Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri May 04, 2018 9:57 pm

Oops trump knew about the payment to Stormy months before he denied it

NYT

:)


one of those 3000 lies
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat May 05, 2018 2:51 pm

emptywheel

Mueller interviews inauguration Chair Tom Barrack in December.

Barrack inauguration aide Rick Gates flips in late February.

Mueller stops inauguration attendee Vekselberg & other oligarchs two months ago.


On top of investigating "collusion" Mueller seems to be pointing to the parts of our system that make our politics ripe for purchase (by all countries). Inauguration committees are a notable cesspool of graft.

Presidential libraries, too.



Seth Abramson



COHEN received from TRUMP or acquired himself $1.24 million during the last 90 days of the 2016 election—only $130,000 of which went to DANIELS.

The STEELE dossier says (1) COHEN was running TRUMP-Russia coordination, and (2) the operation COHEN was running paid off the hackers.


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2/ I don't know what to do with this information—but I know GIULIANI says COHEN had no campaign role, and I know COHEN suddenly had $1.24 million in his pocket in late 2016. And some of it was earmarked by TRUMP to pay off DANIELS. What if the rest of it was *also* to help TRUMP?



3/ A recent report says COHEN did in fact go to Prague—which, if true, means both he and TRUMP lied to the nation about that trip repeatedly. That'd certainly explain why COHEN offered only an incomplete alibi and never showed anyone his passport, though he waved it around a lot.



4/ The STEELE dossier says Cohen went to Prague sometime in August/September 2016. COHEN has an alibi for only a few days within that window. COHEN claims he couldn't have been to Prague because he doesn't have a Prague stamp in his passport. But you can go to Prague without one.



5/ It's believed COHEN was in a nation from which you can travel to Prague with no stamp in the exact time-frame the STEELE dossier alleges he went there.

The only person to (allegedly) examine COHEN's passport for evidence of a Prague trip was TRUMP. Who claimed it looked fine.



6/ COHEN brought his passport on-air with HANNITY, who was secretly COHEN's client—a fact only disclosed when a federal court ordered it disclosed. Suspiciously, HANNITY never looked at the passport or asked detailed questions about its content, despite COHEN using it as a prop.



7/ If, *as the media says*, COHEN went to Prague and not only lied about it but used TRUMP and HANNITY to cover it up; and if, *as the media says*, COHEN got an unexplained $1.11 million from TRUMP and elsewhere in late 2016; STEELE's dossier may very well be *accurate* on COHEN.



8/ Another thing the media says is COHEN is in legal jeopardy for his business practices—and MUELLER will use any indictments against COHEN for such practices to force him to cooperate in the Russia probe. If that's so—and if COHEN did what STEELE said—TRUMP faces a dire endgame.



9/ TRUMP inexplicably gave COHEN $470,000 on a $130,000 bill. TRUMP is known to wildly *underpay* rather than *overpay* subordinates. These facts have led to speculation COHEN used the rest of the money for something else. But COHEN also had $774,000 more:

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/386334 ... ign-report

10/ What COHEN taking out so much money in the last 90 days of the campaign suggests is he had *massive clandestine expenditures* which *weren't* being paid for by clients of his—alleged—law practice and which could *not* come directly from TRUMP. That fits STEELE's dossier. /end



PS/ The now-acknowledged DANIELS payoff confirms that COHEN was the "fixer" TRUMP turned to when he had to secretly pay someone who could blackmail him over conduct that could destroy him professionally. So payoffs to hackers would fit *perfectly* into COHEN's *established role*.



UPDATE1/ A reader reminds me that—4 months after the Prague allegation was published—COHEN finally *did* let media see his passport. It *confirmed* that COHEN was in a nation you can travel to Prague to with no stamp—Italy—between July 9 and July 17, 2016.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/anthonycormier ... .hh56Pr8yz

UPDATE2/ At two points in the STEELE dossier, the timing of COHEN's alleged Prague trip is mentioned: one says August 2016, another August/September 2016. COHEN's documented alibi only accounts for his whereabouts from August 23 to August 29, 2016. So 54 days are unaccounted for.



UPDATE3/ It's certain that the man STEELE says preceded COHEN as Trump's designated Russia fixer, MANAFORT, had *many* passports. So COHEN would've needed multiple passports also. McClatchy reports COHEN went to Prague via Germany in August/September 2016.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politic ... 70264.html

UPDATE4/ The unanswered questions about the $1.11 million "extra" COHEN got from TRUMP and loans have nothing to do with whether COHEN went to Prague in August/September 2016, or instead met Russians (like Papadopoulos did) in Italy. The question is whether he was paying hackers.



UPDATE5/ We know PAPADOPOULOS says every 2016 trip he took was authorized by TRUMP's campaign, meaning he was sent to Italy in March '16—where a Kremlin agent conveniently found him. We know thereafter he told TRUMP's campaign the Kremlin wanted to keep meeting in neutral cities.



UPDATE6/ So we don't know if COHEN paid hackers—but we know he was TRUMP's secret bagman; he mysteriously received enough money to do it; Kremlin sources say he did; McClatchy says he went to Prague and lied about it; and Italy—his July 2016 trip—is a Kremlin-okayed neutral site.



UPDATE7/ If you read the STEELE dossier, it says (pg. 18) the conversation about COHEN and Prague was between a Kremlin official and a compatriot—which, because of its sensitivity, was deliberately "cryptic." That's the reason the possible time-frame for Prague was rather long...



UPDATE8/ ...and why I'm not convinced COHEN's nine-day July '16 Italy trip should be seen as outside that window. COHEN was obsessed with TRUMP's '16 run and in some ways central to it; Italy was a known Kremlin meet site; why would COHEN disappear on vacation there mid-campaign?



UPDATE9/ The '16 Republican National Convention—we now know a flurry of TRUMP-Russia meetings and actions taken to benefit Putin—went from July 18 to 21, 2016. Are you telling me TRUMP's *right-hand man* went AWOL *on vacation* for the 9 days *just before* the Convention started?



UPDATE10/ Don't be surprised if we learn COHEN's Italy trip involved clandestine TRUMP-Russia meetings. A man like TRUMP doesn't let his fixer disappear on vacation for the nine days *immediately preceding* the biggest moment in his life—that'd be out of character for *both* men.



PS/ Keep this calendar of consecutive days in your head:

JULY 7-8: PAGE goes to Moscow and meets Kremlin officials. He later lies about it.

JULY 9-17: COHEN—Trump's fixer—goes on "vacation" to a known Kremlin meet-up nation.

JULY 18-21: The 2016 Republican National Convention.

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 3436133377


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APNewsBreak: Mueller team questions Trump friend Tom Barrack


WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller have interviewed one of President Donald Trump’s closest friends and confidants, California real estate investor Tom Barrack, The Associated Press has learned.

Barrack was interviewed as part of the federal investigation of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The specific topics covered in questions from Mueller’s team were not immediately clear.

One of the people who spoke to AP said the questioning focused entirely on two officials from Trump’s campaign who have been indicted by Mueller: Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s longtime deputy, Rick Gates. Gates agreed to plead guilty to federal conspiracy and false-statement charges in February and began cooperating with investigators.

This person said Barrack was interviewed “months ago” and was asked a few questions about Gates’ work on Trump’s inaugural committee, which Barrack chaired, and but there were no questions about the money raised by that committee.

A second person with knowledge of the Barrack interview said the questioning was broader and did include financial matters about the campaign, the transition and Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

Barrack’s spokeswoman, Lisa Baker, declined comment.

Barrack has rare access and insight into Trump going back decades, since their days developing real estate. Barrack played an integral role in the 2016 campaign as a top fundraiser at a time when many other Republicans were shunning the upstart candidate. Barrack later directed Trump’s inauguration.

While the specifics of Barrack’s questioning were unclear, Mueller’s team has asked several other witnesses about the flow of money related to the campaign.

Investigators have for months been inquiring about the Trump campaign’s finances and compliance with federal election law, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors’ questions have been wide-ranging, these people said, touching on the campaign’s data operations, its relationship with data-mining company Cambridge Analytica, payments to Gates and whether there were arrangements that weren’t disclosed in filings to the Federal Election Commission, they said.

The four people familiar with the investigation spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the confidential interviews.

The investigators’ questions about the campaign’s finances have come up in interviews dating to early fall while prosecutors were preparing the first indictment against Manafort and Gates.

Barrack, a wealthy real estate investor with close ties to several Mideast leaders, met Trump in 1988 when he negotiated the sale of The Plaza Hotel in New York to Trump. Barrack’s publicist in 2016 described the men as having since “solidified a lifelong friendship between themselves and their families.”

Barrack employed Gates last year, wrapping up operations on the Presidential Inaugural Committee, before Gates was charged by Mueller.

Barrack spoke glowingly of Trump in a CNBC interview in early 2016.

“He’s one of the kindest, and actually most humble, friends that I’ve had,” Barrack said. “I have so much respect for him because at this point in his career, wandering into the milieu was not easy, and he’s changed the dialogue of the debate.”

Barrack also was among the featured speakers at the Republican convention where Trump formally received the nomination.

Days after Trump’s victory in November 2016, Barrack told CBS’ “This Morning” that Trump was like an ultimate fighter during the campaign who used “whatever tools necessary to convey a really disruptive message.” Barrack said America would see “a softer, kinder” Trump now that Trump had won the presidency

Mueller’s investigators have interviewed dozens of witnesses in the probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. They have also secured the cooperation of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos.

But few witnesses have as much insight into the president’s lengthy business career and all facets of his campaign and administration as Barrack.

https://apnews.com/6dd33b4234634079821e5825f112e85b
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat May 05, 2018 5:56 pm

Polly Sigh

Russian company Concord, charged in Mueller probe, plans to plead not guilty. Concord, like Kremlin-linked troll group Internet Research Agency, is owned by "Putin's chef" Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was also indicted in the Russia probe.

Image
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Russian company charged in Mueller probe plans to plead not guilty


Former FBI Director Robert Mueller, special counsel on the Russian investigation, leaves following a meeting with members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC on June 21, 2017.
(CNN)A Russian company indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller says it plans to plead not guilty to the criminal charge that it engaged in a fraud conspiracy to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

In a court filing in federal court in Washington, DC, on Saturday, US-based defense attorneys for the Russian company, Concord Management and Consulting, snapped back at Mueller's office by calling the lawyering by one of the prosecutors "pettifoggery."

Special counsel hits snag in bringing a criminal case against Russians
The special counsel's office previously asked to reschedule Concord's initial appearance, set for Wednesday, because it hadn't properly served the company with a summons.
Concord, a company with ties to the Kremlin-linked troll group Internet Research Agency, now opposes moving the hearing.
"I find it disturbing that in your first communication you are already behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the practices of the Department of Justice," Eric Dubelier, a US attorney from the law firm Reed Smith that represents Concord, wrote to prosecutor Jeannie Rhee, according to an April 20 email he submitted to the court.

Dubelier was responding to Rhee's attempt to communicate with Concord by sending him a legal document without first asking if he'd accept it on Concord's behalf.

In US courts, defendants, even those in other countries, must receive formal notice of the charges against them before a case can proceed, unless a judge steps in.

Mueller's team has faced difficulties in pursuing the criminal case against 13 Russians and three Russian entities, including Concord, since charging them in February for allegedly interfering in the 2016 election using social media.
The indictment provided insight into how the Internet Research Agency set up a vast network of fake American activist organization and used the stolen identities of real Americans in an attempt to wreak havoc on the US political system.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/05/politics ... index.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun May 06, 2018 8:09 am

THE QUO: POLICY AND REAL ESTATE PAYOFFS TO RUSSIA (PART THREE)


May 3, 2018/34 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by empty wheel

In this series, I’m analyzing the Mueller questions written down by Jay Sekulow and leaked to the NYT to show how they set up a damning investigative framework. This post laid out how the Agalarovs had been cultivating Trump for years, in part by dangling real estate deals and close ties with Vladimir Putin. This post shows how during the election, the Russians and Trump danced towards a quid pro quo agreement, with the Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange for a commitment to sanctions relief, with some policy considerations thrown in.

Here, I’ll lay out the questions that show Mueller’s interest in how Trump and the Russians began settling the quid pro quo during the transition. To the extent these are quid pro quo payoffs, and not simply Logan Act violations, they’d be key elements in a conspiracy.

THE QUO: POLICY PAYOFFS

Immediately after the election, the Russians called to collect on their winnings.

According to Jared Kushner’s statement to Congress, the day after the election, Putin sent a congratulatory email to the campaign. In response, he reopened communications with Sergey Kislyak. A day later, the Agalarovs emailed congratulations to let the Trumps know they were “always at your disposal here in Russia.”

“Don!!! Amazing run and a glorious victory!!!!! Congratulations to you and your dad, we are proud and happy for you !!!!!! Always at your disposal here in Russia


On November 28, Rob Goldstone sent an email passing on sanctions materials to Trump’s assistant Rhona Graff.

“Aras Agalarov has asked me to pass on this document in the hope it can be passed on to the appropriate team.


Natalia Veselnitskaya, too, followed up on her Magnitsky request.

In addition to the sanctions demand, according to Jared, the Russians emphasized policy concessions on Syria. A retracted Brian Ross story said that emphasis started even before the election, but in reality the outreach happened almost immediately after the election.

DECEMBER 1, 2016: WHAT DID YOU KNOW DURING THE TRANSITION ABOUT AN ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISH BACK-CHANNEL COMMUNICATION TO RUSSIA, AND JARED KUSHNER’S EFFORTS?

On December 1, Jared and Flynn met with Sergey Kislyak. Jared reportedly asked for the Russians to provide a secure channel. Jared claims the idea for a secure channel came from Kislyak (Mueller likely has intercepts that clarify Kislyak’s version of the story). But he makes it clear the back channel pertained to Syrian policy.

[Kislyak] especially wanted to address U.S. policy in Syria, and that he wanted to convey information from what he called his “generals.” He said he wanted to provide information that would help inform the new administration. He said the generals could not easily come to the U.S. to convey this information and he asked if there was a secure line in the transition office to conduct a conversation. General Flynn or I explained that there were no such lines. I believed developing a thoughtful approach on Syria was a very high priority given the ongoing humanitarian crisis, and I asked if they had an existing communications channel at his embassy we could use where they would be comfortable transmitting the information they wanted to relay to General Flynn. The Ambassador said that would not be possible and so we all agreed that we would receive this information after the Inauguration.


Given how often Kushner and Trump talk face to face, this may be one of the questions about which Mueller has the least certainty of the answer. But we know that in Jared’s interview with Mueller’s prosecutors, they focused on that meeting. They also asked if he had information that exonerated Flynn; his answers (and Flynn’s reported unhappiness that Trump had proven disloyal) led immediately to Flynn’s plea deal, so for some reason Mueller must believe Flynn over Kushner.

Mueller’s interest in how much Trump knew about Kushner’s pursuit of a back channel is important for several reasons. It provides evidence that Kushner (and the Trump Administration generally) was engaged in what I call ConFraudUs on foreign policy, pretending to pursue US foreign policy that actually served other interests. And Kushner’s pursuit, possibly at Trump’s direction, of unmonitored channels is important background to Trump’s response as it became clear the FBI had collected evidence of wrong-doing during the transition.

Curiously, Sekulow’s version of these questions does not include one about Kushner’s December 13 meeting with Sergey Gorkov, the head of the sanctioned Vnesheconombank.

DECEMBER 29, 2016: WHAT DID YOU KNOW ABOUT PHONE CALLS THAT MR. FLYNN MADE WITH THE RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR, SERGEY I. KISLYAK, IN LATE DECEMBER 2016?

According to Flynn’s Statement of Offense, as he was on the phone with Kislyak, he was coordinating closely with a transition official we know to be KT McFarland.

On or about December 29, 2016, FLYNN called a senior official of the Presidential Transition Team (“PTT official”), who was with other senior ·members of the Presidential Transition Team at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss what, if anything, to communicate to the Russian Ambassador about the U.S. Sanctions. On that call, FLYNN and the PTT official discussed the U.S. Sanctions, including the potential impact of those sanctions on the incoming administration’s foreign policy goals. The PIT official and FLYNN also discussed that the members of the Presidential Transition Team at Mar-a-Lago did not want Russia to escalate the situation.

Immediately after his phone call with the PTT official, FLYNN called the Russian Ambassador and requested that Russia not escalate the situation and only respond to the U.S. Sanctions in a reciprocal manner.

Shortly after his phone call with the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with the PTT official to report on the substance of his call with the Russian Ambassador, including their discussion of the U.S. Sanctions.

On or about December 30, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin released a statement indicating that Russia would not take retaliatory measures in response to the U.S. Sanctions at that time.

On or about December 31, 2016, the Russian Ambassador called FLYNN and informed him that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to FL YNN’s request.

After his phone call with the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with senior members of the Presidential Transition Team about FL YNN’s conversations with the Russian Ambassador regarding the U.S. Sanctions and Russia’s decision not to escalate the situation.


We know Mueller has an email — one the transition probably didn’t turn over to Congress in voluntary discovery, and about which they may have intended to invoke executive privilege — that captures part of the discussion about sanctions. Of critical importance, the transition team opposed these sanctions for two reasons: 1) because they wanted better relations with Russia and 2) because they believed that sanctioning Russia for tampering with the election created the appearance that Trump wouldn’t have won without Russia’s help.

On Dec. 29, a transition adviser to Mr. Trump, K. T. McFarland, wrote in an email to a colleague that sanctions announced hours before by the Obama administration in retaliation for Russian election meddling were aimed at discrediting Mr. Trump’s victory. The sanctions could also make it much harder for Mr. Trump to ease tensions with Russia, “which has just thrown the U.S.A. election to him,” she wrote in the emails obtained by The Times.

[snip]

Mr. Obama, she wrote, was trying to “box Trump in diplomatically with Russia,” which could limit his options with other countries, including Iran and Syria. “Russia is key that unlocks door,” she wrote.


She also wrote that the sanctions over Russian election meddling were intended to “lure Trump in trap of saying something” in defense of Russia, and were aimed at “discrediting Trump’s victory by saying it was due to Russian interference.”

“If there is a tit-for-tat escalation Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown U.S.A. election to him,” she wrote.

In other words, Mueller has a good deal of evidence showing that Flynn’s actions were closely directed from Mar-A-Lago. He has multiple different versions from people involved about how closely Trump was involved in this direction. He also has substantial evidence that suggests that the worry about diminishing the victory idea actually comes from Trump. The question, then, aims not just to prove that Trump ordered Flynn to undermine the official policy of the United States at a time when he did not have the authority to set US foreign policy, but also to tie these orders to the response Trump took as FBI started discovering his conspiracy with the Russians.

JANUARY 11, 2017: WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT A 2017 MEETING IN SEYCHELLES INVOLVING ERIK PRINCE?

After Jared asked for a back channel, after UAE’s crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan made an unannounced visit to Trump Tower with Jared, Flynn, and Steve Bannon in December, Erik Prince ended up at a meeting in the Seychelles set up by Nahyan with Russian Direct Investment Fund head Kirill Dmitriev and a bunch of other shady funders. On top of looking like the back channel Jared had been seeking in December, the meeting is also a logical follow-on to Jared’s meeting with Gorkov (RDIF is a somewhat less sanctioned subsidiary of Vnesheconombank).

Mueller has George Nader’s testimony about what happened at this meeting, and probably a good deal of SIGINT, which reportedly shows that Erik Prince lied in his HPSCI testimony when he claimed his meeting with Dmitriev had been a chance encounter.

On or around January 11, 2017, I traveled to the Seychelles to meet with some potential customers from the UAE for the logistics business of which I am chairman. After the meeting, they mentioned a guy I should meet who was also in town to see them, a Kyrill Dmitriev from Russia, who ran some sort of hedge fund.

I met him in the hotel bar, and we chatted on topics ranging from oil and commodity prices to how much his country wished for resumption of normal trade relations with the — relationship with the USA
.

Even Prince’s testimony ties sanctions relief with policy considerations in Syria and elsewhere that countered the official policy of the US. And it likely also ties those policy considerations to the personal enrichment of people like Prince and Jared, if not Trump personally.

One note: by repeatedly pitching Trump and his associates using businesses under sanction, the Russians provided Trump with his own incentive to relieve sanctions, the opportunity for Russian investment.

LATE JANUARY, 2017: WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT A UKRAINIAN PEACE PROPOSAL PROVIDED TO MR. COHEN IN 2017?
In late January 2017, just after the inauguration, Ukrainian parliament member Andrii Artemenko met with Felix Sater and Michael Cohen to propose a peace deal for Ukraine that would have Ukrainian voters endorse a long term lease of Crimea for Russia and undermine the government of Petro Poroshenko. Cohen passed on the plan to Flynn just before he resigned. Sater — who claims to be cooperating with Mueller — said that the deal was endorsed by Russia.

Given Sater’s involvement in brokering both the Trump Tower deal and this with Cohen, it’s possible that this deal is another thing that ties policy concessions to Russia with business deals for Trump. Mueller will have both Sater and Flynn’s version of this story. Any records pertaining to it seized by SDNY will be preserved until such time as Mueller asks for them.

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

CNN’s timeline of investigative events

Majority HPSCI Report

Minority HPSCI Report

Trump Twitter Archive

NPR Timeline on Trump’s ties to Aras Agalarov

George Papadopoulos complaint

George Papadopoulos statement of the offense

Mike Flynn statement of the offense

Internet Research Agency indictment

Text of the Don Jr Trump Tower Meeting emails

Jared Kushner’s statement to Congress

Erik Prince HPSCI transcript
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/03/t ... art-three/






THE QUEST: TRUMP LEARNS OF THE INVESTIGATION (PART FOUR)


May 4, 2018/73 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel


In this series, I’m analyzing the Mueller questions as understood by Jay Sekulow and leaked to the NYT to show how they set up a more damning investigative framework than commentary has reflected.

This post laid out how the Agalarovs had been cultivating Trump for years, in part by dangling real estate deals and close ties with Vladimir Putin. This post shows how during the election, the Russians and Trump danced towards a quid pro quo agreement, with the Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange for a commitment to sanctions relief, with some policy considerations thrown in. This post laid out how, during the transition period, Trump’s team took a series of actions they attempted to keep secret that moved towards consummating the deal they had made with Russia, both in terms of policy concessions, particularly sanctions relief, and funding from Russian sources that could only be tapped if sanctions were lifted.

This post will look at Mueller’s reported investigative interest in Trump’s reaction to discovering the “Deep State” was investigating the election year operation, including the actions his team had tried to keep secret. Note, I have put all of the events leading up to Flynn’s firing here (not least because I think the firing itself often gets treated improperly as obstruction), though just some of the Jim Comey events. I will repeat the timeline of events in the next post, which overlaps temporally, for clarity.

JANUARY 6, 2017: WHAT WAS YOUR OPINION OF MR. COMEY DURING THE TRANSITION?

This is a baseline question for Trump’s firing of Jim Comey. At a minimum, Trump would need to explain his decision to keep Comey. It also provides Trump an opportunity to rebut Comey’s claim that, in the January 6 meeting, Trump told Comey he:

had conducted myself honorably and had a great reputation. He said I was repeatedly put in impossible positions. He said you saved her and then they hated you for what you did later, but what coice did you have? He said he thought very highly of me and looked forward to working with me, saying he hoped I planned to stay on. I assured him I intended to stay. He said good.


JANUARY 6, 2017: WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT MR. COMEY’S INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING ON JAN. 6, 2017, ABOUT RUSSIAN ELECTION INTERFERENCE?
One key detail Comey (and the other representatives of the intelligence community) would have detailed for Trump that day is not just that Russia interfered in the election, but their basis for concluding that “We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances,” a conclusion Republicans have objected to repeatedly.

In his book, but not his memos, Comey describes that immediately after the briefing, Trump first asked for assurances Russian interference hadn’t affected the outcome and then, with his team, started strategizing how to spin the conclusions so as to dismiss any outcome on the election.

‘I recall Trump listening without interrupting, and asking only one question, which was really more of a statement: “But you found there was no impact on the result, right?” The intelligence team said they had done no such analysis.

‘What I found telling was what Trump and his team didn’t ask. They were about to lead a country that had been attacked by a foreign adversary, yet they had no questions about what the future Russian threat might be.’

Instead, Trump and his team immediately started discussing how they would “spin” the information on Russia as if the intelligence officers were not in the room. ‘They were keen to emphasize that there was no impact on the vote, meaning that the Russians hadn’t elected Trump.’


This reflects the same concern expressed in the KT McFarland email from just days earlier (which probably reflected detailed Trump involvement) that acknowledging Russian involvement would “discredit[] Trump’s victory by saying it was due to Russian interference.”

JANUARY 6, 2017: WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO MR. COMEY’S BRIEFING THAT DAY ABOUT OTHER INTELLIGENCE MATTERS?
In its analysis of the questions, NYT takes this question to be exclusively about Comey’s briefing on the Steele dossier, and it may be. But in Obama’s January 5 briefing covering the same issues, according to Susan Rice, Comey and others discussed concerns about sharing classified information with the Trump team, especially Mike Flynn.

The memorandum to file drafted by Ambassador Rice memorialized an important national security discussion between President Obama and the FBI Director and the Deputy Attorney General. President Obama and his national security team were justifiably concerned about potential risks to the Nation’s security from sharing highly classified information about Russia with certain members of the Trump transition team, particularly Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.


Even though concerns about Flynn came up in that Obama briefing, the FBI counterintelligence investigation did not. It’s possible that this passage from Comey’s memo, which describes the main part of the briefing and not that part dedicated to the Steele dossier, pertained to the counterintelligence concerns about Flynn,which Obama had already shared with Trump the previous fall; such a warning may or may not have included Flynn’s conversations with Sergey Kislyak.

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If Comey briefed anything to do with Flynn, it would significantly change the importance of subsequent events.

As for the Steele dossier conversation, which surely is included with this question, Comey has claimed that Trump first tried to convince Comey is wasn’t true that he would need to “go there” to sleeping with prostitutes, “there were never prostitutes,” even though Trump’s reference to “the women who had falsely accused him of grabbing or touching them” actually undermined his defense.

Comey has also claimed that Trump seemed relieved when he said (in the context of the Steele briefing), that the FBI was not investigating him. Importantly, this took place after Comey had said he didn’t want people to claim the information came from the FBI.

I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them an excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold.

[snip]

I responded that we were not investigating him and the stuff might be totally made up but that it was being said out of Russia and our job was to protect the President from efforts to coerce him. I said we try to understand what the Russians are doing and what they might do. I added that I also wanted him to know this in case it came out in the media.

He said he was grateful for the conversation, said more nice things about me and how he looks forward to working with me and we departed the room.


JANUARY 12, 2017: WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO NEWS REPORTS ON JAN. 12, 2017?

On January 12, in the context of a discussion of Trump aiming for better relationships with Putin, David Ignatius reported revealed that Flynn had called Sergey Kislyak “several times,” asking whether but not asserting that it might be an attempt to undercut sanctions.

Trump said Wednesday that his relationship with President Vladimir Putin is “an asset, not a liability.” Fair enough, but until he’s president, Trump needs to let Obama manage U.S.-Russia policy.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, cultivates close Russian contacts. He has appeared on Russia Today and received a speaking fee from the cable network, which was described in last week’s unclassified intelligence briefing on Russian hacking as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”

According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act(though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.


The report neither revealed the FBI had intercepts of the conversation nor confirmed an investigation. But it may have alerted Trump that the actions he was probably a party to weeks earlier might have legal consequences.

JANUARY 24: FBI INTERVIEWS MIKE FLYNN AND HE LIES ABOUT TALKING ABOUT SANCTIONS

JANUARY 26 AND 27, 2017: WHAT DID YOU KNOW ABOUT SALLY YATES’S MEETINGS ABOUT MR. FLYNN?

According to Sally Yates’ public testimony, she met with Don McGahn to discuss Mike Flynn’s interview with the FBI on January 26, 2017. She framed it by describing that DOJ knew Mike Pence’s January 15 comments about Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak were not correct.

YATES: So I told them again that there were a number of press accounts of statements that had been made by the vice president and other high-ranking White House officials about General Flynn’s conduct that we knew to be untrue. And we told them how we knew that this – how we had this information, how we had acquired it, and how we knew that it was untrue.

And we walked the White House Counsel who also had an associate there with him through General Flynn’s underlying conduct, the contents of which I obviously cannot go through with you today because it’s classified. But we took him through in a fair amount of detail of the underlying conduct, what General Flynn had done, and then we walked through the various press accounts and how it had been falsely reported.

We also told the White House Counsel that General Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI on February [sic] 24. Mr. McGahn asked me how he did and I declined to give him an answer to that. And we then walked through with Mr. McGahn essentially why we were telling them about this and the first thing we did was to explain to Mr. McGahn that the underlying conduct that General Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself.

Secondly, we told him we felt like the vice president and others were entitled to know that the information that they were conveying to the American people wasn’t true. And we wanted to make it really clear right out of the gate that we were not accusing Vice President Pence of knowingly providing false information to the American people.

And, in fact, Mr. McGahn responded back to me to let me know that anything that General Flynn would’ve said would have been based — excuse me — anything that Vice President Pence would have said would have been based on what General Flynn had told him.

We told him the third reason was — is because we were concerned that the American people had been misled about the underlying conduct and what General Flynn had done, and additionally, that we weren’t the only ones that knew all of this, that the Russians also knew about what General Flynn had done.

And the Russians also knew that General Flynn had misled the vice president and others, because in the media accounts, it was clear from the vice president and others that they were repeating what General Flynn had told them, and that this was a problem because not only did we believe that the Russians knew this, but that they likely had proof of this information.

And that created a compromise situation, a situation where the national security adviser essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians. Finally, we told them that we were giving them all of this information so that they could take action, the action that they deemed appropriate.

I remember that Mr. McGahn asked me whether or not General Flynn should be fired, and I told him that that really wasn’t our call, that was up to them, but that we were giving them this information so that they could take action, and that was the first meeting.

Then there was a follow-up meeting on January 27. Among the five topics discussed, McGahn asked if Flynn was in legal jeopardy, and if “they” (presumably meaning he and the Associate WHCO in the meeting) could see the underlying intelligence.

WHITEHOUSE: Did you discuss criminal prosecution of Mr. Flynn — General Flynn?

YATES: My recollection is that did not really come up much in the first meeting. It did come up in the second meeting, when Mr. McGahn called me back the next morning and asked the — the morning after — this is the morning of the 27th, now — and asked me if I could come back to his office.

And so I went back with the NSD official, and there were essentially four topics that he wanted to discuss there, and one of those topics was precisely that. He asked about the applicability of certain statutes, certain criminal statutes and, more specifically,

[snip]

And there was a request made by Mr. McGahn, in the second meeting as to whether or not they would be able to look at the underlying evidence that we had that we had described for him of General Flynn’s conduct. And we told him that we were inclined to allow them to look at that underlying evidence, that we wanted to go back to DOJ and be able to make the logistical arrangements for that. This second meeting on the 27th occurred late in the afternoon, this is Friday the 27th. So we told him that we would work with the FBI over the weekend on this issue and get back with him on Monday morning. And I called him first thing Monday morning to let him know that we would allow them to come over and to review the underlying evidence.


By the time the materials for review became available on January 30, Yates had been fired, nominally because she refused to defend Trump’s Muslim ban.

The HPSCI report (particularly content newly unredacted on May 4; see PDF 63 ff) reveals there were several concerns about Flynn’s contradictory comments (which Republicans bizarrely present as conflict). First, there had been a counterintelligence investigation into Flynn still active in December 2016, though FBI may have been moving to shut it down. The interview may have been sparked by Logan Act concerns, or it may have been Flynn’s public comments to Pence (the Republican report ignores that this would pose a blackmail problem). Comey told HPSCI that the agents found Flynn — a lifetime intelligence officer — exhibited no physical signs of deceit, but made it clear the Agents did find his statements plainly conflicted with known facts.

When Mueller asks the President what he knew about the meetings, he likely wants to know (and already has answers from McGahn and likely the Associate) whether they told him about the Flynn interview, if so when, and in how much detail. If they did tell Trump, Mueller may also want to know about whether McGahn’s questions on the 27th (including whether Flynn was in legal jeopardy) reflect Trump’s own questions.

Obviously, one other subtext of this question pertains to whether Yates’ pursuit of Flynn contributed to her firing.

The other critical point about whether and what Trump knew of Yates’ meetings with McGahn: on January 27, he had his first creepy meeting with Jim Comey. Then, on January 28, he had his first phone call with Vladimir Putin, a call Flynn attended.

JANUARY 27, 2017: WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR JAN. 27, 2017, DINNER WITH MR. COMEY, AND WHAT WAS SAID?
At lunchtime on January 27 — so after McGahn had called Yates to set up a follow-up meeting and indicated concerns about Flynn’s legal jeopardy, but before that meeting happened — Trump called Comey and set up dinner that day. According to Comey, several minor things that would recur later came up, including questions about Andrew McCabe and Trump’s exposition of the Hillary email investigation.

In addition, five other key things happened at the meeting.

He invited the FBI to investigate “the Golden Showers” thing to prove it was a lie:

At this point, he turned to what he called “the golden showers thing”

[snip]

He said he had spoken to people who had been on the Miss Universe trip with him and they had reminded him that he didn’t stay over night in Russia for that. [this is not true]

[snip]

He said he thought maybe he should ask me to investigate the whole thing to prove it was a lie. I did not ask any questions. I replied that it was up to him, but I wouldn’t want to create a narrative that we were investigating him, because we were not and I worried such a thing would be misconstrued. Ii also said that is very difficult to disprove a lie. He said ‘maybe you’re right,’ but several times asked me to think about it and said he would also think about it.

He asked if the FBI leaks:

He asked whether the FBI leaks and I answered that of course in an organization of 36,000 we were going to have some of that, but I said I think the FBI leaks far less than people often say.


He asked if Comey wanted to keep his job, even though they had discussed it twice before:

He touched on my future at various points. The first time he asked “so what do you want to do,” explaining that lots of people wanted my job (“about 20 people”), that he thought very highly of me, but he would understand if I wanted to walk away given all I had been through, although he thought that would be bad for me personally because it would look like I had done something wrong, that he of course can make a change at FBI if he wants, but he wants to know what I think. There was no acknowledgement by him (or me) that we had already talked about this twice.

I responded by saying that he could fire me any time he wished, but that I wanted to stay and do a job I love to and think I am doing well.


He asked for loyalty:

He replied that he needed loyalty and expected loyalty.

[snip — this comes after the request for an investigation]

He then returned to loyalty, saying “I need loyalty.” I replied that he would always get honesty from me. He paused and said that’s what he wants, “honest loyalty.” I replied, “you will get that from me.”


He claimed to suspect Mike Flynn’s judgment because he had delayed in telling Trump about Putin’s congratulatory phone call:

He then went on to explain that he has serious reservations about Mike Flynn’s judgment and illustrated with a story from that day in which the President apparently discovered during his toast to Teresa May that [Vladimir Putin] had called four days ago. Apparently, as the President was toasting PM May, he was explaining that she had been the first to call him after his inauguration and Flynn interrupted to say that [Putin] had called (first, apparently). It was then that the President learned of [Putin’s] call and he confronted Flynn about it (not clear whether that was in the moment or after the lunch with PM May). Flynn said the return call was scheduled for Saturday, which prompted a heated reply from the President that six days was not an appropriate period of time to return a call from the [President] of a country like [Russia]. (“This isn’t [redacted] we are talking about.”) He said that if he called [redacted] and didn’t get a return call for six days he would be very upset. In telling the story, the President pointed his fingers at his head and said “the guy has serious judgment issues.” I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgement of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn.


Trump would be hard pressed to argue the meeting was unrelated to the Yates meeting and the FBI investigation. Which would mean one thing Trump did — in a meeting where he also lied to claim he hadn’t had sex in Moscow — was to disclaim prior knowledge of the Putin meeting the next day (even while emphasizing the import of it).

Of course, the claim he thought Flynn had poor judgment didn’t lead him to keep Flynn out of the phone call with Putin the next day.

JANUARY 28: TRUMP, PENCE, FLYNN, PRIEBUS, BANNON, AND SPICER PHONE VLADIMIR PUTIN

FEBRUARY 9, 2017: WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO NEWS REPORTS ON FEB. 8-9, 2017?

According to Jim Comey, he went for a meet and greet with Reince Priebus on February 8. While he was waiting, Mike Flynn sat down to chat with him though didn’t mention the FBI interview. Then, after clarifying that the conversation with Comey was a “private conversation,” he asked if there was a FISA order on Flynn. Comey appears to have answered in the negative. Priebus then took Comey in to meet with Trump, who defended his answer in an interview with Bill O’Reilly released on February 6) that “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” After Comey criticized that part of the answer, Trump, “clearly noticed I had directly criticized him.” (h/t TC for reminding me to add this.) Since Yates had told McGahn how they knew Flynn had lied, Priebus’ question about a FISA order suggests the White House was trying to find out whether the collection was just incidental, or whether both sides of all Flynn’s conversations would have been picked up.

On February 9, the WaPo reported that Flynn had discussed sanctions, in spite of public denials from the White House that he had.

National security adviser Michael Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were interpreted by some senior U.S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.

Flynn on Wednesday [February 8] denied that he had discussed sanctions with Kislyak. Asked in an interview whether he had ever done so, he twice said, “No.”

On Thursday [February 9], Flynn, through his spokesman, backed away from the denial. The spokesman said Flynn “indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

Officials said this week that the FBI is continuing to examine Flynn’s communications with Kislyak. Several officials emphasized that while sanctions were discussed, they did not see evidence that Flynn had an intent to convey an explicit promise to take action after the inauguration.


In addition to tracking Flynn’s changing claims, it also noted that on January 15, Mike Pence had denied both any discussion of sanctions in the December call and discussions with Russia during the campaign.

On February 10, Trump was asked by reporters about Flynn’s answer. Trump played dumb: “I don’t know about that. I haven’t seen it. What report is that? I haven’t seen that. I’ll look into that.” (h/t TC)

Presumably, Mueller wants to know how surprised Trump was about this story (which actually builds on whether McGahn told him about the Yates conversation). But given Trump’s earlier question about FBI leaks, I also wonder whether Mueller knows that Trump knew this was coming. That is, some of the leaks may have come from closer to the White House, as an excuse to fire Flynn, using the same emphasis that the story (and Yates) had: the claim that Flynn had lied to Pence.

Except Mueller probably knows that the effort to soothe Russia’s concerns about sanctions made in December were a surprise to few top aides in the White House, least of all Trump.

FEBRUARY 13, 2017: HOW WAS THE DECISION MADE TO FIRE MR. FLYNN ON FEB. 13, 2017?

We have remarkably little reporting on how and why Flynn was actually fired — mostly just the cover story that it was because Flynn lied to Pence — though after Flynn flipped last year, Trump newly claimed he had to fire Flynn because he lied to the FBI (something that, if the claims about the original 302 are correct, FBI hadn’t concluded at the time Trump fired him).

Image

The thing is, neither story makes sense. It’s virtually certain that many people in the White House knew what Flynn had said to Sergey Kislyak back in December 2016; Tom Bossert was included in KT McFarland’s emails to Mike Flynn, and he sent it to Reince Priebus, Stephen Bannon, Sean Spicer, and at least two other people. All of those people, save Bossert, are known to have provided testimony to Mueller’s team.

But it also makes little sense to argue that Trump had to fire Flynn because he lied. If so, he would have done so either immediately, before the Putin meeting, or much later, after FBI actually came to the conclusion he had lied.

One logical explanation is that Flynn lied because he was told to lie, in an effort to continue to hide what the Trump Administration was doing in the transition period to pay off its debts to Russia. But faced with the prospect that the FBI would continue to investigate Flynn, Trump cut him out in an effort to end the investigation. Which explains why things with Comey proceeded the way they did.

Update: This post has been updated with new details surrounding February 8-10 and newly unredacted details from the HPSCI report.

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

CNN’s timeline of investigative events

Majority HPSCI Report

Minority HPSCI Report

Trump Twitter Archive

Jim Comey written statement, June 8, 2017

Comey memos

Sally Yates and James Clapper Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, May 8, 2017

NPR Timeline on Trump’s ties to Aras Agalarov

George Papadopoulos complaint

George Papadopoulos statement of the offense

Mike Flynn statement of the offense

Internet Research Agency indictment

Text of the Don Jr Trump Tower Meeting emails

Jared Kushner’s statement to Congress

Erik Prince HPSCI transcript
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/04/t ... part-four/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 7:44 am

Image
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Nunes, in spat with Justice Department, threatens Sessions with contempt over Russia materials

Nunes threatens to hold Sessions in contempt

By Laura Jarrett, CNN
Updated 3:26 PM ET, Sun May 6, 2018

(CNN)House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes warned Sunday that he plans to urge lawmakers "this week" to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt of Congress for failing to hand over classified materials related to the Russia investigation.

But the Justice Department informed Nunes three days ago -- on the deadline for responding to a subpoena from Nunes' committee -- that providing the information on a "specific individual" could pose grave implications for national security, according to a letter obtained by CNN.

"Disclosure of responsive information to such requests can risk severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives, damage to relationships with valued international partners, compromise of ongoing criminal investigations, and interference with intelligence activities," wrote Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, who heads the Justice Department's Office of Legislative Affairs.

It was not immediately clear why Nunes has targeted Sessions. A source familiar with the matter said that the request falls squarely within Sessions' recusal from all materials related to the Russia investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has been fielding the document requests in his place.

Nunes has not described precisely what information he's seeking, but he said Sunday on "Fox and Friends" that it's "very important."

"We're just not going to take this nonsense of every time we peel something back, every time we need information, we get ignored, we get stalled or stonewalled," Nunes said.

The Justice Department and the California Republican have been down this road before. CNN reported Friday that Nunes threatened to hold Justice Department officials in contempt of Congress on several occasions for failing to turn over sensitive documents related to the Russia investigation only to not read the materials once they were made available to him.
When asked about CNN's reporting by Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Friday evening, Nunes said he wouldn't play "process games" or discuss "specifics about how we conduct our investigation," emphasizing that Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina has read them instead, which CNN has reported.

Despite not reading the documents, Nunes' past threats, with the backing of the White House and House Speaker Paul Ryan, have resulted in the Justice Department making a significant amount of classified materials related to the Russia investigation available to lawmakers, including the document that formally authorized the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the controversial surveillance warrants on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, and the records related to the infamous dossier on Trump and Russia.
This time, the Justice Department appears to have the backing of the White House in resisting Nunes' request -- at least for now.

Boyd's letter makes clear that the Justice Department determined after consulting with the White House, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence that it was "not in a position to provide information responsive to your request regarding a specific individual."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/06/politics ... index.html



House Democrats Plan to Release 3,000 Russian-Linked Facebook Ads

Lawmakers on House Intelligence Committee could release trove of ads as soon as this week

Byron Tau Updated May 6, 2018 9:28 p.m. ET
The House Intelligence Committee displayed images of some of the Russian-linked Facebook pages in November. Privacy considerations prevented the panel from displaying many of the pages and ads.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-demo ... 1525650705
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 7:46 am

Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Julian Borger
Last modified on Sat 5 May 2018 17.11 EDT

Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”

Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”

Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli television, describing how Iran has continued with its plans to make nuclear weapons.
Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli television, describing how Iran has continued with its plans to make nuclear weapons. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA
According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

Although sources have confirmed that contact and an initial plan of attack was provided to private investigators by representatives of Trump, it is not clear how much work was actually undertaken, for how long or what became of any material unearthed.

Neither is it known if the black ops constituted only a strand of a wider Trump-Netanyahu collaboration to undermine the deal or if investigators targeted other individuals such as John Kerry, the lead American signatory to the deal. Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them. Rhodes said: “I was not aware, though sadly am not surprised. I would say that digging up dirt on someone for carrying out their professional responsibilities in their positions as White House officials is a chillingly authoritarian thing to do.”

A spokesman for the White House’s national security council offered “no comment” when approached. However, the revelations are not the first time that claims of “dirty tricks” have been aimed at the Trump camp. Special counsel Robert Mueller is leading an investigation into apparent attempts by Trump’s inner-circle to dig up damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Of particular interest is a meeting involving the US president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information about Clinton.

Trump has repeatedly signalled his intention to scrap the Iran deal, denouncing it as “the worst deal ever.” In a January speech the US president accused his predecessor of having “curried favour with the Iranian regime in order to push through the disastrously flawed Iran nuclear deal.”

Last Monday, Netanyahu, accused Iran of continuing to hide and expand its nuclear weapons know-how after the 2015 deal, presenting what he claimed was “new and conclusive proof” of violations.

However, European powers including Britain responded by saying the Israeli prime minister’s claims reinforced the need to keep the deal.

On Thursday the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres urged Trump not to walk away from the deal, warning that there was a real risk of war if the 2015 agreement was not preserved. The following day details emerged of some unusual shadow diplomacy by Kerry, meeting a top-ranking Iranian official in New York to discuss how to preserve the deal.

It was the second time in around two months that Kerry had met foreign minister Javad Zarif to apparently strategise over rescuing a pact they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration. Straw, who was foreign secretary between 2001 and 2006, said: “The campaign against the JCPOA has been characterised by abuse and misinformation. It is the best chance of ensuring Iran never develops a nuclear weapons programme, and it is insane to suggest abandoning the deal could do anything but endanger international security.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... CMP=twt_gu



If Trump was willing to contract a foreign intelligence service to undermine U.S. policy as president, do you really think he wouldn't be willing to work with a foreign government to undermine his opponent as a presidential candidate?


((MRW))

So, Trump literally tore a page from the Putin Propaganda PlaybSo, Trump literally tore a page from the Putin Propaganda Playbook in a scheme (w. a foreign country) to deliberately lie to the American people and undermine the Iran deal. If that's not violating your oath and blatant corruption, please, tell me what is.


Norm Eisen

There’s a reason this has not happened since Nixon. It exposes the Trump aides to criminal and civil liability, depending on the nature of the “dirty ops,” see eg 18 USC 242, 50 USC 1809, 42 USC 1983. Team Trump is out of control. Expect an investigation.



Colin Kahl


<THREAD> According to this story, in May of last year, Team Trump asked an Israeli intel firm to dig up dirt on me as part of an effort to discredit the Iran deal.

Tonight, as my wife read this story, that date triggered a very creepy memory.


Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Julian BorgerLast modified on Sat 5 May 2018 20.04 EDT
Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran



Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. 2/10



This "UK person" said "she" was flying to DC soon and wanted to have coffee with my wife to discuss the possibility of including my daughter's school in their educational fund network. 3/10


This was not a generic "Nigerian prince" scam. This person had all sorts of specific information on my wife's volunteer duties at an obscure DC elementary school. 4/10


There was a website for the firm (which no longer exists, by the way), but it had no depth to it, and there was no detailed information about the "UK person" who reached out to my wife. 5/10


My wife shared the email with me and a few people we know in both the finance and education fields. All agreed that the entire scenario seemed implausible and seemed like an approach by a foreign intelligence entity. 6/10

To test the implausibility, my wife kept trying to encourage the "UK person" over email to meet with other school fundraising officers & leadership while "she" was in DC, providing relevant contact info. But the "UK person" kept insisting that "she" had to meet with my wife. 7/10


At that point, my wife stopped corresponding.

This all happened in late May and early June of last year. 8/10



Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this obvious scam targeting my family had all the hallmarks of an intel op and coincided with Team Trump's reported efforts to "dig up dirt" on me. 9/10


But the fact that I even have to think about the possibility that my family was targeted by people working for the President is yet another sign of the fundamental degradation of our country that Trump has produced. 10/10



Laura Rozen

Thread. Sounds like MO used by Black Cube as documented in Ronan Farrow Weinstein exposeLaura Rozen added,
Colin Kahl

Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. 2/10

Confirmed with @ColinKahl same fake firm name used to approach his wife that Black Cube used to try to suppress Harvey Weinstein stories

Fake firm that approached @ColinKahl wife (left). same fake firm per @RonanFarrow that went after weinstein accusers https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... y-of-spies
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Odds that Reuben Cap’ls (alias) “Adriana Gavrilo”= (aliases) “Diana Filip”/“Ana” =Stella Penn Pechanac?
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/former- ... -1.5464301 … @ColinKahl
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https://twitter.com/True_Benefits/statu ... 0284057602



Amichai Stein

Verified account

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#BREAKING: Full Black Cube comment on the reports they were the company hired by Trump admin officials to spy & dig dirt on @brhodes & @ColinKahl: "Our policy is never discuss, confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company’s

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work"https://twitter.com/AmichaiStein1/status/993220970575007747


Israeli Spy Firm Black Cube Denies Trump Aides Hired It to Discredit ex-Obama Officials

The private intelligence company, however, does not deny or confirm that it was hired by Harvey Weinstein in a separate case

Amir Tibon (Washington) May 06, 2018 8:37 PM

WASHINGTON — Israeli private intelligence company Black Cube strongly denied Sunday that it was hired by aides to U.S. President Donald Trump to spy on former Obama administration officials.

The denial comes a day after The Observer reported that an Israeli intelligence firm had been hired by Trump’s aides to spy on former Obama administration officials who helped craft the Iranian nuclear deal.

“Black Cube had nothing to do with this,” a spokesman for the company told Haaretz, adding that any claims to the contrary were “false.”

On Sunday, a potential connection to Black Cube was offered by American journalist Laura Rozen.

Writing on Twitter, the Washington-based reporter said a fake company that was allegedly used by Black Cube to spy on complainants against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was also used to contact the wife of Colin Kahl, a former national security official in the Obama administration.

Kahl, who was national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, wrote on Twitter Saturday that his wife was contacted last year by a woman supposedly representing a British financial firm in order to discuss possible contributions to his children’s school.

The woman contacted his wife around the time the Israeli intelligence firm was allegedly hired by the Trump aides to “get dirt” on former Obama administration officials, including Kahl.

According to Kahl, the woman tried to arrange a meeting with his wife but gave up after Kahl’s wife insisted that she contact other people at the school besides her.

Rozen tweeted that she had confirmed with Kahl that the woman who contacted his wife presented herself as an employee of Reuben Capital Partners, a financial firm based in London.

The name Reuben Capital Partners was first mentioned in a New Yorker story last year detailing Weinstein’s attempts to spy on women accusing him of sexual assault. The New Yorker report, which won a Pulitzer Prize, described Reuben Capital Partners as a fake company used by Black Cube, which was hired by Weinstein to spy on his victims and stop them from complaining about his conduct.

While Black Cube denied any connection to the Trump-Obama-Iran issue, the company did not deny or confirm that it was hired by Weinstein, nor did it deny or confirm The New Yorker’s claim about using a Reuben Capital Partners as a front company.

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premiu ... -1.6060707


Vincent Tchenguiz settles Black Cube legal dispute

Simon BowersMon 22 Apr 2013 10.02 EDT
Hearing to determine claims and counterclaims halted after tycoon settles fraud wrangle with Israeli intelligence experts

Mayfair investment tycoon Vincent Tchenguiz has settled a dispute with a band of former Israeli intelligence operatives who had been at the heart of his activities.

The intelligence experts, trading as Black Cube, became important figures in Tchenguiz's inner circle as he pursued international legal claims after the failure of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing in 2008, an event that threatened much of his business empire.

It emerged last week that Tchenguiz, a Conservative party donor, had thrown Black Cube staff out of his Park Lane office and nearby £15m home in February, accusing them of "a wholesale fraud … for a prolonged period". They, in turn, claimed he had breached a contract and left £330,000 in bills unpaid.

Last week the Guardian revealed his employees had secretly recorded private discussions between senior Black Cube executives, attempting to build evidence of alleged fraud.

Tchenguiz had filed a legal claim in Israel against them; meanwhile, Black Cube lodged a claim in the British courts against him.

A hearing to determine where the claims and counterclaims should be heard had been due to take place in London on Monday morning, but was called off at the last minute when a settlement was reach at the weekend and the lawsuits dropped.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed but include an undertaking not to discuss further details with the media.

Lawyers for Tchenguiz said in court filings that £820,000 had been paid to Black Cube over 13 months, suggesting this sum was provided for "open source intelligence".

Black Cube describes itself as providing creative intelligence, and operates out of London and Tel Aviv.

Vincent and his brother, Robert Tchenguiz, had been among the biggest borrowers from Kaupthing and, with the help of Black Cube, they fought a series of disputes over what loan collateral they should surrender to the bank's administrators.

At issue had been interests in Vincent Tchenguiz's £2bn UK residential property ground rent portfolio and the company once behind Peverel property management operations. Stakes Robert Tchenguiz had built in J Sainsbury and Mitchells & Butlers, as well as proceeds from the £1.56bn sale of Somerfield supermarkets, had also been claimed as loan security by Kaupthing administrators.

Black Cube also helped successfully demonstrate that a Serious Fraud Office corruption case – examining the brothers' relationship with former senior Kaupthing bankers – was flawed and that grounds for suspecting Vincent Tchenguiz were entirely misunderstood and baseless.

The investigation into the brothers, as well as former Kaupthing bankers, was dropped last year and Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz are seeking £300m in damages from UK taxpayers.
http://www.newsweek.com/mueller-has-all ... ays-910777
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 8:29 am


ColinKahl

Interestingly, around the same time the Israeli firm was hired, senior White House aides began complaining to Fox News about a “Ben Rhodes-Colin Kahl Nexus” that was supposedly organizing opposition to the administration. https://twitter.com/foxandfriends/statu ... bb44a72ec6

About a month after the Israeli firm was allegedly hired, anonymous White House officials reached out to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing tabloid, to smear Ben & me with baseless & false accusations. Notice the Israel angle to this piece.
http://freebeacon.com/national-security ... perations/



As the summer wore on, senior White House aides pushed a narrative that Ben and I were solely responsible for turmoil across the Middle East.
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-tru ... ors-2017-7

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And, in July, when Trump became frustrated that he didn’t have more options to ditch the Iran nuclear deal, he turned to the same White House aides obsessed with Ben & me for alternatives. http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/21/tru ... epartment/ … 8/10
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So here’s the SECOND thing we know: Some senior aides to the President were obsessed with Ben and me, and were seeking to smear us, around the same time the Israeli firm was tasked by someone to dig up dirt on us and our families.


Did these same Trump aides—or outside people they contacted—have any connections to Black Cube?

It’s unclear. Maybe it is all a coincidence. But it’s a creepy one…and one worth further investigation.

PS: The connection between the allegations in the Guardian piece and Black Cube was originally noted by @lrozen in this thread. https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/993135519767977984
Laura Rozen

On Reuben Capital Partners, cover firm used in op to suppress negative Harvey Weinstein stories, per New Yorker, &in email to Kahl’s wife
https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/993180693743263746



Mueller Has All the Trump Campaign’s Texts and Documents, Former Aide Michael Caputo Says

By Josh Keefe On 5/4/18 at 10:32 AM
Former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo said Thursday special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has all the text messages from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, as well as all the campaign's documents.

“They have all the documents that were produced,” Caputo told Fox News Thursday. “They’ve got further documentation from people who worked outside the campaign — their emails, their texts. They have the entire campaign’s texts.”

Caputo, a longtime political consultant, was interviewed on Wednesday by Mueller’s team, which is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Caputo resigned from the campaign in June 2016 after celebrating the firing of then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in a tweet. He told The Buffalo News at the time the tweet was an “unforced error” and by resigning he was “falling on his sword.”


Despite saying Mueller’s team had all the documents and texts produced by the campaign, Caputo told Fox News that “it doesn't sound like" the team has found proof of collusion.

Caputo has been an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation. On Tuesday, he told a panel of Senate investigators, “You’re the swamp,” and called for “an investigation of the investigators,” according to the Washington Examiner.

Caputo has said he expects to pay at least $125,000 in legal fees as part of the Russian investigation. On Tuesday, he took his anger about those mounting legal fees out on the Senate intelligence committee.

Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

“Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election,” Caputo said. “I want to know because God damn you to hell."

Caputo knows Russia well. In the 1990s, he advised then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin on election law and opened a public relations firm in Russia to help Western companies transition there. In the early 2000s, he did work for Gazprom Media, which supported President Vladimir Putin.

“I returned to the United States after Putin ascended in 2000,” he told the National Review.

In 2004, he wrote a Washington Post op-ed about the murder of his friend American journalist Paul Klebnikov in Moscow.

“Russia hasn't changed in the past decade and at this trajectory it won't be truly civilized for generations,” Caputo wrote. “Those who killed Klebnikov are killing today, plan to kill tomorrow, and know they'll roam free to kill for years to come.”
http://www.newsweek.com/mueller-has-all ... ays-910777
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 11:27 am

Dr. Dena Grayson

Evidence mounts that Donald Trump hired #BlackCube, an Israeli "security" company run by former Mossad agents, to **SPY on former Obama officials** involved with the #Iran deal

If Trump authorized this, WHO PAID FOR THIS



Ronan Farrow

Operatives from the Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube used false identities to track & dig up dirt—even sexual blackmail material—on Obama officials behind the Iran deal. Pages of docs & sources close to the effort show how




Laura Rozen

Source close to Black Cube tells @haaretzcom it was hired by business entity

Spying on Obama Officials: Israeli Black Cube Says It Was Hired by Business Entity, Not Trump
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.pr ... -1.6063162

Source close to company said the purpose of its data collection was to serve the client’s business or legal interests...2/

correspondence regarding Iran nuclear issues related to the business interests of the client who hired the spy firm. 3/

He added that neither the Iranian nuclear program nor Obama associates were at the heart of the intel gathering operation 4/

Any mention of them was intended purely to buy the trust of the parties in order 2 obtain info not connected to Iran https://www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news ... -1.6063162


So Black Cube spied on Kahl and Rhodes’ wives in order to further its client’s non Iran related business/legal interests?

Whose business or legal interests in the spring of 2017 would have felt threatened by Kahl and Rhodes, that was only peripherally abt Iran?

I'll put some money down on X-Co/IronBridge.

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Throwing stuff out there: Erik Prince thought “Obama holdovers” leaked Seychelles meeting to WaPo in April 2017 that blew up his

attempted reconciliation with MBZ.

Doubt it was just business competing with Iran exports. It was entity whose leadership paranoid that leaking it thought coordinated by

cunning ex Obama aides was threatening its prospects or opportunities and or causing it legal troubles.
https://twitter.com/TheViewFromLL2/stat ... 9806043136
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 12:27 pm

SCOOP: It appears KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK set up a lobbying firm in Washington, DC, Incorporation Date: Feb 19, 2015, using Legalinc Corporate Services.

(legalinc.com)

No apparent active/inactive FARA filing for Kilimnik or Begemot Ventures International.
(Mini-Thread) /1

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Konstantin Kilimnik's Begemot Ventures International: A strategic & political advisory firm that helps its clients win elections, strengthen political parties, build the right arguments before domestic & international audiences & achieve better results.
Home
https://www.begemotventures.com/
/2
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Begemot Ventures International, LLC.

Directors & Officers:
- Carri Brown (cc: Journalists & @FBI)
- Konstantin Kilimnik

The company's registered address is apparently a residential multifamily home.

1225 Constitution Ave NE,
Washington, DC, 20002
(opencorporates.com/companies/us_d…) /3

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The Russian word Begemot (Бегемот) means hippopotamus but also refers to the legendary biblical monster Behemoth. Behemoth is also a character with a penchant for chess, vodka, pistols, & obnoxious sarcasm from the novel The Master & Margarita by Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov /4

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In Mikhail Bulgakov's book, Behemoth is depicted as a huge black cat that is known for his many ill-timed jokes which he never stops telling.

The cat below was taken from the Begemot Ventures International website. An apparent calling card & thumbing of the nose by Kilimnick. /5

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It appears the Daily Beast read this thread, did a DC property tax record search for the address above, found the owner & then googled the owner to find his website. That's good but, among others...they didn't answer the question: Why?

Soon, Patriots. /6
Accused Russian Intel Asset Teamed Up With GOP Operative
Konstantin Kilimnik found himself a partner in Sam Patten, a lobbyist and political hand who just happens to have worked previously for Cambridge Analytica.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/accused-r ... perative-3
Annnd here it Patriots: Why would GOP Lobbyist Sam Patten allow a self-admitted GRU Agent, Konstantin Kilimnik, to use his home address for their joint venture?

This new piece answers that question, and others. /7
A Suspected Russian Spy, With Curious Ties to Washington
A longtime Republican operative has been in contact with a suspected Russian intelligence agent for nearly two decades. What does it mean for Robert Mueller's investigation?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... py/557438/
Serhiy Lyovochkin—former chief of staff to ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who hired Manafort to rebrand the pro-Russia Party of Regions in 2014—brought Patten onto Klitschko’s team, Ukrainian media reported at the time. /8
m.kievvlast.com.ua/text/mayor_of_…

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Dmitry Firtash, a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch with ties to Manafort, known for bankrolling pro-Russia candidates in Ukraine, boasted that he brokered Klitschko’s campaign.

"We got the result we wanted, Poroshenko as president, Klitschko as mayor.” /9

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Фирташ рассказал о своей роли в победе Порошенко и Кличко на выборах
Бизнесмен Дмитрий Фирташ заявил, что он лично был причастен к тому, что Петр Порошенко стал президентом Украины, а Виталий Кличко — мэром Киева. Он также обвинил в потере Крыма премьер-министра Арсен…
https://www.rbc.ru/politics/30/04/2015/ ... 646d638717


Dmitry Firtash previously conspired with the notorious Solntsevskaya Bratva Don Mogilevich.

“He acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich's approval to get into business in the first place.” /10
wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/0…

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Security of Assets

“Previously Sam Patten had been working in the team of American lobbyist & political consultant Paul Manafort...Testimony in Vienna court revealed, meetings of Poroshenko, Firtash & Klitschko were also attended by Serhiy Lyovochkin” /11
m.kievvlast.com.ua/text/mayor_of_…

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Aside from 2015, Sam Patten had worked in Ukraine before, between 2005-2010, for President Viktor Yushchenko, a survivor of a 2004 Dioxin poisoning that was likely orchestrated by Vladimir Putin.

In 2005, Yushchenko fired PM Tymoshenko & installed Viktor Yanukovych in 2006. /12

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On February 2, 2006, Sam Patten was in DC with self-admitted GRU agent Rinat Akhmetshin, of the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

Perhaps they discussed Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, as Akhmetishin was quoted by WaPo & NYTimes months later with scathing critiques. /13

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More to come on this same thread very soon, we’re just getting warmed up.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/9798 ... 42561.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 12:34 pm

you've heard the right wing talking points .....now you can read reality


Schiff: Judge's comments on Mueller probe won't stop Manafort case

Schiff: Mueller will prevail in Manafort case
Washington (CNN)The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that he does not believe critical comments from a federal judge in Virginia will ultimately stop the special counsel's case against Paul Manafort.

"While, you know, it's certainly within the judge's prerogative to ask these questions, I don't think it really bears on the legal issues," California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on CNN's "State of the Union."

On Friday, District Judge T.S. Ellis caught the attention of many, including President Donald Trump, when he said special counsel Robert Mueller's team was interested in going after Trump's former campaign manager in a bank fraud case in order to get at Trump. Mueller's team is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and any potential ties between Russia and Trump campaign associates.
Schiff questioned some of Ellis' statements, adding that nevertheless, Mueller's decisions on who to charge rested on firm legal ground.

"I'm not sure that it's germane, for example, for the judge to be asking how much Bob Mueller has spent on the investigation," Schiff said. "It's appropriate to ask about the scope of what Bob Mueller is doing, but he is well within the scope of his jurisdiction in charging Manafort and (former national security adviser Michael) Flynn and the others."

Ellis' pointed comments came after Manafort asked the judge to review Mueller's authority to bring charges in an investigation that began well before the special counsel's appointment and focused on actions years before the campaign.

Schiff said that although he was concerned about the judge's statements, he believed Mueller would nevertheless prevail.

"I think that Bob Mueller will prevail in the sense of being able to go forward with this litigation," Schiff said. "I don't think there's really any legal question about that. But yes, it is concerning that the judge would express this opinion"

Pro-Trump attorney Joseph diGenova highlighted the comments from Ellis at length on "Fox News Sunday," calling it the beginning of a "national civics lesson."

DiGenova, who had been considered for Trump's legal team handling the Russia probe, did not think the judge would necessarily toss the case against Manafort out. However, he said Ellis could possibly prevent the inclusion of evidence seized during a raid on Manafort's home, which diGenova called improper.
"Judge Ellis may very well not dismiss the case," diGenova said. "But he could also exclude from evidence anything seized in that outrageous raid of Paul Manafort's house."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/06/politics ... index.html


THE SEKULOW QUESTIONS, PART FIVE: ATTEMPTING A COVER-UP BY FIRING COMEY

May 7, 2018/0 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by empty wheel

In this series, I have been showing a framework for the investigation that the Mueller questions, as imagined by Jay Sekulow, maps out. Thus far I have shown:

Russians, led by the Aras Agalarov and his son, cultivated Trump for years by dangling two things: real estate deals and close ties with Vladimir Putin.
During the election, the Russians and Trump appear to have danced towards a quid pro quo agreement, with the Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange for a commitment to sanctions relief, with some policy considerations thrown in.
During the transition period, Trump’s team took a series of actions that moved towards consummating the deal they had made with Russia, both in terms of policy concessions, particularly sanctions relief, and funding from Russian sources that could only be tapped if sanctions were lifted. The Trump team took measures to keep those actions secret.
Starting in January 2017, Trump came to learn that FBI was investigating Mike Flynn. His real reasons for firing Flynn remain unreported, but it appears he had some concerns that the investigation into Flynn would expose him.
This post lays out the questions on obstruction that lead up to Comey’s firing on May 9, 2017.

FEBRUARY 14, 2017: WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR FEB. 14, 2017, MEETING WITH MR. COMEY, AND WHAT WAS SAID?
On February 13, Trump fired Mike Flynn. The explanation he gave was one of the concerns Sally Yates had given to Don McGahn when she told him about the interview, that Flynn had lied to Mike Pence about having discussed sanctions relief with Sergey Kislyak on December 29, 2016. Except, coming from Trump, that excuse makes no sense, both because he had already shown he didn’t care about the counterintelligence implications of that lie by including Flynn in the January 28 phone call with Putin and other sensitive meetings. But also because at least seven people in the White House knew what occurred in Flynn’s calls, and Pence probably did too.

Against that backdrop, the next day, Trump had Jim Comey stay late after an oval office meeting so he could ask him to drop the investigation into Flynn. Leading up to this meeting, Trump had already:

Asked Comey to investigate the pee tape allegations so he could exonerate the President
Asked if FBI leaks
Asked if Comey was loyal shortly after asking him, for the third time, if he wanted to keep his job
Claimed he distrusted Flynn’s judgment because he had delayed telling Trump about a congratulatory call from Putin
After Trump asked everyone in the meeting to leave him and Comey alone, both Jeff Sessions and Jared Kushner linger.

While the description of this meeting usually focuses on the Flynn discussion, according to Comey’s discussion, it also focused closely on leaks, which shows how Trump linked the two in his mind.

Here’s what Comey claims Trump said about Flynn:

He began by saying he wanted to “talk about Mike Flynn.” He then said that, although Flynn “hadn’t done anything wrong” in his call with the Russians (a point he made at least two more times in the conversation), he had to let him go because he misled the Vice President, whom he described as “a good guy.” He explained that he just couldn’t have Flynn misleading the vice President and, in any event, he had other concerns about Flynn, and had a great guy coming in, so he had to let Flynn go.

[a discussion of Sean Spicer’s presser explaining the firing and another about the leaks of his calls to Mexican and Australian leaders]

He then referred at length to the leaks relating to Mike Flynn’s call with the Russians, which he stressed was not wrong in any way (“he made lots of calls”), but that the leaks were terrible.

[Comey’s agreement with Trump about the problem with leaks, but also his explanation that the leaks may not have been FBI; Reince Priebus tries to interrupt but Trump sends him away for a minute or two]

He then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying that Flynn is a good guy, and has been through a lot. He misled the Vice President but he didn’t do anything wrong on the call. He said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied by saying, “I agree he is a good guy,” but said no more.

In addition to providing Trump an opportunity to rebut Comey, asking this question might aim to understand the real reason Trump fired Flynn.

MARCH 2, 2017: WHAT DID YOU THINK AND DO REGARDING THE RECUSAL OF MR. SESSIONS? WHAT EFFORTS DID YOU MAKE TO TRY TO GET HIM TO CHANGE HIS MIND? DID YOU DISCUSS WHETHER MR. SESSIONS WOULD PROTECT YOU, AND REFERENCE PAST ATTORNEYS GENERAL?

On March 2, citing consultations with senior department officials, Sessions recused himself “from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States,” while noting that, “This announcement should not be interpreted as confirmation of the existence of any investigation or suggestive of the scope of any such investigation.” At that point, Dana Boente became Acting Attorney General for the investigation.

Note that this question isn’t just about Trump’s response to Sessions’ recusal. That’s likely because even before Sessions recused, Trump got Don McGahn to try to pressure the Attorney General not to do so. He also called Comey the night before and “talked about Sessions a bit.” When Sessions ultimately did recuse, Trump had a blow-up in which he expressed a belief that Attorneys General should protect their president.

[T]he president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump then asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”


In the days after the Sessions recusal, Trump also kicked off the year-long panic about being wiretapped.

On Thursday, Jeff Sessions recused from the election-related parts of this investigation. In response, Trump went on a rant (inside the White House) reported to be as angry as any since he became President. The next morning, Trump responded to a Breitbart article alleging a coup by making accusations that suggest any wiretaps involved in this investigation would be improper. Having reframed wiretaps that would be targeted at Russian spies as illegitimate, Trump then invited Nunes to explore any surveillance of campaign officials, even that not directly tied to Trump himself.

And Nunes obliged.


Don McGahn and Jeff Sessions, among others, have already provided their side of this story to Mueller’s team.

MARCH 2 TO MARCH 20, 2017: WHAT DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE F.B.I.’S INVESTIGATION INTO MR. FLYNN AND RUSSIA IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO MR. COMEY’S TESTIMONY ON MARCH 20, 2017?

As Sekulow has recorded Mueller’s question, the special counsel wants to know what Trump already knew of the investigation into Mike Flynn before Comey publicly confirmed it in Congressional testimony. This may be a baseline question, to measure how much of Trump’s response was a reaction to the investigation becoming public.

But there are other things that went down in the weeks leading up to Comey’s testimony. Devin Nunes had already made considerable efforts to undermine the investigation; he would have been briefed on the investigation on March 2 (see footnote 75), the same day as Sessions recused.Trump went into a panic on March 4, just days after Sessions recusal, about being wiretapped; I’m wondering if there’s any evidence that Trump or Steven Bannon seeded the Breitbart story that kicked off the claim of a coup against Trump. Also of note is Don McGahn’s delay in conveying the records retention request about the investigation to the White House, even as Sean Spicer conducted a device search to learn who was using encrypted messengers.

MARCH 20, 2017: WHAT DID YOU DO IN REACTION TO THE MARCH 20 TESTIMONY? DESCRIBE YOUR CONTACTS WITH INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS.
On March 20, in testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Comey publicly confirmed the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s campaign.

I have 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 and 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.


In addition to questions about the investigation (including the revelation that FBI had not briefed the Gang of Eight on it until recently; we now know the briefing took place the day Jeff Sessions recused which suggests FBI avoided letting both Flynn and Sessions know details of it), Republicans used the hearing to delegitimize unmasking and the IC conclusion that Putin had affirmatively supported Trump.

Sekulow’s questions (or NYT’s rendition of them) lump the hearing, at which Admiral Mike Rogers also testified, in with Trump’s pressure on his spooks to issue a statement that he wasn’t under investigation. Two days after the hearing, Trump pressured Mike Pompeo and Dan Coats to intervene with Comey to stop the investigation.

It’s possible that the term “intelligence officials” includes HPSCI Chair Devin Nunes. On March 21, Nunes made his nighttime trip to the White House to accelerate the unmasking panic. Significantly, the panic didn’t just pertain to Flynn’s conversations with Sergey Kislyak; it also focused on the revelation of Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan’s secret trip to New York.

The day after Nunes’ nighttime trip, Trump called Coats and Rogers (and probably Pompeo) and asked them the publicly deny any evidence of a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia; NSA documented the call to Rogers.

It’s now clear that the calls Nunes complained about being unmasked actually are evidence of a conspiracy (and as such, they probably provided an easy roadmap for Mueller to find the non-Russian conversations).

MARCH 30, 2017: WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR CALL TO MR. COMEY ON MARCH 30?

On March 30, Trump called Comey on official phone lines and asked him to exonerate him on the Russia investigation. According to Comey, the conversation included the following:

He then said he was trying to run the country and the cloud of this Russia business was making that difficult. He said he thinks he would have won the health care vote but for the cloud. He then went on at great length, explaining that he has nothing to do with Russia (has a letter from the largest law firm in DC saying he has gotten no income from Russia). was not involved with hookers in Russia (can you imagine me, hookers? I have a beautiful wife, and it has been very painful). is bringing a personal lawsuit against Christopher Steele, always advised people to assume they were being recorded in Russia. has accounts now from those who travelled with him to Miss Universe pageant that he didn’t do anything, etc.

He asked what he could do to lift the cloud. I explained that we were running it down as quickly as possible and that there would be great benefit, if we didn’t find anything, to our Good Housekeeping seal of approval, but we had to do our work. He agreed, but then returned to the problems this was causing him, went on at great length about how bad he was for Russia because of his commitment to more oil and more nukes (ours are 40 years old).

He said something about the hearing last week. I responded by telling him I wasn’t there as a volunteer and he asked who was driving that, was it Nunes who wanted it? I said all the leadership wanted to know what was going on and mentioned that Grassley had even held up the DAG nominee to demand information. I said we had briefed the leadership on exactly what we were doing and who we were investigating.

I reminded him that I had told him we weren’t investigating him and that I had told the Congressional leadership the same thing. He said it would be great if that could get out and several times asked me to find a way to get that out.

He talked about the guy he read about in the Washington Post today (NOTE: I think he meant Sergei Millian) and said he didn’t know him at all. He said that if there was “some satellite” (NOTE: I took this to mean some associate of his or his campaign) that did something, it would be good to find that out, but that he hadn’t done anything and hoped I would find a way to get out that we weren’t investigating him.


Trump also raised “McCabe thing,” yet another apparent attempt to tie the retention of McCabe to public exoneration from Comey.

Given the news that Sergei Millian had been pitching George Papadopoulos on a Trump Tower deal in the post-election period, I wonder whether Trump’s invocation of him in conjunction with “some satellite” is a reference to Papadopoulos, who had already been interviewed twice by this time. Nunes would have learned of his inclusion in the investigation in the March 2 CI briefing.

On top of the clear evidence that this call represented a (well-documented, including a contemporaneous call to Dana Boente) effort to quash the investigation and get public exoneration, the conversation as presented by Comey also includes several bogus statements designed to exonerate him. For example, Millian had actually worked with Trump in past years selling condos to rich Russians. Trump never did sue Steele (Michael Cohen sued BuzzFeed and Fusion early this year, but he dropped it in the wake of the FBI raid on him). And the March 8 letter from Morgan Lewis certifying he didn’t get income from Russia is unrelated to whether he has been utterly reliant on investment from Russia (to say nothing of the huge sums raised from Russian oligarchs for his inauguration). In other words, like the earlier false claim that Trump hadn’t stayed overnight in Moscow during the Miss Universe pageant and therefore couldn’t have been compromised, even at this point, Trump’s attempts to persuade the FBI he was innocent were based off false claims.

APRIL 11, 2017: WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR CALL TO MR. COMEY ON APRIL 11, 2017?

At 8:26AM on April 11, Comey returned a call to Trump. Trump asked again for Comey to lift the cloud on him.

He said he was following up to see if I did what he had asked last time–getting out that he personally is not under investigation. I relied that I had passed the request to the Acting AG and had not heard back from him. He spoke for a bit about why it was so important. He is trying to do work for the country, visit with foreign leaders, and any cloud, even a little cloud gets in the way of that. They keep bringing up the Russia thing as an excuse for losing the election.

[snip]

He then added, “Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal, we had that thing, you know.”

[snip]

He then said that I was doing a great job and wished me well.


APRIL 11, 2017: WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR APRIL 11, 2017, STATEMENT TO MARIA BARTIROMO?

On April 12, Fox Business News broadcast an interview with Maria Bartiromo (Mueller must know it was recorded on April 11, so presumably after the call with Comey). There are three key aspects of the interview. First, in the context of Trump’s failures to staff his agencies, Bartiromo asks why Comey is still around [note, I bet in Hope Hicks’ several days of interviews, they asked her if these questions were planted]. Given public reports, Trump may have already thinking about firing Comey, though Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Don McGahn staved off the act for weeks.

TRUMP: I wish it would be explained better, the obstructionist nature, though, because a lot of times I’ll say why doesn’t so and so have people under him or her?

The reason is because we can’t get them approved.

BARTIROMO: Well, people are still wondering, though, they’re scratching their heads, right, so many Obama-era staffers are still here.

For example, was it a mistake not to ask Jim Comey to step down from the FBI at the outset of your presidency?

Is it too late now to ask him to step down?

TRUMP: No, it’s not too late, but, you know, I have confidence in him. We’ll see what happens. You know, it’s going to be interesting.


On the same day he had asked Comey to publicly state he wasn’t being interviewed, Trump said he still had confidence in Comey, even while suggesting a lot of other people were angling for the job (something he had also said in an earlier exchange with Comey). Trump immediately pivoted to claiming Comey had kept Hillary from being charged.

TRUMP: But, you know, we have to just — look, I have so many people that want to come into this administration. They’re so excited about this administration and what’s happening — bankers, law enforcement — everybody wants to come into this administration. Don’t forget, when Jim Comey came out, he saved Hillary Clinton. People don’t realize that. He saved her life, because — I call it Comey won. And I joke about it a little bit.

When he was reading those charges, she was guilty on every charge. And then he said, she was essentially OK. But he — she wasn’t OK, because she was guilty on every charge.

And then you had two and then you had three.

But Hillary Clinton won — or Comey won. She was guilty on every charge.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

TRUMP: So Director Comey…

BARTIROMO: Well, that’s (INAUDIBLE)…

TRUMP: No, I’m just saying…

BARTIROMO: (INAUDIBLE)?

TRUMP: Well, because I want to give everybody a good, fair chance. Director Comey was very, very good to Hillary Clinton, that I can tell you. If he weren’t, she would be, right now, going to trial.

From there, Bartiromo asks Trump why President Obama had changed the rules on sharing EO 12333 data. Trump suggests it is so his administration could be spied on, using the Susan Rice unmasking pseudo scandal as shorthand for spying on his team.

BARTIROMO: Mr. President, just a final question for you.

In the last weeks of the Obama presidency, he changed all the rules in terms of the intelligence agencies, allowing them to share raw data.

TRUMP: Terrible.

BARTIROMO: Why do you think he did this?

TRUMP: Well, I’m going to let you figure that one out. But it’s so obvious. When you look at Susan Rice and what’s going on, and so many people are coming up to me and apologizing now. They’re saying you know, you were right when you said that.

Perhaps I didn’t know how right I was, because nobody knew the extent of it.

Undoubtedly, Mueller wants to know whether these comments relate to his comments to Comey (and, as I suggested, Hope Hicks may have helped elucidate that). The invocation of Hillary sets up one rationale for firing Comey, but one that contradicts the official reason.

But the conversation also reflects Trump’s consistent panic that his actions (and those of his aides) will be captured by wiretaps.

MAY 3, 2017: WHAT DID YOU THINK AND DO ABOUT MR. COMEY’S MAY 3, 2017, TESTIMONY?

On May 3, Comey testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee. It covered leaks (including whether he had ever authorized any, a question implicated in the Andrew McCabe firing), and the hacked email raising questions about whether Lynch could investigate Hillary. Comey described his actions in the Hillary investigation at length. This testimony would be cited by Rod Rosenstein in his letter supporting the firing of Comey. In addition, there were a number of questions about the Russia investigation, including questions focused on Trump, that would have driven Trump nuts.

Along with getting a reaction to the differences between what Comey said in testimony and Trump’s own version (which by this point he had shared several times), Mueller likely wants to know what Trump thinks of Comey’s claim that FBI treated the Russian investigation just like the Hillary one.

With respect to the Russian investigation, we treated it like we did with the Clinton investigation. We didn’t say a word about it until months into it and then the only thing we’ve confirmed so far about this is the same thing with the Clinton investigation. That we are investigating. And I would expect, we’re not going to say another peep about it until we’re done. And I don’t know what will be said when we’re done, but that’s the way we handled the Clinton investigation as well.


In a series of questions that were likely developed in conjunction with Trump, Lindsey Graham asked whether Comey stood by his earlier claim that there was an active investigation.

GRAHAM: Did you ever talk to Sally Yates about her concerns about General Flynn being compromised?

COMEY: I did, I don’t whether I can talk about it in this forum. But the answer is yes.

GRAHAM: That she had concerns about General Flynn and she expressed those concerns to you?

COMEY: Correct.

GRAHAM: We’ll talk about that later. Do you stand by your house testimony of March 20 that there was no surveillance of the Trump campaign that you’re aware of?

COMEY: Correct.

GRAHAM: You would know about it if they were, is that correct?

COMEY: I think so, yes.

GRAHAM: OK, Carter Page; was there a FISA warrant issued regarding Carter Page’s activity with the Russians.

COMEY: I can’t answer that here.

GRAHAM: Did you consider Carter page a agent of the campaign?

COMEY: Same answer, I can’t answer that here.

GRAHAM: OK. Do you stand by your testimony that there is an active investigation counterintelligence investigation regarding Trump campaign individuals in the Russian government as to whether not to collaborate? You said that in March…

COMEY: To see if there was any coordination between the Russian effort and peoples…

GRAHAM: Is that still going on?

COMEY: Yes.

GRAHAM: OK. So nothing’s changed. You stand by those two statements?



Curiously (not least because of certain investigative dates), Sheldon Whitehouse asked some pointed questions about whether Comey could reveal if an investigation was being starved by inaction.

WHITEHOUSE: Let’s say you’ve got a hypothetically, a RICO investigation and it has to go through procedures within the department necessary to allow a RICO investigation proceed if none of those have ever been invoked or implicated that would send a signal that maybe not much effort has been dedicated to it.

Would that be a legitimate question to ask? Have these — again, you’d have to know that it was a RICO investigation. But assuming that we knew that that was the case with those staging elements as an investigation moves forward and the internal department approvals be appropriate for us to ask about and you to answer about?

COMEY: Yes, that’s a harder question. I’m not sure it would be appropriate to answer it because it would give away what we were looking at potentially.

WHITEHOUSE: Would it be appropriate to ask if — whether any — any witnesses have been interviewed or whether any documents have been obtained pursuant to the investigation?


Richard Blumenthal asked Comey whether he could rule Trump in or out as a subject of the investigation and specifically within that context, suggested appointing a special counsel (Patrick Leahy had already made the suggestion).

BLUMENTHAL: Have you — have you ruled out the president of the United States?

COMEY: I don’t — I don’t want people to over interpret this answer, I’m not going to comment on anyone in particular, because that puts me down a slope of — because if I say no to that then I have to answer succeeding questions. So what we’ve done is brief the chair and ranking on who the U.S. persons are that we’ve opened investigations on. And that’s — that’s as far as we’re going to go, at this point.

BLUMENTHAL: But as a former prosecutor, you know that when there’s an investigation into several potentially culpable individuals, the evidence from those individuals and the investigation can lead to others, correct?

COMEY: Correct. We’re always open-minded about — and we follow the evidence wherever it takes us.

BLUMENTHAL: So potentially, the president of the United States could be a target of your ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russian interference in our election, correct?

COMEY: I just worry — I don’t want to answer that — that — that seems to be unfair speculation. We will follow the evidence, we’ll try and find as much as we can and we’ll follow the evidence wherever it leads.

BLUMENTHAL: Wouldn’t this situation be ideal for the appointment of a special prosecutor, an independent counsel, in light of the fact that the attorney general has recused himself and, so far as your answers indicate today, no one has been ruled out publicly in your ongoing investigation. I understand the reasons that you want to avoid ruling out anyone publicly. But for exactly that reason, because of the appearance of a potential conflict of interest, isn’t this situation absolutely crying out for a special prosecutor?


Chuck Grassley asked Comey the first questions about what would become the year-long focus on Christopher Steele’s involvement in the FISA application on Carter Page.

GRASSLEY: On — on March 6, I wrote to you asking about the FBI’s relationship with the author of the trip — Trump-Russia dossier Christopher Steele. Most of these questions have not been answered, so I’m going to ask them now. Prior to the bureau launching the investigation of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, did anyone from the FBI have interactions with Mr. Steele regarding the issue?

COMEY: That’s not a question that I can answer in this forum. As you know, I — I briefed you privately on this and if there’s more that’s necessary then I’d be happy to do it privately.

GRASSLEY: Have you ever represented to a judge that the FBI had interaction with Mr. Steele whether by name or not regarding alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia prior to the Bureau launching its investigation of the matter?

COMEY: I have to give you the same answer Mr. Chairman.


In a second round, Whitehouse asked about a Trump tweet suggesting Comey had given Hillary a free pass.

WHITEHOUSE: Thank you.

A couple of quick matters, for starters. Did you give Hillary Clinton quote, “a free pass for many bad deeds?” There was a tweet to that effect from the president.

COMEY: Oh, no, not — that was not my intention, certainly.

WHITEHOUSE: Well, did you give her a free pass for many bad deeds, whatever your intention may have been?

COMEY: We conducted a competent, honest and independent investigation, closed it while offering transparency to the American people. I believed what I said, there was not a prosecutable case, there.


Al Franken asked Comey whether the investigation might access Trump’s tax returns.

FRANKEN: I just want to clarify something — some of the answers that you gave me for example in response to director — I asked you would President Trump’s tax returns be material to the — such an investigation — the Russian investigation and does the investigation have access to President Trump’s tax returns and some other questions you answered I can’t say. And I’d like to get a clarification on that. Is it that you cant say or that you can’t say in this setting?

COMEY: That I won’t answer questions about the contours of the investigation. As I sit here I don’t know whether I would do it in a closed setting either. But for sure — I don’t want to begin answering questions about what we’re looking at and how.


MAY 9, 2017: REGARDING THE DECISION TO FIRE MR. COMEY: WHEN WAS IT MADE? WHY? WHO PLAYED A ROLE?

The May 3 hearing is reportedly the precipitating event for Trump heading to Bedminster with Ivanka, Jared, and Stephen Miller on May 4 and deciding to fire Comey. Trump had Miller draft a letter explaining the firing, which Don McGahn would significantly edit when he saw it on May 8. McGahn also got Sessions and Rosenstein, who were peeved about different aspects of the hearing (those focused on Comey’s actions with regards to Hillary), to write letters supporting Comey’s firing.

Given that Mueller has the original draft of the firing letter and testimony from Rosenstein and Sessions, this question will largely allow Trump to refute evidence Mueller has already confirmed.



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

CNN’s timeline of investigative events

Majority HPSCI Report

Minority HPSCI Report

Trump Twitter Archive

Trump, Sessions, and Rosenstein memos supporting firing of Jim Comey



Jim Comey March 20, 2017 HPSCI testimony

Comey May 3, 2017 SJC testimony

Jim Comey written statement, June 8, 2017

Comey memos

Sally Yates and James Clapper Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, May 8, 2017

NPR Timeline on Trump’s ties to Aras Agalarov

George Papadopoulos complaint

George Papadopoulos statement of the offense

Mike Flynn statement of the offense

Internet Research Agency indictment

Text of the Don Jr Trump Tower Meeting emails

Jared Kushner’s statement to Congress

Erik Prince HPSCI transcript
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/07/t ... ing-comey/



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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 8:44 pm

That word is treason.


Treason: Obama Iran Deal Officials targeted by Trump via Israeli Black Cube
JUAN COLE
05/07/2018

On Saturday, The Observer broke the story that soon after Trump’s visit to Tel Aviv last year, his aides initiated a dirty tricks campaign to smear Obama-era officials Ben Rhodes, Colin Kahl (and likely others) in an effort to discredit the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or Iran nuclear deal.

Apparently the thinking was that it would be easier to convince the US public that it was right to pull out of the deal if the bureaucrats involved in crafting it were discredited. The investigation attempted to discover if they had any personal habits (drug use, chasing women) that could be used against them, or if it could be alleged that they had ever disclosed any classified information.

Especially disturbing is that the Israeli firm allegedly gathered intel on the spouses of the officials and emailed them under false pretences seeking a meeting. Family members. Did they also spy on the children?

Making policy by destroying the reputations of middle management in the government is of course highly destructive to the democratic process.

Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker now reports that the Trump aides who targeted former Obama administration officials Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl used the Israeli Black Cube agency, the same one deployed by Harvey Weinstein to keep his many victims of sexual harassment in line. It advertises itself as being able to provide the best former Mossad agents for the job (but if they are the best why are they former?)

I mind this behavior quite a lot and fear it won’t get the traction it deserves among the press and the public.

On reason I mind, other than the dastardly skullduggery of it all, is that I’ve been at the receiving end of at least one similar conspiracy by a White House. Someone in the National Security Council in the Bush era asked the CIA to try to dig up dirt on me and to destroy my reputation as a way of discrediting my critique of the Bush administration’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Since the CIA by law cannot spy on American citizens on American soil, that action endangered the agency, which is why some appalled analysts eventually found a way to blow the whistle. Perhaps the Trumpies went to Black Cube to avoid that kind of pushback from the US intel community (which they don’t trust anyway).

But let me just let the Trump operatives in on a secret. This way is not less evil or illegal.

Some advice to Trump and the Israeli firm: using a company called “Black Cube” automatically marks you in the forthcoming Hollywood film as the evil supervillain.

The JCPOA was a 7-nation agreement between Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany as an informal representative of the European Union. It cannot actually be undermined by destroying the reputations of some not very well known Obama era officials. But we live in the era of successful propaganda and the abdication of reason, based on implausible conspiracy theories. Pizzagate actually appears to have hurt Hillary Clinton despite its patina as an absinthe hallucination.

There is only one word for a sitting US administration that deploys a foreign intelligence firm linked to that of a foreign government with a vested interest in shaping US intelligence to bamboozle Congress and the US public by smearing dedicated (and as it turns out upright) public servants. That word is treason.
https://www.juancole.com/2018/05/treaso ... geted.html




Black Cube Israeli Intelligence
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=40981
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 9:47 pm

BLACK CUBE Israeli Intelligence
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=40981



While Israeli operatives reportedly dug up dirt on Obama officials, Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka smeared them in the media
Blog ››› 5 hours 33 min ago ››› LIS POWER

Two reports over the weekend revealed that Israeli operatives were hired to collect information on two former officials of President Barack Obama’s administration in order to discredit them, allegedly at the behest of the Trump administration. Simultaneously, Sebastian Gorka, who at the time was deputy assistant to the president, was repeatedly going on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to smear the same officials.

According to reports in The Observer and The New Yorker, “people in the Trump camp” hired Israeli operatives “to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated” the Iran deal. The two aides targeted were Ben Rhodes, a national security adviser to Obama, and Colin Kahl, who was deputy assistant to Obama. The New Yorker reported that in May and June of 2017, Rhodes’ and Kahl’s wives began receiving suspicious emails that now appear “to be part of an undercover campaign by an Israeli private-intelligence firm to discredit Obama officials.”

At the time the Israeli operatives were allegedly trying to dig up dirt on the two officials, Gorka, then deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, was running his own smear campaign against the two with Hannity's help. Gorka repeatedly appeared on his show to vilify Rhodes and Kahl by linking them to “the deep state” and accusing them of being a danger to and jeopardizing national security.

On May 10, 2017, Gorka claimed the “real danger” to this country is political appointees like “the Ben Rhodes of the world, the Colin Kahls.” Several days later, Gorka once again called out Rhodes and Kahl, asking, “When is it going to stop? When is the conspiracy theory insanity of the resist movement, of the Ben Rhodes, Colin Kahl nexus going to say, look, we’re not going to endanger national security anymore?” In June, Gorka once again went after the two officials, saying, “It’s people like [former United Nations Ambassador Susan] Rice, Ben Rhodes, Colin Kahl who are covering their tracks for the disastrous policies of the last eight years.”

Gorka made similar comments on Mark Levin’s radio show in April 2017 as well as on Breitbart radio in August 2017 after he left the White House.
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/ ... red/220134




Caroline O.

The Israeli intel firm that the Trump admin. hired to "dig up dirt" on Obama admin. officials to undermine the Iran nuclear deal is called Black Cube.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower @chrisinsilico testified that CA hired Black Cube to hack Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari.

Image

Black Cube denies that it engaged in any work in Nigeria.

But: In 2016, Black Cube's website had Nigeria highlighted as one of the countries where they had "operated successfully." (http://web.archive.org/web/201606231501 ... e-studies/ …)

It's not highlighted on the current version of the website.

A reminder that former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was caught on video talking about contracting former spies and operating through shell companies & fake websites to hide their work. So hiring a company like Black Cube is right up their alley.Caroline O. added,

Image
Image
Holy hell. Channel4News documentary catches Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix offering to “set up fake ID's and websites” or pose as students doing research to hide their role in election campaigns. Also suggests subcontracting work to ex-spies.





CBS NEWS May 7, 2018, 7:12 PM
Mueller rejects Trump request to answer questions in writing

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is now on President Trump's legal team, told CBS News correspondent Paula Reid Monday afternoon that special counsel Robert Mueller's office has rejected proposals to allow Mr. Trump to answer questions from investigators in writing.

The president's legal team has previously signaled that this would be their preferred format for a possible interview as it helps protect Mr. Trump from the possibility of lying or misleading investigators, which is a criminal offense.

Giuliani told CBS News that it will take up to three weeks for him to get fully up to speed on the facts of the investigation and be prepared to engage in formal negotiations with the special counsel about the terms of a possible interview with Mr. Trump.

Giuliani told Reid that he and the president's legal team continue to be in communication with the special counsel, but that he wants to have a better sense of the facts before engaging in formal negotiations about a possible interview.

If they can come to an agreement on the terms of an interview, Giuliani says he would like to wait until after the North Korea summit to prepare Mr. Trump. He believes that it would take several days to prepare the president for this kind of interview and he would not want to take him away from preparing for talks with North Korea.

If negotiations are not successful and Mr. Trump is subpoenaed, he will fight it, Giuliani said. The case would likely end up at the Supreme Court.

Giuliani is not suggesting that Mr. Trump would ignore a subpoena, but rather that they will use it as another opportunity to negotiate an interview on their terms. If that does not work, they will challenge it in court.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mueller-re ... n-writing/



Adam Schiff Lays Out His Colleagues’ Plan to Oust Robert Mueller

Jurisprudence

On Sunday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes told Fox News that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should be held in contempt of Congress.

Nunes promised to press for that outcome this week after the Justice Department, citing national security concerns, declined to comply with a classified subpoena.

“Disclosure of responsive information to such requests can risk severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives, damage to relationships with valued international partners, compromise of ongoing criminal investigations, and interference with intelligence activities,” Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote in a letter responding to Nunes’ request earlier in the week.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member on the House Intelligence Committee, spoke with Slate on Friday and described what he believes is behind Nunes’ confrontation with the Justice Department.

Schiff said there is a concerted effort by some of his colleagues to force the DOJ into an impossible bind by issuing subpoenas on classified topics. Those requests force the DOJ to either interfere with the Russia probe, by publicizing currently secret evidence, or reject the subpoenas, giving the administration a pretext to remove officials like Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Indeed, President Donald Trump on Wednesday commented on the subpoena situation and issued a veiled promise to “get involved” if it wasn’t resolved satisfactorily.


Schiff told Slate his Republican colleagues have been complicit with the president’s efforts to undermine the rule of law. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jeremy Stahl: Did you read the Politico report “Trump’s Russia Strategy: Bash Mueller to Beat Impeachment?”

“The president is tweeting his attacks on Mueller, and I think it’s a two-pronged strategy.” — Rep. Adam Schiff
Adam Schiff: No, I haven’t read that. Just judging from the headline, I’m not at all surprised if that’s the White House strategy. And they have plenty of allies in Congress that are helping them in that strategy. From the very beginning of our investigation, they decided that the best way to protect the president was by putting the government on trial. It’s a tactic I saw when I was a prosecutor. If the evidence is increasingly incriminating to the defendant, you put the government on trial.

So they began with a conspiracy theory about unmasking, that was part of the Chairman [Devin Nunes]’ midnight run. When that didn’t pan out, then they turned to [an alleged] conspiracy within the FBI involving Carter Page, and when that didn’t pan out they turned to the next phase, which is attacking the initiation of the investigation. Right now, they’re in the process of picking an endless series of fights with Rod Rosenstein, in the hope that if they can keep asking for things until they get to something Rod Rosenstein can’t turn over to the Congress, because it would interfere with the investigation, then it would give the president a pretext to fire him and replace him with someone pliable who will do the president’s will. The president is tweeting his attacks on Mueller, and I think it’s a two-pronged strategy: One that tries to lay the predicate to fire Mueller’s boss as a way of putting someone in who can kneecap the investigation privately outside of the public view by telling Mueller, “You can’t look into certain things.” But if all else fails, then so discrediting the investigators that no matter what they produce, they can cast doubt on it.

You’re basically saying that your colleagues are hoping to force Rosenstein’s hand to either give away evidence that will interfere with the investigation and make public that evidence, or refuse them in a way that would lead them to claim that Rosenstein should be impeached.

Without a question. Most recently they asked for the Comey memos, and they were quite indignant in not getting the Comey memos. What they didn’t reveal, of course, is that we had already had access to the Comey memos. I had already read the Comey memos, and the chairman already had the opportunity to read the memos. Now, whether he took the opportunity or not—the chairman seems to ask for a lot of things and demand them and then not read them—but we already had access, so we knew that the Comey memos were completely consistent with the director and what he was saying in his testimony.

They were hoping for a fight, and they didn’t get it. The Justice Department decided, “OK, we’ll give you the memos.” So then they moved onto the next fight, “OK, we want to see the document in unredacted form that initiated the investigation.” And they were hoping for a fight on that, because that’s even more sensitive. And ultimately, the Justice Department relented again, and they didn’t get their fight. Now they’ve moved onto other things and the goal is to keep asking until they can force the Justice Department to say no. You already saw the president in lockstep say, “Why won’t the Justice Department give the Congress what it’s asking for, what are they hiding? I said I wasn’t going to be involved, but I might have to get involved.” It’s a clearly choreographed effort to give the president and his team a pretext to fire Rod Rosenstein. When this chapter of history is written about our country, it will be damning of the president but it will reserve a special damnation for people in Congress that are complicit in the tearing apart of our institutions and undermining of our systems of checks and balances.

You said previously in an interview with NPR that the Republican members who sought to make these memos public were doing so because they wanted to find inconsistencies in Comey’s stories, but there ultimately were none.

They were, among other things, hoping that there would be some inconsistency that they could latch onto that they could attack Comey with. This both had the object of giving them more fodder to try to attack Comey, they hoped, but also, even if they didn’t get it, giving them a fight with the Justice Department that they wanted even more.

I’ve had my own pet theory about this. It seems to me that they’re trying to demonstrate that James Comey mishandled classified material. Do you think one strategy here is to try to argue that Comey shared information he shouldn’t have?

There’s an effort to tar anyone who’s a witness against the president. To tar Comey in any way, to tar him as a leaker, to tar him if they can make some claim that something in his memo was classified, to find an inconsistency, to tar [fired Deputy FBI Director] Andrew McCabe who corroborates Comey, to tar [FBI officials James A.] Baker or [James] Rybicki, who are also in a position to corroborate Comey. [Editor’s note: Baker resigned on Friday and on Monday morning the president attacked Baker by name on Twitter.] This is not by accident that they’ve singled out these people. They’ve singled them out because they corroborate evidence of potential obstruction of justice by the president. And it’s a scorched earth strategy.

Former chief of staff Reince Priebus also could corroborate portions of Comey’s memos that the president has contested.

And they’ll turn on him too if they consider him to be a threat to the president. But this is where they’re coming from now with someone like Priebus: They have to be concerned that if they go after him, he may know a lot that they don’t want him to share. So, that’s less of an issue with Comey and Rybicki and McCabe, etc. But they’re employing—the president’s allies in Congress, on our committee with the comments of [Rep. Mark] Meadows and [Rep. Jim] Jordan about impeachment—they’re employing a burn-down-the-Congress strategy to protect the presidency. It’s a strategy that says, “We don’t care what happens to the country. We just care about maintaining our majority and protecting the president of our party.” The most appalling realization to me of the last year and a half—it’s not been what kind of president Donald Trump turned out to be; it’s how many people in Congress have been complicit with him. That has been a bitter realization.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... l_dt_tw_ru
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 08, 2018 7:03 am

Colin Kahl

Who hired the Israeli black ops firm to dig up dirt on me and @brhodes (via our families) to discredit the Iran nuclear deal?
@julianborger says it was the Trump camp
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/repor ... clear-deal
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BLACK CUBE Israeli Intelligence
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=40981



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For a sense of why we may care about Michael Cohen and father-in-law Fima Shusterman’s massive loans to a cratering business, look at this passage from a book to be published tomorrow,
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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/he ... shusterman



Podcast — May 8, 2018 at 7:17 am
EPISODE 82 – Dirt for Sanctions – with special guest Marcy Wheeler

by Eclectablog


The show notes for Episode 82 are at http://www.eclectablog.com/2018/05/epis ... eeler.html

Marcy Wheeler on Twitter: @EmptyWheel

Marcy Wheeler’s “must read” series on the leaked Mueller questions for Trump starts here: THE MUELLER QUESTIONS MAP OUT CULTIVATION, A QUID PRO QUO, AND A COVER-UP (PART ONE, CULTIVATION)http://www.eclectablog.com/2018/05/episode-82-dirt-for-sanctions-with-special-guest-marcy-wheeler.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 08, 2018 6:01 pm

money paid to Stormy Daniels came from the same account where a Russian oligarch deposited money

Vekselberg was largest shareholder in Bank of Cyprus when Wilbur Ross was Vice Chairman

Michael Avenatti


After significant investigation, we have discovered that Mr. Trump’s atty Mr. Cohen received approximately $500,000 in the mos. after the election from a company controlled by a Russian Oligarc with close ties to Mr. Putin. These monies may have reimbursed the $130k payment.


The Executive Summary from our first Preliminary Report on Findings may be accessed via the link below. Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen have a lot of explaining to do.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pskgpwr15r48t ... y.pdf?dl=0


emptywheel

There you go: So Cohen set up a "consulting" business to trade on Trump influence, working out of Patton Boggs. The Patton Boggs big was mostly a hash: he didn't bring THEM (much) business. But it was a way to accept this $$.


Polly Sigh

The Viktor Vekselberg [Renova, Columbus Nova] is the Russian oligarch Mueller investigators recently questioned at the airport and who @MichaelAvenatti says gave Trump atty Michael Cohen approximately $500,000 in the months following the election.

Executive Summary from @MichaelAvenatti's first Preliminary Report on Findings: Cohen inexplicably accepted these payments [totaling $500K from Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg] while he was personal atty to 'POTUS' & employed by the Trump Org.
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Andrew Prokop

Avenatti claims Viktor Vekselberg sent Michael Cohen money. Vekselberg is the Russian oligarch Mueller's investigators recently questioned at the airport.
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Olga Lautman

Looks like Michael Cohen received a shitload of money from Vekselberg an oligarch/mobster close to Putin. In Russia Vekselberg is known for his dealings w the Russian mafia as well as Deripaska, Fridman, Firtash, Mashkevich, Agalarov. All of Trumps buddies!

The Executive Summary from our first Preliminary Report on Findings may be accessed via the link below. Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen have a lot of explaining to do.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pskgpwr15r48t ... y.pdf?dl=0


How much Kremlin money was exactly funneled into Trump via his people?

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Simon Kukes should also be a person of interest. Never made a contribution until 2016 when he made a series of them. Also was involved in a lawsuit w Vekselberg and Blavatnik for using mob tactics in a business deal


Olga Lautman

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emptywheel

Actually interested in the genesis of the 4 different Cohen stories tonight. Did Patton Boggs spring a leak?





Ari Melber

BREAKING: Michael Cohen accused of taking $500,000 from a *sanctioned* Russian Oligarch *while Trump was President* and misleading the bank about it.

This allegation comes from @MichaelAvenatti & involves the company Cohen created to pay Stormy Daniels

Implicates Bank Fraud Act
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Viktor Vekselberg, Russian Billionaire, Was Questioned by Mueller’s Investigators

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


Federal agents working with the special counsel stopped a billionaire Russian businessman, Viktor Vekselberg, at a New York-area airport this year. Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

WASHINGTON — When the United States sought to punish Russia last month for its election interference and other aggressions, it targeted some of Russia’s wealthiest men, imposing sanctions on those viewed as enriching themselves off President Vladimir V. Putin’s government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Khan, too, has crossed paths with the special counsel investigation: Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer sentenced to 30 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I., is his son-in-law.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/p ... ation.html
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Wed May 09, 2018 12:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed May 09, 2018 11:16 am

Russian Leverage Over Trump Is Not Just a Theory. It’s Now Fact.
By
Jonathan Chait


No pee tape needed. Photo: MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images


In the waning weeks of 2016, when the intelligence community and many politicians were passing around terrifying reports about Donald Trump’s links to Russia like samizdat, the frightening possibility arose that the sanctity of the United States government might be compromised in a way no living American had experienced. This was just one of the unnerving things about the rise of Trump, and it was one that many well-informed observers doubted. Russia, after all, was poor and weak. To imagine that a country with an economy smaller than Canada’s or Italy’s could leverage a superpower ten times wealthier beggared the imagination. And yet that paranoid, absurd belief seems to be creeping closer to reality than seemed possible even in those dark postelection days.

The New York Times has confirmed the explosive claims made by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, that Columbus Nova — a New York investment firm whose biggest client is a company controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — deposited half a million dollars into a secret account set up by attorney Michael Cohen to pay off Trump’s sexual partners. The possible reasons for this arrangement run from brazenly corrupt to far worse. Columbus Nova said the hefty sum was a “consulting fee” paid to Cohen, hardly a benign explanation.

Columbus Nova reportedly retained Cohen’s services after Andrew Intrater, the company’s American chief executive, met him while attending Trump’s inauguration with Vekselberg, who is his cousin. Like all Russian oligarchs, Vekselberg operates in cooperation with the Putin government. The payments gave Russia several sources of possible leverage over Cohen and Trump. First, the money itself could amount to some kind of bribe, in return for which a favor would be expected. Second, Russia had knowledge of the secret payoff, which it could always expose. Third, the possibility (at minimum) exists that Russia knew the account was being used to silence Trump’s mistresses, yet another source of kompromat.


For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer — who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian “peace plan” with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017 — by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.

Perhaps even more alarming has been the response of the political system to this crisis. The House of Representatives has assigned Devin Nunes, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as its point man to defend Trump against the Mueller investigation. The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy of keeping Congress out of acting investigations, for the obvious reason that elected officials have a powerful incentive to interfere. Nunes has demanded the virtually unlimited right to get inside the Mueller probe. Officials in the Department of Justice have come to suspect his goal is to compromise the investigation by handing information from the prosecutors over to Trump.

The Washington Post tonight reports another, and even more fanatical, step in Nunes’s crusade. Last week, Nunes demanded a piece of information that the FBI and other intelligence officials believed would “endanger a top-secret intelligence source.” They prevailed on Trump to support their request to withhold the information which, they argued, would “risk severe consequences including potential loss of human lives.”

Nunes is not only demanding the secret be revealed to him, but threatening to vote to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt. And officials who secured Trump’s support may have left out the fact that the source provided information to the Mueller investigation. As a result, “several administration officials said they fear Trump may reverse course and support Nunes’s argument.”

Think for a moment what this report tells us. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who enjoys the full backing of his party’s leadership, is willing to risk what his own government describes as the betrayal and potential loss of life of an intelligence source. And officials within this government believe the president would do the same, all in order to obstruct an investigation into the president’s secretive ties to a foreign power. They are acting as though Trump is compromised by Russia, or at the very least, that he cannot be trusted to defend his own country’s security against it. The sordid Russia scandal has already brought some version of a very dark nightmare scenario to life.

This post has been updated with additional information about Columbus Nova’s relationship with Michael Cohen.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... nunes.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
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Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
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