(WATCH) Trump’s Russia Connections: 30+ Of Them 03/01/2017 12:24 pm ET
There has been a metric ton of allegations about President Trump’s Russia connections. Voters, Congress, the media and US intelligence agencies want to know if Russia hacked our election. Were members of Trump’s inner circle in contact with Russian agents prior to the election? Is Trump a Russian puppet? And… how do you get a Russian prostitute’s urine stain out of your Make America Great Again hat? I’m asking for a friend.
President Trump has categorically denied allegations that he has anything to do with Russia.
Is it possible? Could this be the only thing Trump hasn’t lied about? No. Of course not.
30+ CONNECTIONS: In 2004, Donald Trump bought this Palm Beach, Florida mansion for 41 million dollars. In 2008, he sold it to Dmitry Rybolovlev… for 95 million dollars. Dmitry is a Russian billionaire who spent 11 months in a Russian prison for ordering the murder of a business partner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysxt66TIL28 In 2007, Trump licensed his name to a company to sell Trump brand vodka in Russia. That is the actual commercial that ran on Russian TV. All they sold was 8000 cases. The licensing deal was not renewed. And the lesson? Sure, Russians will try vodka flavored with pineapple. But, they draw the line at Vodka flavored with Cheetos and hair spray.
source: imgur.com
In 2013, Trump licensed his name again to The Silk Road Group, a Russian private investment company, to build two Trump Towers in Russia. They were never built.
Trump’s first brush with Russia was in 1998. During a visit to New York, President Mikail Gorbechav stopped his limo in front of Trump Tower. When he discovered the commotion, Trump came down to fawn over him…Later, Trump was told he was the victim of a prank – and that the guy was a Gorbachev look-a-like. True story. That happened.
source: imgur.com
In 2013, the FBI arrested Anatoly Golubchik, an alleged Russian Mobster. He was charged with running a multi-million dollar illegal gambling ring… The headquarters of which… were located inside New York City’s Trump tower. Which I’ve been told is actually owned by… President Trump.
The gambling ring was being run on the 51st floor. Which you might think isn’t a big deal, Trump tower has lots of floors. Except the 51st floor headquarters of the multi-million dollar FBI raided international gambling ring — was just one floor below the 52nd floor, a residence owned by… Donald Trump.
In 2013, Donald Trump brought the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow… His partner was Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian real estate mogul – who owned the arena where the pageant took place.
At Miss Universe, Agalarov announced he and Trump forged a deal to build – you guessed it, a Trump Tower in Moscow. It didn’t happen. The deal is dead. No building.
Now, there’s Agalarav’s son, Emin. Emin is a wanna be international music star…
Who, surprise surprise, performed at Miss Universe. You’ve seen Justin Timberlake? Emin is known as NOT Russia’s Justin Timberlake.
Later in 2013, Emin released a video of his song, In Another Life in which Trump makes a cameo! Then, in Nov 2016, Trump sent Emin a happy 35th birthday message on YouTube.
You can see Trump’s birthday message to the son of the billionaire Russian by watching the new episode of Be Less Stupid below.
Jon Hotchkiss is a 14 time Emmy nominee, a former writer on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, the former show-runner on the series, Penn & Teller: Bullshit, and the host of the new series, Be Less Stupid, available free on the streaming service, factbox.tv http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wat ... 675cf65af5
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.
House Intelligence sets goals for Russia investigation BY JOE UCHILL - 03/01/17 08:21 PM EST
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-Calif) agreed on the scope of their committee's investigation into issues surrounding Russia's interference in the 2016 election.
Though an official, six-page scoping document is classified, Nunes and Schiff released a summary of the investigation's aims in the form of four questions: "What Russian cyber activity and other active measures were directed against the United States and its allies? Did the Russian active measures include links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns or any other U.S. Persons? What was the U.S. Government’s response to these Russian active measures and what do we need to do to protect ourselves and our allies in the future? What possible leaks of classified information took place related to the Intelligence Community Assessment of these matters?"
The intelligence community agrees that Russia was behind data breaches at political targets including the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported the three main intelligence agencies - the CIA, FBI and NSA - all had "high confidence" that Russia's goal was to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency [and that] Vladimir Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump."
Both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are heading investigations into Russia's involvement in election hacking and surrounding matters.
"This investigation is a national security necessity and anything less than a full accounting of all the facts will be insufficient to protect the country and meet the expectations of the American people,” said Schiff in a joint press release with Nunes announcing the goals of the investigation.
"On a bipartisan basis, we will fully investigate all the evidence we collect and follow that evidence wherever it leads,” agreed Nunes in the same release.
On Monday, Nunes made clear that the investigation would have a clear focus on leaks from the intelligence community that lead to former-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's resignation. Those leaks demonstrated that Flynn had more contact with Russia before President Trump's inauguration than he had told even the vice president, including negotiations over sanctions many felt undermined the then still-active Obama administration. But Trump and Nunes have both said that the threat of leaks is a bigger risk than Flynn's alleged overreach.
"We can't run a government like this,” said Nunes.
Nunes went on to say he had been told there was nothing to allegations that the Trump campaign had regular contact with Russian officials, a claim Schiff called "premature" later that day.
"We haven't obtained any of the evidence yet, so it's premature for us to be saying we've reached any conclusion about the issue of collusion," he said, noting that the investigation had neither gathered evidence or formally called witnesses.
"The most that we've had are private conversations, the chair and I with intelligence officials. That's not a substitute for an investigation."
The second question in the scope agreement directly addresses this issue: "Did the Russian active measures include links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns or any other U.S. Persons?" http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity ... estigation
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.
OBAMA WHITE HOUSE WAS AFRAID INTEL LINKING TRUMP CAMPAIGN WOULD BE DESTROYED
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.
Sessions spoke twice with Russian ambassador during Trump’s presidential campaign, Justice officials say At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.
“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded. He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
In January, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Sessions for answers to written questions. “Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote.
Sessions responded with one word: “No.”
LIAR ...WHY WOULD YOU LIE?
Sessions was under oath. He perjured himself to hide Trump campaign contacts with Russia.
it WAS Sessions, that recruited Carter Page!
Laurence TribeVerified account @tribelaw Laurence Tribe Retweeted VoteVets It does look like Sessions lied under oath to US Senate about Russian contacts with Trump surrogates during campaign. Very, very serious.
TRY TAKING MY POT FROM ME NOW ASSHOLE
Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, ADAM GOLDMAN and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTMARCH 1, 2017
President Obama in December. Some in his administration feared that intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 election could be covered up or destroyed. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times WASHINGTON — In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.
Then and now, Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.
At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.
Continue reading the main story It also reflected the suspicion among many in the Obama White House that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia on election email hacks — a suspicion that American officials say has not been confirmed. Former senior Obama administration officials said that none of the efforts were directed by Mr. Obama.
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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Credit Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik Sean Spicer, the Trump White House spokesman, said, “The only new piece of information that has come to light is that political appointees in the Obama administration have sought to create a false narrative to make an excuse for their own defeat in the election.” He added, “There continues to be no there, there.”
As Inauguration Day approached, Obama White House officials grew convinced that the intelligence was damning and that they needed to ensure that as many people as possible inside government could see it, even if people without security clearances could not. Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators — including the Senate Intelligence Committee, which in early January announced an inquiry into Russian efforts to influence the election.
At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.
There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress. In one instance, the State Department sent a cache of documents marked “secret” to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland days before the Jan. 20 inauguration. The documents, detailing Russian efforts to intervene in elections worldwide, were sent in response to a request from Mr. Cardin, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
“This situation was serious, as is evident by President Obama’s call for a review — and as is evident by the United States response,” said Eric Schultz, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “When the intelligence community does that type of comprehensive review, it is standard practice that a significant amount of information would be compiled and documented.”
The opposite happened with the most sensitive intelligence, including the names of sources and the identities of foreigners who were regularly monitored. Officials tightened the already small number of people who could access that information. They knew the information could not be kept from the new president or his top advisers, but wanted to narrow the number of people who might see the information, officials said.
More than a half-dozen current and former officials described various aspects of the effort to preserve and distribute the intelligence, and some said they were speaking to draw attention to the material and ensure proper investigation by Congress. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified information, nearly all of which remains secret, making an independent public assessment of the competing Obama and Trump administration claims impossible.
The F.B.I. is conducting a wide-ranging counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election, and is examining alleged links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government.
Separately, the House and Senate intelligence committees are conducting their own investigations, though they must rely on information collected by the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies.
At his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, former Senator Dan Coats, Mr. Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “I think it’s our responsibility to provide you access to all that you need.”
Dan Coats, President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has pledged cooperation in investigating the Russia allegations. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times Some Obama White House officials had little faith that a Trump administration would make good on such pledges, and the efforts to preserve the intelligence continued until the administration’s final hours. This was partly because intelligence was still being collected and analyzed, but it also reflected the sentiment among many administration officials that they had not recognized the scale of the Russian campaign until it was too late.
The warning signs had been building throughout the summer, but were far from clear. As WikiLeaks was pushing out emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee through online publication, American intelligence began picking up conversations in which Russian officials were discussing contacts with Trump associates, and European allies were starting to pass along information about people close to Mr. Trump meeting with Russians in the Netherlands, Britain and other countries.
But what was going on in the meetings was unclear to the officials, and the intercepted communications did little to clarify matters — the Russians, it appeared, were arguing about how far to go in interfering in the presidential election. What intensified the alarm at the Obama White House was a campaign of cyberattacks on state electoral systems in September, which led the administration to deliver a public accusation against the Russians in October.
But it wasn’t until after the election, and after more intelligence had come in, that the administration began to grasp the scope of the suspected tampering and concluded that one goal of the campaign was to help tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor. In early December, Mr. Obama ordered the intelligence community to conduct a full assessment of the Russian campaign.
In the weeks before the assessment was released in January, the intelligence community combed through databases for an array of communications and other information — some of which was months old by then — and began producing reports that showed there were contacts during the campaign between Trump associates and Russian officials.
The nature of the contacts remains unknown. Several of Mr. Trump’s associates have done business in Russia, and it is unclear if any of the contacts were related to business dealings.
The New York Times, citing four current and former officials, reported last month that American authorities had obtained information of repeated contacts between Mr. Trump’s associates and senior Russian intelligence officials. The White House has dismissed the story as false.
Since the Feb. 14 article appeared, more than a half-dozen officials have confirmed contacts of various kinds between Russians and Trump associates. The label “intelligence official” is not always cleanly applied in Russia, where ex-spies, oligarchs and government officials often report back to the intelligence services and elsewhere in the Kremlin.
Steven L. Hall, the former head of Russia operations at the C.I.A., said that Mr. Putin was surrounded by a cast of characters, and that it was “fair to say that a good number of them come from an intelligence or security background. Once an intel guy, always an intel guy in Russia.”
The concerns about the contacts were cemented by a series of phone calls between Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, and Michael T. Flynn, who had been poised to become Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. The calls began on Dec. 29, shortly after Mr. Kislyak was summoned to the State Department and informed that, in retaliation for Russian election meddling, the United States was expelling 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives and imposing other sanctions. Mr. Kislyak was irate and threatened a forceful Russia response, according to people familiar with the exchange.
But a day later, Mr. Putin said his government would not retaliate, prompting a Twitter post from Mr. Trump praising the Russian president — and puzzling Obama White House officials.
On Jan. 2, administration officials learned that Mr. Kislyak — after leaving the State Department meeting — called Mr. Flynn, and that the two talked multiple times in the 36 hours that followed. American intelligence agencies routinely wiretap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls showed that Mr. Flynn urged the Russians not to respond, saying relations would improve once Mr. Trump was in office, according to multiple current and former officials.
Beyond leaving a trail for investigators, the Obama administration also wanted to help European allies combat a threat that had caught the United States off guard. American intelligence agencies made it clear in the declassified version of the intelligence assessment released in January that they believed Russia intended to use its attacks on the United States as a template for more meddling. “We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned,” the report said, “to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/us/p ... .html?_r=1
Sessions spoke twice with Russian ambassador during Trump’s presidential campaign, Justice officials say Sessions spoke twice with Russian ambassador during Trump's presidential campaign Play Video1:42 Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice in 2016 with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, but did not mention this during his confirmation hearing to become U.S. attorney general. Sessions was asked about possible contacts between President Trump's campaign and the Russian government. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post) By Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller March 1 at 9:16 PM Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.
One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.
The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential election. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been leading investigations into Russian meddling and any links to Trump’s associates. He has so far resisted calls to recuse himself.
When Sessions spoke with Kislyak in July and September, the senator was a senior member of the influential Armed Services Committee as well as one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers. Sessions played a prominent role supporting Trump on the stump after formally joining the campaign in February 2016.
Sessions ‘unable to comment' on Trump intelligence briefing reports Play Video2:15 Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) questioned attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) about news that intelligence officials briefed President-elect Trump on unconfirmed reports that Russia has compromising information on Trump. (Senate Judiciary Committee) At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.
“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded. He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.
“There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions’s spokeswoman.
In January, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Sessions for answers to written questions. “Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote.
Sessions responded with one word: “No.”
Justice officials said Sessions met with Kislyak on Sept. 8 in his capacity as a member of the armed services panel rather than in his role as a Trump campaign surrogate.
“He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee,” Flores said.
She added that Sessions last year had more than 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, including the British, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Indian, Chinese, Canadian, Australian and German ambassadors, in addition to Kislyak.
In the case of the September meeting, one department official who came to the defense of the attorney general said, “There’s just not strong recollection of what was said.”
The Russian ambassador did not respond to requests for comment about his contacts with Sessions.
The Washington Post contacted all 26 members of the 2016 Senate Armed Services Committee to see if any lawmakers besides Sessions met with Kislyak in 2016. Of the 19 lawmakers who responded, every senator, including chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), said they did not meet with the Russian ambassador last year. The other lawmakers on the panel did not respond as of Wednesday evening.
“Members of the committee have not been beating a path to Kislyak’s door,” a senior Senate Armed Services Committee staffer said, citing tensions in relations with Moscow. Besides Sessions, the staffer added, “There haven’t been a ton of members who are looking to meet with Kislyak for their committee duties.”
Last month, The Washington Post reported that Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn had discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak during the month before Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, and other top Trump officials. Flynn was forced to resign the following week.
When asked to comment on Sessions’s contacts with Kislyak, Franken said in a statement to The Washington Post on Wednesday: “If it’s true that Attorney General Sessions met with the Russian ambassador in the midst of the campaign, then I am very troubled that his response to my questioning during his confirmation hearing was, at best, misleading.
Franken added: “It is now clearer than ever that the attorney general cannot, in good faith, oversee an investigation at the Department of Justice and the FBI of the Trump-Russia connection, and he must recuse himself immediately.”
Current and former U.S. officials say they see Kislyak as a diplomat, not an intelligence operative. But they were not sure to what extent, if any, Kislyak was aware of or involved in the covert Russian election campaign.
Steven Hall, former head of Russia operations at the CIA, said that Russia would have been keenly interested in cultivating a relationship with Sessions because of his role on key congressional committees and as an early adviser to Trump.
Sessions’s membership on the Armed Services Committee would have made him a priority for the Russian ambassador. “The fact that he had already placed himself at least ideologically behind Trump would have been an added bonus for Kislyak,” Hall said.
Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor who until 2014 served as U.S. ambassador to Russia, said he was not surprised that Kislyak would seek a meeting with Sessions. “The weird part is to conceal it,” he said. “That was at the height of all the discussions of what Russia was doing during the election.”
Two months before the September meeting, Sessions attended a Heritage Foundation event in July on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention that was attended by roughly 50 ambassadors. When the event was over, a small group of ambassadors approached Sessions as he was leaving the podium, and Kislayk was among them, the Justice Department official said.
Sessions then spoke individually to some of the ambassadors, including Kislyak, the official said. In the informal exchanges, the ambassadors expressed appreciation for his remarks and some of them invited him to events they were sponsoring, said the official, citing a former Sessions staffer who was at the event.
Democratic lawmakers, including senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have demanded in recent weeks that Sessions recuse himself from the government’s inquiry into possible ties between Trump associates and Russia..
Last week, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, became one of the few Republican representatives to state publicly the need for an independent investigation.
Sessions’s public position on Russia has evolved over time.
In an interview with RealClear World on the sidelines of the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum in March 2015, Sessions said the United States and Europe “have to unify” against Russia.
More than a year later, he spoke about fostering a stronger relationship with the Kremlin. In a July 2016 interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sessions praised Trump’s plan to build better relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Donald Trump is right. We need to figure out a way to end this cycle of hostility that’s putting this country at risk, costing us billions of dollars in defense, and creating hostilities,” Sessions told CNN.
Asked if he viewed Putin as a good or bad leader, Sessions told CNN: “We have a lot of bad leaders around the world that operate in ways we would never tolerate in the United States. But the question is, can we have a more peaceful, effective relationship with Russia? Utilizing interests that are similar in a realistic way to make this world a safer place and get off this dangerous hostility with Russia? I think it’s possible.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... c2f92615c5
The Most Audacious Quid Pro Quo In History
Rep. Maxine Waters: Trump and friends guilty of ‘collusion’ with Russia 02/28/2017 09:03 pm ET | Updated 23 hours ago
Donald Trump and the GOP are desperately trying to quash further scrutiny into his administration’s ties to Russia, scrutiny that has only intensified since the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn over leaks that he discussed lifting sanctions with a Russian diplomat after the election. Democrats, and yes, a few Republicans are calling for independent investigations, but no one has been as vocal in their criticism as California Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
After a confidential briefing to Congress on Russian hacking by FBI Director James Comey in January, Waters tersely told reporters that Comey “has no credibility.” At 21 seconds, Elle called her remarks the “the world’s quickest and sassiest press conference.”
THE UNDERCURRENT On Chris Hayes’ show last week, Waters said that Trump and his circle of friends with connections to Russia and the fossil fuel industry are “a bunch of scumbags... who are all organized around making money.” The target of her ire was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon Mobil, who previously negotiated a $500 billion deal with Putin to drill in the Arctic — a deal blocked by sanctions imposed by the Obama administration for the Russian intervention in the Ukraine.
Following up on these statements at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Atlanta last weekend, I asked Rep. Waters if lifting sanctions was the most audacious quid pro quo in history: the presidency for petroleum. In short, she thinks Trump colluded with Russia on lifting sanctions DURING the presidential campaign. That timeline would be critically different from the post-election conversations Flynn had in December. If Waters is right, that collusion may lay the groundwork for Donald Trump’s impeachment. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the ... fdf6197807?
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
British, Dutch Passed Along Intel About Meetings Between Trump Team and Russia KEVIN DRUMMAR. 1, 2017 9:30 PM
Metzel Mikhail/TASS via ZUMA; Dennis Brack/Black Star/Newscom via ZUMA The New York Times reports today on new revelations about contacts between the Trump team and Russia during the last month of the Obama administration:
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Mr. Trump’s associates.
Some of this is coming to light as a result of deliberate efforts by outgoing Obama officials:
Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration. At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.
....Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators....At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low level of classification to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government....There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress.
....Throughout the summer...European allies were starting to pass along information about people close to Mr. Trump meeting with Russians in the Netherlands, Britain and other countries....But it wasn’t until after the election, and after more intelligence had come in, that the administration began to grasp the scope of the suspected tampering and concluded that one goal of the campaign was to help tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor. In early December, Mr. Obama ordered the intelligence community to conduct a full assessment of the Russian campaign.
As the story acknowledges, it's still unclear what all these meetings were about, but "the Russians, it appeared, were arguing about how far to go in interfering in the presidential election."
This has the feel of a scandal that will pass into urban legend without anyone ever knowing for sure what actually happened. It's pretty obvious at this point that something happened, but with every new disclosure it seems as if the truth drifts a little farther out of reach. Unless someone has a smoking gun tape somewhere, it's not clear if this story will ever get resolved.
Sessions under fire over Russia meetings Democrats seek his resignation. By REBECCA MORIN 03/01/17 10:17 PM EST Updated 03/01/17 11:33 PM EST
Top congressional Democrats called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign Wednesday after revelations that he had met with the Russian ambassador in the months before the election — meetings that Sessions did not disclose during his confirmation hearings.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) led the effort late on Wednesday night, accusing Sessions of "lying under oath" during confirmation proceedings about his contacts with the Russians
"The Attorney General must resign,” Pelosi wrote in a statement. “There must be an independent, bipartisan, outside commission to investigate the Trump political, personal and financial connections to the Russians.” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member on the House oversight committee, also called on Sessions to resign.
The news that Sessions met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice last year, including a conversation in Sessions' Senate office, may be the political smoking gun Democrats have been looking for. They've been pushing for months to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate any ties between Donald Trump's campaign and Russian government officials, following a steady drumbeat of news stories saying there had been repeated contacts.
It wasn't just Democrats amping up the pressure. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said a special prosecutor should be appointed if investigators find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Trump campaign, adding that Sessions should recuse himself from any investigation into contacts between the campaign and Russia.
"I don't know that there's anything between the Trump campaign and the Russians. I'm not going to base my decision based on newspaper articles," Graham said during a CNN town hall where he appeared with Sen. John McCain. "If there is something there, and it goes up the chain of investigation, it is clear to me that Jeff Sessions, who is my dear friend, cannot make this decision about Trump."
Graham addressed the issue of recusal after the Washington Post reported that Sessions spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador to the United States last year.
"There may be nothing there, but if there's something there, if the FBI believes is criminal in nature, then, for sure, you need a special prosecutor. If that day ever comes, I'll be the first one to say it needs to be somebody other than Jeff," Graham added.
According to the Post story, Sessions’ conversations with Kislyak took place in July and September. The second meeting reportedly occurred in Sessions' Senate office. Sessions did not disclose those discussions during his confirmation hearing in response to a question, saying he had not had communications with the Russians during the campaign.
Sarah Isgur Flores, a Sessions spokesperson, said "there was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer," noting that he had over 25 conversations with ambassadors as a member of the Armed Services Committee.
"He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee," Flores said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said if the Post story is true, Sessions "must" recuse himself.
"If reports are accurate that Attorney General Sessions — a prominent surrogate for Donald Trump — met with Ambassador Kislyak during the campaign, and failed to disclose this fact during his confirmation, it is essential that he recuse himself from any role in the investigation of Trump campaign ties to the Russians," Schiff said in a statement. "This is not even a close call; it is a must.
During his confirmation proceedings, Sessions declined to commit to recuse himself from Trump campaign related inquiries.
Here's the issue: Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, is considered by US intelligence to be one of Russia's top spies and spy-recruiters.
the biggest oil deal in history was “expected to change the historical trajectory of Russia
Russia’s $500 billion oil deal with Exxon was killed by U.S. sanctions. No doubt coincidentally, drilling In the Russian Arctic would be easier if warming-driven sea ice melt continued. CREDIT: Wall Street Journal, 9/11/2014. But it appears our democracy and our children have a new axis to worry about: Putin, Trump, and ExxonMobil, whose CEO Rex Tillerson — an extreme Russophile and long-time director of a US-Russian oil company — is Trump’s puzzling choice for Secretary of State. I say “puzzling” because the long-serving Exxon employee (from age 23!) has no qualifications to be secretary of state — other than a history negotiating major oil deals with countries like Putin’s Russia, which in any sane world would actually disqualify him or at least force a recusal from all State Department dealings with Russia. But that puzzle disappears if we follow the famous dictum from the Watergate era for uncovering a tangled web of covert campaign acts: “Follow the money.” And perhaps another puzzle is also solved: Why did Putin take such a “fearful risk,” as Frum put it, to “mount a clandestine espionage and disinformation campaign on behalf” of Trump and against Clinton, “when Putin had every reason to expect that he probably would end up facing a President Clinton,” and a tremendous backlash. You can certainly make a plausible case, as U.S. intelligence agencies do in their bombshell new report, that Putin had plenty of motivation to interfere. He wanted to undermine the legitimacy of U.S. elections and a Clinton Presidency, he blamed Secretary Clinton for “inciting mass protests against his regime,” and he was angry with the U.S. for the Panama Papers leaks. Those leaks showed a $2 billion trail of offshore accounts and deals that traced back to Putin and his cabal of kleptocrats, who, among other things, were getting rich “trading shares in Rosneft,” Russia’s state-owned (i.e. Putin run) oil monopoly. But a half trillion dollars to line their pockets and prop up the Russian economy offers a much more tangible motivation for team Putin to get Trump elected. And it was Tillerson who had made the $500 billion oil deal with Putin that got blocked by sanctions. Blocking the deal did not just “put Exxon at risk,” as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2014. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow explained last month the biggest oil deal in history was “expected to change the historical trajectory of Russia.”
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.
Andrew Harnik ByJOSH MARSHALL PublishedMARCH 2, 2017, 8:52 AM EDT I don't have a clear sense of how big a deal last night's Jeff Sessions news will turn out to be. And I mean that both substantively - how much does it really matter? - and more generally - how will it be perceived, what effect will it have on the course of the broader story? As I wrote last night, this is much more about Sessions' need to conceal the meeting than the meeting itself.
My biggest takeaway is that this scandal has all the attributes of the vast and shattering scandals in which people who at least appear to have only indirect or limited roles themselves keep getting pulled under or compromised by it. I know "vast and shattering" is a pretty portentous phrase. Certainly, this revelation itself doesn't shake anything to its foundations. But why did Sessions have this meeting at all? It seems at best ill-conceived, coming in the heat of allegations of inappropriate connections between Trump and Russia last Fall.
Far more baffling, why did he choose to conceal it?
Sessions and his aides claims this morning that a) he forgot or b) that he met with a lot of other ambassadors so it doesn't matter or c) that it somehow didn't count as a meeting because they didn't discuss the election are all either off-point or ridiculous. It is no more than pretty transparent after-the-fact caviling. Any contact with senior Russian officials was going to be scrutinized in this context. Concealing it would set off alarm bells.
A bit of the timeline here is helpful. Sen. Franken's question to Sessions was on January 10th. Sen. Leahy asked a slightly different question. But I'm not sure of the precise date. It was on January 12th that the Post's David Ignatius first reported that Flynn had been in contact with Ambassador Kislyak on the day President Obama announced retaliatory sanctions against Russia. If Leahy's question was also before the 12th (they were written questions, so possible), that was before the issue of Kislyak specifically became a charged public issue. But Sessions actual confirmation vote came almost a month later, plenty of time to revise his testimony.
Why are there so many unforced errors? Why conceal this meeting? Frankly, why lie about it? As I said, big, big scandals work like this. People who don't even appear to be that close to the action keep getting pulled under for what seem like needless deceptions. The answer is usually that the stuff at the center of the scandal is so big that it requires concealment, even about things distant from the main action, things that it would seem much better and less damaging simply to admit.
We've all heard the old saw: It's never the crime, it's the cover-up. This is almost never true. Covering scandals for any length of time is enough to tell you that. People are generally able to make judgments about how much trouble they're in. We think the 'cover up' is worse than the crime because it's actually very seldom that the full scope of the actual crime is ever known. The cover up works better than you think. The other reason the cover up is a logical response is that it usually works. You only find out about it when it doesn't. So it's a good bet.
Astronomers can't see black holes directly. They map them by their event horizon and their effect on nearby stars and stellar matter. We can't see yet what's at the center of the Trump/Russia black hole. But we can tell a lot about its magnitude by the scope of the event horizon and the degree of its gravitational pull, which is immense. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the ... -is-strong
Steve Bannon had to have been coordinating the Russian collusion in the Donald Trump campaign
By Bill Palmer | March 2, 2017 | 0
Now that at least six of Donald Trump’s campaign managers, advisers, and surrogates have been caught colluding with the Russian government during the campaign, it’s clear that this didn’t all transpire by mere happenstance. Someone within the Trump campaign had to have been coordinating the effort – and no, not Trump himself. That person has to have been Steve Bannon from the start.
Consider the chronology of events: Paul Manafort has deep financial ties to the Kremlin, but he was brought into the Donald Trump campaign fairly late. The timeline makes clear that the campaign was colluding with Russia before he was hired and after he was nudged out. Michael Flynn joined the Trump campaign much earlier, and the evidence says he’s fully under Russian control, but his role suggests he was a mere go-between. Carter Page is another Russian stooge, but he never had enough influence in the campaign to have been coordinating the Russian collusion. And Jeff Sessions was merely a Trump campaign surrogate, an informal adviser.
None of them fit the role or the timeline that would have been required to have masterminded the Donald Trump campaign’s Russian collusion from the start. Trump himself appears to be in deep financial debt to Russia, as well as subject to some kind of Russian blackmail. But that makes him a pawn in all this, not a ringleader. Nor is it easy to picture Trump, who only ever handles things in broad strokes, to have been carefully coordinating a clandestine operation to conspire with a Kremlin that was holding him hostage. Instead, tire’s only one person who fits the bill.
Although Steve Bannon didn’t become CEO of the Donald Trump campaign until fairly late in the game, the timeline says Trump was relying on him for guidance from the start. Bannon had real control of the campaign from beginning to finish, no matter who was officially in charge at any given time. Bannon was a seasoned political operative who would have understood how to coordinate with the Russians as needed. And Bannon’s stated goal to destroy the American system of government by any means necessary fits with a willingness to get his stooge Trump elected by conspiring with the foreign power to which Trump was personally beholden.
There is, as of yet, no specific publicly available evidence linking Steve Bannon to the Trump-Russia conspiracy. Nor do I have any specific evidence up my sleeve. But he’s the only person who was in a position to have pulled off coordinating the conspiracy with Russia from Trump’s end. Bannon had motive, means, and opportunity – and no one else did. That’s not enough to convict him. But it’s enough to know which way we should be looking next.
After getting caught up in Trump-Russia scandal, Jeff Sessions now has three bad options By Bill Palmer | March 1, 2017 | 0
After being exposed last night for having colluded with the Russian ambassador while he was a Donald Trump campaign surrogate, and for having lied about it under oath during his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Jeff Sessions did what politicians always do when they’re first caught up in a scandal: he issued a quick and flimsy denial in the faint hope it might take the heat off him. This strategy is always invoked, but almost never works.
Assuming that no one takes Sessions’ denial seriously, the political spotlight will now shine white-hot on him today, as well as every day going forward for some time. Consider the scrutiny that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was under when he was exposed for having colluded with Russia, then multiply it by ten, considering how much more of a central role Attorney General is in the investigation. Flynn lasted just a few days under that spotlight before he chose to resign. Sessions now has three options in front of him, and none of them look good for him, but he’ll need to pick one.
The first option for Jeff Sessions is to resign and walk away. He has a number of friends in the Senate, which is the body that he lied under oath to, meaning that they might be willing to let his perjury slide if he’s willing to just go home. If it later turns out that he’s truly guilty in the conspiracy to rig the election, he’ll still pay the legal price unless he flips on Trump and agrees to testify against him. But in the short term, resigning may be the best way for Sessions to insulate himself. Then again, he’s a proud man, and he just gave up his longtime Senate seat for this role – so is he truly willing to suddenly walk away from politics forever?
The second option for Sessions is to remain on the job but promise to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation, and offer to give Congress approval over the special prosecutor he appoints. This may also insulate him from perjury charges, but it would keep him under constant scrutiny, and he’d be crippled in his job as Attorney General. He’s seventy years old, he’s had a long career, there seems to be little chance he’ll still have the job by the time the scandal plays out — and the more quickly he walks away from this mess, the less damage to his already strained legacy. Is he up for remaining in the spotlight? For all we know, if he recuses himself but doesn’t resign, the mercurial Trump could turn against him and fire him anyway.
The third option for Sessions is to dig in his heels and say “come at me.” His Republican friends in the Senate would hate the idea of going to war against him, but considering the climate, they may not have a choice. And the intelligence community would show no mercy in attempting to continue taking him down. It would seem bizarre for Sessions, who was aligned with Trump during the campaign but who has no personal loyalty to him, to go down with the ship if he has a way out.
Which of the three options is Jeff Sessions most likely to pursue? Even he may not know yet. He’ll have to take the temperature of his allies in the Senate today to find out how thoroughly they want him out of the picture. And he’ll have to see how much public traction the Democrats get with their calls last night for his resignation. He’s also the kind of politician who’s managed to survive in politics for several decades despite a very troubled record, meaning that he knows which way the political wind is blowing and how to navigate it — so he’ll probably strongly consider what his attorneys have to say before making his decision.
From here, the next steps in the Trump-Russia investigation will largely hinge on what Jeff Sessions decides to do today and tomorrow.. If he digs in his heels, then the primary focus and scrutiny is on him until he’s been broken. If he recuses himself or resigns, then another Trump-Russia domino will have fallen, and the focus shifts to the next next domino — ultimately leading to Donald Trump himself https://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/after/1732/
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.
step down to spend more time with Kellyanne/Mercer family
It most famously worked on the “Leave.” campaign during Brexit voting in the United Kingdom.
WILL DONALD TRUMP’S DATA-ANALYTICS COMPANY ALLOW RUSSIA TO ACCESS RESEARCH ON U.S. CITIZENS? Tracing the suspicious-looking, and messy, ties between a Ukrainian oligarch, an elections-information firm, and the GOP candidate’s former campaign manager
The Trump campaign has hired Ted Cruz’s former data-analysis firm, Cambridge Analytica—and in doing so, it has connected itself with a British property tycoon, Vincent Tchenguiz, and through him with the Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, a business associate of Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who resigned last week. It would be hard to find a better example of why the ownership of the companies that collect data on the American electorate matters.
What Cambridge does is what marketers have done for some time now: segment potential customers (in this case, voters) by their buying habits, lifestyle, and psychology. It most famously worked on the “Leave.” campaign during Brexit voting in the United Kingdom.
Cambridge Analytica’s British parent company, SCL, has attracted criticism for some unusual strategies, such as trying to persuade opposition supporters not to vote in a Nigerian election, using the influence of “local religious figures.”
Mainly, though, SCL and CA both seem to have some pretty tired ideas. “The firm groups people according to where they fall on the so-called OCEAN scale, which psychologists use to measure how open, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, or neurotic they are,” Wired reported in April. There’s nothing evil—or particularly smart—about this “psychological profiling,” which has been around for decades, and it’s questionable if it actually works to predict voting behavior.
CA obviously didn’t sprinkle the right kind of fairy dust for Cruz; a recent news item has it that the campaign felt it was CA to develop its product. Others say the firm doesn’t quite “get” American politics and has reliability issues: As Advertising Age quoted a consultant: “The product comes late or it’s not quite what you envisioned.”
But what’s worrisome is that CA, as The Wall Street Journal reports, is not just relying on public records:
Cambridge Analytica is surveying tens of thousands of Britons across the country on issues including partisanship, personality, and their concerns about EU membership. The company will then fuse those findings with other publicly available data on voters to produce advice for how “Leave. EU” should target their messaging more specifically through multiple channels.
Between “big data,” cyberwarfare, and new levels of detail in election polling, Americans ought to be thinking seriously about who owns the firms that collect this data.
And because CA is linked to U.K. property mogul Vincent Tchenguiz, who himself has connections to Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, a Putin protégé (and Paul Manafort business associate) it’s possible the information CA collects might be shared with people who are not friendly to American democracy—not that Donald Trump thinks there’s anything wrong with Putin, Firtash, and others like them.
For 10 years, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company’s largest shareholder was Vincent Tchenguiz, who, together with his brother Robert, is estimated to be worth £850 million (about $1.1 billion). Even today, a year after Tchenguiz divested his shares, SCL Group Chairman Julian Wheatland, who is also one of the company’s four directors, is a Tchenguiz employee.
Tchenguiz used the same Guernsey holding company, Wheddon Ltd., to invest both in Cambridge Analytica’s parent company in the U.K. and in another privately held U.K. business whose largest shareholder was the Ukrainian gas middleman Dmitry Firtash. (To buy into a privately held business you normally need the approval of the biggest shareholders, who were Firtash and Raymond Asquith, who also works for Firtash.) Firtash, indicted in 2014 by the United States in a complex bribery case, is under a sort of house arrest in Austria, free on $175 million bail, while the U.S. continues to attempt, unsuccessfully, to extradite him. He has already been stripped of some of his Ukrainian assets by prosecutors there.
Many articles have reported that the U.S. billionaire Robert Mercer is the owner of Cambridge, but some basic Googling would have shown that this isn’t true. The Daily Beast got it right; Cambridge Analytica’s press releases refer to it as “the U.S. subsidiary of SCL Group.” But the relationship between Cambridge Analytica and SCL is far from easy to decipher.
The privately-held SCL Group Ltd. (UK co. #05514098) has a half-dozen subsidiaries, with an overlapping group of directors. One subsidiary is SCL Elections. Cambridge Analytica’s website in December 2015 listed its New York address as Suite 2703 in the News Corp. building, 1211 Avenue of the Americas, the same New York address formerly listed on SCL Elections’ website as its New York office. (Both websites have since been updated, with new addresses.) SCL Elections is entirely owned by executive Alexander Nix.
Meanwhile, another related company, SCL USA, incorporated in January 2015 and entirely owned by SCL Elections, changed its name to Cambridge Analytica UK Ltd. on April 14 of this year. Confusingly, its U.K. address, 1 Westferry Circle, is not the same as either the address of SCL Elections or the London address of Cambridge Analytica at 1-6 Yarmouth Place in Mayfair. And it’s unclear if there’s a Cambridge Analytica incorporated anywhere in the United States; one would have to search registers in all 50 states.
Ad Age reported that CA “will not discuss its investors,” but the mothership, SCL Group, has pretty straightforward ownership: From shortly after its incorporation in 2005 until June 2015, according to the company’s obligatory Companies House filings, the largest of the 15 shareholders of SCL Group was Tchenguiz.
Tchenguiz made his money in London’s highly competitive real estate market and is said to be smart as a whip. He and his brother Robert are also known as big Tory donors. But what they’re best known for isn’t something any entrepreneur seeks out.
In March 2011 the brothers were arrested in dramatic predawn raids as part of an investigation into the 2008 collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. Just before its collapse, Kaupthing’s loans to the Tchenguiz brothers totaled 40 percent of its capital. It has been charged that Kaupthing—which had a far-from-transparent ownership structure—was effectively the Tchenguiz brothers’ bank and that they looted the bank, leading to its collapse. Various Kaupthing executives ended up in jail. Yet Vincent Tchenguiz managed to beat the charges, and even to win restitution from the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office after charges were dropped. Many think the SFO badly mishandled the case.
That’s not all. Kaupthing’s largest shareholder, Meidur, now called Exista, which owned 25 percent of its shares, had ties to Alfa Bank, the largest Russian commercial bank; Alfa chairman was “deep state” figure Mikhail Fridman, chairman and co-founder of Alfa Group, the parent of Alfa Bank. Meanwhile, Trump adviser Richard Burt is on the “senior advisory board” of Alfa Bank. (None of which is illegal or secret.)
Vincent Tchenguiz’s investment in SCL Group Ltd. began soon after the company’s incorporation July 20, 2005. In the fall of 2005, Tchenguiz’s Consensus Business Group acquired 22,533 shares of SCL—the largest single shareholding, representing 24 percent of its then-95,134 shares. On Nov. 11, 2006, a new director was appointed to represent Tchenguiz’s interests—Julian David Wheatland, who was listed as “chairman” in the 2010 and 2011 accounts and on the SCL Group website.
Wheatland was formerly “head of the International Division at U.K. structured-finance house Consensus Business Group.” Consensus is Tchenguiz’s holding company. Wheatland is currently CEO of Consensus Community, a part of Consensus Business Group, which in turn manages investments for Investec Trust (Guernsey) Ltd., a trustee for the Tchenguiz Family Trust.
The 2006 accounts (available online) of SCL Group show a whopping loss of £2.3 million ($3.02 million), but no “going concern” statement was included. In May 2013, SCL Group’s auditor resigned; the 2011 accounts were the last audited accounts filed. Shareholders’ equity plummeted from: £681,000 in 2006 to a modest £273,000 in 2012 to £4,424 in 2013 and £87,420 in 2014—a very poor showing compared to similar companies.
Tchenguiz remained involved in SCL Group for 10 years, despite its lack of financial returns. Vincent Tchenguiz is mainly known as a real estate investor; his reasons for acquiring shares in SCL in the first place are as opaque as his reason for divesting them. From the outside, it seems an odd, unprofitable sideline. But SCL is a private company, so we can only follow the filings: Tchenguiz’s 22,533 shares were initially held by Consensus Business Group and later owned by Wheddon Ltd., another vehicle owned by his family holding company, Investec Trust.
Then, as of June 10, 2015, SCL canceled Wheddon’s 22,533 shares and paid Wheddon £147,746 (about $194,500)—a tiny amount in relation to Tchenguiz’s estimated wealth. It also changed its name from Strategic Communications Laboratories Ltd. to its current name, SCL Group Ltd. Julian Wheatland signed the “special resolution,” which, in U.K. business is a move “to protect minority shareholders against important decisions being taken without proper consideration and, to the extent possible, consensus.”
Did Tchenguiz change the name and remove his shareholding as an attempt to rebrand, in preparation for going to work for Ted Cruz? If that’s so, the Cruz campaign did only an imitation of due diligence, looking only at the company’s current ownership, not even bothering with the previous year, and not noticing that Tchenguiz still has a director on the company. Though Tchenguiz no longer owns shares in SCL, he would likely retain influence on the company operations: His director, Julian Wheatland is still SCL’s chairman and one of SCL’s four directors to this day. Wheatland is also a director of two other companies in the SCL family: SCL Analytics Ltd. and SCL Strategics Ltd.
Tchenguiz has branched out beyond his core ground-rents business before—and this is what connects him to Manafort partner Dmitry Firtash. Around the same time that he bought into SCL, in 2005-2006, Vincent Tchenguiz began giving interviews publicizing a new interest: “green” investing. One of these seemingly anodyne investments was in a privately held U.K. company called Zander Group Ltd. that has a very complex capital structure.
What does Zander do? Zander says on one of its subsidiaries’ websites that it is in the business of soil regeneration. It doesn’t seem to get a lot of work, but on March 2007, according to a posting on its website from January 2012 (since removed), it signed a contract to work on anti-desertification in Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya. An ex-director of Zander Group, Geoffrey Stuart Pearson, was jailed in Britain for his role in the collapse of Langbar Corp., the U.K.’s biggest AIM market fraud. (At the time, the U.K.’s SFO shut Langbar down in fall 2005, Zander shares were its only investment. The SFO apparently never found this interesting.)
As the obligatory Companies House filings show, Tchenguiz invested in Zander Group in 2005-2006 through his Vantania Holdings Ltd.; on Sept. 11, 2015, Vantania transferred its shares to Wheddon Ltd. (This was just after Wheddon had divested its shares in SCL Group Ltd.)
Here’s the Firtash link: From 2006 until 2011, the largest single shareholding in Zander Group, 28 percent of the total shares, was owned by a Cyprus company called Spadi Trading. And Spadi was owned by Group DF, as in Dmitry Firtash, in the British Virgin Islands. This holding company is one of 153 companies worldwide the U.S. is trying to seize pursuant to its indictment of Firtash. (Spadi’s ultimate owner is Robert Shetler-Jones, also a Group DF board member.).
There’s no proof that Tchenguiz knows Firtash, but it’s hard to imagine he’d be able to buy into a closely-held private business like Zander without the approval of the largest shareholder, even though Tchenguiz only bought 74,075 out of 11.5 million Zander Group shares in 2006. Moreover, Zander Group’s chairman, and its biggest shareholder, is Raymond Asquith, an English peer who doubles as an executive of Group DF.
Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had numerous dealings with Dmitry Firtash’s Group DF. Firtash is probably the most savory person with whom Manafort has worked; others include Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch formerly barred from the United States for Russian mob ties, ex-Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich, Mobutu Sese Seko, Ferdinand Marcos, and African warlord Jonas Savimbi. The fact that Vincent Tchenguiz’s man Wheatland is still the chairman and a director of SCL Group and that Tchenguiz is also a co-investor with the Firtash crew might give some candidates pause—but there’s no reason to think Trump is one of them. (As far as the public record indicates, Trump has never worked directly with Tchenguiz and Paul Manafort is not a director of any English companies, though he might be a shareholder; this information is not easily searchable.)
i couldn’t help but wonder… had the Russian ambassador been meeting with everybody except me?
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Malcolm Nance's thoughts ....there will be a drop of a raw transcript of a conversation between a Russian official and an administration official from maybe a foreign country and that will be the end of trump
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Sessions is lodged in there like a hungry tick, he'll be harder to get rid of than Flynn. He's the guy they installed to stop investigations on all this.
Sessions gives ticks a bad name...he has 4 excuses -No contact -No recollection -Superficial comments -Part of his job as Senator
ticks only have one for sustaining life
Would you risk perjury charges over "superficial comments"?
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.
IS THE WHITE HOUSE NOW JUST ANOTHER TRUMP INC. SUBSIDIARY? No tax returns, no blind trust, no divestment: Donald Trump has ignored calls to put his country before his business. From foreign bank loans to deals with Russian oligarchs, there’s evidence of serious ethics violations ahead.
BY SUZANNA ANDREWS MARCH 2, 2017 5:00 AM SEEING RED Signage being removed from the closing Trump Plaza casino, in Atlantic City, 2014. Left, by Mark Makela/Reuters; Right, by Wayne Parry/A.P. Images/Rex/Shutterstock. On January 11, Donald Trump held his first press conference since his electoral win to address the subject of his business interests and conflicts, which had become—along with the questions about Russian involvement in the election—a primary controversy for Trump. The briefing was held in the lobby of Manhattan’s Trump Tower. Royal-blue drapes covered the marble wall behind the podium, the presidential hue forming a striking backdrop for a row of gold-tasseled American flags. Trump, wearing a navy wool suit, crisp white shirt, and red silk tie, with an American flag pinned to his lapel, stood to one side of the podium, flanked by his three oldest children, Donald junior, 39, Ivanka, 35, and Eric, 33. At the podium, Sheri Dillon, a tax attorney, explained the changes that would be made to the Trump Organization. Next to her, a table covered in black cloth was piled with stacks of manila folders—hilariously spoofed that week on Saturday Night Live as a portable pile of plastic prop folders. They were said to contain thousands of documents involved in re-arranging Trump’s “business empire,” which Dillon described as “massive.”
News. Hollywood. Style. Culture. For more high-profile interviews, stunning photography, and thought-provoking features, subscribe now to Vanity Fair magazine. She likened Trump’s wealth and stature to those of Nelson Rockefeller, a former vice president and scion of one of the nation’s wealthiest and most prominent families. The comparison to Rockefeller was deft, but off the mark. In response to the outcry over his wealth, Rockefeller in 1974 not only released his tax returns to Congress but also offered to put his holdings in a blind trust—neither of which Trump, as it turned out, has been willing to do. Trump’s plan, as Dillon explained, was to put the Trump Organization into a trust to be managed by his sons and one of his longtime executives. There would be no new foreign deals; an ethics adviser would be appointed; and Trump himself would have no involvement in the business. His company would continue to make domestic deals. Trump was not going to sell his business or put it in a blind trust. And he was definitely not going to release his tax returns. “You know the only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters, O.K.?,” Trump said. This despite a recent ABC News poll indicating that 74 percent of Americans say he should release his tax records.
As Trump seemed to see it, he was being magnanimous in making any changes at all. “I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president,” he told the gathering. “I could actually run my business and run government at the same time.”
The loud applause that punctuated Trump’s remarks to the press notwithstanding—which, according to reporters, came from Trump employees—the reaction to his comments was negative and swift. Within hours, ethics experts and advisers to former presidents, including George W. Bush, slammed Trump’s conflict-of-interest plan. Walter Shaub, the top government ethics official, called it “meaningless.”
Among the wealthiest presidents—by his own measure—in the history of the United States, Trump is possibly the most conflicted and indebted. He is also the only president in modern times to resist separating himself from his business interests—and the potential for corruption and self-enrichment—in a way that meets the barest ethics standards. Given the risks to the legitimacy of his presidency, why won’t he?
VIDEO: Donald Trump’s Conflicts of Interest
When asked about his taxes, Trump has repeatedly told people seeking information about his finances to look instead at the financial-disclosure forms which he has been required to file with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. People who have done that, Trump has said, “have learned a lot about my company, and now they realize my company is much bigger, much more powerful, than they ever thought.” And, on paper at least, that’s true. Trump’s latest disclosure form, which was filed in May of 2016, lists 564 companies operating under the umbrella of the Trump Organization. The list goes on for pages, entities with names like DB Pace Acquisition, LLC; DT APP Warrant Holding; and Scotland Acquisitions, LLC. Many are limited-liability companies that may be simply legal envelopes for a bank account or for agreements to license his name, although it is impossible to know for certain. These entities, which also include family trusts set up by Trump’s father for his children, are all private, and there is virtually no way to know from the disclosure forms exactly what they are worth or what they do.
But nestled among the many business entities is Trump’s stake in some of his best-known properties around the world. These include Trump Tower in Manhattan; the Trump International Hotels in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C.; the Towers in Chicago, Toronto, Mumbai, Istanbul, and Manila. And there are his many golf courses—Mar-a-Lago and the Doral, in Florida; the Trump National Golf Club, in Palos Verdes, California; and golf clubs in Scotland, Ireland, and Dubai.
AFTER HIS FLAMEOUT IN THE 90S, VIRTUALLY NO MAJOR BANK OR WALL STREET INVESTMENT BANK WOULD LEND TO HIM.
Trump owns most of his golf courses and a few office buildings, but he does not own most of the sleek glass towers that bear his name. In most cases his involvement is through licensing and management deals, renting out the use of his name to developers, whose hotels and condominiums the Trump Organization manages—for fees of up to $5 million a year for licensing and promotion and $1 million for management. Trump sometimes gets an equity stake in them, but these generally carry no risk for him. The risk is taken by his partners, many of them foreign: Russian financiers, developing-world plutocrats with close ties to their governments, and a couple of banks, although most major banks won’t lend to him.
As best one can tell from the disclosure forms, the Trump Organization makes most of its money from his hotels and golf courses, but he also has media, restaurant, and entertainment revenues, including royalties from The Apprentice, where he remains an executive producer, and his many books. He also has income from his winery, in Virginia, and from stamping his name on an array of products, from mattresses, steaks, and vodka to men’s ties, cuff links, and cologne.
So, what is Donald Trump worth? Without his tax returns it is hard to divine. In June 2015, when Trump announced that he was running for president, his campaign put his net worth at more than $8 billion. A month later, on July 15, 2015, it revised that number: “As of this date,” the statement read, “Mr. Trump’s net worth is in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” Last year, Forbes estimated that he was worth about $3.7 billion, while Bloomberg put the number at $3 billion.
For Trump, the perception of the size of his fortune is serious business. In 2006 he sued Timothy O’Brien, the author of the 2005 book TrumpNation, for $5 billion in damages. The offense: O’Brien cited “three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” who estimated that Trump was worth “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million.” As the book noted, Trump pegged his own net worth at $6 billion, suggesting that lowball estimates of his worth came from “guys who have four-hundred-pound wives” and who were jealous of him. His company’s financial statement, according to court records, put his net worth for year-end 2004 at substantially less than he did: $3.5 billion. That same year, a review of his finances by North Fork Bank put his net worth at $1.2 billion, and an analysis of his statement of financial condition by Deutsche Bank put his net worth at $788 million. Real-estate appraisals can vary widely, but Trump’s financial creativity went beyond property valuations. Trump eventually lost the case on appeal in 2011, but his 2007 trial deposition—led by O’Brien’s attorney Mary Jo White, who went on to become Obama’s S.E.C. chairperson—offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of Donald Trump.
Regarding his claim that he owned the Trump Hotel in Waikiki, Trump seemed unfazed when O’Brien’s attorney pulled out the licensing agreement between Trump and the actual owner of the hotel. “This is such a strong licensing agreement,” Trump responded, “I consider it to be a form of ownership.” He weaved and bobbed in his answers to questions about his finances. As regards a 2005 speech he made at the Learning Annex, for which he said on the Larry King show that he was paid $1 million, the actual fee was $400,000. However, he said, all the money the Learning Annex spent on advertising and promoting his speech was actually a payment to him because it increased the value of his brand.
Trump’s brand—it was, and is, at the core of what Donald Trump is worth. As Trump explained in his deposition, the brand “is my reputation.” And the value of that is hard to say. In 2005, according to court records, Trump’s accountant wrote two drafts of a letter—one version put the value of the brand at $2 billion, the other at $4 billion. More recently, Trump has said that a brand expert he hired valued it at $3 billion.
How does Trump calculate his net worth? “My net worth fluctuates,” he said in his deposition, “and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings . . . . It can vary actually from day to day.” An unflattering article or comment could “psychologically hurt me,” he said, referring, in this case, to O’Brien’s book. “I am a billionaire,” Trump said. “I am not ‘perceived’ [as a billionaire].”
But without Trump’s tax records there is no way of confirming that, says David Cay Johnston, the tax expert and author of the 2016 book The Making of Donald Trump. As it is, says Johnston, “there is not now and never has been any verifiable evidence that Donald Trump is or ever has been a billionaire.”
VIDEO: The Evolution of Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign
When Donald Trump was born, in June 1946, his father, Fred, was already a multi-millionaire. He had made his fortune building solid middle-class housing developments in Brooklyn and Queens, where Trump grew up. Trump went to work for his father in 1968, right out of college, but his ambition was to make a name for himself in Manhattan, and by the mid-80s he had succeeded. With millions of dollars’ worth of loans from his father, and support from Fred’s political allies, he had built the Grand Hyatt, on 42nd Street, and Trump Tower.
Trump engendered a lot of bad feeling among the city’s establishment. He’d sued his partner on the Hyatt, the much-respected real-estate investor Jay Pritzker, and angered historic preservationists by demolishing—after promising to donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—two 15-foot limestone Art Deco panels on the old Bonwit Teller building, which was razed to make way for Trump Tower. He also became involved in a prolonged legal battle over what came to be called “the Polish Brigade,” undocumented laborers who worked on Trump Tower. Recent immigrants from Poland, they slept at the construction site, often worked at night to avoid attracting attention, and did not use safety equipment. They were also frequently not paid. The workers sued Trump and reached a settlement in 1999.
WITH ITS NOUVEAU RICHE APPEAL, THE TRUMP BRAND NATURALLY SEEMED TO ATTRACT SOAKING-RICH RUSSIANS.
Trump was never a member of New York’s real-estate aristocracy. He was brash, too flashy, his taste was too “garish,” and he was not philanthropic. In wealthy New York social circles, that was the kiss of death. “Philanthropy is giving and he’s all about taking,” says one financier who has known Trump for three decades.
As The Washington Post’s David Farenthold would discover, Trump has given very little to charity, a total of about $7.8 million since the early 80s. It’s not that Trump didn’t want to be perceived as generous. In one of the stranger stories unearthed by Farenthold, Trump was “principal for the day” at a school in a destitute Bronx neighborhood, where the chess team was trying to raise money for travel to a tournament. They were $5,000 short. Trump had come prepared—with a fake $1 million bill that he presented to the team. Later, as he got into the backseat of his limousine, he gave the coach the actual donation: $200 in cash.
By 1990, Trump had a small empire. He owned three casinos in Atlantic City, the Plaza hotel in Manhattan, a small airline (the Trump Shuttle), and Mar-a-Lago, which he’d bought in 1985 for the fire-sale price of $8 million. He owned a yacht, a helicopter, and an opulent penthouse in Trump Tower. He had bought it all with borrowed money—hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of junk bonds and bank loans. He was like an addict, undisciplined, unable to stop when the banks came peddling their money. By 1990, Trump had $3 billion in debt, at a time when the real-estate and casino markets were slumping. Even worse, Trump had put his personal guarantee on $900 million of that debt.
Trump lost almost everything. On the verge of personal bankruptcy, he eventually sold the Plaza, his yacht, and the Trump Shuttle. The banks, led by his main lender, Citicorp, put him on an allowance, which, in 1992, was $300,000 a month, down from the $800,000 that he had been spending. Debt re-structurings are not unusual, but the bankers involved felt a special bitterness toward Trump. A rival once said of Trump that he “won’t do a deal unless there’s something extra—a kind of moral larceny—in it,” which left people feeling battered. One of Citi’s executives, Robert McCormack, who died in 2003, used to regale other bankers with the story, one recalls, of how he made Trump come into the bank to get his monthly allowance and then kept him waiting to get his payment approved.
Trump’s casino bondholders were also furious. According to The Vulture Investors, Hilary Rosenberg’s 1992 book, they felt he’d lied to them about his spending, which had gone way over budget. They wanted to force him into bankruptcy. But he would have two critical allies defending him. One was Wilbur Ross, the vulture investor—and now Trump’s secretary of commerce—who was then a re-structuring expert representing the bondholders. The other was Carl Icahn, the infamous corporate raider turned “activist investor,” who owned a chunk of Trump’s casino bonds and now serves as his special adviser on deregulation. Both men argued that Trump’s bonds should be re-structured in a voluntary bankruptcy, which would leave Trump in control of his casinos. His name, they argued, was still valuable. Without Trump at the helm, the casinos—and thus the bonds—would plummet in value.
Ross apparently came to this conclusion after a trip to Trump’s Taj Mahal casino. Accompanied by Trump and his executives, Ross flew to Atlantic City on Trump’s helicopter. Although it was “a bright sunny day in August,” as Ross told Rosenberg, and the casino was barely 150 yards away from the helipad, there, waiting for them, was “a stream of limos.” What especially struck Ross, as they drove down the boardwalk, was the crowd of people lining the road shouting, “Donny! Donny!” To Ross, it was the kind of welcome befitting a Third World dictator—which was when he realized that Trump had to remain in control. It seems not to have occurred to Ross that the cheering crowd might be made up of Trump employees, as was reportedly the case at his January press conference and Trump’s meeting with C.I.A. staff the day after his inauguration. There, the loud applause, as Trump described it, also appeared to come from Trump staff, according to reporters and others in attendance.
During the next 19 years, Trump’s casinos—and the various companies that would be formed to house them—would go through four bankruptcies. During this time, Trump would personally make about $82 million. His casino stock- and bondholders would lose $1.5 billion. And many of the contractors—along with carpenters, electricians, painters, plumbers—who had worked for Trump would go unpaid, some of them forced out of business.
It wouldn’t be the first—or last—time that the Trump Organization shortchanged its workers. According to a recent USA Today investigation, Trump has been involved in “a large number” of legal actions—including “hundreds” of liens, judgments, and government filings—involving contractors and other workers who alleged that Trump or his companies refused to pay them.
This past December, three contractors who worked on Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel filed mechanic’s liens for bills that had allegedly not been paid. Together, AES Electrical, a 45-person company, the family-owned Joseph J. Magnolia plumbing, and A&D Construction, a Hispanic-owned firm, were allegedly owed $5 million for their work on the hotel. Trump’s excuse—which he tells people to their faces—has frequently been that the work he’s refused to pay for was of inferior quality. But AES noted in a $2 million suit filed against Trump in January that withholding payment to force small businesses to accept less than the contracted fee “is a repeated practice of the Trump organizations.” Alan Garten, a Trump Organization attorney, says that allegations by AES are “completely baseless” and that “a few miscellaneous liens” are “not uncommon” in a project of “this scale and complexity.”
Small firms and individual workers do not usually have the ability to stand up to Trump. But his more powerful antagonists do. After his flameout in the 90s, virtually no major bank or Wall Street investment bank would lend to him again. On Wall Street, it’s referred to as “Donald Risk,” and since the mid-1990s, it has caused lenders to avoid being “a counter-party with him,” says one prominent banker. “There’s been a general view that, on many, many occasions, entering into a relationship with Donald has resulted in a bad outcome. I think the view about Donald is that he prioritizes only himself.”
There are only two major institutions that lend directly to Trump. One is Ladder Capital, which has outstanding loans of about $282 million to him. A $6 billion real-estate investment trust, it sells off most of its loans, offering tougher terms than a regular bank. The other of Trump’s lenders is Deutsche Bank, which recently reached a $7.2 billion settlement with the Department of Justice for its role in the 2008 financial crisis and is still under a D.O.J. investigation for stock trades with wealthy clients in Russia. The fact that Trump and his businesses currently owe Deutsche about $360 million—and that, as president, he would be able to influence the D.O.J. investigations—has raised alarms among ethics experts. Those concerns are heightened by the fact that Deutsche Bank holds the federal-government lease on the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., as the collateral on a $170 million loan.
“Donald will spin it to his advantage, but [his relationship with banks] is the reason why his company morphed into a licensing, branding company, where other people own the assets,” says a real-estate financier. “It was because he couldn’t get any money [from banks]. I think he had no choice, even though he will say, ‘Every major New York bank is begging me to let them lend me money,’ which is an absolute falsehood.”
EASY D Left, the Trump Taj Mahal casino, in Atlantic City; Right, Trump, in the casino, photographed by Harry Benson in 1990. Top, by John Moore/Getty Images. It was Trump’s starring role on The Apprentice, beginning in 2004, that really catapulted him onto the national stage. Its underlying premise—as contestants competed on business projects, with Trump as the final judge of their skills—was that Trump was a good judge of people and talent. His executives are generally respected in the industry. But when dealing with people outside his loyal inner circle, where he is in complete control, Trump has stumbled. The most important decisions he has had to make are his choice of the people who will build and own the hotels that bear his name and that he manages. And here the failures have piled up, as some of his partners have gone bankrupt, or mismanaged projects, while others have been accused of tax fraud. Shortly after the election, Trump’s company shut down several overseas projects that had become controversial, including licensing deals for a hotel and an office complex in Rio de Janeiro, which had come under investigation by the Brazilian government for financial irregularities, and another one for a Trump Hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan, because of delays caused by the developer, whose family was closely tied to the country’s government.
But other problems have been closer to home. In 2010, the Bayrock Group, Trump’s partner and the owner of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Fort Lauderdale, defaulted on a $139 million loan and lost control of the hotel. In 2014, Trump SoHo, the $450 million, 46-story hotel and condominium on Spring Street in Lower Manhattan, also developed by Bayrock, was foreclosed on and bought out by a lender. And in 2015 the owners of the Trump Toronto Hotel and Tower, the Russian-Canadian billionaire Alex Shnaider and his partner Val Levitan, defaulted on a $260 million loan. Trump still manages the Toronto hotel, which carries his name, but that may not be for long. In January, the new owner of the debt, JFC Capital, put it on the market for several million dollars less than the $301 million that is still owed on the mortgage.
One of the most controversial of Trump’s properties is the Trump International Hotel, in Washington, D.C. There were several bidders in 2011 for the General Services Administration lease on the government-owned building, including Hilton. On the face of it, Trump appeared to be the weakest candidate, considering his many business bankruptcies. But he had strengthened his bid by promising to use the architect Arthur Cotton Moore, who was favored by the G.S.A. for his commitment to restoring the landmarked Old Post Office building. Trump had also seemed to overcome concerns about his financial history by committing to bringing in the respected $28 billion real-estate investment firm Colony Capital as his partner. It was owned by Trump’s friend Tom Barrack, who headed the Inauguration Committee. Trump’s bid was also the most lucrative for the G.S.A., promising a monthly rent of $250,000—$3 million a year—to the federal government. He also proposed to spend $200 million refurbishing the building, about $60 million more than Hilton’s proposal.
Trump won the bid in February 2012. The decision was challenged by Hilton in a scathing 118-page complaint to the G.S.A. that April. Excoriating Trump as “an unreliable business partner,” Hilton said the G.S.A.’s decision would lead to a “devastating failure for this historical landmark, with a business partner whose history of repeated failure demonstrates that it cannot be counted upon to deliver what it promises.” The G.S.A. dismissed Hilton’s objections.
On some points, Hilton would be proved correct. Within months, Trump announced that Moore, the architect, would no longer be able to work on the project. And soon Colony Capital would be gone. To some it seemed like a clever bait and switch. As early as the spring of 2013, Ivanka and her father, in a meeting at The Washington Post, said that they were considering doing the deal without Colony’s equity financing. That came to pass in August 2014, when Trump took out a $170 million construction loan from Deutsche Bank and put up the Old Post Office lease as collateral. There was nothing the G.S.A. could do without a likely brawl with Trump, who early on proved his willingness to fight by suing Washington, D.C.’s tax commission to lower the tax assessment on the building from $98 million to $28 million.
When the hotel opened in September 2016, bookings were sluggish, as Hilton had predicted. The hotel lost $1.1 million in September and October, according to figures the G.S.A. released to congressional Democrats. Now that Trump is president, the hotel’s fortunes could change, but it remains ground zero in the battle over his conflicts of interest. Federal elected officials are barred from holding the lease on the building. Ethics experts and congressional Democrats maintain that Trump’s position as both landlord and tenant is against the law. The G.S.A., whose head is a presidential appointee, has so far not ruled on the case.
‘I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” Trump tweeted in early January. He reiterated the point in his press conference, along with rambling denials that his campaign had ties to Russia. Since then, questions about Trump’s Russian connections have only intensified with reports of multiple intelligence-agency investigations and Trump’s relentless praise of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As it is, Trump’s business interactions with Russia, and Russians, go back years.
His first visit to Moscow was in 1987, when he was invited by the government to explore business opportunities. From the beginning, the Russians seemed to understand him, his susceptibility to flattery, and “this big, black hole of need inside Donald Trump for praise, attention, and affirmation,” as Timothy O’Brien puts it. According to Trump, Russian fighter jets escorted his plane to Moscow’s airport. He was fêted. Trump and his first wife, Ivana, stayed at the National Hotel, near the Kremlin. Officials offered him land to build on, but he turned them down, insisting that he wanted to own properties without partners.
“RUSSIANS,” DONALD JUNIOR SAID, “MAKE UP A PRETTY DISPROPORTIONATE CROSS-SECTION OF A LOT OF OUR ASSETS.”
Trump does not appear to have been involved in Russian-related deals until about 2001. By then a tidal wave of Russian money had been sucked out of the country by the kleptocracy that had looted Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This new class of rich Russians needed places to park their money, investing it legally or otherwise, and real estate was especially sought after. Around 2001, Trump linked up with Bayrock, the real-estate development firm. It was run by Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet official who was from Kazakhstan. His partner was Felix Sater, a Moscow-born, Russian-American businessman who had served time for stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a margarita glass in a Manhattan bar. Sater had also been implicated in an investment fraud involving alleged Russian and American mobsters but got reduced time after serving as an F.B.I. informant. Sater had an office in Trump Tower, and he and Arif pitched a series of projects to Trump, finally getting him, in 2004, to sign a deal to explore building a Trump Tower in Moscow. It never happened, but they looked at other deals, including in Ukraine. In 2006, Donald junior and Ivanka went to Kiev and then on to Moscow to scope out deals. During 2007 and 2008, Don junior would say that he traveled to Russia six times.
By 2007, Trump had some $2 billion in Trump-branded deals in the works with Bayrock. These included the Trump SoHo and the Trump Fort Lauderdale, a proposed Trump Phoenix, and projects in Istanbul, Kiev, Moscow, and Warsaw. Sometime early that year, according to a 2010 lawsuit filed in federal court by Jody Kriss, Bayrock’s C.F.O., an Icelandic fund, FL Group, which was said to be a favorite of wealthy Russians close to Putin, invested $50 million to build Trump SoHo. According to the suit, this was part of an elaborate tax-fraud scheme.
The lawsuit, which is ongoing, noted that Donald Trump was not involved in or aware of any fraud or wrongdoing. Dismissed by Bayrock as “baseless” and “unsubstantiated,” the suit also claimed that much of the money that Bayrock invested in Trump projects had arrived “magically” from Kazakhstan and Russia whenever funding was needed for real-estate projects. Trump has claimed he barely knew Felix Sater, but as late as 2010, Sater still had an office in Trump Tower and worked for Trump as an adviser.
With its nouveau riche appeal, the Trump brand naturally seemed to attract soaking-rich Russians. Trump Luxury Vodka “24K Super Premium” debuted in 2007 at Moscow’s Millionaire Fair. In 2008, Trump sold a Palm Beach mansion—which he bought for $41 million four years earlier—for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian fertilizer billionaire. Whether Trump did other business with Rybolovlev isn’t clear, but in November, five days before the election, Trump’s Boeing 757 was photographed at a Charlotte, North Carolina, airport, near Rybolovlev’s Airbus A319. Trump was there for two rallies. What Rybolovlev’s jet, which had flown in from New York, was doing there set off fevered speculation, although a Rybolovlev spokesman says the two men have never met.
At a real-estate conference in 2008, Donald junior made a comment that has been parsed and re-parsed since Trump’s Russia-ties questions surfaced. “Russians,” the son said, “make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets . . . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Was he referring to investments in the Trump Organization, loans to the company, or the flood of Russian money being spent to buy Trump condominiums? Exactly which is difficult to know without Trump’s tax returns, but Russians there were. In April 2013, federal agents raided an apartment in Trump Tower as part of an investigation into two gambling rings allegedly run by a Russian Mob boss, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. He may not have known Trump, but, according to Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov, under indictment in the U.S. for various charges, nevertheless made an appearance in November 2013 at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?,” Trump tweeted a few months before the pageant. Putin did not show up for the beauty contest, but he sent a gift—a Russian lacquered box. The event was held in the Crocus City Mall, which was owned by Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch said to be close to Putin. He and Trump discussed building adjacent twin towers in Moscow, but nothing was built. “I know Russia well,” Trump told Fox News in May 2016, when asked about his foreign-policy experience. “I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event,” he said, of the beauty pageant.
GOLD DIGGERS Trump and his children—Eric, Don junior, and Ivanka—at the ground-breaking ceremony of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., 2014. By Shawn Thew/EPA/Redux. Since Trump’s inauguration, documents have been filed in Florida, Delaware, and New York in which he resigned his executive positions, turning the management over to Don junior and Eric. But the controversy remains. His sons may nominally run the company, but their close relationship with their father and their high-visibility presence in the White House suggest that Trump is hardly cut off from decision-making at the company. In February, he turned the wrath of the presidency on Nordstrom, attacking the retailer on Twitter for dropping his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line. Not to be out-conflicted by her boss, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway went on TV the next day urging people to buy Ivanka’s clothing.
Only slightly more subtle was Trump’s New Year’s Eve gala, for which 800 guests bought tickets costing more than $500 apiece to dine and dance with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago—the next day, the initiation fee for the “Winter White House” was doubled, from $100,000 to $200,000.
Most ethics experts believe that Trump must sell his business in order to avoid serious conflicts. But he has refused to do that. Although it has canceled a hotel project in China, his company recently opened a luxury hotel in Vancouver and a golf club in Dubai. And it announced plans to expand in the United States, possibly opening luxury hotels in Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, and Dallas. It is also starting a new line of lower-budget hotels called Scion.
In early September 2016, The New York Times received an envelope with a return address of “The Trump Organization.” In it were three pages from Trump’s 1995 tax returns—the first page of his New York State return, and the first pages of his nonresident New Jersey and Connecticut returns. Who sent them is a mystery, although many people, including David Cay Johnston, believe that the sender was Trump himself in a replay of the years when, masquerading as his own P.R. man, Trump, always the master illusionist, would call reporters, planting stories about himself. The news that erupted with the New York Times tax-return story focused on the $916 million loss that would have allowed him—through use of real-estate tax credits—to pay no federal income tax for nearly 20 years. In the political outcry that ensued, Trump’s allies would spin this as a sign of Trump’s business “genius,” as Rudolph Giuliani said on Meet the Press. “I understand the tax code better than anybody that’s ever run for president,” Trump said shortly before the election. The issue, however, wasn’t how he used the tax code, which was legal; “the issue is that the $1 billion write-off represented a massive failure,” O’Brien says. “It is emblematic of what an abysmal businessman he was.” His complete returns would reveal many things that are not known—his income, his net worth, his assets, his debts, and indications of offshore income. “You give me Donald Trump’s complete 1,200-page tax return and I’ll tell you all about him,” says Johnston. They would reveal so much about the real Donald Trump. Which is why he will never release them, voluntarily. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/ ... e-business
Top House Intel Dem says FBI not forthcoming on Trump-Russia ties CNN Digital Expansion DC Manu Raju By Manu Raju and Tom LoBianco, CNN Updated 1:21 PM ET, Thu March 2, 2017
(CNN)Top House Intel Committee member Adam Schiff expressed frustration Thursday about FBI Director James Comey, saying the FBI was not forthcoming about their investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump administration, and said for the first time there should be a special prosecutor to investigate.
His comments came after revelations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met twice with Russia's ambassador to the US and failed to disclose those meetings when asked about the topic during his confirmation hearing. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a California Republican, shook his head and said "no" when asked if he agreed with having a special prosecutor. Nunes also reiterated he hasn't seen evidence yet of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign. He would not say if Sessions should recuse himself. Schiff said Comey briefed members in the committee for upward of three hours Thursday and offered new information that had not been provided to other Congressional leaders yet. Schiff would not specify what they talked about, but did say he was disappointed that Comey dodged lawmakers questions and that he wants Comey's "full cooperation" next time. Schiff said the information the FBI has provided the committee is a "small fraction" of what the FBI has uncovered. The House Intelligence Committee set the scope of its own investigation into Russia's interference on Monday. http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/02/politics/ ... committee/
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.
Sessions press conference coming up....stepping down.... recuse....or turning himself in?
Jeff Sessions Spits In Face Of FBI Interrogator Trying To Get Him To Turn On Trump
WASHINGTON—Angrily dismissing offers of a plea deal if he would agree to cooperate with an investigation into the current administration’s ties to Russia, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reportedly spit in the face of an FBI interrogator Thursday who was attempting to convince him to turn on President Trump. “If you goddamn Feds want to know whether I’ll turn rat: Here’s my answer,” said Sessions, shortly before leaning over the small wooden table separating him and his interrogator and spitting directly into the FBI official’s eyes. “I’m not gonna crack, so you G-men can threaten me with whatever the hell you want—you’re just wasting your time. I’ll fucking die before I flip, so you got the balls to kill me?” At press time, Sessions had reportedly begun to break down and was frantically divulging everything he knew after agents asked him how long he thought he would last on the inside with all the people he had helped put away on marijuana charges over the years. http://www.theonion.com/article/jeff-se ... ng-g-55433
last on the inside with all the people he had helped put away on marijuana charges over the years.
Dems demand FBI perjury probe of Sessions BY CRISTINA MARCOS - 03/02/17 12:45 PM EST 729
In a letter, the lawmakers called on FBI Director James Comey and Channing D. Phillips, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., to probe whether Sessions lied to Congress under oath and broke the law.
“Efforts by Attorney General Sessions to assert that his testimony was not false or even misleading because he met with the Russian Ambassador in his capacity as a Senator, rather than a campaign representative, appear to be disingenuous at best as the questions put to him did not in any way ask if the meeting was campaign related,” they wrote.
Pressure mounted on Thursday for Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into potential Russian contacts with President Trump’s campaign following a Washington Post report that revealed he spoke with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. in 2016. Sessions denied having any contact with Russian officials during oral and written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing to be attorney general.
During that hearing, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) asked Sessions what he would do if he learned of evidence that Trump campaign associated were in contact with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign.
“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions said, adding that “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
Sessions was also asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in a written question if he had been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election before or after Election Day.
“No,” Sessions responded.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) are now calling on Sessions to clarify his testimony and recuse himself from any Justice Department investigation related to Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.
Democrats, meanwhile, are calling on Sessions to resign, less than a month after being sworn in as attorney general.
Sessions has maintained he spoke with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not as a representative for the Trump campaign. Sessions was the first GOP senator to endorse Trump, and one of his top Senate staffers, Stephen Miller, is now a senior aide to President Trump.
“I never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign,” Sessions said in a statement. “I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.”
But the House Judiciary Committee Democrats said they are skeptical of Sessions’s explanation. The Washington Post noted in its story that of the 26 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2016, none of the 20 who responded met with the Russian ambassador last year.
“His efforts to down play the contacts as ordinary business for a Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee also seem questionable given that other Members of the Committee have not indicated that they had similar meetings with the Russians,” they wrote.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday night that federal investigators have reviewed contacts Sessions had with Russian officials while he was advising Trump’s presidential campaign. http://thehill.com/homenews/house/32202 ... f-sessions
I was thinking of starting a thread for ol' Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions but I don't think he's gonna be around much longer
Six times Jeff Sessions talked about perjury, access and special prosecutors — when it involved the Clintons
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.
Kushner and Flynn Met With Russian Envoy in December, White House Says
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, MATTHEW ROSENBERG and MATT APUZZOMARCH 2, 2017 Michael T. Flynn, left, and Jared Kushner at the White House last month. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times WASHINGTON — Michael T. Flynn, then Donald J. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, had a previously undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador in December to “establish a line of communication” between the new administration and the Russian government, the White House said on Thursday.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower with Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. But among Mr. Trump’s inner circle, it is Mr. Flynn who appears to have been the main interlocutor with the Russian envoy — the two were in contact during the campaign and the transition, Mr. Kislyak and current and former American officials have said.
But the extent and frequency of their contacts remains unclear, and the disclosure of the meeting at Trump Tower adds to the emerging picture of how the relationship between Mr. Trump’s incoming team and Moscow was evolving to include some of the president-elect’s most trusted advisers.
The White House has repeatedly sought to play down any connections with Mr. Kislyak. Attorney General Jeff Sessions acknowledged this week that he had met twice with him during the campaign, despite previous denials.
The New Yorker reported this week that Mr. Kushner had met with Mr. Kislyak at Trump Tower in December. Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman, confirmed on Thursday that Mr. Flynn was also at the meeting in response to questions from a New York Times reporter.
It is common and not improper for transition officials to meet with foreign officials. But all meetings between Trump associates and Russians are now significant as the F.B.I. investigates Russian interference in the American election and whether anyone close to Mr. Trump’s campaign was involved.
The meeting in December came at a crucial time, just as the Obama White House was preparing to sanction Russia and publicly make its case that Moscow had interfered with the 2016 election.
What is now becoming clear is that the incoming Trump administration was simultaneously striking a conciliatory pose toward Moscow in a series of meetings and phone calls involving Mr. Kislyak.
“They generally discussed the relationship and it made sense to establish a line of communication,” she said. “Jared has had meetings with many other foreign countries and representatives — as many as two dozen other foreign countries’ leaders and representatives.”
The Trump Tower meeting lasted 20 minutes, and Mr. Kushner has not met since with Mr. Kislyak, Ms. Hicks said.
When first asked in January about Mr. Flynn’s contacts with Mr. Kislyak, the White House said that there had been only a text message and phone call between the men at the end of December, and that both came before the United States imposed sanctions. That was quickly contradicted by news reports.
Mr. Flynn’s story then began changing, and the White House eventually acknowledged the two men had discussed the sanctions and how the two countries could move past the acrimony once Mr. Trump was in office.
American officials have also said that there were multiple telephone calls between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak on Dec. 29, beginning shortly after Mr. Kislyak was summoned to the State Department and informed that, in retaliation for Russian election meddling, the United States was expelling 35 people suspected of being Russian intelligence operatives and imposing other sanctions.
Mr. Kislyak was irate and threatened a forceful Russian response, according to people familiar with the exchange. He then left the State Department and called Mr. Flynn, the first in a series of calls between the two in the 36 hours that followed.
American intelligence agencies routinely wiretap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls showed that Mr. Flynn urged the Russians not to respond, saying relations would improve once Mr. Trump was in office, according to the current and former officials.
Mr. Flynn’s failure to fully disclose the nature of the calls with Mr. Kislyak ultimately cost him his job last month after a tumultuous 25 days as national security adviser.
The United States government has concluded that Russia intended, at least in part, to help elect Mr. Trump through a campaign of cyberattacks, propaganda and misinformation. The government has concluded that Russian operatives were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Current and former American officials have said that Mr. Flynn had contacts with Mr. Kislyak during the campaign. But few of the specifics of those contacts were known. The Russian ambassador has acknowledged that the two men had known each other since 2013 and were in contact during the campaign.
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Sergey Kislyak, Russian Envoy, Cultivated Powerful Network in U.S. By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and PETER BAKERMARCH 2, 2017
Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, arrived at President Trump’s address to Congress this week. Credit Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Sergey I. Kislyak, the longtime Russian ambassador to the United States, hosted a dazzling dinner in his three-story, Beaux-Arts mansion four blocks north of the White House to toast Michael A. McFaul just weeks before he took up his post as the American envoy to Russia.
It was, Mr. McFaul recalled, an “over-the-top, extraordinary dinner,” including five courses of Russian fusion cuisine for 50 seated guests who shared one main characteristic: They were government officials intimately involved in formulating Russia policy for the Obama administration, including senior figures from the Defense and State Departments.
“I admired the fact that he was trying to reach deep into our government to cultivate relations with all kinds of people,” Mr. McFaul said of the dinner in late 2011. “I was impressed by the way he went about that kind of socializing, the way he went about entertaining, but always with a political objective.”
Mr. Kislyak’s networking success has landed him at the center of a sprawling controversy and made him the most prominent, if politically radioactive, ambassador in Washington. Two advisers to President Trump have run into trouble for not being more candid about contacts with Mr. Kislyak: Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser, and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who admitted two previously undisclosed conversations. Mr. Kislyak also met during the transition with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner.
A career diplomat raised in the Soviet era, Mr. Kislyak, 66, (pronounced kees-LYACK) may seem an unlikely protagonist in such a drama. He has interacted with American officials for decades and been a fixture on the Washington scene for the past nine years, jowly and cordial with an easy smile and fluent if accented English, yet a pugnacity in advocating Russia’s assertive policies.
Invited to think tanks to discuss arms control, he would invariably offer an unapologetic defense of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and assail Americans for what he portrayed as their hypocrisy — then afterward approach a debating partner to suggest dinner.
“Not all of us, myself included, initially appreciated his very tough, in-your-face style,” said Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest and an advocate of closer Russian-American relations, who hosted a dinner at his home for Mr. Kislyak after his arrival in Washington and regularly invited him to events at his center. “But we gradually came to develop a grudging respect for him as someone who was really representing the positions of his country.”
Mr. Simes introduced Mr. Kislyak to Mr. Trump in a receiving line last April at a foreign policy speech hosted by his center at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Mr. Kislyak was one of four ambassadors who sat in the front row for Mr. Trump’s speech at the invitation of the center. Mr. Simes noted that Mr. Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, was there, but he did not notice whether he and the ambassador spoke at that time.
The Russian Embassy did not respond to an email on Thursday, but Mr. Kislyak defended engagements with American officials last November, when he was asked during a speech at Stanford University about allegations of Russian meddling in the elections. Mr. Kislyak echoed his government’s line that it was not involved in hacking. He said it was natural for diplomats to attend events such as political conventions and foreign policy speeches by candidates.
“It is normal diplomatic work that we have been doing: It is our job to understand, to know people, both on the side of the Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “I personally have been working in the United States for so long that I know almost everybody.”
Even some critics of Russian policy said it was hardly surprising that Mr. Kislyak would meet people around Mr. Trump. “That was part of his job,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who is now at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t see anything nefarious in that per se, and I don’t think it was out of the box for Senator Sessions to talk with Kislyak.”
An expert on arms control negotiations with a degree from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, Mr. Kislyak first served in the Washington embassy from 1985 to 1989 during the late Soviet period. He became the first Russian representative to NATO and was ambassador to Belgium from 1998 to 2003. He returned to Moscow, where he spent five years as a deputy foreign minister.
“He is a brilliant, highly professional diplomat — affable, pleasant, unbelievably good at arms control and Russian-American relations for decades,” said Sergei A. Karaganov, a periodic Kremlin adviser on foreign policy.
Some Russian foreign policy experts compared him to Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington from 1962 to 1986 and a political player in both capitals. Until recently, at least, Mr. Kislyak played a more discreet, quiet role in Washington and was even less visible in Moscow.
“I would describe him as Russia’s top authority on the United States,” said Vladimir Frolov, a foreign policy analyst.
The questions about contacts between Mr. Trump’s circle and Russian officials have revealed what both sides presumably knew, that American intelligence agencies closely track Mr. Kislyak’s movements and tap his phone calls. Russian officials on Thursday expressed anger that their ambassador’s actions were being questioned and that some news reports suggested he might be an intelligence operative.
Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, delivered an extended diatribe during her weekly briefing against what she called the low professional standards of the American news media.
“I will reveal a military secret to you: Diplomats work, and their work consists of carrying out contacts in the country where they are present,” she said. “This is on record everywhere. If they do not carry out these contacts, do not participate in negotiations, then they are not diplomats.”
Until Vladimir V. Putin returned to the Russian presidency in 2012 and tensions between Washington and Moscow rose again, Mr. Kislyak was a popular host, especially for weekend events at the estate at Pioneer Point in Maryland, which the Obama administration ordered closed last December over the hacking allegations. He invited the Americans who negotiated the New Start nuclear arms treaty and their families to a party at the estate. Russian security guards took the children of his guests tubing on the ambassador’s boat.
During the treaty negotiations, Mr. McFaul remembered, Mr. Kislyak frequently telephoned the secretary of defense or others involved, thwarting the American desire to limit his channels of communication. “He was actively pushing to try to find fissures and disagreements among us,” Mr. McFaul said.
“He is very smart, very experienced, always well prepared,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who negotiated three Iran sanctions resolutions at the United Nations with Mr. Kislyak. “But he could be cynical, obstreperous and inflexible, and had a Soviet mentality. He was very aggressive toward the United States.”
Some of that aggression was on display at the Stanford event last fall, which was moderated by Mr. McFaul. Saying that he had been sent to Washington to improve relations, Mr. Kislyak named areas of possible cooperation, but then went through a long list of grievances, accusing the United States of meddling around the globe.
When an audience member asked about Russian mistakes, he demurred. He said the most serious problem with the United States is that it believes it is exceptional. “The difference between your exceptionalism and ours is that we are not trying to impose on you ours, but you do not hesitate to impose on us yours,” he said. “That is something we do not appreciate.”
He has told associates that he will leave Washington soon, likely to be replaced by a hard-line general. His name recently surfaced at the United Nations as a candidate for a new post responsible for counterterrorism, diplomats there said. Vitaly I. Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, died last month and that post remains vacant.
For Mr. Kislyak, Washington is no longer the place it once was. It has become lonely, and he has told associates that he is surprised how people who once sought his company were now trying to stay away. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/worl ... .html?_r=0
Jeff Sessions caught using campaign funds for trip to meet with Russian Ambassador By Bill Palmer | March 2, 2017 | 0
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has already recused himself today from any role in the investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal, appears to be waiting to see whether the focus now shifts away from him before deciding whether to resign. But tonight’s latest stunning revelation about Sessions’ meeting with the Russian Ambassador may be enough to finish him off. And it comes down to this: follow the money.
When a grave crime has been committed, but the circumstances are murky enough to make it difficult to pin it down legally, if often comes down to the rules violations that just happened to have been committed in the process of committing that crime. In this instance it’s clear that Jeff Sessions was repeatedly colluding with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Donald Trump’s behalf. But without any record of what they discussed during these in-person meetings, it may be difficult to prove that Sessions was guilty of a conspiracy to rig the election. However, that may no longer matter.
It turns out Jeff Sessions used his own campaign funds to pay for his trip to the Republican National Convention, where he met with the Russian Ambassador. This nullifies Sessions’ current claim that he was attending the convention in his role as a sitting Senator, and not as a Donald Trump campaign adviser — but it would have been improper for him to have used campaign funds under those circumstances. And as a multi-decade Senator, he knows the rules.
Sessions also spoke on Trump’s behalf at an event during the convention, further cementing that he attended the 2016 convention as a Trump adviser, and not as a Senator. This revelation from the Wall Street Journal means that his latest semi-denial is now out the window. It leaves him to now try to come up with an even flimsier semi-denial in which he admits he met with the Ambassador as a Trump adviser but tries to claim he didn’t conspire with him. But he’s near the end of the excuse train. It now seems at least marginally probable that Jeff Sessions will have to resign as Attorney General, and more feasible that he’ll face some kind of legal punishment in the end. http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/jef ... ador/1748/
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
ByJOSH MARSHALL PublishedMARCH 2, 2017, 4:41 PM EDT 63206Views As you've likely inferred from my recent posts I've spent a lot of time in recent days and weeks piecing together different elements of the Trump/Russia story. I've brought other colleagues into the work and plan to expand that once we have people hired for the three new investigative positions I discussed last month. Today everyone is talking about the inexplicable news about Jeff Sessions. But there's another dimension of the Trump/Russia story which has only become clear to me recently but which provides a critical backstory for understanding the background of this scandal and news story.
Let's go back to the story of Felix Sater, the Russian-American immigrant, convicted felon and longtime Trump business associate we discussed last week.
Let me review two separate streams of information which are critical to understanding the story. First, here are some basic and well-attested facts about Felix Sater.
Sater began his professional life as a New York City stock broker; spent 15 months in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken wine glass in a bar fight; and then became involved in a pump and dump penny stock scheme in association with the Gambino and Genovese crime families. When he and his associates were arrested in the securities fraud scheme in 1998, Sater tried to make a deal to save himself.
According to reliable accounts, what Sater offered to do was work with the CIA to facilitate the purchase of Stinger missiles on the weapons black market in post-Soviet Central Asia. According to his accomplice and business partner, Salvatore Lauria, who wrote a book detailing the story, the CIA was more keen on working with Sater than was the FBI, which had recently been burned by its longstanding and close working relationship with Whitey Bulger. The plan eventually fell apart. It seemed like Sater and Lauria might end up doing hard time. They had defrauded investors over more than $40 million. Then 9/11 happened and everything changed. Suddenly the federal government was much more interested in Sater's help.
Lauria later disowned the book which he had cowritten with an AP reporter, David Barry, claiming it was fiction. But Barry insists that he reported out everything contained in the book.
Sater's attorney Robert Wolf made various seemingly hyperbolic claims about Sater's cooperation for federal law enforcement and intelligence. He told The Washington Times in early 2015 that Sater worked on "the most serious matters of national security, battling our greatest enemies at tremendous risk to his own life and for the benefits of all citizens of our country ... [saving] potentially tens of thousands, if not millions, of our citizens' lives."
Needless to say this all sounds wild and improbably novelistic. And you would expect Sater's attorney to make extravagant claims about the value of his clients cooperation. Despite being well-attested, we don't know directly from the US government that any of these wild claims are true. But the statements and actions of federal law enforcement strongly suggest that even if some of the details are off, Sater's assistance was of an exceptional character.
The US government went and continues to go to extreme lengths to keep Sater's cooperation and work for the government a secret. Until quite recently, it went to great lengths to keep Sater's conviction itself, and all documents related to it, a secret. It took the extraordinarily rare step of managing the entire adjudication of Sater's crimes in secret, with all documents kept secret. Federal judges even pursued what might reasonably be called a vendetta against two lawyers who used leaked information about Sater's case in lawsuits growing out of a failed Trump building venture, Trump Fort Lauderdale, as well as lawsuits on behalf of victims in the original pump and dump scheme.
The federal government also kept Sater on as a cooperating witness for fully 11 years before finally sentencing him in 2009 for the plea deal in 1998. In a $42 million securities fraud case, Sater received no jail time, was not forced to pay restitution and was fined a mere $25,000. In other words, he walked away from the crime with close to no punishment. The controversy over the government's secrecy in the Sater case, as well as his minimal punishment, got enough attention that it eventually bubbled up from the criminal courts to the governmental and political realm. During her 2015 confirmation hearings, Attorney General Loretta Lynch was asked about the propriety of the government's cooperation with Sater, in part because she had been the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where Sater's case was adjudicated.
In response to questions from Sen. Orin Hatch, Lynch wrote (emphasis added): The defendant in question, Felix Sater, provided valuable and sensitive information to the government during the course of his cooperation, which began in or about December 1998. For more than 10 years, he worked with prosecutors from my Office, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and law enforcement agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies, providing information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra. For that reason, his case was initially sealed. Lynch's references to "national security" has been echoed by other judges involved in Sater's case, ones who have gone to great length to prevent the release of documents tied to Sater's case.
It is impossible to know precisely what Sater was doing during this decade. But statements from government officials, news reports and Lauria's book make clear that it required him to have extensive associations with and knowledge of the mafia and touched not just on organized crime but specifically on critical matters of national security. Based on published reports and Lauria's book, it seems extremely likely that it also required him to have extensive knowledge of and contacts in the criminal underworld in the former Soviet Union. Clearly the US government saw Sater's cooperation as highly important. Otherwise it would not have gone to such lengths to get it, to keep it secret and to protect Sater after the fact. Lynch's words to Hatch speak volumes.
Then there's Mikhail Sater, aka Michael Sheferofsky, Felix Sater's father.
In 2000, two years after Felix was arrested in the securities fraud scheme, Mikhail Sater was charged along with Ernest "Butch" Montevecchi, a soldier in the Genovese crime family, for running an extortion ring in Brighton Beach between 1990 and 1999. In a separate legal filing by the plaintiffs in the suit seeking restitution for Felix Sater's stock fraud, petitioners claimed that Mikhail Sater was a boss in the Semion Mogilevich crime organization. Mogilevich is considered one of Russia's most notorious organized crime figures and was until 2015 on the FBI's most wanted list. Mikhail Sater also became a cooperating witness in the Eastern District and received three years probation.
There has been great deal of controversy over whether the federal government should have provided such protection for Felix Sater. For our present purposes, that's beside the point. What is relevant is that he was highly connected in the criminal underworld and the federal government found his cooperation extremely valuable.
Now, I've covered a lot of ground here, albeit compressing as much as I've been able a highly complex and florid story. You will no doubt see that Donald Trump's name does not come up in any of these crimes. My aim here is simply to demonstrate who Felix Sater is, his connections with a transnational criminal underworld stretching from New York's Outer Boroughs to Central Asia and (quite likely but not totally proven) meeting up with the weapons market where organized crime touches on international terrorist networks.
We don't just know this information about Sater. Just as importantly we know that the FBI, attorneys in the Eastern District of New York and almost certainly the CIA also knew about Sater's connections with these worlds since they were enlisting his apparently extremely valuable cooperation to help conduct investigations and national security operations in those realms.
Here's where I think this becomes significant to the present moment. If you line up Sater's story and his time as a cooperating witness with his time as a top business associate and finally employee of Donald Trump, they overlap almost exactly.
Trump first met Sater and got into business with Bayrock Capital, where Sater was a cofounder, in 2003. In Bayrock, Sater partnered with Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet trade and commerce official from Kazakstan. Trump and Bayrock partnered together on numerous building projects and Sater was the point man on most of them. The most notable is Trump Soho, which was financed with money from Russia and Kazakstan. There was also Trump Fort Lauderdale, the Sater-managed project whose collapse first triggered the revelation of Sater's 1998 securities fraud conviction. Trump's work with Bayrock continued until 2010 when Sater went to work for the Trump Organization full time - again, putting together deals and financing for Trump-branded building projects.
Let's put this together.
The federal government knew who Sater was, his ties to the criminal underworld, business ties into that world in the former Soviet Union, etc. They also had to know of his deep and longstanding association with Donald Trump, his key role in numerous Trump projects during the first decade of this century and his role arranging financing for these projects. We don't know if the federal government had specific knowledge of the details of these business transactions or whether or how deeply Donald Trump was reliant on capital from Russia and more generally the murky world of oligarchs and underworlds that Sater is clearly immersed in and from which he appeared to draw investment capital. But they likely would have suspected as much, at least that Trump had uncomfortably close ties to someone like Sater.
They wouldn't have had to look far to confirm these assumptions. Take the Trump Soho project. In April 2016, The New York Times published a story on Trump Soho based on lawsuits which grew out of the project in 2011 and 2012. Consider this passage. And yes, Lauria is the same Lauria who was at the '90s bar fight where Sater stabbed the man in the face. He was Sater's accomplice in the 1998 pump and dump scheme and the author of the book that detailed Sater's work for the FBI and the CIA ... Mr. Lauria 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. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt. Here's another passage ... Mr. Kriss’s 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. Bayrock and Trump SoHo drew more negative headlines in October 2010, when news spread from Turkey that Mr. Arif had been aboard a luxury yacht raided by the police, who were investigating a suspected prostitution ring that catered to wealthy businessmen. He was charged but later acquitted. Whatever US law enforcement and intelligence knew about the specifics of Trump's relationship with and his dependence on investment capital out of Russia and the former Soviet Union, material like this in public court filings surely would have raised red flags about Trump's businesses.
As long as Donald Trump was just a high-profile and frequently clownish real estate tycoon from New York and the star of The Apprentice, this probably didn't matter very much. After all, as I've noted, there's no specific evidence that Trump was involved in any of Sater's criminal activity.
But at some point in 2014 or 2015, Donald Trump started moving toward having a credible shot at becoming the President of the United States. By early 2016 that became a real possibility.
(One notable, though perhaps distinct, detail is that we can be sure that the attorney general of the United States at the time, Loretta Lynch, knew a level of detail about Felix Sater and his father Mikhail that only would have been possible as the former US Attorney for the district in which Sater's trial was adjudicated.)
It seems quite probable that as Trump moved closer to the presidency in the early months of 2016, alarm bells started to go off in the FBI and the CIA, as the relevance of business partnerships with Sater and reliance on capital out of the former Soviet Union suddenly became dramatically more relevant. Again, as I said, as long as Donald Trump was just Donald Trump this didn't matter that much. There's plenty of dirty money sloshing around the New York real estate world. But when it started to seem plausible that he might become the next President, this would start to be a matter of great concern.
This certainly also added to the concern when popped up in a meeting with Michael Cohen and a pro-Russian Ukrainian parliamentarian with a dossier he asked Cohen to hand deliver to Michael Flynn.
All of what I've said here would be an issue even if the Russian government had never inserted itself into the US election. It almost certainly predates any awareness within the US national security and law enforcement worlds that that was happening. But I suspect it is a critical backdrop for how this evidence was interpreted once it began to come to light. It quite possibly also informed and drove some of the scrutiny that was applied to Trump and his associates once it did. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/wha ... efore-2016
Three Donald Trump advisers met with Russia at Republican Convention; Ukraine platform changed By Bill Palmer | March 2, 2017 | 0
Three of Donald Trump’s campaign advisers, including current Attorney General Jeff Sessions, met with the Russian Ambassador in Cleveland during the 2016 Republican National Convention. The Trump-led Republican Party then went on to fundamentally alter its party platform during the convention, reversing its stance on the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine.
The three Trump advisers who met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention are Jeff Sessions, Carter Page, and J.D. Gordon. Sessions is now admitting the meeting took place, while USA Today is reporting that the other two advisers participated. This is key, because questions have been simmering for months as to the specific circumstances which caused the Republican Party to officially change its stance on the Ukraine at the convention. Was it merely Trump’s personal position? Had Russia pressured him to do it under threat of blackmail?
And now we know that three key members of the Trump campaign met with the Russian Ambassador in the same precise timeframe and location in which the Ukraine party platform change was made. Sessions is now also admitting that he subsequently met with the Russian Ambassador on September 8th, and that the Ukraine was discussed in that conversation. This is a reversal from his denial last night, when he claimed that his conversations with the Russian Ambassador did not have anything to do with campaign matters.
This also further cements the fact that Sessions perjured himself by lying to Congress under oath about the matter during his confirmation hearings last month. It comes as little surprise that Sessions is now offering to recuse himself from any role in the investigation – he still may end up having to resign as Attorney General. This it further shatters the months of denials from the Donald Trump campaign that anyone involved with the campaign had any contact with Russia during the election.
Furthermore it’s notable that both Jeff Sessions and Carter Page met with the Russian Ambassador while at the Republican National Convention. As we’ve previously reported, there is strong reason to believe that Sessions and his office were responsible for Page having first been hired to the Trump campaign. http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/th ... aine/1740/
Donald Trump changed DOJ order of succession weeks ago, knowing Jeff Sessions wouldn’t last By Bill Palmer | March 2, 2017 | 0
Back on February 9th of this year, Jeff Sessions officially became the Attorney General of the United States. On that same day, Donald Trump signed an executive order changing the line of succession at the Department of Justice that would kick in if Sessions had to resign or recuse himself. In so doing, Trump elevated someone loyal to himself to the number two spot, ensuring that person would be prosecuting the Russia investigation if Sessions stepped aside.
Now that Jeff Sessions has been exposed as having repeatedly colluded with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and discussed Ukraine policy with him, while he was acting as a Donald Trump campaign adviser, the reason for Trump’s executive order seems clear. Sessions was complicit in the Trump-Russia conspiracy, and he was sloppy about it, and then he lied under oath about it during his confirmation hearings. If Trump knew that Sessions had been meeting with Russia, then he knew that Sessions had perjured himself – and thus he knew that Sessions wouldn’t last long on the job one way or the other.
Donald Trump’s executive order elevated Dana Boente into position to take over the Trump-Russia investigation if Jeff Sessions were out of the picture. Boente is the same person whom Trump appointed as acting Attorney General a month ago, after he fired Sally Yates from the role. Trump presumably put Boente in that position because he knew Boente would be loyal to him in the investigation.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this storyline is that, as reported by Raw Story today, President Barack Obama had himself altered the DOJ line of succession shortly before leaving office, specifically to keep Dana Boente out of it. Obama seemingly suspected that Boente was some kind of Trump patsy, and was trying to prevent Boente from being in position to take over the Trump-Russia investigation. http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/don ... last/1742/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
The Trump administration is facing a new scandal as the Justice Department has acknowledged Attorney General Jeff Sessions met twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. This contradicts sworn testimony Sessions gave to Congress. During his confirmation hearing in January, then-Senator Sessions was asked by Minnesota Senator Al Franken whether he knew of contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russia’s government. Sessions replied, "I did not have communications with the Russians." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday accused Sessions of "apparent perjury" and said in a statement, "Sessions is not fit to serve as the top law enforcement officer of our country and must resign." Earlier today, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz called on Sessions to recuse himself from a Justice Department probe into alleged ties between Trump campaign officials and Russia’s government. We speak to David Cay Johnston, the author of "The Making of Donald Trump."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: The Trump administration is facing a new scandal as the Justice Department has acknowledged Attorney General Jeff Sessions met twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. This contradicts Sessions’ sworn testimony to Congress. During his confirmation hearing in January, then-Senator Sessions was asked by Minnesota Senator Al Franken whether he knew of contacts between Trump campaign surrogates and Russia’s government.
SEN. AL FRANKEN: If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do? SEN. JEFF SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I didn’t have—not have communications with the Russians. AMY GOODMAN: The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Sessions twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak: in July on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention and in September in Sessions’ office on Capitol Hill. And The Wall Street Journal reports that federal investigators are probing Sessions’ contacts with Russian officials.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Wednesday accused Sessions of "apparent perjury" and said in a statement, quote, "Sessions is not fit to serve as the top law enforcement officer of our country and must resign," unquote. Joining the call was Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. Many top Democrats are calling for a special prosecutor to investigate ties between top Trump officials and Russia’s government. At least one top Republican senator said Wednesday he is open to the idea. This is South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham speaking on CNN.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: It is clear to me that Jeff Sessions, who is my dear friend, cannot make this decision about Trump. So they may be not—there may be nothing there, but if there’s something there that the FBI believes is criminal in nature, then, for sure, you need a special prosecutor. AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions briefly spoke with an NBC reporter.
ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS: Well, I have not met with any Russians at any time to discuss any political campaign. And those remarks are unbelievable to me and are false. And I don’t have anything else to say about that. So, thank you. AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by two guests. David Cay Johnston is the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter formerly with The New York Times. He’s author of the book The Making of Donald Trump. He is the founder and editor of the DCReport.org. Also with us is economist and lawyer James Henry, who has investigated Trump’s ties to Russia. His most recent report is titled "Another Cabinet Pick with Secret Ties to Putin and Oligarchs." He’s talking about Wilbur Ross.
But I want to turn first to David Cay Johnston. So much has been revealed in the last 24 hours, David, both by The Washington Post and The New York Times. Can you talk about the significance of these revelations?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, their significance is that it shows how we have to have an open, public investigation of Donald Trump. And to paraphrase Richard Nixon, people have got to know that their president is not a traitor. The Intelligence Committee chairman in the House, Representative Nunes, has already said, "Well, I haven’t seen anything. I haven’t seen anything." Of course, he hasn’t started his investigation. But we don’t need to have the intelligence committees, which meet in secret, investigate this, and we don’t need a special prosecutor.
What we need is a public investigation, beginning with getting Donald Trump’s tax returns, not only the ones that he—the IRS has in its possession and that they can subpoena from Trump, if he hasn’t destroyed them, but also those that he’s had to produce in litigation around the country; have the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation review those, so that we know how much money Trump got from the Russians, which Russians, who he’s paid interest to, who he has business partnerships with. And notice how desperate Donald Trump is to make sure we do not investigate this, how Jeff Sessions tries to blow off the fact that he spoke to the Russian ambassador, and yet, twice, in a hearing and then in a letter, said he had had no contact with the Russians, when he was, by his own account, a surrogate for the Trump campaign. This is very, very important, Amy, and we really need to make sure there is an open, public investigation and this is not swept under the Intelligence Committee rug.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about what Attorney General Sessions said. He said as a surrogate for the Trump campaign. He was clearly making a distinction between that and being a senator. But The Washington Post polled 19 of the 26 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on which he serves, and none of them said that they had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States, David.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, yes. And I think it’s very significant that he was later asked, in writing, another question, and his answer was one word: "No." Jeff Sessions is an experienced politician. He has been masterful at obscuring his racist conduct and attitudes. That’s how he got all the way to attorney general. And here, he has shown, at a minimum, at an absolute minimum, that he cannot have anything to do with the investigation of Donald Trump. He was the first senator to back Donald Trump. He has made it clear that he doesn’t think there’s anything here. And so, he has to recuse himself, at an absolute minimum, from any involvement.
What Donald Trump wants first and foremost here, Amy, is to make sure there is not a proper investigation. And Donald Trump, who I’ve known nearly 30 years, has a long history of compromising the FBI, compromising grand juries, compromising the Federal Office of Ethics, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, so that investigations of him are not properly done. People really need to make sure and demand that we have an open, public, bipartisan, no-holds-barred investigation. And it starts with review of Donald Trump’s tax returns, which Congress has the right to see under a 1920s law.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Senator Jeff Sessions speaking in 1999, when he backed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
SEN. JEFF SESSIONS: As a former federal prosecutor for 12 years, attorney general for two years, I know and believe very deeply in the rule of law, in the fact that honest and—testimony is required if we’re to have justice in America. So the problem is not the personal conduct. People on both sides of the aisle have failed in their dedication to their families over and over again. We know that to be true. But the fact is that we’re dealing and wrestling with allegations that suggest perjury or obstruction of justice. The president has a full and should be given a full opportunity to respond to that, but, fundamentally, we’re going to have to wrestle with that, and that issue will not go away. AMY GOODMAN: There is Senator Sessions talking about perjury and obstruction of justice. The significance of this, David Cay Johnston?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, in the case of Donald Trump, keep in mind, Donald Trump lies as easily as you and I breathe. He is, by becoming president of the United States, the number one con artist in the history of the world. He has spent his entire adult life deeply in the embrace of violent felons, Russian mobsters, American mobsters, assorted swindlers and crooks. He has cheated his own workers out of their pay. He has cheated small business people out of their fees. He has swindled investors in properties that were branded with the Trump name. And so, it’s absolutely critical to understand that you can’t rely on anything that Donald Trump says as president of the United States, but especially when he knows that he’s got stuff in his closet to hide.
Now, my colleague Jim Henry, who wrote his report for DCReport, my nonprofit news organization, has spent a lot of time digging into the Russian connections here, and they are vast, deep. They go back more than 30 years. And an important element to understand about why this matters with the Russians, who are the Russian oligarchs? They are a state-sponsored network of international criminals. And Donald Trump has had so many involvements with them, involving the Trump SoHo hotel, the sale of property and other things Jim can talk about. And then we get Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, who is in bed with these guys right up to his eyeballs.
AMY GOODMAN: OK, we’re going to talk about all of that in a moment. David Cay Johnston with us from Rochester, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, author of The Making of Donald Trump. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back with him and Jim Henry in a moment. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/2/d ... f_sessions
"The Making of Donald Trump": David Cay Johnston on Trump's Ties to the Mob & Drug Traffickers
AUGUST 10, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xc0EpF49vE David Cay Johnston Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter previously with The New York Times, now a columnist for The Daily Beast. His biography of Donald Trump, titled The Making of Donald Trump, has just been published.
David Cay Johnston began covering Donald Trump in the 1980s when he was working as the Atlantic City reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Johnston’s new book, "The Making of Donald Trump," looks at a side of Trump seldom covered in the press: his ties to the mob, drug traffickers and felons.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Donald Trump, we’re joined now by David Cay Johnston, who’s followed Trump’s career for decades. His biography of Trump has just been published. It’s titled The Making of Donald Trump and examines Trump’s rise to prominence. David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, previously with The New York Times, now a columnist for The Daily Beast.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s nice to have you in studio. Why don’t we start off with your response to what Trump said yesterday?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I’ve been listening to right-wing radio about this, and all sorts of people are saying, "There goes the liberal media again. He never said that." He certainly said it to people who are zealots, people who are deranged, people who are dangerous. And without question, this was way beyond the pale. But, you know, this will happen again. This is who Donald Trump is. He is a bully. He is someone who believes that whatever he thinks is in his interest in the moment is in the national interest.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, David, you’ve been following Trump now for decades, going back to—even back when you were, what, a bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer in Atlantic City—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —when he was beginning to get his casinos going there in Atlantic City. What’s been the main thread that you’ve taken away from your years of studying his operations.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Donald doesn’t know anything. And if you listen carefully to what he says, it becomes apparent. He was asked by a Hugh Hewitt during one of the debates, the right-wing radio talk show host, about the nuclear triad. That’s the capacity of the U.S. to deliver a nuclear bomb from a submarine missile, a land-based missile or an airplane. His answer indicated he had no idea. Well, it turned out Hugh Hewitt had asked the same question months earlier on his radio show, and Trump didn’t learn in between. Trump talks as if the president’s a dictator. When he ran casinos, he didn’t know the games, he didn’t know the odds, he didn’t know how to handle customers. All he knew how to do was take money out of the organization, which weakened it, and that’s why his casinos were among the first to fold.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to the clip that you reference also in The Making of Donald Trump. During the Republican debate last December, he was questioned, as you said, by Hugh Hewitt, who then asked Senator Marco Rubio for his response.
DONALD TRUMP: First of all, I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who’s totally responsible, who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important. And one of the things that I’m, frankly, most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq, because you’re going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly, and it was very important. But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. HUGH HEWITT: The three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority? Because I want to go to Senator Rubio after that and ask him— DONALD TRUMP: Well, I think—I think, to me, nuclear is just—the power, the devastation is very important to me. HUGH HEWITT: Senator Rubio, do you have a response? SEN. MARCO RUBIO: I do. Well, first, let’s explain to people at home who the triad—what the triad is. Maybe a lot of people haven’t heard that terminology before. The triad is our ability of the United States to conduct nuclear attacks using airplanes, using missiles launched from silos or from the ground, and also from our nuclear subs, ability to attack. And it’s important. All three of them are critical. AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Senator Rubio and, before him, Donald Trump. And, of course, then there recently Joe Scarborough, the talk show host who’s a former Republican conservative congressmember, saying he heard from an international diplomat who was advising Donald Trump—Trump said to the person three times, "If we have nuclear weapons, why don’t we use them?"
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, this is indicative of Donald doesn’t know anything. I mean, if Marco Rubio, who is pretty much an empty suit, has to school you on something this basic, that should have screamed to people back in December, "This man has no qualifications!" He doesn’t qualify to be in Congress, much less be president of the United States. On the other hand, in his own mind, of course, Donald is the greatest living person. And, Amy, if you don’t appreciate that, Donald has a word for you: "Loser!"
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: David, I wanted to ask you about this issue which we discussed previously with Wayne Barrett, as well, on the issue of Donald Trump’s relationship to the mob and his connections over the years to mobsters. And you’ve also looked into that, as well.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes, and it’s not just the traditional Mafia families in New York. First of all, Donald Trump’s father had a business partner who was a mob guy. I’m sure Wayne talked about that. But Donald has done business with people with the Russian mob. He’s done business with con artists. The guy who supplied his helicopters and managed his personal helicopter, called the Ivana, from his first wife back then, was a major cocaine trafficker, who actually handled the drugs. And after he went to prison, Donald wrote a letter pleading for mercy for him, so he got 18 months as the head of the ring. The little fish who delivered the drugs, they got 20 years. Donald continued to do business with him after he was indicted. Donald has done business all his life with mobsters and criminals, because it’s a way to make money.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Joseph Weichselbaum?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes, that’s the guy. Joseph Weichselbaum is this mob associate. He once—he used to do Cigarette boat racing in Miami, and he once was—came in third, right behind Charles Keating, the infamous financier who ripped off people for a billion dollars. And Weichselbaum provided helicopters to the Trump Organization, even though there were better-capitalized, better-run companies. Donald rented an apartment to Weichselbaum and his brother under very unusual circumstances.
When Weichselbaum was indicted, it was for a drug operation that went from Miami to Ohio. When he agreed to plead guilty, the case was mysteriously moved to New Jersey. And who did it come before? Federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald’s older sister. No one knows how this happened. Now, she removed herself from the case, but imagine, Amy, that you, or one of the listeners, you’re the chief judge, and the judge comes to you and says, "Oh, I can’t handle this case, because I fly in this drug trafficker’s helicopters. My husband flies in them every week. My children have flown in this drug trafficker’s helicopters." You know, it helps explain how this guy got a light sentence.
And the question we have to ask is: Why did Donald Trump need to write that letter, which could have cost him his casino license? Because he needed this guy to be his friend and not his enemy. What was going on that Donald Trump needed a drug trafficker to be his friend and not his enemy? And that’s a question no one in the news media has been asking.
AMY GOODMAN: You got a call—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Except me.
AMY GOODMAN: You got a call from Donald Trump over this?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: I got a call related to this, yes. I wrote a piece for Politico magazine back in April about all of Donald Trump’s connections. And Donald finally called me. He’s had my home number for years. He’s called me at home in the past. And he said to me, "Well, you know, you’ve written a lot of things I like. But if I don’t like what you’re writing, I’m going to sue you." I said, "Well, Donald, you’re a public figure." In America, that means that he would have to prove that I deliberately, knowingly told a lie about him. And he said, "I know I’m a public figure, but I’ll sue you anyway." And it’s one of the reasons the news coverage of him has been so soft. He has threatened to sue everybody. That Politico piece that I wrote, I’ve been an investigative reporter for almost 50 years; I’ve never been lawyered like I was for that piece. And it didn’t have anything that hadn’t been published before. He has intimidated the news organizations, and they’re not willing to talk about that.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in your book, you go into a story, not about his father, who’s been well known and covered previously by other publications, but about his grandfather. Talk about Donald Trump’s grandfather.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Donald Trump’s grandfather, Frederick, when he turned 16 in 1885, was subject to mandatory military service in Germany, so he fled the country and came to America. And then he followed Horace Greeley’s advice: "Go West, young man." And he went into the whorehouse business. And he ran bordellos in Seattle, in Everett, Washington, and in the Yukon Territory, until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police showed up. He then took his fortune, went back to Germany, married a young woman his mother didn’t approve of, came back to America. His wife didn’t like it. They went back to Germany. He figured, with all his money, he could buy his way in. And they said, "You’re a draft dodger. Get out," and sent him back to America.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, talk about his father, Fred Trump.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, Fred Trump, whose father died when he was 12 or 13 years old, was a very industrious guy. When he was 15 years old, he started a business—technically owned by his mother, because he couldn’t sign contracts—building garages in the outer boroughs of New York for these newfangled thing called automobiles. When the market collapsed because of the Great Depression, he invented one of the first grocery stores. People used to have clerks give them their canned goods and stuff. He opened one where you did your own, and then sold it for a profit.
He built housing during World War II for shipyard workers and is said to be the first person in line to get federal money to build worker housing. He was a profiteer. Dwight D. Eisenhower personally went into a rage over what he had done, how he’d ripped stuff off, and he had a creative explanation when he was called before the U.S. Senate to justify what he did. He said, "I didn’t profiteer. I didn’t take the money. It’s in the bank account." Strange way to think about things. And, of course, they discriminated against everybody who wasn’t white, and were proven to have done this in the ’50s and in the ’70s. And Woody Guthrie, the folk singer, "This Land is Your Land," he wrote a song, which is in the book thanks to the generosity of the Guthrie family, about one of the all-white outer suburb projects owned by Fred Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: That he had an apartment in.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes, that’s right, that he lived in.
AMY GOODMAN: You tell a story about Fred Trump’s son, his older son, Donald Trump’s brother, and what happened to his family, and particularly his grandchild—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —after the father, Fred Trump, died, and what Donald Trump did to him.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: So, keep in mind he sought mercy for a drug trafficker. So, Freddy Trump Jr. died of alcoholism early. And when Old Man Trump died, he had a new grandson—a great-grandson, who was born a few days later—very sickly child, nearly died several times, huge medical bills. Everyone in the Trump family gets medical insurance from the Trump Organization. Donald is a big believer in healthcare. It’s one of the positive things you can say about him. And the line of Freddy Trump Jr., when they realized they’d been effectively cut out of the will, filed a lawsuit. "Hey, you know, you guys are dividing the money up four ways instead of five." Donald immediately cut off the healthcare for this sickly child.
AMY GOODMAN: This is his grandnephew.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: His grandnephew. And he’s asked about this. And he says, "Well, I don’t like people who sue my father." And he was told, "Well, don’t you think this will look cold-hearted? You’re putting the life of this child in jeopardy." "Well, what else am I to do?" And that’s an essential element to understanding Donald Trump. You don’t exist, Amy, I don’t exist, as a person. That’s why he talks about women the way he does, in these degrading terms. Donald doesn’t see other people as people. He sees them as things to be used. And put the life of a child in jeopardy for more money? Donald thinks nothing is wrong with that. That’s—of course you would do that, if you’re Donald. If you wouldn’t do it, what’s wrong with you? That would be Donald’s attitude.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the issue of Donald Trump’s tax forms, that’s—this has continually come up over this campaign.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: "Why haven’t you released your tax returns?" You’ve looked into this whole issue of why he’s so reluctant to show what his real returns are.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right, and tax has been my big area of specialty. I’m actually writing a whole new federal tax code for the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In your spare time.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yeah. Donald Trump, we know, paid no federal income taxes in 1978, 1979—he and I had lunch and talked about it once—in 1984 and in the 1990s. The 1984 tax return is very revealing. There are special laws in America for full-time real estate people that allow them to live tax-free if they own a lot of property. So, if Donald gave us his tax returns, I could tell you what his property is really worth as opposed to what he tells people it’s worth. That’s one reason he’s not going to give it out. I don’t think he’s anywhere near as wealthy as he claims. Not even close.
But in 1984, he was audited by the state of New York and the City of New York, which both have income taxes. He filed a tax form, not the whole return, that showed zero income for this category of income and over $600,000 of deductions. Surprise, surprise, the auditors said, "Please justify these deductions." He couldn’t do it. But he ordered his law guy—his tax guy to make an appeal. And under oath, his longtime tax guy is shown the return that was filed, and he goes, "Um, that’s my signature, but I didn’t prepare that document." That’s very good evidence of tax fraud.
And Donald has engaged in other tax frauds we know about. He was involved in what’s called the empty box scandal here in New York. That’s where you claim to not live in the city—in the state, and you have an empty box mailed to you out of state to avoid sales tax. In that case, when Donald found out there was an investigation, he did what he often does to not be investigated: He ran to law enforcement and ratted out other people.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But in the ’84 case—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —if there was evidence of fraud, what happened with that case?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: We only know what happened in the city and the state case, all right? The state imposed penalties on him, civil penalties, not criminal. That’s how almost all tax matters are settled. The city, because no one could find the original—all they had was the photocopy—with the signature on it, the judge didn’t impose the penalties, because of the uncertainty about it. But he made it very clear that he thought this is a very fishy case. What the IRS did, I don’t know. In all likelihood, Donald, who says he’s audited all the time, arranges to settle these cases, but, through threats of litigation, when they do the legal algebra, they say, "All right, we’ll take pennies on the dollar. Get out of here," because they don’t have the staff to pursue it.
AMY GOODMAN: You write a lot about the DGE.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, which oversees the Atlantic City casinos.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: What can we learn from their dealings with Donald Trump?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, this shows how masterful Donald Trump is at manipulating law enforcement. He told the attorney general of New Jersey, when he wanted a casino license, "I’m not going to go through the 18 months that all these other people have gone through," and demanded he be investigated in just 90 days. Everybody else, year and a half. The attorney general agreed to six months if Donald cooperated.
Then Donald hid things, including four grand jury investigations that Wayne Barrett found. Four of them. In New Jersey, a woman applying for a blackjack dealer license—that’s a very low-level license—was found morally unfit and denied a license because, as a teenager, she gave friends of hers discounts at the cash register. That’s the legal standard. Donald withheld these grand jury investigations. He withheld associations with mobsters and criminals. And yet he got licensed anyway. Well, once he was licensed, the bureaucracy at the Division of Gaming Enforcement made sure that Donald was never asked a question that would put his license in jeopardy, because that would force them to admit that they hadn’t done their job.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, given this history of lying, of fraud, of all of these other skirtings of the law, have you been surprised at all about this—the enormous support that Trump has gotten among—
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: No. Actually—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —the Republican faithful?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Juan, I’ll tell you why I’m not surprised. As you two know, I’ve spent more than 20 years of my life being on the forefront in the mainstream press of documenting inequality. When nobody else was writing about it, I was showing how government policies are taking from the many and giving to the few. So, the people in this country living in economic terror, the bottom 50 percent, I’ve been their advocate. But they’re not the people who read my books. What they know is: "I’m working harder, I’m making less. If I lose my job, I don’t know how I’ll pay my rent or keep a roof over my kids’ heads." And Donald comes along, like all demagogues do: "I have a solution. It’s the Mexicans. It’s the Muslims. It’s the Chinese." And people gravitate to him—not the only ones, but that’s a big part of his support.
AMY GOODMAN: You write about how many of his restaurants, his golf courses have Five and Six Diamond Awards.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What are these?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, you go to—at least 19 Trump properties have these big plaques: Six Diamond Award, Five Diamond Awards. They’re awards Donald gave to himself. Donald and his family were the majority of the board of something called the Academy of American Hospitality Sciences, or something like that, which is the invention of a mob guy, a convicted art thief named "Joey No Socks," who lives on Central Park South. And Donald has gone to ceremonies to receive these awards and these big plaques, and his signature is on them. This is a man who gives awards to himself. How juvenile.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you most surprised by, as we wrap up this interview, in writing The Making of Donald Trump? You have covered him for many years.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: I did not appreciate, until I worked on the book, that while Donald holds himself out as a devout Christian—"No one reads the Bible more than me"—while he has all these pastors embracing him as a good Christian man, Donald aggressively, thoroughly and at great length, in many forums, denounces Christianity. His personal motto is "always get revenge," whereas the message of Jesus Christ was "turn the other cheek." And these ministers, some of whom I’ve written to and haven’t—they haven’t responded at all—continue to embrace him. And I find it very troubling. Donald has beguiled them with flattery. If they continue, now that my book is out, if they know about it, to do this, they are then deceiving their flocks, and that’s evil. But Donald himself doesn’t care about these things. He will tell you any lie. He can’t quote a single line from the Bible. Not one. And yet he says, "No one reads the Bible more than Donald Trump." If you ask him, "Well, what do you like in the Bible?" "Oh, there’s so many. There’s so many. I just—there are so many, I can’t choose."
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, previously with The New York Times, now a columnist with The Daily Beast. His biography of Donald Trump is called The Making of Donald Trump. It’s just out. https://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/10/ ... thor_david
The Great Trump Tax Mysteries: Is He Hiding Loopholes, Errors, or Something More Serious?
June 23, 2016 5:01 am “Taxation, in reality, is life,” said Sheldon Cohen, a former commissioner of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. “If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can tell their whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of life: greed, politics, power, goodness.”
A rich person’s tax affairs will tell you lots about him or her—but the reverse is fuzzily true, too. Though Donald Trump has refused to release his tax returns, we can get a good idea of what’s in there if we start with what we know about his character and business affairs, then mix these up with the vast rich pudding of loopholes, abatements, and gray areas that wealthy folk in America use to milk the tax system. All this provides an entry into understanding Trump’s bewildering, ever evolving global business affairs, and helps answer some of the great questions of the day. How much is he really worth? Has he broken any laws? How much tax does he pay? Does he use tax havens?
It’s hard to get your arms around Trump’s business conglomerate, which is a patchwork of disparate “artful” deals and raids, strategy changes, bankruptcies, carefully laid plans, and high-energy whims. “I play it very loose,” Trump wrote in his book Trump: The Art of the Deal. “I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops. There is no typical week in my life.”
Trump isn’t nearly the real-estate player he once was, particularly since some of his companies went through high-profile bankruptcies in the early 1990s. In a ranking of New York condominium developers last September, for instance, Trump didn’t even make the top 20. In Atlantic City, whose real-estate sector he once dominated, the Trump Plaza closed in 2014; he sold the Trump Marina (now the Golden Nugget) in 2011 to Landry’s, a Houston-based gaming-and-restaurant company; and activist investor Carl Icahn now owns the Trump Taj Mahal. (Trump is eager to point out, however, that he made money on his Atlantic City adventure. “I never went bankrupt,” he told me in the first of two telephone interviews. “I made a fortune in A.C., which a lot of people don’t understand.... I used a bankruptcy as a business tool: I made great deals.”)
Many bankers don’t lend to Trump now, burned by what some call “Donald risk,” a reference to the fact that some Wall Street banks have been left with pennies on the dollar through some of his maneuvers. (About his relationship with lenders, Trump says, “We have a lot of cash—we don’t need loans. Every bank wants to do business with us, literally every bank.”) There is still plenty of steel and concrete bearing his name in lights, but much of that is simply him taking licensing income and management fees from the people who actually financed, built, and own these properties. “People who are smart love my licensing deals because you don’t have any risk [and] you make tremendous amounts of cash,” Trump says.
In his 92-page financial disclosure to the Federal Election Commission (F.E.C.) in July 2015 and in a second, 104-page disclosure last May, in both of which he calls himself “President of the United States of America” (Hillary humbly calls herself “Candidate for President”), he lists at least $1.5 billion in hard assets. Of this, a minimum of $787 million is in hotels and real estate such as Trump Tower, in Manhattan. There are also 16 golf-related businesses valued at more than $550 million, aircraft worth at least $58 million, $6 million in vineyards, and $4.3 million in entertainment ventures. These are lower-bound numbers: categories include “over $50 million,” with no upper limit. (The main purpose of these disclosures isn’t to build a full picture of a candidate’s finances but to identify conflicts of interest.) Trump claimed to me that his net worth is “much more than $10 billion…. I don’t know how much more.” A Trump press release in July 2015 also claimed his net worth was “in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS,” though Fortune in May estimated it at $3.9 billion, and Bloomberg News reckoned it at $2.9 billion last July. (Michael Bloomberg, by comparison, is worth $45 billion, according to Forbes.)
All this keeps his tax advisers busy, doing imaginative things, such as putting goats on a golf course in New Jersey, to qualify for farmland tax reliefs. A picture he tweeted of him signing his tax returns—a stack of papers that rises above his head and out of the frame—points to the sheer byzantine scale of his tax affairs and a business empire that encompasses Trump Tower, Trump chocolate bars (shaped like gold ingots, naturally), and the intriguingly named Trump Follies LLC. His global interests stretch from Azerbaijan to China, India, Panama, Dubai, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and a few places in between. “I have 121 [foreign] deals either starting or under negotiation, pretty far down the line,” Trump boasts, citing “numerous deals” in China. “China likes Trump,” he adds, “even though I tell the country China is killing us…. It’s our fault, not China’s fault. I’m sure you read the recent articles that the young people of China really like Donald Trump.”
Mitt Romney, whose own complex wealth and tax affairs contributed to his defeat at Barack Obama’s hands in 2012, speculates that the only logical explanation for Trump’s refusal to publish his returns is that there is “a bombshell” in there. “Given Mr. Trump’s equanimity with other flaws in his history,” he continued, “we can only assume it’s a bombshell of unusual size.”
Brilliant Deductions
David Cay Johnston, one of the U.S.’s best-known tax writers, calls Trump “one of the major welfare kings of America,” because of his track record of playing the government for profit. Johnston’s 1992 book, Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business, contains long sections about Trump and includes one of the few public sightings of his tax returns, which appeared on casino regulatory findings. They show that Trump paid a total of just under $72,000 in federal income taxes (on just over $219,000 of income) from 1975 to 1977, then 0 percent in 1978 and 1979. According to a Politico report, Trump again appeared to pay no federal taxes in 1991 and 1993 due to losses in his hotel and casino businesses. The suspicion is that he’s continued to pay little or no federal income tax ever since.
It’s a well-grounded suspicion, not just because of Trump’s reputation for hardball but also because he’s in real estate, which may be the most highly tax-subsidized sector of the American economy.
“Real estate is the gold mine of gold mines for people who know how to maneuver through it,” says Jack Blum, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and an expert in financial crime. “The potential for shenanigans is virtually unlimited, much more than other sectors. The only other one that might come close is petroleum.” Trump himself admits, “One of the big assets of real estate, you are allowed large deductions.”
There are a few big tax strategies in real estate, underpinning some of America’s greatest fortunes.
First, there’s depreciation. Cars, say, lose value, and it makes sense to set those real losses against tax. Buildings, though, generally appreciate in value—yet such is the power of the real-estate lobby that you still get the depreciation deduction, which is based on a formula.
Strategy number two: In theory you pay taxes on your gains when you sell up—but you can get out of that too by using another officially approved scheme, known as the “like-kind exchange.” Here, if you re-invest the proceeds of a sale into a qualifying real-estate project within 180 days, you can postpone paying the tax. The I.R.S. has interpreted this rule very broadly, says Ed Kleinbard, professor of law and business at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law and author of We Are Better than This, a book on the U.S. fiscal system. “So a swap of farmland for an office tower is viewed as a like-kind exchange. The trick in real estate is to keep all the balls in the air as best you can, until you die.”
As if that weren’t enough cream for the real-estate moguls, the sector is fueled by borrowing—and you can set the interest expenses against your income. Lenders will often give mortgages for 90 percent or more of a project’s value, meaning that very little of a developer’s money is involved. Interest and depreciation usually wash out the rental income. As Trump himself once put it, “Leverage: don’t make deals without it.”
Today, however, Trump says, “I don’t need debt. I don’t have very much. I have about 3 percent debt.” When I point out that his F.E.C. disclosure lists debts of at least $315 million, he responds that this is 3 percent of $10 billion. True, but if you go with lower estimates of his wealth and higher estimates of his debt, it is considerably more.
There is a story in Washington, D.C., tax circles that Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1981 to 1994, was so scandalized by the shamelessness of the real-estate sector’s tax perks that he threatened to make the sector tax-exempt—which, counter-intuitively, would have increased their tax payments considerably. “Tax exemption for real estate was a serious threat,” says John Buckley, a former chief tax counsel to the Ways and Means Committee. “It would have recognized that there would be no tax on real estate, but it would have disallowed the use of real-estate tax losses to offset other income.”
And this brings us to yet another avenue to tax-free living for real-estate moguls. These deductions can travel. If you are an active real-estate professional—that is, in part, if you spend at least half of your work time in real-estate activities—then you’re allowed to assemble all your losses and deductions, magpie-like, wherever and however you suffered them, whether it’s from Trump Tower or a Scottish golf course, and throw them all into one big pot. (When Trump was asked whether he was active in real estate, for tax purposes, he responded: “I don’t know how I am categorized, but I spend a lot of time on real estate … even during the campaign.”) You then stir in your federal income and hope those losses will offset it all, like one of those science experiments where you pour one liquid into another, brightly colored liquid to make it all go clear. With enough deductions, a real-estate mogul like Trump can zero out his federal income-tax bill.
If Trump is not considered active enough in real estate, however, he is covered by a different system, for investors, and those real-estate losses do not travel, says Lee Sheppard, a tax lawyer and widely read contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Notes. Trump told me he won’t release his tax returns yet because he’s under a “routine audit,” and Sheppard speculates that the audit could be about this very question: whether he is active enough in real estate to be able to use those real-estate losses to offset other income—something that would become a lot harder to argue, Buckley adds, if he were president.
Even if Trump can’t get to zero after taking advantage of all this, he need not fear: he may be able to deduct expenses incurred by his celebrity lifestyle. Sheppard explains this by citing comedian Carol Burnett, who starred in her own variety show on CBS, starting in 1967. “This really was the 60s,” says Sheppard. “When you came out on the stage you wore a sparkly evening gown.” In those days celebrities paid for their clothes, and Burnett wanted to take the gowns as business expenses. The I.R.S. fought her, but she argued successfully that she would not wear them to the grocery store: they were specific work garments. “Entertainers fight about this stuff with the I.R.S. all the time,” Sheppard says.
We can’t see such deductions without Trump’s tax returns, but we can see other things Trump has put into this pot. A Wall Street Journal analysis, for instance, shows that he was able to deduct $39.1 million from his 2005 federal income tax via a “conservation easement,” which meant he simply pledged not to build houses on a golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, thus reducing the land’s value. Trump’s charitable deduction for the easement amounted to an estimated 2 percent of the entire U.S. total of conservation easements that year, and Trump has done it on at least four of his properties: Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach; his Seven Springs estate, in Westchester County, New York; Bedminster; and a golf driving range in California. When asked if he would curb tax privileges for real-estate moguls, if elected president, Trump said, “I’m not doing anything further with this.”
If Trump hasn’t yet gotten to zero, there’s still another tantalizing possibility: offshore tax havens. Sheppard thinks he doesn’t need to bother because “real estate in the U.S. is so juicy you don’t need tax havens.” Trump himself says, “I don’t use them. Honestly I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth: highly overrated,” he says. “They don’t work, and they cause lots of difficulty, and nobody knows what’s going on, and they are really not good…. There is greater incentive in many ways to keep your money in the U.S.”
But it isn’t strictly true that Trump doesn’t use them. He disclosed a company, DJ Aerospace Limited, which he set up in the tax haven of Bermuda in 1994. (Trump declined to respond to questions regarding this company and a handful of other questions as well.) And he also reportedly transferred more than 110 registered or pending trademarks to a holding company in Delaware, which many people view as a tax haven inside the U.S. because it is secretive and can help you avoid taxes in other states.
Other Trump tax-haven activity is harder to find, yet Kleinbard says you can’t rule it out, as when royalties are paid for the use of Trump trademarks for foreign projects he does own. (That Trump has refused to release his returns positively invites such speculation.)
Many big businesses park foreign income in tax havens, to defer or escape tax: Apple alone holds an estimated $180 billion or more offshore. Could Donald Trump be doing the same? His brand names and trademarks are intangible assets separate from the man himself, and therefore are similar to the intangibles that drive the profits of U.S. tech firms. Could the non-U.S. rights to Trump’s very name be owned by an offshore tax-haven company? If so, as Kleinbard explained to me, the royalties might flow from a Donaldco in Delaware to a company higher up the corporate “tree” in the Netherlands, then further up to an Irish corporation resident in Bermuda (don’t ask), where they would ultimately be parked offshore as “stateless income,” incurring no tax. This might be Romney’s “bombshell.” (Romney should know. After all, he was found to be parking secret stuff in Bermuda.)
“Trump has sophisticated tax advisers,” says Kleinbard, “and I can’t find a technical tax reason why he wouldn’t have used Silicon Valley tax technologies to park his foreign royalties in an offshore tax haven at near-zero tax rates. If Trump didn’t do this, he might want to ask his advisers why they didn’t recommend it.”
Considering all these possible tax-avoidance strategies, the chances that Trump pays a reasonable tax rate are low. And, in fact, there is a more direct indication of this.
In June, Aaron Elstein, of Crain’s, reported that Trump had qualified for several years for tax credits of around $300 under New York City’s School Tax Relief Program (STAR), a benefit open only to married couples whose annual income is less than half a million dollars. This is important for our story. Although we need to be careful not to confuse local taxes with federal taxes, you can extrapolate from one to the other: city and state tax returns normally base their taxable-income assessments on federal tax returns. The Crain’s story suggests Trump has pushed his federal taxable income down below $500,000—less than a thousandth of what he publicly says he earned last year. This indication isn’t watertight: there could be special adjustments between the federal tax return and the city-and-state one, and Trump may also be pushing his licensing income into Delaware to reduce his New York State taxable income. The mayor’s office was “reviewing” the case—but when Crain’s made a Freedom of Information request for Trump’s STAR application the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance said that, after a two-month search, no documents could be found. A Trump spokesperson said, “The city made a mistake and the money was returned.”
But whatever the truth here, Elstein’s story is probably as solid an indication as there is. You, dear reader, may be paying more tax than Trump does—even if you’re only moderately wealthy. He brags about such aggressive tax avoidance by legal means. “I fight like hell to pay as little as possible,” he said last year. His then campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, took this even further: “Every deduction possible—he fights for every single dollar. That’s the mind-set you want to bring to the government.” When I suggested to Trump that he paid very, very low taxes he responded, “I don’t say that,” adding that “hopefully before the election” he would publish his tax returns, “which I think the people will be very impressed with.”
Golf, Anyone?
Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf course lies in stunning coastal wildlands on the Menie Estate, about a 20-minute drive north from the center of Aberdeen, Scotland’s oil city. From the A90 trunk road you turn right onto a mile-long driveway through expansive, gently rolling lawns of roughly cut grass interwoven with pine trees to reach an attractive, relatively modest gray stone clubhouse with parking for around 125 cars. In the foyer, there’s a small shop selling Trump-branded sweaters, $40 woolly hats, and golf paraphernalia. A black-and-gold sign in the rear, looking toward the sea, proclaims, THE GREATEST GOLF COURSE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!, set among THE WORLD’S LARGEST DUNES. The course flows like a turbulent green river for nearly three miles north-south through modestly proportioned coastal dunes. The greens are interspersed and flanked with hardy marram grass, heather, wetland, orchids, and the gray North Sea.
It is a gorgeous place to play golf, Scotland’s inclement weather permitting. Brian Burns, a Glaswegian who plays regularly at the Trump Turnberry resort, Trump’s other Scottish course, on the west coast, was telling me how much he loved both developments when we were politely interrupted by an exceedingly beefy security guard, whom the shop had told I was a reporter. He escorted me gently to the main offices to explain myself. The course has been so controversial that it pays to be careful.
For the old residents of Menie, the first inkling something was afoot came in 2005, when they started getting phone calls from a man introducing himself as Peter White. He said he’d fallen in love with the area, and would they be interested in selling their house? The mysterious caller, whose real name was Neil Hobday, was a Trump project manager.
Through much of 2007, the Aberdeenshire Council dealt with Trump’s planning application for two 18-hole golf courses and facilities at the Menie Estate, along with a 450-unit five-star hotel, 36 villas, 950 vacation apartments, and 500 residences. Trump promised that 6,000 jobs would be directly created, but threatened to “pull out entirely” if his whole proposal wasn’t accepted, or was even delayed. Amid rising Scottish anxiety that their oil is running out, the package was a pretty easy sell to local officials.
Sarah Malone, the course’s executive vice president, says the course now employs 100 core staff, plus up to 50 caddies on a seasonal basis. She said Trump has spent £100 million ($142 million) on the project to date and she is bullish about the future. She promises further developments at the site, including a second golf course, but won’t say more. Trump, she says, lets her run the operation as if it were her own business. “He says it as it is and you know where you stand: there is no ambiguity. You can move forward much more quickly when you have that kind of openness.”
But Malone also touched on another topic, which opens up a new and very different set of questions. Although she wouldn’t discuss any financial details for the course, she didn’t dispute my observation that its accounts for 2014 showed a loss-making operation. The observation was almost “asinine,” she says, because projects routinely make losses in the early years. This was a “legacy project” for Donald, she says. “This is about the love of the game of golf, the love of the land, and memory of his mother,” who was born and grew up in Scotland. The official accounts filed at Companies House (the British version of the S.E.C.) show, in fact, that for the calendar year 2014, the operating company Trump International Golf Club Scotland Limited showed a net loss of £1.1 million ($1.8 million) on revenues of £2.8 million ($4.4 million).
But Trump’s disclosure in July 2015 to the U.S. Federal Election Commission (F.E.C.), under the “income” heading, showed a profit of precisely $4,349,641. We aren’t quite comparing apples with apples here, because the F.E.C. disclosures cover the calendar year 2014 plus preceding months in the current year. This scenario would make sense only if the loss-making operation in 2014 suddenly surged into profit in early 2015, when the course was closed for winter until April 1, then returned (as Malone suggests) to its loss-making ways more recently. Or it could just be an error: mistakes are only human.
But let’s look further. For the Trump Turnberry golf resort, on the Scottish west coast, his F.E.C. disclosures record a profit of $20,395,000—but the accounts for 2014 show a loss of £3.6 million ($5.6 million) on revenues of £9.2 million ($14.6 million). It’s the same story again at his Doonbeg course in Ireland, where he told the F.E.C. his profit was $10,755,683—again, very precise—while Irish company accounts show a loss of 2.5 million euros ($3.3 million) on revenues of 4.2 million euros ($4.7 million).
This looks like a pattern: in each case a loss for 2014 in the company filings morphs into a large profit (for 2014 plus a few extra months) in his F.E.C. filings. This would be compatible with other analyses suggesting Trump is prone to hyping his wealth and income. Shawn Tully at Fortune magazine, using rough but reasonable calculations, estimated in March that Trump had been putting in gross revenues in his disclosures, where he should have been putting income, after stripping out costs, and that his true income was probably between a third and a half of the £362 million ($514 million) he claimed in his July 2015 disclosure.
When I pressed Trump on the discrepancy between the Scottish and Irish filings and what he had reported, he said that the disclosure was “a revenue number: it is not a profit and loss number.” His C.F.O., Allen Weisselberg, who was also on the phone line, echoed that this was a “revenue” number. Yet, in February, Trump told Bloomberg News that these same Scottish and Irish numbers on his disclosures represented “projected future income”—a different thing again, which is certainly not what the F.E.C. asked for.
Similar sloppiness, if that’s what it is, is apparent with his claims that he’s made 4,844 donations worth $102 million to charity over the past five years. A Washington Post analysis found that not a single donation among 4,844 contributions he listed was a personal gift of his own money: $7 million came from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which is funded mostly by others. (Trump didn’t contribute to his foundation from 2009 to 2014, the last year of available records.) The largest chunk of donations was nearly $64 million in those tax-friendly conservation easements he obtained; some beneficiaries were not charities but clients; and 2,900 of the 4,844 contributions were free rounds of golf. (A top Trump aide told the Post that this wasn’t a complete account and that Trump had given his own money to charity, but the aide failed to provide any documentation.) Meanwhile, CNBC probed Trump’s claim in his 2015 F.E.C. disclosures that his 16 golf courses were worth more than $550 million. Golf valuation experts concluded the courses were worth a half or a third of that—and even those estimates involved taking the inflated Scottish and Irish income figures at face value.
What to make of all this? Should we dismiss it as merely more Donald hype? Or are more serious issues at stake?
One can, of course, disagree about his total net worth—not least because, well, how much value should you assign to the unique Trump brand?
Still, some harsher interpretations can be made. Kenneth Gross, a national authority on ethics and securities laws related to political activity, says challenges to financial disclosure statements normally involve failing to disclose assets or gifts, but he could not recall a situation where a filer had been questioned about overstating income. “We are in uncharted waters,” he says. Though he would not comment on the veracity of Trump’s filings, he said disclosure statements submitted to the government can be subject to criminal penalties.
Fill In the Blanks
In fact, declarations to the Federal Election Commission are subject to a rather scary felony criminal statute called 18 U.S.C. 1001, which stipulates fines or prison terms of up to five years for anyone who knowingly and willfully “makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation.” Politicians have been prosecuted under this statute before: in 2008, for instance, Ted Stevens, who represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate, was indicted for willfully concealing and failing to report large gifts. (As it happens, there was prosecutorial misconduct in the case, and Stevens died in a mysterious plane crash in 2010.)
Joseph Sandler, a former general counsel to the Democratic National Committee who has almost 25 years’ experience shepherding candidates through disclosure processes, goes further. Citing the Doonbeg example, where the accounts show a loss but Trump reported a $10.7 million profit to the F.E.C., he says, “If it was still losing money and he put it down to show that it was more successful than it was, and he reported $10 million of phantom income, and he did it deliberately—that is a federal offense, and that would be very serious if he did it.”
Trump’s statement to Bloomberg News that the disclosures reflected “projected future income” and his and Weisselberg’s statements to me that they reflected “revenue” were completely off the mark, Sandler says: both might constitute false statements. “It is not gross revenues earned by the enterprise: it is what he earned from it, what it paid him”—in this case, Trump’s share of the net profits.
The question, he continued, is whether Trump deliberately mis-stated or simply didn’t know what he was talking about. Deliberately overstating income is potentially as serious as mis-statements to hide conflicts of interest, Sandler continued. “It is really a question of how extensive it is. You can make an honest mistake, and people do that all the time.” To see whether a criminal offense had been committed, he says, they would look to see if there was a pattern.
Sandler cited another case involving Trump, reported by several media outlets, which moves from apparent income discrepancies to an apparent asset discrepancy. Trump listed a golf course near Ossining, New York, in the “over $50 million” category in his F.E.C. disclosures—while claiming for state tax purposes that it was worth just $1.4 million (later revised up to $9 million). “In Ossining, you have something hard to compare it to … you are talking apples to apples: however you measure it, it has to be the same answer for state as it is for federal,” said Sandler. If Trump deliberately overstated the value of the course, he continued, then “absolutely, yes, that is a federal offense.”
And if there were a federal offense, he said, the F.E.C. should refer that to the Justice Department—though it would of course be a “big step” for prosecutors to undertake this in the middle of a campaign. “It depends on the extent and frequency with which he mis-stated on his report, and whether it was willful. They’d have to put all the facts together and see.” (Don McGahn, a partner at Jones Day, representing Mr. Trump, said that 18 U.S.C. 1001 “has no place in this” and that it is “reckless and irresponsible” to brandish it: “In my view there is no legal basis” for doing so. He said there are several different ways to value assets, and that there was subjectivity involved. On the income side, he said, the purpose of the disclosure was to ferret out potential conflicts of interest, and he said that income disclosure was not an exact science, and disclosing gross income or revenue was appropriate.)
Whatever, if anything, the F.E.C. makes of this, Trump’s Scottish adventures underline an enduring feature of his finances: that a big part of his wealth flows from his ability to extract goodies from government. And this isn’t only about milking the tax system. In Aberdeenshire he browbeat and inveigled his way into getting permission to build houses, a hotel, and golf courses on a Site of Special Scientific Interest: a British planning designation that is, in the words of Professor Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics, “the most highly protected type of site we have.” Trump’s deal was “a very elaborate way of what I would call gaming the British planning system, to build a new gated community in an otherwise impossible-to-develop site.”
In his foreign licensing deals, Trump emphasizes the importance of political connections. “The nice part [of the licensing model] is you have local people, local developers: they know the government, they know the presidents of the country, the prime ministers of the country, and all of those things,” Trump told me. “Now, I help them a lot: if they need zoning, and they say they are doing a Trump job, every single time they get their zoning because the government wants Trump.”
Some might say that Trump’s single-minded pursuit of money is just a red-blooded example of the American way. Whether or not this is so, his may not be the qualities one seeks in a president. “The president has a duty of loyalty and care to the United States,” said Susan Pace Hamill, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and Honors College and an expert in tax avoidance for small businesses. “He or she is a fiduciary to the public. Donald Trump is a deal-maker for himself. There is not a fiduciary bone in his body. This is generally acceptable in the rough-and-tumble world of business but is not remotely in the universe of what you want out of a public official.”
[img]http://media.vanityfair.com/photos/56cb5d11ae46dea861df0cba/master/h_590,c_limit/donald-trump-short-fingered-vulgarian-fingers-bruce-handy-ss01.jpg [/img] “O.K., you, in the third row… Yes, you… I’m calling on you… Yes, that’s why I’m pointing… I’m pointing with my finger… My FINGER. This one… Why would you think I’m holding up a cocktail frank?”
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Fri Mar 03, 2017 9:49 am, edited 4 times in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
In its last months the Obama administration ordered the intelligence agencies to collect and distribute information of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. This to prevent any change by the Trump administration of the hostile policy towards Russia that the Obama administration instituted. The intent was also gives the intelligence services blackmail material to prevent any changes in their undue, freewheeling independence.
The above is reported in a rather short New York Times piece published yesterday. The reporting angle captured in the headline is biased to set the Obama efforts into a positive light. But the Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking.
But make no mistake. Not single shred of evidence has been provided that "Russia hacked the election" or had anything to do with various leaks of Clinton related emails. A lot of fluff and chaff was thrown around but not even one tiny bit of evidence.
The effort was clearly to sabotage the announced policy of the incoming administration of seeking better relations with Russia. Obama intended to undermine the will of the voters by abusing instruments of the state.
Excerpts from the piece:
In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.
It is completely normal for any campaign, and especially an incoming administration, to have contacts with foreign government officials. Such contacts are needed to prepare policies and to get the facts right to plan and run a consistent foreign policy. I am very sure that there were hundreds of talks between Trump campaign and incoming administration officials with Israeli, European and Arab officials. These are regular contacts and they do not violate any law. There was and is no reasons at all to pick out talks with Russian officials as something sinister or even illegal. Again - no evidence has been provided that Russia somehow interfered in U.S. elections. None at all. There was no sound reason to give special treatment to campaign contacts with Russia.
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.
Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.
Here the NYT is divulging "sources and methods" - usually the holy grail for the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence is intercepting communication "within the Kremlin"? That is surely of interest to Russian counter-intelligence. One also has to ask who ordered the European intelligence services to watch over U.S. contacts with Russia. Were similar orders given to the Dutch secret services to report on contacts of the Clinton campaign with Israeli officials? Undue influencing attempts of Israeli politicians on U.S. policies are legend. Were they watched? If not why not?
Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested the American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.
Guess what - Trump is right. The "Russian hacking" story is not backed by any evidence at all. It IS cooked up. And to say Trump "accused" the Obama administration of attempts to "discredit his new administration" is quite weak. The article says exactly that. How else could one interpret the following section?
As Inauguration Day approached, Obama White House officials grew convinced that the intelligence was damning and that they needed to ensure that as many people as possible inside government could see it, even if people without security clearances could not. Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators — including the Senate Intelligence Committee, which in early January announced an inquiry into Russian efforts to influence the election.
At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.
There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress. In one instance, the State Department sent a cache of documents marked “secret” to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland days before the Jan. 20 inauguration.
The "intelligence community", it is specifically the CIA here which campaigned on the Clinton side, manipulated the classification of secrets for the sole purpose of instigating witch-hunt investigations against the incoming Trump administration. Such secrets were then used to decapitate the Trump administration with the first casualty being his selected national security advisor Flynn. We currently see an attack on the administration's attorney general Session for a routine talk with the Russian ambassador. This based on "Justice department officials", i.e. FBI flunkies. Why would they know who Session legitimately met in his function as U.S. Senator?
Slandered intelligence analysis was classified in low categories with the aim of distributing it far and wide and to practically guarantee that it would "leak" to the media. The real facts though were hidden as much as possible to provide no material for the Trump administration's defense.
The opposite happened with the most sensitive intelligence, including the names of sources and the identities of foreigners who were regularly monitored. Officials tightened the already small number of people who could access that information. They knew the information could not be kept from the new president or his top advisers, but wanted to narrow the number of people who might see the information, officials said.
Everyone was to receive the slander "analysis" the intelligence services provided but no one was supposed to know the sources and the real facts. This would make sure that the anti-Russia and anti-Trump "analysis" would leak but not the weak bits of facts it is based upon.
To repeat: The Obama administration and the intelligence services spared no effort to sabotage the policies of the incoming Trump administration and prepared the grounds for baseless investigation against it. A lot of dirt is now thrown based on that effort and the hope is that some may stick.
The whole effort by the Obama administration started only after Trump was elected:
In early December, Mr. Obama ordered the intelligence community to conduct a full assessment of the Russian campaign.
In the weeks before the assessment was released in January, the intelligence community combed through databases for an array of communications and other information — some of which was months old by then — and began producing reports that showed there were contacts during the campaign between Trump associates and Russian officials.
Again - there is nothing illegal with such contacts. These are routine and happen all the time. U.S. ambassadors all over the world routinely talk with local politicians in foreign countries. The Russian ambassadors do nothing different. This is known as diplomacy. There was no reason for the incoming administration to avoid such contacts with German, South African, Japanese or Russian officials or semi-officials. They intelligence community knows that there is no evidence that Russia interfered in the election. If it had any it would have long provided it. The ffort is specifically against the announced Russia policy.
Trump was election in part because he promised better relations with Russia. What the intelligence services do here is to undermine the will of the people.
As Joanne Leon opined:
Need to recognize this for what it is. The incumbent president used SkyNet to try to rig election and as blackmail tool on his successor
Building on the illegal moves of the Cheney administration Obama installed and empowered the intelligence instruments and the precedence for such manipulations. Not since the worst days of J. Edgar Hoover has the U.S. seen such an interior assault on politicians and policies.
Trump now hired some partisan Russia expert from the Clinton aligned Brookings to run Russia policy in the NSC. She will institute anti-Russian bias in his policies. This would not have happened under a national security advisor Flynn. For now the Obama assault on Trump's announced policy has succeeded. Those who voted for Trump for a change in Russia policies have been disenfranchised.
I do not prefer Trump policies. Flynn was a maniac and Session is a crazy fossil. But that does not justify this anti-democratic abuse of the foreign policy instruments of the state against the political opponents within the country.
Obama created these tools and now left them for the Trump administration to use. They will come back to haunt the Democrats. What will they say and do when the Trump administration will use these against them?
