Here is transcript of Ryan and GOP leaders talking about Russia, Trump, hacking the DNC, etc.
I can't get the text to copy so here is link to WAPO.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/p ... post/2209/
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by PufPuf93 » Wed May 17, 2017 9:54 pm
by PufPuf93 » Wed May 17, 2017 11:55 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu May 18, 2017 8:28 am
POLITICS | Thu May 18, 2017 | 7:19am EDT
Exclusive: Trump campaign had at least 18 undisclosed contacts with Russians: sources
By Ned Parker, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel | WASHINGTON
Michael Flynn and other advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign were in contact with Russian officials and others with Kremlin ties in at least 18 calls and emails during the last seven months of the 2016 presidential race, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the exchanges told Reuters.
The previously undisclosed interactions form part of the record now being reviewed by FBI and congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election and contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Six of the previously undisclosed contacts described to Reuters were phone calls between Sergei Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the United States, and Trump advisers, including Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, three current and former officials said.
Conversations between Flynn and Kislyak accelerated after the Nov. 8 vote as the two discussed establishing a back channel for communication between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that could bypass the U.S. national security bureaucracy, which both sides considered hostile to improved relations, four current U.S. officials said.
In January, the Trump White House initially denied any contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. The White House and advisers to the campaign have since confirmed four meetings between Kislyak and Trump advisers during that time.
The people who described the contacts to Reuters said they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion between the campaign and Russia in the communications reviewed so far. But the disclosure could increase the pressure on Trump and his aides to provide the FBI and Congress with a full account of interactions with Russian officials and others with links to the Kremlin during and immediately after the 2016 election.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment. Flynn's lawyer declined to comment. In Moscow, a Russian foreign ministry official declined to comment on the contacts and referred Reuters to the Trump administration.
Separately, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Washington said: “We do not comment on our daily contacts with the local interlocutors.”
The 18 calls and electronic messages took place between April and November 2016 as hackers engaged in what U.S. intelligence concluded in January was part of a Kremlin campaign to discredit the vote and influence the outcome of the election in favor of Trump over his Democratic challenger, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Those discussions focused on mending U.S.-Russian economic relations strained by sanctions imposed on Moscow, cooperating in fighting Islamic State in Syria and containing a more assertive China, the sources said.
Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees have gone to the CIA and the National Security Agency to review transcripts and other documents related to contacts between Trump campaign advisers and associates and Russian officials and others with links to Putin, people with knowledge of those investigations told Reuters.
The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday it had appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential campaign and possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Mueller will now take charge of the FBI investigation that began last July. Trump and his aides have repeatedly denied any collusion with Russia.
'IT'S RARE'
In addition to the six phone calls involving Kislyak, the communications described to Reuters involved another 12 calls, emails or text messages between Russian officials or people considered to be close to Putin and Trump campaign advisers.
One of those contacts was by Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch and politician, according to one person with detailed knowledge of the exchange and two others familiar with the issue.
It was not clear with whom Medvedchuk was in contact within the Trump campaign but the themes included U.S.-Russia cooperation, the sources said. Putin is godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter.
Medvedchuk denied having any contact with anyone in the Trump campaign.
"I am not acquainted with any of Donald Trump's close associates, therefore no such conversation could have taken place," he said in an email to Reuters.
In the conversations during the campaign, Russian officials emphasized a pragmatic, business-style approach and stressed to Trump associates that they could make deals by focusing on common economic and other interests and leaving contentious issues aside, the sources said.
“It’s rare to have that many phone calls to foreign officials, especially to a country we consider an adversary or a hostile power,” Richard Armitage, a Republican and former deputy secretary of state, told Reuters.
FLYNN FIRED
Beyond Medvedchuk and Kislyak, the identities of the other Putin-linked participants in the contacts remain classified and the names of Trump advisers other than Flynn have been “masked” in intelligence reports on the contacts because of legal protections on their privacy as American citizens. However, officials can request that they be revealed for intelligence purposes.
U.S. and allied intelligence and law enforcement agencies routinely monitor communications and movements of Russian officials.
After Vice President Mike Pence and others had denied in January that Trump campaign representatives had any contact with Russian officials, the White House later confirmed that Kislyak had met twice with then-Senator Jeff Sessions, who later became attorney general.
Kislyak also attended an event in April where Trump said he would seek better relations with Russia. Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, also attended that event in Washington. In addition, Kislyak met with two other Trump campaign advisers in July on the sidelines of the Republican convention.
Trump fired Flynn in February after it became clear that he had falsely characterized the nature of phone conversations with Kislyak in late December - after the Nov. 8 election and just after the Obama administration announced new sanctions on Russia. Flynn offered to testify to Congress in return for immunity from prosecution but his offer was turned down by the House intelligence committee.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... ium=Social
PRESIDENT TRUMP
Trump's Loyalty Test
Michael Scherer,Alex Altman
6:36 AM ET
In the Oval Office, senior aides to President Donald Trump sometimes steal glances at one another while he speaks. Silent and stone-faced, they dare not say what they are thinking, but they communicate nonetheless. Beyond the President's earshot and eyeshot, the concern comes through in less subtle ways. The West Wing's thick walls, even with the TV turned up, cannot muffle the sounds of staffers shouting behind closed doors.
It is a terrible thing to work every day for long hours in a hostile environment you can't control. It is worse when the stakes are as consequential as those at the White House, when your public reputation is on the line and when the man in charge blames those around him for his self-made misfortune. The fourth month of the Trump presidency has unfolded with all the suspense of a reality show. No one knows what will happen next because the President changes his mind in real time. "We watch Twitter," says one aide. "We're just as in the dark," allows another.
Washington AG: President Trump’s Aggression Will Be His Undoing
Senior officials walk through the building with funereal looks on their faces. Others complain that the White House is being "paralyzed" by the commotion. "He likes everyone always being on thin ice," explains one adviser of the President's management style. A few West Wing aides have begun to look for lifeboats, shopping résumés to think tanks, super PACs and corporate communications firms in the market for anyone who can make sense of the White House's bizarre workings. When news broke on May 15 that the President had revealed sensitive classified information to the Russian Foreign Minister and the Russian ambassador in an Oval Office meeting, one White House staffer sent a message to a friend outside the building: FML, read the text--abbreviated millennial slang for an unprintable curse on one's own life.
The President they serve, duly elected by the nation, has decided to govern as he lived before winning the election: impulsively, extemporaneously, with his emotions on full display. But the effect has been different in the White House. There, his decisions have jeopardized foreign intelligence relationships, affected ongoing criminal investigations and provoked the investigatory powers of the FBI and Congress.
No less than Vice President Mike Pence has been caught as collateral damage, his credibility in question after he falsely described the reason for the firing of FBI Director James Comey--only to be contradicted a day later by the President. "The good news is that if you don't like a decision, there's a good chance the President will come up with a new one if he watches enough Fox & Friends," deadpans another senior White House aide.
That leaves White House staff struggling to create a structure that will allow him to succeed. Some are grappling with how much they should try to dissuade the boss when he has his mind made up. Many wrestle with how they can maintain their own reputations while proving their loyalty by going on television to defend him."It's exhausting," says a midlevel aide. "Just when you think the pace is unsustainable, it accelerates. The moment it gets quiet is when the next crisis happens."
In the end, how to respond is a decision each person must make alone. The presidency of Donald Trump, in short, has become an acute test for those helping to lead the nation. At the White House, up on Capitol Hill and in the bowels of the three-letter national security and law-enforcement agencies, men and women are weighing the sometimes conflicting interests of their country, their careers and the President they serve.
It is a political dilemma, to be sure, but also a moral one: a test of allegiance to the truth, to the law and to the traditions of government. For many, the priority now is to limit the damage so the mistakes that have been made don't multiply into something more disastrous. "The situation is what it is," Andrew Card, former chief of staff to President George W. Bush, told MSNBC. "And we have to mitigate it."
trum-loyalty-test-white-house-staffers-grapple-morale-aaron-bernsteinRepublican Senator Bob Corker, surrounded by reporters on May 16, sharply criticized a White House in growing disarray Aaron P. Bernstein—Reuters
For Trump, the learning curve at the White House has been steep. In 2014, Trump said the thing he looks for most in an employee is loyalty. And for decades that is what he demanded, dismissing advisers and executives whose commitment or capacity he came to doubt. But loyalty in business flows directly to the boss. In the federal government, allegiance is sworn to the Constitution, and evidence is growing that Trump does not understand the difference.
Associates of Comey's say the President repeatedly asked for the top law-enforcement officer's loyalty at a private White House dinner in January, even though the FBI director should be loyal to the law only, and at the time Comey was investigating Russian interference in the election and possible ties to Trump's campaign. Then in February, Comey met privately with Trump in the Oval Office, and, according to a memo he wrote at the time, the subject of the recently fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn came up. "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go," Trump told Comey, according to the notes, which were first reported by the New York Times. Although short of a command, the plain language of the request, if accurate, comes dangerously close to a President intervening in a criminal investigation of his own associate.
The White House denies both claims. But no one can dispute Trump's singular, at times disproportionate, obsession with anything concerning the investigation into Russia's involvement in the 2016 election. Nor does the White House deny the President's decision on May 10 to give classified intelligence about the Islamic State, which had been handed over by a foreign intelligence service, to the Russian Foreign Minister, whom Trump had invited to the Oval Office. That development, first reported by the Washington Post and apparently a spontaneous boast, appeared to violate long-standing commitments for the U.S. not to share intelligence from allies without permission. Trump's second National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, argued that the decision was "wholly appropriate," adding that the President did not even know the source of the information he described to the Russians. McMaster, who wrote a book about military officials' failure to challenge a doomed strategy in Vietnam, appeared to be threading the needle, maintaining his loyalty to Trump, while carefully protecting his own reputation by declining to deny the facts of the President's actions.
And so the Russia specter continues to descend from several directions on the executive mansion. Anger at U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision to recuse himself from the investigation led Trump to tweet a false accusation that President Obama had wiretapped his campaign at Trump Tower. Trump has never given up that claim, even as evidence compounded against it. Instead he has argued that the entire Russia-meddling investigation is a sham--and that "wiretapping" can mean things not found in the dictionary--even railing at a televised hearing in the presence of TIME reporters on May 8. Three days later, the President admitted that Comey's pursuit of the Russia investigation played a role in his dismissal, after first announcing to the world that he was only acting on the recommendation of his Deputy Attorney General, who faulted Comey's handling of Hillary Clinton's emails.
All these claims have put the country and its caretakers on notice. For a small group of influential officials, the proper response to this test has been to go public, albeit anonymously. A flood of leaks has resulted, allowing the national press to fulfill its role as a check on the powerful. Similarly, officials at the nation's investigative agencies continue to remind themselves of their professional code. "It is significant that we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and not an individual leader, ruler, office or entity," reads an explainer on the oath on the FBI website. "A government based on individuals--who are inconsistent, fallible and often prone to error--too easily leads to tyranny on the one extreme or anarchy on the other."
In practice, this means the FBI is built to resist loyalty requests from a President. Andrew McCabe, the bureau's acting director and a candidate for the job, has testified to the Senate that there will be no letup, whatever the wishes of the President, in the inquiry into his campaign's contacts with the Russians. "There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date," he said. "You cannot stop the men and women of the FBI from doing the right thing, from protecting the American people, from upholding the Constitution."
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has echoed the same line. In office less than a month, he wrote a memo urging Comey's firing on the grounds that the FBI director had mishandled the investigation into Clinton's emails. For less than 48 hours, Trump adopted this memo as his justification before recanting, and then openly citing the Russia investigation as the cause. With the embarrassing episode behind him, Rosenstein says he plans to return to his primary mission, regardless of the questioning of his motives. "I took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," Rosenstein said in a May 15 speech to business owners in Baltimore. "There is nothing in that oath about my reputation."
Two days later, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein acceded to the demands of Democrats in Congress by appointing a special counsel, former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, to take over direction of the Russia investigation, creating a new buffer to protect the probe from political interference. Mueller ran the FBI from 2001 to 2013.
trum-loyalty-test-white-house-staffers-grapple-morale-win-mcnameeMcMaster at the briefing-room podium, defending Trump’s decision to share intelligence with Russia Win McNamee—Getty Images
The system demands a different role to be played by the elected members of Congress, who pledge allegiance to the Constitution but are directly answerable to voters. Here, too, two weeks of disturbing revelations from the White House have begun to shift calculations. For Democrats, the pressure to oppose Trump is overwhelming. For most Republicans, loyalty to the President will last as long as their interests align.
So far, the GOP's 52 Senators have all voted in accordance with the Trump Administration's preferences at least 88% of the time. But in sotto voce conversations across the Capitol, Republican lawmakers are venting about the President's recklessness. At a minimum, they are fed up with his antics. Some question his suitability for the job. "Probably two-thirds of the Republicans in the Senate are deeply worried about President Trump," says Senator Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat who was Clinton's running mate in 2016. "A handful have been willing to say so."
But the past few weeks have done little to dent Trump's popularity among Republican voters. White House aides remain confident that most Trump supporters see the scandals primarily as media creations. "Our shock absorbers are thick," says one senior White House official, citing campaign controversies like the Access Hollywood tape. When Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974, 24% of the American public still approved of his presidency. That was more than two years after the Watergate break-in. As it stands, according to Gallup, 38% of Americans support Trump. But that includes more than 70% of Republicans in recent polls. "There is an overwhelming percentage of Republican [voters] who are still loyal to Trump," explains Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the chamber's second-ranking Democrat. "And so it unnerves them when they think about retaining control of the House and Senate."
Republicans Are Worried President Trump's Firing of James Comey Will Stall Their Agenda
Republican leaders have mostly gone to ground. House Speaker Paul Ryan has tried to change the subject, holding a press conference about tax reform in the midst of the uproar and offering only a weak assurance that he maintains confidence in the President. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has repeated his patient requests for less White House drama. Others have begun to break ranks more forcefully. "The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order," said Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Obviously, they're in a downward spiral right now." In an interview with TIME, Senator John McCain exhorted colleagues to stop carrying water for the President. "I can't relate to those people who weather-vane," fumed McCain. "Do what's right." He later told an audience that the waves of revelations were reaching "Watergate size and scale."
On the House side, Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz, who has announced that he will not seek re-election, sent a letter to the FBI on May 16 requesting all memos, notes and recordings relating to communications between Comey and the President. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have also promised to press on with their investigations, as has South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who is leading a separate inquiry.
Top communications advisers to House and Senate Republicans have given up trying to coordinate messages with the White House, since no one is sure what the President will do next. In a telling sign of where the power in the White House lies, the calls of concern are going not to White House chief of staff and former party chairman Reince Priebus but rather to Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has been quiet as the scandals have multiplied. "Jared," says one longtime Senate campaign strategist, "might be the only one who can dig us out."
That doesn't solve the immediate problems that White House staff face in preventing Trump from further unforced errors. Inside the West Wing, daily staff meetings have become solemn affairs, with aides waiting for the next shoe to drop and no one quite sure whom the President will take counsel from next. "It's really grim," says one White House aide.
The dominant narratives of the early days of the Trump White House have proved wrong in recent weeks. Those who diagnosed chaos missed the controlling order. Those who focused on ideological splits, between globalists and nationalists, conservatives and moderates, missed the larger picture. The President is not living alone under siege, nor is he unaware of what is transpiring around him. The more operative divide now is that between those who are there to serve Trump himself and those who toil for the institution of the presidency.
There's a chief of staff, a Vice President and a National Security Adviser leading hundreds of political and career employees working to keep the lights on. No one in this group has worked with Trump for more than a couple of years. Then there is a separate staff of Trump loyalists--a shadow Trump organization within the West Wing. It includes family members like Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump; Trump Tower veterans like Keith Schiller, Hope Hicks, Dan Scavino Jr. and Jason Greenblatt; plus the coterie of outside friends who serve as a sort of rump Cabinet.
Both factions have labored to protect the President from his worst instincts. Aides have tried everything from restricting access to the Oval Office to filling the President's schedule in a futile bid to minimize distractions. Staffers are frustrated by leaks about staff turmoil coming from Trump's extended circle of allies. But Trump has so far resisted attempts to impose order, insisting on long stretches of unstructured time to watch television and call allies. Unlike most CEOs, he is an "instinctive and reactive" leader, in the words of one aide, "unwilling or incapable" of hewing to a long-term strategy. Others inside the White House have likened his itchy Twitter finger and obsession with cable chatter to a drug addict who cannot grasp that his habits have become a problem. A single segment "can take over the day" for the entire West Wing, complains a staffer.
The result is a dysfunctional workplace. The President has made clear that he believes he has been let down by his staff. Meanwhile, his staff is increasingly hesitant to sacrifice their credibility for a boss who won't protect them. When news of the classified intelligence given to the Russians came out, the press office, still reeling from supplying bad information on the firing of Comey, sent out McMaster to issue a spirited defense. One day later, when news broke of Comey's memo alleging that Trump had asked him to drop the Flynn investigation, no White House staff rushed to the cameras. Instead, reporters received a denial from the White House by email. No adviser to the President chose to attach their name to his defense.
http://time.com/4783929/president-trump ... =hp-magmod
by seemslikeadream » Thu May 18, 2017 1:53 pm
Big Trouble
Evan Vucci/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 18, 2017 11:49 AM
21714Views
We have a small landslide of new news this morning tied to the growing tangle of Trump administration scandals. Let me try to piece them together and sort the important from the less important. (Everything is relative when we’re moving at this velocity.)
Let’s go through the headlines. I’m choosing just three – there are a handful of others that on any other day would be siren-blaring news.
Reuters says that Mike Flynn and other Trump campaign officials were in contact with Russian government officials at least 18 times between April and November of last year.
McClatchy reports that shortly before President Trump’s inauguration, Mike Flynn effectively killed a military operation against ISIS that would have used Kurdish paramilitaries. The plan was later revived after Flynn’s ouster. But his decision delayed it for months. Any US operations with the Kurds would be firmly against the wishes of Turkey. This was while Flynn was working on behalf of the Republic of Turkey as an unregistered foreign agent.
The Times reports that on January 4th, Flynn notified Trump Transition lawyer and now White House Counsel Donald McGahn that he was being investigated for his undeclared lobbying work on behalf of Turkey.
For the moment I would say that the latter two reports are the most serious, though the first (Reuters on the contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia) may be part of what ends up being the bigger story.
Let’s deal first with killing the anti-ISIS operation with Kurdish forces. This is incredibly serious. We’ve known that Flynn was taking hundreds of thousands of dollars during the campaign to lobby on behalf of Turkey. But Turkey is a longtime US ally and member of NATO. While that’s obviously bad, it wasn’t clear what the concrete negative or illicit effect was. While Turkey’s reputation in the US has – rightly – fallen dramatically in the last few years, it is still a US treaty ally. Here though Flynn’s Turkish lobbying seems arguably to have had a very, very concrete effect, one it could only have had if President Trump had put him in a position of unique power after knowing he was being investigated over that Turkish money.
It’s beyond the scope of this post to weigh the relative merits of this particular anti-ISIS plan. But it seems like it was the consensus position within the US national security bureaucracy to go ahead with it. Flynn vetoed it. Flynn’s decision clearly mimicked the Turkish position (Turkey has a bloody and complicated history with the Kurdish people – those who live in Turkey and those who don’t). Flynn was being paid huge sums of money to advance their interests. Whether Flynn would have made the same call on the merits if he hadn’t gotten a half million dollars to work for Turkey is rendered moot by the fact that he did.
Every decision in the Syria/ISIS theater has lives attached to it. The combination of the money, the non-disclosure and the veto is grave beyond almost anything we’ve seen so clearly documented in the entirety of Trump-related scandals to date. This is exactly why FARA registration – so often honored in the breach or treated as a technicality – turns out to be incredibly important.
This is a big, big deal. And it doesn’t just touch Flynn.
If I’m understanding the timeline correctly, Flynn did this when the Trump team already knew he was a paid agent working on behalf of Turkey, indeed, already knew the DOJ was investigating him for that undisclosed payment. You can likely make determinations about people who lived or died because of this decision. It doesn’t get more serious because it’s not just about abstract decision-making but life and death when illegal money is involved and the cash is arguably driving the decisions.
You can already see where the Times story about Flynn notifying McGahn and the McClatchy story fit together. There’s another way too. Vice President Mike Pence is often portrayed as Trump’s squeaky clean, perhaps goofy second, ready to take over if the avalanche of scandal overwhelms Trump. As I noted earlier this week, this is far from the case. Pence has managed to get implicated in most if not all of the big scandals – that just hasn’t gotten a lot of attention yet.
In this case, Pence was saying in March that he was only just learning about Flynn’s work for Turkey. But we now learn that Flynn had notified McGahn he was being investigated by the DOJ for that work at the beginning of January.
Well, that’s McGahn, not Pence.
But remember, Pence ran the Transition!
Maybe for some reason McGahn somehow didn’t tell Pence. But that’s very, very hard to figure since Flynn was in line for one of the most consequential positions in any presidency and McGahn had just been notified of a fact that under most circumstances would be disqualifying. If Pence lied about this part of the Flynn saga, the idea that he innocently passed on Flynn’s lies about the Kislyak conversation instantly looks much less credible. And that’s not all. Earlier this week we learned that the day after Flynn was finally fired in February, President Trump took FBI Director James Comey aside and asked him to end the Flynn investigation.
What it all amounts to is that the Flynn investigation (just the part tied to Turkey) just got much, much more serious, and the President and Vice President are both implicated in those bad acts, either in advance or after the fact. Likely both.
That’s just the Turkey part of the story. Russia is a whole other thing and likely the bigger deal over time.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/big ... re-1060314
by seemslikeadream » Thu May 18, 2017 6:32 pm
That Didn’t Go Great
President Donald Trump accompanied by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, speaks during a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, May, 18th, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Andrew Harnik/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 18, 2017 5:16 PM
8470Views
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Let me share a few thoughts on the press conference President Trump just held with the President of Colombia. In the nature of the moment, I’ll just focus on the questions President Trump fielded on the investigations.
First, on question one, relative to the wild things he’s already said, Trump got through this one with a relatively normal performance. Yes, he repeated that the probe is a “witch hunt”. But we’re grading on a heavy curve here. He basically said, there’s nothing there. It is what it is. I want to get back to working for the American people.
Fair enough, relative to the Trump norm.
Question two didn’t go as well. A lot of the attention has rightly gone to Trump’s categorical denial that he’d colluded with Russia in any way during the 2016 campaign. But he only made the denial categorical for himself. “I can only speak for myself and the Russians.”
That’s how the quote is being presented in the commentators’ discussions. But that’s not actually what he said. That was “I can always speak for myself and the Russians.” It’s assumed that he meant “only” and not “always.” I think that’s right. But he actually said always. Trump seems to be leaving open the possibility that something might have been amiss with others on his campaign. It was certainly possible to understand the statement as his somehow vouching for the Russians as well as himself. But, again, I’m going to assume that’s not what he meant.
Then he went off on James Comey, categorically denying he ever asked Comey to end the Flynn investigation. As I mentioned earlier, even in the highly improbable scenario that Comey’s lying and Trump’s telling the truth, I think Trump would still be toast on this one. Trump has zero credibility. Comey has a lot. And we’re at least told that Comey has contemporaneous notes. We’ll hear that quote again and I suspect those won’t be happy moments for the President when we do. Why? Because the President is almost certainly lying. Not being able to lie brazenly in a pinch is near territory for him, seemingly an undiscovered country he’ll never get to.
(There was an additional weirdness that on question two Trump called on “Peter Alexander” (NBC), then thought he was talking to “Peter Baker” (NYT) but was actually talking to a third reporter from the local ABC affiliate. I’m not sure that necessarily matters but it just added to the atmosphere of chaos and general weirdness.)
Trump also couldn’t help lashing out at Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General who made the decision to appoint the Special Counsel. Rosenstein reportedly told Senators earlier today that he knew before he wrote his memo that Comey was going to be fired. It was apparently a foregone conclusion and Rosenstein wrote a memo laying out a justification for firing Comey. That doesn’t make Rosenstein look good at all, in my view. But he left no doubt that Trump made the call. Trump went back to trying to hang the decision on Rosenstein, even though Trump himself said last week that he’d already made up his mind. The only real consistency in Trump’s remarks are that he did nothing wrong and his anger at whomever he’s angry at at that moment. Everything else is mutable and up for grabs. He’s mad, mad at everyone, mad at Comey, also mad at Rosenstein and he made that anger clear in something like a million ways during this brief performance.
It could have gone better.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/that-didnt-go-great
What Does the President Owe, and to Whom Does He Owe It?
A special counsel can investigate criminal misconduct—but he can’t examine the bigger questions surrounding Donald Trump.
DAVID FRUM 9:43 AM ET POLITICS
For the chronically indebted businessman Donald Trump, it was a win every day the creditors did not foreclose on him.
President Trump will manage the remainder of his presidency the same way.
The appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel in the Trump-Russia matter will spell vexation in the medium term and may spell danger in the long term. But in the here and now—the next days and weeks, easing into months—the appointment brings relief.
Republicans in Congress have gained a new excuse to revert to their prior enabling of Trump’s misconduct: A special counsel has been appointed!
Instead of defiantly lying, the White House staff can now refuse to answer questions outright: A special counsel has been appointed!
Fundamental questions of national security and public integrity will go unexplored as the special counsel focuses on narrow legal matters. The public debate will be starved of new information as the special counsel proceeds in legally required secrecy.
Yet we can already perceive some of the legal first consequences of the appointment.
The special counsel will investigate whether the president’s message to James Comey about Michael Flynn—“I hope you can let this go”—followed by Comey’s firing, meet the test of prosecutable obstruction of justice. (Expect hundreds of hours of cable-TV airtime for anyone with plausible-sounding legal credentials willing to argue the contrary side of the case.)
Meanwhile, what happened in plain sight—the president fired an FBI director for doing his job—will dwindle into secondary importance.
The special counsel will investigate whether people in the Trump campaign violated any laws when they gleefully leveraged the fruits of Russian espionage to advance their campaign.
By contrast, what happened in plain sight—cheering rather than condemning a Russian attack on American democracy—will be treated as a non-issue, because it was not criminal, merely anti-democratic and disloyal.
If it can be proved that Flynn intentionally altered U.S. foreign policy in Turkey’s favor in knowing return for money, he will face legal jeopardy.
But if the motives cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, the story will disappear from the inquiry.
If the special counsel chooses, he may write a report providing larger context for the troubling events. The Trump Justice Department will then decide whether to release that report to the public.
The counsel’s mandate, however, only empowers him to investigate connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. It’s by no means clear that he has authority to broaden the inquiry into the mighty question of why Russia chose to intervene, or to explore entanglements between the Russian government and Trump’s businesses.
People in Trump’s orbit now face legal fees and legal jeopardy. For a long time however, the president himself will enjoy the shield of Robert Mueller’s professional discretion.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Congress could still investigate itself or empower an independent investigation. This Congress won’t. The next Congress should.
Perhaps it should start on exactly the terrain put off limits to Mueller: The pre-2015 history of connections between Trump and Russia. Congress has power to subpoena the business records of the Trump Organization. It can trace the complex system of holding companies within which (according to Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien) Trump hides his enormous debts. It can order a forensic audit to clarify exactly what the Trump family has received from Russian sources over the years, and what it may still owe.
Very likely none of this is illegal. It is, however, burningly relevant.
This generation’s variant of “What did the president know, and when he know it?” Is “What does the president owe, and to whom does he owe it?”
Not: “Is the president a crook?” (We had available all the information needed to determine that on election day.)
But: “Is the president a risk to national security?”
The most urgent task ahead is not a criminal investigation, potentially leading to indictments and prosecution.
The most urgent task ahead is a broader counter-espionage inquiry conducted not to mete out punishments, but to discover and publicize the truth, however disturbing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... it/527187/
Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America
Massimo Calabresi
Updated: 3:48 PM ET | Originally published: 6:39 AM ET
On March 2, a disturbing report hit the desks of U.S. counterintelligence officials in Washington. For months, American spy hunters had scrambled to uncover details of Russia's influence operation against the 2016 presidential election. In offices in both D.C. and suburban Virginia, they had created massive wall charts to track the different players in Russia's multipronged scheme. But the report in early March was something new.
It described how Russia had already moved on from the rudimentary email hacks against politicians it had used in 2016. Now the Russians were running a more sophisticated hack on Twitter. The report said the Russians had sent expertly tailored messages carrying malware to more than 10,000 Twitter users in the Defense Department. Depending on the interests of the targets, the messages offered links to stories on recent sporting events or the Oscars, which had taken place the previous weekend. When clicked, the links took users to a Russian-controlled server that downloaded a program allowing Moscow's hackers to take control of the victim's phone or computer--and Twitter account.
As they scrambled to contain the damage from the hack and regain control of any compromised devices, the spy hunters realized they faced a new kind of threat. In 2016, Russia had used thousands of covert human agents and robot computer programs to spread disinformation referencing the stolen campaign emails of Hillary Clinton, amplifying their effect. Now counterintelligence officials wondered: What chaos could Moscow unleash with thousands of Twitter handles that spoke in real time with the authority of the armed forces of the United States? At any given moment, perhaps during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, Pentagon Twitter accounts might send out false information. As each tweet corroborated another, and covert Russian agents amplified the messages even further afield, the result could be panic and confusion.
Russia Red Square White House Time Magazine Cover Illustration by Brobel Design for TIME
For many Americans, Russian hacking remains a story about the 2016 election. But there is another story taking shape. Marrying a hundred years of expertise in influence operations to the new world of social media, Russia may finally have gained the ability it long sought but never fully achieved in the Cold War: to alter the course of events in the U.S. by manipulating public opinion. The vast openness and anonymity of social media has cleared a dangerous new route for antidemocratic forces. "Using these technologies, it is possible to undermine democratic government, and it's becoming easier every day," says Rand Waltzman of the Rand Corp., who ran a major Pentagon research program to understand the propaganda threats posed by social media technology.
Current and former officials at the FBI, at the CIA and in Congress now believe the 2016 Russian operation was just the most visible battle in an ongoing information war against global democracy. And they've become more vocal about their concern. "If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundation of our democratic political system, this episode is it," former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before Congress on May 8.
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If that sounds alarming, it helps to understand the battlescape of this new information war. As they tweet and like and upvote their way through social media, Americans generate a vast trove of data on what they think and how they respond to ideas and arguments--literally thousands of expressions of belief every second on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google. All of those digitized convictions are collected and stored, and much of that data is available commercially to anyone with sufficient computing power to take advantage of it.
That's where the algorithms come in. American researchers have found they can use mathematical formulas to segment huge populations into thousands of subgroups according to defining characteristics like religion and political beliefs or taste in TV shows and music. Other algorithms can determine those groups' hot-button issues and identify "followers" among them, pinpointing those most susceptible to suggestion. Propagandists can then manually craft messages to influence them, deploying covert provocateurs, either humans or automated computer programs known as bots, in hopes of altering their behavior.
That is what Moscow is doing, more than a dozen senior intelligence officials and others investigating Russia's influence operations tell TIME. The Russians "target you and see what you like, what you click on, and see if you're sympathetic or not sympathetic," says a senior intelligence official. Whether and how much they have actually been able to change Americans' behavior is hard to say. But as they have investigated the Russian 2016 operation, intelligence and other officials have found that Moscow has developed sophisticated tactics.
In one case last year, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, a Russian soldier based in Ukraine successfully infiltrated a U.S. social media group by pretending to be a 42-year-old American housewife and weighing in on political debates with specially tailored messages. In another case, officials say, Russia created a fake Facebook account to spread stories on political issues like refugee resettlement to targeted reporters they believed were susceptible to influence.
As Russia expands its cyberpropaganda efforts, the U.S. and its allies are only just beginning to figure out how to fight back. One problem: the fear of Russian influence operations can be more damaging than the operations themselves. Eager to appear more powerful than they are, the Russians would consider it a success if you questioned the truth of your news sources, knowing that Moscow might be lurking in your Facebook or Twitter feed. But figuring out if they are is hard. Uncovering "signals that indicate a particular handle is a state-sponsored account is really, really difficult," says Jared Cohen, CEO of Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet, which tackles global security challenges.
Like many a good spy tale, the story of how the U.S. learned its democracy could be hacked started with loose lips. In May 2016, a Russian military intelligence officer bragged to a colleague that his organization, known as the GRU, was getting ready to pay Clinton back for what President Vladimir Putin believed was an influence operation she had run against him five years earlier as Secretary of State. The GRU, he said, was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election.
What the officer didn't know, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, was that U.S. spies were listening. They wrote up the conversation and sent it back to analysts at headquarters, who turned it from raw intelligence into an official report and circulated it. But if the officer's boast seems like a red flag now, at the time U.S. officials didn't know what to make of it. "We didn't really understand the context of it until much later," says the senior intelligence official. Investigators now realize that the officer's boast was the first indication U.S. spies had from their sources that Russia wasn't just hacking email accounts to collect intelligence but was also considering interfering in the vote. Like much of America, many in the U.S. government hadn't imagined the kind of influence operation that Russia was preparing to unleash on the 2016 election. Fewer still realized it had been five years in the making.
In 2011, protests in more than 70 cities across Russia had threatened Putin's control of the Kremlin. The uprising was organized on social media by a popular blogger named Alexei Navalny, who used his blog as well as Twitter and Facebook to get crowds in the streets. Putin's forces broke out their own social media technique to strike back. When bloggers tried to organize nationwide protests on Twitter using #Triumfalnaya, pro-Kremlin botnets bombarded the hashtag with anti-protester messages and nonsense tweets, making it impossible for Putin's opponents to coalesce.
Putin publicly accused then Secretary of State Clinton of running a massive influence operation against his country, saying she had sent "a signal" to protesters and that the State Department had actively worked to fuel the protests. The State Department said it had just funded pro-democracy organizations. Former officials say any such operations--in Russia or elsewhere--would require a special intelligence finding by the President and that Barack Obama was not likely to have issued one.
After his re-election the following year, Putin dispatched his newly installed head of military intelligence, Igor Sergun, to begin repurposing cyberweapons previously used for psychological operations in war zones for use in electioneering. Russian intelligence agencies funded "troll farms," botnet spamming operations and fake news outlets as part of an expanding focus on psychological operations in cyberspace.
Why a Global Cyber Crisis Stalled-This Time
It turns out Putin had outside help. One particularly talented Russian programmer who had worked with social media researchers in the U.S. for 10 years had returned to Moscow and brought with him a trove of algorithms that could be used in influence operations. He was promptly hired by those working for Russian intelligence services, senior intelligence officials tell TIME. "The engineer who built them the algorithms is U.S.-trained," says the senior intelligence official.
Soon, Putin was aiming his new weapons at the U.S. Following Moscow's April 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. considered sanctions that would block the export of drilling and fracking technologies to Russia, putting out of reach some $8.2 trillion in oil reserves that could not be tapped without U.S. technology. As they watched Moscow's intelligence operations in the U.S., American spy hunters saw Russian agents applying their new social media tactics on key aides to members of Congress. Moscow's agents broadcast material on social media and watched how targets responded in an attempt to find those who might support their cause, the senior intelligence official tells TIME. "The Russians started using it on the Hill with staffers," the official says, "to see who is more susceptible to continue this program [and] to see who would be more favorable to what they want to do."
On Aug. 7, 2016, the infamous pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli declared that Hillary Clinton had Parkinson's. That story went viral in late August, then took on a life of its own after Clinton fainted from pneumonia and dehydration at a Sept. 11 event in New York City. Elsewhere people invented stories saying Pope Francis had endorsed Trump and Clinton had murdered a DNC staffer. Just before Election Day, a story took off alleging that Clinton and her aides ran a pedophile ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor.
Congressional investigators are looking at how Russia helped stories like these spread to specific audiences. Counterintelligence officials, meanwhile, have picked up evidence that Russia tried to target particular influencers during the election season who they reasoned would help spread the damaging stories. These officials have seen evidence of Russia using its algorithmic techniques to target the social media accounts of particular reporters, senior intelligence officials tell TIME. "It's not necessarily the journal or the newspaper or the TV show," says the senior intelligence official. "It's the specific reporter that they find who might be a little bit slanted toward believing things, and they'll hit him" with a flood of fake news stories.
Russia plays in every social media space. The intelligence officials have found that Moscow's agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. "They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by--they do that just as much as anybody else does," says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.) The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, has said he is looking into why, for example, four of the top five Google search results the day the U.S. released a report on the 2016 operation were links to Russia's TV propaganda arm, RT. (Google says it saw no meddling in this case.) Researchers at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, found that nearly 20% of political tweets in 2016 between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21 were generated by bots of unknown origin; investigators are trying to figure out how many were Russian.
As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia's role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump's top political adviser Stephen Bannon.
The congressional investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts, a source familiar with the investigations tells TIME. "Nobody can prove it yet," the source says. In March, McClatchy newspapers reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing whether far-right sites like Breitbart News and Infowars had coordinated with Russian botnets to blitz social media with anti-Clinton stories, mixing fact and fiction when Trump was doing poorly in the campaign.
There are plenty of people who are skeptical of such a conspiracy, if one existed. Cambridge Analytica touts its ability to use algorithms to microtarget voters, but veteran political operatives have found them ineffective political influencers. Ted Cruz first used their methods during the primary, and his staff ended up concluding they had wasted their money. Mercer, Bannon, Breitbart News and the White House did not answer questions about the congressional probes. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica says the company has no ties to Russia or individuals acting as fronts for Moscow and that it is unaware of the probe.
Democratic operatives searching for explanations for Clinton's loss after the election investigated social media trends in the three states that tipped the vote for Trump: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In each they found what they believe is evidence that key swing voters were being drawn to fake news stories and anti-Clinton stories online. Google searches for the fake pedophilia story circulating under the hashtag #pizzagate, for example, were disproportionately higher in swing districts and not in districts likely to vote for Trump.
The Democratic operatives created a package of background materials on what they had found, suggesting the search behavior might indicate that someone had successfully altered the behavior in key voting districts in key states. They circulated it to fellow party members who are up for a vote in 2018.
hacking-democracy-inside-russia-social-media-war-america-2Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper calls Russian cyber influence operations a threat to democracy Brendan Smialowski—AFP/Getty Images
Even as investigators try to piece together what happened in 2016, they are worrying about what comes next. Russia claims to be able to alter events using cyberpropaganda and is doing what it can to tout its power. In February 2016, a Putin adviser named Andrey Krutskikh compared Russia's information-warfare strategies to the Soviet Union's obtaining a nuclear weapon in the 1940s, David Ignatius of the Washington Post reported. "We are at the verge of having something in the information arena which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals," Krutskikh said.
But if Russia is clearly moving forward, it's less clear how active the U.S. has been. Documents released by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and published by the Intercept suggested that the British were pursuing social media propaganda and had shared their tactics with the U.S. Chris Inglis, the former No. 2 at the National Security Agency, says the U.S. has not pursued this capability. "The Russians are 10 years ahead of us in being willing to make use of" social media to influence public opinion, he says.
There are signs that the U.S. may be playing in this field, however. From 2010 to 2012, the U.S. Agency for International Development established and ran a "Cuban Twitter" network designed to undermine communist control on the island. At the same time, according to the Associated Press, which discovered the program, the U.S. government hired a contractor to profile Cuban cell phone users, categorizing them as "pro-revolution," "apolitical" or "antirevolutionary."
Much of what is publicly known about the mechanics and techniques of social media propaganda comes from a program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that the Rand researcher, Waltzman, ran to study how propagandists might manipulate social media in the future. In the Cold War, operatives might distribute disinformation-laden newspapers to targeted political groups or insinuate an agent provocateur into a group of influential intellectuals. By harnessing computing power to segment and target literally millions of people in real time online, Waltzman concluded, you could potentially change behavior "on the scale of democratic governments."
In the U.S., public scrutiny of such programs is usually enough to shut them down. In 2014, news articles appeared about the DARPA program and the "Cuban Twitter" project. It was only a year after Snowden had revealed widespread monitoring programs by the government. The DARPA program, already under a cloud, was allowed to expire quietly when its funding ran out in 2015.
In the wake of Russia's 2016 election hack, the question is how to research social media propaganda without violating civil liberties. The need is all the more urgent because the technology continues to advance. While today humans are still required to tailor and distribute messages to specially targeted "susceptibles," in the future crafting and transmitting emotionally powerful messages will be automated.
The U.S. government is constrained in what kind of research it can fund by various laws protecting citizens from domestic propaganda, government electioneering and intrusions on their privacy. Waltzman has started a group called Information Professionals Association with several former information operations officers from the U.S. military to develop defenses against social media influence operations.
Social media companies are beginning to realize that they need to take action. Facebook issued a report in April 2017 acknowledging that much disinformation had been spread on its pages and saying it had expanded its security. Google says it has seen no evidence of Russian manipulation of its search results but has updated its algorithms just in case. Twitter claims it has diminished cyberpropaganda by tweaking its algorithms to block cleverly designed bots. "Our algorithms currently work to detect when Twitter accounts are attempting to manipulate Twitter's Trends through inorganic activity, and then automatically adjust," the company said in a statement.
In the meantime, America's best option to protect upcoming votes may be to make it harder for Russia and other bad actors to hide their election-related information operations. When it comes to defeating Russian influence operations, the answer is "transparency, transparency, transparency," says Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. He has written legislation that would curb the massive, anonymous campaign contributions known as dark money and the widespread use of shell corporations that he says make Russian cyberpropaganda harder to trace and expose.
But much damage has already been done. "The ultimate impact of [the 2016 Russian operation] is we're never going to look at another election without wondering, you know, Is this happening, can we see it happening?" says Jigsaw's Jared Cohen. By raising doubts about the validity of the 2016 vote and the vulnerability of future elections, Russia has achieved its most important objective: undermining the credibility of American democracy.
For now, investigators have added the names of specific trolls and botnets to their wall charts in the offices of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. They say the best way to compete with the Russian model is by having a better message. "It requires critical thinkers and people who have a more powerful vision" than the cynical Russian view, says former NSA deputy Inglis. And what message is powerful enough to take on the firehose of falsehoods that Russia is deploying in targeted, effective ways across a range of new media? One good place to start: telling the truth.
--With reporting by PRATHEEK REBALA/WASHINGTON
http://time.com/4783932/inside-russia-s ... =hp-magmod
Ahhh Michael Cohen Reappears
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 18, 2017 4:08 PM
CNN just reported that a team of outside advisers to the President have been meeting today to bring in more lawyers to help the President in light of the appointment of a special counsel. That is not abnormal. Presidents who have been in some sense the focus of investigations like this have often, probably usually, hired outside lawyers beyond the White House Counsel. But apparently shepherding this process is Michael Cohen, the President’s longtime “personal lawyer” and Trump Organization fixture who has his own tangled relationship with various Russian and Ukrainian interests, Felix Sater and more.
Remember, he was actually the one who met with Sater and that Ukrainian member of parliament who had a ‘peace plan’ to deliver to Mike Flynn.
This is very interesting.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog
by seemslikeadream » Thu May 18, 2017 9:24 pm
The effort is now being led by Brandon Van Grack, a longtime espionage prosecutor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/p ... viser.html
Adam SchiffVerified account
@RepAdamSchiff
Just announced: Former CIA Director Brennan will testify in open session before House Intel Committee next Tuesday as part of Russia prob
Senators Warn Special Counsel Is Good For Democracy, Bad For Transparency
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Published MAY 18, 2017 6:10 PM
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When the Justice Department announced Wednesday evening that it was appointing former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, both Republicans and Democrats cheered the news.
But less than 24 hours later, after a classified briefing from the man who appointed Mueller—Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—many senators were angry, frustrated, and fearful that both they and the American public will remain in the dark as the federal investigation unfolds.
Lawmakers said Rosenstein refused to answer many of their questions Thursday about the successive scandals that have hit Washington over the last few weeks—including why Trump abruptly fired FBI Director Jim Comey, what exactly Rosenstein’s role in that drama was, and whether the congressional committees investigating Trump and Russia will be able to subpoena documents and interview witnesses going forward—because Mueller has not yet set the parameters of his probe.
“Maybe somebody else found something useful in that, but I didn’t,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) huffed as he emerged from the briefing with Rosenstein. “Basically every answer he gave was, ‘I can’t comment because it may be the subject of an investigation by Mueller.”
“It was a very sobering briefing,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) added. “As it became clear how little he was willing to talk about it, it also became clear how broad this investigation Mueller is about to undertake actually is.”
Several lawmakers confirmed to TPM that the FBI’s investigation is now both a criminal and a counterintelligence matter that could include Comey’s firing, Rosenstein’s memo that was used as the basis for that firing, the various scandals of Michael Flynn, and a host of other areas.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) was among those warning that Mueller has no obligation to report anything about his work—even the scope of the inquiry—to Congress or the public, unless it leads to an indictment. “We may not know for months or years,” he told reporters.
Coons and other lawmakers said the appointment of a special counsel may limit the ability of the House and Senate Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight committees from conducting their own investigations into the Trump-Russia mess.
“I didn’t hear anything that gives assurance that they will have the access they need,” Merkley said.
Some Republicans, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) appeared to gloat that the same Democrats who had spent weeks demanding a special counsel are now worried about the implications for transparency.
“It probably frustrated my Democratic colleagues, but they got what they asked for,” Johnson quipped with a smile.
“I think a lot of members wanted the special counsel to be appointed but don’t understand that you’re pretty well knocked out of the game,” added Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who sits on the Judiciary Committee. “And that’s the way it should be.”
Several members of Congress on both sides of the aisle disagreed, and vowed to continue to pursue rigorous committee investigations no matter the scope of the FBI’s inquiry.
“The public deserves a strong and public oversight by the Congress on how Russia has tried to influence our country,” Judiciary Committee member Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) told TPM. “We should go ahead with that. That in no way detracts from what Robert Mueller will do. As good as his appointment was, it does not mean the Congress will say, ‘Our job is done.'”
Trump and Priebus Reportedly Pushed Comey to Publicly Clear Trump in Russia Investigation
By Elliot Hannon
It’s still early days in the Trump v. Comey heavyweight fight to define the reality of what exactly was said between the two men behind closed doors. The stakes are, of course, high as their encounters—or how they are perceived and whose version is believed—will go a long way in determining whether Trump obstructed justice, legally speaking and in public opinion. Since his firing last week, Comey’s corner has been publicly setting the stage for the former FBI director by leaking bits and pieces, drips and drabs, along with bombshells, of Comey’s side of things. And it has been devastating for Trump. The release of portions of Comey’s memos to the New York Times, which chronicle his interactions with Trump, has shaken portions of the president’s Republican support in Congress and effectively prompted the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.
After the Comey memo, which detailed Trump’s attempts at securing the FBI director’s loyalty and commitment to lay off in the investigation into then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, the feeling was that Trump’s actions were minimally unbecoming of a president, but the public discussion quickly turned to what, exactly, is the definition of obstruction of justice. And what does it look like in the real world? That's a worrying development for Trump. On Thursday, the New York Times added fresh logs onto the Is It Obstruction of Justice Yet? fire.
President Trump called the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, weeks after he took office and asked him when federal authorities were going to put out word that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation, according to two people briefed on the call. Mr. Comey told the president that if he wanted to know details about the bureau’s investigations, he should not contact him directly but instead follow the proper procedures and have the White House counsel send any inquires to the Justice Department, according to those people.
Those interactions included a dinner in which associates of Mr. Comey say Mr. Trump asked him to pledge his loyalty and a meeting in the Oval Office at which Mr. Trump told him he hoped Mr. Comey would shut down an investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Trump has denied making the request. The day after the Flynn conversation [between Trump and Comey], Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Comey to help push back on reports in the news media that Mr. Trump’s associates had been in contact with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign.
The Times story adds incremental credence to the assertion that Trump was poking around for ways to curry favor with Comey to quietly relieve some of the pressure the Russia inquiry was putting on his administration. The Trump White House has obviously denied more or less everything, but has so thoroughly leeched the credibility out of the office of the president and the man who inhabits it that it’s difficult to know if the administration still has its ethical bearings enough to even know where the truth begins and ends anymore.
Given everything we know about and have seen of Donald Trump over the past nearly two years as a candidate and now as a president, it seems not only highly plausible, but a near certainty, that Trump would do anything he pleased to discredit or, better yet, end the investigation into him and his allies. If Comey’s version is to be believed, it's clear what Trump was getting at during his discussion with the man who was in charge of investigating him. Was it unethical? Yes. Was it improper? Yes. Was it obstruction of justice? A few more drips and drabs and time will tell.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... probe.html
by seemslikeadream » Fri May 19, 2017 3:48 pm
Russia probe reaches current White House official, people familiar with the case say
Investigation into Russian ties to White House now focuses on current official
The law enforcement investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky May 19 at 3:02 PM
The law enforcement investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest, showing that the probe is reaching into the highest levels of government, according to people familiar with the matter.
The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president, according to these people, who would not further identify the official.
The revelation comes as the investigation also appears to be entering a more overtly active phase, with investigators shifting from work that has remained largely hidden from the public to conducting interviews and using a grand jury to issue subpoenas. The intensity of the probe is expected to accelerate in the coming weeks, the people said.
The sources emphasized that investigators remain keenly interested in people who previously wielded influence in the Trump campaign and administration but are no longer part of it, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Flynn resigned in February after disclosures that he had lied to administration officials about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Current administration officials who have acknowledged contacts with Russian officials include President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
The Washington Post's Devlin Barrett explains the Justice Department's decision to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. (Peter Stevenson,Jason Aldag,Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
[Graphic: What we know so far about Team Trump’s ties to Russian interests]
People familiar with the investigation said the intensifying effort does not mean criminal charges are near, or that any such charges will result. Earlier this week, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III to serve as special counsel and lead the investigation into Russian meddling.
It is unclear exactly how Mueller’s leadership will affect the direction of the probe, and he is already bringing in new people to work on the team. Those familiar with the case said its significance had increased before Mueller’s appointment.
Although the case began quietly last July as an effort to determine whether any Trump associates coordinated with Russian operatives to meddle in the presidential election campaign, the investigative work now being done by the FBI also includes determining whether any financial crimes were committed by people close to the president. The people familiar with the matter said the probe has sharpened into something more fraught for the White House, the FBI and the Justice Department — particularly because of the public steps investigators know they now need to take, the people said.
When subpoenas are issued or interviews are requested, it is possible the people being asked to talk or provide documents will reveal publicly what they were asked about.
A small group of lawmakers known as the Gang of Eight were notified of the change in tempo and focus in the investigation at a classified briefing Wednesday evening, the people familiar with the matter said. Former FBI director James B. Comey had publicly confirmed the existence of the investigation in March.
Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said, “I can’t confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of investigations or targets of investigations.” An FBI spokesman declined to comment.
Team Trump’s ties to Russian interests VIEW GRAPHIC
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said, “As the president has stated before, a thorough investigation will confirm that there was no collusion between the campaign and any foreign entity.’’
While there has been a loud public debate in recent days over the question of whether the president might have attempted to obstruct justice in his private dealings with Comey, who Trump fired last week, people familiar with the matter said investigators on the case are more focused on Russian influence operations and possible financial crimes.
The FBI’s investigation seeks to determine whether and to what extent Trump associates were in contact with Kremlin operatives, what business dealings they might have had in Russia, and whether they in any way facilitated the hacking and publishing of Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails during the presidential campaign. Several congressional committees are also investigating, though their probes could not produce criminal charges.
[Appointment of Mueller could complicate other probes into alleged Russian meddling]
A grand jury in Alexandria, Va. recently issued a subpoena for records related to Flynn’s business, the Flynn Intel Group, which had been paid more than $500,000 by a company owned by a Turkish American businessman close to top Turkish officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Flynn Intel Group was paid for research on Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who Turkey’s current president believes was responsible for a coup attempt last summer. Flynn retroactively registered with the Justice Department in March as a paid foreign agent for Turkish interests.
Separately from the probe now run by Mueller, Flynn is being investigated by the Pentagon’s top watchdog for his foreign payments. Flynn also received $45,000 to appear in 2015 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a dinner for RT, a Kremlin-controlled media organization.
Flynn discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the month before Trump took office, and he withheld that fact from even the vice president. That prompted then-acting attorney general Sally Yates to warn the White House’s top lawyer he might be susceptible to blackmail. Flynn stepped down after The Washington Post reported on the contents of the call.
The president has nonetheless seemed to defend his former adviser. A memo by Comey alleged that Trump asked that the probe into Flynn be shut down.
[Notes made by FBI Director Comey say Trump pressured him to end Flynn probe]
The White House also has acknowledged that Kushner met with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, in late November. Kushner also has acknowledged that he met with the head of a Russian development bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014. The president’s son-in-law initially omitted contacts with foreign leaders from a national security questionnaire, though his lawyer has said publicly he submitted the form prematurely and informed the FBI soon after he would provide an update.
Vnesheconombank handles development for the state, and in early 2015, a man purporting to be one of its New York-based employees was arrested and accused of being an unregistered spy.
That man – Evgeny Buryakov – ultimately pleaded guilty and was eventually deported. He had been in contact with former Trump adviser Carter Page, though Page has said he shared only “basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents” with the Russian. Page was the subject of a secret warrant last year issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, based on suspicions he might have been acting as an agent of the Russian government, according to people familiar with the matter. Page has denied any wrongdoing, and accused the government of violating his civil rights.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... 51b69b57d7
Robert Mueller gets to work
By Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter
Updated 10:44 PM ET, Thu May 18, 2017
He's now in charge of Russia investigation
Mueller brings two veteran lawyers with him, including one who worked on Watergate
His appointment as special counsel was announced Wednesday evening
Washington (CNN)By choosing Robert S. Mueller III for the job of special counsel, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tapped a veteran of the law -- a seasoned prosecutor, former FBI director and private lawyer -- who will methodically peel back the layers of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Any other prosecutor might think twice before taking on a job so fraught with political controversy.
But as a stunned Washington digested Wednesday's surprise announcement, Mueller released a terse statement at 7:04 p.m. ET Wednesday night acknowledging that he would "accept the responsibility" and "discharge it to the best of my ability."
Trump's circle looking for an outside legal team to boost 'firepower' in Russia probe
Trump's circle looking for an outside legal team to boost 'firepower' in Russia probe
And then he got to work.
By 7:38 p.m. ET, his now former firm, WilmerHale, announced that two other partners had stepped down to help -- including one who worked for the Watergate prosecutor back in the 1970s.
"Bob Mueller's attributes are legion," said Richard Ben-Veniste, who served as a special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal and knows the new special counsel.
Mueller's process
Mueller will start with reviewing existing files and talking to the agents who have been on the case. Then he will collect facts and piece together the time line as he sets his investigative strategy. There could be a variety of records, emails, texts, and maybe even recordings.
If past is precedent, he will work his way up to those who are more centrally involved, something that could take months and leave the Trump administration under somewhat of a shadow.
"He will have the opportunity to interview witnesses at a pace he decides is appropriate and, if necessary, he will have the power to immunize witnesses and present evidence to a grand jury," Ben-Veniste said.
Although Mueller has spent stints of his career in private practice, his passion -- according to friends -- has been for public service. His career path has been unusual. After serving as head of the criminal division at the Justice Department, he joined a law firm in DC. But then he gave up a lucrative partnership to take a job as a line prosecutor in the homicide division of the US Attorney's Office.
"He's prosecuted everything from drug-related murders on DC streets to international terrorism in the skies over Lockerbie," said attorney Neil H. MacBride of the law firm Davis Polk, who has known and worked with Mueller for over 20 years.
"Bob used to tell young prosecutors and agents that integrity is doing the right thing when no one else is watching you," MacBride said.
Mueller's work ethic is legendary.
"He's the first person in and the last person out, that's the reason everyone claims he is the gold standard," said longtime friend Daniel Levin of the law firm White & Case. Levin says he brings to the job a terrific judgment when it comes to the criminal justice system and a "very good sense of how things work."
For Levin the most important quality is that after a long stellar career the most remarkable thing is that he "has no ego."
"He's really not looking to make himself good. He will get to the right result, whatever it is," he said.
And for a city that floats on leaks, Mueller will turn off the spigot.
Graham believes Russia probe 'considered a criminal investigation'
His staff
The two men whom he brings with him bring different qualities.
Aaron Zebley was Mueller's chief of staff at the FBI. He also worked as the senior counselor in the National Security Division and knows his way around the Justice Department. Zebley earned his law degree in 1996 from the University of Virginia School of Law and an undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary.
James Quarles has spent the last several years at a private firm focusing on complex litigation matters and management, but it's how his career started that might prove critical. Like Ben-Veniste, Quarles worked on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, for which he served as an assistant special prosecutor.
"There is nothing comparable to the kind of pressure and obligation that this kind of job puts on your shoulders," said Ben-Veniste. "Having been there before, gives him the confidence to know how to do it and how to do it right."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/18/politics/ ... d=37771298
by seemslikeadream » Fri May 19, 2017 4:42 pm
CONGRESS
MAY 19, 2017 3:31 PM
Trump-Russia probe now includes possible cover-up, Congress is told
BY MATTHEW SCHOFIELD AND LESLEY CLARK
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Investigators into Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential elections are now also probing whether White House officials have engaged in a cover-up, according to members of Congress who were briefed Friday by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
That avenue of investigation was added in recent weeks after assertions by former FBI Director James Comey that President Donald Trump had tried to dissuade him from pressing an investigation into the actions of Trump’s first national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, members of Congress said, though it was not clear whom that part of the probe might target.
Even as members of Congress were mulling over the expansion of the case into possible cover-up, and its reclassification from counterintelligence to criminal, the scandal appeared to grow. The Washington Post reported Friday afternoon that federal investigators were looking at a senior White House official as a “significant person of interest.” The article did not identify the official, though it noted that the person was “someone close to the president.”
A person of interest is someone law enforcement identifies as relevant to an investigation but who has not been charged or arrested.
Cover-ups have traditionally been a major part of investigations that have threatened previous administrations. Articles of impeachment levied against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton included allegations of obstruction of justice, as they were suspected of trying to hide other wrongdoing.
Then-FBI Director James Comey announced on March 9 that the FBI was investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents. On May 9, President Trump fired the FBI director, igniting an outcry that grew from just Democrats to include some Republican lawmakers as well.
Natalie Fertig McClatchy
“This is a thorough investigation of what happened in the 2016 election, and it can go anywhere,” said Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C.
The possibility of a cover-up is the third branch of an investigation that began as a look at Russian meddling in the election and broadened into whether members of the Trump campaign had cooperated in that efforts, according to the briefing, members of Congress said.
The election interference aspect, which was first alleged in October in a report by the U.S. intelligence community, appears to be an accepted fact, said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who has been at the center of some of the more explosive congressional revelations about the Russia probe.
What’s really left to be determined, Cummings said, is whether there was “collusion with the Russians, and the possibility of an attempt to cover up.”
The most visible questions about the possible cover-up have come since Trump took office, and especially in the days since the president abruptly fired Comey on May 9. News reports that Comey had written memos about his conversations with Trump since January have fueled that aspect of the probe.
On Friday, members of Congress said, Rosenstein clearly defined his role in Comey’s dismissal, telling the assembly that while he had written a memo criticizing Comey’s flouting of Justice Department rules for his public revelation of aspects of the Hillary Clinton email probe, it was not intended as a justification for firing Comey. The members said he said he’d been told of the decision to fire Comey before he was asked to write the memo.
Rosenstein declined to discuss the timing of the memo and who had asked him to write it, saying the memo and its role in Comey’s firing were likely to be part of the investigation, which will now be led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, whom Rosenstein appointed special counsel on Wednesday.
“He refused to answer questions and he just kept off pushing everything onto Mueller,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who pronounced the briefing “useless.”
Despite such frustrations, members agreed that Rosenstein had received a warm reception from both Republicans and Democrats at the meeting, a development that they said showed not only praise for his selection of Mueller to oversee the probe but also a recognition that Republican resistance to an independent probe was futile.
Trump-Russia is now a criminal matter, senators say after ‘sobering’ briefing
“Everybody applauded,” said Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo. “Well, almost everybody. Let’s say 95 percent applauded. Still, two weeks ago, that would not have happened.”
Cleaver said Rosenstein’s opening statement was “clear, concise” and had let those in the room know “this is a real investigation, looking into very real issues.”
“I came out of there knowing that I trust this deputy attorney general, that I trust this special counsel and while he didn’t answer many questions, he had a clear reason for not answering,” Cleaver said.
Republicans were more reluctant to share details of the briefing, citing its classified nature, but they said they expected Congress to continue its own investigations.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said clearly there might come a time when the special counsel thought the congressional investigation might interfere with his own probe. “But so far, there’s been no suggestion that we can’t move forward,” he said.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said one of his biggest takeaways was that Rosenstein had said he had no evidence that Comey had asked for more resources for the investigation before he was fired.
Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., sounded a note of caution, fearing the public won’t be told the investigation’s results if it falls short of criminal charges.
“If the investigation determines that (cooperation between Trump’s campaign and the Russians) happened but it doesn’t rise to the level not only of criminality but a case that can be made, how will the public ever know about that? A decision to not charge doesn’t necessarily give us any of that information,” he said.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article gave the wrong party for Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politic ... rylink=cpy
Russia probe reaches current White House official, people familiar with the case say
by seemslikeadream » Fri May 19, 2017 7:28 pm
My guess it is that Kushner
Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner 'person of interest in Russia investigation'
A former FBI Director is heading the probe
Andrew Buncombe, Mythili Sampathkumar New York @AndrewBuncombe Andrew Buncombe, Mythili Sampathkumar New York @AndrewBuncombe Friday 19 May 2017 23:05 BST
The Independent US
Mr Kushner is accompanying Mr Trump on his first official foreign visit Getty
Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has reportedly been identified as a “person of interest” in the ongoing investigation into possible ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign.
The Washington Post said a senior adviser to Mr Trump was among people investigators wanted to speak to. A New York magazine reporter then said the person in question was Mr Kushner, 36, who is married to Mr Trump’s eldest daughter and who flew out of Washington on Friday night to accompany the President on his first official foreign trip.
The Post said the person under investigation was close to the President, but did not identify them. However, the number of people who fit such a profile would be very small.
Yashar Ali, a contributor to New York magazine said on Twitter: “It’s Jared Kushner. Have confirmed this with four people. I’m not speculating.”
The White House did not immediately respond to calls and emails from The Independent seeking comment. The Trump Organisation, which controls the President's financial interests, also did not respond to queries.
White House officials have previously acknowledged contacts between Russian officials and Mr Kushner, as well as with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
The revelation came just two days after the Justice Department announced that former FBI Director, Robert Mueller, had been appointed special counsel to lead the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Reports suggest the investigation also appears to be entering a more overtly active phase, with investigators shifting from work that has remained largely hidden from the public to conducting interviews and using a grand jury to issue subpoenas. The intensity of the probe is expected to accelerate in the coming weeks, the Post said.
It said investigators remained keenly interested in people who previously wielded influence in the Trump campaign and administration but are no longer part of it, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
The report was published as Mr Trump travelled to Saudi Arabia on the first leg of a trip abroad that the White House hopes will shift attention away from the political firestorm triggered by his firing last week of former FBI Director James Comey.
Mr Comey was previously leading the probe.
His firing and news reports that Mr Trump had previously asked Mr Comey to stop investigating Mr Flynn led critics to charge that Mr Trump may have improperly sought to hamper the FBI probe.
“As the President has stated before - a thorough investigation will confirm that there was no collusion between the campaign and any foreign entity,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said in a statement in response to the Post’s report.
Separately, the New York Times reported on Friday that Mr Trump told Russian officials at a White House meeting last week that firing Mr Comey relieved “great pressure” that the president was facing from the ongoing probe into Russia and the election.
“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr Trump said, according to the Times, which cited a document summarising the meeting and which was read to the newspaper by a US official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Mr Trump met Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russia’s Ambassador to Washington in the Oval Office the day after he fired Mr Comey.
Earlier this year, the White House issued a statement saying Mr Kushner had volunteered to testify before the Senate intelligence committee in relation to its Russia investigation.
“Mr. Kushner will certainly not be the last person the committee calls to give testimony, but we expect him to be able to provide answers to key questions that have arisen in our inquiry,” said a statement from the Senate intelligence committee.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 45916.html
Peter AlexanderVerified account
@PeterAlexander
EXCLUSIVE: Trump family had "blind spot when it came to Flynn," per source. New details re mtg where Flynn asked for & was granted NSA job.
by seemslikeadream » Sun May 21, 2017 9:32 pm
Josh MarshallVerified account
@joshtpm
One day yr bragging abt Gen Pershing &pigs blood bullets, next yr communing the orb of destiny with The Custodian of the Sacred Mosques
“Financial Crimes” And Why Trump is Right to Worry
Cliff Owen/FR170079 AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 21, 2017 4:52 PM
17646Views
The main takeaway from Friday’s Washington Post story on Trump/Russia was that the investigation has now expanded to include a current White House official who is close to the President as a “significant person of interest.” That’s a big deal not least because the description (1. current White House official, 2. present during the campaign and 3. “close to the president”) matches up so closely with the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. But to me that wasn’t the most noteworthy revelation.
What jumped out to me was that the authors twice invoked investigators’ focus on “financial crimes.”
Here are the two passages.
Although the case began quietly last July as an effort to determine whether any Trump associates coordinated with Russian operatives to meddle in the presidential election campaign, the investigative work now being done by the FBI also includes determining whether any financial crimes were committed by people close to the president. The people familiar with the matter said the probe has sharpened into something more fraught for the White House, the FBI and the Justice Department — particularly because of the public steps investigators know they now need to take, the people said.
And then later …
While there has been a loud public debate in recent days over the question of whether the president might have attempted to obstruct justice in his private dealings with Comey, whom Trump fired last week, people familiar with the matter said investigators on the case are more focused on Russian influence operations and possible financial crimes.
We know – and this article confirms – that Paul Manafort is a significant focus of the probe. Even apart from his political work in Ukraine, Manafort appears to have a series of real estate deals, loans, etc. that investigators are looking at. So perhaps it’s something as mundane as stumbling across some kind of crooked, small-bore real estate ventures Manafort participated in while examining his business ties to people in Ukraine.
But my hunch is that it’s a bit more than that.
As you’ve seen, what I’ve been focused on in recent months are a series of business ventures over the last couple decades – either involving President Trump or his close associates – which seemed to rely on capital from people from the former Soviet Union or recent emigres from those countries. Trump himself, Felix Sater, Michael Cohen and many others figure into this as well as Manafort, Trump’s children, the Kushners and still others. My interest of course is to understand the roots of Trump’s affinity with the post-Soviet oligarch world and whatever financial ties or dependence he has on it. But even if you take the Russia/former Soviet Union connection with its geopolitical dynamics out of the equation, you simply can’t read over these deals and not see that Trump and his crew just play way out on the outer fringe of legality at best. At best. People who have done or subsequently did time in the US or other countries repeatedly appear in the picture. So do people from organized crime. A lot.
One thing you find looking through Trump’s history is that after his fall from financial grace a quarter century ago this pattern seemed to become part of the business model. Cut off from capital from the big banks and most people interested in not losing their money, he had to do business with people with decidedly sketchier reputations. Those people, often looking for places to park wealth in real estate, had to accept much higher levels of risk than people with clean reputations. That seemed to lead them to Trump.
Then there’s another level of it. Even apart from big bad acts and corrupt deals, look at the stuff David Fahrenthold dug up on the Trump Foundation and his Potemkin charitable giving. Beyond issues of possible illegality, the big takeaway there was that Trump operates with a seemingly almost total disregard for rule-following or even a lot of elementary record keeping. So on top of substantively shady deals things are executed in really slapdash and hazard ways. In other words, the Trump Organization sounds a lot like the Trump White House. Only it’s a private company, surrounded by a moat of NDAs, all examined by little more than the thin scrutiny of the New York tabloids.
Here are just a couple examples of some color from the kinds of associations and business dealings I’m talking about: one and two.
A forensic accountant would obviously be able to make more sense of the details and, in an investigative context, have access to a vastly greater number of those details. But even with a basic investigative reporting background, you can’t work through even part of Trump’s business history without finding numerous ventures that look like they would not survive first contact with real prosecutorial scrutiny. A key element, perhaps the key element, of the counter-intelligence probe is examining the financial ties between Trump, members of his entourage and people from the Russian business and intelligence worlds. So a close examination of those ventures isn’t some fishing expedition. It’s at the heart of the investigation. A close look at what is available in public records, court filings and news reporting makes me think that that kind of scrutiny would not end well for any of the people involved.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/fin ... t-to-worry
Donald Trump Failed to Disclose Foreign-Owned Business on Financial Disclosure
Posted by Janet Shan
The Democratic Coalition Against Trump dropped another bombshell about Donald Trump and his finances.
Trump reportedly failed to “list one of his European companies on the Public Financial Disclosure Report submitted at the start of his campaign to the United States Office of Government Ethics,” DCAT said in a news release.
“The company he failed to list is DT Connect Europe Limited which is registered in Turnberry, Scotland and co-owned by Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. The paperwork for the company can be found through the United Kingdom’s official government business register by clicking here.”
“According to the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, “the Attorney General may bring a civil action against any individual who knowingly and willfully falsifies or who knowingly and willfully fails to file or report any information that such individual is required to report,” on the Public Financial Disclosure Report. Additionally, the individual may be fined or may be imprisoned for up to one year.”
“At this point, Trump has to release his tax returns to give the American public a full overview of his business dealings, both foreign and domestic,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Advisor of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. “But Trump obviously doesn’t have an issue lying on government documents, so who knows if we’ll be able to to trust what’s in the returns when he does release them. It only makes sense that the Attorney General’s office open up an investigation into the matter.”
This latest revelation comes as the Washington Post issued a bombshell report that Trump’s charitable foundation reportedly received about $2.3 million from companies owing he or his businesses money. The companies were reportedly told to pay the monies to his foundation, The Washington Post reports.
http://hinterlandgazette.com/2016/09/do ... osure.html
'Espionage Act': The Oval Office is Leaking (Bigly): 'BradCast' 5/16/2017
Guest: Brennan Center's Elizabeth Goitein says Trump may have violated the law during Oval Office meeting with Russians; And then... BREAKING: Trump said to have asked Comey to shut down Flynn probe...
By BRAD FRIEDMAN on 5/16/2017, 5:54pm PT
On today's BradCast: Coverage of the two (yes, two) most recent (yes, most recent) blockbuster reports regarding the President, as leaked out of the Oval Office. [Audio link to show follows below.]
First up today: Washington Post's explosive report from late yesterday detailing Donald Trump's alleged (and all but confirmed by Trump himself) sharing of highly classified information (reportedly now from Israel) during his recent meeting in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyiak. The White House, largely via National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, strongly denies any wrong doing.
We're joined to discuss that and what we know and don't about it all, by Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. And, unlike those who are reporting that Trump broke no laws in his alleged disclosure of sensitive information regarding ISIS, Goitein argues the case is not so clear cut.
Classification and declassification of sensitive information is spelled out by Executive Order of the President. "The existing Executive Order was written by President Obama. It is still in force unless or until Trump revokes it or replaces it," Goitein explains. "But President Obama himself would not have been bound by his own Executive Order. President Trump is not bound by that Executive Order. I think it's problematic that Presidents are not bound by their own Executive Orders. Or, I should say, it's problematic they can secretly depart from those orders. Ideally we would have a classification Executive Order that says what the President can do, even if it's just 'The President is exempt from all of these rules.'"
However, Goitein suggests that even a President could face legal exposure via the Espionage Act of 1917.
"The Executive Order is not the only law that is at play here," she tells me. "Congress has also stepped in on various occasions, to regulate the disclosure of national security information. And there are several statutes in which Congress has done that. The statute that seems most relevant here is the Espionage Act. And this is the law that President Obama infamously used to prosecute national security whistle-blowers and others who leaked information to the media, rather than actual spies and traitors, which is whom the law was designed to address. But this law, on its face, prohibits the communication of information related to the national defense --- whether that information is classified or not --- to anyone not entitled to receive it, if there's reason to believe it could be used either to harm the United States or to aid a foreign nation. So on it's face, that statute would certainly seem to apply."
I discuss that and much more with Goitein about this entire fine mess today. It's worth tuning in for that alone. But then...
Breaking hard mid-show today: The New York Times' perhaps even more explosive report detailing a memo written by then FBI Director James Comey describing his February one-on-one meeting with the President in the Oval Office, in which Comey reportedly charges that Trump requested he drop the Bureau's ongoing investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. "I hope you can let this go," Trump said to Comey, according to the Times, in an account also vigorously denied by the White House, but which, if true, would amount to a very serious case of Obstruction of Justice by the President of the United States.
If only there was a taping system of some kind in the Oval Office so we could figure out who's telling the truth.
Finally today, after disembarking from that insane news roller coaster, if only for the moment, we finish up today with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, because the planet doesn't really give a damn about either national security or politics...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
http://bradblog.com/?p=12148
Opinion: Jeff Sessions is in deep trouble, and here's why
Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post Published 1:28 pm, Thursday, May 11, 2017
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe is contradicting the White House claim that fired director James Comey had lost the support of rank-and-file members of the bureau. He said Comey "enjoyed broad support" within the agency. (May 11)
Media: Associated Press
Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. "During the course of the last several weeks, I have met with the relevant senior career Department officials to discuss whether I should recuse myself from any matters arising from the campaigns for president of the United States," he said in his written recusal released on March 2. "Having concluded those meetings today, I have decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States."
Any existing or future investigations. Related in any way.
Sessions consulted with the president and coordinated the firing of James Comey. Recall that Comey had testified on March 20 that he was heading the Russia investigation:
"I've been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed. Because it is an open, ongoing investigation, and is classified, I cannot say more about what we are doing and whose conduct we are examining."
Sessions consulted with the president and coordinated the firing of James Comey. Recall that Comey had testified on March 20 that he was heading the Russia investigation:
That is the investigation that Sessions promised to stay away from. Firing the man heading the investigation -- especially if Sessions knew that the reason was not the one stated in Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein's May 9 memo -- is a matter "arising from the campaigns for President of the United States."
Sessions may have some explanation for why he chose to participate in the firing of Comey. But the attorney general may now be in considerable legal peril.
Refusing to recuse oneself from a conflict or breaking the promise to recuse from a conflict is a serious breach of legal ethics. "Someone could file a bar complaint, and/or one with DOJ's office of professional responsibility, if Sessions had a conflict of interest when it came to the firing decision, and if he did not follow the ethics rules, including those of DOJ by acting when he had a conflict of interest," legal ethics expert Norman Eisen tells me. "The fact that he broke his recusal commitment, if he did, would be relevant context, and violating an agreement can sometimes in itself be an ethics violation." In sum, Sessions has risked his law license, whether he realized it or not. He needs to testify immediately under oath; if there is no satisfactory explanation, he must resign. The alternative could be impeachment proceedings.
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The problem for Sessions (as it is for Trump) is legal as well. This returns to whether firing Comey constituted obstruction of justice. Lawfare blog supplies us with the persuasive analysis:
"Under 18 U.S.C. 1505, a felony offense is committed by anyone who 'corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation in being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress.'
"An accompanying code section, 18 U.S.C. 1515(b), defines 'corruptly' as 'acting with an improper purpose, personally or by influencing another, including making a false or misleading statement, or withholding, concealing, altering, or destroying a document or other information.' This is where obstruction of justice intersects with the false statements law. If you knowingly and willfully make a false statement of material fact in a federal government proceeding, you've potentially violated 1001, and when you add an objective to influence, obstruct, or impede an investigation, you've now possibly violated 1505 as well. Perjury can intersect with obstruction of justice in the same way.
"Under the statute, a 'proceeding' can be an investigation. Section 1503 criminalizes the same conduct in judicial proceedings. So obstruction during an investigation might violate 1505, while if that same investigation leads to a criminal prosecution, obstruction during the prosecution itself would violate 1503. The individual also has to know that a proceeding is happening in order to violate the statute, and must have the intent to obstruct-that is, act with the purpose of obstructing, even if they don't succeed."
The question for Sessions -- and for the president -- is whether there was intent to obstruct justice. ("As applied to the President and his staff, the first two elements appear to be a slam dunk. First, courts have given "proceeding" a broad definition. . . . Second, Comey himself had recently confirmed that the investigation was ongoing-in extremely public and publicized congressional hearings.") That leaves the matter of intent.
While ordinarily one might find this hard to prove, here we have overwhelming evidence that the reason for the firing was not his handling of the Hillary Clinton email matter. Saying it was not about Russia constitutes a lie, part of an effort to interfere with the investigation. Firing the lead investigator to slow the investigation appears to be designed "to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding."
So Sessions faces a host of serious, potentially career-ending questions. "As I see it, the President's discharge of FBI Director Comey on a clearly pretextual basis for the obvious purpose (even if unlikely to be achieved) of shutting down the FBI's then-accelerating investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was on its face an obstruction of justice, the very same charge that the first Article of Impeachment against Richard Nixon made," says constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe. "And part of the evidence supporting the charge of AG Sessions' conscious involvement in that obstruction is the way in which he violated his public recusal commitment, something he cannot possibly have done in a fit of absent-mindedness."
We are open to alternative explanations for Sessions's conduct, but what could they possibly be?
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/J ... 139288.php
The Cult and the Cover-Up
By Andrew Sullivan
How does this end?
I left D.C. Wednesday for a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, for a talk. The previous night I’d watched slack-jawed as the latest Trump saga unfolded on cable news, switching back from Fox to MSNBC and CNN. As has happened so often in the last few months, it was becoming a blur. What did we now know? The president had kept Mike Flynn on staff many days after learning he was a security risk. Trump had asked FBI Director Comey to give him his personal loyalty, then fired him because he was frustrated that the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government was continuing. Trump then lied repeatedly about this — and sent senior staffers out there to lie as well. He threatened the FBI director with alleged “tapes” of their conversations. We also discovered that Trump had carelessly betrayed a critical ISIS source while bragging to foreign minister Lavrov and Russian ambassador Kislyak in the Oval Office. We were entering, it seemed to me, the Caligula phase of the collapse of the American republic. Pretty soon Trump would be announcing that the new FBI director would be a horse.
And then, on the little shuttle bus on the tarmac to the plane at Reagan National, I found myself sitting next to a recently retired pilot, who struck up a very pleasant conversation. He told me about a recent career change, retirement, his family, and his new neighbors who had left England to escape “the Muslims.” Okay, I thought. No need to make a scene. Just listen for a while. At one point, I gingerly indicated that I didn’t exactly share the views of his neighbors. “Oh I understand,” he said. “My wife is always telling me never to talk about religion or politics with strangers, but I can’t help myself.” No problem, I told him. I do it all the time too. Then he leaned in, pushed his wire eyeglasses up his nose, and looked straight into my eyes. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “This president will be the greatest president we have ever had in our entire history.”
Once in Mississippi, I did my daily scanning of the conservative media. The alternative story was now well-established. Trump had fired Comey because he had a right to (just like he had an “absolute” right to tell Moscow top-secret intel), and because Comey was incompetent and had screwed up the Clinton-email case. The intel gaffe was just a slip-up that wouldn’t matter much at all. There was no evidence of any connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — and so the investigation was hooey anyway. Comey’s memo couldn’t be talked about without the full context — so lets just wait and see. Comey was just interested in revenge anyway. The mainstream media and the “deep state” were busy trying to undermine a president who was accomplishing more than any president this early into his term.
These are, it seems to me, the two unstoppable narratives grinding our politics to a halt. The status quo in Washington — an unhinged, unfit, mentally disturbed narcissist as POTUS fast losing any faint credibility with even his own staffers — is utterly unsustainable. In a serious crisis, more than half the country won’t believe a word the president says. The White House is barely functioning; legislation is completely stalled; next week’s trip abroad will have everyone watching from behind a couch; the FBI and CIA are reeling; there’s almost no one in the State Department; no presidential due diligence is applied to military actions; the president only reads memos when his name is mentioned in them; a not-too-smart and apparently mute 35-year-old son-in-law is supposed to solve every problem in the country and world; and the press secretary is hiding in the bushes. No one has any confidence that the president couldn’t throw us into a war or a constitutional crisis at a moment’s notice. Nothing this scary has happened in my lifetime.
And yet around 35 percent of the country still somehow views every single catastrophe Trump perpetrates on America and the world as either a roaring triumph or a huge middle finger to the elites, and therefore fine. For them, everything is sustainable. When Republicans can shrug off giving top-secret Israeli intelligence to the Russians, there is nothing they cannot shrug off. We are not talking about support for various policies here. We are talking about the kind of following a cult leader has. In poll after poll, around 80 percent of Republicans still approve of the job Trump is doing. Still. That’s why the GOP leadership, even as their agenda evaporates, are leery of taking Trump on. His hold on their own voters is tighter than theirs is. It’s tighter than Nixon’s because Trump has built a reactionary movement from the ground up and taken over an entire party. He can communicate with them in ways no other Republican can. And there is no way on earth he is ever going to go quietly, if he agrees to go at all.
That’s why I have a hard time figuring out how this ends, even though it must end. Even if the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation hits some pay dirt, I can see Trump surviving if he cannot be proven to be directly implicated. He’s already setting up the case: He’s being subjected to an historically unprecedented witch hunt, remember? And there’s no institution or person he won’t blame or destroy in his bid to save himself. Just ask his former creditors. If he’s up against the wall, he will treat the Constitution the way he treated his banks. Or say the Dems manage to regain the House next year, and hold impeachment hearings. Wouldn’t that simply galvanize support for Trump as he fights back against the “deep state,” the “swamp,” the GOP, and what Hannity calls the propaganda media circus — and render 66 votes in the Senate to convict him a pipe dream? Part of me wonders if he’d quit even if he’s beaten in the next presidential election? Isn’t it always rigged when he loses?
In some ways, I think the best analogy for Trump is O.J. Simpson. Even if we all know he’s guilty as sin, even if his own supporters see the flimflam behind the claptrap, even if the evidence is staring us in the face, he’ll never lose his core support. For 35 percent of the country, he’ll never be guiltier than the system he’s challenging. The best we can hope for is a Democratic House in 2018 and a grinding, grueling attempt to minimize the already enormous harm Trump has done in the meantime. We can pursue that outcome while hoping our cold civil war doesn’t get hot — because this is beginning to feel like the 1850s.
What exactly is wrong with cultural appropriation? That was the deliberately provocative point in a recent issue of the magazine Write, the official journal for the Canadian Writers’ Union. Here’s a flavor of the piece by Hal Niedzviecki, the editor of the mag: “In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities. I’d go so far as to say there should even be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.” Niedzviecki went on to lament that Canadian literature was still “exhaustingly white and middle class” because of this aversion to reaching beyond one’s own experience.
Well you know where this is going, don’t you? The man had to resign in ignominy and write a groveling apology. Another member of the editorial board quit in shame: “I can’t, should not, and will not speak for any indigenous writer, but what I do attempt to do, in my life and in my work, is to listen to others who do not move through the world with my level of privilege.” The somewhat glaring irony is that the entire issue of the magazine Niedzviecki edited (and committed heresy in) was devoted entirely to indigenous writers! In the offending piece, Niedzviecki had even written that “indigenous writing is the most vital and compelling force in Canadian writing and publishing today.” Nonetheless, the Equity Task Force of the Writers’ Union accused the editor of promoting “cultural genocide,” and “a long-debunked false universalism.” They demanded a formal retraction of the essay and an apology, anti-racist seminars for everyone on staff, handing the next three issues entirely to indigenous and “racialized” editors and writers, and a criterion for appointing the next editor: that he or she be “active and respected in indigenous sovereignty and anti-racist cultural movements for at least three years.” And this is a union for writers! Yes, I understand that crude or malign stereotyping of others is lame and lazy and often offensive. But that’s obviously not what this super-liberal editor of a super-liberal magazine was doing. And yet still he had to go.
I love the phrase “long-debunked universalism” by the way. Debunked by whom? Universalism — the idea that human beings can exist as individuals, rather than as members of assigned groups — is far from debunked. It is, in fact, one core premise of liberal society. It is, to my mind, a core reason for being a writer at all.
What’s increasingly fascinating to me about the SJW left is its solipsism. If no one is allowed to write about someone with another life experience, or from another race or culture or gender, we are all doomed to write merely about ourselves. The possibility of expressing empathy, of exploring another world, and, yes, even misreading it at times, becomes a form of “harm.” Better, our new PC overlords insist, not to understand and never to embrace the other — because engagement could, at some moment, hurt someone’s feelings. This means the end of literature, not its rebirth, and of the kind of society in which it thrives.
A few weeks ago, I meant to include a link to a recent podcast by Sam Harris with Charles Murray that explored all the arguments in The Bell Curve in a calm and methodical way. Here it is. If you haven’t read the book — and you haven’t, have you? — it’s a pretty painless and lucid guide to it. Sam hadn’t read it before the podcast and simply didn’t recognize the book he’d been taught to hate. I also recommend Vox’s just-published critique of the interview. It begins with the headline: “Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ” and this subhead: “And Sam Harris is the latest to fall for it.” Wow, you think, we’re in for a fantastic demolition.
And then you read the piece. The authors list five separate premises made in the interview and then says of the first four: “none of the premises is completely incorrect.” Another way of saying this is that four of five Murray premises are largely correct. Here they are (my paraphrase): (1) IQ is a meaningful way to measure intelligence; (2) individual intelligence is partly heritable; (3) racial groups differ in their IQ scores; (4) “discoveries about genetic ancestry have validated commonly used racial groupings.” I quoted that last one verbatim because it debunks the most common response I get from people not expert in the subject: that race is only a social construct. Sure, it is a social construct; but there are clear genetic differences between human subpopulations that roughly correspond to those social constructions. That is: race has genetic origins. Of course it does. Just spit in a cup and find out where you come from genetically. You can do it by mail.
As for the fifth premise they discuss, well … I’ll leave you to see if they convince.
See you next Friday.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... er-up.html
by seemslikeadream » Mon May 22, 2017 10:03 am
Trump's casino was a money laundering concern shortly after it opened
By Jose Pagliery, CNN Investigates
Updated 8:21 AM ET, Mon May 22, 2017
Story highlights
Trump's Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules in the 1990s
It was the preferred spot for Russian mobsters to gamble
Episodes like this in Trump's business past will get more scrutiny from Senate investigators
(CNN)The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.
It's a bit of forgotten history that's buried in federal records held by an investigative unit of the Treasury Department, records that congressional committees investigating Trump's ties to Russia have obtained access to, CNN has learned.
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said.
Trump's casino ended up paying the Treasury Department a $477,000 fine in 1998 without admitting any liability under the Bank Secrecy Act.
CNN obtained 417 pages of Treasury Department documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The records included the 1998 settlement, draft and final copies of a similar settlement in 2015, and exchanges between the Trump casino lawyers and federal regulators.
The 1998 settlement was publicly reported at the time, and the Associated Press noted it was the largest fine the federal government ever slapped on a casino for violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
But key details of the casino's cash reporting violations are missing from the publicly released documents, including the identities of the gamblers and casino employees involved in the transactions.
The congressional committees had asked the Treasury Department's financial crimes enforcement network, or FinCEN, to provide any information it has on Trump, his businesses, his top officials and campaign aides.
House and Senate investigators both said they had obtained access to data housed at Treasury's FinCEN -- which will include details of these violations and potentially more, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
Congressional investigators say they are interested in the global network of Trump's finances to determine if FinCEN's data shows connections between Trump associates and Russia.
The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the Trump Organization.
In a statement, the Trump Organization said it "has had no involvement with the Taj Mahal, or any other Atlantic City property, for over a decade and has no knowledge of the events referred to in your email."
The 1998 settlement agreement itself, at just two-pages, is short on details. It only shows that the Taj Mahal "failed to file" currency transaction reports "within the time period required." It states that Trump's casino, which opened in April 1990, made the violations sometime before December 1991.
In the settlement agreement, the casino disputed "any willful failures" to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act.
Related: House Russia investigators get access to Treasury data
Normally, if a gambler cashes out $10,000-plus in a single day, the casino must fill out a form listing their name, physical address, Social Security number, and birthdate. The casino has 15 days to send the form to the IRS.
According to a dozen anti-money laundering experts, casinos often run into these problems. But getting caught with 106 violations in the casino's opening years is an indicator of a serious problem, they said.
The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy.
Trump took on an enormous amount of debt to launch what was -- at the time -- the world's largest, most flamboyant casino.
The Taj Mahal emerged from bankruptcy in late 1991, and Trump sold 50% of his stake to bondholders.
There were also financial issues at a second location in Atlantic City, The Trump Castle Hotel Casino, according to a 1991 New Jersey Gaming Enforcement report.
In the report, regulators described an incident on December 18, 1990, the day Trump owed an $18.4 million interest payment.
An attorney named Howard Snyder walked into the Castle casino with a certified check for $3.35 million drawn from a bank account belonging to Fred C. Trump. Snyder exchanged the check for 670 of the casino's gray gambling chips, which he put into a case. He then walked out of the casino.
By not cashing out the chips, the transaction amounted to a loan, regulators said.
New Jersey gaming regulators charged Trump's operation with violations of the state's Casino Control Act for not disclosing his father as a financial backer.
"The Castle failed to notify the Commission and Division in writing of the fact that the Fred Trump transaction would create a new financial source," the regulators said it their report.
Regulators imposed a $30,000 civil penalty on the Castle.
Trump's third gambling operation in Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, had a better record. When the IRS audited its cash reporting in 1998 and 1999, it found that the casino correctly filed 99.99% of the time, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
FinCEN caught the Trump Taj Mahal dodging anti-money laundering rules again two decades later. In 2015, it fined the casino $10 million.
In the consent order, the casino admitted it "willfully violated" the Bank Secrecy Act's "reporting and recordkeeping requirements from 2010 through 2012."
There was "apparent laundering of funds" using slot machine tickets, according to the 2015 consent order. And the casino didn't keep track of gamblers who deliberately cashed out in smaller payments to avoid having to report it to the federal government.
By then, however, Trump's involvement with the Taj Mahal was in name only. He had departed Atlantic City in 2009, maintaining a small stake in the casino's parent company.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/22/politics/trump-taj-mahal/
Foreign Policy logo
Married to the Ukrainian Mob
Meet Dmytro Firtash, the shady billionaire at the heart of Russia’s energy stranglehold over Kiev.
3 YEARS AGO
CATEGORIES: COLUMN
Michael Weiss
Featured image
Buried in the news of Russia’s invasion, and now annexation, of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea was the second most important event to affect the new Ukrainian government last week — and it happened in Austria. On the evening of March 12, one of the most notorious Ukrainian oligarchs, Dmytro Firtash, whose fortune has been estimated at anywhere from $673 million to the tens of billions, was arrested in Vienna, right outside of one of his offices in the Margareten district. Neither he nor his bodyguards put up a struggle, according to press reports, although Group DF, the massive international holding company Firtash owns, has said in a statement that the whole thing was a "misunderstanding" which would be "resolved in the very near term."
But the misunderstanding involved agents from Austria’s organized crime division and its elite counterterrorism special ops unit, which doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a short-term mix-up, even by European standards. Austrian authorities have said that Firtash was detained on suspicions of bribery and forming a criminal organization related to overseas business deals. On March 18, the oligarch himself claimed that his arrest was "without foundation" and that he believes "strongly that the motivation was purely political." Bail has been set at a record-breaking $174 million, which the Vienna criminal court expects Firtash to post shortly, though he won’t be able to leave Austria.
Relations between Washington and Moscow have deteriorated precipitously since November, when then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych backed out of an E.U. association agreement that he’d spent years lobbying for and opted for a $15 billion bribe from President Vladimir Putin instead. Now, almost a month after Yanukovych’s night-flight from Kiev and his formal ouster from power by the Ukrainian Rada, and three weeks after Russian forces invaded and occupied Crimea, the West has groped to find ways to punish politically keyed-in moneymen, from Moscow to Kiev. For the better part of a decade, Firtash wasn’t just one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, he was the principal conduit for the astonishingly profitable and legendarily crooked gas trade between Russia and Ukraine.
According to the New York Times, Firtash, who has stakes in the energy, media, real estate, banking, and chemical industries, was detained on bribery and other as-yet-unspecified charges at the request of the FBI, which had been investigating the Ukrainian business mogul since 2006. Eight years is certainly a long time to wait. And while it is true that Firtash had so far avoided landing himself on the European Union’s list of 18 sanctioned Ukrainians — most of them former officials in the Yanukovych government, as well as their relatives — few who are familiar with his background or are now closely monitoring an increasingly assertive U.S.-EU effort to counter Russian aggression believe that this high-profile collaring simply occurred out of the blue.
Firtash is simply too good of a political target and the timing, too suspicious. According to Standard Bank analyst Timothy Ash, Firtash "has close ties to Russia via the energy sector, and perhaps even to [President Vladimir] Putin." One of the oligarch’s chemical companies, Ash notes, got large discounts from Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas giant, at a time when Naftohaz, Ukraine’s state gas company, was paying premium prices for imports. The ownership of the Swiss-registered gas trading company RosUkrEnergo is also almost evenly divided between Firtash and Gazprom, indicating that the Ukrainian oligarch was a close partner of the Kremlin.
"The arrest is not a coincidence," former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, told Foreign Policy. "I suspect there are many Ukrainian businesspeople who are very nervous at this point. The United States has put sanctions and visa bans on a few individuals, and Firtash would be a leading candidate. He clearly supported President Yanukovych." The timing of the arrest might have been opportunistic, but the investigations of criminal activity were very real — and U.S. law enforcement agencies had been closing in for some time. Indeed, Taylor said he suspected that the Austrian operation had something to do with longstanding allegations that Firtash is tied to organized crime in the United States and Europe.
One degree of separation from the FBI’s "10 Most Wanted"
As it happens, Firtash has admitted to his mob connections — to Taylor, in fact. In December 2008, the Ukrainian personally requested a meeting with the ambassador to make "his case to the [U.S. government]." A State Department cable, subsequently published by WikiLeaks, stated: "Firtash’s bottom line was that he did not deny having links to those associated with organized crime. Instead, he argued that he was forced into dealing with organized crime members including [Semion] Mogilevich or he would never have been able to build a business."
The Ukrainian-born Mogilevich, thought to be more powerful than John Gotti or Whitey Bulger ever were, is currently on the FBI’s "10 Most Wanted" list. He was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department in 2003 on 45 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud, money-laundering, and racketeering related to a multinational, publicly traded front company called YBM Magnex, Inc, which at its height was valued at $150 million. It claimed to manufacture magnets — except that it didn’t. Instead, YBM Magnex drove its share prices up on the Toronto Stock Exchange by convincing shareholders that the money Mogilevech and his conspirators were moving around banks globally was for the purchases of raw materials. But the end product never existed. In 2009, FBI agent Peter Kowenhoven told CNN that Mogilevich "has access to so much, including funding, including other criminal organizations, that he can, with a telephone call and order, affect the global economy."
The Mogilevich Organization, as the FBI refers to his criminal empire, keeps an especially diverse portfolio: In addition to murder, prostitution, money-laundering, and precious gems dealing, it also traffics in both weapons and nuclear materials. Based in Budapest, the syndicate has branches in Prague, Vienna, Moscow, Israel, France, and Slovakia. In fact, Mogilevich was himself briefly arrested in Moscow in 2008 on tax fraud charges, but was soon released on bail. Ignoring numerous U.S. extradition requests, the Kremlin now allows Mogilevich to reside comfortably on Russian soil, which may be still another reason that Firtash was grabbed while in Austria, which, unlike Russia, has an extradition treaty with the United States. (The FBI has said it hopes Mogilevich travels abroad so that it can have him arrested, too.)
There are plenty of third parties linked to both Mogilevich and Firtash, and even one company where both men were directors at the same time. They also shared the same Israeli attorney, Zeev Gordon. In 2006, Gordon admitted to the London-based corruption watchdog Global Witness that he had acted as a trustee in 2002, when Firtash set up Eural Trans Gas (ETG), a powerful gas trading company and joint venture between Naftohaz and Gazprom. A day after ETG was born, on Dec. 5, 2002, it won a contract to transport gas from Turkmenistan to Ukraine in exchange for gas worth as much as $1 billion on European markets. Not bad for a company founded in a Hungarian village with $12,000 in startup capital.
ETG has extraordinarily opaque origins. Gordon, for instance, was one of four original shareholders in the company. The other three were, as the watchdog Global Witness put it, "three hard-up Romanians with no connection to the gas industry, one of whom was an out-of-work actress who says she took part in order to pay her phone bill." The Israeli lawyer further claimed that Firtash’s role in ETG was as a strictly private investor, not as an agent of either Gazprom or the Ukrainian government, then headed by President Leonid Kuchma. Yet a decade ago, Firtash was a relatively unknown and smalltime businessman. Even in 2006, Global Witness could not account for why someone whose photograph was not yet publicly available was authorized to control such a lucrative enterprise with the blessings of both Kiev and Moscow, especially when the creation of a state-owned gas transport vehicle would have been the more logical joint venture between the two governments. To this day, no one can say with complete certainty how Firtash landed himself in such an elite position, or on whose behalf he was actually acting.
Humble origins
Dmytro Firtash’s own history is bathed in as much opacity as his many professional transactions. Much of what is known about him comes from what he himself has told interlocutors over the years, including Taylor, the former U.S. ambassador, who remains skeptical of many of the oligarch’s claims. Other sources include the Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, which reported that Firtash, although not terribly well-educated, was highly decorated as a soldier in the Ukrainian Army and, like many future oligarchs from the former Soviet Union, parlayed his Communist connections into capitalist riches.
Following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Firtash started a business in Chernivtsi, western Ukraine, which delivered canned goods and dry milk to Uzbekistan. His first company, KMIL, which he co-owned with his first wife, Martiya Kalinvoska, is said to have incurred heavy losses toward the end of the 1990s. KMIL then involved itself in more profitable food-for-gas barter schemes with Turkmenistan, benefitting from Ukraine’s inability to buy gas imports with its diminished foreign exchange reserves. KMIL was eventually rolled into a preexisting Cyprus-registered entity called Highrock Holding, of which Firtash became the director in 2001. According to Ukrainian press reports, also cited in Taylor’s 2008 cable to Washington, Highrock’s financial director in the late 1990s was a man named Igor Fisherman — none other than the future president of YBM Magnex, Inc., the fake magnets manufacturer that defrauded U.S. and Canadian investors and made Mogilevich one of America’s top fugitives. (Fisherman was indicted by the Justice Department in that case, too.)
According to the FBI’s 1996 file on the Mogilevich Organization, Fisherman worked out of the Newtown, Pennsylvania, headquarters of YBM Magnex and acted as the coordinator of the kingpin’s "contacts and criminal activities in the Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, and Hungary."
Highrock’s connection to the Mogilevich Organization was clearly more than just tangential. In yet another U.S. State Department cable from Kiev, this one dated November 2008, William Klein, the acting economic counselor in the U.S. embassy, noted that "34 percent of Highrock was owned by a firm called Agatheas Trading Ltd," which Galina Telesh, Mogilevich’s ex-wife, reportedly directed from 2001 to 2003. The cable also noted that Firtash and his wife owned 33 percent of Highrock, and that the Ukrainian oligarch became the director of Agatheas Trading in 2003.
Firtash himself confirmed this ownership breakdown of Highrock to the Financial Times in 2006, although he denied that he had ever met or dealt with Telesh directly, insisting that another man — his alleged partner in the Cypriot company — was Telesh’s point-person. That man was Igor Makarov, the founder and president of Itera, the company that preceded ETG as the preferred intermediary in the Russian-Ukrainian gas trade.
By 2000, Makarov had grown Itera into the fourth-largest gas company in the world, thanks to its enormous reserves. In conversation with Taylor, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Firtash claimed he used Highrock to transfer food commodities to Itera, which were then used to purchase gas in kind from Turkmenistan — until they fell out in 2001 over Makarov’s alleged failure to pay Firtash the $50 million he was owed in gas proceeds. It was then, according to Taylor, that Firtash decided to embark on his own independent career and unseat Makarov as Ukraine’s top gas importer. He even told the U.S. ambassador about a Sopranos-style sit-down dinner he attended with Makarov in 2002. Mogilevich, he said, was present as Makarov’s bodyguard — and Firtash wasn’t sure he’d get through the meal alive.
To ensure his position as Ukraine’s most powerful gas titan, Firtash appointed former Hungarian Culture Minister Andreas Knopp as managing director of ETG. Knopp was a man he believed could facilitate deals with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — and it was Knopp who ended up signing all the contracts between Naftohaz and Gazprom. But it was also Knopp who brought the budding oligarch once more into the orbit of the mob boss Firtash says he could never have avoided. Knopp is mentioned in a 2005 Austrian Federal Criminal Investigation Agency report on the Mogilevich Organization, which Foreign Policy has obtained. The report states that Knopp was suspected by the FBI of being "a long-standing member of the [organization] and has been frequently involved in [its] operations."
The monopoly man
Firtash’s biggest break came on July 22, 2004, with the birth of RosUkrEnergo (RUE) in Zug, Switzerland. The registration of this company seems hardly a coincidence, as it occurred exactly four days before a meeting in Yalta between Vladimir Putin, then just finishing his first term as president, and Leonid Kuchma, who was just months away from the Orange Revolution that would prevent his chosen successor and then-prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, from stealing a national election. The purpose of the meeting was to broker a new agreement between Naftohaz and Gazprom, and its principal yield was the establishment of a joint venture between Russia and Ukraine that would control the flow of gas from the former into the latter, and then into the rest of the European Union. RUE, as it would be known, was therefore put in charge of ensuring that approximately 50 million people on the continent had access to energy. Yet there was something odd about the ownership structure of this bilateral proposal.
While the Russian half of the joint venture was clearly owned by the Kremlin, no one quite seemed to know who the ultimate legal beneficiaries on the Ukrainian side were, other than that they were an obscure consortium of Ukrainian businessmen. The interests of the Ukrainian shareholders were managed by CentraGas Holding, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raisffeisen Zentralbank, the third-largest bank in Austria. But who were these lucky private investors? "I don’t know any more than you do and Gazprom does not know either," Putin told a Spanish journalist in 2006. "It was they [the Ukrainians] who proposed that RosUkrEnergo supply gas to Ukraine instead of Gazprom. We agreed."
It is, of course, highly unlikely that the Russian president was unaware of the identity of half of the shareholders of a gas transport monopoly which, at its height, made close to $800 million a year. But it was not until 2006 that Firtash disclosed his co-ownership of RUE alongside Gazprom. This may have been at least partly the result of a criminal investigation into both RUE and ETG, opened in June 2005 by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), then headed by Oleksandr Turchynov, a loyalist of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Recently released from prison following the Euromaidan protests and Yanukovych’s ouster last month, Tymoshenko has been repeatedly blamed by Firtash for not only sabotaging his commercial interests in Ukraine but for caving to Moscow. As the Ukrainian oligarch told Taylor in 2008, Tymoshenko was planning to "offer up the country to Russia on a silver platter."
Tymoshenko, who has not escaped corruption allegations herself, once referred to RUE as a "wart on the body of the Naftohaz company" on Ukrainian television. In 2005, SBU head Turchynov told the Financial Times that he suspected the real person behind RUE was not an oligarch, but Ukraine’s most notorious mob boss: "The surname Mogilevich isn’t in the [gas trade] agreements or in the ownership documents," he said, "but there are many indications that a group of people under his control could be involved."
There were other eyebrow-raising aspects to RUE’s governance. Its two co-directors were Konstantin Chuychenko and Oleg Palchykov. Chuychenko was an ex-KGB agent who ran Gazprom’s legal department and maintained close ties to Dmitry Medvedev, who was co-chairman of the board of Gazprom and later tapped by Putin to be a placeholder president of Russia. Palchykov, meanwhile, was the former head of ETG’s Moscow office and yet another link in the chain between Firtash and Mogilevich. As the late Jamestown Foundation scholar Roman Kupchinsky wrote in 2009, the address given for the ETG’s Moscow office was the same building where the mobster’s alleged right-hand man and former Highrock Holding financial director, Igor Fisherman, worked.
In September 2005, Tymoshenko was sacked, along with the rest of her cabinet, by President Viktor Yushchenko — her Orange Revolution ally turned political rival. As a result, Turchynov resigned from the SBU and was replaced by a former assistant who later denied that any investigation into Firtash’s ventures had ever taken place. Turchynov later told Global Witness that he had informed Yushchenko — a man whom Firtash called a friend and confidant — that RUE posed a serious danger to Ukraine’s energy security. These warnings went unheeded at the time, but when Tymoshenko was again appointed prime minister in 2007, Firtash seems to think she resumed her effort to dismantle his energy empire.
Firtash may have been right about that. From 2005 to 2006, Russia waged its first so-called "gas war" with Ukraine — a war seemingly settled on Jan. 4, 2006, when it was decided that Turkmenistan would sell RUE gas for an undisclosed but incredibly cheap price, while Gazprom would sell RUE Russian gas at $230 per 1,000 cubic meters. Ukraine would then pay $95 per 1,000 cubic meters for its imports, while also receiving a 47 percent boost in profits for transporting Russian gas to the European market. One investment analyst told the BBC at the time that the deal was "designed so that both sides can say they’re paying — and being paid — the price they wanted."
Firtash falls out
In order to undercut critics of the Russian side, who (rightly) alleged that this compromise was no less transparent than previous Russian-Ukrainian gas deals, Firtash’s ownership of RUE was outed — itself in the shadiest manner. A journalist named Vladimir Berezhnoi, writing in the then-Gazprom-owned Russian newspaper Izvestia, said that Firtash controlled 45 percent of RUE through CentraGas Holding. The article also claimed that Mogilevich was the owner of Highrock Holding, the company of which Firtash was then a director. The only problem? Inquiries made by the St. Petersburg Times revealed that "Vladimir Berezhnoi" was a concoction — the actual article had been written under a pseudonym by an Izvestia staff writer after a Gazprom representative had turned over an audit proving Firtash’s ownership.
In any event, the new Moscow-Kiev arrangement didn’t last long. In 2009, RUE lost its role as the exclusive importer of Gazprom gas as part of an agreement which Putin and Yushchenko struck to resolve yet another Russian-Ukrainian gas war. Firtash blamed Tymoshenko for eliminating RUE’s import monopoly, and there was evidence that Putin had cast his lot with the blonde-tressed Orange Revolutionary. "From our side, RosUkrEnergo is 50 percent-owned directly by Gazprom, but from the Ukrainian side, there are some individuals," Putin said in January 2009. "We don’t know them. But they again are showing us this Mr Firtash, with whom I have never met, never seen with my own eyes." As for whom Firtash worked, Putin demurred: "Don’t ask us." It was a sign that the Ukrainian oligarch had lost his patron in the Kremlin.
But by this point, Firtash had already begun expanding beyond the energy sector and into other enterprises. He announced plans to acquire Ukraine’s Nadra Bank in 2008-2009, around the time that it was headed into default, and closed the deal in 2011. In 2013, he purchased 100 percent of Inter Media Group back from former co-owner Valery Khoroshkovsky, who had bought out Firtash’s stake in the conglomerate in 2007. Through Inter Media Group, Firtash now owns seven television channels including K1, K2, and Megasport, plus the influential Kiev-based Ukrainian News Agency, outlets that were accused by Euromaidan activists of either censoring material or nakedly siding with Yanukovych’s crackdown.
In 2012, Interfax reported that Firtash planned to team up with another powerful and politically influential billionaire, Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood friend and judo partner. The two were said to be looking to build one of Russia’s largest chemical plants in Russia’s far east. But the Ukrainian was also looking to the West. In particular, he cultivated a special fondness for Britain.
The British connection
One man in particular has played a key role in endearing him to the London establishment: Robert Shetler-Jones, a British businessman who was one of three members of the coordination committee charged with making major decisions during the first year of RUE’s existence. (The other two members were Yuri Boiko, then the controversial chairman of Naftohaz, and Ilhor Voronin, Boiko’s deputy.)
Shetler-Jones has been indirectly tied to two Cypriot-registered companies, Dema Nominees and Dema Trustees, which by 2004 had assumed the controlling stake in ETG. One of these companies’ subsidiaries, Denby Holdings, also registered in Cyprus, listed Shetler-Jones as a director and operated out of the same office in central London as a company called Belgravia Business Services, an address at which Shetler-Jones also worked. In February 2004 — around six months before the Putin-Kuchma summit that established RUE’s monopoly on Russian gas imports — Shetler-Jones’s Hamburg-based company, RSJ Erste, purchased 89 percent of the shares in Kyrmsoda, Ukraine’s largest industrial soda manufacturer. The year 2004 was quite the annus mirabilis for the Briton, whose ties to Firtash seemed inexhaustible.
Take ACI Trading Ltd, a chemical trading company, owned by Dema Nominees and Dema Trustees, the parent companies of ETG. One of ACI Trading’s clients was Kyrmsoda. In 2004, Kuchma, the Ukrainian president, also enlisted RSJ Erste as a partner in a Ukrainian state property fund that included Crimean Titan, "one of Europe’s largest titanium dioxide producers that has distributors throughout the world, including Iran, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the U.S.," to quote William Klein’s State Department cable, which also established that Crimean Titan was nearly half-owned by a subsidiary of Firtash’s Group DF.
In 2005, Shetler-Jones coyly explained to the Kyiv Post, "I have met Mr. Firtash on several occasions and we are acquainted," although he denied that Firtash held any stake in RSJ Erste. As to where, exactly, Shetler-Jones found the requisite startup capital to invest in so many profit-making and politically-connected continental enterprises, the Briton was cagey, telling the Kyiv Post that his funding came from "various European sources." Acquaintanceship only blossomed into direct financial kinship after Shetler-Jones went on to serve as the inaugural CEO of Group DF, from 2007 to 2012, and is now a member of the company’s supervisory council. Shetler-Jones has given tens of thousands of pounds via his own company Scythian Ltd. to the British Conservative Party, as the Independent newspaper reported last week, following Firtash’s arrest. Scythian Ltd. is described on the Group DF website as "a consultancy advising businesses on structuring of corporate acquisitions in the Former Soviet Union."
Shetler-Jones is quite clearly Firtash’s man in London. He’s currently the director of the British Ukrainian Society (BUS), which, according to its own website, "seeks to raise the profile of Ukraine in Great Britain and strengthen relations at all levels between the United Kingdom and Ukraine." The BUS has "received secretarial support from Group DF," according to the Independent, which certainly makes sense given that both the not-for-profit and the for-profit share the same office bloc in the tony Knightsbridge area of central London.
The chairman of BUS, meanwhile, is a British peer, Lord Risby; another director of the organization is Tory MP John Whittingdale, formerly also the "honorary vice president" of Conservative Friends of Russia, which was shuttered in disgrace in 2012 owing to its close ties to the Russian embassy in London and its transparently pro-Putin leanings. (It has since been reconstituted as the Westminster Russia Forum.) Whittingdale has apparently taken several trips to Ukraine in the past few years, all paid for by BUS. He claims to have met both with Yanukovych’s people and the opposition, and to have never received "any instruction" from Firtash as to what politics to espouse, though this probably was not necessary as Whittingdale is an open admirer of former Chilean strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Like many post-Soviet industrialists, Firtash owns property in London, including a mansion near the department store Harrods, complete with an underground swimming pool. He’s also gotten into charity and cultural works. His second wife Lada helps to run the Firtash Foundation, a registered British charity, which in 2012 gave $400,000 to the Ukrainian Catholic University to cover costs for a $12 million campus renovation project, and about $166,000 to the Cambridge Foundation, the fundraising arm of Cambridge University. The money, according to the Firtash Foundation’s Charity Commission filings, went to "the development of academic ideas in order to bring products to market" — whatever that means.
The Firtash Foundation is located in the same Knightsbridge office block as BUS and Group DF. In October, both it and Group DF funded "Days of Ukraine," a lavish cultural event in London launched in the House of Commons, attended by both Speaker of the House John Bercow and now former Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko. According to its own press materials, Days of Ukraine "received support at the highest level, including the patronage of President Viktor Yanukovych." For helping to organize this festival, Firtash was given the privilege of opening the London Stock Exchange.
The Magnitsky link
Since Putin invaded Crimea, and since Washington and Brussels have mulled ways to hit back at Moscow using "banks, not tanks," the ways in which state-indulged, if not state-sponsored, oligarchs from the East found their way into Western capitals and financial markets have come under more intense scrutiny. Non-transparency and plausible deniability are the principal rules of their economic activity, which is why these oligarchs almost never register their holdings in the West (they just spend their money there), but rather in few-questions-asked offshore jurisdictions. An excellent and in-depth investigation was published in April 2013 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), showing how a firm called Commonwealth Trust Limited, based in the British Virgin Islands — a jurisdiction known for its respect for corporate privacy and high tolerance for money-laundering — "served as a middleman for an extensive list of shady operators — setting up offshore companies for securities swindlers, Ponzi schemers and individuals linked to political corruption, arms trafficking and organized crime."
One of Commonwealth Trust’s clients was Dmytro Firtash, who registered Group DF in the British Virgin Islands in 2006. Other clients included a handful of shadowy intermediaries for men and women employed by both the Russian government and a major Russian organized crime syndicate known as the Klyuev Group. These intermediaries, ICIJ learned, set up at least 23 offshore companies that were used to transfer money and obscure the origin of a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by the Klyuev Group on Christmas Eve, 2007.
That theft was uncovered and outlined in painstaking detail in 2008 by Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow-based tax attorney, who was subsequently arrested for the crime himself by the very Interior Ministry policemen he had identified as conspirators. Magnitsky was tortured and killed in prison in 2009, and his corpse was put on trial in Russia last year, not so much to prove his guilt (which not even the prosecutors or judge in the case really believed) but to exonerate the Klyuev Group, several government agents of which were awarded promotions or state honors following what became known in Russia as the "Magnitsky affair."
A U.S. law was passed in 2012, named for Magnitsky and designed as a handy way to freeze the American assets of Russian officials credibly accused of gross human rights abuses. The European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has on March 18 suggested that 32 names — most of them members or affiliates of the Klyuev Group — be sanctioned by the European Union. Washington and Brussels have finally awakened to the fact that money pouring into the West from the East isn’t just dirty. More often than not, it’s blood-soaked.
In 2010, Spanish magistrate Jose Grinda Gonzalez, an expert on organized crime, labeled Russia a "virtual mafia state," adding that Belarus, Chechnya, and Ukraine qualified for this dubious distinction as well.
And herein lies the significance of Dmytro Firtash’s arrest — the rush of anxiety and trepidation it has no doubt precipitated across those countries Putin wants to enlist in his protectionist Eurasian Union. Another revolution, one waged in protest of that neo-Soviet project, has just toppled a government in Kiev, of which Firtash was a major beneficiary. Now the oligarch is in the clink in Vienna and may soon be placed aboard a plane to the United States, where prosecutors and judges aren’t so easily bought and where tolerance for billionaires with dodgy dealings with the Putin and Yanukovych regimes are at all-time lows. Firtash lost his patrons in Moscow in 2009 and his patrons in Kiev three weeks ago. No wonder the law finally caught up with him.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/03/19/mar ... n-mob/amp/
by seemslikeadream » Mon May 22, 2017 7:01 pm
WaPo: Trump Asked DNI, NSA Director To Push Back Against FBI Russia Probe
CIA Director Mike Pompeo, left, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, take their seats next to National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, May 11, 2017. It is an annual hearing about the major threats facing the U.S., but former FBI Director Jim Comey's sudden firing is certain to be a focus of questions. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
By ESME CRIBB Published MAY 22, 2017 6:43 PM
President Donald Trump in March asked the director of national intelligence and director of the National Security Agency to push back against the FBI’s investigation into whether members of his campaign colluded with Russian officials last year, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
The Washington Post reported, citing unnamed current and former officials, that Trump asked Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and NSA Director Michael Rogers to publicly deny that any evidence of collusion existed.
He made that request after former FBI Director James Comey confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that his bureau was conducting an investigation into whether there was any “coordination” between Russian officials and Trump’s associates during the campaign, according to the Washington Post.
Two unnamed current and two unnamed former officials cited in the report said that Coats and Rogers deemed Trump’s request inappropriate and refused to do so.
According to the Washington Post, a senior NSA official documented Trump’s conversation with Rogers in an internal memo written at the time.
Senior officials in Trump’s administration also approached top intelligence officials about the possibility of asking Comey to shut down his bureau’s investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the Washington Post reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
An unnamed official told the Washington Post that those officials wondered whether they could ask Comey “to shut down the investigation.”
The White House did not immediately respond to TPM’s request for comment, but told the Washington Post that it “does not confirm or deny unsubstantiated claims based on illegal leaks from anonymous individuals.”
The New York Times reported last week that Trump personally asked Comey in February to drop the FBI investigation into Flynn, a request that Comey also documented in a contemporaneous memo.
Also in February, CNN reported that White House officials — including chief of staff Reince Priebus — asked members of the FBI and other federal agencies to refute stories about contact between members of the Trump campaign and Russian nationals.
According to CNN, Comey was one of the officials approached, and refused to comment on the stories because of the ongoing FBI investigation.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/w ... ssia-probe
Trump asked intelligence chiefs to push back against FBI collusion probe after Comey revealed its existence
Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats, left, and National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers prepare to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 11. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
By Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima May 22 at 6:23 PM
President Trump asked two of the nation’s top intelligence officials in March to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government, according to current and former officials.
Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.
Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.
Trump sought the assistance of Coats and Rogers after FBI Director James B. Comey told the House Intelligence Committee on March 20 that the FBI was investigating “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
Trump’s conversation with Rogers was documented contemporaneously in an internal memo written by a senior NSA official, according to the officials. It is unclear if a similar memo was prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to document Trump’s conversation with Coats. Officials said such memos could be made available to both the special counsel now overseeing the Russia investigation and congressional investigators, who might explore whether Trump sought to impede the FBI’s work.
White House officials say Comey’s testimony about the scope of the FBI investigation upset Trump, who has dismissed the FBI and congressional investigations as a “witch hunt.” The president has repeatedly said there was no collusion.
Current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation.
A senior intelligence official said that Trump’s goal was to “muddy the waters” about the scope of the FBI probe at a time when Democrats were ramping up their calls for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, a step announced last week.
Senior intelligence officials also saw the March requests as a threat to the independence of U.S. spy agencies, which are supposed to remain insulated from partisan issues.
“The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,” a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.
The NSA and Brian Hale, a spokesman for Coats, declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
The turmoil surrounding former FBI Director James Comey and President Trump started long before Comey was fired on May 9. Here are the pivotal moments in Comey's time as head of the agency. (Jenny Starrs,Julio Negron/The Washington Post)
“The White House does not confirm or deny unsubstantiated claims based on illegal leaks from anonymous individuals,” a White House spokesperson said. “The president will continue to focus on his agenda that he was elected to pursue by the American people.”
In addition to the requests to Coats and Rogers, senior White House officials sounded out top intelligence officials about the possibility of intervening directly with Comey to encourage the FBI to drop its probe of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, according to people familiar with the matter. The officials said the White House appeared uncertain about its power to influence the FBI.
“Can we ask him to shut down the investigation? Are you able to assist in this matter?” one official said of the line of questioning from the White House.
The new revelations add to a growing body of evidence that Trump sought to co-opt and then undermine Comey before he fired him May 9. According to notes kept by Comey, Trump first asked for his loyalty at a dinner in January and then, at a meeting the next month, asked him to drop the probe into Flynn. Trump disputes those accounts.
Current and former officials said either Trump lacks an understanding of the FBI’s role as an independent law enforcement agency or does not care about maintaining such boundaries.
Trump’s effort to use the director of national intelligence and the NSA director to refute Comey’s statement and to say there was no evidence of collusion echoes President Richard Nixon’s “unsuccessful efforts to use the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in on national security grounds,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel at the CIA. Smith called Trump’s actions “an appalling abuse of power.”
Trump made his appeal to Coats days after Comey’s testimony, according to officials.
That same week, Trump telephoned Rogers to make a similar appeal.
In his call with Rogers, Trump urged the NSA director to speak out publicly if there was no evidence of collusion, according to officials briefed on the exchange.
Rogers was taken aback but tried to respectfully explain why he could not do so, the officials said. For one thing, he could not comment on an ongoing investigation. Rogers added that he would not talk about classified matters in public.
While relations between Trump and Comey were strained by the Russia probe, ties between the president and the other intelligence chiefs, including Rogers, Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, appear to be less contentious, according to officials.
Rogers met with Trump in New York shortly after the election, and Trump’s advisers at the time held him out as the leading candidate to be the next director of national intelligence.
The Washington Post subsequently reported that President Barack Obama’s defense secretary and director of national intelligence had recommended that Rogers be removed as head of the NSA.
Ultimately, Trump decided to nominate Coats, rather than Rogers. Coats was sworn in just days before the president made his request.
In February, the Trump White House also sought to enlist senior members of the intelligence community and Congress to push back against suggestions that Trump associates were in frequent contact with Russian officials. But in that case, the White House effort was designed to refute news accounts, not the testimony of a sitting FBI director who was leading an open investigation.
Trump and his allies in Congress have similarly sought to deflect scrutiny over Russia by attempting to pit U.S. intelligence agencies against one another.
In December, Trump’s congressional allies falsely claimed that the FBI did not concur with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win the White House. Comey and then-CIA Director John Brennan later said that the bureau and the agency were in full agreement on Moscow’s intentions.
As the director of national intelligence, Coats leads the vast U.S. intelligence community, which includes the FBI. But that does not mean he has full visibility into the FBI probe. Coats’s predecessor in the job, James R. Clapper Jr., recently acknowledged that Comey did not brief him on the scope of the Russia investigation. Similarly, it is unclear to what extent the FBI has brought Coats up to speed on the probe’s most sensitive findings.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... 56e8e49710
by seemslikeadream » Tue May 23, 2017 9:17 am
Cover Up as Reality Show Clown Show
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 23, 2017 9:12 AM
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Let me share a few more thoughts about yesterday evening’s breaking news about President Trump’s overtures to the head of the NSA and the Director of National Intelligence.
Given what we knew already, these new details cannot be terribly surprising. Indeed, they fit a clear pattern. But they show just how far-reaching, widespread and brazen President Trump was in trying to shut down the investigation into his campaign and Russia.
We know from Comey’s accounts that Trump repeatedly tried to get pledges of loyalty from Comey. He purportedly asked Comey privately to drop the investigation the day after he fired Flynn. Of course, Trump eventually fired Comey, by his own account over frustration with the Russian probe. Now we learn that after Comey’s March testimony in which the FBI Director first confirmed the existence of a collusion/coordination probe, Trump personally reached out to Admiral Rodgers at NSA and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to push back against or dispute Comey’s revelation.
Both apparently politely demurred.
Some minor props here for Coats. The former Indiana Senator’s qualifications for this position were slim. He’s a career politician, not an intelligence professional, with the different political antennae and loyalties that go with being a career elected official. Unlike almost all the rest involved – Comey, Rodgers, et al., he’s in his position because of Trump. Yet he appears to have seen the overtures in the same light and similarly rebuffed Trump’s requests.
In many ways this is the most telling passage …
In addition to the requests to Coats and Rogers, senior White House officials sounded out top intelligence officials about the possibility of intervening directly with Comey to encourage the FBI to drop its probe of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, according to people familiar with the matter. The officials said the White House appeared uncertain about its power to influence the FBI.
“Can we ask him to shut down the investigation? Are you able to assist in this matter?” one official said of the line of questioning from the White House.
There’s a lot here.
It appears that Trump and his top advisors were increasingly concerned that they could not get through to Comey to drop the investigation. They then started reaching out to others in the intelligence community either to publicly rebut Comey’s statements or try to intervene with him directly.
First, let’s consider what appears to have been the extreme importance Trump and his advisors attached to ending the Flynn/Trump-Russia probes. We’re focused on the loyalty pledge and Comey’s ouster. But they apparently tried every means they could think of to shut down the probe, all of them widely in appropriate and others quite possibly illegal.
Second, look at Trump’s personal role. Even if a President or White House has decided to obstruct or shut down an investigation, this is not the way to execute the plan. Put in the most cynical possible way, the President should never have been personally made these calls, implicating himself directly in the effort. These kinds of overtures are made their advisors and hopefully with some ambiguity and thus deniability.
Nor should Trump have called these men, apparently in their offices, where they could write perhaps literally contemporaneous notes of the conversations. It’s hard to unwrap what measure of this was desperation, recklessness or Trump’s complete unfamiliarity and inability to understand that all of these men were not executives in a private company run by him but high level officials in a government in which the President is the dominant but by not means only power center.
To get our collective heads around this, we must take note of this complexity and yet keep it simple: The President desperately wants to shut down the Trump-Russia probe and is going to the wildest and riskiest lengths to end it. The unique dynamics of Trumpian psychology make it just plausible that rather than a consciousness of guilt or fear, he is driven here by a need to brook no opposition or a fear that any discussion of this issue detracts from his “legendary triumph” last November, as Turkish President Erdogan put it.
But there’s a more straightforward explanation, even for Trump: a consciousness of guilt, if not necessarily his than those close around him, whose transgressions would rub off on him. There is of course my “Mailer Standard” theory: that Trump actually doesn’t know what investigators will find but has every reason to think it won’t be good. Simple: President must end the investigation because he can’t allow them to find what’s there.
We’re far past any question of a cover-up or an attempt to kill the investigation. We have almost too much evidence, too many positive acts. It’s like Trump is still operating in a reality show, where every positive act is devoid of subtlety, infinitely direct so as to move the plot-line forward in the length of a single episode and ubiquitously recorded so we can see it all playing out before our eyes.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/cov ... clown-show
House Inquiry Turns Attention to Trump Campaign Worker With Russia Ties
By MAGGIE HABERMANMAY 20, 2017
Michael Caputo, who served as a communications adviser to the Trump campaign, in 2010. Mr. Caputo did work in the early 2000s for Gazprom Media, a Russian conglomerate that supported President Vladimir V. Putin. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Michael Caputo, who served as a communications adviser to the Trump campaign, has been asked by the House committee investigating Russian election meddling to submit to a voluntary interview and to provide any documents he may have that are related to the inquiry.
The House Intelligence Committee, which is examining possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, made its request in a letter on May 9. Mr. Caputo, who lives near Buffalo and spent six months on the Trump team, worked in Russia during the 1990s and came to know Kremlin officials. He also did work in the early 2000s for Gazprom Media, a Russian conglomerate that supported President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Caputo has strongly denied that there was any collusion between him or anyone else on the campaign and Russian officials. He has also accused the committee of smearing him.
A Democratic member of the panel, Representative Jackie Speier of California, raised Mr. Caputo’s name during the March 20 hearing where James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, testified on Russia’s interference in the election. She noted Mr. Caputo’s work for Gazprom, and the fact that he met his second wife, who is Ukrainian, while working in 2007 on a parliamentary election in Kiev.
Mr. Caputo is the latest in a string of Trump campaign officials who have been approached by the committee. He is a protégé of Roger J. Stone Jr., one of President Trump’s longest-serving advisers and one of the people who has been a focus of investigators’ interest. Mr. Stone has also denied having any contact with Russian officials.
The panel’s letter asked Mr. Caputo to “produce documents and other materials to the committee and participate in a voluntary transcribed interview at the committee’s offices,” according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.
It asked for “any documents, records, electronically stored information including email, communication, recordings, data and tangible things” that could “reasonably lead to the discovery of any facts within the investigation’s publicly announced parameters.”
The committee said it wanted to discuss with Mr. Caputo a number of topics, “including Russian cyberactivities directed against the 2016 U.S. election, potential links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns, the U.S. government’s response to these Russian active measures, and related leaks of classified information.”
Mr. Caputo has denounced the allegations for months on social media, and said he tried to contact Ms. Speier the day after she mentioned him and his wife in the hearing.
In a written response to the committee, Mr. Caputo, who said he plans to comply with its request, said, “At no time during this period did I have any contact with Russian government officials or employees.” He said he did not discuss Russia with anyone else on the campaign, including Mr. Trump, during his employment from November 2015 to June 2016.
“The only time the president and I talked about Russia was in 2013, when he simply asked me in passing what it was like to live there in the context of a dinner conversation,” he wrote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/us/p ... trump.html
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 24, 2017 11:44 am
Kim Dotcom tried to hack Seth Rich's gmail account. When he failed, @seanhannity's "bombshell" suddenly dissipated
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpos ... 61dde15a1a
Trump should be scared, Comey friend says
A friend of James Comey said Tuesday that if he were President Donald Trump he would be scared of the former FBI director's pending testimony.
"I found it interesting and very telling that (Comey) declined any opportunity to tell his story in private," Benjamin Wittes, who describes himself as a Comey confidant, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on "AC360."
"This is a guy with a story to tell," says Wittes, who also runs a blog called Lawfare and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Chaffetz's hearing with Comey postponed
Comey has agreed to meet with the Senate intelligence committee after Memorial Day.
Wittes says he decided to speak out about discussions he had with Comey about his contact with Trump because of one recent report of Trump's request for a pledge of loyalty at a dinner shortly after he took office.
Comey was taken aback by Trump request for loyalty pledge
Benjamin Wittes discusses Comey (Full interview) 06:41
"I was very shocked and it certainly crystallized in my mind what a whole lot of these interactions that I have had with him meant and why he had reacted to them the way he had reacted." Wittes added, "I suddenly understood them in a different and frankly, a more menacing and upsetting light than I had at the time of the conversation."
Wittes detailed a few incidents that he said made Comey feel the agency's independence and ability to do its job in an apolitical fashion were not being respected.
One incident was when Trump invited law enforcement officials to the Blue Room to express his thanks for their work at the inauguration just days before. Wittes says Comey was reluctant to attend and tried his best to not have any personal conversation with Trump. At one point, Wittes recalls, Comey stood in a position so that his blue blazer would blend in with the room's blue drapes in an effort for Trump to not notice him.
That tactic was unsuccessful; Trump later called him out by name, leading to a greeting captured on camera.
First on CNN: Comey now believes Trump was trying to influence him, source says
First on CNN: Comey now believes Trump was trying to influence him, source says
"He did not regard the people in the Trump White House as honorable? Cooper asked, to which Wittes replies, "That's correct." "I have no doubt that he regarded the group of people around the President as dishonorable."
Cooper pointed out that defenders of the President could look at Trump's interactions with Comey as just a businessman trying to win people over to his side.
"People have said he's a more transactional person," Cooper said. "In business he's schmoozing, back slapping -- that it's just an attempt to kind of make the relationship personal of friendly."
"I think it's perfectly possible to read it that way," Wittes says. "I'm not going to even say that's the wrong way to read it. It's not the way Comey read it."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/24/politics/ ... index.html
Brennan: Trump Camp’s Contacts With Russia Warranted Investigation
Former CIA Director John Brennan testifies on CapitolHill in Washington, Tuesday, May 23, 2017, before the House Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Task Force. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Published MAY 23, 2017 10:53 AM
16112Views
In testimony Tuesday morning before the House Intelligence Committee, former CIA Director John Brennan gave the most straightforward explanation to date as to why U.S. intelligence agencies embarked last summer on a now-sprawling investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential coordination between Russian officials and individuals connected to the Trump campaign.
In a cold, high-ceilinged, wood-paneled hearing room underneath the U.S. Capitol, Brennan repeated Tuesday what he and many other intelligence leaders have said before, that “Russia brazenly interfered in the 2016 election process.” While he said he does not know whether any Americans engaged in “actively conspiring” with Russia, he cited evidence of contacts between Russian officials and people associated with the Trump campaign troubling enough to warrant a serious investigation.
“I was concerned because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals,” he said. “And it raised questions in my mind again whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”
That cooperation, he noted, could have happened even without the knowledge of the U.S. participants. “Frequently, individuals who go along the treasonous path do not even realize they’re along that path until it gets to be a bit too late,” he said.
Asked if the individuals he was referring to were official members of the Trump campaign or merely people loosely associated with the president, Brennan declined to identify them, citing the classified nature of the intelligence in question.
Though Brennan did not mention any names in particular, recent reports about two individuals in Trump’s inner circle fit the pattern he described. Russian officials have bragged in recent weeks about their attempts to cultivate both Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn and campaign adviser Carter Page and use them to influence Trump.
Brennan reiterated under questioning that interactions between political campaigns and foreign governments are not in and of themselves suspicious, but the fact that these contacts happened at the very time the CIA was learning about Russian attempts to hack and influence the 2016 election raised his suspicions and motivated him to push for a full investigation.
“I don’t have sufficient information to make a determination whether or not such cooperation or complicity or collusion was taking place,” he said. “But I know that there was a basis to have individuals pull those threads.”
Under questioning from Rep. Thomas Rooney (R-FL), Brennan said that he left office with “unresolved questions” about whether Russia had worked with any “U.S. persons” involved in the 2016 campaign to influence the outcome.
Based on what he knows about Russia from decades of work as an intelligence officer, Brennan said: “They try to suborn individuals and try to get individuals, including U.S. individuals, to act on their behalf—wittingly or unwittingly,” he said. “I was worried about the number of contacts that the Russians had with U.S. persons. Therefore, by the time I left office on January 20th, I had unresolved questions in my mind, as to whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons involved in the campaign or not to work on their behalf again either in a witting or unwitting fashion.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/brennan ... -testimony
Donald Trump’s Russia scandal managed to get even worse for him today
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 10:35 pm EDT Tue May 23, 2017 | 0
During the course of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, it may have appeared to those on the outside that he was getting away with it – until suddenly one day he was out on his ass. Similarly, some may believe that Donald Trump is still getting away with his Russia scandal. But the reality is that it’s gotten incrementally worse for him on most days since election day. And today has been a doozy. Here’s a recap of Trump’s terrible day:
• First, former CIA Director John Brennan testified before Congress today. Trump patsy Trey Gowdy tried to run interference on Trump’s behalf, and the end result was that Brennan ended up painting a dire picture of just how suspicious the Trump-Russia scandal is – which Palmer Report reported here.
• Then Trump signaled that he knows just how bad the Russia scandal has gotten for him when he hired an attorney to personally represent him. But he hired an attorney with experience in defending clients accused of money laundering, suggesting that may be his biggest fear as the Special Counsel digs deeper – as Palmer Report covered here.
• By the evening, someone had leaked a transcript of Trump’s phone call with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, which painted Trump as a buffoon – which the Washington Post covered here.
• And to add insult to injury, a Democrat won a special election in New Hampshire tonight in a district which had been solidly Republican. This was a district that Donald Trump won in the 2016 election, but now his own base can’t be bothered to show up and vote Republican anymore, revealing just how badly Trump is dragging down the entire party – which Palmer Report reported here.
So it’s been yet another bad day for Donald Trump overall, yet another explosive day in his Russia scandal, and – whether it feels like it from the outside or not – another step toward Trump being out the door.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/wor ... ssoa/3033/
FEC member urges escalated Trump-Russia inquiry
The agency, already investigating a Trump complaint, is called on to consider reports that Russian agents bought Facebook ads.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL 05/23/2017 05:15 AM EDT
The complaint contends that there is enough evidence for the FEC to investigate whether Trump’s associates violated campaign finance laws by coordinating with the Russians. | Getty
A member of the Federal Election Commission is calling on the agency to investigate whether Russian agents paid for Facebook ads to spread damaging stories about Hillary Clinton ahead of last fall’s presidential election.
“I think there is potential there for finding a violation, but I don’t want to suggest that I have prejudged anything that could potentially come before me,” said FEC commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic appointee to the commission.
Her assertion comes as agency staff is already moving to investigate a related complaint filed in December by a pair of watchdog groups against Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, according to two sources familiar with the agency’s handling of the complaint. They said that, if the investigation proceeds apace, agency staff could be expected to incorporate the recent revelations about Facebook ads into their fact-finding.
The prospect of an escalating inquiry from the quasi-independent election watchdog agency could represent an intriguing new front in the battalion of investigations being pursued by various parts of the federal government. The FBI and various congressional committees are looking into Russia’s meddling in the election and the connections between the country and President Donald Trump’s associates.
The bipartisan FEC is generally better known for gridlock than speedy or aggressive investigations. Yet there are some signs that it might make an exception when it comes to foreign spending in U.S. elections.
The commissioners in October unanimously agreed to prioritize investigations into complaints about foreign spending. And in some ways, the FEC's inquiry into Trump and Russia could offer greater transparency, accountability and focus than the congressional or law enforcement investigations.
FBI and congressional investigators are looking into a wide array of potential legal violations, most of which have little to do with the 2016 presidential election — from omissions on foreign lobbying and personal income filings to money laundering and hacking. And there’s little evidence that they’re narrowing their focus.
The FEC, on the other hand, is charged exclusively with monitoring and enforcing the Federal Election Campaign Act. It bars foreign nationals, companies or governments from donating to U.S. campaign committees or from making expenditures "for the purpose of influencing" an election, and it also prohibits campaigns from coordinating with outside entities, including foreign ones.
If four commissioners vote to find reason to believe a violation may have occurred, the agency can begin issuing subpoenas and moving towards negotiating civil penalties, or possibly making criminal referrals to the Justice Department. (It’s also possible that the FBI could ask the FEC to stand down if the agencies’ investigations start overlapping). Yet, even if the five current members of the FEC (there’s one vacancy) can’t muster the four votes — a scenario that has become increasingly common — the staff’s investigative report still becomes public, which could fuel additional scrutiny from congress and the media.
And, if the complainants are unhappy with the results of the investigation or believe it’s taking too long, they’re able to sue the agency in court — a frequently used recourse that is not available in congressional and law enforcement investigations.
“The FEC has broad investigative powers to subpoena witnesses and documents, and compel testimony under oath,” said Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech for People, one of the watchdog groups that filed the complaint that the FEC is investigating against Trump and Russia. “I don’t want to suggest that the FEC is a model of rapid enforcement, but this is possibly the single most important campaign finance investigation in the agency’s entire history and this is its opportunity to rise to the challenge.”
The complaint by Fein’s group and the Campaign for Accountability alleges that Russia violated the foreign money ban when its state-run media outlets and social-media operations disseminated stories intended to boost Trump and damage Clinton. And the complaint contends that there is enough evidence for the FEC to investigate whether Trump’s associates violated campaign finance laws by coordinating with the Russians, which would run afoul the coordination prohibition.
None of the commissioners other than Weintraub responded to requests for comment, nor did the Trump campaign.
Weintraub’s interest was piqued by an article published last week by TIME magazine that revealed intelligence officials had evidence that Russian agents bought Facebook ads to disseminate election-themed stories. It also indicated that congressional investigators were examining whether Russian efforts to spread such content were boosted by two U.S. companies with deep ties to Trump — Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica.
Representatives for the two companies did not respond to requests for comment.
It’s unlikely that the FEC would be able to build much of a case against Russia, partly because the Justice Department would have primacy on any criminal investigations.
However, Weintraub said, “if there are U.S. citizens involved in any way in spending foreign money to influence a U.S. election, then that would be something that we could and should pursue.”
Yet, the issue is not cut-and-dry, both because Facebook told TIME that it hasn’t found evidence of Russian agents buying ads on the social media platform and because, even if there were proof that Russian agents had paid for the ads, it’s not clear how the FEC would apply the law.
That’s partly because it could be argued that merely paying to disseminate news articles might not qualify as trying to influence an election. And it’s partly because the commission, which is currently comprised of three commissioners nominated by Republicans and two nominated by Democrats (with one Democratic seat vacant), has been famously divided on partisan lines, and its Republican appointees may be disinclined to pursue a case that would embarrass a president of their own party.
Experts suggested that it's unlikely the FEC would be able to muster the votes to pursue a far-reaching finding against Trump, but they nonetheless see a narrow path for such a case at the FEC.
One Republican campaign finance lawyer said that, if it could be proven that Russia bought Facebook ads with the intent of boosting Trump, “it would be a serious DOJ criminal issue, and not an FEC administrative issue.”
Still, the lawyer added, “I would not want to be the test case with an unsympathetic client in the gray area of foreign money.”
Paul Ryan, litigation director for Common Cause, said that if the Russian government paid to disseminate anti-Clinton content “then the activity would seemingly be covered by the ‘expenditure’ prong of the foreign national ban, rather than by the ‘contribution/donation’ prong of the ban.”
Debates about the specifics law aside, Ryan added that “common sense certainly suggests that Russia spending money to influence our elections should be covered by a statute that prohibits foreign nationals from spending money for the purpose of influencing a federal election.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/2 ... ook-238695
Sean Hannity’s dive off the deep end coincides with his bromance with Donald Trump
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 10:06 pm EDT Tue May 23, 2017 | 0
This week I’ve been asked by readers what’s wrong with Sean Hannity. And that’s a good question. He’s long been a reliably predictable villain who, like a lot of other people at Fox News, reports misleading bullshit that’s been carefully crafted enough to pass for news in the eyes of those who don’t know any better. But this week he seems to have simply gone off the deep end. The question is, why now?
Hannity is almost obsessed with pushing a nutjob claim about the death of former DNC staffer Seth Rich. The story is so ridiculous that Rich’s own family has asked him to stop. It’s so discredited that his own network Fox News has retracted it. And yet Hannity seems so obsessed with pushing this crazy conspiracy, which he has to know by now is untrue if he ever did believe it was real to begin with, that he seems to be putting his career at risk.
It almost sounds like something that, well, Donald Trump would do. And so it’s worth asking if Sean Hannity’s reportedly close personal relationship with Trump has impacted his own judgment now that Trump is occupying the office of President of the United States. But it would be an oversimplification to suggest that Hannity’s transformation from standard-issue liar to nutso liar is merely a result of Trump’s rise.
There have been too many other things swirling around Sean Hannity, past and present, to not point them out. He was accused of sexual harassment almost immediately after his colleague Bill O’Reilly was run out of Fox News amid a slew of sexual harassment accusations. Did this put so much pressure on Hannity that it caused him to melt down and begin putting his chips on stories that he knew even Fox couldn’t stand by? Who knows. But at this point we’re watching Sean Hannity implode.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/dee ... nity/3032/
Interesting, Perhaps Relevant, Perspective
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 23, 2017 11:35 AM
This is a very interesting passage from former CIA Director Brennan’s testimony before the House from about 20 minutes ago.
As a young analyst, I wouldn’t have had direct interaction with Andropov. But I have studied Russian intelligence activities over the years and I’ve seen it manifest in many different of our counterintelligence cases and how they have been able to get people, including inside the CIA, to become treasonous. And frequently, individuals who go along a treasonous path do not even realize they’re along that path until it gets to be a bit too late. And that’s why, again, my radar goes up early when I see certain things that I know what the Russians are trying to do, and I don’t know whether or not the targets of their efforts are as mindful of the Russian intentions as they need to be.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/int ... erspective
Brennan: Trump Violated Protocol In Sharing Classified Intel With Russians
Former CIA Director John Brennan testifies on CapitolHill in Washington, Tuesday, May 23, 2017, before the House Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Task Force. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Published MAY 23, 2017 11:31 AM
0Views
Former CIA Director John Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday morning that President Donald Trump violated protocol when he reportedly shared highly classified Israeli intelligence with Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting in early May.
Aside from reports that the U.S. was not authorized to share the intelligence at all—information about an ISIS plot involving explosives concealed in laptops—Brennan says the manner Trump did so was a breach of procedure.
“Such intelligence, classified intelligence is not shared with visiting foreign ministers or local ambassadors, it’s shared through intelligence channels because it needs to be handled the right way and needs to make sure it’s not exposed,” he said. “He didn’t do that, again if the press charges are accurate.”
“Secondly,” Brennan continued, “before sharing any classified intelligence with foreign partners, it needs to go back to the originating agency to make sure that the language in it is not—even just providing the substance—going to reveal sources or methods and compromise the future collection capability. It appears as though, at least from the press reports, that neither did it go in the proper channels nor did the originating agency have the opportunity to clear language for it. That is a problem.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/brennan ... h-russians
Trump retains Marc Kasowitz as private attorney for Russia probe -reports
President Donald Trump has tapped a lawyer who has represented him on business matters to serve as his private attorney as a special counsel investigates whether his campaign worked with Russia in last year's election, news media reported on Tuesday.
Fox Business News and ABC reported that Trump has hired Marc Kasowitz, a New York-based trial lawyer known as an aggressive litigator, to represent him in an Justice Department investigation headed by former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller.
Kasowitz and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
Kasowitz has represented Trump for 15 years on a wide range of matters, but he is not known as a criminal defense lawyer.
During last year's presidential campaign, Kasowitz threatened to sue the New York Times if it did not retract a story about women who accused Trump of touching them inappropriately. The Times did not retract the story.
He also assisted in the defense of fraud claims against Trump University, a series of real-estate seminars. After the election Trump settled the claims for $25 million.
The Washington Post reported on Monday that Kasowitz was among four prominent attorneys who were widely seen as the finalists for the role of Trump's private attorney.
Trump has looked to Kasowitz's firm to fill positions in his government. He has described former Senator Joseph Lieberman, a senior counsel at the firm, as a top candidate to serve as FBI director and he is considering Edward McNally, a white-collar defense lawyer at the firm, as the next U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Trump has also tapped former partner David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel.
ALSO IN POLITICS
Ex-CIA chief: Worries grew of Trump campaign contacts to Russia
Senate panel says it will subpoena Michael Flynn businesses
The outside counsel would be separate from the White House Counsel's Office, led by Donald McGahn.
Mueller was appointed as special counsel by the Justice Department to investigate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia last week. Several congressional committees and the FBI are also investigating the matter.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in January that Moscow tried to sway the November vote in Trump's favor. Russia has denied involvement, and Trump has denied any collusion between his campaign and Russia.
Controversy has engulfed Trump since he fired FBI Director James Comey two weeks ago as Comey oversaw an investigation into possible collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne, Eric Beech and Eric Walsh; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Lisa Shumaker)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... SKBN18J30W
Reports: Trump Praised Philippine President’s ‘Job On The Drug Problem’
By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published MAY 24, 2017 7:07 AM
In a private phone call with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte last month, President Donald Trump praised the way Duterte has handled drug crimes in the Philippines, according to reports in the Washington Post and The Intercept.
Duterte’s crackdown on drug-related crimes has led to a significant increase in extrajudicial killings and Duterte has publicly threatened to kill drug suspects.
Trump praised Duterte for his “unbelievable job on the drug problem,” according to the Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the transcript produced by the Philippine government.
“Many countries have the problem, we have the problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that,” Trump added, per the Post.
Trump told Duterte that he is a “good man,” according to a transcript from the Philippine government obtained by the Intercept.
“Thank you Mr. President,” Duterte then told Trump, per The Intercept. “This is the scourge of my nation now and I have to do something to preserve the Filipino nation.”
Trump then appeared to make a comment about former President Barack Obama.
“I understand that and fully understand that and I think we had a previous president who did not understand that,” Trump told Duterte, according to the Washington Post.
In the White House’s official readout of the call released in April, the administration said Trump and Duterte “discussed the fact that the Philippine government is fighting very hard to rid its country of drugs.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/t ... -crackdown
Dem Reps Ask Deutsche Bank For Info On Trump Accounts, Ties To Russia
By ESME CRIBB Published MAY 24, 2017 11:11 AM
Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday asked Deutsche Bank for information on the accounts that President Donald Trump and members of his family hold at the bank.
In a letter to Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan, Democratic members of Congress cited the bank’s “pattern of involvement in money laundering schemes with primarily Russian participation” and its “unconventional relationship” with Trump.
Deutsche Bank is one of the few major banks that has continued to do business with Trump through multiple bankruptcy filings over nearly two decades.
“Congress remains in the dark on whether loans Deutsche Bank made to President Trump were guaranteed by the Russian Government, or were in any way connected to Russia,” the letter read. “It is critical that you provide this Committee with the information necessary to assess the scope, findings and conclusions of your internal reviews.”
Reps. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Daniel Kildee (D-MI), Gwen Moore (D-WI), Al Green (D-TX) and Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) signed the letter.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/d ... nts-russia
Trump Asked DNI, NSA Director To Push Back Against FBI Russia Probe
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/w ... ssia-probe
by seemslikeadream » Wed May 24, 2017 3:16 pm
WORLD NEWS | Wed May 24, 2017 | 2:50pm EDT
Trump tells Duterte of two U.S. nuclear subs in Korean waters: NYT
FILE PHOTO: The Ohio-class guided-missile submarine USS Michigan arrives for a regularly scheduled port visit while conducting routine patrols throughout the Western Pacific in Busan, South Korea, April 24, 2017. Jermaine Ralliford/Courtesy U.S. Navy/Handout via REUTERS
U.S. President Donald Trump told his Philippine counterpart that Washington has sent two nuclear submarines to waters off the Korean peninsula, the New York Times said, comments likely to raise questions about his handling of sensitive information.
Trump has said "a major, major conflict" with North Korea is possible because of its nuclear and missile programs and that all options are on the table but that he wants to resolve the crisis diplomatically.
North Korea has vowed to develop a missile mounted with a nuclear warhead that can strike the mainland United States, saying the program is necessary to counter U.S. aggression.
Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte Washington had "a lot of firepower over there", according to the New York Times, which quoted a transcript of an April 29 call between the two.
"We have two submarines — the best in the world. We have two nuclear submarines, not that we want to use them at all," the newspaper quoted Trump as telling Duterte, based on the transcript.
The report was based on a Philippine transcript of the call that was circulated on Tuesday under a "confidential" cover sheet by the Americas division of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs.
In a show of force, the United States has sent the nuclear-powered USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier to waters off the Korean peninsula, where it joined the USS Michigan, a nuclear submarine that docked in South Korea in late April.
According to the Times, a senior Trump administration official in Washington, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the call and insisted on anonymity, confirmed the transcript was an accurate representation of the call between the two leaders.
Trump praises Duterte for anti-drug campaign in call transcript
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said Trump discussed intelligence about Islamic State with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak at talks in the Oval Office this month, raising questions about Trump's handling of secrets.
Trump also praised Duterte for doing an "unbelievable job on the drug problem", the New York Times reported, a subject that has drawn much criticism in the West.
Almost 9,000 people, many small-time users and dealers, have been killed in the Philippines since Duterte took office on June 30. Police say about one-third of the victims were shot by officers in self-defense during legitimate operations.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-north ... SKBN18K15Y
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