Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

[stillrobertpaulsen]

I like Larisa. I think she is one of the most intelligent commentators within the large section of the U.S. liberal intelligentsia who have totally lost their shit over the Putin-Trump angle. One of the great examples of herd action, it has been. Not funny given the stakes. Here's a flat-out gangster who can be brought down 41 different ways and also can be defeated epically just on the politics (should have been!), and they've coalesced around what I think is both the most regressive and dumbest possible hope for Trump removal. I will not be happy about it when she is disappointed, as she very likely will be within the short frame, though I'll make no probabilistic predictions for more than a few months. For now I'm far more in tune with this guy:

JUNE 15, 2017
Red Alert: Russian Focus Might Save Trump’s Hide
by CHRIS FLOYD
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/15 ... umps-hide/

Thanks Jack. I like Larisa too. And I agree with you that Floyd is probably more on the money where the truth of the whole Trump/Putin connections is. Like I said on my blog, it is a convenient distraction so the sheeple will stop focusing on how elections are actually stolen in this country and look at how it might possibly have been stolen but which, upon closer, time-wasting examination, will at best prove an attempt to influence the election as opposed to direct theft. But now that the scope of the investigation has widened to include obstruction of justice look directly at Trump, that might not matter, this might be the shift of focus that will actually bring Orange Hulk Donald down. We'll see.

[seemslikeadream]

^^^^^ MONEY LAUNDERING

More Bad News For Jared Kushner as Mueller Follows the Money


Drip, drip, drip.


MATT TINOCOJUN. 15, 2017 8:05 PM



Andrew Harrer/CNP via ZUMA Wire

Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly now investigating the finances and business dealings of Jared Kushner, according to a report Thursday night from the Washington Post.

Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a top White House advisor with a sprawling portfolio, is just one of many in Trump’s circle whom Mueller is investigating in his ongoing probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The news comes just one day after the Post reported the special counsel is investigating President Trump for possible obstruction of justice.

From the Post:

The Washington Post had earlier reported that investigators were scrutinizing separate meetings that Kushner held with Russians in December — first with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and then with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a state-owned Russian development bank. At the time of that report it was not clear that the FBI was investigating Kushner’s business dealings.

…

At the December meeting with [Russian Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak, Kushner suggested establishing a secure communications line between Trump officials and the Kremlin at a Russian diplomatic facility, according to U.S. officials who reviewed intelligence reports describing Kislyak’s account.

The White House has said the subsequent meeting with the banker was a pre-inauguration diplomatic encounter, unrelated to business matters. The Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been the subject of U.S. sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has said the session was held for business reasons because of Kushner’s role as head of his family’s real estate company. The meeting occurred as Kushner’s company had been seeking financing for its troubled $1.8 billion purchase of an office building on Fifth Avenue in New York, and it could raise questions about whether Kushner’s personal financial interests were colliding with his impending role as a public official.

Mueller’s investigation is still in a relatively early phase, and it is unclear if any criminal charges will be brought when it is complete.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... d-kushner/

Jared Kushner Is Now Under Special Counsel Investigation For His Financial Dealings With Russia
By Sean Colarossi on Thu, Jun 15th, 2017 at 7:45 pm
The investigation into Kushner – Trump's son-in-law and most trusted advisor – appears to have escalated yet again.


Jared Kushner Is Now Under Special Counsel Investigation For His Financial Dealings With Russia
Just a day after the stunning report that Donald Trump is officially under criminal investigation for possible obstruction of justice, The Washington Post is now reporting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s shady business dealings with Russia.

According to the report, the new focus on Kushner’s finances is “part of the probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.”

More from The Washington Post:

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller is investigating the finances and business dealings of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, as part of the probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, according to officials familiar with the matter.



FBI agents and federal prosecutors have also been examining the financial dealings of other Trump associates, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Carter Page, who was listed as a foreign policy adviser for the campaign.



The Washington Post had earlier reported that investigators were scrutinizing separate meetings that Kushner held with Russians in December — first with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and then with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a state-owned Russian development bank. At the time of that report it was not clear that the FBI was investigating Kushner’s business dealings.
As the Post noted, Kushner is just the latest associate of the president to be under scrutiny for questionable business dealings with Russia. Kushner was also already under investigation for his secret meetings with several key Russian players, including Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian banker and Putin spy Sergey Gorgov.

Previously, it was reported that Kushner worked to establish a secret channel of communication between Moscow and the Trump team during the post-election transition phase.

With Thursday’s reporting, the investigation into Kushner – Trump’s son-in-law and most trusted advisor – appears to have escalated yet again, and it’s destroying the myth perpetuated by Trump and his allies that there is nothing to see here.

The idea that this is a witch hunt, as Trump childishly tweeted this morning, is getting more and more laughable as each passing day brings about another questionable tie or secret dealing with Russia taken by this president or those in his orbit.
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/06/15/ ... ussia.html

BTW Pence has lawyered up and his attorney's law firm helped Russian oil project get $14 billion in funding

[seemslikeadream]

The number of potential witnesses to Donald Trump’s possible obstruction of justice is staggering.

Reports: Trump Transition Team Told To Save Russia-Related Documents

By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published JUNE 16, 2017 8:22 AM

A lawyer for President Donald Trump’s transition team told transition and campaign officials to preserve documents related to Russia and Ukraine for probes into Russia’s election meddling, according to a memo obtained by the New York Times and Politico.

The memo from attorney Kory Langhofer also stated that officials should preserve travel records and records on campaign aides Paul Manafort and Carter Page, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, as well as records on Roger Stone and Rick Gates, according to Politico.

“In order to assist these investigations, the Presidential Transition Team and its current and former personnel have a responsibility to ensure that, to the extent potentially relevant documents exist, they are properly preserved,” Langhofer wrote in the memo dated Thursday, per Politico.

The memo did not specify which probes requested the documents, according to Politico and the New York Times.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/t ... sia-probes

All The President’s Witnesses For The Prosecution

Former director of the FBI Robert Mueller talks to students in the security studies and political science program at Anderson University in Anderson, Ind. on Wednesday, March 8, 2017. Mueller lead the FBI from September 2001 to September 2013. (AP photo/The Herald Bulletin, Don Knight)
Don Knight/The Herald-Bulletin
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JUNE 16, 2017 6:00 AM

As special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly works to determine whether the President attempted to obstruct justice with regard to the sprawling federal probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, he need look no further than the words of Donald Trump himself.

Trump’s tweets (“Phony collusion with the Russians story”) and public comments (firing his FBI director because of “the Russia thing”) provide a wealth of evidence for the special counsel as he probes why and how the President may have tried to make the Russia investigation disappear.

Mueller “already has the proof that Trump fired Comey because of the Russia investigation,” according to Cornell Law School professor Jens Ohlin.

“Trump just flat-out said it on national television,” he said. “So what would normally be the most difficult part of the investigation is not difficult at all. The whole world has the evidence.”

It’s rare for the reported target of an obstruction of justice investigation to freely provide so much insight into his motives. But even setting aside Trump’s public statements, Mueller would have a staggeringly long list of known fact witnesses and potential fact witnesses to question.

As the Washington Post revealed this week, the obstruction-of-justice inquiry began just days after James Comey was fired as head of the FBI in early May. Mueller took control of that probe after he was named special counsel, according to the Post.

Based on various officials’ sworn testimony before Congress and what’s been reported about Trump’s deliberations around firing Comey, the list of potential witnesses Mueller could speak with run the gamut from top Justice Department and intelligence officials to White House advisers—even Trump’s golf buddies. Here’s who could have valuable information to offer Mueller.

Star witness James Comey
Two private conversations that Trump had with Comey would be central to Mueller’s investigation. As Comey testified in vivid detail last week, the day after national security adviser Michael Flynn was forced out, Trump asked him to linger behind after an intelligence briefing in the Oval Office and told him he hoped the then-FBI director could let the Flynn probe “go.” In a subsequent phone conversation on March 30, Comey says Trump asked what he could do to “lift the cloud” the ongoing Russia investigation created over his administration.

These requests, combined with Trump’s previous appeal for his “loyalty,” did not feel casual, Comey said.

“I took it as a direction,” he testified. “It is the President of the United States, with me alone, saying ‘I hope this.’ I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.”]

Comey kept detailed contemporaneous memos of the one-on-one conversations he had with Trump, which a friend, Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman, reportedly has turned over to Mueller’s office already. The former FBI director testified last week that he documented those conversations out of concern that the President would “lie” about their interactions.

He also testified that he briefed a number of high-level FBI staff about the contents of the memos so that they could corroborate his accounts. Those individuals, who could serve as fact witnesses for Mueller, include Comey’s chief of staff, Jim Rybecki; then-FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe; general counsel James A. Baker’ and McCabe’s chief counsel. According to Comey, some of those debriefing conversations also included David Bowdich, the FBI’s associate deputy director, and Carl Ghattas, the executive assistant director for the national security branch.

Top intelligence officials
Mueller plans to interview a number of senior intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, National Security Agency head Adm. Mike Rogers, and Rogers’ former deputy, Richard Ledgett, as part of the obstruction investigation, according to the Washington Post.

Shortly after Comey first confirmed that the FBI was investigating possible collusion between Trump campaign staffers and Russian operatives, Trump asked Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to stay behind following a March 22 briefing at the White House, according to the Post. Though Coats later testified he never felt pressured to intervene in the Russia investigation, he reportedly told associates at the time that the President had asked if he could convince Comey to lay off an investigation into Flynn.

Days afterward, Trump reportedly called each Coats and Rogers individually to ask that they publicly deny any evidence of collusion—a request they denied.
Ledgett wrote an internal memo documenting Trump’s call with Rogers, according to the Post and the Wall Street Journal. The Journal noted that during that phone conversation, the President cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election.

Attendees at Valentine’s Day briefing
While Trump cornered Comey alone on Feb. 14 to discuss the investigation into Flynn, a number of other senior White House officials can speak to the circumstances surrounding that one-on-one conversation. As Comey testified, he, Vice President Mike Pence, CIA Deputy Director Gina Haspel, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Counterterrorism Center Director Nick Rasmussen, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, were all present for a counterterrorism briefing.

Comey testified that when Trump asked him to stay behind afterwards, Sessions and Kushner dawdled.

“My sense was the attorney general knew he shouldn’t be leaving which is why he was lingering,” he said. “I don’t know Mr. Kushner well but I think he picked up on the same thing.”

Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, also poked his head into the room at one point, according to Comey, before the President waved him away.

Mueller will likely be interested in asking these individuals whether Trump mentioned the Flynn investigation before, during or after that meeting, as well as asking them if they had any insight into why he asked Comey to speak with him alone, legal experts said.

“The particular story with Sessions and Kushner being sent out has to be confirmed by them,” David Golove, a constitutional law expert at New York University, told TPM.

“He might even want to speak to people who were in physical proximity to those rooms who could testify about what people’s reactions were as they were leaving the room, did anyone say anything when they left the room,” Ohlin said, noting administrative staffers like secretaries or schedulers could provide useful insight.

Anyone involved in deliberations over Comey’s firing
Although White House officials have put forth conflicting explanations for Trump’s abrupt dismissal of Comey, Trump told NBC News’ Lester Holt that he would have ousted Comey no matter what advice he received and that the “Russia thing” was on his mind when he decided to go through with it. Comey testified that he believed the President’s account: that he was fired to “change the way the Russia investigation was being conducted.”

Legal experts said Mueller will likely want to speak with the White House officials who reportedly deliberated with Trump and offered support for Comey’s ouster, particularly Kushner and Pence. Priebus, Trump’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, White House Counsel Don McGahn, and Trump’s longtime bodyguard-turned-director of Oval Office operations Keith Schiller, who delivered Comey’s termination letter to FBI headquarters, also were among those involved, according to the Post.

Both Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who Trump tasked with writing memos to lay out the case for firing Comey, could also serve as fact witnesses for Mueller. The administration initially used those memos to justify the President’s move before Trump himself publicly blew up that narrative in the interview with Holt.

NatSec officials who heard Trump call Comey a “nut job”
Trump bragged about firing Comey, who he referred to as a “nut job,” to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak, in an Oval Office meeting the day after he made the bold move. Comey’s removal, Trump told the top diplomats, lifted “great pressure” on him created by the federal Russia investigation, according to a New York Times report.

The Times’ story was based on a document summarizing the gathering and the White House did not dispute it. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and his deputy, Dina Powell, were all present for the meeting, making them potential fact witnesses.

Other unknown administration officials
The President’s loose lips and the unprecedented leakiness of his administration present another potential problem for Trump, as there is a vast network of White House and administration officials who may be privy to information valuable to Mueller.

These include members of the White House communications team and officials at the DOJ and FBI. The Post spoke to some 30 people for its story on the background of Comey’s firing, indicating just how wide a net could be cast.

A wide network of friends and hangers-on
The final group of potential witnesses includes Trump’s close confidantes from New York City and his various private clubs, who he is known to call up to grouse about his administration’s crisis du jour.

“He frequently calls people who work in the media or friends or former partners of his that he’s relied on for counsel—a kind of eclectic collection of people he considers to be loyal and have good advice,” Ohlin said. “So I’d imagine Mueller would want to speak to them all as well.”

Just this week, Trump ally and Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy kicked off a firestorm by suggesting that the President was considering firing the man now reported to be overseeing the obstruction of justice investigation: Mueller himself.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/robert- ... estigation

Robert Mueller expands special counsel office, hires 13 lawyers

By Faith Karimi and Evan Perez, CNN
Updated 1128 GMT (1928 HKT) June 16, 2017
Mueller may investigate Trump for obstruction



Mueller is looking into questions of Russian interference in US election
Donald Trump calls the probe the "single greatest witch hunt in American political history"
(CNN)Special counsel Robert Mueller has brought 13 lawyers on board to handle the Russia investigation, with plans to hire more, according to his spokesman Peter Carr.

Mueller has assembled a high-powered team of top investigators and leading experts, including seasoned attorneys who've represented major American companies in court and who have worked on cases ranging from Watergate to the Enron fraud scandal.
Among them are James Quarles and Jeannie Rhee, both of whom Mueller brought over from his old firm, WilmerHale. He's also hired Andrew Weissmann, who led the Enron investigation.
"That is a great, great team of complete professionals, so let's let him do his job," former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who investigated President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, told ABC News.
While only five attorneys have been identified, concerns have come up over the political leanings of Quarles, Rhee and Weissmann. They have donated overwhelmingly to Democrats, totaling more than $53,000 since 1988, according to a CNN analysis of Federal Election Commission records.
Widening probe
The special counsel's investigators are looking into questions of Russian interference in last year's election, and plan to speak to senior intelligence officials, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
Mueller is also investigating whether President Donald Trump attempted to obstruct justice, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The Post reported that the interviews represent a widening of the probe to include looking into whether the President obstructed justice in suggesting to his former FBI Director James Comey that Comey drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, as well as for his firing of Comey.
Mueller's investigators have asked for information and will talk to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers, according to a source, who said they have also sought information from recently retired NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett. Coats and Rogers have testified that they were not pressured by the Trump administration.
The interviews are some of the first indications of the efforts of Mueller's newly assembled team.
Ultimately, it would be up to Mueller to decide whether there is enough evidence to recommend pursuing charges on any part of the investigation.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/16/polit ... index.html

looks like something coming out about the trumpster ......he's got real buggy last night ...TARGET GETTIN' REAL BUGGY THIS MORNING

Russian Ambassador To US: We Really, Really Want Our Compounds Back
The Trump administration says no deal has been made to return two compounds seized by the US after Moscow interfered in the 2016 election. But Russian Amb. Sergey Kislyak tells BuzzFeed News he brings up the issue “each and every day."

Posted on June 8, 2017, at 1:01 p.m.
John Hudson

Getty Images
The Russian ambassador to the US says Moscow is ramping up pressure on the Trump administration to return two diplomatic compounds that were seized by the Obama administration in response to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

“We insist that [the property] needs to be returned,” Sergey Kislyak told BuzzFeed News and another reporter at a party in Washington held by the government of Azerbaijan. “It’s a violation of the Vienna Convention. It belongs to Russia … It was seized unlawfully.”

The Kremlin’s push comes ahead of a June 23 visit to St. Petersburg by Tom Shannon, a senior State Department official, who is seeking to address what US officials are calling “irritants” in the US-Russia relationship. It also comes as testimony by former FBI Director James Comey on Thursday brought fresh scrutiny to Trump’s relationship with Moscow.

The compounds in New York and Maryland were seized in December when then-President Barack Obama said they were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes” and expelled 35 Russian officials he called “intelligence operatives.” The Trump administration is now reportedly considering returning the property to Russia, a prospect that is angering a bipartisan group of US lawmakers who say it would send the wrong message about the gravity of interfering in the US election.

Russia had been using the compounds since the days of the Soviet Union as a place for recreation for its diplomats. But for decades, US officials have suspected that it’s also been used for espionage based on information from aerial surveillance.

A senior State Department official told BuzzFeed News that Shannon would travel to St. Petersburg later this month to try to resolve the "irritants" in the US-Russia relationship with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. Separately, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert confirmed that the dispute over the compounds was one of the "irritants" on the agenda between the two countries.

In an escalation of the dispute, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that if the US doesn’t restore Russian access to the property, the Kremlin would “reply in kind regarding US property in Russia.” One option the Trump administration is reportedly considering is letting Russian officials back on the properties, but withholding the buildings’ previous diplomatic immunity status. Such a move would allow US authorities to search the compounds like any other building in the US.

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Kislyak said the dispute over the compound is “something that we raise each and every day” with the United States.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote a letter to Trump urging him not to return the properties.

“Returning the compounds to Russian control is unjustifiable,” the senators, including Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrats Amy Klobouchar and Chris Van Hollen, said.

“It would both make it easier for the Kremlin to continue its intelligence operations in our own backyard and make it clear that they can avoid consequences for their actions. We strongly advise against it,” they wrote.

Trump has repeatedly expressed hope that the US and Russia could get along, but has grown skeptical about that possibility given the media scrutiny of his associations with Russia. In his written testimony on Thursday, Comey described a March 30 phone call with Trump in which the president stressed that the Russia “cloud” was “interfering with his ability to make deals for the country.”

“He hoped I could find a way to get out that he wasn’t being investigated,” Comey said. “I told him I would see what we could do, and that we would do our investigative work well and as quickly as we could.”

In recent days, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has reportedly become a person of interest in the special counsel's investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election. The Washington Post reported that Kushner wanted a secret communications channel with the Kremlin wired through the Russian Embassy before the inauguration. The White House has denied the story.

On Thursday, Comey said such a channel could’ve benefited the Russians. “The primary risk is obvious,” he said. “You spare the Russians the cost and effort of having to break into our communication by using theirs and so make it a whole lot easier for them to capture all of your conversations and to use those to the benefit of Russia against the United States.”

When BuzzFeed News asked Kislyak why Kushner wanted to establish the backchannel with Russia, Kislyak declined to comment.

“We have a policy. We do not comment on our daily contacts in America or anywhere else because we need to respect our interlocutors,” he said.

In recent months, the Russian ambassador has been thrust into the center of the controversy surrounding Trump’s former campaign aides and contacts they had with Russian officials. Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was fired after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his discussions with Kislyak related to US sanctions against Russia. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also came under fire for failing to disclose meetings with Kislyak to Congress.

Kislyak’s stay in Washington is coming to an end, and his replacement is expected to be Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Antonov. But that won't necessarily end his diplomatic career. The United Nations is expected to unveil an office of counterterrorism and Kislyak is reportedly a top contender for the position.

When asked if he’s planning to take the job, Kislyak dodged, saying “ I’m working now on the United States and focusing on my work here.”

Still, he winkingly admitted that he would not mind taking a new posting in New York City where the UN is headquartered.

“ [New York City] was my first post. So for each and every diplomat, the first post is usually your first love,” he said. “I like it a lot. It’s similar to Moscow. The tempo, the culture. People do not walk there, they run.”
https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnhudson/rus ... fcn31y96Nn

A Very, Very Dangerous Situation

By JOSH MARSHALL Published JUNE 16, 2017 11:19 AM

It is very difficult to get my head around the question of whether President Trump will fire Robert Mueller. Trump’s personal attack on Mueller yesterday followed by a personal attack on Rod Rosenstein this morning portends a trajectory that ends with the firing of both men. We don’t know that will happen. The consequences of it happening are so dire that it is hard to imagine it will happen. Yet that appears to be more or less precisely what happened with James Comey. Trump is a man of anger and predictable habits. It would be naive in the extreme to assume Trump won’t eventually fire both men.

Do I think it will happen? I have to say that I do not think it will. But when I scrutinize my reasoning in coming to that judgment my reasoning strikes me as weak.

In any case, it is worth contemplating what will happen if and when that transpires. It is the most overused phrase in the world. But at that moment I believe the US will move into a genuine constitutional crisis.

Let me walk you through it to try to bear out those ominous words.

If and when Trump fires Mueller he will have shown through his actions that he will not allow any investigation of Russia and his campaign to go forward. Bob Mueller is one of the most respected law enforcement officials in the country. His integrity and independence are considered beyond reproach. If one insists on looking under the veil at his own political leanings, he is a Republican – both a registered Republican and the appointee, as FBI Director, of a Republican (George W. Bush). If Mueller is not acceptable to Trump as an investigator, clearly no legitimate investigator is or ever will be.

So, again, if Trump fires Mueller he will have made clear that no investigation of the bundle of Russia-related issues is acceptable. Anyone who took it on after Mueller would know that as soon as the probe heated up or press reports confirmed the seriousness of the investigation that person would also be fired. Would another legitimate person even accept an appointment after that? It’s hard to see. It may be best to say that accepting an appointment under those conditions would be prima facie evidence of unfitness for the job.

I cannot think of a set of facts in which a President makes more clear that they will use the statutory powers of the presidency to render themselves above the rule of law. That sounds like a hyperbolic statement, I know. But look at the facts we’ve just walked through.

At that point, the logical move within our constitutional system is for the Congress to move toward impeaching the President and removing him from office. Whether anything like that is in the offing seems quite doubtful. At least at first.

I actually think it’s possible that such a move would push Trump into severe jeopardy in the Senate. But impeachments don’t happen in the Senate. The trial happens there. Impeachment happens in the House. And there I think the prospects are far more dubious.

At that point we will move in uncharted waters.

My biggest concern – based in part on just observing Trump but specifically how Comey’s firing went down – is that Trump will just do this in the middle of the night (at least figuratively but perhaps literally). With no warning. Perhaps no warning even to himself. I fear that it will all go down quickly and impulsively so no other Republicans outside the White House, Hill leaders etc., have a chance to walk him through the consequences of his actions. He does it and it’s a fait accompli. Now, maybe I’m too sanguine about GOP leaders’ willingness to draw that line. But I’d like them to at least get the chance. And I tend to doubt they’d get it.

Again, my best guess is that Trump will not fire Mueller. But I think I base that on the same mix of experience, logic and gut sense that would have led me to believe that firing Comey was out of the question.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-v ... re-1065280

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The number of potential witnesses to Donald Trump’s possible obstruction of justice is staggering.

Check out the portion I'm bolding and underlining from one of the TPM links you pasted:

Mueller plans to interview a number of senior intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, National Security Agency head Adm. Mike Rogers, and Rogers’ former deputy, Richard Ledgett, as part of the obstruction investigation, according to the Washington Post.

Shortly after Comey first confirmed that the FBI was investigating possible collusion between Trump campaign staffers and Russian operatives, Trump asked Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to stay behind following a March 22 briefing at the White House, according to the Post. Though Coats later testified he never felt pressured to intervene in the Russia investigation, he reportedly told associates at the time that the President had asked if he could convince Comey to lay off an investigation into Flynn.

Wouldn't this constitute a second incidence of obstruction of justice (the first being when Trump asked Comey directly) and possibly a second count were Mueller to pursue a charge?

I think this would be assuming the Washington Post's five anonymous sources check out. I worry about that; reminds me of this scene in All the President's Men, "I'm going to count to ten!"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvKBHCBBdf0

[seemslikeadream]

obstruction of justice and money laundering....casinos/money laundering

the FBI as had it in for trump for a very long long time and this time he is going down biggley

the target is getting buggy


CNN has confirmed Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen has hired Stephen Ryan as his attorney in Russia probe

Mr. Mueller Is Following the Money
And he will not be deterred.


BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JUN 15, 2017

I'd say that shit just got real around the White House on Wednesday night, but shit hasn't been anything but real there ever since the country determined it would be best led for the next four to eight years by a vulgar talking yam. As everyone who follows Preet Bharara on the electric Twitter machine—and why don't you, by the way?—knew was coming, the news that special counsel Robert Mueller had rolled out the railroad artillery broke well after the close of business. From The Washington Post:

The move by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump's conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said. Trump had received private assurances from then-FBI Director James B. Comey starting in January that he was not personally under investigation. Officials say that changed shortly after Comey's firing.
You can't fix stupid, boys. Better men than you have tried.

Five people briefed on the interview requests, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said that Daniel Coats, the current director of national intelligence, Mike Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, and Rogers's recently departed deputy, Richard Ledgett, agreed to be interviewed by Mueller's investigators as early as this week.
Also, never underestimate the destructive power of terrified careerists, as The Daily Beast illustrates:

But some privately concede that Trump is so unpredictable—and so frustrated with the persistence of the investigation and its cost in political capital—that they're not ruling it out. Another White House official conceded that it would be "suicide" if Trump sacked Mueller at this point, but "I'd be insincere if I said it wasn't a concern that the president would try to do it anyway."
Let's see if there's any solace to be found over here with the folks at The New York Times. Oops, no, shit's gotten pretty real there, too, via RawStory:

"A former senior official said Mr. Mueller's investigation was looking at money laundering by Trump associates," a source told the Times. "The suspicion is that any cooperation with Russian officials would most likely have been done in exchange for some kind of financial payoff, and that there would have been an effort to hide the payoffs, most likely by routing them through offshore banking centers." A separate investigation into Russia has also reportedly focused on potential use of offshore banking centers to launder money. In April, House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) visited Cyprus, which "has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions."


It is now painfully clear that Mueller has opened the ballgame on the Trump organization's entire business model, which always has been aromatic but which now has become entangled with the intelligence community, the institutions of government, and the national interest, as interpreted by Robert Mueller. He isn't some roofing specialist that you can stiff and then drag through the courts until he can't afford the trip any more. He isn't someone you can scare off with your usual gang of billable-hour button men. He isn't some dingy Russian banker who can float you a loan to tide you over. He is honest and respected and relentless, and the only way you're going to get rid of him is to fire him. In a way, the country is daring you to do that, just to see if you have the stones for what comes next, and (possibly) as the last excuse it needs to insist on a new president. Go ahead. Make our day.

MUELLER ISN'T SOMEONE YOU CAN SCARE OFF WITH YOUR USUAL GANG OF BILLABLE-HOUR BUTTON MEN.
For a long time, I didn't believe that the president* would bring all this down on himself just to hide the fact that he isn't as rich as he says he is, but now I'm less sure. I think, maybe, that's what's at the bottom of everything else. I think he isn't that rich, so he and the family business allegedly needed freshly laundered Russian money to keep the business—and his image—afloat. Then, of course, the bill came due from Moscow, and that required another set of malodorous transactions which, in turn, required that they be concealed by another set of malodorous transactions, including the firing of James Comey, and so on.

God, the tax returns. If he'd only released the tax returns, and the people had gotten a look at how he does business and how much he's really worth, it's likely none of this happens. Of course, it's also likely he doesn't become president* either, but, what the hell, all indications are he doesn't much like the job, anyway, at least not enough to learn the basics of how to do it properly.

In any event, it appears that we're all going to get a crash course in the crooked side of high finance—like we need another one of those—and in identifying all the various fauna in the wild kingdom of the international real estate game. I love those teachable moments. Truly, I do.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/po ... ey-russia/

First on CNN: House Russia investigators want to bring in Trump digital director

By Tom LoBianco, CNN
Updated 3:16 PM ET, Fri June 16, 2017


Brad Parscale played a crucial role on President Donald Trump's campaign as digital director
Parscale dismissed the idea that online Russian bots would have been effective
(CNN)House Russia investigators are planning to call on Brad Parscale, the digital director of President Donald Trump's campaign, as the congressional and federal probes dig into any possible connections between the Trump digital operation and Russian operatives, congressional sources said this week.

The House Russia investigation is planning to send an invite to Parscale soon, as they begin scheduling witnesses over the summer, sources said. The Senate intelligence committee is also interested in how Russian bots were able to target political messages in specific districts in critical swing states, although it is not clear if Parscale will be called before the Senate panel as well.
The news from the House comes as federal investigators have dug into Jared Kushner's role overseeing Trump's data operation -- although he has not been identified as a target of the probe. Kushner is expected to talk soon with Senate investigators about the campaign's data operation.
Parscale played a critical role behind the scenes on the Trump campaign, directing online spending and voter targeting with the use of a highly sophisticated data bank built by the Republican National Committee. Parscale, was running the Trump Organization's digital operation in early 2015, when he was hired onto the Trump campaign -- months before Trump officially announced his bid.

Parscale told CNN Friday that he had not been contacted by any investigators -- either federal or Congressional.
Senate investigators in particular have been interested in looking for a link between the prevalence of fake news that supported Trump and was pinpointed in key areas of Rust Belt states that ultimately flipped from blue to red -- and helped Trump secure the White House.
"There have been reports that their ability to target this information, some reports at least saying that in the last week of the campaign in certain precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania there was so much misinformation coming talking about Hillary Clinton's illnesses or Hillary Clinton stealing money from the State Department or other. It completely blanked out any of the back and forth that was actually going on in the campaign," Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said at a March 30 hearing.
Interactive: The many paths from Trump to Russia
Warner then added, "One of the things that seems curious is would the Russians on their own have that level of sophisticated knowledge about the American political system, if they didn't at least get some advice from someone in America?"
Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and counterterrorism expert, responded that Russian bots masqueraded as conservative voters to support Trump -- but did not say whether he believed the Russians had any help from an American political operative in picking out their targets.

"Part of the reason those bios had conservative Christian, you know, America, all those terms in it is those are the most common ones. If you inhale all the accounts of people in Wisconsin, you identify the most common terms in it, you just recreate accounts that look exactly like people from Wisconsin," Watts testified. "So that way whenever you're trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information is true it's much more simple because you see somebody and they look exactly like you even down to the pictures. When you look at the pictures, it looks like an American from the Midwest or the South or Wisconsin or whatever the location is. And they will change those, they can reprogram them."
But Parscale dismissed the idea that online bots, controlled by Russian operatives, would have been effective in swinging votes to Trump, noting that Twitter -- where those bots operate -- was not an effective tool for the campaign itself (albeit a highly effective tool for Trump.) Twitter, Parscale said, is designed for shouting a message to extremes on the left and the right, but Facebook is where influencers can be most effective in moving key swing votes.
"Twitter wasn't even something we focused on in the campaign, we didn't feel it mattered, Facebook is where 70% voters focused and was the 500-pound gorilla ... to win the election," Parscale said. "Twitter is not where Trump voters were. Over 95% (of the campaign's online budget) went to Facebook."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/16/politics/ ... d=38786552

The Man Behind Trump’s Bid to Finally Take Digital Seriously

BRAD PARSCALE IS a survivor—at least in Donald Trump’s universe. Today, Parscale, Trump’s digital director, is one of the last men standing as the Trump campaign’s revolving door keeps spinning. And with 80 days left in the campaign, he’s about to get a lot busier.

Trump has cycled through campaign personnel—first Corey Lewandowski, and then today Paul Manafort. Through it all, Parscale has kept his head down, working on the campaign since before Trump even announced his candidacy publicly. But from an office in San Antonio, far from the Washington—New York hub of campaign drama, his influence has only grown.

The bearded, 6-foot-7-inch Kansan was there in Cleveland during the Republican convention, hopping into a car with Trump’s social media manager and pushing his way through the chaos on the convention floor to shoot a Facebook Live video of Trump’s children the night their father received the official nomination. Through it all, he’s remained out of the spotlight, but that may soon change. Tomorrow, the Federal Election Commission releases the presidential campaigns’ July financial disclosures. Parscale says the Trump campaign’s ledger will show an $8.4 million payment to his digital marketing firm, about 90 percent of which was spent on digital ads.1 It’s a massive leap that shows Trump may finally be getting serious about a digital strategy that goes beyond tweets.

In June, the Trump campaign spent just $1.63 million on digital advertising, which itself was still dramatically more than the $21,000 Parscale’s firm, Giles-Parscale, made between October and the end of December 2015. During that same time period, the Clinton campaign paid nearly 100 times that to its digital consulting firm, Bully Pulpit Interactive. During primary season, when his poll numbers were strong, Trump utilized free media exposure to gain an edge on his competitors. Now that Clinton’s dominating the polls, it seems, Trump is not only raising money ($80 million in July), he’s spending it too. And Parscale is helping him do it online.

“Mr. Trump understands the value of digital operations,” he says, “and he’s been extremely supportive of this operation.”


Me and Mr. Trump
Parscale, who grew up in Kansas, says he sees a lot of himself in the man he calls “Mr. Trump.” For starters, like Trump, he’s a political novice who has built a professional reputation for himself in Texas but has never worked in Washington. “Brad is a non-traditional guy, and he’s good for a non-traditional campaign,” says Vincent Harris, a Republican digital strategist who briefly worked for Trump’s campaign.

But more than that, Parscale feels his story parallels Trump’s rise in business. Parscale started out with a small investment in 2004. (Parscale’s was his own $500. Trump’s was his father’s $1 million). He began by cold-calling local clients but soon graduated to major contracts with the likes of the Trump Organization, which led to gigs building websites for Trump Winery and the Eric Trump Foundation. Now he’s managing multi-million dollar advertising budgets for perhaps the most-watched man in the world.

In conversation, Parscale expresses fierce loyalty for his controversial boss. He says Trump gave “a farm boy from Kansas” a chance. “When I was successful, he continued to reward me over and over again, because I worked hard and produced success,” he says.

Still, while his boss called for boycotting Apple and prefers talking about the glory days of trade in Pennsylvania steel country, Parscale exhibits the the forward-looking attitude of the typical tech exec. Among other things, he recently helped found a group called Tech Bloc in San Antonio, which represents the tech industry’s interests there. Among its biggest accomplishments was pushing San Antonio’s city council to reverse its decision to ban Uber from the city. Parscale is proud to say he was “rider zero” for Uber when they launched.

“Tech can be something that can be great for us. We don’t need to fear it,” Parscale says.

And yet the Trump campaign has lagged in embracing tech, both as a campaign tool and a policy priority. Unlike Clinton, Trump has not released anything resembling a tech policy agenda. And while Trump initially rejected the need for data as a crucial tool for targeting voters, Clinton has built a huge tech team in Brooklyn, drawing talent from the likes of Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Even some of Trump’s primary season competitors outstripped his campaign in terms of tech. Now, Trump’s team is finally trying to catch up, and Parscale is at the center.

This Ain’t Hollywood
Just before Trump spoke at the Republican convention, Parscale made a six-figure ad buy on Twitter, purchasing the promoted hashtag, #TextTrump88022. Meanwhile, the campaign has released a truly odd series of ads that feature Trump and various shots of astronauts and other space imagery.

For Harris, who ran digital for Sen. Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential bid, it’s the weirdness of these ads that makes them work. “I think the Trump campaign has shown again to Beltway consultants that this isn’t about $50,000 Hollywood video shoots,” Harris says. “This is about effective digital operations. It’s gritty. It’s fast-paced, and it’s about what the base wants to hear.”

Trump’s attempt to make up the gap via digital ads will be a difficult battle for a candidate who’s already starting from behind.
There is, of course, another reason why Trump’s campaign has to spend more on digital advertising, and that is because the campaign has not reserved much television time. According to a July report in AdAge, between July and November, Trump and his PACs had reserved $654,455 in TV and radio advertising compared to $111 million by Hillary Clinton and her PACs. Though he just recently spent $4 million on a new ad buy, that’s still a small amount compared to what Clinton has planned. That could make Trump’s attempt to make up the gap via digital ads a difficult battle for a candidate who’s already starting from behind and whose base is less likely to see those ads anyway.

“Republican voters in the general election are traditionally older,” says Harris. “Older people traditionally get their news and information from television.”

Still, Parscale is satisfied that the investment in digital produced a serious return for Trump in July. He declined to say what percentage of the $80 million raised was the result of the surge in digital ad spending. But it seems unlikely the campaign will let up on the digital front. Trump’s new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, has spent the last few years sitting atop a far-right digital media empire. He seems to know how the web works. And finally Trump seems ready to spend the money to make the web work for him, if it’s not already too late.
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/man-behin ... seriously/

S.A. web firm might be included in probe of the Trump-Russia ties
By Bill Lambrecht, Washington BureauMay 26, 2017 Updated: May 26, 2017 7:52pm


Brad Parscale, who was the Trump campaign's digital director, waits for an elevator at Trump Tower, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) Photo: Carolyn Kaster, STF / Associated Press / Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Photo: Carolyn Kaster, STF / Associated Press
IMAGE 1 OF 4 Brad Parscale, who was the Trump campaign's digital director, waits for an elevator at Trump Tower, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
WASHINGTON — The FBI’s wide-ranging criminal investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election may include scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s San Antonio-based digital operation overseen by senior White House adviser Jared Kushner.

CNN reported that along with Kushner’s contacts with Russians and his relationship with fired national security adviser Michael Flynn, the FBI is looking at the campaign’s 2016 data analytics programs conducted largely out of San Antonio under the direction of local digital advertising executive Brad Parscale.

In looking at possible ties with Russia, the FBI has collected data on computer bots — software that runs automated scripts over the internet — that pushed negative information on Hillary Clinton and positive information on Trump, the cable network reported.

An FBI spokesman declined comment Friday, and the White House did not respond to messages.

Parscale did not respond to phone messages left at Giles-Parscale, the San Antonio web design and digital marketing company that he co-owns.

Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has not been accused of wrongdoing. His lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said he will cooperate with the FBI if asked.

“Mr. Kushner previously volunteered to share with Congress what he knows about these meetings,” she said in a statement, referring to reports of meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and with a Russian banker. “He will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry.”

Parscale, 41, became heavily involved in the Trump campaign after designing a website for the campaign exploratory committee and carrying out other tasks for the Trump family. He worked under Kushner. By the campaign’s end, Parscale ran Trump’s digital operation, media buys and overall advertising, an exceptionally large role for someone with little experience in political campaigns.

“It was a data-driven campaign, so I was in the middle of it all,” Parscale said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News after the election.

Federal Election Commission reports showed that Giles-Parscale received over $91 million from the Trump campaign and an allied super PAC over an 18-month period.

Parscale noted that while his company ended “in a healthy situation,” much of that money was paid for advertising and vendors.

Parscale remained on the campaign payroll through January and is associated with Trump’s re-election committee. FEC records show that his company received an additional $1.6 million through March for what was described as digital consultation and online advertising.

In the “Project Alamo” operation, Parscale had over 100 people employed on Trump’s behalf last year in San Antonio, many of them digital and media experts.

They worked closely with the Republican National Committee, which invested heavily in data and digital technology after losing the previous two presidential elections. The RNC provided the Trump campaign with a massive database that included details on millions of voters’ attitudes, buying habits and personal information available from public and private sources, combined with information the party had gleaned from contacts over the years.

The Parscale-run operation relied heavily on Facebook both for targeting voters and fundraising, Parscale has said, noting that Facebook helped the campaign raise more than

$260 million.

Along with RNC operatives dispatched to San Antonio, the operation employed staff from Cambridge Analytica, the U.S.-based offshoot of a British company that deploys what it calls “psychographics,” research using personality, values and other voter traits for targeting.

Cambridge was paid $6 million for its work, which Republican operatives described as voter persuasion.

BusinessWeek quoted an unnamed member of the Trump campaign staff late in the campaign as saying that their digital operation used Facebook ads and other means to suppress Clinton’s vote totals with negative messages aimed at African-Americans, young women and segments of liberals.

Parscale said in an earlier interview with the Express-News that his operation’s ability to identify 14.4 million persuadable voters in several swing states just prior to the election was a key to Trump’s victory.

“That’s why we won. We knew just the voters we needed to turn out, and we turned them out in big numbers,” he said.

Parscale’s success earned him the Digital Strategist of the Year Award, presented in March by the American Association of Political Consultants.

While not commenting on the report about FBI scrutiny of Kushner, Parscale has used his Twitter account in recent days to step up attacks on CNN and other news outlets with more than a dozen posts since last weekend.

“SO fake news,” Parscale tweeted May 20 in response to a CNN report that a former Trump staffer wants the president to set up a fund to help associates caught in the Russia investigation pay their legal bills. “Let’s fight back against @CNN.”

In another tweet that day, he wrote: “#1 lesson I’ve learned. Media is the enemy of this country.”
http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/a ... 177097.php

[Iamwhomiam]

Reading into the future, I see his future cell mate's written a tell-all book wherein he reports Trump bragging about how his "bust was the greatest ever and it made more papers headlines than anything ever before." "It's the truth," he went on, "I don't lie."

[Elvis]

[seemslikeadream]

Washington, D.C. is now officially out of lawyers. Emergency legal support is being brought in from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, etc.

Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo has been contacted by FBI in Russia probe and has hired his own attorney, a source confirms.

Trump Parscale Chart
Chart below displays open-source information showing organizations and people connected to President Trump and Brad Parscale as of June 2017. Source links are provided below the chart. Also see SCL/Cambridge Analytica chart and Rosneft-Trump-Putin chart.



Source Links as of June 2017:
PAC payments 2016 election cycle — Open Secrets — (Donald J Trump for President $87,838,376 & Trump Make America Great Again Committee $3,702,533)
Giles Parscale website
Parscale Media LLC — Incorporated 4 Oct 2005 — Active
Parscale Properties LLC — Incorporated 24 Aug 2013 — Active
DevDemon website
Vector Media acquires DevDemon from Parscale in January 2017
Parscale’s El Technology Group, LLC — Incorporated 7 Aut 2003 (status: Franchis Tax Ended)
Lara Trump hired by Giles Parscale March 2017
America First Priorities — Parscale — Ayers — Obst — Bossie — Pierson — Gates
Rick Gates business partner with Paul Manafort
Giles Parscale hired Harris Media
Cambridge Analytica’s Alexander Nix meets Brad Parscale
SCL Balkans in Macedonia — Nicola Spasov & Vlado Andonovski
Rating Center team — Nicola Spasov & Vlado Andonovski
Machiavelli Strategies— Nicola Spasov — Edmond Ademi — Mitch Kates
Additional info not yet in chart:
Parscale purchased tv ad space through National Media
Parscale shared office in Trump Tower with Bannon, Conway and Bossie

https://medium.com/@wsiegelman/trump-pa ... ff531064ef

Steve Bannon “crapping” himself over probe into Donald Trump campaign’s Russian data connections
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 12:16 am EDT Sat Jun 17, 2017 | 0
Home » Politics

The House of Representatives investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal is expanding to include the Trump campaign’s possible data connections to Russia, and is bringing in the campaign’s digital director Brad Parscale for questioning. But according to a political insider, this development has Steve Bannon spooked, as he was closely involved with that digital effort.
After the news broke that the House is indeed probing the Trump campaign’s digital data efforts (link), Republican political strategist Rick Wilson posted the following: “A little bird tells me that a certain White House staff member whose name rhymes with Beeve Stannon is crapping diamonds over Parscale.” (link). This raises a number of possibilities for where this might lead.
During the 2016 election cycle, immediately prior to officially joining the Donald Trump campaign, Steve Bannon was running a voter data analysis company called Cambridge Analytica. Although there is no publicly available proof, there has long been widespread suspicion that the company may have been working with voter data stolen by Russian hackers – both during the 2016 U.S. election and during the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom which preceded it. If this were to be proven about Bannon’s company, and if it were to be tied to Brad Parscale’s online voter data efforts for the Donald Trump campaign, it could be legally devastating for everyone involved. It raises the question of what the House committee knows that the public doesn’t. And the news may be even worse for Bannon.
According to another political insider, Claude Taylor, Steve Bannon is now under investigation for obstruction and physically threatening other members of the White House staff (link). In the past months the Trump-Russia scandal and investigation has largely been focused on the likes of Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. But now it appears the Russia investigation spotlight may finally be increasingly shifting toward Steve Bannon.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/st ... ssia/3492/

[seemslikeadream]

Why Mercer bought election: "IRS demandng $7 billion..back taxes frm world’s most profitable hedge fund"

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
MAY 01, 2017 6:00 AM
Billionaire Robert Mercer did Trump a huge favor. Will he get a payback?
BY SCOTT CHRISTIANSON AND GREG GORDON
McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON
The Internal Revenue Service is demanding a whopping $7 billion or more in back taxes from the world’s most profitable hedge fund, whose boss’s wealth and cyber savvy helped Donald Trump pole-vault into the White House.

Suddenly, the government’s seven-year pursuit of Renaissance Technologies LLC is blanketed in political intrigue, now that the hedge fund’s reclusive, anti-establishment co-chief executive, Robert Mercer, has morphed into a political force who might be owed a big presidential favor.

With Trump in the Oval Office, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who has become his public voice, seem armed with political firepower every which way you look – and that’s even though presidential adviser Stephen Bannon, their former senior executive and political strategist, appears to have recently lost influence.

Since the IRS found in 2010 that a complicated banking method used by Renaissance and about 10 other hedge funds was a tax-avoidance scheme, Mercer has gotten increasingly active in politics. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, he doled out more than $22 million to outside conservative groups seeking to influence last year’s elections, while advocating the abolition of the IRS and much of the federal government.

The Mercer Family Foundation, run by Rebekah Mercer, also has donated millions of dollars to conservative nonprofit groups that have called for the firing of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, an Obama administration holdover whose five-year term expires in November.


Trump's Biggest Donors Are At Odds With Administration Team
Inform


One of them, the Heritage Foundation, received $1.5 million from the Mercer foundation from 2013 through 2015, according to its most recent public tax filings.

BOB HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY GOOD AT LEVERAGING HIS MONEY. . . . BOB’S BEEN VERY DISSATISFIED WITH U.S. POLITICS FOR MANY YEARS. . . . I REMEMBER HIM BEING VERY OUTSPOKEN ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON.
Renaissance co-founder Nick Patterson, who recruited Mercer to the hedge fund in 1993

IRS leader Koskinen has said publicly that he intends to finish his term. On his watch, the agency hasn’t been cowed by the Mercers.

The IRS recently released a little-noticed advisory stating that its top targets in future business audits will include so-called “basket options,” the instruments that Renaissance and some other hedge funds have used to convert short-term capital gains to long-term profits that have lower tax rates.

But Renaissance, with assets estimated at $97 billion on Dec. 31, 2016, has shown no signs of buckling to the IRS’s demands.

Nor has there been a hint as to whether Trump, a real estate developer who has refused to make his tax returns public, will intercede. The White House declined to respond to questions about the matter.

Richard Painter, chief White House ethics adviser under President George W. Bush, said the optics surrounding the Mercers’ political connections and the IRS case “are terrible.”

“The guy’s got a big case in front of the IRS,” said Painter, now a University of Minnesota law professor who is also vice chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “He’s trying to put someone in there who’s going to drop the case. Is the president of the United States going to succumb to that or is he not?”

“Are we going to have a commissioner of the IRS who aggressively enforces the law and takes good cases to Tax Court or (somebody who) just throws away tax cases so billionaires don’t have to pay their taxes and the rest of us can pay more taxes?”

The case against Renaissance was initiated before Koskinen became commissioner.

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It’s illegal for the IRS to discuss ongoing tax cases, and the agency declines to comment about Renaissance. But in 2014, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a blistering report detailing Renaissance’s use of so-called “basket options” trades by its employees-only Medallion Fund to slash taxes on $34 billion in profits. The panel estimated that Renaissance’s back tax bill dating to the earliest IRS audit would be at least $6.8 billion.

Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesman for the Mercers, declined to comment on the case.

He pointed McClatchy to a Renaissance statement issued in 2014 in response to the Senate findings. Renaissance said then that its tax calculations were “appropriate under current law” and that it had “cooperated fully” with the IRS inquiry.

Robert Martin, a lawyer in the IRS’s chief counsel’s office who co-authored the agency’s legal notices on the issue in 2010 and 2014, said the law covering reporting of the options profits had held up for more than 75 years.

Trump has the legal authority to replace Koskinen and the IRS’s chief counsel, the other agency position requiring Senate confirmation. The latter post is occupied by an acting chief counsel.

John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University who monitors the behavior of Wall Street firms, said the Mercers might win Koskinen’s ouster, but he doubts they could undermine the case.

“I don’t know they’re going to get their candidate in,” he said, “and I’m not sure many candidates are going to try to reverse the staff on something that’s already deeply advanced in either litigation or negotiation.”

Dennis Ventry, an expert in tax law policy from the University of California at Davis School of Law, said he was unaware of any instance in which a president had intervened to stop a tax audit or prosecution. So far, he said, Trump “has been remarkably restrained regarding the IRS.”

THE GUY’S GOT A BIG CASE IN FRONT OF THE IRS. HE’S TRYING TO PUT SOMEONE IN THERE WHO’S GOING TO DROP THE CASE. IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES GOING TO SUCCUMB TO THAT OR IS HE NOT?
Richard Painter, chief White House ethics adviser under President George W. Bush

A former IBM computer scientist, Mercer has forged a web of relationships reaching high into the new administration.

At the top is Bannon, a former senior executive of Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm in which Mercer owns the largest stake. The firm, a U.S. subsidiary of a British company, is credited with playing a key role in Trump’s victory by providing his campaign with electronic dossiers shedding light on the views of 220 million Americans.

Mercer funded Bannon to produce hard-edged political films and a book attacking Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the presidential race. Mercer also invested millions of dollars to become majority owner of far-right Breitbart News with Bannon at the helm. The Mercers and Bannon helped to fuel conservatives’ anger over the IRS’s 2013 investigations challenging the tax-exempt status of right-leaning nonprofit groups, and Mercer funded a number of efforts calling for Koskinen’s impeachment.

On March 29, at least 30 conservative leaders, including a Heritage Foundation representative, converged on the White House for an off-the-record meeting with Trump aides. The groups pressed a range of agendas, especially urging Koskinen’s firing, said one attendee, President Tom Fitton of the nonprofit group Judicial Watch.

In a phone interview, Fitton said “the conservative movement is united in its belief there need to be changes at the IRS,” but he voiced frustration “that the Trump administration seems to be of two minds on whether or not to replace” Koskinen before his term expires.

Fitton declined to identify other attendees, and the Trump White House has abandoned a longtime practice of publicly releasing visitor logs.

The meeting was organized by White House aide Paul Teller, who worked with Rebekah Mercer on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s failed Republican presidential campaign – an effort that Robert Mercer backed with $13.5 million in donations to an independent, pro-Cruz super PAC freed of the usual contribution limits. Mercer gave millions of dollars more to the committee after Cruz bowed out and the super PAC threw its financial allegiance to Trump.

Other groups that have joined the anti-IRS and anti-Koskinen choruses also got money from the Mercer foundation – $600,000 to the Cato Institute in 2014 and 2015 and $250,000 to Citizens for Self-Governance in 2014.

Perhaps the biggest Mercer foundation beneficiary has been the Citizens United Foundation, which received $3.8 million from 2011 through 2015. The foundation’s advocacy arm, Citizens United, wants Koskinen to be impeached. It also spearheaded attacks on Clinton last year over her use of a personal email account to conduct official business during eight years as secretary of state. David Bossie, who is president of both Citizens United entities, and Rebekah Mercer collaborated on the super PAC that backed Trump and later as members of Trump’s transition team.

“Bob (Mercer) has always been very good at leveraging his money” in both business and politics, said Nick Patterson, a Renaissance co-founder and former intelligence code-breaker who recruited Mercer to the hedge fund in 1993. “Bob’s been very dissatisfied with U.S. politics for many years.”

Spokespeople for the Heritage Foundation, Cato, Citizens for Self-Governance and Citizens United did not respond to requests for comment.

Robert Mercer became co-CEO at Renaissance, or RenTech, in November 2009 as the federal government was cracking down on abuses that had contributed to the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Depression.

As a high-volume, high-frequency trader, RenTech’s role in the crisis attracted scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the IRS. Federal agents were alarmed by what they found.

In 2010, the IRS issued a public memorandum warning hedge funds and banks about using “basket options,” structures in which banks loaned funds for the traders to purchase derivatives, which they held in “baskets.” It didn’t mention RenTech by name.

The IRS memo said that hedge funds – not their partner banks – controlled the underlying assets and thus should pay taxes at a higher capital gains rate.

Some hedge funds and banks stopped using basket options, but RenTech persisted.

Then, in July 2014, Democratic Chairman Carl Levin of the Senate Investigations Subcommittee and its ranking Republican, Arizona Sen. John McCain, issued the report accusing Renaissance of a giant tax dodge on hundreds of millions of options trades dating to 1999.

The panel said basket-trading also had enabled RenTech to dramatically increase its leverage, meaning it could borrow up to 10 times more money against its securities portfolio.

Following the Senate investigation, the IRS issued a notice in 2015 that left no doubt basket-option contracts were taxable as ordinary income.

Without identifying the affected party, IRS attorney Martin confirmed in a phone interview that one ongoing IRS enforcement case stems from basket trades. He said such options cases came down to ensuring that financial instruments were defined for what they really were.

“If you are going to call it a derivative . . . it has to function like a derivative,” he said. “And if it functions like a brokerage account, that’s how it has to be treated.”

The Renaissance case is not yet in tax court.

In the years since the case began, the father-daughter Mercer team has set an agenda that amounts to a full-fledged assault on the established order.

Besides the IRS, targets have included former President Barack Obama, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Justice, various Democratic and moderate Republican members of Congress, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and burdensome regulations and agencies that hinder Mercer’s energy investments.

Mercer has called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a mistake and has voiced disdain for other federal measures to protect the rights of African-Americans and other minorities.

The Mercers’ foundation gave nearly $11 million from 2011 to 2014 to the Media Research Center, an advocacy group whose “sole mission,” according to its website, “is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media.”

In a rare public statement weeks before Trump’s upset victory, the Mercers said they believe that “America is finally fed up and disgusted with its political elite.”

“Trump is channeling this disgust,” they said, “and those among the political elite who quake before the boom-box of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces.”

In 2010, the same year the IRS issued its memo, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling lifting restraints on how much money wealthy donors such as the Mercers may spend to influence election outcomes.

RenTech soon tripled its lobbying expenditures. Last year, it paid $300,000 to a Washington lobbyist and tax strategist, James Miller, a former high-ranking attorney in the IRS’s office of chief counsel. Miller’s public disclosures say his lobbying topics included taxes on derivatives.

And by 2014 the Mercer Family Foundation had distributed $70 million in donations, mainly to conservative nonprofit groups.

By 2016, Renaissance’s founder and chairman, Jim Simons, was one of the Democratic Party’s top backers, and Mercer was a leading Republican donor, making RenTech a leading player in national politics.

Some of Mercer’s projects sought to unseat his Republican adversaries, such as McCain, who became the target of negative ad campaigns during a primary race.

Meanwhile, Rebekah Mercer accumulated so much clout she has been credited with influencing Trump’s choices of several top appointees, including Bannon, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, resigned in February after revelations that he had misled the White House about post-election discussions with Russia’s ambassador.

In January, Rebekah Mercer attended a private meeting in which she had “substantative communications” with Jay Clayton, Trump’s likely nominee to chair the SEC, Clayton later revealed in response to questions from the Senate Banking Committee in advance of his confirmation hearings. The SEC regulates hedge funds.

The Mercers’ struggle didn’t end with Trump’s election.

Bannon, the former Mercer political strategist who now speaks for the White House, seemed to capsulize it in a speech to conservative activists in February.

The goal, he said, amounts to nothing less than unfettered American capitalism and the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Christianson is a McClatchy special correspondent.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politic ... 54324.html

[cptmarginal]

But Kushner's contacts with the Russians came as his family's real estate firm was already in talks with Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese firm with murky ties to the country's government, to invest $4 billion into 666 Fifth Ave.

When Bloomberg News reported that a possible deal between Kushner and Anbang was in the works, the Chinese firm quickly put the kibosh on the story.

"The information about Anbang investment in 666 Fifth Avenue is not correct, there is no investment from Anbang for this deal," the company said in a statement.

NBC News reached out to a Kushner Companies spokesperson and asked point blank whether the purpose of the alleged back channel to Moscow was to find investors for 666 Fifth Ave. A spokesman there declined to comment.

Image: A building at 666 Fifth Avenue, owned by Kushner Companies
A building at 666 Fifth Avenue, owned by Kushner Companies, rises above the street in New York on March 30, 2017. Lucas Jackson / Reuters file
The same question was posed twice to Kushner's White House spokesman Joshua Raffel, a well-regarded former Hollywood publicist. He forwarded an earlier response from another White House flack, Hope Hicks, who said Kushner "was acting in his capacity as a transition official and had many similar discussions with foreign representatives after the election."

"For example, he also started conversations with leaders from Saudi Arabia that led to the President's recent successful international trip," Hicks's statement read.

RELATED: Kushner Asked to 'Lay Low' After Russia Reports

Earlier, when it was first revealed that Kushner had been in contact with the Russians, Trump said he had "total confidence" in him and defended his son-in-law as a "very good person."

National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster has told reporters he's "not concerned" about reports Kushner was in contact with the Russians. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly echoed that during an appearance on Meet the Press.

Play Kelly: 'I Don't See Any Big Issue' with Kushner's Russia Contacts Facebook Twitter Embed
Kelly: 'I Don't See Any Big Issue' with Kushner's Russia Contacts 4:13
"Just because you have a back channel, if indeed that's what Jared was after, doesn't mean that he then keeps everything secret," he said.

Kushner is married to Trump's daughter, Ivanka. He is also the son of New Jersey-based real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, who served 14 months in a federal prison camp for making illegal campaign contributions — and for retaliating against his brother-in-law by hiring a prostitute to seduce him.

When Charles Kushner was released, the family set its sights on Manhattan. Their first attempt at buying a marquee building at 1211 Sixth Avenue ended in failure. So in October 2006, they went after 666 Fifth Ave., which was owned at the time by the Tishman Speyer Properties.

RELATED: Kushner Met With Russian Banker Who Is Putin Crony

In the Book of Revelations and in popular culture, 666 is the "number of the beast."

It was young Kushner himself who placed the call to Rob Speyer, the son of Tishman Speyer co-founder Jerry Speyer, according to New York Magazine.

"This isn't the way we do deals in New York," an angry Scott Latham, the broker representing Tishman Speyer, reportedly said.

The deal was saved, according to the magazine, when Kushner and Speyer had a quiet word in the hallway.

Asked by email about the New York Magazine account, Latham wrote back, "There are multiple points in the story that are not true." He did not respond to a call and second email from NBC News asking for specifics.

Kushner, however, was clearly delighted by his purchase.

Image: A sign hangs on a building at 666 Fifth Avenue, owned by Kushner Companies
A sign hangs on a building at 666 Fifth Avenue, owned by Kushner Companies, in New York on March 30, 2017. Lucas Jackson / Reuters file
"In this particular transaction, we bought really the center of the world," Kushner told The Real Deal in October 2007. "It doesn't get any better than that."

Kushner Companies put $500 million of its own money into the purchase and took out a $1.2 billion mortgage and additional loans to cover the rest of the purchase. The company then moved its offices from Florham Park, New Jersey to the 15th floor of what was supposed to be their flagship building.

The timing could not have been worse.

In 2008, the markets melted down. With the recession dragging rents down, the Kushners were forced to sell off parts of the building to cover their debt and then renegotiate the deal to avoid foreclosure.

Then in 2011, the Vornado real estate company bought 49.5 percent of the building's office space for $80 million. But the building still wasn't covering its operating costs.

RELATED: Kushner Kin's China Sales Pitch Is 'Corruption, Pure and Simple'

Meanwhile, the Kushners commissioned architect Zaha Hadid to design a new 1,400-foot tower to replace the building on the site. Then they began looking for investors to kick in $3.3 billion of the projected $7.5 billion it will cost to demolish the old building and replace it with a new building, the New York Times reported.

Then in March, Bloomberg News reported Anbang was considering investing $4 billion in the tower — an apparent sweetheart deal that would have reduced the Kushners' mortgage "to about a fifth of its current amount" and give them a $400 million payout.

A company spokesman told Bloomberg that Kushner had sold his ownership stake in 666 Fifth Avenue to family members so the deal would pose no conflict of interest with his role as White House adviser.

But Anbang is believed to be so intertwined with the Chinese government that former President Barack Obama declined to stay at the Waldorf Astoria New York, which Anbang owns, for fear of being bugged

Now:

https://qz.com/1005466/a-chinese-tycoon ... f-absence/

A Chinese tycoon just went on a very mysterious leave of absence
Written by Tripti Lahiri - June 14, 2017

How quickly the mighty can fall in China.

Last November, Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of Chinese financial giant Anbang Insurance Group, was having dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, which Anbang owns, with Jared Kushner. Kushner’s father-in-law had just been elected president of the United States. A property deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars was under discussion, according to the New York Times. This week, Chinese media reported late Tuesday that the insurance mogul had been detained by Chinese authorities.

In a June 13 statement, the Beijing-based Anbang Insurance Group said that Wu “is currently unable to fulfill his role for personal reasons. He has authorized relevant senior executives to continue running the business, which is operating as normal.” A company representative said Anbang couldn’t comment further. The business magazine Caijing reported that Wu was detained on Friday in China’s capital, but the piece was later taken down.

In recent years, the privately held Anbang, founded in 2004 and now a company with some 30,000 employees, often created headlines for its ambitious forays overseas. That very ambition may have led to Wu’s downfall, despite his connections, which include a marriage to a grand-daughter of Deng Xiaoping, by drawing ever-increasing attention to the group’s financial structure, and its reluctance to answer questions over it.

Last year Anbang walked away from a roughly $14 billion acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, a move many attributed to its being pressed to disclose more details to allow the hotel chain to better evaluate the offer. In March, Kushner Companies said it had ended talks with Anbang over its Manhattan property. Another deal, to acquire US insurer Fidelity & Guaranty Life, collapsed in April after Anbang didn’t satisfy financial queries from state regulators.

At the end of April, financial publisher Caixin Media released an extensive report on Anbang, describing “complicated transactions that form a maze of capital flow involving more than 100 companies, all linked to the company’s mysterious Chairman Wu Xiaohui.” It also noted that Anbang’s capital and assets had ballooned despite the relatively low market share of its insurance products, citing figures from China’s insurance regulator. Anbang responded by accusing Caixin of issuing “libelous reports” after failing to get business from the insurance giant, and said it would take legal action. Caixin Media Group in turn called the statement defamatory and said it maintains high ethical standards and “sets a strict firewall between its business and newsroom operations, preventing any possible erosion of its journalistic independence.”

The past month has seen Anbang hit by a slew of regulatory actions. In May, authorities stopped Anbang from issuing new products for three months (paywall).

Wu is the third tycoon in less than a year to either disappear from sight or fall out publicly with Chinese authorities. In late January, billionaire Xiao Jianhua disappeared from a posh Hong Kong hotel, with a source saying he was taken away in a wheelchair with a cloth over his head. Meanwhile, from his New York City penthouse, property mogul Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Gwok, has been leveling accusations of corruption against high-level Communist Party officials.

Echo Huang and Visen Liu contributed to this piece.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... cktake-q-a

1. What is Anbang and how big is it?

It’s a closely held insurance and investment firm headquartered in Beijing, and a relatively young one at that. Anbang started out in 2004 as an auto, property and casualty insurer and only got into life insurance in 2010. Now, it also operates in banking, asset management and financial leasing, with what it says are assets of $290 billion and 30,000-plus employees. In its short existence, the company has expanded to become the No. 2 insurer in China in terms of life insurance premiums, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. The company was mulling an initial public offering in Hong Kong.

2. Who runs Anbang and who owns it?

Wu, as chairman and chief executive officer, is the undoubted No. 1. Who owns it is less clear. According to a New York Times report, the vast majority of Anbang is collectively owned by relatives of Wu or his wife, Zhuo Ran. A company official disputed that report without providing details. Wu cemented ties with a prominent family when he married the granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader who promoted market-economy reforms, and is said to have close links with political families including that of former premier Zhu Rongji. During Anbang’s takeover splurge, Wu has personally negotiated deals without using traditional investment banks.

3. What’s happened to Wu?

The company issued a statement June 14 saying Wu was unable to perform his duties for personal reasons. Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported the following day that Wu is being questioned in a joint investigation including the police and a special unit of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. The scrutiny doesn’t mean Wu is accused of any crime or will face charges. The authorities are said to be examining Anbang transactions including acquisitions overseas and their funding. The probe also fits into a broader investigation of possible market manipulation by insurers, the people familiar said. They didn’t specifically define the term “economic crimes.”

4. And what about Anbang?

Authorities have asked banks to suspend business dealings with the insurer, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Separately, at least six large Chinese banks have already stopped selling Anbang policies at their branch networks, according to people with knowledge of their operations.

5. So Anbang enjoyed shopping?

China’s state media likened Wu’s ascent to “the Warren Buffett model” of using insurance income to fund wider ambitions: Anbang says on its website its aim is to become a “comprehensive and globalized financial services group.” Anbang has a few hundred managers searching for overseas investment opportunities and looks at more than 1,000 deals a year, Wu said in March. Those staff have “accumulated enough mileage to travel to the moon twice,” he once quipped.

6. How has Anbang taken to deal-making?

Anbang has drawn attention for making preemptive offers, disrupting transactions already in place and often paying large premiums. It paid a record for a single American hotel with its Waldorf Astoria purchase and in 2016 agreed to buy Strategic Hotels & Resorts, owner of 16 high-end U.S. hotels, for about $6.5 billion. It also made a surprise $14 billion offer for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide last year before walking away with scant explanation. An agreement to acquire Fidelity & Guaranty Life was canceled in April. Its spending spree came to a virtual halt at the end of 2016.

7. And Anbang likes New York?

The company had been in talks to invest in the proposed redevelopment of 666 Fifth Ave. in New York, the marquee holding of Kushner Cos., the family company of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Talks broke off in March.

8. How did Anbang get so big so fast?

Fueling its growth have been insurance policies that are popular with smaller insurers seeking to boost market share, including single-premium, high-yield products, many of which can be redeemed in two years at a profit. The practice of selling such products to gain scale is dubbed in China as “corner overtaking,” a term borrowed from auto racing indicating that the strategy can be risky yet effective. China’s regulator last year imposed caps on sales of such products, warning that they posed financial risks.

[8bitagent]

OH MY GOD DID YOU GUYS HEAR ABOUT TRUMP AND RUSSIA???

[8bitagent]

Am I the only who sees this "Trump Russia" non story simply the Democrats pissed off the conspiracy collusion to fuck over and sabotage Bernie Sanders was
exposed thru the Podesta/DNC leak dump? Be it if it was Assange, Kim Dot Com, "Russians" or the ghost of Seth Rich

[Elvis]

Am I the only who sees this "Trump Russia" non story simply the Democrats pissed off the conspiracy collusion to fuck over and sabotage Bernie Sanders was
exposed thru the Podesta/DNC leak dump? Be it if it was Assange, Kim Dot Com, "Russians" or the ghost of Seth Rich

I agree that it's a huge distraction from the broadly much more important story of what the DNC did to Sanders (imo half a dozen or more people should go to prison for that).

However, Trump's money-laundering schemes mostly involve Russians, and he owes a lot of money to Russian mob types, so—considering Trump is President of the United States, that's sort of a big deal, and likely to end his presidency early (and not soon enough).

But, yes, the widespread notion that Russia had a major impact on the outcome of the U.S. election is horseshit. In my opinion.

[seemslikeadream]

Yes this thread has been about trump owing and doing business with the Russian mob for about 55 pages now...that's is a big deal


you can't say trump without saying Russian mob money ...they are one and the same

Do Trump's Murky Financial Ties to Russia Connect to Money Laundering?
Investigators have only begun to follow the money.
Federal investigators continue to dig into Russia's cyberattack on the US election and the Trump administration's possible involvement—but as bad as that intrusion and collusion may be, Trump's opaque financial dealings could prove even more perilous for the president.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -manafort/

7 billion dollars is a big fucking deal...at least to the Mercers it is....enough to collude...buy and install trump as president

oh Mercer if you had only stuck with Cruz but he didn't win and you had to go with the guy married to the Russian mob....too bad

Why FBI can't tell all on Trump and Russia


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSpFtCmoD5o

there is a hearing on getting Felix Sater court records unsealed on Monday....that is a really BIG deal


Trump hasn't been in the hotel/casino business for last 15 years. He's been in the Russian Mob money laundering business.

Learning Eye-Popping Details About Mr Sater
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lea ... t-mr-sater

MORE ABOUT FELIX SATER — THE PROBLEMATICAL FRIEND TRUMP FORGOT
FBI Informant at the Heart of Trump-Russia Story
https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/05/felix ... mp-forgot/

Donald Trump And The Felon: Inside His Business Dealings With A Mob-Connected Hustler Felix Sater
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardbeh ... 690f5b2282

Trump’s Organized Crime Ties Bring Blackmail to the White House
Says one former business partner, "The headline will be ‘The Kazakh Gangster and President Trump.'"
http://www.salon.com/2017/04/23/trumps- ... ite-house/

Human rights lawyer Scott Horton reported "Among the powerful facts that DNI missed were a series of very deep studies published in the [Financial Times] that examined the structure and history of several major Trump real estate projects from the last decade—the period after his seventh bankruptcy and the cancellation of all his bank lines of credit. ... The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources. He was their man.

"... his real estate deals were used to hide not just an infusion of capital from Russia and former Soviet states, but to launder hundreds of millions looted by oligarchs. All Trump had to do was close his eyes to the source of the money, and suddenly empty apartments were going for top dollar.... real estate has an arbitrary value. Is that apartment worth $1 million? Two million? Why not $3 million for a buyer who really wants it? When the whole transaction is just one LLC with undisclosed ownership paying another LLC with undisclosed ownership, it’s even neater than hiding the money in an offshore account."

Donald Trump used the mob-controlled concrete company S&A Concrete to build Trump Plaza condos. The company used underpaid undocumented Polish workers, most of whom entered the country illegally, lacked hard hats, and slept on the site. Trump avoided labor troubles, like picketing and strikes, and job safety inspections. But Trump and his associates were found guilty in 1991 of conspiring to avoid paying pension and welfare fund contributions.

The relationship beteen Donald Trump and Felix Sater, whose father is a reputed Russian Organized Crime boss, represented a rather direct link between the presidential candidate and Russian Organized Crime. The Russian émigré — a twice-convicted felon with ties to the Mafia — appeared in photos with Trump, and carried a Trump Organization business card with the title “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.” Trump confused when asked under oath in a 2013 about his relationship to the Russian émigré.

Sater served prison time for a grisly 1991 assault at the El Rio Grande restaurant and bar in New York. According to court documents, Sater allegedly told a man at the bar, “I’ll kill you. I’ll rip your f****** head off and stick it down your throat.” Sater then allegedly grabbed a frozen margarita from the bar, flung the contents in the air, smashed the glass on the bar, and stabbed the man in the cheek and neck, breaking his cheek and jaw, lacerating face and neck and severing nerves. He was convicted of first degree assault.

Bayrock Group LLC was a real estate development firm that partnered with Trump on numerous projects after renting office space from the Trump Organization. Sater is a top Bayrock executive in the Bayrock Group, which is headquartered in Trump Tower. The founding chairman of Bayrock is Tevfik Arif, who has reputed Russian organized crime ties. In 2010 he was charged in Turkey for smuggling underage girls into the country for prostitution. Another principal in the deal is Russian émigré Tamir Sapir, who also lives in Trump Tower. Sapir’s executive vice president and top aide, Fred Contini, pled guilty in 2004 to “participating in a racketeering conspiracy with the Gambino crime family for 13 years.”

Sater pled guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Bonanno crime families. The connection to Felix Sater dated to the early 2000s. After Sater's criminal history and past ties to organized crime came to light in 2007, Trump distanced himself from Sater. Less than three years later, Trump tapped Sater for a business development role that came with the title of senior adviser to Donald Trump.

Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, FL, describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world”. In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries. Trump uses a recruiter based in upstate New York, Peter Petrina, to find foreign workers for his resorts, golf clubs and vineyard. Petrina is of Romanian descent and has an office in Romania.

Trump pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs. Guest workers can be attractive to employers because they are essentially a captive work force, since they can work only for the company that sponsored the visa.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... -crime.htm

GOLD DIGGERS


Dark Data: Trump Backers Bankroll Firm Developing Psychological Profiles of Every U.S. Voter
Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica, and how billionaires are profiling voters.

and the Mercers' 7 billion reasons for getting trump elected
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politic ... 54324.html

collusion Mercers/Russian....soon everyone will know who Brad Parscale is

Trump hasn't been in the hotel/casino business for last 15 years. He's been in the Russian Mob money laundering business.

Claude Taylor‏
@TrueFactsStated
Sealed indictments out of Eastern District of Virginia-under Dana Boente. Trump, Manafort and Flynn-among others under sealed indictment.

WHY FBI CAN’T TELL ALL ON TRUMP, RUSSIA

The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot tell us what we need to know about Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia. Why? Because doing so would jeopardize a long-running, ultra-sensitive operation targeting mobsters tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and to Trump.http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/03/27/fbi-cant-tell-trump-russia/

WWW EXCLUSIVE: FELIX SATER LINKS TRUMP TO COMEY’S REPLACEMENT

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifying during US Senate hearing on Global Threats, May 11, 2017. Photo credit: Watch the video on C-SPAN
President Donald Trump’s own words link the firing of James Comey as FBI director to the Bureau’s Russia probe. That move, however, might not have been well thought out because Andrew McCabe, Comey’s deputy and temporary replacement, could have unique firsthand knowledge of potential ties between Trump and organized crime in the former Soviet Union.

This creates an intriguing if complex and nuanced situation that could influence Trump as he decides whether to replace McCabe as interim director.

How this important but overlooked factor — discussed in no other reporting of the drama around the Comey firing, the search for an interim FBI director, McCabe, and Trump — will play out is uncertain. But the importance of McCabe’s prior history is part of the hidden backstory between the FBI and Trump.

First, a quick review.

In an exclusive WhoWhatWhy investigation published in March, we told the story of Felix Sater, the Russian-born financial criminal whose real estate development firm Bayrock partnered with Trump on numerous troubled projects — while Sater was working as an FBI informant. Further, pending civil litigation alleges that Bayrock, whose offices were just a floor beneath Trump’s in Trump Tower, served as a massive money laundering operation for funds from the former Soviet Union.

In the mid-1990s, Sater had been one of the chiefs of State Street, a mobbed-up financial brokerage that racked up tens of millions of dollars in profits in a few short years and fleeced thousands. Sater and 21 others were swept up in the high-profile FBI operation that targeted the brokerage, which included associates of both Italian crime families and the Russian mob — which includes Sater. Sater then “flipped” and became an informant, after pleading guilty to a single count of racketeering. He was working at Bayrock a few short years later.

It turns out that the paths of Andrew McCabe and Felix Sater intersect.

McCabe worked for 20 years in the New York field office of the FBI. According to older FBI biographical information, he joined the New York office in 1996, when he worked on “organized crime matters.” In 2003, “he became the supervisory special agent of the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force, a joint operation with the New York City Police Department.”

“Eurasian organized crime” is the FBI designation for crime that originates from the former Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine.

Curiously, McCabe’s most recent official biography does not include this aspect of his career, and recent press profiles also do not include this fact (although older press releases do so). (This reporter could find no discussion of this period of McCabe’s career in previous press reporting.)

Andrew McCabe, Loretta Lynch
FBI Deputy Director Andrew G. McCabe speaks at a press conference on July 20, 2016; with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Photo credit: FBI

It was the FBI’s organized crime unit in New York that investigated State Street, the mobbed-up brokerage where Felix Sater held sway in the mid-1990s. Sater has been named in numerous press reports in connection with the Russian mob. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), during hearings into Russian interference in the US election, last week noted that Sater’s family has links to organized crime and called Sater a “colorful character.” Sater’s father has been tied to the criminal organization of Semion Mogilevich, perhaps the most powerful of organized crime bosses in the former Soviet Union, and considered a national security threat by US law enforcement. (To WhoWhatWhy, Sater has denied knowledge of or connections to Eurasian mobsters.)

Whether McCabe worked specifically on the State Street case is unclear, but he certainly was in the organized crime section while that high-profile, multi-year investigation was ongoing.

State Street closed as the FBI got close in 1996, Sater signed his cooperation agreement in 1998, the State Street indictments were unsealed in 2000 — and Sater was working at Bayrock in Trump Tower by early 2002.

Sater and Bayrock went on to partner on multiple deals with Trump, including the Trump SoHo. Most of the Bayrock projects failed very badly, leaving a string of lawsuits across multiple states.

While at Bayrock, Sater regularly traveled to Europe, including Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, with numerous trips to Crimea, ostensibly in search of possible development projects that could bear the Trump name — projects that never seemed to reach the drawing board stage. To reiterate, Sater was working as an FBI informant throughout the years he was at Bayrock (until early 2008).

Thus McCabe, as supervisory special agent of the Eurasian organized crime unit in New York from 2003 to 2006, would seem likely to have known very well what Sater was up to and intelligence he had gathered. In addition, he would have been aware of Sater’s relationship with Trump and possibly Trump’s financial relationships in the former Soviet Union at a time when he was struggling to find funding in the US after his numerous bankruptcies.

McCabe also would likely be privy to information about goings-on at Trump Tower, which was a hive of wealthy Russians and others from the former Soviet Union, as well as people like Paul Manafort, who lived in Trump Tower and was actively engaged in supporting pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians and business interests tied to organized crime — including Mogilevich — from 2005. (Manafort is Trump’s long-time friend who served for a period as his campaign manager.)

As must be stressed, Trump’s risk regarding Sater is enormous in multiple ways. While at Bayrock — and serving as an FBI informant — Sater was entering contracts with lenders and clients, and because of his past as a financial criminal, this was a crime. Indeed, Sater was forced to pull out of Bayrock after a New York Times article in late 2007 outed him as a felon, making his position at Bayrock untenable.

If it could be proven that Trump knew that Sater was a financial criminal and did business with him anyway, it would expose Trump to massive financial liability. This is because parties to bank loans and investment contracts must confirm that no owner or manager has been convicted of fraud, and if that confirmation is false, anyone who knew of the fraud is potentially liable.

If Trump or anyone around him — such as other Trump Organization executives, accountants, and lawyers — had knowledge of Sater’s criminal past and yet entered into contracts with Sater and Bayrock, Trump and his company would then be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars and possible jail time. The same would be true even if someone learned about Sater’s criminal status after signing the contract but continued with it.

Yet what if that criminal was considered protected by his informant status with the FBI?

Revealing the criminality on the part of anyone who entered into contracts with Sater despite being aware of his criminal history would also reveal the role of the FBI and Department of Justice and what they knew about Sater’s alleged shady deals and activities while using him as an informant.

McCabe, as a former supervisory special agent of the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force in New York, would be especially well informed of the players and issues regarding the former Soviet Union.

These insights, gained over a 20-year career in New York, would provide him with a unique understanding while overseeing an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia as well as Trump business connections to those in the former Soviet Union. New York is not only the unofficial headquarters of the Russian-speaking community in the US, it is also the center of much financial and other crime tied to the former Soviet Union.

McCabe would likely also have knowledge of potentially problematic issues, such as possible crimes committed by Sater at Bayrock while working as an informant (from which Trump could have profited), questions regarding Trump’s previous relationship with the Bureau, as well as the current and former FBI agents who either are or may have been connected to Trump or his campaign.

This is something the president could be aware of: members of his private security detail during the campaign and after included former FBI agents, one of which — Gary Uher — not only worked in the organized crime section at the same time as McCabe, but investigated and then worked with Sater on the State Street case, as reported exclusively by WhoWhatWhy.

This information, completely overlooked by the rest of the media, adds another layer of complexity and intrigue to the unfolding drama of the Russia investigation that will overshadow everything Trump does until it is resolved one way or another. It also underscores how much we do not know — or are not being told.
http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/05/15/www-ex ... placement/

Russian Mobster Felix Sater Advised The Trump Campaign

Donald Trump and the former Senior Advisor to the Trump Organization, Felix Sater Trump Campaign
A Russian mobster named Felix Sater told the Moscow media that he met with Trump’s campaign before the election, and revealed intimate details about his relationship with the man who Donald Trump swears he doesn’t know.
The newly unearthed Russian language interview with Felix Sater was published on November 15th, 2016 and was discovered by Democratic Coalition senior advisor Scott Dworkin’s #TrumpLeaks research operations.
This entire story is about a man — Felix Sater — whom Donald Trump claimed literally not to know during the Republican primary campaign
Felix Sater’s admitted contact with the Trump campaign during the election culminated in an incident where he carried an abortive secret “peace plan” between Russia and the United States over Ukraine that dovetailed with Donald Trump Jr.’s paid trip to speak a Putin-supported, Paris “peace conference” with a Syrian group.
After a lengthy IRS investigation beginning just after Sater meet Trump, the casino formerly named Trump’s Taj Mahal got slapped with a massive fine from the US Treasury’s criminal investigative division FinCEN.
The Senate wants to know about it, now.
New details from the Senate’s Trump Russia investigation in the last 48 hours since FBI Director James Comey was fired, confirm the importance of the time period when secretly convicted felon Felix Sater worked for Donald J. Trump, and the new Russian interview reveals that he openly moonlighted in the Trump Organization as US secret agent for the FBI and CIA, after he was convicted racketeering with the New York mafia in 1998 — which took a Supreme Court ruling to reveal.
Donald Trump hired the convicted felon, Russian emigre as his Senior Advisor during the decade-long period of time from 1998–2008 which saw him transform from bankrupt developer, to reality TV star with the aid of Producer Mark Burnett, who also did business with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The New York Times profiled Felix Sater in-depth 10-years ago solely because of his special relationship to the man who played a real estate developer on reality TV, who now resides in the White House.
A massive body of evidence points to a special relationship between Felix Sater, Donald Trump — and the federal government, who could have apparently allowed the pair to use Trump casinos to turn over “bad guys” to law enforcement, and which implies that he had the ability to shelter his associates from criminal charges for criminal acts; specifically for money laundering at the Trump casino empire.
It was a casino empire in New Jersey without any form of anti-money laundering controls, for two decades.
Not only does Sater tell the story of meeting Donald Trump in that interview on snob.ru, and talk about his ten years of regular contact with him — sometimes as much as twice a day — but he confirms two very important details about his relationship with our Russophile President.
First, Felix Sater claims that Trump knew about his “secret agent” activities with the FBI and CIA.
While there’s no direct way of proving the President’s knowledge of Felix Sater’s covert activities, the Trump Organization was a sponsor of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers in both 2002 and in 2003, which lends some credence to the idea that Donald Trump knew what was going on.
Former Trump campaign advisor James Woolsey is on the board of AFIO, which is a mainstream organization for America’s former intelligence officers.
Former President George Bush is also a member.
Secondly, Sater claimed to have regular contact with the Trump campaign last year.
We now know that Sater and Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen were caught by the New York Times with Sater, who was attempting to run a private diplomatic mission in Ukraine — an action discussed in the Christopher Steele intelligence dossier .

Via New York Times story “A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates”
The apparent plan to drop sanctions against Russia failed.
Shortly thereafter, Cohen’s Ukrainian relative was found dead under mysterious circumstances.
Trump’s connections to gangsters from Russian and former Soviet states mafiosos and oligarchs alike, all multiplied during Sater’s tenure.
To be clear, there is no question about Felix Sater’s service to the US government either.
It happened.
After Trump was sued for Sater scamming his Florida condominium buyers in the Trump Fort Lauderdale tower, his Senior Advisor fought all the way to the Supreme Court seeking to keep his 1998 felony conviction for racketeering sealed by a then-little known federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York.
The federal government lost in the Supreme Court, leading to what the Miami Herald’s Michael Sallah called dozens of explosive documents.
The court revealed that Felix Sater was nabbed by the feds for his involvement in a New York Cosa Nostra stock scheme in 1998 and had his arm twisted to begin working for both the FBI and CIA.
One person who certainly knew about these activities was former Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who described (p. 142) the convicted felon Sater’s government activities thusly in sworn testimony to the US Senate at the request of Republican Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah, over his concerns about sealed convictions that allowed criminals to roam the streets, without informing Americans that they might be dealing with a confidential informant that could rob them with immunity from criminal prosecution:
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.
Forbes Media recently filed an action in federal court seeking to unseal the remaining records from Felix Sater’s secret criminal conviction, which contains a treasure trove of compiled research on Trump’s former advisor, and included a report by freelance investigative journalist Bill Conroy about the implications of cooperation with the FBI and intelligence agencies. (This paragraph was added the day after publication of this report.)
If his spectacular claims are to be believed, Sater also hunted down the financing for 9/11, helped the Clinton Administration target Osama Bin Laden and all manner of covert activities in his life as a secret operative.
However, the dark side of America’s deal to fight terror included allowing a Mafia-linked felon to have a free hand to conduct a criminal enterprise.
Indeed, Felix Sater did defraud thousands of Americans around the country, and has never faced criminal charges for his activities.
Trump’s Real Business Was Casino Money Laundering, Real Estate Was Just A Side Gig
Yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee delivered a subpoena to obtain documents about Trump’s casino empire from the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) whose job is to protect America’s financial system from crimes and police money laundering activity.
Only three key facts related to the FinCEN action lead to a startling, but factually grounded conclusion that Russia’s “kompromat” against Donald Trump is likely detailed evidence of his material participation in international money laundering rackets, through his old Trump casino businesses in Atlantic City, and then later in the Trump Soho Condo-Hotel project in New York City.
Firstly, in 2015 the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) levied what was then the largest ever Patriot Act violation penalty assessed against a casino to that date, at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City.
The Trump casino empire wound up investigated by the IRS who determined that he casually ignored the Banking Secrecy Act’s requirements altogether and FinCEN levied a $10 million dollar fine based on their findings.
Alleged anti-money laundering violations happened all the way back in 2003 when Donald Trump was still the head of the Taj Mahal’s public parent company, Trump Entertainment Resorts.
Casinos can function just like banks — without any account names or numbers — tailor made for money launderers.
Secondly, Trump’s public gaming company consistently lost money, even when the gaming industry as a whole took off, but over a 20-year period.
Trump Entertainment Resorts improbably violated the principal rule of running a casino, the house always wins; yet, against all business logic, these casinos stayed open.
Paper losses can be used to hide real gains, or launder cash.
Thirdly, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization has been named as a witness in a federal civil racketeering trial in New York involving the Trump Soho and the Mafia-linked company Bayrock who is the defendant in the case.
When FinCEN issued its findings in 2015, Trump’s Taj Mahal applied the same level of “extreme vetting” to prevent money laundering as his administration has applied to infamous figures like General Michael Flynn — which is to say literally none at all. This is beyond suspicious and could only continue for so long, while under IRS investigation, with official blessing from inside the federal government.
That is where the Sater relationship appears to have born fruit of a similar nature for Donald Trump — immunity from prosecution for committing illegal acts.
Trump’s Largest Casino Didn’t Even Have A Written Anti-Money Laundering Plan
This portion of the interview includes information on background from a Treasury department official who could not be named on the record, but explained the findings of FinCEN’s order against the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
If losing casinos close, then why did the Trump Casinos remain a going concern for so long, aside from endlessly patient (or foolish or fooled) investors?
Because nothing in the world could provide an easier front for money laundering than a casino.
Especially a Trump casino.
At Trump’s Taj Mahal there wasn’t even a written plan for anti-money laundering enforcement when the feds landed in 2010 after seven long years of warnings.
Here’s a copy of the final order:
FinCEN Assessment of Civil Money Penalty Trump Taj Mahal (Post-Approval by Bankruptcy Court)

1 The Company, along with Trump Entertainment Resorts, Inc., Trump Entertainment Resorts Holdings, L.P., Trump Plaza…
http://www.scribd.com
The simplest form of laundering that Trump’s casinos were cited for failing to report is “suspicious activity” involving $5000 or more. FinCEN’s enforcement judgment calls this minimal gaming activity, which means that a player buys chips with dirty cash, lingers in the casino, or makes a few insignificant bets as cover and then brings cash to the teller window and just walks away with a cashier’s check to take to the bank.
The Trump casino was cited for failing to maintain files on “rated players” i.e. a casino’s file on each player, which can be used as the basis for reporting or detecting illegal behavior. Ditto for maintaining any controls on the paper tickets for cash into and out of its slot machines.
Even more appalling, Trump’s casinos failed to report “cage markers” — short-term credit extended by the house to a gambler, or “front money” transactions, where a gambler deposits money with a casino in advance, seeking to play later.
This means that a known money launderer at the Trump Taj Majal only had to arrive and sign a marker to obtain cash with which to gamble.
The money launderer could then walk out of the money wth clean cash, deposit it into their bank with a check and later bring dirty cash to pay off the loan. Since Trump wasn’t even bothering to keep player rating files, criminals had nothing to fear about their identity being discovered by law enforcement.
Since Trump wasn’t even bothering to keep player rating files, criminals had nothing to fear about their identity being discovered by law enforcement.
This is also unusual since it means that Trump was not tracking card sharks, high stakes players or really anyone, which all modern casinos have done for decades.
The only reason to do something like this is to make a completely anonymous casino aka the perfect bank to the mafia.
Trump’s casinos were so lax that a money launderer could easily drop off illicit cash as “front money” and then return days, weeks or months later to pick up a check and declare the cash “clean” with a bank deposit.
Another move available for high rollers at the Trump casino, a launderer might buy into the casino’s chips, gamble and then cash out ahead.
Once the funds are “won” then the money launderer simply declares those winnings, and the money is now “clean” without any further fuss, and he deposits it into his bank.
The casino would have to report the winnings on an IRS W2-G form, but without the anti-money laundering report, the gambler’s initial investment into chips gets washed without any records whatsoever.
The three reasons our government made money laundering illegal and enforces those laws vigorously are prevention of organized criminal behavior, terrorism prevention and tax avoidance.
The IRS has primer video (along with an easy to read transcript) on casino compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act.
If you’re not interested in the details of financial regulation, rest assured that their main advice calls to train all casino employees to prevent money laundering, and says that some casinos track anti-money laundering compliance all the way down to $500 bets.
America’s Bank Secrecy Act requires casinos to log all transactions of $10,000 and to be reported. The Patriot Act in 2001 vastly strengthened and expanded the money laundering regulations across financial businesses.
If a casino owner simply refuses to track all of their transactions, then money launderers can use the facilities with impunity to exchange dirty cash for declared, clean money.
Sadly, the $10 million dollar fine against Trump Taj Mahal after a 12 year investigation will do little to discourage that kind of illicit behavior by casinos.
More importantly, there was no legitimate reason for the IRS to investigate for 12 years, when they knew about Trump’s bad behavior going back to the late 1990s.
However, it would make sense that Trump was allowed to pick winners and losers, in conjunction with a confidential FBI informant — like Felix Sater — working with prosecutors in New York’s Eastern District.
In 2009, Trump lost managing control of his casino empire after yet another bankruptcy. Without a source of income — like money laundering — the Trump Organization with Sater at the helm, moved further into brand licensing, but began an ambitious program of developments, which also lost money, but created victims.
They also purchased numerous golf courses with Russian money during the financial crash.
Trump Casinos Lost and Lost and Lost, With Mobsters Nearby
The owner of Trump’s failed Taj Mahal was then and is now Trump Entertainment Resorts, though the name of the public company vehicle and persons who hold the shares have changed over the years.

Donald Trump’s public casino company shareholders lost a fortune.
According to the New York Times an investor who bought 1995 IPO shares, then held them lost over 93% of the stock’s value in a twelve year period.
An investor who bought the Russell 3000 casino index in 1995 would’ve gotten a 250% return on investment over that same 12 year period. Keep in mind that the above chart reflects that America’s economy was in the midst of the Bush-era, Wall Street credit-fueled bubble in 2007.
Even a rising tide failed to lift the Trump Entertainment Resorts’ boat, and it appears just from the chart that Trump executed a classic pump and dump scheme with the IPO, because the share price peaked within the first two years, before its inexorable slide towards multiple bankruptcies and the closing of the Trump Taj Mahal, which is only recently starting the process of being renamed.
Regardless, the years of losses suddenly become easily explainable if you imagine that Trump was carefully doling out shareholder value along with laundered cash to the many players at his casino, which included known mobsters and which he has consistently lied about, even under oath.
Trump’s extensive mob ties have been chronicled going all the way back to the construction of Trump Tower.
The IPO deal to create Trump Entertainment Resorts bailed Trump out of a looming personal bankruptcy in 1995 and simultaneously delivered to him a $916,000,000 paper loss on his income taxes by utilizing a loophole that Congress made illegal in 2006.
That tax loophole let Donald Trump sell his failed businesses to investors, but claim the losses incurred by his bondholders as a profitable (and legal, though dubious) tax shelter.
Reports indicate that Trump’s casino IPO yielded back to the destitute real estate developer up to a $50 million dollar annual tax break for 15 years (and possibly three prior years if he paid taxes).
Amazingly, Trump laid the groundwork for his multi-billion dollar ‘loss-making for profit scheme’ by testifying to Congress that America was no different than the Soviet Union for businesspeople.
Apparently, using communism as the bogeyman was a more effective strategy then than now (see outcry when President Trump caused an uproar making similar remarks comparing America and Russia on Fox News) because Congress passed enhanced passive loss deductions for real estate professionals in 1993 and Trump drove a Mack Truck through the moneymaking tax preference.
All told, Trump could have used those unlimited losses to easily launder dirty cash, in addition to their usefulness in the real estate development world in avoiding the IRS’ onerous 263A rules that require taxes to be paid by builders based on the cost of the property being built during construction.
The Trump casinos lost a fortune, and paid $39 million dollars in management fees to Trump for the privilege.

Trump with Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater
Trump’s SoHo Project Is The Subject Of A Racketeering Lawsuit and Tax Fraud Action
The Trump SoHo project in Manhattan collapsed into a furious pile of lawsuits, though the building is just fine and operated by the President’s family for his benefit today.
Felix Sater and mysterious Kazakstani investor Tevfik Arif who owns the Bayrock Company were behind this failed Trump project.
It all began when the Trump Soho condo-hotel project was financed with an Icelandic bank linked to Putin, and a byzantine legal structure best described as a plate of spaghetti made out of shell companies.

The American Interest made this map of Trump SoHo’s shell companies.
Trump tried to extinguish the fires started by this most troubled of New York real estate deals by paying over a $3 million dollar settlement with disgruntled buyers in 2011.
It didn’t work.
Disgruntled former employees have filed a federal racketeering lawsuit and said in court that this was no ordinary business dispute:
Bayrock leaders had planned and structured businesses from conception as criminal enterprises intended to defraud investors. Kriss also accused lawyers for Bayrock co-owner Felix Satter of trying to “gravely mislead” the court into looking at the underlying issues as a typical business dispute inappropriate for a RICO action.
Kriss and Ejekam accused Satter, Arif and others connected to Bayrock and related entities of fraudulently inducing them into working for the company in exchange for ownership stakes and then engaging in a series of misdeeds and illegal payments.
As the presidential race heated up last year, the AP sued and won release of documents related to the SoHo case.
Trump SoHo is also in New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s sights. Last summer, relators put out a press release unsealing a major tax fraud action called a Qui Tam lawsuit — after the AG gave them clearance to proceed — that names Sater as Bayrock’s silent partner and majority owner, and others as parties to a massive tax fraud.
A Manhattan judge has unsealed a civil tax fraud case brought in behalf of New York State against associates of Donald Trump. The suit accuses convicted racketeer and Felix Sater, Bayrock Group, and prominent law firms of conspiring to launder as much as $250 million dollars of profit on Trump projects Bayrock was co-developing out of the country in a scheme to evade $100 million dollars of state and federal income tax. It alleges that Bayrock — aided by law firms Kramer Levin, Roberts & Holland, and Duval & Stachenfeld — brought a foreign partner into the projects but then hid it behind a Delaware shell company and further disguised the transaction so wholesale transfers of profits corruptly headed overseas to that partner would falsely appear to be debt repayments to a U.S. lender. Defendant Nixon Peabody is charged with facilitating a separate multimillion withholding tax fraud by disguising Sater as a salaried employee to help hide the fact that he owned much of Bayrock.
At this time Mr. Trump is a material witness. Initial investigation of the case uncovered no evidence that he was culpable, as the papers themselves, written some time ago, state. However, in the time since it was filed, especially as a result of media interest, new, relevant Trump and Bayrock information has surfaced, from sources including Mr. Trump himself, which may significantly change that calculus.
One of the plaintiffs lawyers in the tax case — which is being prosecuted with information from a separate whistleblower lawsuit — pointed out that Trump Soho was a lynchpin case in unraveling several realty scams perpetuated by Sater under the employ of the future president in the last decade:
“This is an important case because it not only exposes how Bayrock, while developing Trump SoHo in New York, Trump International in Fort Lauderdale, and Trump Camelback in Phoenix in association with Mr. Trump, took advantage of Delaware secrecy to arrange to siphon most of the profits out of the country untaxed, it also exposes how major law firms were willing to facilitate it.
It all seems improbable and highly unlikely, but the truth about Donald Trump is staring anyone in the face when all of the facts are put together. Trump wouldn’t be the first known FBI confidential informant to inhabit the Oval Office either, that “honor” belongs to Republican icon Ronald Reagan.
Donald Trump was a knowing asset of the federal government, working with a high-profile confidential informant for the better part of a decade, until all of the scams and dodges they were allowed to run got exposed for ripping off hundreds of investors and thousands of Americans when you include victims Trump University who recently settled.
After his money laundering scheme — getting paid by his untouchables, but turning over “bad guys” to the FBI — broke down, Trump’s foray into real estate development laid bare the rusty skills of a trust-fund baby who hadn’t had to earn a living the old fashioned way for years.
The results are scattered across America’s court system in the form of over 3,500 lawsuits against Trump through the years, dozens of which are ongoing today.
Now, President Trump has fired the FBI Director James Comey, and he isn’t afraid to tell the entire world it’s because his Russia investigation was getting uncomfortably close to hitting paydirt.
How else could a known multi-millionaire investor spend a third of his adult life participating in known rackets — including ten years with a known CIA and FBI confidential informant — and escape all forms of federal criminal action while running a casino with zero anti-money laundering controls for that long?
The arc of Trump’s business evolution from a casino manager to the global evolution of his business to the former Soviet states — announced by his synonymous son in Moscow in 2008 — and his entry into the golf market with Russian cash dovetails with what appears to be the end of his relationship with Felix Sater.
All of that coincided with the worldwide economic credit freeze and economic crisis.
Financing is the lifeblood of the real estate business, and at the time, things were so bad that Trump sued his own bankers, just to delay payments that he plainly couldn’t make.
It appears that after the financial crash, the end of Republican one-party rule and after his golden ticket with Sater and his relationship with the federal government terminated, it appears Trump did anything it took to survive, with anyone who would lend him a hand.
Those hands were Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakhstani, Filipino and Turkish, and probably on Cyprus too.
One thing is for certain, none of Trump’s lies won’t help him disassociate himself from Felix Sater.
The most logical conclusion to this story is that New York’s FBI office enabled another “Black Mass” situation, where a confidential informant — or in this case pair of informants — were so highly placed, that they effectively ran federal police activity to support their own criminal enterprise’s operations.
And that Donald Trump would do literally anything to repeat his massively embarrassing downfall in the early 1990s that left him a beggar to his own family.
Perhaps this is why Russia’s top “Americanist” Professor told reporters last October that for Putin to help Donald Trump to win the election, he would have to be a “real Russian agent.”
Because he sure looks like one now.
Here’s Felix Sater’s business card:

Here’s select clips from the Felix Sater interview which have been machine translated by Google:

https://thesternfacts.com/russian-mobst ... 9f3a58d617

The Firing of James Comey

What is he allowed to talk about now?

By Virginia Heffernan and Jacob Weisberg
To listen to this episode of Trumpcast, use the player below:
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/ ... lettertest

The Democratic plan to exploit Comey controversy

J. Scott Applewhite / AP
On CNN's "State of the Union," Jake Tapper asked Chuck Schumer whether he'd refuse to vote on the nomination of a new FBI director to replace James Comey until a special prosecutor is appointed. Schumer said yes; but that's only the beginning of the pressure Democrats plan to exert.

Here's what they'll do in the coming days, per a senior Senate aide:

Establish a litmus test for Republicans who care about the integrity of the Russia investigation: to appoint a special prosecutor.
Call for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from deciding Comey's replacement, given the new FBI director will be overseeing the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the election.
Extract a full explanation from Rod Rosenstein about his role in Trump's firing of Comey. The deputy attorney general will brief senators this week and they'll have a chance to grill him.
Urge Republicans to support Democrats' calls for Comey to testify before a congressional committee.
Around the corner: Watch for Dems to use their demands on the Russia probe as leverage to justify even more aggressive obstruction of the Republicans' legislative agenda. "If they [Republicans] don't cooperate on what we view as requests that should be bipartisan and reasonable," the senior Senate aide said, "I don't think any Democrat would be in the mood to conduct business as normal."

Bonus Comey thing: the most insightful thing I've heard or read about Comey in a week of nonstop coverage is a Slate podcast interview with the former FBI boss' longtime friend Benjamin Wittes. Stressing he had no inside knowledge of his friend's plans, Wittes predicted Comey — "maybe the only completely subtext-less person in Washington" — would publicly tell his full story and probably in a congressional hearing. Wittes had these ominous words for Trump: "One of the problems that Trump created for himself in removing Jim Comey is that he dramatically increased the list of things that Jim Comey is now allowed to talk about."
https://www.axios.com/the-democratic-pl ... 94714.html

The Kazakhstan Connection: Trump, Bayrock And Plenty Of Questions
‘There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.’

—Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth,” 1967

By Richard Behar

Is a former Mob-connected hustler—a real estate developer who in 2010 worked on the same floor as Donald Trump as his “Senior Advisor”—threatening to spill some beans that could harm the President’s reputation?


Felix Sater
Sure looks that way, based on an intriguing Wall Street Journal story that exposed aspects of a bitter feud between two of Trump’s former key business associates. The newspaper revealed that the Russia-born Felix Sater—a twice-convicted one-time Mafia associate—is demanding hush money from a former boss, Kazakhstan-born Tevfik Arif, whose Bayrock Group worked in a close partnership for nearly a decade with the Trump Organization.

Sater warned Arif, in writing, that news headlines will read: “The Kazakh Gangster and President Trump,” unless Arif forks over $3.5 million to reimburse Sater for legal expenses he claims he’s owed, the Journal reported. Specifically, Sater is threatening to reveal negative information about Arif’s “past relationship with President Trump and the Republic of Kazakhstan”—as well as Arif’s alleged connections to “organized crime figures and his business activities in Kazakhstan,” which involve “dealings in the post-Soviet metals industry there.”

Spokespeople for Bayrock and Arif have called the allegations “unsubstantiated falsehoods.” The general counsel of Trump Organization didn’t respond to calls and emails.

Why this story matters

I discovered some missing bricks in the murky Bayrock-Trump edifice as reported by Forbes in October. As for Kazakhstan, sorting out the bewildering tangle (what Russians call a zaputannyj klubok) could take years. But why should anyone even care about it?


Trump, Tevik Arif and Felix Sater (NPO screen shot)
Here are just a few reasons:

It’s a good bet that the Trump-Bayrock relationship will receive scrutiny in Washington. It certainly should be front and center in any serious investigation. Two months ago, Sater burst onto the front-pages when it was revealed that he and one of Trump’s top lawyers delivered a Ukraine peace proposal to the White House. In late March, then-FBI director James Comey was asked about Sater’s relationship with the FBI when he appeared before the House Intelligence Committee. (He declined to comment on it, likely because the twice-convicted Sater spent a decade as a secret government cooperator for both the FBI and at times, the CIA).

Trump fired Comey on Tuesday, just as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s interference in the presidential election has been shifting into a higher gear. Apart from that probe, Republican Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham said on Tuesday that he wants his committee to look into whether Trump has any business dealings in Russia. Near the start of a hearing that committee held on Monday, another Senator dropped the name “Sater.”

Trump and Sater have been doing an odd dance around each other during the past few years, regarding how much they’ve interacted. In 2010, Sater was made a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” and given an office on Trump’s floor in the Trump Tower, where he worked for roughly one year. Nevertheless, Trump consistently has testified in civil cases that he barely knew Sater, barely dealt with him and “wouldn’t recognize him if he was sitting in this [deposition] room.” However, Sater, in another civil case said he would often pop his head into Trump’s office to give him updates on a Moscow hotel deal he had in the works. (It doesn’t appear that the project came to fruition.) Last September, I half-joked to Sater that he must have a photo album filled with pictures of himself with Trump. “A photo album?” he responded. “How about six!”

While it seems unlikely that the Bayrock real estate enterprise will be Trump’s Waterloo, it is, without a doubt, a subject that reporters need to continue chipping away at. In part, because all the key players—from Sater and Arif to Trump and his aides, to tycoons in and from Kazakhstan and Russia—refuse to shed any real sunlight on it. And, as the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once famously said: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

—Richard Behar
Sater, however, may not even need the dough. I’ve discovered that he and a former Trump Organization colleague, Daniel Ridloff, received roughly $20 million—in a settlement of a case that is linked to an alleged multi-billion-dollar global money laundering scheme originating in Kazakhstan, and stretching to Russia and the U.S.


Tri-County Mall (Google satellite image)
Specifically, both men were accused in a 2013 complaint filed by a Swiss financier of absconding with nearly $43 million from the sale of an Ohio shopping mall (Tri-County Mall near Cincinnati) to—American Pacific International Capital (APIC). That company is based in San Francisco. One of the directors is businessman Neil Bush—the son of former President George H.W. Bush and brother of former President George W. Bush.

In the shopping center complaint, the financier included an exhibit—a 2007 New York Times article that revealed numerous details about Sater’s criminal past. The article said Sater had pled guilty and become a cooperating federal witness. Sater’s cooperation agreement was unsealed by a federal judge in 2013, but many other documents in related cases are under court seal.

Five days after the Tri-County mall complaint was filed, the case was settled.

Neither Sater or Ridloff, whose LinkedIn bio says he worked in “Acquisitions & Finance” in 2010 for the Trump Organization, will comment about the subject. In his own LinkedIn bio, Sater describes himself as a former “Senior Advisor to Board of Directors” of one of Neil Bush’s oil companies (TxOil) that once drilled in Turkmenistan, an oil-rich part of the former Soviet Union.

Bush tells me he’s never heard of Sater. Bush also says that the mall was purchased for $43 million by APIC at a public auction, and then transferred to a Singapore publicly-held real estate company that he chairs called SingHaiyi Group. “I helped the group [SingHaiyi] find the property through a friend,” he says. When told about the subsequent litigation against Sater and Ridloff, Bush says: “I don’t remember anything like that. We bought it at a sheriff’s auction. If the funds filtered through some undesignated [entity] or intermediary, I’m unaware of that.”

A second lawsuit filed in U.S. Federal Court (Southern District of New York) may shed additional light on Sater and Ridloff’s Kazakhstan-related business activity. In this case, the BTA Bank (once one of Kazakhstan’s largest banks) and the government of Almaty (the country’s largest city) are accusing three Kazakh men—a former Almaty mayor, his son, and a former chairman of BTA Bank—of absconding with billions of dollars and laundering the money.

The defendants—Viktor and Ilyas Khrapunov, and Mukhtar Ablyazov, respectively—deny the allegations and claim the charges are politically motivated.

That’s not the view of Matthew L. Schwartz, a former federal prosecutor, now in private practice at the prestigious law firm of Boies Schiller Flexner, who represents the city of Almaty and the bank. “The international financial fraud perpetrated by Ablyazov, Viktor and Ilyas Khrapunov, and their associates is as large and far-flung as they come,” Schwartz says. “It involves billions of dollars and has touched at least two dozen different countries—from Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine to the United States, England, and France—and just about everyplace else.”

Schwartz adds: “We’ll follow the money stolen by these fugitives wherever they may try to hide it.” (A Switzerland-based spokesperson for the family welcomed questions, but declined to respond to any.)

Needless to say, the saga—a saga within a saga—is very complicated. A declaration in the Khrapunov case is by Nicolas Bourg, who happens to be the same Swiss financier who accused Sater and Ridloff of stealing the $43 million from the Ohio mall deal. In the declaration, he says that he was president of a real estate fund (named Swiss Development Group, or SDG) that was controlled by the Khrapunov family “and used to conceal the movement and investment of his family’s money.”


Trump SoHo Hotel (Google Streetview)
Time out. Where does Trump fit into all this? In October, the Financial Times revealed that three Trump Soho condos in Manhattan were bought in 2013 with $3.1 million that came from the alleged Khrapunov laundering caper. Trump Soho was 18% owned by Trump at the time. There is no evidence that Trump was involved or knowledgeable about the Khrapunovs. But he seems to have benefitted.

In addition, bank statements submitted by City of Almaty lawyers indicate that the ultimate beneficiary of the companies that bought the condos was Elvira Kudryashova—the California-based daughter of Viktor Khrapunov. The FT reported that correspondence and company documents seen by the newspaper showed that Sater and Ridloff worked closely with Kudryashova in 2012.

“They agreed to serve as directors of a company through which she would pour $3 million into a business venture as part of her efforts to secure a U.S. investor visa,” wrote the newspaper.

Sater and Ridloff, my reporting shows, ran the U.S. arm of the Khrapunov’s SDG entity at the time. Another connection is in the Linked-In bio of Ridloff’s, where he refers to himself as the former vice president of SDG-Investment Fund.

Bourg, the Swiss financier alleging fraud in the Ohio mall sale, maintains in his declaration that a shell entity he created in Luxembourg—Triadou—was an investment vehicle wholly-owned and controlled by SDG. Bourg states that Triadou was also the entity used to buy the Ohio shopping mall.

An exhibit with the declaration from Swiss financier Bourg includes emails to Felix Sater and others in 2014 with “swift code” details for an account at a now-defunct rogue bank that was headquartered in Dubai. Swift codes are used for international money transfers. In 2015, the bank FBME, formerly Federal Bank of the Middle East, was banned from operating in the U.S. due to money laundering and terror financing allegations. The email to Sater cites an entity called Telford International, which was allegedly used to move the money to FBME.

And—closing the circle—Telford was used to fund Triadou, the entity that bought and sold the Ohio mall, according to Bourg.

DCReport.org has obtained an audio recording in which three of Bayrock’s top four executives can be heard discussing coal and oil projects involving Bayrock and Sater, in which the name “Khrapunov” and “his son” are mentioned. The recording was made in Bayrock’s offices in the Trump Tower in 2008. In all likelihood, the references are to Viktor Khrapunov and his son Ilyas.

The recording was made just three months before Viktor reportedly fled Kazakhstan as a fugitive. Ilyas is also accused by Kazakh authorities of money laundering and is a fugitive. Excerpts from the audio are here, and emails penned by Sater in 2007 from Kazakhstan also talk about a coal deal he had just closed—three days after arriving in Kazakhstan without a visa. Whether the emails are referring specifically to a Khrapunov deal is unknown.

The Russian-born Sater spent a year in prison in 1993 after pleading guilty to assaulting a man with a broken glass during an argument with in a bar. (The victim required more than 100 facial stitches.) Next, he pled guilty in 1998 to racketeering. Specifically, he helped run a huge pump-and-dump stock fraud with members and associates from four of New York’s five Italian mafia families—including the brother-in-law of Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the Mafia hitman turned Gotti-informer.

In a press release two years later that cited Sater, New York’s then-police commissioner dubbed the case “Goodfellas meets Boiler Room”—a reference to both the classic film and to cold-calling operations where salespeople often peddle fraudulent securities. This time around, Sater avoided prison by becoming a government cooperator for more than a decade, ratting out mobsters.
https://www.dcreport.org/2017/05/12/the ... questions/

Uncovering More Trump Ties To Mobsters And Shadowy Oligarchs
A Trump Business Partner Threatens to Reveal a Vast Network of Murky Relationships

By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Founder and Editor

Threats by a longtime business partner and “senior adviser” to Donald Trump to spill the beans about the president’s connections to a Russian oligarch have opened the door into a vast network of murky relationships involving the president, our latest exclusive report shows.


Richard Behar
Richard Behar, a veteran investigative reporter and now Forbes magazine’s contributing editor of investigations, pursued facts in a little-noticed report last month in The Wall Street Journal. The Journal told of a threat by longtime Trump associate Felix Sater, a twice-convicted felon, to expose negative information about Kazakhstan-born oligarch Tevfik Arif and his “past relationship with President Trump and the Republic of Kazakhstan.”

Arif and others have called the Journal report nothing to our exclusive report except “unsubstantiated falsehoods

President Trump claims reports of Russian connections are “fake news.” But his firing Tuesday of FBI Director James Comey shows otherwise.


Trump, Tevik Arif and Felix Sater (NPO screen shot)
Behar dug through court filings, internal emails, and other documents from Cincinnati to Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, for our report.

Behar found a vast and murky network of Russian oligarchs, massive money laundering allegations, a dispute over the sale of an Ohio shopping center and more.

This is not a simple story. But Behar’s narrative allows you to peel back a few of the layers of documentation in the public record of the threats, the connections, the contracts and understand the questions that must be answered.

As with our earlier report by Jim Henry, our investigative economics editor, exposing the many deep ties between Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Russian oligarchs, money laundering and corrupt banking, this is not a smoking gun.

However, Behar’s DCReport exclusive is a roadmap for Congressional and FBI investigators as well as other journalists. It advances what we expect time will show is the most important story in the history of the United States, the story of how Moscow and Russian money may have helped put Vladimir Putin’s favored candidate in the White House.
https://www.dcreport.org/2017/05/12/unc ... oligarchs/

Russian elites invested nearly $100 million in Trump buildings
Reuters
Nathan Layne, Ned Parker, Svetlana Reiter, Stephen Grey and Ryan McNeill, Reuters
Mar. 17, 2017, 10:35 PM 11,194

MIAMI/MOSCOW – During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump downplayed his business ties with Russia. And since taking office as president, he has been even more emphatic.

“I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia,” President Trump said at a news conference last month. “I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.”

But in the United States, members of the Russian elite have invested in Trump buildings.

A Reuters review has found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, according to public documents, interviews and corporate records.

The buyers include politically connected businessmen, such as a former executive in a Moscow-based state-run construction firm that works on military and intelligence facilities, the founder of a St. Petersburg investment bank and the co-founder of a conglomerate with interests in banking, property and electronics.

People from the second and third tiers of Russian power have invested in the Trump buildings as well. One recently posted a photo of himself with the leader of a Russian motorcycle gang that was sanctioned by the United States for its alleged role in Moscow’s seizure of Crimea.

The Reuters review of investors from Russia in Trump’s Florida condominium buildings found no suggestion of wrongdoing by President Trump or his real estate organization. And none of the buyers appear to be from Putin’s inner circle.

The White House referred questions from Reuters to the Trump Organization, whose chief legal officer said the scrutiny of President Trump’s business ties with Russia was misplaced.

“I can say definitively that this is an overblown story that is media-created,” Alan Garten said in an interview. “I’ve been around this company and know the company’s dealings.”

The tally of investors from Russia may be conservative. The analysis found that at least 703 – or about one-third – of the owners of the 2044 units in the seven Trump buildings are limited liability companies, or LLCs, which have the ability to hide the identity of a property’s true owner. And the nationality of many buyers could not be determined. Russian-Americans who did not use a Russian address or passport in their purchases were not included in the tally.

The review focused on Florida because the state has a large concentration of Trump-branded buildings, and determining the ownership of properties is easier there than in some other states. The resort town of Sunny Isles Beach, site of six of the seven Trump-branded Florida residential towers, stands out in another way: The zip code that includes the Sunny Isles buildings has an estimated 1,200 Russian-born residents, among the most in the country, U.S. Census data show.

The Trump organization advertises all seven Florida buildings on its website as it pursues similar branding deals around the world. Exactly how much income Trump has earned from the buildings is unclear.

Six of the seven properties were the product of an agreement the New York property magnate struck in 2001 with father-and-son American developers Michael and Gil Dezer. The six buildings operated by the Dezers in Sunny Isles would bear Trump’s name under a licensing agreement.

gil dezer
FLORIDA DEVELOPER: Gil Dezer teamed up with Donald Trump to develop six buildings in Sunny Isles Beach.REUTERS/Joe Skipper

In an interview, Gil Dezer said the project generated $2 billion in initial sales, from which Trump took a commission. Dezer declined to say how large a commission, citing confidentiality agreements. Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, said Trump’s income was a mix of flat fees and percentages but declined to disclose them.

Edgardo Defortuna, a leading Miami developer, estimated that Trump likely made between one percent and four percent in initial sale commissions, based on the standard fees paid on similarly branded projects. If so, Trump stood to reap a total of $20 million to $80 million in Sunny Isles.

Trump receives no commission on subsequent sales in all seven of the Florida residential towers.

He continues to make money from one of the six Sunny Isles buildings, however, according to disclosure forms Trump filed in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. The disclosure form states that Trump received between $100,000 and $1 million from a business called Trump Marks Sunny Isles I LLC. Dezer said these funds came from the Trump International Beach Resort, a hotel and condominium complex.

Trump reported no income on his disclosure form from his seventh Florida property, the Trump Hollywood in the city of Hollywood. How much he has made over the years from that property’s 200 units is unclear. BH3, an investment fund which took over 180 units in a foreclosure sale, paid Trump a licensing fee of $25,000 for each unit, according to Daniel Lebensohn, a principal at the fund. If the remaining 20 units generated the same fee, Trump’s take would have been $5 million. Garten declined to confirm Trump’s commission.

Informed of the Reuters analysis of Trump’s Russian condo investors, two Democratic opponents of the president, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), renewed their calls for greater disclosure of his finances.

“While the president has denied having invested in Russia, he has said little or nothing about Russian investment in his businesses and properties in the United States or elsewhere,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “This should concern all Americans and is yet another reason why his refusal to release his tax returns should be met with considerable skepticism and concern.”

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the Republican chairs of the Senate and House intelligence committees, declined to comment.

Schiff, as well as two U.S. intelligence officials and one former senior law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Russian government sometimes directs funding at prominent individuals in the United States and Europe in hopes of improving their perception of Russia. Reuters found no evidence of such an effort with Trump. Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, scoffed at the idea.

“This is politics at its worst,” he said.

FLORIDA Reuters
Russian elite
The glimpse inside the condominium dealings offers a look at how the wealthy in Putin’s Russia use foreign property to stow cash.

One wealthy Russian buyer was Alexander Yuzvik. In 2010, he and his wife bought unit 3901 of Trump Palace in Sunny Isles for $1.3 million, according to Florida property records. The three-bedroom apartment has 2,100 square feet and panoramic views, according to an online real estate listing.

From 2013 to 2016, Yuzvik was a senior executive at Spetstroi, a state-owned company that has carried out construction projects at military facilities.

The Spetstroi website says the firm was involved in construction projects at the Moscow training academy of the FSB, Russia’s primary civilian intelligence service and successor of the KGB. Spetstroi also did construction work in the administrative building of the general staff of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.

In a statement sent to Reuters, Spetstroi said Yuzvik worked there until he stepped down in March 2016.

Employees of some state-owned Russian companies are typically required to disclose their assets and income. Yuzvik and his wife filed a declaration for 2013. In that declaration, which is publicly available, they list only assets inside Russia. The Florida condo isn’t included.

Yuzvik could not be reached for comment.

Andrey Truskov, another Trump condo owner, is a founder and co-owner of Absolute Group LLC, a holding company involved in wholesale electronics, banking and property development, with projects in Moscow, London and New York. The wholesale electronic business is the biggest in Russia, an Absolute representative told Reuters. The company does not disclose its financial results.

Truskov bought apartment 1102 in the Trump Hollywood building for $1.4 million in 2011. The three-bedroom, 3.5-bath unit is 3,100 square feet, according to online real estate listings.

In a telephone interview, Truskov confirmed that he purchased the Trump Hollywood unit. He said the Florida apartment was the same price as a three-room apartment outside Moscow at the time, and Florida was a nice place to have a property. He said the purchase was a personal decision that had no connection with his business.

Several wealthy buyers were from Moscow and St. Petersburg, the country’s two largest cities, according to interviews in Russia, Florida public records and the Bureau Van Dijk company database Orbis. Among them: Alexey Ustaev, the founder and president of St. Petersburg-based Viking Bank, one of the first private investment banks established in Russia after the fall of Communism.

trump royale
LUXURY APPEAL: From left, the Trump Royale, the Trump Palace and the Trump International Beach Resort in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. REUTERS/Joe Skipper

A donor to orphanages and chess clubs in St. Petersburg, Ustaev has received awards from the Russian Sports Ministry and the St. Petersburg chamber of commerce for his banking and charitable work, according to his biography on the bank’s website.

In 2009, Ustaev bought unit 5006, a 3-bed, 3.5-bath apartment in the Trump Palace complex in Sunny Isles, for $1.2 million in cash, according to Florida public records. Two years later, Ustaev bought another apartment, a penthouse unit, this time in the nearby Trump Royale condominium development, for $5.2 million.

In an email reply to questions, Ustaev said he purchased the properties in the Trump buildings for private use, but declined to comment on his family’s U.S. business. “I am living in Russia, I am working in Russia, and going abroad only for business purposes or vacations,” he said.

Many of the Russian buyers were from the country’s provinces. One is Oleg Misevra, a wealthy coal magnate and former traffic police commander whose company’s main assets are in the Pacific island of Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East. He has caught Putin’s eye: At a 2010 regional meeting of Putin’s United Russia party, Putin praised Misevra’s work and held a lengthy question and answer session with him.

A corporation Misevra controls, Swiss Residence Aliance Inc, purchased Penthouse #1 in Trump Hollywood for $6.8 million in 2010. The six-bedroom duplex is 8,200 square feet and boasts 12-foot ceilings, according to real estate listings. Misevra did not respond to requests for comment.

Some of these Russian buyers appear to have done well in America. Another local politician, Vadim Valeryevich Gataullin, bought an apartment for $3.5 million in the Trump Hollywood. He did the deal through a company registered in Florida called VVG Real Estate Investments LLC. Five years later, Gataullin sold the apartment for $4.1 million to a Delaware-based limited liability company whose owner is not identified in state records.

In early 2012, Gataullin bought a second apartment in the same building, unit 2701, for $920,000, according to Florida records. Several months later, Gataullin sold the apartment for $1.1 million to a couple from Venezuela, property records show.

_S3A4732x
OVERSEAS INVESTMENT: The Neptune Hollywood Beach Hotel, run by Vadim Gataullin, a former Russian politician, in Hollywood, Florida. REUTERS/Joe Skipper

Gataullin is from the semi-autonomous Russian Republic of Bashkortostan, an oil-producing region in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. The son of a deputy regional prosecutor, he was a deputy in the regional parliament from 2013 until 2015.

As a member of the regional parliament, he was required to declare his income and assets under Russian federal law, according to a representative of the Bashkortostan regional parliament. A copy of the income declaration Gataullin filed for in 2013, when he was still owner of the second Trump unit, contains no mention of the apartment.

Gataullin did not respond to messages sent to his company in Bashkortostan.

More recently, Gataullin has been actively investing in the Miami area. His VVG Real Estate has spent at least $28 million on property in Broward County between 2012 and 2016. It also bought and sold six properties in Miami Dade County between 2015 and 2016 for a total profit of $238,400, property records show.

VVG is also the registered licensee on a small motel close to the beach in Hollywood. An employee there told Reuters that Gataullin “appears and disappears like a ghost” and was currently in Russia. A secretary at Gataullin’s holding company in Russia told Reuters on March 17 that he is not in Russia.

The American experience has been a mixed one for some of the Trump buyers. Among them is Pavel Uglanov, a businessman who served as a deputy minister for industry and energy in the regional government of Saratov, in central Russia, from 2010 to 2011.

Uglanov bought unit 3704 of Trump Hollywood in Hollywood, Florida, for $1.8 million in 2012. He sold the 3-bed, 3,395 square foot apartment for $2.9 million two years later.

Back in Russia, Uglanov made unsuccessful runs for the Saratov city assembly in 2006 and 2011, the second time as a member of Putin’s United Russia party. After leaving his deputy ministership in 2011, Uglanov told his then-wife, Anastasia, they were moving to Florida.

Anastasia said in an interview in her Miami apartment that her ex-husband never told her why. “I don’t know what goes on in a man’s head,” she said.

Uglanov Facebook
FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK: Pavel Uglanov, right, a Russian buyer in a Trump building, posted a picture of himself with Alexander Zaldostanov, the head of a Russian motorcycle gang sanctioned by the U.S. government for its role in Russia’s seizure of Crimea. Facebook
In Miami, Uglanov opened a gas station, called Niko Petroleum. When that business struggled, he sold it. He then started a charter boat business and a trucking firm. They struggled, too.

Uglanov did not have connections in the United States like he did in Russia and he didn’t understand how Americans do business, his ex-wife said.

Last August, Uglanov posted a photograph of himself on his Facebook page posing alongside Alexander Zaldostanov, leader of the “Night Wolves” biker gang. The Wolves, and Zaldostanov personally, were made subject to U.S. financial and travel restrictions. The U.S. government said gang members stormed a Ukrainian government naval base and a gas facility during Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

An aide to Zaldostanov did not respond to questions from Reuters. The group, in interviews in Russian media, has denied storming the base and the gas facility.

Zaldostanov has had multiple meetings with Putin, according to the Kremlin’s website. The Russian president awarded Zaldostanov the country’s “medal of honor” in 2013.

In a phone interview late last month, Uglanov confirmed the Trump apartment purchase. He said it was a personal matter and declined to answer questions. “Basically, my private life is not your business,” he said.

The rainmaker
For Dezer, Trump’s American partner in Sunny Isles, the six buildings have been a win for his family, the Trumps and Sunny Isles.

Trump visited the sites at least four times as the buildings – including a hotel – were constructed and promoted between 2001 and 2011, according to Dezer and former employees of Dezer’s company. Trump had approval over the look of the buildings and apartments, Dezer said.

“His people were very much involved in quality control and construction,” Dezer said. “They were down here once every quarter checking on us, the progress. They wanted to see we were making money.”

In 2008, when the housing market crashed, buyers defaulted on 900 Trump apartments, according to Dezer. Dezer said he worked hard over the coming years to pay back creditors. Until those 900 apartments were sold off, Trump did not earn any money for them, he added.

Foreign buyers bought into the Trump buildings as the developers dropped their prices after the crash, according to Dezer and local realtors. The majority of these buyers were from South America, with a smaller percentage of Russians and other former Soviet nationals.

Tanya Tsveyer, a realtor whose Russian clients have bought in the Trump buildings, described her customers as primarily business people, including several with investments across the United States and Russia.

“They bought in the Trump because they liked how the buildings fit their lifestyle,” she said, referring to the Russians.

_G0U6793x
BRAND BUILDING: From left, Trump Towers I, II and III in Sunny Isles Beach. REUTERS/Joe Skipper

By early 2011, the Trump buildings had started to turn a profit, according to Dezer. He invited Trump to a mortgage burning ceremony to celebrate Dezer’s paying off the project’s $475 million dollar mortgage. Dezer recalled Trump telling him that he planned to run for president.

At the party, Dezer, his father and Trump gleefully set flame to a stack of mortgage documents, applauded by a crowd of tenants from the Trump buildings and local business people. A video of the event shows Trump smiling, joking and working the crowd.

“I was with Michael Jackson when he had the hair burned with the Pepsi, and it was a disaster,” Trump told revelers, referring to the time the pop superstar’s hair caught fire during the 1984 filming of a Pepsi commercial. “I am sitting next to that friggin’ fire, and if my hair goes, I am out of business.”

Dezer and Trump got help selling the condos from Elena Baronoff, who immigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Baronoff, who grew up in Uzbekistan, had been active in Soviet cultural associations. In Miami, she soon began bringing Russian tour groups to Miami.

Gil Dezer’s father, Michael, recruited Baronoff to work alongside the Dezer corporation. She traveled to Moscow, St Petersburg, France and London to bring in Russian buyers, according to Dezer, selling apartments to them for between $1 million and $2 million. Baronoff was diagnosed with Leukemia in 2014 and died a year later.

“She was huge, she was big for them,” Dezer said, referring to Russian buyers. “No one has filled her shoes.
http://www.businessinsider.com/wealthy- ... ngs-2017-3

What You Need To Know About The Trump-Kremlin Connection
Dutch TV Expose Goes Where U.S. Networks Won’t; FBI Is Still on the Case

Axis of venal. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told senators that the FBI is continuing the investigation into possible Russian meddling in the election “vigorously and completely.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is stalling the nomination of Trump’s choice for Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial crimes, Sigal Mandelker, to try to get answers about financial ties between Russia and Trump associates.

Connecting the Dots from Trump Tower to Red Square


DCReport’s Jim Henry
A Dutch broadcaster has ventured where no American network will go—deep into the associations of Donald Trump with Russian government officials, oligarchs and gangsters.

The expose, “The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump: The Russians,” features DCReport’s Jim Henry, making the connections that Trump tries to deny. Henry is our senior editor for investigative economics and wrote our expose of connections between Russian oligarchs and Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Commerce Secretary.

Trump is so determined to halt federal investigations into his Russian ties that on May 9 he fired FBI Director James Comey. Earlier, Trump fired Sally Yates, the acting attorney general who warned the White House about retired General Michal Flynn’s conversations with Russians that made him vulnerable to blackmail, and Preet Bharara, the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who was investigating Russian connections to Trump.

“The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump: The Russians,” is part one of the investigative television show ZEMBLA examination of Trump. To watch the episode, in English, featuring Henry click here.

You can find “The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump: King of Diamonds,” part two of the program, here.


Trumped tweeted on the Russian affair just this morning (May 12)
Kansas fraud. Trump has named Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to co-chair a commission to investigate spurious claims of voter fraud. The ACLU, which has repeatedly sued over Kobach’s voter suppression policies, is asking what basis Trump has for making his voter fraud claims. “This commission is a fraud,” said former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander. “And Trump has chosen a fraud to be in charge of it.”

Paris delayed. Trump is going to hold off making a decision on the Paris agreement until June when he returns from a G7 meeting. One of Trump’s campaign pledges was to pull out of the Paris agreement on climate change. Trump also threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement. He now wants to renegotiate NAFTA. Flooding, such as that recently in the Midwest, is happening more often with rising global temperatures.

Offshore drilling. Trump’s Interior Department plans to start seismic testing in the Atlantic Ocean as it looks at permitting offshore drilling. Former President Barack Obama permanently banned new offshore gas and oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, but Trump signed an executive order that could expand offshore drilling. More than 120 cities and towns along the Atlantic coast oppose offshore drilling and/or seismic testing. The testing searches for oil and gas deposits below the ocean’s surface and uses loud airguns that can be heard up to 2,500 miles away and can harm whales, sea turtles and other marine life.
https://www.dcreport.org/2017/05/12/the ... onnection/

99 "coincidences" connecting Trump and Putin
Mar 27, 2017 5:00am CDT by Psimpsonuml


Check out my site for everything.
http://thegopwatchdog.com/

I started writing this because I thought it was important to have a clear understand of what the hell is going on with the Trump - Russia connections. Some of these are just rumors or probably mean nothing (1, 22, 25, 31) but the sheer number of Russian mobsters who have lived at Trump tower and the fact that 5 people have had to resign over connections to Putin is alarming.


Honestly the discovery that surprised me the most is the Abramoff connection. I'm beginning to think that the Russians partnered with the Republican party in the 1990s to build an alliance for reasons not yet known.

Trump's son in Law is Jared Kushner, the former owner of the Observer. The Observer received the DNC hacks from Guccifer 2.0 who is rumored to be a Russian agent.
Guccifer 2.0 and Roger Stone were apparently in contact up to 16 times during the 2016 campaign.
Jared Kushner's parents were friends with Netanyahu. He has forged an alliance with Putin.
His Chief Strategist is Steve Bannon. Bannon is the CEO of Breitbart, with the Mercer family having majority ownership. The Mercers, along with Bannon are heavily involved in Cambridge Analytica a data gathering firm. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company is SCL Group, which lists Dmitry Firtash as a board member. Breitbart and Bannon have extensive ties to the far right movement in Europe which is also funded by Putin.
His second campaign manager was Paul Manafort. He had to resign in August due to having questionable Russian ties like Dmitry Firtash and the former Ukrainian President. Manafort lives in Trump tower, along with Kellyanne Conway and her husband.
Hacked Texts reveal that it looks like Serhiy Leshchenko reached out to Manaforts daughter in an effort to blackmail him. She was not happy about the “blood money’
Mike McSherry, former Delegate strategist for the Trump campaign also lobbied for the same Ukrainian presidential candidate as Paul Manafort.
Rick Gates, Manaforts top aide also lobbied for Pro-Putin Ukrainian candidate.
Per Politico, Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik multiple times during the campaign. The first time appears to be in April, maybe when Trump gave that speech? Kilimnik is thought to be part of Russian intelligence.
They worked Oleg Deripaska on investment funds in Ukraine. Oleg paid Manafort 10 million dollars a year to lobby for Putin.
Oleg Deripaska obtained a VISA to enter this country, after previously being barred from entry due to the lobbying activities of Bob Dole.
Firtash worked with Russian Mob Semion Moglivech boss to help Gazprom oversee Natural Gas distribution to Ukraine.
Trump advisor J.D. Gordon is claiming that he was the advisor who had the Ukraine language softened at the Republican National Convention, at the request of Donald Trump
Kellyanne Conway's husband has business dealings with the Russian government and deleted tweets about it once Conway was chosen. (Conway, Bannon, and the Mercers are part of the "Council on National Policy" a secretive far right think tank group.
George Conway represented a firm that bribed the Russian government.
Trump sold his condo to Dmitry Rybolovev, whose private plane keeps showing up where Trump is. Rybolovev is a Russian billionaire with ties to Putin.
Rybolovev also had his Yacht placed in Croatia at the same time Ivanka and Jared were vacationing there, and his plane landed there around the same time too.
There is a Pro-Russian Think tank called the Center for the National Interest (CNI). CNI Board Member Henry Kissinger, former US Diplomat and current Putin confidante, has gotten close to Trump.
Kissinger suggested both Tillerson and KT McFarland to Trump.
Secretary of State Tillerson has many Russian business dealings through Exxon with Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft.
CNI Board Member Drew Guff runs a Russian Private Equity firm, attended the April Speech by Trump, and also sits on the International Council at the Belfour Center with Oleg Deripaska
The Dossier Christopher Steele created said that Igor Sechin along with Oleg Orovinkin were working on a deal to sell 19.5% of Rosneft to Trump in exchange for dropping sanctions. This deal relied on Carter Page, who resigned as a Trump advisor in September. After the election, a 19.5% deal went through, Oleg Orovkin was found dead in his car and the guy behind the Russian Hacking was arrested for treason in Russia.
Carter Page allegedly met with Igor Diveykin, a former Russian security official in charge of collecting US election information, when he went to Russia.
After the election, Kaspersky labs Ruslan Stoyanov was arrested for investigation of Treason. Once Michael Flynn was ousted as National Security advisor, it also came out that he was working for Kaspersky last year.
The Rosneft deal is linked to Trump through a vast network of holding companies. The 19.5% was through a Singapore company using Caymans offshore accounts. QHG shares was the holding company of the 19.5% sale. QHG's disclosure form stated that it used to be called CATALPO PTE, but no such company existed. Perhaps they did that to confuse people. Anyways, a company with the same information called CATALPA PTE did exist though. Catalpa shared an address with the Intertrust Group. Intertrust’s filing shows an affiliation with Walkers Global which is the affiliation used to incorporate QHG. Intertrust is owned by the Blackstone Group. If that name seems familiar, it is because Blackstone CEO is Stephen Schwarzman, one of Trump's senior economic advisors. Uncovered thanks to this amazing Twitter user
The Blackstone Group was cofounded by Stephen Schwarzman and CNI Board Member Peter Peterson.
The Dossier also claims Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to meet with Russians, which he denied. Recently, it came out that he was working with Felix Sater to broker a Ukrainian-Russia peace deal.
Cohen, Sater, and a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, Andreii Artemenko sat down for dinner to discuss Ukraine, Russia, and sanctions.
Alex Oronov, working with Cohen and Artemenko, developed the plan which they planned on leaving on Michael Flynn’s desk until he had to resign. Oronov mysteriously died at the beginning of March.
Felix Sater claimed to be a Senior Advisor to Trump , which Trump claimed not to remember. Sater had his own office in Trump Tower. Sater has been connected to organized crime and his father is in the Russian Mafia
To finance Trump SoHo, the Bayrock Group formed a tax evading partnership with Icelandic FL-Group. Trump had to sign off on this deal.
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross invested 500 million in the Bank of Cyprus and is on the board of directors. This is where Putin launders his money. Dmitry Rybolovev (7) is the largest shareholder at this bank, and another Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg is the second largest shareholder.
Deutsche Bank, under Ackerman was the only bank willing to loan money to Trump after he declared bankruptcy four times. Josef Ackerman left Deutche Bank to join the Bank of Cyprus after Wilber Ross engineered his takeover.
Putin's propaganda news station Russia Today has frequently had Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and Sebastian Gorka on it.
Carter Page was named as a foreign policy advisor because Jeff sessions Chief of Staff, Rick Dearborn found him.
Stephen Miller is Jeff Sessions former aide and is friends with Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Spencer has ties to European far right groups and was married to a Russian Propaganda mouthpiece with ties to Putin.
Trump friend Roger Stone is in contact with Julian Assange who runs WikiLeaks, who also hacked the DNC and provided leaks to Russia today. Stone is also partner in a lobbying firm with Paul Manafort
Secretary of Education Betsy Devos is the sister of mercenary Erik Prince. Erik Prince is running all over the world helping dictators suppress Muslims. He is a Breitbart contributor, a Pence supporter and a Trump advisor.
Prince also used to work for House Rep Dana Rohrabacker, also known as Putin's Favorite Congressman and one time considered to be Trumps secretary of State.
Prince is connected to John Ashcroft through Constellis Holdings, as Constellis owns Princes old company, Blackwater. Ashcroft has defended Lord of War Victor Bout, a Russian connected to Igor Sechin.
Vadim Trincher, who lived in Trump tower ran a gambling ring out of Trump tower on behalf of Russian mafia don Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov.
Preet Bhahara was fired by the President, along with the other U.S. Attorneys in what is a common move when a new party take power. The odd thing is that Trump had previously asked him stay on. Bhahara is the Attorney responsible for putting Victor Bout and the Russian gambling ring in jail. He also prosecuted one Russian for drug trafficking, a dozen Russian spies, and a Russian Banker. 3 days before being fired, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington requested that he investigate Trump Tower.
Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn violated the Logan Act by discussing lifting sanctions with The Russian Ambassador pre-inauguration.
He also met with Austrian Neo-Nazis working with Putin
Michael Flynn initially chose Monica Crowley to be on the national security council before she had to withdraw due to plagiarism scandal. She recently registered as a lobbyist for Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a Trump (and Clinton) foundation donor with ties to Carter Page.
Trump Tower housed an office of Alfa Bank which had a private server communicating with companies like Spectrum Health, which lists members of the Devos Family as Board Members.
Richard Burt, a Republican Lobbyist and CNI Board Member sat on the board of Alfa Bank. He worked for the Trump Campaign while lobbying for Russian State owned Gazprom
Burt was an advisor to Textron Inc, a financial company help finance some of Trump's international golf course deals.
In recent years, Gazprom has hired the lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs to lobby for it. Lobbyist and Trump supporter Jack Kingston visited Russia the same week as former Gazprom lobbyist Carter page. Totally a coincidence.
Trump threw Miss Universe with Putin-Connected Oligarch Aras Agalorov and had Alex Sapir/Rotem Rosen as guests
Alex Sapir is the son of Tamir Sapir, and they own condos in Trump tower. Sapir and his organization partnered with Bayrock on plenty of Trump condo projects. Alex's sister married Rotem Rosen, a former lieutenant for Lev Leviev
The Bayrock Group was founded by Tevfik Araf, and housed in Trump Tower. Araf hired Felix Sater as his C.O.O.
Michael Caputo, who helped run Trump's NY primary, lived in Russia in the 90's and was Contracted by Gazprom to improve Russia’s image in the United States.
Michael Caputo works for Trump apologist Chris Collins now, and learned everything he knew from Roger Stone.
Ivanka Trump is close friends with Putin's rumored girlfriend Wendi Deng.
Ivanka is also close with Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich and his wife. Here is a photo of them together (also with Wendi Deng)
Abramovich owns the steel company building the pipelines recently approved by the Trump administration
Abramovich's Millhouse Capital merged with Oleg Deripaska's aluminum holdings to form RUSAL
in 2007, Rusal merged with the Aluminum side of Glencore to form an even larger company. Glencore is one of the companies involved in the Dossier - Ross
The Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin died on 2/20. He invited Trump to Russia in 1986.
Lev Leviev is a Putin friend. Not only has he had multiple business dealings with Jared Kushner and the Bayrock group (Felix Sater and Tamir Kapir) but he also works with Netanyahu on settlements.
Russian-Canadian Alex Shnaider partnered with Trump on a building project in Toronto. Shnaider partnered with Ukrainian Billionaire Eduard Shifrin to form a holding company called the Midland Group. Shiftin was recently given Russian Citizenship by a Putin presidential decree. Alex's father in law Boris Birshtein is associated with the Russian Mafia.
Semion Mogilevich is the head of the Russian mafia. In the 1990's, he started a fake company with Jacob Bogatin as the CEO. Jacob's brother David owned 5 separate condos in Trump tower at one point and is well known as part of Mogilevich's key members.
Mogilevich key lieutenant Vyacheslav Ivankov also lived at Trump tower.
Jack Abramoff may be where it all starts. Russian Oil and Gas company NAFTAsib formed a shell company called Chelsea Commercial, which only listed Abramoff and Patrick Pizzella as lobbyists when it was created. The purpose of Chelsea was to promote Russian oil and trade interests in the United States. It also underwrote the trip Tom Delay and Ed Buckham made to Russia with Abramoff. Pizzella also happens to work for Trump. Buckham formed the Alexander Strategy Group to help the US Family Network funnel its money received from Naftasib. The US Family network was primarily a vehicle consisting of Buckham, Delay, Ralph Reed, CNI Board Member Grover Norquist and Abramoff. These people have been members of the Council on National Policy over the years.
In November 1998, Jack Abramoff organized a meeting between Sergei Kiriyenko and Republican lawmakers. Kiriyenko is the former prime minister, and is also featured in the Dossier as part of the Trump scandal.
Bob Ney had a young aide working for him during this time. When he was caught, his aide, some young unknown named Corey Lewandowski wrote a letter to the judge praising him as a father figure.
Don McGahn, White House Counsel defended Tom Delay on charges of a Russian Pay . Delay, along with Jack Abramoff, Buckham, and Ney met with Viktor Chernomyrdin, former head of Gazprom in the 1990s.
Mcgahn also happened to start working for Squire Patton Boggs, the lobbyists representing Gazprom in 2013. SPB, he moved on to Jones Day.
Jones Day opened a Moscow office in 2013 after it successfully worked with AlfaBank (MIkhail Fridman) and Renova Group (Viktor Vekselberg) to create an oil producer with BP, called TNK-BP. It has since been bought out by Rosneft. From there, Mcgahn signed on to work for the Trump Presidential Campaign.
Former Senator Conrad Burns was also taken down by the Abramoff Scandal, and he had positive things to say about Putin. Burns passed away weeks before Trump announced his presidential run.
Patrick Pizzella was recently named Acting President of the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Pizzella and Abramoff organized many trips for conservatives to the Marianas. During one trip, Pizzella had Kellyanne Conway show up . If that is not enough, Conway and Pizzela are both on the Center for National Policy board
Alexander Strategy Group's main lobbyist was Paul Behrends, former National Security Advisor to Dana Rohrabacker and family friend of Erik Prince. He is the Current Staff Director for the House Foreign Affairs committee.
Dana Rohrabacker and Jack Abramoff are long time friends.
Abramoff partnered with Charlie Black (of the lobbying firm Black, (Paul) Manafort and (Roger) Stone) in the 80s to work with brutal African dictators.
Sebastian Gorka worked for Viktor Orban, a Hungarian authoritarian leader close to Putin, before moving to the United States to work for the Republicans. Now he works for the Trump White House.
Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, widely regarded as Russia's top spy, was revealed to have met with Attorney General Sessions twice last year in his capacity as a Senator. He also met with Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn in December. Also, when the Republicans removed anti-Russia language from the Platform at the convention? It was because Trump advisors Carter Page and JD Gordon met with Kislyak.
Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani lobbied for Rosneft
Jim Baker lobbied Trump to nominate Tillerson as Secretary of State, possibly because of the fact that his firm represents both Exxon and Gazprom/Rosneft
The Former head of Yukos is a Trump backer and campaign donor.
CNI Board Member David McCormick is an executive at Bridgewater Associates where James Comey served as General Counsel prior to joining the FBI. They also both worked Din the Bush administration, albeit in different cabinet departments.
CNI Board Member Jon Huntsman was tapped to be ambassador to Russia.
CNI Board Members Dmitri K. Simes and Paul Saunders have hosted events Trump has spoken at, and Simes has been referred to by Putin as his American Friend
Donald Trump met with Ambassador Kislyak during the Presidential Campaign, which looks like nothing until you remember he had previously denied any such meetings.
Trump ally David Clarke visited Moscow the same week as Michael Flynn. His trip was paid for by a Russian gun rights group headed by Maria Butina and included several NRA heads. Butina is close with long time Republican strategist Paul Erickson
Sergei Millian, a Russian born real estate developer has close ties to Trump and to Michael Cohen. It is also said that he may have been behind some of the dirty claims in the dossier.
Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn is a Russian born Pro-Putin immigrant, who has spent a lot of time talking about Crimea on television. He resigned on 3/25/17.
Secretary of the Air Force nominee Heather Wilson founded Keystone International in order to foster business relations Between the United States and Russia
Mark Burnett helped remake Trumps image into a successful reality star, ran his inauguration festivities and has worked with Putin on reality television. Grant Stern does a fantastic job laying out the case that Burnett could have been the guy in the middle of all of this.
Edward Lozansky is a controversial figure at the heart of US-Russia relations over the past 30 years. He openly advocates for a closer alliance in order to bring down Isis. Lozanky is the creator of the annual US-Russia Forum, and founder of American University in Moscow.
Lozansky fled here in 1986, and Bob Dole and Jack Kemp helped him undermine the Soviet Union in order to get his wife over to the United States.
Once the Soviet Union fell, Lozanky created the American University in Moscow, with offices right next door to Paul Weyrich’s heritage foundation new Moscow office.
Lozanky started the Sakharov Institute in Russia in order to fight for the activists freedom, while Richard Burt actively worked on the U.S side for Sakharov’s freedom. Both are now actively working to create a Trump-Putin alliance.
Paul Weyrich, founder of the Council for National Policy and the Free Congress Foundation helped organize the World Russia forum after the downfall of the Soviet Union. In 2003, a who's who of Republican Congressman favorable to Russia including Weldon, Delay, and Rohrabacker were in attendence.
Trump's former lawyer Marc E. Kasowitz has signed on to defend a Russian Bank with ties to Putin.
Trump Transition member and head of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes has his entire net worth sunk into part ownership of a winery in California, which happens to have Russian ties.
The Republican National Committee paid Hamilton Trading Group large sums of money to dig up information on Hillary during the election. Hamilton is co-owned by a former Soviet Spy, Gennady Vasilenko
Nigel Farage is close with Russia and possibly looked the other way while they helped fund Brexit. He is also an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump.
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2017/3/27/1 ... -and-Putin

APRIL 27, 2017 | DAN WISE AND RUSS BAKER
GOVERNMENT MUST TELL IF TRUMP ASSOCIATE HAD RUSSIAN MOB TIES


Todd Kaminsky, Felix Sater, Donald Trump
Photo credit: 591J / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), The New York Senate and The White House.
Several weeks ago, WhoWhatWhy published an investigative story on Donald Trump, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Russian mob. It addressed challenges the FBI faces in fully investigating and reporting to the public what it knows about Trump’s past and his relationships.

One of the figures in that story — and in a followup piece — is a former Trump business associate named Felix Sater. Our article pointed out that Sater, a man with a criminal past, had become a “cooperating witness” for the FBI and had been so while he worked in Trump Tower. He had been highly valued by the FBI — as best as we could determine both for providing information about international terrorism and gangsters from countries of the former Soviet Union.

We were unable at the time to reach Sater for comment, but since publication, we have heard from him. He claimed that he had done no work for the FBI relating to “Russian organized crime,” and that, moreover, he had never even heard of the legendary godfather of the Russia-based crime network, Semion Mogilevich. We have appended his remarks to our original article in an Editor’s Note.

We also added an interesting revelation from the Wall Street Journal that Sater, who says he knows none of those gangsters, has, separately, in a legal action against the man who was his business partner in a deal with Donald Trump, referred to the man as a “Kazakh gangster.”

Without splitting hairs about the differences in meaning between “former Soviet Union,” “Russian,” and “Eastern European” when referring to criminals with roots and ties in various parts of the former Eastern bloc, the question of whether organized crime was a factor in Sater’s usefulness to the FBI while he was a business associate of Donald Trump needs to be resolved.

Someone who could help solve this puzzle and clarify Sater’s connections to the Russian mob is Todd Kaminsky, a former federal prosecutor and now an elected official in New York State. But Kaminsky seems reluctant to press for disclosure.

This is what we do know:

In a secret proceeding in 2011, federal prosecutor Kaminsky praised Sater for providing valuable information on “Russian organized crime.” This information had been hidden in the previously sealed transcript of an argument before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which is based in Manhattan. It was first published on the law blog of Dan Wise, one of the co-authors of this article. (Sater did not respond to two email requests seeking comment on Kaminsky’s statement about him, beyond seeking to know in which venue Kaminsky made that statement.)

***

Clearly, getting to the bottom of the close relationship between the FBI and Sater is essential if the public is to trust the FBI to fully investigate Trump’s relationships to a wide network of Russian-orbit-connected figures, including Vladimir Putin, various billionaire oligarchs, and a crime network widely believed to be closely enmeshed with the Russian leadership.

Aside from speaking with Sater, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees should also speak with the federal prosecutors and FBI agents who worked with Sater, praised his cooperation as an informant, and sought leniency at his sentencing hearing after he was convicted on a charge of securities fraud.

Beyond whatever action Congress takes as a result of its investigations, there are court files that could shed light on the Trump-Russia connection. But getting them unsealed has not been easy. Nor has it been easy to get anyone to talk about Sater’s work. This includes Kaminsky, a former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, which encompasses Brooklyn and Long Island, and one of the prosecutors present at Sater’s sentencing. He is now a New York state senator representing Long Island (9th District, South Shore).

Kaminsky’s office ignored repeated requests for comment on whether he believes the remaining material in Sater’s court files should now be unsealed — considering the paramount national interest in uncovering any connections between the Trump campaign and Russian mobsters, oligarchs, and political leaders, including Putin.

Many news organizations, including WhoWhatWhy, have reported that in today’s Russia, the criminal class, the monied elite, and the political leadership are closely intertwined. Kaminsky, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

The reason Kaminsky’s now-public 2011 statement is so important is that it makes clear Sater had enough credibility with the Russian mob that he could gather “valuable” information from Russian-language gangsters operating in New York City.

This connection was reinforced in February when Sater emerged as the linchpin of an extremely pro-Russian proposal to halt the fighting in Ukraine. Sater, working with a rogue Ukrainian legislator, Andril V. Artemenko, and Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, would have laid the groundwork for ending US financial sanctions against Russia. Further, it would have given Russia unquestioned control of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, for another 50 to 100 years.

The proposal landed on the desk of Trump’s then-national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who has since been forced to resign, ostensibly for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US before Trump’s inauguration. The Sater-Artemenko-Cohen proposal has not been acted upon.

Sater’s role emerged against a steady escalation of concern that Russia had been behind the hacking of both the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Indeed, just three days before the WiseLawNY story ran, on March 23, FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that his agency had begun a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in July 2016.

Todd Kaminsky 2016 campaign video for NY state senate:



It seems beyond question that Kaminsky and other Eastern District prosecutors and law enforcement agents with whom Sater “cooperated” during his years as an informant have a great deal of information about his work with the Russian mob. (The Eastern District includes Brooklyn, long the center of Russian-speaking immigrants in New York.)

Sater, who pled guilty to one count of racketeering in 1998 in connection with an organized-crime “pump-and-dump” stock fraud, was not sentenced until 2009, and he served the FBI as a “cooperating witness” during the intervening eleven years. It was during this period that Sater worked at Bayrock, the real estate development company with offices in Trump Tower that partnered with the Trump Organization on numerous projects, including the Trump SoHo. In pending litigation, Bayrock is alleged to have served as a large-scale criminal operation, laundering vast sums from the former Soviet Union.

Thanks to his efforts as an informant, Sater was given a slap on the wrist for defrauding investors: no jail time, no probation, no restitution, and just a $25,000 fine. It was Kaminsky who represented the government at Sater’s sentencing hearing. Prosecutors had determined that the pump-and-dump operation in which Sater took part in the mid-1990s had fleeced its victims of at least $40 million.

All the information that Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents gathered while supervising Sater’s work as an informant in the 11-year span between his guilty plea in 1998 and sentencing in 2009 may be available (or generally known) to certain agents conducting the counterintelligence probe.

As WhoWhatWhy exclusively reported, one of Sater’s FBI handlers, Gary Uher, was part of Trump’s security team during the campaign. The same story reported that two former Eastern District prosecutors represented Sater at his sentencing hearing in 2009 as attorneys with the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. One was Leslie R. Caldwell, who had been a senior trial counsel in the Eastern District’s Business and Securities Fraud Section; the other was Kelly Anne Moore, who had headed the office’s Violent Crimes and Terrorism Section. President Barack Obama tapped Caldwell to become the number three official in the Department of Justice in 2013. Loretta Lynch worked with both Caldwell and Moore when she was a prosecutor in the Eastern District; in fact, she signed Sater’s cooperation agreement in 1998.

“Highly Sensitive Matters”
.
The vehemence with which prosecutors and judges have acted to block the public airing of information from Sater’s file suggests that prosecutors may have cut a deal with Sater so they could catch even bigger fish: the Russian-based mob and its “boss of bosses,” Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI would later declare a serious national security threat. (As noted above, Sater has denied even having heard of Mogilevich.)

The court battle over whether Sater’s criminal file in his original case should remain sealed continues, six years after the Second Circuit barred two lawyers from talking to anyone, including Congress and arguably even investigators, about the contents of that file. The lawyers were Frederick Oberlander, who had disseminated sealed information from Sater’s file, and Richard E. Lerner, who had defended Oberlander. (Oberlander had initiated the litigation against Bayrock that sought to unseal Sater’s file.)

Indeed, the veil of secrecy had grown so thick by 2011 that in response to a petition from the Associated Press, a judge appointed by the Second Circuit to enforce its orders refused to allow Oberlander and Lerner to even discuss the contents of the materials the judge himself had just ordered unsealed.

Since then, parts of Sater’s criminal file have become public — although the government remains extraordinarily tight-lipped. The reason for the continuing secrecy can probably be found in the 2015 confirmation hearings of Loretta Lynch, who succeeded Eric Holder as US Attorney General under Obama. In a letter responding to a written question from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she made it clear that there was much sensitive information in Sater’s criminal file. “The majority of the materials that remain sealed go to the heart of Sater’s cooperation in several highly sensitive matters,” Lynch wrote to Hatch.

Felix Sater
Photo credit: See complete attribution below.

The public has no idea of what the remaining sealed files contain, other than Lynch’s tantalizing remark.

The nation and world are now riveted by investigations into the Trump campaign’s putative role in Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The issues raised go to the heart of the integrity of the electoral process.

The traditional rationale for cloaking information about an informant’s identity or the scope of his disclosures is to protect the informant’s safety. But Sater’s own behavior suggests that he does not fear for his own safety as a consequence of cooperating with law enforcement officials.

In this vein, it is worth noting that Sater undertook the Ukrainian “peace proposal” mission, which carried with it a reasonable possibility of generating headlines — as it did. Further, if the government feared the exposure of Sater’s mission, it is hard to imagine that his handlers would not have reined him in. The involvement of Cohen, Trump’s personal counsel, is even more inexplicable.

Perhaps Kaminsky, recognizing that the voting public has a deep interest in these matters, will reconsider whether the government’s interest in protecting Sater, the informant, takes priority over determining whether the Trump campaign was complicit in any Russian effort to undermine the 2016 election. Of course, Kaminsky himself may be bound by an obligation not to disclose classified information.

Nonetheless, in 2018, Kaminsky will be running for a second term as state senator representing a swing district in the southwestern corner of Long Island. If he doesn’t budge on the question, it could become an issue on the campaign trail.

The people of the United States — and the world — must have confidence in the conclusions of the ongoing investigations into the Trump-Russian connection. Given the importance of these investigations, continued court secrecy may no longer be in the national interest.
http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/27/govern ... -mob-ties/

[seemslikeadream]

POLITICS | Mon Jun 19, 2017 | 3:28pm EDT
Mueller team lawyer brings witness-flipping expertise to Trump probes

By Karen Freifeld
A veteran federal prosecutor recruited onto special counsel Robert Mueller's team is known for a skill that may come in handy in the investigation of potential ties between Russia and U.S. President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team: persuading witnesses to turn on friends, colleagues and superiors.

Andrew Weissmann, who headed the U.S. Justice Department's criminal fraud section before joining Mueller's team last month, is best known for two assignments - the investigation of now-defunct energy company Enron and organized crime cases in Brooklyn, New York - that depended heavily on gaining witness cooperation.

Securing the cooperation of people close to Trump, many of whom have been retaining their own lawyers, could be important for Mueller, who was named by the Justice Department as special counsel on May 17 and is investigating, among other issues, whether Trump himself has sought to obstruct justice. Trump has denied allegations of both collusion and obstruction.

"Flipping" witnesses is a common, although not always successful, tactic in criminal prosecutions.

Robert Ray, who succeeded Kenneth Starr as the independent counsel examining former President Bill Clinton, noted that Trump's fired former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, has already offered through his lawyer to testify before Congress in exchange for immunity, suggesting potential willingness to cooperate as a witness.

"It would seem to me the time is now to make some decisions about what you have and what leverage can be applied to get the things you don't have," Ray said, referring to Mueller's team.

Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and others close to the president already have hired their own lawyers to help navigate Mueller's expanding probe and ongoing congressional investigations.

Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under former President Barack Obama, said Weissmann is willing to take risks to secure witness testimony that other prosecutors might not. Ruemmler worked with Weissmann on the Justice Department's Enron task force that investigated the massive corporate fraud that led to the company's 2001 collapse.

Ruemmler recalled that Weissmann had a hunch that former Enron treasurer Ben Glisan would be willing to talk despite already having pleaded guilty without agreeing to cooperate. So Weissmann had U.S. marshals bring Glisan before the grand jury from prison, Ruemmler said.

'NOT AFRAID TO LOSE'

Other prosecutors might have feared Glisan's testimony could contradict their theory of the case, Ruemmler said, but Weissmann's gamble paid off when the former executive became a key witness.

"He's not afraid to lose, and that is sometimes an unusual quality," Ruemmler said of Weissmann.

Weissmann also led lengthy negotiations with lawyers for Andrew Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer and a star prosecution witness in the case, gaining leverage from the fact that prosecutors had indicted Fastow's wife, also a former Enron employee, on tax fraud charges.

Both pleaded guilty, and Fastow testified against former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who was convicted in 2006.

Fastow declined to comment. Glisan could not be reached for comment. Representatives for Mueller and the Trump legal team declined to comment.

Critics have said say Weissmann's hardball approach can lead to prosecutorial overreach. A number of Enron convictions were overturned on appeal, and Skilling's 24-year sentence was later reduced by 10 years.

Defense lawyer Tom Kirkendall, who represented clients related to the Enron case, said the task force intimidated witnesses and misinterpreted the law.

But Sam Buell, a former prosecutor who was a member of the Enron task force, called such criticism routine in high-stakes cases.

Mueller has several other highly experienced lawyers on his team, including U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben. Trump has also been building a legal team led by New York lawyer Marc Kasowitz, with veteran Washington defense lawyer John Dowd recently coming aboard.

Before his work relating to Enron, Weissmann served as a federal prosecutor in the organized crime bureau in Brooklyn. In 1997, he and trial partner George Stamboulidis brought down one of the country's most powerful mob bosses, Vincent "the Chin" Gigante, with the help of turncoat witnesses.

"We cut our teeth in the organized crime section," said Stamboulidis, now in private practice. "And the only way you can make those cases is to get people to cooperate, even when the oath of Omerta (a Mafia code of silence and non-cooperation with authorities) was strong and in full play.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... ium=Social

Top intelligence official told associates Trump asked him if he could intervene with Comey on FBI Russia probe

Trump asked intelligence officials to deny connections with Russia
The Washington Post's Adam Entous explains how President Trump asked two top ranking intelligence officials to publicly deny any connection between his campaign and Russia. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
By Adam Entous June 6 at 8:05 PM
The nation’s top intelligence official told associates in March that President Trump asked him if he could intervene with then-FBI Director James B. Comey to get the bureau to back off its focus on former national security adviser Michael Flynn in its Russia probe, according to officials.

On March 22, less than a week after being confirmed by the Senate, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats attended a briefing at the White House together with officials from several government agencies. As the briefing was wrapping up, Trump asked everyone to leave the room except for Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

The president then started complaining about the FBI investigation and Comey’s handling of it, said officials familiar with the account Coats gave to associates. Two days earlier, Comey had confirmed in a congressional hearing that the bureau was probing whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 race.

After the encounter, Coats discussed the conversation with other officials and decided that intervening with Comey as Trump had suggested would be inappropriate, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.

Then-Indiana Sen. Dan Coats on Capitol Hill last November. (Susan Walsh/AP)
The events involving Coats show the president went further than just asking intelligence officials to deny publicly the existence of any evidence showing collusion during the 2016 election, as The Washington Post reported in May. The interaction with Coats indicates that Trump aimed to enlist top officials to have Comey curtail the bureau’s probe.

[Trump asked intelligence chiefs to push back against FBI collusion probe after Comey revealed its existence]

Coats will testify on Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Lawmakers on the panel said they would press him for information about his interactions with the president regarding the FBI investigation.

The question of whether the president obstructed the Russia investigation is expected to take center stage this week with Comey’s highly anticipated testimony on the Hill on Thursday. Comey associates say that before the director was fired in May, the president had asked him to drop the investigation into Flynn, and Comey refused.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), declined to comment on whether Trump asked Coats to intervene with Comey regarding the Flynn investigation. Hale said in a statement: “Director Coats does not discuss his private conversations with the President. However, he has never felt pressured by the President or anyone else in the Administration to influence any intelligence matters or ongoing investigations.”

A spokesman for Pompeo declined to comment on the closed-door discussions. The White House referred questions to outside lawyers, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has repeatedly denied any coordination took place between his campaign and the Russian government, which, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, stole emails embarrassing to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and leaked them to undermine her campaign.

Flynn had served as an enthusiastic surrogate for Trump during the campaign and then was fired after just 24 days as national security adviser over revelations he misrepresented his discussions with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

The incidents suggest that Trump may not have appreciated the traditional barriers meant to insulate the intelligence agencies from politics.

Though the ODNI oversees other intelligence agencies, the FBI director operates independently on many matters. For example, Comey kept James R. Clapper Jr., Coats’s predecessor in the Obama administration, in the dark about the bureau’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A day or two after the March 22 meeting, the president followed up with a phone call to Coats, according to officials familiar with the discussions. In the call, Trump asked Coats to issue a public statement denying the existence of any evidence of coordination between his campaign and the Russian government. Again, Coats decided not to act on the request.

Trump similarly approached Adm. Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to ask him to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of coordination, as The Post previously reported, according to current and former officials. Like Coats, Rogers refused to comply with the president’s request.

Trump announced in January that he was nominating Coats to serve as director of national intelligence, responsible for overseeing U.S. intelligence agencies and for briefing the president on global developments.

In February, as tensions flared between intelligence agencies and the White House over Russia and other issues, some of Trump’s advisers floated the idea of appointing a New York billionaire, Stephen A. Feinberg, to undertake a review of the ODNI. Coats, who was preparing for his confirmation hearing, felt blindsided, officials said.

The White House backed away from the idea of naming Feinberg after Coats, members of the intelligence community and Congress raised objections.

Officials say Trump’s advisers have since revived their proposal to appoint Feinberg to a senior position, possibly to review the roles of the ODNI and other intelligence agencies.

Some officials said they viewed the prospective appointment of Feinberg as an effort by White House officials to put pressure on intelligence agencies to close ranks with the White House.

In an appearance last month before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Coats refused to provide details about his interactions with Trump.

But he indicated that he would cooperate with the Russia probe now being led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Under questioning by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Coats said that if asked, he would provide details of his conversations with Trump to Mueller.

Coats also said that if he is called before an investigative committee, such as the Senate Intelligence Committee, “I certainly will provide them with what I know and what I don’t know.” He said the Trump administration had not directed the ODNI to withhold information from members of Congress conducting oversight.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... 37531a2eed

Seth Davin Norrholm, PhD, Contributor
Translational Neuroscientist/Psychologist
Eternal Emperor in His Own Mind: The Distorted Reality of Donald Trump
05/27/2017 01:17 pm ET | Updated May 27, 2017
In this in-depth article, two high profile mental health experts delve further into the inconsistencies and untruths that underlie much of what this President says and does.

By Seth Davin Norrholm, Ph.D. & David M. Reiss, M.D.


AAP
At a recent NATO summit, President Trump, in classic narcissistic fashion, shoved his way to the front of the gathering of international representatives and assumed a dominant posture.
During his ascent from the business world and reality television to the Presidency of the United States of America, Donald Trump has consistently displayed many of the qualities and behaviors associated with narcissism including:

· grandiose sense of self-importance;

· preoccupation with unlimited fantasies of success, power, and brilliance;

· belief that one is special;

· consistent requirement for excessive admiration;

· sense of entitlement;

· taking advantage of others for one’s own gain;

· lack of empathy for others, and

· hyper-sensitivity to criticism

These behaviors and their potential consequences have been well documented in the mainstream media and individuals representing different schools of thought and areas of expertise within the mental health community, including the two of us, have provided comment and insight to the relationship between extreme narcissism and Presidential fitness for duty.

One aspect of the narcissistic personality that has been increasingly apparent to outside observers during the first 120 days of Trump’s term is his noted penchant for controlling the narrative about him and his performance through misleading statements, exaggerations, or flat out lying…and he has let out some real doozies (492 in his first 100 days by some counts) including:

- he had the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan

- his Inauguration crowd was the largest in history

- 3 to 5 million “illegals” voted in the general election and cost him the popular vote

- the rollout of his travel ban from predominantly Muslim nations was “going well with very few problems” and that any of those protesting the action were “paid” “professional anarchists”

- Former President Obama wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower during the campaign

- “Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated”

- FBI Director James Comey told him that he was not under investigation three times prior to Comey’s firing


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Shortly after his Inauguration in January, President Trump and then FBI Director James Comey greet one another. Trump would later fire Comey in what has been debated as a self-preservation move and/or obstruction of justice.
The narcissist is self-serving and will go to great lengths to protect himself from ego injury, including changing facts to fit his worldview rather than changing his worldview to fit objective facts. The nexus of repeated lies, creating an “alternative reality” even in the face of conflicting evidence, is so deeply rooted and so intricately woven that severe narcissists can display a quasi-delusional state (separation from reality) similar to that seen in psychotic disorders. While there is a subtly different quality of the false beliefs than occurs in primary psychotic disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, delusional disorder, etc.) the distortion of reality by the narcissist can be equally as irrational.

For the past several weeks, the President has been embroiled in controversy regarding the apparent interference by Russia in our 2016 election, the ties of several members of Team Trump with Russia, and accusations levied toward him suggesting that he is actively obstructing the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation. For example, Trump’s rationale for firing FBI Director James Comey has changed numerous times with the most recent explanations seeming to be more closely related to self-preservation rather than dereliction of duty on Comey’s part.

All of these observations beg the questions: Why does the President lie to the extent that he does and why does he appear unconcerned about the consequences of such substantial “twisting of the facts?”

Based on our combined 50 plus years of experience examining human behavior and studying psychopathology, we suggest the following cognitive framework may help explain the contradictory, deceptive, and sometimes bizarre, statements and actions of this President:

1. The extreme Narcissist will distort reality and tenaciously maintain the existence of their distorted reality. This type of defense is not unique to narcissism and is present almost ubiquitously in both psychiatrically healthy individuals and those who suffer from some form of psychopathology.

Distorting reality serves to protect an individual from distressing, fearful, painful, or overwhelming emotion. What is unique to those with personality disorders, including narcissistic subtypes, is the degree to which an individual will go to maintain and rationalize this defense.

The extreme Narcissist will provide any plausible defense for his behavior in order to maintain the ego-protecting reality he has created. In other words, consider that within legal proceedings there exists the concept of demonstrating that something did or did not happen by meeting the criteria of being “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The severe narcissist will seek out and employ a defense, tenaciously, even if it could be characterized as well within the realm of “unreasonable doubt,” and having only the slightest chance of plausibility.

It is not distressing to the severe narcissist if a belief is improbable (e.g., the reported ties between my team and Russia are a hoax created by the opposition) as long as the belief is even barely theoretically possible. In fact, being directly challenged that a belief is improbable (for example, by the press) may actually embolden the extreme narcissist by confirming a sense of “specialness” – the conviction that one is so smart or so important that he sees what others do not. He might respond to such a challenge “That just proves how special I am, how unique my situation is, and that my abilities are so superior!”


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Two representative tweets in response to President Trump’s recent claims that his recent overseas trip to the Middle East and Europe has been “very successful” despite conflicting evidence and controversy along the way.
2. The extreme Narcissist lives in the moment with little regard for linear time, cause and effect, or behavioral consequences. Our clinical observations suggest that the severe narcissist lives in a protective (and expanding) bubble within which life events all occur “in the present.” There is no emotional conception of time in the narcissist as perceived by most individuals. In general, people are able to conceptualize their life history as a linear, logically flowing, autobiographical narrative. While the narcissist may be able to tell you factually that events occurred on a certain date at a specific time, their perception is that it is all encompassed in terms of an immediate “now.”

This phenomenon can be described as a “collapse of time” or an ever-enlarging array of interconnected events as opposed to a directional, sequential passage of time and experiences. Dr. Reiss has used Kurt Vonnegut’s metaphor from Slaughterhouse 5 to explain this type of life perception. Normal perception of time can be thought of as riding in a train traveling in a linear direction with “events” coming up to you and then passing behind you. You have the sense of where you are, you can try to peek at what is coming up, and you can recall what has passed by – yet you are fixed in that position traveling in that direction and you can report how far you have travelled (by using a clock or calendar, for example).

The “collapse of time” is perceived as more of being within an expanding balloon in which neither the events that you experience nor the sense of self that you develop are fixed or anchored. Events that occurred in the past are recalled and re-experienced without a definitive emotional sense of how long ago they occurred.

The relationship between events is dynamic and changeable. In addition, all of the events that an individual experienced are all “there” at the same time and accessible to recall. Events that occurred years ago carry the same emotional power (and impact upon decision making and behavior) as events of perhaps the current month.

The extreme Narcissist lives in the “now” such that:

· gratification (e.g., praise, reward, accolades, adoration) is sought within the moment,

· explanations for misdeeds are presented in present tense terms,

· boastful statements are made because they feel good right now –


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In posting boastful tweets like this, which also includes a false statement, Trump is able to “lean on” his Electoral College victory to feel good “in the now.”

In other words, the severe narcissist does not stop to consider future challenges to his statements or actions, the relevance or consistency of present behaviors with previous events, or the potential negative consequences that “now” actions could have later. The extreme narcissist’s perception of time impairs the ability to function effectively in a society that is based on an implied linear progression of time.

For the narcissist, the sense of the “future” may have a similar “immediate” quality. While narcissists may “plan” for the future, at times even for a legacy after death, when closely exploring the accompanying emotional sense, there is often a hidden child-like belief that even if deceased, one will still be present to experience the “glory” of their own legacy – and in fact, one is already reveling in that anticipated adulation at the present moment. Emotionally, a magical immortality is embraced.

It is our belief that until a Narcissist is directly confronted “head on” with irrefutable evidence of his misdeeds or the clear impossibility of the scenario that has been created, he will devise a narrative to fit the gratification of his ego within the present “now.”

This may, at least in part, explain why there have been so many examples of this President contradicting his previous statements, speaking extemporaneously without substance to back his claims, or “flip-flopping” between positions, all without any indication that he is aware of or experiencing a sense of conflict or inconsistency, or any need to offer an explanation for the objectively illogical presentation.

In our proposed schema, he doesn’t conceive of time in the sense that most people do and, as such, there is no linear relationship between events. That is not to say he cannot engage in more cognitive types planning and thought (i.e., Today I will attend several meetings and tomorrow I will play golf) but that this lack of linearity exists at an emotional level.


WH.GOV
Living in the now, the severe narcissist does not weigh the long term impact of his actions - such as removing environmental restrictions by Executive Order - which may have devastating effects.
It is also worth noting that the “collapse of time” phenomenon previously described coupled with the lack of empathy associated with extreme narcissism may also help to explain the apparent lack of concern by this President for those who would be harmed (including even his own younger wife, children, and grandchildren) by the long-term detrimental effects of his actions, legislation, and positions on such issues as climate change, nuclear arms proliferation, healthcare cutbacks, the defunding of biomedical research, and an overall isolationist approach to global politics.

3. How does the extreme Narcissist develop a fantastical reality within “collapsed time?”

While there may be complex neuro-psychological factors that contribute to the perception of time, from a psychological point of view, there are two inter-related factors related to early-life experience that appear to contribute to the “collapse of time.”

During childhood, it is universally important for a child to learn how to cope with frustration and discomfort. Frustrations and discomforts may range from normal, inescapable circumstances (e.g., experiencing hunger, hot or cold, physical pain, normal anxiety, fear or worry) to situations that are overtly traumatic or abusive. It is well known that sufficient fear or discomfort triggers a “fight or flight” response involves emotional, physical and cognitive reactions. One of the reactions that commonly occurs during the “flight or fight response” is the sensation of time “elongating” or “standing still.” Thus, for a child who experiences an environment that is perceived as particularly stressful, there may be a significant number of episodes (or in severe cases, an almost constant state) during which there is an experience of time distortion or “timeless”, which likely interferes with development of a healthy and normal perception of the passage of time.

At the same time, a second factor derives from the fact that in a “normal” situation of “stress” or discomfort, a child perceives that within a reasonable period of time, their caretaker (parents, parental figures, etc.) will take action to restore a state of comfort. When that occurs regularly, the uncomfortable child learns to “look forward” to the arrival of comforting – and the act of learning to “look forward” supports the perception that events proceed in a linear, progressive passage of time. However, if a child does not experience an expectation of comfort (whether due to comfort not being available or due to an impairment of perception), there then does not exist a motivation to “look forward” for relief. Rather, there develops an attempt to do the best possible to find some manner of “defense” to at least relieve the sense of the distress in the immediate moment. Thus, time is not a factor and there is no “looking forward” or linearization of time – there is only a need to seek immediate relief/gratification in the “ever-present now.” In fact, in unfortunate situations of abuse or overt neglect, the child may learn to fear that the passage of time will only lead to increased distress, leading to a disruptive motivation to avoid “looking forward” and to remain fixed in the present.


FACEBOOK: DONALD J. TRUMP
During his upbringing with a “stern, demanding, and ultimately rejecting father (left)” and as a military school cadet (right), Trump developed “a life is war” mentality.
Without attempting to analyze or evaluate Trump’s developmental years in depth, it is notable that his father has been described as, “stern, demanding, and ultimately rejecting”, leaving young Trump with “a life is war mentality.” That experience could well repetitively trigger a subtle “fight or flight” state that then engenders a “collapse of the perception of time.”

4. What happens when the extreme Narcissist is confronted with “irrefutable evidence” against the fantasy life he has created?

At times, and for many, inevitably, the narcissistic individual will be inescapably confronted with the fact that the fantastical world they have invented and in which they “live emotionally” is not reality-based. This may occur when practical circumstances (e.g., arrest, conviction, incarceration, or financial ruin) prevent even a modicum of the desired fantasy state)

Typically, the first response to this type of confrontation is the emergence of anxiety and an attempt to restructure the narcissistic defenses/fantasies to rationalize the new situation, often at the cost of creating even more of an irrational distance from reality. If those attempts fail, anxiety leads into having to face inner emptiness and despair, with emergence of significant and at times malignantly severe depression.

Depending upon the practical circumstances and environment as well as other personality traits (and possibly, biochemical vulnerabilities), depression may slowly or precipitously lead to a suicidal level of despair or a total “escape” from realty into a “full-blown” paranoid state. The latter statement underscores the need for experts to highlight these behaviors in the current President due to the danger it presents to the millions upon whom his actions have consequences.

5. Concluding Remarks

This phenomenon is, in fact, an aspect of the entrancing power of the severe narcissist. Even while cognitively aware that he is spinning a false tale – i.e., lying – emotionally, in the moment, the story being told is both experienced as reality and conveyed with a tone of conviction and “sincerity” (albeit often bombastically so) such that the listener is forced into the position of taking the significant risk of questioning the sanity a powerful, apparently self-assured person; or adopting the safer, more passive role of relinquishing their own cognitively analytic processes and deferring to the intoxicating, intense and grandiose thought processes of the narcissistic. Thus, the interpersonal interaction commonly referred to as “gaslighting” in fact represents the projection onto the public of the powerful, illogical, and timeless fantastical world of lies in which narcissist (emotionally) lives.

About the Authors:

Seth Davin Norrholm, PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, a full-time faculty member in the Emory Neuroscience Graduate Program, and a member of the Emory Clinical Psychology Graduate Program. Dr. Norrholm has spent 20 years studying trauma-, stressor-, anxiety-, depressive-, and substance use-related disorders and have published over 80 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters. The primary objective of his work is to develop “bench-to-bedside” clinical research methods to inform therapeutic interventions for fear and anxiety-related disorders and how they relate to human factors such as personality, genetics, and environmental influences. Dr. Norrholm has been featured on NBC, ABC, CNN.com, USA Today, WebMD, Scientific American, and is a regular Contributor to The Huffington Post.

David M. Reiss, M.D. has been a practicing psychiatrist for more than 30 years, specializing in “front-line” adult and adolescent psychiatry. He has evaluated and treated over 12,000 persons of diverse social and cultural backgrounds, from every occupational field. Dr. Reiss has been recognized internationally for expertise in character and personality dynamics. He is often interviewed and quoted in the print, Internet and radio/TV media, nationally and internationally, to help the public understand the psychological aspects of current events. He is an authority on issues regarding social and political phenomena, medical and mental health treatment, PTSD, violence in society, and the functioning of the current mental health system.
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Week Four: The President Summons the Ghost of Roy Cohn
His mentor’s bruising style is one Trump studied well. This will be its ultimate test.
By JACK SHAFER June 17, 2017

Never adopt a mentor without first drafting a plan to ditch him and his influence on that day you want to become your own man—or when expediency demands abandonment. President Donald Trump, who was taught the martial arts of verbal combat by Roy Cohn, jettisoned Sen. Joe McCarthy’s former attorney in the mid-1980s when he became ill from HIV. Trump wasn’t so much emerging from the red-baiter’s shadow as he was shunning his faithful attorney due to a sense of morbid panic about the disease. Although he dumped Cohn, Trump never ceased playing the role of the dirtbag attorney’s parrot. Since inauguration, and especially since the scandal with no name has inflicted bleeding wounds all over his presidency, Trump has only become more Cohnian in his persona. He rains his fury down on his opponents, just like Cohn. He breaks rules and bullies all who get in his way. He does whatever it takes to win. When Trump’s mouth forms the words, it’s really Cohn speaking from the grave.

Trump unfurled and waved his Cohnian flag this week as a bundle of obstruction of justice stories hit the front pages. You see it most plainly in the escalating insults directed at former FBI Director James Comey. First he denounces Comey as a leaker, then a coward, then a liar and finally a witch-hunt-leading man of bad character. More of the same arrived when Trump confidant Chris Ruddy of Newsmax took to the airwaves to assert that the president had been musing about firing special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who heads the Russia collusion investigation. The New York Times added to the Ruddy claim, learning that Trump's staff had talked him out of it. But did the internal debate over sacking Mueller accurately reflect White House machination or was it just Cohnian squid-ink injected into the news stream in an attempt to escape from the no-name scandal?

By Wednesday night, the ink cloud thinned long-enough and Trump was still there. The Washington Post had that story that special counsel Mueller's Russia probe was asking whether Trump had committed obstruction of justice. The Times chased the story with a similar take. As anybody who has read crime procedurals knows, obstruction of justice prosecutions, like conspiracy charges, are the sabers that prosecutors rattle to panic the target of an investigation when they're having trouble making a “real” case stick.

But there's substance to the allegations of Trump obstruction. First, in early June, came a report that Trump had asked Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to get Comey off the case. Then came Comey's testimony that Trump asked him to drop the Flynn investigation. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal expanded a previous account that Trump pressured National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and Coats to deny that there was any proof of collusion. According to the Journal’s story, an NSA memo exists that documents a phone call between Trump and Rogers. In that call, Trump “questioned the veracity of the intelligence community’s judgment that Russia had interfered with the election and tried to persuade Mr. Rogers to say there was no evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russian officials.”

As if singing from Cohn's songbook again, Trump battled the stories on Thursday by bellowing on Twitter that the investigation was “the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history” and that the obstruction of justice angle was a “phony story” based on the “phony collusion with the Russians story.” Who else is witch-hunting the president? A Friday tweet accused Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein of stalking him, too. “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt,” the president wrote, thereby confirming that he’s under investigation. Thanks, Donald!

According to Trump, the real Russia scandal is the Clinton family’s Russia dealings, tweeting that Hillary Clinton is the real justice obstructer! This tack, too, is Cohnian. Trump has applied the boomerang to the word “obstructionist”: When tossed in his direction he merely redirects it to strike his political opponents, such as Clinton and the Democrats. Likewise, he’s not conflicted by the many connections his people have with Russia. It is the investigators who are “very bad and conflicted people,” as he put it on Twitter.

How well Cohn taught Trump the basics of media and legal warfare! Cohn acolytes like Trump learned the value of raising disagreements to disputes, disputes to legal threats, threats to lawsuits, and lawsuits to war, and war to burned-earth siege, a progression Trump has been playing on his smartphone's keypad for weeks. Cohn also taught Trump to shrug off IRS audits, deadbeat his personal debtors, lie whenever expedient, and file complicated, retaliatory lawsuits to pour sand in the gears of his opponents. “Over a 13-year-period, ending shortly before Cohn’s death in 1986, Cohn brought his say-anything, win-at-all-costs style to all of Trump’s most notable legal and business deals,” Politico's Michael Kruse wrote last year. “Cohn’s philosophy shaped the real estate mogul’s worldview and the belligerent public persona visible in Trump’s presidential campaign.”

The Cohn method was distilled in Ken Auletta's landmark 1978 Esquire profile. An unnamed law school classmate told Auletta that Cohn was “a formidable adversary not because he's a brilliant lawyer but because he will stop at nothing.” The same applies to Trump. Observing no limits has been Trump’s operational philosophy for as long as anybody can remember, one that informs his current legal defense and the conduct of his administration. Trump's new Cohn is his long-time personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz, who also feels unbound by reality. Following James Comey’s testimony, Kasowitz issued a Cohnian statement that made a mash of the chronology and the facts. As the Atlantic's Matt Ford wrote earlier this month, Kasowitz sought “to shift the investigative cloud away from his client and onto [Comey] the man all but accusing him of obstruction of justice—a task it does not accomplish.” Roy Cohn would be so proud!

Cohn would have also dispensed attaboys to Kasowitz on the news this week from ProPublica that he had boasted about getting the insufficiently loyal U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara fired in March. Such extrajudicial message-jamming was a Cohn tactic from way back when Sen. McCarthy was his mentor. McCarthy didn’t debate his opponents, he defamed them and branded them as illegitimate, a lesson Trump has applied to every crisis of his presidency, ripping judges as “so-called” and the press as “fake.”

The great Washington cliché is that it’s not the crime that destroys you, it’s the cover-up. In truth, it’s the investigation that undoes politicians. Investigations like the ones headed by Mueller and Congress move slowly, amassing evidence by increments, and building a case. The probe puddled out this week to include son-in-law Jared Kushner’s business transactions, according to the Washington Post, adding to the financial investigations of Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Carter Page already reported. In the most sensible moves of the week, both Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen lawyered up, hiring private counsels to firewall them from Mueller's widening inquiry. Never one to lose the spotlight without a fight, Trump placed his order for a second personal attorney Friday afternoon.

Nobody knows how the Russia probe will end, but we can guess the path it will plow to reach its final destination. Trump knows only one method of conflict resolution, the one his mentor taught. As Auletta wrote of Cohn, "It is said by many that he will lie, cheat, invent facts, smoke with bullying rage, or ooze with charm—whatever is required." Like Cohn, Trump views legal trouble as war. There will be no surrender, no quarter given, no prisoners taken. The mentor wouldn’t allow it any other way.

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