Jared Kushner

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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 16, 2017 7:03 pm

Jared Kushner’s Family Is Screwed, and It’s All Boy Wonder’s Fault

His big real-estate deal has gone from bad to worse.

Bess LevinOctober 16, 2017 12:20 pm

He’s got this covered.
By Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images.
On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the president-elect made one of his trademark supremely confident, yet supremely ridiculous statements. Speaking at a black-tie dinner, Trump referenced the fact that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had been tasked with Middle Eastern diplomacy, telling Ivanka’s husband, “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can. All my life I‘ve been hearing that’s the toughest deal to make, but I have a feeling Jared is going to do a great job.”

In Trump’s eyes, Kushner is a genius businessman who will not only achieve a feat that has escaped U.S. presidents and career diplomats alike, but will also solve the opioid crisis, overhaul the government’s I.T. infrastructure, and “reinvent the entire government.” Given his track record, however, it’s unclear whether Kushner is even qualified to work as a White House intern—his only two professional achievements of note have been buying and running a newspaper into the ground and running his family’s real-estate business while his father was in prison, striking a deal that a decade later is still haunting his family.

That deal, of course, was to buy 666 5th Avenue for $1.8 billion on the eve of the financial crisis, which has become an ongoing albatross around Kushner Cos’ neck. With a 30 percent vacancy rate, an expected loss of $24 million this year, and a $1.2 billion mortgage that is due in February 2019, the Kushners want to raze the property and replace it with a glimmering Zaha Hadid-designed tower that would require borrowing even more money—including a $4 billion construction loan. Their Hail Mary plan is a problem not only because their attempts to raise funds have been rebuffed by everyone from the richest man in France, to Israeli insurance companies and banks, to South Korea’s sovereign-wealth fund, to China’s Anbang Insurance Group, but because, according to a new report from Bloomberg, even the family’s partner in the venture is actively trying to shut it down:

Their partner, Vornado Realty Trust, is telling brokers to plan for a much more mundane renovation that would leave the property as an office building, according to three people familiar with the matter. Vornado Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Steve Roth was never enthusiastic about the Kushner plan although until now he hadn’t stood in its way. Putting an end to the Kushner effort—to salvage their overpriced investment by turning it into a Midtown jewel with expensive condos, a hotel and five-floor mall—could have profound ramifications for the family. Vornado, which owns 49.5 percent of 666 Fifth Ave., is unlikely to invest further in the property without first being reassured of its future, said three people familiar with Roth’s thinking. That means returning to the negotiating table with lenders—a battle that could result in Kushner Cos.’ losing control of the building, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing private deals.

In fact, Roth, who has said 666 Fifth “would be worth a lot more if it was just dirt,” is reportedly so disenchanted that he’s sending a message to anyone who might still be interested in the Kushners’ plan to “back off.”

As Bloomberg notes, while “the success of Trump’s campaign drew investors into discussions” for 666 5th, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest, heightened scrutiny plus “financial assumptions for the project that most found to be unrealistic” have resulted in no one wanting to come near the Kushners’ tower with a 100-foot pole.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10 ... ders-fault



JARED KUSHNER HID ONE OF HIS COMPANIES ON A DISCLOSURE FORM — THEN PROFITED
BY CHRIS RIOTTA ON 10/12/17 AT 6:00 AM

Jared Kushner "enriched himself" by not revealing his ownership of a real estate tech business that raised millions of dollars while he served in the government, said a member of the House Judiciary Committee, calling it part of a pattern of unethical behavior that he believes should cause the White House Senior Adviser to be stripped of his security clearance.

Congressman Ted Lieu told Newsweek that Kushner's failure to list a company called Cadre on his initial financial disclosure forms—an oversight that could mean millions for the president’s son-in-law—is an ethical lapse that should have severe ramifications.

"It appears [Kushner] ended up being the beneficiary of that omission," said Lieu, a California Democrat. "He enriched himself by failing to disclose the asset."

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Kushner’s lawyer has said that her client’s failure to list Cadre on the initial filing in March was merely an "administrative error." But that "error" allowed Kushner to maintain a stake in the start-up at a time when the three-year-old business doubled its venture funding from rich private investors.

GettyImages-845621054
Jared Kushner's failure to disclose a company he had financial interests in allowed him to maintain reduced ownership while serving in the White House, according to records obtained by Newsweek.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, GETTY

Kushner's failure to cite Cadre on his financial disclosure form came as the Office of Government Ethics was deciding whether to grant him a Certificate of Divestiture, which requires incoming government employees to divest "100% of all financial interests" from listed companies so they don't violate conflict-of-interest laws. It also allows those government employees to sell their assets without paying heavy capital gains taxes.

The timeline suggests more than just an inadvertent oversight, but an effort by Kushner to hold onto Cadre rather than be forced to divest his interests in the emerging company, according to ethics experts.

On March 9, Kushner submitted his original financial disclosure form to the Office of Government Ethics. It did not specifically list Cadre as one of Kushner's assets, though he co-founded the company with his brother, Joshua Kushner and his Harvard classmate Ryan Williams, who remains Cadre CEO.

The company was already attracting attention in New York's real estate and tech circles because of its promise to disrupt both industries by allowing investors to buy shares in real estate developments much like they would buy shares of companies on the stock market.

Kushner’s lawyer says Cadre was not specifically cited on the March 9 form because his holding company, BFPS Ventures, acquired his interest in Cadre on February 17. That transaction appears to be noted on his financial records as a $100,000 to $250,000 sale.

But that amount does not match subsequent disclosures. When Kushner finally amended his financial disclosure form on July 21, he valued his interest in Cadre from $5 million to $25 million.

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Lawmakers are calling to have Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's security clearances revoked for their omissions on financial and security records.
REUTERS

That disclosure came after Cadre had raised $65 million more in venture funding from major donors including Andreessen Horowitz, adding to a list of prominent venture capitalists such as Democratic donor George Soros and tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel.

The disclosure form suggests that Kushner has not fully divested from Cadre. Indeed, a representative for the start-up told Newsweek that Kushner maintains "a small, passive investment," but has "no operational or advisory role," describing the cofounder as "an early investor in the company."

Government watchdogs have a problem with Kushner’s continued ownership of Cadre.

"Mr. Kushner co-founded Cadre and continues to own a significant part of it," the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wrote to then-Ethics Office Director Walter Shaub on July 6. "As a result [the Ethics Office] appears to have granted the certificate of divestiture based on incomplete information."

Shaub, who resigned on July 19 from the ethics office complaining of the Trump administration's disregard for conflict-of-interest guidelines, never signed off on Kushner’s Certificate of Divestiture. Instead, it was approved by the office's general counsel, David Apol on July 20, the day after Shaub quit. Apol replaced Shaub the next day. The New York Times described Apol as having "a much more cordial relationship with the White House" than Shaub.

Kushner's failure to include the full value of Cadre in his initial filing likely allowed him to hold onto most of his interest rather than be forced to divest, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington says. And had Kushner revealed his ownership in Cadre, the company might not have been as attractive to investors, who would obviously be keen on putting money into a company so closely linked to a person inside the White House. A Kushner representative admitted that investors would certainly have known about Kushner’s holdings in Cadre from publicly available information, which concerns ethics experts.

"(Kushner) could potentially have been wanting to not disclose this asset as the latest round of funding was happening," Elana Fine, executive director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, College Park, said. "When a venture capitalist like Jared Kushner invests in a company, they’re always expecting a return on that investment."

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Under President Donald Trump, White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner has been tasked with Middle East peace negotiations, heading the American Innovation office and criminal justice reform.
REUTERS

The type of business Cadre does is also noteworthy because it sits at the nexus of Kushner’s two power bases: real estate and, now, politics.

Cadre operates as an online platform, connecting wealthy investors like Soros, for example, to emerging real estate properties in which they can buy partial ownership. The billionaire was one of Cadre's initial key investors, opening up a $250 million line of credit between his family offices and Kushner’s start-up.

But ethics experts think the real estate investing platform may allow foreign investors to hide their identities to the public, though not to Cadre insiders.

"It's a novel kind of business," said Virginia Canter, who is executive branch ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Because of the real estate interests that can be traded on the platform, and who can be buying and selling that real estate, [Kushner’s] financial interest in Cadre concerns me … You can have foreign governments or other individuals who have significant interests before Jared Kushner. This is the man responsible for Middle East peace talks and the American Innovation office.

"The point is, Cadre could result in a benefit to him and there’s no way for us to have any insight or to hold him accountable," she added. "In any other administration, he’d be required to divest of this asset. You line this up with [Kushner's] failures on his security forms … and it’s a lot to just say it was an inadvertent failure. It looks like it’s a systemic problem and, in some cases, more than that."

http://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-i ... ons-679231
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 18, 2017 9:27 am

Jared Kushner Adds Charles Harder to Legal Team As West Wing Pressure Mounts

On Friday, Reince Priebus testified for hours with lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. While Priebus has been careful not to criticize the president openly, sources who have spoken to him say he’s not happy about the way he was treated by Trump—and his family. Is Kushner nervous? He has added Charles Harder to his legal team.

Gabriel ShermanOctober 17, 2017 7:49 pm
The White House

When Reince Priebus departed from the West Wing in July, after months of rumor and acrimony, he didn’t let the door hit him on the way out. “A president has a right to hit a reset button. I think it’s a good time to hit the reset button,” he told CNN. “I’m always going to be a Trump fan.”

But the graceful exit and months of public silence were very far from the end of the story. On Friday, Priebus testified for hours with lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team who are probing possible Russia collusion and a host of other matters, including obstruction of justice in Trump’s decision to fire F.B.I. Director James Comey. While Priebus has been careful not to criticize the president openly, sources who have spoken to him say he’s not happy about the way he was treated by Trump and his family. “He was champing at the bit to testify,” a Republican familiar with Priebus’s thinking said. Priebus declined to comment to me about what he told Mueller’s lawyers, but his attorney, William Burck, told Politico that his client “was happy to answer all of their questions.”

According to sources familiar with the matter, the person in Trump’s orbit who may have the most to be worried about in Priebus’s testimony is Jared Kushner. Priebus has knowledge of Kushner’s proximity to the controversial decision to fire Comey during a weekend at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in early May, which, hypothetically, is the lynchpin of an obstruction case against the president and his advisers. Trump was accompanied for the weekend by Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller. At the club, Miller drafted an angry letter to Comey justifying his removal. (White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly told Trump to revise the letter, which people who viewed it likened to a “screed.”) The following Monday, after returning to Washington, Trump told other advisers, including Priebus, of the decision to oust Comey during an Oval Office meeting.

Kushner’s closeness to the discussion of firing Comey continues to be much discussed by current and former Trump administration officials, who see it as one of the main drivers of the administration’s present legal travails. Two sources familiar with the matter told me that prior to Comey’s dismissal, Kushner expressed concern to West Wing officials about the investigation. “He’s all over us,” Kushner told one official in February, according to two sources briefed on the conversation. “He was freaked out about Comey from day one,” one Trump adviser said.

Some in the West Wing were concerned about Kushner's entanglements even before he was a government employee. According to two sources familiar with the matter, transition officials became concerned about meetings that Kushner had helped to set up with representatives from the Chinese insurance giant Anbang and the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund to raise hundreds of millions to bail out 666 Fifth Avenue, the debt-laden crown jewel in his family’s real-estate empire. The meetings raise ethical questions given Kushner’s status as a presidential adviser involved in foreign policy. They worried that he could be subject to, as one of them put it, “an influence operation” by foreign governments.

Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell declined to comment. On Monday evening I was contacted by Charles Harder in his capacity as a legal representative for Kushner. He, too, declined to comment. (Harder, who has represented Hulk Hogan and Melania Trump, recently severed ties with another client, Harvey Weinstein.) Ty Cobb, a member of Trump’s legal team, who is handling the administration’s response to various legal and federal investigations, e-mailed me to say: “It is disturbing how unsubstantiated and reckless this story is. It combines conclusions arising without foundation with well worn but widely peddled fantasies that other outlets have passed on for months because nothing in it is verifiable except for the long well known fact that Jared and his family were in New Jersey that weekend. Jared has fully cooperated with all investigations since the beginning. He has been demonstrably transparent with the Congress. Jared voluntarily produced documents and even appeared for six hours of well received testimony before investigative bodies. Way out of bounds, here!”

Kushner’s legal team has said that their client complied with federal ethics laws when he met with investors. Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, agrees. “At the time that Kushner had them, he was not an official,” Painter told me. But Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and chair of the government watchdog group CREW, says Kushner’s real-estate meetings with foreign investors are problematic. “They raise issues under the transition’s own ethics code,” Eisen told me in an e-mail. “We have a very senior White House adviser whose family is facing an enormous looming liability on 666 Fifth. While he may have divested his personal interest, his family members are at risk, and you can’t divest your gene pool. The situation has given and continues to give him and his family . . . an enormous possible incentive to curry favor with potential investors.”

For his part, Priebus is trying to keep his channels to Trumpworld open and seems to be downplaying any notion that he used his Mueller testimony to settle scores. According to a source, Priebus said after his appearance: “I really didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10 ... al_twitter


Jared Kushner Is Reportedly 'Freaked Out' About the Russia Investigation
The president's adviser may be in a lot of trouble.
By Elizabeth Preza / Raw Story October 18, 2017, 1:39 AM GMT

Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top White House advisor Jared Kushner has been “freaked out” about the investigations into a Donald Trump’s campaign and possible collusion with the Russian government, and has been concerned about former FBI director James Comey “from day one,” a Trump advisor told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman.

According to Sherman, prior to Trump’s May 9 decision to fire Comey (a move Trump himself has said relieved “great pressure” on his administration), Kushner was concerned about the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

“He’s all over us,” Kushner told a White House official, Sherman reports.

News of Kushner’s extensive concerns over Comey come after former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus reportedly met with special counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to lead the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign shortly after Trump fired Comey.

According to a source who spoke with Sherman, Preibus “was champing at the bit to testify.” Priebus’ lawyer William Burck told Politico Priebus was “happy to answer all of their questions.”

As Sherman notes, Priebus was privy to the goings-on at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey when the president decided to fire Comey. Subsequent reports indicate Kushner played an active role in the president’s decision, which is likely the crux of any investigation possible obstruction of justice by the president—a lead the special counsel’s team is likely pursuing.

Kushner, who recently obtained lawyer Charles Harder (Harder represented Hulk Hogan in his suit against Gawker and until recently served as disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s legal counsel), is also under fire for using a private email address to conduct government business.

In a statement to Sherman, Trump’s lawyer Ty Cobb instead the reporter was “way out of bounds” with his line of questioning regarding Comey.

“It is disturbing how unsubstantiated and reckless this story is,” Cobb told Sherman. “It combines conclusions arising without foundation with well worn but widely peddled fantasies that other outlets have passed on for months because nothing in it is verifiable except for the long well known fact that Jared and his family were in New Jersey that weekend. Jared has fully cooperated with all investigations since the beginning. He has been demonstrably transparent with the Congress. Jared voluntarily produced documents and even appeared for six hours of well received testimony before investigative bodies. Way out of bounds, here!”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... estigation


Meet Charles Harder, the Gawker Killer Now Working for Melania Trump and Roger Ailes

By Alexander Nazaryan On 10/14/16 at 11:19 AM
U.S.

TV personality Terry Bollea, also known as Hulk Hogan, and his attorneys David Houston, left, and Charles Harder, center, attend a press conference on October 15, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. Harder is now working for Melania Trump and Roger Ailes. Gerardo Mora/Getty
Charles Harder does not want to be recorded, one of the very few interview subjects I’ve ever had make that demand. Military officers at Guantánamo Bay were fine with it; the convicted murderer in a New York prison was fine with it; countless politicians and government officials were fine with it. But not this Beverly Hills lawyer to the stars, which means that as we sit down for lunch, I am forced to eat with one hand and scrawl notes with the other. I don’t want to give the idea, however, that Harder was torturing me because he likes to torture journalists, though that accusation has been made. A client list that includes Jude Law and Amber Heard means, to borrow from Falstaff, that discretion is the better part of disclosure.

My notes from that meal are sparse, because in addition to not wanting to be recorded, Harder frequently goes off the record. Having become somewhat famous for defending the obscenely famous, Harder has a deceptively casual manner that disguises a master gardener’s impulse for pruning media curiosity into the kind of flowery coverage that reflects well on his practice and clients. He will not so much as acknowledge that he works for Roger Ailes, the deposed Fox News chairman, though Harder’s name appears on a threatening letter to New York magazine. Nor will he say how Melania Trump came to be his client in a lawsuit against the Daily Mail, which alleged, in an article since removed, that the wife of the Republican presidential nominee worked for an escort service in the 1990s. Nor will he talk—on the record or off—about his politics. Or his family. “I have the most boring life in the world,” he says—on the record.

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Harder will gladly talk about one recent case, the one that led to him being called “Hollywood’s favourite lawyer” (Financial Times) and “arguably the highest-profile media lawyer in America” (The Hollywood Reporter). That case is Bollea v. Gawker, in which Terry Gene Bollea, better known as the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, won a $140 million civil judgment in a Florida court against Gawker, the Manhattan-based gossip website that in 2012 posted a brief excerpt of a covertly made recording in which Bollea was seen having sex with the wife of a friend. Bollea’s victory drove both Gawker Media and its founder, Nick Denton, to declare bankruptcy.

Some see in Bollea’s victory a setback for the very notion of a free press that, presumably, should have the right to publish even excerpts of a sex tape, if that sex tape is determined to have news value. Harder disagrees, painting Gawker as a uniquely bad actor with a destructive impulse. When I ask him what doomed Gawker, he answers with a single word: “Gawker.” And though much of the Manhattan media establishment mourned Gawker’s demise as one might have the fall of Rome, Harder shows no contrition. “If it has a chilling effect on irresponsible journalism? Awesome!”

Bold-Faced Faces

A man of aquiline features that are as controlled as his speech, Harder looks like he may have walked out of the Brooks Brothers store on Rodeo Drive a fully formed creature of Beverly Hills, spending his nearly 47 years on Earth without a single hair ever out of place. He was, in fact, born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, in a ranch-style house where his parents (his father is a financial consultant, his mother a homemaker) live to this day. He went off to college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and biked across the country during one summer vacation. He recalls being particularly enamored of Kansas. “I really liked Kansas,” he says. “The friendliest people I have met on planet Earth.”

Long before he ever sued a journalist, he briefly became one, serving as the managing editor of the short-lived Santa Cruz Independent, a weekly “on the boring side” that was to serve as a counterbalance to more liberal publications on an exceedingly liberal campus. After earning his law degree, Harder clerked for A. Andrew Hauk, a federal judge who earned notoriety for social views that today would likely get him tossed from the bench. For example, Hauk dismissed a case of DDT contamination against the Montrose Chemical Corporation, complaining that environmentalists were “do-gooders and pointy-heads running around snooping.” Harder worked on that case and once considered going into environmental law, only to conclude that the field “seemed a little boring.”

He eventually came to work for Lavely & Singer, an entertainment law firm whose defining figure was Martin Singer, the Brooklyn-born son of a Holocaust survivor. Hollywood requires several species of lawyer: the ruthless litigator, the capable deal-maker, the doyen of divorce. Singer turned what The New York Times called the “niche practice” of “shielding stars and their adjuncts from annoyance” into a major firm.

Harder flourished. He usually won his cases via settlement, and he did it quietly, without exposing his famous clients to undue publicity. Most often, those clients were seeking redress from a vendor who’d used a famous face in an advertisement. Harder made them stop and pay for it: a furniture company that named pieces after Clint Eastwood; a similar case involving a furniture line named after Humphrey Bogart; a Canadian fireplace-maker that sold its wares by using a picture of Jude Law.

In 2008, Harder left Singer’s practice for Wolf, Rifkin, Shapiro, Schulman & Rabkin LLP, a bigger Los Angeles firm that may have given the still-young lawyer an easier route to making partner. He seemed well on his way, in 2009 winning arbitrated cases over domain names for Sandra Bullock, Cameron Diaz, Kate Hudson and Sigourney Weaver. Two years later, he won $18 million for Cecchi Gori Pictures in a dispute over movie rights.

Then, in the fall of 2012, came a call from the office of Peter Thiel.

Execution by Surrogate

Harder bristles at being called Thiel’s peon, though one could have a worse patron than the billionaire founder of PayPal. "How is what Peter Thiel did different than what public interest organizations do?" he wonders. That’s a fair comparison, though not an entirely accurate one. When, for example, the Sierra Club sues the California Coastal Commission, it does so openly and, presumably, for the public interest. Thiel’s desire to sue Gawker out of existence stemmed from his need to exact revenge over a 2007 post that outed him. That post may have been of questionable journalistic value, but it passed legal muster, so Thiel waited for Gawker to make another mistake.

That mistake took place on October 4, 2012, when an editor for Gawker named A.J. Daulerio published a post titled “Even for a Minute, Watching Hulk Hogan Have Sex in a Canopy Bed Is Not Safe for Work but Watch It Anyway.” The post excerpted about two minutes of a 30-minute recording, surreptitiously made, of Bollea having sex with Heather Clem, the wife of his close friend Bubba “the Love Sponge” Clem. Bollea’s lawyer, David Houston, sent Gawker a letter demanding that the video be taken down, but Gawker refused.

It’s not known how Thiel recruited Harder, though it has been reported that a representative of Thiel simply called Harder and asked him to take the case. The former wrestler’s own coarse sensibilities could not have mattered much to the Stanford-educated Silicon Valley titan. He wanted only to bring down Gawker, and to do it without his own involvement revealed.

Harder filed suit against Gawker on October 15, 2012, charging that the post was “a shameful and outrageous violation of Mr. Bollea’s right of privacy by a group of loathsome Defendants who have no regard for human dignity and care only about maximizing their revenues and profits at the expense of all others.” Shortly thereafter, Harder left Wolf, Rifkin, taking the lucrative case with him and starting a new firm, Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP.

This led to some grousing, as Forbes has reported, that the firm “has made lawsuits against Gawker its ‘bread and butter,’” with Harder taking on two other cases against the site.

After more than two years of pretrial battle over the post (the video was eventually removed from the site), Bollea v. Gawker finally went to trial last spring in a state court in St. Petersburg, Florida. As late as last March, however, a settlement appeared to be close. Yet none took place, even though a trial promised the worst kind of publicity for Bollea. “Why would Hogan reject what must have been multi-million dollar offers?” wrote the legal blogger Dan Abrams. It’s now clear that Bollea didn’t settle because Bollea was merely a soldier in Thiel’s war.

The trial lasted 15 days. Harder spent much of his time inside the courtroom sitting quietly by his client. “At least initially, Harder’s presence was a mystery to me,” says Anna Phillips, who covered the trial for the Tampa Bay Times. “Although he handled some of the pretrial matters, he played almost no role in the actual trial—most of that work was shouldered by the Tampa attorneys. He seemed to be supervising rather than participating in the proceedings, but it only became clear later on why that was.”

Much of the day-to-day courtroom work was done by Tampa litigators Kenneth Turkel and Shane Vogt, of Bajo, Cuva, Cohen, Turkel. It was Turkel who selected the jury that eventually awarded his client $40 million more than what the lawsuit demanded; it was Vogt who gave the opening statement; Turkel cross-examined Denton, making him read the salacious post accompanying the Bollea sex tape; Vogt cross-examined the author of that post, Daulerio, who conceded that showing Bollea’s penis lacked “news value,” thus throwing Gawker’s entire defense into question; Turkel delivered the closing argument, in which he charged Denton with “playing God over Bollea’s right to privacy.”

Although he acknowledges the work by Turkel and Vogt, Harder makes plain that he was the mastermind behind Gawker’s demise and touts the trial as an important reminder that First Amendment freedoms have limits. “Think twice before you invade someone's privacy or violate their rights,” he wrote in a victory-lap op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter.

Defamation R Us

Despite the enormous award, Terry Bollea is unlikely to soon see a $140 million deposit in his checking account. With both Gawker and Denton having filed for bankruptcy, the appeals process has come to a stop. The generous award by the jury could stand, or shrink, or be the subject of an even-longer court battle, one that could potentially reach the Supreme Court and thus become a landmark ruling on newsworthiness in the digital age.

“Courts are struggling to draw the line right now,” explains Amy Gajda, a media law expert at Tulane Law School, with the standards of print media being challenged by online sources where a single person can be the publisher, editor, author and ombudsman of a news site visited by millions. Rules made for The Saturday Evening Post don’t work in a world ruled by TMZ and Matt Drudge.

Harder has been eager to paint Bollea v. Gawker as a precedent-setter, one that is likely to brush back the kind of online journalism practiced by Gawker. But his primary mission, critics say, was not to amend First Amendment case law but, rather, to be Thiel’s hit man.

Gawker made Harder famous. Shortly after that case ended, he became notorious. He did this by taking on the case of Melania Trump over the summer. Harder sued the Daily Mail , asking for damages of $150 million (the blogger and conspiracy theorist Webster Tarpley was also named in the suit). The Daily Mail took down the article, but the suit continues. Harder puts the matter plainly: “A publication cannot say you were a prostitute in the 1990s if you were not a prostitute in the 1990s.”

10_28_CharlesHarder_02 Melania Trump, wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, listens during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 21. Harder took Trump as his client after allegations by the Daily Mail that she worked as a prostitute in the 90s. Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty

Just days after taking on Trump as a client, Harder added disgraced Fox News founder Roger Ailes to his roster of the maligned. Ailes’s target is likely to be Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine, who wrote a book about Ailes and has more recently chronicled in great detail his history of alleged sexual harassment against female employees at Fox News. He won’t talk about the case, but Lauren Starke, a spokeswoman for the magazine, has acknowledged receipt of a letter from Harder, one that suggested a potential defamation lawsuit.

On October 13, Harder was in the news again. The previous day, People magazine published an account by Natasha Stoynoff, in which she claimed that Donald Trump had been sexually aggressive toward her during a 2005 interview with him. On the evening of October 13, Melania Trump tweeted a photo of a letter from Harder to People editor-in-chief Jess Cagle alleging that a portion of the account, in which Stoynoff describes running into Melania Trump in Manhattan, was “completely fictionalized.” He gave the magazine 24 hours to remove that passage, issue a retraction and apologize.

Cagle stood by Stoynoff’s account, echoing Gawker’s defiance over the Bollea sex tape. Stoynoff’s story has infinitely more news value than a post about the lurid doings of a minor celebrity, yet Harder isn’t likely to make that distinction.

“Harder really has assembled in one place the most committed enemies of liberal democracy,” Gawker founder Denton tells me in a text, citing his work on behalf of Ailes and Trump. “I’m not sure how much journalism would be left if Harder had his way.”
http://www.newsweek.com/charles-harder- ... ine-509926
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 01, 2017 9:15 am

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner get rabbinical pass to fly to Saudi Arabia on Shabbat
Not the first time the couple have managed to circumvent the rules

Image
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump will fly aboard Air Force One to Saudi Arabia with President Donald Trump on Friday, after receiving a rabbinical dispensation to travel on Shabbat.

President Trump’s daughter and her husband, Mr Kushner, as Orthodox Jews, typically observe Shabbat, but have made occasional exceptions.

They received a rabbinical pass to travel by car on President Trump’s inauguration celebrations. It is not clear on what grounds permission was given on this occasion, to accompany the president on his first international trip.

During the presidential campaign, Mr Kushner broke Shabbat during the “Access Hollywood” tape scandal, in which the then-Republican nominee was shown to have bragged about groping women without their consent.
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/ivanka ... t-1.438880


Amid Trump-Russia arrests, Jared Kushner briefly returns to U.S., only to suspiciously leave again
Bill Palmer
Updated: 12:49 am EDT Wed Nov 1, 2017
Home » Opinion

When it was announced on Friday night that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was about to begin making arrests in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal, one surreal detail stood out. Jared Kushner, one of the key players in the scandal, had just secretly left the country. Sure enough, by the time the arrests began on Monday morning, Kushner was back in the United States, and he wasn’t among those arrested. But now he’s immediately leaving the country again.


Kushner snuck off to Saudi Arabia over the weekend, and after it became clear that the arrests were about to commence, Trump’s White House was unwilling to provide any information about why Kushner had left the country. Was he going there to do something that was simply underhanded, or was this the most half-baked attempt at avoiding arrest of all time? In any case he did end up coming back to the United States. But now he’s heading right back to Saudi Arabia, in even more suspicious fashion, this time with Ivanka.


The Jewish Chronicle reveals that Jared Kushner requested a special rabbinical pass to travel on Shabbat, just so he can head back to Saudi Arabia on Friday (link). This means he’s making two different round trips from the United States to Saudi Arabia twice in the same week. That’s insane. It’s not something that anyone does for above-board reasons.


A cynic might suggest that Jared Kushner booked the first mystery trip to Saudi Arabia because he feared he was going to be among those arrested, and then he came back when he got word that it wouldn’t be him, and now he’s making up another excuse to leave because he fears more arrests are coming this weekend. If that’s not the case, then whatever he’s cooking up over in Saudi Arabia – two round trips in the same week – might be even more suspicious.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/as- ... gain/5839/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Nov 02, 2017 4:38 pm

Jared Kushner's team turned over documents to special counsel in Russia investigation

By Evan Perez, Pamela Brown and Shimon Prokupecz, CNN

Updated 4:23 PM ET, Thu November 2, 2017

(CNN)Jared Kushner has turned over documents in recent weeks to special counsel Robert Mueller as investigators have begun asking in witness interviews about Kushner's role in the firing of FBI Director James Comey, CNN has learned.

Mueller's investigators have expressed interest in Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a White House senior adviser, as part of its probe into Russian meddling, including potential obstruction of justice in Comey's firing, sources familiar with the matter said.

Their questions about Kushner signal that Mueller's investigators are reaching the President's inner circle and have extended beyond the 2016 campaign to actions taken at the White House by high-level officials. It is not clear how Kushner's advice to the President might relate to the overall Russia investigation or potential obstruction of justice.

Sources close to the White House say that based on their knowledge, Kushner is not a target of the investigation.

Kushner voluntarily turned over documents he had from the campaign and the transition, and these related to any contacts with Russia, according to a source familiar with the matter. The documents are similar to the ones Kushner gave to congressional investigators.

Two separate sources told CNN that investigators have asked other witnesses about Kushner's role in firing Comey. Investigators have also asked about how a statement was issued in the name of Donald Trump Jr. regarding a Trump Tower meeting and about the circumstances surrounding the departures of other White House aides, according to one source. Kushner attended the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between top Trump campaign officials and a cadre of Russian figures, including some with links to the Kremlin. It was arranged after Trump Jr. was told that the Russian government wanted to pass along damaging information about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton as part of its pro-Trump efforts. The meeting was also attended by Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign chairman.

A White House official said the Mueller team's questions about Kushner are not a surprise, and that Kushner would be among a list of people who investigators would be asking about.

A lawyer for Kushner did not comment. The White House declined to comment. Special counsel spokesman Peter Carr also declined to comment.

The question of whether -- or just how much -- Kushner influenced the President's decision to fire Comey is a matter of dispute among those in Trump's orbit. White House sources say it was the President alone who made that decision after watching Comey's congressional testimony May 3. While Kushner and those close to the White House will only say he was in favor of the decision -- or, in the words of one attorney, "did not oppose it" -- there are multiple sources who say that Kushner was a driver of the decision and expected it would be a political boon for the President.

Why Kushner would want Comey fired also remains a matter of dispute. Some people close to the White House believe it simply reflected a political neophyte wanting to get rid of a presidential enemy without understanding the ramifications, or a son-in-law trying to please his father-in-law and boss. One theory promoted by those in the anti-Kushner camp is that Kushner did not want Comey to comb through his own personal finances, and this was a way to slow down any investigation.

The disclosures follow the indictments this week of Manafort and his longtime business partner and Trump campaign deputy, Rick Gates. Both pleaded not guilty. Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty for making a false statement to the FBI about contacts with people connected with the Russian government.

Even before Mueller took over, the FBI had been looking at Kushner's multiple roles on both the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team. The 2016 Trump Tower meeting, in addition to sessions with Russia's ambassador and a Russian banker, were left off Kushner's security clearance forms, which had to be revised multiple times.

Other points of focus that pertain to Kushner include the Trump campaign's 2016 data analytics operation, his relationship with former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Kushner's own contacts with Russians, according to sources briefed on the probe.


"Not a target of the investigation." Right, keep telling yourself that. :thumbsup
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 05, 2017 10:07 pm

Image

This seems like a key paragraph in David Ignatius’s column on what appears to be unfolding in Saudi Arabia.

MBS is emboldened by strong support from President Trump and his inner circle, who see him as a kindred disrupter of the status quo — at once a wealthy tycoon and a populist insurgent. It was probably no accident that last month, Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, made a personal visit to Riyadh. The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy.


Mohammed bin Salman is just 32 years old and only recently selected as Crown Prince by his 81 year old father who himself became King in 2015. I am not so naive as to think something so dramatic as this turns entirely on the US. But the US, or any great power with a close ally-verging-on-client state, is often a restraining force. Perhaps not so much about human rights or the rule of law but often when it comes to dramatic and possibly destabilizing actions. I would not discount the degree to which Trump and perhaps Kushner on his own offered a green light or even pushed the Crown Prince to be audacious.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/kus ... re-1093890





Kremlin-linked billionaire invested more than $800,000 in Kushner’s startup company in 2014

BOMBSHELL
Massive Leak Reveals New Ties Between Trump Administration and Russia, Implicating Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Jared Kushner

The so-called Paradise Papers have revealed secrets of politicians worldwide, including new links between the Trump administration and Russia.

Andrew Desiderio

11.05.17 2:12 PM ET
A new trove of more than 13 million leaked documents implicates top officials and associates of President Donald Trump—as well as foreign politicians—in shady business relationships tied to offshore financial accounts.
In at least two cases, the documents highlight top administration officials’ previously undisclosed connections to Russia and Kremlin-linked interests.
The so-called Paradise Papers were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the same publication that obtained the “Panama Papers.” Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the new documents with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which led a global effort of 96 media organizations from 67 countries to pore through the records. The findings were published on Sunday.
The documents show that many of the wealthy individuals Trump brought into his administration have worked to legally store their money in offshore havens where they would be free from taxation in the United States. Trump has promised repeatedly to “drain the swamp,” in condemning the idea that well-connected individuals in Washington, D.C., preserve their own interests at the expense of the rest of the country.
Among the Trump administration officials implicated in the leaks is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who according to the documents concealed his ties to a Russian energy company that is partly owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s judo partner Gennady Timchenko and Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov. Through offshore investments, Ross held a stake in Navigator Holdings, which had a close business relationship with the Russian firm. Ross did not disclose that connection during his confirmation process on Capitol Hill.
“In concealing his interest in these shipping companies—and his ongoing financial relationship with Russian oligarchs—Secretary Ross misled me, the Senate Commerce Committee, and the American people,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said in a statement on Sunday. He characterized Ross’ financial disclosures as a “Russian nesting doll, with blatant conflicts of interest carefully hidden within seemingly innocuous companies.”
Ross has been linked to Russian interests before; in 2014, he poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Bank of Cyprus, an institution regarded by financial watchdogs as a haven for Russian money laundering. Ross' fellow investors included a pair of Russian oligarchs, including Dmitry Rybolovlev, the man who bought a Trump property in Palm Beach for $95 million, even though it was valued at less than $60 million. Ross became a vice chair of the bank, along with a reported former KGB officer. Former Deutsche Bank executive Josef Ackermann was installed as chairman. Deutsche Bank—one of Trump’s biggest creditors—subsequently paid hundreds of millions to settle disputes that it shipped $10 billion or more to Russia in suspect loans.

Top White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is also implicated. The documents reveal that Russian tech leader Yuri Milner invested $850,000 in a startup called Cadre that Kushner co-founded in 2014.
Milner has long had a reputation in Silicon Valley as a big-league investor; his firm at one point owned major chunks of both Facebook and Twitter. But Milner was never considered particularly Kremlin-connected. These new documents call that reputation into question. The investing arm of Gazprom, the state-backed energy company, financed a share of Facebook worth up to $1 billion; A Kremlin-owned bank invested $191 million into a Milner firm, and some of that money was then injected into Twitter.
Despite Milner’s investment in his startup, Kushner said in July that he told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door meeting that he never “relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.”
Representatives for Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA), the chairman and vice chairman of the committee, did not immediately return requests for comment. Kushner, who still has a stake in Cadre, did not previously disclose the firm’s other business ties.
The top adviser is already ensnared in the Russia investigations as questions continue to swirl about his meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Kushner attended the meeting alongside Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, who was indicted last week by the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert Mueller, in connection with his lobbying work for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and top economic adviser Gary Cohn are all mentioned in the documents. But some lower-level appointees have more egregious connections to offshore interests—in some cases, directly related to industries they are tasked with regulating.
Randal Quarles, who was confirmed just last month to be vice chairman for supervision at the Federal Reserve, has financial connections to a bank based in Bermuda that is being probed by U.S. officials under suspicion of tax evasion. A Federal Reserve spokesman told The Guardian that Quarles divested from the bank when he assumed his position at the U.S. central bank.
It isn’t just American officials who are implicated in the document dump. A substantial portion of Queen Elizabeth II’s private estate—around 10 million pounds—resides in offshore accounts based in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. Some of the money has been invested in companies with allegedly shady business practices.
A significant number of the leaked documents came from a law firm based in Bermuda called Appleby, which helps its clients set up offshore financial accounts with the goal of avoiding taxes on certain assets. Appleby has maintained that “there is no evidence of any wrongdoing, either on the part of ourselves or our clients.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/massive-l ... ed-kushner


Kremlin-linked billionaire had sunk huge money into Kushner’s real estate business

Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire whose holdings have included major stakes in Facebook and Twitter.

PATRICK T. FALLON / BLOOMBERG, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

Leaked files show that a state-controlled bank in Moscow helped to fuel Yuri Milner’s ascent in Silicon Valley, where the Russia investigation has put tech companies under scrutiny.

By JESSE DRUCKER
NOVEMBER 5, 2017
In the fall of 2010, the Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner took the stage for a Q. and A. at a technology conference in San Francisco. Mr. Milner, whose holdings have included major stakes in Facebook and Twitter, is known for expounding on everything from the future of social media to the frontiers of space travel. But when someone asked a question that had swirled around his Silicon Valley ascent — Who were his investors? — he did not answer, turning repeatedly to the moderator with a look of incomprehension.

Now, leaked documents examined by The New York Times offer a partial answer: Behind Mr. Milner’s investments in Facebook and Twitter were hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kremlin.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/w ... nce-244577



Confirmed: Vladimir Putin secretly floated huge money to Jared Kushner
Bill Palmer
Updated: 7:37 pm EST Sun Nov 5, 2017
Home » Politics

Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has long insisted that he’d never taken any Russian money. Now we know that Jared Kushner has long been lying about it. New leaks reveal a pair of major investments into Kushner’s companies which can be traced back to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin. Suddenly, Kushner now comes off as being every bit as much of a Russian financial puppet as Trump himself – and the Kushner bombshells are still landing as we speak.


First there was the Paradise Papers leak revealing that a Kremlin-linked billionaire invested more than $800,000 in Kushner’s startup company in 2014, according to a Daily Beast report (link. Then came word that another Kremlin-linked billionaire had sunk huge money into Kushner’s real estate business, according to a New York Times report (link). These kinds of transactions would not happen unless Vladimir Putin signed off on them, as Putin has control over every Kremlin oligarch. It gets even worse.


It’s long been documented that during the transition period, Kushner secretly met with the Russian Ambassador and then met with the head of a Russian bank. It’s been suspected that Kushner was attempting to secure a loan to keep his failing Manhattan office building afloat in exchange for political favors, but there has never been any publicly available proof of this. However, Kushner’s string of prior Kremlin cash grabs place his transition meeting in an entirely different light.


Jared Kushner failed to disclose his Russia meetings on his White House security clearance forms, a felony. He also lied to investigators about the earlier investments from the Kremlin, which could be viewed as obstruction of justice. This new information may help to explain the revelation earlier this week that Kushner has begun cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the obstruction of justice investigation into Donald Trump.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ku ... ared/5916/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 06, 2017 12:25 pm

this thread includes all the trump boys

NEWS & POLITICS
Did Russian Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya Just Gift-Wrap Donald Jr. to Robert Mueller?

The attorney alleges Trump officials promised quid pro quo if elected.

By David Edwards / Raw Story November 6, 2017, 8:27 AM GMT

Donald Trump Jr. reportedly told Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya during the 2016 campaign that his family would consider overturning an anti-corruption law opposed by Russia “if we come to power.” And she said that he also asked her to provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Bloomberg reported on Monday that Veselnitskaya made the remarks during a television interview in Moscow.

Trump Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitskaya was first revealed by The New York Times in July. Trump initially said that the meeting was to talk about Russian adoptions in the U.S., which had been halted by Russian President Vladimir Putin after the U.S. passed an anti-corruption law called the Magnitsky Act.

The president’s son later admitted that Veselnitskaya had promised to provide opposition research on then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

“Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it,” she recalled Trump Jr. telling her at the 2016 meeting. “I understand our side may have messed up, but it’ll take a long time to get to the bottom of it.”

According to Veselnitskaya, Trump Jr. also asked her to provide evidence that Clinton’s campaign accepted illegal donations connected to tax evasion. She said that she did not have the evidence he requested “and described the 20-minute meeting as a failure,” Bloomberg reported.

Veselnitskaya said that she would be willing testify before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee if they agreed to make the testimony public.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... rt-mueller


BloombergPolitics
Trump Jr. Hinted at Review of Anti-Russia Law, Moscow Lawyer Says
By Irina Reznik and Henry Meyer
November 6, 2017, 4:01 AM EST
In interview, Veselnitskaya tells of Trump Tower meeting
She says he sought proof in 2016 of illicit Clinton funds
A Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump’s oldest son last year says he indicated that a law targeting Russia could be re-examined if his father won the election and asked her for written evidence that illegal proceeds went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, said in a two-and-a-half-hour interview in Moscow that she would tell these and other things to the Senate Judiciary Committee on condition that her answers be made public, something it hasn’t agreed to. She has received scores of questions from the committee, which is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Veselnitskaya said she’s also ready -- if asked -- to testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.


Natalia VeselnitskayaPhotographer: Yury Martyanov/AFP via Getty Images
Her June 9, 2016 encounter with Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort in New York plays a key role in allegations that the campaign worked with Russia to defeat Clinton.


Veselnitskaya said she went to the New York meeting to show Trump campaign officials that major Democratic donors had evaded U.S. taxes and to lobby against the so-called Magnitsky law that punishes Russian officials for the murder of a Russian tax accountant who accused the Kremlin of corruption.

‘If We Come to Power’

“Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it,’’ Trump Jr. said of the 2012 law, she recalled. “I understand our side may have messed up, but it’ll take a long time to get to the bottom of it,” he added, according to her.


Donald Trump Jr.Photographer: Albin Lohr-Jones/Pool via Bloomberg
Veselnitskaya also said Trump Jr. requested financial documents showing that money that allegedly evaded U.S. taxes had gone to Clinton’s campaign. She didn’t have any and described the 20-minute meeting as a failure.

A lawyer for Trump Jr., Alan Futerfas, said the president’s son had no comment about the interview, the first time Veselnitskaya has offered details about what was discussed at Trump Tower in Manhattan. In the past, Trump Jr. has said that he had wasted his time seeing the lawyer because she provided no useful information.

The meeting took place after British publicist Rob Goldstone contacted Trump Jr. on behalf of Veselnitskaya to request it, describing her as a Russian government lawyer who had information and documents that would incriminate Clinton.


“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,’’ Goldstone wrote in an email to Trump Jr.

‘I Love It’

“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,’’ Trump Jr. replied almost immediately.

Veselnitskaya says she told the president’s son she had information that Clinton’s campaign may have received some of almost $1 billion the wealthy Ziff brothers gained from Russian investments that allegedly evaded U.S. taxes.

She says she was acting in a private capacity and not as a Russian government representative. But there is evidence of an official imprimatur: She brought to the meeting a four-page talking-points memorandum in English that contained very similar information to a document she had provided to the office of Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika in 2015, both of which were obtained by Bloomberg News. Alexander Kurennoy, the spokesman for the prosecutor general’s office, declined to comment.

In April last year, Veselnitskaya took part in a meeting with a visiting congressional delegation headed by Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican with close ties to Russia, that was attended by a senior prosecution official. There she raised the allegations about the Ziff brothers’ money. President Vladimir Putin has recently made the same argument.

Veselnitskaya is defending a Russian businessman in the U.S. on a money-laundering case related to the Magnitsky law. It was settled out of court this year without an admission of guilt.

Magnitsky Law

This law, which Veselnitskaya has been campaigning against, targets Russian officials in retaliation for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a tax accountant who worked for U.S.-born fund manager William Browder. His Hermitage Capital was once the biggest foreign-portfolio investor in Russia. Ziff Brothers Investments LLC invested in Russia with Browder using offshore entities, Veselnitskaya has said.

Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison in 2009 after uncovering what he said was a tax fraud that diverted $230 million of Russian state funds into the pockets of a handful of civil servants. The 2012 U.S. law named after him incensed the Kremlin, which then banned adoptions from Russia to the U.S., further straining ties between Washington and Moscow.

Ziff Brothers Contributions

Ziff Brothers Investments has contributed to Republicans and Democrats since the 2012 election cycle, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. It gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative and made modest donations to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

A spokesman for the Ziff family said it had no comment.

In the interview, Veselnitskaya said she sent her memo to Goldstone in advance so Trump Jr. could familiarize himself with the issues, but he seemed not to have done so. When she began laying out the case against the Ziffs, she said that he asked: “This money the Ziffs got from Russia, do you have any financial documents showing that this money went to Clinton’s campaign?”

She didn’t and the meeting quickly fell apart. Kushner left after a few minutes and Manafort appeared to have fallen asleep. “The meeting was a failure; none of us understood what the point of it had been,’’ Veselnitskaya said, adding she had no further contacts with the Trump campaign.

Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, has sent her more than 90 questions concerning the meeting, asking whether she knows Putin, Manafort and Kushner, and requesting information about Russian hacking and interference, she said. “That I definitely don’t have!” the lawyer said. “I made up my mind a long time ago: My testimony must be honest, full and public.”

Read more: Understanding the Trump-Russia Saga - QuickTake Q&A

Taylor Foy, a Grassley spokesman, said, “We are encouraged that she is planning to cooperate and look forward to receiving the information.” He wouldn’t comment on whether the committee would comply with her request to make her answers public.

Congressional investigators prefer not to release their private interviews and documents in the middle of an investigation. There’s nothing, however, that prevents Veselnitskaya from releasing whatever she wants on her own.

Veselnitskaya and the Russian businessman she’s representing in the New York case, Denis Katsyv, recently asked for permission to enter the U.S. to attend a hearing in the case against his company, Prevezon Holdings Ltd. Prevezon still hasn’t paid a $5.9 million settlement to the U.S. because under the terms of the out-of-court agreement it committed to transfer the funds only after the Netherlands released 3 million euros ($3.5 million) belonging to it that remain frozen.

Frozen Assets

The Dutch authorities unfroze the money at the U.S.’s request on Oct. 10 but froze it again because of a separate money-laundering investigation in the Netherlands, according to U.S. court filings. Prevezon said the Netherlands started the investigation in response to a complaint from Browder.

On Nov. 3, U.S. District Judge William Pauley rejected Prevezon’s request to order the federal government to allow Veselnitskaya and Katsyv into the U.S. to attend a hearing on Nov. 9 sought by prosecutors, who may file a request to enforce the terms of the agreement.

Without “strong proof” that the government’s denial was made “irrationally or in bad faith,” the judge said there is no basis for him to interfere with a decision that sits squarely within the purview of the Executive Branch. Veselnitskaya and Katsyv have now asked to testify by phone or video.
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti ... awyer-says
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 16, 2017 5:40 pm

Senate Judiciary Makes Bipartisan Ask For ‘Missing’ Kushner Russia Docs


Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
By TIERNEY SNEED Published NOVEMBER 16, 2017 2:28 PM

The Senate Judiciary Committee sent a bipartisan letter to Jared Kushner’s attorney Thursday alleging that the production of documents the committee has requested Kushner turn over as part of its Russia probe was “incomplete.”

According to committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Kushner did not turn over a Wikileaks-related email forwarded to him; a document Kushner forwarded about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite”; and communications with Russian-American Chamber of Commerce President Sergei Millian on which Kushner was copied.

These are among “several documents that are known to exist but were not included in your production,” the senators said.

“We appreciate your voluntary cooperation with the Committee’s investigation, but the production appears to have been incomplete,” the letter said. “In addition, you asked for clarification on the scope of the request. Therefore, we write today to clarify the scope and reiterate our requests for documents.”

The senators added that Kushner has not turned over his phone records that the senators “presume exist and would relate to Mr. Kushner’s communications regarding several requests.”

They are also seeking transcripts from Kushner’s interviews with the other congressional committees investigating Russia’s election interference, as well as documents related to his security clearance applications (which Kushner had to amend several times due to omissions of certain foreign contacts).

A whole section of the letter is devoted to documents requested related to Kushner’s communications with former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.



Separately, the senators addressed a concern Kushner apparently raised that turning over some of the documents they’d requested would “implicate the President’s Executive Privilege.”

“We ask that you work with White House counsel to resolve any questions of privilege so that you can produce the documents that have been requested or provide a privilege log that describes the documents over which the President is asserting executive privilege,” they said.

Read the full letter below:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... -judiciary
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 18, 2017 10:37 am

JARED KUSHNER HIDING INFORMATION ABOUT RUSSIA BACKDOOR AND WIKILEAKS CONTACTS, SENATORS SAY

BY CRISTINA MAZA ON 11/17/17 AT 1:14 PM

U.S.JARED KUSHNERRUSSIAINVESTIGATION
The President’s son-in-law and trusted adviser Jared Kushner failed to provide Senate investigators with emails he was forwarded about WikiLeaks and an invitation to contact Russia through a “backdoor,” two senior lawmakers claim.

In a letter to Kushner's lawyer Abbe Lowell, Senator Chuck Grassley and Senator Dianne Feinstein reveal that Kushner received emails in September 2016 about WikiLeaks and about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite."

The Senate is currently looking into whether Trump and his associates colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential campaign. The House and a special counsel are also conducting their own investigations into the same matter.


Caroline O. @RVAwonk
Now is a good time to remember that Jared Kushner still has security clearance & access to classified national security information. https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/931250713707139072


The Senate lawmakers say they know of the existence of the documents from other witnesses in their investigation. Yet Kushner, who says he is cooperating, has not produced them.

“There are several documents that are known to exist but were not included in your production. For example, other parties have produced September 2016 email communications to Mr. Kushner concerning WikiLeaks, which Мr. Kushner then forwarded to another campaign official,” the letter reads. “Likewise, other parties have produced documents concerning а "Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite" which Mr. Kushner also forwarded.”

American intelligence agencies say that WikiLeaks worked as a channel for Russian intelligence services to share information stolen from the Democratic Party during the 2016 electoral campaign. Earlier this week, the Atlantic revealed that Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, had exchanged several direct messages with WikiLeaks via Twitter. The report also said Kushner had forwarded the information from WikiLeaks to a Trump campaign staffer.

In their letter to Kushner's lawyer, the Senators also requested copies of communications among Trump associates and the Belorussian-American businessman Sergei Millian, a former head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. Millian has long claimed to have ties to President Trump and his advisers, but the President’s staff has said the ties are exaggerated.


Reports earlier this year suggested that Millian may be one of the sources included in the Steele dossier, a document compiled by a former British intelligence officer detailing alleged ties between President Trump and Russia.

The Senate letter also indicated that Kushner’s lawyer had failed to hand over unspecified phone records and a copy of a document Kushner submitted in order to obtain a government security clearance. Kushner’s security clearance has come under fire in recent months after it was revealed that he failed to disclose information about his meetings with foreigners, including with a Russian lawyer with alleged ties to the Kremlin.

In addition to the documents about a back channel , the Senators requested documentation related to Trump former national security adviser Michael Flynn, including information on Flynn’s ties to the head of a Russian energy company and WikiLeaks.

Reports suggest that Flynn is the next target of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

The Senators' letter comes following a Newsweek article earlier this week in which a former Watergate prosecutor claimed that definitive proof of Trump's collusion with Russia exists in the email inboxes of Jared Kushner, Trump advisor Stephen Miller, and former Trump campaign staffer Hope Hicks, among others

http://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-t ... aks-715349


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Jared Kushner Sued for Allegedly Overcharging Tenants (Again)

Trump’s son-in-law illegally deregulated sixteen Brooklyn Heights apartments, says a new lawsuit

by STEVEN WISHNIA

NOVEMBER 15, 2017Six tenants in a Brooklyn Heights building owned by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner are alleging that he illegally deregulated their apartments and charged them “far in excess of the legal rent,” according to a class-action lawsuit filed in Kings County Supreme Court November 14.
The Kushner Companies, according to the lawsuit, failed to register sixteen of the eighteen apartments in the six-story brownstone at 18 Sidney Place as rent-stabilized when it acquired the building from Brooklyn Law School in 2014. “When they purchased the building, they were supposed to return all the units to rent stabilization,” says Aaron Carr, executive director of the Housing Rights Initiative, which developed the lawsuit. “They never did.”

The lawsuit “is without merit,” a Kushner Companies spokesperson told the Voice. “The previously empty apartments at 18 Sidney Place were fully renovated to bring them to fair market value in accordance with applicable New York State rent regulations. The only predatory conduct here is that of Aaron Carr, who seems bent on attacking responsible owners in the press for the sake of sensational headlines.”
“That’s not what the law says,” responds Roger Sachar of Newman Ferrara, the law firm representing the tenants. “The statute says nothing about renovations.”

If 18 Sidney Place had been a regular apartment building when Kushner acquired it, he could have legally deregulated vacant apartments by doing renovations that cost enough to get the rent over $2,500. But because it was being used as student housing, Sachar explains, it was temporarily exempt from rent regulations — and “when that temporary exemption ended, rent stabilization was supposed to snap back into place.”

When that happens, Sachar says, a new legal rent is supposed to be set based on a formula ordained by the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR): the last legal rent, adjusted for rent increases allowed by the city Rent Guidelines Board, plus a 20 percent vacancy bonus. The last legal rents were $1,000 a month or less, Carr says. By that formula, an apartment that cost $1,000 when Brooklyn Law School acquired the building in 1991 would be around $2,200 now.

“But instead, Mr. Kushner cheated,” says Lucas Ferrara of Newman Ferrara. “He decided to sidestep rent stabilization.” With Kushner touting 18 Sidney Place as “uniquely Brooklyn,” apartments there have been advertised at $2,600 for a studio and $3,800 for a one-bedroom.

The suit is demanding that the legal rent be calculated and the overcharges refunded to tenants, says Sachar. Because it’s a class-action suit, the tenants can’t claim penalties or punitive damages.
The building’s recent history represents a classic predatory landlord pattern: Buy a rent-stabilized building, empty it out, renovate the apartments and rent them at luxury prices, and then flip the building for a rapid and massive profit. Kushner acquired 18 Sidney Place in February 2014 as part of a six-building portfolio he bought from Brooklyn Law School for $36.5 million, according to the Real Deal. As they were 90 percent vacant, he didn’t have to empty them. Last July, also according to the Real Deal, he put 18 Sidney Place and a smaller building at 144 Willow Street on the market for $20 million. He’d paid $7.6 million for them.

Fraudulently high rents have become increasingly common since the state forced New York City to allow the deregulation of vacant apartments above a certain rent in 1997. Once apartments are deregulated, their rents are no longer required to be registered with DHCR, so it is much harder for tenants to detect fraud. The most common method is inflating the cost of improvements on vacant apartments, as legal increases are pegged to the amount spent on renovations. In 2014, the state Tenant Protection Unit (TPU) said “landlords did not have proof of apartment improvements used to justify rent increases” in 40 percent of the 1,100 such cases it had audited in its first two years.

“To tell that Kushner Companies is engaging in potential illegal misconduct, all you need is Google,” says Carr. Housing Rights Initiative, which the former state assembly staffer founded about two years ago, analyzes publicly available data to look for indicators of illegal rent increases and identify specific buildings where rent fraud is likely.

The 18 Sidney Place lawsuit grew out of an investigation of 89 Hicks Street, another building Kushner bought from Brooklyn Law School. After getting tenants there to obtain their apartments’ rent histories from DHCR, Housing Rights Initiative helped them file a similar class-action suit in August.

The problem with the state’s approach to enforcing the laws against rent fraud, says Carr, is that it is “reactive,” depending largely on complaints from tenants. But that requires tenants to know their rights and the law, and to be willing to get into a prolonged bureaucratic and legal battle with their landlord. In apartments that have been deregulated, tenants have no legal right to renew their lease, and it is likely that their lease will expire long before their case is resolved.

“Most landlords get away with this,” Carr says. “There is no consequence or penalty.” The TPU has taken small steps toward broader investigations, but tenant advocates say the understaffed agency doesn’t do things like investigate other properties owned by a landlord found to have charged illegally high rents in one building.
With rent fraud so widespread, Carr says, the reactive model “is not going to capture the systemicness of the problem.” DHCR, he adds, should view landlords who have not registered rents as “low-hanging fruit” and audit them.

Housing Rights Initiative is also urging the state to investigate all the fifty-plus buildings the Kushner Companies own in the city.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/11/15 ... nts-again/





Legal expert says Jared Kushner will end up “doing hard time”

Bill Palmer
Updated: 1:07 am EST Fri Nov 17, 2017

With each passing day we learn more about the role that Jared Kushner played in the Donald Trump campaign’s coordination with Russia during the election, and the extent he subsequently went to in the hope of covering it up, and the legal trouble he’s now facing. After yet another major revelation about Trump’s son-in-law, one widely respected legal expert now says that he believes Kushner will end up spending serious time in prison.
On Thursday evening the news surfaced that Jared Kushner failed to turn over documents relating to a Russian backdoor overture and a Russian dinner invitation, even after congressional investigators requested those documents (link). It raises questions about why Kushner is refusing to cooperate with those particular aspects of the investigation, and whether he believes he would incriminate himself by turning them over.
This news led Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, one of the most widely respected legal minds in the nation, to tweet “My prediction: Kush will be among the Trumpsters who end up doing hard time.” (link). Tribe did not go on to spell out which potential charges Kushner might go to prison for. It is known that he secretly met with the Russian Ambassador and the head of a Russian bank during the transition period, though it’s not known precisely what was discussed during those meetings. It is, however, known that Kushner omitted those meetings from his White House security clearance forms, and it’s stated on the forms that lying on them is an imprisonable felony.
Perhaps most notably, Professor Tribe is asserting that multiple people will do “hard time” for their roles in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos have already been arrested for their roles. Based on federal court schedules, it appears that several more sealed indictments are in place, waiting to be unsealed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller at his discretion.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/do ... hner/6068/



NOV 18 2017, 12:54 AM ET
Kushner failed to disclose outreach from Putin ally to Trump campaign
by KEN DILANIAN and CAROL E. LEE

WASHINGTON — President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, failed to disclose what lawmakers called a "Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite" involving a banker who has been accused of links to Russian organized crime, three sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

An email chain described Aleksander Torshin, a former senator and deputy head of Russia's central bank who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as wanting Trump to attend an event on the sidelines of a National Rifle Association convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 2016, the sources said. The email also suggests Torshin was seeking to meet with a high-level Trump campaign official during the convention, and that he may have had a message for Trump from Putin, the sources said.

Kushner rebuffed the request after receiving a lengthy email exchange about it between a West Virginia man and Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn, the sources said.

Kushner responded to the email by telling Dearborn and the handful of other Trump campaign officials on the email that they should not accept requests from people who pretend to have contacts with foreign officials to aggrandize themselves, according Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell. Dearborn currently serves as a deputy chief of staff in the White House.

"Pass on this," Kushner responded, according to a letter Lowell sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday evening. "A lot of people come claiming to carry messages. Very few we are able to verify. For now I think we decline such meetings."

However, Torshin was seated with the candidate's son, Donald Trump Jr., during a private dinner on the sidelines of a May 2016 NRA event during the convention in Louisville, according to an account Torshin gave to Bloomberg. Congressional investigators have no clear explanation for how that came to be, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Russian State Duma round table meeting on teaching law basics in secondary schools
Deputy Governor of the Bank of Russia Alexander Torshin addresses a meeting in Moscow in 2016. Alexander Shalgin / TASS via Getty Images
Trump Jr.'s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller are investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Spanish anti-corruption officials have identified Torshin as a "godfather" in the Russian mafia — something Torshin has denied.

The disclosure is the latest example of a senior Russian official seeking to make high-level contacts with the Trump campaign.

It comes after the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Kushner a letter this week accusing him of failing to disclose a series of documents pursuant to requests by Congressional investigators. Lowell said Kushner had responded to every request.

2011 Russia Day Awards
Alexander Torshin, center, attends a ceremony with then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in 2011. Konstantin Zavrazhin / Getty Images file
The source familiar with Kushner's document production said his team made clear to the committee that they were starting with documents he's provided to other congressional committees and were going to subsequently exchange other information.

One source familiar with Kushner's testimony before congressional intelligence committees said he specifically denied, under oath, that he was familiar with any attempts by WikiLeaks to contact the campaign. But, according to the source, Kushner was sent an email by Trump Jr. about his conversations on Twitter with WikiLeaks, which were first disclosed by the Atlantic this week. Kushner forwarded an email about the WikiLeaks conversations to communications director Hope Hicks, the source said. A second source familiar with Kushner's testimony did not dispute that account.

Lowell said in the letter to the judiciary committee chairman and ranking member Friday that the WikiLeaks document has been mischaracterized.

"Mr. Kushner had no contacts with that organization and was, along with others, forwarded an email from Donald Trump Jr. that has been widely reported and disseminated. There is no new document concerning Mr. Kushner," Lowell said.

"As to the document from Mr. Trump Jr., Mr. Kushner was one of many people to whom one email was sent, and he did not respond," Lowell said in the letter.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ku ... gn-n822021


Senate panel interested in Russians' request for Trump meeting during campaign

Last Updated Nov 17, 2017 6:11 PM EST

CBS News has learned that a Russian national requested a meeting with Donald Trump during the presidential campaign in May 2016, and the request is at the center of the Senate Judiciary Committee's demand for more information from Jared Kushner.

On Thursday, the committee asked for additional information from Kushner about a "Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite." Kushner is Mr. Trump's son-in-law and a top White House adviser who played a key role in the campaign.

A source familiar with the document request says the "dinner invite" referred to an email requesting a meeting with a man named Alexander Torshin and a woman reported to be Torshin's assistant, Maria Butina. The source says both claimed in the email to be members of an all-Russian organization called "The Right To Bear Arms."

According to the source, Torshin and Butina were hoping to meet then-candidate Trump and were eager for Mr. Trump to travel to Russia to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The request was made through an intermediary who was attached to a National Rifle Association (NRA) event in Kentucky.

A source says the intermediary forwarded the five-page request to Trump campaign officials, including Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Eventually it was forwarded to Kushner. The source, who has seen the email, says Kushner declined the request for a meeting, apparently commenting that people claiming to carry messages to the campaign rarely are.


However, Torshin does have ties to the Kremlin. According to published reports, in 2015 he was appointed deputy governor of the Bank of Russia. Reports also suggest he is suspected of having ties to organized crime.

In a statement, Kushner's attorney would not discuss the email request, but offered to respond to the Senate Judiciary Committee demands.

"Mr. Kushner and we have been responsive to all requests. We provided the Judiciary Committee with all relevant documents that had to do with Mr. Kushner's calls, contacts or meetings with Russians during the campaign and transition, which was the request," attorney Abbe Lowell said. "We also informed the committee we will be open to responding to any additional requests and that we will continue to work with White House Counsel for any responsive documents from after the inauguration. We have been in a dialogue with the committee and will continue to do so as part of Mr. Kushner's voluntary cooperation with relevant bipartisan inquiries."

In December 2016, Kushner discussed with then-Russian envoy Sergey Kislyak the idea of setting up a "back channel" for communications with the Trump transition team and Russian officials. He also met with Sergey Gorkov, the CEO of Russia's state-owned Vnesheconombank (VEB), which was already sanctioned by the U.S.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-pan ... -campaign/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 21, 2017 7:56 pm

Our TOTALLY LOYAL ALLIES, ISRAEL, went around the State Dept. to Kushner and Bannon - BEFORE THEY HAD ANY ACTUAL GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY
Image


Lying on his SF-86, Kushner concealed his shaping foreign policy WHILE OBAMA WAS STILL PRESIDENT

WSJ: Mueller’s Team Investigating Kushner’s Contact With Foreign Leaders


Andrew Harrer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
By ESME CRIBB Published NOVEMBER 21, 2017 6:44 PM
Investigators working for Robert Mueller, the special counsel probing Russian interference in the 2016 election, are looking into contacts between White House adviser and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and foreign heads of state, the Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, that Mueller’s investigators have questioned witnesses about Kushner’s involvement in a United Nations resolution condemning Israel’s settlements in disputed territories.

A day before the United Nations security council unanimously passed the resolution, Trump said it “should be vetoed.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Kushner and Trump’s former chief adviser Steve Bannon were both involved in Israeli officials’ outreach to Trump’s administration regarding the resolution.

Investigators are also making inquiries about Kushner’s meeting in December 2016 with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian state-owned bank that has deep connections to Russia’s intelligence agency, according to the report. The United States added the bank in question, Vnesheconombank, to its list of sanctioned entities in 2014.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, it was not immediately clear why Mueller’s investigators are looking into the matter, and such questions “don’t necessarily indicate suspicion.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/w ... gn-leaders


New Disturbing Details About Trump Jr.’s Undisclosed Russia Meeting Just Came Out

BY GRANT STERN

PUBLISHED ON NOVEMBER 21, 2017

New details just emerged about the infamous meeting last summer, between the highest ranks of the Trump Campaign and a Russian agent promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, along with her substantial entourage.

Ten days after news of the Trump Tower meeting emerged, Crocus Group executive Ike Kaveladze was identified as the 8th and final known person in the room. He’s was publicly outed by the federal government as the man behind a billion dollar money laundering racket in the late 1990s.

Initially, Kaveladze’s presence was downplayed by his lawyer Scott Balber as nothing more than a translator for convenience’s sake, but today’s story from The Daily Beast reveals that is probably a lie.

Ikraly “Ike” Kaveladze flew all the way from Los Angeles to New York to attend the meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower after a fellow Crocus employee specifically told him it was about Russian sanctions. TDB wrote:

Scott Balber, Kaveladze’s attorney, told The Daily Beast that before Kaveladze headed from Los Angeles to New York for the meeting, he saw an email noting that Kushner, Manafort, and Trump Jr. would all be involved. He thought it would be odd for them to attend the meeting, so he called Roman Beniaminov before heading to New York. Both Beniaminov and Kaveladze have worked with the Agalarov’s real estate development company, the Crocus Group.

Balber said that Beniaminov told Kaveladze that he heard Rob Goldstone— Emin Agalarov’s music manager— discuss “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. It’s never become completely clear what kind of “dirt” the Russians were talking about.

Roman Beniaminov is a Crocus employee and was listed as Emin Agalarov’s General Manager, whose father Aras Agalarov is known as the Trump of Russia for his high-profile Crocus real estate development firm whose projects include the eponymous Crocus City where Miss Universe Moscow was held in November 2013.

Kaveladze turned to Beniaminov for an opinion from inside Crocus what the meeting would really be about, as TDB reports:

According to Balber, Beniaminov was the only person to give Kaveladze any information about the meeting’s purpose.

“That was the only data point Ike had, which was inconsistent with everything else he had heard, which was that the meeting was about the Magnitsky Act,” Balber said.


Roman Beniaminov is also a high school friend of Emin’s and currently runs a real estate rehab company in New Jersey, not far from where they met.


As part of Emin’s music business team, Beniaminov helped set up an appearance at the Kennedy Center, which drew personal thanks on the son of an oligarch’s Instagram account.

Emin Agalarov and Ike Kavaladze’s lawyer Scott Balber – who in a remarkable coincidence is also Donald Trump’s former lawyer – has been representing both men since the first revelation of the Trump Tower meeting, so there’s no reason to doubt the authenticity of his statement.

However, the veracity of the statement is not assured. In fact, this statement raises entirely new questions about the meeting between the Trump team and the Russians led by Rob Goldstone, who plainly identified the purpose of the meet as part of Putin’s official help for Trump with information from Russia’s equivalent of the Attorney General.

Neither Agalarov the father, nor son, is a US citizen and allowed to contribute anything of value to a federal election by law.

Ike Kaveladze is an American citizen.

It’s also illegal for any American to act as a conduit or straw donor for a foreign national in a federal election.

The revelation of Kaveladze’s uncertainty about if the meeting was worth his time flying across the country heightens the importance of his personal attendance because he was not just any random Crocus employee, but rather one of the key figures in luring Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow just three short years earlier.

Today’s news seems to indicate that it may have even been fairly common knowledge inside the Crocus Company, that Emin and his father Aras were actively working on a political mission related to the Magnitsky Act sanctions and our elections.
http://verifiedpolitics.com/new-disturb ... just-came/


REPORT
How Jared Kushner’s Newspaper Became a Favorite Outlet for WikiLeaks Election Hacks
The New York Observer, owned by Trump’s son-in-law, was a friendly outlet for the 2016 Russian hackers.

BY JENNA MCLAUGHLIN | NOVEMBER 17, 2017, 12:50 PM
White House senior advisor Jared Kushner at a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Nov. 9 in Beijing, China. (Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty Images)
White House senior advisor Jared Kushner at a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Nov. 9 in Beijing, China. (Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty Images)
In the fall of 2014, Julian Assange, the embattled head of WikiLeaks, was meeting with a steady stream of supportive journalists in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had taken refuge to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges. Among those seeking an audience with Assange was a freelancer working for the New York Observer, the newspaper owned and published by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and key advisor, Jared Kushner.

Ken Kurson, the newspaper’s editor in chief — along with a freelance writer he’d hired — helped arrange a “no-holds-barred” interview with Assange that October.

“My editor Ken Kurson (kkurson@observer.com) and I are very interested in an interview with Julian Assange. This would be a cover story.… We will be in London the first week of October,” wrote Jacques Hyzagi, a freelance reporter for the Observer, to a press consultant who arranged interviews for WikiLeaks.

Kurson, when contacted by Foreign Policy, said he did not attend that meeting and has never communicated with Assange; he insists that the profile was Hyzagi’s idea. “We ran an interview pitched to us by a freelancer,” he wrote in an email.

“I have never communicated in any way with Julian Assange and this sort of fact-free, evidenceless charge is analogous to pizzagate and other totally ludicrous conspiracies,” he added.

Hyzagi did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

Yet a series of exchanges between Hyzagi and the WikiLeaks representative indicated that a meeting involving Kurson and Assange was in the works; at one point Leonardo DiCaprio was invited to tag along, according to emails obtained by FP. (DiCaprio did not end up attending.)

After that, the plan was to travel to Moscow to meet with Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor. Snowden’s team declined a request for an interview from Hyzagi, according to Ben Wizner, Snowden’s attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Hyzagi’s meeting with Assange resulted in a friendly feature in the Observer and kicked off a long-running series of laudatory articles about the WikiLeaks founder — many of those stories including exclusive details about the Australian transparency advocate. Later, the Observer also became a favored outlet of Guccifer 2.0, a suspected Russian hacker, who along with WikiLeaks released troves of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). WikiLeaks tweeted some of the Observer’s coverage, including stories expressing doubt that the Russians had meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Kushner has long denied any collusion with the Russian government, which is suspected of targeting the 2016 election, but his newspaper proved a favored conduit for hacks, which the U.S. intelligence community says were carried out on Kremlin orders. The Observer was not the only outlet that received exclusive access to Guccifer 2.0 documents — or those from other outlets such as DC Leaks, widely believed to be part of the same campaign — but it was the only one owned by someone who was part of the Trump campaign.

“This would be of significant interest to law enforcement and investigators,” John Sipher, a former CIA officer who worked in Russia, wrote in an email to FP.

How Jared Kushner’s Newspaper Became a Favorite Outlet for WikiLeaks Election Hacks 769 SHARES
Kushner and his connection to WikiLeaks are now back in the crosshairs of congressional investigations, though there’s no indication his ownership of the Observer is part of that probe. Senate Judiciary Committee investigators are looking into emails Kushner received concerning WikiLeaks and a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite,” according to Politico.

A congressional source told FP that Kushner, during testimony on Capitol Hill, said he never had contact with WikiLeaks or Assange — nor did anyone else on the campaign. In fact, the Atlantic reported this week that Donald Trump Jr. and Assange exchanged direct messages on Twitter during the campaign.

There’s no evidence that Kurson or anyone from the Observer was involved in linking WikiLeaks to Kushner or members of the Trump campaign, however.

A spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence Committee declined to comment on whether the Observer was part of the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the election.

* * *
When Jared Kushner purchased the New York Observer in 2006 for $10 million, the newspaper provided the young real estate magnate with a “voice in New York,” wrote Business Insider, in an article about his media work.

Before the meeting with Assange, the Observer, which focused primarily on New York politics and culture, had dedicated little space to the Australian transparency advocate, who achieved notoriety in 2010 after publishing hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Rex Reed, in a review for the Observer of an Assange biopic in October 2013, described him as an “Australian cyberpunk” who was “leaking top-secret government documents that endanger the lives of millions under the bogus guise of the public’s right to know.”

That tone changed in 2014, when the Observer published a feature story on Oct. 16 by Jacques Hyzagi titled “Free Julian Assange: An Exclusive Interview with the WikiLeaks Founder.” Following that article, there was a major uptick in coverage of Assange’s life and work — almost exclusively in a glowing light.

Kurson maintains that he had no direct connection to Assange and that the contributors who wrote the pieces do not represent the site because they are not full-time employees. “The writers who contacted Assange (first Hyzagi, then Celia Farber) were freelancers,” Kurson wrote. “They were not Observer employees and didn’t operate on Observer’s behalf.”

Sources familiar with the Observer disputed those claims, saying that Kurson selected freelancers and articles for publication. “Ken used to just take control of stuff that other people wouldn’t like,” said one source who worked with him. “He’d show up with the finished product and tell people to run it.”

Over the next few years, the Observer gave WikiLeaks a platform, running pieces on the organization’s crowdfunding of information about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and on exactly “Why Julian Assange Doesn’t Want Hillary Clinton to Be President.”

As the 2016 presidential campaign kicked off, and WikiLeaks started getting sources offering access to emails deep within the Democratic Party, the coverage ramped up. The site gave WikiLeaks credit for proving “the [Democratic] primary was rigged” and for exposing dangerous corruption at the DNC. The Observer published dozens of stories largely celebrating WikiLeaks and the revelations it was helping expose.

Most of those articles were written by Michael Sainato, a regular contributor. Kurson said he never edited Sainato’s work and that he was not a staffer.

Sainato did not respond to request for comment.

Assange has repeatedly refused to discuss his sources for the DNC leaks WikiLeaks published just before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 2016. He suggested that “some” of the leaks could’ve come from Russia but never publicly identified any connection with Guccifer 2.0, who is widely suspected of being connected to the Russian government.

But when Guccifer 2.0 started releasing DNC documents, the Observer was one of the outlets that received the leaks.

Writers working for the Observer trumpeted exclusive access to various DNC hack releases and solicited those leaks openly, describing how they were passed files for news coverage.

Possibly the most controversial piece that the Observer published concerned exclusive documents that supposedly exonerated Assange from allegations that he sexually assaulted two women in Sweden. Describing the case against him, which never went to trial, as potential “Nordic neurosis,” the piece argued that the encounters with the two women were simply “fumbling, bleak and unromantic.”

Not all of the Observer’s coverage of the leaks has been positive. Observer contributor and former NSA analyst John Schindler published columns pointing to the Kremlin’s “brazen effort to intimidate American elected officials” by hacking emails and dumping them all over the internet, pandering to journalists craving a new story — while the website he wrote for engaged in exactly that activity.

“I was way ahead of everybody on the WikiLeaks is a Russian front story, The Observer fully supported that,” Schindler wrote in an email to FP. He said he never witnessed any closeness between the outlet and WikiLeaks. “I am not aware of any ‘special’ ties between Ken Kurson or anyone else at The Observer and WikiLeaks. I have no editorial duties, I am a contributor.”

Yet Schindler’s coverage was the exception, as the Observer continued to publish a steady stream of leaks on the Democratic Party.

“Russian hackers now leaking directly to Jared Kushner’s paper. Trump campaign not even being subtle anymore,” tweeted Brian Fallon, then a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, in September 2016.

When Mother Jones wrote about Fallon’s comments, Sainato responded on Twitter that those claims were “more Red Dawn Russian conspiracies” but admitted he had “asked Guccifer on twitter for docs.” He later deleted that tweet.

Kurson told FP that he wasn’t aware of the tweet or Sainato’s reporting strategies.

As the Observer published leaks targeting the Democratic presidential campaign, Kurson maintained a close relationship with his publisher, Jared Kushner, and the rest of the Trump campaign. According to an interview Kurson gave to Recode Media, Kushner never pushed for certain coverage or political support — but would talk politics with him almost every day.

“Jared never — never — asked me or any other Observer reporter to cover Assange, Wikileaks or anything connected to Wiki. There were no ‘exchanges’ with Wikileaks by me or any other Observer staffer, to my knowledge,” Kurson wrote in an email.

He said he did not recall ever discussing the DNC leaks with Kushner during the presidential campaign.

The two did appear to spend significant time together during the campaign. Kurson sat in the Trump family box during the Republican National Convention (RNC) and in March 2016 helped Kushner craft a speech Trump gave at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference.

He later made it a policy at the Observer not to review material for political candidates. Yet the newspaper continued to take positions favorable to Trump — or at least heavily critical of Clinton.

But the connections between Kurson and the Observer with Assange and the Trump campaign simultaneously made some onlookers nervous, looking back.

“When I saw Ken Kurson seated with the Trump family at the RNC, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I had one of those lightbulb moments — then the lightbulb exploded,” said Andy Stepanian, then a public relations specialist for FitzGibbon Media, who helped arrange the interview between Hyzagi and Assange. “I became more and more concerned looking back on the scale of the Observer’s coverage.”

The Observer’s last print edition was on Nov. 9, 2016, just one day after Trump, whom the paper had endorsed in the Republican primaries, was elected president. Kushner gave up direct control of the news outlet when he formally accepted a job in the administration but hasn’t sold it and instead plans to transfer it to a family trust.

Kurson stepped down as editor in chief in May, and no replacement has been named nor is one listed on the masthead.

“I edited the Observer for almost five years and am proud of the work we did there and the 7x growth in traffic,” he told FP. “I resigned because I’d gotten a great offer from a great company and felt that I had accomplished at Observer what I set out to do.”

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/17/how ... ion-hacks/



All the times Jared Kushner has failed to tell Congress something important

He’s constantly keeping the government in the dark about suspicion-arousing information.

Zeeshan AleemNov 20, 2017, 4:20pm EST
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Jared Kushner insists he's got nothing to hide when it comes to Russia. Yet he keeps failing to disclose things that raise real questions about whether he tried to collude with Moscow during the campaign — and whether he's been trying to cover it up ever since.

Just last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee notified Kushner’s attorney that Kushner had failed to provide them with some vital emails regarding their investigation into possible collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Moscow.

Those emails indicate that Kushner knew about multiple attempts by Russian officials to get in touch with the Trump campaign in 2016. They also indicate that he knew Donald Trump Jr. had secretly corresponded with WikiLeaks, the radical transparency organization that released emails during the campaign season stolen from the Democratic National Committee's servers.

In July, Kushner had told congressional investigators that he couldn’t recall any communication between the campaign and WikiLeaks — an assertion that’s at odds with what the committee now knows.

This is far from the first time that crucial pieces of information about Kushner’s Russia ties or business holdings seem to have mysteriously escaped his memory.

He failed to include the names of more than 100 foreign officials whom he met with in the years before joining the White House on his application for national security clearance — including top Russian officials. He’s had to change his financial disclosure forms detailing his divestment from his business empire at least 39 times. He’s neglected to mention the Russian technology magnate that owns a stake in a company he co-owns. And when he offers explanations for the oversights, they’re loaded with deflections such as when he said that a busy schedule and email overload made it hard for him to remember communications with foreign officials.

Here’s a brief guide to all of the things Kushner has conveniently forgotten — and that special counsel Robert Mueller may wind up grilling him about.

Kushner failed to disclose the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s letter to Kushner’s attorney on Thursday revealed that they had identified at least three crucial documents that Kushner had failed to send to them.

One is an email that Donald Trump Jr. sent to Kushner about his secret correspondence with WikiLeaks over Twitter. Kushner forwarded that email to campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks in 2016. But he testified that he had no memory of this during private interviews with lawmakers in July, and he didn’t hand over the email to congressional investigators in response to their documents request.

The second document was an email thread about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite.” The Judiciary Committee’s letter doesn’t specify exactly what that means, but NBC and CBS report that it references an attempt by Aleksander Torshin — the deputy head of Russia’s central bank who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin — to connect with the Trump campaign.

The thread describes Torshin as wanting Trump to attend an event on the sidelines of a National Rifle Association convention in May 2016, and also angling to meet a high-level Trump campaign official at that convention, possibly to convey a message from Putin. Kushner responded to the thread by declining the meeting.

"Pass on this," Kushner wrote according to a letter that Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday. "A lot of people come claiming to carry messages. Very few we are able to verify. For now I think we decline such meetings."

It’s definitely an email investigators would want to see, given that Torshin did in fact end up meeting with Trump Jr. at that convention anyway. But Kushner didn’t hand it over to congressional investigators.

The third document is an email thread involving Sergei Millian, the president of the US-based Russian American Chamber of Commerce, who is believed to be a critical source for the infamous Steele dossier. According to reports, Millian could potentially be the source that claimed to be "present" for Trump's alleged "perverted conduct in Moscow."

Kushner was copied on emails from Millian to the campaign. But he didn’t hand them over to congressional investigators.

Lowell pushed back against the Senate Judiciary Committee’s accusations that Kushner isn’t cooperating, arguing in a letter that there were no “missing documents.” But it’s clear from the original letter lawmakers sent to Kushner’s attorney that they believe Kushner and his attorney are disregarding the full scope of their request.

Specifically, the Senate panel asks that Kushner hand over all email correspondence about a certain set of individuals and organizations that they’re investigating, not just correspondence directly to or from them.

Kushner failed to disclose his meetings with Russians

When Kushner applied for top-secret security clearance when he entered the White House, he was supposed to list any foreign government officials whom he had met with in the past seven years.

The problem is that he initially forgot to mention more than 100 meetings with foreign dignitaries — including several powerful Russians connected to the Kremlin.

He failed to mention meetings in December with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the US, and Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian state-owned bank Vnesheconombank.

He also didn’t disclose that he met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-affiliated Russian lawyer, in Trump Tower in Manhattan in June 2016.

Kushner has defended himself by arguing that it was hard to remember all his meetings with Russians because he was so overwhelmed by meetings and paperwork.

“It was typical for me to receive 200 or more emails a day during the campaign,” he said in a statement in July, in an attempt to explain his lack of disclosure. “I did not have the time to read every one, especially long emails from unknown senders or email chains to which I was added at some later point in the exchange.”

He also blamed his assistant for initially filing an incomplete security clearance form.

But it wasn’t a single error; he’s amended his security clearance form at least three times since his first submission, adding more than 100 names in the process.

Kushner failed to submit financial disclosure forms on time

Kushner is supposed to provide the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) with regular updates on his divestment from his vast business empire, which is a tedious, months-long process intended to mitigate conflicts of interest concerns while he serves in the White House.

It’s not going well. Kushner was fined $200 in October for failing to submit the disclosure forms on time. It was actually the second time he’s failed to meet the ethics office’s deadline.

Beyond missing deadlines, Kushner is also leaving out important substantive details. According to McClatchy, he has amended his disclosure form 39 times — and many of those were in response to questions from OGE.

Kushner failed to disclose his private email account

In September, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) and ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA) sent Kushner an angry letter complaining that they’d learned he had used using private email to handle government business “through the news media rather than from you, in your closed staff interview.”

Lowell said he and Kushner had reviewed the emails and decided that none were relevant to the Russia investigation. That, obviously, doesn’t explain why Kushner didn’t mention the server in the first place.

Kushner failed to disclose his business ties with Russians

In July, Kushner made a public statement in response to the Russia scandal, saying: “I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector. I have tried to be fully transparent.”

But that isn’t right.

Leaked documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in November revealed that Kushner has ties to a Russian oligarch who has helped the Kremlin invest in Facebook and Twitter.

The leaks showed that Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire investor with close financial ties to Russian state-owned companies, owns a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner called Cadre.

Kushner actually also conveniently forgot to list Cadre among his holdings when he entered the White House.

If you want to be generous to Kushner, you’d say he has an astonishingly poor memory. If you want to be harsher, you’d say that it looks like he’s trying to conceal things that would, at the minimum, look bad for him.

The problem Kushner faces is that those omissions, intentional or otherwise, can carry serious consequences.

Lawrence Noble, the general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, told me that Kushner has made so many lapses that “you have to ask if his initial instinct is to try to see if he can get away with hiding contacts or records that he thinks can be used as evidence of the campaign’s involvement with Russians.”

“If so, he has forgotten — or never knew — the warning that the cover-up is sometimes worse than the crime,” Noble said.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... -wikileaks



JARED KUSHNER URGED TRUMP TO FIRE FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY, REPORTS SAY

BY GRAHAM LANKTREE ON 11/22/17 AT 5:37 AM

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner urged him to fire former FBI Director James Comey during meetings with other top officials in the lead up to Comey’s dismissal in May.

Four people familiar with the discussions confirmed to The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that Kushner pushed for Comey to be replaced.

One said Kushner and other top White House officials believed Comey was too unpredictable after his handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Another said Kushner thought Democrats would cheer Comey’s firing after his handling of the Clinton investigation and that FBI agents who were unhappy with his performance would also applaud the move.

Kushner’s involvement in Trump’s decision to fire Comey is being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller. The probe is looking at whether the president obstructed justice by firing the FBI Director while Comey was leading an investigation into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.

Days after Comey was dismissed, Trump justified his firing during an interview with NBC News: “I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”

Trump said he intended to fire Comey “regardless” of a rationale outlined by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in a letter that the White House used to defend the firing. That letter argued that Comey had mishandled the Clinton investigation.

Read more: Kushner worried Mueller's probe would "get" President Trump

During a meeting later that month with Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and the then ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, Trump said firing Comey relieved “great pressure because of Russia.”

Mueller’s legal team are now questioning witnesses about whether Kushner advocated for Comey to be fired, people familiar with the investigation have said.

“When the president made the decision to fire FBI Director Comey, Mr. Kushner supported it,” Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, told the WSJ.

“There’s no apparent evidence of Jared’s involvement in any decision-making process having to do with Mr. Comey’s firing,” a White House attorney also said, adding Kushner had “no meaningful role” in Trump’s decision.

In September The New York Times reported that Trump made the decision to fire Comey before any White House meetings after conferring with his daughter Ivanka Trump, Kushner, and adviser Steven Miller during a weekend at his golf club in Bedminster that began May 4. Trump, the report said, was worried about the Russia investigation during the trip. Both Kushner and Miller supported Trump’s decision and Miller drafted a letter that transcribed the president's thoughts on the matter.

Last Sunday ABC News reported that Mueller has requested emails about Comey’s firing along with other documents from the Justice Department, including ones about Attorney General Jeff Sessions's decision to step away from the Russia investigation
http://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-u ... mey-719340
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 01, 2017 8:53 pm

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My prediction? The next time agents & prosecutors for Special Counsel Mueller interview #Kushner, they will read him his Miranda rights.




It Was Kushner Who Told Flynn To Make Calls About Israel UN Vote, Source Says

The president's son-in-law prompted the Dec. 22, 2016, call to Russia's ambassador that is the focus of Flynn's guilty plea Friday.

December 1, 2017, at 12:55 p.m.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump walk with their children at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree on Thursday.
Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images


WASHINGTON – Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, called Michael Flynn in December 2016 and told him to call members of the UN Security Council in an effort to stop a vote on a resolution critical of Israeli settlement policy, according to a person who was present in the room when Flynn took the call.

Flynn then called Russia’s then-ambassador to the United States to seek his assistance, and later lied to the FBI about having done so, according to documents filed in federal court Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller that explained Flynn’s guilty plea on two counts of lying to federal agents.

The documents do not say on whose behalf Flynn contacted Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, identifying the person only as “a very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team.”

But a Trump transition official who was in the room where Flynn took a call regarding the upcoming UN Security Council vote said Flynn identified the caller as Kushner.

“Jared called Flynn and told him you need to get on the phone to every member of the Security Council and tell them to delay the vote,” the person said.

If confirmed, that call would bring prosecutors one step closer to Kushner, who also serves as a senior adviser to Trump.

Kushner, the source said, told Flynn during the phone call that “this was a top priority for the president.”

The source says Flynn took the call at the Trump transition team’s offices in the General Services Administration headquarters in northwest Washington. After hanging up, Flynn told the entire room that they’d have to start pushing to lobby against the UN vote, saying “the president wants this done ASAP.”

At the time, the Security Council resolution was the subject of bitter debate among the Obama administration, the incoming Trump team, and Israeli officials. The resolution condemned Israeli housing construction in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank as a “flagrant violation under international law” that was “dangerously imperiling the viability” of a future peace settlement establishing a Palestinian state.

The United States traditionally had vetoed similar resolutions, but the Obama administration had said it was likely to abstain, which it ultimately did, allowing the resolution to pass.

Trump, at the prodding of Israeli officials, lobbied hard against the abstention, then denounced it after it took place.

Then–national security adviser Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner at a news conference before Flynn was fired.
Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images
Then–national security adviser Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner at a news conference before Flynn was fired.

Friday’s guilty pleas revealed for the first time how Trump transition officials solicited Russia's help to head off the UN vote and undermine the Obama administration’s policy on Middle East peace before ever setting foot in the White House.

At the time, Obama administration officials viewed the Trump team’s interventions as an egregious breach of diplomatic protocol and a shameless attempt to boost their pro-Israel bona fides despite long-standing US policy that Israel’s construction of settlements constitutes an obstacle to peace.

According to the charge sheet, Flynn, on Dec. 22, 2016, asked Kislyak to use Moscow’s status as a permanent Security Council member to delay or defeat the pending resolution, and subsequently lied about those discussions with the FBI.

It’s unclear why Flynn would have lied, but there are laws that could criminalize such behavior such as the Logan Act, a scarcely enforced law that prohibits unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments that have a dispute with the United States.

In the run-up to the vote, both Flynn and Kushner called several officials of Security Council member states in order to block or delay the resolution. Flynn personally called foreign ambassadors on the Security Council, including representatives of Uruguay and Malaysia, according to a February report by Foreign Policy.

But Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak regarding the resolution had not been previously known and could potentially be relevant to Mueller’s investigation into allegations of collusion between Russian officials and Trump campaign staffers.

Ultimately, the episode represented the first foray by Trump’s inner circle into foreign policy deal-making, though one that fell flat on its face. The goal was to either block the resolution or delay it until Trump could enter the White House and deliver a veto. Shortly after the vote, however, Kushner did have some success in pressuring British Prime Minister Theresa May to align Britain’s policies closer to the incoming administration's. In a late December speech, May criticized then-secretary of state John Kerry’s rebuke of Israel’s settlement policies, an unusual remark and a transparent gift to the Trump team given Britain’s vote in support of the UN resolution.

Kushner has been the subject of intense scrutiny both from Mueller and congressional investigators, particularly over his omissions of contacts with foreign nationals on government-required forms.

In recent months, according to two sources close to the Kushner family, the family has been increasingly concerned about Mueller’s investigations.

Abbe Lowell, Kushner’s lawyer, did not respond to a phone call and an email requesting comment.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/it- ... .okxLgoBgm



NEXT STOP: JARED

December 1, 2017/43 Comments/in Mueller Probe /by empty wheel

This morning at 8, I was on Democracy Now talking about how then reported and now completed Flynn plea agreement would focus attention directly on Jared.

Since then, Mike Flynn indeed pled guilty to one charge of false statements to the FBI about various conversations with Sergei Kislyak, promising he’d fully cooperate with Mueller’s inquiry. Reports describe that Flynn spoke with an unnamed senior advisor who was at Mar A Lago at the time about his December 29 conversations with Kislyak, which pertained to Russian sanctions. They also say Flynn will testify against Trump and members, plural, of his family, particularly regarding the orders he had to reach out to Russia.

The other lie charged about conversations with Kislyak involves a request that Russia try to delay or shut down a vote on condemning Israel’s illegal settlements.

That’s a key lie, because we know who was pushing that: Jared Kushner (though the court filing suggests it might be someone even more senior).

Robert Mueller’s investigators are asking questions about Jared Kushner’s interactions with foreign leaders during the presidential transition, including his involvement in a dispute at the United Nations in December, in a sign of the expansive nature of the special counsel’s probe of Russia’s alleged meddling in the election, according to people familiar with the matter.

The investigators have asked witnesses questions about the involvement of Mr. Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, in a controversy over a U.N. resolution passed Dec. 23, before Mr. Trump took office, that condemned Israel’s construction of settlements in disputed territories, these people said.

Israeli officials had asked the incoming Trump administration to intervene to help block it. Mr. Trump posted a Facebook message the day before the U.N. vote—after he had been elected but before he had assumed office—saying the resolution put the Israelis in a difficult position and should be vetoed.

[snip]

Israeli officials said at the time that they began reaching out to senior leaders in Mr. Trump’s transition team. Among those involved were Mr. Kushner and political strategist Stephen Bannon, according to people briefed on the exchanges.

So that second lie — and almost certainly the first — involves Kushner directing Flynn.

I noted yesterday CNN’s report that in the last few weeks — so during the window when Mueller was in close discussions about Flynn flipping — Mueller’s team interviewed Kushner asking if he had any exonerating information on Flynn.

Mueller’s team specifically asked Kushner about former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who is under investigation by the special counsel, two sources said. Flynn was the dominant topic of the conversation, one of the sources said.

[snip]

The conversation lasted less than 90 minutes, one person familiar with the meeting said, adding that Mueller’s team asked Kushner to clear up some questions he was asked by lawmakers and details that emerged through media reports. One source said the nature of this conversation was principally to make sure Kushner doesn’t have information that exonerates Flynn.

The meeting took place around the same time the special counsel asked witnesses about Kushner’s role in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey and his relationship with Flynn, these people said.

Mueller was, effectively, locking in Kushner’s testimony before Flynn flipped. As I said this morning, speaking of that meeting,

The Kushner meeting was reported as kind of one of the last things that Mueller had to put into place before this plea agreement that people have been talking about with Mike Flynn. And that suggests that there is more news about to drop regarding Mike Flynn that I think is going to really dramatically change how Republicans take the Russian investigation.

Flynn had been avoiding discussing plea agreements for months and months and months, and then really in the last two weeks, all of a sudden it seems like it’s about to happen. Mueller has more leverage over Flynn in the last couple of weeks. It may be Turkey, because a key witness in New York has turned state’s evidence and apparently has information on Flynn. I think there’s some other information.

And so, Flynn, we expect, is moving towards a plea agreement. We expect, or I expect, that’s going to add a lot more pressure on Trump. And I have been saying for months that the way to get to Kushner is through Flynn. Because a lot of the events in which Flynn was involved, such as meeting with Sergei Kislyak in December, they connect very closely with activities that Kushner is known to be involved with.

Kushner may now be hoping he’ll be in a he-said he-said with Flynn, except it’s unlikely Mueller would give Flynn this easy plea without a whole lot more to know that Flynn would be telling the truth. Remember, Kushner is one of the few people aside from Flynn himself who has a very appropriate lawyer for this kind of issue.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/12/01/next-stop-jared/



Marcy Wheeler: Mike Flynn’s Guilty Plea to FBI Will Shape How GOP Handles Russia Investigation
STORYDECEMBER 01, 2017


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB5DtT8gey0

Marcy Wheeler
independent journalist who covers national security and civil liberties.



EmptyWheel.net
Just in: ABC is reporting Michael Flynn is “prepared to testify” that during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump “directed him to make contact” with Russians.

Just before news broke that President Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn will plead guilty this morning to lying to the FBI, we spoke with national security reporter Marcy Wheeler, who anticipated the news and said it could “dramatically change how Republicans face the Russian investigation.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, The New York Times reported President Trump pressured senior Senate Republicans over the summer, including the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, to drop Mueller’s probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. News coming amidst reports that Mueller’s investigators recently questioned senior White House advisor and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, over a meeting with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

MARCY WHEELER: Right, and this is actually one of the reasons why this switch isn’t going to happen, because I don’t think Pompeo is confirmable by the senate foreign relations committee, because we have learned a lot more of his implication in the Russian story.

The Kushner meeting was reported as kind of one of the last things that Mueller had to put into place before this plea agreement that people have been talking about with Mike Flynn. And that suggests that there is more news about to drop regarding Mike Flynn that I think is going to really dramatically change how Republicans take the Russian investigation.

Flynn had been avoiding discussing plea agreements for months and months and months, and then really in the last two weeks, all of a sudden it seems like it’s about to happen. Mueller has more leverage over Flynn in the last couple of weeks. It may be Turkey, because a key witness in New York has turned state’s evidence and apparently has information on Flynn. I think there’s some other information.

And so, Flynn, we expect, is moving towards a plea agreement. We expect, or I expect, that’s going to add a lot more pressure on Trump. And I have been saying for months that the way to get to Kushner is through Flynn. Because a lot of the events in which Flynn was involved, such as meeting with Sergei Kislyak in December, they connect very closely with activities that Kushner is known to be involved with.

So that seems to be where things are moving. And this Pompeo news seems impossible against that background, because Pompeo has helped Trump to cover up this Russia thing. And I don’t see Bob Corker and I don’t see Marco Rubio, who are both Senate foreign relations committee members, I do not see them supporting Pompeo having an even bigger role in the administration as this Russia stuff opens up.

AMY GOODMAN: And Flynn and Turkey. Can you explain what has been uncovered at this point?

MARCY WHEELER: Flynn was a consultant for the Turkish government, but through some cutouts, right? And he is alleged to have A, discussed on two different occasions basically kidnapping a cleric who lives in Pennsylvania that the Turkish government considers one of their big enemies. They blame him for the attempted coup earlier this year. So that’s one thing is that he has talked about kidnapping an American permanent resident on behalf of another government.

The other thing is that there was a guy named Reza Zarrab who was charged in a sanctions avoidance laundering case in New York. Basically, laundering money to get gold to Iran. That connects very closely with Turkey’s president. But that guy, Zarrab, made a plea agreement basically, and that just came out this week. The trial in which he is testifying is rolling out. But he is believed to have some information about Flynn’s efforts to free him on behalf of the Turkish government.

And again, this is another case where Flynn did not disclose these monies. He was working as the transition national security adviser and being paid by a foreign government. There is a much stronger case against him on this Turkish stuff even than on the Russian stuff. So I think not only is it easier to charge him with this stuff—and that would be kind of similar to what happened to Paul Manafort—but also it would—one of the things that has been reported to happen is it would implicate his son, Mike Flynn, Jr., who was involved in some of these things. And so one of the motives that Flynn might have for flipping, for cooperating with Mueller, is to keep his son out of prison.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, do you think this could account for all these developments this week? Could account for the further unraveling of President Trump? Tweeting out these racist, Islamophobic videos, talking about President Obama once again—as he led the birther movement, Trump did—and all of the things he has done? You know, the “Pocahontas comments in the midst of a Navajo code talker ceremony in the oval office in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson. But all of this coming one after another has Republicans scratching their heads as well.

MARCY WHEELER: It is hard to measure the next outrage from the president, but I do think that he is hearing footsteps. I do think he continues to try and convince those around him that he is not in any risk of this investigation. That is ridiculous at this point. It is clear that Mueller is investigating him for obstruction, if not far more. And these attempts to distract attention—but I also think—and this will segue into your next piece, but I also think he is also attempting to distract from the fact that he is about to, in the name of tax reform, carry out this vast looting of the American poor and middle class. So, it serves two purposes—distract from Russia but also distract from the tax bill that they are rushing through Congress this week.

AMY GOODMAN: Marcy Wheeler, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Independent journalist who covers national security and civil liberties, runs the website Emptywheel.net. We’ll link to your piece, Throwing H2O on the Pompeo to State Move. This is Democracy Now!

When we come back, we go to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to talk about a little-known provision of the tax law that has to do with opening up the Arctic to drilling. And then we will go to Mogadishu. We will talk about the latest on a massacre that took place there. What was the U.S. involvement? Finally, we will look at the Impeach Trump movement. Stay with us.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 03, 2017 12:35 pm

Jared Kushner Failed to Disclose He Led a Foundation Funding Illegal Israeli Settlements Before U.N. Vote

By Chris Riotta On 12/3/17 at 6:00 AM
Jared Kushner failed to disclose his role as a co-director of the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation from 2006 to 2015, a time when the group funded an Israeli settlement considered to be illegal under international law, on financial records he filed with the Office of Government Ethics earlier this year.

The latest development follows reports on Friday indicating the White House senior adviser attempted to sway a United Nations Security Council vote against an anti-settlement resolution passed just before Donald Trump took office, which condemned the structure of West Bank settlements. The failure to disclose his role in the foundation—at a time when he was being tasked with serving as the president’s Middle East peace envoy—follows a pattern of egregious omissions that would bar any other official from continuing to serve in the West Wing, experts and officials told Newsweek.

Related: Jared Kushner Can't Pass His Security Clearance Investigation, Officials Say

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The first son-in-law has repeatedly amended his financial records since his initial filing in March, along with three separate revisions to his security clearance application. Despite correcting his financial history on multiple occasions, he has yet to include his role as co-director to the family foundation.

GettyImages-687222532 Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump making their way to board Air Force One before departing from Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv on May 23, 2017. Mandel Ngan, Getty

The omission was first discovered by a team of researchers at American Bridge, a progressive research and communications organization, and shared exclusively with Newsweek on Friday afternoon. The researchers suggested Kushner’s failure may have been more than an inadvertent mistake, but instead an attempt to avoid "potential conflicts with his job negotiating Middle East peace." Newsweek later independently confirmed Kushner's omission on his multiple financial disclosures.

"Every successive failure to disclose his financial holdings makes it harder and harder to believe Jared Kushner isn't trying to intentionally deceive the American people," Pat Dennis, the group’s research director, told Newsweek. "At the very least, his security clearance needs to be revoked immediately. He has no business accessing sensitive national security information."

The foundation donated at least $38,000 between 2011 and 2013 to a fundraising group building a Jewish seminary in a West Bank settlement known as Beit El. During that period, Kushner’s foundation also donated an additional $20,000 to Jewish and educational institutions in settlements throughout the region, the Associated Press reported. Had Kushner included the role in his financial records, his involvement in such donations—and the following conflicts of interest that could possibly arise in his government position—may have been considered by the Office of Government Ethics.

Despite the U.S.’ longstanding policy to diplomatically reject the construction of Israeli settlements, Kushner seemed to wave in a new diplomatic era among members of Trump’s transition team working on foreign issues, according to sources who spoke with The Washington Post, NBC, Buzzfeed and Bloomberg. Each of those reports pointed at Kushner as being the "very senior member" of the transition team mentioned in charging documents Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed Friday.

Kushner demanded future National Security Adviser Mike Flynn "get on the phone to every member of the Security Council and tell them to delay the vote" on the West Bank settlement resolution, Buzzfeed reported Friday. The move may have violated over the 200-years-old law called the Logan Act, which bars "unauthorized citizens" from negotiating with "foreign governments having a dispute with the United States."

Flynn’s guilty plea appears to indicate he’s cooperating with Mueller’s team and could be willing to shed more light on how critical decisions were made throughout the transition, as well as on Russia’s impact in the 2016 presidential election.

"My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the Special Counsel’s Office reflect a decision I made in the best interests of my family and of our country," Flynn said in a statement. "I accept full responsibility for my actions."

Kushner stated that he was a member of the board of directors of the Kushner Family Foundation from 2010 to 2017, though publicly available financial records for that foundation do not include his name on the board. Instead, Kushner’s role as a director for one of his family foundations can be found in the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation’s financial records from 2015—the last year of which such documents are currently available to the public.

Whether Kushner’s latest discovered omission was intentional or not remained a mystery on Friday afternoon, as news was exploding surrounding his involvement in the U.N. Security Council vote, which ultimately approved the resolution condemning West Bank settlements. Representatives for the Office of Government Ethics, Jared Kushner and the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"He’s revised his forms several times already," Dennis said. "There’s no reason his lawyers couldn’t have done what our researchers did. It wasn’t rocket science."
http://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-d ... ium=Social
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:23 pm

The only reason Jared Kushner would hire a crisis public relations firm is because ... wait for it ... A CRISIS IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN TO HIM. Also, anyone who needs a crisis firm should not have a security clearance. Oh, and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, you backed the wrong person. - Ted Lieu



Kushner’s legal team looks to hire crisis public relations firm amid Russia probe


Senior White House official Jared Kushner and his legal team are searching for a crisis public relations firm, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has quietly called at least two firms, these people said. The inquiries have occurred in the past two weeks, and officials at the firms were asked not to discuss the conversations with others.

In a statement, Lowell confirmed he was looking for a firm that would handle media for all high-profile clients that receive attention from the press.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 6bf4b4a76b



Venture Capital‏
@kelly2277
Sure enough, days after Talal’s arrest, Sheikh Hamad Bin Jaber (HBJ) bought Plaza mortgage HBJ is in talks w Kushner on 666 bldg
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Its looking like Kushner used his access to classified info as 'Quid', to get investors for his failing 666 property.

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Posts: 32090
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 22, 2017 4:13 pm

Prosecutors Said to Seek Kushner Records From Deutsche Bank

By BEN PROTESS, JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG and DAVID ENRICHDEC. 22, 2017


Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, earlier this year. Deutsche Bank has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner family real estate business. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have sought bank records about entities associated with the family company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, according to four people briefed on the matter.

In recent weeks, prosecutors from the United States attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank, the giant German financial institution that has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner family real estate business.

Mr. Kushner, who was the Kushner Companies’ chief executive until January, still owns part of the business after selling some of his stake. The family businesses include many legal entities. It is not clear which records were sought by prosecutors, what they are seeking to learn from them or to what degree, if any, they directly involve Mr. Kushner.

There is no indication that the subpoena is related to the investigation being conducted by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into Russian meddling in the 2016 United States presidential election. Three prosecutors on Mr. Mueller’s team previously worked at the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, one as recently as this year. Federal prosecutors around the country typically check with Justice Department headquarters when their investigations may overlap.

The Brooklyn United States attorney has been investigating the Kushner businesses’ use of a program known as EB-5. It offers visas to overseas investors in exchange for $500,000 investments in real estate projects.

But Deutsche Bank does not appear to have been involved in Kushner real estate projects financed through the EB-5 program. That suggests the prosecutors’ subpoena may be unrelated to the visa program.

“We are unaware of any inquiry directed at Deutsche Bank from the E.D.N.Y. and have no reason to believe there is one,” said a spokeswoman for the Kushner Companies, referring to the Eastern District of New York.

A subject of a subpoena wouldn’t necessarily know that the subpoena had been served on a bank or other institution.

The Kushner family has longstanding ties to Deutsche Bank. A financial disclosure form that Mr. Kushner filed with the government shows he and his mother have a line of credit from Deutsche Bank worth $5 million to $25 million. The bank also provided a $285 million mortgage to Kushner Companies last year to help it refinance a loan to purchase several floors of retail space in the former New York Times building on 43rd Street in Manhattan.

Mr. Kushner’s company purchased the space from Africa Israel Investments, a company owned by Lev Leviev. Mr. Leviev’s company has an extensive real estate portfolio in Russia.

Mr. Kushner was interviewed last month by investigators working for Mr. Mueller. Mr. Kushner answered questions about Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, according to a person briefed on the interview.

The interview, and the subpoena of Deutsche Bank, does not mean Mr. Kushner is suspected of wrongdoing. Defense lawyers typically do not consent to such interviews if they believe their clients are the target of an investigation.

Separately, Mr. Mueller’s office has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records related to Paul J. Manafort, a former campaign chairman to Mr. Trump, said people briefed on that subpoena. Mr. Manafort, who was indicted in October, is accused of money laundering.

Deutsche Bank served as a so-called correspondent bank, routing money from a foreign bank to Mr. Manafort’s United States account, according to one of the people briefed on the matter.

Deutsche Bank is also a big lender to Mr. Trump’s companies, though Mr. Mueller has not subpoenaed the bank for information about those accounts, according to people familiar with subpoenas that Deutsche Bank has received.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said publicly that they have been assured that Mr. Mueller has not subpoenaed bank records related to him or his family. People close to Mr. Kushner, who declined to be named, said they do not think he is in jeopardy from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.

In a statement, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman said the bank “takes its legal obligations seriously and remains committed to cooperating with authorized investigations into this matter.”

Before Deutsche Bank got the recent subpoena, Kushner Companies had received inquiries from the Brooklyn prosecutors about its use of the EB-5 visa program on a pair of luxury apartment towers in New Jersey.

“EB-5 is a longstanding federal program that is frequently used by many large developers to raise funds and help create jobs,” Kushner Companies’ general counsel, Emily Wolf, said in a previous statement. “Kushner Companies utilized the program, fully complied with its rules and regulations and did nothing improper.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/busi ... poena.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 25, 2017 8:19 pm

Ivanka and the fugitive from Panama

FAMILY BUSINESS: Donald Trump wanted the Ocean Club project in Panama to help his daughter Ivanka learn about the property business, according to Roger Khafif, the club's developer. Above, Ivanka and her father on the south lawn of the White House in June, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Exclusive: How an alleged fraudster in Panama, working with Donald Trump's daughter, helped make Trump's first international hotel venture a success. The broker was in business with a money-launderer and two criminals from the former Soviet Union. Then he fled.

By NED PARKER, STEPHEN GREY, STEFANIE ESCHENBACHER, ROMAN ANIN, BRAD BROOKS and CHRISTINE MURRAY Filed Nov. 17, 2017, noon GMT
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SNAPPED: Ivanka Trump and Alexandre Ventura Nogueira at Trump Tower in New York in 2006, and Donald Trump with Nogueira at Mar-a-Lago in 2007. The photographs were obtained from Nogueira, who did not identify who took them.

Portuguese version Spanish version

PANAMA CITY/TORONTO - In the spring of 2007, a succession of foreigners, many from Russia, arrived at Panama City airport to be greeted by a chauffeur who whisked them off in a white Cadillac with a Donald Trump logo on the side.

The limousine belonged to a business run by a Brazilian former car salesman named Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, who was offering the visitors a chance to invest in Trump’s latest project – a 70-floor tower called the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower. It was the future U.S. president’s first international hotel venture, a complex including residential apartments and a casino in a waterfront building shaped like a sail.

“Mr Nogueira was an outgoing and lively young man,” remembered Justine Pasek, who was crowned Miss Universe by Donald Trump in 2002 and was acting in 2007 as a spokesperson for Nogueira’s company, Homes Real Estate Investment & Services. “Everybody was so impressed with Homes as they seemed to be riding the top of the real estate boom at the time,” she said.

One of those Nogueira set out to impress was Ivanka, Trump’s daughter. In an interview with Reuters, Nogueira said he met and spoke with Ivanka “many times” when she was handling the Trump Organization’s involvement in the Panama development. “She would remember me,” he said.

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Ivanka was so taken with his sales skills, Nogueira said, that she helped him become a leading broker for the development and he appeared in a video with her promoting the project.

A Reuters investigation into the financing of the Trump Ocean Club, in conjunction with the American broadcaster NBC News, found Nogueira was responsible for between one-third and one-half of advance sales for the project. It also found he did business with a Colombian who was later convicted of money laundering and is now in detention in the United States; a Russian investor in the Trump project who was jailed in Israel in the 1990s for kidnap and threats to kill; and a Ukrainian investor who was arrested for alleged people-smuggling while working with Nogueira and later convicted by a Kiev court.

Three years after getting involved in the Trump Ocean Club, Nogueira was arrested by Panamanian authorities on charges of fraud and forgery, unrelated to the Trump project. Released on $1.4 million bail, he later fled the country.

He left behind a trail of people who claim he cheated them, including over apartments in the Trump project, resulting in at least four criminal cases that eight years later have still to be judged.

Nogueira, 43, denies the charges and told Reuters in an email: “I am no Angel but not Devil either.”

Ivanka Trump declined to comment on her dealings with Nogueira. A White House spokesman referred questions to the Trump Organization. Alan Garten, the organization’s chief legal officer, said: “No one at the Trump Organization, including the Trump family, has any recollection of ever meeting or speaking with this individual.”

Trump put his name to the development and stood to make up to $75 million from it, according to a bond prospectus for the project. He did not exert management control over the construction and was under no direct legal obligation to conduct due diligence on other people involved.

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SUPER SALESMAN: Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, the real estate agent in Panama, pictured here arriving at the office of the Attorney General in Panama City in 2009. Jorge Fernandez/Courtesy of La Prensa
“I am no Angel but not Devil either.”
Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, who sold many of the units in the Trump Ocean Club
Still, some legal experts say the episode raises questions about the steps Trump took to check the source of any income from there. Arthur Middlemiss, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and a former head of JPMorgan’s global anti-corruption program, said that since Panama was “perceived to be highly corrupt,” anyone engaged in business there should conduct due diligence on others involved in their ventures. If they did not, he said, there was a potential risk in U.S. law of being liable for turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.

Jimmy Gurule, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and a former under-secretary for enforcement at the U.S. Treasury Department, agreed. He also said any businessman should avoid working with “anyone with a potential link to criminality” simply as a matter of good ethics.

Reuters could not determine what due diligence Trump carried out in relation to the Ocean Club project.

The White House referred Reuters questions about the Ocean Club development to the Trump Organization. Garten said the Trump Organization’s role in the project “was at all times limited to licensing its brand and providing management services. As the company was not the owner or developer, it had no involvement in the sale of any units at the property.”


CROWNING MOMENT: Donald Trump crowned Justine Pasek of Panama Miss Universe in September, 2002. Pasek later acted as a spokesperson for the Homes Real Estate Investment & Services company in Panama. REUTERS/Chip East
He said the Trump Organization “never had any contractual relationship or significant dealings” with Nogueira.

Nine former business partners or employees of Nogueira interviewed by Reuters accused him of cheating them and his clients. Two of the nine have taken legal action against Nogueira. The cases have yet to be judged.

When first approached by Reuters, Nogueira declined to answer questions. Writing on October 4, he said in an email: “Anything I would say could also damage a lot of important and powerful people. I am not sure I should do that.”

Later, Nogueira agreed to meet. In a lengthy interview, he described his contacts with the Trump family and his role in the Ocean Club project. He said he only learned after the Ocean Club project was almost complete that some of his partners and investors in the Trump project were criminals, including some with what he described as connections to the “Russian mafia.” He said he had not knowingly laundered any illicit money through the Trump project, although he did say he had laundered cash later in other schemes for corrupt Panamanian officials.

It was not his job to check the source of money that investors used to buy units in the Trump Ocean Club, Nogueira said. “I didn’t know the money was coming from anything illegal. As long as they were doing wire transfers and not cash, I wasn’t worried about the source of it.”

Nogueira said that no one asked him about the source of funds. “Nobody ever asked me. The banks didn’t ask. The developers didn’t ask. The Trump Organization didn’t ask me. Nobody asked me: ‘Who are the customers? Where did the money come from?’”

It is unclear how much, if any, laundered money went into the Trump project.

Global Witness, an anti-corruption watchdog, says in an independently-produced report out today, that Panama in the 2000s presented particular challenges for property developers because of its then reputation for corruption.

The ultimate sources of cash for other Trump real estate projects where Trump has licensed his name have drawn scrutiny this year. In March, a Reuters review found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida.

The buyers included politically-connected businessmen and people from the second and third tiers of Russian power. Responding to that story, Garten, the Trump Organization’s counsel, said the scrutiny of Trump’s business ties with Russia was misplaced and that the story was “overblown.”

HIGH LIVING

Donald Trump’s involvement in the Ocean Club began in 2005, when local developer Roger Khafif travelled to Trump Tower in New York to pitch the idea of a Trump project in Panama. Khafif said he told the American tycoon that Trump would need only to license his name and provide hotel management. This way of doing business freed Trump from the burden of taking a stake or making a personal guarantee.

In an interview with Reuters, Khafif recalled that Trump wanted to use the Panama project as a “baby” for his daughter Ivanka, who had just joined the Trump Organization, to gain experience in the property business.

The plan was for Newland International Properties Corp, where Khafif was president and which owned the development, to finance construction with a bond underwritten by Bear Stearns, the U.S. investment bank. The bank, which collapsed in 2008, was acquired by JPMorgan, which declined to comment.

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FOREIGN ADVENTURE: The Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City was Trump’s first international hotel venture. The sail-shaped building is third from left. REUTERS/Carlos Lemos
To sell the bond, the developer needed to prove it could sell the apartments. This was where Nogueira came in. The Brazilian had arrived in Panama in the mid-2000s from Spain, where he had worked as a car salesman.

He had already had a brush with the law. In September 2005, in an official notice posted on the internet, the Spanish economy ministry said it had opened proceedings to fine Nogueira for an alleged “serious violation” of the country’s money-laundering laws. The proceedings were terminated about nine months later after officials could not determine Nogueira’s whereabouts. The ministry declined to comment. Nogueira said it was a trivial incident, caused by him taking too much of his own cash through an airport.

Once in Panama, Nogueira became renowned for his friendships with politicians, his love of Aston Martin sports cars and expensive watches and, as one former associate recalled, for “never wearing the same shoes – no matter how expensive – for more than three months.”

He said he first got involved with the Trump Ocean Club project at an early sales meeting in 2006 in Panama arranged by Khafif, whom he knew already. Ivanka Trump and other real estate brokers were there, he said. He remembered listening as a minimum price of $120,000 for condominiums was discussed.

Nogueira said he stood up and said the price was at the level charged in ordinary developments. “Here, it is Trump selling. You have to give a value to that name. Make it $220,000!”

He said Ivanka replied: “Can you sell it?”

Nogueira said he asked for a week to prove himself. And within a week he managed to collect deposits on over 100 apartments, and after that Khafif made him a leading broker, working on a 5 percent commission of gross sales, he said.

Asked about Nogueira’s account of this meeting, Khafif said that “most of what he said was true.” Khafif said he remembered Nogueira meeting Ivanka “a couple of times.”

Nogueira said that in the months that followed he discussed promotion and sales with Ivanka in Panama, Miami and New York. He said he also joined a group that travelled with Ivanka on a private chartered jet to look at a potential site for another Trump project in Cartagena, Colombia.

While Donald Trump was not the owner of the Panama project, the Trump Organization participated in many details down to “choosing the furniture and fittings,” said Nogueira. Day-to-day the project was assigned to Ivanka, he said, adding: “I spoke to her a lot of times, a lot of times.” He also met Donald Jr. and Eric Trump.

Ivanka Trump did not respond to requests for comment about Nogueira. Garten, the Trump Organization’s counsel, described contact between Nogueira and the Trumps as “meaningless.” He said such meetings and events “may have been memorable” for Nogueira, but for Ivanka and the rest of the Trump family it would have been “just one of literally hundreds of public appearances they were asked to make that year.”

Ivanka and Trump’s sons appeared in public at launch events for the tower, made promotional videos for the project and managed the Trump involvement.

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RISING SONS: Donald Trump on the presidential campaign trail with his sons Eric, far left, and Donald Jr. in 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Nogueira said that one video was commissioned by him. Ivanka helped arrange access to Trump Tower in New York for some sequences. “In this video we made, I was talking and she was talking.”

When the Spanish-language TV channel Univision, in an article published in 2011, first noted Nogueira’s role in the Trump project, Eric Trump responded that Nogueira had been an unaffiliated salesman. “I looked and I’ve never heard the name, nor does it appear in our database. What I found out was [Nogueira] owns a real estate agency in Panama that sells apartments in our building as a third party,” he told the channel.

Asked this month about Eric Trump’s statement in response to the Univision report, the Trump Organization said the company never had any ties to Nogueira or awareness of him.

Despite being a third party, Nogueira and his partners played a major part in the Trump project’s success, according to interviews with former key staff at Homes, developers, investors and lawyers, and an analysis of Panama corporate records and other public documents.

Homes accounted for up to half of the 666 apartment sales in advance of the bond prospectus, people involved in the project told Reuters.

Eleanora Michailov, a Russian who settled in Canada, was Nogueira’s international sales director. She recalled that Nogueira handled the sale of a third of the building, about 200 apartments. Another Homes sales agent, Jenny Levy, a relative by marriage to the developer, Khafif, said she alone sold 30 apartments.


PANAMA PLAYERS: Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Nelson Padilla (a colleague of Alexandre Ventura Nogueira), Donald Jr. Trump and Nogueira in the offices of the Ocean Club developer in Panama City. The photograph was obtained from Nogueira, who did not identify the photographer.
“We sold half the building, baby! Homes sold half,” Levy said in a phone interview. Nogueira said that he and his agents across the world sold between 350 to 400 apartment and hotel units.

Khafif, president and co-owner of the developer, Newland, said he was unsure of the exact number, but Nogueira had probably sold up to 300 units. “Everybody was lining up to work with him ... During those days he was the hottest real estate agency in town,” he said.

Homes found a ready market in Russia. “Russians like to show off,” said Khafif, who went on several sales trips to Moscow. “For them, Trump was the Bentley” of real estate brands.

Michailov said investors in the Ocean Club were asked to pay 10 percent up front for one of the apartments; she said the average price was about $350,000. Buyers had to pay a total of 30 percent within a year, according to the bond prospectus, and Homes organized the investment by setting up Panamanian companies for customers to enter pre-sales agreements with Khafif’s company, Newland.

In 2006 and 2007, Panama corporate records show, at least 131 holding companies with various combinations of the words “Trump” and “Ocean” in their name – for example, the Trump Ocean 1806 Investment Corp - were registered in Panama for pre-sales deals, and mostly by the Homes group.

In many cases the identity of the buyers was not clear. Nogueira and other Homes staff involved said Panamanian law at that time imposed no obligation to verify the identity of owners.

But listed as director of four Trump Ocean investment companies was Igor Anopolskiy, who in 2007 was Homes Real Estate’s representative in Kiev. Police records state he was arrested in March of that year for suspected people trafficking. Released a year later on bail, he was re-arrested in 2013, and in 2014 a Ukraine court handed Anopolskiy a five-year suspended jail sentence with three years probation for offenses including people smuggling and forgery, unrelated to the Trump project.

Interviewed in Kiev, Anopolskiy blamed the case on police corruption and denied committing any crime.


GUESTS: Alexander Altshoul with Nelson Padilla, both business partners of Nogueira, at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2007. The photograph was provided by an associate of Nogueira, who did not identify the photographer.
It was a Colombian businessman named David Murcia Guzman who triggered Nogueira’s downfall. Murcia was indicted in November 2008 for money laundering, first in Colombia and then in the United States. Murcia was sentenced to nine years in prison in the United States for conspiracy to launder drug money. After serving six years, he is expected to be deported to Colombia, his attorney, Robert Abreu, said. Colombia’s government said Murcia will serve a 22-year prison term upon his return for offenses including money laundering.

Murcia did not get permission from U.S. authorities to respond to Reuters’ questions.

Within days of Murcia’s indictment, the spotlight turned to Nogueira. Roniel Ortiz, a former lawyer for both Nogueira and Murcia, said Nogueira had offered to wash Murcia’s money by buying apartments on his behalf. Murcia “could not take his money to a bank,” Ortiz said, so Nogueira “offered to see how he could help.”

Ortiz said he did not know how much, if any, of Murcia’s money was used in the Trump project. Nogueira said Murcia gave him $1 million to invest in Panamanian property, which Nogueira used to pay the deposit on up to ten Trump apartments among other investments. Nogueira added: “He was not a bad guy. I don’t believe everything in those charges was true.”

In 2013 Nogueira, in conversations secretly recorded by a former business partner, said he had performed money laundering as a service, moving tens of millions of dollars mainly through contacts in Miami and the Bahamas. “More important than the money from real estate was being able to launder the drug money – there were much larger amounts involved,” he said in the recording. “When I was in Panama I was regularly laundering money for more than a dozen companies.”

The recordings were heard by Reuters and authenticated by five people who know Nogueira.

Speaking to Reuters, Nogueira said he could not recall making such claims and denied laundering cash through the Trump project or handling drugs money. He said that later, after his real estate business had collapsed in 2009, he had been involved in handling cash from corrupt officials and politicians, and was involved in corrupt schemes to sell Panamanian visas.

THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION

In the story of Panama’s Trump Ocean Club, a high point for many of those involved was a warm, cloudless night in early 2007.

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PARTY PALACE: The Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where Donald Trump held a party in 2007 for people involved in the Panama development that bears his name. REUTERS/Joe Skipper
The setting was Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida. Spilling out of Lamborghinis and Porsches onto the welcoming carpet were the sales people, clients and potential clients whose acumen and cash would make it possible – within a month – to break ground on the project’s building site in Panama City.

Entertained with drinks, music and jokes from American TV celebrity Regis Philbin, the guests got to meet and greet Trump and his children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka. The event was organized to celebrate a successful sales campaign – and to solicit more sales.

The Trump Organization did not comment about the party. Philbin told Reuters he couldn’t recall the event because it was 10 years ago. “I used to be with him [Trump] a lot,” Philbin said. “I was good friends with him.”

Nogueira said he was at the party and there met Donald Trump for “the first and only time.” He recalled: “They introduced me and said, ‘That’s the guy selling Panama,’ and he thanked me. We just talked for two or three minutes.”

Besides Nogueira, the guests included people involved with the project as investors or salesmen, some of Russian or former Soviet Union origin. Among them, in the delegation from Homes and wearing a dark suit, was Alexander Altshoul, born in Belarus. “Russians like their brand names,” Altshoul told Reuters, explaining why investors were attracted to Trump. “The moment was right, they were speculating. Many people hoped to get profits.”

Panama struggles to escape its reputation as a haven for fraud

Ever since its dictator, Manuel Noriega, was captured by U.S. troops in 1989 and jailed for 30 years for drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering, Panama has struggled to live down its reputation as a financial haven for the profits of crime.

The country has tried to boost legitimate income by developing tourism, banking reforms and a major refurbishment of its ocean-linking canal. The arrival of the globally recognized Trump brand, first with the staging of Miss Universe in 2003 and later with the opening of Ocean Club at a ceremony in 2011, marked a step along the road towards rehabilitation.

But there have been hiccups. Ricardo Martinelli, the country’s president from 2009 to 2014, who was called “my friend” by Trump at that at the opening of the Ocean Club, was arrested in Miami in June 2017 on an extradition warrant from Panama. He was alleged to have tapped the phones of opposition politicians and is facing multiple investigations for corruption. Martinelli has denied the charges, calling them politically motivated.

In a report out today, Global Witness, an anti-corruption watchdog, says that Panama in the 2000s presented particular challenges for property developers. “Although there was no requirement in Panamanian or U.S. law at that time that developers or licensors like Trump conduct due diligence on unit purchasers, any responsible businessperson who wanted to prevent money laundering should have ensured such checks took place,” the report says.

Altshoul, who holds Canadian citizenship, was listed on the Homes company website in 2007 as a “partner” and an “owner” of the firm. He became involved in Homes after moving to Panama from Toronto and investing with family and friends in the Trump project, paying deposits on 10 apartments and one hotel unit.

Among his partners in that investment, according to Altshoul and Panamanian corporate records, was a Muscovite named Arkady Vodovosov, a relative of Altshoul. In 1998, Vodovosov was sentenced to five years in prison in Israel for kidnap and threats to kill and torture, court records state.

Contacted by telephone, Vodovosov said inquiries about his involvement with the Trump project were nonsense. “We were in Panama for a very short time, and got out of there a long time ago,” he said, declining to answer further questions.

Altshoul attended the Mar-a-Lago party with another Homes partner, Stanislau Kavalenka, recalled people who were there. Kavalenka was also a Canadian émigré from the former Soviet Union.

At different times, Altshoul and Kavalenka each faced accusations of having connections to organized crime, but the charges were dropped. In Altshoul’s case, police in Toronto filed charges in April 2007, at the time he was promoting the Trump project. He was accused of involvement in a mortgage fraud scheme, unrelated to the Panama project, that involved sending funds through Latvia. The criminal case was dropped a year later.

In a statement, the Canadian government said it was “duty bound to withdraw charges where there is no reasonable prospect of conviction or if it is not in the public interest to proceed.” It did not elaborate further on the case. Altshoul said the decision showed he was innocent.

In 2004, Canadian prosecutors had accused Kavalenka of pimping and kidnapping Russian prostitutes. That case was dropped in 2005 after the alleged prostitutes, who were the main witnesses, did not show up in court. Kavalenka’s whereabouts are unknown. He did not respond to questions about his role in the Trump project sent to him through his family in Canada.

Nogueira said Altshoul and Kavalenka had joined Homes together, first as customers and later as partners. Altshoul told him he had had some difficulties “but they were solved, and it wasn’t my problem,” Nogueira said. Nogueira also said that after he read of Kavalenka’s Toronto case on Google, Kavalenka told him: “I was running some girls. That’s how I made money. But I was cleared.”

SOLD “LIKE HOT CAKES”

In the months after the Mar-a-Lago party, the prospects for everyone involved in the Trump Ocean Club looked rosy. In the midst of a global property boom and a successful pitch, sales had exceeded all expectations.

A bond prospectus was issued in November 2007, enabling the raising of construction funds. By the end of June that year, the prospectus declared, the project had “pre-sold approximately 64 percent of the building’s condominium and commercial units,” guaranteeing receipts on completion of the project of at least $278.7 million.

Trump said later, in a promotional video ahead of the 2011 opening, that the project sold “like hot cakes.”

But not all the money collected in the pre-sales campaign would go on to fund the project. Nine former business partners or employees of Nogueira interviewed by Reuters alleged that, at the Ocean Club and at other developments, Nogueira either failed to pass on all the deposits he collected to the project’s developers, or sometimes sold the same apartment to more than one client, with the result that, on completion of the project, some clients had no clear claim on a property.

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TRUMP HQ: The atrium inside Trump Tower in New York. Roger Khafif, the Panama developer, travelled to the tower to strike a licensing deal with Donald Trump. REUTERS/Mike Segar
Exactly how many apartments were double-sold is unknown. Michailov said up to 10 out of 80 apartments in the Trump tower that she had sold were also sold by Nogueira to others. Lawsuits in Panama and separate written complaints seen by Reuters record at least six instances of alleged fraud by Nogueira, in the Trump project and in other Panama construction projects. Two of the complaints seen by Reuters were in the “Panama Papers,” documents from a local law firm that were leaked to the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Ortiz, the former lawyer for Murcia and Nogueira, said of the Trump-branded project: “When the building was completed and people arrived to seek out their apartments, they ran into each other - two, three people who were fighting for the same apartment.”

Complaints against Nogueira, including allegations of fraud in Trump Ocean Club sales, resulted in four criminal cases against him in Panama and culminated in his arrest on fraud charges in May 2009.

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Nogueira said double-sales occurred because of changes in the building specifications or clerical error. He said he never deliberately sold an apartment twice. He said that not everyone lost money from their investments, and most who did lost out because of poor or unlucky investment decisions. “If you are looking to make easy money from speculation then you have to accept there is a risk,” he said.

Released on bail for $1.4 million, he continued to live in Panama until 2012 when, despite a ban on leaving the country, he fled to his native country, Brazil, before moving on again. Karen Kahn, a federal prosecutor based in Sao Paulo, said Nogueira is under a federal investigation for international money laundering, an inquiry triggered by several large bank transfers that arrived in his accounts from Panama.

Declining to disclose where he is living now, Nogueira agreed to meet Reuters and NBC News on November 13 at a neutral location, on condition it would not be revealed. Nogueira said an arrest warrant was outstanding against him in Panama. “Of course right now, I can be considered by the justice system to be fugitive. But there are two sides to everything.”

It wasn’t only alleged fraud that cost investors. After the global property crash of 2008, any chance of quick profit on the Trump Panama venture vanished.

By the time the Trump Ocean Club project was complete in 2011, many investors had withdrawn and lost their deposits rather than stump up the 70 percent balance. Bond holders lost, too, after Khafif’s company, Newland, defaulted on payments and the bond was restructured.

There was one person who still profited: Donald Trump.

Whatever the losses investors might suffer, under Trump’s licensing deal, detailed originally in the bond prospectus, the future U.S. president was guaranteed to receive payment. Court records from Newland’s bankruptcy in 2013 indicate Trump agreed to reduce his fee, but that he still earned between $30 million and $50 million from lending his name to the project.


HIGH AND LOW LIFE: Panama City, the capital of the Republic of Panama. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
The Trump Ocean Club
Reported by Ned Parker and Nathan Layne in New York and Toronto; Stefanie Eschenbacher, Christine Murray and Elida Moreno in Panama City; Stephen Grey and Tom Bergin in London; Brad Brooks in Americana, Brazil; Angus Berwick in Madrid; and Denis Dyomkin and Anna Mehler Paperny in Toronto. This story was reported in partnership with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (OCCRP), a non-profit journalism group: Roman Anin in Moscow and Tel Aviv, and Anna Babinets and Elena Loginova in Kiev.
Photo editing: Simon Newman
Data: Christine Murray
Design: Catherine Tai
Edited by Richard Woods and Janet McBride
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/sp ... mp-panama/


Seth Abramson

Verified account
6h6 hours ago

8/ To sum up: Galizia worked at ICIJ before she was assassinated; ICIJ received proof Ivanka's Panama business partner Alexandre Nogueira was a fraud; that proof is what led to Reuters connecting Ivanka to the Russian mafia; the FBI is now investigating.




FBI to help investigate car bomb that killed Panama Papers journalist

By JULIA JACOBO Oct 18, 2017, 11:15 AM ET
Rene Rossignaud/AP
WATCH Thousands More 'Panama Papers' Documents to Be Made Public

The FBI is helping authorities in Malta investigate a car bomb that killed a journalist who exposed the nation's ties to offshore tax havens through the leaked Panama Papers.

Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, was killed Monday as she drove away from her home in the town of Mosta, on Malta's main island, said Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, according to The Associated Press.

U.S. Department of State spokesperson Heather Nauert condemned Galizia's death as "appalling violence in the strongest terms possible" in a press briefing Tuesday.

Nauert called for a "thorough, transparent" investigation, saying that the FBI is providing "specific assistance as needed" at the request of Maltese authorities.

PHOTO: Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. The Malta Independent via AP
Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Muscat described Galizia's death as a "barbaric attack" and a "political murder," as well as an assault on freedom of expression.

Galizia was "was one of my harshest critics, on a political and personal level," Muscat said. Galizia wrote that Muscat's wife, along with the country's energy minister and the government's chief of staff, had offshore holdings in Panama to receive money from Azerbaijan, according to the AP. Muscat and his wife denied that they had companies in Panama.

PHOTO: Thousands of people gather for a candlelight vigil in Sliema, Oct. 16, 2017, in tribute to late journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was killed by a car bomb close to her home in Bidnija, Malta.Matthew Mirabelli/AFP/Getty Images
Thousands of people gather for a candlelight vigil in Sliema, Oct. 16, 2017, in tribute to late journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was killed by a car bomb close to her home in Bidnija, Malta.more +
Thousands of people gathered in Sliema Monday night for a candlelight vigil in tribute to Galizia.

Herman Grech, the online editor of the Times of Malta, called her a "dedicated" journalist, adding "no one could stop her."

"She had this uncompromising state of mind. I didn't always agree with her methods. She got this niche of fighting corruption and I don't know any journalist in Malta who will be able to take back her investigations," Grech told ABC News.

The slain journalist had been a columnist for The Malta Independent for more than 20 years and also wrote a blog called the "Running Commentary." She is survived by her husband and three sons.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/fbi ... d=50541078
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 27, 2017 1:50 pm

Mueller is reportedly zeroing in on the Trump campaign's data operation — and the RNC

Natasha Bertrand

Special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly begun to question Republican National Committee staffers about the party's digital work with the Trump campaign last year.
The report indicates that Mueller may be homing in on yet another facet of Russia's election interference — its social media influence campaign and targeted political advertising.
Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner managed the Trump campaign's data operation and recently hired a crisis public relations firm to handle all press inquiries.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has begun to question Republican National Committee staffers about the party's 2016 campaign data operation, which helped President Donald Trump's campaign team target voters in critical swing states.

Two sources told Yahoo News that Mueller's team is examining whether the joint RNC-Trump campaign data operation — which was directed on Trump's side by Brad Parscale and managed by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner — "was related to the activities of Russian trolls and bots aimed at influencing the American electorate."

The FBI has been scrutinizing Kushner's contacts in December 2016 with the Russian ambassador to the US and the CEO of a sanctioned Russian bank.

The special counsel's office declined to comment on its ongoing investigation. Multiple requests to various current and former RNC officials on Wednesday went unanswered. A source close to one of the Trump campaign's data firms said they were "unaware of anyone being questioned."

It is not surprising that federal investigators have begun to examine the possibility that Russia and the Trump campaign helped each other during the election. Investigators have been looking into whether Russia provided the campaign with voter information stolen by Russian hackers from election databases in several states, and whether the Trump campaign helped Russia target its political ads to specific demographics and voting precincts.

The general counsels for Facebook, Twitter, and Google gave enigmatic replies when asked by the House Intelligence Committee last month whether they had investigated "who was mimicking who" when it came to online ads promoted by both the Trump campaign and Russia during the election.

Facebook said in September that about 25% of the ads purchased by Russians during the election "were geographically targeted," though many analysts have said they find it difficult to believe that foreign entities would have had the kind of granular knowledge of American politics necessary to target specific demographics and voting precincts.

Facebook's general counsel Colin Stretch paused before indicating that the committee had access to intelligence that could better contextualize the information Facebook had turned over.

"We've provided all relevant information to the committee, and we do think it's an important function of this committee, because you have access to a broader set of information than any single company will," Stretch said.

"I agree with that," said Kent Walker, Google's counsel and senior vice president.

"Same for Twitter," Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said.

'We brought in Cambridge Analytica'
Image
Brad Parscale at Trump Tower in December, 2016
Brad Parscale. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Investigators have long wondered whether the data-mining and analysis firm Cambridge Analytica served as a link between the campaign's data operation and Russia.

That scrutiny intensified following revelations that Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in June 2016 asking for access to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's "stolen" emails.

It is still unclear how much Cambridge Analytica actually did for the campaign. Trump campaign aides and even current and former Cambridge employees have consistently tried to downplay its role.

Parscale was asked about Cambridge during his interview with the House Intelligence Committee in October. The ranking members of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees sent him a separate letter that month asking whether his firm received "information from a foreign government or foreign actor" at any point during the election.

The letter was also sent to Nix and the heads of Deep Root Analytics, TargetPoint Consulting, and The Data Trust — firms hired by the Republican National Committee last year to bolster the Trump campaign's data operation.

Deep Root accidentally leaked the sensitive personal details of roughly 198 million citizens in June, as its database was left exposed on the open web for nearly two weeks. The firm had stored details of about 61% of the US population on an Amazon cloud server without password protection.

Whereas Deep Root, TargetPoint, and The Data Trust responded to the documents request, Nix did not.

Parscale's letter, meanwhile, mirrored those written by the RNC data firms and used virtually the same language — with one notable exception.

Whereas the firms' letters included a line denying that they had had contact with any "foreign government or foreign actor," Parscale's did not.

In a postelection interview, Kushner told Forbes that he had been keenly interested in Facebook's "micro-targeting" capabilities from early on.

"I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting," Kushner said.

"We brought in Cambridge Analytica," he continued. "I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff ... We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch."
http://www.businessinsider.com/mueller- ... ia-2017-12
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
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Posts: 32090
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