rigorousintuition.ca

Lawyer Who Was Said to Have Dirt on Clinton Had Closer Ties to Kremlin Than She Let On

By ANDREW E. KRAMER and SHARON LaFRANIERE
APRIL 27, 2018


Natalia V. Veselnitskaya had long insisted that she met top Trump campaign officials in 2016 in a private capacity, not as a representative of the Russian government looking to meddle in the election. Newly disclosed details undermine her assertion. Dmitry Serebryakov/Associated Press
MOSCOW — The Russian lawyer who met with Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower in June 2016 on the premise that she would deliver damaging information about Hillary Clinton has long insisted she is a private attorney, not a Kremlin operative trying to meddle in the presidential election.

But newly released emails show that in at least one instance two years earlier, the lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, worked hand in glove with Russia’s chief legal office to thwart a Justice Department civil fraud case against a well-connected Russian firm.

Ms. Veselnitskaya also appears to have recanted her earlier denials of Russian government ties. During an interview to be broadcast Friday by NBC News, she acknowledged that she was not merely a private lawyer but a source of information for a top Kremlin official, Yuri Y. Chaika, the prosecutor general.

“I am a lawyer, and I am an informant,” she said. “Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general.”

The previously undisclosed details about Ms. Veselnitskaya rekindle questions about who she was representing when she met with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and others at Trump Tower in Manhattan during the campaign. The meeting, one focus of the special counsel investigation into Russia’s election interference, was organized after an intermediary promised that Ms. Veselnitskaya would deliver documents that would incriminate Mrs. Clinton.

Ms. Veselnitskaya had long insisted that she met the president’s son, son-in-law and campaign chairman in a private capacity, not as a representative of the Russian government.

“I operate independently of any governmental bodies,” she wrote in a November statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I have no relationship with Mr. Chaika, his representatives and his institutions other than those related to my professional functions as a lawyer.”

But that claim had already been undercut last fall by revelations that her talking points for the Trump Tower meeting — detailing tax and financial fraud accusations against two Democratic Party donors tied to a Kremlin opponent — matched those in a confidential memorandum circulated by Mr. Chaika’s office.

And a sheaf of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s email correspondence released Friday appeared to show that her relationship with Mr. Chaika’s office is far closer than she has described.

The emails were obtained by Dossier, an organization set up by Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former tycoon who was stripped of his oil holdings, imprisoned and then exiled from his native Russia. He has emerged as a leading opponent of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Shown copies of the emails by Richard Engel of NBC News, Ms. Veselnitskaya acknowledged that “many things included here are from my documents, my personal documents.” She told the Russian news agency Interfax on Wednesday that her email accounts were hacked this year by people determined to discredit her, and that she would report the hack to Russian authorities.

The Russian prosecutor general’s office did not respond to requests for comment. In an email, Ms. Veselnitskaya said she would respond in two weeks.

The exchanges document Mr. Chaika’s response to a Justice Department request in 2014 for help with its civil fraud case against a real estate firm, Prevezon Holdings Ltd., and its owner, Denis P. Katsyv, a well-connected Russian businessman.

Federal prosecutors say Ms. Veselnitskaya was the driving force on Mr. Katsyv’s defense team, a description she has echoed in court filings. In a declaration to the court, she identified herself as a lawyer in private practice, representing Mr. Katsyv and his firm.

The Justice Department prosecutors charged Mr. Katsyv’s firm in 2013 with using real estate purchases in New York to launder a portion of the profits from a tax scheme in Russia. They were seeking Russian bank, tax and court records, the type of documents that typically form the crux of civil money-laundering cases. The Justice Department asked the Russian government to keep the matter confidential, “except as is necessary to execute this request,” according to court documents. Russia and the United States have a mutual legal assistance treaty governing law-enforcement requests.

The emails indicate that a senior prosecutor on Mr. Chaika’s staff, Sergei A. Bochkaryov, worked closely with Ms. Veselnitskaya to craft the Russian government response. She knew him well enough to address him in friendly terms.

“Dear Sergei Aleksandrovich!” Ms. Veselnitskaya wrote on Aug. 2, 2014, in one of at least 11 emails exchanged. “I am sending you the edits in the draft response, as per instructions. I am ready to answer any questions that arise, at any time convenient for you.”

The language in their final email exchange matches that of the prosecutor general’s official response to the Justice Department.

The judge in the case later wrote that the Russian government had “spurned” the Justice Department’s request for evidence, instead sending a lengthy treatise on why Ms. Veselnitskaya’s client was innocent.

Ms. Veselnitskaya’s involvement in the official communications with the Russian government “raises serious questions about obstruction of justice and false statements,” said Jaimie Nawaday, a former assistant United States attorney in Manhattan who was a prosecutor on the case.

She said Ms. Veselnitskaya’s actions should be referred to the United States attorney’s office for investigation, including whether she misrepresented herself to the court. “It’s completely outrageous,” Ms. Nawaday said.

Asked about the Russian government’s culpability, Andrew Keane Woods, a professor at the University of Kentucky law school who specializes in international law, said, “If there was funny business, then they are not really complying with the terms of the treaty.” But, he added, “there is no clear sanction” for failing to comply.

Moscow’s refusal to provide records to the American prosecutors dealt a severe blow to the case. In the end, the Justice Department agreed to settle it for about $6 million. Prevezon, which did not admit fault, has yet to pay.

Although Ms. Veselnitskaya appears to have influenced how the Russian prosecutor general’s office justified its decision, its refusal to cooperate was not unexpected. The tax fraud was uncovered by Sergei L. Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was imprisoned and died in custody after disclosing the theft. Russian officials contend that the Magnitsky case, which became a cause célèbre in Washington, was a fraud concocted by the West to justify sanctions against Russian citizens.

The release of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s emails by Mr. Khodorkovsky marks a second foray by Russian opposition figures into the controversy over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. In a telephone interview, Mr. Khodorkovsky said someone had deposited the email records anonymously into an electronic drop box maintained by his organization.

This year, Aleksei A. Navalny, a key opposition leader in Russia, also publicized videos that he said hinted at a role for Oleg V. Deripaska, a well-known Russian oligarch, in the Russian government’s efforts to meddle in the American political process. A spokesman for Mr. Deripaska said Mr. Navalny’s accusations were utterly false.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/us/n ... neral.html

PROOF: Trump Knows Agent Who Set Up Russian Meeting With Trump Jr. (UPDATED)

Grant SternJul 10, 2017
Miami based columnist and radio broadcaster, and professional mortgage broker.


Photos from the Las Vegas Trump Hotel where Emin Agalarov (center of both images) met with Donald Trump. Agalarov’s manager Rob Goldstone is highlighted with a red arrow, to his left is Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen.
Donald Trump personally knows the agent and the Russian Oligarchs he represented, who set up a meeting with an unregistered Russian agent, whom the New York Times’ bombshell report uncovered offering a deal for stolen emails during last year’s presidential campaign.

This story’s cover photo proves conclusively that Donald Trump knows Rob Goldstone, the agent to Emin Agalarov who admitted to the Washington Post that he arranged the meeting.

Photos from closing the Miss Universe Moscow deal in 2013 are conclusive.

Donald Trump Jr. denied that his father knew about the secret meeting with a Russian agent offering stolen emails, but changed his story about the meeting from one day to the next.


Rob Goldstone on June 17th, 2013, the day after he met with Donald Trump for dinner to bring Miss Universe to Moscow. Source: Facebook.
Then, Donald Trump Jr. shockingly admitted that it was “clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”

Furthermore, Trump Jr. said that the unregistered Russian agent brought up sanctions that Putin wants to be dropped, which started in 2012 when Congress adopted the Magnitsky Act.

This story is the first major smoking gun that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russia.

It’s also illegal for a campaign to knowingly solicit anything of value from a foreign agent, person or government under the FEC Act.

Based upon photographic evidence related to the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, we only know that Trump and his lawyer knew the Agalarovs.


Photo: Trump meeting with Emin Agalarov and Goldstone (left) Inset: Photo of Rob Goldstone from 2013 Miss USA Pageant where he was a judge.
Democratic Coalition co-founder Scott Dworkin found the photo of that meeting in late May of this year, and it went viral in an earlier story debunking the blanket alibi proffered by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen claiming he had no Kremlin connections.

Rob Goldstone is Emin Agalarov’s manager, whose father is a Russian oligarch who arranged Miss Universe Moscow.

Goldstone even posted a selfie on to Facebook publicly on June 17th, 2013, which visually confirms his personal acquaintance with Donald Trump.

UPDATE: July 11th, 2017 — Rob Goldstone took his Facebook account private for a time today, so screen captures have been added to this story. A cropped version of the cover image in this story was found on Mr. Goldstone’s Facebook account. Goldstone removed a check in from his account and a screenshot is in its place inline with the story. It is firm proof of his personal acquaintance with Donald J. Trump. This is a screenshot of that image:


Notably, Donald Trump Jr. was not present for their Las Vegas meeting to close the deal bringing the pageant to Moscow and he’s absent from official photos of that year’s Miss Universe contest as well.

Rob Goldstone was even a Miss USA 2013** pageant judge, according to the Las Vegas Sun, and he worked as a judge for the Miss Universe 2017 preliminaries earlier this year.

Donald Trump met Rob Goldstein, and his client Emin Agalarov — with whom he appeared in a music video (below) — and his oligarch father, Aras Agalarov in Las Vegas and published still photos of themselves working to close the deal to bring Miss Universe 2013 to Moscow along with the event announcement.

The AP reports that Donald Trump was at Trump Tower on the day of the meeting, Thursday, June 9th, 2016.

Trump was joined by 60 supporters, and then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus, to kick off his campaign’s lagging fund raising in the wake of his racial insults hurled at the federal judge presiding over the Trump University fraud and racketeering trial.

He sent this tweet about Hillary Clinton’s email that day.

The Music Agent Admits Setting A Meeting With Trump Campaign And Russian Agent

Emin Agalarov’s father, Aras, is a Russian oligarch real estate developer nicknamed the Trump of Russia, and he’s a pop “star” and social media personality.

Vladimir Putin gave Aras Agalarov an Order of Honor award right before Miss Universe began in Moscow the next month.

The origin of the photo with Trump, Cohen and Goldstone is detailed here:

A complete, unaltered set of the photos is below.

Donald Trump Jr. made a stunning admission/denial statement about his June 9th, 2016 meeting with the Russian spy which forcefully claimed that he was only interested in compromising material about Hillary Clinton.

Goldstone told the Washington Post that he’d arranged the meeting with a Russian lawyer, and he even published a public check in at the Trump Organization onto Facebook on June 9th, 2016.


Screenshot of Rob Goldstone checking into the Russia collusion meeting at the Trump Organization at 3:32pm, June 9th, 2016.
Even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is pursuing enforcement the criminal complaint against Natalia Veselnitskaya under America’s spying laws, which was made last summer by the ex-American — who surrendered his citizenship to become a British subject — William Browder.

Browder’s Hermitage investment fund was persecuted extralegally in Russia, touching off the Magnistky affair. Sergio Magnitsky was Browder’s lawyer, uncovered a tax fraud, and was thrown into a Russian prison and mistreated until he died.

Sergio Magnitsky was Browder’s lawyer, uncovered fraud, and was thrown into a Russian prison and mistreated until he died. Putin’s government tried Browder in absentia and in a stunning move, they tried his lawyer Sergey Magnitsky posthumously.

Cyprus-based company Prevezon, run by Denis Katsyv was accused of being the beneficiary of the massive tax fraud and buying up luxury US real estate in Manhattan, linked to Magnitsky’s death and identity theft against his client Hermitage.

The scam caused Russia’s government to disgorge a $230 million dollar tax refund to Hermitage entities that were delivered instead to Prevezon’s owners.

They blamed the fraud on Browder.

This kind of exotic multi-national real estate and money laundering fraud is actually commonplace in the brutal billionaire brawls common to Russian oligarchs, like this murderous dispute over who owned Fischer Island, a refuge island for the ultra-wealthy located off of Miami Beach — basically reserved for the global top 0.01% of earners — and home to America’s highest per capita income.

Fischer Island was once the wealthiest city in the entire world.

RAILROADED: Prevezon Laundered Its Ill Gotten Gains Into New York Luxury Real Estate

It turns out that the Prevezon story is actually closely linked to Russian Railways, a group of whose executives were deeply involved in railroading Browder and stashing the loot.

So is Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

She’s literally in bed with the public employee railway barons of Russia.

Natalia Veselnitskaya is married to a former-Russian Deputy Transportation Minister in charge of the Moscow region.

A search of New York public records about her client Denis Katsyv — who controls the Prevezon holding companies — yielded numerous, profitable real estate deals. (see results below)

Katsyv’s father Pyotr is the Vice President of Russian Railways, who made his son wealthy and destroyed whistleblowers in his path.

Pyotr Katstv even called the met with the FBI in Rome tried to become an informant, so long as his son got to keep the money. Trump’s former business partner Felix Sater — illegally according to Law360 — obtained a similar deal to keep ill gotten gains in exchange for testimony and cooperation in a secret prosecution. (full article)

The US Attorney’s office nixed the deal when informed of the FBI meeting.

Veselnitskaya was denied a regular entry visa, but gained entry to the US on parole — which is a one time, non-visa entry for humanitarian reasons— solely to defend the criminal case against Denis Katsyv of US vs. Prevezon, which was recently settled in New York’s Southern District after the office spent years pushing to try the case.

Fake NGO Run As An Illegal Lobbying Shop

By February 2016, Veselnitskaya had setup a Delaware non-profit called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGI) and lobbied Congress in person last May against the “Global Magnitsky Act” in the House, after it had already passed the Senate.

It’s illegal to lobby Congress without registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.

But HRAGI did not register.

Its bare bones website says this:

Officially, the Russian law was passed following outrage over the 2008 death of Chase Harrison (original Russian name Dima Yakovlev) — a toddler adopted by a Virginia family, left to die in a car on a sweltering summer day. Unofficially, Russia passed the law in retaliation for the 2012, passage of the US “Magnitsky Act” by the U.S. Congress, which imposed sanctions on Russia and on individuals blamed for the death of the Russian citizen, Sergei Magnitsky.
HRAGI is dedicated to overturning the Russian adoption ban.
Which is revised from last year when TDB said this was on the website:

HRAGIF claims to be “working on analyzing legal and legislative options to help overturn this adoption ban,” according to its site. “We would like to present our findings to the members of U.S. Congress, Administration and U.S. public and is planning to brief them on possible ways of resolution of this stalemate on adoptions.”
That Global Magnitsky Act would enshrined the name of 2012 sanctions against Russia, into a new, global anti-corruption bill.

Rep. Rohrabacher’s aides also told The Daily Beast last May that his office had received documents about the legislation from the Russian government when he led a Congressional Delegation (CODEL) to Russia at the end of April 2016.

Putin’s Favorite House Republican Gets Taken For A Ride In Russia


Sanctioned Russian Railways boss Vladimir Yakunin with Vladimir Putin via Getty Images (CNBC).
While in Russia on the CODEL, Rohrabacher met with the former state-owned Russian Railways boss Vladimir Yakunin, who happened to be previous boss Pyotr Katsyv’s boss, who is the man whose son Veselnitskaya was defending from prosecution in New York City.

According to Politico’s reporting after the election, the Republican legislator confirmed his meeting with the sanctioned Russian rail baron and the story of the mysterious documents:

Last April, Rohrabacher traveled to Moscow on an official congressional trip with four other members of Congress and two staffers. Rohrabacher and his senior aide, Paul Behrends, met privately with Vladimir Yakunin, a Putin confidant whom the Treasury Department blacklisted in 2014 to punish Russia for invading Ukraine, according to an itinerary reviewed by POLITICO and confirmed by Rohrabacher.
There was nothing illegal about talking to Yakunin, but the rest of the delegation steered clear. At this meeting, one of the topics Yakunin, Rohrabacher and Behrends discussed, according to Rohrabacher, was the Magnitsky affair.
Later that day, Rohrabacher rejoined the rest of the delegation to meet with Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the International Affairs Committee in the Federation Council (Russia’s counterpart to the Senate). At that meeting, Kosachev urged Rohrabacher to consult with Russian prosecutors about the Magnitsky affair. Rohrabacher did and received a document questioning Magnitsky’s story, Rohrabacher told POLITICO.
“[Kosachev was] the one who asked, would I accept information from the prosecutors and look at what they had to say on this particular case,” he said.
The document, which is marked “Confidential” and was obtained by POLITICO, blamed Magnitsky and his employer, an American-born investor named Bill Browder, for orchestrating the tax fraud. The letter proposed that if more members of Congress followed Rohrabacher’s lead in questioning the Magnitsky story, Russia would reconsider its ban on American adoptions, which Putin imposed in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act in 2012.
Vladimir Yakunin served as a UN Diplomat for the USSR in the 1980s, prompting rumors of having KGB training, and resigned under pressure from his government job running the rails in 2015, after his son was exposed for profiteering on the father’s position, and Andrei Yakunin — the son — applied for British citizenship.

Canadian media noted that their government refused to sanction him because of the relationship he built with train manufacturer Bombardier to supply his railway, serving 1 billion annual trips. Yakunin created a company named Multiserv Overseas Ltd. in Britain that acted as a middleman in the Bombardier deals.

Years earlier, Congressman Rohrabacher was warned by the FBI that Russian agents of influence were recruiting him, but apparently, none of this tipped off the Republican legislator that this activity or his particpation may have been illegitimate.

Natalia Veselnitskaya’s lobbying apparently ‘succeeded’ in convincing Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) — best known as Putin’s favorite Congressman — to offer an amendment to drop the name in a House Foreign Relations Committee meeting on May 18th, 2016 (see video below).

It’s illegal to represent a foreign power in a policy matter without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a federal law mainly used to catch spies.

Natalia Veselnitskaya did not register under FARA.

Ultimately, House Foreign Relations Committee rejected Rohrabacher’s amendment and his extensive arguments, approving the anti-corruption bill over his objections.

As an unregistered agent of the Russian state, Veselnitskaya could have carried out any number of other covert activities during her time in New York and DC.

Veselnitskaya later returned to Washington, D.C. just four days after her June 9th, 2016 meeting with the Trump Campaign.

First, she attended an anti-Magnitsky propaganda film screening at Washington’s Newseum, which had been canceled in a major political flap when EU Parliament members had scheduled a screening in Brussels only six weeks earlier.

The following day, Veselniskaya attended a House Foreign Relations Committee meeting entitled “U.S. Policy Towards Putin’s Russia” (transcript) and was featured that week in a Sputnik News story about the Congressional hearing and the film.

Two days after the House Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Vladimir Yakunin publicly announced his support for Donald Trump’s campaign for President. The Russian billionaire told CNBC:

“It was always Republicans when, in the old days, some of kind of bridges were constructed. If Mr Trump is coming into power, that will be more facilitative to faster establishing new kinds of relations.”
The Global Magnitsky Act was later added to a major defense bill and passed last December.

Last month, Vladimir Yakunin gave a lengthy interview to BBC claiming to be solely a strongly pro-Putin private citizen, and around the 8 minute mark, he reversed course on his CNBC endorsement of Trump.

Meanwhile, the Agalarovs have been crowing very publicly about their access to the President of the United States.

Conclusion

Donald Trump Jr.’s incriminating public statements about the campaign’s meeting with Russian agents present an apparent violation of election laws and pretty clear evidence that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russian agents of influence.

It’s not clear who translated for Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at her Trump Campaign meeting, because none of the participants Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. speak Russian and she told a Federal court that she does not even speak English, according a sworn statement to the court.

What is clear is that the new head of the Trump Organization looks like he will be facing fresh scrutiny by Special Prosecutor Mueller’s probe this week as the President’s painful attempts to normalize Russian interference in America’s elections just failed miserably.

And that his father definitely has a relationship with the middle man who brokered the deal, which should lead the media to ask firmly what the President knew about this meeting and when he knew it.

Donald Trump already admitted on national television that he fired the FBI Director to try and disturb the investigation into his campaign’s Russian ties.

Even worse, these disclosures link the Trump Campaign directly to an ongoing prosecution by a US Attorney who was unexpectedly fired right before a case directly impacting the Russian government was set to go to trial.

Even Russia’s Attorney General admitted that “the judgment undoubtedly would have precedential value in many countries.”

The Prevezon case was instead settled unexpectedly, shortly thereafter, in a major victory for the Russian state.

Now judgement day will have to wait for those fighting public corruption abroad.

But for those seeking to prove that America’s president and his family are not above the law, judgement day seems to be drawing ever closer.


Original photos of June 17th, 2013 meeting in Las Vegas between Trump Organization and Agalarovs


Original photo of Donald Trump meeting with Emin Agalarov, Goldstone, Michael D. Cohen and others.









U.S. vs. Prevezon real estate transactions and charts by prosecution:


Prevezon real estate transactions.


Left: Prosecutors show the money trail from Russia’s treasury to Prevezon’s Swiss bank account. Right: Prevezon entities named in the criminal case.

House Foreign Relations Committee meeting about Global Magnitsky Act on 5/18/2016, begins at minute 59.

Emin Agalarov’s music video with Donald Trump. Ironically, the music video mirrors his real life meeting with Trump in Las Vegas.
**Rob Goldstone’s 2013 Miss America page has been wiped out, but publicists used his 2013 photo in this year’s Miss Universe promotional according to a Google Images search.
https://thesternfacts.com/proof-trump-k ... 68fd2621b8

Grassley says he wants to release transcripts tied to 2016 Trump Tower meeting

ELANA SCHOR04/26/2018 06:09 PM EDT

Chuck Grassley is pictured. | AP Photo
A Republican Judiciary panel aide said Sen. Chuck Grassley's "staff has completed its work to redact personally identifiable information, law enforcement sensitive material and third party personal information irrelevant to our inquiry." | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said this week that he is eager to release transcripts of interviews with Donald Trump Jr. and other participants in a 2016 Trump Tower meeting that included a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer.

Grassley first announced plans to release the transcripts in January, one day after two committee Democrats urged him to share them with special counsel Robert Mueller. Three months later, Grassley told POLITICO that the transcripts "ought to be getting out" following some redactions, describing it as the next step in the committee's Russia oversight work.

"I don’t understand the process of redaction, I’m not an authority in that, and I think you have to have people who are an authority in it," Grassley said in a Tuesday interview. "But we ought to get the redactions done and get them out."

Aside from Trump Jr., the committee anticipates releasing written responses from Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who attended the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower alongside the president's eldest son, son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

A Republican Judiciary panel aide said Grassley's "staff has completed its work to redact personally identifiable information, law enforcement sensitive material and third party personal information irrelevant to our inquiry."

The aide added that Grassley has asked the committee's top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, "to submit any redactions she’d like to propose; however, we have not yet received any."

Asked Thursday about the status of the transcripts, Feinstein said that "I haven't heard" about an update. A Democratic aide said staff members continue to work on the matter.

Other attendees of the Trump Tower meeting who sat for closed-door interviews, transcripts of which the Judiciary Committee aims to release, are Russian real estate executive Ike Kaveladze, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, music promoter Rob Goldstone and translator Anatoli Samochorno. Kushner and Manafort did not participate in interviews with the committee.

Grassley warned in January that the release of a different politically volatile transcript — of the committee's interview with the co-founder of the firm that commissioned a now-famous dossier on President Donald Trump's Russian connections — might imperil the panel's prospects of getting voluntary compliance from Kushner.

Democrats, however, have long pressed for public hearings to compel testimony from Kushner and further testimony from Trump Jr., both of whom they described as failing to comply with document requests.https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/ ... 53?cid=apn

The Hill's Morning Report: As Trump talks, his lawyers sweat
http://thehill.com/homenews/morning-rep ... e-chaplain

House intel panel releases final report on Russia probe
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 841beafe2f

Crazed Right-Wing Sites Pushing Nunes #ReleaseTheMemo

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... 27#p649836

Caroline O.

This is an actual excerpt from the House Intelligence Committee's final report.

So.. I thought the Trump transition team denied reports that they tried to establish a backchannel? Yet, House intel cmte is citing those efforts to refute the idea of collusion during the campaign.



The House Intelligence Committee's Majority Report acknowledges that Trump campaign associates repeatedly met with Russian officials, and even admits that they tried to obtain dirt on Hillary — but apparently, it's all good because they were incompetent?


Also, efforts to establish a backchannel during the transition period don't preclude 'collusion' during the campaign. It's not at all unlikely that these efforts reflect greater awareness on the part of Trump & co that their comms w/ Russian officials were under scrutiny.

Christopher Wylie
‏
The Republicans boycotted my testimony. If they cared about their democracy, they would show up. I flew across the Atlantic bc this matters. They should learn from UK cross-party inquiry led by a Conservative MP! @DamianCollins asks tough questions and works across party lines.

empty wheel
‏
Here are the links to the HPSCI RU report, which I'll live-tweet.

https://intelligence.house.gov/uploaded ... dacted.pdf …

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00 ... -115-1.pdf …

Redacting names in alpha order will make it fairly easy to reverse engineer some of them.



Such as Emin and Aras Agalarov here. We just don't get to see how HPSCI described them.



Legal processes, how do they work?

Signed, a bunch of lawyers.



"Not readily accessible": We chose not to ask those questions.



In which Republicans who created a hoax fraud task force condemn those who question democratic processes.



3 of the 4 or 5 people first investigated have been charged but we're going to keep THOSE 3 names redacted bc...



Side note: This isn't so much a report as a Borgesian game of hiding the most important footnotes.

It's easier to make a totally unsupportable claim about the June 9 meeting if you don't use any verbs in that sentence.



If the HPSCI report cites the IRA indictment at all, it is redacted.



These low quality images add to the 3rd grade book report aesthetic of the HPSCI report.



For some reason the RU attack on Merkel has to be redacted but the one on Macron doesn't have to be, perhaps bc of the contractor attribution that France has since refuted.



These two bullets are probably discoverable. One may be the statement that Wikileaks is a hostile non-state actor.



As a redaction aficionado, the treatment of this page intrigues me. Why the two different approaches to these columns? Visuals on the right?



Unclassified: Attribution is a bear.



A report released by Devin Nunes says no credible evidence supports the "alternative actor" theories.



Y'all, it's secret that Crowdstrike first attributed the DNC hack.



The references to these footnotes are redacted. But at least @JasonLeopold will know what to FOIA.




There are a number of places where the treatment of Guccifer 2.0 is insufficiently critical and reliant on dated analysis. But this one is particularly weak, given the analysis of the files in question and the dismissal, elsewhere, of counter explanations.


HPSCI relies on a problematic NYT article to support claim that Wikileaks benefits RU. The case can be made, but HPSCI should in no way rely on that article.



In recent years Wikileaks has also released versions of declassified Kissinger files and FOIAed Hillary emails. Plus, Wikileaks released Syria files the US had a hand in stealing.



Another place where the report doesn't mention the IRA indictment.




No mention of how Trump's spawn and aides magnified @TEN_GOP.



There are methodological problems w/HPSCI's treatment of RU use of social media that others will cover in more depth. In short, they don't consider the non-paid use of SM (except by RT) at length, especially WRT relative impact.

A version of this is redacted in the summary.



Note HPSCI doesn't distinguish between hack attempt and hack victim.



PDF 52/p 42 has a description of what DHS did that is a more detailed a nuanced version of efforts to warn states than has been publicly reported.

This is a Susan Rice quote. "Awaiting 'with urgency'" is a curious construction; I wonder if it was quoted faithfully.




Because it's highly classified, HPSCI can't describe the Red Phone call from Obama to Putin.



Somehow, from this sentence, the footnotes get to first substantive (mostly redacted) discussion of Steele dossier.




While HPSCI complains abt tradecraft behind Putin favoring Trump, they don't dispute that Putin personally ordered the op.



Here's the description of why HPSCI believes ICA didn't use proper tradecraft to vet the Putin favoring Trump part--perhaps some highly compartmented counterevidence undermined the overall claim.



The redaction of Corey Lewandowski in the list of people at beginning is interesting since report redacts his name in body of report.




In this paragraph, HPSCI elides how the false statements WERE important to election timeframe, as they hid Manafort's motivations. In following one, they go even further to hide how Gates' ConFraudUs hid key details.



HPSCI goes to some (unsuccessful but legitimate) lengths to hide that CI investigation into Flynn started before he became NSA. But this redacted paragraph and transition make it clear his RT meeting was part of that.



Hmm. Why didn't HPSCI ask Jared about this personally?



https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/9 ... 6517328896

Court Docs: Affidavit from Russian lawyer/spy Natalia Veselnitskaya-who met with Don Jr, Manafort & Kushner-proves she was a lawyer for Kremlin front company that laundered money in US via real estate. Chart below shows how the money was laundered and what companies they used.




https://twitter.com/georgezab

Did Trump Jr. Talk to His Dad About the Trump Tower Meeting?

Republicans don’t want to know.

Dan FriedmanApr. 27, 2018 4:26 PM

Donald Trump Jr. at the White House on April 2, 2018.Chip Somodevilla/CNP via Zuma Wire
.

Did Donald Trump Jr. speak to his father in June 2016 about a Russian offer to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton? Republicans on the House intelligence committee haven’t even bothered to find out, their Democratic counterparts say.

Committee Republicans on Friday released a 253-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which says they “found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian government.” But Republicans did not try very hard to find such evidence. Democrats on the panel noted that the GOP did not contact many potential witnesses, subpoena sufficient records to check if witness testimony was accurate, or follow up on leads obtained during the probe.

“The Majority was unwilling to pursue the matter.”
One particularly notable example of the committee’s less-than-zealous approach to the investigation is its analysis of the infamous June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting at which Trump Jr. and other top Trump aides met with a Russian lawyer in an effort to acquire damaging information about Hillary Clinton from the Kremlin.

It’s unclear what candidate Trump knew about the meeting, but any involvement by him would certainly be a big deal—new evidence that he was aware of Russian efforts to connect with his campaign. Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign chief, has said he believes the elder Trump likely knew of the meeting.

The Republican report says that “no witness, including the attendees, testified that candidate Trump was aware of the meeting prior to its public exposure in June 2017.” But a dissenting report released Friday by committee Democrats suggests Republicans did not vigorously pursue the question of what President Trump knew about the meeting.

The meeting was organized on behalf of Aras Agalarov, a construction magnate based in Russia, and his son Emin, a singer. The Agalarovs had partnered with the Trump Organization on the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow. Rob Goldstone, a publicist for Emin Agalarov, emailed Trump Jr. to seek the meeting. In a June 3, 2016, email, Goldstone said that a senior Russian official, as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” had “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

Less than 20 minutes late, Trump Jr. responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

According to the Democrats’ report, Trump Jr. exchanged calls about the meeting with Emin Agalarov on June 6 at Goldstone’s request. The first call was at 4:04 pm. At 4:27 pm, prior to Trump Jr.’s second call with Emin, Trump Jr. received a call from a “blocked” number. Trump Jr. told the committee last year he did not know who had called him. The Democrats note, however, that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager, told the committee that Trump Sr.’s “primary residence has a blocked [phone] line.”

Democrats say they made “repeated efforts to obtain the home or cell phone records for then-candidate Trump to determine whether the blocked call was Trump Jr.’s father.” But, they note, “the Majority was unwilling to pursue the matter.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... r-meeting/

Trump Jr. And Emin Agalarov Stayed In Touch Throughout The Transition

From phone calls and text messages to “an expensive painting” that Aras Agalarov gave Donald Trump for his birthday in 2016, the two families were in regular communication before and after the Trump Tower meeting — and during the transition.

Chris Geidner
April 27, 2018, at 10:09 p.m.
Emin Agalarov, Donald Trump, and Aras Agalarov attend the red carpet at Miss Universe Pageant Competition 2013 on November 9, 2013 in Moscow, Russia.
Victor Boyko / Getty Images


A direct line of communication between the Kremlin-connected Agalarov family and the Trump family was open during the transition after President Donald Trump’s presidential election, BuzzFeed News has learned.

The “first of a series” of text messages was sent between Emin Agalarov and Donald Trump Jr. two days after the 2016 election, a source familiar with the communications told BuzzFeed News.

The communications continued through at least mid-December 2016, according to information made public Friday.

It is not clear how many messages were sent, whether Trump Jr. sent any of them, or how many were sent by either party — although BuzzFeed News confirmed that multiple messages were sent.

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee revealed one of the text messages, from Dec. 13, 2016, in their “minority views” report on Friday — one of several new pieces of information that suggest that the Trumps’ relationship with the Agalarovs was much closer than the president and his family have said.

The Agalarovs and Trumps have a relationship dating back to 2013, when Trump and the Agalarovs — father Aras (who has ties to Putin and whom Putin presented with the Order of Honor in 2013) and son Emin — hosted the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

When news of the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting broke in the summer of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. initially said that he “was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance” — later clarifying that it was “an acquaintance [he] knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.”

In the days that followed, Trump Jr.’s lawyer — Alan Futerfas, who currently represents the Trump Organization in the litigation over materials seized in the search of Michael Cohen’s properties — acknowledged that the meeting was set up by Rob Goldstone, Emin’s music manager and the person who connected the Agalarovs with the Miss Universe pageant back in 2013.

The emails released by Trump Jr. later that week made clear that Goldstone suggested the meeting at the request of Emin and following a conversation that Aras had earlier that day with what Goldstone described as “the Crown prosecutor of Russia.”

Despite that introduction and Trump Jr.’s infamous “if it’s what you say I love it” response, the Trumps have sought to downplay the significance of the relationship since.

But as even House Republicans concede in the House Intelligence Committee report released Friday, “the Agalarovs were the driving force to arrange” the Trump Tower meeting.

In their response to the Republican report, the Democrats on Friday provided more detail about the relationship between the Trumps and the Agalarovs.

The report confirms an email exchange Trump Jr. released in July 2017 in which Trump Jr. and Goldstone were trying to set up a phone call between Trump Jr. and Emin on June 6, 2016. BuzzFeed News sought more information this past summer about whether any such calls took place, but no one would say — until Friday, when the Democrats detailed two calls from a number that Trump Jr. told the committee was Emin’s. A call came from “a ‘blocked’ number … between the two calls.”

“The first call occurred at 4:04 pm on June 6, 2916 [sic] – just 21 minutes after Goldstone emailed Trump Jr. to say that Emin Agalarov was ‘on stage in Moscow but should be off within 20 minutes so I am sure can call,’” the report states. The blocked call came at 4:27 pm.

By 4:38 p.m., Trump Jr. sent Goldstone a follow-up email: “Rob thanks for the help. D”

Three days later, Trump Jr. — along with Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner — would host the Trump Tower meeting.

In addition to Goldstone, the attendees would include the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who Trump Jr. has said he knew would be attending but claims not to have known her name; Ike Kaveladze, a longtime employee of the Agalarov business; Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist with ties to Russian intelligence; and Anatoli Samochornov, a Russian-American translator who served as Veselnitskaya’s translator but has worked for the US State Department at other times.

Although expecting damaging information about Hillary Clinton, both the Republicans and Democrats' reports say the discussion quickly turned to the Magnitsky Act — a set of sanctions against Russians and Russian businesses that are strongly opposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin — and Putin’s response to the law: banning adoptions of Russian children by Americans.



After the short meeting, according to the Democrats’ report, the group — excluding Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner — went to the bar in Trump Tower. While there, Kaveladze took a call from Aras Agalarov.

The next day, Aras had “an expensive painting” delivered to Trump. The Democrats’ report cites an email — subject line, “Birthday gift for Mr. Trump” — from Goldstone to Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime assistant.

A week later, the Democrats’ report states, Trump sent Aras a thank-you note.

“There are few things better than receiving a sensational gift from someone you admire – and that’s what I’ve received from you,” Trump wrote to Aras. “You made my birthday a truly special event by your thoughtfulness – not to mention your remarkable talent. I’m rarely at a loss for words, but right now I can only say how much I appreciate your friendship and to thank you for this fantastic gift. This is one birthday that I will always remember.”

Contacts between the Trumps and the Agalarovs continued after the election as well. While it has been known that the Agalarovs posted supportive messages on social media surrounding Trump’s election and inauguration, it had not before Friday been known that they were directly communicating during that time as well.

In the Democrats’ report, it notes one message sent by Emin to Trump Jr. on Dec. 13, 2016, posing a “quick question” for Trump Jr. According to the footnotes in the report, the text message was found among documents turned over to the committee by Trump Jr. labeled, “Text Messages from Emin Agalarov to Donald Trump Jr., November 10, 2016.”

A source familiar with the messages told BuzzFeed News that the Nov. 10, 2016, date represents “the date of the first of a series” of messages between Trump Jr. and Emin. Based on the description in the Democrats’ report, the text messages — at least those between Nov. 10 and Dec. 13, 2016 — fit on one page.

Emin’s texts were not the only Agalarov communications to Trump associates that took place during the transition.

Goldstone, who had sent the email about Aras Agalarov’s present for Trump to Graff in June, sent another email to Graff on Nov. 28, 2016.

“Aras Agalarov has asked me to pass on this document in the hope it can be passed on to the appropriate team.” The attachment related to the Magnitsky Act.

In Trump Jr.’s second statement after the news of the Trump Tower meeting came out in July 2017, he referenced the Magnitsky Act by name, and said of the brief meeting, “That was the end of it and there was no further contact or follow-up of any kind. My father knew nothing of the meeting or these events.”

Friday’s report from the Democrats makes clear there was follow-up — and precisely the follow-up Trump Jr. had told them to make at the meeting. In that second statement, Trump Jr. wrote that he had interrupted Veselnitskaya when she was talking about the sanctions law and told her “that her comments and concerns were better addressed if and when he held public office.”

Graff forwarded Golstone’s Nov. 28, 2016, email to Steve Bannon, then one of Trump’s closest advisers, that same day.

She added a short note to the top: “The PE [President Elect] knows Aras well. Rob is his rep in the US and sent this on. Not sure how to proceed, if at all. R.”
https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/t ... lkobkXEqB0

Mueller's former assistant says grammatical errors prove leaked questions came from Trump
BY BROOKE SEIPEL - 05/01/18 07:55 AM EDT
http://thehill.com/homenews/news/385602 ... tions-came

Mueller Has Dozens of Inquiries for Trump in Broad Quest on Russia Ties and Obstruction
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTAPRIL 30, 2018


Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, has dozens of questions for President Trump and is said to be trying to determine whether the president had criminal intent when he fired James B. Comey. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s election interference, has at least four dozen questions on an exhaustive array of subjects he wants to ask President Trump to learn more about his ties to Russia and determine whether he obstructed the inquiry itself, according to a list of the questions obtained by The New York Times.

[Read the questions here.]

The open-ended queries appear to be an attempt to penetrate the president’s thinking, to get at the motivation behind some of his most combative Twitter posts and to examine his relationships with his family and his closest advisers. They deal chiefly with the president’s high-profile firings of the F.B.I. director and his first national security adviser, his treatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

But they also touch on the president’s businesses; any discussions with his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, about a Moscow real estate deal; whether the president knew of any attempt by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to set up a back channel to Russia during the transition; any contacts he had with Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser who claimed to have inside information about Democratic email hackings; and what happened during Mr. Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant.

The questions provide the most detailed look yet inside Mr. Mueller’s investigation, which has been shrouded in secrecy since he was appointed nearly a year ago. The majority relate to possible obstruction of justice, demonstrating how an investigation into Russia’s election meddling grew to include an examination of the president’s conduct in office. Among them are queries on any discussions Mr. Trump had about his attempts to fire Mr. Mueller himself and what the president knew about possible pardon offers to Mr. Flynn.

“What efforts were made to reach out to Mr. Flynn about seeking immunity or possible pardon?” Mr. Mueller planned to ask, according to questions read by the special counsel investigators to the president’s lawyers, who compiled them into a list. That document was provided to The Times by a person outside Mr. Trump’s legal team.

A few questions reveal that Mr. Mueller is still investigating possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. In one of the more tantalizing inquiries, Mr. Mueller asks what Mr. Trump knew about campaign aides, including the former chairman Paul Manafort, seeking assistance from Moscow: “What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?” No such outreach has been revealed publicly.

Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, declined to comment. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The questions serve as a reminder of the chaotic first 15 months of the Trump presidency and the transition and campaign before that. Mr. Mueller wanted to inquire about public threats the president made, conflicting statements from Mr. Trump and White House aides, the president’s private admissions to Russian officials, a secret meetings at an island resort, WikiLeaks, salacious accusations and dramatic congressional testimony.

The special counsel also sought information from the president about his relationship with Russia. Mr. Mueller would like to ask Mr. Trump whether he had any discussions during the campaign about any meetings with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and whether he spoke to others about either American sanctions against Russia or meeting with Mr. Putin.

Through his questions, Mr. Mueller also tries to tease out Mr. Trump’s views on law enforcement officials and whether he sees them as independent investigators or people who should loyally protect him.

For example, when the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was fired, the White House said he broke with Justice Department policy and spoke publicly about the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email server. Mr. Mueller’s questions put that statement to the test. He wants to ask why, time and again, Mr. Trump expressed no concerns with whether Mr. Comey had abided by policy. Rather, in statements in private and on national television, Mr. Trump suggested that Mr. Comey was fired because of the Russia investigation.

Many of the questions surround Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Sessions, including the attorney general’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation and whether Mr. Trump told Mr. Sessions he needed him in place for protection.

Mr. Mueller appears to be investigating how Mr. Trump took steps last year to fire Mr. Mueller himself. The president relented after the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, threatened to resign, an episode that the special counsel wants to ask about.

“What consideration and discussions did you have regarding terminating the special counsel in June of 2017?” Mr. Mueller planned to ask, according to the list of questions. “What did you think and do in reaction to Jan. 25, 2018, story about the termination of the special counsel and Don McGahn backing you off the termination?” he planned to ask, referring to the Times article that broke the news of the confrontation.

Mr. Mueller has sought for months to question the president, who has in turn expressed a desire, at times, to be interviewed, viewing it as an avenue to end the inquiry more quickly. His lawyers have been negotiating terms of an interview out of concern that their client — whose exaggerations, half-truths and outright falsehoods are well documented — could provide false statements or easily become distracted. Four people, including Mr. Flynn, have pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in the Russia inquiry.

The list of questions grew out of those negotiations. In January, Mr. Trump’s lawyers gave Mr. Mueller several pages of written explanations about the president’s role in the matters the special counsel is investigating. Concerned about putting the president in legal jeopardy, his lead lawyer, John Dowd, was trying to convince Mr. Mueller he did not need to interview Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Mueller was apparently unsatisfied. He told Mr. Dowd in early March that he needed to question the president directly to determine whether he had criminal intent when he fired Mr. Comey, the people said.

But Mr. Dowd held firm, and investigators for Mr. Mueller agreed days later to share during a meeting with Mr. Dowd the questions they wanted to ask Mr. Trump.

When Mr. Mueller’s team relayed the questions, their tone and detailed nature cemented Mr. Dowd’s view that the president should not sit for an interview. Despite Mr. Dowd’s misgivings, Mr. Trump remained firm in his insistence that he meet with Mr. Mueller. About a week and a half after receiving the questions, Mr. Dowd resigned, concluding that his client was ignoring his advice.

Mr. Trump’s new lawyer in the investigation and his longtime confidant, Rudolph W. Giuliani, met with Mr. Mueller last week and said he was trying to determine whether the special counsel and his staff were going to be “truly objective.”

Mr. Mueller’s endgame remains a mystery, even if he determines the president broke the law. A longstanding Justice Department legal finding says presidents cannot be charged with a crime while they are in office. The special counsel told Mr. Dowd in March that though the president’s conduct is under scrutiny, he is not a target of the investigation, meaning Mr. Mueller does not expect to charge him.

The prospect of pardons is also among Mr. Mueller’s inquiries, and whether Mr. Trump offered them to a pair of former top aides to influence their decisions about whether to cooperate with the special counsel investigation.

Mr. Dowd broached the idea with lawyers for both of the advisers, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Manafort, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Manafort has pleaded not guilty on charges of money laundering and other financial crimes related to his work for the pro-Russia former president of Ukraine.

Mr. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who was ousted from the White House in February 2017 amid revelations about contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States, ultimately pleaded guilty last December to lying to federal authorities and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel.

“After General Flynn resigned, what calls or efforts were made by people associated with you to reach out to General Flynn or to discuss Flynn seeking immunity or possible pardon?” Mr. Mueller planned to ask.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/us/p ... trump.html

What Mueller Wants to Ask Trump About Obstruction, and What It Means

The questions show the special counsel’s focus on obstruction of justice and touch on some surprising other areas.

April 30, 2018

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, recently provided President Trump’s lawyers a list of questions he wants answered in an interview. The New York Times obtained the list; here are the questions, along with the context and significance of each. The questions fall into categories based on four broad subjects. They are not quoted verbatim, and some were condensed.

Questions related to Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser

• What did you know about phone calls that Mr. Flynn made with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, in late December 2016?

These questions revolve around whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice to protect Mr. Flynn from prosecution. His phone calls with Mr. Kislyak are at the heart of that inquiry.

During the calls, Mr. Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to sanctions just announced by the Obama administration. But Mr. Trump’s aides publicly denied that sanctions were discussed and, when questioned by the F.B.I., Mr. Flynn denied it, as well. Mr. Mueller wants to know whether Mr. Flynn was operating on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Prosecutors may already know the answer: Mr. Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying and is cooperating with investigators.

• What was your reaction to news reports on Jan. 12, 2017, and Feb. 8-9, 2017?

In January, the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius revealed Mr. Flynn’s phone calls with Mr. Kislyak. Mr. Ignatius questioned whether those conversations had violated law prohibiting private citizens from attempting to undermine American policies. In February, The Washington Post revealed the true nature of Mr. Flynn’s conversations with Mr. Kislyak.

Mr. Mueller wants to know, among other things, whether Mr. Trump feared that his national security adviser had broken the law and then tried to shield him from consequences.

• What did you know about Sally Yates’s meetings about Mr. Flynn?

Ms. Yates, the acting attorney general for the first weeks of the Trump administration, twice warned the White House that Mr. Flynn was lying, and those lies made him vulnerable to Russian blackmail. No one from the White House has ever said how much Mr. Trump knew about those warnings.

• How was the decision made to fire Mr. Flynn on Feb. 13, 2017?

Eighteen days after Ms. Yates’s warning, Mr. Flynn was asked to resign. The White House said that Mr. Trump lost confidence in Mr. Flynn because he had lied. But the White House has never fully explained why, after learning about the lie, officials waited so long to act.

• After the resignations, what efforts were made to reach out to Mr. Flynn about seeking immunity or possible pardon?

The Times recently revealed that, when Mr. Flynn began considering cooperating with the F.B.I., Mr. Trump’s lawyers floated the idea of a pardon. Mr. Mueller wants to know why.

Questions related to James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director


• What was your opinion of Mr. Comey during the transition?

The questions about Mr. Comey relate to whether Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey last year to shield Mr. Flynn, or anyone else, from prosecution. Mr. Trump has denied that, saying he fired Mr. Comey because of his mishandling of the F.B.I.’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

This question is important because, if Mr. Trump truly was upset about the Clinton investigation, he would have shown an early distaste for Mr. Comey.

• What did you think about Mr. Comey’s intelligence briefing on Jan. 6, 2017, about Russian election interference?

The briefing revealed that American intelligence agencies had concluded that Russian operatives meddled in the election to hurt Mrs. Clinton and to boost Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on these conclusions and said he believes the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, who denies any interference.

• What was your reaction to Mr. Comey’s briefing that day about other intelligence matters?

This question addresses documents written by a retired British spy, Christopher Steele, who said that Russia had gathered compromising information on Mr. Trump. The documents, which became known as the Steele Dossier, also claim that the Trump campaign had ties to the Russian government. Mr. Comey privately briefed Mr. Trump about these documents.

• What was the purpose of your Jan. 27, 2017, dinner with Mr. Comey, and what was said?

A few weeks after his briefing, Mr. Comey was called to the White House for a private dinner. Mr. Comey’s notes say that Mr. Trump raised concerns about the Steele Dossier and said he needed loyalty from his F.B.I. director. This question touches on Mr. Trump’s true motivation for firing Mr. Comey: Was he dismissed because he was not loyal and would not shut down an F.B.I. investigation?

• What was the purpose of your Feb. 14, 2017, meeting with Mr. Comey, and what was said?

That was a key moment. Mr. Comey testified that the president told him, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Mr. Trump has denied this.

• What did you know about the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Flynn and Russia in the days leading up to Mr. Comey’s testimony on March 20, 2017?

Mr. Comey’s testimony publicly confirmed that the F.B.I. was investigating members of the Trump campaign for possible coordination with Russia. Mr. Mueller wants to know what role that revelation played in Mr. Comey’s firing.

• What did you do in reaction to the March 20 testimony? Describe your contacts with intelligence officials.

In the aftermath, The Post reported, Mr. Trump asked the United States’ top intelligence official, Daniel Coats, to pressure Mr. Comey to back off his investigation. Mr. Mueller wants to ask Mr. Trump about his contacts with Mr. Coats as well as the C.I.A.’s director at the time, Mike Pompeo, and the National Security Agency’s director, Michael S. Rogers. The conversations could reflect Mr. Trump’s growing frustration with Mr. Comey — not about the Clinton case, but about his refusal to shut down the Russia inquiry.

• What did you think and do in reaction to the news that the special counsel was speaking to Mr. Rogers, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Coats?

It is not clear whether Mr. Mueller knows something specific about Mr. Trump’s reaction to these interviews, but the question shows that Mr. Mueller is keenly interested in how Mr. Trump responded to each step of his investigation.

• What was the purpose of your calls to Mr. Comey on March 30 and April 11, 2017?

Mr. Comey said that Mr. Trump called twice to ask him to say publicly that he was not under F.B.I. investigation. In the second call, Mr. Comey said, the president added: “I have been very loyal to you, very loyal. We had that thing, you know.”

• What was the purpose of your April 11, 2017, statement to Maria Bartiromo?

While the White House ultimately said Mr. Comey was fired for breaking with Justice Department policy and discussing the Clinton investigation, Mr. Trump expressed no such qualms in an interview with Ms. Bartiromo of Fox Business Network. “Director Comey was very, very good to Hillary Clinton, that I can tell you,” he said. “If he weren’t, she would be, right now, going to trial.”

• What did you think and do about Mr. Comey’s May 3, 2017, testimony?

In this Senate appearance, Mr. Comey described his handling of the Clinton investigation in detail. Mr. Comey was fired soon after. Mr. Mueller’s question suggests he wants to know why Mr. Trump soured.

• Regarding the decision to fire Mr. Comey: When was it made? Why? Who played a role?

Over the past several months, Mr. Mueller has asked White House officials for the back story, and whether the public justification was accurate. He will be able to compare Mr. Trump’s answers to what he has learned elsewhere.

• What did you mean when you told Russian diplomats on May 10, 2017, that firing Mr. Comey had taken the pressure off?

The day after Mr. Comey’s firing, Mr. Trump met with Russian officials in the Oval Office. There, The Times revealed, Mr. Trump suggested he had fired Mr. Comey because of the pressure from the Russia investigation.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

• What did you mean in your interview with Lester Holt about Mr. Comey and Russia?

Shortly after firing Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump undercut his own argument when he told NBC News that he had been thinking about the Russia investigation when he fired Mr. Comey.

“I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should've won.”

• What was the purpose of your May 12, 2017, tweet?

After The Times revealed the president’s private dinner with Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump responded on Twitter.

Mr. Comey appeared unworried. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Mr. Comey said. The White House ultimately said that, no, there were no tapes.

• What did you think about Mr. Comey’s June 8, 2017, testimony regarding Mr. Flynn, and what did you do about it?

After he was fired, Mr. Comey testified about his conversations with Mr. Trump and described him as preoccupied with the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia. After the testimony, Mr. Trump called him a liar.

• What was the purpose of the September and October 2017 statements, including tweets, regarding an investigation of Mr. Comey?

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Comey had testified falsely to Congress and suggested that the Justice Department might investigate. Mr. Trump followed up with tweets suggesting that he should be investigated for rigging an inquiry into Mrs. Clinton. Such comments reinforced criticism that Mr. Trump views the Justice Department as a sword to use against his political rivals.


• What is the reason for your continued criticism of Mr. Comey and his former deputy, Andrew G. McCabe?

Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe are among Mr. Trump’s favorite targets. Mr. McCabe is a lifelong Republican, but Mr. Trump has criticized him as a Clinton loyalist because Mr. McCabe’s wife, a Democrat, ran unsuccessfully for office in Virginia and received donations from a Clinton ally. This question suggests that Mr. Mueller wants to know whether Mr. Trump’s criticism is an effort to damage the F.B.I. while it investigates the president’s associates.

Questions related to Attorney General Jeff Sessions


Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April in Washington.Lawrence Jackson for The New York Times

• What did you think and do regarding the recusal of Mr. Sessions?

Mr. Trump has criticized Mr. Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation. The Times reported that Mr. Trump humiliated him in an Oval Office meeting and accused him of being disloyal. Mr. Sessions ultimately submitted his resignation, though Mr. Trump did not accept it. Along with the next two questions, this inquiry looks at whether Mr. Trump views law enforcement officials as protectors.

• What efforts did you make to try to get him to change his mind?

The Times has reported that Mr. Trump told his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to stop Mr. Sessions from recusing himself. Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and Mr. Trump erupted, saying he needed an attorney general who would protect him.

• Did you discuss whether Mr. Sessions would protect you, and reference past attorneys general?

Mr. Trump has spoken affectionately about past attorneys general who he said were loyal to their presidents. He cited Robert F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. as examples. “Holder protected the president,” he said in a Times interview in December. “And I have great respect for that.”

• What did you think and what did you do in reaction to the news of the appointment of the special counsel?

In a twist, Mr. Mueller’s very appointment has become part of his investigation. Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced the inquiry as a “witch hunt.” Mr. Trump blames the appointment on Mr. Sessions’s recusal.

• Why did you hold Mr. Sessions’s resignation until May 31, 2017, and with whom did you discuss it?

Mr. Trump rejected Mr. Sessions’s resignation after aides argued that it would only create more problems. The details of those discussions remain unclear, but Mr. Trump’s advisers have already given Mr. Mueller their accounts of the conversations.

• What discussions did you have with Reince Priebus in July 2017 about obtaining the Sessions resignation? With whom did you discuss it?

Mr. Priebus, who was Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, has said he raced out of the White House after Mr. Sessions and implored him not to resign. Mr. Mueller has interviewed Mr. Priebus and would be able to compare his answers with those of Mr. Trump.

• What discussions did you have regarding terminating the special counsel, and what did you do when that consideration was reported in January 2018?

Again, Mr. Mueller’s investigation intersects with its own existence. The Times reported that, in June 2017, Mr. Trump ordered Mr. McGahn to fire Mr. Mueller. Mr. McGahn refused. Though Mr. Trump’s own advisers informed Mr. Mueller about that effort, Mr. Trump denied it: “Fake news,” he said. “A typical New York Times fake story.”

• What was the purpose of your July 2017 criticism of Mr. Sessions?

Mr. Trump unleashed a series of attacks on Mr. Sessions in July.

Campaign Coordination With Russia

Donald Trump Jr. arranged a meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016.Leah Millis/Reuters

• When did you become aware of the Trump Tower meeting?

This and other questions relate to a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who offered political dirt about Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., arranged the meeting. He said he did not tell his father about it when it happened.

• What involvement did you have in the communication strategy, including the release of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails?

When The Times found out about the meeting, Mr. Trump helped draft a misleading statement in his son’s name, omitting the true purpose of the meeting. After The Times obtained the younger Mr. Trump’s emails, he published them on Twitter.

• During a 2013 trip to Russia, what communication and relationships did you have with the Agalarovs and Russian government officials?

The Trump Tower meeting was arranged through the Russian singer Emin Agalarov, his billionaire father, Aras Agalarov, and a music promoter. Mr. Mueller is scrutinizing the nature of connections between the Agalarovs, Mr. Trump and Russian officials.

• What communication did you have with Michael D. Cohen, Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals, about Russian real estate developments during the campaign?

Mr. Mueller is referring to a failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Mr. Sater, a business associate, proposed the idea to Mr. Cohen, the longtime personal lawyer to Mr. Trump. Emails show that Mr. Sater believed that the project would showcase Mr. Trump’s deal-making acumen and propel him into the presidency.

• What discussions did you have during the campaign regarding any meeting with Mr. Putin? Did you discuss it with others?

Journalists and lawmakers have uncovered several examples of Russian officials trying, through intermediaries, to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. Senior campaign officials rejected some overtures, but Mr. Trump’s involvement has been a mystery.

• What discussions did you have during the campaign regarding Russian sanctions?

Even as the Obama administration stepped up sanctions on Russia, Mr. Trump struck a laudatory tone toward Mr. Putin.

• What involvement did you have concerning platform changes regarding arming Ukraine?

A portion of the Republican platform was changed in a way more favorable to Russia.

• During the campaign, what did you know about Russian hacking, use of social media or other acts aimed at the campaign?

This is a key question. Mr. Trump praised the release of hacked Democratic emails and called on Russia to find others. Mr. Mueller’s investigation has unearthed evidence that at least one member of Mr. Trump’s campaign — George Papadopoulos — was told that Russia had obtained compromising emails about Mrs. Clinton. But Mr. Trump has repeatedly said there was “no collusion” with the Russian government.

• What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?

This is one of the most intriguing questions on the list. It is not clear whether Mr. Mueller knows something new, but there is no publicly available information linking Mr. Manafort, the former campaign chairman, to such outreach. So his inclusion here is significant. Mr. Manafort’s longtime colleague, Rick Gates, is cooperating with Mr. Mueller.

• What did you know about communication between Roger Stone, his associates, Julian Assange or WikiLeaks?

Mr. Stone, a longtime adviser, claimed to have inside information from WikiLeaks, which published hacked Democratic emails. He appeared to predict future releases, and was in touch with a Twitter account used by Russian intelligence. This question, along with the next two, show that Mr. Mueller is still investigating possible campaign cooperation with Russia.

• What did you know during the transition about an attempt to establish back-channel communication to Russia, and Jared Kushner’s efforts?

Mr. Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, has testified that the Russian ambassador proposed getting Mr. Flynn in contact with Russian officials to discuss Syria. In response, Mr. Kushner said, he proposed using secure phones inside the Russian Embassy — a highly unusual suggestion that was not accepted.

• What do you know about a 2017 meeting in Seychelles involving Erik Prince?

The meeting was convened by Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. It brought Mr. Prince, an informal adviser to Mr. Trump’s team, together with a Russian investor close to Mr. Putin.

• What do you know about a Ukrainian peace proposal provided to Mr. Cohen in 2017?

Mr. Cohen, the lawyer, hand-delivered to the White House a peace proposal for Ukraine and Russia. This unusual bit of backdoor diplomacy is of interest because it involved a Ukrainian lawmaker who said he was being encouraged by Mr. Putin’s aides. Mr. Cohen has said he did not discuss the proposal with Mr. Trump.

Matt Apuzzo is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter based in Washington. He has covered law enforcement and security matters for more than a decade and is the co-author of the book "Enemies Within."

@mattapuzzo

Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent for The Times who covers national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues and the other for coverage of President Donald Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia.@NYTMike
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/us/p ... ussia.html

“Just Obstruction” Is the New “Red Line”

emptywheelMay 1, 2018
In the past, I have complained about how the NYT (including Mike Schmidt) themselves set a “red line” over which Robert Mueller shouldn’t cross, then gleefully focused on that in their reporting.

It further speculates this might cross a “red line” they put there themselves back in July, a red line commentators routinely report incorrectly as pertaining to any business interests of his.

Mr. Mueller could run afoul of a line the president has warned him not to cross. Though it is not clear how much of the subpoena is related to Mr. Trump’s business beyond ties to Russia, Mr. Trump said in an interview with The New York Times in July that the special counsel would be crossing a “red line” if he looked into his family’s finances beyond any relationship with Russia.

BREAKING: Robert Mueller would be fucking stupid if he weren’t subpoenaing this information.

[snip]

As I said, while the NYT got their own reporting right, most people quoting from it misquote what Trump actually said about any red line. Here’s the exchange.

SCHMIDT: Last thing, if Mueller was looking at your finances and your family finances, unrelated to Russia — is that a red line?

HABERMAN: Would that be a breach of what his actual charge is?

TRUMP: I would say yeah. I would say yes. By the way, I would say, I don’t — I don’t — I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something, so, you know, I sell a lot of condo units, and somebody from Russia buys a condo, who knows? I don’t make money from Russia. In fact, I put out a letter saying that I don’t make — from one of the most highly respected law firms, accounting firms. I don’t have buildings in Russia. They said I own buildings in Russia. I don’t. They said I made money from Russia. I don’t. It’s not my thing. I don’t, I don’t do that. Over the years, I’ve looked at maybe doing a deal in Russia, but I never did one. Other than I held the Miss Universe pageant there eight, nine years [crosstalk].

SCHMIDT: But if he was outside that lane, would that mean he’d have to go?

[crosstalk]

HABERMAN: Would you consider——

TRUMP: No, I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia. So I think if he wants to go, my finances are extremely good, my company is an unbelievably successful company. And actually, when I do my filings, peoples say, “Man.” People have no idea how successful this is. It’s a great company. But I don’t even think about the company anymore. I think about this. ’Cause one thing, when you do this, companies seem very trivial. O.K.? I really mean that. They seem very trivial. But I have no income from Russia. I don’t do business with Russia. The gentleman that you mentioned, with his son, two nice people. But basically, they brought the Miss Universe pageant to Russia to open up, you know, one of their jobs. Perhaps the convention center where it was held. It was a nice evening, and I left. I left, you know, I left Moscow. It wasn’t Moscow, it was outside of Moscow.

Aside from the prompted feel of the question (as if Trump or Chris Ruddy set these reporters up to pose the questions so Trump could “warn” Mueller), it pertains only to business unrelated to Russia. Trump seems to admit that the mobbed up Russians buying his condos would be pertinent, his Miss Universe contest, and his serial efforts to get a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Even the example the NYT points to today — the involvement of UAE in some pre-inauguration meetings — pertains to Russia, as one of the points of the meetings were to set up a back channel with … Russia.

I think Jared Kushner’s business ties … that’s a different issue. But as to the substance of Trump’s purported red line, nothing in today’s report says Mueller has crossed that (even if he cared about such things).

Effectively, the NYT reporters who kept harping on a limit they themselves either set or parroted back on someone’s cue served to justify Trump’s own threats against Mueller and others. They had become the news.

It appears the same is true for the extended reporting — from the NYT, among others (though this NBC report is a rare exception) — that Mueller is primarily investigating Trump for obstruction. For some time, the press has been reporting that Mueller is honing in on an obstruction case against Trump, seemingly without understanding that some things being labeled obstruction — such as the response to Mike Flynn lying about implementing the policy concessions to Russia Trump made in the transition period — actually went to prove the quo part of a quid pro quo.

And so, when NYT published their list of questions Mueller had given Trump’s lawyers, almost a third of which have nothing to do with obstruction and many others have to with have to do with both the conspiracy case in chief and obstruction, the headline focused exclusively on obstruction.



And while Mike Schmidt’s report on the questions does mention “Russian ties” and include two paragraphs on the questions that address topics besides obstruction, the lead might be read to focus on obstruction itself.

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s election interference, has at least four dozen questions on an exhaustive array of subjects he wants to ask President Trump to learn more about his ties to Russia and determine whether he obstructed the inquiry itself, according to a list of the questions obtained by The New York Times.

This morning, Trump predictably pointed to the list that one of his associates leaked, claiming to be outraged by a new “leak,” and asserted, evidence to the contrary, that the questions did not address “collusion.”



That, in turn, led a bunch of people on Twitter to try to fact check Trump, as if such “facts” would persuade either Trump (who is doing this to manipulate coverage, not to assert facts) or his followers (who wouldn’t believe the fact-checkers over Trump anyway).

Schmidt added this line to his own story, without acknowledging that his own outlet had “incorrectly” used a headline that backed Trump’s claim, even if the details themselves did not.

President Trump said on Twitter on Tuesday that it was “disgraceful” that questions the special counsel would like to ask him were publicly disclosed, and he incorrectly noted that there were no questions about collusion.

I get that Trump’s claims that the questions include none on the underlying conspiracy need to be debunked.

But one reason why he tweeted what he did is because it plays into a narrative that the press has long very credulously helped to create. What is needed now (indeed, what was needed months ago) is loud reporting that the whole obstruction emphasis was a distraction partly seeded by those being investigated for a conspiracy, a distraction in which the press was complicit.

As with the “red line” of Trump’s (non-Russian) business interests, the notion that he is being investigated only for obstruction is a tactic he has used, and used well, to play public opinion. Before trying to get the man to acknowledge public facts his team itself released, however, the press ought to consider how they’ve been doing just what Trump did this morning for months, ignoring the details that implicate him personally in “collusion.”
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/01/j ... -red-line/

FBI shadows Russian MMA great Fedor Emelianenko at Bellator event in Chicago


Fedor Emelianenko meets Frank Mir here in Chicago in the Bellator Heavyweight Tournament Credit: Lucas Noonan/Bellator
Fedor Emelianenko was expecting to see Frank Mir in the Windy City. What he wasn't expecting was the FBI to show up and knock on the door of his hotel suite here. No one knows why, and no one wants to discuss it.

But officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are here, and they are talking to the man widely regarded as mixed martial arts' heavyweight 'GOAT'.

There is no suggestion that Fedor is in trouble with the FBI. But no one has a word to say about it. Not the officials overseeing the Bellator 198 event. They don't know why. Not Fedor, nor his team. Not a word from the FBI, either.

Stum. No comment all round. But the theories, for what they are worth, are plentiful and plausible.

Here's what happened: on Tuesday, Fedor arrived into Chicago with his team - a group of around twelve in the entourage, including his translator - after a training camp spent largely in Amsterdam, in preparation for his headline fight in Bellator's heavyweight World Grand Prix tournament against Mr Mir, the former two-time UFC champion. Both men have been decorated champions, and are close to the end of their careers.

Three days ago, while the mixed martial arts legend was taking a walk outside in the vicinity with some members of his entourage, officials from the FBI turned up at the hotel, requested to see him, and knocked on his room. They waited for him. They spoke with him. They have, by some accounts, been in and out in the last few days.



Fedor Emelianenko takes part in pre-event interviews ahead of facing Frank Mir Credit: Lucas Noonan/Bellator
It is worth recalling that Fedor has friends, who are fans, in very high places. Namely Presidents Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump.

Putin has attended Fedor's fights in the plush seats in the past, and the fighter has also served as a government official in the sports department in his native Russia. With Fedor being a person of note, and the current ongoings in Syria involving Russia and the USA, there could be security issues around his being here that are being monitored for his own safety.

But it could be other matters. The association with POTUS Trump goes back a decade ago to Fedor's days fighting in the Affliction Entertainment fight league, which Trump had a "significant stake" in, and for whom, in 2008, the President elect became a front man for.

When Affliction Clothing, a manufacturer of MMA apparel based in California,looked to challenge the UFC's dominance, Affliction Entertainment was formed as a separate company to hold pay-per-view events. They needed big name signings. Fedor was one. So was Trump.

Affliction executives threw chunk sized money in the direction of the Russian heavyweight. But who was appointed the COO of Affliction ? None other than Michael Cohen, currently under deep scrutiny and investigation by the FBI.

Two weeks ago, federal agents raided the New York offices and hotel apartment of Cohen. Described by Rolling Stone earlier this month as a decade-long "heavy, fixer and connector" for Trump, the investigation into Cohen from the US Attorney's office at the behest of Robert Mueller, looking into allegations of fraud and alleged payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, may have seen Cohen's associative net widened. It would certainly be intriguing if Fedor was being asked about that time.

Fedor Emelianenko, the GOAT of heavyweight MMA fighters
Fedor Emelianenko, the GOAT of heavyweight MMA fighters Credit: Lucas Noonan/Bellator
Mr Cohen is facing a series of legal actions, and there is also a criminal investigation of Mr Cohen in New York, which prompted the recent FBI raid. Even this week it has been revealed that sixteen cell phones belonging to Cohen, found in the New York raid,and many of them old, have been confiscated and are being examined.

Which brings us back to Fedor. Who knows whether imprints of Fedor's time fighting in Affliction have shown up in the FBI's fine-combing. As stated, there is no suggestion that Fedor has done anything wrong, or is implicated in any wrongdoing, but as fight week build-ups go, this has to rank as one of the strangest of all for the fan favourite.

The final theory was that he got his passport wet, and the embossed page was hard to read. While it must have come as a surprise to get that 'knock on the door', it doesn't seem to have bothered the fight sport legend. He just looks ready to do the business in a fighting cage on Saturday night.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/mma/2018/04 ... tor-event/

Zarina Zabrisky
Jul 3, 2017
WRESTLING AND MAFIA STATES

Putin’s Coach: “I Might Be Dead but the Mafia is Immortal”



On July 2, Trump tweeted a doctored video: he attacks and wrestles a man. Trump used it to threaten CNN and mass media. It’s an old video; I wrote about it before in reference to domestic violence and fascism. Wrestling, however, deserves an explanation.

WRESTLING AND RUSSIAN POLITICIANS

A striking number of Russian politicians, organized crime gang members, and oligarchs have wrestling background, particularly in sambo (Russian self-defense) and judo. Putin is a “Master of Sports” and a champion of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in sambo.
“Sambo can be compared with the secret organization of free masons,” reported a Russian newspaper in 2008.
The newspaper then gave an incomplete list of politicians-wrestlers: Sergei Shoigu, Minister of Defense; Aslambek Aslakhanov, the State Duma deputy, advisor and former aide to Putin; Sergei Kiriyenko, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia; Yury Trutnev, Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology; Mikhail Fradkov, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation; Andrei Seltsovsky, Head of the Moscow City Government Health Department; Dmitry Rogozin, Russian Representative to NATO; Yuri Luzhkov, former Moscow Mayor; Viktor Khristenko, Minister of Industry and Trade; Sergei Baidakov, Deputy Mayor of Moscow; and more.


Putin, Rotenberg, Shestakov.
“I’M DEAD BUT THE MAFIA IS IMMORTAL”
From the age of sixteen, Putin trained under Leonid Usvyatsov, a professional wrestler, stuntman and an organized crime group boss. Usvyatsov had two convictions (for group rape and currency fraud) and spent almost 20 years total behind bars. In 1968–82, Usvyatsov taught sambo (Russian self-defense) and judo at Putin’s wrestling school.



Putin does not mention his coach’s last name in his memoirs because Usvyatsov was known as a “criminal authority” and a gang member in St. Petersburg (Leningrad at the time.)
Usvyatsov’s tombstone has an inscription:
“A grave. On the grave, an epitaph:
I’m dead but immortal is mafia.”
Usvyatsov played an important role in Putin’s life. He helped Putin to get accepted to the elite law faculty of the Leningrad State University. Putin got in on an athletic merit.


Putin and Shestakov, now and then.

Athletic merit in the USSR meant low expectations and relaxed academic requirements. Athletes were helped with exams and grades. The task of athletic merit students was to represent the university, play for the team and win medals.
Usvyatsov also helped Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s teammate and friend, to get accepted into the Institute of Physical Education and later helped him find a coaching position. Brothers Rotenberg stayed close to Putin. In 2007, they bought Gazprom construction divisions, merged them into one private company and then received massive orders from Gazprom at inflated prices. Since 2007, Rotenbergs have received more than 1 trillion roubles in state orders.

WRESTLING CLUB AND ORGANIZED CRIME

Rotenberg worked as a coach in a club that provided training for delinquent teenagers and the members of the biggest organized crime group in Leningrad, Tabmov gang (aka Tambovskaya OCG.)


Left: Abramov, Rotenberg, Usvyatsov as stuntmen at Leningrad film studio in 1960s. Right: Putin awards Arkady Rotenberg.


Left: former wrestlers Sergey Shoigu, Minister of Defense; Alexander Abramov of Evraz; Putin. Middle: Abramov and Roman Abramovich, Evraz founders. Right: Ivanka Trump and Abramovich’s wife.

The backbone of Tambov gang consisted of athletes. In 1992, Usvyatsov organized athletes in a militarized security squad. In 1994, he was shot. Tambov gang lived on.

TAMBOV GANG

According to the court materials of 2015, Litvinenko trial in London, in late 1990s Putin supported Tambov gang. Litvinenko investigated the ties between Tambov gang and St. Petersburg city administration and their involvement with Columbian cocaine trafficking and money laundering. He met with Tambov gang bosses who left for Spain in the 2000s and made a mistake of mentioning these encounters in an interview. As a result, FSB officer Lugovoy poisoned Litvienko with Polonium-210.
In 2016, The Guardian reported that “the high-placed officials are thought to have helped one of Russia’s best-known mafia groups, the Tambov gang, infiltrate state structures, police, port authorities and private banks and corporations. The Tambov and Malyshev gangs, which made their names smuggling heroin in St Petersburg when Putin was deputy mayor in the 1990s, allegedly laundered money through Spanish real estate.

They are also accused of murder, extortion and drugs and weapons trafficking.

The Spanish prosecutor’s moves bolster longstanding allegations that the Russian government is a mafia state involved in corruption and organised crime. The reputed head of the Tambov gang, Gennady Petrov, has previously been tied to several of Putin’s closest allies.”

HOW A MAFIA STATE WORKS



Anti-corruption protests in Russia, March — June, 2017.
A conglomerate of billionaires, criminals and extremists consolidates all power and wealth of a country. It controls ALL aspects of political and social life.

Its goals are:
The accumulation of maximum power and wealth
Expansion and/or the maintenance of status quo.
The regime uses “law and order” and mind control principles and tools:
Legislation system. The regime issues executive orders, new laws, and changes the existing laws. Constitution becomes obsolete.
Judicial system. It represses protests, resistance or any deviance from the main policy by force. Public trials and clandestine arrests instill fear.
Enforcement apparatus. It uses military forces, intelligence services, police, and penal system to enforce the new rules. Citizens risk incarceration at any time and without a reason.
Organized crime. Assassinations, kidnapping, poisoning, torture and other methods of physical execution become a reality. Terrorist attacks are staged.
Mass media/Press/Social Media. The government silences the independent publications, outspoken journalists and opposition leaders by threats, law suits or murder and controls the remaining mass mediaby funding and censorship. The brainwashed population becomes politically inactive.
External politics. The government creates the myth of a foreign invasion threat and is likely to start a war. It distracts from the domestic issues, its own obvious and extreme wealth, and the lack of civil and human rights in the country.

AFFLICTION


In 2008, Trump had partnered with Affliction Entertainment, a mixed martial arts entertainment company, to host pay-per-view fights in the U.S. and a reality television show to be filmed in Russia. AE collapsed in 2009 after staging two events. Fedor Emelianenko, the star fighter of Affliction, campaigned for Putin’s presidential campaign in 2012. Soon after, Putin named him to a presidential sports and fitness council. Putin watched his battles from front-row seats and socialized with Emelianenko at dinners and sports events.

WHAT TO DO?

Do not wait for someone to come and help. In mafia states, justice becomes a personal matter.
Read more fantastical stories about Russian mafia state and Trump here:

TRUMP — RUSSIA: KGB, OLIGARCHS, MAFIA
https://medium.com/everyvote/everything ... bbbeba09ba

Investigative Photo Stories: Manafort, Page, Nunes, Wray and More

medium.com

https://medium.com/mosaic2/wrestling-an ... 79f1e71bb4

The Professor At The Center Of The Trump-Russia Probe Was In Moscow Just Weeks Before Court Documents Were Unsealed

Joseph Mifsud's trip to Moscow coincided with an official visit by the king of Saudi Arabia.

Alberto NardelliMay 1, 2018, at 11:18 a.m.

Joseph Mifsud, the enigmatic Maltese professor at the center of the Trump-Russia probe, was in Moscow just weeks before special counsel Robert Mueller unsealed court documents alleging that Mifsud had told a Trump campaign adviser that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, BuzzFeed News has learned.

The trip, which hasn’t been previously reported, is the last time Mifsud is known to have been in Russia.

Three weeks after his Russia trip, Mifsud was identified as the unnamed “overseas professor” who allegedly told foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos in April 2016 that Russia had thousands of emails from the Democrats. That was weeks before the Democrats themselves were aware that their computer systems had been hacked.

Mifsud was last seen in public Oct. 31, 2017, in Rome. His current whereabouts are unknown.

The precise nature of Mifsud's place, if any, in Russia's meddling in the 2016 US election remains unclear and unexplained.

Still, the new information on Mifsud's travels indicates that even after he'd been questioned by the FBI, and as US investigators were about to make his role public, he remained in contact with Russian government circles.

The Maltese professor was formally invited to Moscow by the Russian Council of International Affairs (RIAC), a think tank close to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to a visa dated Oct. 4, 2017.

In Moscow, Mifsud participated in a seminar about security challenges in Yemen organized by RIAC and Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies.

Two sources at RIAC told BuzzFeed News that Mifsud was a member of the official delegation of Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, who was in Russia on an official visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the same dates.

The King Faisal Foundation and the Saudi Embassy in London didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud ahead of their talks at the Kremlin in Moscow, Oct. 5, 2017.
Alexey Nikolsky / AFP / Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud ahead of their talks at the Kremlin in Moscow, Oct. 5, 2017.

Mifsud had spoken at other events, in both Saudi Arabia and Russia, organized by RIAC and the King Faisal Center, and he has traveled to Moscow frequently in recent years. A separate visa seen by BuzzFeed News, dated March 24, 2017, to March 1, 2018, was issued upon invitation of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, one of Russia’s most prestigious universities, with which Mifsud has collaborated in various capacities.

Mifsud has gone underground since being identified as the professor who told Papadopoulos that Russia had thousands of emails from the Democrats.

In February, BuzzFeed News revealed that not even his girlfriend in Ukraine, who claims to be the mother of his child, has heard from him since the court documents were made public.

She told BuzzFeed News that she last met Mifsud in person in Kiev in early April 2017. He told her then that he had recently been questioned by the FBI in the US.

And at the end of October, he stopped replying to her messages and phone calls after urging her not to talk to journalists.

The fact that Mifsud was in Moscow in early October 2017 would appear to contradict some of the WhatsApp messages seen by BuzzFeed News that he sent his Ukrainian girlfriend saying he couldn’t visit her in Kiev because he was ill and unable to travel.

Mifsud and his girlfriend in Ukraine.
Provided to BuzzFeed News
Mifsud and his girlfriend in Ukraine.

During his stay in Moscow, Mifsud met with at least one other individual referenced in the Mueller documents.

According to the documents, Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to a "Russian national connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs" over email in April 2016. Media reports have suggested that the unnamed Russian national is Ivan Timofeev, RIAC’s director of programs.

Timofeev acknowledged over email that Mifsud was in Moscow last October and volunteered the information about the seminar, but he declined to say whether they discussed interactions with Papadopoulos.

Mifsud was last seen Oct. 31, 2017, when he gave an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica published the next day. He has since vanished from the Rome university where he’d worked for years and quit his job with a Scottish university. The London diplomatic institute where he was a director has shut down, and Italian prosecutors, who are seeking him in an unrelated case where he is accused of inflating salaries at a university consortium in Agrigento, Sicily, which he presided over nearly a decade ago, haven’t been able to locate him.

Mifsud has not responded to repeated requests for comment. He acknowledged in the interview with La Repubblica that he met Papadopoulos “three or four times,” and facilitated connections between "official and unofficial sources," but denied any wrongdoing.

According to court filings, Mifsud told Papadopoulos about the Democrats’ emails in April 2016, before the Democrats themselves were aware that their computer system had been hacked. Mifsud told Papadopoulos he’d learned of the emails during a trip to Russia, but who told him is unknown.

Papadopoulos is reported to have later shared the information with the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, whose government passed the information to US authorities after WikiLeaks began publishing the emails in July 2016. That information sparked the FBI to launch the investigation that Mueller now leads.

Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardell ... sv85zDdeOM

Rosenstein On Impeachment Threat: The DOJ ‘Is Not Going To Be Extorted’
By Kate Riga | May 1, 2018 3:18 pm

on October 17, 2017 in Washington, DC.Alex Wong/Getty Images North America
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that the Department of Justice “is not going to be extorted” and that he has no response to documents that “nobody has the courage to put their name on” in response to inquiries about the articles of impeachment the House Freedom Caucus is drafting to possibly bring against him.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ ... e-extorted

'It Was Never Just About Obstruction':

'BradCast' 5/1/2018
Guest: NatSec journalist Marcy Wheeler on leaked Mueller questions, Cohen tossed under the bus, and Trump stealing his own medical records; Also: GOP photo ID voting restriction law blocked in AR, allowed in TX...

By BRAD FRIEDMAN on 5/1/2018, 6:29pm PT

On today's BradCast: The chaos that is the Trump Administration continues to move faster than anyone can possibly keep up with. But we try. [Audio link to show follows below]


Then, we're joined today by national security journalist MARCY WHEELER of Emptywheel to try and make sense of, among other things, the nearly four dozen questions said to be from Robert Mueller's Special Counsel probe for Donald Trump, as published by the New York Times on Monday night after apparently being leaked by someone on Team Trump. Those questions include queries on Trump's alleged obstruction of justice, as well as Team Trump's so-called "collusion" with Russia before and after the 2016 election.

Wheeler explains why she believes the information was leaked and how its being desperately used by Trump to (falsely) suggest the Special Counsel has found no evidence of "collusion", despite the many published questions in the list which cite issues related to a conspiracy between Russians and members of the Trump Campaign.

"These guys are incompetent at governing and most every other thing, but they are very competent at playing the press. And they have played the press for the last six months, making it seem as if the only risk to Trump has to do with obstruction," Wheeler argues. "More than a third of these questions go to the conspiracy. It was never just about just obstruction."

We also try to make sense of the bizarre, late-breaking story regarding Trump's infamous gastroenterologist, Dr. Harold Borenstein, who is now charging that Trump's longtime personal bodyguard Keith Schiller and a Trump Organization lawyer "raided" his office last year to take Trump's medical records without the required legal forms, shortly after Borenstein told the media that Trump uses a hair-loss drug.

Wheeler also offers her insights into the new evidence suggesting that Trump is now tossing his old business partner and personal lawyer Michael Cohen under the bus in the wake of the recent FBI raids on Cohen's office and residences. "There are so many weird things about the Cohen thing that I hesitate to settle on an explanation for what's going on there, aside from the fact that I think that yeah, Trump is worried about him flipping."

All of it is perhaps best summed up by Wheeler's comment today: "It's a mess. Trump is in trouble."

http://bradblog.com/?p=12563

THE MUELLER QUESTIONS MAP OUT CULTIVATION, A QUID PRO QUO, AND A COVER-UP (PART ONE, CULTIVATION)

May 2, 2018/4 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by empty wheel

I wasn’t going to do this originally, but upon learning that the Mueller questions, as NYT has presented them, don’t maintain the sixteen subjects or even the 49 questions that Jay Sekulow drew up from those 16 areas of interest, and especially after WaPo continues to claim that Mueller is only investigating “whether Trump obstructed justice and sought to thwart a criminal probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election,” I am going to do my own version of the questions, as released by the NYT.

I’m not pretending that this better represents what Mueller has communicated to Sekulow, nor am I suggesting NYT’s version isn’t valid. But the questions provide an opportunity to lay out a cultivation, quid pro quo, and cover-up structure I’ve been using to frame the investigation in my own mind.

This post lays out the “cultivation” questions Mueller wants to pose.

THE CULTIVATION

The questions start well before the election, focusing on both Trump’s persistent interest in building a Trump Tower in Moscow, the cultivation of Trump by the Agalov camp, and Trump’s interest in becoming best friends with Vladimir Putin. The questions may also include other real estate deals that would be less obviously tied to Russia, but possibly just as compromising. It’s worth remembering, Trump probably didn’t expect he’d win. So the Trump Tower offers were a prize that would be available (and easier to take advantage of) based on the assumption he’d lose.

NOVEMBER 9, 2013: DURING A 2013 TRIP TO RUSSIA, WHAT COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONSHIPS DID YOU HAVE WITH THE AGALAROVS AND RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS?

On November 9, 2013, the Agalorovs helped Trump put on Miss Universe in Moscow; Trump Tower meeting attendees Rob Goldstone and Ike Kaveladze were both also involved. If the pee tape — or any kompromat involving “golden showers,” as Jim Comey claims Trump called it — exists, it was made on November 8, 2013.

Leading up to the event, Trump talked about meeting Putin and “will he become my new best friend?,” but that reportedly did not happen. But he did meet a bunch of other oligarchs. In the after math of the event, the Agalorovs floated building a Trump Tower in one of their developments.

NOVEMBER 2, 2015 TO NOVEMBER, 2016: WHAT COMMUNICATION DID YOU HAVE WITH MICHAEL D. COHEN, FELIX SATER AND OTHERS, INCLUDING FOREIGN NATIONALS, ABOUT RUSSIAN REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE CAMPAIGN?

On November 3, 2015, at a time when Trump’s campaign was experiencing remarkable success, and well after (per the Internet Research Agency indictment) the election year operation had started, Felix Sater approached Michael Cohen to pitch yet another Trump Tower in Moscow deal. He tied the deal explicitly to getting Trump elected.

Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins [sic] private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.

Remember: Mueller’s subpoena to Sam Nunberg goes back to November 1, 2015, suggesting this is the timeframe he’s thinking explicitly about.

The initial public story about the deal — which Cohen tried to squelch before his congressional interviews — claimed that the deal fizzled out in January 2016. More recent reporting has revealed that one of the people involved in this deal has ties to GRU, the Russian intelligence organization behind the hack-and-leak, and that Cohen pursued it at least as late as June, 2016.

Around that time (possibly on July 22, with the involvement of Ivan Timofeev, who was involved in offering up emails), Sergei Millian — who had brokered Trump business with Russians in the past — started cultivating George Papadopoulos. After the election, Millian pitched that the two of them should do a Trump Tower deal.

The Trump Tower offers are only the most obvious election-related deal Mueller might be interested in. In October 2016, for example, Cypriot businessman Orestes Fintiklis obtained a majority stake in the troubled Trump Panama development, which he has since taken over (possibly along with a bunch of papers showing the money laundering Ivanka did to fill the building). And all that’s before you consider any deals Jared was pitching.

RESOURCES

These are some of the most useful resources in mapping these events.

CNN’s timeline of investigative events
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/po ... tigations/
Majority HPSCI Report
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00 ... -115-1.pdf
Minority HPSCI Report
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00 ... -115-2.pdf
Trump Twitter Archive
http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com/archive
Internet Research Agency indictment
https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download
Text of the Don Jr Trump Tower Meeting emails
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... -text.html
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/t ... ltivation/

Caputo questioned by Mueller's team on Russian election meddling

By Jerry Zremski Published 2:07 p.m. May 2, 2018 Updated 13 minutes ago
Michael Caputo, an East Aurora political consultant, was questioned by special counsel Robert Muller's team. (Ron Sachs/CNP)
Michael R. Caputo underwent an intense three hours of questioning from investigators from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, and the East Aurora political consultant emerged sounding shaken.

"They have every bit of information you could possibly have on the Trump campaign," said Caputo, who worked for the Trump effort in late 2015 and early 2016, in a telephone interview with The Buffalo News. "They had a lot of questions I had no answers to. At times it was kind of frightening."

Prosecutors made clear that Caputo is considered just a witness and not a suspect in the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, but he said the session remained intense nevertheless.

Caputo said he could not go into details of what the three-person team from Mueller's office asked him. But, he could not recall the prosecutors asking him any questions directly about Donald Trump, the Republican elected president in 2016.

The prosecutors did, however, ask questions about all the key figures in the Trump campaign.

"They asked me about all my friends," said Caputo, 56, who has worked with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, informal Trump adviser Roger Stone, Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen and others in the president's circle. "It's a frightening thing."

The investigation has already resulted in fraud charges against Manafort in connection with his business dealings in Ukraine. And Mueller's office handed off an investigation into Cohen's business interests to federal prosecutors in Manhattan who recently searched his homes and electronic devices.

Mueller – who did not attend his staff's session with Caputo – is investigating whether anyone involved with the Trump campaign colluded with Russia's attempt to intervene in the campaign, to Trump's benefit.

To that end, Caputo confirmed that the special counsel's team quizzed him about the roles of Wikileaks and a hacker named Guccifer 2.0 in the leaking of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

But that doesn't mean that anyone associated with Trump was involved in any of that.

"I do not believe there was any collusion," Caputo said Wednesday, as he has for many months.

He has long dismissed the Russia investigation as a "witch hunt," and when asked if he still felt that way after speaking with the prosecutors, Caputo said: "I believe that some of the areas in which they're taking the investigation indicate that it's a witch hunt."

At the same time, he added: "The questions were directed, relevant and complete."

Caputo said the prosecutors did not ask him any questions about the allegation that Trump may have obstructed justice once the probe started and after he became president. They wouldn't do that, Caputo noted, because he never served with the Trump administration.

Caputo worked for the Trump campaign until June 2016, when he quit after sending out an insulting tweet about Corey Lewandowski, who had been fired as Trump's campaign manager.

Caputo has also drawn the interest of investigators because he worked in Russia as a political consultant for several years in the 1990s, and has a company that had an office there until recently. But the prosecutors made clear from the start that Caputo was a witness and not a suspect in the investigation, both he and his attorney, former state attorney general Dennis C. Vacco, said after the session.

Even as a witness, though, Caputo found the questioning much more rigorous than what he had faced Tuesday at a meeting with Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, or at a meeting last year with the House Intelligence Committee.

Caputo came away impressed with the level of research prosecutors had done.

"They remembered things I didn't remember," he said. "They remembered things I thought I did in July that I had actually done in May."

Caputo said he voluntarily went before the special prosecutor's team because he thought it was his duty to do so.

"Every question they asked was relevant," he said. "They kept me on topic. Most importantly, Dennis Vacco kept me out of trouble."

Vacco, a former federal prosecutor, said Mueller's team was businesslike, professional and extremely well-prepared.

"I tell witnesses: You have to assume when you go into something like this that they know more than we do," Vacco said. "That was proven correct today."

Vacco said the prosecutors' questions sometimes veered into "uncharted territory," but he added that Caputo handled the interview well.

It made sense for Mueller's team to question Caputo, given his connections with former Trump campaign figures, Vacco said.

"It's standard operating procedure," Vacco said. "You talk to as many people as possible."
http://buffalonews.com/2018/05/02/caput ... l-counsel/

THE QUID PRO QUO: A PUTIN MEETING AND ELECTION ASSISTANCE, IN EXCHANGE FOR SANCTIONS RELIEF (PART TWO IN A SERIES)

May 2, 2018/0 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by empty wheel

As I explained in Part One of this series, I think the Mueller questions leaked by the Trump people actually give a far better understanding of a damning structure to the Mueller investigation — one mapping out cultivation, a quid pro quo, and a cover-up — than the coverage has laid out. This post will lay out how, over the course of the election, the Russians and Trump appear to have danced towards a quid pro quo, involving a Putin meeting and election assistance in exchange for sanctions relief if Trump won (as noted, the Russians dangled real estate deals to entice Trump based on the assumption he wouldn’t win).

APRIL 27, 2016: DURING THE CAMPAIGN, WHAT DID YOU KNOW ABOUT RUSSIAN HACKING, USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA, OR OTHER ACTS AIMED AT THE CAMPAIGN?

Given the structure of George Papadopoulos’ plea, it’s highly likely Mueller knows that George Papadopoulos passed on news that the Russians had thousands of Hillary emails they planned to release to help Trump to people in the campaign. Papadopoulos could have passed on that news to Stephen Miller and Corey Lewandowski as early as April 27. On the same day, Papadopoulos helped draft Trump’s first foreign policy speech, which Papadopoulos reportedly told Ivan Timofeev signaled a willingness to meet.

Between the time the GRU first exfiltrated DNC emails in April and the election, Trump invoked “emails” 21 times on Twitter (usually to refer to emails from Hillary’s server). The first of those times came on June 9, less than an hour after the Trump Tower meeting. The most famous of those came on July 27, when Trump addressed Russia directly.



That Trump’s email comments pertain mostly to Hillary’s home-based server doesn’t actually exonerate him. Right after the DNC release (and therefore the July 27 Trump tweet), GOP rat-fucker Peter Smith started reaching out to Russian hackers in hopes of finding hacked versions of those emails. His support documents named Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, and Mike Flynn. If those people actually learned of the effort (there’s reason to believe Smith was just overselling the ties to the campaign), it’s possible that Trump learned about it as well.

As to social media, while it has gotten virtually no attention, the reference to three Florida-based Trump campaign officials in the Internet Research Agency indictment suggests further investigative interest in them.

[T]here are three (presumed) Americans who, both the indictment and subsequent reporting make clear, are treated differently in the indictment than all the other Americans cited as innocent people duped by Russians: Campaign Official 1, Campaign Official 2, and Campaign Official 3. We know, from CNN’s coverage of Harry Miller’s role in building a cage to be used in a fake “jailed Hillary” stunt, that at least some other people described in the indictment were interviewed — in his case, for six hours! — by the FBI. But no one else is named using the convention to indicate those not indicted but perhaps more involved in the operation. Furthermore, the indictment doesn’t actually describe what action (if any) these three Trump campaign officials took after being contacted by trolls emailing under false names.

So Mueller may be pursuing whether there was state-level coordination going on, and if so, how far up the campaign chain of command knowledge of that coordination extended.

MAY 31, 2016: WHAT DISCUSSIONS DID YOU HAVE DURING THE CAMPAIGN REGARDING ANY MEETING WITH MR. PUTIN? DID YOU DISCUSS IT WITH OTHERS?

On June 16, 2015, the day Trump announced his campaign, the Agalarovs offered to serve as an intermediary between him and Putin.

Then, starting at least as early as March 31, 2016 (with Trump’s first foreign policy meeting), his aides started floating pitches for meetings with increasingly senior campaign officials that would hypothetically lead up to one between Trump and Putin.

Those include at least:

The George Papadopoulos thread, spanning from March 21 through August 15
The Carter Page thread, including his Moscow trip in July, and possibly continuing through his December Moscow trip
The NRA thread, focusing on the NRA meeting in Kentucky in May; NRA’s longer outreach includes Trump associates John Bolton and David Clarke
We know Trump was present and did not object when Papadopoulos pitched this in the May 31 meeting. Several of the other entrees went through Don Jr. Many of the offers got briefed at least as far as Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. We don’t know how many of the other offers he learned about. We just know that years earlier he had joked about becoming Putin’s best friend, and over the course of the campaign, Russian intermediaries made repeated, persistent efforts to work towards a meeting between Trump and Putin.

MAY 31, 2016: WHAT DISCUSSIONS DID YOU HAVE DURING THE CAMPAIGN REGARDING RUSSIAN SANCTIONS?
This is an open-ended question that might pose particular problems for Trump given the misleading statement claiming the June 9 meeting was about adoptions and not the Magnitsky sanctions. More interesting still are hints that Mueller sees a signaling going back and forth involving Papadopoulos; some of this may have involved signaling a willingness to provide sanctions relief.

Both Aras Agalarov and Natalia Veselnitskaya followed up after the election pushing for sanctions relief.

JUNE 9, 2016: WHEN DID YOU BECOME AWARE OF THE TRUMP TOWER MEETING?

Sam Nunberg has suggested Trump probably learned of the Trump Tower meeting before it happened. While he is unreliable on that point, the original June 3, 2016 email Rob Goldstone sent to Don Jr suggests reaching out to Trump’s assistant Rhona Graff.

I can also send this info to your father via Rhona, but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.

Democrats suspect that between two calls Don Jr had with Emin Agalarov about the meeting on June 6, 2016, he called his dad.

Trump Jr.’s phone records show two calls to and from the same Russian number on June 6, 2016.62 The first call occurred at 4:04 pm on June 6, 2916 – just 21 minutes after Goldstone emailed Trump Jr. to say that Emin Agalarov was “on stage in Moscow but should be off within 20 minutes so I am sure can call. [emphasis added]” 63 At 4:38 pm, Trump Jr emailed Goldstone, “Rob, thanks for the help.”64

This documentary evidence indicates that a call likely took place between Trump Jr. and Emin Agalarov. During his interview, Trump Jr. confirmed that the Russian phone number belonged to Agalarov, though he claimed to not recall whether he actually spoke with him. Rather, despite one of the two calls reflecting a two-minute connection, Trump Jr. suggested that Agalarov may have left voice messages.65

The phone records also show a “blocked” number at 4:27 pm, between the two calls to and from Emin Agalarov. Trump Jr. claimed he did not know who was associated with the blocked number.66 While the Committee has not pursued leads to determine who called Trump Jr. at this crucial time from a blocked number, Corey Lewandowski told the Committee that Mr. Trump’s “primary residence has a blocked [phone] line.” 67

Mueller, of course, almost certainly has the phone records the Democrats weren’t able to obtain.

Finally, Steve Bannon has stated that he’s certain Don Jr “walk[ed] these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor” on the day of the meeting. There’s reason to believe Ike Kaveladze and Goldstone could have done so, including the new piece of evidence that “Kaveladze left [a meeting with Rinat Akhmetshin and Natalia Veselnitskaya] after a few minutes to take a call from Agalarov to discuss the meeting.”

The day after the meeting — and four days before Trump’s birthday — Agalarov sent Trump an expensive painting as a present.

The June 9 meeting is, as far as is public, the most important cornerstone in a presumed quid pro quo. Russians offered unnamed dirt that Don Jr seemed to know what it entailed even before speaking to Emin Agalarov personally. Having offered dirt, four Russians — including two representatives of Trump’s long-time handler Aras Agalarov — laid out a pitch to end the Magnitsky sanctions. And less than a week later, a presumed Russian agent released the first dirt stolen from Hillary Clinton.

JULY 7, 2016: WHAT KNOWLEDGE DID YOU HAVE OF ANY OUTREACH BY YOUR CAMPAIGN, INCLUDING BY PAUL MANAFORT, TO RUSSIA ABOUT POTENTIAL ASSISTANCE TO THE CAMPAIGN?

We don’t have many details on what Mueller knows about Manafort’s requests for help on the campaign. We do know he remained in close touch with Russians via someone the FBI believed was a Russian intelligence agent, Konstantin Kilimnik, through whom he remained in communications with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska is named in some court documents in a way that suggests his relationship with Manafort may be the still hidden third prong of investigation into Manafort approved by August 2, 2017.

Starting in April, Manafort and Kilimnik (whom Rick Gates and therefore presumably Manafort knew was a former GRU officer), exchanged a series of cryptic emails, suggesting that Manafort might be able to pay off the $20 million he owed Deripaska with certain actions on the campaign. In an email sent on July 7, Manafort offered to provide briefings on the campaign to Deripaska. On or around August 2, Manafort and Kilimnik met in person at the Grand Havana Club, in Kushner’s building at 666 5th Avenue. Both deny that anything about the campaign came up. Shortly after this meeting, one of Deripaska’s jets came to Newark, and Russian opposition figure Viktor Navalny has claimed to have proof the jet went from there to a meeting between Deripaska and Russian deputy prime minister Sergei Prikhodko.

An August 2017 report describes intercepts picking up “Russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with Manafort, … relay[ing] what they claimed were conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians.”

There’s one more area of potential assistance I find of interest. Since January, we’ve been getting hints that Oleg Deripaska has some tie to the Steele dossier, possibly through a lawyer he and Steele share. I’ve raised repeated concerns that the Russians learned about the dossier and found ways to feed Steele disinformation. If they did, the disinformation would have led Democrats to be complacent about the hacks that targeted them. And whether or not the dossier is disinformation (and whether or not Deripaska had a role in that, if true), Paul Manafort coached Reince Priebus on how to attack the dossier as a way to discredit the investigation into the campaign’s ties with Russia.

With regards to this Manafort question: remember that Rick Gates flipped on February 23, and the questions date to early March. So Gates may have proffered confirmation about these details. In any case, Mueller likely has learned far more about them two months after Gates flipped.

JULY 10-12, 2016: WHAT INVOLVEMENT DID YOU HAVE CONCERNING PLATFORM CHANGES REGARDING ARMING UKRAINE?

The Majority HPSCI Russia Report explains that the RNC platform was changed by staffers at the convention based off Trump’s public statements on sanctions.

[Rick] Dearborn generated a memorandum, dated August 1, 2016, outlining a detailed sequence of events that occurred between July 10 and 12, 2016. As part of that memo, J.D. Gordon created a timeline that noted candidate Trump’s policy statements–including at a March 31, 2016, national security meeting–served as the basis for the modification of [Diana] Denman’s amendments. Gordon’s timeline made it clear that the change was initiated by campaign staffers at the convention–not by Manafort or senior officials.

J.D. Gordon has not confirmed that he was asked about this, but he surely was. I would expect Mueller to have tested the timeline Gordon laid out in summer 2016 (when the platform change was a big political issue) against the testimony and communications records of everyone else involved.

Of course, by asking the question in this fashion, Mueller doesn’t reveal what he has already confirmed about the platform changes.

AUGUST 5, 2016: WHAT DID YOU KNOW ABOUT COMMUNICATION BETWEEN ROGER STONE, HIS ASSOCIATES, JULIAN ASSANGE OR WIKILEAKS?

After multiple public statements that the Russians were behind the hack-and-leak, on August 5, 2016 (after traveling from NY to LA to his home in FL), Roger Stone wrote a column claiming to believe that Guccifer 2.0 was a hacktivist with no ties to Russia. Stone’s purportedly changed beliefs about Guccifer 2.0 coincide with an August 4 claim he made in an email to Sam Nunberg that he had met with Julian Assange the night before. Stone’s claimed belief that Guccifer 2.0 is not Russian is key to his denials of any involvement or pre-knowledge of hack-and-leak events. It also kicked off an alternative story that others, up to and including Trump, have adopted to excuse their own embrace of the stolen emails. In other words, a key prong in the plausible deniability the Russians built into the hack-and-leak campaign came from long-time Trump associate Roger Stone, after a dramatic and unexplained change in beliefs (Lee Stranahan, who used to work for Breitbart and now works for Sputnik, has claimed some credit for the change, and given how lucid the August 5 column is, someone had to have helped Stone write it).

Ten days later, after Stone had called on Twitter to let him out of Twitter jail, Guccifer 2.0 and Stone started exchanging (fairly innocuous) DMs.

There are events both before and after that which suggest Stone — probably through more interesting go-betweens than Randy Credico — sought information on what dirt Assange and Wikileaks had, and what and when planned to do with it.

Much has been made, especially in the DNC lawsuit, about Stone’s seeming prediction that “it would soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel.” Perhaps that’s true (and Stone’s explanation for the tweet is garbage), but any explanation of Stone’s supposed prediction needs to acknowledge that he more often predicted Wikileaks would release Clinton Foundation emails, not Podesta ones, that he got the timing somewhat wrong, and that he didn’t dwell on the Podesta emails at all once Wikileaks started releasing them (preferring, instead, to talk about Bill Clinton’s lady problems). Still, that may reflect Stone involvement in the Peter Smith operation, and efforts to get WikiLeaks to release purported Clinton Foundation emails passed on via hackers.

That Mueller is even asking this suggests (if the several grand jury witnesses in recent months dedicated to it don’t already) that Mueller has a pretty good idea that Stone’s communications were more extensive than his denials let on. That he thinks Stone may have shared that information with Trump is all the more interesting.

All of which is to say that the known answers to Mueller’s questions map out a quid pro quo set up during the election, in which Russians offered a Putin meeting and dirt on Hillary, with the expectation that Trump would lift the Magnitsky sanctions if he won (and would get a Trump Tower in Moscow if he lost). I suspect there are other pieces to the quid pro quo, dealing with Ukraine and Syria. But certainly the June 9 meeting set up a dirt for Magnitsky understanding that the release of the Guccifer 2.0 emails may suggest the Trump camp signaled acceptance of.

RESOURCES
These are some of the most useful resources in mapping these events.

CNN’s timeline of investigative events
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/po ... tigations/
Majority HPSCI Report
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00 ... -115-1.pdf
Minority HPSCI Report
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00 ... -115-2.pdf
Trump Twitter Archive
http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com/archive
NPR Timeline on Trump’s ties to Aras Agalarov
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/17/53671440 ... se-pageant
George Papadopoulos plea
https://ia800101.us.archive.org/32/item ... 8.19.0.pdf
George Papadopoulos complaint
https://ia800101.us.archive.org/32/item ... 98.1.1.pdf
Internet Research Agency indictment
https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download
Text of the Don Jr Trump Tower Meeting emails
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... -text.html

Tom Arnold
‏
Verified account

@TomArnold
Follow Follow @TomArnold

Spent the day at my Funny & kind friend Felix Sater’s beautiful LI home. We shared stories about NY real estate, our mutual friend, visiting our mutual friend on the set of the Apprentice, Russia & video tapes.

TRUMP REPEATS THE “TAPP” STORY LINE FROM SEASON ONE

May 3, 2018/12 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
Last March 4, as it became clear the FBI was investigating him, President Trump wrote a bunch of tweets that claimed, falsely, that he had been wiretapped.




He even called for a “good lawyer” to make a case out of the “fact” that Obama was tapping his phone.



Today, Day Two of the Don and Rudy show, NBC has an exclusive story reporting that Michael Cohen’s phones were tapped before he was raided by the FBI a few weeks ago.

It’s certainly possible that the story is true. After all, prosecutors already revealed that “the USAO-SDNY has already obtained search warrants – covert until this point – on multiple different email accounts maintained by Cohen.” They also referred to some [redacted] reason to be concerned that Cohen was destroying evidence. So it’s certainly feasible SDNY had probable cause and reason to want to wiretap mob lawyer Michael Cohen.

But within minutes of the story breaking, Rudy was on the phone with Robert Costa, making false claims that if the wiretap picked up a conversation between Trump and Cohen, as the NBC report claims based off a single source, the FBI would need to notify Trump.

Giuliani tells me he can’t confirm there were wiretaps, hasn’t been informed. But when read NBC report, he was furious. “If they picked up the president, they would have had to notify him.” Said if true, wld be a “mockery” of attorney-client privilege and “gov’t misconduct”

And Giuliani’s concerns echo advice he gave Trump as the Cohen story was breaking, to stay off the phones with Cohen because they might be tapped. something the story itself describes, attributed to “sources close to” Rudy.

After the raid, members of Trump’s legal team advised the president not to speak to Cohen, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Two sources close to Trump’s newest attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, say he learned that days after the raid the president had made a call to Cohen, and told Trump never to call again out of concern the call was being recorded by prosecutors.

Why would this detail be included in this NBC story? It’s like a Chekhov suicide pill, unnecessary to the story in chief but useful for giving a story additional dramatic meaning [yes, I made that term up, but I’ve got a PhD in literature, so am taking license to do so].

Incidentally, Corey Lewandowski was dining with Rudy last night before he went on Hannity.

As to the report about the wiretap itself, the NBC story is sourced to:

” two people with knowledge of the legal proceedings involving Cohen” [a kind of code often used to describe defense lawyers, though there are so many involved in this wiretap that it could be any of many]

“one person with direct knowledge”

“the person ” [that is, with direct knowledge — this is the confirmation that a call to the White House got picked up]

Nowhere does the story explain why someone with knowledge of a wiretap would want to burn it.

Certainly, there are explanations that given the people involved might explain the story. Michael Avenatti has claimed to know quite a bit about the surveillance of Michael Cohen; certainly, he has had communications with prosecutors involved, not least about whether he can intervene in the case. Alternately, Rudy is still quite close to some of NY’s more unethical FBI Agents, and it’s certainly possible one of them leaked the news.

By all means, let’s entertain the distinct possibility that the President’s personal lawyer, with all his mob ties, got treated like a mob lawyer. But let’s remember that Rudy appears to have made promises he can end the investigations into the President in the short term. He’s a liar. And Trump has specifically lied about being wiretapped before. So even if Cohen was wiretapped, beware serial liars making claims about the impact of such wiretaps on the President himself.

The President who cried “wiretap” once too often should be treated with a great deal of skepticism, particularly given the way Rudy immediately used this story to attack the investigation into Cohen.

Update: And now Rudy is using the alleged wiretap to call for Sessions to investigate those who were investigating Cohen.

Rudy Giuliani called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to intervene in the Michael Cohen case and put the people behind the probe “under investigation” in a phone call with The Hill on Thursday.

“I am waiting for the Attorney General to step in, in his role as defender of justice, and put these people under investigation,” Giuliani said, reacting to an NBC News report that phones belonging to Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal attorney, had been tapped by investigators.

He gives up the game when he complains that FBI didn’t inform “us” of the alleged wiretap.

But Giuliani said that a wiretapping of Cohen would amount to “gross misconduct” by the government. He further alleged that “this case has been surrounded by numerous acts” that fit that description.

Giuliani added sarcastically, “And they don’t even notify us? I mean, he’s only the president of the United States.”

Rudy wasn’t representing Trump when the raid occurred.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/03/t ... eason-one/

INDICTED Turkish Minister Former General Manager...GIULIANI
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... ni#p650476

Mike Pence thinks he could become president soon
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/mike-p ... dent-soon/

Michael Avenatti
‏
Verified account

@MichaelAvenatti
11m11 minutes ago
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Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump are making it up as they go along. Never before has that old adage been more appropriate: “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” - W. Scott. How stupid do they think all of us are? #basta

Polly Sigh

Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg [Putin ally whose

Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg [Putin ally whose US associates donated a combined $1.25M to Trump inaugural fund] was the oligarch questioned & his electronic devices searched by Mueller investigators after he stepped off a plane in the US.

Viktor Vekselberg, Russian Billionaire, Was Questioned by Mueller’s Investigators

By ADAM GOLDMAN, BEN PROTESS and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUMMAY 4, 2018


Federal agents working with the special counsel stopped a billionaire Russian businessman, Viktor Vekselberg, at a New York-area airport this year. Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
WASHINGTON — When the United States sought to punish Russia last month for its election interference and other aggressions, it targeted some of Russia’s wealthiest men, imposing sanctions on those viewed as enriching themselves off President Vladimir V. Putin’s government.

Now it turns out that one of the men, Viktor F. Vekselberg, was also singled out in another of the efforts to confront Russia’s election interference: the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

Federal agents working with Mr. Mueller stopped Mr. Vekselberg, a billionaire businessman, at a New York-area airport this year and sought to search his electronic devices and question him, according to people familiar with the matter. They confronted him after he stepped off a private plane about two months ago, according to one of the people.

There is no indication that Mr. Mueller suspects Mr. Vekselberg of wrongdoing. But Mr. Vekselberg attended the presidential inauguration last year, and the interest in him suggests that the special counsel has intensified his focus on potential connections between Russian oligarchs and the Trump campaign and inaugural committee.

Though it is unclear what prompted Mr. Mueller’s investigators to approach Mr. Vekselberg, his widespread corporate interests and attendance at Mr. Trump’s inauguration are among the potential avenues for examination. Mr. Vekselberg also attended a December 2015 dinner in Russia where Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, was also among the guests and sat beside Mr. Putin. The dinner was hosted by RT, the English-language television news network financed by the Kremlin.

Mr. Flynn was ousted weeks after the inauguration amid revelations that he misled the vice president and others about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty in December to lying to the F.B.I. and is cooperating with the special counsel.

Another potential area of interest for Mr. Mueller is Mr. Vekselberg’s business in Cyprus, the Mediterranean nation considered a magnet for Russian money. Mr. Vekselberg has controlled a company that has been the largest single shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus. Around the same time that Mr. Vekselberg was investing in the bank, Mr. Trump’s future commerce secretary, Wilbur L. Ross, was its vice chairman.

Mr. Mueller’s interest in Mr. Vekselberg has not been previously reported. CNN has reported that investigators for the special counsel stopped an unnamed Russian oligarch at a New York-area airport.

A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment; a lawyer and a spokesman for Mr. Vekselberg did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, the spokesman confirmed that Mr. Vekselberg attended Mr. Trump’s swearing-in as president.

Mr. Vekselberg’s ticket to the inauguration came from his cousin and business associate, Andrew Intrater. Mr. Intrater, an American who lives in New York, donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, campaign finance records show.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Intrater, according to a person briefed on the matter, though there is no indication that he is suspected of wrongdoing. A person close to Mr. Intrater said that he was encouraged to attend the inauguration by an American friend, and that he had wanted to use the trip as an opportunity to meet with business associates in Washington. Documents the person provided indicated that Mr. Intrater intended to hold business meetings during the weekend of the inauguration.

Mr. Intrater is the chief executive of Columbus Nova, an investment management firm whose biggest client is the Renova Group, Mr. Vekselberg’s sprawling conglomerate that operates in the energy sector and elsewhere.

At one point, Renova donated $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Mr. Vekselberg, who has a net worth estimated at more than $13 billion by Forbes, has primarily made his fortune in oil and metals. And as his wealth has risen, he appears to have maintained strong ties to the Kremlin.

Mr. Vekselberg is among the select Russian oligarchs who made their fortunes in the early post-Soviet period and managed to retain wealth under Mr. Putin while others went to prison or into exile. In 2010, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the Russian president at the time, appointed Mr. Vekselberg to help lead a technology-business project near Moscow.

Mr. Vekselberg, who is believed to have a favorable relationship with Mr. Putin, was one of seven Kremlin-linked oligarchs hit with sanctions in April by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration’s decision to target Mr. Vekselberg and the Renova Group with sanctions underscored his perceived closeness to the Kremlin. The sanctions — against seven of Russia’s richest men and their companies as well as 17 top government officials — were aimed at penalizing those seen as enriching themselves from Mr. Putin’s government.

And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Russian-American joint venture, according to an archived version of the company’s website.

And during a thaw in United States-Russian relations — the so-called reset orchestrated by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state — Mr. Vekselberg was appointed to help attract Silicon Valley investors to the technology park outside Moscow, known as Skolkovo.

“The whole country needs some sort of breakthrough,” he told The New York Times in a 2010 interview about the effort.

Mr. Vekselberg also donated to Fort Ross, a state park in California that is the site of a 19th-century Russian settlement, to keep it open during the state’s financial crunch in the recession.

After making his fortune in aluminum and oil in Siberia in the 1990s, Mr. Vekselberg, together with partners, closed in 2003 what was at the time the largest private transaction in Russian history by forming a joint oil-pumping venture with the British company BP, called TNK-BP.

But soon, BP executives came to suspect the Russian partners had close ties to the F.S.B., the main successor intelligence agency to the K.G.B., and other Russian security services. The F.S.B. classified oil field maps and closely tailed British employees. Once, during a business dispute with the Russians, BP’s office in Moscow was raided by police officers armed with assault rifles.

Amid this conflict with BP, one of Mr. Vekselberg’s partners, German Khan, turned up for a dinner with a BP executive at a remote hunting lodge in Russia with a chrome-plated pistol, according to a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks. Mr. Khan confided to the executive that he considered the 1972 film “The Godfather” a “manual for life.”

Mr. Khan, too, has crossed paths with the special counsel investigation: Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer sentenced to 30 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I., is his son-in-law.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/p ... d=tw-share