of investment banking and money management experience." It goes on to detail his "expertise in international investments and American politics."

The alleged agreement outlines Broidy's background in Republican politics, describing how he served "as Finance Chair of the Republican Party and has access to US politicians and government agencies."

The business and lobbying activities of this prominent Republican are coming under increasing scrutiny beyond Ukraine.

Last week a group calling itself LA Confidential leaked emails that appeared to show Broidy and his wife Robin Rozenzweig, deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee, asking for more than $75m to squash an investigation in the US into a multi-billion dollar fraud in Malaysia.

Further revelations came from The New York Times, which reported that Broidy has a lucrative defence contract with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and that he had lobbied President Trump to meet privately with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the leader of the UAE. The emails suggest he has direct access to the US President.

Romanian media have also reported Broidy's role in negotiating arms deals worth potentially millions of dollars.

In 2009, Broidy pleaded guilty in New York to bribing New York state pension officials with almost $1m in return for their $250m investment in an Israel-focused investment fund he helped to manage.

He and the firm paid over $30m in fines, however, the charges against Broidy were downgraded and he avoided jail.

Now, Broidy claims he is the victim of a "hack" and smear campaign orchestrated by the state of Qatar in response to his criticism of the Gulf state's record against terrorism, a charge that Qatar denies.

Amid long-standing regional rivalries, the UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain, has imposed a nine-month long siege on Qatar. Broidy has close financial ties to the UAE and its royal family.


Broidy is tipped to be a key part of President Trump's re-election campaign team in 2020 [Reuters]
Broidy's wider links with the Middle East are now reportedly of interest in the FBI's far reaching probe into foreign influence in US politics, which are mostly focused on Paul Manafort. Breaches of the Foreign Agents Registration Act form a key part of this investigation.

'Confidential MOU'

A second document appears to expose further connections with the UAE. It outlines a plan for ICU and an Abu Dhabi based company to invest $40m into a fund to be managed by Broidy. The same group also handed what is described as a "Confidential Memorandum of Understanding" to prosecutors in Ukraine.

The Abu Dhabi firm and ICU apparently agreed to provide 80 percent of the investment, including an initial $3.5m payment.

It is unclear as to what the $40m was to be used for. This alleged MOU states that the deal was effective from December 2014, but omits specific details on how the money would be invested. It is also not clear if it was ever completed as the paperwork is unsigned.


This alleged MOU states that the deal was effective from December 2014, but omits specific details on how the money would be invested [Al Jazeera]
Broidy owns a security company, which is run by former US military personnel and provides services to governments in the Middle East. Its services include conducting "specialised operations, infrastructure protection and training."

Broidy, a Los Angeles-based financier and seasoned political operator, has raised millions of dollars in donations for the Republican Party. He is tipped to be a key part of Trump's campaign team for 2020.

In a response to these claims, ICU denies that the company, or its affiliates, has had any relationship with Broidy or his company and describes the contracts as being part of an elaborate forgery.

"We believe they are part of a malicious fraud against us," they told Al Jazeera in a statement.

VTB Bank also denied dealing with the Republican Party fundraiser. "Yuri Soloviev is not acquainted with Elliott Broidy and has never had any business dealings with him."

Al Jazeera also approached Broidy for comment during the preparation of this article. However, no response was received.

Al Jazeera obtained the documents as part of a one-year investigation into corruption involving Eastern European oligarchs, which also revealed a massive off-shore corruption network linked to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/ ... 32781.html