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Donald Trump says ‘people will die’ as a result of focus on Russia allegations

Andrew Restuccia11/11/17, 1:28 PM CET

U.S. President Donald Trump (left) chats with Russia's President Vla

dimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017 | Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP via Getty Images
Donald Trump says ‘people will die’ as a result of focus on Russia allegations

‘Every time he sees me he says, “I didn’t do that,” and I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it,’ Trump says after meeting Putin at Vietnam summit.

DANANG, Vietnam — President Donald Trump on Saturday called into question the American intelligence community’s assessment that Russia sought to influence last year’s presidential election, while raising concerns that the intense focus on the issue could sour U.S. relations with Vladimir Putin.

Pressed by reporters, Trump didn’t directly say whether he personally believed Putin was involved in the alleged election meddling. But he suggested he takes the Russian president at his word when he denies directing the influence campaign.

“Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it,” Trump said, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Hanoi, Vietnam. ”But he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”

Trump dismissed the meddling allegations as driven by Democrats, warning that the heavy focus on the issue threatens the United States’ ability to partner with Russia on key issues. He asserted that the allegations could fray the U.S.-Russia relationship so badly that the country could be less willing to cooperate on North Korea, Syria and other international crises — an outcome that would put lives at risk.

“This artificial Democratic hit job gets in the way and that’s a shame because people will die because of it,” he said. “And it’s a pure hit job.”

“Everybody knows there was no collusion,” he continued. “I think it’s a shame that something like this can destroy a very important potential relationship between two countries that are very important countries Russia could really help us.”

The president said Putin again denied that he had a role in the effort to influence the election during a few brief conversations that the two leaders had on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

“He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. I just asked him again. He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did,” Trump said, adding that he and Putin, “have the potential to have a very good relationship.”

American intelligence agencies have said Russia interfered in the election with the goal of boosting Trump and defeating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The agencies have also said they have “high confidence” that Putin directed the effort.

Trump said he and Putin had “two or three very short conversations” during the APEC summit. The White House had previously said the two leaders would not hold a formal meeting.

Putin and Trump largely focused on Syria during their chats, according to the president.

Following the discussions, the U.S. and Russia released a joint statement on Saturday in which they “confirmed their determination to defeat ISIS in Syria.”

Trump later declined to say whether embattled Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore should resign, adding that he doesn’t know enough about the allegations to weigh in. Moore has been accused of initiating sexual contact with teenagers decades ago.

“Well again, I’ve been with you folks, so I haven’t gotten to see too much,” he said. “And believe it or not, even when I’m in Washington or New York, I do not watch much television. I know they like to say that.”

Authors:
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald- ... legations/

Scott Dworkin‏Verified account
@funder

In the last 24 hours Trump:

-met w/Putin 3 times
-sent out joint statement w/Putin via Kremlin
-said people will die due to Russia probes
-called Russia probe a Democratic hit job
-sided w/Putin over US Gov’t & military
-ruined #VeteransDay

‘Tis the season for treason.

New report suggests Trump may have lied about ties to mob-linked Russian businessman

A new report describes Trump meeting with Felix Sater shortly after the 2016 presidential election

8.1K13.8K227
MATTHEW ROZSA
11.07.2017•3:21 PM
President Donald Trump has long insisted that he doesn't know Felix Sater, a Russian businessman with a number of shady ties to organized crime. Yet a new report suggests that Trump and Sater not only know each other but hung out together just as the former was celebrating his upset victory in the 2016 election.
Courtesy of GQ's account of Trump's war room during election night:


Explore Downtown Charm in Elizabethtown, Kentucky
BY http://WWW.TOURETOWN.COM
11:55 P.M.—Among the well-wishers and Trump associates eager to join in the celebration is Felix Sater, a Russian-born entrepreneur and sometime business partner of Trump's, who's helped locate potential real estate deals in the former Soviet Union. (Since the election, Sater's links to Russia have come under scrutiny as it's been revealed that he offered, in 2015, to broker a relationship between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin—one that he said could win Trump the White House. "I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected," Mr. Sater wrote to Trump's lawyer.) . . .
From his home on Long Island, Sater orders a late-night ride from a car service. His destination: the invite-only victory party at the Midtown Hilton.
Trump has become notorious for downplaying his association with Sater. During a court deposition in 2013, Trump said, "I mean, I’ve seen him a couple of times; I have met him." He was also reported as saying, "If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like." This continued to be Trump's position in 2015, when he responded to a question about Sater by saying, "Boy, I have to even think about it."
Despite these denials, neither Donald Trump Jr. nor Ivanka Trump deny that they were personally escorted around Moscow by Sater. Sater has also claimed to have helped Trump with some of his business deals, even bragging in 2015, "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this, I will manage this process."
https://www.salon.com/2017/11/07/new-re ... sinessman/

Investigators probe Trump knowledge of campaign's Russia dealings: sources
Mark Hosenball, John Walcott

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has questioned Sam Clovis, co-chairman of President Donald Trump’s election campaign, to determine if Trump or top aides knew of the extent of the campaign team’s contacts with Russia, two sources familiar with the investigation said on Friday.

U.S. President Donald Trump and China's Premier Li Keqiang (not pictured) meet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, November 9, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
The focus of the questions put to Clovis by Mueller’s team has not been previously reported.

“The ultimate question Mueller is after is whether candidate Trump and then President-elect Trump knew of the discussions going on with Russia, and who approved or even directed them,” said one source. “That is still just a question.”

Clovis testified in late October before the grand jury in Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He is also cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating the same issues.

Contacted late on Friday, the White House declined to comment.

One of the sources described Clovis as “another domino” after former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI over his own contacts with Russians during the 2016 election campaign.

“The investigators now know what Papadopoulos was doing on the Russian front, which he initially tried to conceal, and who he told that to,” said the other source. “Now [they] want to know whether Clovis and others reported these activities and others related to Russia, and if so, to whom,” this source said.

Attorneys for Clovis did not respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for Papadopoulos had no immediate comment.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment.

According to court documents related to Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, he reported to Clovis in an email on a March 24, 2016, meeting he had in London with a professor later identified as Joseph Mifsud.

Mifsud in turn introduced him to a Russian woman and the Russian ambassador in London, and they discussed setting up meetings to talk about U.S.-Russia ties in a Trump presidency.

The documents showed Clovis responded to the proposed meetings by saying he would “work it through the campaign.” While he told Papadopoulos not to make a commitment then to set up those meetings, he congratulated him for “great work.”

In August 2016, after Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, Clovis encouraged Papadopoulos to “make the trip” when Papadopoulos proposed going to an off-the-record meeting with unnamed Russian officials, the court documents show.

Victoria Toensing, one of Clovis’s lawyers, said last week her client “always vigorously opposed any Russian trip for Donald Trump and/or the campaign”.

After Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, the White House and former Trump campaign officials dismissed Papadopoulos and Clovis as minor figures in the campaign.

The campaign’s National Security Advisory Committee, which Clovis formed, has become a focus of the investigations by both Mueller and the Senate, sources said.

“Sam built the first group of eight,” J.D. Gordon, the director of the campaign foreign policy group, told Reuters, adding that he and then-Senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. Attorney General, had “nearly doubled” it in size.

However, two other sources familiar with the investigations said investigators have been told the committee Clovis formed did very little, and that other advisers appeared to carry more weight with Trump.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... SKBN1DB04J

College linked to Trump/Russia affair covers its tracks

LSET owner Prasenjit Kumar at a private function with prime minister Theresa May
The London School of Executive Training — one of several quasi-academic institutions linked to the Trump/Russia affair — clearly has something to hide. Following my story yesterday about its owner’s relations with vanished professor Joseph Mifsud, with a Russian woman who posed as Putin’s niece and with British foreign secretary Boris Johnson, the school has deleted all mention of its board of governors from its website.
The school’s action echoes a similar move by the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP) which deleted staff profiles from its website once it became known that Mifsud — the middleman in the Trump-Russia affair — and Trump adviser George Papadopoulos had been colleagues together at LCILP for several months last year.
Until yesterday, the London School of Executive Training (LSET) listed 10 governors on its “About us” page, together with biographical notes. Here is
the page as it appears now, and here is an archived version from yesterday. The 10 people listed as governors are:
Ravi Mehrotra CBE
Dr Prem Sharma OBE FRSA
Ambassador K V Rajan
Prasenjit Kumar
Marie Haughey MBE
David Webb
Peter Sage
Peter Bowyer
Professor Iain Dewar
Dr Charles Chatterjee
One interesting name on the list is Prasenjit Kumar (aka Prasenjit Kumar Singh), the owner of LSET. His biographical note says:
“An Engineer by profession, Prasenjit Kumar is the think tank [sic] behind the success of a group of Colleges for the last 14 years. He has also served as the President and Chancellor of a US based University for eight years. The undivided devotion and effort he has put into the group has resulted in some well-established Colleges and numerous companies internationally. He is a devotee of Anandamurtijee, who dedicated his life to the upliftment of human society.”
The first part of this is rubbish. As reported yesterday, before launching LSET in December 2013, Kumar was involved in a succession of failed educational businesses. He also seems reluctant to name the “US based university” of which he is president and chancellor but it may be one of these. “Anandamurtijee” in the last sentence refers to Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, founder of the Indian Ananda Marga movement.
Another of LSET’s governors, Charles Chatterjee, is described as “a visiting academic” at London Diplomatic Academy (the recently-closed institution where the recently-disappeared Joseph Mifsud was director). In 2014, Chatterjee also spoke at an event organised by LCILP, the now-dormant institution where Mifsud and Papadopoulos later worked.
Yet another interesting governor of LSET is Prem Sharma who, as Robert Mackey points out in an article for The Intercept, is the father of Alok Sharma, Conservative member of parliament for Reading West.
In 2009, one of Kumar’s educational ventures, Halifax College (UK) Limited, donated £5,000 to the Conservative party in Reading West — money which presumably helped Alok Sharma to capture the seat from Labour a few months later.

At the Conservative fundraising dinner. Left to right: Mifsud, Johnson and Kumar
Last month Kumar and Mifsud both attended a Conservative fundraising dinner in Sharma’s constituency where they were photographed alongside foreign secretary Boris Johnson.
In a post on Facebook last year, Kumar described Mifsud as one of his “good old friends”. Even more intriguingly, he is also a friend of the Russian woman who was initially alleged to be Putin’s niece.
The woman, later identified as Olga Polonskaya and unrelated to Putin, was present at a key meeting between Mifsud and Papadopoulos in London on March 24 last year (see chronology).
Polonskaya is a Facebook friend of Kumar but they have also met in person on at least two occasions. Kumar told The Observer he had initially met her at Link Campus University in Rome (also visited by Papadopoulos and Nagi Idris of LCILP) where Mifsud held an academic post.
Kumar also met her at a shopping centre in London “about two and a half months ago”. He told The Observer:
“I was with my family and we were going to the Westfield shopping centre and I said: ‘Yes, come and meet me there.’ She was going to translate my website — for the London Executive School [LSET] — from English into Russian so I could try and attract more Russian students. She did that: I just haven’t put it up yet.”
Kumar’s description of Polonskaya as a translator conflicts with a story in the New York Times on Friday suggesting she could barely speak English:
After Politico identified her on Thursday by her maiden name, Vinogradova, her brother, Sergei Vinogradov, spoke to The Times on her behalf.
He said she was in London discussing a possible internship with Mr Mifsud, a friend of hers, the morning before the meeting with Mr Papadopoulos …
He said that she only exchanged pleasantries with Mr Papadopoulos, and that she understood only about half of the discussion between Mr Mifsud and Mr Papadopoulos. He shared a text message from her in which she explained to him the reason: “Because my English was bad,” it read.
“It’s totally ridiculous,” Mr Vinogradov said. “She’s not interested in politics. She can barely tell the difference between Lenin and Stalin.”
This also begs the question why, if Polonskaya was not interested in politics, she would seek an internship with Mifsud, whose main interest was politics.
https://medium.com/@Brian_Whit/college- ... 3167f3ea4f

College chums: another academic link in the Mifsud puzzle

The London School of Executive Training (LSET) is a dynamic institution located in the heart of London with a “world-renowned” teaching faculty — 
or so its website says.
As part of its mission “to drive global transformation”, the school aims to attract “business leaders, bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers” and others for short courses lasting one to four weeks. A one-week course costs £1,500 (almost $2,000) which includes some sightseeing and, for the better-off students, “helicopter hire is available”.
A photo on LSET’s website shows a substantial stone-and brick building which casual observers might assume to be the school. The website doesn’t give its exact location but a few checks on Google show that the building is Hamilton House in Bloomsbury, best known as the headquarters of the National Union of Teachers. However, Hamilton House also has spare rooms that can be hired for meetings — which appears to be where LSET fits in.
LSET is the latest in a series of academic or fringe-academic institutions with links to Joseph Mifsud, the now-vanished professor at the centre of the Trump/Russia affair. In 2014 LSET told inspectors it was “working in partnership” with the London Academy of Diplomacy where Mifsud was director until the academy’s recent closure.
The owner of LSET is Prasenjit Kumar Singh, a donor to the British Conservative party who, in a post on Facebook, has described Mifsud as one of his “good old friends”.

At the Conservative fundraising dinner. Left to right: Mifsud, Johnson and Kumar
That in itself might not be significant — Mifsud appears to have been a virtuoso networker — but Kumar was also a Facebook friend of Olga Polonskaya, the mysterious Russian woman who in March last year attended a meeting with Mifsud and Trump “adviser” George Papadopoulos posing as a niece of President Putin.
Last month, Mifsud and Kumar both attended a Conservative party fundraising dinner where they were photographed with foreign secretary Boris Johnson. Kumar posted the photo on Facebook, where it was “liked” by Ms Polonskaya.
LSET was inspected in 2014 by the British Accreditation Council which gave it a broadly favourable report while noting that at the time it had a total of
only five students.
Before launching LSET in December 2013, Kumar was involved in a succession of failed educational businesses:
Albert College Limited (wound up by court order)
Halifax College (UK) Limited (declared insolvent)
Techno School of Business & Engineering Limited (voluntarily struck off the companies register)
Halifax Educational Research Limited (compulsorily struck off the companies register)
In 2007, London University complained that Albert College was offering its students some of the university’s external courses, but had not asked for up-to-date study materials and had never put forward any candidates for examination. Northumbria University also complained that Albert College was advertising the university’s distance-learning law course in its prospectus without the right to do so — and threatened legal action.
Halifax College was established in 2004 as the British arm of Halifax University in Wyoming whose degree courses were not accredited by the US Department of Education. The British branch attempted to describe itself as a university but the government intervened to stop it, according to a BBC report. This caused some embarrassment for the Conservative party (which was in opposition at the time) because one of the party’s grandees, Michael Ancram, had performed the opening ceremony.
Although Halifax College ended up insolvent, in 2009 it made donations to the Conservative party in Reading West amounting to £5,000. At the time, Reading West was a marginal constituency held by Labour. The following year, Alok Sharma captured it for the Conservatives.
Last month’s fundraising dinner where Kumar and Mifsud were photographed with Boris Johnson took place in Sharma’s constituency. Sharma later told The Observer that he had “briefly greeted” Mifsud at the dinner and that he had met him “a couple of times” before. Johnson, meanwhile, denied ever having “knowingly” met Mifsud.
https://medium.com/@Brian_Whit/college- ... eb388dc226

The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks

The transparency organization asked the president’s son for his cooperation—in sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia’s ambassador to the United States.

Julia Ioffe4:22 PM ET

Peter Nicholls / Reuters
Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?” (The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.)

The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around,” he wrote on September 21, 2016. “Thanks.”

The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.

“Over the last several months, we have worked cooperatively with each of the committees and have voluntarily turned over thousands of documents in response to their requests,” said Alan Futerfas, an attorney for Donald Trump Jr. “Putting aside the question as to why or by whom such documents, provided to Congress under promises of confidentiality, have been selectively leaked, we can say with confidence that we have no concerns about these documents and any questions raised about them have been easily answered in the appropriate forum.” WikiLeaks did not respond to requests for comment.

The messages were turned over to Congress as part of that body’s various ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. American intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of engaging in a deliberate effort to boost President Donald Trump’s chances while bringing down his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. That effort—and the president’s response to it—has spawned multiple congressional investigations, and a special counsel inquiry that has led to the indictment of Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, for financial crimes.

Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to “ask around.” According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/545738/

That’s a Problem

By JOSH MARSHALL Published NOVEMBER 13, 2017 5:39 PM

Here’s an interesting, prescient read from former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer, writing at justsecurity.org back in July. Not the reference to Wikileaks in light of the news this afternoon of a correspondence between Donald Trump, Jr. and Wikileaks.

Here’s the key passage …

A charge of illegal coordination is consistent with a conspiracy, aiding or abetting, or “substantial assistance” source of liability. It is the campaign finance law equivalent to what has been referred to in the public debate as “collusion.” In other words coordination is a legally prohibited form of collusion: spending by Russia, if coordinated with the campaign, is a contribution to the campaign. The contribution, of course, would be illegal. It is important to underscore here that this area of law applies to any and all coordinated spending beneficial to the campaign, not only to coordination with Russians, the Russian government, or other foreign nationals (think: Wikileaks).

These are more technical legal infractions that are distinct from the larger issues with conspiring with a foreign government. But the law seems pretty clear.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/tha ... re-1095248

Today’s Impeach-O-Meter: Donald Trump Jr. Corresponded With WikiLeaks About Clinton
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
gettyimages669433422_1
Donald Trump Jr. at the White House on April 17.
Win McNamee/Getty Images

The Impeach-O-Meter is a wildly subjective and speculative daily estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump leaves office before his term ends, whether by being impeached (and convicted) or by resigning under threat of same.

Donald Trump Jr. exchanged direct messages with the WikiLeaks Twitter account—which at least at some points appears to have been operated personally by Julian Assange—as early as Sept. 2016, the Atlantic reports, citing documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators. The correspondence involved, in part, discussion of material harmful to Hillary Clinton’s campaign:

On October 3, 2016, Wikileaks wrote again. “Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story,” Wikileaks suggested, attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to “just drone” Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.
“Already did that earlier today,” Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. “It’s amazing what she can get away with.”
More:

On October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr. “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications,” Wikileaks wrote. ... “Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us,” Wikileaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump’s followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories. “There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it,” Wikileaks went on. “Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”
And will you look at this:


(Trump Jr., for his part, sent out the specific link that WikiLeaks had provided him two days later.)

While Trump Jr. and the WikiLeaks account do not appear to have discussed the provenance of the hacked Clinton-related emails that the site began publishing in July 2016, the younger Trump is known to have been told that June that the Russian government supported his father’s campaign. June is also the month that public reports first suggested that Russia had committed hacking attacks against figures in the Democratic Party; before that, in April, a Trump foreign policy adviser is known to have been told that Russia possessed “thousands of emails” that constituted “dirt” on Clinton. Wikileaks has denied that it received hacked emails from Russian operatives, but not many people believe that claim, including Donald Trump’s own CIA director.

The Atlantic reports, moreover, that Trump Jr. informed campaign chairman Steve Bannon, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, campaign digital media director Brad Parscale, and campaign adviser Jared Kushner of his contact with WikiLeaks in Sept. 2016. Less than a month later, the campaign indignantly denied that it had had any contact with the organization.

Good stuff!

Today’s meter level is unchanged, but in an very eyebrows-raised kind of way.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... ition.html

EVIDENCE OF TRUMP-RUSSIA COLLUSION ALREADY EXISTS, WATERGATE PROSECUTORS SAY
BY CHRIS RIOTTA ON 11/14/17 AT 5:00 AM

There is definitive proof of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election — and it exists in the email inboxes of Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Hope Hicks and others.

That's what several former Watergate prosecutors believe, telling Newsweek that evidence of collaboration between the Kremlin and the president's top campaign aides could literally be at Special Counsel Robert Mueller's fingertips. It just has to be uncovered.

"The key difference between this and Watergate is … at the time, you certainly didn't have computers," said Nick Ackerman, one of the prosecutors who probed the 1972 break-in at the Democratic party's Watergate offices. "Rather than use burglars to break into the Democratic National headquarters, they used Russian hackers. ... The question is whether that was coordinated in any way with the Trump campaign. Their emails will answer that question, once the special counsel gets its hands on them."

Kushner has reportedly turned over documents related to his campaign contacts with Russians to Mueller earlier this month, a voluntary move of cooperation between the White House senior adviser and the federal probe. Still, it remains unclear whether those documents include emails, as well as whether Kushner provided the entirety of his communications with Russians to the investigators. If he didn't provide investigators the full details about his correspondences, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time the president’s son-in-law failed to disclose his Russian contacts (or his business interests, for that matter), having been forced to revise his government security clearance forms with at least 100 foreign contacts previously left off the list.

Even if he's cooperating, Kushner may be lying about the campaign's interactions with the Russians, and doing a terrible job of covering it up, according to Jill Wine-Banks, another former Watergate prosecutor. At issue is his response to the discovery of a June meeting in Trump Tower attended by Kushner, other Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives. The meeting was set up by Donald Trump Jr.; Kushner said he didn't know what was going to be discussed and left early after being bored by the conversation.

"The data ... will make Kushner’s defense fall entirely apart," Wine-Banks told Newsweek. "We know that statement was a total fabrication since the [Trump] campaign was looking for dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians … I have faith the grand jury will get down to the bottom of what really happened in that meeting."

Also at issue is the Trump campaign's involvement with Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data mining operation with apparent ties to Russia, which Kushner boasted was "brought in" to steer the campaign to victory.

"As far as Russian collusion, right now there are two aspects: one is, did they micro target Hillary Clinton voters to suppress the vote?" Ackerman said. "We know that there was a data mining process that was done by Kushner out of Texas and we know that the Russians were doing targeting with Facebook and Twitter. The question is trying to compare the data sets to see if there was coordination between those two things.

"Email evidence already shows that the purpose of the meeting on June 9 was to bring incriminating evidence, supposedly emails about Clinton, to the campaign, but we don’t know exactly what they did with that evidence after that meeting," Ackerman continued.

GettyImages-870908198
Paul Manafort leaving the Prettyman Federal Courthouse after a bail hearing November 6, 2017 in Washington, DC. Manafort and his former business partner Richard Gates both pleaded not guilty Monday to a 12-charge indictment that included money laundering and conspiracy.
MARK WILSON, GETTY

It's been a whirlwind few weeks for the Mueller team: investigators ramped up their meetings with Trump officials as former campaign aide George Papadapoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with Russian operatives—the same day ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates were indicted by a grand jury.

Carter Page, another former campaign aide, then revealed key officials like Miller and Hicks were aware of his travels to Moscow, in an explosive eight-hour testimony provided to the House Intelligence Committee last week. His version of the events directly contradicted Hicks’ flat denial to the media about the campaign’s contact with Russian operatives. The White House communications director is now set to meet with Mueller sometime this month.

"The process continues to be one of cooperation" between White House officials and the special counsel, the president’s lawyer for Russia matters, Ty Cobb, told Newsweek. "We remain hopeful the interviews of current and former [White House] personnel can be concluded before Thanksgiving or shortly thereafter."
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-russia-co ... ica-710084

He Perfected a Password-Hacking Tool—Then the Russians Came Calling

AUTHOR: ANDY GREENBERGANDY GREENBERG
SECURITY
11.09.1707:00 AM
HE PERFECTED A PASSWORD-HACKING TOOL—THEN THE RUSSIANS CAME CALLING

RS AGO, Benjamin Delpy walked into his room at the President Hotel in Moscow, and found a man dressed in a dark suit with his hands on Delpy's laptop.

Just a few minutes earlier, the then 25-year-old French programmer had made a quick trip to the front desk to complain about the room's internet connection. He had arrived two days ahead of a talk he was scheduled to give at a nearby security conference and found that there was no Wi-Fi, and the ethernet jack wasn't working. Downstairs, one of the hotel's staff insisted he wait while a technician was sent up to fix it. Delpy refused, and went back to wait in the room instead.

When he returned, as Delpy tells it, he was shocked to find the stranger standing at the room's desk, a small black rollerboard suitcase by his side, his fingers hurriedly retracting from Delpy's keyboard. The laptop still showed a locked Windows login screen.

The man mumbled an apology in English about his keycard working on the wrong room, brushed past Delpy, and was out the door before Delpy could even react. "It was all very strange for me," Delpy says today. "Like being in a spy film."

It didn't take Delpy long to guess why his laptop had been the target of a literal black bag job. It contained the subject of his presentation at the Moscow conference, an early version of a program he'd written called Mimikatz. That subtly powerful hacking tool was designed to siphon a Windows user's password out of the ephemeral murk of a computer's memory, so that it could be used to gain repeated access to that computer, or to any others that victim's account could access on the same network. The Russians, like hackers around the world, wanted Delpy's source code.

In the years since, Delpy has released that code to the public, and Mimikatz has become a ubiquitous tool in all manner of hacker penetrations, allowing intruders to quickly leapfrog from one connected machine on a network to the next as soon as they gain an initial foothold.


BENJAMIN DELPY
Most recently, it came into the spotlight as a component of two ransomware worms that have torn through Ukraine and spread across Europe, Russia, and the US: Both NotPetya and last month's BadRabbit ransomware strains paired Mimikatz with leaked NSA hacking tools to create automated attacks whose infections rapidly saturated networks, with disastrous results. NotPetya alone led to the paralysis of thousands of computers at companies like Maersk, Merck, and FedEx, and is believed to have caused well over a billion dollars in damages.

Those internet-shaking ripples were enabled, at least in part, by a program that Delpy coded on a lark. An IT manager for a French government institution that he declines to name, Delpy says he originally built Mimikatz as a side project, to learn more about Windows security and the C programming language—and to prove to Microsoft that Windows included a serious security flaw in its handling of passwords.

His proof-of-concept achieved its intended effect: In more recent versions of Windows, the company changed its authentication system to make Mimikatz-like attacks significantly more difficult. But not before Delpy's tool had entered the arsenal of every resourceful hacker on the planet.

"Mimikatz wasn’t at all designed for attackers. But it's helped them," Delpy says in his understated and French-tinged English. "When you create something like this for good, you know it can be used by the bad side too."

Even today, despite Microsoft's attempted fixes, Mimikatz remains an all-too-useful hacker tool, says Jake Williams, a penetration tester and founder of security firm Rendition Infosec. "When I read a threat intelligence report that says someone used Mimikatz, I say, 'tell me about one that doesn’t,'" Williams says. "Everyone uses it, because it works."

Secrets for the Taking
Mimikatz first became a key hacker asset thanks to its ability to exploit an obscure Windows function called WDigest. That feature is designed to make it more convenient for corporate and government Windows users to prove their identity to different applications on their network or on the web; it holds their authentication credentials in memory and automatically reuses them, so they only have to enter their username and password once.

While Windows keeps that copy of the user's password encrypted, it also keeps a copy of the secret key to decrypt it handy in memory, too. "It’s like storing a password-protected secret in an email with the password in the same email," Delpy says.

Delpy pointed out that potential security lapse to Microsoft in a message submitted on the company's support page in 2011. But he says the company brushed off his warning, responding that it wasn't a real flaw. After all, a hacker would already have to gain deep access to a victim's machine before he or she could reach that password in memory. Microsoft said as much in response to WIRED's questions about Mimikatz: "It’s important to note that for this tool to be deployed it requires that a system already be compromised," the company said in a statement. "To help stay protected, we recommend customers follow security best practices and apply the latest updates."

'When you create something like this for good, you know it can be used by the bad side, too.'
MIMKATZ CREATOR BENJAMIN DELPY
But Delpy saw that in practice, the Windows authentication system would still provide a powerful stepping stone for hackers trying to expand their infection from one machine to many on a network. If a piece of malware could run with administrative privileges, it could scoop up the encrypted password from memory along with the key to decrypt it, then use them to access another computer on the network. If another user was logged into that machine, the attacker could run the same program on the second computer to steal their password—and on and on.

So Delpy coded Mimikatz—whose name uses the French slang prefix "mimi," meaning "cute," thus "cute cats"—as a way to demonstrate that problem to Microsoft. He released it publicly in May 2011, but as a closed source program. "Because you don’t want to fix it, I’ll show it to the world to make people aware of it," Delpy says of his attitude at the time. "It turns out it takes years to make changes at Microsoft. The bad guys didn’t wait."

Before long, Delpy saw Chinese users in hacker forums discussing Mimikatz, and trying to reverse-engineer it. Then in mid-2011, he learned for the first time—he declines to say from whom—that Mimikatz had been used in an intrusion of a foreign government network. "The first time I felt very, very bad about it," he remembers.

That September, Mimikatz was used in the landmark hack of DigiNotar, one of the certificate authorities that assures that websites using HTTPS are who they claim to be. That intrusion let the unidentified hackers issue fraudulent certificates, which were then used to spy on thousands of Iranians, according to security researchers at Fox-IT. DigiNotar was blacklisted by web browsers, and subsequently went bankrupt.

The Second Russian Man in a Suit
In early 2012, Delpy was invited to speak about his Windows security work at the Moscow conference Positive Hack Days. He accepted—a little naively, still thinking that Mimikatz's tricks must have already been known to most state-sponsored hackers. But even after the run-in with the man in his hotel room, the Russians weren't done. As soon as he finished giving his talk to a crowd of hackers in an old Soviet factory building, another man in a dark suit approached him and brusquely demanded he put his conference slides and a copy of Mimikatz on a USB drive.

Delpy complied. Then, before he'd even left Russia, he published the code open source on Github, both fearing for his own physical safety if he kept the tool's code secret and figuring that if hackers were going to use his tool, defenders should understand it too.

As the use of Mimikatz spread, Microsoft in 2013 finally added the ability in Windows 8.1 to disable WDigest, neutering Mimikatz's most powerful feature. By Windows 10, the company would disable the exploitable function by default.

But Rendition's Williams points out that even today, Mimikatz remains effective on almost every Windows machine he encounters, either because those machines run outdated versions of the operating system, or because he can gain enough privileges on a victim's computer to simply switch on WDigest even if it's disabled.

"My total time-on-target to evade that fix is about 30 seconds," Williams says.

In recent years, Mimikatz has been used in attacks ranging from the Russian hack of the German parliament to the Carbanak gang's multimillion dollar bank thefts. But the NotPetya and BadRabbit ransomware outbreaks used Mimikatz in a particularly devious way: They incorporated the attacks into self-propagating worms, and combined it with the EternalBlue and EternalRomance NSA hacking tools leaked by the hacker group known as Shadow Brokers earlier this year.

Those tools allow the malware to spread via Microsoft's Server Message Block protocol to any connected system that isn't patched against the attack. And along with Mimikatz, they added up to a tag-team approach that maximizes those automated infections. "When you mix these two technologies, it’s very powerful," says Delpy. "You can infect computers that aren’t patched, and then you can grab the passwords from those computers to infect other computers that are patched."

'I think we must be honest: If it wasn't Mimikatz there would be some other tool.'
NICHOLAS WEAVER, UC BERKELEY
Despite those attacks, Delpy hasn't distanced himself from Mimikatz. On the contrary, he has continued to hone his creation, speaking about it publicly and even adding more features over the years. Mimikatz today has become an entire utility belt of Windows authentication tricks, from stealing hashed passwords and passing them off as credentials, to generating fraudulent "tickets" that serve as identifying tokens in Microsoft's Kerberos authentication system, to stealing passwords from the auto-populating features in Chrome and Edge browsers. Mimikatz today even includes a feature to cheat in Windows' Minesweeper game, pulling out the location of every mine in the game from the computer's memory.

Delpy says that before adding a feature that exploits any serious new security issue in Windows, he does alert Microsoft, sometime months in advance. Still, it has grown into quite the repository.

"It's my toolbox, where I put all of my ideas," Delpy says.

A Bitter Password-Protection Pill
Each of those features—the Minesweeper hack included—is intended not to enable criminals and spies but to demonstrate Windows' security quirks and weaknesses, both in the way it's built and the way that careless corporations and governments use it. After all, Delpy says, if systems administrators limit the privileges of their users, Mimikatz can't get the administrative access it needs to start hopping to other computers and stealing more credentials. And the Shadow Brokers' leak from the NSA in fact revealed that the agency had its own Mimikatz-like program for exploiting WDigest—though it's not clear which came first.

"If Mimikatz has been used to steal your passwords, your main problem is not Mimikatz," Delpy says.

Mimikatz is nonetheless "insanely powerful," says UC Berkeley security researcher Nicholas Weaver. But he says that doesn't mean Delpy should be blamed for the attacks it's helped to enable. "I think we must be honest: If it wasn't Mimikatz there would be some other tool," says Weaver. "These are fundamental problems present in how people administer large groups of computers."

And even as thieves and spies use Mimikatz again and again, the tool has also allowed penetration testers to unambiguously show executives and bureaucrats their flawed security architectures, argues Rendition security's Williams. And it has pressured Microsoft to slowly alter the Windows authentication architecture to fix the flaws Mimikatz exploits. "Mimikatz has done more to advance security than any other tool I can think of," Williams says.

Even Microsoft seems to have learned to appreciate Delpy's work. He's spoken at two of the company's Blue Hat security conferences, and this year was invited to join one of its review boards for new research submissions. As for Delpy, he has no regrets about his work. Better to be hounded by Russian spies than to leave Microsoft's gaping vulnerability a secret for those spies alone to exploit.

"I created this to show Microsoft this isn't a theoretical problem, that it’s a real problem," he says. "Without real data, without dangerous data, they never would have done anything to change it."
https://www.wired.com/story/how-mimikat ... al_twitter

WikiLeaks Set Off an Attack on Our Trump-Russia Project—Right After Messaging Donald Trump Jr. About It

Was Julian Assange trying to conspire with the Trump campaign?
BILL BUZENBERG
NOV. 15, 2017 6:00 AM



Additional reporting for this story was contributed by Denise Clifton and AJ Vicens.

On Monday, The Atlantic published private messages from September 2016 in which WikiLeaks gave Donald Trump Jr. the password to a forthcoming site documenting his father’s ties to Russia. But there was more to the story of WikiLeaks’ apparent effort to conspire with the Trump campaign against PutinTrump.org—and I had a front row seat to it, as editorial director of the site. Within just minutes of reaching out to Trump Jr., Wikileaks also publicized the password, setting off a wave of online harassment, email bombs, and personal threats against people behind the site.

Here’s the deeper story.

On the evening of September 20, 2016, WikiLeaks sent a direct message on Twitter to Trump Jr.: “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch. The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?”

“Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around,” Trump Jr. responded about 12 hours later. “Thanks.”

“It was the scariest times in our lives,” recalls one of the people targeted. “There were messages threatening our families.”
Trump Jr. soon emailed top officials in the Trump campaign about the exchange, according to The Atlantic, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, digital director Brad Parscale, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; Kushner forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks.

Almost immediately after WikiLeaks messaged Trump Jr., though, it made another move: It tweeted out the password. (The password did not allow anyone access to the back end of the site; it was intended simply to let the press preview the site as it would look the following day, when it went live.)

“‘Let’s bomb Iraq’ Progress For America PAC to launch ‘http://PutinTrump.org ‘ at 9.30am,” WikiLeaks tweeted. “Oops pw is ‘putintrump’ http://putintrump.org/ ”


Our site was soon hit with a surge of traffic and spam while it was still password-protected and meant to be out of public view—and that was just the beginning. Within hours, people involved with launching the site were doxxed and personally targeted on Twitter, an attack that quickly spread to Reddit and to alt-right and pro-Trump news sites. Mother Jones is withholding some details about the attack at the request of the people who were targeted due to their concerns about further harassment: Their cell phone numbers, home addresses, and other information about them and their family members were publicized, alongside calls to go after them. Their email accounts were hit with a spambot attack, signing them up for thousands of unwanted subscriptions—many in a foreign language—which rendered the accounts unusable. In a panic, one of them sent me a message: “We are getting 100,000 spam messages to our inbox and all of our personal info is on twitter.” They also received menacing emails and crank phone calls.

“It was the scariest times in our lives,” recalls one of the people targeted. “There were messages threatening our families.”

It is unclear who was behind the Twitter account that appeared to lead the targeting of PutinTrump.org on Sept. 20. (We are also withholding the account’s handle because the personal information of the victims remains posted there as of this story’s publication.) The account was created in February 2016 and went dark about three weeks after the attack began, just before the presidential election. The account offered to reward “whoever can find dirt” on the people working with PutinTrump.org; in another tweet it declared, “We will uncover them ALL!”

WikiLeaks messaged Trump Jr. about the launch of PutinTrump.org just eight minutes before it posted the password for its millions of followers.
The lead attacker’s eight-month-long timeline was filled primarily with anti-Hillary Clinton vitriol and conspiracy theories. It also purported to back Bernie Sanders—and, on numerous occasions, it highlighted the John Podesta emails stolen by Russian hackers and retweeted pro-Trump content from WikiLeaks.

We found no evidence that our site was hacked. The password shared without authorization by WikiLeaks had been created for an embargoed press release sent on Sept. 19 to journalists at roughly a dozen major news organizations who agreed to keep the information about the project private until after the following morning’s launch. It is unclear how WikiLeaks learned about the existence of our site prior to the launch—we had not yet publicized it to anyone other than the group of journalists.

The private exchange between WikiLeaks and Trump Jr. came just seven weeks before the presidential election, and two months after WikiLeaks began releasing Democratic National Committee emails stolen by Russian hackers. By then it was widely known that WikiLeaks had been a vehicle for Russian hackers, as publicly confirmed by US intelligence leaders.

Digital evidence examined by Mother Jones indicates with near certainty that WikiLeaks communicated with Trump Jr. about the launch of PutinTrump.org just eight minutes before posting the password for its millions of followers.

WikiLeaks and a representative for Donald Trump Jr. did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.

WikiLeaks also was wrong about the PAC funding our project. Created by technology entrepreneur Rob Glaser, the PAC was initially titled “Progress for America.” There was no connection to a much older pro-Iraq War PAC of the same name, as WikiLeaks perhaps believed. That older group had not been registered with the Federal Election Commission; after realizing the overlap, Glaser immediately changed the PAC’s name to “Progress for USA,” on the day PutinTrump.org was launched.

After the election, we preserved PutinTrump.org as a content archive. In March, journalist Denise Clifton and I began working with Mother Jones on a new project contributing to Mother Jones’ broader reporting on the sprawling Trump-Russia investigation. (Disclosure: Mother Jones receives some funding from Glaser’s foundation.)

“We launched PutinTrump.org because I and others inferred that there were a set of unseemly and perhaps illegal links between then candidate Trump and Russia’s efforts to hack our democracy. It’s clear that our inferences were well founded,” Glaser says. “Even so, we had no idea that our website would actually stimulate new links connecting the Trump campaign, Russian hackers, and their publisher, WikiLeaks.”
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... er-attack/

Justice investigation into Russian laundering through Deutsche Bank gone quiet
By Kara Scannell
Updated 3:08 PM ET, Wed November 15, 2017

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
German Bank paid over $670 million in penalties in US and UK this year relating to Russian trades
Criminal investigations like the one facing Deutsche Bank can span months or years
Washington (CNN)A Justice Department investigation into Deutsche Bank's role in a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme has gone dormant months after the bank settled with regulators, according to people with direct knowledge of the investigation.

DOJ's money laundering division along with the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York have been investigating the German lender over allegations it missed red flags that allowed Russians to launder billions of dollars out of Moscow using an elaborate trading scheme.
The bank has paid over $670 million in civil penalties to US and UK regulators this year relating to the Russian trades and disclosed in regulatory filings as recently as last month that it set aside an undisclosed amount to cover a potential settlement with DOJ. It is common for regulators and DOJ to move to settle cases at the same time, which companies often advocate for so they can put the matter behind them.
Analysis: Trump goes after basic democratic norms and Sessions tiptoes
Analysis: Trump goes after basic democratic norms and Sessions tiptoes
The DOJ investigation has been closely watched by Democrats on Capitol Hill who have tried and failed to get Deutsche Bank to turn over its internal investigation into the Russian trades and a separate internal review into whether bank accounts of President Donald Trump and his family have any ties to Russia. The Deutsche Bank civil settlement has no connection to bank accounts held by the President or Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and White House senior adviser
Criminal investigations like the one facing Deutsche Bank can span months or years before resolutions are reached or DOJ determines there is not a case. Prosecutors have not made requests for information or witness testimony in several months leaving some people familiar with the investigation wondering about the status. There have also been no settlement talks between the sides despite the bank indicating it is prepared to pay a fine to settle the investigation. While the investigation appears to have slowed down, it could be revived at any time.

Representatives from the US attorney's office in Manhattan and DOJ declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the bank declined to comment.
Multiple investigations by congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller are looking broadly into Russia's possible interference with the US election including money transfers. It is not clear whether Mueller has taken an interest in the Russia trades.

It is not clear why the DOJ investigation appears to have slowed, but it comes as senior positions within DOJ have not been filled with permanent appointees and as top agency officials have signaled they are rethinking department policy toward corporate prosecutions.
Under the Obama administration, financial institutions paid hundreds of billions of dollars in fines in the decade since the 2008 financial crisis. The DOJ had reversed decades of tradition by requiring banks to plead guilty to criminal charges ranging from market manipulation to sanctions violations.
In September, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said during a question-and-answer session after a speech at the Heritage Foundation that DOJ is reviewing its stance toward corporate prosecutions.
"Corporations of course don't go to prison. They do pay a fine. And so the issue is: Can you effectively deter corporate crime by prosecuting corporations or do you in some circumstances need to prosecute individuals? I think you do," according to a transcript posted on C-SPAN.
He added, "I do anticipate we may in the near future make an announcement about what changes we're going to make to the corporate fraud principles."

Democrats have focused on the bank since the election. "Deutsche Bank's pattern of involvement in money laundering schemes with primarily Russian participation, its unconventional relationship with the President, and its repeated violations of US banking laws, all raise serious questions about whether the Bank's reported reviews of the trading scheme and Trump's financial ties to Russia were completely thorough," according to a letter sent in May by California Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, and four other Democrats.
Deutsche Bank has been a key lender to Trump businesses when other major banks have balked. Trump businesses have borrowed over $300 million for a Florida golf course and hotels in Chicago and Washington DC, according to financial disclosures and public filings from 2012 to 2015. Kushner disclosed an unsecured line of credit from the bank ranging between $5 million to $25 million that he shares jointly with his mother since 2015.
The White House did not comment. A spokesman for Kushner declined comment.
A March letter by the same Democrats asking Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the Financial Services Committee's Republican chairman, to subpoena the bank said, "We are concerned about the integrity of this criminal probe and whether senior bank officials will be held accountable given the President's ongoing conflicts of interest with Deutsche Bank." In July, Waters used a procedural move to try to force Hensarling to subpoena the bank but the motion was voted down.
Deutsche Bank has declined to provide the Democrats information citing privacy laws. In a June letter, lawyers for the bank wrote, "We respectfully disagree with the suggestion that Deutsche Bank freely may reveal confidential financial information in response to requests from individual Members of Congress."
In September, when Deutsche Bank Chief Executive John Cryan was asked by CNBC whether the bank has heard from Mueller he said, "We think we said we wouldn't comment any further on that investigation."
Asked generally about US inquiries into possible Russian interference and loans extended to the Trump family, Cryan said, "I think we have agreed we wouldn't comment on that matter other than to say if we do receive a request potentially in the form of a subpoena, but there are other forms of formal request by which we're bound, then of course we will cooperate fully with any official investigation."
Deutsche Bank disclosed the Russian trading scheme in July 2015 when it said it was conducting an internal investigation into trades through the bank's Moscow desk that passed through New York and London. The bank said it brought the issue to the attention of regulators and law enforcement in the US, Germany, Russia and the UK.
In late January, Deutsche Bank paid $630 million to settle civil claims by New York's Department of Financial Services and the UK's Financial Conduct Authority over the alleged conduct that spanned from 2011 until early 2015. In May, it paid $41 million to the Federal Reserve.
The New York state regulators alleged in the consent order that they found "serious compliance deficiencies" that "spanned Deutsche Bank's global enterprise. These flaws allowed a corrupt group of bank traders and offshore entities to improperly and covertly transfer more than $10 billion out of Russia, by conscripting Deutsche Bank operations in Moscow, London and New York to their improper purpose." The regulator added, "Deutsche Bank has represented that it has been unable to identify the actual purpose behind this scheme. It is obvious, though, that the scheme could have facilitated capital flight, tax evasion, or other potentially illegal objectives."
The bank said in its October filing that it "continues to cooperate with regulators and law enforcement authorities, including the DOJ, which has its own ongoing investigation into these securities trades."
The investigation is one of the last remaining major liabilities hanging over the bank, which has moved under Cryan to resolve open investigations and shift the bank's focus toward growing its business.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/15/politics/ ... olitics=Tw

WHERE'S REZA?
Did the Feds Flip Turkish Businessman Reza Zarrab—and Could He Bring Down Michael Flynn?


Reza Zarrab, whose trial for allegedly cheating U.S. sanctions is scheduled to begin in days, was secretly removed from a federal prison and may be working with prosecutors.

Katie Zavadski
KATIE ZAVADSKI
11.16.17 12:20 AM ET
A man who may be part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged misdoings by President Donald Trump’s campaign and administration was secretly removed from a federal prison this month.

Mueller is reportedly looking at a December meeting blocks from Trump Tower where Michael Flynn—shortly before Trump became president and named him national security adviser—was reportedly offered upward of $15 million if he could help Turkey win the extradition of cleric Fethullah Gülen as well as the release of gold trader Reza Zarrab.

Now it appears Zarrab, whose trial for allegedly cheating U.S. sanctions by facilitating gold-for-gas deals between Turkey and Iran is scheduled to begin in just days, may be working with federal prosecutors.

Last month, lawyers for his co-defendant, bank manager Mehmet Atilla, remarked sardonically in court filings that Zarrab, the man at the root of the charges facing their client, had all but vanished, and it seemed “likely that Mr. Atilla will be the only defendant appearing at trial.”

The Bureau of Prisons website shows that Zarrab was released from BOP custody on Nov. 8. He had been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal administrative prison near the Southern District of New York courthouse, before then.

Zarrab has not filed any court documents in the last month. Zarrab and his attorney, Benjamin Brafman, were not at a pre-trial conference Thursday. Flynn’s lawyer did not return a request for comment Wednesday evening.


“All I can tell you is that he is in federal custody,” Nick Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, told The Daily Beast.

In court on Thursday, Victor Rocco, an attorney for Atilla, brought up the issue of the missing co-defendant with a prosecutor during break.

“Where’s Waldo?” Rocco asked. “Are we gonna know? I’ve never been in a case where the defendant has been absent for virtually every proceeding.”

Brafman declined to comment on where Zarrab is being held, or anything else, as Zarrab’s removal from the federal prison system has reignited speculation that he has struck a plea deal on the eve of his trial.

On Wednesday, the Turkish foreign ministry contacted U.S. officials about Zarrab’s whereabouts, pro-government Turkish media reported. The foreign ministry urged “the U.S. to notify Turkish authorities before relocating Turkish detainees to different facilities,” according to The Daily Sabah, which added that “Zarrab was recently threatened in a federal holding facility,” necessitating the move. (A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office would not comment on the allegation.)

Renato Mariotti, a former assistant U.S. attorney and now candidate for attorney general in Illinois, told The Daily Beast that inmates in pre-trial detention are sometimes moved when they are working to cooperate with the federal government.

“It can be a challenge to work with them as a cooperator in a more active way,” Mariotti said. “Maybe he’s spending time in a hotel suite with some FBI agents, or in their local lockup.”

War of Words

Zarrab’s arrest in Miami last march, while he was on vacation with his family, ignited a bitter war of words between the Turkish government and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said he asked then-Vice President Joe Biden about arranging for the release of the 34-year-old trader, a dual Turkish and Iranian citizen who’s socialized with the Turkish president and is married to a popular Turkish singer.

And Erdoğan has intimated that both Bharara and Judge Richard Berman were secretly agents of exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen.

Gülen, who has lived in Pennsylvania for nearly two decades, is a common scapegoat for the Turkish government, which blames his followers for, among other things, a failed coup attempt in 2016 that was quickly followed by arrests, trials, and increased powers for Erdoğan, whose efforts to pressure the United States into extraditing Gülen and releasing Zarrab continued when Trump took office.

While Trump fired Bharara in March—and is now personally interviewing candidates to be the new SDNY U.S. attorney, with jurisdiction over much of his business empire—the Zarrab case has continued under the leadership of former Bharara deputy and acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim.

Hoping to cut the prosecutor out of the loop, Zarrab hired former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to “determine whether this case can be resolved as part of some agreement between the United States and Turkey that will promote the national-security interests of the United States and redound to the benefit of Mr. Zarrab,” as the two men put it in affidavits filed in federal court. Judge Berman called them “disingenuous” for omitting any mention of Iran.

The two former federal prosecutors also met with high-level Trump administration officials in Washington, D.C., to discuss Zarrab’s release but told the court that they would not be appearing there on his behalf.

Flynn, who disclosed that he had been a paid agent of Turkey only after he was forced to resign as national security adviser because of his interactions with Russian officials, had also been a prominent Trump campaign surrogate. The Mueller investigation is looking into whether Flynn discussed the Zarrab case with Turkish contacts, NBC News reported Friday.

Giuliani and Mukasey did not return a request for comment. Victor Rocco, an attorney for Atilla, also did not return a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Turkey has launched a series of retaliatory measures over Zarrab’s arrest, including the arrests of Americans and Turkish personnel working at U.S. embassies.

“They’re using these people as hostages, they thought they could use these people as leverage to get Zarrab released,” Henri Barkey, a Lehigh University professor and former State Department official, told The Daily Beast.

A ‘Multi-Year Scheme’

The key to understanding why a young Turkish-Iranian businessman has become a focal point in international relations lies in the charges against Zarrab and a slew of others, including Atilla, a former Halkbank manager.

In a lengthy superseding indictment filed in September, SDNY prosecutors alleged a “multi-year scheme” run by high-ranking Iranian and Turkish officials. Zarrab and others traded Turkish gold to Iran in exchange for oil and natural gas, in violation of U.S. sanctions, and a Turkish state-owned bank was used to facilitate the scheme and lie to regulators, the complaint says.

The complaint alleges that Iranian and Turkish government “officials received bribes worth tens of millions of dollars paid from the proceeds of the scheme so that they would promote the scheme, protect the participants, and help to shield the scheme from the scrutiny of U.S. regulators.”

The allegations are similar to those in a 2013 corruption scandal that rocked Turkey before being swept under the rug by Erdoğan’s government, Barkey said. The scandal was also related to the Turkish-Iranian gas-for-gold scheme, and included recorded audio of bribes and Erdoğan telling his son to hide money.

“The fact that they broke sanctions, and stuff like that? [Erdoğan] can explain that at home,” Barkey said. “What he can’t explain, obviously, is direct bribery.”

If Zarrab is cooperating with U.S. officials, his testimony could bring a torrent of embarrassment down on the Turkish establishment by implicating top officials there, including Erdoğan himself.

“But that’s really problematic for [Zarrab], because he’s never going to be able to go to Turkey,” Barkey said. “He’s essentially going to be on the run, because they’re going to be really mad if he drops the dime on Turkey.”

The Turkish government has already played up the prosecution as an anti-government campaign.

“The reason Zarrab is in jail with Atilla is because the nasty United States is trying to plot the overthrow of Erdoğan,” Barkey explained, paraphrasing the government-run media line.

But if Zarrab is only testifying against Atilla, prosecutors traded in a big fish for a smaller one: letting an ultra-wealthy gold trader with two homes on the banks of the Bosphorus, close ties to Erdoğan, and a pop-star wife off the hook to take down a middling bank manager. It’s hard to see the feds making that deal after alleging in court that top Turkish and Iranian officials were involved in the criminal scheme.

Mueller’s investigation into Flynn’s Turkish dealings offers an alternative explanation.

The details of Zarrab’s extrajudicial discussions with members of the Trump administration may line up with lines of inquiry in the Mueller investigation. If so, Zarrab’s cooperation could go as far as to waive any potential privilege in his communications with Giuliani and Mukasey, freeing them to relay the substance of their dealings in D.C. and Ankara.

“Giuliani can’t keep anything a secret from Bob Mueller as long as his client does not want him to,” Mariotti, the former prosecutor, said.

In court on Thursday, Judge Berman suggested the answer may come soon.

“My client has asked me repeatedly to ask: Is Mr. Zarrab going to be on trial with Mr. Atilla or not?” Rocco, Atilla’s lawyer, asked at the end of the proceedings.

“The one perk of being a judge is you don’t have to answer questions, as witnesses or lawyers do,” Berman replied. “So I would say just keep your eye on the docket.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-the-f ... hael-flynn

Has this former Trump Tower resident cut a deal against Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump?
Bill Palmer
Updated: 12:52 pm EST Thu Nov 16, 2017


It was a huge scandal with wide reaching implications at the highest levels of the Donald Trump administration, and then it mysteriously faded away. Now the scandal is suddenly back at the center of controversy. A former resident of Trump Tower in Istanbul, who has been imprisoned and awaiting trial on a number of charges, has suddenly disappeared – suggesting he may have cut a deal against Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani and perhaps even Donald Trump himself.



All we know for certain is that Reza Zarrab, who was charged in the United States with a variety of crimes tied to Turkish government corruption, is suddenly no longer in prison. Either no one involved knows where he is, or no one involved will say where he is, according to a new Bloomberg report. But he didn’t escape from prison and he didn’t die in prison, which means he was released for reasons that can’t yet be made public – and that likely only points to one thing.



Special Counsel Robert Mueller is currently pursuing Michael Flynn for a number of alleged crimes, including a kidnapping plot involving the Turkish government and a would-be victim in Pennsylvania. Is it coincidence that Reza Zarrab, who is on trial for crimes related to the Turkish government, is suddenly free without explanation? There may be more to it.



Rudy Giuliani was long expected to take a major role in the Donald Trump administration, until he ran into legal trouble when he tried to interfere with Reza Zarrab’s trial. It’s never been entirely clear if Giuliani is being pursued as part of Robert Mueller’s investigation or part of any other criminal investigation. However, Reza Zarrab’s sudden mysterious release from jail also raises the question of whether he might have given up Giuliani in the process. Finally, there’s the question of what Trump himself knew or didn’t know about the crimes Flynn and Giuliani allegedly committed with the Turkish government. Read the full Bloomberg article here).
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/fly ... rump/6060/

Where Is Reza Zarrab?
By Christian Berthelsen
November 16, 2017, 1:05 AM CST Updated on November 16, 2017, 1:16 PM CST
Zarrab no longer in prison system but still in U.S. custody
Is he cooperating and what does he know of Erdogan’s regime?
Turkey wants him freed. A few in President Trump’s sphere have pushed for a deal. Even so, he’s scheduled to go on trial in New York on Monday.

A wealthy Turkish-Iranian gold trader who had an office in Trump Towers Istanbul, Reza Zarrab stands accused of helping Iran evade U.S. sanctions and bribing senior Turkish officials and bank executives. Anticipation is building from Istanbul to Washington about possible revelations in a case shrouded in mystery and stocked with surprises.

Right now, though, there is a simpler question: Where is Zarrab?




Jailed in grim New York City lockups last year after U.S. authorities seized him en route to a family vacation at Disney World, he is no longer behind bars there. Last week, the inmate registry for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons suddenly said Zarrab had been released. Two people familiar with the case said Zarrab remains in U.S. custody but not in a federal jail. That sometimes happens when a defendant has agreed to serve as a government witness. A lawyer for Zarrab’s accused accomplice has said Zarrab is no longer participating in the defense. Prosecutors and Zarrab’s lawyers have declined to comment.

Has Zarrab decided to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors and tell what he knows about alleged corruption at the highest reaches of the Turkish government? Even the Turkish government is curious, recently asking the U.S. government whether Zarrab is safe.

At least publicly, there were no answers. During the final hearing Thursday before jury selection begins on Nov. 20, Zarrab and his lawyers were not present, and repeated references were made to his absence. At the hearing’s conclusion, Victor Rocco, the lawyer for Zarrab’s co-defendant, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, tossed up his hands and in a loud voice asked the judge if Zarrab would be on trial as well.

Smiling, the judge declined to answer and told Rocco to watch the court docket.

Turkish Billionaire

Zarrab, 34, lived a gilded life in Turkey, with a private plane, a yacht, a waterside mansion in Istanbul and a Turkish pop-star wife. He’s accused of using his network of companies to move money through the U.S. financial system on behalf of Iran and related companies, to help them evade sanctions when the U.S. was stepping up economic pressure on the country in retaliation for its nuclear ambition.

Iran was able to process hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenue to keep the country’s economy humming, in part by using a state-run Turkish bank, Turkiye Halk Bankasi AS, to carry out fraudulent transactions that disguised their true nature by labeling them as food shipments and other allowable commerce, according to prosecutors.

Atilla, a deputy chief executive officer of the bank, was arrested this year during a trip to the U.S. and accused of helping Zarrab. He denies wrongdoing.

The U.S. has alleged that some of the laundered funds benefited entities suspected of supporting terrorism, including Iran-based Mahan Airlines, which has allegedly aided Hezbollah and is blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department.

The Zarrab case has seethed with geopolitical intrigue and riveted Turkey since it burst into the public consciousness with a corruption probe there in 2013. That investigation was ultimately smothered by a purge of Turkey’s judiciary orchestrated by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who accused a political rival, Fethullah Gulen, of running a shadow government and fomenting a coup attempt against him from afar. Gulen has been living in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999.

Aborted Probe

The aborted Turkish probe threatened to raise questions about corruption within Turkey’s government and expose details of its relations with countries including Russia and Iran. Now, these same themes may play out in the New York courtroom, where American prosecutors seeking to prove sanctions violations appear ready to present some of the same evidence uncovered by Turkish investigators.

In Turkey, new developments in the case have set off angry eruptions from Erdogan and his ministers, who’ve suggested that the U.S. investigation is cover for a plot to undermine Turkey’s economy. Some legal observers say the Turkish evidence to be aired in the U.S. case could expose how Turkey, a key U.S. ally in the Mideast, was aiding Iran, one of America’s most vexing antagonists.

Court filings in recent weeks suggest that Turkey’s internal affairs -- and the corruption allegations -- will feature strongly in the U.S. trial. Prosecutors are seeking to question prospective jurors on their feelings about Erdogan, Gulen and Turkish politics in general.

Prosecutors have also begun to cite evidence of Zarrab’s relationship with Erdogan in court filings, noting that they have taped conversations and other records suggesting that the trader told Erdogan of the scheme and sought his support, and directed donations to charitable foundations associated with Erdogan family members. Erdogan hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing in the U.S. case.

“Erdogan clearly has a strong personal interest in Zarrab’s case, as he has raised it at the highest levels of both the Obama and Trump administrations,” said Amanda Sloat, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former State Department official overseeing U.S.-Turkey relations. “U.S. judicial proceedings could also hurt the Turkish economy. Since much of Erdogan’s popularity resulted from his successful economic reforms, his domestic political support would be undermined by a downturn.”

Longtime Allies

Ultimately, the case is a test of U.S.-Turkish relations, already at one of the lowest points in the countries’ longstanding alliance, with analysts questioning how close the charges might get to Erdogan himself.

Gyrations in the case have also spurred dramatic moves in the nation’s currency and stock markets. For example, Halkbank’s market capitalization is a third of what it was before Zarrab was first arrested in Turkey, and the bank hasn’t sold an international bond or received a syndicated loan from abroad in more than a year. Other bank executives have been charged by the U.S. in absentia.

There are almost as many riddles on the U.S. side, where the case was brought by former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara during the waning days of the Obama administration.

Among the many sources of intrigue: Zarrab’s stable of more than a dozen lawyers includes two close associates of President Donald Trump -- former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and ex-U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey -- who sought to broker an end to the case after meeting Erdogan in Turkey.

Giuliani Talk With Erdogan Adds Mystery to Sanctions Case

Erdogan and other members of his cabinet have repeatedly asked the U.S. to drop the case. Erdogan lobbied then-Vice President Joe Biden in a September 2016 meeting and pressed for Zarrab’s release in talks with Trump after he became president.

Giuliani and Mukasey said they met with Erdogan in Turkey earlier this year after informing Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In a court filing, they portrayed U.S. officials as receptive to a diplomatic resolution of the case. The Erdogan meeting occurred after Michael Flynn had left the Trump administration as national security adviser. Flynn later registered as a foreign agent working on behalf of Turkey and is said to have discussed ways to return Zarrab to Turkey, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal have reported.

In a court filing last month, Rocco, Atilla’s lawyer, wrote that Zarrab “has essentially not participated in the case” since new charges were added in early September, which expanded the indictment to include Turkey’s former economy minister, Mehmet Zafer Caglayan, and Halkbank’s former chief executive, Suleyman Aslan, along with others. None of the new defendants is in the U.S. or has responded to the charges in court.

In the filing, Rocco said it “appears likely that Mr. Atilla will be the only defendant appearing at the trial.”

The case is U.S. v. Zarrab, 15-cr-867, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ing-turkey

Academic at heart of Clinton 'dirt' claim vanishes, leaving trail of questions
By Tim Lister and Nic Robertson, CNN
Updated 11:01 AM ET, Wed November 8, 2017

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

Now, after being identified as a key figure in the US special counsel investigation into Russian influence over the 2016 US presidential election, Mifsud has gone to ground.
Last Thursday he disappeared from the private university in Rome where he teaches. Repeated attempts to reach him since have been unsuccessful, though he appears to have read some messages from CNN.
But more details are emerging of the background and contacts of the man who emerged last week as "the professor" in court filings relating to charges brought against former Trump aide George Papadopoulos.
Content by Museum of the Bible

In the US affidavit, Papadopoulos claims Mifsued -- referred to as "Foreign Contact 1" -- told him in April 2016 that the Russians had "thousands of emails" relating to Hillary Clinton.

Joseph Mifsud met with the Russian ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko in May 2014.
An associate also told CNN that he repeatedly bragged about how Moscow had "compromising material" on the Clinton campaign in spring 2016, contradicting Mifsud's assertion that he never talked about Russian "dirt" on the Democratic presidential bid.
At that time, according to US officials and independent analysts, Russian agencies or proxies were rummaging around the stolen emails of both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The intrusion would not become public for several months.
The associate, who spoke to CNN at length, also said that Mifsud told him that he had been interviewed by the FBI while on a visit to the US earlier this year. That chimes with Mifsud's own account -- in an interview last week with Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he refers to a discussion with the FBI.
Mifsud was in Washington in February -- he spoke at an event organized by Global Ties, which describes itself on its website as a non-profit partner organization of the US State Department.
Last week, Mifsud described Papadopoulos' claim that he knew about Russia's material on Clinton as "baloney."
"I absolutely exclude the fact that I spoke of secrets regarding Hillary Clinton," he told La Repubblica.
Those were his last words in public on the subject.

The Moscow connection
Mifsud first met Papadopoulos in March 2016 in Rome, according to his own account. They met again shortly after Papadopoulos was first publicly named as an adviser to the Trump team around March 21. Days later, Papadopoulos wrote to colleagues on the Trump team that he "had just finished a very productive lunch with a good friend of mine... who introduced me to both Putin's niece and the Russian ambassador," according to court filings.
The "good friend" was Mifsud. After discovering Papadopoulos' elevation to the Trump campaign, he moved swiftly to put the two sides in contact. (It has since become clear that the woman attending the lunch was not Putin's niece.)

George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the FBI about his Russia connections.
The following month, Mifsud travelled to Moscow to give a talk at the Valdai Club, a think-tank with close connections to the Kremlin. "We have to open up trade to the Russian Federation," he said at the event, on April 19. "Imposing sanctions for example is suicidal in our case -- and because of the pressure... from the United States."
The FBI affidavit implies Mifsud may have been "played" by the Russians.
"The Russian government and its security and intelligence services frequently make use of non-governmental intermediaries to achieve their foreign policy objectives," it said. "The Russian government has used individuals associated with academia and think-tanks in such a capacity."
Mifsud's associate told CNN that seemed very plausible. Anything he was told would soon be repeated to others, the associate said.

A long courtship
Even before encountering Papadopoulos, Mifsud had been a regular visitor to Russia. He attended events sponsored by the Valdai Club between 2014 and 2016 and and other educational conferences in the past four years.
Mifsud also met the Russian ambassador to London Alexander Yakovenko in 2014 after returning from an academic conference in Moscow.


For an academic with modest credentials and few publications to his name, he had surprisingly high-profile connections among Russian officials.
Mifsud's former assistant has told CNN that she set up meetings between Mifsud and Russian academics and officials. They included Ivan Timofeev, who is on the Russian International Affairs Council, and Evgeny Bazhanov, President of the Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy.
CNN cannot confirm the assistant's account; she requested not to be named.
His most recent visit was in September this year when he moderated two panels during Moscow State University's "Global Congress." The university has an exchange agreement with the private Link University in Rome, where Mifsud teaches.
The state-funded Russia24 network has heaped praise on Link's director Vincenzo Scotti, describing him as "an experienced politician who thinks that cultural exchange and 'soft power' democracy will lead to lifting of the anti-Russian sanctions."
At Moscow State University there are still several photographs displayed of Mifsud with the Dean of the Institute of Global Studies. He is also featured on a poster as one of three prominent lecturers from abroad.
Two of the Institute's faculty told CNN Tuesday that Mifsud presented himself as someone who could build contacts to foreign universities and institutes. They said several of the institute's officials visited the London Academy of Diplomacy, which Mifsud helped run.
Picture on the wall at Moscow State University (MSU) of Joseph Mifsud (left) with Yury Sayamov, UNESCO Chairholder in the Faculty of Global Processes at MSU. The picture was taken while the two men were at the London Diplomatic Academy.

People who know him say Mifsud was always networking and often exaggerated his access to decision-makers. His stories are frequently contradictory. He has denied knowing anyone in the Russian government yet had previously claimed to have had an exchange with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at an event. Nor is there any evidence to support a claim by Mifsud that he met President Putin.
On at least one occasion he was described at a conference as an ambassador. In fact, he has never held such a post. His resume claims he has been a member of a French presidential panel called the "Comite du Risque" -- but no such organization exists, the French Presidency told CNN.
Mifsud's relationships with several academic institutions have ended badly. For a time he was President of the London Academy of Diplomacy, whose degrees were certified by the University of East Anglia. Mifsud visited the University with a Russian diplomat -- Ernest Chernukhin -- in July.
The university says the connection has now ended, and the academy is now defunct. His resume has also been deleted from another London institution with which he was connected, the London Centre of International Law Practice.
Mifsud left his position as President of Euro-Mediterranean University in Slovenia in 2012. The university claimed he owed 39,000 euros in unexplained expenses.
However, Mifsud's credentials were enough for him to be offered a teaching position at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Earlier this year an email written by deputy principal John Gardner said Mifsud had "truly global contacts in the world of diplomacy and is on first name terms with a wide variety of ambassadors from across the globe."
Why Mueller isn't charging anyone with 'collusion'
Why Mueller isn't charging anyone with 'collusion'
The email was obtained by STV, a Scottish television network. Stirling University would not comment on its content but said Mifsud remained employed at the university.
Mifsud's history of exaggerations, and his enthusiasm to be seen as an important player in demand at conferences the world over, may now be coming back to haunt him.
The "Putin niece" that Papadopoulos mentioned to the Trump campaign was, after all, no relation of the Russian President, Mifsud admitted last week.
He told La Repubblica: "She is a simple student, very beautiful. Like many other students, I introduced her at the London Center where Papadopoulos was, and he showed an interested in her that was not academic."
His associate told CNN that Mifsud had introduced the woman to him as a Russian journalist, one of several he'd met during his dealings with the Russians. The associate says he warned Mifsud about the danger of being played by the Russians.
For the most popular talk-show on Russian television, Mifsud's activities are now the object of ridicule. On Sunday, the show's host, Dmitry Kiselev, said that Papadopoulos was introduced to the fictional Putin niece by "a fly-by Maltese professor called Joseph Mifsud, a retired bottom-feeder diplomat."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/08/politics/ ... index.html

THE EX-SPY BEHIND THE TRUMP-RUSSIA DOSSIER LEFT A CLUE FOR MUELLER
Christopher Steele told a reporter that one real-estate deal might be key to understanding the collusion case.

BY ABIGAIL TRACY
NOVEMBER 16, 2017 11:44 AM
Christopher Steele

As federal investigators pour over the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, the work of ex-British spook Christopher Steele continues to loom large. At least part of Robert Mueller’s probe has been informed by Steele’s infamous dossier, which alleges substantive ties between Donald Trump and the Russian government. Though Trumpworld has cast doubt on the document’s legitimacy, with former Trump aide Carter Page dubbing it the “dodgy dossier,” Steele has stood by his research and, reportedly, has offered up another tip: zero in on the president’s foreign real-estate deals.

In December of last year, Steele informed Luke Harding, a journalist for the Guardian, that “the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals” between Trump and individuals with the Kremlin ties warrant investigation. “Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” the former spy said, according to a conversation detailed in Harding’s new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. “The difference is what’s important.”

According to his book, Steele did not elaborate on this point to Harding, but his implication was clear: it’s possible that Trump was indebted to Russian interests when he descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to declare his candidacy. After the real-estate mogul suffered a series of bankruptcies related to the 2008 financial crisis, traditional banks became reluctant to loan him money—a reality he has acknowledged in past interviews. As a result, the Trump Organization reportedly became increasingly reliant on foreign investors, notably Russian ones. As Donald Trump Jr. famously said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The significance of such transactions is not lost on Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Citing a person familiar with the F.B.I. probe, Bloomberg reported in July that Mueller’s team is investigating a series of deals Trump struck, including the Trump Organization’s failed SoHo development that involved Russian nationals, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and the president’s sale of a Palm Beach estate in 2008. All three deals have drawn scrutiny for their ties to Russian interests; as Craig Unger outlined for the Hive, the 2014 Trump SoHo development is likely of interest to Mueller thanks to the involvement of Felix Sater—a Moscow-born, Russian-American businessman who did time for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass—and the now-defunct company he worked for, the Bayrock Group. Similarly, Russian developer Aras Agalarov, whose son Emin helped broker the controversial Trump Tower meeting last June between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, paid $20 million to bring Miss Universe to Moscow. And Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the Florida mansion for a staggering sum of $95 million in 2008—despite Trump having paid just $41 million for the property four years prior.

Watch Now: Is Donald Trump Emotionally Intelligent?

Trump has cautioned that he would view any attempt by Mueller to dig into his past business deals as out of bounds. But the former F.B.I. director has a broad mandate from the D.O.J. to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign” and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”—suggesting that Trump’s deals with Russians fall under Mueller’s purview. Nor is Mueller’s tack in following the money limited to Trump. The indictments the special prosecutor brought against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy and longtime business associate Rick Gates included conspiracy to launder money and seven counts of improper foreign banking and financial reporting. (Both Manafort and Gate have denied the charges.)

Since media outlets published the Steele dossier last January, Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits alike have sought to discredit it. In recent weeks, Trumpworld has latched onto the revelation that the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign indirectly bankrolled Steele’s investigative work—which he conducted for Washington-based intelligence firm Fusion G.P.S.—through the law firm Perkins Coie. They have argued that the dossier’s origins not only make it invalid, but are indicative of a larger anti-Trump conspiracy. Steele, however, stands by his work. While the former MI6 agent acknowledged that no piece of intelligence is 100 percent airtight, Harding noted that Steele told friends he believes the 16 memos he delivered to Fusion to be “70 to 90 percent accurate.”

NOV 17 2017, 6:17 PM ET
Rob Goldstone ready to come to U.S. and talk to Mueller
by ROBERT WINDREM

The British publicist who helped set up the fateful meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a group of Russians at Trump Tower in June 2016 is ready to meet with special counsel Robert Mueller's office, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Rob Goldstone has been living in Bangkok, Thailand, but has been communicating with Mueller's office through his lawyer, said a source close to Goldstone.

Goldstone's New York lawyer, G. Robert Gage, declined to comment other than to say, "nothing is presently scheduled."

However, sources close to Goldstone and familiar with the investigation say they expect he will travel to the United States at some point "in the near future," as one put it.

Image: Rob Goldstone attends a benefit in 2009
Rob Goldstone attends a benefit in Water Mill, New York on August 22, 2009. Adriel Reboh / Patrick McMullan via Getty Image file
Goldstone helped set up — and attended — the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower at which Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she presented information to Donald Trump Jr. and other key Trump aides. The meeting has emerged as a focus of Mueller's investigation into whether the Trump team colluded with the Russian effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

In an email that later became public, Goldstone wrote to Trump Jr. that "the Crown prosecutor of Russia … offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."

There is no office of crown prosecutor, but Goldstone appeared to be referring to the Russian prosecutor general.

He added that "this is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin," a reference to his long-time clients, oligarch Aras Agalarov and his son, Emin, a Russian pop singer. Much of Goldstone's publicity business involves music promotion. He also represented the Miss Universe pageant, at one time owned by President Trump.

In reply to Goldstone's email, Trump Jr. wrote, "if it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer."

Trump Jr. hosted the Russians alongside Paul Manafort, then Trump's campaign chairman, and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser. Along with Veselnitskaya, the Russian delegation included Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, who works for the Agalarov family in the U.S., and Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist engaged in trying to lift Obama administration sanctions on Russia and Russian entities.

Also in the room was Russian-American translator Anatoli Samochornov, who had done work for the State Department and had translated previously for Veselnitskaya.

Investigators are trying to determine whether the promised assistance from the Russian government was provided, and whether it was part of what a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer called "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Veselnitskaya told NBC News she first received the supposedly incriminating information she brought to Trump Tower — describing alleged tax evasion and donations to Democrats — from Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS owner, who had been hired to conduct research in a New York federal court case.

A source with firsthand knowledge of the matter confirmed that the firm's research had been provided to Veselnitskaya as part of the case, which involved alleged money-laundering by a Russian company called Prevezon.

Veselnitskaya said she turned Simpson's research over to the Russian prosecutor.

A spokesman for Mueller's office declined to comment.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ro ... er-n821826

The guy behind the Trump-Russia dossier reveals how the Kremlin snuck money to Donald Trump
Bill Palmer
Updated: 11:45 pm EST Fri Nov 17, 2017
Home » Politics

Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele helped push Donald Trump’s Russia scandal into the public eye with his “Trump Russia dossier” which laid out how the Kremlin spent years cultivating and compromising Trump ahead of his run for president. The dossier was initially attacked by the American mainstream media in vicious fashion, but many of its claims have since proven true, and none of its claims have been proven false. Now Steele is revealing new information which could blow the entire scandal wide open.


Steele, who is British, has long been hesitant to speak to American investigators or even set foot in the United States, perhaps out of fear of retaliation from Donald Trump. He recently spoke to British publication The Guardian about the Trump-Russia scandal, and shared a new clue which might end up revealing the entire puzzle (link). Steele said that the loan amounts don’t match up with the actual values of the hotel deals and land deals between Trump and Kremlin-tied investors.


He didn’t go on to say which deals in particular he was referring to, but there are a number of possible explanations. For instance, he may have been referring to the Trump Soho real real estate deal in New York. The Trump Organization partnered with convicted Russian mafia money laundering figure Felix Sater on that deal. It’s also possible he may have been alluding the massive loans that Deutsche Bank has continued to float to Donald Trump over the years, even after he became a poor credit risk, and the fact that Deutsche Bank was busted this year for laundering Russian money.


In any case, while Christopher Steele’s Trump-Russia dossier is most popularly known for its still-unproven “Pee Pee Tape” allegation, other key aspects of his dossier have been proven true. His research is credible enough that his new “follow the money” reveal should be taken seriously.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/do ... oney/6071/

TRUMP IS MUELLER’S ‘PRIMARY TARGET,’ AND FLYNN COORDINATION IS A ‘SCANDAL,’ LEGAL EXPERT SAYS
BY GREG PRICE ON 11/24/17 AT 10:17 AM

The information-sharing deal between President Donald Trump’s legal team and that of former national security adviser Mike Flynn has been a “scandal,” as well “ethically dubious” and could be construed as form of “witness tampering,” according to a top legal expert.

University of New Hampshire professor and attorney Seth Abramson shared his opinions in a 30-tweet thread posted Thursday night on a possibly nefarious deal between the two legal camps and provided greater insight and context into what he believes has gone on.

Abramson broke down The New York Times explosive report of how Flynn’s attorneys informed the president’s lawyers they could no longer discuss Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. The report asserted such a breakaway could be a sign that Flynn is “cooperating with prosecutors or negotiating a deal.”


The president, himself, could also be Mueller’s “primary target.”

15h

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
Replying to @SethAbramson
2/ This matters—as those who follow the probe have known since March Flynn signing a deal was a matter of time, leverage and hammering out details. Mueller needed time to get maximum leverage before hammering out details—the only way he'd refuse is if Flynn were a primary target.

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
3/ The NYT has toyed—or even more than that—with Trump's self-aggrandizing pet theory that he isn't a target, so they assumed Flynn flipping at some point *wasn't* certain. But experts saw that, while Flynn was going to face punishment here, Donald Trump was the primary target.
9:50 PM - Nov 23, 2017
12 12 Replies 287 287 Retweets 1,178 1,178 likes
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Both Trump and Flynn were possibly legally exposed as far back as February by legal experts as both could be seen as “witnesses” or “suspects” in a federal criminal probe, according to Abramson.

14h

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
Replying to @SethAbramson
7/ It's true defense lawyers with different clients can't work together when it poses a conflict—and that conflict arises the moment two suspects have divergent legal interests, *not* when one is cooperating. So in fact cooperation of the sort Trump and Flynn had is *not* common. pic.twitter.com/KPjANiW5B8

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
8/ Legal experts saw legal exposure for Trump and Flynn in February of 2017—and saw both men as witnesses and possible suspects in the same federal criminal investigation. Sharing privileged info or valuable investigative research under such circumstances is suspect and uncommon.
10:04 PM - Nov 23, 2017
10 10 Replies 282 282 Retweets 1,026 1,026 likes
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Trump was also possibly further exposed when he spoke to Flynn in April, well after Flynn had left the White House, and reportedly told him to “stay strong.” Following that call, Flynn then failed to give documents to congressional investigators. That key moment alone, according to Abramson, could be “evidence of criminal witness tampering.”

14h

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
Replying to @SethAbramson
8/ Legal experts saw legal exposure for Trump and Flynn in February of 2017—and saw both men as witnesses and possible suspects in the same federal criminal investigation. Sharing privileged info or valuable investigative research under such circumstances is suspect and uncommon.

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
9/ Trump's legal exposure comes in part from an April call to Flynn in which he told him to "stay strong"—after which Flynn refused to hand over docs to Congress. So Trump-Flynn coordination to date has been a scandal and maybe evidence of criminal witness tampering—not "common."
10:07 PM - Nov 23, 2017
16 16 Replies 379 379 Retweets 1,356 1,356 likes
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Furthermore, the split between Trump and Flynn’s legal teams may be a sign that whatever possible deal each side had previously — with such a deal heavily favoring Trump — it now may be in Flynn’s best interests to break away.

14h

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
Replying to @SethAbramson
10/ Keeping in mind I've been saying since March 31 that Flynn will eventually get a deal—because Trump is Mueller's target—the idea an info-sharing deal ends only if Flynn has cut a deal or Flynn has initiated plea negotiations is farcical. There are many other possible reasons. pic.twitter.com/Huu0DQex0g

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
11/ As I've indicated, the info-sharing deal between Flynn and Trump was (a) ethically dubious from the start, (b) possibly connected to a course of conduct by Trump and allies that constituted witness tampering, and (c) nonsensical from a strategic standpoint—at least for Flynn.
10:11 PM - Nov 23, 2017
12 12 Replies 255 255 Retweets 965 965 likes
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And Abramson pointed out that Flynn and Trump’s “interests” may have diverged, which could lead one of the president’s top and most trusted former campaign officials to consider working with Mueller even more.

14h

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
Replying to @SethAbramson
6/ Given that the scope of Mueller's authority is a national issue—as before this is all over, Trump will seek to fire Mueller—the New York Times adopting the Trump campaign line on Mueller's authority ("we're only in trouble if we actively helped Russian hacking") is a problem.

Seth Abramson
✔
@SethAbramson
7/ It's true defense lawyers with different clients can't work together when it poses a conflict—and that conflict arises the moment two suspects have divergent legal interests, *not* when one is cooperating. So in fact cooperation of the sort Trump and Flynn had is *not* common. pic.twitter.com/KPjANiW5B8
10:01 PM - Nov 23, 2017
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The former three-star general Flynn, who resigned from his White House post in February after he misinformed Vice President Mike Pence about his meeting with a Russian ambassador, was a key figure throughout Trump’s successful campaign last year and led cheers of “lock her up” in reference to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

But Flynn, as well as his son Mike Jr., have come under investigation for failing to properly disclose lobbying work at the behest of foreign governments under the firm, The Flynn Intel Group.

Earlier this week, a former partner of Flynn’s was named as a possible witness before a Mueller grand jury and could face questions about Flynn’s firm’s work for Turkey, according to NBC News.
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-target-mu ... ynn-721443

Czech Court Rules Russian Hacking Suspect Can Be Extradited to U.S.

RFE/RLNovember 24, 2017 12:40 GMT
A prison guard walks outside a courtroom during an appeal by Yevgeny Nikulin, who faces charges of hacking computers of American companies, in Prague on November 24.
PRAGUE -- A Czech court has ruled that a suspected Russian hacker at the center of a tug-of-war between Washington and Moscow can be extradited to the United States.

Prague's High Court on November 24 upheld a lower court's ruling allowing the extradition of Yevgeny Nikulin, whom the United States accuses of hacking computers and stealing information from major Internet companies including LinkedIn and Dropbox.

Moscow, which has repeatedly denounced U.S. efforts to extradite its citizens from third countries, has sought Nikulin's extradition on separate Internet-theft charges.

A final decision will be in the hands of the Czech justice minister, who can approve extradition to one country and block the other.

Nikulin initially appealed his extradition to both the United States and Russia, but later withdrew the appeal against extradition to his homeland.

Nikulin was arrested by Czech authorities in October 2016 based on an Interpol warrant requested by the U.S. government.

The latest ruling on his extradition comes amid ongoing U.S. investigations into an alleged Russian campaign to influence last year's presidential election.

U.S. intelligence has concluded that Russia used computer hacking, e-mail leaks, and propaganda in an effort to influence the November 2016 presidential election that swept President Donald Trump into the White House. Moscow rejects the allegation.

A lawyer for Nikulin claimed earlier this year that FBI agents tried to get his client to confess to hacking the U.S. Democratic Party before the election.

The issue came up briefly during the May 30 hearing at the Prague Municipal Court, which ruled that Nikulin could be extradited either to Russia or the United States.

Nikulin said during that hearing that he was not involved in cyberattacks targeting the Democratic Party, and he has insisted he is innocent of the charges he faces in the United States.

With reporting by Oksana Kapinos of Current Time TV in Prague, AP, Reuters, and Lidovky.cz
https://www.rferl.org/amp/russia-us-cze ... 74803.html

Robert Mueller nabs Trump-Russia hacker at the worst possible time for Donald Trump

Bill Palmer
If Donald Trump was thinking that his Thanksgiving holiday weekend couldn’t get any worse after Michael Flynn revealed he’s cutting a Trump-Russia deal, things have indeed found a way to get even worse. An infamous Russian hacker, believed to be near the center of the Trump-Russia election hacking scandal, is being extradited to the United States so that the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller can have their way with him.

The Czech Republic has ruled that Russian hacker Yevgeny Nikulin will be extradited to the United States, and not returned to Russia, according to a new report from Radio Free Europe (link). Nikulin’s attorney has revealed that the FBI believes Nikulin was involved in Trump-Russia election hacking. Mueller has jurisdiction over the FBI in all matters relating to the Trump-Russia scandal, which means that Nikulin is now all his.

So now, even as Robert Mueller is gaining Michael Flynn as a cooperating witness with valuable information about the Trump campaign’s sign of Trump-Russia collusion, he’s also gaining a hacker with insider information on the Russian side of the collusion. There is no guarantee that Nikulin will cut a deal once he arrives in the United States. But assuming he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life rotting in an American prison, it’s likely that he’ll work something out with Mueller and spill his guts.

To give you an idea of how much value the United States government places on the cooperation of Yevgeny Nikulin, it had him arrested on an Interpol warrant more than a year ago – before election day – and has been trying to get him extradited ever since. The timing of this extradition ruling appears to be coincidental to Michael Flynn’s decision to cut a deal. It simply means that Donald Trump’s luck – and his future prospects – are growing dimmer by the hour.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ha ... ller/6215/

seemslikeadream » Fri May 26, 2017 8:26 am wrote:

U.S. Catches Russian Hackers Napping on Vacation
Posted on May 25, 2017 by Daniel Hopsicker

The idea that the Russian hackers who tipped the U.S. election to Trump were victims of a U.S. ‘deep state’ propaganda meme would never have occurred to the genius-level tech-savvy Russian busted for cybercrime recently by U.S. agents.

He just wanted to take a vacation

Something told him to leave the Lamborghini in Moscow

A slim 30-year old man in a gray sweatshirt was just settling down for brunch with his girlfriend in the restaurant of a 5-star hotel in downtown Prague. It was just two days after the United States accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee on June 15, 2016.

Yevgeny (or Evgeniy, or Jevgeni, depending on your taste in Cyrillic) Nikulin and his girlfriend were enjoying a 3-week motor tour through Belarus, Poland and the Czech Republic.

He had just finished parking in a special VIP spot on the street, careful to leave plenty of room on each side of his new black Mercedes AMG GLE63 SUV. He was only driving the Mercedes because, so far out of Moscow, driving his Lamborghini seemed an invitation to trouble.

The couple sat side-by-side, thighs touching, taking advantage of being almost alone in the restaurant. Suddenly a police SWAT team came bursting through the front door and headed right for his table. A man in body armour ordered Nikulin to place his hands flat on the table.

Cops forced him to stand, handcuffed his hands behind his back, and led him away, right in front of his girlfriend. Cold.

“The blistering, two-minute action,” claimed a Prague newspaper. “eventually triggered cracking in several parts of the world.”



Where the “Cracking” began

What was going on in Russia at the time was earthshaking, but remains unknown to most Westerners.

Every Russian conflict with a neighboring country since 2000—Georgia, Estonia, and the Ukraine—was accompanied by a crude onslaught against that country’s online assets.

The Russians weaponized what used to be called “spam” for use in psychological warfare. And they were good at it. They used a variety of tools. General political websites were supported, but with no indication of Russian funding.



A group calling itself Cyber Guards was formed. In the summer of 2013 a pro-Kremlin organization announced the launch of a new large system for social network monitoring.

Pro-Kremlin youth organizations were taught to become patriotic hackers and trolls. Soon a tidal wave of propaganda spread on social networks, aimed, not at countries, but at individual adversaries of the Kremlin.



Turning the boys loose

London’s The Guardian was among the first to find itself in the Russian trolls’ crosshairs. As the Ukraine-Russia conflict heated up, waves of so-called “Nashibot” trolls relentlessly posted pro-Putin propaganda in the paper’s comments section.



French and Italian journalists who published stories critical of Russia were attacked, not crudely, but in fluent and flawless Italian and French. These were not amateur, but professional trolls.

“An army was unleashed, a fighting force whose weapons were words. Legions of trolls were deployed to provoke and intimidate,” write Andrei Soldatov and Irinia Borogan in the just-released “Red Web.”

Domestically, the Kremlin decided to put the Internet under control by technical means, through filtering. Gradually, Russian authorities exerted more control in a coordinated squeeze in what amounted to nationwide censorship through a relatively small government agency called Roskomnadzor, which selected what was to be censored, but left it to individual ISP’s and telecom operators to carry it out.



Czech-mate, mate

Meanwhile, back in Prague… Police— alert to the possibility of worldwide publicity—filmed the arrest in jerky-cam style. It was not an artistic choice.

For several days afterwards, due to “tactical reasons,” according to a spokesman for Czech police, Yevgeny Nikulin’s capture went unannounced while diplomatic maneuvers between the U.S. and Russia began over his extradition.

Cynics said it sounded like someone holding a silent auction.

Nikulin was wanted in the U.S. for a raid on more than 100 million users of Linked in 2012, and several smaller social media sites like Dropbox and Formspring, the little-known sexting app used by Anthony Weiner. He was also accused of conspiracy to traffic information from the professional networking site, and supplying hacking tools to others.

But while the other three Russian hackers profiled here have all been explicitly linked to the hacking of the U.S. presidential election last year, Nikulin’s role, if any, has not yet been revealed. However the intense struggle over his extradition between the U.S. and Russia indicates the true story of Nikulin’s involvement remains untold.

A top-dollar ‘get’

In 2009, a person with the same name was detained in Moscow, but ultimately not charged with any crime. Nikulin, whose hacker nicknames included Chinabig01, Dex.007, Valeriy.krutov3 and iBlackHat, offered to the agents that he had no idea why.

Naturally, cyber-experts in the U.S. speculated Nikulin must be working for one of the Russian secret services. Or was that just part of the ‘deep-state’ propaganda meme?

Catching Nikulin was especially valuable for the Americans. They had been unable to detain high-level Russian hackers before, Czech newspapers reported.



The U.S. immediately began demanding his extradition. But the Russians wanted him too. And, not that anyone was asking, but Nikulin voted to be sent back to Russia. He also denied knowing anything about computers. Earlier, he had denied being Nikulin.

The big hacker arrest was splashed across newspapers in Moscow and Prague. In Moscow, a friend confirmed Nikulin had from an early age been involved with computers and technology. His involvement in hacking in Russia was no secret.It was a normal thing.

Also, the existence of Russian hackers had not yet being hotly disputed. It was still a full three weeks before Seth Rich was shot and murdered in Washington, D.C.



Give it to me straight

With its suspect in custody, the FBI wanted to know all about Nikulin’s connections with Moscow’s elite.

He had boasted on Russia’s Facebook about collecting Lamborghinis, wearing gold Rolexes, and hand-stitched boots, and was famous for posting photos of himself on Instagram with his stable of luxury cars: Aston Martins, Bentleys, Porsches, and Lamborghinis.

One picture, from a Russian automotive magazine, showed him driving a Lamborghini Hurricane. “This is not my first Lamborghini,” he told the publication. One can imagine him sniffing.



It was not all fun and games. One of his friends told a reporter that Nikulin was “an idiot” for traveling abroad while hen had an Interpol warrant out on him.

He sent an email to worried friends in Moscow. “I’ll be back soon, why the fuss?”

Sounding like he’d watched a few gangster movies in his spare time, Nikulin said tersely,
“FBI Agents mentioned names to me. Lukoil chief Vagit Alekperov, Defense Minister Sergej Šojgu, President of Rosneft Eduard Chudajnatov, and Putin spokesman Dmitrij Peskov.”

He was friends with the son of the head of the Russian oil group Lukoil, he admitted, as well as the daughter of the Russian defense minister. And also a Putin spokesman. So what? He went racing late at night through the streets of Moscow with sons of Russian privilege. It was no big deal.



Desperate back-stage struggle

More dramatic than his arrest was the backstage struggle underway to obtain the alleged hacker, reported Czech weekly magazine Respekt.

“He was never formally accused at that time, I think because he was recruited by Russian security,” said Ondrej Kundra, political editor with the magazine. “Russians typically offer alleged hackers immunity from prosecution in exchange for collaboration,” he reported.

Moscow said it would do everything possible to keep Nikulin from being extradited to the United States.

They even sent a special envoy— Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who looked as if she was quite used to being treated with diplomatic courtesy—to plead their case. She said “The US approach is part of a hunt for Russian citizens around the world to impose their jurisdiction on foreign countries.”

She also allegedly threatened the Czechs. Send him to the U.S., went the message, and you can forget about obtaining the release of any Czech citizens hiding from justice on Russian soil.

Six months later the Czech Republic suffered a damaging cyber-security breach. Dozens of senior Czech diplomats had their emails hacked in a massive cyber-attack that was thought to have been carried out by Russia.

Nikulin, meanwhile, lay in his cell like a wounded animal, waiting for two lions to decide who would eat first.



Needs a weekend in the country

Shortly after Nikulin’s arrest, he was reported to have had a nervous breakdown. He was hospitalized in a local psychiatric facility for several days. At his first hearing, he said he was being treated for cardiovascular disease, intestinal problems, and suffered panic attacks.

In early May Nikulin appeared before a court deciding where to extradite him to the US or Russia. He claimed to have been the victim of a political game.

The FBI had tried to force a confession during interrogation, to make him admit he had been part of the team that hacked the US election. “I had to admit to intervening in the U.S. election in exchange for a comfortable life in the United States.”

It was a savvy move. Late word from the Municipal Court in Prague was they would announce a decision by the end of May. Until then, the only thing certain was that, in Prague today, money is changing hands.

http://www.madcowprod.com/2017/05/25/u- ... -vacation/

YEVGENIY NIKULIN WRITES THE DONALD

July 19, 2017/15 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Russian hacks /by emptywheel
Back in July, I noted that Vladimir Putin started waxing about independent hackers’ “art” as it looked more and more likely that Yevgeniy Nikulin, the guy DOJ has accused of hacking Linked In and MySpace, among others, would be extradited to the US. Nikulin also made some news by alleging that back in February, the FBI Agent who had interrogated him in Prague had asked him about the election hack.

Now Nikulin has gone one better, writing to President Trump with his claim that he was asked to perjure himself by claiming credit for the DNC hack. (h/t ME)

Obviously, this might just be a ploy to garner attention and give Russia some ammunition to bolster their (thus far reportedly losing) claim that they should get custody of Nikulin for a minor hack rather than the US for a number of very major ones. It is a good way to get attention, especially given the way Trump keeps raising doubts about who hacked the DNC.

But it is actually not crazy to think Nikulin had a role in the DNC hack. One fairly credible alternative theory for the source of the DNC emails dealt to WikiLeaks is that someone used easily cracked credentials from Nikulin’s alleged breaches to obtain the email boxes of about 9 people at the DNC. If that were the case, it would raise the stakes for the logic behind the hacks Nikulin is alleged to have committed and the timing of the more public release of the stolen credentials.

In which case Nikulin’s appeal to Trump (who of course has shown zero interest in the plight of unjust DOJ claims for anyone else, even American citizens, since being elected) would be far more interesting — a way for Trump to personally intervene to prevent potentially damning information from landing in the hands of American prosecutors.

It’s the kind of thing that might come up in hour long conversations on the sidelines of meetings between Putin and Trump.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/07/19/y ... he-donald/

Exclusive: Digital Trail Betrays Identity Of Russian 'Hacker' Detained In Prague
October 20, 2016 13:52 GMT
Dmitry Treshchanin
Nick Shchetko

PRAGUE -- An investigation by Current Time TV has determined that the Russian national accused by American officials of hacking U.S. targets and arrested earlier this month in the Czech capital is 29-year-old Moscow resident Yevgeny Nikulin.

Czech authorities this week said the suspect was detained in downtown Prague on October 5 in response to an Interpol warrant requested by the United States and now faces a Czech extradition hearing.

Czech police and local media have identified him only as "Yevgeniy N," and the Russian and U.S. governments revealed only that he was a Russian citizen.

The investigation by Current Time, which is run jointly by RFE/RL and VOA, uncovered Nikulin's Instagram account under the handle "i.tak.soidet," displaying a taste for luxury cars and jewelry and a digital trail that led through Belarus and Poland to the Czech Republic in the weeks before the Prague arrest.

WATCH: Czech Police Arrest Russian Accused Of Cybercrimes

The Instagram account went private shortly after Current Time's Russian-language report was published on October 20. Soon after that, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed Nikulin’s identity for journalists in Moscow.

"The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Embassy in Prague are actively working with the Czech authorities to prevent the extradition of a Russian citizen to the United States," she added.

The Instagram account contained numerous photographs that included a gold Rolex watch, a distinctive bracelet and sneakers, and a luxury Mercedes AMG GLE63 automobile that all match items shown in a video of the arrest released by Czech police.

A social-media friend of Nikulin's who asked not to be identified told Current Time that Nikulin was "an idiot" for traveling abroad and that "he knew about Interpol."

The last post to the i.tak.soidet Instagram account appeared on October 11, six days after Nikulin's arrest. It is a simple text message that says, "I will return soon, what's all the fuss?" and was tagged "Prague Old Town."


LinkedIn Hack

One of the Instagram road photos from the days before the detention shows Nikulin's Mercedes apparently in Poland, and has a comment from a user asking, "What about Interpol?"

Current Time was also able to learn the license-plate number of Nikulin's Mercedes, which appears to match the blurred number shown in the video released by the Czech police


It is unclear exactly what role Nikulin is suspected of playing in the alleged U.S. website hacks or even which websites were involved. A spokesperson from the U.S. Embassy in Prague confirmed that a Russian had been detained who was "suspected of hacking U.S. targets."

Hours after news emerged of the arrest, the professional networking service LinkedIn issued a statement suggesting the development was connected to a 2012 breach of its members' information. In May, LinkedIn acknowledged that intrusion compromised more than 100 million of its users' passwords.

The social-media friend who spoke with Current Time described Nikulin as "a young genius" who "now will be working for the government in the United States." The i.tak.soidet Instagram account, however, does not hint at any specific expertise in computers.

The i.tak.soidet account is popular, with nearly 44,000 followers and most of his posts garnering hundreds, or even thousands, of "likes."

'A Successful Entrepreneur'

In a 2015 interview with the Russian car website AvtoRambler, Nikulin describes his experience of owning Lamborghini cars. He is described as "a very busy young man."

"Yevgeny is already a successful entrepreneur whose business interests include a construction firm, an automobile service garage, and a company that sells luxury watches. As you can see from our interview," the article states, "the Huracan is not his first Lamborghini."

He boasts of owning a Bentley, a Continental GT, and a Mercedes-Benz G-Class.

No date has been set for Nikulin's extradition hearing, but Czech authorities said the man would remain in custody until that process.

The Russian Embassy in Prague told Current Time that Moscow will be seeking his return to Russia. Moscow, an embassy source said, rejects "the U.S. practice of forcing the entire world to enforce its extraterritorial jurisdiction."

Interpol had issued a so-called Red Notice for the alleged Russian hacker, a designation for "wanted international fugitives."

President Barack Obama's administration on October 7 explicitly pointed to Russia as the alleged director of recent cyberattacks and leaks seemingly aimed at disrupting the U.S. elections in November, citing e-mails and digital intrusions on a range of election-related institutions. A week later, Vice President Joe Biden said the United States was "sending a message" over Russia's apparent role in the digital attacks and Russian President Vladimir Putin would get it.

Putin's spokesman and other Russian officials have downplayed such allegations and suggested that they are "dirty tricks" and Americans should pay more attention to the information contained in the leaks.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-hacker-p ... 65492.html

IN THE BARREL
If Flynn Is Cooperating With Mueller, Then Case Against Trump Gets Much More Serious
The break-up with the president’s legal team suggests a turning point in the Russia investigation, especially if Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey.

Barbara McQuade
BARBARA MCQUADE
11.24.17 10:33 AM ET
The report by The New York Times that Michael Flynn has withdrawn from a joint defense agreement with President Donald Trump might indicate that he is cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. If so, this could be a significant turning point in the investigation.

First, what is a joint defense agreement? A joint defense agreement is a pact among attorneys for multiple targets or subjects in a criminal case in which they agree to share information. The agreement may be written or unwritten. Any joint defense agreement will be defined by its explicit terms, but generally, under such an agreement, attorneys have a duty to keep the confidences of all of the clients covered by the agreement. The attorneys also have a duty to avoid conflicts of interest as to any of the clients. The attorneys can compare notes, allocate work efficiently by dividing tasks and avoiding duplication, and develop a unified strategy.

The main advantage of joint defense agreements is that the information that they share is protected by a form of the attorney-client privilege, known by some courts as a joint interest privilege. These agreements can help targets or subjects sidestep the so-called prisoner’s dilemma, in which they must decide in a vacuum whether to help each other by remaining silent or betray each other by cooperating with authorities. When subjects or targets form a unified defense strategy, it is more difficult for prosecutors to “flip” targets, and use them as cooperators against their co-conspirators.

In the special counsel’s investigation, it has been reported that members of the administration have entered into a joint defense agreement. This makes sense because as they field requests from Mueller and his team for documents and interviews, they can work together to share the work and develop a unified defense strategy.

But what does it mean if Flynn has decided to withdraw from the defense agreement? It could mean that he and his attorney have decided that his interests have diverged from the other members of the agreement. Perhaps Flynn and his attorney have decided to pursue a different strategy. For example, they may decide against voluntarily turning over documents and instead to litigate disclosure issues in court. But such details can usually be worked out within the defense team. For that reason, it seems more likely that Flynn has withdrawn from the agreement because he has decided to cooperate with Mueller to provide truthful information and possibly testimony in exchange for leniency for any crimes of which he is convicted.

Recent reports suggest that Flynn has significant exposure to criminal prosecution. Mueller effectively fired a shot against Flynn’s bow when he charged Paul Manafort with violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act, among other offenses. Similarly, reports say that Flynn belatedly filed notice with the Department of Justice regarding his own lobbying work for the government of Turkey. Even more concerning, other reports indicate that Flynn participated in meetings to discuss the kidnapping and rendition to Turkey of cleric Fethullah Gulen from his refuge in Pennsylvania. Gulen is a rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The congressional testimony of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates in May provides further evidence of criminal exposure for Flynn. Her testimony about Flynn’s contacts with Russians suggest that his conversations may have been intercepted by a wiretap authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This surveillance could yield a great deal of incriminating information about Flynn and his contacts with Russia on behalf of the Trump team. Yates was careful to protect classified information during her testimony, so we do not know all of the details about his conversations, but Yates testified that she was concerned that Flynn was “compromised.” If so, he could be charged with acting as an agent of a foreign government while serving as a U.S. government official.


All of these potential charges provide an incentive for Flynn to cooperate against others. And even if Flynn is unwilling to cooperate to obtain leniency for himself, he may be willing to do so for his son, Michael Flynn Jr. Reports indicate that Flynn Jr. also faces potential charges arising from his work as chief of staff for his father at Flynn Intel Group. Prosecutors will sometimes agree to give what is known as “third-party credit” in the form of leniency to another person in exchange for a defendant’s cooperation.

If, in fact, Flynn is cooperating, this development could be very significant for Mueller’s investigation. As a member of the foreign policy team on Trump’s presidential campaign, he likely has information about any contacts with the Russian government by members of the campaign. Flynn may be able to provide the crucial links between all of the disparate pieces of evidence that have come to light to date—the June 2016 meeting with Russians to obtain disparaging information about Hillary Clinton, the overtures for meetings with George Papadopoulos, the travels of Carter Page. A cooperator is often disliked by a jury because of his own crimes, but if his testimony can be corroborated by other independent evidence, such as telephone records, bank records or surveillance recordings, then he can become a powerful narrator who can pull together the pieces of the story in a way that makes sense.

And if there was substantial cooperation between the Trump campaign and the government of Russia to influence the election, then Trump’s request to former FBI Director James Comey to “letting Flynn go” takes on a more ominous tone, and becomes a more egregious alleged case of obstruction of justice. Ironically, Flynn’s cooperation against Trump could provide the basis for charges against Trump for his efforts to protect Flynn.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/if-michae ... re-serious

The latest Trump-Russia investigation news, explained
Michael Flynn may be inching toward a plea bargain, and top White House aides will be interviewed soon.
Updated by Andrew Prokopandrew@vox.com Nov 29, 2017, 8:10am EST

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (C) arrives at the Trump Tower in New York on November 14, 2016. Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
It’s been a relatively quiet period for the Trump-Russia investigation since news of its first indictments dropped in late October — but a series of recent reports could give some clues about what special counsel Robert Mueller might do next.

First, reports have indicated that President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn may at least be exploring the possibility of making a deal with Mueller’s team. The question of whether Flynn flips and gives Mueller incriminating information about other Trump officials or the president himself could turn out to be tremendously important.

Second, Mueller’s investigators have already interviewed several top current and former White House aides, and they plan to interview several more in the coming weeks, including White House counsel Don McGahn, communications director Hope Hicks, and a communications aide who’s worked closely with Jared Kushner.

Third, we learned this week that Turkish gold trader Reza Zarrab, who had been charged with orchestrating a scheme to avoid Iran sanctions, has agreed to become a government witness as part of a plea deal. And while Zarrab’s prosecution is separate from Mueller’s probe, his name has intriguingly come up in recent reports about Flynn’s connections to the Turkish government.

Will Flynn flip?
With charges against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates filed — their trial is expected to begin in May 2018 — attention has turned to the other Trump associate who’s appeared to be in very serious legal jeopardy: Michael Flynn.

Flynn has reportedly been under investigative scrutiny for a plethora of matters — ranging from whether he made false statements about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition to whether he properly disclosed payments he received from Russian and Turkish interests to the broader matter of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

NBC News reported back on November 5 that, per “multiple sources familiar with the investigation,” Mueller had enough evidence to bring charges in the Flynn investigation — and that those charges could implicate Flynn’s son Michael Flynn Jr. of wrongdoing as well.

And over the ensuing days, reports suggested that the Flynns were in even more legal trouble than had previously been known. In particular, the Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller’s team was investigating whether the pair had agreed to try to remove Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen from the country in exchange for payments of millions of dollars. (Flynn’s lawyer issued a statement denying the story.)

Then last week, the New York Times reported that Flynn’s lawyers had informed President Trump’s legal team that they could no longer share information about Mueller’s case. This was interpreted as a sign that Flynn’s team was exploring making a plea deal, in which he’d provide information in return for leniency in charging or sentencing (either for himself or for his son).

The most recent development is that on Monday morning, Flynn’s attorney Robert Kelner met with Mueller’s team, according to ABC News. It’s still not entirely confirmed that they’re discussing a cooperation deal, but it appears to be a strong possibility. Whether they’ll arrive at such a deal and what it might entail remains unclear.

More White House aides will reportedly be interviewed soon
American campaign finance lawyer Donald McGahn II takes the elevator at Trump Tower January 14, 2017 in New York
Don McGahn at Trump Tower during the transition. Don Emmert/AFP/Getty
But Mueller’s team isn’t only investigating what happened during the campaign. They’re also looking into whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice once in office — and they’re asking White House staffers to give sworn statements about what they might know.

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller — who is very close to both Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — was recently interviewed by Mueller’s team, CNN reported. Former White House aides Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer were both questioned in October.

At these sessions, aides were reportedly questioned about Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey earlier this year, and about the White House’s response to Russia-related news stories.

Now at least three other aides are reportedly next on the docket for questioning: communications director Hope Hicks, White House counsel Don McGahn, and communications aide Josh Raffel.

Hicks has been part of Trump’s inner circle since he launched his campaign and could have useful information about a host of matters, both from before the election and now. McGahn, meanwhile, will probably be asked about just what he did after he was told that Flynn had been giving false information about his contacts with Russians, as well as other matters.

But Mueller’s interest in interviewing Raffel, an aide with a much lower profile, is particularly interesting. That’s because Raffel is best known for working closely with Jared Kushner — which could suggest that Mueller is closely scrutinizing Kushner’s activities.

The curious case of Reza Zarrab
Detained Azerbaijani businessman Reza Zarrab (C) is surrounded by journalists as he arrives at a police center in Istanbul on December 17 ,2013. Turkish police detained more than 20 people including the sons of three cabinet ministers and several high-profile businessmen on December 17 in a probe into alleged bribery and corruption, local media reported. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which boasts of being pro-business, has pledged to root out corruption, a chronic problem in Turkey. AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSE (Photo credit should read OZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images)
Reza Zarrab, in 2013. Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty
Finally, there’s been a major new development in a news story that’s a bit far afield from Mueller’s investigation — but that could turn out to be related to it.

This is the separate case of Reza Zarrab, an extremely wealthy 34-year-old gold trader who has dual Turkish-Iranian citizenship and close ties to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s inner circle.

Federal prosecutors indicted Zarrab in 2016 for what they alleged was his participation in a massive scheme to evade US sanctions on Iran by shipping gold to the country in exchange for oil and natural gas. Prosecutors also allege that high-ranking Turkish government officials were involved and took millions of dollars worth of bribes. Nine people were eventually indicted, but only two — Zarrab and banker Mehmet Hakan Atilla — were ever in US custody.

It’s long been clear that Erdogan really, really did not want Zarrab’s prosecution to go forward — and he’s waged what the Washington Post’s David Ignatius called an “extraordinary” campaign to try to stop it. This included public denunciations of the charges as a plot against his regime, private lobbying of Presidents Obama and Trump (and other administration officials) to try to get Zarrab released, and an unusual meeting in Turkey with Rudy Giuliani (who’d joined Zarrab’s legal team earlier this year). The obvious explanation, of course, is that Erdogan fears Zarrab could implicate his own close associates or family members.

The Turkish president’s effort to get Zarrab off the hook, it’s now clear, has failed. Zarrab has become a cooperating witness for the US government as part of a plea deal, a prosecutor confirmed in court Tuesday. He is expected to take the stand on Wednesday as the case moves forward.

What could tie this matter to Mueller’s probe, though, is a potential connection to Michael Flynn.

Flynn has already admitted that he was paid by Turkish interests while advising Trump during the presidential campaign. But recent reports have suggested that Mueller’s team is examining whether Flynn continued to act on Turkey’s behalf during the transition, when he was the national security adviser-in-waiting, and during his brief stint in the White House before his firing in February — and whether he may have been promised millions of dollars in return.

A meeting Flynn had with Turkish officials in mid-December 2016 has come under particular investigative scrutiny. That was the meeting where participants may have discussed a potential deal to deliver Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish cleric opposed to the regime who lives in the US, into Turkish custody, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But NBC News’s Carol Lee and Julia Ainsley added the detail that Zarrab’s case may have been discussed as well. They reported that “Mueller is specifically examining whether the deal, if successful, would have led to millions of dollars in secret payments to Flynn, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.”

We don’t yet know whether Flynn did anything untoward here, or whether Zarrab would even know about it if he did. Still, Zarrab’s testimony this week will surely be closely watched — by both Erdogan’s government and the Trump administration.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... ation-news

What An Alleged Film Fraud Scheme Has To Do With Mueller’s Case Against Gates

Rick Gates’ side-job producing a handful of D-list films has come back to haunt him in the case brought against him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Whether Gates’ Hollywood dealings would attract the attention of Mueller has long been a question and it appears now that they have, as a separate fraud case brought in New York against some of Gates’ film producing associates is now causing Gates problems in his own criminal case.


The New York case involves allegations that a group of producers bamboozled investors, including a reality TV star, using falsified bank statements and other fraudulent means, to convince them to back film projects the producers claimed they were attached to. The producers instead would allegedly use the investors’ funding for personal expenses — such as homes, time shares, club memberships, and clothing — as well as to pay back other investors growing suspicious of their sham projects.

The issue Mueller has raised in Gates’ case is that Gates shares an attorney with one of the producers in the New York case, Steven Brown. According to court filings last week, the two shared financial relationships that Gates failed to disclose to Mueller’s team as they hash out a bail deal. Additionally, Gates put up as a bail guarantee Brown’s brother Marc, who told Mueller’s team he felt a “duty” to support Gates because they belonged to the same fraternity (though not at the same college).

Prosecutors have now asked a judge to review the potential conflict of Gates and Brown sharing the attorney, Walter Mack, in their respective cases, with a hearing on the issue scheduled for next week.

Mack did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.

The Film Fraud Scheme

A June 2016 federal indictment against Brown — and his two alleged co-conspirators in the case, James David Williams and Gerald Seppala — alleged that the three secured more than $12 million in financing for film-related projects they promised investors would earn them guaranteed returns and a share of the projects.

That money was instead allegedly diverted to personal expenses, including restaurants and their children’s tuition. To convince investors to participate in the financing, the men allegedly would show falsified falsified screenshots of transactions they said showed they had put up their own money as well.

A 2014 civil lawsuit previously brought in California by one of the investors adds more details to the alleged scheme. In in it, the investor, Bill Busbice, of the A&E reality show “Country Buck$” said he was first approached by the men in April 2013, offering him an opportunity to invest in a documentary project they called “Made in America.” After being emailed screenshots of a transaction purporting to show that Williams had put up $500,000 of his own money for the project, Busbice agreed to match it with his own $500,000.

The screenshot was a fake, and the account attached to the film project would contain no significant funds beyond what had been transferred in by Busbice, according to his lawsuit. Most of was quickly wired out and used for purposes not related to the documentary film, Busbice alleged.

According to the civil suit, Williams would later use similar tactics to secure a total of $10.9 million from Busbice for what were described as promotional deals connected to “The Letters,” a film about Mother Theresa; the straight-to-video Christmas movie “Angels Sing,” starring Harry Connick Jr.; and Christian apocalypse flick “Left Behind.” The lawsuit was settled, with Williams and Brown ultimately ordered to pay $6.95 million and $3.5 million respectively to Busbice.



Williams, Brown and Seppala were arrested last year in the criminal case, which includes allegations that other investors were defrauded in addition to the claims previously brought by Busbice. Williams pleaded guilty earlier this fall, while Brown continues to face charges of fraud, attempted fraud and money laundering

Gates’ Connection To The New York Case

The New York film scam case is now being dragged into Mueller’s case against Gates due to what the prosecutors described as Gates’ and Brown’s “shared multiple financial and business interests.”

Their “long-term personal and business relationship” raises the possibility that Gates or Brown could be witnesses in their counterpart’s cases, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors pointed to a $50,000 transfer from Bade, LLC, a Gates-run entity, to Plainfield Pass, a company the producers told an investor was attached to one of the film projects in the New York case. Bade, LLC is among the entities Mueller alleges that Gates and Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who has also been charged in Mueller’s probe, used to hide money made lobbying for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Bade, LLC was also listed as a recipient of Republican National Committee funding for what appears to be for work Gates did for President Trump’s 2016 campaign, McClatchy reported.

At one time Brown did work for the lobbying firm run by Gates and Paul Manafort. DMP International paid Brown a total of $40,000 in 2012 and 2013 for “political and media out reach” for its client, Ukraine’s Party of Regions, according to disclosure forms filed by the firm.

The recent Mueller filings reference another Ukrainian connection:

“In addition, during the period at issue in the New York indictment, Brown and Williams repeatedly discussed, including in meetings with Gates, the possibility that Gates would arrange for certain Ukrainian clients to invest in a print and advertising fund for film distribution, to be run by Brown and Williams.”

According to Mueller’s filing, Brown and Gates allegedly shared an interest in MAP Global Holdings, a company behind the film 2017 film “Walk Of Fame,” which starred Clint Eastwood’s son Scott. The film is one of three that Gates is listed as a producer of on IMDB.



Brown and Gates are partners at MAP Global Holdings, where they each “share recourse liabilities in the amount of $3,355,125 and $3,355,126, respectively,” according to prosecutors.

Those and other film-related assets and liabilities “do not appear to have been included in Gates’s personal financial statement submitted to the government as part of his bail package,” Mueller’s court filing said. Mueller’s team has told the judge in Gates’ case repeatedly that it is struggling to pin down Gates’ net worth in order to hash out a deal to release him from house arrest.

The potential conflict of his lawyer is not the only issue Gates is facing in connection to the New York film fraud case.

In filing earlier this month, Mueller noted that Gates had listed as a surety for a potential bail package someone who was already listed as a surety an unnamed defendant in a New York case. That surety, it turns out, is Marc Brown. Mueller’s team sounded less than convinced of his reasons for supporting Gates in a filing last week that said they “seemingly do not have a significant relationship” and they had “not had regular contact over the past ten years.”

“In an interview with the Special Counsel’s Office on November 16, Marc Brown listed as a reason for seeking to support Gates that they belonged to the same fraternity (although they did not attend the same college) and that, as such, he felt duty bound to help Gates. Of note, Marc Brown’s financial assets were significantly lower, almost by half, than previously represented by Gates,” the filing said.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... ler-lawyer

Trump Pressed Top Republicans to End Senate Russia Inquiry

By JONATHAN MARTIN, MAGGIE HABERMAN and ALEXANDER BURNSNOV. 30, 2017


Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, is chairman of the Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump over the summer repeatedly urged senior Senate Republicans, including the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to end the panel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, according to a half dozen lawmakers and aides. Mr. Trump’s requests were a highly unusual intervention from a president into a legislative inquiry involving his family and close aides.

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the intelligence committee chairman, said in an interview this week that Mr. Trump told him that he was eager to see an investigation that has overshadowed much of the first year of his presidency come to an end.

“It was something along the lines of, ‘I hope you can conclude this as quickly as possible,’” Mr. Burr said. He said he replied to Mr. Trump that “when we have exhausted everybody we need to talk to, we will finish.”

In addition, according to lawmakers and aides, Mr. Trump told Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and a member of the intelligence committee, to end the investigation swiftly.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who is a former chairwoman of the intelligence committee, said in an interview this week that Mr. Trump’s requests were “inappropriate” and represented a breach of the separation of powers.

“It is pressure that should never be brought to bear by an official when the legislative branch is in the process of an investigation,” Ms. Feinstein said.

Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said on Thursday that the president had not acted improperly. Mr. Trump, he said, “at no point has attempted to apply undue influence on committee members’’ and believes “there is no evidence of collusion and these investigations must come to a fair and appropriate completion.’’

Mr. Trump’s requests of lawmakers to end the Senate investigation came during a period in the summer when the president was particularly consumed with Russia and openly raging at his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from any inquiries into Russian meddling in the election. Mr. Trump often vented to his own aides and even declared his innocence to virtual strangers he came across on his New Jersey golf course.

In this same period, the president complained frequently to Mr. McConnell about not doing enough to bring the investigation to an end, a Republican official close to the leader said.

Republicans played down Mr. Trump’s appeals, describing them as the actions of a political newcomer unfamiliar with what is appropriate presidential conduct.



President Trump lobbied Senator Roy Blunt in August during a trip on Air Force One to “wrap up” the investigation. Tom Brenner/The New York Times
Mr. Burr said he did not feel pressured by the president’s appeal, portraying it as the action of someone who has “never been in government.” But he acknowledged other members of his committee have had similar discussions with Mr. Trump. “Everybody has promptly shared any conversations that they’ve had,” Mr. Burr said.

One of them was Mr. Blunt, who was flying on Air Force One with Mr. Trump to Springfield, Mo., in August when he found himself being lobbied by the president “to wrap up this investigation,” according to a Republican official familiar with the conversation.

Mr. Blunt was not bothered by Mr. Trump’s comments, the official said, because he did not see them bearing a “sinister motive.’’

But Mr. Burr and Mr. Blunt have both taken steps to limit their interaction with Mr. Trump this year, not wanting to create the perception of coziness as they conduct a highly sensitive investigation into contacts between the president’s campaign and Moscow last year.

Robert S. Mueller III, the Justice Department’s special counsel who is leading a separate investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, is also examining whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice when he fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director who was running a federal inquiry into the matter.

Mr. Trump also called other lawmakers over the summer with requests that they push Mr. Burr to finish the inquiry, according to a Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss his contact with the president.

This senator, who was alarmed upon hearing word of the president’s pleas, said Mr. Trump’s request to the other senators was clear: They should urge Mr. Burr to bring the Russia investigation to a close. The senator declined to reveal which colleagues Mr. Trump had contacted with the request.

Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers feared he would move to fire Mr. Mueller, an option that the president pointedly left open in an Oval Office interview with The New York Times in July.

During this time, Mr. Trump made several calls to senators without senior staff present, according to one West Wing official. According to senators and other Republicans familiar with the conversations, Mr. Trump would begin the talks on a different topic but eventually drift toward the Russia investigation.

In conversations with Mr. McConnell and Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Trump voiced sharp anger that congressional Republicans were not helping lift the cloud of suspicion over Russia, the senators told political allies. The Times reported in August that the president had complained to Mr. McConnell that he was failing to shield Mr. Trump from an ongoing Senate inquiry.

The earlier call with Mr. Burr, however, was perhaps the most invasive, given Mr. Burr’s role directly supervising the Senate’s investigation of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Burr told other senators that Mr. Trump had stressed that it was time to “move on” from the Russia issue, using that language repeatedly, according to people who spoke with Mr. Burr over the summer. One Republican close to Mr. Burr, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Trump had been “very forceful.”

Asked why Mr. Trump is so irritated with the investigation, Mr. Burr said: “In his world it hampers his ability to project the strength he needs to convey on foreign policy.”

Mr. Burr said Mr. Trump was not fully aware of the impropriety of his request because the president still has the mind-set of a businessman rather than a politician. “Businessmen are paid to skip things that they think they can skip and get away with,” he said.

This past summer, Mr. Trump also contacted Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who in August introduced a bipartisan bill limiting the president’s power to dismiss special prosecutors — a measure widely seen as aimed at protecting Mr. Mueller from Mr. Trump. In an interview this week, Mr. Tillis said the president “just asked me where my head was” on the legislation and described the exchange as “pleasant.” Mr. Trump did not press him on the Senate investigation, said Mr. Tillis, who is not on the intelligence committee.

Republicans said Mr. Trump’s ire often went beyond the intelligence committee investigation and spilled over a range of issues that touched on Russia and his relationship with Congress.

Another Republican senator said Mr. Trump had not urged him to help bring the Russia inquiry to a halt. Instead, the senator said, the president nudged him to begin an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s connection with the intelligence-gathering firm Fusion GPS, which produced a dossier of allegations about Mr. Trump’s ties to Moscow.

Mr. McConnell — who over the summer was quickly notified of Mr. Trump’s calls to his Senate colleagues — told multiple associates that Mr. Trump appeared unable to distinguish traditional policy concerns about Russia from more specific questions about Russian interference in the presidential race.

The Senate leader told associates that Mr. Trump did not seem to recognize that the Republican Party traditionally took a suspicious view of Russia, or that lawmakers could favor punishing Russia without questioning Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. The president had reluctantly signed a bill imposing sanctions on Moscow on Aug. 2, using an extraordinary written statement to lash out against what he viewed as a usurping of executive authority from a Congress that “could not even negotiate a health care bill after seven years of talking.”

Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell told associates, appeared inclined to treat criticism of Russian meddling in the United States as giving credence to unproven allegations that his campaign colluded with foreign actors.

In that respect, Mr. Trump’s private consternation mirrored some of his public complaints about the Russia issue. He has continued to seethe regularly, and openly, about the scrutiny of Russia’s political activities, tweeting just last weekend: “Since the first day I took office, all you hear is the phony Democrat excuse for losing the election, Russia, Russia, Russia.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/us/p ... intel.html

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Replying to @SethAbramson
73/ But as I say this, understand something else—this is the beginning of the end for Trump, but it is *not* the end. The number of additional shoes that will be dropping in the days, weeks, and even months to come will cause substantial alarm to all Americans of good conscience.

Mueller: Trump Team Meddling In Obama Diplomacy Extended Beyond Flynn

J. Scott Applewhite/AP
By TIERNEY SNEED and Caitlin Macneal Published DECEMBER 1, 2017 12:11 PM

In court documents and at a hearing where former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn entered a guilty plea for lying to the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team said that other officials in President Trump’s transition team were aware of and even directed Flynn’s backchannel communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States before Trump’s inauguration.

Flynn has now admitted that in a voluntary Jan. 24 interview with FBI he made false statements about a push by the Trump transition team to persuade officials from a foreign government to delay or defeat a United Nations Security Council vote on a resolution to condemn Israeli settlements. Flynn also has admitted he lied to FBI agents about a previously reported conversation he had with the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, on Dec. 29 about sanctions the Obama administration was imposing on Russia at the time.


In both instances, Mueller alleged that at least another member of the Trump transition team was involved in Flynn’s plans to talk to Kislyak about the UN vote and the sanctions. The allegations undermine the response offered Friday by White House attorney Ty Cobb to news of Flynn’s guilty plea. “Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn,” Cobb said in a statement before the full range of Mueller’s allegations became public.

According to prosecutors, after Egypt submitted the UN resolution on Israeli settlements on Dec. 21, “a very senior member” of Trump’s transition team “instructed” Flynn to “contact officials from foreign governments, including Russia, to learn where each government stood on the resolution and to influence those governments to delay the vote or defeat the resolution.”

Flynn went on to discuss the vote with Kislyak on Dec. 22, and informed him that Trump’s incoming administration opposed it, according to prosecutors. Kisylak informed him the next day that Russia would not vote against the resolution, Mueller’s team said.

About a week later, as the Obama administration was getting ready to impose sanctions on Russia related to its interference in the 2016 election, Kislyak reached out to Flynn. The next day, Dec. 29, according to prosecutors, Flynn called a senior presidential transition team official who Mueller dubs the “PTT official.” The official, who was at Mar-A-Lago with other members of Trump’s transition team, discussed with Flynn what he should communicate to Kislyak, prosecutors said.

“The PTT official and Flynn also discussed that the members of the presidential transition team at Mar-A-Lago did not want Russia to escalate the situation,” Mueller’s court documents said.

Flynn called Kislyak immediately after his call with the official, where he asked that Russia not escalate the situation in its response to the sanctions, according to prosecutors. Flynn spoke to the transition official shortly thereafter, according to prosectors, to debrief the official on the call with Kislyak.

Kislyak called Flynn again on Dec. 31 to inform him Russia would not escalate its response, and after the call, “Flynn spoke with senior members of the Presidential Transition Team” about his conversations with the ambassador about the sanctions, the Mueller filing said.

The latest moves by Mueller add significant details to what we know about the Trump team’s backchannel diplomacy push during the UN vote and Flynn’s sanctions-related conversations with Kislyak, which led to his firing in February.

The Trump transition team’s scrambling to interfere with the Dec. 23 U.N vote had been reported more broadly by Foreign Policy. According to the magazine, the transition team begged Obama’s State Department to hand over the contact information of the foreign officials representing the countries involved in the vote (the State Department declined, according to FP).

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who would go on to be Trump’s UN envoy, called Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power on both her office and cell phone (Power did not respond, according to FP).

Foreign Policy also reported that Flynn reached out to officials from Uruguay and Malaysia about the vote, but in Mueller’s documents, Flynn also admits that Russia was part of his outreach efforts.

Flynn’s sanctions conversation with Kislyak was initially reported by the Washington Post and the New York Times; an official told the Post that “Kislyak was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time.”

The revelations on Friday go a step further, by detailing Kislyak’s response to Flynn’s request. Kislyak had also denied discussing sanctions with Flynn.

The biggest bombshell, however, is that Flynn was by no means a rogue freelancer in his efforts to undermine the Obama administration’s diplomacy; by Flynn’s own admission, other members of Trump’s transition team had condoned and even encouraged his backchannel communications.

Read Flynn’s statement of offense, filed by Mueller’s team, below:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... n-meddling

Operative Offered Trump Campaign ‘Kremlin Connection’ Using N.R.A. Ties

Donald J. Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee, speaking at the National Rifle Association convention in Louisville, Ky., in May 2016.

By NICHOLAS FANDOS
DECEMBER 3, 2017
WASHINGTON — A conservative operative trumpeting his close ties to the National Rifle Association and Russia told a Trump campaign adviser last year that he could arrange a back-channel meeting between Donald J. Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, according to an email sent to the Trump campaign.

A May 2016 email to the campaign adviser, Rick Dearborn, bore the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” In it, the N.R.A. member said he wanted the advice of Mr. Dearborn and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, then a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump and Mr. Dearborn’s longtime boss, about how to proceed in connecting the two leaders.

Russia, he wrote, was “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” and would attempt to use the N.R.A.’s annual convention in Louisville, Ky., to make “‘first contact.’” The email, which was among a trove of campaign-related documents turned over to investigators on Capitol Hill, was described in detail to The New York Times.

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, secured a guilty plea on Friday from President Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for lying to the F.B.I. about contacts with Moscow’s former ambassador to the United States. But those contacts came after Mr. Trump’s improbable election victory.

The emailed outreach from the conservative operative to Mr. Dearborn came far earlier, around the same time that Russians were trying to make other connections to the Trump campaign. Another contact came through an American advocate for Christian and veterans causes, and together, the outreach shows how, as Mr. Trump closed in on the nomination, Russians were using three foundational pillars of the Republican Party — guns, veterans and Christian conservatives — to try to make contact with his unorthodox campaign.


Rick Dearborn, left, a Trump campaign adviser, received an email asking for advice on how to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY IMAGES
Both efforts, made within days of each other, centered on the N.R.A.’s annual meeting and appear to involve Alexander Torshin, a deputy governor of the Russian central bank and key figure in Mr. Putin’s United Russia party, who was instructed to make contact with the campaign.

“Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” the N.R.A. member and conservative activist, Paul Erickson, wrote. “He wants to extend an invitation to Mr. Trump to visit him in the Kremlin before the election. Let’s talk through what has transpired and Senator Sessions’s advice on how to proceed.”

It is not clear how Mr. Dearborn handled the outreach. He forwarded a similar proposal, made through Rick Clay, an advocate for conservative Christian causes, to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a top campaign aide. Mr. Kushner rebuffed the proposal at the time, according to two people who have seen Mr. Kushner’s email.

Mr. Sessions told investigators from the House Intelligence Committee that he did not recall the outreach, according to three people with knowledge of the exchange. Mr. Dearborn did not return requests for comment, and Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with matters related to the investigations, declined to comment. Repeated attempts to reach Mr. Erickson were not successful.

Intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia, on orders from the highest levels of its government, undertook a sophisticated campaign to hack Democratic computers, spread propaganda and undermine the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. The repeated outreach around the N.R.A. convention, where Mr. Trump accepted the group’s endorsement, came just weeks after a self-described intermediary for the Russian government told George Papadopoulos, a campaign aide, that the Russians had “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton. And just weeks later, the president’s eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about the would-be Democratic nominee.

“The Kremlin believes that the only possibility of a true reset in this relationship would be with a new Republican White House,” Mr. Erickson wrote to Mr. Dearborn, adding, “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”


Alexander Torshin, a deputy governor of the Russian central bank and key figure in Mr. Putin’s United Russia party, was instructed to make contact with the Trump campaign.
STANISLAV KRASILNIKOV / TASS, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Congressional investigators obtained the email as part of their inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether Mr. Trump’s campaign aided the efforts. It appears to have caught the attention of senators as well. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, penned letters to several Trump campaign foreign policy advisers last week asking for all documents related to the N.R.A., Mr. Erickson, Mr. Torshin, Mr. Clay, Mr. Dearborn and others.

Mr. Erickson, a longtime conservative operative who has been involved in several presidential campaigns, presented himself in the email as a well-connected intermediary to the upper reaches of the Russian government. By “happenstance” and the reach of the N.R.A., Mr. Erickson wrote, he had been put in position to “slowly begin cultivating a back-channel to President Putin’s Kremlin” in recent years.

“Russia is quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S. that isn’t forthcoming under the current administration,” he wrote.

Indeed, evidence does appear to show deep ties between Mr. Erickson, the N.R.A. and the Russian gun rights community that were formed in the years when many American conservatives, put off by the Obama administration’s policies, were increasingly looking to Mr. Putin as an example of a strong leader opposing immigration, terrorism and gay rights.

The N.R.A. was one of Mr. Trump’s biggest backers during the campaign, spending tens of millions of dollars to help elect him.

Mr. Erickson has known Maria Butina, a former assistant to Mr. Torshin and the founder of the Right to Bear Arms, a Russian gun-rights group, for several years. Ms. Butina, who helped Mr. Torshin make the request through Mr. Clay, hosted Mr. Erickson at a September 2014 meeting of the group at its Moscow office. And in February 2016, the two incorporated a company, Bridges LLC, together in South Dakota. What the company does is unclear.


In December 2015, Mr. Erickson returned to Russia as part of an N.R.A. delegation that included David Keene, the group’s onetime president, top donors and David A. Clarke Jr., the former sheriff of Milwaukee County who became a popular Trump campaign surrogate. At one stop, the group met with Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister in charge of defense. A photograph from the meeting shows Mr. Torshin was also present.

In the United States, the hospitality was returned. Mr. Torshin and Ms. Butina attended the N.R.A.’s annual convention in 2014 and 2015. Ms. Butina told the conservative news site Townhall that she attended the N.R.A. Women’s Leadership Luncheon as a guest of Sandra S. Froman, a former president of the group. And in 2015, she was given a tour of the N.R.A.’s Virginia headquarters.

Attempts to contact Ms. Butina were unsuccessful.

Mr. Erickson does not explicitly name Mr. Torshin in the email to Mr. Dearborn, but the message appears to refer to him, the people familiar with the communication said. Instead, he describes “President Putin’s emissary on this front,” whose plans match those of Mr. Torshin.

Mr. Torshin, he wrote, was planning to attend a reception being planned by Mr. Clay honoring wounded veterans that he expected Mr. Trump would also attend. Mr. Torshin expected to use the reception to “make ‘first contact’” with the candidate and present Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, with a gift from the Russian Orthodox Church.

According to Mr. Clay, neither Mr. Trump nor his campaign officials attended the veterans’ dinner. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Mr. Torshin did attend a separate N.R.A. dinner that night.

Mr. Torshin served in the upper house of the Russian Parliament and was a member of the country’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee, a government body that includes the ministers of defense, interior and foreign affairs and the director of the Federal Security Service, known as F.S.B., the K.G.B.’s successor. He has been a leading advocate of gun rights in Russia and of more closely linking the government and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Spanish investigators say that while he was in Parliament, Mr. Torshin laundered money for the Russian mafia through Spanish banks and properties. Mr. Torshin has denied those accusations.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/u ... 5DaH?amp=1