First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Russia

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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Nov 02, 2017 5:01 pm

Well slad, I think I found that Gates-Pence connection. Looks like Mueller did too!

Mueller’s next target is pro-Trump group with ties to Mike Pence’s chief of staff: report

Noor Al-Sibai

02 Nov 2017 at 16:20 ET

Image
Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Nick Ayers (left) and Vice President Mike Pence (right). Image via Ayers/Twitter).

Now that he’s all but bagged one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly set his sights on another target — a pro-Trump non-profit with ties to the vice president’s top staffer.

According to Fox News, America First Policies, a group co-founded by newly-indicted Manafort deputy Rick Gates, recently received a request from Mueller’s office.

Along with the group’s connection to one of Mueller’s latest targets, it also has a friend in even higher places — Vice President Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff Nick Ayers.

According to an ABC published soon after Ayers was confirmed as the vice president’s second chief of staff, the young Republican was a “leader” of AFP.

Ayers made headlines last month when his comments suggesting the GOP should “purge” anti-Trump Republicans at a donor meeting were leaked to Politico.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby Elvis » Thu Nov 02, 2017 9:12 pm

I regret speaking harshly in my last post, I chose my words poorly. I beg the forgiveness of the readers and members.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 03, 2017 9:30 pm

POLITICS

Trump Campaign Adviser Met With Russian Officials in 2016

By MARK MAZZETTI and ADAM GOLDMANNOV. 3, 2017

WASHINGTON — Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump presidential campaign, met Russian government officials during a July 2016 trip he took to Moscow, according to testimony he gave on Thursday to the House Intelligence Committee.

Shortly after the trip, Mr. Page sent an email to at least one Trump campaign aide describing insights he had after conversations with government officials, legislators and business executives during his time in Moscow, according to one person familiar with the contents of the message. The email was read aloud during the closed-door testimony.

The new details of the trip present a different picture than the account Mr. Page has given during numerous appearances in the news media in recent months and are yet another example of a Trump adviser meeting with Russians officials during the 2016 campaign.
In multiple interviews with The New York Times, he had either denied meeting with any Russian government officials during the July 2016 visit or sidestepped the question, saying he met with “mostly scholars.”

Mr. Page confirmed the meetings in an interview on Friday evening, but played down their significance.

“I had a very brief hello to a couple of people. That was it,” he said. He said one of the people he met was a “senior person,” but would not confirm the person’s identity.


He confirmed that an email he had written to the campaign after that trip to Moscow was presented to him during Thursday’s appearance before the House Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Page acknowledged his meeting with Russian government officials during sharp questioning by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the committee
, according to a congressional official familiar with the exchange.

During another part of the testimony, Mr. Page was questioned about a trip to Budapest, although it was not immediately clear why. Mr. Page told The Times earlier this year that he had taken that trip around Labor Day weekend last year, but he said he had not met with any Russians.

“It was a short four-day trip over a long holiday weekend at the end of the summer,” Mr. Page said at the time. “I had a nice trip up the Danube, to the Visegrad castle, did a lot of sightseeing and went to a jazz club. Not much to report.”

Court records unsealed on Monday revealed that another campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, met with Russian officials in 2016 and was offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” The court records were released by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian attempts to disrupt the presidential election last year and whether any of President Trump’s associates helped in that effort.

Mr. Page was questioned by the F.B.I. earlier this year and has also appeared before the grand jury as part of the special counsel’s inquiry.

The House Intelligence Committee is one of three congressional investigations that are also examining these issues.

Mr. Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016 was never a secret, and during the trip, he gave a speech at a graduation ceremony at the New Economic School, a university there. But the trip was one of the triggers of a counterintelligence investigation begun by the F.B.I. later that month.


In his talk at the university, Mr. Page criticized American policy toward Russia in terms that echoed the position of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change,” Mr. Page said.

His remarks accorded with Mr. Trump’s positive view of the Russian president, which had prompted speculation about what Mr. Trump saw in Mr. Putin — more commonly denounced in the United States as a ruthless, anti-Western autocrat.

Mr. Page left the Trump campaign not long after the trip, and since then, Mr. Trump’s advisers tried to distance the campaign from Mr. Page.

During another trip to Moscow, in December 2016, after Mr. Page had left the Trump campaign, he said he planned to meet with “business leaders and thought leaders.” At the time, a Kremlin spokesman said that no government officials planned to meet Mr. Page and that the Kremlin had never had any contact with him.

“We have learned about this from the press,” the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told the news agency Interfax.

A former Navy officer and Annapolis graduate, Mr. Page was unknown in Washington foreign policy circles when Mr. Trump announced him as a member of his team of advisers in March 2016.

But his Russian experience was real, as Mr. Page lived in Moscow from 2004 to 2007 while working as a junior investment banker for Merrill Lynch.

Mr. Page subsequently started his own investment firm, Global Energy Capital, and teamed up on some deals with a Russian businessman, Sergey Yatsenko. Mr. Yatsenko had been deputy chief financial officer for the Russian energy giant Gazprom, which is majority-owned by the government and has close ties to Mr. Putin.

Mr. Page was wrapped up — but not charged — in an F.B.I. investigation in 2013 that targeted people suspected of being Russian intelligence officers in New York. One of the of three men who was later charged with being an unregistered agent of a foreign power had met Mr. Page at an energy symposium, and was recorded describing him as having dreams of lucrative deals.

Mr. Page had said he did not know the man was an intelligence officer.

In a video of the July 2016 speech he gave in Moscow, Mr. Page told the audience that he had met with an executive of Rosneft, another major Russian energy company. He said that person was a “friend.”

His time on the Trump campaign was short, but he has described the experience as particularly meaningful.

“The half year I spent on the Trump campaign meant more to me than the five years I spent in the Navy,” he said in an interview earlier this year.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/us/p ... ssian.html


Aug 13, 2016

seemslikeadream » Sat Aug 13, 2016 3:22 pm wrote:Trump’s money mystery: Trump is definitely hiding something, but the question is what
Are we going to find deep ties to Russia in those long-awaited tax returns?
MICHAEL WINSHIP, BILLMOYERS.COM

This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.

First things first, Donald Trump: Release. Your. Tax. Returns.

No excuses.

Second, if we have to have a cartoon character running for president, I would prefer Bart Simpson. He has better writers and a healthier sense of self-awareness.

Like Donald Trump, Bart clings to a life’s philosophy best summed up as, “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it, unless it’s something good, in which case I did do it, even if I didn’t do it.”

That said, while Bart rarely can discern right from wrong, he frowns on bad organization and a lack of finesse. Of the Trump campaign, he would look askance and dismissively pronounce, as he has of other fiascoes, “This is senseless destruction with none of my usual social commentary.”

Bart also has a finer comprehension than Trump of government and the U.S. Constitution, a document he supports and understands, but about which he forthrightly declares, “I’m pretty sure the Patriot Act killed it to ensure our freedoms.”

But back to those tax returns. According to experts, the old “I’m being audited and can’t release them” argument does not hold water. For the umpteenth time, what is Trump hiding?

Of course, many have speculated for months that his obfuscating is because he has much less money than he claims; some have suggested that the returns would reveal that Trump is a complete chiseler when it comes to contributing to charity.

No, what’s truly disturbing is the prospect of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, each an exemplar of thuggish ultra-nationalism, joining hands and merrily dragging the rest of us down the lane to a kleptocratic, even fascist hell. And in the end, it’s all about the money.
Like others, I believe that what’s in those documents would reveal how deeply in hock Trump is to overseas investors, especially the Russian oligarchs. How could we have a president with hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign debt? How effectively could Trump engage as a leader of the United States when he personally owes other countries’ financiers a fortune? This is almost as frightening as the prospect of Trump waking up in a cranky pants mood and eighty-sixing the planet. Almost.

The relationship among Trump, his advisors and Russia is deeply troubling and not because of Cold War-era paranoia about the Communist threat (although it is fascinating to see how the possible involvement of Russia in this election is both stirring up that nostalgic paranoia while at the same time opening old fissures on the left, as if we were back debating Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin and the cult of personality).

Bad enough that many intelligence and computer experts seem to agree that the recent cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign are the handiwork of hackers in the employ of Russian security services. The long-suspected machinations of several DNC staffers against the Bernie Sanders campaign that were revealed by the hacks, while indeed worthy of condemnation, do not justify the act itself. Nor do the many past acts of interference by the United States in the electoral process of friends and enemies. But as many have noted, we once voted to impeach a president after a break-in at Democratic headquarters; this current breach should be taken no less seriously and is, in many important ways, worse.

You don’t have to be a hawk on these issues or an hysteric on the dangers of Russia — and I’m neither — to be deeply concerned that outside influences could so easily manipulate a potential president.Worrying, too, to see the recent interference, reportedly by Trump staffers, with the Republican Party platform plank calling for the protection of Ukraine’s security against Russia, as well as Trump’s own comments praising Putin and Russia while questioning America’s continuing role as the linchpin member of NATO. Not to mention a campaign manager, Paul Manafort, whose work as a political consultant to former Ukrainian president and Putin pal Viktor Yanukovych is deeply suspect and an advisor, Carter Page, who has ties to Gazprom, the Russian, state-controlled energy giant. In July, Page spoke at Moscow’s New Economic School and said that the chance for better relations with Russia has been diminished because, “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote a couple of weeks ago, “Those associations might simply be unsavory if the candidate were an experienced political figure or surrounded by knowledgable advisors. Neither is the case…My own concern is mainly that this kind of mix of ignorance, grifters and disorganization is the kind of seed bed where influence operations and malign influence tend to thrive and take root. We’ve seen more than enough to know this knot of connections requires deep scrutiny, extreme vetting as Trump might say. This is no joke.”

But most important, follow the money. Trump denies that he has any investments in Russia, which as many have pointed out is not for lack of trying, and which essentially raises the question, what have the Russians invested in Trump? “There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump’s coffers,” Marshall wrote late last month, “and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.”

We know that Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets…We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” The Guardian reports there are “several Russian billionaires tied to Trump” and notes Trump’s sale of a Palm Beach mansion for $95 million to Russian fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, “who was reported in the Panama Papers leaks to have used offshore law firms to hid more than $2 billion worth of artworks, including pieces by Picasso, Van Gogh and Leonardo, from his wife in advance of their divorce.”

Perhaps most damning is The New York Times’s April account of accusations that arose from the building of Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo tower in downtown Manhattan, “one of several instances in which Mr. Trump’s boastfulness — a hallmark of his career and his campaign — has been accused of crossing the line into fraud.”

Times reporter Mike McIntire wrote that one of the associates at Bayrock, the development company behind the Trump project, “brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians ‘in favor with’ President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives.” Another lawsuit “was filled with unflattering details of how Bayrock operated, including allegations that it had occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia.”

The aforementioned Josh Marshall has been taking all of this in and covering Trump’s Russia ties with the persistence and eagle eye of a superb investigative reporter. He writes:

“Trump has been blackballed by all major U.S. banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major U.S. presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

“…Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump’s financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That’s simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.”

Yes, the body of evidence, while large, is circumstantial. But where there’s smoke, which makes it all the more imperative that Trump let the press and public see his tax returns so we have a chance at piecing together the truth.

There is no sense in allowing a man with this potentially monstrous amount of foreign debt to be our president, especially when he is someone monumentally indifferent to understanding America’s place in the world, a fool whose entire worldview seems equivalent to that of the blowhard at the local tavern whose total knowledge comes from something he heard from a guy once.

Dump Trump, Republicans, and see if Bart Simpson will give you a tumble.

http://www.salon.com/2016/08/13/trumps- ... r_partner/



Now we know why Donald Trump and his allies have spent all week lying about the Trump-Russia dossier
Bill Palmer
Updated: 10:54 pm EDT Fri Nov 3, 2017
Home » Politics


Donald Trump and his allies have spent the past week or more spreading nonstop false claims about the “Trump-Russia dossier” compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. It’s been clear that they’ve been trying to create a distraction, as the arrests have begun in the Trump-Russia scandal. Now we know why Trump and his gang have been focusing on attacking the dossier specifically.



Here’s a line straight out of Steele’s dossier: “July 2016: Trump advisor Carter Page holds secret meetings in Moscow with Sechin and senior Kremlin Internal Affairs official, Divyekin.” Now the New York Times reports that on Thursday, Carter Page testified to the House Intelligence Committee that when he traveled to Russia in July 2016, he did indeed secretly meet with Russian government officials (link). The official cover story for Page’s trip was to give a policy speech, and up to now he’s never admitted that he secretly met with the Russian government while he was there. Why is this so important?



For reasons known only to them, nearly every major media outlet has treated the Trump-Russia dossier like toxic radiation from the start. CNN initially refused to publish it at all. After BuzzFeed did publish it, other news outlets felt compelled to periodically report on it, but insisted on disclaiming it as being “unverified.” This was true, but these same news outlets were simultaneously reporting far flimsier claims without any such disclaimer. As time has gone on, one claim in the dossier after another has been independently verified. Not a single claim in the dossier has been disproven. Now we have Carter Page confirming that the claim about him in the dossier is indeed true.



This helps explain why Donald Trump and his allies have recently begun frantically trying to discredit the Trump-Russia dossier by falsely claiming that it’s a work of fiction created by Hillary Clinton. They’ve known that more pieces of the dossier were about to be confirmed to be true, and they were trying to get out ahead of it.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ly ... rump/5891/
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: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 04, 2017 1:18 am

Washington is bracing for the next indictment to be unsealed, but it is unclear when that will happen. There are several people under scrutiny at risk. Even those close to President Trump are speculating. A source familiar with the inner workings of the Trump business and White House operation says, "I think everyone in the entire circle is potentially a target." Among the names the source mentioned were former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn; his son, Michael Flynn Jr.; Felix Sater, a former Trump business associate; Carter Page – a former foreign policy adviser for the campaign; Sam Clovis a former top campaign official; Michael Cohen, Trump's personal attorney; and Jared Kushner who is the president's son-in-law and one of his top advisers.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/source-who ... r-himself/


Carter Page
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40369

Jared Kushner
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40566

Will Flynn bring back Yellowcake to WH
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40188

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FELIX SATER
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40670&p=642965&hilit=felix+sater#p642965
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 04, 2017 2:03 pm

Trump team collusion with Russia? Ukraine connection may hold key.
Cheri Jacobus, Opinion contributor Published 10:58 a.m. ET Nov. 3, 2017 | Updated 4:51 p.m. ET Nov. 3, 2017
Robert Mueller will find interesting evidence in the shifting stories of just how pro-Russia tweaks to the GOP platform came about..


After months of speculation, educated guesses and connecting the dots, the FBI investigation into just what Russia did to attempt to impact the 2016 U.S. presidential election and who in the United States had dealings with Russians is coming into sharper focus. In fact, there is one thread that may end up as the defining unraveling of the Trump presidency.

Rubber — meet road.

The unverified Steele dossier alleges that Donald Trump offered a quid pro quo to Russia, promising to change the GOP platform language on Ukraine to favor Russia, if Wikileaks would provide his campaign with any salacious and damaging information uncovered from the hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Is that why Trump advisers insisted — even to the point of bullying, by some accounts — that the GOP platform language be changed to make sure it didn't call for giving Ukraine weapons to fight Russian forces? And why do they now tell different stories than they told just a few months ago?

Republicans in Congress have approved providing arms to the Ukrainian government in light of increased Russian aggression, so the strong-arming of platform committee members seemed odd at the time. But the reasons now seem less mystifying.

Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who reportedly has known Trump for 30 years, is now charged with conspiracy and money laundering while working for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. Trump is claiming ignorance about all of Manafort’s dealings, and complete ignorance about the strange GOP platform meeting where the Ukraine language was changed. Incredibly, Manafort claims he wasn't involved either.

The Trump presidency may very well hinge on the whats and whys of that meeting. The altered stories by various Trump players are the red flags.

Several people who were in the platform committee meeting say Trump campaign aides were present and pushed hard for the pro-Russian change, memorable because it seemed to be the only item they were concerned with. They were on a mission.

Trump campaign official J.D. Gordon participated in the effort and said he was acting to keep the platform language in line with Donald Trump's views. A delegate in the room said Trump campaign staff were on their cell phones talking to the New York Trump campaign headquarters.

Longtime Republican National Convention (RNC) member Diana Denman of Texas was surprised by the aggressiveness of the effort by the Trump staff in the room, and as she wrangled with them over the precise language, the two men said they had to “make some calls and clear it.” She said she didn’t expect to be in a “firefight.”

More: New York unbowed by fresh terror attack

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Noteworthy, is that J.D. Gordon and Carter Page, another Trump aide, also met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention.

So just why has Gordon changed his story claiming he did not advocate modifying the language and that he did not act on behalf of Trump? Why did Trump deny he knew anything about the platform change? Who were Trump staff talking with on their cell phones? And why is this so very, very critical?

In what is increasingly looking like a desperate attempt to cover up yet another item of disturbing coziness by Trump Team with Russia, the sudden denials and reversals, rather than exculpatory, actually serve as a bright light with glowing arrows saying “This! This right here!”

It’s a safe bet those RNC platform committee delegates have, or will soon, be having detailed discussions with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team regarding that meeting at the convention and what was said and done by Trump staff.

We are being asked to believe that Trump aides were acting independently, that RNC platform committee members are lying, that the ONLY platform change the Trump campaign aides intervened on was done 100% without Trump’s knowledge, and that the dossier is just a complete fake, even though parts have already been verified.

That’s a lot to swallow, even for the most diehard Trump supporters.



Image


and General Yellowkerk has been cooperating for months :)




WaPo: Congressional Investigators To Interview Former Trump Bodyguard

By MATT SHUHAM Published NOVEMBER 4, 2017 1:37 PM
President Donald Trump’s former longtime bodyguard will face questions from congressional investigators next week about a 2013 trip both men took to Moscow, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Keith Schiller, once Trump’s body man in the White House and the longtime director of security for the Trump Organization, traveled with Trump to Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant.

According to unnamed people familiar with the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation, the Washington Post reported, the committee has called for Schiller to appear for an interview Tuesday and question him about allegations included in a dossier created by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.

Steele produced the dossier for Fusion GPS, a research firm previously hired by the conservative news website Free Beacon that was at the time working for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Among the dossier’s many claims is that Russian officials obtained compromising information on Trump during his 2013 trip, including that he allegedly hired prostitutes and brought them to his Moscow hotel room.

According to the Post, Schiller’s role in personally delivering former FBI Director James Comey’s termination letter is of interest to the committee, as well.

An unnamed U.S. official “familiar with the inquiry” told the Post, referring to Schiller: “He can expect to be asked about any interaction with Russians, with or without Trump.”

Ty Cobb, the lawyer overseeing the Trump White House’s response to the Russia investigation, told the Post: “[T]he White House is delighted that Mr. Schiller will have an opportunity to shed some light on these scandalous allegations, and we are sure that his testimony will be of great interest to all fair-minded people.”

The Post noted that Trump told the New York Times in July, referring to Schiller’s reaction to the dossier’s claims: “He said, ‘What kind of crap is this?’ I went there for one day for the Miss Universe contest, I turned around, I went back.”

Before Schiller left the White House in September, he was closely involved in Trump’s campaign and administrative operations.

Schiller escorted, physically, Univision journalist Jorge Ramos from a press conference after Ramos insisted he had a right to ask Trump about his immigration enforcement agenda. (“I didn’t escort him out. You’ll have to talk to security. Whoever security is escorted him out,” Trump said of his bodyguard of 18 years following the incident.)
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/r ... h-schiller
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: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Nov 06, 2017 5:25 pm

Image

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 6749671424

The ambitious George Papadopoulos
ALEXIS PAPACHELAS

Image
George Papadopoulos (third from left) sits at a table with then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump and others during a meeting in Washington in this photo that was posted on Trump’s Twitter account on March 31.

When I first heard the name George Papadopoulos coming from the lips of Donald Trump, I admit I was taken aback. We more or less know all the Greek Americans who are active in the Greek lobby or in think tanks. George Papadopoulos, however, was a name we hadn’t heard. The only Greek American close to Trump during the US president’s election campaign was George Gigicos, who traveled across America with him, organizing his rallies.

With some research, a journalist with Kathimerini tracked down Papadopoulos, who had come to Athens to make “contacts.” It was May 2016 and Trump was very much a question mark. No one knew his positions on foreign policy issues, nor of course, on Greece. I admit I was curious to meet the man and see whether there was a “Greek” element in Trump’s closest team.

The first meeting

I contacted him and we met at a central Athens hotel. Sharply dressed in a manner befitting of a US law school graduate in his first job at a firm, he started to explain Trump’s dogma and to stress his own role as foreign policy adviser. His manner was that of a second-rate actor in a political thriller. Every so often, he would lower his voice so as not to be overheard or drop hints of major contacts, mainly in Israel, but also in Egypt and Cyprus. He also insinuated having some kind of close connection to the Israeli energy firm Noble. It was obvious that he didn’t know a lot of people in Athens at the time, but was eager to make important acquaintances. The way he threw out different names, like that of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, made me think that he would soon accomplish his goal. I left that first meeting unsure of who I was dealing with or, rather, whether I was looking at someone who was too green or too flippant for the job he had been assigned.

We met again when he came back to Athens a few weeks later. By then he had met everyone he needed to know and spoke very comfortably about the Greek president, the ministers of foreign affairs and defense, the head of the main opposition and important businessmen. He “revealed” that had been secretly planning a pre-election trip by Trump to Greece and Israel, which he saw taking place that July. His contacts with the Greek government, he claimed, were quite advanced and he appeared confident the visit would happen despite some reservations from the prime minister’s office.

In the meantime, he expressed his interest in an article I had written on the need for Greece to acquire some influence in Trump’s team, because up to that point, the government and its politicians were only in contact with the Democrats. I asked him to mediate with the Trump campaign people to get some answers from the candidate regarding issues that were of Greek interest. He said he would do it, so I sent him my questions. He then disappeared for a while and wouldn’t answer the email I sent him. On June 3, he forwarded me an email from Hope Hicks, the head of communications in the Trump campaign, in which she said she would be happy to do an interview, but needed a bit of time.

I heard nothing more on the issue and Papadopoulos disappeared again until September 30, 2016, when he forwarded me an interview he had given to Russia’s Interfax news agency. I traveled to the US the following month for the elections and tried to track him down for an interview. He finally answered after I had sent several messages, saying that there had been some issues with the campaign, but they were OK now. Then he disappeared again.

Key contact

In the meantime, I started hearing complaints from all sorts of people regarding Papadopoulos’s attitude. He had acquired a new status in Athens and was widely regarded as being the key to having Trump’s ear. He was bestowed with awards, wined and dined by prominent Athenians and even appointed to the judging committee of a beauty pageant on a Greek island. I had expected him to get a job at the State Department as it became clear after the elections that Trump did not have enough people of his own to staff hundreds of political positions.

For months I heard nothing of Papadopoulos and wondered what had become of him. Last Tuesday, I was at Dubai airport on my way back to Greece from Japan when I saw the news of Papadopoulos’s arrest in the CNN headlines. The ambitious young Greek American had finally managed to become famous – albeit not in the way he had intended.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 06, 2017 7:32 pm

Russian Twitter Support for Trump Began Right After He Started Campaign

In three months after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy, tweets from Russian accounts offered far more praise for the businessman than criticism
Image
A staff member arranges a display showing a social-media post during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Nov. 1 in Washington.

By Mark Maremont and Rob Barry
Nov. 6, 2017 5:33 a.m. ET

Kremlin-backed support for Donald Trump’s candidacy over social media began much earlier than previously known, a new analysis of Twitter data shows.

Russian Twitter accounts posing as Americans began lavishing praise on Mr. Trump and attacking his rivals within weeks after he announced his bid for the presidency in June 2015, according to the analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

A U.S. intelligence assessment released early this year concluded the Kremlin developed a “clear preference” for Mr. Trump over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, but cited December 2015 as the earliest suspected time that Russian social-media accounts advocated for Mr. Trump.

The earlier starting point of pro-Trump tweets highlights the breadth of the Russian effort to manipulate social media during the 2016 election. Kremlin-paid actors sowed division among Americans with fake pages and accounts, inflammatory postings and thousands of paid ads aimed at both liberal and conservative audiences, according to testimony before Congress last week.

The Journal analyzed 159,000 deleted tweets from accounts that Twitter identified to congressional investigators as operated by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency.

Twitter said it has suspended all 2,752 of the accounts, which removes their tweets from its platform. Congress released the names of the accounts on Nov. 1, during hearings on Russian interference in the 2016 elections.


Russia's Sophisticated Efforts to Interfere in 2016 Election
Based on the information that's now coming out of congressional committees, Russian goals to interfere in the 2016 election were very broad. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib explains just how sophisticated the Russian efforts were using social media. Photo: AP
In the three months after Mr. Trump announced his presidential candidacy on June 16, 2015, tweets from Russian accounts reviewed by the Journal offered far more praise for the real-estate businessman than criticism—by nearly a 10-to-1 margin. At the same time, the accounts generally were hostile to Mrs. Clinton and the early GOP front-runner, Jeb Bush, by equal or greater margins.

The Journal pieced together the deleted tweets from data it has collected as well as that provided to the Journal by several researchers. The records contain at least one tweet from more than 2,000 of the accounts.

A Twitter Inc. spokeswoman declined to comment. In Senate testimony last week, a Twitter attorney said the company takes seriously “that the power of our service was misused by a foreign actor for the purpose of influencing the U.S. presidential election,” and said Twitter is beefing up its efforts to combat such activities.

Mr. Trump, a regular user of Twitter himself, has called claims that the Russians manipulated the 2016 election via social media “a hoax.”

“BOOM! DOWN GOES @jebbush,” wrote @DorothieBell, three weeks after Mr. Trump entered the race. The account, claiming to be run by an American “Conservative wife, mother” who wanted to “take this once great country back!!!,” linked to a Breitbart News article about Mr. Trump attacking Mr. Bush for being soft on immigration.

In August, @TamaFlan, claiming to be an American named Tamar Flanagan, tweeted: “#TrumpBecause It’s time for @BarackObama and @HillaryClinton to go quietly into the night #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.”

Other accounts criticized Mr. Bush for being a “RINO” (Republican in name only). One offered a succinct put-down: “@JebBush ewww.”

The numerous Russian Twitter attacks on Mrs. Clinton during this three-month period included a tweet comparing her treatment of the press to Adolf Hitler’s, adding: “Heil Hillary.” Another account tweeted links to an editorial—published months earlier—criticizing Mrs. Clinton’s “Culture of Corruption.”

Many political messages were sent out word-for word by multiple Russian-backed accounts, often within minutes of each other, suggesting a coordinated campaign.

Of the Russian-backed accounts that tweeted about Mr. Trump in the summer of 2015, at least 40 served up positive sentiment; just one account captured by the Journal data expressed strong negative opinions.

The exception was @Jenn_Abrams, an account that pretended to be run by an opinionated American blogger that eventually attracted 71,000 followers and many media mentions. “I’d rather join #ISIS than have Donald Trump as my president,” that account tweeted on the day Mr. Trump announced his candidacy.

It isn’t clear whether the Russian accounts truly backed Mr. Trump from the start, or viewed support for the upstart candidate as an opportunity to disrupt U.S. politics.

As the November 2016 election approached, the Kremlin preference for Mr. Trump became even more pronounced. Pro-Trump tweets—either favoring him or attacking his opponent—outnumbered those for Mrs. Clinton by a 30-to-1 ratio in the two weeks before the election, the Journal analysis found. There were about 236 pro-Trump or anti-Clinton tweets captured in the Journal data during those two weeks compared with seven that were pro-Clinton or anti-Trump.


Much of the Russian social-media disinformation campaign has been linked to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, a shadowy, so-called troll farm that spread Russian propaganda across the Internet.

Twitter has said the 2,752 Internet Research Agency-operated accounts sent out 131,000 messages on its platform in a 2 1/2-month period around the November election. Messages from a much broader network of automated bot accounts were viewed about 288 million times in that period.

Nearly all of that activity has vanished, because Twitter removes all tweets from suspended or deleted accounts and requires its vendors to do the same. That makes it difficult to analyze past behavior; the tweets captured by the Journal represent only a slice of the messages sent out by the troll farm-operated accounts.

The Kremlin social-media operation didn’t always favor one U.S. political party, and spanned the ideological spectrum.

A Facebook account called Blacktivist claimed to push the Black Lives Matter movement, while an account called Heart of Texas agitated for that state’s secession.

The Russian-backed Twitter accounts were so successful at imitating Americans that they were frequently followed and retweeted by prominent people, including Trump campaign insiders, and quoted in mainstream media publications.

One such account, @Pamela_Moore13, which claimed to be operated by a Texan who was “Conservative. Pro God. Anti Racism,” amassed an impressive 70,000 followers—including retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Fox News commentator Sean Hannity —before being suspended by Twitter in the purge of Russian accounts.

An attorney for Mr. Flynn and spokeswoman for Fox didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Before the election, at least 104 of the Russian-controlled accounts, including many of those with tens of thousands of followers, posted hashtags supporting Mr. Trump, including variations of the campaign catchphrase Make America Great Again. More than 90 accounts posted negative messages about Mrs. Clinton’s health, emails and alleged corruption. The accounts posted a handful of pro-Clinton hashtags.

For the GOP debate on Dec. 15, 2015 in Las Vegas, dozens of the accounts live-tweeted using the hashtag #VegasGOPDebate. Many showed a clear preference for Mr. Trump.

“Trump is a real leader, I believe debates will help to see it,” six of the accounts wrote.

“Only Trump can deal with #ISIS,” wrote @MarissaImStrong to its 413 followers.

One, @Cheese_Monay, disagreed, tweeting: “We need real debates not this clown show on #Fox.”

On Election Day, the accounts warned of rigged voting machines and called for an indictment of Mrs. Clinton.

As voting wound down that day, @JacquelinIsBest tweeted to its 2,100 followers: “I can’t believe I was able to experience our potential president speak at his very last rally. #HillaryForPrison2016 #TrumpForPresident.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-tw ... 1509964380
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
 
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 06, 2017 10:56 pm

Mueller could charge Manafort with intentionally endangering the soldiers (Ukraine)

Mueller could charge Flynn with attempted kidnapping

Murder/Kidnapping/Agent of a foreign government

The “Conspiracy against the United States”

This is all about to get really real for the citizens of the U.S.

But here’s what is clear: in the grand jury case against Michael Flynn that involved James Woolsey as a witness, the sealed indictment is already in place. Flynn has already been indicted, whether he knows it or not. By the way, Woolsey presumably testified that he witnessed Flynn conspiring with the Turkish government to kidnap a guy in Pennsylvania and ship him off to Turkey – so Flynn’s arrest will set off an explosively juicy media narrative about the Trump-Russia scandal now involving kidnapping.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/in ... lynn/5932/


seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 05, 2017 9:04 pm wrote:CIA director R. James Woolsey abruptly quits Trumps transition team :)

Former CIA director James Woolsey quits Trump transition team
By Philip Rucker January 5 at 7:24 PM
Former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr., a veteran of four presidential administrations and one of the nation’s leading intelligence experts, resigned Thursday from President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team because of growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies.

Woolsey’s resignation as a Trump senior adviser comes amid frustrations over the incoming administration’s national security plans and Trump’s public comments undermining the intelligence community.

“Effective immediately, Ambassador Woolsey is no longer a Senior Advisor to President-Elect Trump or the Transition. He wishes the President-Elect and his Administration great success in their time in office,” Jonathan Franks, a spokesman for Woolsey, said in a statement.

Woolsey said on CNN Thursday night that he did not want to “fly under false colors” any longer. “I’ve been an adviser and felt that I was making a contribution….. But I’m not really functioning as an adviser anymore. When I’m on the [television] screen, everybody announces that I’m a former CIA director and that I’m a Trump adviser and I’m really not anymore.”

People close to Woolsey said that he had been excluded in recent weeks from discussions on intelligence matters with Trump and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the incoming White House national security adviser. They said that Woolsey had grown increasingly uncomfortable lending his name and credibility to the transition team without being consulted. Woolsey was taken aback by this week’s reports that Trump is considering revamping the country’s intelligence framework, said these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.

“Jim is very uncomfortable being considered an adviser in an area where one might consider him an expert when he is not involved in the discussions,” one person close to Woolsey said. “To be called ‘senior adviser’ and your opinion is not sought is something he cannot handle.”

Trump transition officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Woolsey’s resignation.

Woolsey has been a key player in the national security firmament since the late 1970s, when he served as undersecretary of the Navy in the Jimmy Carter administration. He has held other roles under former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, culminating with the post as director of the CIA between 1993 and 1995.

The person close to Woolsey described him as having chafed at Trump’s loose style on Twitter. They described Woolsey as a “very principled” diplomat who takes care to communicate the right message with just the right words. “This is a guy [for whom] commas, periods, etc., all have special meaning,” this person said.

Woolsey joined the Trump campaign last September, issuing a statement commending Trump’s plans to grow and modernize the military.

“Mr. Trump understands the magnitude of the threats we face,” he said in the statement.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... e3fa776085

posting.php?mode=quote&f=8&p=626166


seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 14, 2017 8:18 am wrote:gone but not forgotten

Trump Hotel To Host Conference For Michael Flynn’s Foreign Lobbying Client

11:18 PM 03/13/2017

A Turkish business consortium chaired by a businessman with lobbying ties to former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn is co-hosting a three-day conference at Trump International Hotel in May.

The Turkish-American Business Council (TAIK) will co-host the 36th annual “Conference on U.S.-Turkey Relations” with the American Turkish Council (ATC) from May 21 to May 23.

TAIK’s chairman is Ekim Alptekin, the sole proprietor of Inovo BV, a Dutch shell company that paid Flynn’s consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, $530,000 last year for work on behalf of the Turkish government.

Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, disclosed details of that work last week in papers filed with the Justice Department. He also registered as a foreign agent of Turkey. (RELATED: As Foreign Agent, Michael Flynn Formed ‘Investigative Laboratory’ To Seek ‘Criminal Referrals’ On Turkey’s Behalf)

ATC and TAIK announced Trump International as the conference venue in January, before Flynn was fired from his job as national security adviser and before he registered as a foreign agent of Turkey. But his work with Alptekin and for Trump is likely to raise questions about whether he had anything to do with arranging the conference.

The groups have held the conference at The Ritz-Carlton since 2010. The reasons for the change of is unclear. ATC did not respond to a request for comment.

The website Washington Hatti reported the TAC-TAIK conference on Monday.

Trump International’s D.C. hotel has been the target of intense scrutiny from many Trump critics since its opening in October.

Though Trump has said he’s cut direct financial ties to his real estate empire, groups like the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have filed complaints alleging that his hotels violate the little-used Emoluments Clause, a rule which constitutionally prohibits U.S. officials from receiving payments or gifts from foreign governments or government-controlled entities without congressional approval.

And TAIK has close ties to the Turkish government.

The group, which Alptekin took over in 2015, operates directly under the umbrella of Turkey’s Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEIK). Though that group is nominally controlled by Turkey’s cabinet, several sources with knowledge of Turkey’s political and economic climate have told The Daily Caller that both organizations operate increasingly at the direction of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Business executives from the U.S. and Turkey, as well as U.S. and Turkish government officials, are set to attend May’s conference. Ernest Moniz, the Energy Secretary under President Obama, was the highest-ranking U.S. official to speak at last year’s gathering.

ATC did not respond to a request for comment on the decision to switch this year’s conference to the Ritz-Cartlon and on whether Alptekin will speak at the event. The 40-year-old businessman gave a speech at least year’s meeting.

The group was also asked if Flynn had any input into this year’s conference.

As a foreign agent for Turkey, Flynn agreed to conduct research on Erdogan’s most hated enemy, Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric living in self-exile in Pennsylvania.

Erdogan has pleaded with Presidents Obama and Trump to extradite Gulen, who he accuses of masterminding a failed coup attempt in July.

As part of its contract, Flynn Intel agreed use an “investigative laboratory” to conduct research that could be used to make “criminal referrals,” seemingly regarding the Gulen case.

The contract, signed on Aug. 9, stated that Flynn Intel’s “investigative laboratory” would consist of former CIA director James Woolsey and several ex-FBI officials. Information for the research was also to be used to make a documentary and to perform other public relations activities.

Flynn Intel was initially set to be paid $600,000 for three months of work on the project.

Woolsey, who served as an unpaid adviser to the Flynn Intel group, told TheDC through a spokesman that he had no idea about Flynn’s work for the Turkish government. He also said he was never asked or consulted about being part of an investigative team for the company.

Trump Hotels did not respond to a request for comment on May’s conference.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/13/trump ... z4bJ1D9qG5


N.J. congressman wants details on Michael Flynn's lobbying status
Fredreka Schouten , USA TODAY Published 7:06 a.m. ET March 14, 2017 | Updated 1 hour ago

The White House says lawyers for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn told President Donald Trump's transition team before the inauguration that Flynn might need to register with the government as a foreign agent, but Trump was not aware of the move. (March 10) AP

WASHINGTON — A New Jersey congressman wants to know whether President Trump's former national security adviser can skirt ethics rules and profit from his short-lived government post with lucrative lobbying work.

Ethics rules that President Trump signed in January bar administration officials from lobbying their former agencies for five years after leaving the government and impose a lifetime prohibition on lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. The executive order, however, dropped a requirement imposed by President Obama to publicly report on the number of employees who complied with the ethics pledge and whether the administration had granted any waivers that allow employees to avoid those ethics restrictions.

Rep. Bill Pascrell, a Democrat who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, has written to Trump asking whether former national security adviser Michael Flynn received a waiver that would allow him to lobby on behalf of a foreign government.

Flynn, who lasted less than a month in the White House before he was fired by Trump over his discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, last week registered retroactively as a foreign agent. He acknowledged working on behalf of a Dutch firm with ties to Turkey’s government and said he earned $530,000 from the firm last year while serving as a key adviser to the Trump campaign.

Flynn’s work included investigating Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who lives in exile in rural Pennsylvania. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims Gulen helped instigated a failed coup against his government last year and wants him extradited.

“Trump’s campaign was built on a platform of America First,” Pascrell told USA TODAY, citing one of the president’s campaign themes. “I’m concerned that Trump’s national security adviser advocated for a client that put a foreign government first.”

In a letter to Trump, Pascrell asked him to “publicly certify” whether he or anyone in the administration has or will exempt Flynn from the post-employment foreign lobbying ban.

On Monday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters all administration officials are required to sign an ethics pledge that bars them from ever lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.

White House officials declined to answer USA TODAY questions about whether Flynn — or any other administration official — had received a waiver from the ethics order.

They referred questions to Flynn, who did not respond to interview requests.

Flynn's lobbying revelations have forced the White House to contend with repeated questions in recent days about the conduct of a former employee as the administration works on an array of issues, ranging from a newly revised order on immigration to efforts to push a bill through Congress that repeals the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

Ethics watchdogs have sounded alarms about Trump’s decision to drop the public-disclosure requirement.

“It’s one of the biggest weaknesses of the new order,” said Norm Eisen, who served as Obama’s top ethics lawyer and now chairs Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Ethics doesn’t work in secret.”

Eisen’s group has sued Trump over his decision to retain ownership of his real-estate and branding businesses.

Pascrell also has challenged Trump on other issues. Last month, for instance, he unsuccessfully sought to have the Ways and Means Committee use an obscure 1924 law to examine the president’s tax returns for potential conflicts of interest.

Trump has refused to release his tax returns, citing an ongoing IRS audit.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli ... /99143896/


Michael Flynn an Undisclosed Foreign Agent During Trump Campaign

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn worked as a "foreign agent" for the Turkish government last fall, even as he served as a top adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign—and failed to disclose his lobbying efforts as required by law. The revelation came in a retroactive filing by Flynn with the Justice Department on Tuesday. It reveals he was paid more than a half-million dollars to lobby on behalf of a firm linked to the Turkish government. By failing to register with the federal government, Flynn violated the Foreign Agent Registration Act. On Election Day, Flynn authored an op-ed in the newspaper The Hill calling for the extradition to Turkey of a prominent opponent of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who’s lived in Pennsylvania since 1999. At the White House, Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked if Donald Trump knew of Flynn’s work as a foreign agent.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer: "I don’t believe that that was known. I would refer you to General Flynn and to the Department of Justice in terms of the filings that have been made."
John Roberts: "Had the president have known that, would he have appointed him?"
Press Secretary Sean Spicer: "I don’t know, John. That’s a hypothetical that I’m not prepared to ask. I don’t—I don’t—I don’t know what he discussed prior to—prior to being appointed, in terms of his background, his résumé, his client base. I don’t know any of that."
Last month, the White House fired Michael Flynn as national security adviser, following revelations he discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador before Donald Trump’s inauguration.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/10/ ... p_campaign



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HlC9qEi2Bk


seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 18, 2017 11:59 am wrote:
Mike Flynn Didn’t Report 2014 Interaction With Russian-British National
Meeting at a U.K. dinner occurred when he was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency

By CAROL E. LEE, ROB BARRY, SHANE HARRIS and CHRISTOPHER S. STEWART
March 18, 2017 12:04 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON-—Former national security adviser Mike Flynn interacted with a graduate student with dual Russian and British nationalities at a 2014 U.K. security conference, a contact that came to the notice of U.S. intelligence but that Mr. Flynn, then the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, didn’t disclose, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Flynn met Svetlana Lokhova at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, a gathering of former intelligence officials hosted at Cambridge University, in February 2014....
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-flynn ... 1489809842


Exposed: Michael Flynn has been secretly meeting with Russians since his time at the DIA
By Bill Palmer | March 17, 2017 | 0

Donald Trump’s decision to hire Michael Flynn as a campaign adviser and later as his White House National Security Adviser continues to look more suspicious. Despite Trump’s longtime insistence that he wasn’t aware Flynn had any contact with Russia or the Kremlin during the campaign, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Flynn’s pattern of covertly meeting with Russians dates back to his final days at the Defense Intelligence Agency before he was fired.

Before Michael Flynn went on to become a paid foreign agent of Russia and Turkey and simultaneously an adviser to Donald Trump, he’d seemingly had a respectable military career. Flynn was the head of the DIA under President Barack Obama. But for reasons still unknown, he unraveled during his time on the job, acting in an abrasive and out of control manner, and had to be fired in 2014. That’s the point at which he went fully rogue and decided to go on the take from multiple foreign nations. But now it turns out that Flynn had at least one meeting with a Russian shortly before he was fired, which he failed to disclose as required at the time.

Flynn met with a young Russian woman named Svetlana Lokhova while at a conference in the United Kingdom in 2014. If this Russian woman came out of nowhere and approached Flynn, then he would have been expected and required to report the encounter when he got home. These are the kinds of tactics often used by foreign spies, and are therefore reported and tracked – particularly when it involves the head of the DIA. But instead there is no record that Flynn reported the meeting, thus suggesting that the meeting involved something on Flynn’s part that he didn’t want the U.S. government knowing about.

This raises several questions. Was this Russian woman (source: Wall Street Journal) sent to this UK conference to recruit Michael Flynn for the Kremlin? Was this the starting point for Flynn's subsequent coordinations with the Russians which involved everything from dining with Vladimir Putin in 2015 to routinely phoning the Russian Ambassador while working for the Trump campaign? And how much did Donald Trump know about Flynn's illicit Russian ties when he hired him in 2016?
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/exp ... -dia/1965/


but wait a minute

why was Mike Flynn surveilled?

was he surveilled?

Intel chair asked for info on Fylnn by today from the three agencies respond by today NSA partial response

CIA and FBI have NOT responded

this is NOT moral ....they are supposed to be compelled to do what the Intell Committee asks.... they can not say no

this is strange......was Flynn illegally surveilled?

our constitution does not work this way FBI CIA have to do what the Intel Committee says



Ben Siegel‏Verified account @benyc 1h1 hour ago
More
House Intel Cmte Chairman Devin Nunes says Cmte is "satisfied" with DOJ after receiving response to request for info on Trump surveillance.



satisfied.....satisfied that listening to Flynn had been happening and it was legal? :big smile


LOBBYING LOOPHOLES
While Michael Flynn Lobbied for Turkey, His Firm Told Congress to Extradite Turkish Dissident
Months before he registered as a foreign agent, his company brought in House staffers to preview encrypted technology—then pushed them to send Turkey a wanted man living in the U.S.
KIMBERLY DOZIER
LACHLAN MARKAY
03.17.17 10:37 AM ET
The congressional staffers thought they were going to see a whiz-bang encrypted communications technology when they traveled to Old Town, Alexandria, for a presentation by the now-shuttered Flynn Intel Group.
It’s what came after that gave them pause: a half-baked, conspiracy theory-laden briefing alleging that Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen is leading an Islamic extremist cultural invasion of the United States.
He’s a threat to us, and to our good friend and ally Turkey, Flynn representative Bijan Kian told the House Homeland Security Committee staffers, according to a congressional staffer familiar with the matter.
Kian asked the staffers to back the Turkish government’s demand to extradite Gülen, apparently not realizing their committee didn’t have jurisdiction over the matter, the staffer said.
“It was a sloppy, uncompelling presentation” that smacked of lobbying on Turkey’s behalf, according to a congressional staffer, sharing details not previously reported about the October meeting.
That view was only strengthened when retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn published an op-ed arguing for Gülen’s extradition, describing him as “a shady Islamic mullah residing in Pennsylvania whom former President Clinton once called his ‘friend.’”
Yet Flynn Intel Group only registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent last week—acknowledging that his firm’s work may have benefited Turkey. The public disclosure came after he’d served the shortest term as national security adviser in U.S. history, stepping down after misrepresenting his contacts with the Russian ambassador to Vice President Mike Pence.
And now House Democrats on Thursday released documents detailing that Flynn was paid more than $56,000 in 2015 by three Russian firms with alleged Kremlin ties, including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s media mouthpiece RT and Kaspersky Labs.
That disclosure raises the specter that Flynn violated the U.S. Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bans retired general officers from accepting payments from foreign governments, according to House Oversight Committee Ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-MD), in a letter to the White House, Pentagon, and FBI.
Flynn spokesman Price Floyd said the retired general had informed the Defense Intelligence Agency of the paid speaking engagement for RT. “General Flynn informed and briefed the DIA before his trip to Russia and again upon his return,” Floyd told The Daily Beast on Thursday.
“Flynn properly reported his overseas travel for the December 2015 trip, in accordance with the regulations for people holding security clearances,” said DIA spokesman Jim Kudla on Thursday.
He reportedly did not file paperwork to report the payments to the U.S. Army, however. Army spokesmen did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

But Flynn’s multiple links to foreign concerns raise questions about how carefully the Trump administration vetted its senior staffers, as well as Flynn’s own instinct for what may be legal but not quite appropriate behavior for a retired flag officer.
They also highlight loopholes in Justice Department measures meant to require lobbyists to disclose their work on behalf of foreign governments. Proponents of reforms to those laws say Flynn followed the letter, if not the spirit, of existing rules on foreign governing lobbying, though Flynn’s spokesperson denied that that was the case.
But discrepancies in the firm’s various lobbying filings point to exactly the kind of gray area the Justice Department warned about in a report last fall. Justice officials tasked with enforcing the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) told the department’s inspector general that foreign governments might be exploiting loopholes in U.S. lobbying disclosure laws to exert influence surreptitiously on American public policy.
“We are hoping that with this whole controversy surrounding Flynn, there will be a renewed interest in closing these loopholes,” said Lydia Dennett, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight. The Flynn situation “is the perfect example of how things can fall through the cracks.”
***
Last fall, Flynn disclosed to the Justice Department that he was lobbying for the Dutch company Inovo BV. Flynn’s initial lobbyist registration form last year said the Flynn Intel Group would “advise [Inovo] on U.S. domestic and foreign policy.”
He registered through a domestic disclosure process that requires far less information to be made public than when one registers as a foreign agent. And in the months that followed, as Flynn’s registration as a foreign agent essentially acknowledges, its push for Gülen’s extradition crossed the line from purely commercial work to lobbying for a major foreign-policy objective of the Turkish government.
His initial lobbying registration was a tacit claim that Inovo was independent of the Turkish government. But Inovo’s owner, Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin, chairs a Turkish trade promotion group organized under the auspices of the country’s Foreign Economic Relations Board, whose members are government-appointed. And Alptekin told Turkish media that he had helped arrange a visit to the United States by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year.
Kian’s congressional presentation on the threat posed by Gülen and his American followers, and Flynn’s subsequent column, dovetailed with the interests of the Turkish government, which has blamed a failed July coup attempt on cleric Gülen and demanded his extradition.
That’s why Flynn’s lawyers decided to retroactively register him as a foreign agent “out of an abundance of caution,” a person close to Flynn told The Daily Beast, speaking anonymously as a condition of describing Flynn’s legal strategy.
His Inovo work, Flynn acknowledged in the filing, “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the White House had been unaware Flynn was about to make a FARA filing, but the person close to Flynn said his lawyers had notified the White House counsel’s office before and after the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
Kian did not respond to emails or telephoned requests for comment, nor did Flynn’s law firm, Covington & Burling.
***
Yet for all that smoke, legal experts say Flynn was complying with the law as currently written—or enforced.
Disclosure requirements turn on the question of who benefits. Lobbyists whose work principally benefits a foreign government or political party must notify the Justice Department and register as a foreign agent.
But lobbyists for foreign companies and organizations, even state-owned ones, that are not controlled or directed by a foreign government can simply report their work as if they were working for a U.S. company.
That’s why Justice officials have warned that foreign state actors might seek to evade the heightened scrutiny of registering as a foreign agent by routing U.S. advocacy through ostensibly independent commercial entities.
Officials at the Justice Department's National Security Division (NSD), which administers and enforces foreign agent laws, warned the inspector general in a report last September that foreign governments might try to influence U.S. policy through private companies whose lobbyists manage to evade FARA’s heightened disclosure requirements. The inspector general agreed, and the Justice Department has since recommended that Congress close the loophole through legislation.
The Trump White House has accentuated shortcomings in lobbyist reporting laws, Dennett says, by narrowly tailoring ethics requirements surrounding foreign lobbyists to cover only those who register as foreign agents.
Trump administration appointees are required to pledge that they will never, after their time in the administration, engage in lobbying activity that “would require me to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
Dennett says that pledge leaves open the possibility of work on behalf of non-U.S. companies, some of which might have closer ties to foreign governments than they let on.
Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist with the group Public Citizen, considers the Trump administration to be a case study in the need for more stringent disclosure.
“The Trump administration is stepping into the White House with more foreign investments and conflicts of interest with foreign countries than we’ve ever seen before. So this is something that can become a very, very critical issue in the next four years,” he said in a January interview.
There is one upside to the potential controversy. “All our lobby disclosure improvements, and even the lobby disclosure acts themselves, have come in the wake of scandal,” Holman said.
“I’m fully expecting the new Trump administration to be one of the most scandal-ridden administrations in recent history,” he said, “and upon that scandal, we may be able to promote some sort of vast improvements” in foreign lobbyist disclosure laws.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ident.html



WHAT MIKE FLYNN DID FOR TURKEY
By Nicholas Schmidle March 16, 2017
New information about Flynn’s involvement with Turkey raises new questions about his judgment—and about the Administration’s handling of his entanglements.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW HARRER-POOL / GETTY
One Friday last July, as members of the Turkish military were staging a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general who went on to become Donald Trump’s first national-security adviser, gave a speech in Cleveland. The event was organized by a local chapter of act for America, a self-described “grassroots national security organization” that regards Muslims with considerable suspicion. “There’s an ongoing coup going on in Turkey right now,” Flynn said in his remarks. “Right now!” The country, Flynn said, was heading “towards Islamism” under Erdoğan, and the military was trying to preserve Turkey’s secular identity. The audience applauded the putschists.

A day later, the coup failed; Erdoğan proceeded to round up thousands of alleged plotters and sympathizers, including military officers, judges, and teachers. A Times editorial accused the Turkish President of staging a “counter-coup” and acting “increasingly authoritarian.” Such characterizations tend to unnerve tourists and foreign investors. In early August, Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman and the chairman of the Turkey-U.S. Business Council, contacted Flynn’s consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, about repairing Turkey’s image in the United States. Flynn, whom I profiled for the magazine in February, was one of Trump’s most prominent supporters on the campaign trail, and often accused Hillary Clinton of “influence peddling.” Still, he agreed to help Alptekin, in exchange for a six-hundred-thousand-dollar contract.

In order to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or fara, lobbyists working directly or indirectly on behalf of foreign governments must file paperwork with the Justice Department identifying themselves as “foreign agents.” After agreeing to work with Alptekin, Flynn and his colleagues initially considered doing this, according to a source who participated in the discussions, but they concluded that it wasn’t necessary, since Alptekin was not a Turkish official and the funds were not Turkish government funds. Instead, they filed with Congress, under the Lobbying Disclosures Act. Flynn was merely helping a businessman, they rationalized, and not acting as an agent of a foreign government.

But, last week, Flynn—who was forced to resign as Trump’s national-security adviser on February 13th—refiled his paperwork, to acknowledge that his work for Alptekin may, in fact, have benefitted the Turkish government. The disclosure put Flynn’s work with Alptekin in a new light, raising new questions about Flynn’s judgment—during both the campaign and his brief time in the Administration—and about the Administration’s handling of his entanglements.

Flynn’s work for Alptekin began in earnest in mid-September, when the businessman arranged a meeting in New York between Flynn and the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, at a New York hotel. Turkey’s energy minister, Berat Albayrak, who is also Erdoğan’s son-in-law, was there, too. On Flynn’s side, James Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A. and a member of Flynn Intel Group’s advisory board, attended, as did Brian McCauley, a former F.B.I. agent who worked closely with Flynn in Iraq. (Woolsey told me that he had only “perfunctory involvement” with the Flynn Intel Group and “received no compensation.”) Though the full breadth of the group’s conversation is not known, the same source told me that the Turks sought, among other things, Flynn’s assistance in maligning Fethullah Gülen, a self-exiled cleric who lives in Pennsylvania, whom Erdoğan blamed for the attempted coup. Subsequently, the Flynn Intel Group paid S.G.R., a lobbying and public-relations firm, forty thousand dollars to work on a project that included designing a graphic—“Gulenopoly”—characterizing Gülen as “the Mula Mullah” whose “clandestine” movement had “mastered the game of political and economic influence.”

Yet it seemed that Alptekin was expecting more from Flynn and his colleagues. On November 2nd, Alptekin met with Bijan Kian, the vice-president of the Flynn Intel Group, and McCauley, among others, at the Flynn Intel Group’s offices, in Alexandria, Virginia. (Flynn was not present.) Alptekin stressed their need to produce something—and soon, since Election Day was approaching and the polls suggested that Trump was certain to lose. “We have to generate something to show Turkey how successful we can be,” Alptekin said, according to the source. “What success can we show them now?”

A week later, an op-ed appeared in The Hill, a Washington, D.C., newspaper, authored by Flynn. It heralded Turkey as “our greatest ally” against the Islamic State; accused Obama of “keeping Erdogan’s government at arm’s length”; and described Gülen as a “false façade,” a closet supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood—the Islamist political movement founded in Egypt—and “Turkey’s Osama Bin Laden.”

Nine days after winning the election, Trump appointed Flynn as his national-security adviser. The following day, Bill McGinley, a law partner at Jones Day who advised Trump during the campaign and transition, and who is now the White House Cabinet secretary, spoke on the phone with Kian and others working with Flynn to review the particulars of Flynn’s piece in The Hill. When asked about the article, Kian said that Flynn wrote it himself, and that it was unrelated to his work for Alptekin. “Some people seemed skeptical as to whether Flynn had really woken up the day before the election and felt compelled to write an op-ed defending Erdoğan,” the source said. “McGinley wanted to know if Turkish government dollars touched that op-ed.” (Flynn was not on the call.)

According to the Washington Post, Don McGahn, now the White House Counsel, was also notified during the transition of Flynn’s potential ties with Turkey. (In response to questions about McGinley’s conversation with Flynn Intel Group executives, the White House said, in a statement, “The transition team advised Flynn, like numerous other appointees and nominees, to retain his own counsel to ensure his own compliance with legal obligations. The transition was subsequently informed that Flynn retained counsel.”)

The Flynn Intel Group’s contract with Alptekin was terminated in November, though Turkey’s interests may have remained on Flynn’s mind. A few days before Trump assumed office, Flynn spoke with Susan Rice, Obama’s national-security adviser, to discuss her team’s ongoing initiatives against isis. An element of their plan for taking Raqqa, isis’s self-proclaimed capital, entailed aligning militarily with the Y.P.G., an armed Kurdish group that the Turkish government regards as terrorists. According to the Washington Post, Flynn told Rice not to commit to that plan. “Don’t approve it,” Flynn said. “We’ll make the decision.” Once Trump took office, the plan was put on hold.

Meanwhile, by late January, Flynn’s attorneys were again exploring the prospect of refiling under fara. They were preparing the paperwork when news emerged about contact, before the Inauguration, between Flynn and Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., and how Flynn had supposedly misled Vice-President Mike Pence about that contact. In the wake of the scandal, Flynn was fired—but the fara discussions continued.

Three weeks ago, Flynn’s attorney Robert Kelner, a partner at Covington & Burling, a firm that specializes in political-law compliance, met with Justice Department lawyers. The Justice officials later urged that, in order to comply with the law, Flynn should register as a foreign agent: Flynn’s work for Alptekin may not have been at the behest of the Turkish government, but it served Ankara’s interest.

Last week, after Flynn’s foreign-agent status became public, Pence described the news as “an affirmation of the President’s decision to ask General Flynn to resign,” and said that the reports of Flynn’s work for Turkey had been “the first I’d heard of it.” But on November 18th—the same day McGinley spoke with Flynn Intel Group’s executives—Elijah Cummings, a congressman from Maryland, addressed a letter to Pence, expressing concern about Flynn’s “being paid to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign government’s interests.” As more details about Flynn’s work become public—on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that he was paid tens thousands of dollars by Russian companies as recently as 2015—it may get harder for the Administration to maintain that he was operating in a vacuum.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk ... for-turkey


seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 2:46 pm wrote:BY Removal THEY MEAN KIDNAPPING

Why did James Woolsey wait so long to tell anyone about this?



Ex-CIA Director: Mike Flynn and Turkish Officials Discussed Removal of Erdogan Foe From U.S.
James Woolsey says he attended a September meeting where other participants, including then-Trump adviser Mike Flynn, talked of moving Fethullah Gulen back to Turkey without going through U.S. extradition process
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, center, consulted last September with Turkish government ministers about the case of a controversial Muslim cleric.

By JAMES V. GRIMALDI, DION NISSENBAUM and MARGARET COKER
Updated March 24, 2017 2:35 p.m. ET
83 COMMENTS
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, while serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign, met with top Turkish government ministers and discussed removing a Muslim cleric from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey, according to former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, who attended, and others who were briefed on the meeting.

The discussion late last summer involved ideas about how to get Fethullah Gulen, a cleric whom Turkey has accused of orchestrating last summer’s failed military coup, to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process, according to Mr. Woolsey and those who were briefed.

Mr. Woolsey told The Wall Street Journal he arrived at the meeting in New York on Sept. 19 in the middle of the discussion and found the topic startling and the actions being discussed possibly illegal.

The Turkish ministers were interested in open-ended thinking on the subject, and the ideas were raised hypothetically, said the people who were briefed. The ministers in attendance included the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the country’s foreign minister, foreign-lobbying disclosure documents show.

Mr. Woolsey said the idea was “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away.” The discussion, he said, didn’t include actual tactics for removing Mr. Gulen from his U.S. home. If specific plans had been discussed, Mr. Woolsey said, he would have spoken up and questioned their legality.

It isn’t known who raised the idea or what Mr. Flynn concluded about it.

Price Floyd, a spokesman for Mr. Flynn, who was advising the Trump campaign on national security at the time of the meeting, disputed the account, saying “at no time did Gen. Flynn discuss any illegal actions, nonjudicial physical removal or any other such activities.”

Mr. Flynn served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for 24 days and resigned after he misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about his contact with a Russian diplomat. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into whether Trump campaign officials collaborated with the Russian government to influence the presidential election.

Former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey said attendees at the September meeting discussed removing a Muslim cleric from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey.
Former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey said attendees at the September meeting discussed removing a Muslim cleric from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey. PHOTO: DAVID HUME KENNERLY/GETTY IMAGES
On March 2, weeks after Mr. Flynn’s departure from the Trump administration, the Flynn Intel Group, his consulting firm, filed with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for the government of Turkey. Mr. Trump was unaware Mr. Flynn had been consulting on behalf of the Turkish government when he named him national security adviser, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said this month.

In its filing, Mr. Flynn’s firm said its work from August to November “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” The filing said his firm’s fee, $530,000, wasn't paid by the government but by Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.
U.S.-Turkish relations deteriorated in the final year of the Obama administration over disagreements about extraditing Mr. Gulen and U.S. support for Syrian Kurdish forces battling Islamic State. The Turkish government has been demanding Mr. Gulen’s extradition to face charges that he was the architect of an unsuccessful military coup last summer to overthrow Mr. Erdogan.

Mr. Gulen, who since 1999 has lived in the Pocono Mountains north of Philadelphia and has a green card giving him permission to live in the U.S., denies involvement. Mr. Erdogan has been trying for years to undermine Mr. Gulen, a one-time ally whom Turkey has now branded as a terrorist leader.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Tuesday he had given the White House and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions new evidence linking Mr. Gulen to the coup.


Mr. Woolsey said he attended the Sept. 19 meeting at the urging of the Flynn Intel Group’s chairman and president, Bijan Kian. Mr. Woolsey said he had agreed to be on the group’s advisory board and was offered a consulting fee for his work, but turned it down because of what he heard at the meeting. He held no stake in the firm.

“It seemed to be naive,” Mr. Woolsey said about the discussion. “I didn’t put a lot of credibility in it. This is a country of legal process and a Constitution, and you don’t send out folks to haul somebody overseas.”

The meeting, held at the Essex House hotel in Manhattan, included Mr. Cavusoglu and Berat Albayrak, Mr. Erdogan’s son-in-law and the country’s energy minister, according to the disclosure documents. Also present were Messrs. Alptekin and Mr. Kian.

Cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey has accused of orchestrating last summer’s failed coup, at his home in Pennsylvania last year.
Cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey has accused of orchestrating last summer’s failed coup, at his home in Pennsylvania last year. PHOTO: CHARLES MOSTOLLER/REUTERS
Mr. Woolsey said he didn’t say anything during the discussion, but later cautioned some attendees that trying to remove Mr. Gulen was a bad idea that might violate U.S. law. Mr. Woolsey said he also informed the U.S. government by notifying Vice President Joe Biden through a mutual friend.

The mutual friend confirmed to the Journal he told Mr. Biden about the meeting. Mr. Biden’s spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter, other than to say Mr. Biden felt the Gulen matter should be handled through the courts.

Mr. Flynn’s spokesman, Mr. Floyd, said that at the meeting “Gen. Flynn did discuss the Flynn Intel Group’s work for Inovo that included gathering information that could lead to a legal case against Mr. Gulen.”

Messrs. Kian and Alptekin didn’t respond to calls and emails seeking comment, nor did a spokesman for Mr. Albayrak. Mr. Cavusoglu’s spokesman referred the Journal to the Turkish Embassy in Washington.

In a written statement, the Turkish Embassy acknowledged that Turkish officials met with Mr. Flynn but declined to discuss the conversation. Referencing the Flynn Intel Group’s client, Inovo, the embassy said: “We are not in a position to comment on any engagement between a U.S. consultancy firm and a private company owned by a Turkish businessman.”

The disclosure Mr. Flynn’s firm filed with the U.S. government this month said the meeting was “for the purpose of understanding better the political climate in Turkey at the time.”

Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments.

Mr. Woolsey, who served as CIA director under President Bill Clinton, offered in September to advise the Trump campaign and opposed Hillary Clinton for president. He briefly served as a senior adviser to the transition team.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ex-cia-dir ... 1490380426


:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:


Image
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Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments.Mr. Woolsey, who served as CIA director under President Bill Clinton, offered in September to advise the Trump campaign and opposed Hillary Clinton for president. He briefly served as a senior adviser to the transition team.



How Carter Page Shot Himself In Foot With Descriptions Of 2016 Moscow Trip

Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, speaks with reporters briefly following a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 2, 2017. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published NOVEMBER 6, 2017 4:18 PM
15513Views
A barrage of reports over the weekend divulged what was framed as a major new development in the Russia investigation: former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page admitted that he met with a senior Kremlin official during a July 2016 trip to Moscow.

But we already knew this detail. In an interview with the Washington Post over a year ago, Page acknowledged that he met and shook hands with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich during a graduation event at the New Economic School, where both men were invited to give speeches.

It is Page’s subsequent downplaying of that encounter that made it seem like a new revelation when reports emerged that Page divulged the encounter in his lengthy closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee late last week. By repeatedly insisting he met mostly with “scholars” and had no formal meetings with Russian government officials on his Moscow jaunt, Page turned his run-in with Dvorkovich into red meat for hawk-eyed reporters looking for any discrepancy in how Trump campaign staffers describe their contacts with Russia.

In text messages to TPM on Monday, Page reiterated that he “covered this irrelevant point” in that September 2016 interview with the Post and that the renewed focus on the meeting was a “complete waste of time.” He added that he had “moved on to more important things.”

A review of that original story shows that his description of the run-in has stayed consistent. He volunteered to Post columnist Josh Rogin that he met and shook hands with Dvorkovich at the event in an “exchange of pleasantries.” On Friday, he told the New York Times that he said “a very brief hello to a couple of people,” including a “senior person” who he later told CNN was Dvorkovich.

What seems to have gotten Page in trouble is his overly strict definition of what constitutes a “meeting.” In his many conversations with the press over the past year, Page adamantly denied that he ever met with Russian government officials over the course of the 2016 campaign.

Asked by PBS in February if he’d had “any meetings with Russian officials in or outside of Russia” in 2016, Page replied, “no meetings, no meetings. I might have said hello to a few people as they were walking by me at my graduation—the graduation speech that I gave in July, but no meetings.”

As the Times noted, in multiple conversations with the newspaper about his Moscow trip he either denied meeting with any Russian government figures or avoided the question by saying he met with “mostly scholars.”

These blanket denials came back to bite him before, when he was forced to admit in March that he had also exchanged a quick hello with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention. The situation played out again this weekend because Page has insisted these encounters with high-level Kremlin figures were not long or involved enough to qualify as “meetings.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... dvorkovich



PAGE 53

Hope.... Corey......Jeff Sessions :fingerwag:

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They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 08, 2017 11:12 am

Inside secret court hearing in Mueller's Trump-Russia probe
Audio reveals details of George Papadopoulos' July arraignment in closed Virginia courtroom.
By JOSH GERSTEIN 11/08/2017 05:23 AM EST

One of the first court appearances by special counsel Robert Mueller's team got off to an inauspicious start with a federal magistrate scolding prosecutors for being late.

"Where were you all? This was scheduled for 2 o'clock," a gruff-sounding U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan told the prosecution team last July as they entered her Alexandria, Va., courtroom to arraign former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos on charges of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about the timeline of his Russia-related contact.

"We were informed it had been moved to 3 o'clock. We apologize if we misunderstood that it had been rescheduled," prosecutor Brandon Van Grack replied to the judge's query.

The July 28 hearing took place behind closed doors, but after the case was formally unsealed, POLITICO obtained audio of the roughly eight-minute-long session.

Much of the exchange between Buchanan and Van Grack that day centered on the formalities of closing the courtroom during Papadopolous' appearance.

"I can't get a hold of the judge. Are you telling me he actually entered an order sealing this case?" Buchanan asked.


Indeed, Van Grack said the chief judge of the district court in Washington, D.C., had issued such an order. (That judge, Beryl Howell, also happens to be a she.)

"We need to seal the courtroom then. I'm sorry to make you all go back out, but we need to seal the courtroom again," Buchanan announced to those in the gallery.

When the case was called, Van Grack declared that he was appearing for the United States along with Mueller team prosecutors Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Goldstein.

Buchanan told Papadopolous to stand and formally advised him he'd been charged in a criminal complaint with obstruction of justice and making false official statements. She then called on Van Grack to lay out the maximum penalties: five years and a $250,000 fine for the false statement charge and 20 years in prison and $250,000 fine for the obstruction charge.

Van Grack said the government wasn't seeking Papadopolous' detention—a somewhat unusual move since agents had just arrested him. But the Chicago-based energy consultant was told to give up his passports (two of them) and to keep away from individuals and entities related to the charges against him.

Some of the few words from the defendant came after Buchanan asked if he had a lawyer or needed a court-appointed attorney.

"I do have my own attorney," Papadopoulos said.

The former Trump campaign adviser said "Yes" when the magistrate asked if he understood his obligation to appear in court when requested, but chimed in moments later to indicate he didn't know who he was forbidden to contact.

"Is it possible to know what individuals and entities" shouldn't be contacted? he asked.

"You'll have to give him a list," Buchanan said to prosecutors.

"Yes, your honor," Van Grack said.

"All right. He'll be released. Thank you," Buchanan said, before another exchange with Van Grack about a order he said was needed to seal the courtroom.

Legal experts said the brief appearance was noteworthy in a couple of respects.

First, Papadopoulos had no defense attorney. Typically, a public defender will stand in in such situations at least temporarily.

"That's odd," former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer said. "You would not normally have a defendant appearing before the court and not be represented. The court wasn't concerned with it but that was strange."

Second, Papadopoulos' arrest seems to have been the product of some haste. Indeed, when he was arrested at Dulles Airport July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint. The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved by Howell in Washington.

And when prosecutors filed the complaint the next day they got a verbal order from Howell to seal it, but followed up with a written request that they could take to the magistrate in Alexandria, where they showed up almost an hour later than she was expecting.

All of it suggests something of a scramble, rather than a carefully-prepared plan to take Papadopolous into custody.

A defense lawyer for Papadopoulos, Thomas Breen, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Mueller's office declined to comment.

Whatever transpired in the 24 hours after Papadopoulos landed at Dulles, it doesn't seem to have impaired his cooperation with Mueller's team.

At another sealed hearing in Washington in October, he entered a guilty plea to the false statement charge, while prosecutors dropped the more serious obstruction count.

A statement of facts agreed to by both the prosecution and defense says he's been aiding investigators since he was taken into custody at Dulles three months ago.

"Following his arrest, defendant PAPADOPOULOS met with the Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions," the statement said.

Cramer said the arrest, the sealed hearing and the defendant's release the following day all suggest prosecutors didn't want the energy consultant's associates aware that he was in trouble with the feds and wanted to keep open the possibility of using him to try to extract damaging admissions from others.

"That's pretty consistent with if you want to send him back in or use him," the ex-prosecutor said. "If you're picking someone up and want to send them back into their organization, if people know he's been arrested they're going to run away from this guy...It also shows you're serious. That's going to show this isn't a game."

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/ ... obe-244653


Ask Russia or Guccifer asshole! Your BFF trumpy isn't helping you out?

Ex-Trump adviser Roger Stone seeks donations to help pay for his defense in Russia probe

Erin Kelly, USA TODAY Published 6:03 p.m. ET Nov. 7, 2017


Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone sent out an email Tuesday asking supporters to help him raise $500,000 to clear his name of any wrongdoing in the investigation of Russian interference in last year's presidential election.

"Friend, I'm facing a $500K price tag to clear my name of the Deep State's baseless charges!" the flamboyant Republican consultant wrote in his fundraising appeal, which asked supporters to contribute from $25 to "even $100 or more immediately."

Stone wrote that the "legal assault" against him has already cost him more than $100,000 in legal fees.

Stone has not yet been charged with anything by special counsel Robert Mueller or accused of anything by the three congressional committees conducting Russia probes. Mueller and the committees are investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.

Stone testified behind closed doors in late September before the House Intelligence Committee. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the panel, said afterward that Stone might face subpoenas for refusing to answer questions about "one significant area."

Stone told reporters that he declined to tell the committee who had served as his intermediary with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

House investigators quizzed Stone about his advance knowledge of WikiLeaks' release of a slew of embarrassing emails from the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta in the midst of the presidential race.

Stone made cryptic references via Twitter about the expected publication of damaging information related to Podesta just two months before the emails were released. Stone said he wouldn't tell committee members who served as his intermediary with Assange because it was a journalist and their conversation was off the record.

Stone rejects the Intelligence Community's conclusion that Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee were hacked, arguing that the emails were leaked by someone inside the campaign and amounted to "an inside job."

"But the Deep State Democrats who hate President Trump and need an excuse for the internal failures and disastrous results of Hillary's campaign keep coming after us," Stone wrote. "The President and I are under assault!"

Last month, Stone was suspended from Twitter after an expletive-filled tweetstorm attacking CNN and some of its news anchors.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 841798001/
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby SonicG » Wed Nov 08, 2017 12:24 pm

"But the Deep State Democrats who hate President Trump and need an excuse for the internal failures and disastrous results of Hillary's campaign keep coming after us," Stone wrote. "The President and I are under assault!"

I see Roger Stone was on Hoagland....
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 08, 2017 4:33 pm

George Papadopoulos meeting with UK during Trump campaign revealed
Anthony Zurcher
North America reporter
@awzurcher on Twitter
59 minutes ago


Media captionGeorge Papadopoulos: The Trump adviser who lied to the FBI
Dismissed by the White House as a "low-level volunteer", more about the true status of adviser George Papadopoulos seems to emerge by the day.
The Trump campaign foreign policy aide's contacts with Russians have already got him in trouble. He has admitted lying to the FBI about them.
But it is now revealed he also met a British Foreign Office official, two months before the US presidential election, for a "working level" meeting.
"As you would expect in the run up to an election we seek to build links with figures in both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns," a Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokeswoman told the BBC, confirming the meeting. "This type of outreach is normal diplomatic business."
While such meetings may be routine diplomacy, the fact that Papadopoulos was presenting himself to the government of one of the US's closest allies as a representative of the Trump campaign undercuts the White House's recent assertion that Papadopoulos was a campaign volunteer of little importance.
"It was extremely limited," White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on 30 October, when questioned about Papadopoulos's role in the Trump campaign. "It was a volunteer position. And again, no activity was ever done in an official capacity on behalf of the campaign. He was a volunteer on the campaign.

Image
papadopoulos - third from leftImage copyrightREUTERS
Mr Trump himself tweeted the following day that "few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar".
The White House has not yet responded to inquiries from the BBC for comment on the matter.
We don't know whether Papadopoulos was operating in an official capacity for the Trump campaign or simply presenting himself that way without prior approval. Given that through much of 2016 the Trump team operated on a shoestring budget, with little in the way of traditional campaign hierarchy or structure, the latter is entirely possible.
Finding it all hard to follow?
Here's a guide to who's being investigated (and who isn't)
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
When it comes down to it, however, the British government apparently treated him with the type of deference due to a top-level political adviser.
Word of the Papadopoulos sit-down in London was first reported by Scott Stedman, a California university student, in a post on the website Medium. He writes that the Trump adviser met "an unidentified, high-ranking member of the UK's department that handles foreign affairs".
According to the indictment papers released by the independent counsel investigation into possible Trump campaign ties to Russia, Papadopoulos was in regular communication with high-level Trump campaign officials during much of 2016.
After being named by Mr Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers on 21 March, Papadopoulos attended a 31 March Washington, DC meeting with the candidate, then-Senator Jeff Sessions (now US attorney general) and other members of Mr Trump's national security team.
This Russia stuff - storm in a teacup?


Media caption'Lizard, liar, leaker' - Trump supporters on Comey and Russia investigation
In April, per the independent counsel's office, Papadopoulos communicated with a London-based professor, Joseph Mifsud, who introduced him via email to a Russian national with "connection to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs".
Mifsud subsequently informed Papadopoulos that the Russian government had "dirt" on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton through "thousands" of her emails.
Papadopoulos, with the blessing of Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis, would later explore the possibility of visiting Russia for an "off the record" meeting with Russian officials. He never did.
It seems, however, he had more success getting a face-to-face sit-down with the British government.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41892373
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby SonicG » Thu Nov 09, 2017 7:28 am

Oh Flynny!

Mueller Has Enough Evidence to Bring Charges in Flynn Investigation
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mu ... on-n817666

Image

From the Guardian:
The younger Flynn appeared to address the report in a tweet. “The SJW are out in full this morning,” he wrote, using an acronym for “social justice warriors”, a pejorative often used in reference to liberals. “The disappointment on your faces when I don’t go to jail will be worth all your harassment.”
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 09, 2017 8:55 am

thanks for that Sonic

I think Flynn is going to be arrested at any moment now....he's giving a big hint here

Flynn gets taken into custody on charges of conspiracy against the US, for being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false/misleading statements & possibly money laundering & attempted kidnapping.


Flynn worries about son in special counsel probe
Jim Sciutto-Profile-ImageCNN Digital Expansion DC Marshall Cohen
By Jim Sciutto and Marshall Cohen, CNN
Updated 8:07 PM ET, Wed November 8, 2017
Sources: Flynn worried about son's legal fate


Washington (CNN)Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn has expressed concern about the potential legal exposure of his son, Michael Flynn Jr., who, like his father, is under scrutiny by special counsel Robert Mueller, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

Flynn's concern could factor into decisions about how to respond to Mueller's ongoing investigation. The special counsel is looking into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign as well as the business dealings of key campaign advisers to President Donald Trump.

Flynn's wife, Lori, shares his concerns about their son's possible legal exposure, according to a person who knows the family.

Interviews conducted by special counsel investigators have included questions about the business dealings of Flynn and his son such as their firm's reporting of income from work overseas, two witnesses interviewed by the team told CNN. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires people acting as agents of foreign entities to publicly disclose their relationship with foreign countries or businesses and financial compensation for such work.
Flynn Jr., who served as his father's chief of staff and top aide, was actively involved in his father's consulting and lobbying work at their firm, Flynn Intel Group. That included joining his father on overseas trips, such as Moscow in December 2015. During that trip, Flynn dined with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a black-tie gala for the RT television network, which US intelligence views as a Russian propaganda outlet.

Flynn's business dealings have been the subject of federal investigation since November 2016, prior to Mueller's appointment in May. Flynn is also under legal scrutiny by Mueller's team for undisclosed lobbying that he did during the presidential campaign on behalf of the Turkish government, according to sources familiar with the matter. It's against the law to lobby in the United States on behalf of a foreign government without informing the Justice Department.
Another area of interest to Mueller's team is Flynn's alleged participation in discussions about the idea of removing a Turkish cleric who has been living in exile in Pennsylvania, sources said. In the past, a spokesman for Flynn has denied that such discussions occurred.


It is not clear that either of the Flynns will face charges once the investigation is complete.
Flynn's attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Flynn Jr.'s lawyer declined to comment.
"The disappointment on your faces when I don't go to jail will be worth all your harassment," Flynn Jr. tweeted on Sunday, responding to his online critics.
Investigators have asked witnesses about the Flynns' social media posts and retweets, though this did not appear to be a significant focus of the investigation, according to one person interviewed by investigators.
During the campaign, Flynn and his son both followed and shared material from Twitter accounts that were recently revealed to be controlled by Russian trolls. The House intelligence committee last week released a list of Twitter handles associated with Russia's election-meddling efforts.
Flynn's legal troubles
Flynn's troubles extend to Congress, where his activities have attracted the attention of the House oversight committee. The panel's top Republican and Democrat made a stunning announcement in April after their own inquiry: Flynn likely broke federal law by taking a paid speaking engagement in Russia without US government approval, and he hid the payments from FBI investigators reviewing the security clearance he is afforded as a retired lieutenant general.
After that announcement, Flynn's attorney told CNN that Flynn wasn't hiding anything and that he had briefed the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency "both before and after" the trip to Moscow.
FBI investigators also have scrutinized a series of phone calls during the Trump transition between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the US at the time, Sergey Kislyak. The conversations centered on US sanctions against Russia and whether they would remain in place during the Trump administration.

When Trump took office in January 2017, Flynn served as his national security adviser, but he resigned after one month amid questions about the Kislyak calls and his other links to Russia.
The Logan Act, passed in 1799, bans private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, but it is hardly ever used in practice. More pressing for Flynn might be what he told the FBI about the calls.
CNN reported that Flynn initially told investigators sanctions weren't discussed but changed his answer to say he didn't remember. Mueller could use this to charge Flynn with making false statements -- the same charge that former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to last month.
The former general's consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, took $530,000 from a company based in the Netherlands that has extensive ties to the Turkish government.
Flynn retroactively registered as a foreign agent in March, which his lawyers said was done "to eliminate any potential doubt," though they also said their previous filings should have been sufficient.
Former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates already face charges relating to their undisclosed foreign lobbying, for Ukraine. They were indicted by Mueller's grand jury last month. Both have pleaded not guilty.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/08/politics/ ... 702PMStory


Where In The World Was George Papadopoulos During The Campaign?

By TIERNEY SNEED Published NOVEMBER 9, 2017 6:00 AM

Two days before President Donald Trump’s election, George Papadopoulos appeared in front of a Greek-American forum in Astoria, New York, and promised, in Greek, that he would personally counsel Trump to ensure “new relations, better relations, between Greece, America, and Cyprus.”

“Mr. Trump and our team thought that it is very important for me to come here and talk to the Federation,” Papadopoulos told the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, as translated for TPM from a YouTube video of the event. “We might not win in New York, but we want Greek Americans to know what people in our team think, what Mr. Trump thinks, and what will happen on the day and the days after the man wins on Tuesday, for Greece and Cyprus.”

Such an appearance wouldn’t be unusual for a typical campaign surrogate for a typical presidential candidate. But Papadopoulos’ role as a foreign policy adviser to the campaign has taken an unexpected turn. With the revelation last week that Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of the special counsel’s Russia probe, the White House and its allies have denied that he had any real campaign involvement beyond a March 2016 group meeting with Trump.


“My understanding is the only interaction he ever had was the one meeting that the advisory council gathered together, where he was in a large group of other people in the room,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said last week. “And to my knowledge, that’s the only interaction they ever had. ”

What exactly Papadopoulos was up to in 2016 — and particularly in the months after the GOP convention — is still shrouded in mystery. But what has emerged in new reporting and resurfaced media appearances during that time is that the jet-setting 30-year-old was quick to claim influence with Trump. He suggested to foreign audiences that he was going to play a key role in advising the new administration, even as few paid attention to him in United States after he was initially named to the campaign.

According to the court filings in the case by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Papadopoulos, who called himself an energy consultant, spent his first few months affiliated with the campaign living in London. During that time, he communicated with three individuals presenting themselves as tied to the Russian government. One of those individuals, a London-based professor, Papadopoulos first met while on a trip to Italy about a week before being named as a Trump adviser.

On July 22, when the Republican National Convention had wrapped up and the first round of Wikileaks hacked Democratic emails had dropped, the court filings go mostly mum on Papadopoulos’ activities.

Here’s what we know about what Papadopoulos was up to from that period onward:

July 20, 2016: Cleveland

Papadopoulos appears on panel hosted by the American Jewish Committee in Cleveland, where the GOP convention is being held, joined by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) and Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL). A picture from the event is currently Padapolous’ Facebook background photo.



Kenneth Bandler, a spokesperson for the American Jewish Committee, told TPM that Papadopoulos “identified himself as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, but he was not representing the Trump campaign on the panel.”

August 15, 2016

Papadopoulos trail goes cold at least publicly for the month after the convention. According to court docs, Sam Clovis, the campaign official who brought Papadopoulos on as an adviser, communicates to him around Aug. 15 that he would “encourage” Papadopoulos to take a trip he had been pitching to the campaign to meet with Russian officials.



Clovis’ attorney told the Wall Street Journal that his client, a “polite gentleman from Iowa,” was just expressing “courtesy and appreciation.”

Early-to-mid September 2016: London

Papadopoulos tells a reporter with whom he is corresponding that he’s traveling abroad, and around Sept. 13 he says he’s in London.

According to the Washington Post, he used his trip to London to ask British officials to meet with senior government officials. He ultimately is granted a meeting with mid-level official at the Foreign Office in London, and Papadopoulos mentions to the official that he had been in contact with top Russian government officials, the Washington Post reported

A Foreign Office spokeswoman confirmed the meeting to the BBC, calling it “normal diplomatic business” as the office seeks “to build links with figures in both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns.”

Mid-to-late September 2016: New York

Papadopoulos is in New York, where sometime between Sept. 22-25, he meets with Ksenia Baygarova, a reporter for the privately-owned Russian news outlet Interfax.

He initially suggests they meet at Trump Tower, but ultimately they conduct the interview at a hotel.

The interview, published Sept. 30, describes Papadopoulos as one of Trump’s “foreign political advisors” whose opinions do “not necessarily coincide” with the candidate’s (a disclaimer included at Papadopoulos’ request).

The interview takes place after Papadopoulos had sent written answers to questions the reporter previously had provided him. He refuses to answer any additional questions and only allows minor changes to the written answers he’s already provided, Baygarova told TPM.

“He sounded a little bit inexperienced, but very ambitious, and I had a feeling that he is afraid to make any change into the written text without an approval of somebody else,” Baygarova said, making her think that he had a supervisor at the campaign to whom he was reporting.

Also while in New York, Papadopoulos meets with Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, who was in town for the United Nations General Assembly. A spokesman for the Greek embassy confirmed the meeting to Washington Post and said the meeting was set up as part of the embassy’s typical outreach to Greek Americans “hoping they have a sentimental attachment to Greece and that we can connect.”

October 1, 2016

Papadopoulos sends his Interfax interview to the London-based professor, according to the Mueller court documents. Papadopoulos also sent the interview to other reporters with whom he had been corresponding.

October 7, 2016

Papadopoulos is quoted as a foreign policy adviser to Trump in a policy paper written by freelance journalist Ariel Ben Solomon for the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel. (Papadopoulos had participated in a lunch at the center back in in the spring of 2016, where Trump’s views on international affairs were a topic of discussion.)

Papadopoulos first reached out to Solomon in 2014 via LinkedIn, Solomon told TPM. But their correspondence picked up in September 2016 and continued until before the election, when Papadopulos went quiet. Based on what Papadopoulos said in the correspondence, Solomon said “it was clear” he was involved in the campaign, but he wouldn’t go into any more detail.

“I didn’t get much from him about [the campaign],” Solomon said, adding their correspondence was about “professional” matters.

Late October 2016

According to the accounts of some Greek reporters who had been in touch with Papadopoulos, he tells them he has had a falling out of sorts with the campaign, but his relationship with the campaign is mended a week or so later.

“He finally answered after I had sent several messages, saying that there had been some issues with the campaign, but they were OK now,” Alexis Papahelas, of the Athens paper Kathimerini, wrote in an account of their relationship this week. A Greek-language article on the news site from last November also mentioned Papadopoulos flip-flopping as to whether he was still attached to the campaign.

Papahelas offered the lowdown on the rumors in Greece:

In the meantime, I started hearing complaints from all sorts of people regarding Papadopoulos’s attitude. He had acquired a new status in Athens and was widely regarded as being the key to having Trump’s ear. He was bestowed with awards, wined and dined by prominent Athenians and even appointed to the judging committee of a beauty pageant on a Greek island. I had expected him to get a job at the State Department as it became clear after the elections that Trump did not have enough people of his own to staff hundreds of political positions.

TPM has been unable to confirm independently Papadopoulos’ alleged beauty pageant judging gig.

November 6, 2016: New York

Papadopoulos is back in New York for a panel at the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York.

A Facebook event for the panel calls him the keynote speaker and says the topic is “What new will a Trump presidentship bring to US and to our relations with Greece and Cyprus?”

According to a video of his remarks posted to YouTube, Papadopoulos tells the audience that “Mr. Trump and our team thought that it is very important for me to come here and talk to the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York.”



(TPM had this and other videos translated by Maria Mytilinaki Kennedy, a Thessaloniki-based translator.)

Papadopoulos acknowledges that Trump has not gone into specifics on his positions affecting Greece, and says that Trump is learning about those issues gradually as he goes.

“As his counselor, as a Greek-American who knows these issues inside out, since I was little, I will do everything I can, personally as a counselor, so that the man, President Trump, knows them inside out, so that we see new relations, better relations, between Greece, America, and Cyprus, that we have ever seen here in America,” Papadopoulos says.

November 9, 2016

After Trump’s election, Papadopoulos gets a personal shoutout on Twitter from Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, whom Papadopoulos met on a trip to Greece in the spring of 2016.

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Panos Kammenos @PanosKammenos
Συγχαρητήρια στον νέο πρόεδρο Τραμπ σημαντική η θέση πλέον του Ελληνοαμερικανού Γιώργου Παπαδόπουλου για την Ελλάδα
1:44 AM - Nov 9, 2016
45 45 Replies 54 54 Retweets 126 126 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Early December 2016: Greece

Papadopoulos travels to Greece, where he signals to government officials that he’ll be a key player in the new administration, even though it appears no official position had been offered to him.



He gives a speech at a conference of Greek mayors in Thessaloniki where he says that the United States “anticipates a close relationship with Greece.” In interviews with local media outlets he says that Trump should visit Greece, but with the caveat that “I cannot speak for Mr. Trump at this moment. But I would really like that as a counsel, yes.”

Nonetheless, he suggests to local media that he is playing a role putting together the new administration.

“Right now we are gradually organizing the new administration. We do not have the complete team figured out,” Papadopoulos says, when asked about a dispute between Greece and Macedonia.



“In about a month, when we know who will be in each position, then we will know, but today unfortunately I cannot inform you about what Mr. Trump will think about the Macedonian issue, the Aegean, Cyprus, Greece…” he says.

“As his counselor, I come here to show that Mr. Trump and the new administration see Greece as a friend,” he adds.

While in Greece, he is wined and dined by various Greek politicians, including Kammenos, the defense minister, with whom Papadopoulos is photographed having lunch.

January 20, 2017: Washington, D.C.

During the inauguration festivities, Papadopoulos meets again with Kammenos, who also meets with incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.

January 22, 2017: Washington, D.C.

Papadopoulos, the Washington Post reported, meets with a group of Israelis involved in the West Bank settler movement and films a video documenting the confab for the Israelis.

“We had an excellent meeting with Yossi and we hope that the people of Judea and Samaria” — the name used by the Israeli right for the West Bank — “will have a great 2017,” Papadopoulos said, according Washington Post’s report of the video. “We are looking forward to ushering in a new relationship with all of Israel.”

January 27, 2017: Chicago

Papadopoulos is interviewed by the FBI as part of its Russia investigation, according to court filings. Papadopoulos later pleads guilty to lying to the FBI in this interview about certain Russia-related contacts during the campaign.

February 16, 2017

Papadopoulos interviews with the FBI again, according to court filings. The next day he deletes the Facebook account he had been using to communicate with the Russian-affiliated contacts, and a few days later he also gets a new cell phone number.

July 27, 2017: Virginia

Papadopoulos is arrested at the Dulles airport coming off a flight from Munich. He’s released the next day on the condition he limits his travel between D.C. and Chicago, his hometown, according to court materials.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... 6-timeline


Federal Subpoenas Seek Info on Carl Icahn’s Role as Trump Adviser
by TOM WINTER and TRACY CONNOR

Prosecutors are investigating whether billionaire businessman Carl Icahn pushed for a federal policy change that would have benefited one of his investments while he was serving as an adviser to President Donald Trump.

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has issued subpoenas to Icahn's company and another company, CVR Energy, in which he has an 82 percent stake, both firms disclosed in regulatory filings. CVR is a publicly traded company that specializes in refining and is valued at nearly $3 billion.

The companies said they are cooperating with the subpoenas, which were first reported by Bloomberg. "The U.S. Attorney's office has not made any claims or allegations against us or Mr. Icahn," Icahn Enterprises L.P. said in its filing.

Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Speaks At New York Election Night Event
Donald Trump greets Carl Icahn, billionaire activist investor, at a campaign event in April 2016. Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
Icahn, who backed Trump during the campaign, was named a special adviser on regulation last December. He quit in August to avoid what he called "partisan bickering" about his position in the administration.

His resignation followed an investigation by CNBC into potential conflicts of interest and came just before a magazine report questioning whether he had broken any laws.

The matter centered on the Renewable Fuel Standard, a program that requires refiners to blend renewable biofuels into gasoline and diesel. Icahn wanted changes that would have helped CVR Energy, CNBC reported.

The U.S. Attorney's office declined to comment on the scope of the probe, but Icahn LP said in its filing that investigators want "information pertaining to our and Mr. Icahn's activities relating to the Renewable Fuels Standard and Mr. Icahn's role as an advisor to the President."

Icahn did not immediately return a call for comment but when he resigned, he denied any conflict.

"I never had a formal position with your administration nor a policymaking role. And contrary to the insinuations of a handful of your Democratic critics, I never had access to nonpublic information or profited from my position, nor do I believe that my role presented conflicts of interest," he wrote to Trump.

"Indeed, out of an abundance of caution, the only issues I ever discussed with you were broad matters of policy affecting the refining industry. I never sought any special benefit for any company with which I have been involved, and have only expressed views that I believed would benefit the refining industry as a whole," he added.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fe ... er-n819066



then there always is the Fox News/Russian/trump/Pompao"I'm thinking about it" point of view :roll:


Russian Embassy, UK‏Verified account
@RussianEmbassy
Follow Follow @RussianEmbassy
Image
FM Lavrov: all established facts point not to a “Russian trace” in 2016 US election, but rather to @TheDemocrats inside job
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: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 09, 2017 5:03 pm

:P

Bodyguard admits Russia offered to send prostitutes to Donald Trump during “Pee Pee Tape” trip
Bill Palmer
Updated: 2:56 pm EST Thu Nov 9, 2017
Home » Politics

Yesterday it was revealed that Donald Trump’s longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller testified to Congress about the alleged “Pee Pee Tape” incident for several hours. Palmer Report pointed out at the time that in such instances, even uncooperative witnesses tend to give away details they think are harmless, for the sake of trying to appear cooperative – and that those details can sometimes turn out to be anything but harmless. Sure enough, that’s what happened.



The infamous Trump-Russia dossier has long asserted that during Trump’s trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe in 2013, the Russians sent prostitutes to Trump’s hotel room so they could secretly record him in the act, and then use it to blackmail him. Although much of the dossier has since been independently proven, that portion never has. According to NBC News (link), Schiller testified to Congress this week that the Russians offered to send five prostitutes to Trump’s hotel room, but claims the offer was turned down. He may be protesting too much.



Schiller appears to have offered this information in an attempt at demonstrating that Donald Trump is the kind of guy who turns down prostitutes even when they’re offered to him, and therefore the Pee Pee Tape incident can’t possibly have happened. But this is the kind of thing that can get witnesses in trouble. Trump’s own bodyguard just acknowledged that during the Pee Pee Tape trip, the Russians offered Trump prostitutes. That confirms half the story. It also gives much more specific detail to the story, which can set off a series of dominoes.



Perhaps another hotel guest, or hotel employee, has long remembered seeing a guy who looked like Keith Schiller ushering five women into a hotel suite. Now that Schiller has given specific detail to the story, that individual might feel emboldened to come forward. We’ll see what this leads to – but thanks to his oddly specific denials, Schiller just unwittingly put us a lot closer to the Pee Pee Tape.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/bo ... utes/5977/


Trump Bodyguard Keith Schiller Testifies Russian Offered Trump Women, Was Turned Down
by KEN DILANIAN and JONATHAN ALLEN

WASHINGTON — After a business meeting before the Miss Universe Pageant in 2013, a Russian participant offered to "send five women" to Donald Trump's hotel room in Moscow, his longtime bodyguard told Congress this week, according to three sources who were present for the interview.

Two of the sources said the bodyguard, Keith Schiller, viewed the offer as a joke, and immediately responded, "We don't do that type of stuff."

Sources: Trump Was Offered '5 Women' In Russia Play Facebook Twitter Embed

The two sources said Schiller's comments came in the context of him adamantly disputing the allegations made in the Trump dossier, written by a former British intelligence operative, which describes Trump having an encounter with prostitutes at the hotel during the pageant. Schiller described his reaction to that story as being, "Oh my God, that's bull----," two sources said.

The conversation with the Russian about the five women took place after a morning meeting about the pageant in Moscow broke up, two sources said.

That night, two sources said, Schiller said he discussed the conversation with Trump as Trump was walking back to his hotel room, and Schiller said the two men laughed about it as Trump went to bed alone. Schiller testified that he stood outside Trump's hotel room for a time and then went to bed.

One source noted that Schiller testified he eventually left Trump's hotel room door and could not say for sure what happened during the remainder of the night.

US-POLITICS-TRUMP
Director of Oval Office operations Keith Schiller attends a signing ceremony at the White House on June 23. Mandel Ngan / AFP-Getty Images
Two other sources said Schiller testified he was confident nothing happened.

Schiller said he and Trump were aware of the risk that hotel rooms in Moscow could be set up to capture hidden video, two sources said.

Schiller was grilled about the Moscow trip as part of four hours of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. The questioning around the Moscow trip took a significant amount of time, the sources said. Schiller was also asked about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and Russians, two of the sources said. He testified that he did not recall much about that day.

In a statement, Schiller's lawyer said "the versions of Mr. Schiller’s testimony being leaked to the press are blatantly false and misleading. "

"We are appalled by the leaks that are coming from partisan insiders from the House Intelligence Committee," said Stuart Sears. "It is outrageous that the very Committee that is conducting an investigation into leaks — purportedly in the public interest — is itself leaking information and defaming cooperative witnesses like Mr. Schiller. The Chairman and Ranking Member should investigate and hold accountable whoever is responsible for leaking false and misleading versions of Mr. Schiller’s testimony. This conduct is indefensible and calls into question the credibility and motives of the Committee’s investigation."

A Navy veteran, Schiller worked part-time as a bodyguard for Trump while still an NYPD officer. He began working for Trump full-time after his retirement from the force in 2002 and became his director of security in 2004. He served as director of oval office operations in the Trump White House from January until September.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tr ... wn-n819386


Mueller Comes Calling for Miller

By JOSH MARSHALL Published NOVEMBER 9, 2017 5:45 PM
0Views
CNN is now reporting that Robert Mueller’s Russia probe has now interviewed young White House advisor Stephen Miller. The focus seems to be on Miller’s knowledge of and possible involvement in the firing of James Comey. With this news, I want to remind everyone of Miller’s role on that pivotal weekend with Trump before the Comey firing and that still unexplained Air Force One incident on the Sunday night flight back to Washington. Here’s my report.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/mue ... for-miller


Stephen Miller, James Comey and the Mystery of the Secret Hour

By JOSH MARSHALL Published SEPTEMBER 1, 2017 1:12 PM

With the news that Robert Mueller has a copy of the original letter on James Comey’s firing written by Trump aide Stephen Miller and Trump himself, we need to return to the great mystery of that lost hour on the tarmac on Air Force One.

What am I talking about? Well, with a touch of dramatic flair I’m talking about this odd and increasingly odd over time mystery about what was happening the night President Trump came back from his Bedminster villa after a weekend of stewing about James Comey and then fired Comey 36 hours later.

At the time, it just seemed like another Trump era weirdness. Air Force One landed. Jared got off the plane, put Ivanka and the kids in an SUV and then got back on the plane. And then Trump and a group of his closest aides were apparently arguing on the plane for about an hour while the traveling press cooled its heels and wondered what was going on. They never got an explanation. But after about an hour a rather disheveled President Trump got off the plane and went back to the White House. Who was there on the plane with Trump? Stephen Miller.

Here’s the key portion from my rundown from early June on the details …

4. What happened that Sunday night on Air Force One? What am I talking about? Let’s look at the timeline. We know from abundant reporting that in early May (May 6th-7th) President Trump spent the weekend at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. He apparently stewed over that weekend about Comey and came back to Washington Sunday night determined to fire him. He proceeded to do just that. He called in Rosenstein and Sessions the next day (Monday), got Rosenstein’s recommendation memo and promptly fired Comey on Tuesday (May 9th).

This we all know. But that Sunday evening return flight from New Jersey was also the night something kind of odd happened. Air Force 1 left Morristown at 8:02 PM and landed at Andrews at 8:40. But unlike what normally happens, the President didn’t get off the plane. Just before 9 PM Jared and Ivanka got off the plane with their kids. Jared put Ivanka and the kids into a silver minivan and got back on the plane. He got off the plane again at 9:07 and then got back on the plane a couple minutes later. The press pooler for that night filed an update at 9:18 PM updating colleagues and noting that there’d been no explanation what the hang up was or why the President was still on the plane.

Finally, at 9:24 PM the cabinet room opened and the president emerged. Here’s the pool report filed a few minutes later.

Cabinet door opened at 9:24 pm, and POTUS, sans tie, emerged at 9:26,
46 mins after wheels down. He was followed a moment later by Hope
Hicks, Jared Kusher, KT McFarland, Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino.

No immediate explanation from press shop for the delay.

Kushner walked by the press corp, and stopped briefly in front of
reporters. “Every is good. He was just working on something,” Kushner
said.

One reporter asked if he would do any more briefings. “I don’t think
so. I’m not as good as Sean.”

A few minutes later the press cool got this from the press office: “On background, the President was finishing a meeting.”

Here’s a mini-collage I put together the next evening (Monday evening), along with photos posted to Twitter by Mark Knoller of CBS news.
Image


Not a great deal got made of this after that evening. That’s understandable and largely correct. Any number of things could have happened. Maybe they just wanted to finish a meeting. Maybe the President was eating or needed a bathroom break. It was only 45 minutes. Let me also clearly bound my own questions and speculations. I don’t think anything horrible or shocking happened in that 45 minutes. But given the oddity of the event and the fact that Trump returned to the White House and immediately put in process one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency – firing Comey – I think it is highly, highly likely that the two things are connected. As you can see from the pool report, Trump was traveling with what I would call five of his most aggressive and enabling advisers: Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner, KT McFarland, Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino. We know from subsequent reporting that Kushner was a major proponent, perhaps the most voluble proponent of firing Comey. I strongly suspect that the hold up was some on-going discussion, perhaps a heated discussion, of the decision to fire Comey.

However that may be, I think Kushner’s role in all of the entire Trump/Russia story is bigger and more central than most of us have understood. One day will find out what happened in that 45 minutes. And I’ll be happy that day.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ste ... ecret-hour
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: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 11, 2017 1:28 pm

A London Meeting of an Unlikely Group: How a Trump Adviser Came to Learn of Clinton ‘Dirt’

By SHARON LaFRANIERE, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANDREW HIGGINS and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZNOV. 10, 2017


Joseph Mifsud, left, and Ivan Timofeev at an April 2016 conference in Moscow for the Valdai Discussion Club, a gathering of academics. Valdai Club, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON — At midday on March 24, 2016, an improbable group gathered in a London cafe to discuss setting up a meeting between Donald J. Trump, then a candidate, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

There was George Papadopoulos, a 28-year-old from Chicago with an inflated résumé who just days earlier had been publicly named as a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign. There was Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic in his mid-50s with a faltering career who boasted of having high-level contacts in the Russian government.

And, perhaps most mysteriously, there was Olga Polonskaya, a 30-year-old Russian from St. Petersburg and the former manager of a wine distribution company. Mr. Mifsud introduced her to Mr. Papadopoulos as Mr. Putin’s niece, according to court papers. Mr. Putin has no niece.

The interactions between the three players and a fourth man with contacts inside Russia’s Foreign Ministry have become a central part of the inquiry by the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III, into the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere with the presidential election. Recently released court documents suggest that the F.B.I. suspected that some of the people who showed interest in Mr. Papadopoulos were participants in a Russian intelligence operation.

The March 2016 meeting was followed by a breakfast the next month at a London hotel during which Mr. Mifsud revealed to Mr. Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” That was months before the theft of a trove of emails from the Democratic National Committee by Russian-sponsored hackers became public.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators are seeking to determine who — if anyone — in the Trump campaign Mr. Papadopoulos told about the stolen emails. Although there is no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos emailed that information to the campaign, Mr. Papadopoulos was in regular contact that spring with top campaign officials, including Stephen Miller, now a senior adviser to President Trump, according to interviews and campaign documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The revelations about Mr. Papadopoulos’s activities are part of a series of disclosures in the past two weeks about communications between Trump campaign advisers and Russian officials or self-described intermediaries for the Russian government. Taken together, they show not only that the contacts were more extensive than previously known, but also that senior campaign officials were aware of them.

Last week, Carter Page, another former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee that he also had a private conversation with a Russian deputy prime minister on a trip to Moscow in July 2016. Mr. Page, who had previously denied meeting any Russian officials during the trip, said that he had informed at least four campaign officials about his trip beforehand and notified the campaign afterward that the Russian minister had pledged “strong support for Mr. Trump.”

Publicly, Mr. Trump and former campaign officials have tried to distance themselves from Mr. Papadopoulos. Although he once praised him as an “excellent guy,” Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that “few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House spokeswoman, said his involvement in the campaign was “extremely limited.”

But records and interviews show that in spring 2016, Mr. Papadopoulos was welcomed into the thinly-staffed campaign as a “surrogate” who could articulate the candidate’s views. He even helped edit a major foreign policy speech that Mr. Trump gave in Washington in late April, records indicate.

The day before he learned about the hacked emails, Mr. Papadopoulos emailed Mr. Miller, then a senior policy adviser to the campaign, saying Mr. Trump had an “open invitation” from Mr. Putin to visit Russia. The day after, he wrote Mr. Miller that he had “some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right.”

Those emails were described in court papers unsealed Oct. 30 disclosing that Mr. Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts to the F.B.I. But the documents did not identify Mr. Miller by name, citing only a “senior policy adviser.” Neither he nor his lawyer responded on Friday to requests for comment.

During interviews with Mr. Mueller’s investigators, former campaign officials now working at the White House have denied having advance knowledge of the stolen emails, according to an official familiar with those discussions. Mr. Miller was among those recently interviewed.

Mr. Mifsud’s interest in Mr. Papadopoulos began only after Mr. Papadopoulos had joined the Trump campaign, according to documents released by Mr. Mueller. Mr. Papadopoulos was living in London at the time, hoping to land a full-time job with the campaign, and possibly in a future Trump administration.

Stocky and with a receding hairline, Mr. Mifsud boasted of his Russian connections to Mr. Papadopoulos and others. But in interviews, numerous Russia scholars in London and elsewhere said they had never heard of him, and his career had been rocky for years. He had served as the director of two different European institutions with grandiose names but no accreditation, and he had left two jobs dogged by suggestions of financial impropriety.

“I remember him as a snake-oil salesman,” recalled Manuel Delia, a former Maltese government official who first encountered him in the late 1990s when Mr. Mifsud was administering a scholarship program. Later, Mr. Mifsud styled himself as an expert in international relations, landing a job in 2012 as director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, a for-profit continuing education program. By early 2016, that academy had shut down.



A photograph shared on Twitter by President Trump showed a national security meeting in March 2016, during the presidential campaign. In attendance was George Papadopoulos, third from left.
He did not exhibit any special interest or expertise in Russia until 2014, when his academy was beginning to stumble financially. It was at that time a 24-year-old Russian intern, Natalia Kutepova-Jamrom, turned up in his office with an improbably impressive résumé.

Fluent in Russian, English, German and Chinese, Ms. Kutepova-Jamrom had worked in the Russian government as a legislative aide and would move on to a Russian state newspaper. Both Mr. Mifsud’s lawyer and Ms. Kutepova-Jamrom declined to comment. Mr. Mifsud did not respond to messages.

Ms. Kutepova-Jamrom introduced Mr. Mifsud to senior Russian officials, diplomats and scholars. Despite Mr. Mifsud’s lack of qualifications, she managed to arrange an invitation for him to join the prestigious Valdai Discussion Club, an elite gathering of Western and Russian academics that meets each year with Mr. Putin.

Mr. Mifsud’s inclusion in the group was “very, very strange,” said James Sherr, the former head of the Russian studies program at Chatham House in London and a member of Valdai for nearly a decade. It “might suggest he does have connections,” Mr. Sherr said.

Mr. Mifsud suddenly became a popular pundit with state-run news outlets in Russia, praising the country and Mr. Putin. At his first Valdai conference in 2014, he argued against Western sanctions that punished Russia for its annexation of Crimea that year.

“Global security and economy needs partners, and who is better in this than the Russian Federation,” he said.

Among Mr. Mifsud’s most important new contacts was Ivan Timofeev, a graduate of the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations and a program director for the Valdai conference. Mr. Mifsud would eventually introduce Mr. Timofeev to Mr. Papadopoulos by email in April 2016, and the two men communicated for months about possible meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.

During those exchanges, Mr. Timofeev referred repeatedly to his contacts in Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, court records show.

Reached by phone, Mr. Timofeev declined to comment on his relationships with Mr. Mifsud or Mr. Papadopoulos. But in an interview with the online news website Gazeta.ru in August, he acknowledged corresponding with Mr. Papadopoulos.

“At some point, he started asking whether it would be possible to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin or some other high-ranking Russian politicians,” Mr. Timofeev said at the time. “Our conversations made it clear that George was not well acquainted with the Russian foreign political landscape. You obviously can’t just go and set up a meeting with the president, for instance. Things just aren’t done that way.”

Exactly how Mr. Mifsud first met Ms. Polonskaya, the Russian woman who attended the London cafe meeting in March 2016, is unclear.

In a recent interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Mr. Mifsud said the Russian woman who met Mr. Papadopoulos was “a simple student, very beautiful.” He suggested Mr. Papadopoulos hoped for a romantic involvement, adding, “Putin had nothing to do with it, a lovely invention.”

Mr. Mifsud did not reveal her name in that interview — and court records do not identify her — but The Times identified her through emails, interviews and other records.

Ms. Polonskaya did not respond to emails from The Times this week. After Politico identified her on Thursday by her maiden name, Vinogradova, her brother, Sergei Vinogradov, spoke to The Times on her behalf.

He said she was in London discussing a possible internship with Mr. Mifsud, a friend of hers, the morning before the meeting with Mr. Papadopoulos. He insisted that she had no connections to the Russian government and never portrayed herself as Mr. Putin’s niece, despite the court records unsealed by Mr. Mueller.

He said that she only exchanged pleasantries with Mr. Papadopoulos, and that she understood only about half of the discussion between Mr. Mifsud and Mr. Papadopoulos. He shared a text message from her in which she explained to him the reason: “Because my English was bad,” it read.

“It’s totally ridiculous,” Mr. Vinogradov said. “She’s not interested in politics. She can barely tell the difference between Lenin and Stalin.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/us/r ... .html?_r=0


Stephen Miller May Have Some Problems

By JOSH MARSHALL Published NOVEMBER 10, 2017 10:33 PM

Fascinating piece here in the Times applying some Times level sleuthing to shed more light on those Papadopoulos court documents from last week. We get some idea of the backstory of Joseph Mifsud, apparently a failing and shambling academic career that was on its final skid when Russians showed up in 2014 with money and newfound respectability, an old story. Other gaps of the story are filled in. But the big one is Stephen Miller.

According to the Times, Miller is the “senior policy advisor” referenced in the Papadopoulos court documents. He was the only unnamed player still unidentified. This means that Miller was one of the top Trump advisors Papadopoulos was keeping posted on his efforts to set up meetings between Russian officials and Trump campaign officials, perhaps even (preposterous as it may seem) a meeting between Trump and Putin himself.

One noteworthy paragraph from the Times …

The day before he learned about the hacked emails, Mr. Papadopoulos emailed Mr. Miller, then a senior policy adviser to the campaign, saying Mr. Trump had an “open invitation” from Mr. Putin to visit Russia. The day after, he wrote Mr. Miller that he had “some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right.”

This revelation is important for at least three reasons.

First: The most mundane is that Miller was at the highest level of Trump’s campaign advisors and remained in at least as high a role into the White House and up until today. He is within the innermost circle.

Second: Miller was also one of the advisors pressing hard for President Trump to fire James Comey. Indeed, Mueller’s investigators just interviewed Miller, apparently mainly about the Comey firing. Miller was one of the small group of Trump lickspittles who accompanied the President on the lost weekend at Bedminster when he stewed over Comey and resolved to fire him on his return. He also wrote a first draft of Trump’s firing letter, which the grownups back in Washington, horrified, dramatically revised. In short, Miller’s hands are all over the Comey firing. Now that we know he was in the loop for the Russia contacts, we know that in seeking to fire Comey he was at least in part seeking to kill an investigation into himself.

Third: Miller came to Trump via Jeff Sessions. He was a top staffer to Sessions in the Senate. By 2016 he had risen to Communications Director. And when Sessions endorsed Trump in late February 2016 he brought Miller into the Trump circle. As a speechwriter and advisor, Miller played a key role taking Trump’s instinctive racist-nationalist politics and aligning it with the comparable policy mix Sessions had been pushing, with no great luck, in the Senate for years. Here’s an interesting look at the relationship.

We still don’t have a terribly good explanation of how Jeff Sessions got on the Russia bandwagon, how he ended up having as multiple private conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak over the course of 2016, including one private meeting in Sessions’ senate office in September. Miller seems like at least one likely conduit. At a minimum, Miller getting updated on Papadopoulos’ adventures makes it much less credible that Sessions knew nothing about the channels opening up between the campaign and Russia.

This is all very interesting.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ste ... e-problems



Report: Stephen Miller’s resignation may be imminent
Bill Palmer
Updated: 2:08 am EST Sat Nov 11, 2017
Home » Politics

Two days ago we got word that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had quietly interviewed Donald Trump’s White House senior adviser Stephen Miller before the start of the Asia trip. Yesterday we got word that Miller was the unnamed “senior policy adviser” mentioned in the confession of Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Now comes a report that Stephen Miller’s resignation may be imminent.


First came the surprising word on Thursday from CNN that Mueller had interviewed Miller at least a week earlier. This was notable because the media had previously believed that Mueller’s first interview with a current Trump White House senior adviser would be with Hope Hicks, and that it would take place after the Asia trip. This prompted Palmer Report to point out that Mueller clearly knew something about Miller the the rest of us didn’t, though it wasn’t yet clear what it was (link). Then came the even more surprising revelation on Friday from the New York Times that Miller was aware of at least portions of Papadopoulos’ Russian conspiracy plot at the time (link). Now here comes the stunning part.


Late on Friday night, Democratic Coalition co-founder and MSNBC guest commentator Scott Dworkin tweeted that “3 different GOPers told me tonight that we should expect Stephen Miller to resign next week, possibly as early as tomorrow” (link). Donald Trump tweeted a photo of himself and Miller aboard Air Force One earlier this week, confirming that Miller is on the Asia trip. This would mean that Miller could resign before the trip is even finished.


One possible explanation for this could be that Trump didn’t know Stephen Miller had met with Robert Mueller, and now that it’s surfaced in the media, things have immediately gone sour between the two of them. There are other possible explanations. Now we wait to see what happens next.

http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/re ... ller/6007/


Academic at heart of Clinton 'dirt' claim vanishes, leaving trail of questions
By Tim Lister and Nic Robertson, CNN
Updated 10:40 AM ET, Fri November 10, 201

(CNN)Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese academic suspected of being a link between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, was once a regular on the foreign policy circuit, attending conferences the world over.

Now, after being identified as a key figure in the US special counsel investigation into Russian influence over the 2016 US presidential election, Mifsud has gone to ground.
Last Thursday he disappeared from the private university in Rome where he teaches. Repeated attempts to reach him since have been unsuccessful, though he appears to have read some messages from CNN.
But more details are emerging of the background and contacts of the man who emerged last week as "the professor" in court filings relating to charges brought against former Trump aide George Papadopoulos.
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In the US affidavit, Papadopoulos claims Mifsued -- referred to as "Foreign Contact 1" -- told him in April 2016 that the Russians had "thousands of emails" relating to Hillary Clinton.
Joseph Mifsud met with the Russian ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko in May 2014.
Joseph Mifsud met with the Russian ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko in May 2014.
An associate also told CNN that he repeatedly bragged about how Moscow had "compromising material" on the Clinton campaign in spring 2016, contradicting Mifsud's assertion that he never talked about Russian "dirt" on the Democratic presidential bid.
At that time, according to US officials and independent analysts, Russian agencies or proxies were rummaging around the stolen emails of both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The intrusion would not become public for several months.
The associate, who spoke to CNN at length, also said that Mifsud told him that he had been interviewed by the FBI while on a visit to the US earlier this year. That chimes with Mifsud's own account -- in an interview last week with Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he refers to a discussion with the FBI.
Mifsud was in Washington in February -- he spoke at an event organized by Global Ties, which describes itself on its website as a non-profit partner organization of the US State Department.
Last week, Mifsud described Papadopoulos' claim that he knew about Russia's material on Clinton as "baloney."
"I absolutely exclude the fact that I spoke of secrets regarding Hillary Clinton," he told La Repubblica.
Those were his last words in public on the subject.
READ MORE: Who is George Papadopoulos?
The Moscow connection
Mifsud first met Papadopoulos in March 2016 in Rome, according to his own account. They met again shortly after Papadopoulos was first publicly named as an adviser to the Trump team around March 21. Days later, Papadopoulos wrote to colleagues on the Trump team that he "had just finished a very productive lunch with a good friend of mine... who introduced me to both Putin's niece and the Russian ambassador," according to court filings.
The "good friend" was Mifsud. After discovering Papadopoulos' elevation to the Trump campaign, he moved swiftly to put the two sides in contact. (It has since become clear that the woman attending the lunch was not Putin's niece.)
George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the FBI about his Russia connections.

The following month, Mifsud travelled to Moscow to give a talk at the Valdai Club, a think-tank with close connections to the Kremlin. "We have to open up trade to the Russian Federation," he said at the event, on April 19. "Imposing sanctions for example is suicidal in our case -- and because of the pressure... from the United States."
The FBI affidavit implies Mifsud may have been "played" by the Russians.
"The Russian government and its security and intelligence services frequently make use of non-governmental intermediaries to achieve their foreign policy objectives," it said. "The Russian government has used individuals associated with academia and think-tanks in such a capacity."
Mifsud's associate told CNN that seemed very plausible. Anything he was told would soon be repeated to others, the associate said.
READ MORE: Carter Page reveals new contacts with Trump campaign, Russians
A long courtship
Even before encountering Papadopoulos, Mifsud had been a regular visitor to Russia. He attended events sponsored by the Valdai Club between 2014 and 2016 and and other educational conferences in the past four years.
Mifsud also met the Russian ambassador to London Alexander Yakovenko in 2014 after returning from an academic conference in Moscow.
World sees Trump as a weakened president

For an academic with modest credentials and few publications to his name, he had surprisingly high-profile connections among Russian officials.
Mifsud's former assistant has told CNN that she set up meetings between Mifsud and Russian academics and officials. They included Ivan Timofeev, who is on the Russian International Affairs Council, and Evgeny Bazhanov, President of the Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy.
CNN cannot confirm the assistant's account; she requested not to be named.
His most recent visit was in September this year when he moderated two panels during Moscow State University's "Global Congress." The university has an exchange agreement with the private Link University in Rome, where Mifsud teaches.
The state-funded Russia24 network has heaped praise on Link's director Vincenzo Scotti, describing him as "an experienced politician who thinks that cultural exchange and 'soft power' democracy will lead to lifting of the anti-Russian sanctions."
At Moscow State University there are still several photographs displayed of Mifsud with the Dean of the Institute of Global Studies. He is also featured on a poster as one of three prominent lecturers from abroad.
Two of the Institute's faculty told CNN Tuesday that Mifsud presented himself as someone who could build contacts to foreign universities and institutes. They said several of the institute's officials visited the London Academy of Diplomacy, which Mifsud helped run.
Picture on the wall at Moscow State University (MSU) of Joseph Mifsud (left) with Yury Sayamov, UNESCO Chairholder in the Faculty of Global Processes at MSU. The picture was taken while the two men were at the London Diplomatic Academy.
Picture on the wall at Moscow State University (MSU) of Joseph Mifsud (left) with Yury Sayamov, UNESCO Chairholder in the Faculty of Global Processes at MSU. The picture was taken while the two men were at the London Diplomatic Academy.
People who know him say Mifsud was always networking and often exaggerated his access to decision-makers. His stories are frequently contradictory. He has denied knowing anyone in the Russian government yet had previously claimed to have had an exchange with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at an event. Nor is there any evidence to support a claim by Mifsud that he met President Putin.
On at least one occasion he was described at a conference as an ambassador. In fact, he has never held such a post. His resume claims he has been a member of a French presidential panel called the "Comite du Risque" -- but no such organization exists, the French Presidency told CNN.
Mifsud's relationships with several academic institutions have ended badly. For a time he was President of the London Academy of Diplomacy, whose degrees were certified by the University of East Anglia. Mifsud visited the University with a Russian diplomat -- Ernest Chernukhin -- in July.
The university says the connection has now ended, and the academy is now defunct. His resume has also been deleted from another London institution with which he was connected, the London Centre of International Law Practice.
Mifsud left his position as President of Euro-Mediterranean University in Slovenia in 2012. The university claimed he owed 39,000 euros in unexplained expenses.
However, Mifsud's credentials were enough for him to be offered a teaching position at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Earlier this year an email written by deputy principal John Gardner said Mifsud had "truly global contacts in the world of diplomacy and is on first name terms with a wide variety of ambassadors from across the globe."
Why Mueller isn't charging anyone with 'collusion'
Why Mueller isn't charging anyone with 'collusion'
The email was obtained by STV, a Scottish television network. Stirling University would not comment on its content but said Mifsud remained employed at the university.
Mifsud's history of exaggerations, and his enthusiasm to be seen as an important player in demand at conferences the world over, may now be coming back to haunt him.
The "Putin niece" that Papadopoulos mentioned to the Trump campaign was, after all, no relation of the Russian President, Mifsud admitted last week.
He told La Repubblica: "She is a simple student, very beautiful. Like many other students, I introduced her at the London Center where Papadopoulos was, and he showed an interested in her that was not academic."
His associate told CNN that Mifsud had introduced the woman to him as a Russian journalist, one of several he'd met during his dealings with the Russians. The associate says he warned Mifsud about the danger of being played by the Russians.
For the most popular talk-show on Russian television, Mifsud's activities are now the object of ridicule. On Sunday, the show's host, Dmitry Kiselev, said that Papadopoulos was introduced to the fictional Putin niece by "a fly-by Maltese professor called Joseph Mifsud, a retired bottom-feeder diplomat."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/08/politics/ ... index.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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