rigorousintuition.ca

seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 23, 2017 10:16 am wrote:

Laurence Tribe‏Verified account
@tribelaw

Trump's failed bluff "endeavored to impede the due administration of justice" in criminal violation of 18 USC 1503:

Hey, Mueller, You Should Check Out Iceland

That's where a shady Trump associate got some of his money. And where some investigators heard Russian footsteps.
By Timothy L. O'Brien
24
June 23, 2017, 6:30 AM CDT

Land of opportunities. Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Earlier this week I wrote about the Bayrock Group, a property developer that did business deals for a decade with President Donald Trump.

Felix Sater -- a Bayrock principal who was a career criminal with American and Russian mob ties and who has remained in the Trump orbit -- helped reel in funds of murky origin that Bayrock and Trump used for projects such as the Trump Soho hotel in Manhattan. And one of Bayrock's biggest financial backers was an Icelandic investment bank, the FL Group.

Iceland would seem like an unlikely place for U.S. Justice Department investigators to look as they probe Trump connections with Russia and related matters. Yet there are trails to pursue there.



When Sater convinced FL to invest in Bayrock in 2007, Iceland was a font of easy money caught up in a financial binge so frenzied that it would cause the country's economy to implode in 2008.

Prior to that collapse, a handful of hard-driving financiers -- Icelanders dubbed them "The Vikings" -- took control of Iceland's three main banks following a series of controversial privatizations.

The Vikings pulled in piles of money from overseas and then went about making global acquisitions. Some of them loaned recklessly, had interlocking business relationships, produced glossy and misleading financial statements, made end runs around unsophisticated regulators and at the peak of their powers controlled assets worth 10 times more than Iceland's gross domestic product.

FL -- an investment firm that owned the largest stake in one of Iceland's three big banks -- was controlled by Jon Asgeir Johannesson, who once described himself as "more rock star than businessman."

FL drew funds from all three of Iceland’s major banks and then invested in a wide range of businesses: insurers, airlines, real estate, gambling, a brewery, retailers, commercial shipping, a fruit juice maker -- and Trump’s partner, Bayrock.

When Iceland's bubble burst in 2008 and an island of just 320,000 people was left reeling, FL was the first major firm to collapse. The big banks soon followed. Amid the political and economic upheaval that followed, Iceland let its banks fail and sent some of the bankers responsible to prison. (Johanneson was eventually convicted of tax and accounting fraud and fined, but received suspended prison terms; he didn’t respond to interview requests.)

To pursue the bankers, Iceland appointed a local prosecutor and a well-known Norwegian fraud investigator to oversee what evolved into a team of more than 100 people.

The special prosecutor, Olafur Hauksson, was a former police chief of a small town near Reykjavik who had no prior experience probing financial fraud. A friendly, dedicated and bear-sized man who took on a job that few in Iceland wanted because of the powerful players involved, Hauksson still secured more than two dozen fraud convictions against Icelandic financiers.

Hauksson, whom I interviewed at his Reykjavik office, said he didn't see evidence of Russian funds moving through the banks he has investigated for the last nine years. He qualified that observation by pointing out that he was tasked with narrowly examining financial and managerial malfeasance, and that his work didn't include a deep, global probe into financial dealings outside the country.

Hauksson was joined early in his investigation by Eva Joly, whom Iceland brought on for advice and to elevate the sophistication and breadth of the probe. She has a decidedly darker view than Hauksson of outside influence on Iceland’s banking system.

Born in Norway, Joly later moved to France and eventually became a French judge specializing in financial crimes and public corruption. After that, she served as a prominent prosecutor and spearheaded a number of major European fraud investigations. She's now a member of the European Parliament.

When I asked her during an interview in her Brussels office about ways in which the FL Group, Bayrock and Russian money might have intersected, she brightened: "I have been waiting almost 10 years for a journalist to walk into my office and ask me these questions."

Joly said that she had to prod the Icelandic government to commit resources to an investigation that implicated many of the country's most powerful political and business leaders. (She also likes to point out how many Icelanders -- along with a former prime minister -- surfaced as owners of off-shore accounts in the Panama Papers document trove: "600.")

Like Haukkson, Joly said that she never uncovered evidence that Russian money was moving through Iceland's banks. Unlike Haukkson, she was interested in the global funds washing in and out of Iceland's lightly regulated banks and wanted to explore that vigorously. But she says she needed greater cooperation from authorities in other countries to uncover the source of the funds, and that didn’t happen.

"There was a huge amount of money that came into these banks that wasn't entirely explained by central bank lending," she said. "Only Mafia-like groups fill a gap like that."

Another Icelander involved in the country's fraud investigations said that substantial Russian funds are likely to have moved through the banks there, but that it’s a subject Icelanders prefer to avoid -- even though the first country that offered financial aid to Iceland when the 2008 meltdown occurred was Russia, and even though legions of Russian oligarchs frequently jetted in and out of Reykjavik.

The late Boris Berezovksy, once one of the wealthiest and wiliest of Russia's oligarchs, thought the Russia-Iceland connection was obvious. He told a SkyTV interviewer in 2009 that if you wanted to look for where "Putin and his cronies" might be laundering money, well, "the best example, definitely, is Iceland."

Berezovsky and Russian President Vladimir Putin were well acquainted. Putin helped Berezovsky get an automobile dealership launched in St. Petersburg, Russia and Berezovsky later played a pivotal role in Putin’s political ascent.

When Berezovsky broke into the car market in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, the city was a notoriously difficult place to do business. The Russian Mafia held sway and the city’s struggling economy was still dominated by the Russian state. The city’s mayor had placed his young deputy –- Putin -- in charge of economic and business development there.

“Putin took a long view and operated a kind of favor bank –- doing something for someone today, calling upon them for something tomorrow,” says Stephen Kotkin, director of the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies and a leading authority on Russia. “Given what was at stake, how Putin did his job, and how Russia works, it is unimaginable that anything of significance could have happened in St. Petersburg without Putin’s direct involvement or subsequent blessing.”

Berezovsky and Putin’s relationship later fell apart. When the Russian president began nationalizing the oligarch’s holdings, Berezovsky grew vigilant about where his funds went after the Kremlin got its hands on them.

"Russian top-level bureaucrats like Putin, like others, and oligarchs, together they create a system," for buying assets outside of Russia, Berezovsky told the SkyTV interviewer. Iceland, he noted, was part of that "system."

A prominent European financier who met with Felix Sater when Sater was doing deals with Bayrock and the Trump Organization told me that Sater bragged about his own relationship with Berezovsky. (Sater did not respond to repeated interview requests.)

Berezovsky wasn't the only Russia connection Sater bragged about. A former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, said in a series of interviews and in a lawsuit that Sater claimed that funds the FL Group invested in Trump-Bayrock projects were tied to Putin. The Kremlin told me that no such connection existed, and no documentation has surfaced indicating otherwise.

Russian roots were also represented in Iceland’s banks through Thor Bjorgolfsson, a prominent Reykjavik banker and businessman. He and his father made hundreds of millions of dollars in the bottling and brewery businesses in St. Petersburg during the Putin years there from 1990 to 1996, and after selling those assets they later got control of one of Iceland’s most prestigious banks. (Bjorgolfsson declined to be interviewed. In his autobiography, he mentions two personal meetings with Putin -- one in St. Petersburg when Putin was a deputy mayor and another, a decade later, in the Kremlin after Putin became president.)

At the height of Iceland’s banking boom, Bjorgolfsson tried to outflank the FL Group to make his own investment in Bayrock. Kriss, the former Bayrock insider, said he met with Bjorgolfsson to discuss the bid at the Mercer Hotel in Manhattan – but that Sater brushed off that offer, saying that FL was preferable because of its proximity to Putin.

Even if Putin had nothing to do with FL, FL had a lot to do with Bayrock – it agreed to invest $50 million in the developer. And Bayrock was the future president's business partner. Where Bayrock’s and FL’s money came from, exactly, may be a useful question for the Justice Department’s investigators to answer.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... ut-iceland

Bloomberg Column Suggests Mueller “Check Out Iceland”


Words by
Paul Fontaine
@pauldfontaine
Photos by
Gage Skidmore/Remy Steinegger/World Economic Forum/Wikimedia Commons
Published July 5, 2017

As we watch the salty hell circus that is the Trump administration Russian collusion investigations unfold from our tiny rock in the North Atlantic, we are at once horrified and relieved—horrified, because of the way the administration has been behaving, and relieved, because at least, we tell ourselves, this madness isn’t happening here.

All that changed with a single opinion piece published by Bloomberg last month, “Hey, Mueller, You Should Check Out Iceland.” In this article, Timothy L. O’Brien makes a compelling case for why Special Counsel Robert Mueller should look into Iceland’s shady financial past for clues that could tie the Trump administration to Russian oligarchs.

The main thrust of the article concerns property developer Bayrock Group and Felix Sater, “a Bayrock principal who was a career criminal with American and Russian mob ties and who has remained in the Trump orbit,” O’Brien writes, and who “helped reel in funds of murky origin that Bayrock and Trump used for projects such as the Trump Soho hotel in Manhattan.” As O’Brien also points out, one of Bayrock’s largest financial backers was the now-defunct Icelandic investment bank FL Group.

Every Icelander knows the major points of the story of FL Group. They owned enormous stakes in one of Iceland’s three major banks, and the investment company itself was run disgraced tycoon Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson. They siphoned in all kinds of money from all Iceland’s banks to invest in all kinds of ventures, including Bayrock.

It’s very likely making people nervous; most definitely, the kind of people who were hoping that the post-crash investigations were done and over with, with all their skeletons resolutely buried in the back of the closet.
In fairness, it bears emphasising that no one has found any hard connections between Russian oligarchs and FL Group. But O’Brien recounts that when he spoke with renowned corruption hunter Eva Joly, she noted that vast sums of money were “washing in and out” of Icelandic banks before the 2008 crash which have largely gone unaccounted for.

“There was a huge amount of money that came into these banks that wasn’t entirely explained by central bank lending,” O’Brien recounts her saying. “Only Mafia-like groups fill a gap like that.”

O’Brien cites other whispers, hints, and insinuations from various other sources, but nothing constituting hard evidence. As it’s newsworthy nonetheless, the Icelandic media has picked up on this, and it’s very likely making people nervous; most definitely, the kind of people who were hoping that the post-crash investigations were done and over with, with all their skeletons resolutely buried in the back of the closet.

All this may end up being a foregone conclusion anyway. As O’Brien himself admits, hard evidence when it comes to Russian oligarch connections to Iceland are very hard to come by. They’ll likely be even harder to come by some ten years after the fact. His column nonetheless strikes a nerve with us, and is a sober reminder that in this connected world, there are no islands.
https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2017/ ... t-iceland/

THE RIGHT WING
Newt Gingrich Plays Goebbels for Trump in Insane Attack on Justice Department and Mueller
Gingrich smears the DOJ's mission as a leftist vendetta.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet July 26, 2017, 11:22 AM GMT


The Trump administration, which has been caught lying hundreds of times and continues to ceaselessly attack the media, sunk to new lows Tuesday as former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich launched an attack worthy of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

Gingrich, who has never shied away from verbal jousting, held forth on NPR’s Morning Edition in an outrageous, eight-minute attack on the federal Department of Justice, smearing the DOJ as a “left-wing” institution bending laws and abusing its authority to destroy lives. He said the lawyers who are overseeing the special counsel investigating the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia are all Democrats, as evidenced by donations to institutions supporting that party.

Gingrich glossed over the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller is a Republican—as NPR host Rachel Martin interjected—and countered that the DOJ is filled with Trump-hating career staffers. He said Mueller’s first hires included lawyers who were “killers,” predicting they would stop at nothing to convict Trump associates of fake crimes.

Gingrich's assault did not merely seek to delegitimize the ongoing investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia—which may bleed over into Trump's business deals with Kremlin-connected Russians. It was also an attack on the DOJ’s mission, writ large, which includes enforcing anti-corruption laws—which Gingrich fully knows, being the first Speaker of the House ever fined while in office for ethical breaches ($300,000 in 1997).

While Gingrich plays the part of the loyal foot soldier to Trump, his attack fits the administration's pattern of seeking to delegitimize critics in the press and the government who do not embrace Trump’s far-right agenda. Gingrich's attacks intentionally distort the DOJ’s mission, the basis of Mueller’s role and the legitimacy of the Trump-Russia probe. The purportedly anti-Trump lawyers he names all have Jewish surnames. Gingrich is vying to be Trump’s attack-dog minister of propaganda. Goebbels would be proud.

Gingrich opened his attack by attacking the DOJ as a bastion of leftists, offering proof via guilt by association, which could be seen, he said, by the vast majority of their presidential campaign contributions going to Clinton.

“The Justice Department is an extraordinarily left-wing institution,” Gingrich began. “Ninety-seven percent of its donations went to Hillary Clinton. It has an embedded bureaucracy, which was captured very, very well by Sidney Powell in her [2014] book, Licensed to Lie. And I think that he’s [Trump] deeply troubled by the entire way that both Comey and Mueller have operated, and the degree to which the attorney general has not exercised any authority over that.”

It’s important to put Gingrich’s remarks in context. He makes it sound like the DOJ’s employees are uniquely anti-Trump. But as The Hill reported last October, employees at virtually every federal agency overwhelmingly gave to Clinton’s campaign: from 84 percent of those making a presidential campaign donation at Defense; to 94 percent at the IRS; to 95 percent and above at Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Justice, State and Treasury. Why the pattern? Because federal employees want a pro-government president, academics told The Hill.

Nonetheless, Gingrich attacked the DOJ as uniquely anti-Trump, accusing Sessions of not “enforcing the law” by reeling in Mueller. When Martin countered that it's not the attorney general’s job to protect the president, Gingrich launched his next distortion.

“What you just said has a misleading implication,” he replied. “It is the attorney general’s job to enforce the law… Andy McCarthy, who’s a former Department of Justice prosecutor, who prosecuted the 1992 World Trade Center bombings, has said over and over again that there is no evidence of a crime. So what is Mueller investigating? This is a fishing expedition.”

Gingrich is name-dropping rabid right-wingers as authorities. Powell’s 2014 book is an unabashed attack on the DOJ. McCarthy is an early critic of President Obama who in 2008 wrote for the National Review, “Obama’s personal radicalism, including his collaboration with radical, America-hating Leftists, should have been disqualifying.” But beyond citing blowhards whose views are championed on far-right websites like Breitbart.com, Gingrich is fundamentally twisting what a DOJ investigation does.

Martin rejected his "fishing expedition" frame, saying that police investigations pursue unanswered questions.

“That’s not true,” Gingrich replied. “You have no reason for appointing somebody with the power of the government if you have no evidence of a crime having been committed. It’s very clear in the statute that governs this kind of appointment.”

Wait a minute, Martin said; the DOJ decided an investigation was warranted. That decision included Sessions, even though the attorney general recused himself. Trump keeps saying the whole Russian collusion investigation should not happen in the first place, she said, which is suspect.

“Of course, it’s suspect to you,” Gingrich said. “But isn’t it suspect to you that 97 percent of the donations by people employed at Justice went to Hillary Clinton? And then in terms of Mueller’s law firm, it was 99.82 percent went to Hillary Clinton. And in terms of the people he’s been hiring, they are paid killers. If you read Sidney Powell’s book about the Enron case, you will see these names coming up. These are people who the Supreme Court, on a 9-0 vote, rebuked.”

When Martin pointed out that Sessions is no liberal, Gingrich countered that Sessions is not serving Trump by allowing the special counsel to proceed. He went on to say that Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, a career department employee, was running the DOJ.

“The whole point that Trump is making is he [Sessions] stepped aside,” Gingrich said. “He’s not the leader of the department. A career Justice Department person is the leader of the department. And it’s a department whose culture is very liberal, a department whose culture is very anti-Trump."

Martin replied that Gingrich was suggesting the department should be run entirely by Republicans. Shouldn't the DOJ be non-partisan and enforce the laws on the books?

“And if you believe that, you live in a fantasy land,” Gingrich interjected. “If you believe the Justice Department does not have a deep cultural bias, and you believe that the average conversation at the Justice Department is not anti-Trump, you’re just living in a fantasy land. That’s the president’s frustration. He doesn’t expect the attorney general to single-handedly change everything. He doesn’t expect the attorney general to in any way impede the law. But let me go back to the original thing. I am personally appalled as a former Speaker of the House that neither the House nor the Senate Judiciary Committee have asked of Rosenstein, the person that is in charge of this investigation… what is the crime which Mueller is investigating? Tell us what the code is that has been violated that he’s investigating. Second, why would he hire only anti-Trump lawyers? These are legitimate questions that need to be answered.”

Martin countered that Gingrich cannot prove the DOJ is filled with anti-Trump lawyers.

“Oh, give me a break,” Gingrich replied, then saying it didn’t matter that Mueller was a Republican because his law firm was filled with people who donated to Democrats. “Yes, and [Mueller] worked in a law firm that gave 99.82 percent of its donations to Hillary. But let me give you an example. One of the first people he hired had worked for the Clinton Foundation—I love this because it is so ironic—had worked for the Clinton Foundation fighting against Freedom of Information Act requests. Now would you say that a lawyer who worked for the Clinton Foundation trying to cut off FOIA, which I would assume NPR was very much in favor of Freedom of Information Act requests, would you say that person’s suspect? Do you think they probably have a bias?”

The rest of the interview went even further into the guilt-by-association weeds, seeking to turn the focus away from Trump’s attacks on Sessions, Comey and Mueller. “If he has nothing to hide, why is he acting like he does?” Martin asked.

Gingrich replied that special counsels are runaway prosecutors who will not quit until they have convicted someone—this time someone in Trump’s orbit.

“Mr. Comey’s last independent counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who Comey got appointed after he knew there was no crime, and after they knew who had leaked the CIA agent’s name, and they told the person who leaked to shut up,” he said. “And then they went after Scooter Libby who was Dick Cheney’s chief of staff because they wanted to get Cheney, and they then locked up a New York Times reporter for 85 days to get her to testify. And you looked at that record… Mueller is going to get somebody."

The interview ended shortly thereafter, with Gingrich conceding that even Rudy Giuliani said he would have recused himself, had he been appointed attorney general. But that’s a distraction from what’s really going on with Gingrich’s attack on Mueller and the entire Justice Department. Gingrich is trying to be Trump's Goebbels.

As Leonard W. Doob wrote in his essay, “Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda,” published in Public Opinion and Propaganda, the first two principles were, “Propagandists must have access to intelligence concerning events and public opinion,” and “propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority.” Clearly, arch Trump defenders like Gingrich cannot abide by having a special counsel investigation proceed where it cannot influence its scope, censor its findings and shape the publicly reported outcome.

While many political observers have said it is only a matter of time before Trump fires Mueller, what’s new and different with Gingrich’s latest line of attack is that he’s not merely angling to be Trump’s top propaganda hitman; he’s willing to smear and discredit the Justice Department to protect Trump’s presidency, as if Trump’s team is above the law and the uppermost federal law enforcement agency's efforts to uphold it.
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/newt ... nistration

Trump’s Ex-Biz Partner Eyed Energy Deal As He Helped Push Ukraine ‘Peace Plan’


Derick Dirmaier for TPM
By SAM THIELMAN Published JULY 27, 2017 2:43 PM

When a former business partner of President Donald Trump’s and a Ukrainian politician approached an ally of the administration with a “peace plan,” they were already at work on an energy trading deal. That deal, said one of the region’s leading energy policy experts, stood to benefit from the scheme the pair proposed to resolve the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Felix Sater, who worked obtaining financing for Trump projects including the Trump SoHo, told TPM that the “peace plan” came up in the course of his attempts to broker an agreement to sell energy abroad from Ukraine’s nuclear power plants with Andrii Artemenko, at the time a Ukrainian parliamentarian. The plan was to refurbish dilapidated nuclear power plants in that country and then sell the power generated by them into Eastern Europe, using established commodities trading companies as a means of retroactively financing the deal, Sater said.

The business proposition would help break the Russian monopoly on energy, according to Sater. But Artemenko’s political proposal would have had Ukrainian voters decide whether to lease Crimea to Russia for 50 or 100 years—an idea encouraged by advisors to Russian president Vladimir Putin, and so offensive to his country’s government that Ukrainian prosecutors accused Artemenko of treasonous conspiring with Russia after the peace plan was first reported earlier this year.

It’s been widely reported that Sater and Artemenko met with Michael Cohen, who was then Trump’s personal lawyer and who has known Sater since he was a teenager, in January; under discussion was the peace plan, which would have paved a path for the U.S. to lift sanctions on Russia. Cohen has given conflicting statements about his involvement. Sater said he came to be involved in the scheme through Artemenko.

“We were trying to do a business deal at the same time,” Sater told TPM. “We were working on a business deal for about five months, and he kept telling me about the peace deal, and as the Trump administration won, that’s when I delivered it [the peace deal] to them.”

He insisted the political and business propositions were unrelated, other than each involving himself and Artemenko as primary players.

Sater had worked brokering major deals internationally for some time after the 1996 dissolution of White Rock, a firm at the center of a pump-and-dump securities fraud scandal that led to Sater’s conviction for fraud. Instead of going to prison, Sater paid a fine and went to work as an FBI informant. Those deals included a job for AT&T in Russia, as previously reported by Mother Jones, where Sater says the company was “trying to expand.”

Sater said the business proposition with Artemenko “was to try to rehabilitate the existing nuclear power plants in the Ukraine and build new ones using either U.S. or Canadian [companies] like GE, or the Koreans.” Ukraine’s history with nuclear power includes the Chernobyl disaster, and Sater noted that the aging plants needed refurbishment in order to continue working without another incident. Otherwise, he noted, “they’re ready to [have] another Chernobyl any day now.”

The pair further planned “to sell the excess power to [international energy companies] Trafigura or Vitol to sell the power to Eastern Europe, and in that way finance the plants,” Sater explained. He named Poland and Belarus as two potential state clients.

“It was a way to break the energy monopoly the Russians have,” he said.

Chi Kong Chyong, director of the Energy Policy Forum at Cambridge University’s Energy Policy Research Group, told TPM that energy independence from Russia was indeed a pressing issue in Ukraine, and noted a peace deal would ease the kind of international transaction Sater and Artemenko were proposing.

Sources close to the matter told TPM that there were no records of any current conversations between Sater or Artemenko and American industrial conglomerate GE. Trafigura and Vitol are trading houses that deal heavily in energy; Victoria Dix, a spokeswoman for Trafigura, said there was “no element of truth whatsoever” to any suggestion that Sater was pursuing a proposal with the company. Andrea Schlaepfer, a spokeswoman for Vitol, said, “We don’t comment on commercial activities.” Neither the Ukrainian Embassy nor the Consulate immediately responded to requests for comment.

Artemenko responded “Maybe later” when asked to comment generally on this story through Facebook Messenger. He did not respond to specific follow-up questions.

For Artemenko, the fallout from the January meeting with Sater and Cohen was immediate and severe. He was expelled from his Verkhovna Rada political party the day after the New York Times reported the meeting, and by May, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had stripped him of his citizenship.

For his part, Sater said he had nothing to do with the documents filled with damaging information on Ukrainian politicians, including Poroshenko, that Artemenko reportedly brought to the January meeting. “I never saw them,” Sater said, adding that Cohen might have thrown them in trash but he wasn’t sure. “I don’t want to get into it.”

Whether Sater and Artemenko’s energy trading plan was well underway or simply in the proposal stage by the time of the meeting, it would have been an easier sell with Artemenko’s Putin-approved ceasefire in place, according to Chyong.

“Any military conflict in your neighborhood or close to you affects the transaction cost of arranging commercial deals, whether that is between Ukraine and the eastern [EU, where Poland lies] or Ukraine and Belarus, for example,” Chyong said. “It increases the transactional costs. The conflict itself, of course, forces the Ukraine to think about other ways and other sources of importation of energy—gas and electricity trading.”

Exporting energy from Ukraine would be easiest to places like Belarus and Russia, Chyong noted. Old electrical grids are among the strongest remaining ties between former Soviet bloc states and Russia itself; Ukraine hopes to break them by 2025, something Sater said he hoped he could help along.

Sater insisted his motivations in bringing the proposal to the Trump administration via his longtime acquaintance Cohen were altruistic.

“People are getting killed. They’re dying,” he said. “I didn’t see anything wrong with trying to do something that could help all sides.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... peace-plan

Bill Browder’s Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing Could Explain Anthony Scaramucci’s Bizarre Behaviour
Deliberate?
31/07/2017 10:31 | Updated 8 hours ago
Chris York
Senior Editor, HuffPost UK

In his first week on the job, Anthony ‘The Mooch’ Scaramucci grabbed headlines around the world by swearing like a trooper and saying things like this about his new colleagues...


The new White House Communications Director was so busy causing a scene he even reportedly missed the birth of his baby son on Monday, congratulating his recently-estranged wife by text message.


Whilst barely any type of behaviour from the Trump administration surprises anymore, it’s worth asking if The Mooch’s outbursts were spontaneous or designed to distract from something else.

On Wednesday 26th July, financier Bill Browder was due to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.


In pre-prepared remarks published by The Atlantic, he said: “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use US enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests.”

On the same day Browder was due to testify, President Trump announced, seemingly out of nowhere, that transgender people will not be allowed to serve in “any capacity” in the US military.

Browder’s testimony was then postponed to the next day - the same day The Mooch made headlines when his expletive-ridden tirade was published.


Browder’s testimony, which received relatively little coverage, is extraordinary with a senator calling it one of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s “most important” hearings.

In it he describes a Russian system of government that operates in the shadows using corruption, blackmail, torture and murder - all led by Vladimir Putin.

Browder said: “Effectively the moment that you enter into their world, you become theirs.”

Browder was a very successful businessman operating in Russia and was on friendly terms with Putin but this all changed when he and his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered evidence of a huge $230 million corruption scandal.

The pair reported it to the Russian authorities: “And we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys.

“It turned out that in Putin’s Russia, there are no good guys.”

Instead of investigating the allegations Browder was himself accused of tax evasion and was barred from reentering Russia after travelling abroad on business.

Magnitsky was jailed and is believed to have been beaten to death in 2009.

Browder said: “Sergei Magnitsky was murdered as my proxy. If Sergei had not been my lawyer, he would still be alive today.”


Nataliya Magnitskaya (L), mother of Sergei Magnitsky, grieves over her son ‘s body during his funeral at a cemetery in Moscow November 20, 2009.


In 2012 the dead lawyer gave his name to the Maginstky Act which was passed by the US Congress to target Russian human rights abusers by barring them from America and freezing their financial assets.

Browder said of the move: “Putin was furious. Looking for ways to retaliate against American interests, he settled on the most sadistic and evil option of all: banning the adoption of Russian orphans by American families.”

But why was Putin so angry at the sanctions? Bowder explains:

For two reasons. First, since 2012 it’s emerged that Vladimir Putin was a beneficiary of the stolen $230 million that Sergei Magnitsky exposed.

Recent revelations from the Panama Papers have shown that Putin’s closest childhood friend, Sergei Roldugin, a famous cellist, received $2 billion of funds from Russian oligarchs and the Russian state.

It’s commonly understood that Mr. Roldugin received this money as an agent of Vladimir Putin. Information from the Panama Papers also links some money from the crime that Sergei Magnitsky discovered and exposed to Sergei Roldugin.

Based on the language of the Magnitsky Act, this would make Putin personally subject to Magnitsky sanctions.

This is particularly worrying for Putin, because he is one of the richest men in the world. I estimate that he has accumulated $200 billion of ill-gotten gains from these types of operations over his 17 years in power.

He keeps his money in the West and all of his money in the West is potentially exposed to asset freezes and confiscation. Therefore, he has a significant and very personal interest in finding a way to get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions.

The second reason why Putin reacted so badly to the passage of the Magnitsky Act is that it destroys the promise of impunity he’s given to all of his corrupt officials.

There are approximately ten thousand officials in Russia working for Putin who are given instructions to kill, torture, kidnap, extort money from people, and seize their property.

Before the Magnitsky Act, Putin could guarantee them impunity and this system of illegal wealth accumulation worked smoothly. However, after the passage of the Magnitsky Act, Putin’s guarantee disappeared.

The Magnitsky Act created real consequences outside of Russia and this created a real problem for Putin and his system of kleptocracy.
Interestingly, Donald Trump Jr described his controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer last summer as a “short introductory meeting” focused on the disbanded program that had allowed American adoptions of Russian children.

This Russian lawyer was Natalia Veselnitskaya, a woman Browder describes as part of a “group of Russians acting on behalf of the Russian state”.

He adds:

Pyotr Katsyv, father to Denis Katsyv, is a senior Russian government official and well-placed member of the Putin regime; Denis Katsyv was caught by U.S. law enforcement using proceeds from the crime that Sergei Magnitsky uncovered to purchase high-end Manhattan real estate (the case recently settled with the Katsyv’s paying $6 million to the U.S. government). Natalia Veselnitskaya was their lawyer.

In addition to working on the Katsyv’ s money laundering defense, Ms. Veselnitskaya also headed the aforementioned lobbying campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act. She hired a number of lobbyists, public relations executives, lawyers, and investigators to assist her in this task.

Her first step was to set up a fake NGO that would ostensibly promote Russian adoptions, although it quickly became clear that the NGO’s sole purpose was to repeal the Magnitsky Act.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee, Browder was asked by Senator Lindsey Graham’s on the apparent contradiction of Russia allegedly having ties to the unverified dossier on Trump while also rooting for him to win the presidency.

Browder replied: “What you need to understand about the Russians is there is no ideology at all.

“Vladimir Putin is in the business of trying to create chaos everywhere.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal asked: “They’ve got you both ways: with the carrot of continued bribery, and the stick of exposure and blackmail if you defect?”

Browder replied: “That is how every single one of their relationships work. That’s how they grab people and keep them.

“And once you get stuck in with them, you can never leave.”

The full transcript of Browder’s prepared remarks is as follows...

Chairman Grassley, Ranking Member Feinstein, and members of the committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify today on the Russian government’s attempts to repeal the Magnitsky Act in Washington in 2016, and the enablers who conducted this campaign in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, by not disclosing their roles as agents for foreign interests.Before I get into the actions of the agents who conducted the anti-Magnitsky campaign in Washington for the benefit of the Russian state, let me share a bit of background about Sergei Magnitsky and myself.I am the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management. I grew up in Chicago, but for the last 28 years I’ve lived in Moscow and London, and am now a British citizen. From 1996 to 2005, my firm, Hermitage Capital, was one of the largest investment advisers in Russia with more than $4 billion invested in Russian stocks.Russia has a well-known reputation for corruption; unfortunately, I discovered that it was far worse than many had thought. While working in Moscow I learned that Russian oligarchs stole from shareholders, which included the fund I advised. Consequently, I had an interest in fighting this endemic corruption, so my firm started doing detailed research on exactly how the oligarchs stole the vast amounts of money that they did. When we were finished with our research we would share it with the domestic and international media.
For a time, this naming and shaming campaign worked remarkably well and led to less corruption and increased share prices in the companies we invested in. Why? Because President Vladimir Putin and I shared the same set of enemies. When Putin was first elected in 2000, he found that the oligarchs had misappropriated much of the president’s power as well. They stole power from him while stealing money from my investors. In Russia, your enemy’s enemy is your friend, and even though I’ve never met Putin, he would often step into my battles with the oligarchs and crack down on them.

That all changed in July 2003, when Putin arrested Russia’s biggest oligarch and richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin grabbed Khodorkovsky off his private jet, took him back to Moscow, put him on trial, and allowed television cameras to film Khodorkovsky sitting in a cage right in the middle of the courtroom. That image was extremely powerful, because none of the other oligarchs wanted to be in the same position. After Khodorkovsky’s conviction, the other oligarchs went to Putin and asked him what they needed to do to avoid sitting in the same cage as Khodorkovsky. From what followed, it appeared that Putin’s answer was, “Fifty percent.” He wasn’t saying 50 percent for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50 percent for Vladimir Putin personally. From that moment on, Putin became the biggest oligarch in Russia and the richest man in the world, and my anti-corruption activities would no longer be tolerated.

The results of this change came very quickly. On November 13, 2005, as I was flying into Moscow from a weekend away, I was stopped at Sheremetyevo airport, detained for 15 hours, deported, and declared a threat to national security.

Eighteen months after my expulsion a pair of simultaneous raids took place in Moscow. Over 25 Interior Ministry officials barged into my Moscow office and the office of the American law firm that represented me. The officials seized all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies of the funds that I advised. I didn’t know the purpose of these raids so I hired the smartest Russian lawyer I knew, a 35-year-old named Sergei Magnitsky. I asked Sergei to investigate the purpose of the raids and try to stop whatever illegal plans these officials had.Sergei went out and investigated. He came back with the most astounding conclusion of corporate identity theft: The documents seized by the Interior Ministry were used to fraudulently re-register our Russian investment holding companies to a man named Viktor Markelov, a known criminal convicted of manslaughter. After more digging, Sergei discovered that the stolen companies were used by the perpetrators to misappropriate $230 million of taxes that our companies had paid to the Russian government in the previous year.I had always thought Putin was a nationalist. It seemed inconceivable that he would approve of his officials stealing $230 million from the Russian state. Sergei and I were sure that this was a rogue operation and if we just brought it to the attention of the Russian authorities, the “good guys” would get the “bad guys” and that would be the end of the story.

We filed criminal complaints with every law enforcement agency in Russia, and Sergei gave sworn testimony to the Russian State Investigative Committee (Russia’s FBI) about the involvement of officials in this crime.

However, instead of arresting the people who committed the crime, Sergei was arrested. Who took him? The same officials he had testified against. On November 24, 2008, they came to his home, handcuffed him in front of his family, and threw him into pre-trial detention.Sergei’s captors immediately started putting pressure on him to withdraw his testimony. They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds, leaving the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat and no windowpanes, and he nearly froze to death. They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor and sewage bubbling up. They moved him from cell to cell in the middle of the night without any warning. During his 358 days in detention he was forcibly moved multiple times.They did all of this because they wanted him to withdraw his testimony against the corrupt Interior Ministry officials, and to sign a false statement that he was the one who stole the $230 million—and that he had done so on my instruction.Sergei refused. In spite of the grave pain they inflicted upon him, he would not perjure himself or bear false witness.After six months of this mistreatment, Sergei’s health seriously deteriorated. He developed severe abdominal pains, he lost 40 pounds, and he was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones and prescribed an operation for August 2009. However, the operation never occurred. A week before he was due to have surgery, he was moved to a maximum security prison called Butyrka, which is considered to be one of the harshest prisons in Russia. Most significantly for Sergei, there were no medical facilities there to treat his medical conditions.

At Butyrka, his health completely broke down. He was in agonizing pain. He and his lawyers wrote 20 desperate requests for medical attention, filing them with every branch of the Russian criminal justice system. All of those requests were either ignored or explicitly denied in writing.

After more than three months of untreated pancreatitis and gallstones, Sergei Magnitsky went into critical condition. The Butyrka authorities did not want to have responsibility for him, so they put him in an ambulance and sent him to another prison that had medical facilities. But when he arrived there, instead of putting him in the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell, chained him to a bed, and eight riot guards came in and beat him with rubber batons.That night he was found dead on the cell floor.Sergei Magnitsky died on November 16, 2009, at the age of 37, leaving a wife and two children.I received the news of his death early the next morning. It was by far the most shocking, heart-breaking, and life-changing news I’ve ever received.Sergei Magnitsky was murdered as my proxy. If Sergei had not been my lawyer, he would still be alive today.That morning I made a vow to Sergei’s memory, to his family, and to myself that I would seek justice and create consequences for the people who murdered him. For the last seven and a half years, I’ve devoted my life to this cause.Even though this case was characterized by injustice all the way through, the circumstances of Sergei’s torture and death were so extreme that I was sure some people would be prosecuted. Unlike other deaths in Russian prisons, which are largely undocumented, Sergei had written everything down. In his 358 days in detention, Sergei wrote over 400 complaints detailing his abuse. In those complaints he described who did what to him, as well as where, how, when, and why. He was able to pass his hand-written complaints to his lawyers, who dutifully filed them with the Russian authorities. Although his complaints were either ignored or rejected, copies of them were retained. As a result, we have the most well-documented case of human rights abuse coming out of Russia in the last 35 years.

When I began the campaign for justice with this evidence, I thought that the Russian authorities would have no choice but to prosecute at least some of the officials involved in Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and murder. It turns out I could not have been more wrong. Instead of prosecuting, the Russian authorities circled the wagons and exonerated everybody involved. They even went so far as to offer promotions and state honors to those most complicit in Sergei’s persecution.

It became obvious that if I was going to get any justice for Sergei Magnitsky, I was going to have to find it outside of Russia.But how does one get justice in the West for a murder that took place in Russia? Criminal justice is based on jurisdiction: One cannot prosecute someone in New York for a murder committed in Moscow. As I thought about it, the murder of Sergei Magnitsky was done to cover up the theft of $230 million from the Russian Treasury. I knew that the people who stole that money wouldn’t keep it in Russia. As easily as they stole the money, it could be stolen from them. These people keep their ill-gotten gains in the West, where property rights and rule of law exist. This led to the idea of freezing their assets and banning their visas here in the West. It would not be true justice but it would be much better than the total impunity they enjoyed.In 2010, I traveled to Washington and told Sergei Magnitsky’s story to Senators Benjamin Cardin and John McCain. They were both shocked and appalled and proposed a new piece of legislation called The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. This would freeze assets and ban visas for those who killed Sergei as well as other Russians involved in serious human rights abuse.

Despite the White House’s desire to reset relations with Russia at the time, this case shined a bright light on the criminality and impunity of the Putin regime and persuaded Congress that something needed to be done. In November 2012 the Magnitsky Act passed the House of Representatives by 364 to 43 votes and later the Senate 92 to 4 votes. On December 14, 2012, President Obama signed the Sergei Magnitsky Act into law.

Putin was furious. Looking for ways to retaliate against American interests, he settled on the most sadistic and evil option of all: banning the adoption of Russian orphans by American families.This was particularly heinous because of the effect it had on the orphans. Russia did not allow the adoption of healthy children, just sick ones. In spite of this, American families came with big hearts and open arms, taking in children with HIV, Down syndrome, Spina Bifida and other serious ailments. They brought them to America, nursed them, cared for them and loved them. Since the Russian orphanage system did not have the resources to look after these children, many of those unlucky enough to remain in Russia would die before their 18th birthday. In practical terms, this meant that Vladimir Putin sentenced his own, most vulnerable and sick Russian orphans to death in order to protect corrupt officials in his regime.Why did Vladimir Putin take such a drastic and malicious step?

For two reasons. First, since 2012 it’s emerged that Vladimir Putin was a beneficiary of the stolen $230 million that Sergei Magnitsky exposed. Recent revelations from the Panama Papers have shown that Putin’s closest childhood friend, Sergei Roldugin, a famous cellist, received $2 billion of funds from Russian oligarchs and the Russian state. It’s commonly understood that Mr. Roldugin received this money as an agent of Vladimir Putin. Information from the Panama Papers also links some money from the crime that Sergei Magnitsky discovered and exposed to Sergei Roldugin. Based on the language of the Magnitsky Act, this would make Putin personally subject to Magnitsky sanctions.

This is particularly worrying for Putin, because he is one of the richest men in the world. I estimate that he has accumulated $200 billion of ill-gotten gains from these types of operations over his 17 years in power. He keeps his money in the West and all of his money in the West is potentially exposed to asset freezes and confiscation. Therefore, he has a significant and very personal interest in finding a way to get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions.The second reason why Putin reacted so badly to the passage of the Magnitsky Act is that it destroys the promise of impunity he’s given to all of his corrupt officials.There are approximately ten thousand officials in Russia working for Putin who are given instructions to kill, torture, kidnap, extort money from people, and seize their property. Before the Magnitsky Act, Putin could guarantee them impunity and this system of illegal wealth accumulation worked smoothly. However, after the passage of the Magnitsky Act, Putin’s guarantee disappeared. The Magnitsky Act created real consequences outside of Russia and this created a real problem for Putin and his system of kleptocracy.

For these reasons, Putin has stated publicly that it was among his top foreign policy priorities to repeal the Magnitsky Act and to prevent it from spreading to other countries. Since its passage in 2012, the Putin regime has gone after everybody who has been advocating for the Magnitsky Act.

One of my main partners in this effort was Boris Nemtsov. Boris testified in front of the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, the Canadian Parliament, and others to make the point that the Magnitsky Act was a “pro-Russian” piece of legislation because it narrowly targeted corrupt officials and not the Russian people. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov was murdered on the bridge in front of the Kremlin.Boris Nemtsov’s protégé, Vladimir Kara-Murza, also traveled to law-making bodies around the world to make a similar case. After Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, was added to the Magnitsky List in December of 2016, Vladimir was poisoned. He suffered multiple organ failure, went into a coma and barely survived.The lawyer who represented Sergei Magnitsky’s mother, Nikolai Gorokhov, has spent the last six years fighting for justice. This spring, the night before he was due in court to testify about the state cover up of Sergei Magnitsky’s murder, he was thrown off the fourth floor of his apartment building. Thankfully he survived and has carried on in the fight for justice.

I’ve received many death threats from Russia. The most notable one came from Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2013. When asked by a group of journalists about the death of Sergei Magnitsky, Medvedev replied, “It’s too bad that Sergei Magnitsky is dead and Bill Browder is still alive and free.” I’ve received numerous other death threats from Russian sources through text messages, emails, and voicemails. U.S. government sources have warned me about a planned Russian rendition against me. These threats were in addition to numerous unsuccessful attempts that the Russian government has made to arrest me using Interpol or other formal legal assistance channels.

The Russian government has also used its resources and assets to try to repeal the Magnitsky Act. One of the most shocking attempts took place in the spring and summer of last year when a group of Russians went on a lobbying campaign in Washington to try to repeal the Magnitsky Act by changing the narrative of what had happened to Sergei. According to them, Sergei wasn’t murdered and he wasn’t a whistle-blower, and the Magnitsky Act was based on a false set of facts. They used this story to try to have Sergei’s name taken off of the Global Magnitsky Act that passed in December 2016. They were unsuccessful.Who was this group of Russians acting on behalf of the Russian state? Two men named Pyotr and Denis Katsyv, a woman named Natalia Veselnitskaya, and a large group of American lobbyists, all of whom are described below.

Pyotr Katsyv, father to Denis Katsyv, is a senior Russian government official and well-placed member of the Putin regime; Denis Katsyv was caught by U.S. law enforcement using proceeds from the crime that Sergei Magnitsky uncovered to purchase high-end Manhattan real estate (the case recently settled with the Katsyv’s paying $6 million to the U.S. government). Natalia Veselnitskaya was their lawyer.

In addition to working on the Katsyv’ s money laundering defense, Ms. Veselnitskaya also headed the aforementioned lobbying campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act. She hired a number of lobbyists, public relations executives, lawyers, and investigators to assist her in this task.Her first step was to set up a fake NGO that would ostensibly promote Russian adoptions, although it quickly became clear that the NGO’s sole purpose was to repeal the Magnitsky Act. This NGO was called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGI). It was registered as a corporation in Delaware with two employees on February 18, 2016. HRAGI was used to pay Washington lobbyists and other agents for the anti-Magnitsky campaign. (HRAGI now seems to be defunct, with taxes due.)Through HRAGI, Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet intelligence officer naturalised as an American citizen, was hired to lead the Magnitsky repeal effort. Mr. Akhmetshin has been involved in a number of similar campaigns where he’s been accused of various unethical and potentially illegal actions like computer hacking.

Veselnitskaya also instructed U.S. law firm Baker Hostetler and their Washington, D.C.-based partner Marc Cymrot to lobby members of Congress to support an amendment taking Sergei Magnitsky’s name off the Global Magnitsky Act. Mr. Cymrot was in contact with Paul Behrends, a congressional staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, as part of the anti-Magnitsky lobbying campaign.
Veselnitskaya, through Baker Hostetler, hired Glenn Simpson of the firm Fusion GPS to conduct a smear campaign against me and Sergei Magnitsky in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act. He contacted a number of major newspapers and other publications to spread false information that Sergei Magnitsky was not murdered, was not a whistle-blower, and was instead a criminal. They also spread false information that my presentations to lawmakers around the world were untrue.As part of Veselnitskaya’s lobbying, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Chris Cooper of the Potomac Group, was hired to organize the Washington, D.C.-based premiere of a fake documentary about Sergei Magnitsky and myself. This was one the best examples of Putin’s propaganda.They hired Howard Schweitzer of Cozzen O’Connor Public Strategies and former Congressman Ronald Dellums to lobby members of Congress on Capitol Hill to repeal the Magnitsky Act and to remove Sergei’s name from the Global Magnitsky bill.On June 13, 2016, they funded a major event at the Newseum to show their fake documentary, inviting representatives of Congress and the State Department to attend.While they were conducting these operations in Washington, D.C., at no time did they indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests, nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.United States law is very explicit that those acting on behalf of foreign governments and their interests must register under FARA so that there is transparency about their interests and their motives.Since none of these people registered, my firm wrote to the Department of Justice in July 2016 and presented the facts.I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests. I also hope that this story and others like it may lead to a change in the FARA enforcement regime in the future.Thank you.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/b ... 4ebb7675a6?

How an Anti-Putin Filmmaker Became a Kremlin Stooge
Andrei Nekrasov made a movie accusing Putin of bombing Moscow, then a "documentary" accusing Sergei Magnitsky of being the real criminal. What happened?

KATIE ZAVADSKI
07.25.17 1:00 AM ET
When the Trump family has tried to explain away Donald Trump Jr.’s most suspicious meetings with Russian officials, or the president’s with Vladimir Putin himself, they said they were just talking about orphans. But in the annals of Washington’s deeply troubled relations with Putin, that’s code: They were discussing sanctions.
In 2012, the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration imposed financial and travel restrictions on some of Putin’s closest allies because of mistreatment—or worse—that lead to the death of a whistleblowing tax lawyer in a Russian prison. The lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, had exposed a massive $230 million fraud committed by officials.
The Magnitsky Act, as the law is known, bars dozens of Russian officials from entering the U.S. or using its banking system because of their alleged involvement in Magnitsky’s death and other human rights violations.
Putin retaliated against the U.S. by blocking American adoption of Russian children, many of whom were physically or mentally impaired.
Since then, the Russian campaign to discredit the narrative of Magnitsky’s death, and get the sanctions overturned, has been one of Putin’s obsessions. What could be better than a report by a critic of his regime who suddenly saw the light and changed his views entirely?
This is the story of Andrei Nekrasov, a man who previously made documentaries saying that Putin’s rise to power was cemented by government-orchestrated bombings of apartment buildings in the dead of the night.
Now, Nekrasov appears on Russian TV saying that he investigated Magnitsky and saw the light, that the Magnitsky affair is one big hoax.

Nekrasov is central to the story of the Magnitsky sanctions because it is his film that was used to try to recruit Rep. Dana Rohrabacher to the Russian cause. And Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. to talk adoptions, paid for and attended a screening of Nekrasov’s movie in D.C. just days later.
In Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes, Nekrasov tells the story of how he was planning to put together an exposé about the whistleblower’s death at the hands of Russian authorities. Instead, he says he uncovered a massive lie by Magnitsky’s employer, American-born businessman Bill Browder, who became a leading proponent of sanctioning Russian officials after Magnitsky’s death in a Russian prison in 2009. Nekrasov questions not only the narrative of Magnitsky’s death by beating, but that of a Russian tax theft more broadly.
It’s not clear when Nekrasov filmed key parts of Magnitsky Act, but he absolves the Russian government of any responsibility for Magnitsky’s death. The film follows Nekrasov as he supposedly figures out the truth that has eluded everyone else.
Browder told The Daily Beast that most of the interview footage of him used in the movie was filmed in 2010 after a talk in Finland, when Nekrasov’s then-girlfriend, a Finnish member of the European Parliament named Heidi Hautala, asked Browder to sit down with the filmmaker.
“Because he was validated by such an important politician, I had no concerns about his intentions,” Browder said.

Years went by before Browder said he heard from Nekrasov again. Browder said he chalked up the silence to thinking Nekrasov was “a disorganized artist guy who couldn’t get his project done if he wanted to.”
Nekrasov was by this point an award-winning filmmaker.
They ran into each other again in 2015 at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Nekrasov told Browder he had big funding for the movie and asked him to collaborate, Browder says.
“There was something a bit odd about it, I didn’t feel right about it,” Browder says of the meeting, which appears in the film.
Nekrasov appeared again at a book party for Browder, and got the financier to agree to a final interview. Browder said his suspicions weren’t allayed.
“I said to him, on tape, it sounds like you’re part of the FSB,” Browder recalled. “Those are FSB questions.”
In the tense scene from the film, Browder gets up to leave and advises Nekrasov that his questions sound like the FSB party line, akin to the claim that there are no Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
Nekrasov also interviewed Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya Magnitskaya, while still presenting himself as exposing the men responsible for her son’s death.
Nekrasov sent The Daily Beast a five-page memo responding to questions for this article, and accusing the media of bias against him simply because of his Russian background. He reiterated that the film had begun as a laudatory documentary about Magnitsky, but that his views changed, in particular after he interviewed the author of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe report on Magnitsky’s death, Andreas Gross.
“Mr. Gross told me that Magnitsky had not been murdered, but that he died because the jailers did not look well enough after him,” Nekrasov said.
But Gross disavowed Nekrasov’s final product, and called some of Nekrasov’s claims “demonstrably false.” In particular, the men disagree over whether Magnitsky implicated police officers in his June 2008 testimony.
“This is NOT true,” Nekrasov responded.
“Once again Katie, do you trust someone, who himself confesses to having no Russian, and not me?” Nekrasov wrote. “Do you seriously think I would spend years making this internationally produced film and misrepresent these key documents for anyone to look at?”
Nekrasov railed against Browder as a man who used the political climate of instability to become “a rich guy (who made all his money in the corrupt Russia).”
In one of the film’s eureka moments, Nekrasov points to testimony given by Magnitsky in October 2008 as proof that the theft was actually reported not by him but by a pensioner who accused Browder’s companies for wrongdoing.
But Browder’s employees had filed another document with police five months before the pensioner’s supposed statements, saying they feared the documents seized in a search of their office were used to perpetrate the fraud.
“Who is the person who reported the crime first?” Nekrasov asks rhetorically in the film.
Browder says he didn’t find out about the movie until promotions started in 2016. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher was invited to an exclusive screening at the Newseum, funded by Veselnitskaya’s group. Browder and his team worked up a response to the nearly three-hour film, which claims to capture Nekrasov’s realization that Browder’s claims of Magnitsky’s death at the hands of Russian authorities were all lies.
The movie is so flattering to the Russian narrative that Pavel Karpov—one of the police officers accused of being responsible for Magnitsky’s death—plays himself.
The Daily Beast asked Nekrasov about how he got Karpov to agree to participate in an in-line question in the lengthy statement he sent responding to initial questions. He first declined to open the attachment for fear of hacking.
“When I at last got hold of [Karpov’s] number and rang him up, he set no preconditions for being interviewed. He did listen carefully, though, to my long speech on the phone, about wanting to give his version of the story a fair chance,” Nekrasov later wrote. “As for my own state of mind at that point in time, I was mainly after the scoop production value of having the guy in my show. I also wanted, ideally, to get some strong reaction from my actor on camera. Someone playing a villain, meeting the real thing.”
Browder says Europe’s strong anti-defamation laws, which often apply to both living and dead people, helped stop the screening in Brussels after his legal team pointed out the factual flaws. But Nekrasov and his allies claim that the billionaire Browder bullied their little film into near-obscurity.
Except not quite. The film was still shown in Norway—and in D.C. at the Newseum in the screening was introduced by veteran journalist Sy Hersh.
But Browder says he doesn’t think Nekrasov is an agent of the Russian state.
“In my view, he has no political views whatsoever,” Browder told The Daily Beast.
Nekrasov says he remains independent.
“I am a consistent critic of oligarchic capitalist system that has robbed the Russian people and have introduced a ‘culture’ of neo-slavery in the country,” Nekrasov said. “Bill Browder is, or at least, most certainly was, a part of that oligarchic-capitalist system.”
Before Nekrasov began working on the Magnitsky film, he agreed to work on a documentary about the fall of the Soviet Union with American journalist David Satter. It was supposed to be based on Satter’s book, Age of Delirium. Satter had no filmmaking experience, so he reached out to Nekrasov for help.
They’d gotten to know one another when Nekrasov based his documentary about 1999 apartment building bombings in Moscow heavily around a recorded interview with Satter. In the documentary, Nekrasov advances the idea that the bombings, which killed 293 people and were blamed on Chechen extremists, were actually orchestrated by Russian security services to cement Putin’s grip on power. (Nekrasov told The Daily Beast he stands by those films.)
“Why is it important [to the FSB] that he made a movie about the bombings?” Satter asked. “Because they can later use him later for other purposes, and he'll have high believability.”
Satter says they were connected for that taping by Alexander Goldfarb, a Russian opposition figure close to oligarch Boris Berezovsky. (Attempts to reach Goldfarb for comment were unsuccessful.)
Goldfarb asked if a German film crew could tape Satter at a book talk, Satter told The Daily Beast. Nekrasov holds German citizenship, according to Satter.
The story of Berezovsky and Nekrasov is a tale of post-Soviet intrigue.
Berezovsky rode the wave of post-Soviet privatization to wealth and power. He was even a booster of Putin in his rise to power, and won a seat in the Duma, or Russian parliament, on a pro-Putin platform in 2000. But the men had a falling out shortly after Putin became president.
Berezovsky was soon living in the U.K. in exile, hurling accusations at Putin, including the claim that the 1999 bombings were orchestrated to help Putin cement his grip on power. Berezovsky got asylum in the U.K. in 2003.
Berezovsky was also linked to another of Nekrasov’s projects: a film on the poisoning of ex-FSB lieutenant colonel Alexander Litvinenko.
Like Berezovsky, Litvinenko was a man of the system who’d fallen out with it. In 1998, Litvinenko claimed to have uncovered a plot within the FSB to kill Berezovsky. Litvinenko subsequently fled to Britain, where he joined Berezovsky in allegations that the 1999 Moscow apartment building bombings were a government plot, and wrote other books criticizing Putin and the FSB.
In 2006, Litvinenko was killed by Russian assassins in London with a lethal dose of radioactive polonium in his tea.
Nekrasov began to work on a film about Litvinenko’s murder. The movie, which like much of Nekrasov’s work, features the filmmaker as a main character, starts with an apparent threat to Nekrasov’s life because of his work on Litvinenko’s death.
Satter entered into an agreement with two of Nekrasov’s production companies in 2005 to produce the film based on his book, according to an arbitration statement filed as part of a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court. The Hudson Institute, where Satter works, contributed $300,000 for the project and Nekrasov agreed to contribute €76,500, according to the statement. Satter hoped to put out the film in 2011, for the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the USSR.
But five years later, Satter said he still hadn’t even gotten a draft from Nekrasov. The lawsuit accuses Nekrasov of faked illnesses, broken promises, and evasive statements, after which Satter was left to finish the film on his own.
“He dragged out the process of making the film for years, constantly finding other things to do, spending the film’s money, and finally disappeared,” Satter told The Daily Beast. “And went to work on another film of the same subject.”
The suit adds that Nekrasov would not account for the $300,000 in funding that had gone into the project. And it claims that the grant which Nekrasov said his portion would come from “did not exist.”
A New York judge confirmed the arbitration finding in July 2013, ordering Nekrasov’s companies to pay Satter $94,340. Satter says he hasn’t seen a penny of it. He also says he connected Nekrasov with dissidents only to later see their interviews in a film that spoke positively of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
Nekrasov said he disputed many of Satter’s claims, and said he often worked for free on the underfunded project. He also said he was unaware of the suit and any other legal action against him.
When provided with a copy of the ruling in the case, Nekrasov said he didn’t feel comfortable opening documents sent via email attachment.
“They are NOT my companies! Absolutely not,” Nekrasov wrote. “So I was right, the law suite involved companies, not myself. That is why they can’t enforce that ruling, I suppose.”
The website for one of the companies, Dreamscanner, loads to a page for Nekrasov’s late wife.
Berezovsky, the key figure behind at least two of Nekrasov’s films, died in 2013. He was found hanging in his Berkshire home.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/dissident- ... -attack-us

Trump dictated son’s misleading statement on meeting with Russian lawyer

President Trump personally intervened to write Donald Trump Jr. statement

President Trump personally dictated a statement that was issued after revelations that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 election. The Washington Post's Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig explain. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
By Ashley Parker, Carol D. Leonnig, Philip Rucker and Tom Hamburger July 31 at 7:46 PM
On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany this month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.

The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.

But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared a story, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”

The claims were later shown to be misleading.

President-elect Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. at a news conference at Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 11, 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an email promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy.

As Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III investigates potential obstruction of justice as part of his broader probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, these advisers worry that the president’s direct involvement leaves him needlessly vulnerable to allegations of a coverup.

“This was . . . unnecessary,” said one of the president’s advisers, who like most other people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Now someone can claim he’s the one who attempted to mislead. Somebody can argue the president is saying he doesn’t want you to say the whole truth.”

Trump has already come under criticism for steps he has taken to challenge and undercut the Russia probe.

He fired FBI Director James B. Comey on May 9 after a private meeting in which Comey said the president asked him if he could end the investigation of ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats told associates that Trump asked him in March if he could intervene with Comey to get the bureau to back off its focus on Flynn. In addition, Trump has repeatedly criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the FBI’s Russian investigation — a decision that was one factor leading to the appointment of Mueller. And he has privately discussed his power to issue pardons, including for himself, and explored potential avenues for undercutting Mueller’s work.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump board Air Force One in Hamburg, Germany, after the Group of 20 summit on July 8, 2017. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
[Top intelligence official told associates Trump asked him if he could intervene with Comey on FBI Russia probe]

Although misleading the public or the press is not a crime, advisers to Trump and his family told The Washington Post that they fear any indication that Trump was seeking to hide information about contacts between his campaign and Russians almost inevitably would draw additional scrutiny from Mueller.

Trump, they say, is increasingly acting as his own lawyer, strategist and publicist, often disregarding the recommendations of the professionals he has hired.

“He refuses to sit still,” the presidential adviser said. “He doesn’t think he’s in any legal jeopardy, so he really views this as a political problem he is going to solve by himself.”

Trump has said that the Russia probe is “the greatest witch hunt in political history,” calling it an elaborate hoax created by Democrats to explain Clinton losing an election she should have won.

Because Trump believes he is innocent, some advisers explained, he therefore does not think he is at any legal risk for a coverup. In his mind, they said, there is nothing to conceal.

[Trump’s legal team faces tensions — and a client who often takes his own counsel]

The White House directed all questions for this story to the president’s legal team.

One of Trump’s attorneys, Jay Sekulow, declined to discuss the specifics of the president’s actions and his role in crafting his son’s statement about the Russian contact. Sekulow issued a one-sentence statement in response to a list of detailed questions from The Post.

“Apart from being of no consequence, the characterizations are misinformed, inaccurate, and not pertinent,” Sekulow’s statement read.

Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment. His lawyer, Alan Futerfas, told The Post that he and his client “were fully prepared and absolutely prepared to make a fulsome statement” about the meeting, what led up to it and what was discussed.

Asked about Trump intervening, Futerfas said, “I have no evidence to support that theory.” He described the process of drafting a statement as “a communal situation that involved communications people and various lawyers.”

Peter Zeidenberg, the deputy special prosecutor who investigated the George W. Bush administration’s leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, said Mueller will have to dig into the crafting of Trump Jr.’s statement aboard Air Force One.

Prosecutors typically assume that any misleading statement is an effort to throw investigators off the track, Zeidenberg said.

“The thing that really strikes me about this is the stupidity of involving the president,” Zeidenberg said. “They are still treating this like a family-run business and they have a PR problem. . . . What they don’t seem to understand is this is a criminal investigation involving all of them.”

Advocating for transparency
The debate about how to deal with the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting began weeks before any news organizations began to ask questions about it.

Kushner’s legal team first learned about the meeting when doing research to respond to congressional requests for information. Congressional investigators wanted to know about any contacts the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser had with Russian officials or business people.

Kushner’s lawyers came across what they immediately recognized would eventually become a problematic story. A string of emails showed Kushner attended a meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in the midst of the campaign — one he had failed to disclose. Trump Jr. had arranged it, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort had also attended.

To compound what was, at best, a public relations fiasco, the emails, which had not yet surfaced publicly, showed Trump Jr. responding to the prospect of negative information on Clinton from Russia: “I love it.”

Lawyers and advisers for Trump, his son and son-in-law gamed out various strategies for disclosing the information to try to minimize the fallout of these new links between the Trump family and Russia, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

[Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting: What we know and when we learned it]

Hope Hicks, the White House director of strategic communications and one of the president’s most trusted and loyal aides, and Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman who works closely with Kushner and Ivanka Trump, huddled with Kushner’s lawyers, and they advocated for a more transparent approach, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.

In one scenario, these people said, Kushner’s team talked about sharing everything, including the contents of the emails, with a mainstream news organization.

Hicks and Raffel declined to comment. Kushner lawyer Abbe Lowell also declined to comment.

The president’s outside legal team, led by Marc Kasowitz, had suggested that the details be given to Circa, an online news organization the Kasowitz team thought would be friendly to Trump. Circa had inquired in previous days about the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The president’s legal team planned to cast the June 2016 meeting as a potential setup by Democratic operatives hoping to entrap Trump Jr. and, by extension, the presumptive Republican nominee, according to people familiar with discussions.

Kasowitz declined to comment for this article, as did a Circa spokesman.

Consensus overruled
Circumstances changed when the New York Times began asking about the Trump Tower meeting, though advisers believed the paper knew few of the details. While the president, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were attending the G-20 summit, the Times asked for White House comment on the impetus and reason for the meeting.

During breaks away from the summit, Kushner and Ivanka Trump gathered with Hicks and Raffel to discuss Kushner’s response to the inquiry, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Kushner’s legal team joined at times by phone.

Hicks also spoke by phone with Trump Jr. Again, say people familiar with the conversations, Kushner’s team concluded that the best strategy would be to err on the side of transparency, because they believed the complete story would eventually emerge.

The discussions among President Trump’s advisers consumed much of the day, and continued as they prepared to board Air Force One that evening for the flight home.

But before everyone boarded the plane, Trump had overruled the consensus, according to people with knowledge of the events.

It remains unclear exactly how much the president knew at the time of the flight about Trump Jr.’s meeting.

The president directed that Trump Jr.’s statement to the Times describe the meeting as unimportant. He wanted the statement to say that the meeting had been initiated by the Russian lawyer and primarily was about her pet issue — the adoption of Russian children.

Air Force One took off from Germany shortly after 6 p.m., about noon in Washington. In a forward cabin, Trump was busy working on his son’s statement, according to people with knowledge of events. The president dictated the statement to Hicks, who served as a go-between with Trump Jr., who was not on the plane, sharing edits between the two men, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

In the early afternoon, Eastern time, Trump Jr.’s team put out the statement to the Times. It was four sentences long, describing the encounter as a “short, introductory meeting.”

“We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up,” the statement read.

Trump Jr. went on to say, “I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”

Over the next hour, word spread through emails and calls to other Trump family advisers and lawyers about the statement that Trump Jr. had sent to The Times.

Some lawyers for the president and for Kushner were surprised and frustrated, advisers later learned. According to people briefed on the dispute, some lawyers tried to reach Futerfas and their clients and began asking why the president had been involved.

Also on the flight, Kushner worked with his team — including one of his lawyers, who called into the plane.

His lawyers have said that Kushner’s initial omission of the meeting was an error, but that in an effort to be fully transparent, he had updated his government filing to include “this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr.” Kushner’s legal team referred all questions about the meeting itself to Trump Jr.

The Times’ story revealing the existence of the June 2016 meeting went online around 4 p.m. Eastern time. Roughly four hours later, Air Force One touched down at Joint Base Andrews. Trump’s family members and advisers departed the plane, and they knew the problem they had once hoped to contain would soon grow bigger.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... e4d38fd069

Stinger Missiles And Shady Deals: Ex-Biz Partner To Trump Has A Tall Tale To Tell


By SAM THIELMAN Published AUGUST 1, 2017 6:00 AM



In December 2015, an Associated Press reporter asked Donald Trump why he had appointed Felix Sater, a man who’d been convicted for stock fraud, his senior advisor. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” Trump told the AP. “I’m not that familiar with him.”

The feeling is not mutual.

“My last Moscow deal [for the Trump Organization] was in October of 2015,” Sater recalled. “It didn’t go through because obviously he became President.” Sater had told the New York Times that he was working on the deal that fall, but over the course of several conversations with TPM, he gave a slightly more detailed timeline. “Once the campaign was really going-going, it was obvious there were going to be no deals internationally,” Sater said. “We were still working on it, doing something with it, November-December.”

That deal was for “The Trump Tower, to develop in Moscow.” It was a similar proposition to the one Trump himself tried to broker with the Agalarovs, a family of vastly wealthy Russian oligarchs who brought Miss Universe 2013 to Moscow and were behind the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting between the President’s oldest son and an attorney said to work for the Russian government. Sater said he never worked with the Agalarovs on a Moscow deal for Trump, but did work with others who he declined to name. Those aren’t Sater’s connections, he said. “That’s not me. I don’t work with them and I’ve never worked with them.” When asked who he was working with, Sater chuckled. “A couple of people I’d like to continue working with, and that’s why I don’t want their names in the newspaper. People say, ‘I care about you and love you but why do I need my name in the press?’”

The Trump Organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TPM. But to understand Trump and the type of people his real estate empire did business, it’s worth trying to understand Sater, the Russian-American émigré whose connections span not only the worlds of Russian and Italian organized crime—which Sater said are in part a result of not being able to find legitimate work after two criminal convictions—but the FBI and, now, the presidency.

South Brooklyn tough
Sater is from the Brighton Beach and Coney Island neighborhoods of Brooklyn, an area with large populations of both first-generation Russian-Americans and multigenerational African-American families. It’s a vital part of the $200 million real estate business Trump took over from his father in 1974, which in turn seeded his own wealth. Rather than benefiting from shrewd dealmaking for hotels and casinos, as the President likes to suggest, Trump built his real estate empire on his hereditary residential businesses, accrued by his father through the construction, purchase and management of residential buildings, many of them inhabited by Russian-Americans like Sater.

The Trumps were already notorious: Donald and his father, Fred Trump, allegedly preferred to rent to white families and subsequently found themselves “charged with discrimination” in “a number of local actions against us,” he told the Times in 1973 when he settled discrimination charges in Coney Island, among other areas of the city. Sater would surely have been familiar with the Trumps when, renting an office with his partner Tevfik Arif for their real estate firm Bayrock, he approached Trump personally in “2000, 2001,” by his recollection.

After high school, Sater went to Pace University, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge—but now he was on the Manhattan side. When he graduated he worked for prestigious financial outfits like Bear Stearns and Gruntal & Co. In 1991, Sater got into a bar fight with a fellow Wall Streeter that ended with Sater stabbing the other man in the face with a margarita glass. The injured man needed 110 stitches and suffered nerve damage; Sater went to prison for a year, which he described as “the worst time in my life.”

“Yes, I got into a bar fight. Yes, the instance at which I hit the man with the margarita glass…” he broke off. “I didn’t break it and try to carve my initials into his face. It was a bar fight. That’s all it was. I made the mistake of going to court, lost, went to jail over it, got involved in a dirty, scammy Wall Street deal [with former Gruntal colleague Salvatore Lauria]. I did.”

As far as Sater is concerned, he’d done his time. But like most people who have been to prison, his punishment seems not to have ended. “Everybody’s making it sound like I’m Tony Soprano,” he sighed.

Sater and Lauria gained control in 1993 of White Rock Partners, a business that would go on to become intertwined with the Italian mafia because, Sater said, he owed his lawyer: “When I came out, I was released on appeal bond, I couldn’t do anything I needed to pay my lawyer $100,000 to keep me out on appeal.” His only professional skill was bond trading, but he was legally barred from doing that at a legitimate business—so he started another kind of business. “I’m not some poor little lamb,” he admitted.

Indeed not: The firm, which was renamed State Street Capital, would go on to steal some $40 million. Court documents accuse State Street of targeting “little old ladies;” Bloomberg reported in June that a number of the victims were also Holocaust survivors. Sater denied knowing this about the people his firm fleeced.

“I gave them the coordinates”
A strange thing happened after Sater’s second arrest, however: He did not go to prison. Instead, in 1998 he signed an FBI cooperation agreement that was approved by Andrew Weissmann, who is now part of the legal team investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election under Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Sater appears to have forfeited not his share of the $40 million, but a $25,000 fine and a house in the Hamptons.

Sater had been in Russia working for AT&T when he heard that the FBI was looking for him, according to a heavily redacted court transcript—which refers to Sater as “Felix Slater”— obtained by legal reporter Daniel Wise. No one had been prosecuted in the State Street scam by 1998, but with Sater’s help 20 people “at various levels of that operation, ranging from the brokers to the people who were transferring money” were prosecuted, according to the documents. The government described Sater’s cooperation as “exemplary.”

The FBI’s glowing testimonial isn’t a patch on claims made by Lauria in his book, which he later disavowed as a work of fiction. Lauria and co-writer David S. Barry wrote that Sater had tried and failed to purchase black-market Stinger missiles in Afghanistan.

Sater makes impressive claims, too: TPM asked him if he’d returned his share of the State Street money. He said, “Because of national security issues I can’t discuss anything other than one part of it: You understand that I was given a $25,000 fine, and it’s not because of Vinnie Boombatz from Brooklyn?”

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Sater noted, had publicly defended him in her confirmation hearing, and she had used the phrase “national security.”

“When she was talking about national security, she wasn’t talking about Stinger missiles,” he said. “She was talking about our country’s biggest enemy who killed over 3,000 people. How ‘bout the first time Bill Clinton bombed his camps, I provided the coordinates?”

Sater appeared to be referring to Operation Infinite Reach, a cruise missile launch based on CIA intelligence against Osama bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan—where Sater had sought the missiles—and Sudan. Sater wouldn’t say more.

Sater told the Los Angeles Times he spent the late ’90’s “hunting bin Laden”; the Stinger missile episode was also attributed to the CIA in Lauria’s book. The CIA declined comment, but a source familiar with the intelligence community’s use of civilian assets told TPM that claim is wildly unlikely: Anyone considered for work directly with the CIA would almost certainly be immediately be disqualified by the criminal record Sater deplores and has tried to escape.

It’s theoretically possible for Sater to have provided information that was communicated to the CIA by the FBI, the source said. It’s even possible that the information was correct: The August 20, 1998 Al Qaeda meeting was “not much of a secret,” Steve Coll writes in his book about the CIA in Afghanistan, “Ghost Wars.” But if Sater told the agency more, the fact that it came through the FBI and not the CIA’s own sources might have limited its use within the intelligence community. The FBI’s national press office declined to comment to TPM.

“The biggest, scummiest gangster”
Sater’s two arrests often have been presented as exhibit A in the case against the President’s 15-year association with the man, but Trump has been defensive of the relationship even while distancing himself from it.

When pressed in 2013 by the BBC’s John Sweeney about whether he should have cut ties with Bayrock because of its association with Sater, Trump told Sweeney, “John, maybe you’re thick but when you have a signed contract, you can’t in this country just break it.” He added, “Sometimes we’ll sign a deal and the partner isn’t as good as we’d like.” In a deposition that same year, Trump denied knowing what Sater looked like.

That halfhearted defense is more than Sater usually gets. Like many ex-cons, he is understanding of people who pretend not to know him: He said his involvement in Bayrock was kept secret because of his “bad past.”

The Bayrock Group is the subject of much legal scrutiny; one suit filed by Bayrock’s former CFO Jody Kriss flatly describes Bayrock as a money laundering operation; it also alleges that the firm defrauded investors by not revealing Sater’s felony convictions. That’s what eats at Sater; he doesn’t understand why the past can’t be past. Re-opening those wounds, he said, is the worst sin of all. “The biggest, scummiest gangster I’ve met is Jody Kriss,” he told TPM on several occasions. Kriss, he said, wanted to out him for testifying against mobsters.

Kriss is frank: “Felix Sater is a fucking liar,” he told TPM. “You can’t believe anything he says.”

Sater’s way of thanking people who have helped him is not to tell reporters their names. He told TPM a mentor had helped him find work in real estate, outside the Wall Street world where he’d been barred from working. Like his Russian connections, Sater wouldn’t name this man, who he described as “a serious real estate guy.”

“He doesn’t need my name; he helps me. The last thing he needs is [to be tarred with] my brush,” Sater said. “He liked me, he loved me, he taught me the business.”

The other serious real estate guy in his Rolodex—the President—has gone from being his employer to being the most powerful man in the world. Sater has approached the Trump administration since the election, but that has been through Michael Cohen, another man with deep ties to the former Soviet bloc and New York real estate, who Sater has known since the pair’s teenage years.

What’s it like to know the President personally? “That and a token will get me a ride on the subway,” Sater said ruefully. “If it was in Russia, he’d give me a billion dollar contract and I’d be wealthy.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... of-mystery

Did President Trump Dictate the False Statement? Or Was It President Putin?

Evan Vucci/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 1, 2017 5:01 PM


Below we discussed the big Washington Post story about President Trump’s role writing what turned out to be a false statement on behalf of his son Don Jr. about that meeting with the Russian lawyer in June 2016. I want to flag a timeline that may be relevant and which may tie together the false Don Jr. statement dictated by the President on Air Force One on July 8th and the conversation Trump had with President Vladimir Putin earlier that evening.

Let’s piece together some published information and dates.

According to The Washington Post, the President’s advisers were actively discussing the coming New York Times Don Jr. story on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany last month. The G20 Summit was on July 7th and 8th.

From the Post …

On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany last month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.

From this it seems clear that this was an active discussion on Friday July 7th and Saturday July 8th and likely before.

President Trump and Putin had their first public meeting on Friday July 7th. Later in July it was revealed that the two men had a second unreported meeting on the Saturday the 8th at a dinner for assembled heads of state and their spouses.

What did they discuss? According to President Trump in an interview with The New York Times on July 19th they discussed adoption. From the Times interview …

TRUMP: [Melania] was sitting next to Putin and somebody else, and that’s the way it is. So the meal was going, and toward dessert I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about — things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.

HABERMAN: You did?

TRUMP: We talked about Russian adoption. Yeah. I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don [Jr., Mr. Trump’s son] had in that meeting. As I’ve said — most other people, you know, when they call up and say, “By the way, we have information on your opponent,” I think most politicians — I was just with a lot of people, they said [inaudible], “Who wouldn’t have taken a meeting like that?” They just said——

This was a dinner on Saturday July 8th. Hours later Trump was in the air on Air Force One returning to the United States when he dictated the Don Jr. statement. Here’s the crux of the statement.

It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.

It means one thing if it happens that Putin and Trump discussed adoption and it just so happens that that’s what Trump Jr. also discussed with the Russian lawyer. It’s a bit different if we know that Trump actually wrote Trump Jr.’s account and he is actually the author of that false statement.

So, let’s run through what appears to be the chain of events.

July 7th: On or before Friday July 7th Trump advisors and lawyers begin discussing how to respond to press inquiries about Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who an intermediary told Trump Jr. had information tied to the Russian government’s support for Trump’s candidacy.

July 7th: Presidents Trump and Putin meet for first meeting.

July 8th: Presidents Trump and Putin meet for a second, unreported meeting, at which they discussed Russian adoptions, according to President Trump.

July 8th: Late evening, President Trump overrules advisers and lawyers to dictate a statement for his son in which he claims that the topic of the June 2016 meeting was Russian adoptions.

There are some important caveats here. The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, has been lobbying for some time for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. As part of its retaliation for Magnitsky, the Russian government banned US adoptions. So the two things are connected. Whatever else they were discussing, it still seems to be the case that Veselnitskaya pushed her case about the Magnitsky Act in the Trump Tower meeting. So it’s not implausible that she discussed adoptions. She may well have. It’s also true that “adoptions” are sometimes a code word for sanctions in discussions with Russian government officials. So again, there are alternative, less damning explanations.

But piecing together this timeline and based on President Trump’s own account, we can say that he knew his advisers were discussing how to respond to a press story about the June 2016 meeting. He had a secret conversation with President Putin at which they discussed the issue of Russian adoptions. Then hours later he dictated a false statement to be released in the name of his son in which he claimed that Russian adoptions were the topic of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. That is a highly troubling chain of events to put it mildly.

Perhaps these things are unrelated. But it certainly seems worth asking what the two men discussed, whether President Trump raised the need to respond to this story with President Putin and whether the discussion with Putin was the basis of the statement Trump dictated on his son’s behalf.

[Ed.note: I initially got onto this idea from a tweet from my friend Laura Rozen who asked what I took to be a rhetorical question about whether Trump and Putin discussed the statement. I poked around and discovered what I discussed above. Later I realized that higher up in her thread Laura had flagged the same points. So she made this connection before I did.]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/did ... dent-putin

Death of a F***ing Salesman

by KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON July 30, 2017 4:00 AM @KEVINNR

Donald Trump can’t close the deal. A few years ago in New York, Al Pacino starred in a revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, and the casting was poignant: In 1992, a much younger and more vigorous Pacino had played the role of hotshot salesman Ricky Roma in the film adaptation of the play; in the Broadway revival, a 72-year-old Pacino played the broken-down has-been Shelley Levene. Glengarry Glen Ross is the Macbeth of real estate, full of great, blistering lines and soliloquies so liberally peppered with profanity that the original cast had nicknamed the show “Death of a F***ing Salesman.” But a few of those attending the New York revival left disappointed. For a certain type of young man, the star of Glengarry Glen Ross is a character called Blake, played in the film by Alec Baldwin. We know that his name is “Blake” only from the credits; asked his name by one of the other salesmen, he answers: “What’s my name? F*** you. That’s my name.” In the film, Blake sets things in motion by delivering a motivational speech and announcing a sales competition: “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize? A set of steak knives. Third prize is, you’re fired. Get the picture?” He berates the salesmen in terms both financial — “My watch cost more than your car!” — and sexual. Their problem, in Blake’s telling, isn’t that they’ve had a run of bad luck or bad sales leads — or that the real estate they’re trying to sell is crap — it is that they aren’t real men. The leads are weak? You’re weak. . . . Your name is “you’re wanting,” and you can’t play the man’s game. You can’t close them? Then tell your wife your troubles, because only one thing counts in this world: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. Got that, you f***ing f*****s? A few young men waiting to see the show had been quoting Blake’s speech to one another. For them, and for a number of men who imagine themselves to be hard-hitting competitors (I’ve never met a woman of whom this is true), Blake’s speech is practically a creed. It’s one of those things that some guys memorize. But Blake does not appear in the play, the scene having been written specifically for the film and specifically for Alec Baldwin, a sop to investors who feared that the film would not be profitable and wanted an additional jolt of star power to enliven it. That’s some fine irony: Blake’s paean to salesmanship was written to satisfy salesmen who did not quite buy David Mamet’s original pitch. The play is if anything darker and more terrifying without Blake, leaving the poor feckless salesmen at the mercy of a faceless malevolence offstage rather than some regular jerk in a BMW. But a few finance bros went home disappointed that they did not get the chance to sing along, as it were, with their favorite hymn. These guys don’t want to see Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. What they want is to be Blake. They want to swagger, to curse, to insult, and to exercise power over men, exercising power over men being the classical means to the end of exercising power over women, which is of course what this, and nine-tenths of everything else in human affairs, is about. Blake is a specimen of that famous creature, the “alpha male,” and establishing and advertising one’s alpha creds is an obsession for some sexually unhappy contemporary men. There is a whole weird little ecosystem of websites (some of them very amusing) and pickup-artist manuals offering men tips on how to be more alpha, more dominant, more commanding, a literature that performs roughly the same function in the lives of these men that Cosmopolitan sex tips play in the lives of insecure women. Of course this advice ends up producing cartoonish, ridiculous behavior. If you’re wondering where Anthony Scaramucci learned to talk and behave like such a Scaramuccia, ask him how many times he’s seen Glengarry Glen Ross. What’s notable about the advice offered to young men aspiring to be “alpha males” is that it is consistent with the classic salesmanship advice offered by the real-world versions of Blake in a hundred thousand business-inspiration books (Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World is the classic of the genre) and self-help tomes, summarized in an old Alcoholics Anonymous slogan: “Fake it ’til you make it.” For the pick-up artists, the idea is that simply acting in social situations as though one were confident, successful, and naturally masterful is a pretty good substitute for being those things. Never mind the advice of Cicero (esse quam videri, be rather than seem) or Rush — just go around acting like Blake and people will treat you like Blake. If that sounds preposterous, remind yourself who the president of the United States of America is. –– ADVERTISEMENT –– Trump is the political version of a pickup artist, and Republicans — and America — went to bed with him convinced that he was something other than what he is. Trump inherited his fortune but describes himself as though he were a self-made man. We did not elect Donald Trump; we elected the character he plays on television. He has had a middling career in real estate and a poor one as a hotelier and casino operator but convinced people he is a titan of industry. He has never managed a large, complex corporate enterprise, but he did play an executive on a reality show. He presents himself as a confident ladies’ man but is so insecure that he invented an imaginary friend to lie to the New York press about his love life and is now married to a woman who is open and blasé about the fact that she married him for his money. He fixates on certain words (“negotiator”) and certain classes of words (mainly adjectives and adverbs, “bigly,” “major,” “world-class,” “top,” and superlatives), but he isn’t much of a negotiator, manager, or leader. He cannot negotiate a health-care deal among members of a party desperate for one, can’t manage his own factionalized and leak-ridden White House, and cannot lead a political movement that aspires to anything greater than the service of his own pathetic vanity. He wants to be John Wayne, but what he is is “Woody Allen without the humor.” Peggy Noonan, to whom we owe that observation, has his number: He is soft, weak, whimpering, and petulant. He isn’t smart enough to do the job and isn’t man enough to own up to the fact. For all his gold-plated toilets, he is at heart that middling junior salesman watching Glengarry Glen Ross and thinking to himself: “That’s the man I want to be.” How many times do you imagine he has stood in front of a mirror trying to project like Alec Baldwin? Unfortunately for the president, it’s Baldwin who does the good imitation of Trump, not the other way around. Hence the cartoon tough-guy act. Scaramucci’s star didn’t fade when he gave that batty and profane interview in which he reimagined Steve Bannon as a kind of autoerotic yogi. That’s Scaramucci’s best impersonation of the sort of man the president of these United States, God help us, aspires to be. But he isn’t that guy. He isn’t Blake. He’s poor sad old Shelley Levene, who cannot close the deal, who spends his nights whining about the unfairness of it all. So, listen up, Team Trump: “Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers only.” Got that?

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... g-salesman

Special counsel Mueller impanels grand jury as Russia probe intensifies, WSJ reports
Special counsel Robert Mueller is impaneling a grand jury in the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to The Wall Street Journal.
It's a sign the probe is intensifying and could drag on for months.
Jacob Pramuk | @jacobpramuk
5 Mins Ago
CNBC.com
Robert Mueller Mueller impanels grand jury in Russia probe -WSJ
22 Mins Ago | 02:15
Robert Mueller, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, has impaneled a grand jury in Washington, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The move means the probe is intensifying and could stretch "for months," according to the newspaper. Impaneling a grand jury suggests Mueller "believes he will need to subpoena records and take testimony from witnesses," the Journal said.

It does not necessarily mean he will bring charges against Trump allies.

Former FBI Director Mueller is investigating Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin. The investigation has dogged and frustrated President Donald Trump during his first six months in office.

The president has repeatedly called it a "witch hunt" and denied any collusion with Moscow. He and his allies have also been critical of Mueller.

The Justice Department appointed Mueller after Trump fired former FBI chief James Comey.

Trump lawyer Ty Cobb told the Journal: "The White House favors anything that accelerates the conclusion of his work fairly....The White House is committed to fully cooperating with Mr. Mueller."
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/03/special ... ports.html

Two Words That Should Scare the Trump Administration: Grand Jury

Robert Mueller is not f*cking around.


BY JACK HOLMES
AUG 3, 2017

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has convened a grand jury in Washington, D.C., as part of his probe into Russia's interference in the 2016 election and whether associates of Donald Trump colluded in that effort, The Wall Street Journal reports. The step represents a new phase of the Justice Department probe, of which Mueller took the helm in May not long after President Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey. Investigators had been using a separate grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, prior to Mueller's arrival as they looked into the dealings of Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who was dismissed after lying about his phone call with the Russian ambassador.

Grand juries, as the Journal notes, are "powerful investigative tools that allow prosecutors to subpoena documents, put witnesses under oath and seek indictments, if there is evidence of a crime." Experts who commented for the story agreed that the move indicates Mueller's investigation is set up to be rigorous, long-term, and large in scale. His office declined to comment, but the fantastically named Ty Cobb, an attorney for the president, said their side was not aware of the new arrangement.

The development comes as yet more high-profile litigators join Mueller's team, and as new details continue to emerge about Donald Trump, Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer last June. Most recently, that included the revelation that Trump the Elder dictated a misleading statement about the meeting to be made public in his son's name. At the same time, members of the Senate have raised new concerns about threats to his independence—and job security—from the White House. Two bipartisan pairs—Thom Tillis and Chris Coons, along with Lindsey Graham and Cory Booker—have begun drafting bills that would inhibit President Trump's ability to get rid of Mueller in unjustified circumstances.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/ne ... sia-probe/

The Trump-Russia investigation is headed to a grand jury

That's huge.

Updated by Alex Ward@AlexWardVoxalex.ward@vox.com Aug 3, 2017, 4:40pm EDT

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller testifies during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee June 13, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Mueller testified on the oversight of the FBI. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Special counsel Robert Mueller has asked a grand jury in Washington, DC, to investigate Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, a major signal that the probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia is getting a whole lot bigger.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, this means Mueller’s probe has moved from simply investigating what might have happened to possibly charging people with crimes. That may not necessarily be an outcome, of course, but the fact that the investigation is widening means there is more Mueller deems worth looking into.

The call for a grand jury is done for a specific purpose: so that prosecutors can subpoena documents they might not otherwise get, ensure witnesses testify under oath, and formally charge someone with a crime if they decide to. It’s unlikely Mueller would have taken this step unless he felt there was a good reason to do so.

And there is apparently good reason. CNN reports that the special counsel has found the financial ties between Trump associates and Russia to be among the most fruitful areas of investigation.

There were signs something like this was coming. Since taking over the probe in May, Mueller has hired 16 lawyers with expertise in multiple areas including cybercrime, white-collar crime, and financial crime. Clearly, his team is looking at all angles in this investigation. The move to involve a grand jury implies there is still much more to look into over the next few months.

"This is yet a further sign that there is a long-term, large-scale series of prosecutions being contemplated and being pursued by the special counsel," Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, told the Wall Street Journal. "This suggests that the investigation is bigger and wider than Flynn, perhaps substantially so."

Now, more than ever, the Trump-Russia story is not fake news. In fact, it just got very real.

Firing Mueller is an even worse idea now
There’s another problem for Trump besides the growing inquiry: It’s going to be much more difficult for him to fire Mueller.

The more serious the investigation gets, the worse it looks for Trump to ask Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to let Mueller go. Rosenstein has said he would not fire Mueller without “good cause.” If Trump wanted to relieve Mueller of his duty now, it would show he was reacting to the growing probe, as there is yet no indication of Mueller ineptly performing in his role.

Republicans have warned Trump that firing Mueller would be a bad idea. “Any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, unless Mueller did something wrong,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told NBC News.

It remains to be seen how Trump will react to all of this. But the safe bet is he won’t be happy about even more people looking into his finances, his friends, and his family.
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/3/1609 ... estigation

Exclusive: top FBI officials could testify against Trump

The acting head of the bureau told top officials to prepare.

Updated by Murray Waas Aug 3, 2017, 9:40am EDT

Shortly after the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told several of the highest-ranking managers of the bureau they should consider themselves possible witnesses in any investigation into whether President Donald Trump engaged in obstruction of justice, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials.

McCabe has told colleagues that he too is a potential witness in the probe of whether Trump broke the law by trying to thwart the FBI's Russia investigation and the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Two senior federal law enforcement officials have told me that the new revelations illustrate why they believe the potential case against Trump is stronger than outsiders have thought.

“What you are going to have is the potential for a powerful obstruction case,” a senior law enforcement official said. “You are going to have the [former] FBI director testify, and then the acting director, the chief of staff to the FBI director, the FBI’s general counsel, and then others, one right after another. This has never been the word of Trump against what [James Comey] has had to say. This is more like the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus Donald Trump.”

Trump and his supporters have long argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the special counsel to bring an obstruction case against Trump. The case would rely on the word of one man versus another, that of the president of the United States versus the FBI director he fired. But this was never the case.

Including Comey, as many as 10, and possibly more, of the nation’s most senior law enforcement officials are likely to be questioned as part of the investigation into whether Trump committed obstruction of justice, according to two government investigators with firsthand knowledge of the matter. Comey’s notes on his conversations could also be used as evidence, according to many reports.

The White House declined to comment. First contacted by email by on July 27, White House spokesperson Kelly Love responded late Wednesday saying, "This would be a question for outside counsel." Love did not name which of the president's many lawyers to contact. Marc E. Kasowitz, an attorney for the president, did not respond to a phone message Wednesday evening. The FBI also declined to comment.

FBI agents are experienced witnesses who routinely testify in high-pressure cases. Plus, the FBI itself is a rare public institution that is widely respected and trusted by the American public. The witness list and breadth of possible evidence, including notes Comey and several other senior FBI officials made at the time, could add up to a much stronger obstruction of justice case than Trump ever could have imagined.

Among those who McCabe and other law enforcement officials have privately believed are potential witnesses are six of the highest-ranking officials of the agency: They include McCabe himself; Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff; James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI; David Bowdich, who as the FBI’s associate director is the agency’s third-highest official; and Carl Ghattas, the head of the FBI’s national security division and a legal adviser to McCabe. McCabe was deputy director of the FBI until May, when he became acting director after President Trump fired Comey.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and a third senior Justice Department official are believed by law enforcement officials to be crucial fact witnesses in the obstruction probe. Their testimony is likely to support Comey and harm Trump, according to investigators and outside experts.

Mueller's case is looking stronger than Trump surrogates say
In May, Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate whether Trump colluded with the Russian government to help defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. A related area of inquiry for the special counsel is whether Trump obstructed justice when he allegedly asked Comey to shut down his inquiry of Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Trump made sure he and Comey were alone when he allegedly pressured the then-FBI director to curtail the FBI’s Russia investigation. At a private White House dinner on January 27, Trump allegedly pressed Comey to pledge his personal loyalty. The dinner came right after the president learned Flynn was under criminal investigation.

Later, on February 14, Trump allegedly leaned on Comey privately in an Oval Office meeting to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. Comey did not drop the investigation or take other steps Trump requested that the then-director of the FBI felt were improper. Trump then fired Comey on May 9.

Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s pressure on Comey to shut down his investigation — combined with other efforts to thwart the investigation, including firing Comey — are an obstruction of justice. As such, Comey is the central witness against Trump in any such obstruction investigation. That Trump was ordinarily alone with Comey when these various incidents occurred has led Trump and his surrogates to argue that it would be difficult for any obstruction of justice case to be brought because it would be based solely on Comey’s word.

“We have to keep in mind that is one person’s record of what happened,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said on Fox News in one typical comment repeated by White House surrogates. “The only two people who know what happened in these meeting are the president and James Comey.”

But even though Trump took great pains to try to be alone with Comey when they spoke, Comey regularly spoke to the six high-ranking FBI managers, often right after a distressing conversation with Trump about the Russia probe.

Comey spoke to these FBI officials almost always within 24 to 48 hours after such a contact took place, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials. A person familiar with the matter told me they know for certain there were at least eight such conversations — and likely more than a dozen — that Comey had with these high-ranking FBI managers, sometimes one on one, sometimes in groups of several officials. More than one such meeting was longer than an hour.

And in at least one previously unreported instance — that of a phone conversation between the president and Comey, during which Trump pressed Comey to say that Trump wasn’t personally under investigation — Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff, was present for the entirety of the phone call.

Trump had unexpectedly called Comey while Comey was in a meeting with Rybicki. As Trump and the then-FBI director spoke, Rybicki stayed put and listened to the entirety of Comey’s side of the conversation, according to Comey’s testimony to Congress and a senior federal law enforcement official.

In addition, Comey often emailed Rybicki accounts of his troublesome discussions with Trump about the Russia investigation — if not immediately after, sometimes the same day, according to a senior federal law enforcement official.

Baker, the FBI general counsel, took methodical notes during his discussions with Comey and others in the FBI hierarchy about Trump’s efforts to thwart the FBI’s investigation, according to these same sources.

Law enforcement officials are likely to be questioned
I interviewed current and former law enforcement officials, including some who, though not directly involved in the investigation, have held key positions working for independent counsels or special prosecutors investigating earlier presidents. They told me they agree with McCabe’s assertions that the senior FBI managers are almost certainly to be questioned for any investigation of President Trump for obstruction of justice.

Sam Buell, a Duke University law professor who has previously served as a federal prosecutor in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, and Houston, similarly told me that Mueller will almost certainly interview all six senior FBI officials that Comey confided in, as well as Sessions and Rosenstein: “In any high-stakes matter, you are going to want to talk to anyone in the vicinity of a conversation. It doesn’t mean that they end up as trial witness. But at an investigative stage, you are going to talk to all of these people. You want their stories locked in. You want to know if what they have to say would help you or hurt you.”

John Keker, who during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations prosecuted retired Lt. Oliver North for the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, explained to me: “Think of any crime. The defense might make the case that the accuser made it up. The questions for the witness are: ‘Did you just make this up?’ ‘Are you just saying this now?’ ‘Why didn’t you say something before?’ ‘Whom did you say something to? Did you write it down?’

“But if they told people when it happens, it makes their story more plausible. It helps their credibility. In this case, the people Comey told were multiple senior FBI officials.”

Other evidence is there too
In addition to the actual testimony of Comey and nine other senior federal law enforcement officials against the president, there is other related corroboratory evidence created as a result of those conversations. And this could bolster any potential obstruction of justice case against Trump.

There are Comey’s now-famous notes, which are careful, meticulous accounts of his meetings with the president. They are powerful not only for their detail but even for the atmospherics that tell a compelling story, according to people who have read portions of them.

Explaining why he took these notes, Comey told Congress: “I knew that there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself but also to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function. … [I]t was a combination of circumstances, subject matter, and the particular person.”

FBI agents and managers are inveterate note takers. It is part of the culture of the FBI. Several of the senior FBI managers Comey consulted with are also attorneys, who have similar traditions of memorializing important matters by taking careful and contemporaneous notes.

“That’s the culture of the FBI — you habitually document everything you do,” Lauren C. Anderson, a former senior FBI official who worked for the bureau for 29 years, told the New York Times, explaining why Comey made notes of his crucial conversations with the president. Her comments also would appear to explain why other senior FBI managers might have made similar sets of notes about their conversations with Comey.

Although it is unclear which FBI managers took notes and which did not, at least one person familiar with the matter said that James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, made detailed notes of virtually every conversation with Comey or others about the Russia probe.

Those notes by Baker are crucial to investigators because Baker was a lively participant in discussions about whether to inform the Justice Department of the president’s pressure on Comey to end the Flynn investigation. During discussions about whether Comey or the Justice Department should give in to Trump’s request to say the investigation had not focused on him, Baker was the primary and strongest proponent that they not do so.

The potential testimony by Comey, McCabe, and so many other FBI witnesses could prove damning to Trump for other reasons. FBI agents and their managers are more than just highly credible witnesses. In the course of a typical FBI agent’s career, he or she works closely with federal prosecutors in making cases based on the testimony of witnesses first interviewed by the agent, and often testifies as a witness in cases, some dozens of times in the course of a career.

While most major governmental institutions have, according to most polls and surveys, faced some of their lowest ratings ever, the American public still retains strong confidence in its FBI. A November 2015 Pew Research national survey found that 68 percent of all Americans viewed the FBI favorably. Only four other federal agencies ranked higher: the US Postal Service, the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and NASA.

Even Trump allies could hurt Trump
Comey testified to Congress that he shared with senior managers of the FBI the president’s efforts to thwart the bureau’s Russia investigation. But he did not inform the Justice Department of those efforts prior to Trump firing him. A major reason he didn’t do so, Comey said, was because the FBI’s leaders told him, “Look, it’s your word against the president’s. There’s no way to corroborate this.”

But Comey testified that during a private meeting with Sessions about another matter — “the president’s concerns about leaks” — he took the opportunity “to implore the attorney general to prevent any future direct communication between the president and me.” Comey told Sessions that leaving him alone with Trump “was inappropriate and should never happen again.” Comey said that Sessions “did not reply at all, his body language suggesting he was helpless or unwilling to do anything.”

Comey also testified that he expressed similar concerns to Rosenstein: “I explained my serious concern about the way in which the president is interacting, especially with the FBI.”

In his own testimony to Congress, Sessions sharply disputed Comey’s claim that he said or did nothing when Comey raised these concerns, saying he told Comey “that the FBI and Department of Justice needed to follow department policies regarding appropriate contact with the White House.”

But more importantly, while taking issue with that one aspect of the story, Sessions largely corroborated Comey’s account under oath — about how uncomfortable the then-FBI director felt with the president’s interactions with the FBI. Sessions is a Trump loyalist, the first US senator to endorse Trump, and the Trump administration’s attorney general — this only enhances his credibility as a witness whose testimony would harm Trump. (Of course, that relationship is now severely strained.) That Sessions recommended Comey’s firing as FBI director also, ironically, enhances his credibility as a corroboratory witness of Comey’s and against the president.

Rosenstein is yet to be heard from.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... surrogates

Trump’s Worst Nightmare: Mueller’s Grand Jury Subpoena’s Russia Documents
By Juan Cole | Aug. 4, 2017 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has empaneled a grand jury in the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. The Grand Jury in turn has already issued a subpoena with regard to the meeting of Don Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisors June 9 of 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya. Trump is clearly under investigation for obstruction with regard to the latter meeting, since he allegedly wrote a statement for Don Jr. to be read out for the public, in which he had his son deny that the meeting was campaign oriented, saying it was about adoption.
The mention of adoption is a tell. When Congress enacted a law permitting the sanctioning of high Russian officials around Vladimir Putin (the Magnitsky Act) in 2012, Putin’s response was to forbid Americans from adopting Russian babies. When Trump senior had his son say the meeting was about adoption, he was revealing that it was in part about the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. The Russians who set up the meeting, the Agalarovs, promised Trump Jr dirt on Hillary Clinton (presumably gathered by hackers, whom Putin once called “patriotic.”)
It now seems clear that Don Jr. released the email chain around that meeting in order to protect himself from going to jail, since his father had been imposing on him press releases about the meeting that distorted what happened and so may have involved obstruction of justice.
The Emoluments clause of the Constitution forbids politicians to accept anything of value from a foreign power. Some legal analysts have suggested that if the Trump campaign did receive significant help from Russia, even in the form of information, it could meet the definition of an emolument.
Mueller appears to think there is something to the story of Trump’s collusion with Russia during the campaign. The Veselnitskaya meeting alone is pretty strong evidence in this regard. But Mueller is also investigating Trump’s finances, including the possibility that Trump used his New York real Estate holdings for money laundering for Russian concerns. For Mueller to zero in on Trump’s business affairs is The Donald’s worst nightmare, and he tried to make it a red line, to no avail.
Ironically, Trump was just forced by Congress to sign new tough sanctions on Russia into law. The Putin team seem to have been hurt and confused. It is almost as though they knew nothing about the separation of powers and expected Trump to erase the Magnitsky Act by presidential fiat.
According to Interfax/ BBC Monitoring, Igor Sechin, the head of the Russian oil corporation Rosneft, complained, “Even the US president has said that the bill [on sanctions] is wrong. He objects it but signs it. What else can I add? Of course, the law is wrong, they understand it themselves,” Rosneft and Sechin are both under US sanctions.
Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev lamented this state of affairs on Facebook [BBC Monitoring]:
“the Trump administration has demonstrated complete impotence, handing over executive powers to Congress in a most humiliating manner. This changes the balance of forces in US political circles.”
“What does this mean for them? The American establishment has comprehensively outplayed Trump. The president is not happy over the new sanctions, but he could not not sign off the law. The new sanctions move is, above all, yet another way of reining in Trump. There will be more moves, the ultimate purpose of which is his removal from office.”
So Medvedev is putting his money on Mueller to dig up the kind of dirt that will get Trump impeached. And there is something guilty about his performance.
—–
Related video:
CNN: “Mueller is investigating the Trump money trail”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JS1r4h_UIc[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JS1r4h_UIc
https://www.juancole.com/2017/08/nightm ... ments.html

Why Dana Rohrabacher's name keeps coming up in the Russia investigation

Dana RohrabacherU.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher speaks to Russian lawmakers at a meeting in the Russian parliament's lower house at the end of May 2013. (Misha Japaridze / AP)
By Sarah D. WireContact Reporter
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher has long believed that the United States needs to build a friendlier relationship with Russia, and he’s never tried to hide it.

He’s been a frequent defender of Moscow on cable news for years, and his colleagues have speculated privately about the reasons he’s willing to work with much-maligned Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But links between the Costa Mesa Republican and the country he’s bucked his party to extend a hand toward have raised new eyebrows because of the investigations into Russia’s attempts to undermine the 2016 election that Donald Trump won.

Despite winning reelection last year by nearly 17%, Rohrabacher’s district is considered a battleground for 2018. He has drawn a Republican challenger, and a handful of Democratic challengers — several of whom are highlighting his friendliness toward Russia in their campaigns.

There is no indication Rohrabacher is under investigation by the FBI or the House and Senate committees looking into what happened, but his name keeps popping up in connection to key figures and events in the investigation.

It’s a story that involves Russian tax fraud, foreign adoptions, dinner with a foreign agent and a meeting in Trump Tower with the soon-to-be president’s son. And much of it has just recently come to light.


2012

A warning from the FBI

FBI agents sat Rohrabacher down in the Capitol and warned him that a Russian spy was trying to recruit him as an “agent of influence” — someone the Russian government might be able to use to steer policymaking.

When the New York Times first reported the meeting in May amid swirling accusations about Russia’s election meddling, Rohrabacher said he appreciated the warning but didn’t need it.

“Any time you meet a Russian member of their Foreign Ministry or the Russian government, you assume those people have something to do with Russian intelligence,” he told the newspaper.

The newspaper’s sources said there was no evidence the recruiters succeeded or that Rohrabacher had been paid by a foreign government.

March 19, 2013

A ‘nice little’ dinner with Paul Manafort

When former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party in 2013, he met with just one U.S. politician — Rohrabacher.

Rohrabacher said in an interview the meeting happened over dinner at the Capitol Hill Club, a popular Washington Republican social club. He said Manafort billed it as a chance to get reacquainted decades after they worked together in the 1970s on President Reagan's campaign. Still, he assumed Manafort had an agenda.

“I assume when old friends call me up and are wanting to get reacquainted and stuff I always assume they are in some way under contract with somebody,” Rohrabacher said. “We discussed a myriad of things, a lot of personal stuff, a lot of different analysis of the politics of the day. It was a nice little dinner.”

Manafort didn’t file as a foreign agent with the Justice Department, or disclose the dinner, until he came under scrutiny during the Russia investigation.

April 2016

A meeting in Moscow

During a congressional trip to Russia in 2016, Rohrabacher and his longtime friend and employee Paul Behrends met privately with high-ranking Russian justice officials.

At the time, Congress was considering expanding the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which prevented Russians believed to be involved in certain human rights abuses from traveling to the United States or spending money in the country.

The law was named for whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died under suspicious circumstances in a Russian prison after he accused several top Russian officials of misappropriating $230 million in taxes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was incensed by the restrictions. In retaliation, he halted U.S. adoptions of Russian children.

During the April meeting, according to multiple news reports, Rohrabacher was given a memo stamped “confidential.” Deputy general prosecutor Viktor Grin, one of the Russians whose foreign accounts were frozen under the Magnitsky Act, was in the room, according to news accounts.

“Changing attitudes to the Magnitsky story in the Congress… could have a very favorable response from the Russian side,” the memo said, according to the Daily Beast.

It contested the details of the Magnitsky case, including how the lawyer died, and leveled accusations against Magnitsky’s American-born boss, financier Bill Browder. They wanted Rohrabacher to cast doubt on what had happened to Magnitsky, and try to at least get Magnitsky’s name removed from the law.

Politico also reported that Rohrabacher huddled with Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya while he was in Moscow, a meeting Rohrabacher hasn’t confirmed. The pair later went on to lead lobbying efforts against the expanded Magnitsky Act when Rohrabacher returned to Washington.

Rohrabacher called stories about the trip and the document a "nothing burger” this month, saying that as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats he has an obligation to get information from many sources. He said foreign governments often pass on information to try to prove their point.

"The criminal justice department in Moscow had done a study of the Magnitsky case and had investigated it, and I was asked if I would look at it, and I said sure," Rohrabacher said. "I'm the chairman of the subcommittee that's supposed to focus on Russia. It's absolutely appropriate, and I think anybody that doesn't spend that time focusing on their responsibility is derelict in their duty."

May and June 2016

Lobbying fellow House members

Soon after Rohrabacher and Behrends returned to Washington, Rohrabacher delayed further consideration of the expanded Magnitsky Act.

“The congressman came across some information that puts the Magnitsky narrative as we know it into some question, and he wants to pursue it," Rohrabacher spokesman Ken Grubbs told National Review at the time.

Rohrabacher and Behrends began setting up a subcommittee hearing on the Magnitsky Act with plans to invite Browder and show a documentary disputing the facts of the Magnitsky case.

Also trying to sway members of Congress at this time were the lobbyist and lawyer Rohrabacher had reportedly met with in Moscow months before: Akhmetshin, a registered lobbyist for Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative, a group started by Veselnitskaya to lift the adoption ban, but widely thought to be focused on getting rid of the Magnitsky Act sanctions.

But Rohrabacher’s plan for a subcommittee hearing was waylaid by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), who instead arranged for the full committee to discuss U.S. policy toward Russia in June, a move that meant Royce controlled who would be called as a witness.

Veselnitskaya can be seen in video of the hearing sitting behind then-U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

Neither Akhmetshin or Veselnitskaya registered as foreign agents with the Justice Department, but Akhmetshin did register as a lobbyist. His 2016 registration lists three foreign clients, all Moscow residents.

One of them, Denis Katsyv, owns Prevezon, the company sued by then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara for using the stolen money Magnitsky was investigating to buy Manhattan real estate.

Bharara was fired by Trump along with other U.S. attorneys, and his replacement settled the case against Katsyv and Prevezon in May for $6 million. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the timing of the settlement, which came just days before the trial was set to begin and for about half of what the Justice Department initially sought.

June 9, 2016

A meeting in Trump Tower

Around the same time as Rohrabacher was organizing the subcommittee hearing that never happened, the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., agreed to meet with some people with Russian ties after he was told he would be given derogatory information about Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” according to emails.

He brought along his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to the Trump Tower gathering.

Veselnitskaya provided Trump Jr. with material she said showed improper donations to the Democratic National Committee. Then Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin began to talk about the Magnitsky Act and Russian adoptions, according to multiple news accounts.

Huntington Beach businessman Ike Kaveladze also attended the meeting. Rohrabacher said in an interview he’d never heard of Kaveladze, a constituent who lives near Rohrabacher’s Costa Mesa home, until after the Los Angeles Times identified him as a meeting attendee.

Reports on who attended the meeting thrust Rohrabacher's efforts to remove Magnitsky’s name from the sanctions law back into the spotlight.

June 15, 2016

‘There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump’

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a GOP California colleague of Rohrabacher’s, speculated in a private meeting that Trump and Rohrabacher were being paid by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) said in a recording of the exchange, first reported by the Washington Post in May. At that point, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan cut off the conversation and swore those who were there to secrecy.

A transcript of the tape noted that McCarthy was laughing during the conversation with other Republican leaders. After the transcript leaked, both McCarthy and Ryan said the comment had been a joke.

Spring 2017

A canceled trip to Russia

After promoting a trip to meet with the Russian parliament in January, Rohrabacher canceled it with no notice weeks later.

Rohrabacher said in an interview that he decided not to go because he was worried the national focus on Russia would make it difficult to have serious conversations with Russian officials.

"In the middle of a chaotic, public brouhaha, you're not going to be able to get the serious job done that you need to get done," he said.

But a senior House GOP aide who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to reporters said Royce declined Rohrabacher’s request to travel to Moscow shortly after the inauguration.

July 21, 2017

Accused of violating Russian sanctions

Rohrabacher has now been accused of violating the Russian sanctions he fought against by the man who convinced Congress to approve them.

In a complaint filed with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, Browder alleged that by getting information from Grin — one of the Russians sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act — and using it to try to change U.S. law, “Rohrabacher’s and Behrends’ reported actions thus provided services to one of the central figures targeted by the Magnitsky Act.”

Such complaints are most commonly made about the actions of big banks or private citizens, not a sitting member of Congress.

In a statement responding to the compliant, Rohrabacher said, “anyone who knows me understands that I am the member of Congress least likely to take directions from government officials, especially foreign government officials.”
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol- ... story.html

Tangled web connects Russian oligarch money to GOP campaigns
FILED UNDERCOMMENTARY AT 23 HRS AGO SHARE


Party loyalty is often cited as the reason that GOP leaders have not been more outspoken in their criticism of President Donald Trump and his refusal to condemn Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Yet there may be another reason that top Republicans have not been more vocal in their condemnation. Perhaps it's because they have their own links to the Russian oligarchy that they would prefer go unnoticed.
Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.
During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonid "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org.


Marco Rubio's Conservative Solutions PAC and his Florida First Project received $1.5 million through Blavatnik's two holding companies. Other high dollar recipients of funding from Blavatnik were PACS representing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at $1.1 million, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at $800,000, Ohio Governor John Kasich at $250,000 and Arizona Senator John McCain at $200,000.
In January, Quartz reported that Blavatnik donated another $1 million to Trump's Inaugural Committee. Ironically, the shared address of Blavatnik's companies is directly across the street from Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in New York.
Len Blavatnik, considered to be one of the richest men in Great Britain, holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and the U.K. He is known for his business savvy and generous philanthropy, but not without controversy.
In 2010, Oxford University drew intense criticism for accepting a donation of 75 million pounds from Blavatnik for a new school of government bearing his name. Faculty, alumni and international human rights activists claimed the university was selling its reputation and prestige to Putin's associates.
Blavatnik's relationships with Russian oligarchs close to Putin, particularly Oleg Deripaska, should be worrisome for Trump and the six GOP leaders who took Blavatnik's money during the 2016 presidential campaign. Lucky for them no one has noticed. Yet.

Oleg Deripaska is the founder and majority owner of RUSAL, the world's second largest aluminum company, based in Russia. Len Blavatnik owns a significant stake in RUSAL and served on its Board until November 10, 2016, two days after Donald Trump was elected. Blavatnik's resignation from RUSAL's board was published on the company's website with a note in all caps: "NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES."
Deripaska controls RUSAL with a 48 percent majority stake through his holding company, EN+ Group, and the Russian government owns 4.35 percent stake of EN+ Group through its second-largest state owned bank, VTB. VTB was exposed in the Panama papers in 2016for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Vladimir Putin and is under sanctions by the U.S. government.


Deripaska has been closely connected to the Kremlin since he married into Boris Yeltsin's family in 2001, which literally includes him in the Russian clan known as "The Family."According to the Associated Press, starting in 2006, Deripaska made annual payments of $10 million to Paul Manafort through the Bank of Cyprus to advance Putin's global agenda.
Len Blavatnik's co-owner in RUSAL is his long-time business partner, Viktor Vekselberg, another Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin. Blavatnik and Vekselberg hold their 15.8 percent joint stake in RUSAL in the name of Sual Partners, their offshore company in the Bahamas. Vekselberg also happens to be the largest shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus.
Another oligarch with close ties to Putin, Dmitry Rybolovlev, owns a 3.3 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus. Rybolovlev is known as "Russia's Fertilizer King" and has been in the spotlight for several months as the purchaser of Trump's 60,000 square-foot mansion in Palm Beach. Rybolovlev bought the estate for $54 million more than Trump paid for the property at the bottom of the crash in the U.S. real estate market.
The convoluted web that links Putin's oligarchs to Trump's political associates and top Republicans is difficult to take in.

Trump and Putin have a common approach to governance. They rely heavily on long-term relationships and family ties. While there have been tensions between Putin and Deripaska over the years, the Kremlin came to Deripaska's rescue in 2009 when he was on the verge of bankruptcy by providing a $4.5 billion emergency loan through state-owned Vnesheconombank (VEB), where Putin is chair of the advisory board.
VEB, known as President Putin's "pet bank," is now in crisis after sanctions applied by Europe and U.S. in 2014 have isolated it from the international banks that were the sources of its nearly $4 billion in hard currency loans that, according to Bloomberg, mature this year and in 2018.
Russia's international currency reserves are near a 10-year low, which has put further pressure on the president of VEB, Sergey Gorkov, to find sources of international rescue capital. Notably, it was Gorkov who met secretly with Jared Kushner in December at Trump Tower. Kushner's failure to report the meeting with Gorkov has drawn the attention of the Senate intelligence committee that now wants to question Kushner about the meeting.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comm ... -campaigns

Trump’s Fledgling Presidency Has Already Collapsed
By Jonathan Chait

President Trump’s approval rating has dropped by about one percentage point per month and now sits in the mid-30s. At the current rate, it would hit zero in September 2020. (A highly unlikely possibility, though with Donald Trump, anything is possible.) Measured in less quantifiable terms, Trump’s political decline has not occurred in so linear a fashion. It has happened, as Ernest Hemingway wrote about bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly.

After half a year of comic internal disarray, even in the face of broad public dismay, Trump’s administration had, through most of July, managed to hold together some basic level of partisan cohesion with a still-enthusiastic base and supportive partners in Congress. This has quickly collapsed.

Signs of the disintegration have popped up everywhere. The usual staff turmoil came to a boil in the course of ten days, during which the following occurred: The president denounced his own attorney general in public, the press secretary quit, a new communications director came aboard, the chief of staff was fired, the communications director accused the chief strategist of auto-fellatio in an interview, then he was himself fired. Meanwhile, the secretary of State and national-security adviser were both reported to be eyeing the exits. (Against this colorful backdrop, the ominous news that Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury barely registered.)

More disturbingly for Trump, Republicans in Congress have openly broken ranks. When the Senate voted down the latest (and weakest) proposal to repeal Obamacare, Trump demanded the chamber resume the effort, as he has before. This time, Republican leaders defied him and declared the question settled for the year. When the president threatened to withhold promised payments to insurers in retribution, Republicans in Congress proposed to continue making them. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley, responding to the president’s threat to sack Jeff Sessions, announced he had no time to confirm a new attorney general. Many Republican senators have endorsed bills to block the president from firing the special counsel.

From his views on NATO to his policies regarding U.S.-Russia relations, Trump has proven again and again that he's a "very flexible person."
The most humiliating rebuke came in the form of a bill to lock in sanctions on Russia, passed by Congress without the president’s consent. The premise of the sanctions law is that Congress cannot trust the president to safeguard the national interest, treating him as a potential Russian dupe. It passed through both chambers almost unanimously. Trump delayed signing the bill for days, then submitted to its passage in the most begrudging fashion possible, releasing a statement that reads less like something a president would publish to commemorate the signing of a law than a petulant handwritten note a grounded teen might tape to the bedroom door. “Congress could not even negotiate a health-care bill after seven years of talking,” wrote the president of the United States. “I built a truly great company worth many billions of dollars. That is a big part of the reason I was elected.”

During his very brief tenure as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci blurted out something very telling: “There are people inside the administration that think it is their job to save America from this president.” The conviction that Trump is dangerously unfit to hold office is indeed shared widely within his own administration. Leaked accounts consistently depict the president as unable to read briefing materials written at an adult level, easily angered, prone to manipulation through flattery, subject to change his mind frequently to agree with whomever he spoke with last, and consumed with the superficiality of cable television. In the early days of the administration, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and then–Homeland Security Director John Kelly secretly agreed that one of the two should remain in the country at all times “to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House,” the Associated Press reported recently.

And the insurrection appears to be creeping outward. When Trump tweeted that he would ban transgender Americans from military service, the Defense Department announced there had been “no modifications to the current policy” and that, “in the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect.” When Trump gave a speech to police urging them to rough up suspects, several police chiefs and even the head of his own Drug Enforcement Agency registered their public objections. The accretion of these acts of defiance is significant. The federal government has flipped on its chief executive.

Trump’s only opportunity lies in exploiting fear to demonstrate strength.
Barring resignation or removal from office — which would require the vote of a House majority plus two-thirds of the Senate — we are stuck with a delegitimized president serving out the remaining seven-eighths of his term. Politically gridlocked presidencies have become normal, but for the office to be occupied by a man whose own party elites doubt his functional competence and even loyalty is, to borrow a term, unpresidented. Trump’s obsession with humiliation and dominance has left him ill-prepared to cope with high-profile failure. He seems unlikely to content himself with quiet, incremental bureaucratic reform.


And yet it is difficult to see what Trump can do to reverse the situation. His next major domestic-agenda item, a regressive tax cut, is highly unpopular. He has inherited peace and prosperity. Nobody in the administration has been indicted. It is far easier to imagine conditions changing for the worse than the better.

There is one frightening exception. Trump could regain public standing through the rally-round-the-flag effect that usually occurs following a domestic attack or at the outset of a war. A miniature version of that dynamic was on display in April, when Trump launched a small missile strike on Syria, garnering widespread praise in the media for his newfound stature. The 9/11 attacks elevated George W. Bush’s approval ratings for three years, long enough for his party to gain seats in the 2002 midterms and for Bush, two years later, to win what is still the Republican Party’s only national-vote plurality victory since 1988.

Trump’s authoritarian tendencies make the prospect of his rebuilding his legitimacy on the basis of security especially dangerous. The number of Republicans who see Trump as a strong leader has dropped by 22 percentage points since January. Trump’s opportunity lies in exploiting fear to demonstrate strength.

There is an answer to this danger. It is to not simply assume Trump can — or should be allowed to — use war or terrorism to his advantage.

After 9/11, Democrats and the mainstream news media, harking back to the national unity that prevailed after Pearl Harbor, demonstrated their patriotism by supporting their president almost unquestioningly. That choice allowed Bush to escape scrutiny for policies that may have helped enable the attacks to happen. (Before, his administration had deemphasized the fight against Al Qaeda.) Bush’s ground-zero halo gave him a presumption of competence as commander-in-chief that enabled him to launch a war without planning for the occupation. It mostly survived the revelations of the 9/11 Commission Report three years later and did not fully dissipate until the Iraq War occupation had unmistakably descended into a quagmire.

The ability of a president to gain popularity by launching (or suffering) an attack is not a law of nature. It reflects, in part, choices — by the opposition to withhold criticism and by the news media to accept the administration’s framing of the facts at face value. A chaotic, still-understaffed administration led by a novice commander-in-chief who has alienated American allies deserves no benefit of the doubt. Everything from Trump’s incompetent management of the Department of Energy, which safeguards nuclear materials, to the now-skeletal State Department, to his blustering international profile has exposed the country to an elevated risk of a mass tragedy. A long-term task of the opposition is to prevent the crumbling presidency from transmuting that weakness into strength.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... apsed.html

Russian Gas Company Part-Owned By Putin Hired GOP Lobbyists Against US Sanctions

Russian President Vladimir Putin, a 4.5% shareholder of Gazprom, the parent company of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Russian President Vladimir Putin hired high priced former Republican House Congressional aides as lobbyists through the subsidiary of the massive state-run gas company, which he owns a considerable interest.
A lobbying disclosure reveals that Gazprom is 38% owned by the Russian state, but fails to mention that Putin is a 4.5% direct shareholder in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline who hired Capitol Consultants, LLC.
Shortly after Putin’s lobbyists were hired, the White House made a public push to water down Congressional sanctions.
The Democratic Coalition’s co-founder Scott Dworkin made the lobbying connection to the Kremlin.
“Once again Putin is spending money in America,” says Dworkin, “just to interfere with our government.”
He cites a report The Bureau of Investigative Journalism entitled “Putin: The richest man on earth?” The independent, non-partisan news outlet wrote:
Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and critic of Putin, is one of the most outspoken. He claims Putin could be worth as much as $70bn, a figure that would make him the richest man in the world.
This extraordinary sum is based on claims that Putin owns shares in three major oil and gas companies: 4.5% of national gas giant Gazprom, 37% of oil supplier Surgutneftegas and a major shareholder of a company that cannot be named for legal reasons. That company strenuously denies any links to Putin.
Russia’s MICEX stock exchange fell over 4% the day that the Senate voted on the new sanctions in June.
But the bill was held up in the House for six more weeks until finally being presented by Congressional Republicans to President Trump, and becoming the only major legislation he signed in his first six months in office.
Legistorm published the scoop:
The lobbying firm assigned Bob Brooks, former chief of staff to ex-Reps. James McCrery (R-La.) and Jay Dickey (R-Ark.), and Warren Tryon, a former House Financial Services Committee staffer, to the contract.
The new Russia sanctions could derail Gazprom’s pipeline projects, though they tell Reuters that they are accelerating work even though they don’t know where the pipes will land.
The President has bellowed about an “America First” trade policy, but now that it involves Vladimir Putin’s gas lines, it appears that he’s choosing sides with Russia. Reuters reports:
Despite Trump’s desire to promote U.S. liquefied natural gas exports to Europe that would compete with the Russian gas, he said he did not want the sanctions to get in the way of efforts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.
Russia has been known to use Gazprom as an instrument of state power for many years.
A member of the Ukrainian Parliament called Nord Stream 2 a “pipeline of deception” in Forbes, because its approval goes against the EU’s stated goals of being energy independent from Russia.
It’s not surprising that Putin would wish to lobby against sanctions, but at what point to Americans say enough to taking foreign cash to work against this country’s interests?
American sanctions against Russia’s state-run and Putin owned energy businesses are having their intended effect, yet sadly, Republicans are still taking big money to defend policies friendly to a ruthless dictator who hacked our elections.
https://thesternfacts.com/russian-gas-c ... c1858079d6

Investigators are now focusing in on Donald Trump’s personal secretary
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 1:56 pm EDT Fri Aug 11, 2017
Home » Politics

Back when Donald Trump Jr. released his emails about his Russia meeting because the New York Times was about to publish them anyway, Palmer Report noted at the time that the most important word in those emails was “Rhona.” That’s the name of Donald Trump’s longtime personal secretary, and the person who’s probably the closest to him professionally. Sure enough, investigators are now focusing in on Rhona, in what could cause all kinds of trouble for Trump.

Congressional investigators now say they want to bring in Rhona Graff for questioning, according to ABC News (link). That means it’ll end up happening; no one ultimately gets away with saying no to testifying before Congress. The reason is that Trump Jr.’s friend Rob Goldstone, who set up the Russia collusion meeting, mentioned the possibility of sending the information onto Rhona. Sending it to Rhona would have been the same as sending it to Donald Trump.

It’s long been established that going through Rhona is the most efficient way of getting a message to Donald Trump himself. That’s been the case in the business world for decades. Back in March, a Politico article revealed that Trump’s associates still often go through New York-based Rhona to reach him, even now that he’s in the White House in Washington DC (link). The bottom line is that Rhona has been privy to Trump’s most informal contacts and communications both before and since he took office. Once investigators bring her in, they can ask her about the entire range of Trump’s private communications that she’s processed and handled. Have world leaders been unofficially going through her to get to Trump? Have criminals?

In terms obtaining information that could end up exposing Donald Trump’s crimes and ousting him from office, going after his personal secretary Rhona may end up being more damaging than any attempt at going after his family members such Donald Trump Jr or Jared Kushner. This certainly won’t raise as many eyebrows in the public as the FBI recently having busted down Paul Manafort’s door. But this latest development may put more fear into the heart of Trump – because Rhona knows everything.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/in ... tary/4275/

Need to reach Trump? Call Rhona.
The president's acquired a White House staff, but his old friends still prefer to go through his longtime Trump Tower assistant.
By TARA PALMERI 03/26/2017 07:13 AM EDT

“If I really wanted to whisper something in his ear, I would probably go to Rhona,” said New York grocery billionaire John Catsimatidis. | Getty

When longtime friends and associates of President Donald Trump want to reach him, they don’t go directly to the White House. Instead, they call the woman who’s been the gatekeeper at Trump Tower for a quarter century: Rhona Graff.

Since Trump took office in January, Graff has become a conduit for those who want to quietly offer advice, make personnel suggestions or get on the president’s calendar when he’s at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The list includes investor Ken Langone and Hank Greenberg, the chairman & CEO of CV Starr whose assistant recently went to Graff about trying to set up a lunch with Trump, according to a person with knowledge of the call.

POLITICO spoke to seven associates of Trump who still pass on messages to the president through Graff, most of whom requested anonymity so as not to risk their access.

“If I really wanted to whisper something in his ear, I would probably go to Rhona,” said New York grocery billionaire John Catsimatidis, who’s dabbled in New York Republican politics and has known Trump for decades.

Some of the calls are just a matter of habit for people who have dealt with Graff for decades — but some see her as a way to get around White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and others surrounding Trump in Washington.

Roger Stone, a Republican strategist and long-time confidant of Trump, described Graff as a favored point of contact for “anyone who thinks the system in Washington will block their access.”

“I go through Rhona,” said Stone. “She’s a woman of excellent judgment who reflects her boss’ views. She has to field requests from a lot of people.”

Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort also stays in touch with the president through Graff, though a person close to Manafort said “it’s so infrequent, it’s not worth the mention.”

“If I wanted to get something to Trump without calling his cell phone, I’d send it to Rhona,” said another confidant who goes through Graff to get to Trump. “Rhona is always going to be around.”

During the campaign, Graff was instrumental in coordinating Trump’s travel and personal schedule. She considered moving to Washington, but decided to remain in New York, where her daughter is in high school. Instead, she passes requests along to Trump’s personal assistant in the White House, Madeleine Westerhout, who was trained by Graff during the transition.

Graff declined to comment for this story.

White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters rejected the idea that Graff continues to play a role in connecting Trump with people outside his administration as “completely false.”

“All correspondence goes through the White House,” Walters said.

"Rhona is not a go around," Walters also said.

The White House is bound by the requirements of the Federal Records Act, which governs the preservation of all records including schedules and correspondence from the president, the vice president and their staffs in the National Archives.

“There is a duty of the president to document his service and his activities as president and if you had a private employee who is creating a bunch of records outside of the federal government, then you do create a problem,” said Douglas Cox, a law professor at the City University of New York, who focuses on government records law. But, Cox went on, “there’s a distinction for so-called personal records, anything that’s purely private or non-public and does not relate to carrying out the duties of the president.”

Presidents George H.W. Bush, George Bush and Barack Obama relied on White House staff to handle all their scheduling. “It strikes me as unusual,” said Ryan Streeter, a former assistant to President George W. Bush. “I remember [Bush's] schedule being driven very much internally.”

Before Trump moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Graff warned deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, who now oversees the President’s schedule, that many of Trump’s longtime friends and their assistants would likely contact her to reach him purely out of habit, according to a person with familiar with the conversation. Walsh specifically requested that Graff forward the requests along, this person said.

“She’s still a factor, that’s all I know,” said New York Congressman Peter King, who arranged a meeting with Trump in December through Graff. “She gets things done and she’s very straight. It’s not a diplomatic call.”

Trump associates nevertheless say they’d rather go through Graff than through official White House channels, because they can be assured that messages will actually get to the President. Trump has even directed some people to go directly to Graff rather than the White House, according to two associates who have received this advice.

The president has been resisting the isolation of the White House by spending his weeknights making phone calls to old friends — a kitchen cabinet he relies on, to the irritation of some staff, including Priebus. Yet people who have Trump’s cell phone number say they’re wary of abusing that privilege and instead flag their interest in talking by passing on messages through Graff.

“Do you know the number of people who have his cell phone?” said a person who has the president’s number. “It’s a joke.”

Graff’s greatest influence is over Trump’s calendar at Mar-a-Lago, where his schedule is less tightly controlled by Washington staff. The president requests blocks of personal time be left free, which he uses to meet with friends, many of them club members who alert Graff in advance that they’re planning to be in Palm Beach at the same time as the president.

During Trump's first few trips to Mar-a-Lago, his official schedule was left open for meetings coordinated by Graff, according to a person with knowledge of his schedule.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/r ... uit-236484

Strategic coordination between Robert Mueller and Congress is paying off in Trump-Russia probe
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 4:37 pm EDT Fri Aug 11, 2017
Home » Opinion

Back when Special Counsel Robert Mueller was first appointed to investigate the Trump-Russia scandal, it left the public confused as to what role the House and Senate committees were supposed to play. News outlets friendly to Trump tried to further muddy the waters by reporting on an essentially imaginary turf war between Mueller and Congress. But now we’re seeing evidence that they’ve been strategically coordinating all along – and that it’s paying off.



The first concrete example surfaced this week when we learned about the sequence of events that led to Paul Manafort’s house being raided. Congress had demanded that Manafort come in and testify about the scandal under threat of subpoena. The public was upset that Manafort had only agreed to closed-door hearings. But the point of this wasn’t to serve up Manafort for public consumption. It was to get him to either slip up and reveal something that could be used against him, or to demonstrate his lack of cooperation so it could be leveraged against him.



We still don’t know whether Robert Mueller was able to get a no-knock warrant for Manafort’s house because of something he gave away during his testimony, or because of what he refused to answer. But either way, it was enough for a federal judge to be convinced that the warrant was justified. Sure enough, one day after Manafort’s Congressional testimony, the FBI was inside of Manafort’s house before the sun came up the next morning.



In hindsight, Congress and Mueller must have been coordinating their approach to Manafort all along – and it paid off in spades. We can now assume that they’re working together when it comes to every witness or suspect they approach. Whenever the House or Senate demands that someone show up and testify, it’s a safe bet that it’s part of the Special Counsel’s targeting of that individual. And we’ll see similar payoffs going forward.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/rob ... robe/4279/

Robert Mueller seeks to interview Reince Priebus, other Trump staff in Russia probe

BY
DENIS SLATTERY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, August 12, 2017, 10:54 PM
The federal investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election is focusing on current and former White House officials — starting with recently resigned Reince Priebus, according to a report on Saturday.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has asked the Trump administration about information regarding specific meetings, who attended them and whether there are any notes or transcripts of certain sit-downs, the New York Times reported.

Priebus, who stepped down as President Trump’s chief of staff last month, would have an extensive knowledge of meetings and related documents.

The Times reports that Mueller is specifically interested in Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey. Comey was canned in May after Trump urged him to “let go” of the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn in relation to the probe.

Trump was joking when he thanked Putin for booting diplomats
Mueller is reportedly probing whether President Trump obstructed justice by firing former FBI head James Comey.
Mueller is reportedly probing whether President Trump obstructed justice by firing former FBI head James Comey. (ANDREW HARNIK/AP)
Critics have openly questioned whether his dismissal can be regarded as obstruction of justice.

Comey testified before Congress that Trump on more than one occasion made inappropriate comments to him about the Russia investigation during meetings at the White House.

Ty Cobb, a special counsel to the President, told the Times that the White House would “continue to fully cooperate” with Mueller’s inquiry.

Last week it emerged that Mueller has impaneled a grand jury and issued subpoenas — clear signs the investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election and Moscow’s ties to the Trump campaign is heating up.

Russia may be forced to shut down consulate in the US
Kenji Logie (l) claps his hand as he watches former FBI director James Comey testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee at the Building on Bond restaurant in Brooklyn, New York. Logie is one of many worldwide tuned into the testimony, taking place in Washington, D.C. on June 8, 2017.

The jury has issued subpoenas relating to a secret meeting held at Trump Tower last year between Trump campaign associates, including his son, and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is also reportedly a main target of Mueller’s investigation. Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Va., was searched in a pre-dawn FBI raid last month.

Trump has repeatedly called the investigation a “witch hunt” and denies any collusion with Moscow took place.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... ailyNewsTw

Robert Mueller has a new target in Donald Trump’s White House: Everybody.
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 3:26 pm EDT Sat Aug 12, 2017
Home » Politics

You know that phase of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation where he and his team were doing all their work behind the scenes, and it was difficult to gauge just what they were doing? Yeah, that’s finished now. Over the past week or so, we’ve learned that Mueller has a grand jury and it’s been sending out subpoenas. We’ve also learned that the FBI raided Paul Manafort’s home. Now Mueller has a new target in Donald Trump’s White House: everyone.

When word surfaced last night that the Congressional committees investigating Trump’s Russia scandal are seeking to interview Trump’s longtime personal secretary Rhona Graff, it was a hint at where Robert Mueller – who appears to be very much working hand in hand with those committees – was headed next. And sure enough, today comes word from the New York Times (link) that Mueller has reached the point where he’s targeting pretty much everyone in Trump’s orbit.

This will include the entirety of Trump’s White House senior staff, both the ones who are still on the job, and the many who have already quit or been fired. The NYT says Mueller is seeking to learn who has attended what meetings and what has been said to whom, and he wants the transcripts from all of the above. Now that he’s got everyone in Trump’s wake rattled by having busted down Manafort’s door, he’s moving in for the evidentiary kill. And things may be even further along than they seem.

The NYT didn’t mention as much, but legal experts have told me that when prosecutors and investigators begin demanding that documents be turned over (in this case the meeting transcripts), it’s often because they already have copies of those documents. Someone in the mix has already privately cut a deal and turned everything over. The documents are then requested in order to see who panics and begins destroying their own copies. That in and of itself is a crime that can then be leveraged to force them to flip on Trump.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ro ... yone/4284/

WHY ROBERT MUELLER HAS TRUMP SOHO IN HIS SIGHTS

The Russian money trail leads right through the president’s troubled project in downtown Manhattan. A series of e-mails reveals new details.

BY CRAIG UNGER
AUGUST 13, 2017 4:00 PM
Robert Mueller, the Trump Soho Hotel, and Donald Trump with Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater at the Trump Soho Launch Party on September 19, 2007.

Left, By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call; right, BEHAR ANTHONY/SIPA/AP Photo. Inset by Mark Von Holden/WireImage.
Trump SoHo, the gleaming 46-story condominium and hotel that bears the president’s name in Lower Manhattan, was a troubled project even before it broke ground. It was initially marketed to wealthy foreigners enthralled by the Trump brand and the building’s opulent hotel-style amenities, but it never attracted nearly as many buyers as its developers had anticipated. Then, a few years before it was set to open, in 2010, an unusual complication came out of the blue. On December 17, 2007, veteran New York Times reporter Charles Bagli revealed that Felix Sater, managing director of the Bayrock Group, one of the building’s developers, had a hidden sordid past.

In 1991, Sater, then a stockbroker, got into a bloody bar fight with a commodities broker, stabbing him in the face with a broken margarita glass. The resultant wounds caused nerve damage and required 110 stitches. Then, in 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to participating in a “pump and dump” stock fraud. The maneuver, which was tied to the Mafia, involved laundering money, and eventually defrauded investors of $40 million. This checkered history appeared to catch his latest partner by surprise. “We never knew that,” Bagli quoted Donald Trump as saying about Sater’s criminal past. “We do as much of a background check as we can on the principals. I didn’t really know him very well.”

Since Sater’s run-ins with the law had not been previously disclosed to its investors, Bayrock was suddenly in crisis. Given that the company had raised money without revealing Sater’s convictions, could Bayrock be vulnerable to charges of bank fraud? Would its backers pull out? Were Bayrock’s principals and its partners—including Trump—in legal jeopardy? One problem, however, had to be dealt with immediately. Trump and his family had plenty to be unhappy about with Bayrock—budgetary overruns, the article in the Times, a construction disaster at the sales office, vicious internal politics, and more—and, as a result, they had requested a meeting with the firm’s principals. The gravity of the situation was underscored by the fact that all of the Trumps—Donald Sr., Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr.—were to attend.

As the meeting approached, Bayrock counsel, Julius Schwarz, was so apprehensive that he sent a cautionary e-mail to Sater and other Bayrock employees on January 21, 2008. “I think it is a trap,” he wrote, adding that the meeting with the Trumps was likely to become “a royal ass fucking.” But half an hour later, Sater, who appears to have talked with Trump about the crisis, sent a reply that was intended to calm things down. “I agree with all,” he e-mailed, “but we can’t cancel the meeting. They will still show up and tear is [sic] apart. . . . Go to the meeting but stand our ground and be prepared.” Sater’s criminal record, it seemed, did not appear to be a deal breaker for Trump. “Donald is happy with me,” Sater said in one of a series of e-mails obtained by Vanity Fair from a lawsuit against Bayrock. “I will explain when I see you.” (Some of the Bayrock e-mails are exclusive to Vanity Fair, but others were first published last October by Richard Behar in Forbes.

A decade later, of course, much has changed. Bayrock, which was once located in Trump Tower, is now defunct. Trump SoHo has been involved in ongoing litigation, including a lawsuit claiming that it was partly financed from “questionable sources,” as the Times would put it, from Russia and Kazakhstan. More recently, it has again found itself at the center of a new scandal. As Bloomberg News reported on July 20, Trump SoHo is among the targets special counsel Robert Mueller is scrutinizing in his probe into ties between the president and Russia. Mueller’s mandate, of course, is investigating possible collusion relating to the 2016 presidential election. The fact that Bayrock, which began working with Trump nearly 15 years ago, is now in his sights suggests that he understands that Russian-intelligence tradecraft is often indistinguishable from business, with its operatives navigating international flows of capital. In Vladimir Putin’s regime, business and organized crime and intelligence are often intertwined, and can all be used as weapons of the state. Mueller’s investigators are looking to unravel this web by following the money. And one company that potentially questionable Russian money flowed through was Bayrock.

Bayrock has been enmeshed in legal imbroglios since 2010, when its former finance director, Jody Kriss, and another Bayrock employee, Michael Ejekam, sued the company and its principals for $1 billion. In 2002, Kriss, then an aspiring 28-year-old developer who had done real-estate deals in Miami, was dazzled when Sater showed him Bayrock’s lavish Trump Tower offices and made promises that Kriss would get 10 percent of the firm’s profits, Kriss claimed in his lawsuit. “Felix knew how to be charming and he knew how to be brutally nasty,” Kriss told Bloomberg. “He has a talent for drawing people in. He has charm and charisma. But that’s what con men do.” But in the end, as his lawsuit asserts, Kriss felt “deprived of fair compensation by means of fraud”—this after working for years in a company he characterized as a criminal enterprise.

His complaint alleged that Bayrock was “covertly mob-owned and operated,” “backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people,” and “engaged in the businesses of financial-institution fraud, tax fraud, partnership fraud, human trafficking, child prostitution, statutory rape, and, on occasion, real estate.” The suit claimed that Bayrock had defrauded Kriss and Ejekam and “never intended to honor” promised payments. Instead, the real purpose of the company, it said, in addition to marketing expensive condos bearing the Trump brand, was “to launder many millions of dollars and evade taxes.”

On the top left: Eric Trump, Tevfik Arif, Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Tamir Sapir, Alex Sapir and Julius Schwarz at the Trump Soho Launch on September 19, 2007. On the bottom, Tamir Sapir and Felix Satter also attend Trump Soho Hotel Launch Party. On the right, the Trump Soho Hotel.
On the top left: Eric Trump, Tevfik Arif, Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Tamir Sapir, Alex Sapir and Julius Schwarz at the Trump Soho Launch on September 19, 2007. On the bottom, Tamir Sapir and Felix Satter also attend Trump Soho Hotel Launch Party. On the right, the Trump Soho Hotel.
Clockwise from top left: by Mark Von Holden/WireImage, BEHAR ANTHONY/SIPA/AP Photo, by WILL RAGOZZINO/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images.
His filing soon morphed into multiple lawsuits after attorneys Frederick Oberlander and Richard Lerner found out that Sater’s records had been sealed as the result of an immunity agreement, and they filed a writ of certiorari before the United States Supreme Court in hopes of unsealing them. Later, in 2015, Oberlander and Lerner also filed a qui tam suit against Bayrock, that is, a civil suit that rewards private entities working to recover funds for the government. In this case, they charged Bayrock with laundering $250 million in profits from Trump SoHo and other projects, and set up elaborate mechanisms to evade more than $100 million in state and federal taxes. Sater’s attorney, Robert Wolf, characterized the allegations of “their extortionate litigations” as “baseless and highly defamatory.”

President Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing in the suits, but the internal e-mails from Bayrock shine new light on the president’s relationship with Sater and the company, raising questions about what Trump might have known about the sources of Bayrock’s funds and whether he had a fiduciary duty to further investigate Sater and Bayrock. “It’s certainly a question for [special counsel Robert] Mueller to look into,” said Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement during the Clinton administration. “What anyone in Trump’s position should have done is investigate those allegations [about Sater’s criminal past] to ensure that there was not a money-laundering operation.” (President Trump and the White House declined to comment for this story, but a spokesman for the Trump Organization issued a statement saying, “The Trump Organization’s involvement in the Trump SoHo project was limited to licensing its brand and managing the hotel. The company was not responsible for and had no involvement in the financing of the project.”)

Sater’s history, after all, would have likely raised eyebrows. In order to stay out of prison in the wake of his 1998 conviction for stock fraud, he became a clandestine asset for the F.B.I. and other government agencies. His case came up during Loretta Lynch’s confirmation hearings for attorney general in 2015. Asked why the records in Sater’s fraud conviction were sealed, she responded that Sater had provided “information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”

There are differing accounts of exactly what Lynch may have been referring to, but according to one of his business associates, Salvatore Lauria, Sater became involved in a plan to buy anti-aircraft missiles on the black market for the C.I.A. As Lauria tells the story in his autobiography, The Scorpion and the Frog, with Langley’s backing, Sater agreed to participate in a complicated scheme to buy a dozen Stinger missiles from Afghanistan with tracking devices. The missile deal fell through, but after 9/11, Sater called Lauria to say the terrorist attacks had made them so valuable that they “were now going to be the F.B.I.’s new best friend,” according to the writ. (Sater’s attorney, Wolf, described the book as “completely false.”)

Meanwhile, Bayrock’s relationship with Trump dates back to 2002, when the company first leased space in Trump Tower and Trump was still licking wounds over his Atlantic City over-expansion a decade earlier, after which he had a more difficult time borrowing money. British billionaire Richard Branson said he once had a one-on-one lunch with Trump in which the future president vowed to spend the rest of his life seeking revenge against those who failed to help him. “He began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help,” Branson wrote in a blog post last fall. “He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people. He didn’t speak about anything else, and I found it very bizarre.”

Meanwhile, in Russia, oligarchs and mafioso were on the ascent. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, since the 1990s, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital had poured out of Russia, meaning that hordes of cash needed to be laundered. In Manhattan luxury real estate, the Russians, among many other nationalities, found an ideal vehicle. “We in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” said Winer, who oversaw anti-money laundering operations in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real-estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money.”

Foreign money, often untraceable, began transforming the high-end Manhattan real-estate market, and the pools of cash that Bayrock promised appealed to Trump. By 2003, Sater was working there in a position variously described as managing director and chief operating officer. His actual proximity to Trump is unclear. On the one hand, Trump had famously testified under oath that he barely knew Sater, that he probably wouldn’t recognize him if they were in the same room, and that he had no knowledge of Sater’s criminal past. But it has been widely reported that Sater did business deals with Trump, that he took Trump’s kids to Moscow, and that he was given a business card identifying him as a senior adviser to the Trump Organization.

Its other principals—wealthy émigrés from the former Soviet Union who knew how to get backing from Russia’s richest oligarchs—were more than familiar with the clientele who sought Trump-branded luxury condos. And under his agreement with Bayrock, Trump would not have to put up a single penny, but he would still get 18 percent of the profits—merely for licensing his name—as Bayrock financed and developed the 46-story Trump-branded luxury condo in SoHo. In 2006, Trump plugged the building on The Apprentice, referring to it as “my latest development.” “When it’s completed in 2008,” he said, “this brilliant $370 million work of art will be an awe-inspiring masterpiece.”

There were other Trump-Bayrock projects on the boards as well, in Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale, and elsewhere. In order to execute the plans, however, Bayrock and a partner, the Sapir Organization, had to raise roughly $1 billion. But there was one major problem: presumably no banks would lend to Bayrock if they knew about Sater’s convictions. On the other hand, according to Oberlander, hiding Sater’s past invited serious legal jeopardy. “Inducing a bank to lend money based on fraudulent loan application—i.e., concealing Sater’s criminal past—is bank fraud,” said Oberlander. “If you know that the loans were procured by fraud yet stay involved, it’s a conspiracy to violate money laundering and racketeering statutes.”

When Bayrock began to develop Trump SoHo, Sater led the way, now spelling his name “Satter,” as he told the Times, to “distance himself from a past” and to throw off anyone searching his name on Google. Two days after Bagli’s piece appeared in the Times, on December 19, 2007, Trump gave a deposition in a lawsuit he filed against author Timothy O’Brien. When Trump was asked, under oath, if he had learned about Sater’s criminal past, Trump testified that he was “looking into it because I wasn’t happy with the story. So I’m looking into it.”

Because this deposition was marked “Confidential” and kept under seal, Trump may not have expected it to become public, said attorney Lerner. Regardless, Trump’s knowledge of Sater’s past was now a matter of court record. And, according to Winer, if someone in Trump’s situation failed to investigate such allegations that person would be “open to charges of ‘willful blindness’ in terms of the knowledge he had.”

“The responsible course of action would have been to have Sater resign and to disclose Sater’s past to interested parties,” said Lerner. But, according to Sater’s e-mails, rather than extricate himself from the deal with Bayrock, Trump apparently saw the predicament as an opening to renegotiate his fees; in an e-mail written to two investors sent a few days later, Sater wrote: “Donald . . . saw an opportunity to try and get development fees for himself.”

In the end, Sater remained managing director of Bayrock through 2010. Trump also continued to participate in the venture and enjoy its profits. Once condos in the building were finally for sale, however, its problems began in earnest. The building’s no-man’s-land neighborhood—not really SoHo—with its grand entrance beside Varick Street and the chaotic approach to the Holland Tunnel—made it a difficult sell. It was explicitly marketed to prospective buyers overseas as a second or third home, with the challenging proviso that owners could live in their apartments only 120 days a year, and never for more than 29 consecutive days in any 36-day period. In 2010, 15 condo buyers filed suit, charging the Trumps and Bayrock with “an ongoing pattern of fraudulent misrepresentations and deceptive sales practices.” According to The Daily Beast, among the claims made to spur sales were Ivanka Trump’s proclamations to Reuters and to The London Times in June 2008 that 60 percent of the 391 units in the building had been sold. Documents later submitted to the New York attorney general showed that only 15 percent had found buyers.

The suit was eventually settled, and the plaintiffs received 90 percent of their deposits back. But that wasn’t the end of it. In 2014, four years after its opening, more than two-thirds of its condos remained unsold. The Web site Curbed headlined a story: “Trump SoHo Heads to Foreclosure Due to Unsellable Condos.”

As other lawsuits unfolded, more charges about Bayrock came forth, among them allegations that the condos themselves were being used as vehicles for money laundering. These transactions are the ones that Robert Mueller’s team of investigators seems designated to unravel. One case, as reported by the Financial Times last year, was that of Viktor Khrapunov, a former Kazakh energy minister and ex-mayor of Almaty, the biggest city in Kazakhstan. According to the F.T., lawyers for Almaty charged that Khrapunov and his family “conspired to systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets . . . and to launder their ill-gotten gains through a complex web of bank accounts and shell companies . . . particularly in the United States.”

The lawyers further charged that Khrapunov’s network used dozens of shell companies, among them three limited-liability companies—whose ownership could be easily concealed—called Soho 3310, Soho 3311, and Soho 3203, which corresponded to apartments of the same name in Trump SoHo. The vendor of the apartments was Bayrock/Sapir Organization L.L.C., which was named after the developers of the Trump SoHo, Bayrock, and the Sapir Organization founded by the late Tamir Sapir. The F.T. also reported that, according to regulatory filings, Bayrock/Sapir had a third co-owner—Donald J. Trump. (In response, Jan Lawrence Handzlik, an attorney for Khrapunov, issued a statement to Vanity Fair saying, “These allegations are more than a decade old. . . . For seven years ending in 2004, Viktor served with honor and distinction as administrator, or akim, of Almaty, a political subdivision of the Nazarbayez government. He then served as Nazarbayez’s administrator of the East Kazakh Region until 2007. It was then that Viktor had a political falling-out with the Nazarbayez regime. Since then, Viktor has been relentlessly pursued by the regime, which has sought to discredit him in the eyes of the Kazakh people. Now persona non grata in their own country, Viktor and his family look forward to refuting these old allegations in a fair public trial in a country that guarantees justice to those who come before its courts.”)

The Oberlander and Lerner lawsuit further alleged that $250 million of Bayrock’s projected profits as the co-developer of Trump SoHo and three other projects were “to be laundered, untaxed, through a sham Delaware entity to Iceland (and reportedly then Russia), intending to evade up to $100,000,000 of U.S. taxation.” Initially, Sater had helped the Khrapunov family buy apartments in the building, but last month he reportedly turned on the family and began cooperating with lawyers and private investigators who were pursuing multiple cases against the Khrapunovs on three continents.

As for the Trump SoHo, the building changed hands in 2014, after a foreclosure sale, but, according to Pro Publica, the Trump Organization still manages and markets the property, for which it pays Trump 5.75 percent of the condo tower’s operating revenues. In 2015, according to federal financial-disclosure reports, Trump made $3 million off the building.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08 ... his-sights

EXCLUSIVE: Emails Say Whole Trump Family Participated In SoHo Hotel Criminal Enterprise

The entire family gathers for a photo at the Trump SoHo Hotel’s grand opening party, September 2007.
It’s beginning to look like Special Counsel Mueller will catch President Trump and his three eldest children committing the first ever reality TV show assisted financial crime, all collaborating in a $350 million dollar bank fraud.
Three weeks ago, Bloomberg News reported that Mueller is focusing on the lower Manhattan Trump Soho Hotel deal and Vanity Fair reported today that new emails reveal the Trump family’s participation in a criminal enterprise there.
The Russian money trail leads right through the president’s troubled project in downtown Manhattan. A series of e-mails reveals new details.
Tonight, we’ve obtained leaked copies of those emails which are embedded below.
These leaked emails are the first evidence that proves that Donald Trump and his family personally knew of Sater’s crime and participated in a meeting about covering it up.
Donald Trump hawked the Trump SoHo Condo Hotel extensively on NBC’s The Apprentice, but committed a bank fraud to keep the project afloat the following year, and dragged his family into it.
The newly leaked emails from the Sapir Organization’s attorney document a “time sensitive and should not be pushed back” meeting the Trumps demanded on January 21st, 2008.
The meeting happened soon after the New York Times publicly revealed in mid-December 2007 that the Trump Organization’s investor and SoHo partner Bayrock Company’s manager-member Felix Sater had secretly entered financial felony plea deal in the late 1990s.
Donald Trump, his daughter Ivanka and sons Don Jr. and Eric collectively demanded and presumably attended the important meeting to chew out Bayrock about the project, and specifically Felix Sater about his felony past.
We know because Sater wrote Bayrock’s investors complaining that his own company wanted to fire him after meeting the Trumps.
Hiding a financial felon’s involvement is a form of criminal bank fraud. The Trump SoHo project ultimately failed and was foreclosed by lenders.
Instead of informing banks and buyers about Sater’s criminal past, as was the Trump Organization’s obligation, the Trump family proceeded to keep the felony secret as Sater engaged in a scheme to hide his interests in the deal.
The Trump family proceeded to squeeze their partner Sater to take his financial stake in the deal. (prior email)

There are major legal ramifications for the Trump-Sater meeting because the project is already the subject of an ongoing RICO civil trial by a whistleblower who worked inside the Bayrock Company; that is, the Trump SoHo hotel is being accused of operating a criminal enterprise.
These kinds of RICO cases are subject to enforcement in both civil lawsuits with tripled damages and criminal law, with jail and restitution to the victims as the penalty.
Here is the smoking gun email showing that the Trump family and all partners in the venture attended the meeting (full chain embedded below) to discuss Sater’s felony past, which they then kept secret:

The Trump family’s urgent request for meeting is conveyed by lawyers for his partners in Trump SoHo, the Sapir Organization
The newly leaked email chain also confirms a major German public television report on Trump SoHo that the Trumps participated in concealing a felon’s association in their hotel.
ZDF interviewed financial fraud expert Professor William Black, who was told the fact pattern of the Trump SoHo frauds — without the names of the participants — and he concluded based on their thorough reporting that the first family committed a bank fraud that violated the federal RICO Act.
The Trumps Stood To Benefit Financially From Participating In A Criminal Enterprise
The information about Trump and Sater defrauding banks has come to light only because attorneys Fred Oberlander and Richard Lerner refused to back down. They filed and are litigating two of the civil cases against the Trump SoHo’s developers.
Federal judges and prosecutors threatened them with prosecution for revealing that Sater was given an illegally light sentence for his crime, in secret. The judges even issued an order that gagged them from telling Congress about the judges’ own misconduct, but the attorneys persisted and are pursuing a civil law claim against the developers of Trump SoHo.
The attorney Richard Lerner has since written an extensive, fact-checked article about the harmful effects of secret sentencing in Law360 based on his wild experiences in the Trump SoHo case with Sater, who became an FBI informant against his mafia partners in the scheme.
The Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is America’s top anti-mafia federal law and the threshold for violating the law is merely participating in a business which engages in a pattern of illegal or fraudulent behavior.
New York state also has a RICO law, which is not subject to the powers of the Presidential pardon and could be enforced by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, alongside any federal investigation.
“The statute of limitations on RICO acts lasts for ten years from the last known act.” For RICO based upon bank fraud, according to lawyer Joshua Gold, who is licensed to practice in New York since 1998, “These emails are less than ten years old.”
Even though Trump’s participation in the project dates back to far more than ten years ago — and was far more than just licensing the family’s brand name — only criminal acts like hiding his partner’s felony count, start the clock ticking on the ten years a prosecutor could call forth a criminal case on the matter.
Hawking the Trump SoHo Hotel on NBC’s The Apprentice
During Season 5 of NBC’s “The Apprentice” Donald Trump awarded a job at the Trump SoHo Hotel to winner Sean Yazbek in February 2006.
Later, Donald Trump pitched the Trump SoHo Condo Hotel project on The Apprentice in early September 2007. He launched the boxy tower shortly thereafter according to the New York Daily News with “servers in masks pour champagne while Cirque du Soleil performed. The reigning Miss USA attended.”
The following year when major Wall Street firms failed, killing real estate lending markets for years, Donald Trump didn’t want to scare his lenders by admitting the truth, but he stopped hawking the SoHo deal on TV.
By the end of 2009, the New York Times reported that the condotel market had been dead as far back as 2007, giving Donald Trump a lot of incentive to conceal crucial information that would cause his lenders to repossess his tower then.
Eventually, lenders did foreclose on the property and sold off the Trump SoHo condo after 2/3rds of the units remained unsold in 2014.
In Trump SoHo’s three active civil litigations which includes one RICO lawsuit, and a suit Vanity Fair reports is related to an official from a former-Soviet Republic who bought units at Trump Soho, the Trump family is not a named defendant, but this new evidence could subject them to criminal liability.
The email with Sater’s after-action report that described the meeting with the Trump family in detail was released last October in Forbes. It revealed Trump’s future Senior Advisor describing his scheme to defraud the banks to his project’s Icelandic equity investors from Stodir (aka FL Group), who themselves went bankrupt only 9 months later.
Sater intricately recounted the story of Bayrock’s General Counsel Julius Schwarz's attempt to immediately force him out of Bayrock over the revelation of his felony conviction which he described as “damaging.”
One of the Bayrock Company whistleblowers suing Trump’s partners for RICO violations learned that Sater financed the SoHo hotel with money from Vladimir Putin, via Icelandic investors.
Special Counsel Mueller will have his hands full unraveling all of the Russian money connections to the Trump SoHo project.
It’s increasingly looking like there is substantive proof of criminal ties between the Trump family and Felix Sater, which may deliver the evidence of crime prosecutors seek to flip witnesses against larger targets.
Theoretically, even Donald Trump’s children could turn into the state’s witnesses against their father, the President because he dragged them into the Trump SoHo bank fraud scheme and cover up of their shady real estate deal partners’ financial crimes.
Here are the two sets of smoking gun emails, with the exclusive email chain linked here and on the left:
Felix Satter Email Chain Shows Trump Family Met About His Felony Past | Email | Cyberspace

http://www.scribd.com
Click here for the prior email chain where Felix Sater describes his fraud scheme in detail to his Icelandic investors.
https://thesternfacts.com/exclusive-ema ... 03277dfa71

August 21, 2017 Issue
Trump’s Business of Corruption

What secrets will Mueller find when he investigates the President’s foreign deals?

By Adam Davidson

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump, is looking at his past deals.Illustration by Oliver Munday; photograph by Skynesher / Getty (hands)

President Donald Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow recently told me that the investigation being led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, should focus on one question: whether there was “coördination between the Russian government and people on the Trump campaign.” Sekulow went on, “I want to be really specific. A real-estate deal would be outside the scope of legitimate inquiry.” If he senses “drift” in Mueller’s investigation, he said, he will warn the special counsel’s office that it is exceeding its mandate. The issue will first be raised “informally,” he noted. But if Mueller and his team persist, Sekulow said, he might lodge a formal objection with the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, who has the power to dismiss Mueller and end the inquiry. President Trump has been more blunt, hinting to the Times that he might fire Mueller if the investigation looks too closely at his business dealings.
Several news accounts have confirmed that Mueller has indeed begun to examine Trump’s real-estate deals and other business dealings, including some that have no obvious link to Russia. But this is hardly wayward. It would be impossible to gain a full understanding of the various points of contact between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign without scrutinizing many of the deals that Trump has made in the past decade. Trump-branded buildings in Toronto and the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan were developed in association with people who have connections to the Kremlin. Other real-estate partners of the Trump Organization—in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere—are now caught up in corruption probes, and, collectively, they suggest that the company had a pattern of working with partners who exploited their proximity to political power.
One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea in the Republic of Georgia, has not received much journalistic attention. But the deal, for which Trump was reportedly paid a million dollars, involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as “red flags” for bank fraud and money laundering; moreover, it intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. As a result, Putin and his security services have access to information that could put them in a position to blackmail Trump. (Sekulow said that “the Georgia real-estate deal is something we would consider out of scope,” adding, “Georgia is not Russia.”)
The waterfront lot where the Trump Tower Batumi was supposed to be built remains empty. A groundbreaking ceremony was held five years ago, but no foundation has been dug. Trump removed his name from the project shortly before assuming the Presidency; the Trump Organization called this “normal housekeeping.” When the tower was announced, in March, 2011, it was the centerpiece of a bold plan to transform Batumi from a seedy port into a glamorous city. But the planned high-rise—forty-seven stories containing lavish residences, a casino, and expensive shops—was oddly ambitious for a town that had almost no luxury housing.
Trump did very little to develop the Batumi property. The project was a licensing deal from which he made a quick profit. In exchange for the million-dollar payment, he granted the right to use his name, and he agreed to visit Georgia for an elaborate publicity campaign, which was designed to promote Georgia’s President at the time, Mikheil Saakashvili, as a business-oriented reformer who could attract Western financiers. The campaign was misleading: the Trump Tower Batumi was going to be funded not by Trump but by businesses with ties to Kazakh oligarchs, including Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s autocratic ruler, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and a close ally of Putin. Kazakhstan has the largest economy in Central Asia, based on its vast reserves of oil and metals, among other natural resources. Kazakhstan is notoriously corrupt, and much of its wealth is in the hands of Nazarbayev’s extended family and his favored associates.
Trump visited Georgia in April, 2012, at a politically vulnerable time for Saakashvili. Nine years earlier, Saakashvili had led the Rose Revolution, which overturned the country’s autocratic post-Soviet leadership. After assuming power, he initially cracked down on widespread petty corruption and cleaned up the civil service, which had functioned largely on bribes. Then, in 2008, he led a disastrous war against Russia over control of the breakaway region of South Ossetia. By then, his fight against corruption had largely ceased, and Transparency International and other N.G.O.s were reporting that élite corruption—in which wealthy, politically connected people receive better treatment from courts, prosecutors, and government administrators—was rampant in Georgia. Under these conditions, few Western investors or brands were willing to put money into the country. Saakashvili himself was increasingly unpopular, and the Trump deal was meant to help salvage his reputation.
Saakashvili showed Trump around Tbilisi, the capital, and Batumi. Georgian television covered the events fawningly, promising viewers that Trump would soon build a second tower, in Tbilisi. One broadcaster proclaimed that Trump was the world’s top developer. At the groundbreaking ceremony in Batumi, Saakashvili said that the tower was “a big deal . . . that changes everything around here.” At another event, beneath a banner that proclaimed “trump invests in georgia,” he thanked Trump for being part of the project—which, he said, had a budget of two hundred and fifty million dollars. He also awarded Trump the Georgian Order of Brilliance. Trump, in turn, praised Saakashvili. “Everybody in the world, they speak of Georgia and the great miracle that’s taking place,” he said.
Upon returning home, Trump appeared on “Fox and Friends.” Gretchen Carlson, the host at the time, asked him, “What are you going to be investing in?” He responded, “I’m doing a big development there—and it’s been amazing.” He said of Saakashvili, “He’s one of the great leaders of the world.”
Virtually none of the things that Saakashvili and Trump said about the deal were true. The budget of the Trump Tower Batumi was not two hundred and fifty million dollars but a hundred and ten. Trump, meanwhile, could hardly have invested such a sum himself. He professed to be a billionaire, but a few months earlier an appeals court in New Jersey had shut down Trump’s legal campaign against Timothy O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation,” which argued that Trump had wildly inflated his fortune, and was actually worth less than a quarter of a billion dollars. Julie George, a political scientist at Queens College who studies Georgia, told me that, by 2012, Saakashvili’s tenure could in no way be considered a “great miracle.” The country’s economy was floundering, and shortly after Trump’s visit it was revealed that the government had been torturing political opponents. (Saakashvili did not respond to requests for comment.)
The announcement of the Batumi tower was handled with cynical opportunism by both Trump and Saakashvili, but that was not the deal’s biggest problem. The developer that had paid Trump and invited him to Georgia—a holding company known as the Silk Road Group—had been funded by a bank that was enmeshed in a giant money-laundering scandal. And Trump, it seemed, had not asked many questions before taking the money.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Batumi had been a popular resort town, but by the early aughts it had fallen into disrepair. Its beachfront hotels housed refugees from the nearby Abkhazia region, which had broken away from Georgia in 1992. Batumi was the capital of the semiautonomous Adjara region, which was itself on the verge of declaring independence. Saakashvili saw the redevelopment of Batumi as critical for maintaining Georgian sovereignty there. Batumi residents promised to turn the city into the Monaco of the Black Sea.
But nobody seemed willing to put money into Batumi. Levan Varshalomidze, the governor of Adjara at the time, told me that Saakashvili and other Georgian officials sought financial backers, but they could not get anyone to invest in a run-down Georgian port.
Then, in 2005, something remarkable happened. Saakashvili and President Nazarbayev, of neighboring Kazakhstan, announced that B.T.A. Bank—the largest bank in Kazakhstan—was giving several hundred million dollars in loans to help develop Georgia. The loans would pay for the construction of hotels in Batumi, the expansion of the Georgian telecommunications industry, and the growth of a Georgian bank. Curiously, all the loans went to subsidiaries of one company: the Silk Road Group, which specialized not in real-estate development but in shipping crude- and refined-oil products, by rail, from Kazakhstan to other countries. Its senior executives had very little experience in telecommunications, banking, or hospitality. The Silk Road Group, which had annual revenues of roughly two hundred million dollars, was planning, in an instant, to venture into several new industries. Compounding the risk, this expansion involved taking on a debt one and a half times its annual revenue.
That wasn’t the only puzzling thing about the loans. At the time that B.T.A. was lending all this money to the Silk Road Group, the bank’s deputy chairman, Yerkin Tatishev, was apparently crossing an ethical line—positioning himself to exert improper influence over some of the very Silk Road Group subsidiaries that were benefitting from the loans. B.T.A. Bank had representatives on the boards of those subsidiaries, but one representative serving on two boards, Talgat Turumbayev, was simultaneously working for Tatishev’s company, the Kusto Group, supervising mergers and acquisitions. (Turumbayev told me that serving on the boards wasn’t a conflict of interest, because it didn’t take “a lot of time.”)
I spoke with people who had knowledge about the subsidiaries. They told me that the subsidiaries were co-owned by the Silk Road Group and secret partners. The source at one subsidiary told me he suspected that Tatishev—who repeatedly participated in company meetings—was a hidden owner.
Tatishev, who is estimated by Forbes to be worth half a billion dollars, left B.T.A. Bank in 2009. He insisted to me that, while he was there, he had no personal financial involvement in the Silk Road Group. But he acknowledged that he “developed a strong friendship” with George Ramishvili, the company’s C.E.O., and “offered to advise him.” He added, “It was the right thing to do, and this is my definition of friendship.” But is it true that Tatishev merely advised the Silk Road Group? The Web site of Tatishev’s company, the Kusto Group, declares that it has been “an outstanding partner for the Silk Road Group” since 2006, noting, “Together we have successfully invested in various sectors of the Georgian economy.” Whenever I pointed out such contradictions to Tatishev, he came up with new answers. In an e-mail, he said that the joint investments were simply “charity/heritage projects.” After he told me that he never served on the committee of B.T.A. Bank that oversees lending, I checked, and confirmed that this was false. He then insisted that he “did not recall” participating.
If, as the Web site suggests, Tatishev financially involved himself in businesses funded by the B.T.A. Bank loans, then he and the Silk Road Group may well have committed bank fraud. When bank executives have a personal financial stake in projects that their own bank is financing, it is known as “self-dealing,” and it is a crime in nearly every country, including Kazakhstan. I recently spoke with Sergei Gretsky, a professor at the Catholic University of America, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the Kazakh banking sector. When I asked him if it would be illegal for the deputy chairman of a Kazakh bank to have personal investments in a project that his bank was funding and withhold that information from investors, he laughed and said, “Yes, of course.”
Richard Gordon, the director of the financial-integrity unit at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, explained that self-dealing represented a central cause of the 1997 global financial crisis. Banks in Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, and Taiwan failed, in part, because bank executives and board members kept lending money to themselves and to their cronies. “This leads to defaults, bank bankruptcies, or government bailouts,” he said. Since then, nearly every nation has made efforts to prevent self-dealing. Gordon said that, at most banks today, the board members and senior staff don’t even have a credit card associated with the bank, in order to eliminate any appearance of a conflict of interest.
Lending to companies in which a senior bank executive has a personal stake is a crime because it violates the central trust that makes banking possible. The fundamental business of banking is to borrow money from one group and lend it to another. B.T.A., which had been heralded internationally as a fast-growing bank in a troubled part of the world, had raised money by selling bonds through J. P. Morgan, Credit Suisse, and many other top Western banks. If these Western banks had known that a senior B.T.A. official was heavily involved in the operations of a company that was receiving huge loans from B.T.A., they might have balked.

“It’s a very hip disease, so it’s good that we caught it early, before everyone’s talking about it.”
In the years before the Trump Tower Batumi deal, B.T.A. Bank became entangled in a spectacular crime. Mukhtar Ablyazov, the bank’s chairman, was a prominent figure in Kazakhstan, and not just because he was a billionaire. He was one of the leading sponsors of a political party opposed to President Nazarbayev. In 2009, when Nazarbayev signalled a desire to seize control of B.T.A. Bank, Ablyazov fled the country for London—taking billions of dollars in bank funds with him. He accomplished this with a diffuse scheme: dozens of offshore companies under his control received loans from B.T.A., and none of the loans were paid back.
In 2010, when a Trump Organization executive, Michael Cohen, began negotiating with the Silk Road Group about licensing Trump’s name for the Batumi tower, Ablyazov was facing eleven lawsuits in the U.K. The Kazakh government, which had indeed seized control of B.T.A. Bank, had sued him to reclaim ten billion dollars that he had allegedly siphoned out of the country. The Financial Times covered the case extensively, as did the Times, which described “a scheme by B.T.A.’s former chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov, to direct between $8 billion and $12 billion worth of B.T.A. loans—about half of the bank’s loan book—to companies that he secretly controlled.” The article noted that Ablyazov was renting “a 15,000-square-foot mansion” in London.
It would have taken only a Google search for the Trump Organization to discover that the Silk Road Group had received much of its funding from B.T.A. Bank, which, at the time of the Batumi deal, was mired in one of the largest fraud cases in recent history. The Silk Road Group had even been business partners with the central figure in the scandal: Ablyazov and the Silk Road Group were two of the owners of a bank in Georgia. I asked Cohen, who visited Georgia with Trump, if he had been concerned about the Silk Road Group’s connection to B.T.A. Bank. “I didn’t even know that B.T.A. was involved in this entire scenario up until the moment you told me,” he said. He added that he was not aware of any information about how the tower would be funded—or even “if there was going to be any funding at all.” He went on, “We had not gotten to that stage of the process. Remember, this was a licensing deal. The financing of the project was the responsibility of the licensee”—the Silk Road Group.
I recently spoke with John Madinger, a retired U.S. Treasury official and I.R.S. special agent, who used to investigate financial crimes. He is the author of “Money Laundering: A Guide for Criminal Investigators.” When I told him what Cohen had said to me, he responded, “No, no, no! You’ve got to do your due diligence. You shouldn’t do a financial transaction with funds that appear to stem from unlawful activity. That’s like saying, ‘I don’t care if Pablo Escobar is my secret business partner.’ You have to care—otherwise, you’re at risk of violating laws against money laundering.”
A judge in the U.K. ruled repeatedly against Ablyazov, starting in 2009, and ordered him to hand over more than four billion dollars to B.T.A. (The Kazakh government insisted that six billion dollars more remained missing.) The judge, Sir Nigel John Martin Teare, said that Ablyazov’s use of offshore holding companies had facilitated “fraud on an epic scale.” Teare ruled that “there can be only one explanation for the fact that the very large sums of money which were advanced were immediately transferred to companies owned or controlled by Mr. Ablyazov, namely, that the original loans were part of a dishonest scheme whereby Mr. Ablyazov sought to misappropriate monies which belonged to the bank.” Ablyazov was eventually sentenced to twenty-two months in a U.K. prison, for contempt of court, because he had refused to reveal disputed assets. In February, 2012, when Trump was planning his trip to Georgia, Ablyazov fled to France. He is currently fighting extradition.
The Silk Road Group, which was established in Georgia shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, does not have a conventional corporate structure. It is a holding company that controls dozens of corporate entities registered around the world. In total, B.T.A. loaned the Silk Road Group three hundred million dollars, and these funds were dispersed among its many subsidiaries, making the money trail hard to follow. For example, an eight-million-dollar loan was granted to Batumi Riviera Holding, B.V., which was registered in Holland. Batumi Riviera Holding has reported having a sole asset: a company called Vento, L.L.C., which is registered in Georgia. That registration indicates that its creditor is B.T.A., which made loans valued at seventy-five per cent of the initial investment in the company. Batumi Riviera Holding, in turn, is owned by Tbilisi Central Plaza, a company registered in Malta. Tbilisi Central Plaza is owned by Susalike Holding GmbH, which is registered, in Germany, to a Silk Road Group subsidiary.
Giorgi Rtskhiladze co-owns the Silk Road Transatlantic Alliance, a subsidiary that focusses on business deals involving the U.S. He brokered the Trump relationship. The Silk Road Group’s leadership in Georgia asked him to represent the company in interviews for this article. I recently met him at the St. Regis hotel in New York. When I asked why the Silk Road Group had such a bewildering structure, Rtskhiladze said, “There are tax reasons, and there are other reasons. To reduce liabilities, if we were sued or have to sue, certain courts are more efficient.” He pointed out that many companies legitimately use offshore jurisdictions to register their firms.
“That’s true,” Richard Gordon, the financial-integrity expert at Case Western, said. However, he added, “it is difficult to conceive of legitimate reasons for one shell company in an offshore jurisdiction to own a chain of companies established in a series of other offshore jurisdictions.” Such byzantine arrangements add expense, complexity, and uncertainty—the opposite of what businesses normally want—without providing any clear benefit, other than obfuscation. Moreover, by registering in so many different jurisdictions, the Silk Road Group has actually increased its legal risk, because a potential claimant can sue the company in all those jurisdictions. Gordon, who helped write the Republic of Georgia’s tax law, told me that he could think of no reason that this structure would help a Georgian company lawfully pay fewer taxes.
When I described to John Madinger, the retired Treasury official, the various entities and transactions involved in the funding of the Trump Tower Batumi, he said, “That is what you would expect to see in a money-laundering operation: multiple shell companies in multiple countries. It’s designed to make life hard for people trying to follow the transaction.”
It was difficult to pierce the veil of ownership, but I made some headway by collaborating on a reporting project with an investigations team at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Manuela Andreoni and Inti Pacheco, two recent graduates who are now investigative fellows, have spent months researching the Silk Road Group, Mukhtar Ablyazov, Yerkin Tatishev, and B.T.A. Bank. They have looked closely at relevant lawsuits, and they have obtained and translated property records and corporate registries from around the world.
Although Tatishev had repeatedly assured me that he was not involved in making decisions about Silk Road Group projects that had been funded by B.T.A. loans, I continued to accrue contradictory evidence. I recently received a cache of internal Silk Road Group e-mails, dating back to 2014, and they make clear that Tatishev has exerted detailed operational control over the company’s activities, including real-estate businesses that were funded by the B.T.A. loans. The e-mail cache shows that David Borger, a German financier who is a top executive at the company, regularly informed Tatishev about delicate internal financial matters and asked him for approval on a wide variety of decisions pertaining to Silk Road Group hotels, casinos, telecommunications infrastructure, and hydroelectric plants. Many of these projects had been initially funded by loans made while Tatishev was a senior official at B.T.A. Bank.
In one e-mail exchange, from earlier this year, Tatishev weighed in on a decision about which investment bank the Silk Road Group should use for a transaction. “We are cool guys,” Tatishev wrote. “And should always work with cool guys.” Borger responded, “Dear Yerkin, in this case can you please help us to get a cool deal with them?” He then asked Tatishev to describe how he wanted the deal to be structured.
In another recent e-mail discussion, which touched on crucial questions about the ownership and the financing of a major Silk Road Group project, Borger told Tatishev, “I need your ok.” In a subsequent e-mail, George Ramishvili, the C.E.O. of the Silk Road Group, added that Tatishev needed to give his approval. Tatishev did so. In a 2014 e-mail, a Silk Road Group consultant sent Tatishev and Ramishvili a summary of a plan they had devised to settle the outstanding debt owed to B.T.A. Bank.
Video from Trump’s visit to Georgia provides further evidence that Tatishev was a key part of the Silk Road Group—and suggests that Trump recognized his importance. During a speech that Trump gave in Tbilisi, Tatishev can be seen sitting in the audience next to Ramishvili. Trump says, “We have two great partners.” He points toward the seats where Tatishev and Ramishvili are sitting. “And they’re going to do a fantastic job.” (Giorgi Rtskhiladze, the Silk Road Transatlantic Alliance executive who met me in Manhattan, told me that Trump must have thought it was him, not Tatishev, sitting next to Ramishvili. But Rtskhiladze and Tatishev look nothing alike: Rtskhiladze is clean-shaven, with light-colored hair; Tatishev is nearly bald, with dark facial hair.) Tatishev accompanied Trump to meet Saakashvili at the Presidential Palace, in Tbilisi. When Michael Cohen, the Trump Organization executive, went to Georgia in 2010 to discuss building a tower with the Silk Road Group, he also met with Tatishev. A representative of the Silk Road Group said that Tatishev is a friend of Ramishvili and simply wanted to say hello to a big American tycoon. Inviting friends to important business meetings, the representative said, is common practice in the Caucasus region.
With minimal due diligence, Trump Organization executives would have noticed that the Silk Road Group exhibited many warning signs of financial fraud: its layered and often hidden ownership, its ornate use of shell companies, its close relationship with a bank that was embroiled in a financial scandal. Trump’s visit to Georgia occurred while his company was making a series of similar foreign deals. Until then, the Trump Organization had ventured abroad only occasionally: in 1999, a set of Korean buildings licensed the Trump name; in 2006, Trump bought a golf course in Scotland; the following year, construction began on a Trump-branded tower in Turkey. But by 2012 Trump was struggling in the U.S. market. His biggest investment, in American casinos, had proved ruinous, and he was now a minority owner of a near-bankrupt business. Trump had defaulted on loans multiple times, and nearly every bank in the U.S. refused to finance deals bearing his name. And so Trump turned to people in other countries who did not share this reluctance to give him money. In 2012 alone, the Trump Organization negotiated or finalized deals in Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, Georgia, India, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, and Uruguay.
At the time, the Trump Organization had only a handful of staff members involved in dealmaking. His children Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., assumed a management role in many of these foreign projects. According to Rtskhiladze, Trump, Jr., helped oversee the Batumi deal. At one point, Rtskhiladze and Cohen held two days of meetings in New York to discuss the project. Trump, Jr., dropped by several times. According to former executives at the Trump Organization, the company lacked rigorous procedures for assessing foreign partners.
A month after Trump visited Georgia, he agreed to license his name to, and provide oversight of, a luxury hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan, a deal that I examined in an article in The New Yorker earlier this year. Trump received several million dollars from the brother and the son of an Azerbaijani billionaire who was then the Minister of Transportation—a man who, U.S. officials believe, may have been simultaneously laundering money for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In 2013, Trump met with the Azerbaijani-Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov and his son, Emin; that November, they partnered with Trump on the Miss Universe contest, in Moscow, and discussed building a Trump Tower in the Russian capital. In June, 2016, at Emin Agalarov’s request, Trump, Jr., met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer who has represented Russian intelligence. Trump, Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya came to the meeting accompanied by business associates who have extensive ties to Georgia and Azerbaijan.
In December, 2012, not long after Trump signed the Batumi licensing deal, a company called Riviera, L.L.C., bought the fifteen-acre parcel of land on which the Trump Tower Batumi would supposedly be built. The price was twelve million dollars, and the seller was Vento, L.L.C., which was owned by a company that was owned by a company that was owned by a company that was owned by the Silk Road Group. Riviera, L.L.C., was also partly owned by the Silk Road Group. In other words, the Silk Road Group was selling property to itself.

“He’s wearing oven mitts, so I threw him an oven.”
The Financial Action Task Force, headquartered in Paris, is led by representatives from thirty-seven nations. In 2007, the task force issued a report about the use of real-estate projects for money laundering. The report makes note of several red flags. It warns of “complex loans” in which businesses “lend themselves money, creating the appearance that the funds are legitimate.” It also warns of the use of offshore shell companies and tangled corporate legal structures, especially those in which third parties are hired to administer a company and conceal its true ownership. These intertwined companies can then trade property among themselves, in order to create inflated valuations: “An often-used structure is, for example, the setting up of shell companies to buy real estate. Shortly after acquiring the properties, the companies are voluntarily wound up, and the criminals then repurchase the property at a price considerably above the original purchase price. This enables them to insert a sum of money into the financial system equal to the original purchase price plus the capital gain, thereby allowing them to conceal the origin of their funds.”
The report states that money launderers often find that “buying a hotel, a restaurant or other similar investment offers further advantages, as it brings with it a business activity in which there is extensive use of cash.” Casinos—like the one planned for the Trump Tower Batumi—are especially useful in this regard. The casino was to be owned by the Silk Road Group and its partners.
Alan Garten, the chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, declined to describe the due diligence behind the Batumi tower. When the deal was signed, the general counsel for the Trump Organization was Jason Greenblatt, who is now President Trump’s envoy to negotiate Middle East peace. (The White House declined to comment for this story, referring me instead to Sekulow, Trump’s lawyer, who also declined to discuss the specifics of the Batumi deal.)
A representative of the Silk Road Group told me that the company had been eager to assuage any ethical concerns the Trump Organization or other potential partners may have had, and so it had conducted due diligence—on itself. In May, 2012, the Silk Road Group commissioned K2 Intelligence, a firm founded by the investigator Jules Kroll, to produce a report. (This was fourteen months after the Trump Organization signed the Batumi deal.) I recently obtained a summary of the report, which explained that K2 was “asked to probe the background and integrity of S.R.G.’s principal shareholder, George Ramishvili, more deeply than a standard investigative or compliance report might.” However, the report seems to have addressed only one issue: a rumor, circulating in the Georgian media, that Ramishvili had once been a member of the Mkhedrioni, a right-wing militia. K2 concluded that the rumor was false. The summary did not address the Silk Road Group’s funding sources, its complex legal structure, or its relationship to the B.T.A. Bank scandal, which was unfolding in London courts at the time. Other due diligence may have been performed, but the Silk Road Group, K2, and the Trump Organization declined to share specific information.
Ross Delston, a prominent anti-money-laundering attorney in Washington, D.C., told me that, if one of his clients approached him with the possibility of entering a licensing relationship with the people involved in the Batumi deal, he “would tell him not to walk away but to run away—to run like hell.” He explained, “There are too many aspects of the deal that don’t make sense, and there’s no way, as an outsider, that you could conduct sufficient due diligence to figure out if it is criminal.”
So many partners of the Trump Organization have been fined, sued, or criminally investigated for financial crimes that it is hard to ascribe the pattern to coincidence, or even to shoddy due diligence. In criminal law, there is a crucial concept called “willful blindness”: a person can be convicted of a crime even if he was unaware of certain aspects of the crime in which he was engaged. In U.S. courts, judges routinely explain to juries that “no one can avoid responsibility for a crime by deliberately ignoring what is obvious.” (When the Trump Organization cancelled the Batumi deal, it noted that it held the Silk Road Group “in the highest regard.”)
John Madinger, the former Treasury official, said that, in any deal that might involve money laundering, there is one critical question: “Does the financial transaction make economic or business sense?” In recent years, a lot of residential housing has been built in Batumi, but most of it has consisted of what Colliers, the market-analysis firm, calls “low-segment”—down-market—apartments. The Trump Organization, with its extensive experience in the luxury real-estate market, could surely sense that it would not be easy to enlist hundreds of wealthy people to buy multimillion-dollar condominiums in Batumi. I asked several New York real-estate developers to assess the proposed tower. One laughed and said that the Batumi deal reminded him of “The Producers,” the Mel Brooks movie about two charlatans who create a horrible musical designed to fail. Another New York developer, who spent years making deals in the former Soviet Union, told me, “A forty-seven-story tower of luxury condominiums in Batumi is an insane idea. I wouldn’t have gone near a project like this.”
Giorgi Rtskhiladze, the Silk Road Transatlantic Alliance executive, confirmed that the luxury-housing market in Batumi was nonexistent in 2012, when he invited Donald Trump to visit Georgia, but said that the tower’s investors were nonetheless confident that a Trump-branded skyscraper would attract buyers. He insisted that the Silk Road Group had not taken part in anything illicit, and said that B.T.A. Bank’s 2005 decision to lend the Silk Road Group several hundred million dollars was hardly suspicious. The company had been working in Kazakhstan for years, transporting oil products, and had become close with the Tatishev family. When the bank that Tatishev helped run, B.T.A., decided to invest in redeveloping Batumi, the obvious partner was the Silk Road Group. “We were the partner they knew,” Rtskhiladze said. “We’re active in the region.”
Rtskhiladze acknowledged that it was quite a big loan for such a poor country. “Unbelievable,” he called it. And it was true that the Silk Road Group had little experience in hotels or construction or telecommunications when it suddenly entered those industries. But, he pointed out, Georgia was still emerging from the torpid days of the Soviet Union. “You’re talking about a country that had no experience,” he said. “Nobody else had experience.” In any case, he suggested, “real-estate development wasn’t that complicated. You hire third parties, who do feasibility studies. You look at the numbers. It wasn’t that difficult.” He added, “We like to do clean, transparent business.”
I asked Rtskhiladze why he had invited Trump, who has generally avoided travelling abroad, to Georgia. He told me a story from 1989, when he was a young soldier in the Soviet Army. “They told me, for target practice, to shoot Ronald Reagan’s face,” he recalled. “I refused.” The Army jailed him for several days. Soon after he was released, he said, he saw a magazine with Trump on the cover. He told himself, “One day, I will go to New York and meet this man.”
He argued that the fact that “there was no luxury in Batumi” was precisely why the idea of a Trump Tower was so smart. The skyscraper, with its “pool and gyms and conference rooms,” would single-handedly create “an entire universe of very New York-style luxury in a seaside town.” The luxury condominiums, he added, were “for international buyers—Saudis, Turks, Russians.” In his “strong opinion,” the Trump brand was “the only brand for them.” (David Borger, the Silk Road Group executive, told me that a study by a well-regarded Turkish firm had concluded that the tower was a good business idea, but he declined to share the name of the firm or the study.)
Melanie A. Bonvicino, who handles communications for the Silk Road Group, told me that the Trump Tower Batumi deal demonstrated an openhearted vision. “With the Batumi project, Trump was once again able to demonstrate his keen business sense,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Donald Trump in his role as futurist and visionary ordained the region as the next big thing. Mr. Trump had an immediate grasp over the geopolitical significance of the Republic of Georgia and its Black Sea region, acknowledging its vast potential by jointly transforming this hidden gem into the next Riviera. In the élite realm of global residential and commercial real-estate developers, the Trump moniker was and remains synonymous with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Michael Jackson.”
In 2009, when Ablyazov fled to London, the Kazakh government seized control of B.T.A. Bank. (Tatishev moved to Singapore in 2013.) A lawyer representing the bank, Roman Marchenko, informed the Silk Road Group that he had reason to believe that it had participated in Ablyazov’s loan scheme. The Silk Road Group denied any wrongdoing. A settlement was reached, for fifty million dollars—a bargain price, considering that the loans had totalled three hundred million. Marchenko believes that the Silk Road Group was deeply entwined with Ablyazov, but Kazakh government officials decided to stop investigating. They were pursuing Ablyazov’s stolen assets all over the world, and there was more money in other countries.
The Kazakh government placed B.T.A. Bank’s assets under the authority of its sovereign-wealth fund. Soon after, Timur Kulibayev—the powerful son-in-law of the country’s dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev—became the director of the fund. Kulibayev and his staff had access to all the bank’s internal documents. Recently, Kulibayev became the majority owner of the bank, giving him total control over B.T.A.’s archives, as well as ownership of its assets. Kulibayev was surely familiar with the players involved in the Trump Tower Batumi project. In 2011, Giorgi Rtskhiladze and Michael Cohen, the Trump Organization executive, began promoting the idea of a Trump Tower in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. They visited Astana and met with Karim Masimov, the Prime Minister. Masimov is now the head of Kazakhstan’s national-security apparatus.
Keith Darden is a political scientist at American University who has written extensively on the use of compromising information—kompromat—by former Soviet regimes against people they want to control. He told me that Kazakh intelligence is believed to collect dossiers on every significant business transaction involving the country. This would be especially true if a famous American developer was part of the deal, even if it would not have occurred to them that he might one day become the U.S. President. “There is no question—they know everything about this deal,” Darden said.
Darden explained that Kazakh intelligence agents work closely with their Russian counterparts. Kulibayev himself has direct ties to Russia’s leadership. In 2011, he was named to the board of Gazprom, the Russian gas behemoth, which is widely considered to be a pillar of Putin’s fortune. In “The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev,” Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at U.C.L.A. who specializes in Russia, wrote, “For Putin, Gazprom was a personal obsession. He memorized the details of the company’s accounts, its pricing rules and pipeline routes. He personally approved all appointments down to the deputy level, sometimes forgetting to tell the company’s actual C.E.O., Aleksey Miller.” Kulibayev could not possibly be serving on Gazprom’s board without Putin’s assent.
Robert Mueller has assembled a team of sixteen lawyers. One of them is fluent in Russian, and five have extensive experience investigating and prosecuting cases of money laundering, foreign corruption, and complex financial conspiracies. The path from Trump to Putin, if one exists, might be found in one of his foreign real-estate deals.
When Mueller was appointed special counsel, his official writ was to investigate not just “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” but also “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” Much hinges on the word “directly.” Sekulow, Trump’s lawyer, insists that Mueller’s mandate essentially stops at the Russian border. Pawneet Abramowski, a former F.B.I. intelligence analyst, told me that Sekulow’s assertion is nonsensical. “You must follow the clues,” she said. When investigating a businessperson like Trump, “you have to follow the money and go wherever it leads—you must follow the clues all the way to the end.” ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/ ... corruption

The Original Russia Connection

Felix Sater has cut deals with the FBI, Russian oligarchs, and Donald Trump. He’s also quite a talker.

By Andrew Rice

Photo-illustration by Bobby Doherty
August 3, 2017
10:50 am

On June 19 in a courtroom in Downtown Brooklyn, a federal judge took up the enigmatic case of an individual known as John Doe. According to the heavily redacted court record, Doe was an expert money launderer, convicted in connection with a stock swindle almost 20 years ago. But many other facts about his strange and sordid case remained obscured. The courtroom was filled with investigative journalists from numerous outlets along with lawyers petitioning to unseal documents related to the prosecution. “This case,” argued John Langford, a First Amendment specialist from Yale Law School who represented a Forbes editor, implicates an “integrity interest of the highest order.” The public had a right to know more about Doe’s history, Langford argued, especially in light of “the relationship between the defendant in this case and the president of the United States.”

John Doe’s real name, everyone in the courtroom knew, was Felix Sater. Born in Moscow and raised in Brooklyn, Sater was Donald Trump’s original conduit to Russia. As a real-estate deal-maker, he was the moving force behind the Trump Soho tower, which was built by developers from the former Soviet Union a decade ago. Long before Donald Trump Jr. sat down to talk about kompromat with a group of Kremlin-connected Russians, Sater squired him and Ivanka around on their first business trip to Moscow. And long before their father struck up a bizarrely chummy relationship with Vladimir Putin, Sater was the one who introduced the future president to a byzantine world of oligarchs and mysterious money.

Sater was a canny operator and a colorful bullshitter, and there were always many rumors about his background: that he was a spy, that he was an FBI informant, that he was tied to organized crime. Like a lot of aspects of the stranger-than-fiction era of President Trump, these stories were both conspiratorial on their face and, it turns out, verifiably true. Langford read aloud from the transcript of a 2011 court hearing, only recently disclosed, in which the Justice Department acknowledged Sater’s assistance in investigations of the Mafia, the Russian mob, Al Qaeda, and unspecified “foreign governments.” A prosecutor once called Sater, in another secret proceeding, “the key to open a hundred different doors.” Many were wondering now whether he could unlock the truth about Trump and Russia.

Related Stories

How Trump’s Russian Business Ties Led to Don Jr. Meeting a Kremlin-Linked Lawyer
Report: Trump’s Lawyer Involved With Secret Plan to Lift Russian Sanctions
In the universe of what the president has called, with telling self-centrism, his “satellite” associates, Sater spins in an unmapped orbit. The president has said under oath that he “really wouldn’t know what he looked like” if they were in the same room. (For the record, Sater is 51 years old and olive-complexioned, with heavy-lidded eyes.) Yet their paths have intersected frequently over the years. Most recently, in February, the Times reported that Sater had attempted to broker a pro-Russian peace deal in Ukraine, handing a proposal to Michael Cohen, the president’s personal attorney, to pass to Michael Flynn, who was then still the national-security adviser. Both Cohen and Flynn are now reported to be under scrutiny by the FBI, in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s election interference and Trump’s campaign.

If there really is a sinister explanation for the mutual affinity between Trump and Putin, it almost certainly traces back to money. The emissaries who met with Don Jr., promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton, came through the family’s business relationship with property developer Aras Agalarov, who had been trying to build a Trump tower in Moscow. Both congressional investigators and the special counsel are reportedly zeroing in on the finances of Trump and associates, looking for suspicious inflows. On July 20, Bloomberg News reported that the special counsel had taken over a preexisting money-­laundering investigation launched by ousted U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and was said to be examining, among other things, the development of the Trump Soho.

As a convicted racketeer with murky ties to the Mafia, law enforcement, intelligence agencies (both friendly and hostile), various foreign oligarchs, and the current president of the United States, Sater has become an obsession of the many investigators — professional and amateur — searching for Trump’s Russia connection. Since the election, especially in the more feverish precincts of the internet, he has been the subject of constant speculation, which has at times been contradictory. Was he the missing link to the Kremlin? (“Trump, Russia, and a Shadowy Business Partnership,” read the headline of a recent column by Trump biographer Tim O’Brien.) Or could he be Mueller’s inside man? (“Will a Mob-Connected Hustler Be the First Person to Spill the Beans to the FBI on Trump’s Russian Ties?” asked a story on the lefty site Alternet.) Could he be playing both sides?

At least one clue to the answer, Sater’s pursuers suspect, may be found in the records of his closed criminal case — which just so happened to have been overseen by one of the top prosecutors working on Mueller’s investigation. Judge Pamela Chen listened as the various attorneys advocating for disclosure made impassioned arguments, drawing on Supreme Court precedents, the Pentagon Papers, and even the possibility of “fraud by President Trump.” But when it came time for federal prosecutors to make the case for continued confidentiality, citing concerns for Sater’s safety and the possible disclosure of sensitive details about government operations, Chen closed the courtroom to the public.

The key documents in Sater’s case remain sealed. His lips, however, are another matter.


Trump with Sater in 2005. Photo: Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post via Getty Images
For an international man of mystery, Sater can be quite talkative. Over the past few months, I’ve reached out to him regularly by phone and email, and every once in a while, he has responded. He would vent about how he was “tired of being kicked in the balls” over long-ago offenses, by reporters investigating his ties to Trump. Then he asked what I wanted to know.

“What do you do for a living?” I asked.

“I am the epitome of the word ‘the deal guy,’ ” Sater replied.

People who know Sater told me he shares some character traits with Trump, a man for whom he professes unabashed affection. He tends to talk grandiosely, if not always entirely truthfully; he can play the coarse outer-borough wiseguy or the charming raconteur. Most of all, like the man he orbits, he has a transactional view of the universe — anything can be brokered. “I work on deals,” Sater told me. “Deals in real estate, liquid natural gas, medicine. I am currently working on bringing a — don’t laugh, do not laugh — a cure for cancer using stable isotopes.” He said he found the technology through a former real-estate partner, who had met a scientist, who was now testing it.

“I own a significant piece of it for doing the work,” Sater said. “I’ll find investors, and eventually, God willing, we will be able to deliver the cure for cancer. But as my lawyer, Robert Wolf, says, ‘Felix, if you announce that you’ve found the cure for cancer, tomorrow’s papers are going to be, ‘Trump’s Gangster-Related Ex-Partner Looking to Steal Money from Medicaid.’ That’ll be the headline for the cure for cancer.”

Sater said a lot of things like that, maybe just to be playful. He would joke sardonically about the latest additions to his Google search results, which yielded story after story about his entrepreneurial ventures, live and defunct, the two dozen or so lawsuits relating to various personal and business disputes, his curious presence at Trump Tower (the Federal Election Commission recorded a $120 purchase of campaign merchandise there on July 21, 2016, the day before WikiLeaks started releasing hacked Democratic Party emails) and even the Orthodox religious movement he belongs to, which was the subject of a breathless Politico exposé headlined “The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin.” “It was like, my rabbi from Chabad flying back and forth and smuggling secret messages in his ass or something,” Sater said. He scornfully dismissed the whole notion that he might be some kind of middleman between Trump and Russia. Then he would confide just enough about himself to keep the conversation interesting.

When I asked Sater how he first met Trump, he replied, “No comment on anything related to the president of the United States.” He savored a delicious pause. “But back in ’96, I rented the penthouse suite of 40 Wall Street,” a Trump-owned skyscraper. (A contemporary court record confirms he had an office there.) A few years later, Sater started doing deals to license Trump’s name for real-estate projects.

“How did I get to Donald?” Sater asked. “I walked in his door and told him, ‘I’m gonna be the biggest developer in New York, and you want to be my partner.’ ”

In reality, Sater’s route to Trump’s office was anything but direct. His family emigrated from the Soviet Union when he was 7. He grew up on Surf Avenue in Coney Island. As a boy, he said, he used to sell the Forward on the boardwalk. His father, Mikhail — “a big strapping fellow,” Sater said, who was once a boxer — worked as a cabdriver. At some point, the elder Sater got involved in organized crime, running a long-term extortion racket in Brighton Beach with a Genovese-family soldier. (He would end up pleading guilty to extortion charges in 2000.)

After a few years of college, Felix Sater found his way to Wall Street in the late 1980s. Brokerage houses then had retail operations that sold stocks over the phone, and Sater started out as a cold-caller. He worked his way up through several firms, including Gruntal, a freewheeling brokerage that did a lot of business with Michael Milken. (One of Sater’s colleagues there was Steve Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire who recently dodged insider-trading charges.) A friend, Sal Lauria, later wrote in a Wall Street crime memoir, The Scorpion and the Frog, that Sater was a sly salesman and a sharp dresser who would routinely spend thousands of dollars on designer suits. They frequented nightclubs and celebrity parties. At one such event, Lauria wrote, they encountered Trump, who sent a bodyguard over to obtain the phone numbers of their wives.

They laughed off that advance, but Lauria wrote that Sater could be “a hothead” when provoked. One night in 1991, when Sater was in his mid-20s, they were out at a bar in midtown when Sater got into a drunken argument over a woman and ended up slashing another man’s face with a broken margarita glass. He was convicted of assault, served a year in prison, and was barred from selling securities.

Sater moved over to the shady side of Wall Street, establishing a firm called White Rock, which engaged in illegal pump-and-dump schemes. The firm would secretly acquire blocks of penny stocks; then, its brokers would hype them to suckers over the phone. Sater and Lauria had personal ties to mobsters, and the firm received protection from Mikhail Sater’s associate in the Genovese family. Using an alias, “Paul Stewart,” Felix Sater laundered fraud proceeds through a labyrinthine network of Caribbean shell companies, Israeli and Swiss bank accounts, and contacts in New York’s Diamond District. He moved in the same bucket-shop demimonde as Jordan Belfort, the crooked trader portrayed in The Wolf of Wall Street.

“Jordan was a stone-cold little bitch, and everybody knew it,” said Sater, who claims that Belfort was actually nothing special as a salesman. “Jordan picked up 90 percent of it from everybody else and turned it into his own movie. I have had 27 producers approach me already to sell my life’s work, and I’m sitting here going, ‘Why?’ So in the first two minutes of the movie some director could show me doing coke out of a hooker’s ass?” (Through a representative, Belfort said he had no recollection of Sater.)

In the mid-1990s, the Mafia’s involvement in stock manipulation caught the attention of law enforcement. Feeling the heat, Sater decided to get out of the illegal business, starting a seemingly legitimate investment company in his penthouse office at 40 Wall Street. He explored opportunities back in Russia, which was going through its chaotic post-­Communist privatization process. He and his partners moved to Moscow, where they presented themselves as New York bankers. “We were dealing with ex-KGB generals and with the elite of Russian society,” Lauria wrote.

One night, Sater told me, he went to dinner with a contact that he assumes was affiliated with the GRU, the Russian military-intelligence agency, where he was introduced to another American doing business in Moscow, Milton Blane. “There’s like eight people there,” Sater said, “and he’s sizing me up all dinner long. As I went to take a piss, he followed me into the bathroom and said, ‘Can I have your phone number? I’d like to get together and talk to you.’ ” Blane, who died last year, was an arms dealer. According to a government disclosure made 13 years ago in response to a Freedom of Information Act query, Blane had a contract with the Defense Department to procure “foreign military material for U.S. intelligence purposes.” Sater says the U.S. wanted “a peek” at a high-tech Soviet radar system. “Blane sat down with me and said, ‘The country needs you,’ ” Sater said.

This was the beginning of what Sater claims were many years of involvement with intelligence agencies. He says he developed contacts at secret Russian military installations known as closed cities. “I was working for the U.S. government, risking my life in Russia,” Sater said. “Picture what they would have done if they were to have caught me in closed military cities — a little Jewish boy who gave up his passport and now was trying to buy the highest secret shit on behalf of the Americans. You think anybody would ever find me again?”

Meanwhile, back in New York, the FBI was looking for Sater. The bureau’s investigation into the Mafia and Wall Street had caught a break when someone neglected to pay the rent for a locker at a Manhattan Mini Storage facility on Spring Street. The management opened it up, found three guns, and called the police. The locker also held a cache of papers stuffed into a box and a gym bag: financial records that documented Sater’s money-laundering activities. The FBI launched an investigation called Operation Street Cleaner, targeting Sater and his co-conspirators.

At first, Lauria wrote, they hoped that Sater’s spying might earn them a “free ride” for their financial crimes. In addition to the radar system, Sater has publicly claimed that he provided intelligence on some Stinger missiles floating around Afghanistan, as well a phone number for Osama bin Laden. The FBI was not satisfied, however, so the fugitives returned to the U.S., where they pleaded guilty and became government witnesses. (Andrew Weissmann, the supervising prosecutor who approved Sater’s cooperation agreement in December 1998, would go on to become a top deputy to Mueller on the Russia investigation.) In 2000, Operation Street Cleaner culminated in the arrests of 19 people, including several alleged mobsters, who were charged with cheating investors out of $40 million.

Sater would continue to work with the FBI for years afterward in the hope of reducing his eventual sentence. Sater provided assistance “of an extraordinary depth and breadth,” a prosecutor later said in a closed hearing, on matters that ran “a gamut that is seldom seen.” After the September 11 attacks, as the FBI and CIA scrambled to respond to the threat of terrorism and Islamist insurgency, intelligence about black-market arms dealing suddenly became extremely valuable. Loretta Lynch, who oversaw Sater’s case as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, later testified during her confirmation process to become Attorney General that Sater’s work for the FBI and other agencies involved “providing information crucial to national security.”

Sater was skilled at deciphering financial fraud, and as is often the case, the same things that made him a successful criminal — his ingratiating charm, his street smarts, his ability to see all the angles — made him a very useful government asset. He engaged in undercover work, making “surreptitious recordings,” according to an unsealed court-hearing transcript. “He was always looking for the next big person to get connected to,” said a former law-enforcement officer who worked on Sater’s case.

So long as Sater continued to assist the FBI, the bureau left him free to do business. He kept up his wealthy lifestyle with his family, living on a beachfront lane in the moneyed enclave of Sands Point on the Long Island Sound — the model for East Egg in The Great Gatsby. He was finished on Wall Street, but real estate is far less regulated. Sometime around 2000, Sater got to know a neighbor, Tevfik Arif, an oleaginous former Soviet official from Kazakhstan. Arif and his family made money in the chromium business after the fall of communism, and had interests in hotels and construction in Turkey. He and Sater went into business together, calling their firm the Bayrock Group.

Bayrock leased office space on the 24th floor of Trump Tower, one floor below the headquarters of the Trump Organization. At this time, it wasn’t too difficult for a company without a reputation to approach Trump, whose business career was in a relative lull between his 1990s crash and his big comeback with The Apprentice. The Bayrock office was staffed with an assortment of eye-catching women, many of them from Eastern Europe. One attracted the attention of a Trump Organization leasing agent, who started paying calls to the office. He provided an introduction to Trump’s development team, a former Bayrock executive says. Soon Sater was in the boss’s office. In a 2008 deposition taken in connection with Trump’s unsuccessful libel lawsuit against his biographer O’Brien, Sater testified that the companies interacted “on a constant basis” and that he frequently popped in to visit Trump himself for “real-estate conversations.”

Sater says he convinced Trump to license his name to Bayrock developments in Florida and Arizona. Such deals, a major component of Trump’s business over the past two decades, allowed him to avoid issues of creditworthiness, which posed a problem because of his previous defaults, while capitalizing on his primary asset, his celebrity. Trump described the licensing business as “really risk-free.” If a project succeeded, he could bray triumphantly and collect fees, and if it failed, he could walk away, disclaiming responsibility. For Sater, the partnership offered an opportunity to leverage Trump’s name. In the deposition, he called this his “Trump card,” and he said he played it at every possible opportunity. “My competitive advantage is, anybody can come in and build a tower,” Sater said. “I can build a Trump tower, because of my relationship with Trump.”

When asked about Sater in his own deposition, Trump swore that “nobody knows anything about this guy.” Sater’s federal case was still secret, and he had taken to spelling his name “Satter” to avoid incriminating search results. But even a cursory background check would have revealed his earlier assault conviction and a 1998 Businessweek article about his involvement in stock fraud headlined “The Case of the Gym Bag That Squealed.” Sal ­Lauria, despite his lack of real-estate experience, also went to work for Bayrock as an independent contractor.

Sater played the role of the jet-setting deal-maker, entertaining lavishly, traveling constantly, jumping on a helicopter to Cannes when he felt the traffic from a nearby airport was moving too slowly. Joshua Bernstein, one of Sater’s subordinates, later asserted under oath that he and Lauria would often joke about being “white-collar criminals” and claimed that Sater had threatened to kill him, once on the day of the office Christmas party while wielding a pair of scissors. “He would say things like that regularly throughout the firm,” Bernstein testified. Another Bayrock associate in Arizona claimed in a lawsuit, later settled and sealed, that Sater once threatened to torture him and leave him dead in a car trunk. (Sater vehemently denies threatening either man and says the lawsuit allegations were financially motivated.)

In 2005, Sater and Trump embarked on their most ambitious joint project: the Trump Soho. The site of the development — a parking lot on Spring Street — happened to be directly across the street from the storage facility that had been Sater’s previous undoing. Trump took a very active interest, handling negotiations over construction contracts and promoting the building on The Apprentice. Trump received a 15 percent ownership stake in return for contributing his name and expertise, as well as a potential cut of development fees and an ongoing deal to manage the hotel. Another 3 percent of the building was allotted to Trump’s children Ivanka and Don Jr., who were just beginning to involve themselves in the family company. They worked closely with Bayrock, particularly Don, who played a deal-making role, traveling with Sater to explore other prospective projects.

Sater also tried to take the Trump brand abroad. Bayrock proposed deals in Ukraine, Poland, and Turkey. In Moscow, Sater identified a site for a high-rise Trump tower. He later testified that Donald Trump personally asked him to chaperone Don and Ivanka when they traveled to the Russian capital to explore the opportunity.

In September 2007, Trump, Arif, and Sater unveiled Trump Soho. The real-estate bubble was about to burst, but Bayrock was inflated, at least temporarily, by a group of people with even worse market timing: Icelandic bankers. Lauria managed to broker a deal with the FL Group, an investment group run by a long-haired “Viking raider.” The Icelandic fund agreed to invest $50 million in Bayrock, offering Arif and Sater a potentially lucrative payout. In December 2007, though, the Times reporter Charles Bagli published a scoop, revealing many details of Sater’s criminal history. Bayrock’s partners were upset; Sater complained in a leaked email that Trump was treating the scandal as “an opportunity to try and get development fees for himself.” Sater was quickly and quietly forced out of the company.

When the market crashed, Bayrock did, too, and none of the foreign projects came to fruition. Condo sales at the Trump Soho dried up, although Ivanka and Don Jr. continued to boast, falsely, that a majority of the building’s units had been sold. In August 2010, a group of Trump Soho buyers sued, claiming the building’s marketing was “fraudulent.” (Trump and his co-defendants agreed to settle with the buyers, refunding nearly $3 million.) That September, Arif was arrested on human-trafficking charges in Turkey after police broke up an alleged sex party he was holding on a yacht attended by Russian prostitutes and business associates, including a Kazakh billionaire whom Bayrock once listed as a financial backer. (Arif was later acquitted at trial.)

Sater, meanwhile, dropped out of public view. As Bayrock was imploding, he formed a new company called Swiss Capital, also on the 24th floor of Trump Tower. He shifted his activities to Europe, working on coal and oil deals in Kazakhstan, hotel projects in France and Switzerland. He spent an extended period in London, pursuing developments with Sergei Polonsky, a flamboyant builder from St. Petersburg who — like all of Russia’s new billionaires — maintained warm relations with Vladimir Putin. But Polonsky soon went bust and ran afoul of the Russian state. He was later arrested at his Cambodian island retreat, deported home, and convicted of embezzlement.

This whole time, Sater had been working on the side with the FBI. He has claimed that he was “building Trump Towers by day and hunting bin Laden by night.” When his Orthodox synagogue, Chabad of Port Washington, named him its Man of the Year, the congregation’s rabbi gave a speech recounting how Sater had told him many things about his past, few of which he really believed, until one day he was invited to a private event at a federal building in New York. “I get there, and to my amazement I see dozens of U.S. intelligence officers from all the various three-letter intelligence agencies,” the rabbi said. “They’re taking turns, standing up one after the other, offering praise for Felix, praising him as an American hero for his work and his assistance at the highest levels of this country’s national-security interest.”

Sater’s decade of undercover work finally ended in October 2009, when he was sentenced for his securities fraud at a secret proceeding in Brooklyn. (He was given no jail time and a $25,000 fine.) Around the same time, Sater paid a visit to Trump Tower. “I stopped up to say hello to Donald, and he says, ‘You gotta come here,’ ” Sater told me. Though the Trump Organization has contended it never formally employed Sater, he had business cards that identified him as a “senior advisor” to Trump. “Donald wanted me to bring deals to him,” Sater said. “Because he saw how many I put on the table at Bayrock.”

He said Trump’s willingness to take him on, even after discovering his criminal past, was indicative of his character. “I know you’re gonna be able to spin it as ‘He doesn’t care and will do business even with gangsters,’ ” Sater said to me. “Wouldn’t it also show extreme flexibility, the ability not to hold a grudge, the ability to think outside the box, and it’s okay to be enemies one day and friends the next?”

None of the real-estate deals Sater was trying to drum up for Trump materialized, and he drifted away from the company within a year. Since then, Trump’s memory of Sater has grown foggier. “I never really understood who owned Bayrock,” he testified in 2011. Two years later, he abruptly cut off a BBC television interview when Sater’s name came up. In 2015, in response to questions from the Associated Press, Trump replied, “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it.” In legal proceedings related to Bayrock’s failed ventures, Trump has contended he had little personal involvement in any of his licensing projects. “In general, [you] go into a deal, you think a partner is going to be good,” Trump said in a 2013 deposition. “It happens with politics. It happens with everything. You vote for people, they turn out to be no good.”

I stopped up to say hello to Donald, and he says, ‘You gotta come here,’ ” Sater said. “Donald wanted me to bring deals to him.
Sater continued to move in New York real-estate circles, though he tried to keep a lower profile. He was part of an insular Russian-American business community, and during the oil and gas boom earlier this decade, he was well positioned to act as a middleman between New York developers and Russian oligarchs who were trying to reinvest their fortunes in property. “He had access to high-net-worth individuals in Russia and the U.S.,” said a business associate of Sater’s. Sater has claimed he was working on a Trump-branded real-estate deal with a Russian real-estate developer in Moscow as late as 2015. (Agalarov signed a letter of intent to build a Trump tower in Moscow around the same time, but Sater denied this was the same project.)

One person whom Sater dealt with extensively was a Swiss-based investor named Ilyas Khrapunov, whose family was involved in banking and politics in Kazakhstan. Starting in 2011, with Sater’s assistance, Khrapunov and his family members invested in, among other things, a shopping mall outside Cincinnati, a residential complex in Syracuse, an apartment building on West 52nd Street, and three condos in the Trump Soho. According to a lawsuit filed by the firm of Boies Schiller Flexner, which is coordinating a global asset-recovery effort on the behalf of a Kazakh bank, the money for Khrapunov’s real-estate investments came from billions looted from the bank and a municipal government. In July, the Financial Times reported that Sater was assisting in a money-laundering investigation of the Khrapunovs, in which it said the FBI has taken an interest. (The paper’s sources said Sater was “being paid handsomely for his assistance.”) U.S. laws, which exempt real-estate transactions from certain anti-money-laundering regulations, have long made if possible for American developers to profit from the proceeds of crime and political corruption. The FBI is reported to be looking into whether Trump and other figures close to him might have engaged in such behavior, but money-laundering investigations are notoriously arduous, and proving intentional wrongdoing is especially difficult when the money comes from criminal activity in a foreign country.

Much of what is publicly known about Sater traces in one way or another to a seven-year legal battle, which has taken place largely out of public view. Years before anyone cared much about Donald Trump’s ledger books, Jody Kriss, Bayrock’s former director of finance, went to see a lawyer named Frederick Oberlander. Kriss thought he had been cheated out of money that Bayrock owed him. He told Oberlander, a specialist in arcane tax issues, all about the company’s dealings, including the FL Group transaction. Oberlander has a shambling manner and talks like a mad scientist. (Among other things, he told me that he studied astrophysics at a NASA institute and had taught computer science at Yale, that he had worked on nuclear submarines, that he used to be a competitive weightlifter, that he made a fortune in software development, that he once traded derivatives and sniffed out Bernie Madoff before anyone, and that he went into tax law, at which he was brilliant, because he “thought it would be fun.”) Oberlander told Kriss he thought that Bayrock’s finances looked fishy.

Oberlander also made contact with a second former Bayrock employee, Joshua Bernstein, the one who claimed Sater had threatened him. He had been fired and was suing over compensation. He possessed a hard drive containing thousands of internal documents and emails, as well as copies of several documents from Sater’s stock-fraud case, including a confidential government presentencing report, detailing his secret cooperation. Oberlander appears to have seen the documents as a tool to prod Bayrock toward a large settlement. “I am so not kidding this is not a game,” Oberlander wrote Bernstein in an email. “My job is to shake the living daylights out of them.”

In May 2010, Kriss filed suit in federal court, alleging that “tax evasion and money laundering are the core of Bayrock’s business model.” An enormous complaint, written by Oberlander and illustrated with arrow-filled flowcharts and snippets of incriminating internal emails, purported to describe a wildly complex racketeering conspiracy. It claimed that Bayrock had been “largely a mob-owned and operated business,” that it had engaged in fraud, that the FL Group transaction has been structured to evade taxes, and that much of the money had been siphoned off by insiders. (The complaint alleged some $10 million was allotted to “repay hidden interests in Russia and Kazakhstan.”) Oberlander attached Sater’s presentencing report as an exhibit. In a letter to Sater’s lawyer, Oberlander likened the suit to a “tactical nuclear device,” bound to yield massive press attention.

Sater’s lawyers later claimed that the presentencing document amounted to “an extortionist’s Holy Grail,” exposing him to retribution from the Mafia. Oberlander argued that the First Amendment gave him the right to alert the public, especially in light of Sater’s continuing business activities. The courts came down hard on Sater’s side. The civil case against Bayrock was immediately sealed, and the judge who presided over Sater’s old stock-fraud case, saying “something very bad and perhaps despicable was done,” ordered that Oberlander and Bernstein hand over the offending documents. (Bernstein later settled his claim against Bayrock and is no longer involved in the case.)

For the next few years, in closed proceedings, Oberlander would fight an increasingly fanatical legal battle, filing numerous suits against Bayrock, its lawyers and accountants, and the man referred to only as “John Doe.” He has faced both civil contempt proceedings and a criminal investigation related to his alleged defiance of court orders regarding the dissemination of sealed information. (No charges have ever been brought.) “Frederick Oberlander has a history of overstepping legal boundaries,” a Bayrock spokeswoman said, citing the contempt proceedings. “He has filed a string of meritless legal actions in hopes of a financial windfall.”

Whatever Oberlander’s motivations were to begin with, he has managed to drag many compromising facts into the open, including the FBI’s apparent blindness to Sater’s business dealings and millions in income from Bayrock. (In 2011, well after his sentencing, the IRS hit Sater with $460,000 in tax liens relating to the period he worked for Bayrock, which he did not pay off for two years.) Even after Kriss removed him as his lawyer, Oberlander continued to fight on in a variety of legal venues, including in a case in which he is suing on behalf of allegedly defrauded New York State taxpayers.

His lawsuit does not name Trump as a defendant, but the litigation has already damaged the president by revealing the dodgy goings-on at Bayrock, which, even if not criminal, certainly look suspicious, given the many questions surrounding Trump’s financial links to Russia. Two sources said Oberlander has provided information to Senate investigators.

“Donald Trump’s projects with Bayrock were financed with the proceeds of transnational crime,” Oberlander claimed when I met him for lunch one day in April. “He knew, and he continued to take the money.” (The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.) Oberlander described elaborate machinations involving secret agreements and misdirection, most of which appeared to be based on inference rather than the documentary evidence in the public domain. “You want to understand how it works? I show you or you’re obviously going to fail,” he snapped, when I expressed confusion about an intricate diagram he was sketching on a paper tablecloth. “You think way too much more of your intellect than you should. And you can quote me on that!”

In our chats, Sater called Oberlander a “nut job” and said the lawsuits were “pure extortion.” Last December, a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss Kriss’s civil fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy claims against Sater and other Bayrock executives. (The parties are now in settlement talks.) “It overshadows my life. And then with Donald becoming president and obviously me being the major Russian mafioso that I am,” he said sarcastically, “it’s just been a disaster for my life. A complete disaster.”

Despite his protests, Sater seemed to revel, just a bit, in all the speculation swirling around him. Last August, in the middle of the presidential campaign, Sater was introduced, via a mutual friend, to a veteran political fixer named Robert Armao. “I looked him up,” Armao told me, “and I said, ‘This is an interesting man.’” They met for a meal, where Sater regaled him with tales about Trump, and predicted he would win the presidency, for sure. Armao was impressed. “Felix Sater knows everybody, everywhere,” he said.

Armao, once a political aide to Nelson Rockefeller, has represented foreign leaders as a communications adviser and does business in the energy industry. Sater told him he coveted the “wonderful Rolodex” he had built over decades. Over the next few months, he would ask Armao to act as his intermediary on a number of matters, including enlisting Armao’s assistance in brokering an energy deal to refurbish Ukraine’s aging nuclear reactors.

They met again for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, a block south of Trump Tower, on October 7, the day the Obama administration issued its first urgent warning about Russian election interference, WikiLeaks published the first batch of John Podesta’s emails, and Trump’s vulgar Access Hollywood tape appeared. This time, Sater brought along a friend: Andrii Artemenko, a Ukrainian opposition politician. The nuclear deal appeared to be just the beginning of their plans, which would end up entangling the White House. “I think they had visions of kingmaking, and making Artemenko president of Ukraine,” Armao said. “Then you’d really be in business.”

“Artemenko is a politician who, like every politician, wants to become president,” Sater said. “So he came to me.” Though they started off talking about nuclear reactors, and averting another Chernobyl, Trump’s election appeared to open up an even more ambitious opportunity. “I got friendly with Artemenko over that deal, and he said, ‘Look, it’s killing me, we’ve got people dying every day between all the bombings and killings.’ I mean they’re killing kids over there. ‘There’s a new administration coming in, you got access to the administration. I know how to end the war in eastern Ukraine.’

“He goes, that’s the idea, let’s end the war. Let’s get peace going. Peace sounds good, right? How does the word peace not work?”

In January, Artemenko returned to the United States to attend Trump’s inauguration, bringing with him a Putin-friendly peace proposal, which called for a referendum to approve Russia’s occupation of Crimea in return for the end of hostilities in eastern Ukraine. (The plan also called for deploying propaganda to undermine Ukraine’s current president, a Putin adversary.) “I think it sounds like a good idea,” Sater said. “Politically, it would be an opportunity to break the situation that is currently going on with Russia. ’Cause I am a very firm believer that Vlad the Terrible — no matter how poised he is and how well he controlled himself in the Oliver Stone interview — that crazy fucker has got 10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us. Not a good guy to get into a pissing match with.

“So I figured, hey, things could work out all around, and probably give Donald, who wants to get on better relations with Putin, an opportunity to break this logjam. So I picked up the phone, and called Michael Cohen.”

Cohen, one of Trump’s personal attorneys, had known Sater since they were teenagers. He met Artemenko and Sater at a hotel on Park Avenue, and they gave him a sealed envelope containing the plan. The New York Times reported that Cohen said he had hand-delivered the envelope to Flynn at the White House. (Cohen later denounced the Times story as “fake news.”) After it was exposed, the peace initiative was scuttled and Trump’s opponents seized on fresh evidence that — preposterous as it might seem — Sater still had enough pull with the president to dabble in diplomacy. “A Big Shoe Just Dropped,” wrote the liberal blogger Josh Marshall, who has continued to enthusiastically delve into Sater’s role in what he calls the “Trump-Russia money channel.”

Since then, shoe after shoe has clunked to the floor, in a cacophonous cascade of ever-more-damaging disclosures. “I know there is a huge movement to find the there there,” Sater said in June. “I got it. But unfortunately, I’m not going to be the one.” He said he would be happy to be summoned to speak to Mueller or congressional investigators. “God bless them if they do,” he said. “We could talk about bin Laden and Al Qaeda and cyber-crime convictions and operations of over fucking 12 years, no problem.”

He couldn’t resist telling me, though, that something big was brewing. “In about the next 30 to 35 days,” he told me, “I will be the most colorful character you have ever talked about. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.”

This was before the news of Don Jr.’s fateful Trump Tower meeting came out. Still, it was already clear that Mueller was shifting his attention toward Trump’s family business, and many were wondering if Sater, who sang so beautifully for the FBI before, might have another big number to perform. Lately, something about Mueller’s investigation seems to have truly alarmed the president. Rattled by its focus on his finances, the president has sent signals that he might fire the special counsel and has openly discussed issuing preemptive pardons. The extremity of Trump’s reaction has only heightened suspicions he has something truly damning to hide. And if anyone outside the president’s immediate orbit knows what that is, one could imagine it would be Sater.

Sater laughed off such theories. “The next three years of hearings about Trump and Russia will yield absolutely nothing. I know the man, they didn’t collude,” he said. “Did a bunch of meetings happen? Absolutely. The people on the Trump team who had any access to the Russians wanted to be first in and be the guys that ran the whole détente thing. Michael Flynn wanted to be the détente guy, and then [Paul] Manafort, I’m sure, wanted to be the détente guy. Shit, I wanted to be the détente guy, why not? But was it really a conspiracy between Putin and Donald to get him elected? A little bit of a stretch.”

“When was the last time you talked to the president of the United States?” I asked.

For once, the deal guy had nothing to offer.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... ation.html