Spicer, Priebus, Hicks among current, former Trump aides Mueller eyes interviewing for Russia probe
By Carol D. Leonnig, Rosalind S. Helderman and Ashley Parker September 8 at 3:27 PM Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has alerted the White House that his team will probably seek to interview six top current and former advisers to President Trump who were witnesses to several episodes relevant to the investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the request.
Mueller’s interest in the aides, including trusted adviser Hope Hicks, former press secretary Sean Spicer and former chief of staff Reince Priebus, reflects how the probe that has dogged Trump’s presidency is starting to penetrate a closer circle of aides around the president.
Each of the six advisers was privy to important internal discussions that have drawn the interest of Mueller’s investigators, including his decision in May to fire FBI Director James B. Comey and the White House’s initial inaction following warnings that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had withheld information from the public about his private discussions in December with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, according to people familiar with the probe.
The advisers are also connected to internal documents that Mueller’s investigators have asked the White House to produce, according to people familiar with the special counsel’s inquiry.
Play Video 3:30 The fight for control over the special counsel's Russia investigation
President Trump has weighed in on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election time and time again. Here's a look at how he can limit the probe, and what Congress is trying to do about it. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) Roughly four weeks ago, the special counsel’s team provided the White House with the names of the first group of current and former Trump advisers and aides whom investigators expect to question.
In addition to Priebus, Spicer and Hicks, Mueller has notified the White House he will probably seek to question White House counsel Don McGahn and one of his deputies, James Burnham. Mueller’s office has also told the White House that investigators may want to interview Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman who works closely with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
White House officials are expecting that Mueller will seek additional interviews, possibly with family members, including Kushner, who is a West Wing senior adviser, according to the people familiar with Mueller’s inquiry.
[New FBI head says he’s not seen ‘any whiff’ of White House interference in the Russia probe]
Mueller’s probe is seeking to determine whether any Trump associates may have coordinated with Russia to influence the election. That investigation is also examining whether the president or others at the White House may have attempted to obstruct justice leading up to the firing of Comey.
Spicer declined to comment, and Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.
Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer focused on the probe, declined to comment on behalf of current White House aides McGahn, Burnham, Hicks and Raffel. Cobb also declined to discuss the details of Mueller’s requests.
“Out of respect for the special counsel and his process and so we don’t interfere with that in any way, the White House doesn’t comment on specific requests for documents and potential witnesses,” Cobb said.
A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.
No interviews have been scheduled, people familiar with the requests said. Mueller’s team is waiting to first review the documents, which the White House has been working to turn over for the past three weeks.
People familiar with the probe said the documents Mueller has requested strongly suggest the topics that he and his investigators would broach with the aides.
McGahn and Burnham were briefed by then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on Jan. 26, days after Trump’s inauguration, about concerns in the Justice Department and FBI that Flynn could be compromised by the Russians. She warned that the FBI knew he was not telling the whole truth — to Vice President Pence and the public — about his December conversations with then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Courts have held that the president does not have attorney-client privilege with lawyers in the White House counsel’s office, and their testimony about their Oval Office dealings can be sought in investigations.
Spicer had been drawn into the White House’s handling of the Flynn matter before the inauguration. After The Washington Post reported that Flynn had talked with Kislyak about sanctions, Spicer told reporters that Flynn had “reached out to” Kislyak on Christmas Day to extend holiday greetings — effectively rejecting claims that they had talked about U.S. sanctions against Moscow. A few days later, President Barack Obama had announced he was expelling Russian diplomats in response to the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. election.
After Obama’s announcement, Spicer said Kislyak had sent a message requesting that Flynn call him.
“Flynn took that call,” Spicer said. But he stressed that the call “centered on the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and [Trump] after the election.”
As chief of staff, Priebus was involved in many of Trump’s decisions, including the situations involving Flynn and Comey. Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in June that Priebus was among a group of White House aides whom Trump instructed to leave the Oval Office before he asked the FBI director to drop the inquiry into Flynn.
Hicks, who is now White House communications director, and Raffel were involved in internal discussions in July over how to respond to questions about a Trump Tower meeting that Donald Trump Jr. organized with a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign in June 2016. The two communications staffers advocated being transparent about the purpose of the meeting, which Trump Jr. had accepted after he was offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton that he was told was part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.
Ultimately, according to people familiar with the discussions, the president dictated language for the statement that his son would release to the New York Times, which was preparing a report about the meeting. The response omitted important details about the meeting and presented it as “primarily” devoted to a discussion of the adoption of Russian children.
ISSIE LAPOWSKY BUSINESS 09.06.1704:55 PM THOUSANDS OF FACEBOOK ADS TIED TO BOGUS RUSSIAN ACCOUNTS
DANIEL BISKUP/REDUX AMID ONGOING CONCERN over the role of disinformation in the 2016 election, Facebook said Wednesday it found that more than 5,000 ads, costing more than $150,000, had been placed on its network between June 2015 and May 2017 from "inauthentic accounts" and Pages, likely from Russia. The ads didn't directly mention the election or the candidates, according to a blog post by Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos, but focused on "amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights." Facebook declined to discuss additional details about the ads. Facebook says it had given the information to authorities investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. "We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform," Stamos wrote in the post. "We believe in protecting the integrity of civic discourse, and require advertisers on our platform to follow both our policies and all applicable laws."
Even If Kushner Can't Recall His Russia Talks, the FBI Would Speculation has swirled about the role Facebook played spreading fake news during the 2016 election. Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has gone so far as to wonder whether President Trump's tech and data team collaborated with Russian actors to target fake news at American voters in key geographic areas. “We need information from the companies, as well as we need to look into the activities of some of the Trump digital campaign activities," Warner said recently. Brad Parscale, digital director of the Trump campaign, has agreed to an interview with the House Intelligence Committee, and maintains he is "unaware of any Russian involvement in the digital and data operations of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign." Wednesday's revelation is a new wrinkle in the ongoing Russia investigations. In July, Facebook told WIRED it had found no indication of Russian entities buying entities during the election. In the larger context of political ad spending, even $150,000 is a nominal amount. According to a report by Borrell Associates, digital political-ad spending totaled roughly $1.4 billion in 2016. And yet, this finding exposes what seems to be a coordinated effort to spread misinformation about key election issues in targeted states. Facebook is remaining tight lipped about the methods it used to identify the fraudulent accounts and Pages that it has since suspended. One search for ads purchased from US internet addresses set to the Russian language turned up $50,000 worth of spending on 2,200 ads. Facebook said about one-quarter of the suspect ads were geographically targeted, with more of those running in 2015 than 2016. According to The Washington Post, some accounts may be linked to a content farm called Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg. Facebook said it is implementing changes to prevent similar abuse. Among other things, it's looking for ways to combat so-called cloaking in which ads that appear benign redirect users to malicious or misleading websites once people click through. That allows bad actors to circumvent Facebook's ad review process. But while Facebook may be able to limit what people can and can't buy on its platform, it doesn't change the fact that social media has created a stage for anyone looking to spread false information online, with or without ads. As the $150,000 figure indicates, this finding is but a small fraction of a much larger problem. https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ti ... -accounts/
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.
According to a Nov.'16 interview w/ Parscale, Trump's campaign embraced Facebook "in a way that no presidential campaign has before..."
Kushner:
trump paid Parscale $90mm for his data work during campaign. Awful lot of dough.
and that $90M didn't come out of trump's pocket
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.
The case for Trump-Russia collusion: We’re getting very, very close By Anne Applebaum September 8
President Trump at the White House last month. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images) We now know the motives. In backing Donald Trump, Russia’s oligarchical class sought not only to disrupt U.S. politics but also to reverse sanctions, both those applied in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and those connected to the Magnitsky Act, which targeted officials involved in human rights violations. In seeking Russian support, Trump sought not only to become president but also to make money: Even as he launched his presidential campaign, he hoped to receive a major influx of money from a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow.
Along with the motives, we know the methods. As the New York Times has just graphically demonstrated, professional Russian Internet trolls, probably operating out of St. Petersburg, set up hundreds of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts during the election campaign. The trolls then posted thousands of fake stories, memes and slogans, supported anti-Clinton hashtags and narratives, and linked back to DCLeaks, the website that posted emails that Russian hackers stole from the Clinton campaign. The emails “revealed” by that hack were utterly banal. But the fake operatives said they contained “hidden truths,” hinted that they were part of a secret “Soros” operation, after liberal financier George Soros, and persuaded people to click. This is a method Russian operatives had used before. Previous elections, in Poland and Ukraine, demonstrated that stolen material — any stolen material — can be used to foment conspiracy theories that never die.
According to people familiar with Facebook's findings, company officials told congressional investigators on Sept. 6 that they discovered political ads on its site bought by a Russian company during the 2016 election. (The Washington Post) We know what happened next: The fake stories, memes and slogans moved from the network of Russian-sponsored “American” accounts into the networks of real Americans. Some, such as “pizzagate,” the theory that Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophile ring being run out of Washington pizza parlor, got a lot of attention. Others, such as the theory that Barack Obama founded the Islamic State, or the theory that the Google search engine was working on Clinton’s behalf, got less attention but were notable for another reason: They were not only promoted on the fake Russian network, which bought advertising in order to push them further, but also were promoted on open Russian news networks, including the Sputnik English-language news services. Afterwards, they were repeated, also openly, by candidate Trump.
Now here is a piece of the story that we don’t know: How did the Russians behind the fake “American” accounts know which real Americans would be most excited to read conspiracy theories on Facebook? How did they know how to target their ads? Perhaps they just got lucky. Perhaps they just happened upon broad networks of people who were willing to click on their conspiracy theories and pass them on. Or perhaps they had some help. Certainly the Trump campaign had this kind of information — recently, one of Trump’s online campaign managers bragged to the BBC about their ability to “target” on Facebook and elsewhere.
Here is another piece we don’t know: How did Trump happen to use the same conspiracy theories that were proliferating on Russian media, both real and fake? Again, this could be coincidence. Or, again, there could have been coordination. Messages tested by Russian trolls might have been passed on to the Trump campaign — or vice versa.
I still believe, as I’ve been writing for months, that Trump’s sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a cynicial and vicious dictator, should, by itself, have eliminated him from U.S. politics. Nothing else that we will ever learn about him makes him more unqualified to be president of the United States.
But for those who want something more, do be aware that circumstantial evidence of Russian collusion with his campaign is already available. And direct evidence is getting very, very close. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/glo ... ery-close/
PROOF: Trump Tower Moscow Had Land And Plans — His Lawyer Lied To Hide It (UPDATED) Left: Donald Trump and Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov’s plan to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow, pictured from 2013 press release in the center. Newly discovered Russian news reports prove that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen has told a series of bombshell lies to the media. He claimed to the Washington Post that no land had been chosen for Trump’s Moscow Tower, but years of news reports and press releases say otherwise. In June, The Stern Facts first debunked Cohen’s blanket alibi for his involvement in the Christopher Steele dossier. The Trump Tower Moscow project that Michael Cohen planned for his then-Republican presidential candidate client— and directly asked for help from the Kremlin to approve — did, in fact, have a site, and was planned adjacent to the Crocus City Hall, right alongside the Myakinino metro station. Initial plans dated all the way back to 2013 and the Miss Universe Moscow pageant. Development partners the Agalarov family confirmed Crocus City as the Trump Tower site as late as 2015, during the campaign. Democratic Coalition co-founder Scott Dworkin unearthed a July 3rd, 2015 story in Russia’s state-run TASS news agency during the presidential campaign with one of Trump’s oligarch partners. Emin Agalarov — who set up with his agent Rob Goldstone, Don Jr.’s infamous meeting with Russian agents for dirt on Hillary Clinton — told TASS reporters that the real estate deal would survive the political campaign (via Google Translate): “Donald Trump, despite the difficult international political situation, is still interested in this project. We are in the process of negotiations, but due to the fact that Trump is nominated for the presidency, and our plans are constantly being adjusted, it can still change.” “In case this project is implemented (under the Trump Tower brand), the participation of an American billionaire involves the provision of a brand and technologies for this facility. The investment component of the Crocus Group will be handled independently, "Agalarov added. Trump had entered the Republican primary campaign two weeks earlier, on June 16th, 2015. TASS reported that a bank loan of up to $100 million from state-owned Sberbank would be sought for the $170 million Moscow Tower project. Sberbank sponsored Miss Universe 2013 and announced $2.4 billion in financing for the Trump project with Crocus just days after the pageant concluded, but landed on America’s sanctions list over the Ukraine invasion in March 2014. UPDATE: Google Street View images show that one of the towers pictured near the cover photo, inside Crocus City’s master planned space began construction on or before June 2015. (image & update notes below) Kremlin-linked developer Aras Agalarov told Russian media in September 2015 that his son Emin had been in contact with Donald Trump during the primary campaign. Komsomolskaya Pravda reports that Aras Agalarov said (via Google Translate): “[Trump] is busy with the presidential election campaign. And Emin had seen him recently — there, in America.” When asked this by KP, “Tell us and now do you have no contacts with Trump?” Agalarov replied, “Principally we have contacts.” But Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen definitely lied to the news media while spinning the damaging release of emails he sent to the Kremlin asking for help with the project. He told the Washington Post this week that the Trump Moscow project was unable to obtain land: In a statement to The Post, Cohen described the potential Moscow project as “simply one of many development opportunities that the Trump Organization considered and ultimately rejected.” Cohen said he abandoned the project because he lost confidence that the Moscow developer would be able to obtain land, financing and government approvals. “It was a building proposal that did not succeed, and nothing more,” he said. Contrary to the Trump Organization’s bogus spin, the massive development site below was designated, and plans for Trump Tower Moscow were proceeding during the presidential campaign. Initially proposed site of Trump Tower Moscow. Source: http://www.mk.ru/mosobl/article/2013/12 ... shnyu.html Trump also purportedly signed a letter of intent with a Russian building development company on October 28th, 2015, which itself has relations with sanctioned financial companies. Trump Tower Moscow Started During The 2013 Miss Universe Pageant During the Miss Universe Moscow pageant in November 2013 the TASS agency and Kommersant both reported that Trump was planning a Russian Tower. The Agalarovs told Forbes Russia contemporaneously that they wished to develop a tower with Trump, and that he was receptive. Source: http://www.mk.ru/mosobl/article/2013/12 ... shnyu.html On December 16th, 2013 a Russian media outlet published a story about Donald Trump’s plan with the Crocus Group led by Aras Agalarov to build his thousand unit hotel project, adjacent to the rail-linked Crocus City entertainment complex in the floodplain of the Moscow River. Agalarov’s Crocus Expo center linked to that news report on the new Trump Tower Moscow the very next day. Crocus has published photos of the towers which are being built today on the Trump Tower site, and describes their “Residential and Business Complex at Crocus City” like this: “The successful business strategy of Crocus Group is based on a systemic approach: the creation of a unified residential and business complex will augment the interest of clients and partners of Crocus Group toward the business and commercial centers situated nearby.” Web page snapshots of the Crocus website in the internet archive depict years worth of changes to the plans for the site announced as Trump Tower Moscow, and currently, includes an extensive photo gallery. Conclusion Today, the proposed site of Trump Tower is being developed into a high rise tower complex, though it’s impossible to actually know if the President is involved. Last November, the Dworkin Report revealed a web of 250 Trump named companies in Russia. Just tonight, Politico reported that the TrumpTowerMoscow.com domain was renewed in July. “Once again It’s like pulling teeth to get the full truth from the Trump team,” says the Democratic Coalition’s Dworkin, “And we have no plans turns into we had plans for years.” “There’s a definition for this: It’s called a lie.” Here are the photos of Trump’s Moscow tower site and plans: Crocus City construction site where Trump Tower Moscow was originally proposed.
Images of the Business and Residential Complex at Crocus City
Updated Image: Google Street View image of Crocus City development from June 2015 showing the building Crocus featured on their website Source: https://goo.gl/maps/tgtFH6rGFR22
UPDATE Notes: This story originally contained information from a Mother Jones report that Crocus City obtained a new local zoning approval just days after the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting for dirt on Hillary Clinton was revealed in July 2017. The project indicated is a shopping mall and not a tower project. There is a single tower project known to be on the site and is pictured above as it was presented in the original report. https://thesternfacts.com/proof-trump-t ... 14939610f3
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.
Trump’s Congressional Allies Are Trying to Manipulate the Steele Dossier to Undercut the Russia Investigation Rep. Devin Nunes’ renewed role is troubling, Democratic lawmakers tell Mother Jones. DAN FRIEDMANSEP. 8, 2017 2:43 PM
As the Trump-Russia scandal expands, Republicans responsible for leading investigations into the matter have consistently pursued angles that critics say are designed to undermine the investigation and distract attention from the main issue: Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 election and interactions between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Last week, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) joined in a key component of that GOP effort: attempts to deflect attention by focusing on what’s known as the Steele dossier. These are the memos written during the campaign by a veteran British intelligence official that included allegations that the Kremlin had sought to cultivate and co-opt Trump, in part by collecting compromising information on him, and that his campaign secretly exchanged information with Moscow.
Nunes, who was forced to step aside from the Trump-Russia probe in March, returned to the fray by subpoenaing the Justice Department and FBI to demand information on the FBI’s interactions with Steele, who began sharing his memos with the bureau in the summer of 2016. The subpoenas seek material on whether the FBI paid Steele or used his information to apply for secret warrants (presumably to eavesdrop on Trump-related targets).
Trump and GOP lawmakers “tried to conflate two things so that they could create the false narrative that the Russians were meddling on both sides,” Sen. Whitehouse says. Democrats say the request appears to be the latest example of committee Republicans attempting to furnish the White House with talking points to diminish the Russia scandal. “They seem to want to do the president’s bidding and parrot the president’s misguided beliefs,” says Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a member of the Intelligence Committee.
It may seem odd that Republicans believe going after the Steele memos, which included salacious allegations about Trump, is a way to help the president. But they appear to have two goals: to suggest the Steele memos were actually cooked up by the Russian government—and thus are proof that Moscow did not favor Trump in 2016—and to undercut the FBI’s Russia investigation by linking its origins to the Steele memos.
Nunes’ demands mirror prior requests from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to the Justice Department and FBI. Grassley’s letters demanded information while also implying misconduct by the FBI related to the Steele dossier, an effort that hit some political pay dirt. A hearing Grassley convened in July covered the previously reported fact that Fusion GPS, the firm that retained Steele to dig up information on Trump’s Russia ties, also worked for a law firm representing Prevezon Holdings, a company owned by the son of a senior Russian official that faced a federal lawsuit over fraud and money laundering.
The White House has seized on the Grassley-publicized connection between Fusion GPS and Prevezon to suggest that the Steele dossier was actually the result of a Russian operation—which would suggest Trump is not a Kremlin favorite but a victim. “The Democrat-linked firm Fusion GPS actually took money from the Russian government while it created the phony dossier that’s been the basis for all of the Russia scandal fake news,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said after Grassley’s hearing.
Trump, in a July 29 tweet, went further. Citing a breathless Fox News report on the committee hearing, the president asserted, contrary to the consensus of the US intelligence community, that “Russia was against Trump in the 2016 Election.”
Democrats see an effort to gin up controversy over of the Steele memos to protect Trump. “They tried to conflate two things so that they could create the false narrative that the Russians were meddling on both sides,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a Judiciary Committee member, told Mother Jones.
Swalwell and other Intelligence Committee Democrats note that Nunes decided to issue the subpoenas to the FBI and Justice Department without first asking if these agencies would voluntarily provide the information. They suggest Nunes did this to create the appearance that the FBI and Justice Department were not cooperating, cooking up another distraction.
“If this is an honest pursuit,” says Swalwell, “why not seek it from those agencies in voluntary fashion?”
The subpoenas were issued over objections from Democrats, according to Swalwell and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. “Whenever we go outside of doing things collaboratively, I am immediately suspicious about what the intent is,” adds Swalwell.
Nunes’ latest action is a red flag: In March, after he was exposed collaborating with White House officials in a ham-handed effort to support Trump’s false claim that former President Barack Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower, Nunes announced he would “step aside” from the Russia probe. His renewed role, Democrats say, suggests committee Republicans are resuming the more partisan approach they softened when Nunes was sidelined.
“He should not be involved,” Swalwell argues. “Every time he does that he adds an asterisk to the integrity and credibility of the investigation.”
Schiff notes that committee Republicans have been less eager to issue other subpoenas. For instance, they have not agreed to demand the White House hand over material on conversations between Trump and former FBI Director James Comey, who Trump fired after Comey resisted his requests related to the bureau’s Russia investigation.
GOP Congressman Sought Trump Deal on WikiLeaks, Russia California’s Dana Rohrabacher asks for pardon of Julian Assange in return for evidence Russia wasn’t source of hacked emails Julian Assange, shown in London in May, is the founder of WikiLeaks, which published classified U.S. government documents in 2010. Julian Assange, shown in London in May, is the founder of WikiLeaks, which published classified U.S. government documents in 2010. PHOTO: JACK TAYLOR/GETTY IMAGES By Byron Tau, Peter Nicholas and Siobhan Hughes Updated Sept. 15, 2017 6:06 p.m. ET 246 COMMENTS WASHINGTON—A U.S. congressman contacted the White House this week trying to broker a deal that would end WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s U.S. legal troubles in exchange for what he described as evidence that Russia wasn’t the source of hacked emails published by the antisecrecy website during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The proposal made by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.), in a phone call Wednesday with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, was apparently aimed at resolving the probe of WikiLeaks prompted by Mr. Assange’s publication of secret U.S. government documents in 2010 through a pardon or other act of clemency from President Donald Trump.
The possible “deal”—a term used by Mr. Rohrabacher during the Wednesday phone call—would involve a pardon of Mr. Assange or “something like that,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. In exchange, Mr. Assange would probably present a computer drive or other data-storage device that Mr. Rohrabacher said would exonerate Russia in the long-running controversy about who was the source of hacked and stolen material aimed at embarrassing the Democratic Party during the 2016 election.
From the Archives
Assange: 'The Proper War Is Just Commencing' Julian Assange emerged on the balcony of London’s Ecuadorian embassy in mid-May, just hours after Sweden's top prosecutor dropped an investigation into a rape claim against the WikiLeaks founder. Photo: Praxis Films (originally published May 19, 2017) “He would get nothing, obviously, if what he gave us was not proof,” Mr. Rohrabacher said.
Mr. Rohrabacher confirmed he spoke to Mr. Kelly this week but declined to discuss the content of their conversation. “I can’t confirm or deny anything about a private conversation at that level,” he said in a brief interview. He declined to elaborate further.
A Trump administration official confirmed Friday that Mr. Rohrabacher spoke to Mr. Kelly about the plan involving Mr. Assange. Mr. Kelly told the congressman that the proposal “was best directed to the intelligence community,” the official said. Mr. Kelly didn’t make the president aware of Mr. Rohrabacher’s message, and Mr. Trump doesn’t know the details of the proposed deal, the official said.
In the call with Mr. Kelly, Mr. Rohrabacher pushed for a meeting between Mr. Assange and a representative of Mr. Trump, preferably someone with direct communication with the president.
“I would be happy to go with somebody you trust whether it is somebody at the FBI; somebody on your staff,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. The California congressman said he would be pleased to talk to CIA Director Mike Pompeo, but that the agency “has its limitations” and wanted “to cover their butt by having gone along with this big lie.” The CIA was one of the intelligence agencies that helped determine in January that emails from prominent Democrats were stolen by Russian intelligence and given to WikiLeaks.
Mr. Pompeo has said that WikiLeaks is akin to a foreign hostile intelligence service and is an adversary of the U.S. “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” Mr. Pompeo said in an April speech where he criticized the organization for stealing secrets from democratic governments all while receiving the backing of authoritarian states.
The CIA declined to comment further.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.), shown in May, has long been a pro-Russia voice in Congress. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.), shown in May, has long been a pro-Russia voice in Congress. PHOTO: AARON P. BERNSTEIN/REUTERS The U.S. has confirmed the existence of an investigation into the disclosure of classified material to WikiLeaks that was opened after the publication of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents in 2010. Mr. Assange or the organization have never been publicly accused of wrongdoing. He and the group have said their actions were important in bringing transparency to the powerful institutions and governments and is akin to journalism.
Mr. Rohrabacher, who has long been a pro-Russia voice in Congress, traveled to London in August to meet with Mr. Assange, who has been living in Ecuador’s embassy since 2012 to avoid arrest and extradition to Sweden on allegations of sexual assault. Mr. Rohrabacher’s travel wasn’t paid for by the U.S. House of Representatives and wasn’t an official government trip, aides said.
The Swedish investigation into Mr. Assange ended in May, but he remains in the embassy to avoid arrest and extradition by the U.S.
The organization said in a statement that Mr. Assange didn’t request a pardon at any time during his conversation with Mr. Rohrabacher. The organization didn’t address whether Mr. Assange asked Mr. Rohrabacher to carry a message to the president.
Related Video
The Trump-Russia Investigations: Who Are the Russians Involved? U.S. investigators are looking into contacts between several current and former associates of Donald Trump and Russian individuals—some with direct ties to the Russian government or state-owned entities. WSJ's Niki Blasina provides a who's who of the Russians at the center of the investigations. “Mr. Assange explained that the ongoing attempts to bring a prosecution against WikiLeaks and its staff for its work documenting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are unconstitutional, widely condemned, should immediately cease and that the continuation is an abuse of process for improper purposes,” WikiLeaks said in a statement about the August meeting between Mr. Assange and Mr. Rohrabacher.
U.S. officials haven’t said whether they have formally requested Mr. Assange’s extradition or whether he has been secretly indicted by a grand jury.
After the visit to London, Mr. Rohrabacher said in a statement that Mr. Assange “emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.”
Mr. Rohrabacher has also publicly stated his desire to arrange some sort of meeting between Mr. Assange and Mr. Trump or his representatives in media interviews after the visit. He told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that he had talked to “senior people at the White House” about presenting Mr. Assange’s evidence.
But his contact with the White House chief of staff and the idea of a deal between the Trump administration and Mr. Assange that would end the legal jeopardy faced by WikiLeaks hasn’t been previously reported.
WikiLeaks came under U.S. scrutiny after the publication of more than 250,000 classified U.S. State Department diplomatic dispatches. During the 2016 campaign, the organization also published thousands of emails stolen from the servers of prominent Democrats and Democratic political organizations.
The U.S. intelligence community later concluded that the Democratic emails were stolen and released at the direction of the Russian government, as part of a multipronged influence campaign aimed at boosting Mr. Trump at the expense of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. In a January report, the intelligence agencies said they had “high confidence” that Russian hackers stole emails from U.S. victims and released them publicly using WikiLeaks, another website called DCLeaks and a hacker persona known as Guccifer 2.0, among other channels.
Other Russia tactics, directed from the highest levels of the Russian government, included efforts to hack state election systems and disseminate through social media and other outlets negative stories about Mrs. Clinton and positive ones about the Mr. Trump, the report said. Russia denies any interference, while Mr. Trump has called the investigations into possible collusion between his campaign and Russia a “witch hunt.”
During the campaign, Mr. Trump praised WikiLeaks for releasing negative information about Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats. At an October 2016 rally, he told a cheering crowd: “I love WikiLeaks.”
Since taking office, however, Mr. Trump’s administration has signaled that it considers stemming the leaking and dissemination of classified information to be a priority. Attorney General Jeff Sessions described the case against Mr. Assange as a “priority.”
Mr. Rohrabacher is known as an iconoclast within the Republican congressional caucus. In addition to holding views on U.S.-Russian diplomatic rapprochement that put him outside the mainstream of his party, he has used his perch in Congress to push issues like the legalization of marijuana.
He serves as the chairman of the subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats, which has jurisdiction over Russia-related issues within the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Look at the Mueller team. Emphasis is on money laundering. Trump is a traitor but he's going down like Al Capone
Another prosecutor joins Trump-Russia probe Kyle Freeny jumps to Mueller staff from money laundering unit. By JOSH GERSTEIN 09/15/2017 11:47 PM EDT Share on Facebook Share on Twitter An attorney working on the Justice Department's highest-profile money laundering case recently transferred off that assignment in order to join the staff of the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia, POLITICO has learned.
Attorney Kyle Freeny was among the prosecutors on hand Friday as a spokesman for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jason Maloni, testified before a grand jury at federal court in Washington.
Freeny, whose assignment to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff has not been previously reported, is the 17th lawyer known to be working with the former FBI chief on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. She departed from the courthouse Friday with two other members of Mueller's squad: former Criminal Division chief and Enron prosecutor Andrew Weissman and Civil Division appellate attorney Adam Jed, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
Before being detailed to Mueller's team, Freeny was shepherding the Justice Department's headline-grabbing effort to seize the profits from the film "The Wolf of Wall Street" on grounds that the film was financed with assets looted from the Malaysian government.
Freeny withdrew from the "Wolf of Wall Street" case on June 26, court records show, shortly before many of Mueller's attorneys joined his team in early July.
Lawyers for the production company behind the film, Red Granite Pictures, said in a court filing in Los Angeles Friday that they've reached a settlement with prosecutors. A Justice Department spokesperson said he was aware of the filing, but declined to comment.
The most reliable politics newsletter. Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning — in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Freeny's work on the movie-related case and the Manafort aspect of the Trump-Russia probe appear to have some commonalities
The Justice Department billed the "Wolf of Wall Street" case as a product of the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, an effort to pursue the proceeds of foreign corruption and return such monies to the public in the affected countries.
Justice Department officials including former Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the same kleptocracy project is probing the transfer of assets overseas by Ukrainian officials, including former President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort served as a consultant to Yanukovych and his Party of Regions — work that has triggered suspicions about the former Trump campaign chief because of Yanukovych's warm relationship with Moscow.
A Manafort firm belatedly filed a report in June with U.S. authorities disclosing about $17 million in payments from the Party of Regions between 2012 and 2014.
Manafort has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime. However, in July, FBI agents executed an early-morning search warrant at his Alexandria, Va. condominium.
A spokesman for Mueller's office confirmed Freeny is part of the staff, but he declined to elaborate on her role or what took place at the courthouse Friday.
Before joining Justice's Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section last year, Freeny drew scrutiny and criticism for her role as one of the federal government's key lawyers defending a lawsuit in which Texas and 25 other states challenged President Barack Obama's 2014 executive actions on immigration.
U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen blasted the government's attorneys, including Freeny, for misleading him at the outset of the litigation by declaring that none of the changes Obama ordered had taken effect. In fact, some had.
President Donald Trump is pictured. | AFP/Getty Images CONGRESS Left warns Pelosi, Schumer: Don’t get too close to Trump By ELANA SCHOR “The misconduct in this case was intentional, serious and material,” Hanen wrote last May. “In fact, it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.”
The Justice Department apologized for any misunderstanding, but insisted it was unintentional. Justice lawyers also argued that the judge had a memo in the court file at the time showing that one aspect of Obama's directive was already underway.
Hanen was so exercised about the episode that he sought to order three-hours of ethics training for all Washington-based Justice Department attorneys who appear in courts in the 26 states involved in the immigration-related case. Justice countered by adding an additional hour of annual ethics training for its Civil Division lawyers.
In January, Hanen backed down, saying he accepted that the comments he regarded as misleading were "unintentional." The lawyers involved "acted with no intent to deceive the other parties or the Court," the Brownsville, Texas-based, George W. Bush appointee wrote, as he dropped his plans to impose sanctions on the government and on individual lawyers not specified in public court filings.
Freeny, a Maryland native, is a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School. An Arabic speaker, she taught kindergarten for a time in Egypt before getting her law degree.
DID JARED KUSHNER’S DATA OPERATION HELP SELECT FACEBOOK TARGETS FOR THE RUSSIANS? The Russians used social media to rile the electorate. Investigators wonder if they had inside help. BY CHRIS SMITH SEPTEMBER 15, 2017 1:08 PM
The headlines were about Facebook admitting it had sold ad space to Russian groups trying to sway the 2016 presidential campaign. But investigators shrugged: they’d known or assumed for months that Facebook, as well as Twitter and other social-media platforms, were a tool used in the Kremlin’s campaign. “The only thing that’s surprising is that more revelations like this haven’t come out sooner,” said Congressman Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat and a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “And I expect that more will.”
Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”
Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.
Video: Middle East Journeyman
Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” (Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment.)
Senator Martin Heinrich is leading the charge to update American election laws so that the origins of political ads on social media are at least as transparent as those on TV and in print. Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, is also part of the Senate Intelligence Committee that is tracing Russia’s 2016 tactics. “Paul Manafort made an awful lot of money coming up with a game plan for how Russian interests could be pushed in Western countries and Western elections,” Heinrich said, referring to a mid-2000s proposal Manafort pitched to a Russian oligarch. “Suddenly he finds himself in the middle of this campaign. If there is a person who I think is very sophisticated in this stuff, and runs in pretty dicey circles, that is the place where I would dig.” No evidence has emerged to link Kushner, Cambridge Analytica, or Manafort to the Russian election-meddling enterprise; all have denied colluding with foreign agents. (Kushner’s representatives declined to comment for this article. Manafort’s spokesman could not be reached.) Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. “Could they have hired a warehouse full of people in Moscow and had them read Nate Silver’s blog every morning and determine what messages to post to what demographics? Sure, theoretically that’s possible,” said Mike Carpenter, an Obama administration assistant defense secretary who specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. “But that’s not how they do this. And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.”
Maybe no one. Or perhaps the chaotic Trump campaign unwittingly enlisted Russian-connected proxies who were eager to exploit any opening to damage Hillary Clinton’s run. It’s also plausible that Trump’s long-shot, anti-establishment bid was willing to take on assistance without asking too many questions. “Are we connecting the dots? I’m finding more dots,” said Quigley, who recently traveled to Prague and Budapest to learn more about the history of Russian influence campaigns. “I believe there was coordination, and I’m going to leave it at that for now.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09 ... a-facebook
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.
What The Facebook Search Warrant Means For Mueller’s Russia Probe
By TIERNEY SNEED Published SEPTEMBER 18, 2017 4:15 PM
It’s not surprising that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is interested in the role Facebook played in Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 election. Yet, the news that broke over the weekend that his team had obtained a search warrant to access information about Facebook’s recently disclosed Russia-linked ad spending is the clearest sign yet of the breadth of his probe, the pace at which its moving along and what kind of case he might be trying to build, regardless of whether he ultimately brings criminal charges.
“This is not a wild goose chase, it’s not just a fishing expedition. [It shows] that there is good reason to be believe that someone committed criminal behavior, we just don’t know who that was and exactly what the behavior was,” Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor, told TPM.
“Given the recent revelations, it’s hard to keep calling this a witch hunt,” she later added.
That Mueller had sought a search warrant for information about Russia ad buys on Facebook was alluded to first in a Wall Street Journal report Friday evening, and confirmed by CNN on Saturday.
Getting a search warrant is a higher bar for Mueller to clear than a grand jury subpoena, another tool Mueller is using to obtain documents and testimony.
“To get a search warrant like that, you have to show a judge that there is probable cause that evidence of a crime will be found at the location,” said Harvard Law professor and former federal prosecutor Alex Whiting. “The fact that they got a search warrant shows that the investigation is moving forward and that they have found some evidence of crimes.”
Furthermore, former federal investigators tell TPM that it’s likely that the warrant Mueller obtained is tailored and focused in a way only possible if you have a good idea of what you think you’ll find.
“It has to be particularly described, what he is looking for,” said Asha Rangappa, who was a counter-intelligence agent for the FBI and now a Yale Law School professor. “A judge isn’t going to sign off some sort of blanket warrant that tells Facebook to turn over everything.”
Facebook admitted in a blog post earlier this month, before the revelation of a Mueller search warrant, that it had identified $100,000 in spending on about 3,000 ads purchased by 470 “inauthentic” accounts “likely operated out of Russia.”
It wasn’t clear exactly what prompted Facebook, which is notoriously secretive about its internal operations, to come clean on what it found. Congressional investigators running their own Russia probes have since signaled their interest in what Facebook has learned about Russia’s involvement in politically-tinged Facebook posts.
A search warrant, however, would oblige Facebook to be responsive to Mueller in a way a voluntary request does not.
“For Facebook, voluntarily turning over the information may not be the approach they want to take because their image is, ‘We trying to protect privacy of people’s information,'” Levenson said. “A subpoena could be used, but I think in this situation the message their trying to send to the Facebook customers is, ‘We follow the law, but we’re not voluntarily turning over your information.’”
A question that has emerged since Facebook publicly admitted the presence of the accounts is whether the social media platform was the site of any criminal election law violations. Foreign nationals are prohibited from making political contributions — including money as well as other things “of value” — in U.S. elections. It is also illegal to aid and abet a foreign national’s contributions to a campaign.
A question for Mueller’s team is who was behind the Facebook campaigns and whether the Facebook activity qualifies as a contribution “of value” under federal election law.
Mueller also appears to be interested what sort of criteria was used by the ad purchasers in targeting the content, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to Rangappa, even some of the most sophisticated foreign intelligence operations may be unfamiliar with the nuances of American politics.
“If the targeted criteria was so specific that they would really need someone who would know American culture and campaigns to help them, who would that person be? Who would have that knowledge?” Rangappa said.
However, legal experts caution that a search warrant is by no means a predictor that the Mueller probe is heading towards an indictment.
“It doesn’t meant that they have found evidence of crimes committed by Americans — it could be crimes committed by Russians—and it doesn’t mean that somebody may be charged with a crime,” Whiting said.
“Some of these investigative moves, might be consequential and might be really leading to something, and some may be more crossing off less promising leads but making sure everything is chased down,” he added. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... ch-warrant
Donald Trump attorney caught hiding evidence of Trump’s guilt in a safe By Bill Palmer Updated: 5:15 pm EDT Mon Sep 18, 2017
Thanks to one of Donald Trump’s Russia lawyers having a very loud mouth and using it indiscriminately in a public setting, we now know that one of Trump’s other Russia lawyers is hiding incriminating evidence in a safe. Because these attorneys technically work for the government and not for Trump himself, this could shift the entire trajectory of the investigation into Trump’s Russia scandal.
The story began when Trump’s Russia attorney Ty Cobb admitted during a lunch meeting that White House Counsel Don McGahn has documents related to the Russia scandal “locked in a safe.” A reporter from the New York Times was at the restaurant and overheard Cobb (link). There would be no reason for McGahn to do this unless the documents were evidence of Trump’s guilt. This has the potential to change everything. First, it’s made Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators aware that McGahn is sitting on incriminating evidence. Second, it may legally open the door for Mueller and the FBI to forcibly retrieve it.
McGahn, as White House Counsel, does not represent Trump and therefore does not share the usual attorney-client privilege with him. Cobb is essentially representing Trump, but because Trump tried to save a buck by technically hiring him as a White House lawyer, their attorney-client privilege is in question as well. This means Mueller can go before a judge and argue that the documents must be turned over. Cobb and McGahn could both be compelled to testify about what the documents say. A warrant could be issued for the FBI to raid McGahn’s safe.
Moreover, if McGahn moves or destroys the incriminating documents now that Cobb has told the entire world about them, based on the fear that Mueller may be able to legally gain access to them, it’s possible McGahn could be on the hook for obstruction of justice. At the least, Mueller now knows there’s a smoking gun in McGahn’s possession – and attorney client privilege here is questionable at best. http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/hi ... rump/4991/
Trump Lawyers Clash Over How Much to Cooperate With Russia Inquiry By PETER BAKER and KENNETH P. VOGELSEPT. 17, 2017
Donald F. McGahn II, center, the White House counsel, during a swearing-in ceremony for White House staff in January. He has expressed caution about limiting the president’s ability to assert executive privilege as the Russia investigation proceeds. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times WASHINGTON — President Trump’s legal team is wrestling with how much to cooperate with the special counsel looking into Russian election interference, an internal debate that led to an angry confrontation last week between two White House lawyers and that could shape the course of the investigation.
At the heart of the clash is an issue that has challenged multiple presidents during high-stakes Washington investigations: how to handle the demands of investigators without surrendering the institutional prerogatives of the office of the presidency. Similar conflicts during the Watergate and Monica S. Lewinsky scandals resulted in court rulings that limited a president’s right to confidentiality.
The debate in Mr. Trump’s West Wing has pitted Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, against Ty Cobb, a lawyer brought in to manage the response to the investigation. Mr. Cobb has argued for turning over as many of the emails and documents requested by the special counsel as possible in hopes of quickly ending the investigation — or at least its focus on Mr. Trump.
Mr. McGahn supports cooperation, but has expressed worry about setting a precedent that would weaken the White House long after Mr. Trump’s tenure is over. He is described as particularly concerned about whether the president will invoke executive or attorney-client privilege to limit how forthcoming Mr. McGahn could be if he himself is interviewed by the special counsel as requested.
The friction escalated in recent days after Mr. Cobb was overheard by a reporter for The New York Times discussing the dispute during a lunchtime conversation at a popular Washington steakhouse. Mr. Cobb was heard talking about a White House lawyer he deemed “a McGahn spy” and saying Mr. McGahn had “a couple documents locked in a safe” that he seemed to suggest he wanted access to. He also mentioned a colleague whom he blamed for “some of these earlier leaks,” and who he said “tried to push Jared out,” meaning Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who has been a previous source of dispute for the legal team.
After The Times contacted the White House about the situation, Mr. McGahn privately erupted at Mr. Cobb, according to people informed about the confrontation who asked not to be named describing internal matters. John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, sharply reprimanded Mr. Cobb for his indiscretion, the people said.
Mr. Cobb sought to defuse the conflict in an interview over the weekend, praising Mr. McGahn as a superb lawyer. “He has been very helpful to me, and whenever we have differences of opinion, we have been able to work them out professionally and reach consensus,” Mr. Cobb said. “We have different roles. He has a much fuller plate. But we’re both devoted to this White House and getting as much done on behalf of the presidency as possible.”
The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is investigating connections between Russia and Mr. Trump and his associates, including whether they conspired to influence last year’s election. Mr. Mueller is also looking into whether Mr. Trump’s decision to fire James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director initially leading the investigation, constitutes obstruction of justice. He has asked the White House for emails and documents related to these matters, and Mr. Cobb has organized the requests into 13 categories, but officials would not describe them in more detail. So far, officials said the White House has not turned down any request.
Mr. Trump’s aides said they were scrambling to respond to the requests to avoid a subpoena that might make it look as if the White House was not cooperating. Mr. Cobb hoped to turn over a trove of documents this week, according to people close to the legal team.
Mr. Cobb argues that the best strategy is to be as forthcoming as possible, even erring on the side of inclusion when it comes to producing documents, because he maintains the evidence will show Mr. Trump did nothing wrong. Mr. McGahn has told colleagues that he is concerned that Mr. Cobb’s liberal approach could limit any later assertion of executive privilege. He has also blamed Mr. Cobb for the slow collection of documents.
Complicating the situation is that Mr. McGahn himself is a likely witness. Mr. Mueller wants to interview him about Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the White House’s handling of questions about a June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer said to be offering incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.
Mr. McGahn is willing to meet with investigators and answer questions, but his lawyer, Bill Burck, has asked Mr. Cobb to tell him whether the president wants to assert either attorney-client or executive privilege, according to lawyers close to the case. Mr. McGahn could face legal jeopardy or lose his law license should he run afoul of rules governing which communications he can divulge. He did not respond to requests for comment.
During the 1998 investigation into whether President Bill Clinton committed perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up an affair with Ms. Lewinsky, an appeals court ruled that government lawyers do not enjoy the same attorney-client privilege as private lawyers and that prosecutors in some circumstances can compel a White House lawyer to testify.
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Ty Cobb, whom the White House brought in to manage the response to the Russia investigation, has argued for turning over as many of the emails and documents requested by the special counsel as possible. Credit Jerry Cleveland/The Denver Post, via Getty Image Mr. Trump’s legal team has been a caldron of rivalry and intrigue since the beginning. His first private lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, grew alienated from the White House in part over friction with Mr. Kushner. The lawyer was unhappy that Mr. Kushner was talking with his father-in-law about the investigation without involving the legal team.
At one point, the private lawyers explored whether Mr. Kushner should resign because he was involved in the investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported. People close to the situation confirmed that talking points were drawn up to explain such a resignation, although it was not clear how directly the issue was raised with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Kasowitz was eventually pushed to the side, and Mr. Trump elevated John Dowd, a Washington lawyer with extensive experience in high-profile political cases, to take the lead as his personal lawyer. At the same time, Mr. Trump decided he needed someone inside the White House to manage the official response since Mr. McGahn, whose professional experience is mostly in election law, already handles a vast array of issues from executive orders to judicial appointments.
Mr. McGahn’s first choices turned down the job, in part out of concern that Mr. Trump would not follow legal advice. Eventually, Mr. Dowd introduced Mr. Trump to Mr. Cobb, another veteran Washington lawyer known for his high energy and expansive, curly mustache, and he was tapped as special counsel to the president, much to Mr. McGahn’s chagrin.
Tension between the two comes as life in the White House is shadowed by the investigation. Not only do Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. McGahn all have lawyers, but so do other senior officials. The uncertainty has grown to the point that White House officials privately express fear that colleagues may be wearing a wire to surreptitiously record conversations for Mr. Mueller.
Admirers said Mr. Cobb has developed a rapport with the president and does not report to Mr. McGahn, who they believe feels insecure about his place in Mr. Trump’s orbit. Mr. McGahn’s supporters argue that Mr. Cobb is wildly over-optimistic to think he can steer the investigation away from the president, given that Mr. Mueller has now hired 17 prosecutors.
The suspicion within the legal team seemed evident in the lunch conversation Mr. Cobb had last week with Mr. Dowd at BLT Steak, not far from the White House and a few doors down from The Times’s office. A reporter who happened to be at the next table heard Mr. Cobb describing varying views of how to respond to Mr. Mueller’s requests for documents.
“The White House counsel’s office is being very conservative with this stuff,” Mr. Cobb told Mr. Dowd. “Our view is we’re not hiding anything.” Referring to Mr. McGahn, he added, “He’s got a couple documents locked in a safe.”
Mr. Cobb expressed concern about another White House lawyer he did not name. “I’ve got some reservations about one of them,” Mr. Cobb said. “I think he’s like a McGahn spy.”
While Mr. Cobb advocated turning over documents to Mr. Mueller, he seemed sensitive to the argument that they should not necessarily be provided to congressional committees investigating the Russia matter. “If we give it to Mueller, there is no reason for it to ever get to the Hill,” he said.
Mr. Cobb also discussed the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting — and the White House’s response to it — saying that “there was no perception that there was an exchange.”
In the interview over the weekend, Mr. Cobb emphasized respect for Mr. McGahn. “Don McGahn is an exceptional professional,” he said. “He’s done a superior job of building and managing a White House counsel’s office that deals with a wide variety of issues effectively every day. He works hard and is highly regarded, and his lawyering skills are excellent.”
Mr. Cobb acknowledged that the two approach the investigation from different perspectives. His role, he said, was “working as hard as I can every day to assist and fully cooperate with the special counsel’s office, and that cooperation is ongoing at a substantial pace.”
Contacted separately, Mr. Dowd emphasized that the lunch conversation was not critical of Mr. McGahn. “Don McGahn is doing a terrific job and our needs are an extra load,” he said in an email. “We understand and respect the time it has taken to gather the material and review it. Nothing we said reflected adversely upon Don McGahn.”
He said tension over how to respond to document requests was normal. “Assertions of privilege are the exception to the rule that the law is entitled to every man’s evidence, and in this instance it is critical in our judgment that the president be fully transparent with the special counsel in this inquiry,” Mr. Dowd said. “All this is getting worked out in a professional manner. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/us/p ... -cobb.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.
SPOTLIGHT ON MICHAEL COHEN — TRUMP’S MYSTERIOUS LAWYER WITH DEEP UKRAINE TIES
What Can Investigators Learn from Trump’s Long-Time Confidant? Meets with Senate Intel 9/19
Michael Cohen, Trump Tower_Entrance Michael Cohen, attorney. Photo credit: IowaPolitics.com / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Preston Kemp / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn … all members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle — past and present — have been scrutinized by the media, and their various Russia ties are being investigated by the press and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. One figure, however, managed to fly largely under the radar until very recently: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former right-hand man and in-house attorney.
Cohen, who came out of nowhere to occupy a prominent spot in Trump’s orbit, has his own unique links to Russia and Ukraine. In fact, he might be one of the missing links that ties the president to shady figures and shady money from the former Soviet Union (familiarly known as FSU).
After months of speculation, he’s finally meeting, informally, with the Senate Intelligence Committee, i.e. not under oath, and in closed session. It’s not clear how in-depth the conversation will be, or what we will learn about it.
But the following story should help. It lays bare, in documented detail, Cohen’s dealings, his ties to the FSU, and how he could trigger a world of trouble for the president if he ever decided to reveal what he knows about Trump’s business empire.
Among the points illustrated below:
— Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, two key figures in Trump’s businesses in recent years, both have backgrounds tied to the FSU
— Both men knew each other; both began entering Trump’s orbit around the same time with money that may have come from FSU sources — and in a period when Trump came to increasingly depend on such monies
— Putin appears to have launched a full-court press on the United States in this time frame through surrogates, and eventually took an interest in Trump as someone who could help advance Russian interests
— Both Cohen and Sater showed up recently as intermediaries to Trump on behalf of pro-Putin policy initiatives
— While Trump has a history of sticking with supporters, even controversial ones, his loyalty does not extend to Cohen, Sater, Manafort (who managed his campaign for a time) and Flynn, who briefly served as National Security Advisor. What do they all have in common? Ties to Russia. Ties that are part of the public record.
Cohen will meet with the Senate Intelligence Committee September 19. He will not be under oath.
While Manafort and Flynn played only specific and short-lived roles with Trump, Cohen has served as confidant, spokesperson and liaison between his boss and powerful foreign agents over the past decade.
Of all the people Trump could have tapped to function as his main man, the lawyer who is always around him, his legal rottweiler, why Michael Cohen?
The story behind Cohen’s pre-Trump connections to an avalanche of dubiously sourced money from the FSU offers a possible explanation — and the tantalizing prospect of new insight into the president’s curious co-dependence with the Kremlin.
The “art of the deal” seems to be about knowing people who need to move money, and getting them to move it through you. As WhoWhatWhy previously reported, the crux of Trump’s relationship with Moscow goes beyond the presidential campaign to prior dealings that were central to his business empire.
Those dealings concern investors and business partners from various parts of the FSU. Tied into this network of influence are Russian President Vladimir Putin, wealthy FSU businessmen (“oligarchs”), and allied members of organized crime. And, improbably, Cohen, Trump’s own attorney.
Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at the 2017 G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. Photo credit: President of Russia / Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
Enter Cohen, the Ultimate Groupie . In 2007, the little-known Cohen suddenly became visible in the Trump camp. Positioned close to the throne, he became executive vice president of the Trump Organization and special counsel to Donald Trump.
Cohen told a reporter that he first got hooked on Trump after reading his book, The Art of the Deal, twice, cover to cover. If so, he is the ultimate groupie.
“Over the years I have been offered very lucrative employment opportunities, which I summarily dismissed,” he said. “To those of us who are close to Mr. Trump, he is more than our boss. He is our patriarch.”
Indeed, Cohen has a reputation for being a kind of Trump Mini-Me. In July 2015, he vowed to “mess up” the life of a Daily Beast reporter who brought up the decades-old allegation that Trump assaulted his first wife, Ivana. And he tweeted about his desire to “gut” then-Fox anchor Megyn Kelly when she challenged Trump. Cohen’s bravado has earned him comparisons — from Trump Organization colleagues — to Tom Hagen, Vito Corleone’s consigliere in the Godfather movies.
Trump values fiercely protective loyalists, and none has proven more loyal than Michael Cohen.
With the exception of a quixotic run for New York City Council as a Republican in 2003, Cohen had been a lifelong Democrat, voting for Obama in 2008. So it was a quite a change when he decided to formally join the GOP — after Trump’s inauguration.
But neither that switch nor years of devoted service to the Trump Organization could win Cohen a post in the president’s administration, though he had reportedly yearned for and expected to occupy one. And why was that?
Possibly because by the time Trump took office, Cohen’s name had surfaced in headline-grabbing, Russia-related stories — and that is the one kind of publicity from which Trump has tried to distance himself.
Cohen and the Dossier . To begin with, the name “Michael Cohen” showed up in the controversial “dossier” put together last year by a former UK foreign intelligence officer doing private research on Russia connections for Trump opponents. The 35-page collection of memos, published in its entirety by Buzzfeed, comprises precise but unverified documentation of continuous contact between Trump associates and Russian operatives during the presidential campaign.
Cohen’s name appeared on page 18 of the dossier, which claimed that he met with Kremlin representatives in Prague last August to conduct damage control on a pair of “western media revelations”: Manafort’s “corrupt relationship” with Ukrainian President Yanukovych and campaign adviser Carter Page’s meeting with “senior regime figures” in Moscow a month earlier.
Cohen has forcefully rejected the notion that he was the man referenced in the dossier. To prove this, he made public his own passport stamps, which indicate he could not have been in the Czech Republic last August.
Shortly after the inauguration, Cohen’s name was in the news again, this time for meeting in late January with a Moscow-connected Ukrainian politician, and in this case his involvement is not in dispute. The Ukrainian had come bearing a “peace agreement” intended to lift punishing economic sanctions that had been imposed on Russia after Putin’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region.
Cohen, Felix Sater, and the Russians . Cohen purportedly attended the meeting at the urging of Felix Sater, a one-time mob-connected businessman who went on to work with Trump, and about whom WhoWhatWhy has written extensively.
According to The New York Times, as a result of that meeting, Cohen joined other Trump associates already under scrutiny in the FBI’s counterintelligence inquiry related to Russia.
Why was Cohen even in a meeting about US foreign policy at all? As Cohen himself noted, his role as “special counsel” with Trump was limited to representing Trump personally, not as president.
Since the January meeting, Cohen has become even more ghostlike, and his boss has remained conspicuously quiet as Cohen landed in the crosshairs of both the media and Mueller’s investigative unit — two entities Trump hasn’t been shy about lambasting. Though he retains his official title as the president’s personal advisor and attorney, Cohen appears to have been exiled from Trump’s inner circle. Neither the White House Press Office nor the Trump Organization responded to WhoWhatWhy’s inquiry about Cohen’s current role in the Trump orbit.
Trump is not one to banish someone just because he or she is run-of-the-mill controversial. Witness such highly polarizing, risky figures as Stephen Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller who, though relative latecomers to the Trump camp, were kept on long after they were political liabilities, albeit popular with his ever-shrinking base. (And Miller is still on board.)
So why does Michael Cohen’s fate resemble that of Manafort and Flynn, who were ditched when their Russia-related activities drew unwelcome national attention?
In the Spotlight . This spring, when it became apparent that members of Congress might wish to question him, the typically brash Cohen declared that he would only testify if he received a subpoena. Eventually he agreed to meet with the Senate Intelligence Committee informally, i.e. not under oath (that’s happening September 19).
Compared to some others in Trump’s entourage, he is largely unknown to the public. Notwithstanding those brief moments in the limelight, the media overall (with a few notable exceptions including Talking Points Memo and Buzzfeed) has devoted little attention to him.
But a new development thrust Cohen back into the limelight Monday, when the Washington Post reported that Cohen and Sater had worked together closely in the early months of Trump’s presidential campaign on a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
At Sater’s suggestion, Cohen had emailed Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s personal spokesperson, to solicit the Kremlin’s approval of the lucrative project while Trump, stumping on the campaign trail, was lavishing the Russian president with praise at debates and rallies. The real estate deal, Sater suggested in a string of emails to Cohen, would be a win-win: Trump would look like a great negotiator, and Putin would be boosting the prospects of the candidate he preferred.
“Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote to Cohen. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”
The tower never materialized, but their “boy,” of course, did ascend to the presidency. And the Trump Organization renewed ownership of the TrumpTowerMoscow.com domain this July — before the latest controversy, though it has since gone dark.
Cohen’s Own Ukrainian Connections . The son of a Long Island physician, Michael Dean Cohen received his law degree from a low-ranked Michigan school, the Thomas M. Cooley Law School — a “diploma mill” according to some, which later rebranded as Western Michigan University. The school, which, like Trump, doesn’t hesitate to sue its critics, has highlighted Cohen as an illustrious alumnus.
Cohen was admitted to the New York Bar in 1992 and became a personal injury lawyer.
He soon began assembling a portfolio of businesses outside the legal profession, virtually all involving Ukrainian immigrants — many of whom were, or became, immensely wealthy.
Perhaps the earliest was a taxi business in partnership with the Ukraine-born Simon Garber, who was at one time involved with a Moscow cab company, and now has huge stakes in cab ownership in New York, Chicago and New Orleans.
By 2003, Cohen and Garber were running more than 200 taxis in New York, allowing Cohen to pull in $90,000 a month in 2011. The partnership imploded in 2012 after a nasty legal dispute, after which Cohen went his own way and entrusted his 15 medallion companies to Evgeny Friedman, a Russian immigrant who holds the single largest collection of medallions in New York.
In partnership with two other Ukrainian immigrants, Cohen went into the casino boat business. His partners, Leonid Tatarchuk and Arkady Vaygensberg, were associated with a man who allegedly had FSU mob ties, and with a lawyer indirectly connected to the late mob legend Meyer Lansky.
The gambling venture was besieged by lawsuits from unhappy workers and investors. Cohen has had other legal problems. He could not explain what had become of $350,000 held in a trust account he managed, according to court documents obtained by Buzzfeed News.
Victory Casino Cruises Victory Casino Cruises. Photo credit: Rusty Clark ~ 100K Photos / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
In 1998 Michael Cohen incorporated two entities: Ukrainian Capital Partners LP and Ukrainian Capital Growth Fund Corp. The Growth Fund was dissolved in 2002, but, according to New York Department of State records, Capital Partners is still active.
Towering Trump Investments . Shortly after the turn of the century, Cohen took a new direction. He began buying — as did his relatives — properties in buildings with the Trump name.
He obtained his first in 2001: a unit in Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza. And he kept on buying.
Some years later, the Trump-friendly New York Post profiled Cohen and his passion for Trump developments in a real-estate-porn article headlined “Upping the Ante.”
Once some buyers go Trump, they never go back. Take Michael Cohen, 40, an attorney and partner at Phillips Nizer. He purchased his first Trump apartment at Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in 2001. He was so impressed he convinced his parents, his in-laws and a business partner to buy there, too. Cohen’s in-laws went on [to] purchase two more units there and one at Trump Grande in Sunny Isles, Fla.
Cohen then bought at Trump Palace at 200 E. 69th St., and Trump Park Avenue, where he currently resides. He’s currently in the process of purchasing a two-bedroom unit at Trump Place on Riverside Boulevard – so, naturally, Cohen’s next step is to purchase something at Trump Plaza Jersey City. He’s now in negotiations for a two-bedroom unit there.
“Trump properties are solid investments,” says Cohen, who’s also looking at the new Trump SoHo project.
By the time he entered Trump’s employ, Cohen, his relatives and his business partner had already purchased a combined 11 Trump properties.
Why did Cohen and company begin buying all those Trump properties? Where did the money come from? And did Cohen use this spending spree to gain an entrance into Trump’s inner circle?
The answers to these questions may lie in what at first appears to be a mere coincidence: Around the time Cohen began buying these properties — 2000-2001 — the aforementioned Felix Sater apparently first approached Trump.
It is interesting to learn that when Cohen was growing up, he had known and run in the same circles as Sater when both lived on Long Island.
Sater and Cohen would go on to play intriguingly interconnected roles in the saga linking Donald Trump to vast supplies of dubiously sourced money from the FSU.
Sater’s family immigrated to the US in the 1970s, landing in the Coney Island-Brighton Beach area, a part of Brooklyn heavily populated by Soviet emigres — and an area where the Trump family owned lots of buildings.
In addition to the Trump units, Cohen owns entire buildings around New York City. In 2015, while working for Trump, he bought a $58 million apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. According to the New York real estate news site The Real Deal, Cohen also holds multiple luxury apartment units and other buildings on the Lower East Side and in the Kips Bay section of Manhattan. Trump buildings Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Rustycale / Wikipedia, Leandro Neumann Ciuffo / Flickr (CC BY 2.0), Americasroof (talk) / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0), Alex Proimos / Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0) and Stepanstas / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Cohen has a seemingly limitless appetite for real estate, and his younger brother Bryan, also a lawyer, entered the real estate trade and is now Chief Administrative Officer of DE Development Marketing, part of the prominent Douglas Elliman real estate brokerage.
More Businesses, More Ukrainians . That Cohen buys luxury Trump apartments like others buy shoes — and that he has a seemingly inexhaustible budget — could conceivably be explained, at least in part, by his ties to people who, as noted earlier, became extremely wealthy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
There are any number of perfectly legitimate ways for Cohen to amass the funds necessary to purchase entire buildings. Usually, however, the source of such wealth can be ascertained. In Cohen’s case, the source is unclear— and Cohen refused to discuss the origin of those funds with WhoWhatWhy.
It should be noted that Russians and others from the former Soviet Union seeking to move funds West are among the biggest buyers of New York real estate.
But Cohen’s Ukrainian ties run even deeper. His wife, Laura, is from the Ukraine. So is Bryan Cohen’s wife, Oxana.
From here we follow a trail through a somewhat complicated cast of characters. At the end, you will see how all of these people are connected to one another as well as to Trump — and to Russia.
The trail begins with Bryan Cohen’s father-in-law, Alex Oronov, born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, who emigrated with his family to the United States in 1978. He ran a Manhattan art gallery, and eventually, and surprisingly, managed to convince the old-school communist government to partner with him to sell lithographs based on the collection of the State Russian Museum. His influence or skills of persuasion were so good that he even persuaded Kremlin authorities to permit him to open a gift shop at the museum, a rarity in the USSR.
Following Ukrainian independence in 1994, Oronov spotted a far more lucrative opportunity: Ukraine’s privatized bounty of grain. Ukraine has some of Europe’s largest acreage of arable land — and it is highly fertile and productive, making it the “breadbasket of Europe.”
He founded an agribusiness firm, Harvest Moon (later rebranded as Grain Alliance); Bryan Cohen notes in his own online biography that he served as General Counsel and Executive Vice President for Grain Alliance, Americas. It’s not clear where the funding for the enterprise, which had more than 100,000 acres in production at one point, came from.
The firm seems to have benefited from the lack of strong central authorities in the Ukraine. According to a brochure from a Kiev-based law firm, “Foreign Investment in Ukrainian Agriculture,” prepared for a 2010 seminar on investment, “Grain Alliance… expanded rapidly over the last five years when Ukraine had no control from any government officials.”
In this and similar ventures Oronov, from a modest start, became wildly wealthy, working with a network of well-connected Ukrainian politicians and businessmen with alleged mob ties. One of his partners was Viktor Topolov, a wealthy Ukrainian closely associated with figures the FBI has identified as “well known” members of the Russian and Ukrainian underworld. A Ukrainian court document obtained by Buzzfeed reveals that Topolov ignored subpoenas and lied about his role in a money-laundering and fraud investigation in the late 1990s. Semion Mogilevich FBI Wanted Poster for Semion Mogilevich. Photo credit: FBI
To follow the Trump money trail further requires a brief dip into Ukraine’s recent history, which turns out to be crucial to Michael Cohen’s story.
Ukraine in Tug of War Between East and West . Starting around 2000, Ukraine increasingly became the subject of a tug of war between the West and Russia. Ukraine was once one of the most valuable parts of the USSR. Since gaining independence in 1991, it has been drawn closer to the West, and has even toyed with the ultimate snub to Russia: joining NATO, the Western military alliance.
The struggle to control Ukraine, its political leaders and its resources, played a major role in Russia’s decision to enter Ukraine militarily in the summer of 2014. This led the West to impose sanctions that have severely harmed Russia’s economy. Putin has made no secret of his desire to get the sanctions lifted.
Also at stake for Russia in its relations with Ukraine is the future of the pipelines that pass through Ukraine, bringing Russian natural gas to Western Europe. Russia is not happy that its lucrative gas exports, the source of much of its foreign exchange, must be transported across the territory of its now-adversary.
Going head to head in the battles to control the future of this resource are sovereign nations, international corporations, shadowy public-private entities, and shady figures like the Ukrainian-born Semion Mogilevich. The reputed “boss of bosses” of organized crime in today’s Russia is believed to be the most powerful mobster in the world. His sub-boss, Vyacheslav Ivankov, was sent to America, and discovered by the FBI living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower, and later, having fled Manhattan, in a Trump casino in Atlantic City.
Mogilevich was identified as the secret majority owner of the Ukrainian stake in a mysterious intermediary company, half-owned by Russian energy giant Gazprom. Ivankov later stated that Mogilevich and Putin were close; soon after, the man was gunned down on a Moscow street.
One beneficiary of the Ukrainian pipeline situation was future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was paid millions of dollars by prominent players in the natural gas scramble.
While questions swirled about the international ramifications of the pipeline battle, Sater, then an FBI informant, traveled to Ukraine and Russia — ostensibly searching for properties to develop with the Trump Organization. Alex Oronov Alex Oronov. Photo credit: Facebook / TPM
In the past, Cohen has downplayed his connections to the FSU. In a January 2017 interview with Yahoo News, he averred that he had only been to Ukraine twice — “either 2003 or 2004.” The reason? His “brother’s father-in-law [i.e., Oronov] lives in Kiev.”
However, Cohen seemingly would not have to travel to see his relative. Oronov had homes in the US — including one on Long Island and one at the Trump Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida; he was even registered to vote in Florida.
The Cohens said that they knew nothing about Topolov when they pitched the project. But if they didn’t know the background of Bryan Cohen’s father-in-law’s famous longtime business partner, they’re unusually ill-informed, and certainly failed to do due diligence in a situation well-known to be rife with financial criminals.
Cohen and Sater and Trump….Together . The Trumps themselves have stated that their company came to depend increasingly over the years on monies tied to the FSU. Thus, it would not be illogical to wonder whether Michael Cohen was brought into the Trump Organization because of his ability to help in that regard.
But there’s more here. As mentioned above, Cohen dovetails in interesting ways with another FSU-tied figure who entered Trump’s orbit in roughly the same period: Felix Sater, the one-time mob-connected businessman who worked with Trump in the past, and about whom, as noted earlier, WhoWhatWhy has written extensively. Both bring ostensible ties to people who themselves have links to organized crime, and to those whose interests coincide with those of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchic network.
Take Topolov, with whom Cohen and his brother have done business. Via a conglomerate of his, Topolov employed three executives the FBI have described as members of a violent Russian organized-crime network: one, a mob enforcer closely associated with Mogilevich, the powerful organized crime boss, was reportedly responsible for at least 20 murders.
We previously reported about Mogilevich’s associates’s ties to Trump Tower, dating back to the 1990s. We noted how, from its inception, Trump Tower was a popular place with people having organized crime connections. We noted the various people connected with the FSU, with FSU organized crime, and the ties between those organizations and the Putin regime.
We told the story of Sater, a USSR-born felon who had cut a deal to serve as a confidential source for the FBI in return for leniency after he was caught participating in a major financial fraud with a group of men including one with American organized crime ties.
We explained that tackling FSU influence in Wall Street had become one of the FBI’s highest priorities.
We described how, circa 2001, Sater joined Bayrock, a real estate development company run by FSU emigres in Trump Tower, and eventually began working directly with Donald Trump. Sater and Bayrock were supplying Trump with income during a period when his other investments had been suffering.
The money spigot was apparent to all. In a 2008 deposition, Sater even testified that, upon Trump’s request, he accompanied Donald Jr. and Ivanka on business trips to the FSU. Donald Jr. would later declare that the region had become the family’s main source of investment.
While Sater was moving up in the Trump orbit, Cohen’s status as a mysterious Trump real estate mega-investor of uncertain wealth and an undistinguished legal practice changed, seemingly overnight.
In 2006, the year before he went to work fulltime for Trump, Cohen suddenly went big-time, becoming, briefly, a partner at a prominent New York firm, Phillips Nizer, where, according to a profile, “he counted [Trump] as one of his many high-profile wealthy clients.”
He was then offered a job by the developer. The reason? “I suspect,” Cohen said, “he was impressed with both my handling of matters as well as the results.”
According to cached images of the Phillips Nizer website found in the Internet Archive, he was first listed as partner in October 2006. By May 2007, about the time he was hired by Trump, Cohen’s title was changed from partner to counsel. He remained in the Phillips Nizer directory as counsel until some time in late 2008.
What exactly did this obscure former personal injury lawyer bring to the firm? It has become increasingly common for law firms to bring on board anyone who can bring business with them. Interestingly, Cohen’s practice there was described as including distressed debt — which certainly could have described Trump’s frequently unstable situation. Mark Landis, managing partner at the firm, declined to comment, saying it is policy not to discuss current or former colleagues.
But in an interview with WhoWhatWhy, Bryan Cohen said that both he and his brother came to Phillips Nizer as part of a merger between Nizer and their entity, the Cohen Law Firm. Asked why Nizer wanted to combine with the much smaller Cohen operation, Bryan Cohen declined to say, terming the question “irrelevant.” Phillips Nizer Photo credit: baba_1967 / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Whatever one is to make of Cohen’s sudden affiliation with Phillips Nizer, just as abruptly as he appeared, he moved on. So did Bryan Cohen, who joined the real estate firm, Douglas Elliman.
Michael Cohen officially joined Trump’s organization in a top position — as Executive Vice President and Special Counsel.
With Sater already working with Trump, this meant that for much of 2007, two of Trump’s key people were decidedly unusual fellows with major ties to the FSU.
Thus we see a fascinating pattern in which two childhood acquaintances began entering the Trump orbit at the same time, circa 2000-2001 (with Cohen making his extraordinary string of Trump property purchases and Sater moving into business in Trump Tower) and, by 2007, both were working near each other inside the Trump empire itself.
In this period, we see a third figure who would later become highly controversial for his links into the FSU: Paul Manafort.
It was in 2006 that the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, long a close Putin associate, signed a whopping $10 million a year contract with Manafort based on what Manafort had presented as efforts inside the United States that would “greatly benefit the Putin government.” (As the Daily Beast reported, few have noted that Deripaska soon partnered with Manafort and the Ukrainian alleged gangster Dmytro Firtash in acquiring New York’s Drake Hotel.)
That same year, Manafort himself bought an apartment…. In Trump Tower.
A Whirlwind in the Former Soviet Union . In September 2007, Trump, Sater and another partner posed for a photo at the opening of their Trump SoHo Hotel in New York.
The celebration would be brief. In December, the Times revealed that Sater had a criminal past. Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater attend the Trump Soho Launch Party on September 19, 2007 in New York. Photo credit: Mark Von Holden / WireImage
This potentially put Trump in a very difficult spot. If Trump were to admit that he knew Sater was a convicted felon but did business with him nonetheless, he, the Trump Organization, and anyone within the company who knew of it would be potentially liable for sky-high sums. This was especially true for the Trump-Bayrock projects (as noted, many of them financed by FSU figures), as so many of them ended terribly, with multiple lawsuits across many states.
Bayrock unraveled. Trump SoHo went into foreclosure in 2013, after just three years of operation, leaving a slew of unoccupied units in the hands of a new developer. It was the firm’s final deal. As is now well known,Trump, who would later claim to barely know Sater, kept him on in the building and, if anything, he and Sater grew even closer. Indeed, Sater was soon working directly for Trump himself, with an office, business cards, phone number and email address all provided by the Trump Organization. The cards identified him as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.”
In this period, Trump Organization activities in the countries of the former Soviet Union appear to have accelerated.
In 2010 and 2012, while working for Trump, Cohen traveled to the former Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan and Georgia. It’s worth noting that Bayrock had earlier received large infusions of cash from the ultra-corrupt Kazakhstan, and other funds from Georgia, also awash in ill-gotten fortunes.
In 2013, leading up to the Russian-hosted winter Olympics in Sochi, a close Putin ally reached out to Trump.
Aras Agalarov, an Azerbaijani billionaire real estate developer with Russian citizenship who is known as the “Donald Trump of Russia,” paid Trump millions of dollars to bring Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow.
An Instagram post by Agalarov’s son shows Cohen with Trump and Agalarov at the Trump Vegas around the time the deal was inked.
Right around this time, Putin awarded Agalarov a state medal for his entrepreneurial and philanthropic contributions to Russia.
The Third American Political Party: Russia . As Trump’s relationship to the former Soviet Union intensified, so, seemingly, did Russian interest in the American political system and the presidency.
In 2014, we now know, US intelligence secretly identified what it determined was a Russian effort to sow doubt and chaos in the US elections system.
By then, Trump was widely recognized for his long-standing presidential ambitions — he ran for the office as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, garnering more than 15,000 votes in the California primary before abruptly dropping out. The Russians understood that he also had mass appeal, and a personality, temperament and history associated with provoking strong and divisive reactions.
Also, in a GOP primary field with a crowd of lackluster candidates, Trump was guaranteed to draw considerable public and media interest. At a time when Hillary Clinton, an antagonist of Putin, was viewed as virtually a shoo-in, Trump was a dark horse and a wild card, but one with plenty of outside potential to shake things up.
By February, 2015, Trump had already recruited staff in early voting states; a month later, he formed a presidential exploratory committee and delayed the production of “The Apprentice,” the still-running reality television show that established Trump as a pop culture icon in the mid-2000s. Trump officially announced his candidacy for president on June 16, 2015.
The date of the first campaign-related contacts between Trump’s people and the Russians is not clear, though as time passes, we are learning of earlier and earlier interactions.
Matters seem to have come to a head in June 2016, when, at the request of Russians, Donald Trump Jr. convened a meeting in his office. Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner. Photo credit: Watch the video on C-SPAN, Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs / Flickr.
When the meeting was revealed in July 2017, a panicked Donald Trump Jr. sought to downplay it, claiming it was to discuss policy toward adoptions of Russian children. Further revelations forced him to gradually disclose bits of information that cumulatively make clear the meeting was in response to Russian offers to help Trump’s candidacy by providing intelligence on Clinton that could be used against her.
Among those attending were Manafort, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and publicist Rob Goldstone — who works for the son of the previously mentioned Russian real estate mogul Aras Agalarov and who brokered the meeting. Also present was Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, a fervent opponent of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on certain Russian officials following the imprisonment, and subsequent death, of a Russian tax accountant investigating fraud. Veselnitskaya claimed to hold incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.
Another participant was Rinat Akhmetshin, whose past activities and associations led some to wonder whether he was or is a spy. Sen. Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley, a Republican, speculated that the meeting itself was a classic ploy of Russian intelligence, intended to draw the Trump people into a potentially incriminating relationship. That, perhaps paradoxically, would likely make Trump even more vulnerable and beholden to Putin.
And of course the meeting was arranged via Goldstone, who works for the Agalarovs — who performed such valuable services to Russia that, as noted, Putin gave Aras Agalarov a medal.
Cozier and Cozier . To sum up, Trump’s financial fortunes seem — both by appearance and by statements from the Trumps themselves — to have been heavily dependent on money from the former Soviet Union. Besides the Cohen retinue buying at least 11 apartments in Trump buildings, the money that came in through Felix Sater was also from the FSU.
How much of the funds that kept Trump’s shaky financial empire afloat in those lean years had its origins in the part of the world dominated by the Kremlin? Well, how much did not? Even Donald Trump, Jr. declared in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
As for Trump, he has repeatedly tweeted and declared that he has no loans “from Russia” and no “deals” in Russia. While that may be technically true, what’s more important is that money that originated in the FSU has played a crucial role in his business career. The “art of the deal” seems to be about knowing people who need to move money, and getting them to move it through you. Felix Sater, FBI Felix Sater and Trump business card superimposed over FBI building. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Cliff / Flickr (CC BY 2.0), 591J / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Boing Boing (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).
Sater appears to have been an FBI asset for many years, including at least some of the years when Cohen was working with Trump.
Sater denied to WhoWhatWhy that any of his reports to the FBI from Trump Tower concerned organized crime figures in Russia, and asserted that he had never even heard of Mogilevich, though his own father was said to be a Mogilevich underling.
In any case, the FBI agents running Sater were extremely focused on the FSU underworld. It is likely that they would take an interest in the partner of Cohen’s in-law, and all the partner’s ties to organized crime. And they would surely have been interested in how Donald Trump fit into this underworld web all around him.
The Ukraine “Peace Deal” . Yet Cohen remained mostly out of the public eye, even as myriad Trump associates (including Manafort) ended up in the hot seat for their business dealings in the FSU.
That changed with the report of the January 27, 2017, meeting between Cohen, Sater and Ukrainian politician Andrii V. Artemenko at a luxury hotel in New York.
The three men discussed a proposed Russia-Ukraine peace agreement that would result in the lifting of economic sanctions against Russia. Artemenko told The New York Times that Cohen delivered the proposal to Michael Flynn, who was then Trump’s national security advisor. Cohen has told different stories about his role, but in one interview he confirmed that he delivered a bundle of documents containing the proposal to Flynn’s office while Flynn was still part of the Trump administration. Cohen has insisted he was not aware of any Kremlin involvement.
In bragging about his role in getting such material into the White House, Artemenko comes across as clumsy and artless, seemingly oblivious to how devastating the revelation could have been to Trump had the media and, say, influential congressmen made more of it. But was he naive? Or was this actually a House of Cards-type scenario, where the Russians were deliberately publicizing another bit of incriminating material on Trump in order to gain yet more leverage over him and control over his fate?
The Artemenko “peace plan” was — importantly — accompanied by documents that purported to reveal corruption on the part of Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, which could be used to weaken (and potentially topple) the Ukrainian regime led by an enemy of Putin.
This of course made the current Ukrainian authorities go ballistic. No more has emerged on the document bundle, or what, if anything, resulted from its arrival in the White House. But the intent was clearly to advance Russia’s interests, and that of a pro-Russian Ukrainian politico with historic ties to Manafort. Andrii V. Artemenko , Michael Cohen Andrii V. Artemenko superimposed photo of Michael Cohen. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from IowaPolitics.com / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and A. V. Artemenko / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Although Felix Sater was present at the meeting as a supposed intermediary, he wouldn’t have been needed for that. Artemenko had known Cohen for years. Cohen’s brother’s father-in-law was, as mentioned earlier, tied to Artemenko through business. Artemenko was also closely tied to Topolov, the allegedly money-laundering Ukrainian politician in business with Oronov, Bryan Cohen’s father-in-law. (Oronov died March 2 after suffering from what Bryan Cohen described to WhoWhatWhy as an “incredibly aggressive” cancer diagnosed three months earlier.)
Artemenko said that his Russia-Ukraine sanctions proposal had been discussed with Cohen and Sater back during the primaries in early 2016, just as Trump was emerging as the frontrunner.
Western sanctions have delivered some crushing blows to Russia’s economy, slashing both its GDP and ruble value by 50 percent in three years, according to a 2017 Congressional Research Service report. Though the economy is expected to resume modest growth, getting out from under the stifling sanctions is for Putin still a national security concern of the highest possible priority. And the Trump camp had been all about lifting the sanctions.
During the 2016 Republican Convention, the party surprisingly removed from its platform a condemnation of Russia over its incursion into Ukraine. Initially, both Donald Trump and campaign manager Paul Manafort denied any knowledge of the platform change. Much later, though, we learned that Trump’s platform chairman, J. D. Gordon, had met with the Russian ambassador during the convention.
In an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta, Gordon said he had promoted the softening of the language on Ukraine — a softening that Trump himself had advocated earlier in the year, in a meeting with Gordon. Later still, Gordon would attempt to walk back the admission in a parsing reminiscent of Bill Clinton: “I mean, what’s the definition of pushed for the amendment, right? It’s an issue of semantics.”
Semantics or no semantics, the platform was changed.
Trump himself has been very kind to Russia. As a candidate, he worked strenuously to avoid criticizing Russia. He wouldn’t even acknowledge that Russia had seized Crimea, or that it had military units in eastern Ukraine. Even after he was nominated, he told a reporter,
“Just so you understand: [Putin] is not going to go into Ukraine, all right?,” as if that had not already happened two years earlier.
This seeming quid pro quo with Russia suggests the extent to which Russia has compromised the Trump White House.
Having Cohen and Sater deliver the sanctions “peace proposal” to Flynn, a trusted figure with his own Russia connections, keeps Trump himself out of the loop, something Cohen would well understand — that’s one of the core things lawyers do understand, and a role they often play.
We also know that Artemenko’s role in the meetings with Cohen and Sater led Ukraine’s chief prosecutor to open a treason investigation.
Why would Cohen go to such a meeting? It seems crazy. But then the Trump team’s defining trait has been its reckless bravado, and a brash disregard for troubling appearances.
As for Artemenko’s seemingly bumbling admission about the meeting, it is reminiscent of the “indiscretion” of Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the US, who went to the Republican convention to meet with Manafort about softening the GOP’s stance toward Russia. Although Trump and Manafort vigorously denied it, Kislyak then went public with his own account of the meeting.
In the complex game being played by Putin, with Russia’s (and Putin’s) future at stake, Trump seems to have been cornered into a precarious dependence on Russian “good will.” As we noted months ago, the FBI has long known much of this. What former FBI director and Special Counsel Robert Mueller will do about it remains to be seen.
WhoWhatWhy sought an interview with Cohen, but he declined. When we offered to send him questions, he wrote back: “You can send questions but not committing to respond.” We did send questions. And he did not respond.
How to Read Bob Mueller’s Hand Based on what we know so far, here’s a former federal prosecutor’s expert read on where the Russian investigation is heading. By RENATO MARIOTTI September 18, 2017
Although the scope of the special counsel’s investigation is vast, public reporting of his activities indicate the direction his investigation is taking and gives us a good sense of the types of charges that could result. But most of the breathless speculation about what he will ultimately do is likely wrong—the result of a misunderstanding of how the law works, a misreading of the public evidence we’ve seen so far or wishful thinking by those who would either like to see the president driven from office or see everyone on his team exonerated.
As a starting point, it’s important to keep in mind what prosecutors do: They investigate discrete crimes. Although the media often throw around phrases like “Russian collusion,” that term has no legal meaning whatsoever. Mueller won’t charge one grand conspiracy involving everyone he’s looking at. If he brings charges, expect to see individuals charged separately unless they committed a crime together.
Top focus: Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn
The person in the greatest legal jeopardy, given what we know from media reports, is former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, whose home was searched by the FBI. When the bureau executes a search warrant at your home, that means the prosecutor has already convinced a judge that there is good reason to believe a crime was committed and that evidence of that crime was at your house. That’s bad news for Manafort.
But that doesn’t mean Mueller’s search warrant application alleged that Manafort is or was conspiring with Moscow. There are crimes that are much more straightforward to prove, such as false statements in disclosures made by Manafort. It’s more likely that Mueller is focused on easy wins like this.
The same is true of Flynn, the former national security adviser who is under scrutiny for failing to disclose income from Russia-related entities. Proving that Flynn lied on a form is much more straightforward than proving an agreement between him and foreigners. Recent news that Flynn’s son is also in Mueller’s sights suggests that the former FBI chief might be developing a case against the son in the hopes that Flynn will cooperate to obtain leniency for his son, which is called “vicarious cooperation.”
Neither of these two pieces of the Mueller investigation has any apparent connection to the rest of what his team is investigating, and if either results in charges, they would be contained in stand-alone indictments that are unconnected to the other matters they are looking at.
Obstruction of justice
The other aspect of Mueller’s investigation that appears to be fairly advanced is his obstruction investigation. We know Mueller is looking at obstruction related to the firing of FBI Director James Comey for many reasons—most recently, the Justice Department refused to permit a Senate committee to interview two FBI officials who were witnesses on this issue, and when asked about the matter, referred questions to Mueller. This indicates that Mueller believes the FBI officials are potential witnesses. (If Mueller thinks he might use their testimony later, he would want to reduce the risk that potential defendants and their counsel can learn about it in advance. He also doesn’t want to generate inconsistent accounts from witnesses that can be used to undermine them at trial.)
Mueller also has set up interviews with White House officials who were reportedly involved in the decision to fire Comey, and Trump lawyers reportedly sent a memo to Mueller making legal arguments about obstruction and claiming that Comey is not a credible witness. This suggests Trump’s legal team believes Mueller is focused on obstruction. They wouldn’t waste their time otherwise.
The Friday Cover Sign up for POLITICO Magazine’s email of the week’s best, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. The strength of the obstruction case against the president is still an open question, however. On the day Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, I told the New York Times that “a prudent prosecutor would want more facts before bringing this case against a president.” Since then, many more facts have been disclosed, including Thursday’s revelation that the president erupted at Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he learned of Mueller’s appointment, calling him an “idiot” and demanding his resignation.
The intensity of Trump’s reaction to the appointment is unusual and will prompt questions about why he cared so deeply about losing control over the Russia investigation. Moreover, former White House aides Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Vice President Mike Pence will likely be questioned about what they told the president to persuade him not to fire Sessions, and what he said in response. The president’s words could be used by Mueller as evidence of his “corrupt” intent, which he would need to prove obstruction of justice.
The most significant testimony could come from White House Counsel Don McGahn, who reportedly looked at a letter justifying Comey’s firing that was drafted by White House aide Stephen Miller at Trump’s direction. McGahn made numerous deletions and comments in the draft and also discussed his concerns verbally, according to the New York Times, but it was never published. Mueller has that letter, the Justice Department has confirmed.
McGahn’s comments could be extremely important. If McGahn counseled Trump that firing Comey for the reasons he originally stated could create legal liability for the president, that could be powerful evidence for Mueller. Alternatively, if McGahn’s concerns were focused solely on the tone or language used by Miller, Trump would have an “advice of counsel” defense—he could say that the fact that his lawyer did not raise these concerns led him to believe there was no legal jeopardy associated with firing Comey.
At this point, too little is known to evaluate the strength of the obstruction case, particularly against anyone other than the president himself. Because most legal scholars believe a sitting president cannot be indicted, any legal liability for Trump himself would likely come via impeachment proceedings, a political process that would require votes from a GOP House majority as well as at least votes from 19 GOP senators—assuming Democrats vote in lockstep—to convict. For that reason, any legal action by Mueller on the obstruction front would likely come against others who aided an obstruction effort, not against the president. While some legal scholars—including one who provided an opinion to then-independent counsel Kenneth Starr—believe the president could be indicted while in office, Mueller would likely follow Starr’s approach of presenting a report for Congress to consider.
What we’ve discussed so far is consistent with a September 6 email that White House lawyer Ty Cobb sent in reply to someone who used a spoof email account to pretend to be his colleague. Cobb indicated that Manafort and Flynn have “issues” but he believes the president and White House would be cleared. That could be spin, but it acknowledges that—based on what he knows, which is more than we do—the Manafort and Flynn issues are distinct.
Another person facing his own distinct liability is the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has come under scrutiny for failing to disclose contacts with foreign individuals. The government would need to prove that those omissions were made “knowingly” and “willfully,” and as I’ve analyzed elsewhere, Kushner’s legal team asserts that the omissions were inadvertent.
The Trump Tower Meeting
Another major aspect of the Mueller investigation is the meeting at Trump Tower that was attended by Donald Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort. Trump Jr.’s many statements about the meeting, one of which was highly misleading and allegedly dictated by the president, have created problems for him that could result in a charge if his statements to Congress (which I dissected here) were false.
As for the meeting itself, what Trump Jr. and Kushner have admitted publicly is insufficient to establish liability. Whether that encounter results in charges depends on whether Mueller can prove that more happened within the meeting—or that there were more meetings.
Of course, meeting with Russians is not itself a crime. To bring charges, Mueller would need to prove there was an agreement to commit a crime and that one of the Trump associates joined that effort, or that they knew that a crime had been committed (like hacking a U.S. server) and helped it succeed. It is also a crime to offer or agree to trade an official act (such as repealing sanctions) in exchange for something of value. In addition, it can be a crime to knowingly receive stolen property.
The Facebook angle
Until recently, there was very little that indicated Mueller was far along in investigating the efforts of Russian operatives to undermine our election. That changed when the Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller obtained information from Facebook via search warrant. That news is extraordinarily important because it indicates he presented evidence that convinced a federal judge there was good reason to believe that foreign individuals committed a crime by making a “contribution” in connection with an election and that evidence of that crime existed on Facebook.
Before we knew of the search warrant, Mueller's efforts to obtain information about Russian interference in the election could have been an effort to gather counterintelligence or run out every lead. Now, it looks like he has his sights on specific foreign individuals and their interference in our election.
That also opens up Trump associates to criminal liability. Someone is guilty of “aiding and abetting” when they know a crime is being committed and actively help to make it succeed. So if a Trump associate knew about the foreign contributions that Mueller’s search warrant focused on and helped that effort in a tangible way, they could be charged.
In addition, anyone who agreed to be part of the Russian effort in any way could be charged with criminal conspiracy. They wouldn’t need to be involved in the whole operation or know who else was involved. but they would have to agree to be part of some piece of it.
If Mueller brings charges against Americans who worked with Russians to undermine in the election, those could potentially be the most explosive and wide-ranging charges but also the most difficult to defend legally. I doubt jurors would have much patience for technical legal defenses, however, if there were solid evidence that the American worked with a Russian operative.
Following the money
Lastly, there have been reports Mueller has subpoenaed numerous financial records, and his decision to involve the IRS criminal investigation unit indicates he is looking at tax charges against someone. But it’s unlikely he would bring very wide-ranging tax or money laundering charges. Money laundering can be difficult to prove because it requires a prosecutor to prove an underlying crime, such as bribery or tax evasion.
Mueller’s investigation appears to be proceeding at a rapid pace, but we should not expect it to conclude this year. When it does, any charges that Mueller brings will likely be narrower and more targeted than many observers expect, although the recent Facebook search warrant could result in explosive charges involving cooperation with Russian operatives.
Regardless of what charges are ultimately brought, you can expect them to be carefully considered and limited to what Mueller can readily prove. Proving criminal charges beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury is a weighty burden, and a veteran prosecutor like Mueller will not bring charges unless he is confident he can prove them.
Why Robert Mueller Probably Has Trump's Tax Returns As the special counsel's probe continues, actions point to access to the president's closely held financial information.
By Jeff Nesbit, Contributor |Sept. 18, 2017, at 5:35 p.m.
Why Robert Mueller Probably Has Trump's Tax Returns
Left: President Donald Trump listens to a question during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations General Assembly, Monday, Sept. 18, 2017, in New York. (AP/Evan Vucci) Right: Then-FBI director Robert Mueller speaks during an interview at FBI headquarters in Washington on Aug. 21, 2013. (AP/Evan Vucci) President Donald Trump, left, has said Robert Mueller, right, shouldn't be delving into his corporate finances. (Evan Vucci, AP) It now appears likely special counsel Robert Mueller has crossed what President Donald Trump has said is a clear red line by gaining access to the president's tax returns as part of a broadening investigation looking for links between Trump's business interests, his presidential campaign and Russia.
In fact, it seems almost certain the FBI–special counsel investigation has its hands on the president's tax returns.
Senate Investigators to Interview Trump Attorney "Mueller would be engaged in malpractice if he didn't" already have access to the president's tax returns, a member of Congress on one of the congressional committees looking at Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election told me.
In fact, people familiar with the type of investigation that Mueller is now running signal the near-certainty that Mueller has access to the president's tax returns. The purpose would be to use the tax returns as a road map to investigate potential Russian financial influence within Trump Organization limited liability companies.
"I believe Mueller has already obtained tax returns in the Russia investigation," Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor in the Securities and Commodities Fraud Section of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago, said on Twitter on Aug. 10. He later wrote in The Hill he often used tax returns in his own federal investigations, and that it is almost a necessity in an investigation like Mueller's. It's also done without knowledge of the subjects of the investigation.
"A federal prosecutor obtains tax returns by seeking an ex parte order from a federal judge. That means that the person who is being investigated doesn't know that the tax returns are being sought or if the judge issues the order," he said. "Basically, it's done in secret."
Mariotti also said that "the July FBI raid at the home of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort tells us a great deal about the status of … Mueller's investigation."
Before taking "an aggressive, public action" like having the FBI search a subject's home, Mariotti wrote, a "typical step" federal prosecutors take in white-collar investigations is obtaining tax returns.
"A prosecutor would first take steps that can be done covertly, without the subject knowing, to gather evidence that can serve as the basis for more aggressive actions like search warrants," he wrote. "I worked with federal prosecutors who obtained tax returns in every single white-collar investigation they worked on."
Mariotti also said it ordinarily would require a senior Justice Department official to sign off on a request to the IRS for tax returns in a non-tax federal investigation. But, in this case, Mueller already has that authority.
"Mueller has authority to do so because the statute permits 'United States attorneys' to obtain tax returns and he has the power of a 'United States attorney' pursuant to the special counsel regulations," he wrote, noting that "even the tax return of someone other than Manafort" could be helpful to Mueller, and that "he could have tax return information for many individuals."
Does Mueller have the president's tax returns?
"I would be surprised if Mueller hadn't obtained some tax returns by now. The question is just whose tax returns he has," Mariotti wrote.
Bloomberg reported in late July that Mueller had expanded his probe to Trump's business interests – prompting the president's lawyers to complain that such an investigation was outside the scope of his remit and leading to considerable public speculation about the scope and direction of the special counsel's investigation. Meanwhile, Trump a day earlier pointed to Mueller examining his finances as a red line that should not be crossed.
What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us An even surer sign that such a red line has likely been crossed now, experts say, is the direct involvement of the IRS' vaunted Criminal Investigation unit – the one that once put mob boss Al Capone away on a tax conviction and has deep expertise in such matters.
The Daily Beast has reported exclusively that Mueller's team has, in fact, begun to work closely with this IRS department. Obtaining Trump's tax returns as a routine part of that inquiry is not just possible – it's likely, experts say.
"Special counsel Bob Mueller has teamed up with the IRS. According to sources familiar with his investigation into alleged Russian election interference, his probe has enlisted the help of agents from the IRS' Criminal Investigations unit," Daily Beast political correspondent Betsy Woodruff reported on Aug. 31.
"This unit—known as CI—is one of the federal government's most tight-knit, specialized, and secretive investigative entities. Its 2,500 agents focus exclusively on financial crime, including tax evasion and money laundering," she reported. "A former colleague of Mueller's said he always liked working with IRS' special agents, especially when he was a U.S. Attorney. And it goes without saying that the IRS has access to Trump's tax returns—documents that the president has long resisted releasing to the public."
Every American's personal tax information is sacred to the IRS. That includes the president of the United States. Any IRS employee is fired on the spot if they're caught even looking at someone's personal tax information outside of an audit. That, too, includes Trump's tax returns.
But, as Mariotti pointed to, there is one time-honored avenue for access to someone's personal tax records – and it doesn't require a subpoena or necessarily notifying the subject of the IRS or FBI investigation. Any U.S. attorney (or a special counsel acting under U.S. attorney powers) can request access to tax returns through an ex parte court order, and the request is nearly always handled without further review up the line at the IRS.
Now, quite obviously in this case, it would be nearly impossible for Mueller to obtain the president's tax returns without triggering an intense reaction inside the agency and the FBI hierarchy. But once the IRS' Criminal Investigation unit is involved – as appears to be the case, according to the Daily Beast's reporting – then that process is well-known, understood and compartmentalized.
A longtime congressional oversight staff director who has overseen dozens of similar investigations pointed me to this particular section in the criminal resource manual for U.S. attorneys, which describes what they need to do in order to obtain someone's tax returns as part of an FBI investigation.
"United States Attorneys may have occasion to seek access to tax information (returns and return information) for use in non-tax criminal matters," it reads. "Title 26, United States Code, Section 6103(i)(1) provides for tax information to be obtained upon the grant of an ex parte order by a Federal district court judge or magistrate judge for use in criminal investigations."
New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman looks on during a press conference to call for an end of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in New York state courts, Aug. 3, 2017 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. During remarks, Attorney General Schneiderman stated that 'targeting immigrants at our courthouses undermines our criminal justice system and threatens public safety.' N.Y. AG Joins the Trump-Russia Probe Bringing in the IRS' Criminal Investigation unit makes this process even easier, and more likely. IRS officials then make those records available – without necessarily notifying anyone outside the investigating teams of the request. The FBI has that sole authority to request this of the IRS. When both the FBI and the IRS are working together, the circle is close-knit.
We may not know, for sure, whether Mueller's team has access to the president's tax returns until he takes an action publicly. Congressional oversight committees conducting their own investigations aren't likely to know, either.
Congressional access to tax return information from the IRS is quite limited, a senior congressional oversight investigator told me. Only the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees have the authority to look at individual tax returns from the IRS, and neither panel is involved in the congressional Russia investigations.
They're completely focused on tax reform at the moment. It's also highly unlikely any of them will seek those returns, this aide told me. "Even if they were briefed, I would assume that they would hold that information very close," the aide said.
And Trump's attorneys may have no way of knowing whether that red line has been crossed, either, even though it certainly appears likely that it has been. They, too, might be forced to wait and see how the Mueller investigation concludes. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-ne ... ax-returns
THE RUSSIA CONNECTION
The Latest Scoops from CNN and the New York Times: A Quick and Dirty Analysis
By Susan Hennessey, Shannon Togawa Mercer, Benjamin Wittes Monday, September 18, 2017, 11:03 PM
CNN and the New York Times this evening published dueling scoops on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
As Jim Comey might put it: Lordy, there appear to be tapes.
First, CNN reported that U.S. government investigators wiretapped Paul Manafort, the onetime Trump campaign chairman, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. According to CNN, the court that provides judicial oversight for the administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized an FBI investigation into Manafort in 2014 focused on “work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine's former ruling party.” Manafort’s firm, among notable others, had failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for work with the pro-Russian Ukrainian regime. This first investigation was reportedly halted in 2016 by Justice Department prosecutors because of lack of evidence, but a second warrant was later issued in service of the FBI’s investigation into Russian influence of the election and potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
CNN reported that interest in Manafort was “reignited” because of “intercepted communications between Manafort and suspected Russian operatives, and among the Russians themselves.” The FBI also conducted physical searches: one of a storage facility belonging to Manafort and a more widely reported search of his Alexandria home in late July. Manafort was not under surveillance when he became chairman of Trump’s campaign, CNN sources suggested, because of the gap between the two warrants.
While CNN did not report a known start date for the second surveillance period, it suggested that the FBI had already “noticed what counterintelligence agents thought was a series of odd connections between Trump associates and Russia” by the time Manafort left the campaign in August. CNN describes as unclear whether FBI surveillance of Manafort took place while he was residing in Trump Tower, and there is no new evidence in this report to indicate that Donald Trump himself was under surveillance. The Justice Department and the FBI have denied that Trump was subject to wiretapping.
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Shortly after CNN’s story broke, the New York Times published its own scoop regarding Manafort. The story is largely a scene piece, but includes a number of highly significant facts. The Times catalogs what it describes as “aggressive tactics” that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has employed in his investigations of Trump associates, specifically Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. First, the Times reveals that after the July raid on Manafort’s residence, Mueller’s prosecutors warned Manafort that he would be indicted. The story also reports that Mueller’s team has subpoenaed several of Manafort’s associates, including Jason Maloni, a former Manafort spokesman; the heads of Mercury Public Affairs and the Podesta Group; and one of Manafort’s former lawyers (with Mueller’s team claiming an exception to attorney-client privilege). While White House officials have been given the opportunity to appear for “voluntary interviews” instead of before grand juries, Manafort’s associates have been subpoenaed, marking a less deferential approach to the Manafort investigation. The Times suggests that Mueller, leaving no rock unturned, is investigating Manafort for “possible violations of tax laws, money-laundering prohibitions and requirements to disclose foreign lobbying.”
These stories come on the coattails of recent news about the Mueller investigation, including the Sept. 15 Wall Street Journal report that Facebook gave Mueller records of Russian ad purchases, apparently in response to a warrant. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that Mueller had obtained a letter drafted by Trump detailing his rationale for firing former FBI director James Comey.
Let’s start with a key disclaimer: We don’t know that all the reported facts in these stories are correct, and we don’t know what other facts not reported may complicate the picture. So far, no other journalistic organization seems to have independently reported the key facts in these stories, giving additional reason for caution, for now. That said, the following are some initial questions on people’s minds, along with some early and necessarily preliminary answers that could change as facts continue to develop.
What does it mean that Manafort was informed he will be indicted?
The Times’ revelation that Manafort has been informed that he will be indicted involves a pretty spare set of reported facts. In fact, there’s really only one fact: “The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, then followed the house search with a warning: His prosecutors told Mr. Manafort they planned to indict him, said two people close to the investigation.” The language here is not legally precise. It could mean that Manafort has been formally informed that he is an investigative “target”—a designation that means that prosecutors intend to ask a grand jury to indict him. It could, instead, suggest something less than that—a kind of verbal aggressiveness designed to put pressure on him to cooperate.
The significance of this is that it means that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has reached a critical stage—the point at which he may soon start making allegations in public. Those allegations may involve conduct unrelated to L’Affaire Russe—that is, alleged bad behavior by Manafort and maybe others that does not involve the Trump campaign—but which may nonetheless serve to pressure Manafort to cooperate on matters more central. Or they may involve conduct that involves his behavior with respect to the campaign itself. Note that if Manafort cooperates, we may not see anything public for a long time to come. Delay, that is, may be a sign of success. But in the absence of cooperation, the fireworks may be about to begin.
This is not the first indication in recent weeks that the Mueller investigation is nearing the litigation stage. The fact that Mueller’s staff executed a search warrant against Manafort in July—which was first reported Aug. 9 by the Washington Post—was telling, implying that the special counsel had shown a court probable cause of criminal activity. The Times rightly notes that the circumstances of the execution of the warrant were aggressive:
It is unusual for a prosecutor to seek a search warrant against someone who, like Mr. Manafort, had already put his lawyer in contact with the Justice Department. No search warrants were executed during the investigations by Mr. Starr or Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a special counsel appointed during the George W. Bush administration to investigate the leak of the name of a C.I.A. officer.
To get the warrant, Mr. Mueller’s team had to show probable cause that Mr. Manafort’s home contained evidence of a crime. To be allowed to pick the lock and enter the home unannounced, prosecutors had to persuade a federal judge that Mr. Manafort was likely to destroy evidence.
Said [Jimmy] Gurulé, the former federal prosecutor, “Clearly they didn’t trust him.”
All of this suggests that there’s something significant the public does not yet know about the Manafort case—some reason why Mueller would, with a judge’s permission, behave this way. The Wall Street Journal’s report that the Mueller investigation has obtained a separate warrant for materials from Facebook connected to Russian ad buys during the campaign—which again suggests that a judge found probable cause of a crime—is further indication of an investigation reaching critical mass. Combined with a flurry of stories about subpoenas, grand-jury appearances and other activity, it’s reasonable to expect that Mueller is moving forward on a number of different fronts and is getting close to entering a litigation phase.
The key question is what he will allege, to what extent it will deal with campaign activity, and against whom he will allege it.
What does the fact of a FISA warrant mean?
Under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a person can be targeted if the government establishes probable cause that he or she is the “agent of a foreign power.” The definition of “agent of a foreign power” is different for U.S. persons versus non-U.S. persons. Manafort is a U.S. person (a category that includes but is not limited to U.S. citizens). That means he can be the agent of a foreign power under FISA only if the government shows probable cause that he:
(A) knowingly engages in clandestine intelligence gathering activities for or on behalf of a foreign power, which activities involve or may involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States;
(B) pursuant to the direction of an intelligence service or network of a foreign power, knowingly engages in any other clandestine intelligence activities for or on behalf of such foreign power, which activities involve or are about to involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States;
(C) knowingly engages in sabotage or international terrorism, or activities that are in preparation therefor, for or on behalf of a foreign power;
(D) knowingly enters the United States under a false or fraudulent identity for or on behalf of a foreign power or, while in the United States, knowingly assumes a false or fraudulent identity for or on behalf of a foreign power; or
(E) knowingly aids or abets any person in the conduct of activities described in subparagraph (A), (B), or (C) or knowingly conspires with any person to engage in activities described in subparagraph (A), (B), or (C). This means that in order for a U.S. person to qualify as the agent of a foreign power under FISA, there typically needs to be some indication of criminal conduct. That is not quite the same as the ordinary warrant requirement of a showing of probable cause that a crime has or will be committed—an important distinction.
Notably, CNN reported that two FISA warrants were issued against Manafort, first before he worked for the Trump campaign and then after he was no longer affiliated with it. The first “centered on work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine's former ruling party” and was “discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence.” While it is unclear when the second warrant began—former FBI director Jim Comey has testified that the FBI investigation began in July 2016—this time it was related to the investigation of “ties between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian operatives.”
Manafort isn’t the first Trump adviser media reports have confirmed to be FISA targets. In April, the Washington Post reported that the government had obtained a FISA warrant against Trump adviser Carter Page also as “part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign.”
Are these leaks big deals and are they prosecutorial leaks?
Earlier this month, Lawfare published a guide to reading Trump-Russia stories and understanding where they are coming from. What can we say about these two reports?
Short answer: The CNN leak is bad. Let’s deal with the Times article first.
The Times story shows every indication of being principally sourced to the defense bar, particularly to lawyers for Manafort himself. The opening passage, as quoted above, is sourced to “two people close to the investigation.” But the passage contains no information that only prosecutors or investigators would know. And a defense lawyer for a soon-to-be-indicted target can reasonably be said to be “close to the investigation”—closer than he or she probably wants to be. The next paragraph describes the story more generally as coming from “lawyers, witnesses and American officials who have described the [hardball] approach” Mueller is taking. “American officials” here is consistent not just with people in Mueller’s office but with both congressional and White House staff—both of whose viewpoints the story sometimes reflects—and “lawyers” can be on the defense side as well as on the prosecution side.
There’s really only one passage in the story that gives rise to any suspicion of a prosecutorial disclosure:
His team has occasionally been caught by surprise, hearing of possibly important information only when it is revealed in the news media.
This was the case in July, when Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors learned about email exchanges between Donald Trump Jr. and an emissary for a Kremlin-connected Russian oligarch only after they were disclosed in The New York Times, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. This could be a leak, a recent disclosure, but it could also reflect contact from the time of those earlier New York Times stories that took Mueller’s staff by surprise. It is not unheard of, and not necessarily inappropriate, for investigators to make contact with journalists who have gotten ahead of them on key matters by way of catching up.
The CNN story is a different matter. The story discloses FISA wiretaps against a named U.S. person. Whatever Paul Manafort may have done, he is a citizen of this country, and this is an egregious civil liberties violation. It’s also a significant compromise of national security information. Simply put, FISA information should never leak. When it does, it erodes the systems through which the government protects national security—and it rightly erodes public confidence that the systems designed to protect civil liberties work as intended.
Political leaking of wiretapping information is the stuff of the Hoover era. It has no legitimate place in our politics.
Who is responsible for this particular leak is unclear. The story is, for starters, vaguely sourced. Here are all the sourcing references in the story:
US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN…
…
Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.
…
A secret order authorized by the court that handles the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) began after Manafort became the subject of an FBI investigation that began in 2014. It centered on work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine's former ruling party, the sources told CNN.
The surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence, according to one of the sources.
…
Sources say the second warrant was part of the FBI's efforts to investigate ties between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian operatives.
…
The conversations between Manafort and Trump continued after the President took office, long after the FBI investigation into Manafort was publicly known, the sources told CNN.
…
Last year, Justice Department prosecutors concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to bring charges against Manafort or anyone of the other US subjects in the probe, according to sources briefed on the investigation.
…
The FBI surveillance teams, under a new FISA warrant, began monitoring Manafort again, sources tell CNN (emphasis added). This kind of sourcing is not ideal journalistic practice. It is possible that this is the best CNN could do given its relationship with the sources in question, but it’s not helpful to readers to have no information with which to assess a story like this. To wit, none of the references gives any indication of what sort of sources the story relies on, only that there appear to be at least three sources for individual facts and that some of them were “familiar with the investigation” and some were “briefed on the investigation.”
This isn’t a lot to work with, but here’s what we can say. The categories of people legitimately aware of FISA surveillance are not many. There are people associated with the FISA court. There are people associated with the FBI or the investigation. There are political echelon folks who receive intelligence product and sometimes underlying information about how it was obtained. And there are congressional oversight committees. With respect to FISA material, it’s reasonable to assume the sources here are not defense lawyers, as FISA material would not have been disclosed to them before any indictment. The sourcing is consistent with any of the above categories—or some combination of diverse sourcing among them.
For what it’s worth, a congressional or political echelon leak here seems to us more likely than either an investigative leak from Mueller’s shop or a leak from the court. The FISA court has been a black box since its creation in 1978. Mueller’s shop has been very quiet since its inception—and these leaks are to a considerable degree at his expense. The world, after all, now knows (assuming the story is true) that he has Manafort tapes during a period in which Trump was talking to Manafort; and Trump now has a great talking point about how his claims of having had his “wires tapped” have been vindicated. In that sense, at least, it’s a bad day for Mueller.
So was Trump right to say that he was “wire tapped”?
No.
Nothing in this report vindicates Trump’s claims that he or Trump Tower were wiretapped.
Trump accused President Obama of wiretapping him.
This story reports that Manafort was a target of collection and that Trump was talking with him at the time Manafort was under surveillance. It does not report that Trump Tower, where Manafort did have an apartment, was the location of that targeting.
Press reports have indicated for months that at least one, and potentially multiple, close associates of Donald Trump were subject to FISA warrants. It is possible now—as has been noted many times since Trump tweeted his accusation in March—that if the U.S. president was in communication with these individuals, his communications might have been incidentally collected. That isn’t the same as being wiretapped—and being subject to incidental collection as part of lawful collection against a third party really is not the same thing as being wiretapped by President Obama. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has already attempted to spin incidental collection into presidential vindication in a bizarre series of press conferences unveiling intelligence revelations—which later turned out to have been fed to him by the White House itself.
CNN reported that it is “unclear whether Trump himself was picked up on the surveillance.” But there isn’t anything untoward about incidental collection, even if it did happen. It happens routinely in both criminal and intelligence contexts, when non-targeted individuals communicate with the target. To the extent that there has been significant additional confirmation of incidental collection of Trump campaign staff, it came in the form of the resolution of the “unmasking” stories also pushed by Nunes and in conservative media. Multiple stories confirm that Obama officials unmasked the names of Trump campaign officials in order to give proper context to intelligence information related to their interactions with foreign officials. Both Republicans and Democrats on the intelligence committees have concluded that there was no wrongdoing by Obama officials, and current national security advisor H.R. McMaster has determined that his predecessor, Susan Rice, did nothing wrong. Those stories contain more explicit confirmation of incidental collection than does this newest bombshell. For those who don’t believe those prior stories vindicate Trump’s claim of wiretapping—and we do not think they do—then neither does this one.
What does this mean for the future of the Trump-Russia investigation?
No one knows for sure—and take with a grain of salt anyone who predicts things confidently. It’s clear that L’Affaire Russe isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s clear that Mueller knows a great deal that the rest of us do not. And it’s clear that the White House’s public dismissiveness aside, there is real reason for the president and his coterie to worry about the many shoes left to drop. Beyond that, things remain very murky.
Consider, for example, that for all the Times’ certainty that Manafort will be indicted, neither the Times nor CNN gives much hint beyond the vaguest phrases of what charges might be expected. People anticipating a swift end to this drama should temper their expectations. https://lawfareblog.com/latest-scoops-c ... y-analysis
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.
Mueller Rents Giant Warehouse to Store Evidence Against Trump
By Andy Borowitz September 18, 2017 Photograph by SWNS / Alamy WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Robert Mueller is renting a massive warehouse facility in suburban Virginia to accommodate the approximately forty cubic tons of evidence against Donald Trump that the independent counsel’s investigation is generating on a daily basis. Employing over two thousand workers in a warehouse the size of seven football fields, the Mueller investigation has become the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Working twelve-hour shifts, the members of Mueller’s evidence-storage team rarely leave the warehouse, where the punishing task of filing mountains of evidence against Trump proceeds around the clock. “It’s like a city all its own,” one warehouse worker said. “There are people working in the Michael Flynn section who’ve never met the people working in the Paul Manafort section.” While the warehouse workers are well paid, there have been issues with burnout. “The team in charge of filing all of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s different explanations of his meeting with the Russians had to take time off,” one worker said. As gargantuan as the storage space appears to be, an aide to Mueller said that the investigation would soon be seeking a second, even larger warehouse. “We need a place to put all the Jared stuff,” the aide said. https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowit ... inst-trump
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.
Mueller Rents Giant Warehouse to Store Evidence Against Trump
By Andy Borowitz September 18, 2017 Photograph by SWNS / Alamy WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Robert Mueller is renting a massive warehouse facility in suburban Virginia to accommodate the approximately forty cubic tons of evidence against Donald Trump that the independent counsel’s investigation is generating on a daily basis. Employing over two thousand workers in a warehouse the size of seven football fields, the Mueller investigation has become the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Working twelve-hour shifts, the members of Mueller’s evidence-storage team rarely leave the warehouse, where the punishing task of filing mountains of evidence against Trump proceeds around the clock. “It’s like a city all its own,” one warehouse worker said. “There are people working in the Michael Flynn section who’ve never met the people working in the Paul Manafort section.” While the warehouse workers are well paid, there have been issues with burnout. “The team in charge of filing all of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s different explanations of his meeting with the Russians had to take time off,” one worker said. As gargantuan as the storage space appears to be, an aide to Mueller said that the investigation would soon be seeking a second, even larger warehouse. “We need a place to put all the Jared stuff,” the aide said. https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowit ... inst-trump
Funny stuff!
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security." -Jim Garrison 1967
Mueller Seeks White House Documents Related to Trump’s Actions as President By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT SEPT. 20, 2017
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, has asked the White House for documents about some of President Trump’s most scrutinized actions since taking office, including the firing of his national security adviser and F.B.I. director, according to White House officials.
Mr. Mueller is also interested in an Oval Office meeting Mr. Trump had with Russian officials in which he said the dismissal of the F.B.I. director had relieved “great pressure” on him.
Photo
Russia’s official news agency photographed President Trump’s meeting with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, in the Oval Office in May. The American news media was denied access. Credit Alexander Shcherbak/TASS, via Getty Images The document requests provide the most details to date about the breadth of Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and show that several aspects of his inquiry are focused squarely on Mr. Trump’s behavior in the White House.
In recent weeks, Mr. Mueller’s office sent a document to the White House that detailed 13 different areas that investigators want more information about. Since then, administration lawyers have been scouring White House emails and asking officials whether they have other documents or notes that may pertain to Mr. Mueller’s requests.
One of the requests is about a meeting Mr. Trump had in May with Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, was fired. That day, Mr. Trump met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, along with other Russian officials. The New York Times reported that in the meeting Mr. Trump had said that firing Mr. Comey relieved “great pressure” on him.
Mr. Mueller has also requested documents about the circumstances of the firing of Michael T. Flynn, who was Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. Additionally, the special counsel has asked for documents about how the White House responded to questions from The Times about a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. That meeting was set up by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, to get derogatory information from Russians about Hillary Clinton.
Ty Cobb, the lawyer Mr. Trump hired to provide materials related to the Russia investigation to the special counsel and Congress, has told Mr. Mueller’s office that he will turn over many of the documents this week.
Mueller casts broad net in requesting extensive records from Trump White House Play Video 3:30 The fight for control over the special counsel's Russia investigation
President Trump has weighed in on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election time and time again. Here's a look at how he can limit the probe, and what Congress is trying to do about it. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) By Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman September 20 at 3:30 PM
The special counsel investigating Russian election meddling has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the White House, covering everything from the president’s private discussions about firing his FBI director to his White House’s handling of a warning that President Trump’s then-national security adviser was under investigation, according to two people briefed on the requests.
White House lawyers are now working to turn over internal documents that span 13 categories investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their probe, the people said. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed in May in the wake of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, took over the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians in that effort.
The list of requests was described in detail by two people briefed on them. Both insisted on anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation. Some details of the requests were first reported Wednesday afternoon by the New York Times.
The requests broadly ask for any document or email related to a series of highly publicized incidents since Trump became president, including the firing of national security adviser Michael Flynn and Comey, the people said. The list demonstrates Mueller’s focus on key moments and actions by the president and close advisers that could shed light on whether Trump sought to block the FBI investigations of Flynn and of Russian interference. His team is also eyeing whether the president sought to obstruct the earlier Russia probe overseen by Comey.
The special counsel team’s work in recent months has zeroed in on Paul Manafort, a former chairman of the Trump campaign, and Flynn. An official close to the probe said both men are under investigation.
Play Video 1:05 White House: 'We will be fully transparent' with Mueller about Trump's Comey letter After the revelation that the special counsel is examining a letter President Trump drafted to fire former FBI director James Comey, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said they're working with the special counsel on Sept. 1. (Reuters) Mueller’s agents have questioned witnesses and business associates of both men about whether the men sought to conceal the nature of consulting work they did that could have benefited foreign governments. In a raid of Manafort’s home last month, agents sought to seize records related to Manafort’s finances.
Over the past few weeks, White House lawyer Ty Cobb began sending records to the special counsel. Cobb is working within the White House to gather more of those documents and has told staffers and other lawyers that he hoped to turn over many more this week.
Cobb declined to discuss the subjects that Mueller’s team has questioned him about.
“The White House doesn’t comment on any communications between the White House and the Office of Special Counsel out of respect for the Office of Special Counsel and its process,” Cobb said in a statement. “We are committed to cooperating fully. Beyond that I can’t comment.”
Mueller also asked for any email or document the White House holds that relates to Manafort, the people briefed on the requests said. Manafort resigned from the campaign before the election amid scrutiny of his work for a powerful Ukrainian political party aligned with the Russian government.
Mueller has requested that the White House turn over all internal communications and documents related to the FBI interview of Flynn in January, days after he took office, as well as any document that discusses Flynn’s conversations with Russia’s then-ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, in December. Mueller has also asked for records about meetings then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates held with White House counsel Don McGahn in late January to alert him to Justice Department concerns about Flynn, as well as all documents related to Flynn’s subsequent firing by the White House.
Regarding Comey, Mueller has asked for all documents related to meetings between Trump and Comey while Comey served at the FBI, records of any discussions regarding Comey’s firing and any documents related to a statement by then-press secretary Sean Spicer made on the night Comey was fired. He has also asked for any documents related to a meeting Trump held in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the day after Comey was fired.
Mueller has also asked for all records related to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer hosted by the president’s son, as well as all documents related to the White House’s response to the publication of that meeting in July 2017.
Mueller is moving as quickly as he can and is taking his three-part mandate very seriously, one government official told The Washington Post. He believes for the moment he has all the resources he needs, the office is now a fully formed agency and it is using a grand jury for subpoenas and interviews vigorously, the official said.
“I am convinced that no matter where they end up, this investigation will run to completion even if they fire Mueller,” the official said. “There is a feeling of inevitability now that we didn’t have before — not of the outcome of the investigation but that there will be an outcome. There is no escaping this thing, whatever the conclusions.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 058ca31c51
What About the Tarmac Interlude?
Alex Brandon/AP By JOSH MARSHALL Published SEPTEMBER 20, 2017 4:25 PM
The Times is reporting that Robert Mueller is requesting documents relating to President Trump’s firing of Mike Flynn, firing of James Comey and that bizarre meeting with the Russian Ambassador and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in which Trump told Lavrov that firing Comey had taken the “pressure” off him. Since it’s been widely understood that Mueller is probing whether Trump obstructed justice in firing Comey, this isn’t altogether surprising. But it certainly seems to confirm this assumption since these are key events you’d want to know more about to make that case.
With this new information, I must again raise that hour long interlude on Air Force One two days prior to Comey’s dismissal. Giving the timeline we’ve discussed earlier, there’s very good reason to believe that Comey’s imminent firing was what Trump and his aides were discussing.
Remember, Trump spent the weekend at Bedminster fuming about Comey and returned to Washington with his decision made. But the key in my mind has always been who was with him on Air Force that evening. Trump has two broad classes of advisors. The toady enablers and the semi-grown-ups. You may not like White House Counsel Don McGahn. But he’s actually tried to stop Trump from doing a lot of stupid things. Even Steve Bannon – Steve Bannon!! – tried to convince Trump not to fire Comey. But there’s that other class: the 7th tier toadies and lickspittles and enablers who cheer on Trump’s worst tendencies. That weekend and on that plane ride home, he had the all star class of Trump toadies: Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner, KT McFarland, Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino. The worst and the stupidest.
Remember, too: Kushner encouraged Trump to fire Comey. Stephen Miller and Trump co-wrote the screed version of the Comey firing letter that McGahn was able to dramatically edit down. Though I don’t want to criticize these people, it is fair to say these are five of the least experienced, stupidest and most aggressive members of the Trump entourage. It was on a weekend stewing with them that Trump made his decision that Comey had to go – one his DC staffers were unable to warn him off of. Those conversation that weekend and the particularly the one that kept the six on the tarmac for an hour that Sunday evening must be where the most unvarnished and inane conversations about the need to fire Comey took place. Mueller must want to know more about what they discussed. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/wha ... re-1084457
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.
Am I the only one who finds it really fucking ironic that "Trump's team may have colluded with Russia" is the singular thing that talking heads on cable news say could bring down Trump....not fucking indiscriminate bombings, proposed torture and now threatening nuclear annihilation at the UN? No matter what Mueller "finds", its just a circular game of paper-rock-scissors. Trump tweeted some insane "I was wiretapped" baloney as a distraction, but now it turns out Manafort was really wiretapped, and now Fox News is like "see! they were wiretapped!".
Again, dropping bombs on civilians overseas(Trump ordered the bombing death of Anwar al-Awlakis American child, just like Obama killed his other American kid) is totally kosher, but "colluding with Russia" is the biggest sin. What about Hillary and Ukraine and Kazakhstan?
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
Facebook is now cooperating with the Russian investigation
Ale @aliasvaughn
Ale Retweeted NBC Politics 1. Let me say a couple of quick things about this HUGE piece of news.Ale added,
NBC PoliticsVerified account @NBCPolitics JUST IN: “Russian government cyber actors” unsuccessfully attempted to hack 2016 election results in Wisconsin, DHS tells state officials 2:08 PM - 22 Sep 2017
2. Up until now, there was complete DENIAL that the Russians even TRIED to hack election results. BC ppl refused to understand what IC said.
3.Comey SPECIFICALLY said that the FBI did NOT LOOK INTO vote hacking. He said they had no evidence of an attempt to do that.
4. They knew about voter databases. But it wasn't just that. It was RESULTS as well, as we always knew. So for starters, THEY DID TRY.
5. Now, regardless of succeeding or not (I believe they DID succeed in various precincts) the point is this: WHY would Russians target WI?
6. As @DrDenaGrayson underlined, the Trump campaign had their own mysterious "data" on WI when everyone was like "NOPE". AND RUSSIANS, TOO?
7. This "coincidence" is interesting to say the least. Let me be clear, EVEN IF unsuccessful, if Kushner &Parscale are connected? It's OVER.
8. If there is a proven link between Russian ATTEMPTS and Kushner/Parscale data, this is TREASON, CONSPIRING with foreign power. 3 replies 102 retweets 314 likes
9. It is conspiracy with a foreign enemy to steal an election, whether the Russian attempts succeeded or not is IRRELEVANT at that point.
10. So the point here, as usual, is INTENT. IF Russian hackers used Kushner/Parscale data as a guide this is a HUGE crime.
11. And by huge I mean treason, I mean Kushner and Trump and everyone are gonna go to jail and FBI is gonna throw away the keys.
12. So IF this becomes a story in that Mueller finds (or has already found for all I know) a link between RU hackers & Trump? Checkmate.
13. So keep a very close eye on this stuff because THIS? Is such a huge crime that all the rest would become peanuts compared.
14. I personally believe, having looked at specific precincts in WI, MI & PA that some attempts to hack results WERE successful.
15. I do believe vote tallies WERE altered but that's beside the point. The ONLY point here is the LINK between Kushner/Parscale & RU hacks.
16. I was part of #AuditTheVote bc I FIRMLY believed there needed to be AUDITS. That did NOT happen, anywhere. No machine audits, NO proof.
17. But regardless, the only point is proving connection between Trump campaign & RU hacking attempts. THAT? Is the silver bullet.
Donald Trump’s attorney fees in Russia scandal are being paid for by a Kremlin oligarch By Bill Palmer Updated: 4:55 pm EDT Fri Sep 22, 2017 Home » Politics
Earlier this week a curious storyline emerged: the Republican National Committee was paying Donald Trump’s attorney fees in the Russia scandal for no apparent reason. Now the other shoe has dropped, and it’s become clear why the RNC has been willing to shovel six figures worth of money in Trump’s direction: the money is being funneled through the RNC to Trump by way of a Kremlin oligarch.
Len Blavatnik was born in Ukraine, raised in Russia, and now has dual U.S. citizenship – but he’s a Kremlin oligarch who makes his money by doing business with his fellow Kremlin oligarchs. According to the Wall Street Journal, he’s donating money to the RNC legal fund, which is in turn being funneled to Donald Trump’s Russia attorneys (link). Because of the dual citizenship, Blavatnik’s donations to American political entities are technically legal, but in practical terms this reads like the Kremlin finding a way to pay Trump’s legal bills in the Russia scandal. This is not the first time Blavatnik has surfaced in this role.
Back on May 24th of this year, Palmer Report brought you the story of how Len Blavatnik had donated millions of dollars to key Republican political leaders including Mitch McConnell and Scott Walker in 2016 (link). Months later, in August, the Dallas Morning News confirmed our reporting (link). Now the same Kremlin oligarch is funneling money through the Republican National Committee to fund Donald Trump’s legal defense.
Each of Blavatnik’s largest donations just happened to go to a Republican who played a convenient role in ushering Donald Trump into office. McConnell worked behind the scenes during the election to try to prevent the Russia meddling from becoming public. Walker is the Governor of Wisconsin, a state which Trump won in nearly statistically impossible fashion. Now, after Blavatnik paid off these two politicians, he’s paying for Trump’s attorneys. http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/tr ... arch/5064/
Given What We Know Now, Some Of The Steele Dossier’s Claims Aren’t So Crazy
By SAM THIELMAN Published SEPTEMBER 21, 2017 3:25 PM
Every few days, a fresh press report or one of the various federal and congressional probes offers a new glimpse into the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 election. Taken together, all of those pieces offer a chance to stress-test the most detailed and the most outrageous document we have tying together Donald Trump, his associates and the Kremlin: the Steele dossier.
The dossier, written by former MI-6 spy Christopher Steele, is filled with scandalous and still-uncorroborated allegations, from bizarre stories of Trump’s alleged sexual escapades to supposed payoffs from his campaign to Russian hackers, allegedly brokered by Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen.
Printing the contents of the dossier has seemed irresponsible in the past; the document is composed of unverified, “raw” intelligence that would have been seen as limited even by Steele, as John Sipher, formerly an analyst with the CIA, recently wrote in an in-depth examination of the dossier’s credibility at Just Security. But a steady drip of new information reinforces more and more of the claims in Steele’s dossier, often in spirit if not in particular.
Here are some of the dossier’s claims that have solidified, at least in part, in light of what we know now.
The claim: Russian government collected and distributed damaging information about Hillary Clinton In 2015 Steele began producing the document, which BuzzFeed News published earlier this year, for Republican opposition research firm Fusion GPS at the behest of Republicans worried Trump could win the Republican nomination. In June 2016, Steele wrote about efforts to discredit Clinton that he’d heard about from sources: “A dossier of compromising material on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct.”
So what happened to that dossier, if it exists? We don’t know. But we do know that a Kremlin-connected lawyer brought a folder of printed-out documents to a June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., according to the account of a Russian-American lobbyist who also attended named Rinat Akhmetshin. An email to Trump Jr. from Rob Goldstone, a publicist who arranged the meeting on behalf of a Russian oligarch’s son, promised “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
The material contained in the folder wasn’t transcripts of bugged conversations, according to the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya—she has said the information pertained to records of incriminating donations to Democrats—but it was presented as damaging, regardless. Akhmetshin told the AP he thought Veselnitskaya left with the folder.
The claim: Russia probably distributed stolen DNC, Podesta emails through WikiLeaks Steele wrote that he’d heard about rising cyberwar activity in Russian intelligence. We never saw scandalous information emerge from wiretaps or bugs, the preferred methods alleged by Steele’s sources, during the 2016 campaign.
But we now know state-sponsored Russian hackers breached Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Campaign and a Clinton campaign staffer’s email accounts, and that emails probably obtained through those breaches were distributed through the DCLeaks website, by Guccifer 2.0 and by WikiLeaks.
Steele blames WikiLeaks for Russian collusion, citing “an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, [who] admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership.” Steele’s source said “the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to the Wikileaks platform.” A difference source said “further hacked CLINTON material”, likely campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, “already had been injected by the Kremlin into compliant western media outlets like Wikileaks.”
Julian Assange vociferously denies this, though emails the U.S. government believes Russian intelligence services stole from the DNC and from Podesta appear among those WikiLeaks published.
Steele also received information about an anti-Clinton propaganda campaign that he did not connect to the hacking efforts in June of 2016—months before the Federal government would formally attribute the hacks, though they had been reported in the press.
The claim: Blackmail victims aided Russia’s cyberwar operations Russian authorities didn’t admit to hack attacks, though they did coyly suggest that they might have had something to do with it: President Vladimir Putin notoriously credited “patriotic hackers” with the election-related attacks.
Steele’s sources suggested it was fear, rather than patriotism, that motivated the hackers.”[I]n terms of the FSB’s recruitment of capable cyber operatives to carry out its, ideally deniable, offensive cyber operations, a Russian IT specialist with direct knowledge reported in June 2016 that this was often done using coercion and blackmail,” he wrote.
In a breakdown of state-sponsored Russian hacking activity in June 2016, researchers at private digital security firm Cyberreason cited the application of “coercive force” as one of the ways Russia’s intelligence services operate.
This is implied, though not stated directly, in the U.S. Justice Department’s indictment of four FSB operatives who hacked tech company Yahoo, two of whom had prior criminal records. Last month, Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian intelligence and organized crime, told TPM that the FSB made a point of recruiting criminals; he said they were the proponents of the risky strategy Steele refers to as “black PR” in his reports.
The claim: Carter Page met with Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin in Moscow Weakening U.S. and U.N. sanctions remains incredibly important to the Russian government and its notoriously corrupt oil industry. The dossier suggested that one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page was offered huge bribes by Igor Sechin, vice-chair of the board of directors of Russian state oil company Rosneft.
The two men did in fact meet, according to investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Isikoff wrote at Yahoo in September 2016—after the date on Steele’s memo about the meeting, but before his dossier was made public—that Page had met with Sechin as well as another “top Putin aide” who appears in the dossier, named Igor Diveykin.
“Sechin’s associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page and his associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft,” Steele wrote.
Page was already a fan. Steele describes the meeting as “recent” in his July 2016 memo, but Page was already lauding Sechin in blog posts as far back as 2014.
The claim: Michael Cohen met with Kremlin officials Trump consigliere Michael Cohen is described in the dossier as vital to the “covert relationship with Russia.” Steele’s source alleged that Cohen met with Kremlin officials, but the dossier noted the source was “was unsure of the identities of the PA [Putin presidential administration] officials with whom COHEN met secretly in August, or the exact date/s and locations of the meeting/s.”
The dossier speculated Konstantin Kosachev, head of Russia’s Foreign Relations Committee, may have been one of the alleged contacts. As part of his alleged work facilitating—and then, according to Steele, covering up—Russian election interference, the dossier also asserts Cohen traveled to Prague. Steele wrote Cohen was accompanied to Prague by a man named Oleg Solodukhin, who denied the report to the New York Times.
Last month, the Washington Post broke Cohen did communicate directly with Kremlin publicist Dmitry Peskov, albeit through a generic email address, on the matter of a Trump Tower in Moscow. The two men are characterized as holding corresponding positions in the Trump and Putin camps in the Steele dossier, Peskov as “the main protagonist in Kremlin campaign to aid Trump and damage Clinton.”
Peskov confirmed that he had received Cohen’s email, but said nothing came of it.
Cohen has vociferously denied the dossier’s claims, famously trashing the allegation that he’d been coordinating with hackers in August 2016 in Prague. When Cohen shared photos of his passport as evidence, BuzzFeed reporters observed stamps indicating he could have entered the Czech Republic through Italy; a CNN report, on the other hand, suggested the Michael Cohen who went to Prague was a different man altogether.
The Steele dossier is filled with such maddening claims—is the Prague trip a fabrication, or did the ex-spy’s sources get the timing wrong? It’s impossible to know. But too often to ignore, Steele’s sources appear to have described—often with errors—an event or a relationship of significance that would become clear with the benefit of hindsight. The question now, then, is whether the dossier’s wilder and more difficult to prove claims have the same element of near-truth to them as the allegations examined here. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... ign=buffer
DHS tells 21 states they were Russia hacking targets before 2016 election BY JOE UCHILL - 09/22/17 05:21 PM EDT 214
DHS tells 21 states they were Russia hacking targets before 2016 election
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified 21 states Friday that Russia attempted to hack their election systems before the 2016 election.
In the majority of the states, the Department of Homeland Security only saw preparations for hacking, like scanning to find potential modes for attack. Voting machines are not connected to the internet and cannot be scanned in this way, but other systems, including those housing voter rolls, can be.
DHS has not released a list of what states were notified.
"[R]ecognizing that state and local officials should be kept informed about cybersecurity risks to election infrastructure, we are working with them to refine our processes for sharing this information while protecting the integrity of investigations and the confidentiality of system owners," DHS Spokesman Scott McConnell said in a written statement to The Hill.
McConnell later added: "As part of our ongoing information sharing efforts, today DHS notified the Secretary of State or another chief election officer in each state of any potential targeting we were aware of in their state leading up to the 2016 election. We will continue to keep this information confidential and defer to each state whether it wishes to make it public or not.” The Wisconsin Elections Commission, took the DHS up on that offer, announcing that it was one of the states notified by DHS.
Wisconsin officials said their internet-facing systems were among those scanned by Russia but Russia did not hack or in any way impact any of its machines.
The United States intelligence community believes that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and other political targets in an attempt to influence the election. They do not, however, believe voting machines were hacked or votes were directly altered by Russia.
In August, Judd Choate, state election director for Colorado and president of the National Association of State Election Directors, expressed frustration that states had not been notified of Russian hacking attempts. At the time, DHS said it was working to address the issue, but that its initial policy was to only notify the group that was attacked — often times a contractor.
Illinois and Arizona announced before the election that voter roles connected to the internet had been hacked by Russia.
Alabama also confirmed to The Hill that it had been targeted. Five other states told The Associated Press they had been targeted including Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia and Washington. In most cases, they said they did not know until notified Friday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Elections are organized by states, not the federal government. DHS, however, has declared elections critical infrastructure, giving states a variety of voluntary options for assistance. http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity ... an-hacking
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.
“If you had seen what I had seen you’d want me to go full throttle,” he said.
Trump is ‘prepping his base’ for a constitutional crisis to stop the Russia probe: Dem lawmaker
22 SEP 2017 AT 12:52 ET
President Donald Trump is preparing his base for the constitutional crisis he’ll trigger by firing special counsel Robert Mueller, according to a congressional investigator.
Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the probe has gotten deep into sensitive financial areas involving Trump and his family, and he “impulsive” president was almost certain to fire the special counsel.
“The Mueller investigation could take at least another year, maybe two, but (the House) investigation is closer to its infancy than conclusion,” Quigley said Thursday, during a discussion at DePaul University College of Law. “In the meantime, we live with the very real threat that the Mueller investigation gets shut down.”
Quigley said the investigation, despite its complexity, had already revealed evidence of wrongdoing.
“If you had seen what I had seen you’d want me to go full throttle,” he said.
The lawmaker said he’s trying to communicate a sense of urgency, because he believes Trump is willing to risk democratic institutions and civil society to protect himself from the investigation.
“One of the reasons I speak the way I do when I message about this is I’m worried about a constitutional crisis,” Quigley said. “I think there is a reason he speaks to the base in the manner in which he does. He’s prepping them, girding them for this.”
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.
Special counsel probing flow of Russian-American money to Trump political funds By BRIAN ROSS MATTHEW MOSK Sep 26, 2017, 2:53 PM ET
WATCHSpecial counsel's Russia probe loses top FBI investigator
Three Americans with significant Russian business connections contributed almost $2 million to political funds controlled by Donald Trump, ABC News has learned.
The timing of contributions coming from US citizens with ties to Russia is now being questioned by investigators for special counsel Robert Mueller, according to a Republican campaign aide interviewed by Mueller’s team.
Unless the contributions were directed by a foreigner, they would be legal, but could still be of interest to investigators examining allegations of Russian influence in the 2016 campaign, said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
“Obviously, if there were those that had associations with the Kremlin that were contributing, that would be of keen concern,” Schiff told ABC News.
A review of Trump campaign records conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics for ABC News found large contributions coming from two émigrés born in the former Soviet Union who now hold U.S. citizenship, and from a third American who heads the subsidiary of a large Russian private equity firm.
Those donations began flowing to the Republican National Committee, the group says, just as Trump was on the verge of securing the Republican nomination and culminated in two large gifts – totaling $1.25 million – from these individuals to the Trump inaugural fund following his victory.
Government officials familiar with the House and Senate investigations into Russian election interference told ABC News that near the conclusion of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Trump’s son Don Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Russian emissaries interested in curtailing U.S. sanctions, Manafort made a cryptic and cursory notation on his phone. It said, “Active sponsors of RNC,” a phrase that some investigators have viewed as a reference to campaign donations, the sources said.
Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni disputed any notion that he was referencing contributions, telling ABC News any assertion that they talked money was “not true.”
“This sounds like more Washington whispers,” Maloni said. “Anonymous sources with self-serving motives peddling rumors and speculation.”
Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which specializes in analyzing and tracking political contributions, said she would expect the special counsel to look closely at one of the most time-honored ways to exert influence in an election -- donations.
“I think it will be a dereliction of duty for the investigators and special counsel Mueller not to look into” that flow of money, Krumholz said.
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Leonard Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born billionaire who holds American and British citizenship, has contributed $383,000 to the Republican National Committee since late April 2016 and added another $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Those figures include more than $12,000 that was later directed into President Trump’s legal defense fund, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. He did not give directly to the Trump campaign.
Blavatnik made his fortune in heavy industry and oil and gas after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding his Russian holdings under Putin through a lucrative oil deal while also purchasing familiar Western brands such as the Warner Music Group, which he bought in 2011 for $3.3 billion.
He has donated tens of millions of dollars to educational and charitable causes and prefers to be known as an American philanthropist. He also has a long history of political giving to PACs supporting candidates of both parties. He gave $1.5 million for Sen. Marco Rubio during the early 2016 primary campaign, as well as $1 million for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and $800,000 for South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. In 2011, he gave for both President Barack Obama and his GOP challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
When asked if Blavatnik had been contacted by federal investigators about his contributions during and after the 2016 campaign, a spokesperson told ABC News the billionaire would not comment. In an earlier statement made to British media, Blavatnik noted that neither his contributions, nor those of his company Access Industries, were made directly to Trump.
"Access Industries made a donation to the Presidential Inaugural Committee, a joint Congressional committee that has been responsible for organizing the inauguration ceremonies of every U.S. president since 1901 and which helps to organize public and private events during the week leading up to the Inauguration,” the statement said. "The types of events that the Presidential Inaugural Committee plans and supports include public concerts, fireworks, lunches, dinners, the inauguration ceremony, and the inaugural parade.”
Krumholz, however, said the donations to the inauguration are hard to view as having a solely charitable motive. Blavatnik, she said, is a political “heavy hitter,” and longstanding political donor. “He runs Access Industries and I think the name probably says it all,” she said.
Additional contributions from Russian-connected donors came from Russian-born oil executive Simon Kukes and New York businessman Andrew Intrater, who oversees the U.S. arm of the Russian conglomerate Renova Group. Neither Kukes nor Intrater had an appreciable record of political contributions until last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
After Trump secured the nomination, Kukes gave $280,000 to an assortment of Trump-controlled funds over the next several months. Intrater contributed $35,000 to the Trump Victory committee, plus $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Neither Kukes nor Intrater returned messages left at their homes and offices.
All three men -- Blavatnik, Kukes, and Intrater -- have been publicly identified as associated with Viktor Vekselberg, considered one of the richest men in Russia. Vekselberg is reported to hold frequent meetings with President Vladimir Putin as part of a business group known as the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Emails to Vekselberg’s Moscow-based company, Renova, were not returned. Vekselberg’s firm, the Renova Group, has also donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
Experts who follow the activities of Russia’s cadre of billionaires, commonly known as the “oligarchs,” told ABC News they believe donations from these three men, all of whom have worked closely with Vekselberg, warrant intense scrutiny.
Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, said she does not believe large contributions from Blavatnik or from donors associated with Vekselberg would occur without the implicit approval of the Kremlin.
“If you have investments in Russia then you cannot be sure that they are secure if you go against the Kremlin's will,” Shelley said. “You can't be an enormously rich person in Russia, or even hold large holdings in Russia without being in Putin's clutches.”
Both Blavatnik and Vekselberg had crossed paths with officials in Trump’s inner circle prior to the real estate mogul’s run for president.
After Trump supporter and now Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross took a controlling interest in the Bank of Cyprus, for instance, a company controlled by Vekselberg became the biggest single Bank of Cyprus shareholder. During Ross’s confirmation hearings in February, a group of six Democratic senators raised questions about the nominee’s ties to Vekselberg. They noted that Vekselberg had served on the board of the Russian oil company, Rosneft, which was placed under sanctions in 2014 after Russia’s armed incursion into Crimea.
Vekselberg also oversaw fundraising for the Moscow Jewish Museum, including hosting a 2014 gala in Russia attended by Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner. Blavatnik also attended the event.
In addition, both men have business ties to another Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, whose name has already surfaced in connection with the Mueller investigation -- Deripaska was a client of Manafort’s prior to joining Trump’s campaign, as first revealed in Manafort’s foreign registration filings. Deripaska is the majority owner of RUSAL, the world's second largest aluminum company. Vekselberg and Blavatnik hold a significant interest in RUSAL, and Blavatnik served on the company’s board until shortly after Trump was elected.
Ilya Zaslavskiy, an Oxford-trained scholar and frequent critic of the oligarchs, told ABC News there is good reason for concerns about the role Vekselberg and Blavatnik may have played in the 2016 elections, given what he says was “a continuous relationship of these oligarchs with Kremlin and security services.”
Special counsel Mueller “should absolutely look into this because these people have a track record of very close relationships with the Kremlin,” Zasklavskiy said. “There is now overwhelming evidence that Putin has run a multilayered, sophisticated campaign against American institutes.”
Schiff said he has not reached any firm conclusions, but his committee will be looking closely at every facet of the Russian influence effort, including political donations from billionaires with lasting ties inside Russia.
“The oligarchs are really part and parcel of service to the Kremlin,” Schiff said. “They can be called upon at basically Putin’s will to do what he needs done. It gives them some distance from the Kremlin, it gives them some plausible deniability.”
Shelley said the country may never know if the contributions were made independently or covertly directed by the Kremlin. But she believes that in the 2016 presidential contest, anyone with deep business investments in Russia “would not be contributing to Hillary, [and] Russians would not be aligning themselves with Hillary, because they knew that Putin really disliked her.” http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/investig ... d=50100024
White House stonewalls Capitol Hill over records in Russia probe
White House legal team overshadows Trump (CNN)Tension is rising between congressional investigators probing Russia meddling and the Trump administration, as the White House and Justice Department withhold a number of records sought by Capitol Hill at a critical time in the investigations.
Operating on parallel tracks from special counsel Robert Mueller, the three congressional committees probing Russia's election meddling have asked for scores of documents related to everything from Jared Kushner's security clearance to records surrounding President Donald Trump's discussions with James Comey before he was fired as FBI director.
At the same time, the GOP leader of the House intelligence committee is threatening to hold a public hearing this week over documents the Justice Department has so far failed to turn over to Capitol Hill regarding the FBI's ties to a British operative who compiled a dossier of allegations on Trump's connections with Russia.
And the GOP-led Senate judiciary committee is in a growing standoff with the Justice Department's deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, over several issues, including the department's decision to prevent two senior FBI officials from sitting down for transcribed interviews on Capitol Hill to provide eyewitness accounts of the Comey firing.
While the Trump campaign has provided lawmakers with thousands of pages of documents thus far, there are numerous requests where the White House, FBI and Justice Department have missed the committees' deadlines, prompting some committee members to threaten to issue subpoenas to the West Wing and Justice Department.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told CNN on Saturday that the White House has "refused" since June to comply with the panel's bipartisan request for documents over Trump's conversations with Comey -- "despite repeated attempts" to obtain the information.
"The White House's refusal to answer Congress in full and truthfully raises serious questions about the White House's intent, including the potential that it is misleading Congress," Schiff said in an email. "The White House must fully comply immediately; if it does not, the Committee should, on a bipartisan basis, subpoena the records."
A spokeswoman for Republican Rep. Mike Conaway, who is leading the House intelligence committee Russia investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.
The White House did not comment when asked about its standoff with Congress over the Russia documents. Trump and White House officials have denied there was any collusion with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign, with the President calling the inquiries a "witch hunt."
It's not unusual for the executive branch to ignore requests from Capitol Hill over records requests -- something that far predates the Trump administration.
But the resistance now to providing key documents could limit the key congressional committees' abilities to learn the extent of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign -- as well as whether Trump acted improperly by seeking to fire Comey to quash an FBI probe into Russian election meddling.
Complicating matters further is Mueller's probe, which has ramped up in aggressiveness and has broadened to examine Trump's White House.
Mueller has asked for an array of documents from the White House, including documents and emails relating to the dismissals of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Comey, as well as Trump's Oval Office meeting with senior Russian officials in which he said Comey's firing eased pressure on the White House, sources have told CNN. Of particular concern to Capitol Hill are comments made by White House special counsel Ty Cobb, who was overheard in a lunch conversation by a New York Times reporter suggesting he wouldn't cooperate with Capitol Hill.
"If we give it to Mueller, there is no reason for it to ever get to the Hill," Cobb was reported as saying. A White House official said Cobb has no involvement with congressional inquiries, and that the decision on whether to comply with Hill requests is one left to the White House counsel's office, run by Don McGahn.
Earlier this year, well before Mueller was tapped as special counsel, White House lawyers instructed aides to preserve documents and other materials that could be related to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. There are several unfilled requests for documents from the White House already, and the list is likely to grow as the congressional probes heat up this fall.
The House intelligence committee request stems from Trump's suggestion earlier this year there were tapes of his conversations with Comey. The panel asked McGahn for any "recordings or memoranda" related to their conversations, and the White House did respond with a letter stating there were no tapes that existed, citing a Trump tweet.
But that didn't satisfy the House Russia investigators. Conaway and Schiff issued a June 29 statement that their initial request had only been partially met, and they asked again for the White House "to appropriately and fully comply" with the request, which is still outstanding.
Rep. Devin Nunes, who stepped aside from leading the committee's Russia probe over concerns about his own handling of classified information, is running a parallel investigation into alleged "unmasking" of Trump officials by the Obama administration.
Earlier this month, Nunes pushed back a deadline for the FBI and Justice Department to produce documents about the FBI's relationship with the former British agent Christopher Steele, who produced a dossier of allegations -- some details of which have been substantiated, but others have not -- about Trump ties to Russia. He warned he would haul Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray before the committee if his requests were not met.
But the second deadline set for this past Friday came and went.
The panel has now scheduled a Thursday hearing for "document production" related to the subpoena, which could lead to a public showdown between the California Republican and the DOJ and FBI.
A Nunes spokesman declined to comment. A Justice Department spokesperson said: "Discussions with the committee are ongoing, and we have asked that the subpoenas that had compliance dates for (Friday) continue to be on hold during that process."
The scrutiny on the Justice Department also extends to the Senate side. The Justice Department has not responded to some key requests from the Senate Judiciary Committee, including a June request by Sens. Chuck Grassley, the committee chairman, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, to detail whether the US government sought to spy on any Trump associates during the last election season.
In particular, what has irked Grassley and the committee's top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, is the Justice Department's decision not to allow two senior FBI officials, James Rybicki and Carl Ghattas, to interview with the panel about the Comey firing. The department has said it's up to Mueller's team to decide whether to allow them to come forward, something it has not done so far.
Discussions with Rosenstein are supposed to continue this week, sources said.
"We've got subpoenas at the Senate counsel office," Grassley told CNN last week, referring to the Senate office that would draft the subpoenas. "When we get done there, I'm gonna have to consult with Sen. Feinstein."
Moreover, the White House has ignored a July deadline to respond to a series of questions related to Kushner, the President's son-in-law, about his application forms to get his security clearance -- something that had to be repeatedly amended because of his failure to list meetings with foreign officials, including Russians.
Among the questions the judiciary committee leaders have asked: Whether any White House official intervened during the background check process on Kushner's behalf and whether he has any "continuing contact" with a foreign national.
Kushner's attorneys have responded to the committee, citing in large measure his public statement insisting his mistakes were innocent and his meetings with Russians were innocuous. But the White House has not answered the questions raised by GOP and Democratic leaders of the committee, according to committee officials.
The Kushner security clearance form also has come under sharp scrutiny from Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee. Along with the other Democrats on the panel, Cummings requested a response by July 5 about omissions on Kushner's security clearance and whether he should continue to access classified information. They have yet to receive a response, according to Cummings' office.
Cummings has pushed for a range of documents, including on Flynn and Comey, but has not received responses from the White House on those matters either. Lacking support from the GOP chairman of the committee, Trey Gowdy, who wants to pursue the issues through the House intelligence committee, Cummings is unable to issue subpoenas for such records.
Yet the previous chairman of the House Oversight committee, then Rep. Jason Chaffetz, did sign onto a March request asking for documents related to the Flynn vetting process. But the White House sent an April letter suggesting that such information would not be forthcoming, and Republicans on the panel did not pursue the matter after that.
Senate Intelligence committee officials refused to say if they've made any requests for documents from the White House that are still outstanding.
But committee Chairman Richard Burr and ranking Democrat Mark Warner said in May they would request a briefing from the White House on what was said in the meeting that month between Trump, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak Warner also told CNN in July that the committee had requested more records from Kushner, as well as Donald Trump Jr., following the revelation of their June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer. A spokeswoman for Burr did not respond to a request for comment, and a Warner spokeswoman declined to comment.
Congress prepares to drop the subpoena hammer on Donald Trump Bill Palmer Updated: 2:21 pm EDT Mon Sep 25, 2017 Home » Politics
Here’s how you know the investigations into Donald Trump’s scandals are reaching a point where he’s afraid of what’s going to happen to him: he and his White House are now outright refusing to cooperate with the requests of investigators, even while facing the prospect of running afoul of the law in the process. As a result, congressional committees are preparing to drop subpoenas on Trump’s head which could have unprecedented consequences.
Although Democrats like Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings are struggling to get their Republican majorities on their respected House committees to agree to subpoenas, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are successfully moving forward. The committee chair, Republican Chuck Grassley, has confirmed to CNN that subpoenas are being drafted against the White House itself (link), and that the next steps with those subpoenas will essentially be Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein’s call.
If and when the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenas Trump and his White House to turn over the documents and records in question, the nation will be facing a potential constitutional crisis if Trump still refuses to comply. The Senate could hold Trump and/or his top officials in contempt of Congress, and they could convince a judge to order the documents to be turned over. If Trump and his people refuse to honor the court order, the judge could then theoretically order law enforcement officers to enter the White White and seize the documents. Anyone in the White House who tries to block the move, short of Trump himself, could be arrested for it.
As we head into this next phase of the investigation, we’re about to come up against the kinds of lines that even Richard Nixon ultimately refused to cross once he realized his Watergate scandal was going to take him down. Now we wait to see how Donald Trump handles the realization that his own demise is inevitable http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/co ... rump/5108/
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.
Russia investigation to probe “foul corners” of 4Chan and Reddit
By David Gilbert Sep 28, 2017 A congressional committee probing Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election could broaden its investigation to look at Reddit and 4Chan as potential tools of clandestine activity, according to a congressional aide.
The Hill reported Wednesday that Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wants to look at the loosely controlled internet message boards, which became a hub for the so-called alt-right during the election.
The investigation is already probing Facebook and Twitter over claims of Russian meddling.
The controversial TheDonald subreddit, which launched the same day Trump confirmed his candidacy, will be of particular interest.
It has been described as a “safe-harbor” for racists, white-nationalists, and white supremacists to express their views and spread conspiracy theories, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism.
According to the Economist, “few corners of the internet are fouler.”
The subreddit has gained notoriety for promoting conspiracy theories, including Pizzagate and the Seth Rich murder. The infamous video of Trump body-slamming CNN first appeared there.
The notorious 4Chan message board, where anonymous users fear few restrictions, already has a link to Trump. While still a candidate, the businessman tweeted an image of Pepe the Frog, a meme that originated on the 4Chan site and has strong links to far-right groups, anti-Semites, and racists.
Users of 4Chan started a discussion Wednesday on the possibility of their actions becoming the focus of a Congressional investigation.
One poster noted that controversial comments were on the site long before the Trump campaign: “4chan was always like this you retards. Just look at the official logo of /pol/ from 6 years ago. It’s a swastika.” https://news.vice.com/story/russia-inve ... and-reddit
Insider reveals the specific criminal charges Robert Mueller will bring against Donald Trump and his co-conspirators Bill Palmer Updated: 12:27 am EDT Thu Sep 28, 2017 Home » Politics
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is still quietly working his way through the various aspects of the most complex criminal investigation in United States history. His actions, such as subpoenas and FBI raids and specific hires and impending indictments, have tipped off bits and pieces of where he’s headed. But now a Department of Justice insider has revealed the specific criminal charges that Mueller can be expected to bring against Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.
Jimmy Gurulé was an Assistant Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration, giving him specific expertise when it comes to putting together the pieces and figuring out specifically what a prosecutor like Mueller is aiming toward. Gurulé appeared on the Brian Williams show on MSNBC on Wednesday night, and he laid out the various criminal charges that he expects Mueller to bring in the Trump-Russia probe.
According to Gurulé the list includes obstruction of justice, violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act (a law which centers around campaign fundraising), violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, IRS tax laws, and possibly money laundering. He didn’t spell out which charges will be brought against which individuals, but based on prior reporting, some of it can be put together rather easily.
For instance, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn are accused of being in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, while the inclusion of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act suggests that someone on Trump’s team may have committed criminal hacking, or conspired with the Russians to commit criminal hacking. The larger question, of course, is which of these charges apply to Donald Trump himself.
Robert Mueller cannot put Donald Trump on trial; only Congress can try the President for alleged crimes. But Mueller can ask a grand jury to name Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator, as was the case during Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. There are legal scholars such as Professor Laurence Tribe who believe Mueller can indict Trump for crimes, even if he can’t try him for those crimes. The point of that would be to demonstrate such obvious guilt that Congress would have no choice but to finish Trump off. Once Trump is ousted from office, he can then be prosecuted in a regular court of law. http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ch ... ller/5168/
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.
Will Donald Trump go down due to his dubious ties to the former Soviet Union? The president seems to be getting in deeper and deeper. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investigating if Trump colluded with Russia in order to win the elections, is also digging into Trump's past. In that past, one of Donald Trump's business partners plays a crucial role, Felix Sater. A convicted felon who has ties with the Russian mafia. Last May, Zembla disclosed how an American real estate company, co-owned by Sater, used Dutch mailbox companies within a network, which has been suspected of laundering money. Presumably $1.5 million dollars had been diverted. Donald Trump built hotels and apartment blocks with this suspicious company.
In the last few months ZEMBLA received indications of a greater fraud. A billion dollar fraud. And here Sater, Trump's questionable business partner, shows up, as well. The money trail leads to Kazakhstan, to real estate projects in New York and again to the Netherlands. ZEMBLA investigates: How compromising is this case for the current president of America?
ZEMBLA, The dubious friends of Donald Trump III: The billion dollar fraud.
Twitter finds hundreds of accounts tied to Russian operatives
Twitter's Carlos Monje, the director of public policy and philanthropy, right, knocks on the door with Colin Crowell, head of global public policy, to enter the closed door meeting with the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, Thursday, Sept. 28, 2017 in Washington. Officials from Twitter are on Capitol Hill as part of the House and Senate investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) (Alex Brandon/AP) By Elizabeth Dwoskin, Adam Entous and Karoun Demirjian September 28 at 3:57 PM Twitter said Thursday it had shut down 201 accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who posted thousands of political ads on Facebook, but the effort frustrated lawmakers who said the problem is far broader than the company appeared to know.
The company said it also found three accounts from the news site RT — which Twitter linked to the Kremlin — that spent $274,100 in ads on its platform in 2016.
Despite the disclosures, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) questioned whether the company is doing enough to stop Russian operatives from using its platform to spread disinformation and division in American society.
He said Twitter’s presentation to a closed door meeting of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers Thursday morning was “deeply disappointing” and “inadequate on almost every level.” Twitter made a similar presentation to House Intelligence Committee staffers on Thursday afternoon.
The company “showed an enormous lack of understanding... about how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions,” Warner said.
Facebook announced on Sept. 21 that it would turn over copies of 3,000 political ads brought by Russian accounts during the 2016 election, while Twitter said on Sept. 28 that it had shut down 201 accounts tied to the same group. (The Washington Post)
The meeting between the company and Congressional investigators was part of a widening government probe into how Russian operatives used Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media platforms to sow division and disinformation during the 2016 campaign. Those companies are under increasing pressure from Capitol Hill to investigate Russian meddling on their platforms and are facing the possibility of new regulations that could impact their massive advertising businesses.
Facebook, Google and Twitter are also being summoned to a public hearing on Capitol Hill on Nov. 1.
The Twitter accounts, which were taken down over the last month, were associated with 470 accounts and pages that Facebook last month said came from the Internet Research Agency, a Russia-connect troll farm. Twitter said the groups on Facebook had 22 corresponding Twitter accounts. Twitter then found an additional 179 accounts linked to those 22.
But lawmakers and analysts criticized Twitter for appearing as if it only accepted and looked into the data that it received from Facebook, rather than conduct a broader internal investigation. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Ca.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said Twitter needs to launch “a far more robust investigation” into how Russian actors used the platform.
“They have no idea who is on their platform. If it wasn’t for Facebook’s data, they would have no idea these were even Russian accounts,” said Clint Watts, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
In its blog post, Twitter did not reveal who the ads reached and how many times they were shared. It is also not clear whether Twitter did a broader search of its users for Russian interference.
Twitter wrote that it was cooperating with the Congressional investigation. “Twitter deeply respects the integrity of the election process, which is a cornerstone for all democracies. We will continue to strengthen Twitter against attempted manipulation, including malicious automated accounts and spam, as well as other activities that violate our Terms of Service,” the post said.
Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, President Trump's nominee to be ambassador to Russia, said there was "no question" that Moscow meddled in the 2016 U.S. election. (Reuters) But Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, said there’s plenty of evidence that Russian intelligence operatives have been on Twitter for years and have used the platform to amplify messages.
“We need to think very carefully about what role we want these companies to have in our debate – and, since these platforms largely regulate themselves, what kind of accountability we want them to have,” Howard said.
Silicon Valley has long enjoyed a hands-off approach from regulators, and has become a major lobbying force in Washington in order to keep things that way. But that attitude appears to be shifting quickly.
Last week Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Warner urged colleagues Thursday to support a bill that would create new transparency requirements for platforms that run political ads online akin to those already in place for TV stations, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post. Lawmakers from across the political spectrum – from Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex) – have called for more scrutiny into the market power of technology companies over the last few months.
Facebook has faced the greatest scrutiny. The company has said it will provide 3,000 political ads, in addition to payment information and data about who those ads targeted, to Congress in the coming days.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg apologized for saying it was “pretty crazy” that fake news could have influenced the U.S. election.
“Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive,” he wrote. He then emphasized the role Facebook played in spurring authentic debate and sustaining democratic ideals was much greater than any exploitation that took place.
“The data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election,” he said.
Google, the largest online advertising company in the world, has also been asked to provide information to Congressional investigators and to testify before Congress, but has not said whether it will do so. The company has said it will cooperate with any investigation and has “seen no evidence” of a Russian-promoted ad campaign. Google did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In many ways, Twitter has been the most vulnerable to exploitation of all the social media companies. The company officially says the 5 percent of accounts on Twitter are automated bots, but outside researchers say the number could be much higher.
It’s very easy to buy fake accounts on Twitter, making it hard for Twitter to discern the extent of the Russian meddling, analysts said.
“Anyone can create an account anonymously on Twitter and hide its origin,” said Watts, the Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow.
NATIONAL Ex Trump associates helped fugitive Kazakhs in visa scheme BY BEN WIEDER, GABRIELLE PALUCH AND KEVIN G. HALL khall@mcclatchydc.com
JULY 21, 2017 5:00 AM
SANDS POINT, NEW YORK Two former associates of Donald Trump helped a family of wealthy Kazakh fugitives make extensive investments in the United States, some aimed at helping family members obtain legal residency here, a McClatchy investigation shows.
Felix Sater, an ex-con and one-time senior adviser in the Trump Organization, helped the Trump family scout deals in Russia. He led an effort that began in 2012 to assist the stepchildren of Viktor Khrapunov, who that year had been placed on an international detention request list by the global police agency Interpol.
Viktor Khrapunov Former Kazakh Energy Minister Viktor Khrapunov, shown in this photo from an Interpol notice in 2012, faces civil lawsuits in the United States alleging that he and his family laundered stolen money through property in the United States and elsewhere. Interpol
Khrapunov is the former Kazakh energy minister and ex-mayor of Almaty, that nation’s most populous city. He fled to Switzerland a decade ago, after Kazakhstan’s leaders accused him and his wife of stealing government funds. They are now accused in civil lawsuits of laundering money through luxury properties, including Trump-branded condos in the Soho neighborhood New York.
McClatchy’s probe reveals that with the help of Sater and his then-business associate Daniel Ridloff, also formerly affiliated with the Trump Organization, the Khrapunov family invested millions in a short-lived company that sought to place biometrics machines in airports across the country.
The real aim of Khrapunov’s investment was obtaining US residency for at least one member of the family; the company submitted, with the help of the onetime Trump associates, at least three requests to obtain visas for foreign workers.
The McClatchy investigation reveals a deeper relationship than previously known between the former Trump Organization figures and the fugitive Khrapunovs — underscoring how little is known about many of those involved with the Trump Organization.
There is no evidence that Trump himself participated in the courting of the Khrapunovs, but the affair sheds light on the often murky activities of the associates with whom he did deals at home and abroad.
What Ties?
On paper, Donald Trump’s business relationship with Sater ended almost a decade ago. But earlier this year, Sater re-entered Trump’s orbit when he and Michael D. Cohen, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, were involved with a Ukraine-Russia peace proposal that was presented to Michael Flynn, then Trump’s national security advisor.
Sater, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as a senior adviser to Trump in 2010 and 2011, also gave more than $10,000 to Trump’s presidential campaign and a joint Trump-Republican National Committee fund in 2016, and at least $6,000 this year, according to Federal Election Commission records.
The web connecting the Trump administration to Russia
From Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to former campaign director Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's allies have business and personal connections to Russia. As Congress and the FBI look into Russia's involvement with the 2016 election, those connections are increasingly under a microscope.
Natalie Fertig and Patrick Gleason McClatchy This as Bloomberg reported Thursday that Trump Soho in New York, where the Khrapunovs invested, were among several Trump businesses being looked at by former FBI Director Robert Mueller in his probe of possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016.
“Do not know,” said John M. Dowd, an outside lawyer for Trump, said of the report in response to questions from McClatchy.
Several key people in Trump’s orbit did business with the Kazakh clan, including the law firm of Trump campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani and the Bayrock Group, which developed Trump-branded projects in New York, Florida and Arizona and was founded by Tevik Arif, a politically-connected former Soviet official from Kazakhstan.
Lincoln Mitchell, a political consultant who specializes in Russia and its neighboring countries, said virtually any investment from Kazakhstan warrants scrutiny.
"It would be hard to imagine getting Kazakh investment that wasn't close to the ruling family," Mitchell said in a telephone interview from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
Nursultan Nazarbayev has ruled resources-rich Kazakhstan since 1989, placing his children and their spouses in top government posts. Some of his family assets have been frozen in Switzerland, and a U.S. Justice Department settlement in 2015 spotlighted how bribes paid to senior Kazakh officials ended up in offshore accounts belonging to the Kazakh government.
Both Sater and Ridloff had worked for Bayrock before joining the Trump Organization, Sater being one of its managing partners. Later, the two men facilitated the purchase in 2013 of three condos in the Trump SoHo for $3.1 million by companies tied to the Khrapunov children, Ilyas Khrapunov and Elvira Kudryashova.
In 2012 and 2013 alone, Sater and Ridloff worked with the Khrapunovs on more than $40 million in real estate and investment deals. All came after Kazakhstan added Viktor to the Interpol wanted list in February 2012.
Later, the former Trump associates and their Kazakh investors appeared to have a falling out, becoming mired in acrimonious lawsuits that ended in secret sealed settlements. Yet their business relationship appears to have continued after the settlements, and they continue to maintain a friendship via social media.
Viktor Khrapunov’s wife, Leila, would be added to the Interpol wanted list later in 2012, and stepson Ilyas was added in May 2014.
Ilyas Khrapunov Ilyas Khrapunov, shown in a photo from an Interpol notice, faces civil lawsuits alleging that he and his father, Viktor, a former energy minister and mayor in Kazakhstan, laundered stolen money through property in the United States and elsewhere. Interpol The Khrapunovs – who declined to answer detailed questions from McClatchy — maintain that they are the victims of political persecution by the despotic Nazarbayev, who once offered Viktor the post of prime minister before their falling out.
“This is about a dictator trying to silence his political opponents,” Marc Comina, a Khrapunov family spokesman in Switzerland, said in an emailed statement. “Kazakhstan is using the legal systems of Western countries to harass, wear down and destroy political opponents.”
From Almaty to the Big Apple
On the surface, a multimillion dollar investment by the Khrapunovs in a New York-based health technology company would appear to make little sense.
World Health Networks was formed from the ashes of a failed firm that had created health monitoring kiosks placed in pharmacies. The new company aimed to put similar devices in airports across the world, but first it needed capital.
Enter Sater. He was representing the Khrapunovs, who were looking for US investments, and was introduced to executives of World Health Networks through an intermediary who attended the same synagogue on Long Island, according to a person with intimate knowledge of the deal.
Company executives made a pitch to the Khrapunovs in April 2012, according to documents reviewed by McClatchy, and court documents show that the money started flowing into the New York firm soon after.
World Health Network’s business model evolved over the course of its short existence, from an early plan to attract sponsorships from health insurance companies to a later plan to sell advertising space on the machines.
“It was definitely a real company,” said Ken Williams, who helped develop the firm and sat on its board.
Sater installed Ridloff as the company’s chief operating officer, according to former employees who demanded anonymity because of several ongoing lawsuits.
Silence and Denials
McClatchy reporters knocked on Sater’s door in wealthy New York suburb of Sands Point on July 17. He declined comment when asked about World Health Networks and other dealings with the Khrapunovs, saying he was late for a golf outing. McClatchy returned later in the day, prompting Sater to email that he’d call police if reporters came back again.
His attorney, Robert S. Wolf, declined to meet with McClatchy a day later when reporters went to his office in Manhattan’s Chrysler Building seeking comment.
A Port Washington address Sater has listed multiple times as his place of business turned out to be a UPS store.
“He comes in here once in a blue moon,” said Nagasar Lachman, owner of the store.
This much is known: Ridloff submitted three visa applications for highly skilled workers on the company’s behalf between March 2013 and March 2014, all seeking to hire foreign budget analysts.
Stopped on the street as he left his Manhattan office, Ridloff confirmed to McClatchy that the investment by the Khrapunovs – ultimately $6 million, according to court records -- was aimed at securing Kudryashova, Viktor’s stepdaughter, legal residence in the United States.
The company partnered with the Swiss-based World Heart Federation and managed to place its machines in several airports, including Detroit, San Jose and Sacramento, Calif. But former employees confirmed its revenue couldn’t keep pace with expenses.
The company spent liberally on international travel and a bloated payroll, they said, and it folded soon after funding from the Khrapunovs dried up in late 2014.
It’s unclear the visas were ever issued, or whether the Khrapunovs obtained legal U.S. residence through any other means. The State Department and Homeland Security did not immediately provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act about World Health Networks’ visa applications.
Elvira Kudryashova listed a Newport Beach, Calif., address on a 2016 incorporation document for an upscale toy store she owned called Anthill shopNplay. The property in Newport Beach was sold later the same year.
Mall Brawl
Sater and Ridloff also worked with the Khrapunovs on nearly $35 million in U.S. real estate purchases during the same time period.
They started with several acquisitions in N.Y., including the three condos in the Trump SoHo for which they spent $3.1 million.
Then in June 2013, Sater and Ridloff helped a Khrapunov-linked company purchase the debt on the Tri-County Mall in the Cincinnati suburbs for $30 million. A month later, they sold their interest in the mall for $45 million to a U.S. company whose website lists Neil Bush, son of former President George H. W. Bush, on its board of directors.
Sater and Ridloff were owed a $1.6 million commission for their work arranging the Ohio deal, but a lawsuit filed in December 2013 alleged that they took nearly the entire $45 payment.
The lawsuit was settled, remarkably, in one day’s time, on Dec. 20, 2013, and the terms are secret. That might have been expected to be the end of the business relationship between the Khrapunovs and Sater.
But documents and social media suggest a seemingly amicable alliance extending beyond the 2013 lawsuit.
On Feb. 19, 2014 – two months after the lawsuit was filed – Ridloff submitted the third, final visa application on behalf of World Health Networks.
Ridloff incorporated World Health Networks in Kansas in March 2014, 10 days before the company was approved to enter into a contract with the Kansas City Airport in Missouri.
A Khrapunov-linked company made payments of at least $250,000 to World Health Networks in 2014, according to court records in a U.S. civil lawsuit brought against the family, with a payment of $80,000 made in September of 2014.
And Ridloff’s Facebook page shows that he is currently “friends” with Ilyas Khrapunov – years after the lawsuit alleging Sater helped orchestrate a multi-million dollar heist from a Khrapunov-connected company.
Bayrock Origins
Sater first began working with Trump while the Russian emigre was at Bayrock, which developed projects with Trump in Phoenix and Fort Lauderdale in addition to the Trump SoHo in New York.
Trump had given Bayrock exclusive rights in 2005 to develop a Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow. Court documents show Sater claims to have led a scouting trip in Russia with Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump in 2006.
Sater and Ridloff appear to have first become acquainted with the Khrapunovs during their time at Bayrock; in 2007 and 2008, companies tied to the Kazakh family entered into several deals with Bayrock, including a joint energy extraction venture in Kazakhstan called Kazbay and the development of a luxury building in Switzerland overlooking Lake Geneva.
Bracewell & Giuliani, the law-firm co-founded by former New York City Mayor and Trump surrogate Rudolph Giuliani, was retained to handle legal matters for the joint Bayrock-Khrapunov energy venture, according to documents obtained by Dutch broadcaster Zembla. Giuliani left the partnership in 2016 and Bracewell officials did not respond to numerous calls.
The Giuliani law firm’s Kazakh office was also behind the placement of more than $1 billion in corporate debt for Bank Turanalem, or BTA. Its top shareholder was Mukhtar Ablyazov, another fugitive Kazakh, whose daughter is married to Ilyas Khrapunov.
Kazakhstan’s president ordered BTA seized in 2009 and soon after accused Ablyazov of absconding with billions. Lawsuits in Los Angeles, New York and across the globe accuse of the Khrapunovs of co-mingling funds with Ablyazov and laundering the money, which is also the basis for the Interpol request by Kazakhstan. Lawyers for both the Khrapunovs and Ablyazovs deny this.
The Kazbay deal would ultimately fail and the Bayrock Group imploded soon after, in part as revelations emerged about Sater’s past. He had done prison time in the mid-1990s after being convicted of stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass during a bar brawl. Later, Sater pleaded guilty to racketeering in a securities fraud case but avoided prison by becoming a U.S. government informant.
Those revelations didn’t end Sater’s relationship with Trump – he and Ridloff both worked as advisers to the Trump Organization in 2010.
While Sater has said he was scouting potential Russia projects for the Trump Organization as late as 2015, Trump has played down their relationship.
“If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump said in a Florida deposition in 2013.
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.
