George Papadopoulos
Posted: Wed May 16, 2018 9:30 pm
seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 21, 2016 5:19 pm wrote:Donald Trump unveils foreign policy advisers
By Jeremy Diamond and Nicole Gaouette, CNN
Updated 5:03 PM ET, Mon March 21, 2016 | Video Source: CNN
Donald Trump revealed a list of at least five foreign policy advisers guiding his policies
This comes weeks after Trump has said he would unveil whom advised him on foreign policy
Washington (CNN)Donald Trump on Monday finally named several members of his team of foreign policy advisers in a meeting with The Washington Post's editorial board, also laying out a global posture starkly at odds with longstanding U.S. policy.
The names he provided for his advisory team ended weeks of questions about who forms the Republican front-runner's brain trust on global affairs. But the group's lack of boldface Washington names and clear policymaking track records means there are still unanswered questions about the international direction they would hope to lead the country in. They also don't clarify the GOP candidate's broader global vision, as some have taken positions contrary to those he has articulated on the campaign trail.
Trump told the Post that he wants to reduce American commitments to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a pillar of relations with Europe, and challenged the benefit of American military investment in Asia, one of the world's fastest-growing economic regions.
Trump detailed the position and his foreign policy team just hours before his first major foreign policy test -- a speech before the annual 18,000-strong American Israel Public Affairs Committee gathering in Washington.
Speaking alongside his Democratic and Republican rivals, Trump will have to display a grasp of substance on issues within Israel, such as the peace process and and Israel's qualitative military edge, and in the region, including Iran's nuclear program. In doing so, he could provide an initial sense of how this new group of advisers will shape Trump's world view.
"If he does not make this foreign policy advisers group look good by what's in that speech," political strategist Angela Rye told CNN, "I think he's got a problem."
Comparing the unglamorous business of crafting a foreign policy to sausage-making, Rye added that for Trump, the test is that "it's about knowing what to put in the sausage as well."
The team of foreign policy advisers, led by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, consists of counter-terrorism expert Walid Phares, energy consultant George Papadopoulos, former Defense Department inspector general Joe Schmitz, managing partner of Global Energy Capital Carter Page and former Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed the names to CNN.
"And I have quite a few more," Trump told the Post's editorial board, without offering details. "But that's a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do. But that's pretty representative group."
Later at a Washington news conference on Monday, Trump said, "I have a team, we actually have a very good team," calling it, "a top-of-the-line team."
None of the men on Trump's list are leading figures in the Republican foreign policy establishment. Many of the latter group came out publicly against a Trump presidency in a March letter that declared he would make "America less safe" and that he was "utterly unfitted to the office" of president.
One challenge Trump faces is that at this stage of the campaign, he doesn't have a large pool to draw from, Matt Lewis, a CNN political commentator and senior contributor for The Daily Caller, told CNN. "It's tough for Donald Trump," Lewis said.
Describing Trump's advisers as "smart, serious people," Lewis added that, "You're either going to choose people who weren't at the upper, upper echelon, or people who are associated with the George W. Bush era," who Lewis said are known for "nation-building and adventurism."
Another option for Trump, Lewis suggested, would be to go with Democrats.
Trump supporter John Phillips, a KABC radio host, said that the real estate mogul will have no trouble fielding talented help. "No question, as he moves closer to the convention in Cleveland and he looks more and more like the nominee every single day, all of this these people or many of them are going to come on board," Phillips said.
But one of Trump's opponents, John Kasich, blasted the foreign policy names that the former reality TV star announced earlier in the day.
Taking a dig at Trump on Twitter, Kasich sent out a list of his own advisers -- former administration officials and lawmakers who include a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a former CIA director.
"This is what it looks like when you build your national security team out of actual experts," Kasich said.
The advisers already with Trump include Phares, a professor at National Defense University and and adviser to the U.S. House of Representatives on terrorism. The Lebanese-born Phares, who previously advised 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was also a high-ranking official in a Christian militia tied to massacres during Lebanon's civil war.
Carter Page, the founder of Global Energy Capital, has experience as an investment banker in London and Moscow. George Papadopoulos, who worked for former Republican candidate Ben Carson, is an oil and gas consultant focused on the geopolitics of the energy trade, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Joe Schmitz, a lawyer, is a former Defense Department Inspector General and a former executive with the Blackwater security firm, associated with the killing of Iraqi civilians.
And Gen. Joseph Keith Kellogg, at one point a COO at Oracle, led the 82nd Airborne Division and served as chief operating officer of the multinational Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq from 2003 through 2004.
Trump has criticized American involvement in Iraq and said that he was an early opponent of intervention there.
He acknowledged that Kellogg and his perspectives on the conflict diverge.
"He does have a different opinion, but I do like different opinions," Trump told CNN.
And he said more broadly of his advisers: "It doesn't mean that I'm going to use what they're saying."
Trump's meeting with the Post came just hours before the billionaire businessman took questions from the press at the hotel he is building in Washington. This evening, he addresses AIPAC along with Kasich and fellow Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, a Texas senator.
Trump has for weeks said he would release the names of foreign policy advisers but has until now repeatedly missed his own deadlines.
Asked last week in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" about his advisers, Trump first pointed to himself: "I'm speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain."
The foreign policy positions he advanced Monday demonstrated that his thinking on global affairs has led him to advance positions that would turn parts of U.S. foreign policy on their head.
"NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we're protecting Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money," Trump said of the alliance in his remarks to the Post. "We certainly can't afford to do this anymore."
And when asked whether the U.S. benefits from its engagement with Asia, Trump responded, "Personally, I don't think so."
Nordic » Tue Mar 22, 2016 2:15 am wrote:Okay here is CRAZY Trump making no sense at all!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... gton-post/
Contrast this with Hillary's psychopathic blood-lust speech at AIPAC today.Trump questions need for NATO, outlines noninterventionist foreign policy
Donald Trump outlined an unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs Monday, telling The Washington Post's editorial board that he questions the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has formed the backbone of Western security policies since the Cold War.
The meeting at The Post covered a range of issues, including media libel laws, violence at his rallies, climate change, NATO and the U.S. presence in Asia.
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Speaking ahead of a major address on foreign policy later Monday in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Trump said he advocates a light footprint in the world. In spite of unrest abroad, especially in the Middle East, Trump said the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding domestic infrastructure.
Donald Trump speaks with Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan, left, as he departs a meeting with the editorial board of The Washington Post. Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is on the right. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
"I do think it’s a different world today, and I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore," Trump said. "I think it’s proven not to work, and we have a different country than we did then. We have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting, probably, on a bubble. And it’s a bubble that if it breaks, it’s going to be very nasty. I just think we have to rebuild our country."
He added: "I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’re blown up. We build another one, we get blown up. We rebuild it three times and yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education because we can’t build in our own country. At what point do you say, 'Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?' So, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that. But at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities."
For the first time, Trump also listed members of a team chaired by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) that is counseling him on foreign affairs and helping to shape his policies: Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares and Joseph E. Schmitz.
Trump praised George P. Shultz, who served as President Ronald Reagan's top diplomat, and was harshly critical of current secretary of state John F. Kerry. He questioned the United States’ continued involvement in NATO and, on the subject of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, said America’s allies are "not doing anything."
"Ukraine is a country that affects us far less than it affects other countries in NATO, and yet we’re doing all of the lifting," Trump said. "They’re not doing anything. And I say: 'Why is it that Germany’s not dealing with NATO on Ukraine? Why is it that other countries that are in the vicinity of Ukraine, why aren’t they dealing? Why are we always the one that’s leading, potentially the third world war with Russia.' "
Listen: Donald Trump's full interview with The Washington Post editorial board
Play Video63:53
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump visited the editorial board of The Washington Post on Mar. 21. Here is audio of the full, unedited interview. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
Trump said that U.S. involvement in NATO may need to be significantly diminished in the coming years, breaking with nearly seven decades of consensus in Washington. "We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore," Trump said, adding later, "NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money."
Trump sounded a similar note in discussing the U.S. presence in the Pacific. He questioned the value of massive military investments in Asia and wondered aloud whether the United States still was capable of being an effective peacekeeping force there.
“South Korea is very rich, great industrial country, and yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do," Trump said. "We’re constantly sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games — we’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing."
Asked whether the United States benefits from its involvement in the region, Trump replied, "Personally, I don’t think so." He added, "I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country, and we are a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation."
Trump cast China as a leading economic and geopolitical rival and said the United States should toughen its trade alliances to better compete.
"China has got unbelievable ambitions," Trump said. "China feels very invincible. We have rebuilt China. They have drained so much money out of our country that they’ve rebuilt China. Without us, you wouldn’t see the airports and the roadways and the bridges. The George Washington Bridge [in New York], that’s like a trinket compared to the bridges that they build in China. We don’t build anymore. We had our day."
Trump began the hour-long meeting by pulling out a list of some of his foreign policy advisers.
"Walid Phares, who you probably know. PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives. He’s a counterterrorism expert," Trump said. "Carter Page, PhD. George Papadopoulos. He’s an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy. The honorable Joe Schmitz, [was] inspector general at the Department of Defense. General Keith Kellogg. And I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do. But that’s a pretty representative group."
Trump said he plans to share more names in the coming days.
Kellogg, a former Army lieutenant general, is an executive vice president at CACI International, a Virginia-based intelligence and information technology consulting firm with clients around the world. He has experience in national defense and homeland security issues and worked as chief operating officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad following the invasion of Iraq.
Schmitz served as inspector general at the Defense Department during the early years of President George W. Bush’s administration and has worked for Blackwater Worldwide. In a brief phone call Monday, Schmitz confirmed that he is working for the Trump campaign and said that he has been involved for the past month. He said he frequently confers with Sam Clovis, one of Trump's top policy advisers, and that there has been a series of conference calls and briefings in recent weeks.
[Opinion: The foreign policy 'experts' who will flock to Trump should scare you]
Papadopoulos directs an international energy center at the London Center of International Law Practice. He previously advised the presidential campaign of Ben Carson and worked as a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
Phares has an academic background, teaching at the National Defense University and Daniel Morgan Academy in Washington, and has advised members of Congress and appeared as a television analyst discussing terrorism and the Middle East.
Page, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and now the managing partner of Global Energy Capital, is a longtime energy industry executive who rose through the ranks at Merrill Lynch around the world before founding his current firm. He previously was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focused on the Caspian Sea region and the economic development in former Soviet states, according to his company biography and documents from his appearances at panels over the past decade.
Trump’s meeting with The Post was on the record. An audio recording was shared by the editorial board, and a full transcript will be posted later Monday. Trump was accompanied to the meeting, which took place at The Post's new headquarters, by his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and spokeswoman, Hope Hicks.
Read more:
seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 12, 2017 8:46 pm wrote:The Timeline
Gerald Herbert
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublished
FEBRUARY 12, 2017, 1:13 PM EDT
As the allegations surrounding National Security Advisor Michael Flynn escalate, I wanted to put together for my own use a timeline of key events in this story. The story, as I see it, is the pervasive evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election and widespread, though murky, evidence of ties between the Russian government the Trump campaign.
I've always been partial to timelines because ... well, we live in time. Chronology is the basic organizing principle of our existence. It allows us to get our heads around scatterings of facts in much the way a good chart allows us to synthesize numerical data. Of course, a timeline can create the impression of causation where none exists. It's important to keep that in mind. Still, it's helpful to get a lot of information in one place organized in time. It helps us bound what events can possibly be causally related as well as how they may or may not be related.
A few notes.
One point I was trying to illuminate for myself was when Michael Flynn became associated with Donald Trump. I took a renewed interest in this in light of reports that Flynn's communications with the Russian Ambassador to the United States began during the campaign, not during the transition period. So when did the campaign start for Flynn? As nearly as I can tell from contemporaneous press reports, Flynn's first meeting with Trump was in the late summer of 2015. Something like an official advisory role began in the Spring of 2016.
This is a timeline in progress. I'm still adding details. For the moment, I haven't added claims of applications for FISA warrants, first denied and later approved. It seems likely to me that these occurred. But the reporting remains murky. I've tried to keep the timeline to publicly known incidents and events or those attested and confirmed with specific details by multiple, credible news sources.
June 16th, 2015: Donald Trump announces his candidacy for President of the United States.
Circa Summer 2015: The US government alleges that Russian hackers first gain access to DNC computer networks.
Circa August 2015: Trump staff arranges first meeting between Trump and General Flynn, according to Flynn's account in an August 2016 interview with The Washington Post. "I got a phone call from his team. They asked if he would be willing meet with Mr. Trump and I did. … In late summer 2015."
August 8th, 2015: Roger Stone leaves formal role in Trump campaign. Whether he quits or was fired is disputed. Stone will continue as a key, albeit informal advisor, for the remainder of the campaign.
December 10th, 2015: Michael Flynn attends conference and banquet in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of RT (formerly Russia today). Flynn is seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the concluding banquet.
March 21st, 2016: In a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board, Trump provides a list of five foreign policy advisors. The list includes Carter Page but not Michael Flynn. The list is Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg.
March 28th, 2016: Trump campaign hires Paul Manafort to oversee delegate operations for campaign. Manafort becomes the dominant figure running the campaign by late April and takes over as campaign manager on June 21st with the firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
February-April 2016: Flynn advisory relationship with Trump appears to have solidified over the Spring of 2016. In late January Flynn is mentioned as an advisor who has "regular interactions" with Trump. There are similar mentions in February and March. Yet as late as mid-March, Flynn appeared to downplay his ties to Trump. By May Flynn is routinely listed as an advisor and by late May is even being mooted as a possible vice presidential pick.
April 2016: DNC network administrators first notice suspicious activity on Committee computer networks in late April, 2016, according to The Washington Post. The DNC retains the services of network security firm Crowdstrike which expels hackers from the DNC computer network. Crowdstrike tells The Washington Post it believes hackers had been operating inside the DNC networks since the Summer of 2015.
June 14, 2016: Washington Post publishes first account of hacking of the DNC computer networks, allegedly by hackers working on behalf of the Russian government.
July 11th-12th, 2016: Trump campaign officials intervene to remove language calling for providing Ukraine with lethal aid against Russian intervention is Crimea and eastern Ukraine. It is, reportedly, the only significant Trump campaign intervention in the platform in which the Trump campaign has allowed activists a free hand.
July 12th, 2016: Official publication date, The Field of Fight by Michael Flynn and Michael Ledeen.
July 22, 2016: Wikileaks releases first tranche of DNC emails dating from January 2015 to May 2016.
July 27th, 2016: Donald Trump asks Russia to hack Clinton's email to find 33,000 alleged lost emails: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you can find the 33,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."
August 1st, 2016: Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort denies Trump campaign changed GOP platform on Russia and Ukraine.
August 14th, 2016: The New York Times publishes story detailing handwritten ledgers showing "$12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau."
August 19, 2016: Paul Manafort resigns from Trump campaign.
August 21, 2016: Trump advisor Roger Stone tweets: "Trust me, it will soon [sic] the Podesta's time in the barrel."
September 26th, 2016: Trump Russia-Europe Policy Advisor Carter Page steps down from campaign while disputing allegations that he engaged in private communications with Russian government officials. A Yahoo News article from three days earlier reported that US intelligence officials were probing whether he met privately with Russian officials in Moscow in July, including an alleged meeting with close Putin ally Igor Sechin, Chairman of Russian oil company Rosneft.
September 26th, 2016: At first presidential debate, Donald Trump casts doubt on Russian role in hacking campaign: "It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds."
October 7, 2016: A "Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence" officially accuses the Russian government of being behind hacking of the DNC "to interfere with the US election process."
October 7, 2016: Wikileaks releases first batch of Podesta emails - one hour after release of Access Hollywood Trump tape.
October 12th, 2016: Stone says he has been in contact with Assange through an intermediary.
October 30th, 2016: In response to FBI Director James Comey's letter to Congress about new developments in the Clinton email server probe, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid writes a public letter to Comey in which he claims: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government."
December 9th, 2016: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) hand delivers a selection of memos (aka 'the Steele dossier') to FBI Director James Comey.
December 29th, 2016: President Barack Obama outlines a wave a sanctions and expulsions of Russian diplomat in response to Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
December 29th, 2016: Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov vows retaliation for sanctions.
December 29th, 2016: Incoming National Security Michael Flynn has multiple phone conversations with Russian Sergey Kislyak. It is later reported that the calls covered US sanctions and suggestions that Obama's punitive actions could be undone in a matter of weeks. Trump administration officials had repeatedly denied that the conversations involved more than pleasantries and logistics about future meetings.
December 29th-30th, 2016: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announces preliminary plans to expel American diplomats.
December 30th, 2016: Russian President Vladimir Putin says he will not retaliate against sanctions and expulsions but await presidency of Donald Trump.
January 19th, 2017: The New York Times reports that the FBI is leading an interagency task force probing ties between Russia and three close Trump associates: Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Roger Stone.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-timeline--2
seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 04, 2017 11:09 am wrote:How Did Page Get Picked?
Grigoriy Sisoev
ByJOSH MARSHALL
Published
APRIL 4, 2017, 11:51 AM EDT
One of the abiding mysteries of the Trump saga is just who those five initial foreign policy advisers were, the ones he announced at an editorial meeting with The Washington Post on March 21st, 2016. It was an odd group: five guys, half with sordid pasts and others no one had ever heard of. One of them actually had Model UN work listed as one of his job qualifications! They weren't sending their best!
This was at the point when Trump had no foreign policy advisers and he'd recently said he got his ideas on the topic from watching generals on the cable networks. Because of all this, it's always been plausible that the whole question of how these guys were picked is radically over-determined: maybe the list was just five guys someone grabbed off their rolodex in a panic in time for the Post editorial board meeting. Who knows?
The one thing that makes the list of some abiding interest was that this was the first announcement of Carter Page's association with the campaign. The new story about Page and Russian spies needs a little unpacking. Page didn't pass government documents to these spies. He wasn't in government. The rest of the story appears to show that the Russians didn't think Page knew they were spies, even though they were trying to recruit him. They also thought he was a rube. But given all the rest we've learned in recent months, the fact that Russian intelligence had tried to recruit the guy who two years later became Trump's chief advisor on Russia and Europe seems like a hell of a coincidence. It also makes it worth considering again just where this list came from. My interest was also peaked by new news that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince also looks to be in the Trumpian mix.
One of the five advisors was Joseph E. Schmitz, the son of a notorious GOP Congressman who was an anti-Semite and member of the John Birch Society. The younger Schmitz served in the Bush administration but eventually got bounced in part because of charges of anti-Semitism against him. It turns out that after Schmitz got bounced from the Pentagon, he went to work as an executive at Blackwater. In other words, he got hired by Erik Prince.
Then there's this.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Mike Flynn's lobbying for Turkey was tied to new gas fields being developed off the coast of Israel ...
Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments.
That reminded me of this, from a write-up in the Post from last March ...
Almost all [of George Papadopoulos' ] work appears to have revolved around the role of Greece, Cyprus and an Israeli natural gas discovery in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet Jonathan Stern, director of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said when asked about Papadopoulos: “He does ring a very faint bell but he’s not written anything very significant on East Mediterranean natural gas and pipelines that I can remember.”
Papadopoulos had written a number of articles on the subject in the English language Israeli press, apparently of little significance to Mr. Stern. But again, he's the guy who listed Model UN on his resume. There's a major difference here: Does Israel pivot to Turkey or Greece and Cyprus and Egypt in selling its offshore natural gas? But it's still a notable connection and Turkey's relationship to Israel and Russia was changing markedly over the course of 2016.
These points of course prove nothing. They are simply suggestive connections that may help figure out just why these four men were chosen. It does make me want to know a bit more about Prince's role in the campaign early on. In any case, with the new Page information, it's about time we find out more about just who put together this list of five people. It's a very odd list. It always was. Even more so now.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/how ... get-pickedCarter Page: 'I Didn't Want To Be A Spy'
Grigoriy Sisoev
By MATT SHUHAM
PublishedAPRIL 4, 2017, 9:47 AM EDT
4969Views
A one-time foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign denied Monday afternoon that he had ever sought to become a Russian spy.
"I didn't want to be a spy," Carter Page told ABC News. "I'm not a spy."
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Page, whom the Trump administration has portrayed as a minor player in the 2016 campaign, and who stepped down from his advisory job after it was revealed that the FBI was investigating his possible ties to Kremlin-aligned Russian figures during a trip to Moscow, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that he gave information to undercover Russian agents in 2013.
Two of those agents were under cover of diplomatic immunity when they were charged with conspiracy and aiding and abetting a third agent, who was not officially working in a diplomatic capacity and served time in an Ohio prison for conspiring to act as a foreign agent.
According to ABC News, FBI court filings revealed that spy recruiters were overheard telling one of the agents, Evgeny Buryakov, about “the attempted use of Male-1 as an intelligence source for Russia.” Page confirmed to Buzzfeed that he is “Male-1.”
According to the FBI's filings, ABC reported, Page and one of the agents discussed business, and Page emphasized his ties to the Russian energy giant Gazprom. The agents were later heard laughing, according to the filings, and saying that Page didn’t know they were government agents.
“I shared basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents with Podobny who then served as a junior attaché at the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations,” Page said in a statement to ABC, before explaining that the information was culled from lectures he was giving at the time at New York University.
Watch clips of ABC News' interview with Page below:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/c ... ussian-spy
seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 12, 2017 11:58 am wrote:Nice Try on Carter Page, Guys
Grigoriy Sisoev
ByJOSH MARSHALL
PublishedAPRIL 12, 2017, 12:30 PM EDT
There's something a bit funny going on today. The White House is simultaneously claiming that news of the Carter Page FISA warrant vindicates their claims about Obama administration surveillance while also insisting Page had virtually nothing to do with the campaign. This is a complicated story because the Trump campaign - especially at that stage - was so chaotic and disorganized that the line between central and peripheral could be hard to detect and change from one day to the next. But the White House can't get away with saying that Page was an "informal" advisor one with "no official title."
He was as official as it got.
This is another moment when it is important to recur to the timeline. Well into 2016, Trump had no official or unofficial foreign policy advisors. Indeed, he got in trouble for saying that he got his foreign policy knowledge from watching generals talk on cable. When he had to come up with a group of official, named advisors, he did so in concert with now Attorney General Jeff Sessions and he came up with a list of five people. He announced the five at an on the record and high profile meeting with The Washington Post editorial board. There were five of them: Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg.
Page's official stated advisory purview? Europe and Russia.
It was quite formal and quite official. Now, the White House's current line is basically: Come on, the whole campaign was a mess. We barely even knew who he was. In part, this is true. It was a motley bunch, as I've discussed here. Some of these guys went on to big things with Trump. Walid Phares has continued to be a close administration advisor on trashing Muslims and Gen Kellogg was Trump's interim National Security Advisor. He's still at the NSC. Page was official as it got. The fact the campaign was so chaotic and the now-administration either won't say or doesn't remember how certain people got on the list is another issue entirely.
In the Spring of 2016 there were numerous write-ups of Carter Page and his roll in the Trump campaign, which the campaign either didn't object to or cooperated with. Here's one great nugget from a March 30th profile of Page from Bloomberg News ...
When Donald Trump named him last week as one of his foreign-policy advisers, Page says his e-mail inbox filled up with positive notes from Russian contacts. “So many people who I know and have worked with have been so adversely affected by the sanctions policy,” Page said in a two-hour interview last week. “There's a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation.”
It is quite true that Page never seems to have been a Trump insider. They claim at least that he never met with Trump - a claim I have little problem believing. Indeed, Page's best defense against being a spy is his own enduring and profound gooberishness. Even the Russian spies the FBI recorded discussing efforts to recruit him in 2013 thought he was a doofus. But again, he was named not on some random secondary advisory panel. He was one of five named Trump foreign policy advisors and remained with that status for months. Our headline the day he was announced: "Donald Trump Finally Releases Partial List Of His Foreign Policy Advisers."
Having followed this evolving story for a year, I do not think for a moment that Page was running the show, directing Trump's actions or even speaking to him regularly or maybe at all. I think there are much bigger fish who are getting much less attention. Why Page was apparently the only one monitored with a FISA warrant is a good question. It's possible he was the only one clumsy and sloppy enough to get the FBI's early attention or provide enough material to get a warrant. It may also tell us how sluggish the FBI's investigation was or that the penetration of the campaign didn't run that deep. Regardless, Page was a high profile, named, titled advisor for the campaign. For months.
Reporters should get snowed into forgetting that.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/nic ... -page-guys
seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 2:31 pm wrote:The Most Gobsmacking Details From Trump Jr.’s Russian Meeting Email Chain
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JULY 11, 2017 2:37 PM
After months of incremental reports about meetings and business dealings that President Donald Trump’s associates had with Russian operatives over the course of the 2016 campaign, the motherlode of news bombshells dropped on Tuesday morning.
Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted out what he said was his full email exchange with a family acquaintance who wanted to connect him with a “Russian government attorney” who could provide him dirt on his father’s likely presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton.
The answers to swirling questions about what Trump Jr. knew going into the June 2016 sit-down with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, came into crystal-clear focus. The emails revealed that the President’s eldest son, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, attended a meeting that had been expressly billed to Trump Jr. as an opportunity to obtain damaging information about Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help the Trump campaign.
Here are the most arresting details from Trump Jr.’s email exchange with that acquaintance, the music publicist Rob Goldstone.
The promised Clinton dirt was part of a larger Russian government effort to help Trump
Goldstone unequivocally says the “sensitive” information his contact has to share with Trump Jr. comes from the Russian government in their initial email exchange on June 3.
“Emin just called and asking me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote. “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
There is no “Crown prosecutor” in Russia, and Goldstone may have been referring to that country’s Prosecutor General.
“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Goldstone continued.
When news of the meeting first broke over the weekend, Trump Jr. said his discussion with Veselnitskaya focused primarily on a program allowing U.S. citizens to adopt Russian children before admitting the next day that he’d attended the meeting because he was promised negative information about Clinton. Until he released these emails over Twitter, Trump Jr. had not acknowledged publicly that he knew ahead of time the person he met with was connected to Vladimir Putin’s government.
Trump Jr. said he’d “love” the oppo, “especially later in the summer”
If Trump’s eldest son was concerned about the source of the information he would receive, he gave Goldstone no indication.
“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” Trump Jr. told Goldstone in response to his initial email, expressly noting that it would be more useful to have after the conventions were wrapped and Clinton was formally named as the Democratic nominee.
Trump Jr. also repeatedly thanked Goldstone for his role in orchestrating the meeting, saying he appreciated his “help” and his assistance “helping set it up.”
Goldstone made clear the meeting would be with a “Russian government attorney”
Goldstone identifies the lawyer’s country of origin in two separate emails. In one June 7 email, he calls her “The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.” In an emails sent the following day, he refers to her as “the Russian attorney.”
Trump Jr. has said he did not know the name of the lawyer before the meeting, and Veselnitskaya is not named in the emails he released. But he certainly knew where she was from.
Manafort and Kushner were forwarded an email outlining the meeting’s purpose
Manafort and Kushner were forwarded the entire email chain detailing the purpose and timing of the meeting, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Their names are visible on one exchange that Trump Jr. tweeted. That email updated them on the time of the gathering, with the subject line “FW: Russia – Clinton – private and confidential.”
Manafort and Kushner both confirmed to the Times that they attended the meeting, but declined to answer additional questions about it.
Trump Jr. also highlighted their expected attendance in his exchange with Goldstone, writing, “It will likely be Paul Manafort (campaign boss) my brother in law and me.”
Goldstone was open to sharing the dirt with Donald Trump himself
Goldstone apparently considered routing the Clinton dirt sourced from the Russian government to the presumptive Republican nominee himself. In that same June 3 exchange, he proposed passing the compromising information along to Trump through his longtime secretary, Rhona Graff.
“I can also send this info to your father via Rhona, but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first,” Goldstone wrote to Trump Jr.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/stunnin ... yer-emailsLook At The Timeline
Patrick Semansky/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 11, 2017 12:56 PM
Over the weekend, as the import of the Donald Trump Jr meeting became clear, but before this morning’s emails release, I started going back through my notes to piece together the timeline of events and whether they looked different in the light of the new revelations. And? Good guess! They look a lot different. For the moment, look at the timeline after the jump starting in April and running through August. That is the critical part. The critical addition of the Don Jr meeting fits right into a critical period when what we understand were Russian intelligence operatives were trying various vehicles to surface emails that were stolen during the spring. Look at the timeline after the jump – again, go ahead to April 2016.
June 16th, 2015: Donald Trump announces his candidacy for President of the United States.
Circa Summer 2015: The US government alleges that Russian hackers first gain access to DNC computer networks.
Circa August 2015: Trump staff arranges first meeting between Trump and General Flynn, according to Flynn’s account in an August 2016 interview with The Washington Post. “I got a phone call from his team. They asked if he would be willing meet with Mr. Trump and I did. … In late summer 2015.”
August 8th, 2015: Roger Stone leaves formal role in Trump campaign. Whether he quits or was fired is disputed. Stone will continue as a key, albeit informal advisor, for the remainder of the campaign.
December 10th, 2015: Michael Flynn attends conference and banquet in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of RT (formerly Russia today). Flynn is seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the concluding banquet.
March 19th, 2016: Hackers successfully hack into Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s email.
March 21st, 2016: In a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board, Trump provides a list of five foreign policy advisors. The list includes Carter Page but not Michael Flynn. The list is Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg.
March 28th, 2016: Trump campaign hires Paul Manafort to oversee delegate operations for campaign. Manafort becomes the dominant figure running the campaign by late April and takes over as campaign manager on June 21st with the firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
February-April 2016: Flynn advisory relationship with Trump appears to have solidified over the Spring of 2016. In late January Flynn is mentioned as an advisor who has “regular interactions” with Trump. There are similar mentions in February and March. Yet as late as mid-March, Flynn appeared to downplay his ties to Trump. By May Flynn is routinely listed as an advisor and by late May is even being mooted as a possible vice presidential pick.
April 2016: DNC network administrators first notice suspicious activity on Committee computer networks in late April, 2016, according to The Washington Post. The DNC retains the services of network security firm Crowdstrike which expels hackers from the DNC computer network. Crowdstrike tells The Washington Post it believes hackers had been operating inside the DNC networks since the Summer of 2015.
April 19th, 2016: “DCLeaks.com” url/address registered.
May 3rd, 2016: Donald J. Trump becomes becomes presumptive nominee after Ted Cruz and John Kasich withdraw from race.
May 26th, 2016: Donald J. Trump officially secure majority of GOP delegates, officially clinching the nomination of the Republican party.
June 3rd, 2016: First email contact between Rob Goldstone and Donald Trump Jr. about meeting with “Russian government lawyer” with damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
June 7th, 2016: Donald J Trump gives speech in which he promises a major speech about Hillary Clinton’s crimes on June 13th. “I am going to give a major speech on … probably Monday [June 13th] of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”
June 8th, 2016: First tweet posted to “DCLeaks” Twitter account.
June 9th, 2016: Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort meet with Natalia Veselnitskaya. Trump agreed to take the meeting after being told by Trump associate Rob Goldstone that Veselnitskaya had damaging information about Hillary Clinton which came from a Russian government operation to help his father Donald J. Trump.
June 12th, 2016: Julian Assange first announces that Wikileaks has Clinton emails which are soon to be released. “Wikileaks has a very big year ahead … We have emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”
June 14, 2016: Washington Post publishes first account of hacking of the DNC computer networks, allegedly by hackers working on behalf of the Russian government.
June 15th, 2016: “Guccifer 2.0”, later identified by US government officials and other private sector analysts as a fictive persona created by Russian intelligence operatives, contacts The Smoking Gun to take credit for hacking the DNC.
June 27th, 2016: First hacked DNC emails posted to “DCLeaks” website.
July 11th-12th, 2016: Trump campaign officials intervene to remove language calling for providing Ukraine with lethal aid against Russian intervention is Crimea and eastern Ukraine. It is, reportedly, the only significant Trump campaign intervention in the platform in which the Trump campaign has allowed activists a free hand.
July 12th, 2016: Official publication date, The Field of Fight by Michael Flynn and Michael Ledeen.
July 22, 2016: Wikileaks releases first tranche of DNC emails dating from January 2015 to May 2016.
July 27th, 2016: Donald Trump asks Russia to hack Clinton’s email to find 33,000 alleged lost emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find the 33,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
August 1st, 2016: Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort denies Trump campaign changed GOP platform on Russia and Ukraine.
August 8th, 2016: Trump Advisor Roger Stone tells Southwest Broward Republican Organization “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”
August 14th, 2016: The New York Times publishes story detailing handwritten ledgers showing “$12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau.”
August 17th, 2016: Nominee Donald Trump receives his first intelligence briefing with Gen. Michael Flynn and Gov. Chris Christie in attendance.
August 19, 2016: Paul Manafort resigns from Trump campaign.
August 21, 2016: Trump advisor Roger Stone tweets: “Trust me, it will soon [sic] the Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
September 26th, 2016: Trump Russia-Europe Policy Advisor Carter Page steps down from campaign while disputing allegations that he engaged in private communications with Russian government officials. A Yahoo News article from three days earlier reported that US intelligence officials were probing whether he met privately with Russian officials in Moscow in July, including an alleged meeting with close Putin ally Igor Sechin, Chairman of Russian oil company Rosneft.
September 26th, 2016: At first presidential debate, Donald Trump casts doubt on Russian role in hacking campaign: “It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
October 7, 2016: A “Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence” officially accuses the Russian government of being behind hacking of the DNC “to interfere with the US election process.”
October 7, 2016: Wikileaks releases first batch of Podesta emails – one hour after release of Access Hollywood Trump tape.
October 12th, 2016: Stone says he has been in contact with Assange through an intermediary.
October 30th, 2016: In response to FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress about new developments in the Clinton email server probe, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid writes a public letter to Comey in which he claims: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government.”
December 9th, 2016: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) hand delivers a selection of memos (aka ‘the Steele dossier’) to FBI Director James Comey.
December 29th, 2016: President Barack Obama outlines a wave a sanctions and expulsions of Russian diplomat in response to Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
December 29th, 2016: Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov vows retaliation for sanctions.
December 29th, 2016: Incoming National Security Michael Flynn has multiple phone conversations with Russian Sergey Kislyak. It is later reported that the calls covered US sanctions and suggestions that Obama’s punitive actions could be undone in a matter of weeks. Trump administration officials had repeatedly denied that the conversations involved more than pleasantries and logistics about future meetings.
December 29th-30th, 2016: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announces preliminary plans to expel American diplomats.
December 30th, 2016: Russian President Vladimir Putin says he will not retaliate against sanctions and expulsions but await presidency of Donald Trump.
January 19th, 2017: The New York Times reports that the FBI is leading an interagency task force probing ties between Russia and three close Trump associates: Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Roger Stone.
January 26th, 2017: Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and a senior intelligence official visit to White House Counsel Donald McGahn to deliver the message that National Security Advisor Flynn has deceived the Vice President about the subject matter of his calls and may be subject to Russian blackmail.
February 13th, 2017: Michael Flynn resigns as National Security Advisor.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/loo ... e-timeline
seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 24, 2017 2:03 pm wrote:Thoughts About the New Trump-Russia Email
Trump deputy chief of staff for policy, Rick Dearborn, left, and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, right, walk down the steps of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Friday, Jan. 13, 2017, following a meeting. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Susan Walsh/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 24, 2017 2:08 PM
I wanted to note briefly the news of this new Russia-related email in the news today. The email is from Rick Dearborn, a key Trump staffer, whose role in the drama we’ll return to in a moment. We don’t have the email itself but rather descriptions of it. And it appears to reference an effort by an individual from West Virginia (who knows?) to set up a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Vladimir Putin. Notably, the email dates from June 2016, around the time of the notorious Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr and just as Russian intelligence operatives were kicking their election disruption campaign into high gear.
Now, who is Rick Dearborn? This is the critical point. Dearborn was Senator Jeff Sessions’s right hand man. For a dozen years before the the 2016 campaign Dearborn had been Sessions’ Senate Chief of Staff. Those Senate chief of staff positions are extraordinarily powerful. If you’ve been in the job for a dozen years you’re a big deal – certainly with that senator and really in the entire world of capitol hill.
Remember, Sessions was a critical figure for Trump. He was far, far right in the Senate. But he was a sitting US senator who endorsed Trump when virtually no one of any standing in the GOP would back him. That was a big deal in symbolic terms. But almost as important it was a big deal in terms of having people on board who had some basic grasp of policy issues and how to run a real campaign. On this front, Sessions brought not just himself but his people. Rick Dearborn was the most important of those people. And he was quickly seconded to the campaign. The other key Sessions staffer? Stephen Miller. But we’ll return to him later.
For our present purposes what is important to note is that Dearborn was charged with putting together Trump’s policy shop and the armada of advisors and wonks who surround and work for every presidential campaign once it seems to have a real shot of winning a nomination. These people are critical not just because you need to generate positions on almost countless issues and start recruiting people who are likely to get appointments if you win the White House, but because doing these things is a key indicator for elite stakeholders – journalists, business, the foreign policy community, the think tank world, campaign donors, etc – that you’re really a serious campaign.
That was Dearborn’s job. And you’ll remember that of the five men Trump announced as his original foreign policy adviser team in March 2016, two have been identified as key figures in the Trump Russia probe. The five were Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg. Carter Page you know about. Papadopoulos, we now know, spent most of his adviser time trying to connect Trump officials up with people from Russia. It’s been claimed that another guy, Sam Clovis, a right wing talk radio show host who Trump recently installed at the USDA, is actually the guy who chose Page. I don’t think we really know who did. I think it’s altogether possible that Dearborn did. But it all took place under Dearborn’s charge.
There’s also Jeff Sessions meeting with Russian officials, most notably the one he had in his Senate office. It’s never been quite clear how or why Sessions got tangled up in these Russia meetings. Dearborn would be an obvious explanation.
In any case, I would say this email is the rare case where the old cliche is true: it raises more questions than it answers. But Dearborn does connect together a number of the Russia threads through the 2016 Trump campaign. And this email – whatever the details behind it and whatever came of it – comes right in the critical period when Russian operatives appear to have been probing for multiple points of contact and entry into the Trump campaign.
I doubt we’ve heard the last of this.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/tho ... re-1078799
seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 27, 2017 9:03 pm wrote:Trump’s business sought deal on a Trump Tower in Moscow while he ran for president
Donald Trump during a 2005 visit to Colorado to speak at a business convention. At his right is Felix Sater, a Russian-born real estate developer. (Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post)
By Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman August 27 at 8:48 PM
While Donald Trump was running for president in late 2015 and early 2016, his company was pursuing a plan to develop a massive Trump Tower in Moscow, according to several people familiar with the proposal and new records reviewed by Trump Organization lawyers.
As part of the discussions, a Russian-born real estate developer urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the proposal and suggested that he could get President Vladimir Putin to say “great things” about Trump, according to several people who have been briefed on his correspondence.
The developer, Felix Sater, predicted in a November 2015 email that he and Trump Organization leaders would soon be celebrating — both one of the biggest residential projects in real estate history and Donald Trump’s election as president, according to two of the people with knowledge of the exchange.
Sater wrote to Trump Organization Executive Vice President Michael Cohen, “something to the effect of, ‘Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?’ ” said one person briefed on the email exchange. Sater emigrated from what was then the Soviet Union when he was 6 and grew up in Brooklyn.
Trump never went to Moscow as Sater proposed. And although investors and Trump’s company signed a letter of intent, they lacked the land and permits to proceed and the project was abandoned at the end of January 2016, just before the presidential primaries began, several people familiar with the proposal said.
Nevertheless, the details of the deal, which have not previously been disclosed, provide evidence that Trump’s business was actively pursuing significant commercial interests in Russia at the same time he was campaigning to be president — and in a position to determine U.S.-Russia relations. The new details from the emails, which are scheduled to be turned over to congressional investigators soon, also point to the likelihood of additional contacts between Russia-connected individuals and Trump associates during his presidential bid.
White House officials declined to comment for this report. Cohen, a longtime Trump aide who remains Trump’s personal attorney, and his lawyer have also declined to comment.
In recent months, contacts between high-ranking and lower- level Trump aides and Russians have emerged. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a U.S. senator and campaign adviser, twice met Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Donald Trump Jr. organized a June 2016 meeting with campaign aide Jared Kushner, campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer after the president’s eldest son was promised that the lawyer would bring damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help the campaign.
Internal emails also show campaign adviser George Papadopoulos repeatedly sought to organize meetings with campaign officials, including Trump, and Putin or other Russians. His efforts were rebuffed.
The negotiations for the Moscow project ended before Trump’s business ties to Russia had become a major issue in the campaign. Trump denied having any business connections to Russia in July 2016, tweeting, “for the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia” and then insisting at a news conference the following day, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”
Discussions about the Moscow project began in earnest in September 2015, according to people briefed on the deal. An unidentified investor planned to build the project and, under a licensing agreement, put Trump’s name on it. Cohen acted as a lead negotiator for the Trump Organization. It is unclear how involved or aware Trump was of the negotiations.
As the talks progressed, Trump voiced numerous supportive comments about Putin, setting himself apart from his Republican rivals for the nomination.
By the end of 2015, Putin began offering praise in return.
“He says that he wants to move to another, closer level of relations. Can we really not welcome that? Of course, we welcome that,” Putin told reporters during his annual end-of-the year news conference. He called Trump a “colorful and talented” person. Trump said afterward that the compliment was an “honor.”
Though Putin’s comments came shortly after Sater suggested that the Russian president would speak favorably about Trump, there is no indication that the two are connected.
There is no public record that Trump has ever spoken about the effort to build a Trump Tower in 2015 and 2016.
Trump’s interests in building in Moscow, however, are long-standing. He had attempted to build a Trump property for three decades, starting with a failed effort in 1987 to partner with the Soviet government on a hotel project.
“Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment,” he said in a 2007 court deposition.
“We will be in Moscow at some point,” he promised in the deposition.
Sater was involved in at least one of those previous efforts. In 2005, the Trump Organization gave his development company, the Bayrock Group, an exclusive one-year deal to attempt to build a Moscow Trump Tower. Sater located a site for the project — an abandoned pencil factory — and worked closely with Trump on the deal, which did not come to fruition.
In an unrelated court case in 2008, Sater said in a deposition that he would personally provide Trump “verbal updates” on the deal.
“When I’d come back, pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal.’ And he would say, ‘All right,’ ” Sater said.
In the same testimony, Sater described traveling with Trump’s children, including joining Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. on a trip to Moscow at their father’s request.
“They were on their way by themselves, and he was all concerned,” Sater said. “He asked if I wouldn’t mind joining them and looking after them while they were in Moscow.”
Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, told The Washington Post last year that Sater happened to be in Moscow at the same time as Trump’s two adult children. “There was no accompanying them to Moscow,” he said.
Neither Sater nor his attorney responded to requests for comment.
Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Sater, who served time in jail after assaulting a man with the stem of a broken margarita glass during a 1991 bar fight and then pleaded guilty in 1998 to his role in an organized- crime-linked stock fraud. Sater’s sentencing was delayed for years while he cooperated with the federal government on a series of criminal and national security-related investigations, federal officials have said.
During that time, Sater worked as an executive with Bayrock, whose offices were in Trump Tower, and brokered deals to license Trump’s name for developments in multiple U.S. and foreign cities. In 2010, Trump allowed Sater to briefly work out of Trump Organization office space and use a business card that identified him as a “senior adviser to Donald Trump.”
Still, when asked about Sater in 2013 court deposition, Trump said: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” He added that he had spoken with Sater “not many” times.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ab2dc31d20More on Trump Tower Moscow
By JOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 27, 2017 10:17 PM
The Washington Post has a piece up tonight reporting that during the 2016 campaign Donald Trump was trying to put together a deal to build a Trump Tower Moscow. I would not be doing right by TPM’s crack reporting staff if I didn’t note that TPM’s Sam Thielman reported these details in this piece on August 1st. The Times was the first to reference this deal in February, though only obliquely. But in a series of conversations with Theilman, Sater provided considerably more detail about this key project.
From Thielman’s August 1st piece …
“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: “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 Post doesn’t reference the Times or TPM. But it does add two important new details. The first is that Michael Cohen was the negotiator on the Trump Organization’s side of the detail. This is not a surprise. It makes sense. Sater and Cohen show up together again and again through the Russia story. And as Thielman was first to report in July, the two knew each other as kids, having a personal relationship long before they both became key business associates of Donald Trump. (Both men grew up in the Russia/Ukrainian emigre world of Brighton Beach and surrounding areas, though Cohen was born in the US.) It was, remember, Cohen and Sater who had that meeting in February of this year where that Ukrainian parliamentarian pitched his ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine and handed over a dossier of documents which Cohen then hand delivered to Mike Flynn at the White House.
Again, it makes perfect sense that Cohen would be the contact in the Trump Organization. But we didn’t know that, at least not the best of my knowledge. As I’ve explained before, Cohen was brought into the Trump Organization because he was conduit for money from the countries of the former Soviet Union. It makes sense.
The other detail is that this information comes from what appear to be subpoenaed Trump Organization emails which the Post says “which are scheduled to be turned over to congressional investigators soon.”
As we noted when we reported this a month ago, the fact that Trump was actively trying to secure a deal to build a major development in Moscow during the early months of the campaign is a big, big deal. This was happening months before Russia became a charged campaign issue in the late summer of 2016. But it was while Trump was making various public comments praising Putin and Putin was, on a more limited basis, doing the same in return. With these emails now in the process of being handed over to investigators we are likely to get much more detail not only about on-going communications between Trump Organization officials and people in Russia because on-going business negotiations. The money negotiations were going through Michael Cohen at the same time he was acting as a key spokesman for Trump’s campaign.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/mor ... re-1079252Trump-McConnell Feud Sets The Stage For A September From Hell
AP/TPM
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Published AUGUST 28, 2017 6:00 AM
As White House spokespeople blithely insist that everything is fine between the Republican president and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, the relationship continues to deteriorate—with vague sniping in the press escalating into screaming private phone calls and public call-outs at rallies and on Twitter.
Always one who thrives on attacking a real or invented enemy, President Donald Trump, whose party controls every level of power in Washington, has targeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for ridicule, blaming him for just how little Republicans have been able to accomplish in 2017.
The president has also gone after individual lawmakers in his own party, threatening to primary some of the Senate’s most vulnerable GOP members and publicly and privately berating others.
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The attacks could not come at a worse time.
Because Congress ate up so much of the year with a failed push to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they have an extremely narrow time frame left to pass a budget, raise the debt ceiling, reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Flood Insurance Program and appropriate funding to stabilize Obamacare’s marketplaces. This would be a challenge even with full support from the White House, but it becomes nearly impossible with a president whose spasms of rage, loose grasp of policy, and itchy Twitter finger threaten to derail the delicate deal-making process.
Here comes the September from hell.
The House and Senate return from recess Sept. 5, the day after Labor Day, and will only be in session for 12 days in September. During that time, they must negotiate and pass a slew of bills to keep the government running and avoid defaulting on the national debt.
Besides raising the debt ceiling and approving either a short- or long-term budget by the end of September, Congress must also reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program before their funding expires.
Republican leaders on the Hill have already conceded that, given the tight deadline, their promises of a return to “regular order” budget votes will have to wait, and the best they can hope for is a short-term continuing resolution to stave off a government shutdown for a few more months.
Trump lobbed a grenade into this tense process by calling publicly for a government shutdown if Congress is unwilling to spend billions on the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico—a cost he repeatedly promised would not fall on U.S. taxpayers.
Republican leaders immediately poured cold water on the president’s threats, with House Speaker Paul Ryan offering assurances that a shutdown was not “necessary” or in anyone’s interest. Many rank-and-file Republicans have agreed, showing no eagerness to back the president’s hard line on border funding, while Democrats remain staunchly opposed and emboldened to make their own demands.
In addition to the looming shutdown showdown, Trump and McConnell are fighting one another in proxy wars in Republican primaries in Alabama and Arizona—with McConnell mobilizing to defend incumbents Jeff Flake and Luther Strange against attacks from Trump and Trump-allied PACs.
As lawmakers scramble over the coming weeks to craft a grand bargain that both sides of the aisle can live with, the escalation of this Republican civil war could prove disastrous.
During the last round of budget negotiations in the spring, Trump’s bluster about border wall funding and other issues fizzled quickly, and he ended up signing a bill that met essentially none of his demands.
Since then, Republicans have only shown themselves more willing to ignore and defy him—on everything from Russia sanctions to taking their traditional August recess to protecting the special counsel’s investigation of Trump.
Lawmakers have similarly waved away the president’s repeated demand that the Senate kill the legislative filibuster and move to a simple majority vote on all bills—a move McConnell and most Republicans firmly oppose, knowing it could backfire if and when Democrats take back the upper chamber.
The president’s ham-handed negotiating tactics during the multi-month health care fight will likely make lawmakers even less willing to risk their own necks to advance his agenda. Holding an over-the-top Rose Garden celebration when the House passed the deeply unpopular Obamacare repeal bill, only to call that bill “mean” weeks later, gave members of Congress whiplash.
And whether he was demanding swing vote Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) promise to vote for a bill she’d never seen before riding on Air Force One, or dispatching a cabinet member to threaten Alaska’s Republican senators with cuts to their state’s funding, or generally treating lawmakers like his underlings instead of a co-equal branch of government, Trump proved himself unable to use carrots or sticks to get any bill across the finish line.
Now, still bruised from the health care debacle, lawmakers say they will turn their attention to passing tax cuts—a goal they originally pledged to meet by August and now say, dubiously, that they will accomplish by the end of the year. The president will reportedly not contribute any policy proposals of his own.
With a marked uptick in the number of Republicans willing to buck the president’s priorities, and even openly question his fitness for office, Trump may lash out and potentially veto whatever legislation Capitol Hill manages to produce. The famed deal-maker appears far more interested in making sure Congress shoulders the blame for any future failures than avoiding those failures altogether.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/trump-m ... -from-hellTrump Associate Boasted That Moscow Business Deal ‘Will Get Donald Elected’
By MATT APUZZO and MAGGIE HABERMANAUG. 28, 2017
Donald J. Trump with Felix H. Sater, right, and Tevfik Arif at the official unveiling of Trump SoHo in September 2007. Credit Mark Von Holden/WireImage
WASHINGTON — A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.
The associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin and predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
Photo
A portion of an email Felix Sater sent to Michael Cohen on Nov. 3, 2015.
The emails show that, from the earliest months of Mr. Trump’s campaign, some of his associates viewed close ties with Moscow as a political advantage. Those ties are now under investigation by the Justice Department and multiple congressional committees.
A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates FEB. 19, 2017
American intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 presidential election to try to help Mr. Trump. Investigators want to know whether anyone on Mr. Trump’s team was part of that process.
Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow.
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote.
Mr. Sater said he was eager to show video clips to his Russian contacts of instances of Mr. Trump speaking glowingly about Russia.
There is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had stalled. But Mr. Sater did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.
The project never got government permits or financing, and died weeks later.
“To be clear, the Trump Organization has never had any real estate holdings or interests in Russia,” the Trump Organization said Monday in a statement.
The Trump Organization on Monday turned over emails to the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian meddling in the presidential election and whether anyone in Mr. Trump’s campaign was involved. Some of the emails were obtained by The Times.
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A portion of an email Mr. Sater sent to Mr. Cohen on Nov. 3, 2015.
None of the emails obtained by The Times include any responses from Mr. Cohen to Mr. Sater’s messages.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Cohen suggested that he viewed Mr. Sater’s comments as puffery. “He has sometimes used colorful language and has been prone to ‘salesmanship,’” the statement said. “I ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.”
The emails obtained by The Times make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the hacking of Democrats’ emails. Mr. Trump has said there was no collusion with Russian officials. Previously released emails, however, revealed that his campaign was willing to receive damaging information about Mrs. Clinton from Russian sources.
Mr. Sater was a broker for the Trump Organization at the time of his messages to Mr. Cohen, which means he was paid to deliver real estate deals and had an incentive to overstate his business-making acumen. He presents himself in his emails as so influential in Russia that he helped arrange a 2006 trip that Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, took to Moscow.
“I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,” he said.
Ms. Trump said she had no involvement in the discussions about the Moscow deal. In a statement, she said that during the 2006 trip, she took “a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin” as a tourist. She said it is possible she sat in Mr. Putin’s chair during that tour but she did not recall it. “I have never met President Vladimir Putin,” she said.
The Times reported earlier this year on the plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow, which never materialized. On Sunday, The Washington Post reported the existence of the correspondence between Mr. Sater and Mr. Cohen but not its content.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/p ... ubz=0&_r=0I told you last night’s Trump Tower Moscow bombshell was merely a teaser. It just got much, much bigger.
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 3:06 pm EDT Mon Aug 28, 2017
Home » Politics
Last night the Washington Post reported that Donald Trump was trying to build Trump Tower Moscow during the election. The story stood out, not only because it’s a major bombshell, but because it had been rushed out in seemingly in half finished fashion – and published while the public was instead focused on Hurricane Harvey flooding. I pointed out last night that this had to be nothing more than a teaser, with more to come. And sure enough, the story got much bigger today.
Now we know why the WaPo was in such a hurry to publish what it had last night: it was racing the New York Times, which was working on a much bigger version of the same story. Now the Times has published its own version today, and it’s nothing short of stunning. Not only were Donald Trump and convicted Russian mafia figure Felix Sater trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, they’d been trying to pull it off dating back to 2006, when Sater took Ivanka Trump to the Kremlin. But that’s just the beginning.
During the 2016 election cycle Sater sent an email to Donald Trump’s longtime attorney Michael Cohen, stating “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it” and “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process” (NY Times). This may help explain why Cohen has since hired an attorney of his own. The infamous Trump-Russia dossier has asserted that Cohen played a key role in negotiating the terms of the Kremlin’s blackmail over Trump, though Cohen has long denied this. Now he’s allegedly right back to being in the thick of it. But there’s more.
Sater also says that “I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.” Ivanka has responded by admitting she toured the Kremlin but insisting that she never met Putin. This is getting deeper by the minute. Remarkably, this is probably still just the warmup act. It’s clear the Washington Post and New York Times are racing each other to unearth the details of this story in real time.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/bo ... gger/4552/