Paul Manafort

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 23, 2018 8:05 pm

Manafort offered to give Russian billionaire ‘private briefings’ on 2016 campaign

Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 61cd9927c5


Paul Manafort's ties to Russia mean he may have been blackmailed by the Kremlin The Independent

5 hours ago
In August 2016 it was revealed that Manafort had received secret payments from the pro-Kremlin party of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine's ousted president

President Donald Trump‘s defenders responded to the news of Paul Manafort‘s plea deal on Friday with the usual refrain: his case has nothing to do with the Trump campaign or allegations that it colluded with Russia in 2016.

They are wrong. Why? Because they are overlooking the blackmail factor.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has painstakingly documented evidence of Manafort’s role in a 10-year scheme involving money laundering, tax evasion and illicit lobbying – crimes that could lead to decades in a prison cell. Given Manafort’s extensive ties to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, Russian president Vladimir Putin would almost certainly have had detailed knowledge of Manafort’s transgressions. And that means that, when Manafort was promoted to chairman of Mr Trump’s campaign in May 2016, the Kremlin probably had vast amounts of material it could use to blackmail him. When it was revealed in August 2016 that Manafort had received at least $12.7m (£9.6m) in secret payments from the pro-Kremlin party of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s ousted president, that alone was enough to end his nascent return to US politics.

The use of blackmail, or kompromat, in the former Soviet Union is as common as beet dishes. Indeed, Mr Putin has cultivated his system of power around selective use of compromising information, especially evidence of financial malfeasance. And its use is reserved not only for his opponents. As the Russian journalist Yulia Latynina once wrote, “To keep kompromat on enemies is a pleasure. To keep kompromat on friends is a must.” The regime’s use of the tactic is so widespread that one scholar of modern day Russia has described the country as a “blackmail state”.

The gathering of kompromat is an organic process. Rarely is there a longterm strategy behind it; it often functions as a kind of insurance in business or political dealings. Accordingly, to say that the Russian government would have access to kompromat on Manafort is not necessarily to argue that its procurement was part of a sustained, centrally orchestrated campaign. Instead, it could have been casually generated through Manafort’s dealings with Kremlin-connected oligarchs and politicians, as well as Konstantin Kilimnik, his right hand man, who Mueller has alleged had active “ties to Russian intelligence” through 2016.

Kilimnik was integral to Manafort’s decadelong scheme to defraud the United States. He was a close confidant, business associate, interpreter and someone Manafort often described as his “Russian brain.” In Kiev, Kilimnik was known as “Manafort’s Manafort,” and he probably helped the American lobbyist to use stolen or false Ukrainian identities to set up offshore shell companies that were used to launder some $30m (£22m). Kilimnik ran Manafort’s office in Ukraine, where investigators found forged invoices, including one that billed a Manafort front company $750,000 (£568,000) for hundreds of nonexistent computers. The intimate relationship between Manafort and Kilimnik is perhaps best captured by Kilimnik’s frustrated attempts to contact witnesses in Europe to ensure they would not disclose Manafort’s secret lobbying in the United States, which violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Kilimnik was also Manafort’s main conduit to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch within Mr Putin’s inner circle. Kilimnik facilitated Manafort’s failed investments of Deripaska’s money and communicated with Deripaska on Manafort’s behalf when the latter wanted to use his new role as Trump’s campaign chairman to “get whole.” When Manafort agreed to work for Mr Trump for no salary, he reportedly owed Deripaska almost $30m, including for a $10m (£7.5m) unpaid loan. (It is worth noting that the Justice Department attempted to persuade the oligarch to “give up Manafort” – apparently without success.)

If Kilimnik and Deripaska knew of Manafort’s crimes and crippling financial distress, so did the Kremlin. We can safely assume that Manafort was a compromised man when, on 9 June 2016, he met with a Russian government attorney to, in an ironic twist, receive illicit “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.


But Manafort was not the only person on the Trump campaign vulnerable to potential kompromat possessed by the Kremlin. Like his campaign chairman, Mr Trump has been plagued by self-engineered financial distress. He has grown reliant on money from the former Soviet Union, including Russia. He worked closely with politically connected oligarchs and corrupt business partners. His financial empire is shrouded in the secrecy of hundreds of shell companies. And questions about his tax and bank documents abound. The parallels between Mr Trump and Manafort are many, but they do not end there.

Manafort’s cooperation with Mueller could soon reveal how the Kremlin employed kompromat to attack US democracy, because if Putin had compromising information on the campaign chairman of a major party candidate in a US general election, he would probably put it to use. The same applies to the candidate himself.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 44396.html



Paul Manafort owes $10 million to a Russian oligarch. Reuters is reporting that the details of a recently unsealed search warrant application show that Manafort, who worked as campaign manager for Donald Trump in 2016, was heavily in debt to a Putin-affiliated plutocrat. “In an affidavit attached to the July 2017 application, an FBI agent said he had reviewed tax returns for a company controlled by Manafort and his wife that showed a $10 million loan from a Russian lender identified as Oleg Deripaska,” Reuters notes.
The new documents underscore the fact that Special Counsel Robert Mueller clearly remains very interested in Manaforts ties to the Russian government and possible collusion, rather than the simple money laundering and obstruction of justice charges which make up the visible side of the government’s case against Manafort. A closer reading of the affidavit reveals that it also mentions another Russian oligarch, whose name has been redacted, who Manafort tried did business with. The affidavit also indicates an interest in Manafort’s ties to Rinat Akhmetov, an oligarch active in Ukrainian politics and Aras Agalarov, the wealthy Russian who is also close to Putin and who Donald Trump cultivated ties with in a 2013 trip to Moscow. Agalarov’s son Amir, a pop star in Russia, helped orchestrate the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between campaign officials and Russians with Kremlin connections. Amir (as he is known) recently released a music video where an actor pretending to be Trump engages in sexual escapades in Moscow.

As Reuters notes, “The search warrant application also confirmed that Mueller has been investigating Manafort’s role in a June 9, 2016, meeting that he attended at the Trump Tower in New York between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer and self-professed Kremlin informant who purportedly was carrying damaging information on Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president.”

All of this confirms that despite President Donald Trump’s frequent cries of “no collusion,” Robert Mueller remains very much interested in the possibility that there was collusion.
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/149461/ ... n-oligarch



2014: Oleg Deripaska sues Paul Manafort for $18.9 million

Paul Manafort is a longtime American consultant and political operative who served as Donald Trump’s second campaign chairman. After serving in the Reagan administration, Manafort co-founded the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, which became known as “The Torturers’ Lobby” for its work on behalf of dictators like Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko and rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. Prior to joining the Trump campaign in March 2016, Paul Manafort worked extensively to advance Russian interests in Ukraine and the United States.

In 2004, Manafort began a decade-long relationship with the pro-Russia Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, helping them gain power by capitalizing on pro-Russia, anti-NATO sentiment in Eastern Ukraine. For at least part of the time that Manafort worked with the Party of Regions, he did so as an unregistered foreign agent, and only properly registered in June of 2017 for work he did between 2012 and 2014. Manafort ultimately resigned from the Trump campaign because investigators in Ukraine found secret ledgers listing more than $12 million in off-the-books payments to Manafort from the Party of Regions (Manafort’s lawyer has said that Manafort did not receive “any such cash payments.”)

Manafort’s failure to register brought scrutiny from the FBI; according to CNN, the FBI had been investigating Manafort’s extensive unregistered work in Ukraine since at least 2014. That year, the FBI received a warrant from a federal court to surveille Manafort’s communications, including by wiretapping his phones, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). After the initial FISA warrant expired in 2016, the FBI received a second warrant that extended at least into early 2017, although sources have said that the FBI was not listening to his communications in June 2016.

Manafort has been linked to Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, whom Bloomberg has described as “Putin’s handpicked surrogate” in the Ukrainian natural gas industry. In a civil court case filed in the U.S. in 2011, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko alleged that Manafort and Firtash collaborated on a Manhattan real-estate project that doubled as a money-laundering operation. Firtash has denied the charges and accused Tymoshenko of lying, while Manafort has said that the deal with Firtash “never got off the ground;” the case was ultimately rejected on jurisdictional grounds.

Manafort also has a long track record of business with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and aluminum magnate who was described in a 2006 diplomatic cable as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and “a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.” In 2006, Manafort signed a $10-million annual contract with Deripaska to lobby American officials to “greatly benefit the Putin government” as part of a $60-million-plus business relationship. Manafort allegedly owes Deripaska at least $19 million from a failed business deal in Ukraine, and offered the billionaire secret briefings on the Trump campaign. Manafort has denied that his work with Deripaska “involve[d] representing Russia’s political interests.”

In 2007, Manafort and Deripaska co-founded the private-equity firm Pericles Emerging Market Partners in the Cayman Islands with the intent of investing in the Eastern European telecommunications market. According to The New York Times, Deripaska agreed to commit as much as $100 million to the endeavor, which began with an investment of nearly $18.9 million to purchase the Yanukovych-linked Ukrainian company Black Sea Cable. The deal failed, leading to a falling out that has played out in part through a lawsuit in the Cayman Islands involving Deripaska suing Manafort seeking to recover his initial investment (although Manafort has indicated that the legal matter was resolved, The Washington Post has disputed this account, and the status of the case is unclear.)

Emails obtained by journalists at The Washington Post and The Atlantic seem to indicate that Manafort saw his involvement in the Trump campaign at least in part as a means of resolving his legal conflict with, and debt to, Deripaska. In an April 11, 2016, email conversation with his former business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort reportedly asked whether “our friends,” including “OVD”—initials believed to stand for Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska—had seen the media coverage surrounding his joining the Trump campaign two weeks prior. Manafort reportedly went on to ask Kilimnik, “How do we use to get whole?” Manafort’s spokesman Maloni has denied this interpretation, calling the emails “innocuous” and characterizing them as an attempt by Manafort to collect on, rather than repay, debts. Deripaska’s spokeswoman in turn denied that Deripaska owes Manafort any money, and denied any communication between Deripaska and Manafort during the election. Kilimnik has not yet publicly commented on the subject. On July 7, 2016, Manafort made what could be considered as another attempt to make peace with Deripaska, reportedly suggesting to Kilimnik that he would be able to provide private briefings to Deripaska’s aide during the campaign.

Though Manafort’s official participation in the Trump campaign lasted just less than five months, he has nevertheless emerged as a key focus of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the campaign’s collusion with Russia because of the timing and substance of his involvement. Manafort has been tangentially connected with Trump since the 1980s, when the Trump Organization briefly contracted with Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly to lobby the government on gambling and real estate, although there is little reason to believe they had anything more than cursory interactions prior to the 2016 election. Manafort ultimately joined the Trump campaign in March 2016. His method of doing so was itself unusual: According to The New York Times, Manafort began writing unsolicited emails to Trump offering advice about how to run the campaign in late February. According to Thomas Barrack, a long-time Trump associate who has known Manafort for decades, Manafort at one point told him, “I really need to get to” Trump. Manafort officially joined the campaign as an unpaid adviser on March 28 to help coordinate delegate-counting efforts for the Republican National Convention, and went on to become Trump’s campaign chairman on May 19, still as an unpaid position.

Perhaps the single most notable occurrence during Manafort’s tenure was the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between representatives of the Trump campaign and several Russian individuals claiming to represent the Russian government and offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Manafort was present at this meeting; according to CNN, the FBI obtained his notes on the encounter in a pre-dawn raid of his home in July 2017.

Ultimately, Manafort’s past scandals caught up to him. On August 14, The New York Times reported that Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators had found handwritten ledgers listing $12.7 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from the Party of Regions. Though Manafort has denied any wrongdoing, on August 19, he resigned as Trump’s campaign chairman, and was replaced by Steve Bannon.

Manafort has emerged as a central focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and became one of the first members of Trump’s circle indicted in association with the case. On July 26, 2017, the day after he met with the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss the June 9 meeting in Trump Tower, Mueller’s team reportedly conducted a pre-dawn, no-knock raid of Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia. In court filings, Mueller’s team has disputed reports about the raid, claiming they did not pick the lock to enter Manafort’s home. On October 27, Mueller’s team indicted Manafort and his long-time business associate Rick Gates on 12 counts, including conspiracy against the United States and money laundering. Initially, Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty to both charges on October 30, 2017. On February 16, 2018, the Office of the Special Counsel added five charges against Manafort, including Conspiracy Against the United States and Conspiracy to Launder Money. On February 22, Mueller’s team filed 32 additional charges against Manafort and Gates, including bank and tax fraud. The following day, Gates submitted a guilty plea in exchange for his cooperation in the investigation. In doing so, Gates pleaded guilty “to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to FBI agents.” The other charges against Gates, including bank and tax fraud, were dropped in the plea agreement. On June 8, 2018, Mueller filed a third superseding indictment against Manafort and a business associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, which added charges related to obstruction of justice. Kilimnik has issued no response to the indictment. Also in June, the Special Counsel accused Manafort of witness tampering, alleging that he had attempted to communicate with witnesses by telephone and encrypted messages. Since then, Manafort has been held in jail in Virginia as he awaits trial.

Ever since Manafort’s initial indictment, the White House has attempted to distance itself from the charges, asserting that they stem from activities that happened prior to Manafort and Gates joining the campaign and are unconnected to allegations of collusion.

On August 21, 2018, a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found Manafort guilty on eight charges, including tax fraud, hiding foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud. The judge declared a mistrial on 10 other charges. Manafort is still scheduled to go on trial in the District of Columbia in September. This separate case includes conspiracy to defraud the United States, failure to register as a foreign agent, witness tampering, money laundering, and making false statements.
https://themoscowproject.org/collusion/ ... 9-million/



Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, was indicted on a total of 25 different counts by Mueller’s team, related mainly to his past work for Ukrainian politicians and his finances. He had two trials scheduled, and the first ended in a conviction on eight counts of financial crimes. To avert the second trial, Manafort struck a plea deal with Mueller in September 2018.

....

Manafort and Gates: This pair worked for Ukrainian politicians (and, eventually, the Ukrainian government) for several years prior to the Trump campaign, and made an enormous amount of money for it. Mueller charged them with hiding their lobbying work and the money they made from it from the government, as well as other financial crimes and attempts to interfere with the investigation.

Gates was the first to strike a plea deal. In February, Mueller dropped most of the charges he had brought against him. In exchange, Gates pleaded guilty to two counts — one conspiracy to defraud the United States charge encompassing the overall Ukrainian lobbying and money allegations, and a false statements charge. (With the latter, Gates admitted lying to Mueller’s team during a meeting this February. A Dutch lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan, also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI related to his Ukrainian work with Gates.)

Manafort, meanwhile, fought the charges in two venues, Washington, DC, and Virginia. His first trial was in Virginia, and in August, it ended with his conviction on eight counts — five counts of subscribing to false income tax returns, one count of failing to report his foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud. The jury deadlocked on another 10 counts, so for those, the judge declared a mistrial.

The conviction finally brought Manafort to the table, and on September 14, he and Mueller’s team struck a plea deal requiring his cooperation. Manafort pleaded guilty to just two more counts — conspiracy to defraud the United States, and an attempted obstruction of justice charge. But he admitted that the other allegations Mueller previously made against him were true as well.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... grand-jury




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

(legalinc.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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Security of Assets

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

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

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

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

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

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More to come on this same thread very soon, we’re just getting warmed up.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/9798 ... 42561.html


Ukrainian politician behind controversial peace proposal to appear in Mueller probe

JOSH MEYER05/14/2018 05:11 PM EDT

A lobbying campaign by led by Paul Manafort and Rick Gates promoting former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych has caught the attention of Robert Mueller.
Ukrainian politican Andrii Artemenko’s testimony could help special counsel Robert Mueller’s team fill in the gaps on the peace plan. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
KIEV — A Ukrainian politician who communicated with Trump associates about a controversial plan to resolve Ukraine’s conflict with Kremlin-backed rebels said Monday that he has been called to testify before a grand jury connected to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Andrii Artemenko said he could not provide details of his upcoming appearance before the grand jury, which he said is scheduled for Friday. But he said he assumed he would be asked about the peace plan, about which he communicated with Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, in early 2017.

“I received the subpoena last week,” Artemenko told POLITICO by telephone, adding that he intended to comply with the request. He said he would appear in person.

A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.

The Artemenko case is one of the more unusual developments in the investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. The New York Times reported in February 2017 that Artemenko had contacted Felix Sater, a former business associate of Trump’s, to find out how he could make his plan for peace in Ukraine known to the Trump administration. Sater introduced Artemenko to Cohen, who left the plan in the office of then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, The Times reported. (Cohen has denied that, saying he threw the document away.)

When the news broke about the peace plan, it caused a scandal in Ukraine. Among the plan’s proposals was the idea of leasing to Russia the Crimean peninsula — which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014 — for 50 years, in exchange for ending the ongoing war in Ukraine’s Donbass region. The back-channel effort also sought to have the Trump administration drop sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama White House.

Artemenko was ejected from his political party, and Ukraine's top prosecutor launched an investigation into whether he had committed treason. In May 2017, Ukrainian officials stripped him of his citizenship, ostensibly because he also held a Canadian passport. Artemenko said he was being punished politically for opposing President Petro Poroshenko, whom he also accused of corruption.

Artemenko’s testimony could help Mueller’s team fill in the gaps on the peace plan, which he has been investigating in part because of the roles of Cohen and Sater, who also worked together to try and launch a Trump-branded development in Moscow starting in early 2015.

The plan may also be of interest to Mueller because it reportedly was hatched shortly after Flynn discussed dropping sanctions against Russia in a call with the Russian ambassador that was intercepted by intelligence officials. Flynn was fired from the White House after it became clear that he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations about Russian sanctions.

There have been conflicting stories about whether Russian officials were involved in hatching the peace plan.

Cohen told The Washington Post that Artemenko boasted during their January 2017 meeting that the Russian government “was on board” with the proposal. Artemenko denied that, telling The Post that he had not spoken to any Russian officials and that the proposal came about during consultations with Ukrainian officials.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/ ... lan-585653


Michael Avenatti

See below, which is included in the @Slate article I posted yesterday. You cannot reconcile this “no basis to confirm the video” with their admission today to @cnn that he was there. This smells really bad. #basta
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Mueller: Secret Court Order Suspended Statute Of Limitations On Manafort Charge
By Tierney Sneed | May 15, 2018 11:03 am

Special Counsel Robert Mueller obtained a secret order from a federal magistrate judge to suspend the statute of limitations on one of the charges he ultimately brought against Paul Manafort, a court filing revealed Monday evening. Mueller did not inform Manafort of the secret order until after the former Trump campaign chairman had requested that charge be thrown out, the filing said.

Mueller also disclosed in the Monday court filing that, as recently as April 30 of this year, the government of Cyprus was still turning over documents related to the special counsel’s Manafort investigation.

Because investigators were relying on a foreign government to produce certain evidence, Mueller last June asked a magistrate judge in Virginia to suspend the statute of limitations on the charge that Manafort failed to to file a Foreign Bank Account Report (FBAR), according to the filing. Mueller ultimately brought that charge against Manafort in February. The judge’s decision granting Mueller’s request to suspend the statute of limitations was previously under seal, but was included in Monday’s filings.

The revelation came in a response to Manafort’s motion to dismiss the FBAR charge in the Eastern District of Virginia, where he is also facing tax fraud and bank fraud charges. That case is in addition to the one brought in Washington, D.C., where Manafort has been charged with money laundering and failure to disclose foreign lobbying.

Manafort has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

“Because the government secured a timely and valid order in this District to suspend the running of the applicable statute of limitations until at least the date on which the Superseding Indictment was returned, Manafort’s motion should be denied,” Mueller said in his motion.

According to Monday’s filing, investigators first sought the documents from Cyprus in early June 2017. The request is called a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT), and it was filed through the Office of International Affairs of the United States Department of Justice.

Investigators were seeking “among other evidence, bank records, articles of incorporation, and witness interviews concerning certain of Manafort and Richard Gates’s bank accounts in Cyprus,” according to the filing.

Because the statute of limitations was set to run out on June 29 — five years after the June 29, 2012 deadline Manafort would have faced to file the foreign bank report with the U.S. Treasury — prosecutors on June 26 came to Judge Claude M. Hilton with their request, which was filed ex parte, meaning only the government’s side was aware of it, and not Manafort.

Cyprus’ production of evidence has taken months, according to the filing, and investigators wrote to Cypriot authorities in December informing them that they were still missing some of the Manafort documents they had requested. Cyprus’ government did not respond to the request until April 30 this year, according to Monday’s filing, well after Mueller’s grand jury in Virginia handed down indictments against Manafort in February.

“The bottom line, then, is that Cyprus had not fully satisfied the government’s official request when the original and Superseding Indictment of Manafort were returned on February 13 and 22, respectively,” Mueller said. “As a result, no ‘final action’ had yet occurred as of the date of the operative indictments, and the applicable statute of limitations remained suspended.”

Cyprus began turning over documents in September, 2017, according to the filing.


Mueller’s filing also revealed that, at the time Manafort requested that the FBAR charge be thrown out, the prosecutors had not yet informed him of their successful request to have the statute of limitations suspended.

“The government has now produced that Order to the defense, together with redacted versions of the MLAT requests themselves,” the filing said.

Read the full filing below:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker ... imitations





emptywheel

After dismissing his motion about 4 different ways in the body of the opinion, ABJ kicks him once more in a footnote in case he wasn't paying attention yet.
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Wowee. This would suggest Manafort's "primary client" wasn't actually Trump but the folks hiding out in Russia.

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Olga Lautman

These are some interesting notes that Manafort took at the Trump- Russia meet!
Remember when this ‘silly little nothing’ meet according to Don Jr was about ‘adoptions’?

These notes definitely look more like discussions re the Magnitsky Act and rewards for lifting them.
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Manafort's former son-in-law cuts plea deal with government

3:54 PM ET Fri, 4 May 2018 | 01:11

Tom Williams

The former son-in-law of Paul Manafort, the one-time chairman of President Donald Trump's campaign, has cut a plea deal with the Justice Department that requires him to cooperate with other criminal probes, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The guilty plea agreement, which is under seal and has not been previously reported, could add to the legal pressure on Manafort, who is facing two indictments brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Manafort has been indicted in federal courts in Washington and Virginia with charges ranging from tax evasion to bank fraud and has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Jeffrey Yohai, a former business partner of Manafort, was divorced from Manafort's daughter last August.

Yohai has not been specifically told how he will be called on to cooperate as part of his plea agreement, but the two people familiar with the matter say they consider it a possibility that he will be asked to assist with Mueller's prosecution of Manafort.

Legal experts have said that Mueller wants to keep applying pressure on Manafort to plead guilty and assist prosecutors with their probe. Manafort chaired the Trump campaign for three months before resigning in August 2016.

Both Trump and Russia have denied allegations they colluded to help Republican Trump win the election.

Hilary Potashner, a public defender who is representing Yohai, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manafort's spokesman, Jason Maloni, declined to comment.

Andrew Brown, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, had been overseeing an investigation into Yohai's real estate and bank dealings in California and New York several months before Mueller was appointed to his post in May 2017.

Yohai's agreement, which was concluded early this year, included him pleading guilty to misusing construction loan funds and to a count related to a bank account overdraft.

While the deal was cut with Brown's office, the federal government can ask for help at any time, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for Brown did not respond to a request for comment and a spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.

Manafort trial pending

Manafort is to go on trial later this year to fight the two indictments. The charges against him range from failing to disclose lobbying work for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party to bank fraud.

As a close business partner, Yohai was privy to many of Manafort's financial dealings, according to the two people familiar with the matter and court filings in the bankruptcies of four Los Angeles properties in 2016. In addition to co-investing in California real estate, the two cooperated in getting loans for property deals in New York, Manaforts indictments show.

Mueller sent a team of prosecutors to interview Yohai last June, asking him about Manaforts relationship with Trump, his ties to Russian oligarchs, and his borrowing of tens of millions of dollars against properties in New York, Reuters reported in February, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/17/manafor ... uters.html


Wendy Siegelman

Trump lawyer 'paid by Ukraine' to arrange White House talks - Michael Cohen received a secret payment of at least $400,000 to fix talks between the Ukrainian president and President Trump, according to sources in Kiev close to those involved

Trump lawyer 'paid by Ukraine' to arrange White House talks

By Paul Wood BBC News, Kiev
Poroshenko shakes hands with TrumpGetty Images
Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko (left) meets US President Donald Trump at the White House in June 2017
Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, received a secret payment of at least $400,000 (£300,000) to fix talks between the Ukrainian president and President Trump, according to sources in Kiev close to those involved.

The payment was arranged by intermediaries acting for Ukraine's leader, Petro Poroshenko, the sources said, though Mr Cohen was not registered as a representative of Ukraine as required by US law.

Mr Cohen denies the allegation.

The meeting at the White House was last June. Shortly after the Ukrainian president returned home, his country's anti-corruption agency stopped its investigation into Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

A high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence officer in Mr Poroshenko's administration described what happened before the visit to the White House.

Mr Cohen was brought in, he said, because Ukraine's registered lobbyists and embassy in Washington DC could get Mr Poroshenko little more than a brief photo-op with Mr Trump. Mr Poroshenko needed something that could be portrayed as "talks".

This senior official's account is as follows - Mr Poroshenko decided to establish a back channel to Mr Trump. The task was given to a former aide, who asked a loyal Ukrainian MP for help.

He in turn used personal contacts who attended a Jewish charity in New York state, Chabad of Port Washington. (A spokeman for the Chabad has asked us to make clear that officials there were not involved.)

This eventually led to Michael Cohen, the president's lawyer and trusted fixer. Mr Cohen was paid $400,000.

There is no suggestion that Mr Trump knew about the payment.


Ukraine allegedly paid Michael Cohen $400,000 for fixing a meeting with President Trump
A second source in Kiev gave the same details, except that the total paid to Mr Cohen was $600,000.

There was also support for the account from a lawyer in the US who has uncovered details of Mr Cohen's finances, Michael Avenatti. He represents a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, in legal action against President Trump.

Avenatti said that Suspicious Activity Reports filed by Mr Cohen's bank to the US Treasury showed he had received money from "Ukrainian interests".

As well as Mr Cohen, the two Ukrainians said to have opened the backchannel for their president also denied the story.

The senior intelligence official in Kiev said Mr Cohen had been helped by Felix Sater, a convicted former mobster who was once Trump's business partner. Mr Sater's lawyer, too, denied the allegations.

The Ukrainian president's office initially refused to comment but, asked by a local journalist to respond, a statement was issued calling the story a "blatant lie, slander and fake".

As was widely reported last June, Mr Poroshenko was still guessing at how much time he would have with Mr Trump even as he flew to Washington.

The White House schedule said only that Mr Poroshenko would "drop in" to the Oval Office while Mr Trump was having staff meetings.

That had been agreed through official channels. Mr Cohen's fee was for getting Mr Poroshenko more than just an embarrassingly brief few minutes of small talk and a handshake, the senior official said. But negotiations continued until the early hours of the day of the visit.

The Ukrainian side were angry, the official went on, because Mr Cohen had taken "hundreds of thousands" of dollars from them for something it seemed he could not deliver.

Right up until the last moment, the Ukrainian leader was uncertain if he would avoid humiliation.

"Poroshenko's inner circle were shocked by how dirty this whole arrangement [with Cohen] was."

You might also be interested in:

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'I wish Mum's phone was never invented'
Mr Poroshenko was desperate to meet Mr Trump because of what had happened in the US presidential election campaign.

In August 2016, the New York Times published a document that appeared to show Mr Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, getting millions of dollars from pro-Russian interests in Ukraine.

It was a page of the so-called "black ledger" belonging to the Party of the Regions, the pro-Russian party that employed Mr Manafort when he ran a political consultancy in Ukraine.

The page appeared to have come from Ukraine's National Anti Corruption Bureau, which was investigating him. Mr Manafort had to resign.

Former Trump campaign manager Paul ManafortReuters
Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort maintains his innocence
Several sources in Ukraine said Mr Poroshenko authorised the leak, believing that Hillary Clinton was certain to win the presidency.

If so, this was a disastrous mistake - Ukraine had backed the losing candidate in the US election. Regardless of how the leak came about, it hurt Mr Trump, the eventual winner.

Ukraine was (and remains) at war with Russia and Russian-backed separatists and could not afford to make an enemy of the new US president.

So Mr Poroshenko appeared relieved as he beamed and paid tribute to Mr Trump in the Oval Office.

He boasted that he had seen the new president before Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin. He called it a "substantial visit". He held a triumphant news conference in front of the north portico of the White House.

A week after Mr Poroshenko returned home to Kiev, Ukraine's National Anti Corruption Bureau announced that it was no longer investigating Mr Manafort.

At the time, an official there explained to me that Mr Manafort had not signed the "black ledger" acknowledging receipt of the money. And anyway, he went on, Mr Manafort was American and the law allowed the bureau only to investigate Ukrainians.

US charges facing Paul Manafort

conspiracy against the US, conspiracy to launder money and failure to disclose foreign assets - all related to his work in Ukraine and filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. He pleaded not guilty
tax and bank fraud charges later filed by Mueller in US state of Virginia, also denied by Manafort
Read more about Manafort: The man who helped Trump win

Ukraine did not terminate the Manafort inquiry altogether. The file was handed from the Anti Corruption Bureau to the state prosecutor's office. It languished there.

Last week in Kiev, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Serhiy Horbatyuk, told me: "There was never a direct order to stop the Manafort inquiry but from the way our investigation has progressed, it's clear that our superiors are trying to create obstacles."

Anti-Russian protests in KievGetty Images
Anti-Russian protests in Kiev this year
None of our sources say that Mr Trump used the Oval Office meeting to ask Mr Poroshenko to kill the Manafort investigation. But if there was a back channel, did Michael Cohen use it to tell the Ukrainians what was expected of them?

Perhaps he didn't need to.

One source in Kiev said Mr Poroshenko had given Trump "a gift" - making sure that Ukraine would find no more evidence to give the US inquiry into whether the Trump campaign "colluded" with Russia.

Mr Poroshenko knew that to do otherwise, another source said, "would be like spitting in Trump's face".

More on Michael Cohen


Was Trump's Stormy Daniels payment legal?
Who is Michael Cohen?
The big question at heart of Stormy Daniels saga
Why the raid on Trump's lawyer is a big deal
A report by a member of a Western country's intelligence community says Mr Poroshenko's team believe they have established a "non-aggression pact" with Mr Trump.

Drawing on "senior, well placed" intelligence sources in Kiev, the report sets out this sequence of events…

As soon as Trump was elected, the report says, Ukraine stopped "proactively" investigating Manafort.

Liaison with the US government was moved away from the National Anti Corruption Bureau to a senior aide in the presidential administration.

The report states that Poroshenko returned from Washington and, in August or September, 2017, decided to completely end cooperation with the US agencies investigating Manafort. He did not give an order to implement this decision until November 2017.

The order became known to the US government after scheduled visits by Poroshenko's senior aide to see Mueller and the CIA director, in November and December, were cancelled.

The report says that an "element of the understanding" between Poroshenko and Trump was that Ukraine agreed to import US coal and signed a $1bn contract for American-made diesel trains.

These deals can only be understood as Poroshenko buying American support, the reports say.

In March, the Trump administration announced the symbolically important sale of 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.

Even under President Obama, the US did not sell arms to Ukraine. A well known figure in Kiev, now retired from his old job in government, told me he didn't like what had happened with the Manafort inquiry; however, Ukraine was fighting for its survival.

"I want the rule of law," he said, "but I am a patriot."

He said he had kept in touch with his former subordinates and had heard many of the details about a "Cohen backchannel".

Michael Cohen in an elevator at Trump TowerGetty Images
Michael Cohen visited Donald Trump at Trump Tower in 2016
He said that if Ukrainians came to believe that a corrupt deal had been done over Mr Manafort: "This thing might destroy support for America."

Ukraine's domestic intelligence service, the SBU, did their own - secret - report on Mr Manafort.

It found that there was not one "black ledger" but three and that Mr Manafort had been paid millions of dollars more from Ukraine than had been made public. (Mr Manafort has denied any wrongdoing.)

This information was given to me by a very senior police officer who saw the report. He said it had not been passed to the Americans.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44215656


@WendySiegelman
18h18 hours ago
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BBC Breaking News
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@BBCBreaking
After the alleged payment to Cohen for White House talks, Ukraine’s Anti Corruption Bureau drops Paul Manafort investigation


The senior intelligence official in Kiev also said Cohen had been helped by Felix Sater, a convicted former mobster who was once Trump's business partner. Sater's lawyer, too, denied the allegations. The Ukrainian president's office refused to comment.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44215656#

Image


"Mr Poroshenko decided to establish a back channel to Trump. The task was given to a former aide, who asked a loyal Ukrainian MP for help. He in turn used personal contacts in a Jewish charity in New York state, Chabad of Port Washington"Wendy Siegelman added,

Olga Lautman

@olgaNYC1211
https://twitter.com/olganyc1211/status/ ... 60832?s=21
Looks like the Port Washington Chabad is making its way back into the news finally
Show this thread
Image

Ukraine's domestic intelligence service, the SBU, did a secret report on Manafort & found there wasn't one "black ledger" but three & Manafort had been paid millions of dollars more from Ukraine than had been made public (Manafort denied any wrongdoing)
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44215656


AlwaysAFedcase


Sater was Port Washington Chabad's Man of the Year.
https://youtu.be/xSpFtCmoD5o

Image

AlwaysAFedcase


That is Sater's Chabad. Newsy piece here:

The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin

Where Trump's real estate world meets a top religious ally of the Kremlin.

BEN SCHRECKINGERApril 09, 2017

Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island’s Manhasset Bay, sits in a squat brick edifice across from a Shell gas station and a strip mall. The center is an unexceptional building on an unexceptional street, save for one thing: Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run straight through it.

Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him. On the other side of the world, the brash Manhattan developer was working to get a piece of the massive flows of capital that were fleeing the former Soviet Union in search of stable assets in the West, especially real estate, and seeking partners in New York with ties to the region.

Their respective ambitions led the two men—along with Trump’s future son-in-law, Jared Kushner—to build a set of close, overlapping relationships in a small world that intersects on Chabad, an international Hasidic movement most people have never heard of.

Starting in 1999, Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”

A few years later, Trump would seek out Russian projects and capital by joining forces with a partnership called Bayrock-Sapir, led by Soviet emigres Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater and Tamir Sapir—who maintain close ties to Chabad. The company’s ventures would lead to multiple lawsuits alleging fraud and a criminal investigation of a condo project in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, the links between Trump and Chabad kept piling up. In 2007, Trump hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter and Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. A few months after the ceremony, Leviev met Trump to discuss potential deals in Moscow and then hosted a bris for the new couple’s first son at the holiest site in Chabad Judaism. Trump attended the bris along with Kushner, who would go on to buy a $300 million building from Leviev and marry Ivanka Trump, who would form a close relationship with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova would host the power couple in Russia in 2014 and reportedly attend Trump’s inauguration as their guest.

With the help of this trans-Atlantic diaspora and some globetrotting real estate moguls, Trump Tower and Moscow’s Red Square can feel at times like part of the same tight-knit neighborhood. Now, with Trump in the Oval Office having proclaimed his desire to reorient the global order around improved U.S. relations with Putin’s government—and as the FBI probes the possibility of improper coordination between Trump associates and the Kremlin—that small world has suddenly taken on outsize importance.

Trump’s kind of Jews

Founded in Lithuania in 1775, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement today has adherents numbering in the five, or perhaps six, figures. What the movement lacks in numbers it makes up for in enthusiasm, as it is known for practicing a particularly joyous form of Judaism.

Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, recalled having this trait impressed upon him during one family wedding at which the two tables occupied by his first cousins, Chabad rabbis, put the rest of the celebrants to shame. “They were dancing up a storm, these guys. I thought they were black. Instead they’re just black-hat,” Klein said, referring to their traditional Hasidic garb.

Despite its small size, Chabad has grown to become the most sprawling Jewish institution in the world, with a presence in over 1,000 far-flung cities, including locales like Kathmandu and Hanoi with few full-time Jewish residents. The movement is known for these outposts, called Chabad houses, which function as community centers and are open to all Jews. “Take any forsaken city in the world, you have a McDonald’s and a Chabad house,” explained Ronn Torossian, a Jewish public relations executive in New York.

Chabad adherents differ from other Hasidic Jews on numerous small points of custom, including the tendency of Chabad men to wear fedoras instead of fur hats. Many adherents believe that the movement’s last living leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, is the messiah, and some believe he is still alive. Chabad followers are also, according to Klein, “remarkable” fundraisers.

As the closest thing the Jewish world has to evangelism—much of its work is dedicated to making Jews around the world more involved in Judaism—Chabad serves many more Jews who are not full-on adherents.

According to Schmuley Boteach, a prominent rabbi in New Jersey and a longtime friend of Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, Chabad offers Jews a third way of relating to their religious identity. “You have three choices as a Jew,” he explained. “You can assimilate and not be very affiliated. You can be religious and Orthodox, or there’s sort of a third possibility that Chabad offers for people who don’t want to go the full Orthodox route but do want to stay on the traditional spectrum.”

This third way may explain the affinity Trump has found with a number of Chabad enthusiasts—Jews who shun liberal reform Judaism in favor of traditionalism but are not strictly devout.

“It’s not a surprise that Trump-minded people are involved with Chabad,” said Torossian. “Chabad is a place that tough, strong Jews feel comfortable. Chabad is a nonjudgmental place where people that are not traditional and not by-the-book feel comfortable.”

He summarized the Chabad attitude, which is less strict than the Orthodox one, as, “If you can’t keep all of the commandments, keep as many as you can.”

Torossian, who coincidentally said he is Sater’s friend and PR rep, also explained that this balance is particularly appealing to Jews from the former Soviet Union, who appreciate its combination of traditional trappings with a lenient attitude toward observance. “All Russian Jews go to Chabad,” he said. “Russian Jews are not comfortable in a reform synagogue.”

Putin’s kind of Jews

The Russian state’s embrace of Chabad happened, like many things in Putin’s Russia, as the result of a factional power struggle.

In 1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for Russia’s Jewish civil society, the Russian Jewish Congress, led by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, a potential threat to Putin and President Boris Yeltsin. A year later, Gusinsky was arrested by Putin’s government and forced into exile.

At the time, Russia already had a chief rabbi as recognized by the Russian Jewish Congress, Adolf Shayevich. But Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival organization. The Kremlin removed Shayevich from its religious affairs council, and ever since it has instead recognized Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, leaving the country with two rival claimants to the title.

The Putin-Chabad alliance has reaped benefits for both sides. Under Putin, anti-Semitism has been officially discouraged, a break from centuries of discrimination and pogroms, and the government has come to embrace a state-sanctioned version of Jewish identity as a welcome part of the nation.

As Putin has consolidated his control of Russia, Lazar has come to be known derisively as “Putin’s rabbi.” He has escorted the Russian leader to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and attended the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, Putin’s pet project, on the Jewish Sabbath. Putin returned that favor by arranging for Lazar to enter the stadium without submitting to security checks that would have broken the rules for observing Shabbat.

In 2013, a $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow under the auspices of Chabad and with funding from Abramovich. Putin donated a month of his salary to the project, while the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, pitched in by offering relevant documents from its archives.

In 2014, Lazar was the only Jewish leader present at Putin’s triumphal announcement of the annexation of Crimea.

But the rabbi has paid a price for his loyalty to Putin. Since the annexation, his continued support for the Russian autocrat has caused a rift with Chabad leaders in Ukraine. And for years, the Russian government has defied an American court order to turn over a trove of Chabad texts called the “Schneerson Library” to the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Shortly after the opening of the tolerance museum, Putin ordered the collection transferred there instead. The move made Lazar the custodian of a prized collection that his Brooklyn comrades believe is rightfully theirs.

If Lazar has any qualms about his role in all the intra-Chabad drama, he hasn’t let on publicly. “Challenging the government is not the Jewish way,” the rabbi said in 2015.

Trump, Bayrock, Sapir

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, as Trump looked for business and investors in the former Soviet Union during the first years of this century, he struck up an enduring relationship with a firm called Bayrock-Sapir.

Bayrock was co-led by Felix Sater, a convicted mob associate.

Sater and another Bayrock employee, Daniel Ridloff, who like Sater later went on to work directly for the Trump Organization, belong to the Port Washington Chabad house. Sater told POLITICO Magazine that in addition to serving on the board of the Port Washington Chabad house, he sits on the boards of numerous Chabad entities in the U.S. and abroad, though none in Russia.

The extent of Sater’s ties to Trump is a matter of some dispute. Working out of Trump Tower, Sater partnered with the celebrity developer on numerous Trump-branded developments and scouted deals for him in the former Soviet Union. In 2006, Sater escorted Trump’s children Ivanka and Don Jr. around Moscow to scour the city for potential projects, and he worked especially closely with Ivanka on the development of Trump SoHo, a hotel and condominium building in Manhattan whose construction was announced on “The Apprentice” in 2006.

In 2007, Sater’s stock fraud conviction became public. The revelation did not deter Trump, who brought him on as “a senior advisor to the Trump Organization” in 2010. In 2011, a number of purchasers of Trump SoHo units sued Trump and his partners for fraud and the New York attorney general’s office opened a criminal inquiry into the building’s marketing. But the purchasers settled and agreed not to cooperate with the criminal investigation, which was subsequently scuttled, according to the New York Times. Two former executives are suing Bayrock alleging tax evasion, money laundering, racketeering, bribery, extortion and fraud.

Under oath, Sater has described a close relationship with the Trumps, while Trump has testified under oath that he barely knew Sater and would not be able to pick his face out in a crowd. Several people who worked closely with Sater during this period and who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation from both men, scoffed at Trump’s testimony, describing frequent meetings and near-constant phone calls between the two. One person recalled numerous occasions on which Trump and Sater dined together, including at the now-defunct Kiss & Fly in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

“Trump called Felix like every other day to his office. So the fact that he’s saying he doesn’t know him, that’s a lot of crap,” said a former Sater colleague. “They were definitely in contact always. They spoke on the phone all the time.”

In 2014, the Port Washington Chabad house named Sater its “man of the year.” At the ceremony honoring Sater, the chabad’s founder, Shalom Paltiel, recounted how Sater would spill his guts to him about his adventures working as a government cooperator on sensitive matters of national security.

“I only recently told Felix I really didn’t believe most of it. I thought perhaps he watched too many James Bond movies, read one too many Tom Clancy novels,” said Paltiel at the ceremony. “Anyone who knows Felix knows he can tell a good story. I simply did not put too much credence to them.”

But Paltiel went on to recount receiving special clearance years later to accompany Sater to a ceremony at the federal building in Manhattan. There, said Paltiel, officials from every American intelligence agency applauded Sater’s secret work and divulged “stuff that was more fantastic, and more unbelievable, than anything he had been telling me.” A video of the event honoring Sater has been removed from the Port Washington Chabad house’s website but is still available on YouTube.

When I contacted Paltiel for this article, he hung up the phone as soon as I introduced myself. I wanted to ask him about some of the connections I’d come across in the course of my reporting. In addition to his relationship with Sater, Paltiel is also close to “Putin’s rabbi” Lazar, calling Lazar “my dear friend and mentor” in a short note about running into him at Schneerson’s gravesite in Queens.

According to Boteach, this is unsurprising, because Chabad is the sort of community where everybody knows everybody else. “In the world of Chabad, we all went to Yeshiva together, we were all ordained together,” Boteach explained. “I knew Berel Lazar from yeshiva.”

The Port Washington Chabad house has another Bayrock tie. Among its top 13 benefactors, its “Chai Circle,” as listed on its website, is Sater’s partner, Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif.

Arif, a former Soviet bureaucrat turned wealthy real estate developer, owns a mansion in Port Washington, an upscale suburb, but he makes a curious patron for the town’s Chabad. A Kazakh-born citizen of Turkey with a Muslim name, Arif is not Jewish, according to people who have worked with him. In 2010, he was arrested in a raid on a yacht in Turkey that once belonged to the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, and charged with running an international underage prostitution ring. Arif was later cleared of the charges.

Before the scandal on Ataturk’s yacht, Arif partnered closely with Trump, Ivanka Trump and Sater in the development of Trump SoHo along with the Sapir family, a New York real estate dynasty and the other half of Bayrock-Sapir.

Its patriarch, the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.

Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.

Five months later, in early June 2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy site.

Trump attended the bris. A month earlier, in May 2008, he and Leviev had met to discuss possible real estate projects in Moscow, according to a contemporaneous Russian news report. An undated photograph on a Pinterest account called LLD Diamond USA, the name of a firm registered to Leviev, shows Trump and Leviev shaking hands and smiling. (The photograph was first pointed out by Pacific Standard.)

That same year, Sapir, an active Chabad donor in his own right, joined Leviev in Berlin to tour Chabad institutions in the city.

Jared, Ivanka, Roman, Dasha

Also present at the Sapir-Rosen bris was Kushner, who along with his now-wife Ivanka Trump has forged his own set of ties to Putin’s Chabad allies. Kushner’s family, which is Modern Orthodox, has long been highly engaged in philanthropy across the Jewish world, including to Chabad entities, and during his undergraduate years at Harvard, Kushner was active in the university’s Chabad house. Three days before the presidential election, the couple visited Schneerson’s grave and prayed for Trump. In January, the couple purchased a home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood and settled on the city’s nearby Chabad synagogue, known as TheSHUL of the Nation's Capital, as their house of worship.

In May 2015, a month before Trump officially entered the Republican presidential primary, Kushner bought a majority stake in the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Leviev for $295 million.

Kushner and Ivanka Trump are also close with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Abramovich, an industrialist worth more than $7 billion and the owner of the British soccer club Chelsea FC, is the former governor of the Russian province of Chukotka, where he is still revered as a hero. He owes his fortune to his triumphant emergence from Russia’s post-Soviet “aluminum wars,” in which more than 100 people are estimated to have died in fighting over control of aluminum refineries. Abramovich admitted in 2008 that he amassed his assets by paying billions of dollars in bribes. In 2011, his former business partner, the late Boris Berezovsky—an oligarch who had fallen out with Putin and gone on to live in exile at the Trump International on Central Park West—accused him of threats, blackmail and intimidation in a lawsuit in the United Kingdom, which Abramovich won.

Abramovich was reportedly the first person to recommend to Yeltsin that he choose Putin as his successor. In their 2004 biography of Abramovich, the British journalists Chris Hutchins and Dominic Midgely write, “When Putin needed a shadowy force to act against his enemies behind the scenes, it was Abramovich whom he could rely on to prove a willing co-conspirator.” The biographers compare the two men’s relationship to that between a father and a son and report that Abramovich personally interviewed candidates for Putin’s first cabinet. He has reportedly gifted Putin a $30 million yacht, though Putin denies it.

Abramovich’s vast business holdings and his personal life overlap with Trump’s world in multiple ways.

According to a 2012 report from researchers at Cornell University, Evraz, a firm partly owned by Abramovich, has contracts to provide 40 percent of the steel for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project whose completion was approved by Trump in March after years of delay. And in 2006, Abramovich purchased a large stake in the Russian oil giant Rosneft, a company now being scrutinized for its possible role in alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. Both Trump and the Kremlin have dismissed as "fake news" a dossier that alleges that a recent sale of Rosneft shares was part of a scheme to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia.

Meanwhile, his wife, Zhukova, has long traveled in the same social circles as Kushner and Ivanka Trump: She is a friend and business partner of Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng, one of Ivanka’s closest friends, and a friend of Karlie Kloss, the longtime girlfriend of Kushner’s brother, Josh.

Over the years, Zhukova has grown close to Jared and Ivanka themselves. In February 2014, a month before Putin illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Ivanka Trump posted a photo to Instagram of herself with Zhukova, Wendi Deng, a bottle of wine, and the caption, “Thank you [Zhukova] for an unforgettable four days in Russia!” Deng was recently rumored to be dating Putin, though she denied it. Other photos from the trip show Kushner was also present in Russia at the time.

Last summer, Kushner and Ivanka Trump shared a box at the U.S. Open with Zhukova and Deng. In January, Zhukova reportedly attended Trump’s inauguration as Ivanka Trump’s guest.

On March 14, The Daily Mail spotted Josh Kushner dining with Zhukova in New York. According to the outlet, Josh Kushner “hid his face as he exited the eatery with Dasha.”

A week later, at the same time Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were vacationing in Aspen with her two brothers and their families, Abramovich’s plane flew from Moscow to Denver, according to a flight tracking service. Abramovich owns two properties in the Aspen area.

A spokesman for Abramovich declined to comment on the record about the Colorado overlap. The White House referred queries about the couples to a personal spokeswoman for Ivanka Trump. The spokeswoman, Risa Heller, initially indicated she would provide answers to questions about the Colorado overlap and recent contacts between the couples, but did not do so.

President Trump has reportedly sought security clearances for Kushner and Ivanka, who have taken on growing roles in his White House. For anyone else, a close personal relationship with the family of a top Putin confidant would present significant hurdles to obtaining security clearances, former high-ranking intelligence officials said, but political pressure to grant clearances to the president’s children would be likely to override any security concerns.

“Yes, such connections to Russia should matter for a clearance,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA Moscow station chief. “Question is, will they?”

“I don’t think the Trump family camp will have any trouble with security clearances, as long as there’s no polygraph involved,” said Milt Bearden, former chief of the CIA’s Eastern European division. “It’s absolutely crazy, but not going to be an issue.”

***

With Washington abuzz about the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump world’s relationship with Putin’s Kremlin, their overlapping networks remain the object of much scrutiny and fascination.

In March, the New York Times reported that Lazar had met last summer with the Trump administration’s special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt, then a lawyer for the Trump Organization. The men characterized the meeting as a normal part of Greenblatt’s campaign outreach to Jewish leaders and said it included general discussion of Russian society and anti-Semitism. The meeting was brokered by New York PR rep Joshua Nass, and Lazar has said he did not discuss that meeting with the Russian government.

In late January, Sater met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to discuss a proposed Ukraine peace deal that would end U.S. sanctions on Russia, which Cohen then delivered to Trump’s then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House, according to the Times. Cohen has given varying accounts of the episode.

According to one Jewish Republican who said he sees Cohen “all the time” there, Cohen himself is a regular presence at the Midtown Chabad on Fifth Avenue, a dozen blocks south of Trump Tower and a half-dozen blocks south of his current office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Cohen disputed this, saying, “I’ve never been to a Chabad and I’ve never been to one in New York City either.” Cohen then said he last stepped foot in a Chabad over 15 years ago to attend a bris. He said the last Chabad-related event he attended was on March 16 at a hotel in Newark when he spoke at a dinner honoring Trump’s secretary of veterans affairs, David Shulkin. The dinner was hosted by the Rabbinical College of America, a Chabad organization.

To those unfamiliar with Russian politics, Trump’s world and Hasidic Judaism, all these Chabad links can appear confounding. Others simply greet them with a shrug.

“The interconnectedness of the Jewish world through Chabad is not surprising insofar as it’s one of the main Jewish players,” said Boteach. “I would assume that the world of New York real estate isn’t that huge either.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... tin-215007


https://twitter.com/WendySiegelman



Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel: What the Hell Was Going On at Trump Tower?

Arabs and Israelis, Oh My!

In recent days the so-called Russiagate affair seems to have splintered into a million different pieces. It’s no longer just the Russians who were romancing Donald Trump and those around him with promises of helping him get elected. Now we can add the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Saudis, Qataris, and Israelis.

Each party was apparently taking a number for their turn to place an order at the All-You-Can-Eat Trump Deli.

Most folks don’t pay much attention to the ever-changing diplomatic and geopolitical currents flowing across the planet. So, as new revelations bring new players into the metastasizing scandal that engulfs this administration, we squint our eyes and wonder “what the f… ”

Putin understood he didn’t need a compromising videotape to get what he wanted. All he needed to do was flatter and treat Trump like the big shot he wanted everybody to think he was.

So let’s pause a moment and take a close look at what drew such a manic and motley crew of outsiders into our national election and White House.

Don Jr., Manafort, Kushner Meet Russians at Trump Tower (June 9, 2016)

We all know about this meeting now. And we understand that its real purpose was not to discuss US adoptions of Russian orphans, but to try to convince Trump to repeal the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Russia signed into law by President Barack Obama. This meeting was an amateurist attempt by both sides. The Trump folks thought they were getting dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians and the Russians didn’t deliver. Both sides walked out empty handed.

Don Jr. Meets Emissary for the Saudis and Emiratis at Trump Tower (August 3, 2016)

Donald Trump Jr. held another unusual meeting before the election, this time with an even stranger cast of characters — including Erik Prince, a professional soldier of fortune and former head of Blackwater; George Nader, a Middle East lobbyist who said he was there representing the crown princes of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and Joel Zamel, Nader’s business partner, who was there to pitch a social media platform to aid Trump’s presidential campaign.

Donald Trump Jr.
Photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

In many ways this second Trump Tower meeting was more interesting, and troubling, than the first. Both Nader and Zamel are practiced players in the byzantine world of Middle East politics. The social media company they were pitching to Donald Jr. was full of former Israeli intelligence officers and analysts. Think of it as Cambridge Analytica on steroids. They were offering to fill US social media with posts demographically targeted to shore up support for Trump and diminish support for Clinton.

What strange bedfellows, one might think… unless of course you do think about it a bit. At the time, all parties — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel — had a common problem: Iran. All three wanted someone in the White House who would side with them against Iran, and Trump had already signaled his own animosity toward the regime in that country.

China realized as well that Trump is not moved by principles, but transactions.

Nader and Zamel’s clients, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, were each terrified that the rise of Iran might lead to Shiite rebellions in their own countries and their own demise. Also, despite the occasional trash-talk, both the Saudis and UAE get along quite well with Israel behind the scenes.

And, while Donald Jr. downplayed the second Trump Tower meeting as he did the first, his father has in fact more than delivered for those three countries, by nixing the Iran nuclear deal, slapping sanctions back on Iran, and threatening “the strongest sanctions in history,” coming soon.

Nor did it end with just that one meeting. Here the Trump-Gulf States nexus meet the Trump-Russia nexus. Almost immediately after the election another member of that second meeting, Erik Prince, flew to the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean on a trip arranged by his clients, the UAE. The exact purpose of that trip remains clouded in intrigue and obfuscation. But the cast of characters is telling. Prince met not only with UAE officials but also with one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bankers, Kirill Dmitriev.

Prince testified to Congress that it was a coincidence, a chance meeting over drinks. Such a coincidence.

Erik Prince
Photo credit: Miller Center / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

But what the hell does Russia have to gain from the Trump-Gulf matter? Well, plenty. Russia was, and remains, deeply invested in Syria and its President Bashar al-Assad, alongside Assad’s other chief benefactor, Iran. Iran? Again, heads explode. Wait, didn’t we just say that the Saudis and UAE are sworn enemies of Iran? And Russia is, by contrast, friendly with Iran. What gives?

Well, it is true the Russians are friendly with Iran. But they themselves are threatened on their southern flank by radical Islamists who are also opposed by Iran. So their cooperation with Iran is essentially an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing.

If Arabs in that part of the world understand anything, it’s that alliances are transactional, not personal. The Saudis and UAE understand that Russia has its own agenda, one that has little or nothing to do with them, or that threatens them less than Iran does.

So what is Putin up to, playing all these different, even apparently contradictory hands all at once? Putin’s prime directive since taking power has been to make Russia not just a relevant world power again, but a decisive power. He did that in Syria, winning where the US foundered. He did that in the Crimea, where he stuck the Russian flag in Ukrainian soil and made it stick.

And, more recently, Putin has seen some dividends on the sanctions issue, as Trump has refused to impose all the additional sanctions on Russia passed months ago by Congress.

Oh, one more small thing: Putin successfully disrupted, and likely swayed, a US presidential election.

The Russian president’s main strategy is to sow confusion, frustration, suspicion, and discord within Western democratic societies. His goal is to push NATO back away from Russia’s borders. He knows he cannot accomplish that militarily. So he is doing it through what Russian strategists call “war by other means.”

Vladimir Putin
Photo credit: President of Russia / Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)

His first major invasion in that war was the Brexit vote and the 2016 US presidential election. He has since fought other battles, with mixed success, in some Western European countries, as well as countries once part of the Eastern bloc, with more success.

So from Putin’s point of view, while that first meeting in Trump Tower didn’t quite pan out as intended for Russia, it did show a willingness to play along on the part of Trump and his circle. Putin looked into Trump’s soul and saw a man who could be suckered and strung along: a useful fool. Putin understood he didn’t need a compromising videotape to get what he wanted. All he needed to do was flatter and treat Trump like the big shot he wanted everybody to think he was.

China, too, has had no illusions about how Trump operates. China realized as well that Trump is not moved by principles, but transactions. Which explains Trump’s backtracking on the sanctions he imposed on the high-tech Chinese manufacturer, ZTE, just days after we learn that the Chinese government was fronting half the cost, $500 million, for the construction of an enormous Trump-branded resort in Malaysia. In China for trade talks at the time was US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who announced a day later that broader sanctions against China were now “on hold.”

Related: Is Trump Trying to Prevent #ChinaGate?

None of Trump’s transactional diplomacy was lost on one other world leader. If there’s anything Trump relishes more than money, it’s adoration and fame. So North Korea’s Kim Jong-un baited his hook with the offer of a big-shot summit, and Trump bit like the sucker he is. Over the next few weeks, Kim played Trump like a guppy on a 100-pound line, until more recently cutting bait and letting Trump float to the surface belly up.

Related: Kim Jong-un vs. Donald J. Trump: Kim Wins

So folks, that’s what the hell is going on. While our traditional allies wonder if we’ve all lost our minds over here, Russia and China and various players in the Middle East and Gulf are lining up to kiss Trump’s plastic ring and pick his pocket while they undermine our democracy and institutions.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/05/24/russi ... -going-on/


Mueller Filing: Probe Is Ongoing With ‘Multiple Lines Of Non-Public Inquiry’
By Tierney Sneed | May 24, 2018 10:33 am


Special Counsel Robert Mueller stressed that his investigation into Russian election meddling was ongoing and consisted of “multiple lines of non-public inquiry,” in a court filing Wednesday evening in a lawsuit brought by media companies seeking the release of certain records related to the probe.

“Many aspects of the investigation are factually and legally interconnected: they involve overlapping courses of conduct, relationships, and events, and they rely on similar sources, methods, and techniques,” the special counsel said. “The investigation is not complete and its details remain non-public.”


The Associated Press, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post and Politico are suing for the unsealing of various types of warrants used in the special counsel’s investigation, as well as sealed court documents specific to the case of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was indicted last fall.

“The fact that certain charges have been brought does not imply that the Special Counsel’s investigation into the assigned matters is closed,” Mueller said, arguing against the release of the records. “Nor does it imply that the search warrant materials could be unsealed at this time without creating a serious risk of jeopardizing the ongoing and interconnected aspects of the investigation.”

The filing comes as President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has claimed that Mueller’s attorneys told him that they intend to wrap up the aspect of the probe pertaining to allegations that Trump obstructed justice by September. (A source told Reuters that deadline was “entirely made-up.”)

It was also filed hours after a court filing in the case for George Papadopoulos — the Trump campaign adviser who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about Russian contacts — asked the judge to begin the sentencing process. Many took the filing to be a sign that Mueller’s team is not planning to use Papadopoulos, who has been cooperating with the probe, as a trial witness.

There have been other indications in court documents and elsewhere that Mueller’s investigation was chugging along. But it is rare to see Mueller’s own lawyers say so as a robustly as they did in Wednesday’s filing:


In the filing, Mueller also said that many media reports about the nature of the investigation “may be inaccurate or incomplete” and may be “based on unofficial sources, half-understood facts, or speculation.”

Mueller, in the filing, said that he was not opposed to unsealing the two Manafort warrants that have been subject to legal challenges that Manafort has brought seeking to throw out certain evidence, with Mueller acknowledging that many of the details about them were already coming out in open court proceedings.

“Additionally, because these are among the earliest warrants obtained in the investigation and only two warrants are at issue, the government believes that it could practicably redact sensitive information and nonetheless leave unredacted certain information whose disclosure would not harm the ongoing investigation,” the special counsel said.

The Mueller team also offered to give U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson a “more detailed presentation of the investigation” and the relevant records in private, though the special counsel said he believed that lawsuit could be resolved based just on the public record.

Read the filing, which also includes an appendixes of charges brought by and plea deals reached by Mueller so far, below:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker ... uit-filing



Judge says special counsel Robert Mueller is correct to withhold certain information being demanded by lawyers for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 27, 2018 12:13 pm

Mueller's office says Paul Manafort lied to the FBI about "a variety of subject matters" after he pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel. He has breached his plea agreement so there's no reason to delay his sentencing.

Without credit for cooperation, Manafort is looking at a guideline sentencing range of 17 1/2 to almost 22 years in federal prison.
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Mueller's office says Manafort "committed federal crimes" by lying to the FBI after he signed a plea agreement. Previously, he attempted to obstruct justice while on house arrest (one of the crimes he pleaded guilty to in the plea agreement).
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Trump Soho & Drake Hotel Deals

Wendy SiegelmanJun 23, 2017
Chart below shows failed deal to purchase the Drake Hotel (left) and the Trump Soho development (right). Trump was part owner of Trump Soho but had no known involvement with Drake deal, other than a March 2009 email written by Brad Zackson suggesting “idea to bring Trump in on the Drake.” Both deals resulted in lawsuits (RICO and fraud) and debt foreclosures and involved iStar and CIM Group, along with people close to Trump. See sources below & other charts: Parscale, Rosneft, SCL/Cambridge Analytica.

NRvgA.png


Dec 2010 Bayrock Soho — iStar about to sell $270 Mil in debt on Bayrock Soho to CIM Group

Trump Soho — Bayrock — Sapir — FL Group — fraud lawsuit settled

2008 letter from Felix Sater to Richard Beenstock and Orvar Kaernested at Stodir (FL Group)

Sapir Org & CIM Group — co-owned 11 Madison and sold in 2015 for $2.3 Billion

In 2008 Rotem Rosen, former CEO at Lev Leviev’s Africa Israel (AFI) married Alex Sapir’s sister Zina Sapir at Mar-a-Lago

Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosem travel with Trump to 2013 Miss Universe in Moscow

Kushner bought $340 million stake in Watchtower with CIM Group

Kushner bought $296 million in NYT Building from Lev Leviev’s AFI Group in 2015

Jan 2010 CIM Group purchased Drake for $305 Mil from Macklowe Properties

Macklowe originally bought site for $418 Mil
Macklowe took out loans of $543 Mil
Deutsche Bank filed to foreclose on $482 million in loans in August 2008
iStar Financial tried to sell a $224 million first position debt for $160 million, but could not find a buyer in 2009
Drake Hotel — Paul Manafort — Arthur Cohen — Brad Zackson

11/13/14 Tymoshenko et al vs Firtash et al lawsuit

2008 memo written by Rick Gates, Manafort’s business partner and fellow alumnus of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign references finalizing Deripaska’s company Pericles’ participation in the Drake deal.
https://medium.com/@wsiegelman/trump-so ... aca92d7eef



Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy
Exclusive: Trump ally met WikiLeaks founder months before emails hacked by Russia were published

Dan Collyns
Last modified on Tue 27 Nov 2018 09.25 EST

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

Manafort, 69, denies involvement in the hack and says the claim is “100% false”. His lawyers declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about the visits.

Manafort was jailed this year and was thought to have become a star cooperator in the Mueller inquiry. But on Monday Mueller said Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI, despite agreeing to cooperate two months ago in a plea deal. According to a court document, Manafort had committed “crimes and lies” on a “variety of subject matters”.

His defence team says he believes what he has told Mueller to be truthful and has not violated his deal.

Why Manafort sought out Julian Assange in 2013 is unclear. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
Manafort’s first visit to the embassy took place a year after Assange sought asylum inside, two sources said.

A separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian lists “Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions “Russians”.

According to two sources, Manafort returned to the embassy in 2015. He paid another visit in spring 2016, turning up alone, around the time Trump named him as his convention manager. The visit is tentatively dated to March.

Manafort’s 2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes, one source said, adding that the American was casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt.

Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports. Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged.

Embassy staff were aware only later of the potential significance of Manafort’s visit and his political role with Trump, it is understood.

The revelation could shed new light on the sequence of events in the run-up to summer 2016, when WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails hacked by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Hillary Clinton has said the hack contributed to her defeat.

The previously unreported Manafort-Assange connection is likely to be of interest to Mueller, who has been investigating possible contacts between WikiLeaks and associates of Trump including the political lobbyist Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr.

One key question is when the Trump campaign was aware of the Kremlin’s hacking operation – and what, if anything, it did to encourage it. Trump has repeatedly denied collusion.

Earlier this year Mueller indicted 12 GRU intelligence officers for carrying out the hack, which began in March 2016.

In June of that year WikiLeaks emailed the GRU via an intermediary seeking the DNC material. After failed attempts, Vladimir Putin’s spies sent the documents in mid-July to WikiLeaks as an encrypted attachment.

According to sources, Manafort’s acquaintance with Assange goes back at least five years, to late 2012 or 2013, when the American was working in Ukraine and advising its Moscow-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Why Manafort sought out Assange in 2013 is unclear. During this period the veteran consultant was involved in black operations against Yanukovych’s chief political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, whom Yanukovych had jailed. Manafort ran an extensive lobbying operation featuring European former politicians.

He flew frequently from the US to Ukraine’s capital, Kiev – usually via Frankfurt but sometimes through London, flight records seen by the Guardian show.

Manafort is currently in jail in Alexandria, Virginia. In August a jury convicted him of crimes arising from his decade-long activities in Ukraine. They include large-scale money laundering and failure to pay US tax. Manafort pleaded guilty to further charges in order to avoid a second trial in Washington.

As well as accusing him of lying on Monday, the special counsel moved to set a date for Manafort to be sentenced.

One person familiar with WikiLeaks said Assange was motivated to damage the Democrats campaign because he believed a future Trump administration would be less likely to seek his extradition on possible charges of espionage. This fate had hung over Assange since 2010, when he released confidential US state department cables. It contributed to his decision to take refuge in the embassy.

According to the dossier written by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, Manafort was at the centre of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Russia’s leadership. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Clinton, Steele wrote, whom Putin “hated and feared”.

In a memo written soon after the DNC emails were published, Steele said: “The [hacking] operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.”

As a candidate Trump warmly welcomed the dump of DNC emails by Assange. In October 2016 he declared: “I love WikiLeaks.” Trump’s comments came after WikiLeaks released a second tranche of emails seized from the email account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.

The Trump White House subsequently sent out mixed messages over Assange and his legal fate. In 2017 and behind the scenes Assange tried to reach a deal with Trump’s Department of Justice that might see him avoid US prison.

In May 2017, , Manafort flew to Ecuador to hold talks with the country’s president-elect Lenín Moreno. The discussions, days before Moreno was sworn in, and before Manafort was indicted – were ostensibly about a large-scale Chinese investment.

However, one source in Quito suggests that Manafort also discreetly raised Assange’s plight. Another senior foreign ministry source said he was sceptical Assange was mentioned. At the time Moreno was expected to continue support for him.

Last week a court filing released in error suggested that the US justice department had secretly charged Assange with a criminal offence. Written by the assistant US attorney, Kellen Dwyer, the document did not say what Assange had been charged with or when the alleged offence took place.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... an-embassy
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby Rory » Tue Nov 27, 2018 12:19 pm

SmartSelect_20181127-081643_Twitter.jpg


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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 27, 2018 12:21 pm

I wonder how they knew what he was wearing?


emptywheel


One thing folks seem to be missing about my point that a Manafort sentencing report may be Mueller's prime "report."

For cases involving classified information, it is normal to have a classified and unclassified version of that report.


So doing his "report" as a Manafort sentencing report would allow Mueller to capture all the counterintelligence stuff (that, bc he was in bed w/Russia, centers on Manafort), w/o burning sources and methods, plus a public report that we get to read.

I can assure you folks in Congress are already starting to think about how to get the classified version of it.

One limiting factor tho is how to write it up w/o requiring CIPA for the sentencing (which neither side wants to bother with).




emptywheel


Folks the skepticism to that Guardian report couldn't be more broad-based:

@ggreenwald @aaronjmate @auerfeld @pwnallthethings @benjaminwittes @NatSecGeek and me rarely ALL agree. But we do all think that this is sketchy.

Add @HeerJeet and @PreetBharara to the list of skeptics about that Guardian report.


The Hoarse Whisperer


Replying to @emptywheel @ggreenwald and 7 others
Seems like more pretext to turn over Assange...



bmaz

Replying to @emptywheel @ggreenwald and 7 others
Yeah, add me in too.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1 ... 9195343872




RudyGiuliani just texted to the press that this mornin's Manafort/Assange bombshell is "unequivocally fake news", which is Trump-speak for "100% true."



CASE CLOSED


Remember when Trump assured there were "NO MEETINGS WITH RUSSIA WHATSOEVER?" Yeah, good times.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 27, 2018 1:59 pm

Ken Dilanian


Ken Dilanian Retweeted WikiLeaks
Why would Manafort begin collaborating with Wikileaks even before Trump? Ukraine.

WikiLeaks



@wikileaks

#Ukraine's #Poroshenko implicated 1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... odoc1.html … 2: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... odoc2.html … 3: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... odoc3.html

Image
https://twitter.com/wikileaks




Caroline Orr

April 2016 (cont):

-Early April: Papadopoulos goes to Israel to discuss Russia policy
-4/11: Manafort emails Konstantin Kilimnik: “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD operation seen?” (OVD = Oleg Deripaska)
-Mifsud intros Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev (direct Russia connect.)

March 2016: Manafort/Assange meet. Also:

3/6: Papadopoulos joins campaign
3/14: Papadopoulos meets Joseph Mifsud
3/21: Trump ID's Carter Page & Papadopoulos as foreign policy advisers
3/24: Papadopoulos sends email w/ subject line: Meeting w/ Russian Leadership — Including Putin

March 2016 (cont)
3/29: Manafort (who is broke & in debt to a bunch of oligarchs) agrees to work unpaid for the Trump campaign
3/31: Trump meets w/ his foreign policy advisers

April 2016:
-1st unreported contacts between Trump campaign & Russian officialsCaroline Orr added,

Roger Stone was the one who convinced Trump to hire Paul Manafort. The idea of hiring Manafort to work unpaid? That was Roger Stone's idea.

This took place at some point in March 2016. The same month Manafort met with Julian Assange.

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1067445561631100928
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Nov 27, 2018 2:09 pm

Worth keeping a close eye on this - quiet corrections to Guardian story: https://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/1706143/diff/0/1
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 27, 2018 2:10 pm

Scott Stedman


"After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement."
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https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/statu ... 6362184705
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby Rory » Tue Nov 27, 2018 2:18 pm

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 27, 2018 2:24 pm

Mueller is not desperate ...far from it

Manafort is going to jail for the rest of his life ......
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Nov 27, 2018 2:41 pm

.

Prosecutor Mueller now says Manafort lying

on a variety of subject matters


Woah! Well that settles it. And you know what? I have no reason to doubt it in particular. There's no way they've already nailed him on even a fraction of what he has nailable.

But I must say I like the latest, de-Putinized, New York-mob, American crony-capitalist edition of the SLAD subject line.

trump was born into front org of Genovese crime family
Russians in trumpRussia = Russian mob.
same mob rolled over NYC mob in '90s
launders money through trump Org
funneled money into trump campaign
sent their banker to meet Jared Mob


Beginnings of a very good summary!

A couple of things lacking:

1. Russian mob=internationalized capitalist gangsters

i.e., 1990s oligarchs and long-established expatriates in America, nowadays largely operating outside Russia or in exile because of Putin, more at home in New York, London, or Cyprus than Moscow, so that this demolishes the standard Clintonian-CIA-MSNBC-neocon-Marcy Wheeler version of #Russiagate

2. launders money through trump Org
along with a whole bunch of non-Russian gangsters
from Saudi Arabia and 110 other places many of whom also

funneled money into trump campaign
sent their banker to meet Jared Mob
which would mean Israeli-Likud interests

But, good progress!

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby Rory » Tue Nov 27, 2018 5:16 pm

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 27, 2018 6:52 pm

1. SPILL THE BEANS
3 HOURS AGO
Mueller Probing Manafort Meeting With Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno: Report

James Lawler Duggan
Special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into a meeting between ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, CNN reported Tuesday. The meeting reportedly took place in 2017 in Quito, and Mueller has made inquiries about whether WikiLeaks or its founder, Julian Assange, came up during the sit-down. The revelation comes hours after The Guardian, citing unnamed sources, reported that Manafort met repeatedly in secret with Assange at London’s Ecuadorian embassy before WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic National Committee emails. Manafort has denied the meetings ever occurred.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-p ... eno-report


Ecuador just finished removing its Ambassador to the United Kingdom, along with essentially every other diplomat who had any kind of relationship with Julian Assange, from its embassy in the UK......I wonder why...someone helping Manafort get into the embassy

Will shake-up at London embassy leave Assange out in the cold?
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/23/uk/j ... index.html



The U.S. State Department posted a blurb today on its official website

The headline is “Secretary Pompeo’s Meeting With Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Jose Valencia and Finance Minister Richard Martinez” and the press release goes on to reveal that the meeting took place yesterday.

Secretary Pompeo's Meeting With Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Jose Valencia and Finance Minister Richard Martinez


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Readout
Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
November 27, 2018

The below is attributable to Spokesperson Heather Nauert:‎

Secretary Pompeo met on November 26 with Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Jose Valencia and Finance Minister Richard Martinez. They reaffirmed their commitment to expand bilateral cooperation on a number of political and economic issues, including through the recently relaunched U.S.-Ecuador Trade and Investment Council. Secretary Pompeo confirmed U.S. support for Ecuador’s efforts in strengthening democratic institutions and President Lenin Moreno’s commitment to democratic reforms. He also recognized Ecuador’s significant support to Venezuelan refugees and migrants and welcomed further Ecuadorian cooperation on a democratic solution to the man-made crises in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/11/287585.htm
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Nov 27, 2018 7:43 pm

.

Have you read up on developments in Ecuador over the last years?

Moreno campaigned as pinktide or equivalent of Correa II, with Correa's endorsement. Immediately after the election he did a 180-degree turn. Went full neoliberal, pro-IMF and pro-US imperialist, even favoring new bases.

When Moreno meets Pompeo for a love fest, he's probably meeting his current superior (if not immediate supervisor) on the State-CIA organizational chart. I know this seems confusing since Pompeo is a double Trump appointment, but it makes sense to me. Pompeo is Trump's insurance at the real deep-state HQ, in Langley. Try to recall Trump's Day 1 visit - to the CIA. You will not see Pompeo fired any time soon, unless Trump is done. And part of that deal is that Assange is now "equivalent of a non-state hostile intelligence agency."

Moreno's secret services are the ones providing a list of Assange visitors with Manafort on it, as well as "Russians" (snarf!), according to the Harding story. Moreno is the one negotiating the transfer of Assange.

(If I were Assange, by the way, at this point I'd walk out and take my chances with a UK judge.)

So Moreno is no friend to Assange, who would arrange secret meetings with Manafort for him. He's the immediate reason why Assange is facing extradition. Whatever was discussed at Moreno's meeting with Manafort, it makes no difference to this assessment.

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 28, 2018 11:33 pm


Manafort Lied About Business Dealings, Mueller’s Team Believes


Statements, which the former Trump aide describes as truthful, led the special counsel to end his plea agreement

By Aruna Viswanatha and Rebecca Ballhaus Nov. 28, 2018 7:41 p.m. ET

Paul Manafort’s alleged misstatements to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators include comments about his personal business dealings and about his contacts with a former associate in Ukraine, say people familiar with the matter.

The content of those statements don’t appear to be central to the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election that Mr. Mueller is investigating. It is unclear if prosecutors plan to accuse Mr. Manafort of additional lies.

But Mr. Mueller’s move to end the cooperation deal reflects more broadly a combative relationship that has developed between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s investigators, as well as the special counsel’s conclusion that Mr. Manafort fell short of his cooperation agreement, court filings show.

Investigators alleged that Mr. Manafort made inaccurate statements in interviews with Mr. Mueller’s team about his communications with Konstantin Kilimnik, said the people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Kilimnik, who Mr. Mueller charged earlier this year along with Mr. Manafort with trying to influence the testimony of two witnesses against Mr. Manafort, had worked for Mr. Manafort’s lobbying firm in Ukraine. Messrs. Manafort and Kilimnik communicated earlier this year about contacting others who worked with them in an alleged effort to coordinate their stories, according to an indictment Mr. Mueller filed against them.

Mr. Kilimnik, whom the FBI has assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to a filing by the special counsel’s office, isn’t in custody and hasn’t responded to the charges in court.

A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment.

Mr. Mueller has long been interested in the relationship between Messrs. Manafort and Kilimnik. He has questioned witnesses about a boat trip that Mr. Manafort took with Tom Barrack, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump, after Mr. Manafort was ousted from the Trump campaign in August 2016, say people familiar with the matter. Witnesses believed investigators were seeking to determine whether Mr. Manafort ever met with Mr. Kilimnik on that trip.

In his conversations with Mr. Mueller’s team, Mr. Manafort also allegedly misrepresented information about payments he received related to his lobbying work, the people familiar with the matter said.

A judge plans to set a date on Friday for Mr. Manafort’s sentencing, now that his cooperation with Mr. Mueller has reached an apparent impasse. Before that sentencing, Mr. Mueller’s office will submit a memo outlining Mr. Manafort’s alleged misdeeds in more detail.

Mr. Mueller’s team, in the court filing Monday, accused Mr. Manafort of “lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters.” Mr. Manafort’s lawyers said he had spoken repeatedly to the special counsel’s team and provided information “in an effort to live up to his cooperation obligations.”

With the Mueller-Manafort dispute breaking into public view, some legal experts believe Mr. Manafort’s best hope for leniency is to obtain a presidential pardon. On Wednesday Mr. Trump told the New York Post a pardon for Mr. Manafort was “not off the table.” Any pardon would likely spark a firestorm among Democrats, who are preparing to take control of the House.

Mr. Manafort’s decision to plead guilty to other crimes in September and cooperate in the continuing investigation into Russian electoral interference and any links to the Trump campaign appeared to be a major win for the prosecutors.

Mr. Manafort’s allies have said for months that the former Trump aide had little to tell investigators about Russia’s 2016 efforts. Mr. Mueller’s actions to end the cooperation agreement signals Mr. Manafort provided little information that prosecutors found useful.

Mr. Manafort’s team maintained an unusual open channel with Mr. Trump’s attorneys even after his plea agreement, briefing the president’s lawyers about its contacts with Mr. Mueller’s office.

Still, attorneys for the president weren’t aware that Mr. Mueller would accuse Mr. Manafort of lying until Monday’s filing, they said. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said the legal team has received no indication that any of Mr. Manafort’s allegedly false statements relate to the president.

Mr. Trump recently responded in writing to a set of questions posed by Mr. Mueller’s office, including a few questions related to Mr. Manafort, said a person familiar with the matter. They did include questions about a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between top Trump campaign aides, including Mr. Manafort, and a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin.

Mr. Trump responded that he didn’t know at the time about the Trump Tower meeting, the person said.

The developments come as some targets of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry are taking an increasingly combative tone in public. Conservative activist Jerome Corsi, who had been in talks with Mr. Mueller’s office to potentially plead guilty to lying to investigators, has publicly rejected a plea and said Wednesday he hired a new lawyer.

In a tweet, Mr. Corsi said he had instructed his legal team to file with Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker “a criminal complaint against Mueller’s Special Counsel and the DOJ for prosecutorial misconduct in my case.”

On another front, Senate Republicans Wednesday blocked an effort to pass legislation protecting Mr. Mueller’s investigation.

For the second time this month, Sens. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz) and Chris Coons (D., Del.) tried to pass by unanimous consent legislation designed to protect Mr. Mueller from being fired. They were blocked by Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) on Wednesday. Two weeks earlier, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) had objected, blocking the bill.

The proposed measure would protect a special counsel from removal except for “good cause.”

Corrections & Amplifications
Paul Manafort lied about his business dealings and contacts with a Ukrainian associate, according to people familiar with the matter. An earlier headline suggested that Robert Mueller’s team released the information.

— Kristina Peterson in Washington contributed to this article.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/muellers-t ... IY3NaZjWl4
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 02, 2018 7:05 am

The Manafort Lying Cards I’d Show if I Were Playing Presidential Pardon Poker

emptywheelDecember 1, 2018
One detail from Paul Manafort’s status hearing yesterday did not surprise me: Andrew Weissmann said he was “ready to go immediately with his filing of details on Manafort’s alleged breach” of his plea agreement. (Judge Amy Berman Jackson gave him a week, until December 7, to do so).

Weissmann plays coy about next steps

One detail surprised me a bit: Weissmann claimed the government hasn’t decided whether they’ll further charge Manafort.

Jackson asked Weissmann if the government planned to bring more charges against Manafort after noting that the report by prosecutors earlier this week repeatedly used the word “crimes” in describing new allegations against Manafort.

The “report seems to make a point with its vocabulary,” Jackson said.

Weissmann said they hadn’t made a decision yet, but that they did believe Manafort’s conduct would be relevant at sentencing on the charges he already pleaded guilty to.


It’s not really clear from the reporting precisely what the government would charge him with, either: either the hung charges from EDVA, those that had been dropped in DC, or something else.

I’m spitballing, of course, but the two details together suggest that while Mueller has a very specific story to tell about Manafort ready to go, they haven’t decided where to go once they tell that story — whether they plan to pressure him some more to provide evidence on the things he has lied about, or perhaps charge him in the case in chief. We’re not, then, getting the full Mueller report, but I expect we’ll get some fairly interesting accusations and — given past practice from this team — some primary evidence to back up those claims. Further, given Kevin Downing’s claim to be mystified about the substance of Manafort’s lies, I suspect the Manafort (and Trump) team will get specifics about what Mueller knows that they’re not yet aware of.

Mueller’s slow reveal

When they’ve laid out such details in the past, the Mueller team has significantly advanced the long slow process of getting Manafort to describe what really happened in 2016. Early on, they used a redlined copy of an op-ed Manafort did with Konstantin Kilimnik to argue that Manafort had violated the gag in the case; while revealing that op-ed didn’t elicit sanctions on Manafort, it put Manafort in a weaker spot with ABJ. It also may have been how Manafort learned that the government had (probably in mid-August 2017, so in the wake of the raid on his condo) had seized the content of the email account he used to communicate with Kilimnik.

Then, for months, the government let Manafort submit one after another attempt to make bail. And only when he had finally done so, they moved to revoke bail by slapping on two additional obstruction charges. To substantiate those charges (in yet another speaking indictment), they not only revealed that Manafort and Kilimnik had tried to convince witnesses to lie about past work with Manafort, but in the process they revealed they had collected and parallel constructed both men’s WhatsApp and Telegram chats (and had, presumably, parallel constructed Manafort’s communications with Kiliminik going back over two years, importantly for our purposes, including the entire time period Manafort worked on Trump’s campaign).

Image

Given all the discussion Friday about further indictments, it’s instructive that rather than just submitting a motion to revoke bail last June, the government had the grand jury indict those two new charges, with the effect that they didn’t have to call the Hapsburg witnesses publicly to describe the attempts to suborn perjury.

I’m not saying it will happen again. But it could.

In any case, that move had the result of getting Manafort thrown in the pokey (he got put in a nice one, at that point), adding pressure to flip.

The next month, as Manafort made an ill-considered attempt to move his trial to Roanoke, Judge TS Ellis instead moved him to the crummier Alexandria jail. In fighting both those moves, the government revealed several new details about how they were collecting his ongoing communications, both that they had heard him say damning things on a call to his spouse, but also that they heard him explaining that “he reads and composes emails on a second laptop that is shuttled in and out of the facility by his team.”

To sum up, thus far: over the course of the 400 days since Manafort was first indicted, the government has made Manafort disclose everything he was willing to put up for bail (that is, the liquid and legal stuff), while repeatedly providing hints about how they continued to thwart his counter-surveillance (and shitty opsec) methods, while providing mere snippets about what they were learning as a result. Meanwhile he has been sitting in increasingly shitty jail cells for over five months.

And now the government has a set of accusations about his lies all wrapped up with a bow, or maybe they’ll just roll out another indictment.

If we’re playing another round of poker

As I noted above, when we were at this stage in June, the government just indicted as a way of making it far easier for ABJ to revoke bail. Here, getting a grand jury to agree they had probable cause that Manafort lied to the FBI would even further surpass the good faith standard Mueller needs to deem Manafort in violation of his plea deal.

But let’s assume, for the moment, that they’re not going to do that, that they’re going to submit a declaration laying out Manafort’s lies. What lies would Mueller disclose to ratchet up the pressure on Manafort more?

It seems there are several potential lies that would continue to wear away at Manafort’s efforts to protect Trump.

Kilimnik on a boat

A year ago, Mueller made clear he knew what Manafort was clandestinely up to with Kilimnik. In June, Mueller made clear he knew what Manafort was clandestinely up to with Kilimnik. Just weeks before Manafort purportedly flipped, Mueller made it clear, with the plea deal of Sam Patten, he knew what Kiliminik was up to.

Are you sensing a theme here?

And since Mueller deemed Manafort in violation of his plea agreement, WSJ has reported that one thing Manafort lied about was Konstantin Kilimnik. That includes whether Manafort — at a time he was dead broke and setting off on a crime way to hide that fact and his ties to Russia — hopped on a yacht with Tom Barrack (the guy who got him the job in the first place) and Kilimnik.

He has questioned witnesses about a boat trip that Mr. Manafort took with Tom Barrack, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump, after Mr. Manafort was ousted from the Trump campaign in August 2016, say people familiar with the matter. Witnesses believed investigators were seeking to determine whether Mr. Manafort ever met with Mr. Kilimnik on that trip.


Particularly given that Mueller has two cooperating witnesses who were close with Kilimnik in this period, I assume we’ll get more — possibly substantially more — details about how the suspected GRU spy Kilimnik served as the handler for Trump’s campaign manager during a period when GRU was rolling out its stolen emails.

Hidden stash

I noted on Pod Save America the other day, Manafort’s calculations look idiotic if Mueller is about to seize the last of his ill-gotten gains. It looks a little different if he’s got $100 million stashed in Cyprus that, if he is pardoned, he can go live off of.

That’s another thing the WSJ reported that Manafort lied about.

In his conversations with Mr. Mueller’s team, Mr. Manafort also allegedly misrepresented information about payments he received related to his lobbying work, the people familiar with the matter said.


Particularly given that Manafort hadn’t paid his mortgage on his Trump Tower condo, Mueller has permission under Manafort’s plea deal to replace that forfeiture with another. So after spending 6 months making Manafort identify the last of his liquid and legal holdings in the US, Mueller could go after whatever else Manafort has.

If Mueller not only proved Manafort was lying, but proved he had the funds to replace the forfeitures that he hadn’t actually owned, that would further constrain his finances going forward.

Trump’s pardon dangles

Between Michael Cohen and Mike Flynn, we’ll have sentencing hearings for two people known to have been floated pardons by Trump for their lies. Admittedly, both the public reporting based off leaks nd Cohen’s language about pardons in his sentencing memo stops short of offering a guarantee — or, indeed, any direct conversations with attorneys.

He took these steps, moreover, despite regular public reports referring to the President’s consideration of pardons and pre-pardons in the SCO’s investigation. See, e.g., Sharon LaFraniere and Nicholas Fandos, Trump Raises Idea of Pardon For Manafort, N.Y. Times, Nov. 28, 2018, at A1; Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey, Trump Recently Sought His Lawyers’ Advice on Possibility of Pardoning Manafort, Giuliani Says, Washington Post (Aug. 23, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... -counseled He took these steps, moreover, despite regular public reports referring to the President’s consideration of pardons and pre-pardons in the SCO’s investigation. See, e.g., Sharon LaFraniere and Nicholas Fandos, Trump Raises Idea of Pardon For Manafort, N.Y. Times, Nov. 28, 2018, at A1; Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey, Trump Recently Sought His Lawyers’ Advice on Possibility of Pardoning Manafort, Giuliani Says, Washington Post (Aug. 23, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... -counseled.

[snip]

He could have fought the government and continued to hold to the party line, positioning himself perhaps for a pardon or clemency, but, instead – for himself, his family, and his country – he took personal responsibility for his own wrongdoing and contributed, and is prepared to continue to contribute, to an investigation that he views as thoroughly legitimate and vital.


According to ABC, pardons are one of the topics Cohen cooperated on.

So Mueller probably has evidence that Trump systematically offered pardons, and may have more than that.

If Mueller has proof that Trump offered Manafort a pardon to keep quiet (or that Manafort believed he had) and Manafort denied it, disclosing that now would be devastating, not least because it would force a judicial decision about whether that had actually happened.

If Mueller can present evidence, now, that Trump promised to pardon Manafort and then Manafort lied about it, then it would make it far harder for Trump to follow through on what was probably not a promise in any case without it being an obviously impeachable offense, if not worse.

And proving that lie might, in addition, change Manafort’s calculus about holding out for a pardon.

June 9 meeting

Finally there’s any number of key disclosures involving Trump about which Trump — as well as Manafort — have already submitted sworn statements. The key one of these involves the Trump Tower meeting. Trump’s lackeys have already made it clear he denied knowledge of the meeting.

President Donald Trump told special counsel Robert Mueller in writing that Roger Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks, nor was he told about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his son, campaign officials and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

One source described the President’s answers without providing any direct quotes and said the President made clear he was answering to the best of his recollection.


Given that Trump has made this clear, he must believe his answers match Manafort’s on this point.

But if Mueller has solid evidence — perhaps in the form of both witnesses and communications — then revealing that would undercut all the President’s claims about this meeting.

An even crazier possibility is if Mueller has found evidence — perhaps on those iPods I’m so obsessed about — that Manafort not only has proof to the contrary, but that Manafort was keeping records for his handler Kilimnik.

A big reason Trump seems to have turned on Cohen is that, in the course of reviewing the stuff SDNY seized from Cohen’s home, he discovered how much incriminating evidence Cohen was sitting on, whether intentionally (in the form of recordings) or not. Trump hasn’t gotten the same visibility on how damaging the materials seized in the Manafort raid were — though in the immediate aftermath, John Dowd panicked in the same way (though perhaps not as acutely) he did when SDNY raided Cohen. Heck! Who knows? Maybe there’s even hard evidence of a pardon dangle that was in Manafort’s condo by the time he was raided in July 2017, when the Trump people were trying to minimize Manafort’s awareness of the meeting.

The point being, if Mueller can provide evidence, it would be useful both to show that he has proof that Trump knew about the June 9 meeting (though that’s only the most obvious example) and that Manafort kept evidence showing that proof (as Cohen did, of other incriminating activities). The former would undercut the President’s relentless claims there was no collusion. The latter would lead the President to believe Manafort had betrayed him, like his former lawyer.

Mueller is sitting on a great deal of evidence right now, and neither Manafort’s nor Trump’s team seems to know what to expect. If they have the evidence to do so, it seems it would be very easy to replicate the betrayal that happened with Michael Cohen.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/12/01/t ... don-poker/
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