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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Developing information about the cast of characters in the “Russia-Gate” psy-op, we highlight the political allegiance of “Team Trump”–the operatives involved with Trump’s campaign and business dealings with Russia, as well as Robert Mueller, former FBI chief and a very special prosecutor indeed.
Although Trump certainly had links to Russian mob figures, they are by no means the prime movers in this drama.
Most importantly, we detail the political resumes and deep politics underlying the cast of characters in this drama, tracking the operational links back to Joe McCarthy and the red-baiting specialists from the first Cold War.
Joe McCarthy legal point man Roy Cohn is, to a considerable extent, the spider at the center of this web. Cohn:
- Was Trump’s attorney for much of “The Donald’s” professional life.
- Introduced Trump campaign manager and dirty tricks specialist Roger Stone to the seated President.
- Was instrumental in arranging for a bribe which made “independent” Republican John Anderson the Presidential candidate for the Liberal Party in New York. This gambit gave Reagan a key victory in New York. Cohn and Stone’s associate in this operation was Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno–one of Cohn’s mob clients and among Donald Trump’s organized crime associates as well.
- Was the point man for introducing Rupert Murdoch to Ronald Reagan and forging the right-wing media attack machine that dominates today, the most prominent element of which is Fox News.
Roger Stone is another figure who weaves throughout this concatenation. Stone:
- Was Donald Trump’s campaign manager and later dirty tricks operative, who networked with WikiLeaks go-between for the Trump/Alt-right crew.
- Was touting Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. Johnson and Jill Stein were advocated for by Stone as participants in the debates between Hillary Clinton and Trump. (Johnson and Stein’s combined vote total helped Trump win in several key states.)
- Worked with Roy Cohn to put “independent” Republican John Anderson the Presidential candidate for the Liberal Party in New York. This gambit gave Reagan a key victory in New York, as noted above.
The point man for the Trump business interests in their dealings with Russia is Felix Sater. A Russian-born immigrant, Sater is a professional criminal and a convicted felon with historical links to the Mafia. Beyond that, and more importantly, Sater is an FBI informant and a CIA contract agent. As the media firestorm around “Russia-gate” builds, it is important not to lose sight of Sater. ” . . . . He [Sater] also provided other purported national security services for a reported fee of $300,000. Stories abound as to what else Sater may or may not have done in the arena of national security. . . .” We wonder if helping the “Russia-Gate” op may have been one of those.
Beyond Sater, other key players in this concatenation do not track back to “Kremlin/Putin/FSB/KGB.” Rob Goldstone–the publicist whose overture to Donald Trump, Jr. initiated the latest “Russia-gate journalistic feeding frenzy in the media, began his career a journalistic foot soldier for Rupert Murdoch, the very same Rupert Murdoch whose christening as a GOP/right-wing propagandist was initiated by Roy Cohn.
Goldstone contacted Donald Trump Jr., dangling the bait that there might be dirt on Hillary available if he met with some associates. Foremost among those is a Russian attorney, Natalie Veselnitskaya. Her apparent purpose in this meeting was not to offer up dirt on Hillary Clinton but to work toward easing a media lockdown on a documentary about the Magnitsky affair.
Spun in the West, the U.S. in particular, as a classic example of ham-fisted Russian corruption and violence, the Magnitsky affair was revealed in the film documentary to be an example of U.S. corruption, not Russian.
Crafted by Putin political opponent Andrei Nekrasov, the film revealed an unexpected dynamic: ” . . . . Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder’s company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky – rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme. . . .”
Attempting to lift the media blackout on Nekrasov’s film was Veselnitskaya’s goal, not disseminating dirt on Hillary Clinton.
CORRECTION: At a couple of points in the audio discussion of Goldstone, Veselnitskaya et al, Mr. Emory misspeaks, describing the participant in the meeting as “Donald Trump.” It was his son Donald Trump, Jr.
Program Highlights Include:
- The financing of Joe McCarthy’s career by Nazi sympathizer Walter Harnischfeger, part of the German-American Fifth Column in this country which was at the forefront of the discussion in FTR #‘s 918, 919.
- McCarthy’s use of a postwar Nazi network headed by General Karl Wolff, SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s personal adjutant.
- Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s role in covering up the BCCI scandal and the overlapping Operation Green Quest investigation pursuant to 9/11.
1. By way of review, we remind listeners that the point man for the Trump business interests in their dealings with Russia is Felix Sater. A Russian-born immigrant, Sater is a professional criminal and a convicted felon with historical links to the Mafia. Beyond that, and more importantly, Sater is an FBI informant and a CIA contract agent. ” . . . . He [Sater] also provided other purported national security services for a reported fee of $300,000. Stories abound as to what else Sater may or may not have done in the arena of national security. . . .” We wonder if helping the “Russia-Gate” op may have been one of those.
- The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston; Melville House [HC]; copyright 2016 by David Cay Johnston; ISBN 978–1‑61219–632‑9. p. 165.
. . . . There is every indication that the extraordinarily lenient treatment resulted from Sater playing a get-out-of-jail free card. Shortly before his secret guilty plea, Sater became a freelance operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of his fellow stock swindlers, Salvatore Lauria, wrote a book about it. “The Scorpion and the Frog” is described on its cover as ‘the true story of one man’s fraudulent rise and fall in the Wall Street of the nineties.’ According to Lauria–and the court files that have been unsealed–Sater helped the CIA buy small missiles before they got to terrorists. He also provided other purported national security services for a reported fee of $300,000. Stories abound as to what else Sater may or may not have done in the arena of national security. . . . - Sater was active on behalf of the Trumps in the fall of 2015: “. . . . Sater worked on a plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow as recently as the fall of 2015, but he said that had come to a halt because of Trump’s presidential campaign. . . .”
- Sater was initiating contact between the Russians and “Team Trump” in January of this year: “ . . . . Nevertheless, in late January, Sater and a Ukrainian lawmaker reportedly met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, at a New York hotel. According to the Times, they discussed a plan that involved the U.S. lifting sanctions against Russia, and Cohen said he hand-delivered the plan in a sealed envelope to then-national security advisor Michael Flynn. Cohen later denied delivering the envelope to anyone in the White House, according to the Washington Post. . . .”
2. Rob Goldstone–the publicist whose overture to Donald Trump, Jr. initiated the latest “Russia-gate journalistic feeding frenzy in the media, began his career a journalistic footsoldier for Rupert Murdoch, the very same Rupert Murdoch whose christening as a GOP/right-wing propagandist was initiated by Roy Cohn.
“Britain’s Gift to America: The New Sleazocracy” by Peter Jukes; The New York Times; 7/14/2017.
. . . . According to Mr. Goldstone’s account,he moved from local journalism to work for Rupert Murdoch’s best-selling British daily newspaper The Sun and other tabloids before turning to public relations for pop stars. . .
3. Trump dirty tricks operative and former campaign manager was introduced to Trump by Joe McCarthy legal point man and later Trump attorney Roy Cohn.
“Is Roger Stone Making Good on a 40-Year-Old-Grudge” by Michael D’Antonio; CNN; 5/20/2017.
. . . . In the middle of the Watergate scandal, Stone, who engaged in dirty tricks during Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign, was discovered to have hired a Republican operative to infiltrate the George McGovern campaign and was subsequently fired from his job. After the President’s resignation, Stone remained an ardent Nixon apologist and loyalist. He even had the man’s face tattooed on his back and devoted his life to ruthless, anything-goes politics (or political consulting, as you may know it). Stone’s motto was and continues to be: “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.” And anyone who has watched Trump closely over the years would think it was his personal slogan, too.
Stone was introduced to Trump in the 1980s by the notorious Roy Cohn. Then a Manhattan lawyer who represented several reputed mobsters, Cohn had become infamous in the 1950s as the chief inquisitor during Joe McCarthy’s “Red Scare” hearings in the United States Senate. After McCarthy’s inquisition was shut down, Cohn began a new life as a political and legal fixer. He became a mentor to Stone and Trump and taught both men how to manipulate the media and bully opponents. . . .
4. Goldstone contacted Donald Trump Jr., dangling the bait that there might be dirt on Hillary available if he met with some associates. Foremost among those is a Russian attorney, Natalie Veselnitskaya. Her apparent purpose in this meeting was not to offer up dirt on Hillary Clinton but to work toward easing a media lockdown on a documentary about the Magnitsky affair.
Spun in the West, the U.S. in particular, as a classic example of ham-fisted Russian corruption and violence, the Magnitsky affair was revealed in the film documentary to be an example of U.S. corruption, not Russian.
Crafted by Putin political opponent Andrei Nekrasov, the film revealed an unexpected dynamic: ” . . . . Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder’s company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky – rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme. . . .”
Attempting to lift the media blackout on Nekrasov’s film was Veselnitskaya’s goal, not disseminating dirt on Hillary Clinton.
“How Russia-Gate Met the Magnitsky Myth” by Robert Parry; Consortium News; 7/13/2017.
Near the center of the current furor over Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 is a documentary that almost no one in the West has been allowed to see, a film that flips the script on the story of the late Sergei Magnitsky and his employer, hedge-fund operator William Browder.
Donald Trump Jr., speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.’s campaign, represented a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S. Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called the first shot in the New Cold War.
According to Browder’s narrative, companies ostensibly under his control had been hijacked by corrupt Russian officials in furtherance of a $230 million tax-fraud scheme; he then dispatched his “lawyer” Magnitsky to investigate and – after supposedly uncovering evidence of the fraud – Magnitsky blew the whistle only to be arrested by the same corrupt officials who then had him locked up in prison where he died of heart failure from physical abuse.
Despite Russian denials – and the “dog ate my homework” quality of Browder’s self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder’s narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale.
However, the project took an unexpected turn when Nekrasov’s research kept turning up contradictions to Browder’s storyline, which began to look more and more like a corporate cover story. Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder’s company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky – rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme.
So, the planned docudrama suddenly was transformed into a documentary with a dramatic reversal as Nekrasov struggles with what he knows will be a dangerous decision to confront Browder with what appear to be deceptions. In the film, you see Browder go from a friendly collaborator into an angry adversary who tries to bully Nekrasov into backing down.
Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes” – and it was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder’s legal threats – the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part, brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy.
As a lawyer defending Prevezon, a real-estate company registered in Cyprus, on a money-laundering charge, she was dealing with U.S. prosecutors in New York City and, in that role, became an advocate for lifting the U.S. sanctions, The Washington Post reported.
That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee.Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along.
By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky Act and Putin’s retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump Tower with Trump’s son.
But another goal of Veselnitskaya’s U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov’s blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post.
There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder’s lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations in the past.
Their stand wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. “We’re not going to allow them not to show the film,” said Scott Williams, the chief operating officer of the Newseum. “We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen.”
In an article about the controversy in June 2016, The New York Times added that “A screening at the Newseum is especially controversial because it could attract lawmakers or their aides.” Heaven forbid!
So, Nekrasov’s documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary’s discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War. . . .
5. Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were advocated for by Stone as participants in the debates between Hillary Clinton and Trump. (Johnson and Stein’s combined vote total helped Trump win in several key states.)
. . . . Although some Democratic voters (in particular, white working-class voters in Rust Belt states) probably did swing to the Republicans, the bigger problem was the large number of what I call “Obama-Johnstein” voters — people who supported Mr. Obama in 2012 but then voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, or Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, last year (according to the exit polls, 43 percent of them were nonwhite).
In Wisconsin, for example, the Democratic vote total dropped by nearly 235,000, while Mr. Trump got only about the same number of votes as Mr. Romney in 2012. The bigger surge in that state was for Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein, who together won about 110,000 additional votes than the candidates of their respective parties had received in 2012. And in Michigan, which Mrs. Clinton lost by fewer than 11,000 votes, the Johnson-Stein parties’ total increased by about 202,000 votes over 2012. . . .
6a. Roger Stone was touting Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. Johnson and Jill Stein were advocated for by Stone as participants in the debates between Hillary Clinton and Trump. (Johnson and Stein’s combined vote total helped Trump win in several key states.)
Stone then worked with Roy Cohn to put “independent” Republican John Anderson the Presidential candidate for the Liberal Party in New York. This gambit gave Reagan a key victory in New York, as noted above.
. . . . The fact that Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party was founded and funded by the Koch brothers (David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s VP in 1980 in order to make it easier for the Kochs to shovel more money into the party and the libertarian cause), and that Gary Johnson was a longtime loyal Republican — considering all of this, and what’s at stake in presidential elections, it would seem to me malpractice for a journalist to assume there isn’t a story, or several stories, to be found under the Gary Johnson rock. Stories that matter. And that are bizarre and fun and grotesque in their own right. . .
. . . . Exhibit A: Roger Stone, a self-described “GOP hitman” with a giant tattoo of Richard Nixon’s face etched across his back. Roger Stone —the skeeziest, meanest, most flamboyant and most Russian-nihilistic of any Republican dirty trickster working the field going back a few decades, the Satanic Zelig of Republican black ops, who’s had a hand in just about every major GOP election crime you’ve heard of, and lots more you haven’t heard of. Everyone seems to have forgotten already, but last spring, Roger Stone made a big public stink about how he’s fed up with the Republican Party and the two-party stranglehold, and joined Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party campaign. Pro bono. Because democratic idealism and principles are what Roger Stone is all about. . . .
. . . . This episode comes from a rather candid interview Roger Stone gave to the Weekly Standard in a 2007, and in it he describes how the most effective election fraud trick of all is using a credible Third Party candidate to split the opposition’s vote. In 1980, Stone’s candidate was Ronald Reagan, and his enemy was incumbent president Jimmy Carter. The wild card in the 1980 election was a popular Illinois liberal Republican named John Anderson, who lost in the primaries against Reagan and decided to run against him and Carter anyway, given his popularity and disgust with both Reagan and Carter.
John Anderson’s biggest problem was getting his name on the ballots. Roger Stone realized that if Anderson could get on the New York state ballot, it could split the liberal vote and hand the electoral prize to Ronald Reagan. So Stone seeks help from a political operative so evil he makes Roger Stone look like a Mormon: Roy Cohn, Sen. McCarthy’s right-hand henchman during the Red-baiting hearings. Cohn brings a mobster named Fat Tony Solerno with him, and they ask Roger Stone what his problem is and how they might help.
Roger Stone’s problem was simple: He wanted to get “Mr. Clean” outsider John Anderson on the New York state ballot as a third party candidate to drain votes from Carter, but there wasn’t nearly enough time to make it happen. Most people were led to believe that Anderson would naturally split the Republican vote, but that wasn’t the case at all. Privately, polls showed that in tight state races, Anderson’s candidacy caused far more damage to Carter than to Reagan. . . .
. . . . Stone, who going back to his class elections in high school has been a proponent of recruiting patsy candidates to split the other guy’s support, remembers suggesting to Cohn that if they could figure out a way to make John Anderson the Liberal party nominee in New York, with Jimmy Carter picking up the Democratic nod, Reagan might win the state in a three-way race. “Roy says, ‘Let me look into it.’ ” Cohn then told [Fat Tony Salerno], “ ‘You need to go visit this lawyer’–a lawyer who shall remain nameless–‘and see what his number is.’ I said, ‘Roy, I don’t understand.’ Roy says, ‘How much cash he wants, dumbf–.’ ” Stone balked when he found out the guy wanted $125,000 in cash to grease the skids, and Cohn wanted to know what the problem was. Stone told him he didn’t have $125,000, and Cohn said, “That’s not the problem. How does he want it?” Cohn sent Stone on an errand a few days later. “There’s a suitcase,” Stone says. “I don’t look in the suitcase . . . I don’t even know what was in the suitcase . . . I take the suitcase to the law office. I drop it off. Two days later, they have a convention. Liberals decide they’re endorsing John Anderson for president. It’s a three-way race now in New York State. Reagan wins with 46 percent of the vote. I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don’t know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.” I ask him how he feels about this in retrospect. He seems to feel pretty good–now that certain statutes of limitations are up[...] “Reagan got the electoral votes in New York State, we saved the country,” Stone says with characteristic understatement. “[More] Carter would’ve been an unmitigated disaster.” . . . .
6b. Tony Salerno–the Cohn mob client whose talents were drawn upon by Roger Stone in the positioning of John Anderson–is a Trump crony as well.
. . . Trump bought his Manhattan ready-mix [concrete] from a company called S & A Concrete. Mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano secretly owned the firm. S & A charged the inflated prices that the LeFrak and Resnik families complained about, LeFrak to both laws enforcement and The New York Times. As [reporter Wayne] Barrett noted, by choosing to build with ready-mix concrete rather than other materials, Trump put himself ‘at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers.’ But having an ally in Roy Cohn mitigated Trump’s concerns. With Cohn as his fixer, Trump had no worries that the Mafia bosses would have the unions stop work on Trump Tower; Salerno and Castellano were Cohn’s clients. Indeed, when the cement workers struck in summer 1982, the concrete continued to flow at Trump Tower. . . .
7. It was Roy Cohn who introduced Rupert Murdoch to Ronald Reagan and thus initiated the forging of the right-wing Republican media Amen Chorus that dominates today. The Murdoch journalistic empire was the breeding ground for Rob Goldstone.
“How Roy Cohn Helped Rupert Murdoch” by Robert Parry; Consortium News; 1/28/2015.
Rupert Murdoch, the global media mogul who is now a kingmaker in American politics, was brought into those power circles by the infamous lawyer/activist Roy Cohn who arranged Murdoch’s first Oval Office meeting with President Ronald Reagan in 1983, according to documents released by Reagan’s presidential library.
“I had one interest when Tom [Bolan] and I first brought Rupert Murdoch and Governor Reagan together and that was that at least one major publisher in this country would become and remain pro-Reagan,” Cohn wrote in a Jan. 27, 1983 letter to senior White House aides Edwin Meese, James Baker and Michael Deaver. “Mr. Murdoch has performed to the limit up through and including today.” . . .
8. Eventually, the rehabilitated SS general Karl Wolff began feeding information to “Frenchy” Grombach, a former military intelligence agent who formed a network of operatives who fed information to the CIA, among others. As indicated here, one of Grombach’s major sources in his efforts was Wolff. Among the primary recipients of Grombach’s and Wolff’s information was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who utilized dirt given him by the network to smear his opponents. Among those who were trashed during the McCarthy period were people involved with Safehaven.
. . . One of Grombach’s most important assets, according to U.S. naval intelligence records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, was SS General Karl Wolff, a major war criminal who had gone into the arms trade in Europe after the war. . . . Grombach worked simultaneously under contract to the Department of State and the CIA. The ex-military intelligence man succeeded in creating ‘one of the most unusual organizations in the history of the federal government,’ according to CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick. ‘It was developed completely outside of the normal governmental structure, [but it] used all of the normal cover and communications facilities normally operated by intelligence organizations, and yet never was under any control from Washington.’ By the early 1950s the U.S. government was bankrolling Grombach’s underground activities at more than $1 million annually, Kirkpatrick has said. . . .
. . . Grombach banked on his close connections with Senators Joseph McCarthy, William Jenner, and other members of the extreme Republican right to propel him to national power. . . .Grombach’s outfit effectively became the foreign espionage agency for the far right, often serving as the overseas complement to McCarthy’s generally warm relations with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI at home . . . . U.S. government contracts bankrolling a network of former Nazis and collaborators gave him much of the ammunition he needed to do the job. Grombach used his networks primarily to gather dirt. This was the American agent’s specialty, his true passion: political dirt, sexual dirt, any kind of compromising information at all. ‘He got into a lot of garbage pails,’ as Kirkpatrick puts it, ‘and issued ‘dirty linen’ ‘reports on Americans. ‘Grombach collected scandal, cataloged it, and used it carefully, just as he had done during the earlier McCormack investigation. He leaked smears to his political allies in Congress and the press when it suited his purposes to do so. Grombach and congressional ‘internal security’ investigators bartered these dossiers with one another almost as though they were boys trading baseball cards. . . .
9. Next, we recap some of the deep political connections of Joe McCarthy (this text was read into the record in AFA #2.) Note that McCarthy’s backing traces to the same German-American pro-Nazi Fifth Column that we analyzed in FTR #‘s 918, 919 and 929.
. . . . Why did he [McCarthy] rage in defense of the Nazi murderers of American soldiers?
The answer lies in the influence exerted by some of McCarthy’s ultraconservative, even pro-Nazi, backers in Wisconsin. McCarthy had been bankrolled in his political campaigns by such leaders of Wisconsin’s powerful German-American community as Frank Seusenbrenner and Walter Harnischfeger. Seusenbrenner was the president of the Kimberly Clark Paper Company and president of the board of the University of Wisconsin; Harnischfeger was president of the Harnischfeger Company, of Milwaukee, makers of traveling cranes, overhead machinery–and prefabricated houses. Both men were known as being fiercely pro-German.
McCarthy showed not the slightest repugnance for Harnischfeger’s passionate ultrarightism and admiration for Hitler. Before the war, one of the manufacturer’s nephews attending the University of Wisconsin had shocked fellow students by displaying an autographed copy of Mein Kampf, and flaunting a watch-chain swastika. During the war, Harnischfeger had advocated a negotiated peace with Germany, and as soon as the war ended, he played a leading role in organizing a German relief society. The Harnischfeger Corporation w one of eight Midwestern concerns holding war contracts that were ordered by the President’s Fair Employment Practices Commission to stop discriminating against workers because of race or religion. The commission charged on April 12, 1942, that these firms had refused to employ Jews or Negroes and had advertised for only Gentile, white Protestant help.
After 1945, Harnischfeger made several trips to Germany. He criticized the dismantling of German factories, denounced the war-crimes trials, and urged the restoration of Germany’s colonies. After Joe McCarthy became a Senator, he inserted Harnischfeger’s pronouncements in the Congressional Record; and Upton Close, the profascist radio commentator, parroted the views to his radio audience.
McCarthy’s 1947 financial troubles, stemming from his stock market reverses and his heavy overload of loans from the Appleton State Bank, appear to have been cured by this Wisconsin angel. “I have made complete arrangements with Walter Harnischfeger to put up sufficient collateral to cure both our ulcers,” McCarthy finally wrote to his harried banker friend, Matt Schuh. At the time of the 1948 Presidential election, McCarthy had listened to the returns in Harnischfeger’s home. The industrialist’s interest in prefabricated housing was believed in Washington to have been one of the reasons that McCarthy had so interested himself in the issue.
In terms of the Malmedy investigation, Anderson and May described the McCarthy-Harnischfeger axis in these terms: “Ten days after the Malmedy investigation was begun, a young man named Tom Korb worked for six weeks, carried on the books as McCarthy’s administrative assistant.” He stayed long enough to help Joe write a speech on the Malmedy Massacre, delivered on July 26, 1949, and then he went back to his job as a lawyer and corporation official in Milwaukee. His employer: the Harnischfeger Corporation.” . . . .
10. Bush also recently selected Robert Mueller, a member of his father’s Justice Department, to be FBI director. Reprising information from FTR #310:
President Bush tapped Robert S. Mueller III, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, as the new director of the FBI yesterday, seeking a no-nonsense manager to repair the image of an agency accused of botching several recent high-profile cases.
Mueller, a 56-year-old veteran federal prosecutor who helped put Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega behind bars, was nominated to succeed Louis Freeh. Freeh, who led the department through eight turbulent years under President Bill Clinton, retired last month.
Mueller was picked for the 10-year FBI director’s term after proving himself as acting deputy attorney general during Bush’s presidential transition. His nomination requires Senate confirmation.
11a. On April 4, Treasury Secretary O’Neill met with powerful Islamist Republicans whose spheres of interest overlap those of the institutions and individuals targeted on March 20, 2002. Reprising information from FTR #356:
(“O’Neill Met Muslim Activists Tied to Charities” by Glenn R. Simpson [with Roger Thurow]; Wall Street Journal; 4/18/2002; p. A4.)
11b. A principal figure in the group that interceded on behalf of the (alleged) Al Qaeda/Al Taqwa-connected targets of the Operation Green Quest raids was Talat Othman, a close business and political associate of President Bush.
Among the Muslim leaders attending [the meeting with O’Neill] was Talat Othman, a longtime associate and supporter of President Bush’s family, who gave a benediction at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in August 2000 . . . But he also serves [with Barzinji] on the board of Amana Mutual Funds Trust, an investment firm founded by M. Yacqub Mirza, the Northern Virginia businessman who set up most of the entities targeted by the Treasury and whose tax records were sought in the raid. . . . (Idem.)
12. As Mr. Emory hypothesized in FTR#353, the Norquist/GOP/Islamist links are part of the Republican Party’s ethnic outreach program. Again, one should note that these elements are directly connected to Al Qaeda and exemplify the Saudi/petroleum/GOP/Bush structural economic and political relationships at the core of the corruption of investigations into Al Qaeda and 9/11.
. . . .The case also highlights conflicts between the Bush administration’s domestic political goals and its war on terror. GOP officials began courting the U.S. Muslim community intensely in the late 1990’s, seeking to add that ethnic bloc to the party’s political base. . . (Idem.)
13. The Amana organization (on the board of which Othman serves) has numerous areas of overlap with organizations described as being implicated in terrorism and the milieu of Al Queda.
. . . Two nonprofits affiliated with Mr. Mirza and named in the search warrant, the SAAR Foundation Inc. and the Heritage Education Trust Inc., held large blocks of shares in Amana’s mutual funds in 1997, according to SEC records. The SEC documents and other records detailing connections between Mr. Othman and the Islamic Institute [on the board of which Mr. Othman serves] and the raided groups were compiled by the National Security News Service, a Washington based nonprofit research group. . . (Idem.)
14. Further details have emerged about the links between Al Taqwa and the GOP/Bush administration.
. . . .Mr. Othman also is on the board of Mr. Saffuri’s [and Norquist’s] Islamic Institute, the GOP-leaning group that received $20,000.00 from the Safa Trust, one of the raid’s targets. The president of the Safa Trust, Jamal Barzinji, is a former business associate of Switzerland based investor Youssef Nada, whose assets were frozen last fall after the Treasury designated him a person suspected of giving aid to terrorists. [Italics are Mr. Emory’s.] (Idem.)
15. Othman’s links to Bush are profound.
. . . Mr. Othman has ties to the Bush family going back to the 1980’s, when he served with George W. Bush on the board of a Texas petroleum firm, Harken Oil & Gas Inc. Mr. Othman has visited the White House during the administrations of both President Bush and his father George H.W. Bush. . . .(Idem.)
16. Next, the program reviews other areas of intersection between the labyrinthine network attacked in the 3/20 raids, the Al Taqwa milieu, and the Republican Party. A recent Wall Street Journal article described some of the organizations targeted in the raids:
. . . . These include Al-Taqwa Management, a recently liquidated Swiss company the U.S. government believes acted as a banker for Osama bin Laden’s al Queda terrorist network . . . Two people affiliated with the companies and charities are linked by records to entities already designated as terrorist by the U.S. government. Hisham Al-Talib, who served as an officer of SAAR, the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Safa Trust Inc., another Mirza charity, during the 1970’s was an officer of firms run by Youssef M. Nada, records show. Mr. Nada is a Switzerland-based businessman whose assets have been frozen by the U.S. for alleged involvement in terrorist financing, and is alleged by U.S. officials to be a key figure in the Taqwa network. . .Jamal Barzinji, an officer of[Emphasis added.]
Mr. Mirza’s company Mar-Jac and other entities, also was involved with Mr. Nada’s companies in the 1970’s, according to bank documents from Liechtenstein. A message was left yesterday for Mr. Barzinji at his address in Herndon. Mr. Barzinji and Mr. Talib live across the street from each other. A third business associate of Mr. Nada, Ali Ghaleb Himmat (who also has been designated by the Treasury as aiding terrorism), is listed as an official of the Geneva branch of another charity operated by Mr. Mirza, the International Islamic Charitable Organization. . . .
17. Further detailing the background of Othman, the broadcast highlights the connections between people associated with the Nugan Hand Bank and Othman.
. . . .Harken Energy was formed in 1973 by two oilmen who would benefit from a successful covert effort to destabilize Australia’s Labor Party government (which had attempted to shut out foreign oil exploration). A decade later, Harken was sold to a new investment group headed by New York attorney Alan G. Quasha, a partner in the firm of Quasha, Wessely & Schneider. ...William Quasha [Alan’s father] had also given legal advice to two top officials of the notorious Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, a CIA operation. After the sale of Harken Energy in 1983, Alan Quasha became a director and chairman of the board. Under Quasha, Harken suddenly absorbed Junior’s struggling Spectrum 7 in 1986. (“Bush Family Value$: The Bush Clan’s Family Business” by Stephen Pizzo; Mother Jones; September/October 1992; accessed at www.motherjones.com/news_wire/bushboys.html .) (For more about Nugan Hand, see AFA#‘s 4, 25, 30.)
18. Othman also has links to Gaith Pharoan of the BCCI and, through him, to James R. Bath and the Bin Ladens.
. . . . Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, in turn, was a business associate of BCCI front man Gaith Pharoan; he bought a chunk of Harken’s stock and placed his representative, Talat Othman, on Harken Energy’s board of directors. . . . (Idem.)
Regarding Bill Browder and how he fits into all this, Mark Ames wrote a piece in Pando Daily back in May of 2015 that not only covers Browder, but how he fits into a larger collection of figures around the Legatum Institute, billionaire-financed neocon think tank that has spent a great deal of time trying to convince Western policy-makers that Putin’s Russian is waging an information warfare campaign that presents an existential threat. As Ames points out, the individual taking the lead in pushing this, Peter Pomerantsev, is quite close to Browder. And as Ames also points out, the billionaires behind the Legatum Institute, the Chandler brothers, were massive beneficiaries of the initial state privatizations programs in Russia in the 90’s and have a history of making gobs of money by investing in developing countries, then making a lot of noise about “anti-corruption” and “good corporate governance”, and then selling their assets to foreign investors. It’s a network of people that include Michael Weiss — a major proponent of a war in Syria — along with Pierre Omidyar, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
So, yeah, this piece by Ames is even more important today than it was when it was initially printed:
“The real giveaway for me, which got me looking into who Pomerantsev works for, was his choice of heroes in the scary Kremlin information wars: western investors, and western global financial institutions. People like billionaire vulture capitalist Bill Browder, the bloodless grandson of former US Communist Party leader Earl Browder, who served as Putin’s most loyal attack dog while he was raking in his billions, but then transformed himself into the Andrei Sakharov of vulture capitalism as soon as Putin’s KGB tossed Browder out of their circle and decided to keep his share of the take for themselves.”
Yep, Pomerantsev and Browder are quite tight. So tight that he lobbied for Browder’s Magnitsky Act before the British parliament. And as Ames describes it, the overarching goal of Browder doesn’t remotely appear to be “anti-corruption” or “good governance”, but Browder was more than happy to be the beneficiary of corruption and bad governance before he was chased out of Russia. Instead, the overarching goal appears to be to force the Kremlin to open up to foreign vulture capitalists like Browder again. Like it was before:
“That’s the Bill Browder I remember. And ever since his KGB pals decided they’d had enough of him and chased him out to London a very rich vulture capitalist, Browder has styled himself as the Mother Theresa of global vulture capitalism—and he’s thrown untold millions into promoting that public relations/lobbying effort, whose goal is to use human rights abuses he once covered for and profited from as a cudgel to force the Kremlin to become investor-friendly to vulture capitalists like Bill Browder again”
But the way Pomerantsev puts it, Browder’s struggle against the Kremlin is part of an existential struggle to deal with rising Russia that threatens the existence of the “fragile” West:
And then Ames spends the rest of the piece describing the toxic mix of neocons and vulture capitalists behind the Legatum Institute, started by the Chandler brothers and staffed by hard core neocons:
“What the Chandlers did to cash out big in South Korea is what Pomernatsev is doing today with Russia: Talking a big disingenuous game about corporate governance, ethics, fighting corruption and so on . . . without in any way being the least bit forthright about his own agenda and how his people stand to profit from a seemingly principled struggled.”
And that appears to be a major driving force in what we’re seeing today as Russia continues to be cast as the greatest threat in the world: Making a big deal about corporate governance, ethics, and fighting corruption — coupled now with Pomerantsev’s depicting of Russian as an information warfare global hegemon — so the foreign billionaires who made their fortunes by flouting corporate governance, ignoring ethics, and profiting from corruption can be allowed back into Russia’s markets. Rinse and repeat.
So that’s all some pretty critical context now that Browder is being touted as an anti-corruption crusader.
Felix Sater just did another interview with Talking Points Memo where he largely projects a “woe is me, why does everyone treat me like a mobster?” sentiment and discusses a number of his his past associations with both the mafia and the US national security state.
Sater says the last deal he working on for the Trump Organization was in October 2015 for a deal to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow. And as the article notes, that sounds like a similar proposition to the one Trump himself tied to broker with the Agalarovs (recall Aras and Emin Agalarov’s association with the now-notorious meeting arranged by Don Jr. and Rob Goldstone) back in 2013. Sater says his 2015 work didn’t involve the Agalarovs and he’s never worked with them, but he also refused to say who he was actually working with on that deal so it will be interesting to see if that information dribbles out at some point.
Sater also claims that his national security work for the US actually involved providing the coordinates of Osama bin Laden’s training camp when it was hit in a cruise missile strike.
So Sater is feeling chatty about his background and ties to the Trump organization. But it’s a highly selective chattiness:
“That deal was for “The Trump Tower, to develop in Moscow.” It was a similar proposition to the one Trump himself tried to broker with the Agalarovs, a family of vastly wealthy Russian oligarchs who brought Miss Universe 2013 to Moscow and were behind the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting between the President’s oldest son and an attorney said to work for the Russian government.”
Yep, Sater’s ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ deal he was working on in the fall of 2015 was awful similar to the 2013 deal Trump was trying to work out with the Agalarovs, but Sater says is actually unnamed mystery people that he was working with:
So if we trust Sater’s word, he’s never worked with the Agalarovs. Of course, such denials say nothing about whether or not he’s an acquaintance of the Agalarovs. And, of course, there’s no reason to actually take Sater at his word on such matters. But that’s his official stance on the matter at this point.
And regarding the role he played in providing the coordinates for Osama bin laden’s training camp...
...it’s worth noting that, in the book The Scorpion and the Frog: High Crimes and High Times, co-authored by Sater’s former business partner Salvatore Lauria who also become an FBI and CIA informant, their work purchasing stinger missiles on behalf of the CIA collapsed at one point when one of the members of Sater’s mobster-informant crew, Gene Klotsman, decided to inflate 10-fold the price of the stinger missiles they were selling back to the CIA, prompting the FBI to drop their assistance and once again threaten to send them to jail over their Wall Street crimes. But then 9/11 happened, and it was their work providing Osama bin Laden’s cell phone number to the CIA in 1998 and FBI interest in that work that helped get them off the hook.
So if that all is true (and Sater’s lawyer said the book had a fictitious account of the stinger-deal), perhaps the bin Laden’s cellphone provided the coordinates for that training camp missile strike?
“As recounted in The Scorpion and the Frog: High Crimes and High Times, a 2003 book Lauria later co-authored with former Associated Press journalist David Barry, the three associates became spies for the CIA, tasked with offering U.S. taxpayer money to buy Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that had gone missing from the covert U.S. campaign to oust the Soviets in Afghanistan. Those missiles, it was feared, were destined for Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The idea, according to the book, was to give the Russian government the funds to purchase 10 Stingers on the black market in Afghanistan, and then turn them over to the Sater, Klotsman, and Lauria, who would then relinquish them to their Langley handlers.”
And according to that book, the stinger missile plan almost went according to plan. Until one of Sater’s partners got greedy:
But then, facing a renewed legal threat from the FBI, 9/11 happened and all of that work on the stinger missile swap and turning over what they thought was bin Laden’s active cell phone number was enough to put them back in the FBI’s good graces:
“We had provided the actual serial numbers of the Stingers, which had been available in ’98, and we had passed on what we thought was an active cell phone number for bin Laden.”
So who knows how much of that all is true, but it’s pretty clear from the interviews that Sater is giving that he would indeed like his story told. Or rather, he wants a story told, and he’s giving interviews so we’ll see what else Sater decides to divulge in future interviews.
But note one area of ‘Sater’s story’ that is blatantly wrong that he appears to have no interest in correcting: the story about Ukrainian ‘peace plan’ concocted by the allegedly ‘pro-Russian’ Andreii Artemenko. And yet Artemenko is about as far from a pro-Russian politician as one can get. But that hasn’t changed the fact that he’s been widely reported as being ‘pro-Russian’ and putting forth a Kremlin-packed peace plan. And here’s Felix Sater, giving interviews, trying to explain how his story is so misunderstood, with this massive opportunity to point out Aremenko’s Radical Party and Right Sector ties, and no mention of it.
So despite the legal peril the investigation into the Trump team’s alleged collusion with Russia creates for Sater’s long-time business partner Donald Trump, and it would appear that Sater and Trump attorney Michael Cohen would rather the world believes that Artemenko is a ‘pro-Russian’ politician than acknowledge his far-right anti-Russian ties. It’s a reminder that the heavily redacted history of Felix Sater includes a lot of self-imposed significant redactions about some very recent and relevant history.
Felix Sater’s recent chattiness is once again display in a new interview in New York Magazine. It covers a lot of the same history that many of the other pieces on Sater covers, but there’s a some new interesting tid-bits, especially about Robert Armao, the third person who apparently sat in on the meetings between Sater and Ukrainian far-right politician Andrey Artemenko. According to Armao, he was the one who initiated contact with Sater back in August of 2016 and “over the next few months, he would ask Armao to act as his intermediary on a number of matters”. So it apparently wasn’t just shady nuclear plant deals that Armao and Sater were working together on.
Sater also makes a rather ominous boast near the end of the interview. It was made back in June (the interview was done bit by bit over several months): “In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colorful character you have ever talked about. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.” And as the article notes, Sater’s boast was made before the revelation of the meeting between the Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and the figures offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.
And the article also notes how Sater’s claims to have been working on a Trump Tower Moscow in the fall of 2015 are awfully similar the Trump Tower Moscow deal that Aras Agalarov was working out and that apparently was only scuttled due to Trump’s presidential bid according to Aras’s son Emin (recall that Sater recently claimed to TPM that his work on Trump Tower Moscow had nothing to do with the Agalarov’s but he also wouldn’t reveal his partner).
So while there hasn’t been any clear Sater connection to that meeting that’s been publicly discovered yet, we still have the following tantalizing pieces of info:
1. The ties of the Agalarovs to many of the figures in that Trump Tower meeting.
2. The fact Sater claims to have worked in the fall of 2015 on basically the same deal that Agalarov was partnering with Trump on and that deal with Agalarov was only scuttered after Trump announced his campaign, which happened in the summer of 2015 (this is what Emin said back in March).
and
3. Sater boasted back in June, before the story of that Trump Tower meeting meeting went public, about how he was about to be part of something big that would hit in the next 30 days.
4. The now notorious Trump Tower meeting had a seemingly ever-expanding guest list as the story unfolded, until it eventually settled at eight people from the ‘Russian government’ delegation.
Given all that, might Sater be a still-undisclosed 9th member of the ‘Russian government’ delegation? We may never ever find out, but Sater appeared to be very confident back in June that something big was about to hit about him over the following months and he seemed almost excited to talk about it:
“He couldn’t resist telling me, though, that something big was brewing. “In about the next 30 to 35 days,” he told me, “I will be the most colorful character you have ever talked about. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.””
That was the boast from back in June, which was more than 35 days agao and there hasn’t been anything wildly huge involving Sater. Is there some big Sater-related bombshell yet to hit the news?
Or perhaps the big news is going to be about Robert Armao?
“Armao, once a political aide to Nelson Rockefeller, has represented foreign leaders as a communications adviser and does business in the energy industry. Sater told him he coveted the “wonderful Rolodex” he had built over decades. Over the next few months, he would ask Armao to act as his intermediary on a number of matters, including enlisting Armao’s assistance in brokering an energy deal to refurbish Ukraine’s aging nuclear reactors.”
Armao was acting as a Sater intermediary on a number of matters in the fall of 2016. Might that be the source of whatever Sater was hinting at?
Or was Sater just BS-ing as usual about the ‘big’ story that was about to drop? Who knows, but note again how Sater claims he was working on a Trump-branded deal with an unnaemd developer in Moscow in late 2015:
And recall that Sater recently told Talking Points Memo that the deal he was working on in October of 2015 was “Trump Tower Moscow”. And, again, here’s what Emin Agalarov said about the Trump Tower Moscow deal that Aras Agalarov was working on with Trump: their “Trump Tower Moscow” deal “was sidelined” when Trump made his presidential bid:
“But the Agalarovs had their eyes set on a bigger target: a licensing partnership with the Trump Organization. “We thought that building a Trump Tower next to an Agalarov tower—having the two big names—could be a really cool project to execute,” Emin Agalarov recalls. He says that he and his father selected a parcel of land and signed a letter of intent with their counterparts in New York, but before negotiations could further develop Trump launched his campaign and the deal was sidelined. “He ran for president, so we dropped the idea,” Agalarov says. “But if he hadn’t run we would probably be in the construction phase today.””
So the Agalarovs got all the way to the point of selecting a parcel of land and signing a letter of intent, then Trump announces his presidential run in the summer of 2015, the deal gets “sidelined”, and apparently Felix Sater starts working on his own “Trump Tower Moscow” deal in October of 2015. But one that definitely didn’t involve the Agalarovs.
That’s their story at this point and they’re sticking to it. Until they inevitably change it.
@Pterrafractyl–
Notice that there is not ONE WORD about Sater’s work for the CIA in either of these articles, although his meeting with the arms dealer occurs in that general context.
It would not surprise me if CIA contract agent Sater did indeed posture himself as a Russian government agent, in order to help remove Trump in favor of Pence (with John Kelly already implementing a White House staff agenda that is not unlike declaring martial law in the White House).
That will also cement the “Russia interfered with our democracy” meme.
“Our democracy” had its brains blown all over the back of limousine in Dallas, Texas on 11/22/1963.
The U.S.S.R. didn’t do it, although the latest spin coming out of Langley reprises that propaganda theme, and Russia didn’t interfere with “our democracy” either.
“Our democracy” went by the boards, with generous assists from the media, the government agencies who conduct covert operations on the American political landscape, and the average dumb s*t American citizen, who pays no attention to anything that isn’t on their smart phone.
Sitting on their “apps” might be a good way of putting it.
Best,
Dave
Check out what Felix Sater is reportedly telling his family at this point: Special Counsel Robert Mueller is going to find enough evidence of a crime to send both Sater and Donald Trump to prison. He’s very very confident of this, reportedly:
“For several weeks there have been rumours that Sater is ready to rat again, agreeing to help Mueller. ‘He has told family and friends he knows he and POTUS are going to prison,’ someone talking to Mueller’s investigators informed me.”
That’s quite a tasty morsel of rumors. Is it true? Time will tell, but it’s worth noting another recent report that does potentially tangentially corroborate the above report: according to recently leaked emails, the Trump family is implicated in a $350 million fraud investigation...centered around the Trump SoHo project that Felix Sater owned and operated:
“We’ve obtained leaked copies of those emails related to a key lawsuit related to the Trump SoHo – which are embedded below – that outline the Trump family’s complicity in a major financial crime.”
So there’s now leaked emails related to a lawsuit involving Trump SoHo. And what do those emails demonstrated? That Trump and his children participated in a cover up in order to keep the Trump SoHo construction loans flowing:
And what was it that they were covering up? The presence of convicted felon Felix Sater as the owner and operator of Bayrock, the company that actually owned and operated Trump SoHo. That’s what they were covering up. Felix Sater:
And how will all this get tied back to #TrumpRussia and Putin? Well, Bayrock’s investors include Iceland’s oligarchs were where laundering Putin’s money:
And adding to the drama is that this particular crime is a state-level crime, meaning Trump can’t just issue a bunch of presidential pardons:
So if this is all true, it’s looking like the #TrumpRussia line of inquiry that will finally lead to the removal of Trump will be the crime of not reporting to investors the presence of convicted felon Felix Sater on the board of Bayrock and Trump SoHo. And Bayrock laundered some Russian oligarch money via some Icelandic investors. And that’s largely going to be it unless there’s a completely different angle that Mueller’s team is also pursuing that’s also going to yielding actionable leads.
So now you know why Trump always claims to never have any idea who Felix Sater is...Sater is the guy that apparently could end Trump’s presidency, but only as long as it can be proven Trump really knew him.
Here’s a teaser relating to the recent stories indicating that the #TrumpRussia investigation is going to be focused on Donald Trump’s relationship to Felix Sater and the possibility that Trump committed fraud back when he partnered with Sater’s Bayrock Group when developing Trump SoHo: Talking Points Memo has been doing some more digging into Felix Sater’s past and his history with Trump and came across a finding that’s going to make it a lot harder for Trump to claim he never knew Sater or Sater’s criminal background. It turns out that the developer of the Trump Phoenix Plaza filed a lawsuit in 2007 that revealed the 1998 fraud convictions for Sater. And that lawsuit ended up getting retroactively sealed in Arizona even after it was make public, in keeping with the US government’s pattern of keeping Sater’s past convictions a secret.
TPM also talked with Frederick Oberlander, the lawyer of form Bayrock executive Jody Kriss who sued Bayrock and Sater for hiding Sater’s criminal past in a separate lawsuit that is at the center of the speculation that Sater’s involvement with Bayrock to lead to fraud charges against Trump. Trump also claimed to know nothing about Sater in that lawsuit but the way Oberlander sees it there’s no way Trump couldn’t have know about Sater’s past. And as we previously saw, the statute of limitations on Trump’s liability is a decade from the last criminal act, and the newly discovered emails that appear to demonstrate knowledge and concern of Sater’s criminal past and implicate not just Trump but also his children are from January 2018. So Trump is still potentially criminally liable for covering up Sater’s criminal past while Trump, but that window of liability is closing fast.
Oberlander also asserts that the US government’s treatment of Sater has nothing to do with anti-terrorism operations Sater was involved in but instead government fears that it will be discovered that his sentence for the 1998 pump and dump scheme was illegally lenient. Oberlander doesn’t explain why the government would have given such an illegally light sentence but that’s his take on the situation.
So there’s an ongoing mystery as to what exactly Sater did for the US government and why his convictions were so light and so secret. And that leads us to the teaser: the judge who sentenced Sater cases just told TPM that Forbes reporter Richard Behard, the reporter who uncovered the bizarre nuclear power plant angle to the Ukrainian ‘peace plan’ fiasco, has moved to unseal documents related to the sentencing. And Glasser is expecting a report on that “soon”. So we might be a bout to learn a lot more about Sater’s past work with the US government just as the clock ticking on Trump’s legal liability for fraudulently covering up Sater’s criminal past:
“In court papers filed during the Kriss suit, Oberlander addressed Sater’s fraud conviction and the cooperation agreement that kept it secret; for that, he was referred for criminal contempt. The vigor of the court’s pursuit of Oberlander surprised many; reporter and legal blogger Dan Wise memorably referred to it as “Javert-like.””
There’s definitely something under that rock! Perhaps something scandalous, although it’s not impossible that there’s a real national security aspect to it all. Presumably it’s a mess of scandal and real national security stuff but we’ll see! Perhaps see soon if judge Glasser’s prediction is correct:
“A report I think has been made and is under seal, but I believe it will be unsealed soon...I really can’t speak to you about it.”
And there’s our teaser. The ticking time-bomb of an administration might have a new ticking time-bomb. And for all we know some sort of blockbuster report on Sater’s past could happen right before Trump’s criminal liability expires, or perhaps right after. We’ll see about that too. It’s quite a teaser.
Here’s a new round of twists in the story of Felix Sater and his role in the Trump organizations ties to Russia: So remember the mystery that recently emerged over the Trump Tower Moscow deal that Sater claimed he started working on in the fall of 2015 but he insisted wasn’t the same Trump Tower deal that Aras Agalarov was reportedly working on with Trump from 2013 to mid-2015 ? Well, we just learned a bit more about the deal Sater was reportedly working on, although we still aren’t told who the unnamed investors were (investors Sater insists weren’t the Agalarovs but he won’t say anything else about them). First, we learned that long-time Trump Org. lawyer Michael Cohen was also involved with the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations along with Sater. This is after we learned that Cohen and Sater knew each other since childhood and were both involved in the bizarre story of the Ukraine ‘peace plan’ and nuclear plant deal with a far-right Ukrainian politician. So if Cohen and Sater worked on the Trump Tower Moscow deal together two that represents a second significant secret deal involving Cohen and Sater.
But we also learned another tantalizing tidbit about Sater’s potential ties to the Kremlin, or at least the ties he claimed to have, which is particularly tantalizing when you consider the growing volume of evidence of Sater’s long-standing working relationship with the FBI and CIA: Sater reportedly urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the Trump Tower proposal and suggested that he could get President Vladimir Putin to say “great things” about Trump:
“Discussions about the Moscow project began in earnest in September 2015, according to people briefed on the deal. An unidentified investor planned to build the project and, under a licensing agreement, put Trump’s name on it. Cohen acted as a lead negotiator for the Trump Organization. It is unclear how involved or aware Trump was of the negotiations.”
Michale Cohen acted as lead negotiator for the Trump Organization in a deal with childhood acquitaince Felix Sater. And this was all being done in secret as Trump was running for president. Part of what makes this revelation so significant is that one of the big questions swirling around Trump’s behavior as a candidate was the motivation for hiring so many staffers with Russian ties (like Carter Page) and his frequent kind words about Russia how it would be better for the US and Russia to normalize relations. The explanations for such behavior typically ranged from “Trump is Putin’s puppet” to “Trump just wants better relations with Russia because it’s a political winner and actually better policy”. But learning about a secret Trump Tower deal certainly adds a new context for the Trump team’s apparent Russian crush: Trump wanted that deal and Felix Sater was apparently hinting at the prospect of warm Kremlin ties:
And here’s another interesting tidbit: Remember how we got reports that the Trump Tower Moscow deal that Trump was previously trying to working out with the Agalarovs but was apparently abandoned in 2015 shortly before the secret Sater deal was started. And remember how it was reported that the Agalarovs got as far as picking out the property and signing a letter of intent and Sater insisted that he wasn’t working with Agalarov at all and it was a completely different deal? Well, now we learn that the Sater deal apparently managed to get a letter of intent too:
Also of note is that the new information contradicts some of Sater’s earlier comments regarding why the deal he was working on ultimately imploded. We’re now being told that the deal didn’t happen because lacked the land and permits to proceed. But as Talking Points Memo points out, Sater told them in an earlier interview that the project was abandoned because Trump was running for President (the same explanation Agalarov gave for killing his version of the Trump Tower Moscow deal that was killed in mid-2015). So given the widespread suspicions that Trump is a pawn of the Kremin, it would be really interesting to get an answer to the question of whether or not the Trump Tower Moscow was simply abandoned for political expediency or ultimately rejected by Russian authorities:
“Sater told TPM that a Moscow deal “didn’t go through because [Trump] became President,” while emails between Sater and Cohen were apparently enthusiastic about the prospect that both might come to pass at once. A “person briefed on the email exchange” paraphrased one upbeat email from Sater to the Post: “Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?””
So did Trump’s political campaign suddenly change their mind about the going through with the deal because it looked like Trump might secure the nomination or did the project simply fail to get the land permits? It’s a pretty big open question. Along with the question of who the mystery investors:
And let’s keep in mind in all this that a number of figures involved with the notorious June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafor, and a collection of Russian lawyers are tied to the Agalarov. Rob Goldstone is Emin Agalarov’s talent agent and Ike Kaveladze reportedly attended the meeting as a representative of Emin and Aras Agalarov. And in Goldstone’s opening email to Don Jr. he floated the prospect of Kremlin help for Trump. So if it turns out Sater and Agalarov were indeed both working on essentially the same Trump Tower Moscow project that means we have two figures involved with this Trump Tower Moscow project, Sater and
Goldstone (presumably acting as an Agalarov representative), offering a channel to the Kremlin.
And yet everything we’re learning about Sater as his history gets exposed points towards him being a creature of the FBI and CIA. And even more bizarrely is that Trump had to know about Sater’s history with US authorities, and yet Sater is still one of the key contacts in the former Soviety Union and apparently promising Trump closer ties to the Kremlin. As Sater recently told New York Magazine, “I will be the most colorful character you have ever talked about. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.” It’s one instance where he might actually be telling to the truth.
Following up on the new reports about Michael Cohen, a Trump attorney and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, and his role as negotiator in the deal with Felix Sater to develop Trump Tower Moscow that was being negotiated in the fall of 2015 and before being abandoned in January 2016 and Sater’s hints that he could get Vladimir Putin to “say great things” about Trump. We now have a new report that adds some additional details. Michael Cohen apparently did directly reach out to Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s top press aide, in order to get Kremlin assistance in on the Trump Tower Moscow deal, and this was done at Felix Sater’s recommendation. We are also learning the name of the investment company that was supposed to partner with Trump on the deal, although we don’t know the name of the people behind it: I.C. Expert Investment Co.
Cohen said he never received an response from Peskov and the deal was apparently abandoned a couple weeks later. And this is all the story Cohen is submitting to Congress, representing the most direct interaction documented yet between a top Trump aide and the Russian government. So the most direct interaction documented yet between a top Trump aide and the Russian government appears to have been an unreturned email that was sent at the behest of Felix Sater. Obviously there could be a lot more than meets the eye here since we’re largely relying on what Michael Cohen and Felix Sater tell us at this point but thus far it’s looking like Sater is the figure who played a key role as a Trump-Kremlin middle-man:
“Cohen told congressional investigators that the deal was envisioned as a licensing project, in which Trump would have been paid for the use of his name by a Moscow-based developer called I.C. Expert Investment Co. Cohen said that Trump signed a letter of intent with the company on Oct. 28, 2015 and began to solicit designs from architects and discuss financing.”
Well, it’ll be interesting to see who’s hiding under the I.C. Expert Investment Co rock. More friends of Felix Sater? The Agalarovs? Only time will tell, unless it doesn’t and remains a mystery. But with Sater brokering a secret deal between Trump and Moscow during the campaign and his status as a long-time informant of the FBI and CIA, you have to wonder who else Sater may have been talking about this secret negotiation with:
Because at this point, if we we’re looking at all the ‘sides’ Sater could have been playing for, we have:
1. Team Trump, as Trump’s long-time business partner.
2. The Russian mafia, given Sater’s family relationship with Semion Mogilevich.
3. The FBI, as a long-time informant.
4. The CIA, as a long-time informant.
5. The Kremlin, as a long-time businessman with Russian mafia ties.
6. Working for himself with no particular allegiance.
Those are just readily apparent conflicts of interest that we have to factor into an assessment of a figure of Sater and there’s presumably more that we don’t know about. And this is the guy who appears to have been leading the secret Trump Tower Moscow negotiations and kept pushing Michael Cohen to reach out to the Kremlin.
The clearer a picture we get of what happened between the Trump campaign and Russia the more opaque the situation gets in many respects. It’s the Fog of Felix Sater, and it continues to thicken.
Now that the Trump Tower Moscow deal pushed by Felix Sater and pursued by Michael Cohen in the fall of 2015 has become the latest source of interest in the #TrumpRussia investigation one of the big questions is to what extent did a FBI and CIA informant with Russian mafia ties like Felix Sater actually have a working relationship with the Kremlin. Sater was clearly bragging in his emails to Cohen that he had some high level Kremlin contacts. But the fact that the Trump Tower Moscow project never actually got Kremlin approval suggests otherwise, along with the reports that Michael Cohen contacted the Kremlin’s top spokesperson about the project at Sater’s recommendation but reportedly never heard back.
So what are people looking at to assess Sater’s Kremlin ties? that Sater somehow arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s chair during a tour of the Kremlin in 2006:
“The first line of the email, which was obtained by The New York Times and published on Monday, alludes to a trip to Moscow that two of Trump’s children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., took in 2006.”
Putin’s private chair at the Kremlin. That was the Sater’s opening selling point when pitching the Trump Tower Moscow project to Cohen. Sater is so tight with Kremlin that he managed to get Ivanka the best seat on the house during their 2006 trip to Moscow!
And managing to get such an up close tour is seen as a sign that either Sater or Trump or both were important people in the eyes of the Kremlin:
And while it’s certainly plausible that the Trump family would be seen in a favorable light in the eyes of the Kremlin given the popularity of Trump’s US properties with Russia’s oligarchs (and probably his willingness to ‘look the other way’ as a property developer), it’s also worth recalling an article written by Bloomberg reporter Leonid Bershidsky a while back about the informal “level” system in Russian that framed then businessman Donald Trump as being not on Vladimir Putin’s “level” and too relatively unimportant to warrant a direct conversation (Rex Tillerson as the head of Exxon would have been on Putin’s “level”). But it’s certainly not inconceivable that the Trump kids would have been “high level” enough to have received a special tour or that Sater would have had the kinds of Kremlin connections that might have allowed him to arrange for such a treat.
And yet when we look at this new set of emails between Michael Cohen and Felix Sater and their efforts to explore this Trump Tower Moscow deal the overall picture that emerges in one of a couple of people who were simply not very “high level” enough to get the job done. Because not only did the deal apparently never get the Kremlin’s backing but when Michael Cohen emailed Dmity Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, at Sater’s recommendation for the purpose of getting the Kremlin’s backing for the Tower, not only did they never hear back but apparently they didn’t even use Peskov’s email address. Instead, Cohen sent the email reaching out to the Kremlin to a general Kremlin inbox for press inquiries:
“There is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had stalled. But Mr. Cohen did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.”
Sater couldn’t even give Cohen a non-public Peskov email? Sad!
“If he says it we own this election...Americas most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald is a good guy to negotiate.”
And that was Sater’s sales to pitch Cohen: Trump Tower Moscow isn’t just a great investment that Sater could make happen with his Kremlin contacts but it would also be a political coup. Putin would tell the world during the ribbon cutting ceremony that Trump was a great man he could do business and American voters would lap it up. Which of course never happened.
So whether or not Sater had any pull with the Kremlin back in 2006 he didn’t appear to still have it in 2016. And there’s perhaps one very obvious reason for that: Sater’s criminal background and history of working as an FBI and CIA informant wasn’t publicly available in 2006, but it sure was after the New York Times reported on Sater’s work with the CIA back in 2007. And that’s going to be something rather critical to keep in mind as Felix Sater continues to move close and closer to the #TrumpRussia investigation: whatever ties Sater managed to cultivate with Kremlin over the course of his life were probably changed significantly after it became public in 2007 that he had a history of working with the FBI and CIA. While most reports about Sater largely ignore this chapter in his history, it’s hard to imagine the Kremlin making the save oversight.
Might Sater have arranged for a special Kremlin tour for the Trump kids in 2006 and even scored Putin’s chair for Ivanka? It sounds like it. Might he have been able to do that again after it become public that he worked with the FBI and CIA? That seems like much more of an open question. Let’s not forget that the ‘pro-Russian’ Ukrainian politician who was negotiating that “peace deal” proposal, Andreii Artemenko, was in fact affiliated with some of the most anti-Russian political parties in Ukraine. So that will be something to watch for: signs that Sater still had Kremlin ‘juice’ in recent years after all his ‘juice’ with the FBI and CIA was publicly disclosed. Are there any signs at all or is it all just Sater’s puffery at this point?
Here’s some more on the scheme to build Trump Tower Moscow that pursued by Felix Sater and Michael Cohen back in later 2015/early 2016: We now have reports on the figures behind IC Expert, the Russian property firm that the Trump Organization was supposed to team up with to build Trump Tower Moscow. The chairman of IC Expert is a Andrei Rozov. Rozov and Sater both knew each other going back to at least 2008 (note that Sater left Bayrock that year) when they both served on the executive board of Mirax Group, a Moscow real estate company that ran into hard times during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. And as we’ll see, Mirax Group was headed by another Russian property developer billionaire, Sergei Polonsky, who was convicted of defrauding investors in July in an unrelated luxury residential housing project that was never finished after the financial crisis/housing crisis sent Mirax into a financial crunch. While Polonsky’s conviction ultimately was dropped immediately after he received it due to the statute of limitations expiring, Polonsky still had to spend 5 years fighting the case and two years in custody after he was extradited back to Russia from Cambodia back in May of 2015, suggesting that Polonsky is not exactly on the best terms with the Kremlin in recent years. And while at this point there’s no indication that Polonsky was involved with the Trump Tower Moscow bid, Sater history with Mirax and Polonsky gives us a sense of who Sater has been closest to in the Russian oligarchy.
So it appears that the Trump Organization’s partner in the Trump Tower Moscow project, IC Expert, was a firm headed by one of Felix Sater’s associates from Mirax, Andrei Rozov, who first met Sater when they both worked on a firm owned by Sergei Polonsky who has been experiencing a 5‑year long fall from grace that included extradition from Cambodia and the last two years in custody:
“The sprawling development, called Novokosino‑2, is the most significant project to date of a Russian property firm called IC Expert. The firm was to be the partner in a separate venture: Donald Trump’s failed bid during the 2016 presidential campaign to launch “Trump Tower Moscow,” according to a statement given to congressional investigators this week and a person familiar with the effort. Trump’s plans were revealed this week in correspondence from Trump’s longtime business lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, in answering inquiries from investigators looking into Trump’s connections with Russia. As a candidate, Trump said he had “nothing to do with Russia.””
First, note that Novokosino‑2, the signature residential development project of IC Expert that’s also worrying buyers because it appears to be far behind schedule isn’t the same residential development project that got Sergei Polonsky convicted of fraud. The project Polonsky was charged with embezzlement over was the Kutuzovskaya Mile residential complex. It just happens to be the case that IC Expert’s chairman, Andrei Rozov, has a history of being involved with firms that fall far behind their projects and raise embezzlement concerns.
And it was Rozov who was was serving alongside Felix Sater back in 2008 on the board of Mirax, the firm owned by now-disgraced billionaire Sergei Polonsky who was recently convicted of fraud in Russian courts over an residential development project that was went awry due to the 2008–2009 financial/housing crisis:
And according to this piece in a Ukrainian publication, LB.ua, Sater initial met Polonsky in 2000:
“Felix Sater’s success story is also quite impressive. In 1993, the son of a Russian crime boss, Felix Sater, ended up in a prison over a brawl in a US bar. Police spotted him again when he was trying to buy Russian missile rockets from a Central Asian country. In 1998, he was suspected of creating a fraudulent scheme at the stock exchange through which he stole around 40m dollars. In 2000, Sater met a Moscow developer and Mirax Group owner, Sergey Polonskiy. Polonskiy is in custody now, and his case has been sent to court. He is suspected of construction fraud and especially gross embezzlement. Board member Felix Sater managed to avoid prosecution.”
And while it appears that Sater and Rozov appear to have dodged a bullet in avoiding prosecution as board members of Mirax, not all of the other Mirax board members escaped that fate:
“In addition, the court convicted his business partners, Alexander Paperno and Alexei Pronyakin, and shortened their sentences to three and two years in prison, respectively. The other top managers of Mirax Group escaped persecution.”
And also note that the particular embezzlement charges against Polansky specifically relate to payments the firm was taking in 2007–2008, which presumably overlaps with Sater’s and Rozov’s time on Mirax’s executive board:
“In 2007 and 2008 Polonsky’s companies sold apartments in the ongoing Kutuzovskaya Mile project. A subsidiary of Potok drew up sale agreements that bore no relation to the actual project, collected the money, and was then artificially bankrupted, investigators claim.”
It will be interesting to see what more emerges regarding Sater’s time at Mirax (renamed Potak) and how many other Mirax executives from that time escaped prosecution. If Sater joined the board in 2008 and the fraudulent sales took place in 2007–2008, it’s possible he joined Mirax after many of the fraudulent actions actually happened.
So that’s the overview of IC Experts, a firm that couldn’t even get the Kremlin to return its inquiry, assuming that’s really the case. While there are many possible scenarios that could have resulted in the Trump Tower Moscow project never even getting a reply from the Kremlin, the fact that IC Expert was headed up by a guy who was sitting on the board of Mirax in 2008 might have had something to do with it. Of course, the fact that Sater has been revealed to be an FBI and CIA informant might have had something to do with it too.
McClatchy has a rather interesting update on Felix Sater that relates to both Sater’s criminal history and also the bizarre Ukrainian ‘peace plan’ concocted with Ukrainian MP Andreii Artemenko: It turns out that multiple people involved with the Sater during his days at White Rock Partners back in the 90’s are working in the same suite as Sater in his Long Island, NY, office. White Rock Partners was the firm Sater controlled with Salvator Lauria and Gene Klotsman that became intertwined with the Italian mafia and was busted by federal investigators for scamming investors with pump and dump schemes and it was Lauria and Klotsman who ended up with with Sater as FBI and CIA informants.
So Sater’s company in this suite is Regency Capital Inc. The other firm sharing the suite is Advance Capital, and Regency and Advance Capital both share a three year lease that started in May of 2016. Advance Capital’s chairman, Gary Levi, is described as a longtime Sater associate and the company’s vice president of business development is Salvatore Morreale, cousin of Sater’s Salvatore Lauria. Another figure at Advance Capital, vice president of underwriting Kalsom Kam, is also the registered agent for Global Habitat Solutions, Inc.. And the CEO of Global Habitat Solutions is Sater. So Sater appears to have a number of significant ongoing relationship with his old crew. The same crew with the oddly close working relationship with the FBI and CIA.
And here’s the part that ties into the Ukrainian ‘peace plan’: It turns out the figure who arranged the contact between Sater and Ukrainian PM Andreii Artemenko was Michael Cohen’s brother’s father-in-law, Alexander Oronov. Oronov died in March of this year, and while a business associate who knew Oronov well told McClatchy that he died of cancer and his death wasn’t mysterious, Artemenko claims Oronov was killed for knowing too much. And none other than Salvatore Lauria made a post of Oronov’s obituary saying, “My best to the family. We will never forget Alex, never, never, never.”
So Sater’s Regency Capital shares a suite with a company headed by a long-time associate and Salvator Lauria’s cousin as the vice president of business development. And Lauria himself indicated some sort of deep personal relationship to Michael Cohen’s brother’s father-in-low, Alexander Oronov, who was apparently the guy who arranged the contact between Sater and Artemenko:
“And now a new McClatchy investigation reveals that Sater is again associated with some of the individuals with whom he was implicated in FBI probes of stock manipulation on Wall Street on behalf of Russian and Italian mobsters in the late 1990s. Several of the people who were convicted or faced regulatory sanctions in those probes have been working in the same suite as Sater on Haven Avenue in this affluent Long Island, N.Y., suburb.”
Sater’s 90’s band appears to have reunited. Except for Klotsman who is in prison in Russia:
And and one of the major figures in that band, Salvator Lauria, appears to be well acquainted with the guy who is not only Michael Cohen’s brother’s father-in-law but also the guy apparently arranged the meetings with Andreii Artemenko.
And let’s recall that, contrary the widespread characterization of Artemenko as a ‘pro-Russian’ Ukraine politican, Artemenko’s history and party affiliations appears to align him with the extreme anti-Russian far-right wing of Ukrainian politics who wanted to push a ‘peace plan’ that would make himself president and was going to temporarily lease, not give, Crimea to Russia. That’s part of why it’s going to be very interesting to learn more about Alexander Oronov’s relationship to the Ukrainian political scene. What other MP’s might he know? And, more specifically, was Michael Cohen’s family relations and businesses in Ukraine (don’t forget Cohen’s wife is Ukrainian too) a potential conduit to the Ukrainian anti-Russian far-right.
So here’s a look at another figure close to both Oronov and Artemenko who Cohen also has past dealings with in the Ukrainian ethanol sector: Viktor Topolov, one of the wealthiest people in Ukraine who was appointed the former coal minister under the Yushchenko government in 2005. Topolov was co-owner of Oronov’s ethanol company that Cohen tried to raise funds for. And as the following BuzzFeed article describes, Topolov also has connections to the Ukrainian and Russian mafia. The kind of deep connections that resulted in him getting targeted by Semion Mogilevich’s hitman, Leonid Roytman (So odds are his Ukrainian mob ties a little stronger than his Russian mob ties these days). And Andreii Artemenko is described as one of Topolov’s close associates going back for years:
“By the time of his meeting with the Cohens, Topolov was one of the richest men in Ukraine.”
And not only was he really, rich, but Topolov is describe as “a personal friend” of Ukraine’s president”. And co-owner of Alex Oronov’s ethanol company that Michael Cohen and his brother Bryan pitched to American investors:
Keep in mind that it’s not entirely clear which of Ukrainian president Topolov is a personal friend of: Viktor Yushchenko, who appointed Topolov coal minister, or the current president Petro Poroshenko. But since Poroshenko and Yushchenko are political allies the broader point is that Topolov appears to be politically allied with the current anti-Russian government in Kiev.
And Topolov also described as a close associate with Andreii Artemenko:
And, of course, there’s Topolov’s ties to the Ukrainian and Russian mafia. Ties that presumably became strained somewhat after the Ukrainian civil war broke out. Especially his ties to the Mogilevich gang:
And note how two employees of Topolov, the “Brothers Karamazov”, were on Roytman’s hit list, and one of them, Slava Konstantinovsky, is now a Ukrainian MP:
So to get a better idea of where Topolov and his network lie on Ukraine’s political spectrum (specifically, the pro-or-anti-Russian sides of Ukraine’s political spectrum) it’s worth what type of MP is Slava Konstantinovsky. Well, as this report from September of 2014, demonstrates, Slava Konstantinovsky is the kind of MP that not only personally financed the “volunteer batallions” that were fighting the seperatists in the East but he also joined them himself:
“Konstantinovsky has a shaved head, a wrestler’s build and a scrapbook of pictures showing him squiring Ukrainian beauties around in a Rolls-Royce. Among other things, he owns some of the most expensive restaurants in Kiev. But this summer he paid the costs for 15 volunteers and joined the fight himself.”
And that gives us a pretty good idea of the politics of Slava Konstantinovsky: He paid for 15 volunteers in a militia, probably a far-right neo-Nazi militia given the close ties of Andreii Artemenko to the far-right neo-Nazi Pravy Sektor/Right Sector militia. And this is one of the “Brothers Karamazov” and Viktor Topolov’s employee at a company who were also apparently a mob hitman and who was himself targeted by one of Mogilevich’s hitmen.
So to summarize this all, we’ve thus far learned that:
1. Felix Sater’s Regency Capital shares a suite with a company that employs Salvatore Lauria’s cousin.
2. Lauria appears to have known Ukrainian oligarch Alex Oronov, who died in March.
3. Oronov is an associate of Andreii Artemenko and appears to be the person who introduced Sater to Artemenko.
4. Oronov is a long-time partner and associate of Viktor Topolov and they co-owned the ethanol company Michael Cohen tried to attract investors for.
5. Topolov was appointed coal minister under Vikor Yushchenko.
6. Topolov also had Ukrainian and Russia mob ties, including employeeing the “Brothers Karamzov”, charged with being mafia hitmen.
7. Mogilevich hitman Leonic Roytman apparently tied to kill both Topolov and the Brothers Karamazov.
8. One of the Brothers, Slava Konstantinovsky, became a Ukrainian MP. And then financed and joined one of the “volunteer” battalions fighting the separatists in the East.
So as we can see, Sater and Cohen are clearly a significantly link between the Trump Organization and the former Soviet Union. But as we can also see, the more we learn about those links, the more it appears that Cohen’s ties to Ukraine in particular is specifically to the anti-Russian faction of Ukraine’s oligarchy. It’s quite a twist.
One of the more interesting aspects about the whole #TrumpRussia story is how, when you look at Trump’s history with investments in Russia it’s almost entirely a history of Trump getting rejected by Kremlin. Rejections that included the bid to build Trump Tower Moscow that fizzled out in early 2016 following the failure of Trump Org attorney Michael Cohen to get a reply from Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov about getting approval for the project. It’s the kind of context that raises the question of whether or not the Russian government’s sudden friendliness (the meeting in Trump Tower) with the Trump campaign starting around June of 2016 was partly driven by the fact that the Kremlin had been rejecting Trump for years. It’s not hard to imagine that the Kremlin may have been sensitive to the fact that the they had repeatedly rejected the guy who might be president, including a rejection just earlier that year.
So along those lines, it’s worth noting that two more Russian business proposals were just revealed: one from June of 2016 and one from October 2015.
The inquiry in October 2015 was from Russian real estate developer Sergei Gordeev about a Trump-branded residential complex. But the offer was reportedly rebuffed because Trump Org was already partnering with IC Expert (a firm heading by a Sater associate) on a Trump Tower Moscow deal. The same deal that fizzled in early 2016.
And, surprise!, the proposal from June 2016 was basically Felix Sater trying to rekindle that fizzled Trump Tower Moscow deal. Sater was apparently encouraging Trump Org attorney Michael Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a government-hosted economic forum designed to showcase investment opportunities to the international business community and put these people in contact with Russian government officials. Sater was apparently suggesting that he could arrange for Cohen to meet with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, top financial leaders, and maybe even Putin. Sater also reportedly told Cohen that Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, could help arrange the discussions, which is interesting since the previous Trump Tower deal apparently fell through after Peskov ignored Cohen’s emails when Cohen reached out to him (at Sater’s recommendation) to get some assistance on getting approval for the Trump Tower Moscow project.
Cohen didn’t take Sater up on his offer, but it’s worth noting that Sater reportedly provided Cohen with a formal invitation to the conference from the Russian leader of the event that included a letter signed by a conference officials designed to help Cohen get a visa from the Russian government. It’s notable because when you review all of the various antics involving Sater over the last couple of years it’s not actually clear that Sater has any meaningful contacts with the Russian government and wasn’t just hyping his connections. But it looks like he was able to at least get Cohen this invitation to this event which is the pretty much the only successful instance of Sater somehow using his famed Kremlin ties in this whole #TrumpRussia story. Which raises an interesting question about Sater and his ties to the Russian government: Did Sater actually still have meaningful Kremlin connections in recent years (after he was revealed to be an FBI and CIA informant in 2007–2008) or did Sater’s standing with the Kremlin only rise as Trump’s political prospects rose throughout the GOP primaries? Because don’t forget that Trump was looking like the probably GOP primary winner in June of 2016, which is quite different from how it looked in January of 2016 when Sater and Cohen apparently couldn’t even get an email returned from Putin’s spokesman.
Also don’t forget about the alleged Russian government outreach efforts with the Trump campaign took place in June of 2016 too, so it would be interesting to learn the exact dates of Sater’s emails to Cohen about this. Rob Goldstone sent Donald Trump, Jr. the now notorious email saying the Russian government wants to help Trump on June 3rd, 2016, and the meetings with the Russian delegation in Trump Tower took place on June 9th. Also note the first reports of DNC server hacking happened on June 14th and the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum took place from the June 16–18, 2016. So when exactly did Sater’s outreach to Cohen take place? It seems like a pretty relevant question if we’re supposed to assume that the Russian government was trying to invite a close Trump affiliate to a Russian government-hosted economic forum, ostensibly to get a Trump Tower Moscow deal worked out, at the same time some sort of Trump-Kremlin collusion deal involving hacked material was being negotiated out:
“The June 2016 email to Cohen about the economic conference came from Felix Sater, a Russian-born real estate developer and former Trump business associate. Sater encouraged Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, with Sater telling Cohen that he could be introduced to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, top financial leaders and perhaps Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence. At one point, Sater told Cohen that Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, could help arrange the discussions, according to a person familiar with the exchange”
So Sater makes one more attempt to make the Trump Tower Moscow deal happen. Once again by promising high-level Kremlin contacts. Contacts that never materialized, although in this case it’s hard to say what would have happened if Michael Cohen had taken him up on the offer. And Sater was actually able to provide a formal invitation from the head of the event. But it’s rather difficult to say how significant that is because, after all, Trump was basically the GOP nominee at that point. Moscow clearly had a reason to establishment positive relations with Team Trump, especially given the years of unsuccessful Trump attempts to make a development in Moscow happen include the rejected attempt from January of 2016, just 5 months earlier:
So, like so much of the #TrumpRussia case, we have new information, no new answers, but a whole lot of new questions. Questions that mostly revolve around Felix Sater.
Mystery solved. Specifically, the mystery of who Roger Stone’s intermediary was with Julian Assange during the 2016 election: New York political satirist and radio personality Randy Credico:
“On his radio show, Credico has had both Assange and Stone appear as guests, and he met with Assange in person earlier this year.”
And Credico as the middle-man has been confirmed by Roger Stone:
Although it’s worth noting that when Stone initially declined to identify Credico he denied that even when directly asked that by Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker if Credico was the middle-man back in March. Stone recently texted Lizza say, “A misguided effort to protect Credico who I felt had helped me on an off the record basis. Sorry.”
Also note that when Stone says he initially refused to identify Credico over concerns that the exposure would harm Credico’s career, that’s a career that ostensibly had Credico on the left-wing of the political spectrum:
But as Josh Marshall notes below, if you actually look at Credico’s career, it appears to involve quite a bit of trolling the Democrats:
“Credico now says he supported Jill Stein. But in May 2016 Stone told another radio audience that Credico was starting a group called Sanders Supporters for Trump. He’s a colorful character. Here’s his congressional subpoena that he tweeted out yesterday, signed by Devin Nunes.”
A Sanders Supporters for Trump group. That’s what Roger Stone claimed Credico was going to start back in May of 2016. If true, it’s quite a downfall for Credico given his background in political activism. In the following piece by Max Blumenthal, Credico is characterized is a comedian truth-teller who first gained prominence criticizing Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central American in the mid-80’s and has done quite a bit to bring attention to the Drug War’s impact on minority communities. He also claims he wouldn’t lift of finger to help Trump and described Jeff Sessions as the worst Attorney General he’s ever seen. Whoops:
“Credico first appeared in the national spotlight in 1984 when he trashed Reagan’s Central American proxy wars during a comedy set on the Tonight Show. A look of severe discomfort could be seen on Johnny Carson’s face when Credico likened Reagan’s neoconservative UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick to Eva Braun. Though he was never invited back on the show, the comic’s uncanny impersonations and incendiary political satire won him the admiration of peers like Larry David, Barry Crimmins and Jack Black.”
So Credico first appears in the national spotlight in 1984 trashing Reagan’s Central American proxy wars on the Tonight Show. And spends the next couple of decades crusading against the abuses of the Drug War. He sounds like a reasonable left-wing activist so far:
But then, in 2014, appears to Credico finally kicks his drug and alcohol addictions, an period of his life that appears to coincide with his associations with Julian Assange and other national security whistle-blowers:
And Credico also acknowledges that he and Stone have “cooperated on a few oddball political initiatives over the years,” (does this include “Sanders Supporters for Trump?”) and describes Stone as just “a whipping post” for Congress to go after Assange. Which is about the nicest spin you could lend to Stone given the role he played in the 2016 election dirty tricks operations. But Credico assures us that he hates Trump and wouldn’t want to lift a finger to help him:
It’s quite a story arc: Credico spends decades fighting the good fight while drunk and high. Then he sobers up and start palling around with Julian Assange and Roger Stone and end up assisting a dirty-tricks campaign that helps Donald Trump become President and Jeff Sessions the Attorney General. Sobriety isn’t always a walk in the park.
There’s a new twist to the #TrumpRussia investigation that relates to both the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting initiated by Rob Goldstone’s “The Russian Government wants to help you” email and potentially also the January 2016 outreach efforts by Trump Org attorney Michael Cohen and Felix Sater to get the Kremlin’s help in getting approval for a Trump Tower Moscow project:
First, recall that the Trump Tower Moscow initiative culminated in an email sent by Michael Cohen in January of 2016 to Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov asking for assistance in getting that project approved. Also recall that the email was never responded to according to reports. And while it’s unclear from the reports when exactly in January this email was sent, there is one article that describes it as “mid-January”. So in mid-January we have the Trump Org attorney writing an email to the Kremlin.
With that “mid-January” apparently failed outreach effort by Michael Cohen in mind, let’s take a look at this new report about thread of emails between the Trump team and Russian figures that started up right around this same time and eventually involved Rob Goldstone.
In this case, the emails were about a proposal by an executive at the “VK” website. VK is short for Vkontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook. And it turns out that in January of 2016 an executive at VK, Konstantin Sidorkov, reached out to Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump campaign’s social media director Dan Scavino with a proposal: Why not have the Trump campaign set up a web page on VK as a means of reaching-out to the Russian-American vote? The way Sidorkov put it, such a move would be big news in Russia. And as the following article also notes, while VK doesn’t have much of a presence in the US, it is particularly popular with white nationalist and people who read sites like InfoWars and Brietbart.
But before Mr. Sidorkov sent his proposal, it was none other than Rob Goldstone who initiated the whole thing. The dates when this started aren’t entirely clear, but according to the following article, Scavino wrote back to Rob Goldstone on January 19th, 2016, saying, “Please feel free to send me whatever you have...Thank you so much for looking out for Mr. Trump and his presidential campaign.”
So we have a “mid-January” Michael Cohen/Felix Sater outreach effort to the Kremlin for Trump Tower Moscow right around the same time we have a “mid-January” outreach effort from Goldstone to the Trump team.
It’s unclear what the Trump team did with this offer, but this line of inquiry didn’t stop there. We also learn that Goldstone wrote to Scavino again on Jun 29th, less than three weeks after the notorious June 9th Trump Tower meeting. And in that email Goldstone indicates that this VK web page topic came up during that meeting and Paul Manafort indicated he was in favor of the idea. Interestingly, Ike Kaveladze, a U.S.-based representative for the Agalarovs who attended the Trump Tower meeting, asserts that the topic of a VK page did not come up at all.
Also don’t forget that “Guccifer 2.0” had already started dumping hacked documents on June 15th of 2016, one day after the initial news reports of the DNC hack. So less than three weeks after the June 9th Trump Tower meeting, and two weeks after “Guccifer 2.0” emerges, we have Goldstone back in contact with the Trump campaign trying to encourage the Trump campaign to set up a VK page.
Finally, on November 5th, 2016, days before the election, we have one last push for Sidorkov to get the Trump team to put up a VK page. That appears to be the end of this particular #TrumpRussia thread.
So was Goldstone’s January 2016 outreach to the Trump team a kind of informal Kremlin response to the Cohen/Sater outreach to the Kremlin that same month? It seems possible, although without knowing the exact dates of these events it’s hard to say. But one thing becomes increasingly clear: If the Kremlin really was behind the DNC hacking campaign and subsequent distribution of that material, avoiding obvious connections and a digital paper-trail between the Trump campaign and people who behave like Kremlin operatives definitely was not part of the plan. Which, of course, raises questions about what that plan actually was since leaving Russian fingerprints all over the hacking operation and then encouraging the Trump campaign to leave its own fingerprints all over the various Russian outreach efforts seems like an odd plan. Unless the plan was to create a giant scandal involving the GOP candidate openly colluding with Russian hackers and alleged Kremlin operatives, in which case, mission accomplished:
“The executive at Vkontakte, or VK, Russia’s equivalent to Facebook, emailed Donald Trump Jr. and social media director Dan Scavino in January and again in November of last year, offering to help promote Trump’s campaign to its nearly 100 million users, according to people familiar with the messages.”
An offer to help promote Trump’s campaign. On the Russian version of Facebook. It’s not obvious why the Trump team would have found this offer particularly appealing. But the Trump team was apparently interested anyway. Or at least were interested in conveying interest:
But there was one aspect of the campaign that may have been helped by putting up a Trump VK page: VK is popular with the far-right and white nationalists:
And it was none other than Rob Goldstone who initiated this, first writing to Trump Jr. in mid-January 2016, who forwarded the proposal to Trump social media director Dan Scavino. And it was Scavino who wrote back to Goldstone on January 19th with an open invite for Sidorkov to set Scavino “whatever you have”:
And the VK Trump campaign page proposal pops up again. Thanks to Rob Goldstone. Just a few weeks after the Trump Tower meeting. And while Goldstone’s email at the time make it sounds like this VK page topic came up during the meeting, one of the attendees, Ike Kaveladze, says the topic never actually came up:
And then this same VK Trump page idea is pushed by Sidorkov one last time on November 5th, just days before the election:
It’s all quite a head-scratcher. Sure, it’s not hard to imagine that the operators of VK would be thrilled to have the Trump campaign set up a page on their website. It really would be big news in Russia. And big news in the US. Especially after all those hacked documents started getting released by “Guccifer 2.0”, who kept leaving all sorts of “I’m a Russian hacker” clues in the hacked documents. Don’t forget, “Guccifer 2.0” started releasing hacked documents on June 15th and by June 16th there were already reports concluding that “Guccifer 2.0” was probably a Russian hacker thanks to all the ‘oopsie’ clues left in the metadata of the documents like signing the documents with “Iron Felix”, the nickname of the first head of Soviet intelligence. It took a whole day before the “Guccifer 2.0” persona was labeled a Russian proxy thanks to the inexplicably blatant clues. And two weeks later we have Rob Goldstone once again trying to get the Trump team to set up a VK page.
So once again, the more we learn about the strange case of the Trump team and alleged Russian collusion, the more it appears that, if there was an actual Russian operation to collude with the Trump team, it was an operation where leaving lots and lots of evidence of the plan from was part of the plan. From start to finish. Which seems like a pretty unorthodox and risky plan of this nature.
Here’s one more new twist to the strange tale of Rob Goldstone and his repeated contacts with the 2016 Trump campaign: Goldstone actually started his outreach effort in July of 2015, just a month after Donald Trump announced he was running. And he specifically dangled the possibility of Trump meeting with Vladimir Putin during this initial outreach.
The initial emails were sent on July 22, 2015, to Trump’s longtime personal assistant, Rhona Graff. Goldstone was trying to get Trump to attend the birthday of Aras Agalarov. Recall that Aras and his pop-star son, Emin, licensed Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in 2013. Also recall that one of the 2015 attempts to get Trump Tower Moscow built centered around Trump courting the Agalarovs (this is separate from the Trump Tower Moscow drive Felix Sater was pushing in late 2015/early 2016). And that initial push with the Agalarovs to get the tower built was reportedly scuttled in 2015 after Trump announced his candidacy (whereas Sater’s push to get the tower built started up in the Fall of 2015).
So in July of 2015, a month after Trump announces his candidacy which apparently ended the Trump Tower Moscow deal between Trump and the Agalarovs, we have Rob Goldstone, Emin’s publicist, starting an email correspondence with Rhona Graff that includes offers to meet Putin. And as the article notes, this was just one of several attempts to arrange for a meet with Putin: there was Felix Sater’s offer to get Trump Org lawyer Michael Cohen to travel to an economic conference in St. Petersburgh that would potentially involve a meeting with Putin (to ostensibly work out the Trump Tower Moscow deal Sater and Cohen were pursuing). And there was also the offers given to Trump team foreign policy advisor George Papapdopoulos by the mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud to arrange a Trump meeting with Putin. So we can add an offer by Rob Goldstone in the summer of 2015 to that list of Putin meeting offers.
It’s hard to know what additional insights this gives us. But if Goldstone really was acting as a Kremlin agent as is widely assumed, and this offer to meet Putin was genuine, that would suggest the Kremlin had no problem at all with having Trump openly meeting with Putin well before he even won the GOP primary, which seems like the kind of political risk that could have complicated Trump’s ability to actually win the primary and eventually the presidency. It’s reminiscent of the offer Goldstone made in January of 2016 to get the Trump team to set up a campaign page on VK, the Russian analog of Facebook.
So in addition to arranging the now notorious Trump Tower meeting of June 2016, where Goldstone promised Russian government “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, and in addition to suggesting the Trump team set up a Russian social media campaign page, we can add arranging a meeting with Putin to the list of fun offers Rob Goldstone made to the Trump campaign:
““Maybe he would welcome a meeting with President Putin,” Goldstone wrote in a July 24, 2015, email to Trump’s longtime personal assistant, Rhona Graff. There is no indication Trump or his assistant followed up on Goldstone’s offer.”
Notice how the Putin meeting offer was more of a deal sweetener when it looked like Trump wouldn’t make it to Aras’s birthday party in Moscow:
And notice how this offer to meet Putin is sort of like a make-up offer after Agalarov’s offer to have Trump meet Putin at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant fell through:
So, to some extent, offering to have Trump finally meet Putin is finishing up unfinished business. It’s part of why it would be nice to know if this offer by Goldstone was made before or after the Trump Tower Moscow deal fell through. Was this offer a deal sweetener to keep that whole project going? Did the Trump team have concerns that the Agalarovs didn’t have the political clout to get the tower deal approved and this was a way of projecting that clout? That seems like important context in interpreting this offer.
And, of course, the whole thing is made that much more curious by the fact that the Felix Sater/Michael Cohen outreach effort to the Kremlin in January of 2016 to get the second Trump Tower Moscow project approved fell flat, but then we have George Papadopoulos getting offers of a Putin meeting a couple months later:
Recall that it was Paul Manafort who reportedly turned to the offers Papadopoulos was given, saying, “We need someone to communicate that [Trump] is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
All in all, it would appear that the Trump team did indeed want someone to meet with Putin last year. Ostensibly to arrange a big Trump Tower Moscow deal and who knows what else. But the Trump team didn’t want Trump to actually attend the meeting because that’s too conspicuous. And yet Trump’s partners on that Trump Tower Moscow project- whether it’s the Agalarovs or Felix Sater — really wanted to see a high-profile Trump-Russia event of some sort. It’s like a game of footsie when one side wants the footsie to be as conspicuous as possible and the other side just wants to quietly play footsie. It’s a recipe for some controversial footsie.
Here’s an article that contains a couple of fun-facts about the relationship between Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch: First, the article notes a recent story in Esquire about the ever-shrinking “Never Trump” faction of the conservative movement that includes an interesting fun-fact about the Wall Street Journal’s self-censorship during the campaign. James Freeman, a Ted Cruz backer, wrote a strong piece attacking Trump’s mob ties during the GOP primaries. And Freeman has a second piece ready to go. But as the nomination got closer, and Rupert Murdoch realized Trump could win, that second piece kept getting delayed. Once the piece was finally published, after Trump became the likely Republican nominee, it had turned into a Trump endorsement.
And here’s the second fun-fact relating to Trump and Murdoch: the article notes a New York Times article from back in May that makes a claim that’s both not at all surprising but still rather startling: apparently Murdoch is one of Trumps regular advisors and they speak almost every day:
“Freeman wrote a strong attack on Trump’s Mob dealings, and had a second ready to go. But as Trump got closer to clinching the nomination, Paul Gigot kept delaying publication, saying “it needed work.” Once Trump became the likely Republican nominee, Freeman executed a neat volte-face. “The facts suggest that Mrs. Clinton is more likely to abuse liberties than Mr. Trump,” he wrote. “America managed to survive Mr. Clinton’s two terms, so it can stand the far less vulgar Mr. Trump.””
So the Wall Street Journal was willing to publish strong anti-Trump editorials that attack Trump’s mob dealings...until it looks like Trump is going to win, at which point the WSJ decided it was time to cuddle up to the GOP nominee. And that cuddling has apparently only grown more intense:
A Donald & Rupert daily pow wow. You’d think Trump’s daily binges on Fox News would suffice, but apparently the president and Rupert Murdoch have separate chats too. At least that was the reporting back in May. And it’s hard to see anything since then that was suggest a change. So let’s take a closer look at that article from back in May. It’s an interview by the New York times of the Times’s White House correspondent Maggie Haberman about Trump’s relationship with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnull. A topic that inevitably goes back to Trump’s relationship with Australian-born Rupert Murdoch, especially since it sounds like Murdoch influence the Trump administration on all sorts of US foreign policy, not just in relation to Australia:
“They’ve known each other, obviously, a very long time. The president, when he was a real estate developer and man about town in New York City, was a regular feature on the gossip pages of The New York Post, which Murdoch owns. In the years since, Ivanka Trump has become close with Murdoch, as well as his ex-wife Wendy.”
So Trump and Murdoch have, at a minimum, been long time associates. But in recent years, Ivanka has grown close to Murdoch too, long with Wendy Deng, Murdoch’s ex-wife. And now that Trump is president, Rupert is apparently a regular White House advisor on all sorts of topics. Like policies towards China and Australia:
Again, none of this is particularly surprising, but it is still somewhat shocking. Rupert Murdoch is apparently both the presidential shadow advisor along with being the CEO of the a media organization that’s basically ‘Trump TV’ at this point.
But what is surprising about all this is that somehow, despite all this media focus on #TrumpRussia, the Murdochs have never been swept up in the #TrumpRussia investigation. After all, let’s not forget about all those rumors that Wendy Deng was dating Vladimir Putin, Ivanka and Wendy traveling together in August of 2016. Deng reportedly introduced Ivanka to to the wife of Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch seen as close to Putin. And then there’s the fact that Rob Goldstone — the publicist at the center of the notorious Trump Tower meeting — worked for a Murdoch-owned British tabloid The Sun (back in the 80’s) before becoming a publicist in the music industry. And while Deng denies the Putin-romance rumors (and there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of that beyond the rumors), it’s not like merely being a rumor is something that would stop a story from becoming enmeshed in the #TrumpRussia speculations. And sure, Goldstone’s employment at Murdoch publications was a while ago, but it’s not like decades-old relationships aren’t relevant when you’re trying to investigate and discover hidden relationships and motives that could be driving an elaborate conspiracy.
So how is it possible that the Murdochs managed to keep themselves out the this #TrumpRussia story almost entirely while being tangentially tied to it in a number of different ways?
Here’s another relationship between Rupert Murdoch’s family and the cast of characters involved with the #TrumpRussia antics of 2016. It’s a tangential relationship but still worth noting, especially given the reports that Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch talk daily: it turns out Emin Agalarov — the pop-start son of Aras Agalarov — was married to Leyla Aliyeva, the daughter of the long-time president of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev. They divorced in 2015, but reportedly remain on friendly terms, with Emin helping raise Leyla’s adopted daughter. And while the Agalarovs are generally referred to as “Russian oligarchs”, as we’ll see, they’re actually better described as “Russian/Azerbaijani oligarchs”.
And don’t forget that Azerbaijan happens to be one of the countries Donald Trump tried to build a Trump Tower in back in 2012, partnering with the notoriously corrupt Transportation Minister on a Trump Tower Baku project that was never completed.
Here’s where the Murdochs tie in: Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, is reportedly quite chummy with Emin’s ex-wife Leyla. So chummy that Elisabeth’s husband, Matthew Freud (now ex-Husband), helped “launch” Leyla’s status as a London socialite back in 2011. Again, it’s just a tangential tie to whole #TrumpRussia investigation, but one of a number of tangential ties which is why it’s rather noteworthy.
So first, here’s an 2011 about Leyla Aliyeva and her ties to a number of UK socialites. She was the front person for a number of Azerbaijani cultural outreach events in the UK that year, and as the article notes, it was Elisabeth Murdoch’s husband who put on one of those events:
“Leyla is married to dishy, U.S.-educated singer Emin Agalarov, whose billionaire father is close to Russian premier Vladimir Putin. She also has a close group of friends, once running up a bill of £300,000 for Cristal champagne at a gathering for a dozen girlfriends.”
That was 2011, when the then-wife of Emin Agalarov was hobnobbing with UK socialites and promoting Azerbaijan in a series of London events. Events that included the “Flying Carpet to Fairy Tale” exhibition of antique Azerbaijani rugs that was put on by Elisabeth Murdoch’s husband’s organization:
Note that Elisabeth Murdoch and Matthew Freud have since divorced, something that reportedly pleased Rupert Murdoch since he never particularly liked Matthew Freud, a man considered one of London’s premier publicists. And the event that reportedly doomed their marriage was the revelation that Rupert’s ex-wife, Wendy Deng, has an affair with Tony Blair. Freud was Blair’s PR man/confidant and Elisabeth and Matthew were considered a ‘golden couple’ in the UK press. So Elisabeth Murdoch is far more than just Rupert Murdoch’s daughter. She’s a TV executive who was married to one of the most influential men in the UK. And that’s the kind of social circle Leyla Aliyeva was involved with.
Now, in the above article, Elisabeth Murdoch is described as a mere guests at the event. But as the following article notes, Elisabeth is considered part of Leyla’s social circle, along with the Duke of York — Prince Andrew — and Lord Mendelson.
As the following article also notes, Leyla and her sister were both caught up in the “Panama Papers” scandal. It turns out the Aliyev family’s vast fortune of UK properties were managed by a firm secretly incorporated in the British Virgin Islands in 2015, right around the same time Leyla and Emin were divorced. The firm, Exaltation Limited, was purchased by Mossack Fonseca, the paper at the center of the Panama Papers scandl. So after Leyla and Emin get divorced, the Aliyev family’s vast secret empire got a bit of a secret makeover. And that was just one of the secret trusts set up by the family. The Panama Papers also revealed was a second trust set up on behalf the Aliyev family, Ata Holdings, set up by Azerbaijan’s long-time minister of taxes Fazil Mammadov.
And what this all tells us is that Leyla wasn’t just the daughter of Azerbaijan’s long-standing strong-man president who happened to be a London socialite and friends with some of the most influential people in the UK like Prince Andrew and Elisabeth Murdoch. She is also a key player in managing her family’s ill-gotten wealth, a lot of that wealth is in UK properties, UK firms were used to set up the secret holdings:
“Leyla and Arzu Aliyeva – who have cultivated high profiles inside and outside their home country – are shareholders in Exaltation Limited, leaked documents reveal. The company was incorporated in April 2015 with the purpose of “holding UK property”. The London law firm that set it up, Child & Child, claimed – wrongly – that the two women had no political connections.”
So Leyla and Emin get divorced in 2015, and the London law firm that set up this secret offshore company to manage their real estate assets claims Leyla and her sister had no political connections. And that gives us an idea of one of the key mechanism the global super-rich use to avoid scrutiny while setting up of offshore business in tax shelters: elite firms that play dumb. Really, really dumb:
Yes, apparently Leyla and her sister were not “PEPs” — politically exposed persons. At least for the purposes of setting up an offshore tax shelter firm and avoiding extra scrutiny they weren’t PEPs. And these two non-PEPs just happened to be a socialite with friends like Prince Andrew, Lord Mandelson, and Elisabeth Murdoch:
So just how close was Leyla to Matthew Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch? Well, according to the following piece in Foreign Policy, Matthew Freud actually threw “a caviar-rich London party” in 2011 to “launch” Leyla in British high society:
“In addition to being a high-stakes property owner in the Gulf, first daughter Leyla Aliyeva is also fashion and art junkie — and a journalist. She’s editor-in-chief of the “style magazine” Baku, a publication financed by her father and published by Condé Nast Contract Publishing in London. Something of an Azeri Kim Kardashian, Aliyeva of course needs good PR people to help maintain her jet-set lifestyle. Enter Matthew Freud, the son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch and head of the London-based PR firm Freud Communications. Having reportedly rejected contracts from Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi 10 times, and from ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak five times, Freud was clearly more amenable to a request for representation by the Azeri dauphine. In 2011, he organized what the British satirical weekly Private Eye called “a caviar-rich London party” to “launch” Aliyeva in British high society. Guests at this soirée included Lord Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s onetime political svengali; Freud’s wife and Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth; Lord Browne, the former head of BP; Ed Vaizey, the current British culture minister; Stuart Rose, formerly the top man at Marks & Spencer; and Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian oligarch proprietor of the Independent and Evening Standard newspapers, and son of billionaire businessman Alexander Lebedev.*”
All in all, it would appear that Leyla Aliyeva, now the ex-wife of Emin Agalarov, was mighty close to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter. So close that Elisabeth and her husband helped launch Leyla’s UK socialite status.
And let’s not forget that the Trump family has its own history of dealings in Azerbaijan and the Aliyev clan. Shady dealings that involve a stunning lack of due diligence, of course.
There was another recent twist in the #TrumpRussia investigation. This one again focuses on George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign’s young ‘foreign-policy advisor’ who become a contact person between the Trump campaign and a cast of characters with Kremlin ties like Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor who told Papadopoulos Moscow had thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and a woman claiming to be Vladimir Putin’s niece.
It turns out Papadopoulos decided to talk about his contacts with these Kremlin-connected individuals with a third party: The Australian government. Not directly, but that’s basically what Papadopoulos did when he reportedly got very drunk in May of 2016 and talked with Alexander Downer, Australia’s top diplomat in Britain, about his new Russian friends. What exactly he told Downer isn’t clear, but it was apparently salacious enough that the information helped to prompt the FBI into quietly opening up its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. Curiously, though that information wasn’t actually passed along to the US government until a couple of months after Papadopoulos’s drunken chat with Downer, after the DNC emails started getting released.
So what was it that prompted Papadopoulos to open up to Australia’s top diplomat in the UK? That’s not at all clear. It’s also unclear whether Downer was fishing for this information or if Papadopoulos brought it up on his own. The meeting at the bar came reportedly came about from a series of connections that started when an Israeli Embassy official introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to another Australian diplomat in London. And Australia was apparently just one of a number of foreign intelligence agencies were were sending the US government information related to the #TrumpRussia investigation, with Britain and the Netherlands intelligence agencies also sending info. So who knows how many other people Papapdopoulos was ‘spilling the beans’ to during this period.
But we do know that Alexander Downer is a conservative Australian politicians from the center-right Liberal Party. Perhaps Papadopoulos figured they were on the same ideological ‘team’ and it was safe to talk about this? Who knows, but like a number of aspects of this investigation, it begs the question that keeps coming up given the characters involved in all this: “what did Rupert Murdoch know and when did he know it?”
No, Rupert Murdoch isn’t directly involved with this latest twist, but when you step back and look at the situation — a situation where the likely GOP nominee’s campaign staff was blabbering to a top Australian diplomat about an alleged Kremlin dirty tricks operation that the GOP nominee was apparently fine with — it’s hard to imagine that Rupert Murdoch didn’t come up in the “what do we do with this information?” conversations that the Australian government must have been quietly having. After all, Murdoch is both one of the most prominent and influential Australians in the world AND the media God Father for the Republican Party. He’s the perfect guy for the Australian government to go to with this type of information. So when a right-wing Australian government wants to share something extremely sensitive to the US establishment that might be damaging to the GOP in the middle of a presidential election, how would it go about doing that? It seems like having a quiet chat with Rupert would be an obvious choice for an initial outreach to informally talk about what’s to be done.
Did some sort of quiet outreach to the Murdochs take place? We don’t get to know. But now we know that the Australian government did pass this information along to the US government a couple of months of Downer received it. After the hacked emails started getting released. And that information played a major role in getting the FBI countintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign started in the first place:
“Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.”
So the Australian government gets all this info directly from George Papadopoulos about the Trump campaign’s discussions with people Papadopoulos believes are Russian government operatives back in May of 2016, then the hacked emails get released, and then, some time in July of 2016 they pass this info to the FBI, helping launch the counterintelligence investigation. Although as the article notes, this wasn’t the only info the FBI was working with. There was also info from British and Dutch intelligence, and a trip to Moscow by Carter Page that also raised eyebrows. But based on this report it would appear that it was the information the Australians handed over that played the biggest role in launching the investigation:
So whatever Papadopoulos told Downer, it was apparently quite significant.
It also all points towards one of the other adds aspects of this whole mess: Given the fact that the hacking operation was filled with “I’m a Russian hacker!” clues — like the Cyrillic metadata with the name “Iron Felix” that was almost immediately used to blame the hack on Russia — it might be tempting to assume these clues were left intentionally for strategic purposes if the Kremlin was actually behind that operation. Like, maybe it was determined that the Republican party is so fundamentally corrupt that Moscow could effectively buy off the Republican party and get better treatment on things like sanctions by openly hacking Hillary Clinton. And yet we have one story after another about people who act like Kremlin operatives openly approaching the Trump campaign and openly talking about hacked emails. In other words, the high profile “I’m a Russian hacker!” clues were completely unnecessary in terms of sending a message to the GOP. Those messages were already being privately sent through people like Papadopoulos or the infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 2016. It’s not as if the Trump team wouldn’t have had reason to assume it was Kremlin hackers if none of those “I’m a Russian hacker!” clues had been left. And it would have been a lot easier for Trump to actually improve relations with Russia if he wasn’t embroiled in a giant Russian collusion scandal that probably wouldn’t have ever happened if it wasn’t for all those “I’m a Russian hacker!” clues. It’s as if the Kremlin was actively trying to get caught despite the fact that getting caught ruins so much of the potential value of such an operation.
And yet here we are, with an unfolding investigation that reveals one behind-the-scenes point of contact after another between the Trump campaign and apparent Kremlin operatives in the lead up to a high-profile hacking operation filled with in-your-face “I’m a Russian hacker!” clues all over the place. And now we learn that the Trump campaign itself was sharing this kind of information with one of Australia’s top diplomats. And who knows who else. If the Kremlin was actively trying to get caught for some reason it couldn’t have chosen a better partner.
Here’s another Rupert Murdoch-related twist/mystery to the Trump White House escapades: There appears to be quite a bit of shock within the White House over the brutal portrayal of Trump and his entire team in Michael Wolff’s new Fire and Fury book. And to some extent that shock might be understandable given that the book was on Wolff’s exclusive access to the White House. They probably didn’t expect the journalist who was given exclusive access to end up writing a book that portrays Trump as a demented lunatic his entire staff is scare of and makes Steve Bannon into Trump’s Judas (or more like an anti-Judas given who Trump is).
But here’s the Murdoch twist: Wolff was also the guy who wrote the 2008 book The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch about Rupert Murdoch. A book that also involved Wolff getting extensive inside access and also resulted in Murdoch feeling like a much nastier story was written about him than he expected.
So given how long Murdoch and Trump have known each other and how often they reportedly talk to each other, you have to wonder what, if anything, Murdoch told Trump about having Wolff act as the exclusive White House inside reporter. And as the following piece notes, Murdoch has already responded to this question, but it’s a rather curious response:
“I’m not the only one to arrive at that observation. On Twitter today, Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman wrote, “One of the baffling things about Trumpworld giving access to Wolff: all they needed to do was call Murdoch and he would have said don’t cooperate b/c Wolff had written nasty book on him. And Jared/Trump speak to Murdoch all the time!””
It’s a pretty obvious question: how did the Trump White House, which has long-standing and extensive ties to the Murdochs, end up picking the exact same biographer that left Murdoch feeling so burned a decade ago?
And look at Murdoch’s response to that open question:
“I kept waiting for that call to be made”
WHAT!? “That call” reportedly happens almost every day. Trump and Murdoch are phone buddies!
But Wolff apparently managed to flatter the Trumps enough to get the deal. And when you read the reports from Wolff back in February of 2017, right around the time Wolff was trying to get permission from the White House to write the book, it’s not inconceivable that the Trumps really were quite flattered by Wolff(assuming they never discussed this with the Murdochs, which is less conceivable):
“Wolff, a source said, is attempting to convince the White House to grant him access for the book. A few weeks ago, he was seen having lunch at the fading Manhattan media power lunch joint Michael’s with special counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, which turned heads even at a restaurant known for star sightings.”
Just a couple weeks after the inauguration Wolff is openly trying to get a book deal and is seen chatting with Kellyanne Conway. So there was already reporting about Wolff trying to get this book deal, and that reporting included warnings about how Wolff treated Murdoch! It’s just amazing.
But note how Wolff didn’t just start cozying up to the Trump team at that point. He had been buttering them up for months, including a largely flattering profile of Steve Bannon shortly after the election:
So is it possible that it wasn’t actually the Trump family that grant Wolff this access but instead Conway or Bannon? Well, according to the following article, the White House is now claiming that it was Bannon who was granting Wolff most of his access, and Trump is claiming that he turned down Wolff’s book request numerous times:
“Upstairs, Wolff said he told Trump he’d like to write a book. “A book?” Trump responded, according to an account Wolff published Thursday in the Hollywood Reporter. “I hear a lot of people want to write books.””
That was apparently the first time Wolff brought up the idea of a book to Trump. Eight days before the inauguration. But notice how Wolff was clearly given prior permission to actually approach Trump and float the idea:
So Wolff was “the one reporter” who was allowed to actually ascend Trump Tower that day. Someone clearly gave him access just to do that. And then the access flowed. Conspicuously. For months:
Semi-Permanent residence on a couch in the lobby where he could watch the daily interactions of top players. That’s some pretty conspicuous access!
And yet the White House line now is that this was all Steve Bannon’s doing, and Trump claims he granted no access at all and turned Wolff down many times:
It was all Bannon’s doing! That’s the White House line at this point.
And when you read the following piece by Wolff summarizing his experience, it does appear to be the case that Bannon was the person most openly critical of Trump. Whether or not he was directly confiding in Wolff or Wolff picked all this up while sitting on the couch in the lounge is unclear. But Wolff clearly had no shortage of highly critical comments from Bannon about Trump. Bannon even reportedly portrayed himself as the person really in charge, with Trump just a figurehead.
And yet the following piece also makes clear that it wasn’t just Bannon expressing these view. As Wolff puts it, “my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.” So while Bannon might have been the most caustic in his remarks about Trump, he apparently was far from the only one who felt that way:
“Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump’s off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet “President Bannon” was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House’s policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don’t-blame-me eye roll.”
President Bannon. That was the spin Bannon himself apparently tried to put on the situation.
But it sure doesn’t sound like Bannon was the only one talk to Wolff. Apparently, “everybody in the West Wing tried, with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here”:
And Trump himself appears to be well aware of this internal panic with his staff, since he was apparently calling his billionaire friends every day to complain about his staff. Billionaire friends that, as Wolff notes, frequently included Rupert Murdoch:
“One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: “What a fuc king moron,” said Murdoch after one call.”
So Murdoch used to just express contempt for Trump, but now they’re regular buddies, at least to Trump’s face. But not behind his back, when Murdoch ridicules Trump as a “fuc king moron”. That’s a pretty remarkable admission. Because the Murdochs and Trumps have been hanging out together for years. Ivanka and Rupert’s ex-wife Wendi have reportedly been “dear friends” for the past 12 years and Ivanka is even helping oversee a $300 million trust fund for Rupert and Wendi’s two youngest daughters.
So does Rupert really call Trump a “fuc king moron” in private? Well, if so, might that be part of why he never bothered to warn Trump about Wolff? Don’t forget, this book Wolff wrote wasn’t some surprise no one knew about. As we saw above, there were articles about Wolff trying to score this book access just a few weeks into the Trump administration. So what are the odds Murdoch didn’t know Wolff was writing this book? Heck, how did Wolff learn that Murdoch still calls Trump a “fuc king moron” in the first place? Was Murdoch also interviewed by Wolff for this book? Is this another Trumpian open secret?
It’s all part of seemingly endless maelstrom of chaotic mystery swirling about this administration. But if it really is the case that Murdoch basically thinks nothing of Trump, despite the years of apparent friendship between the two families, it certainly adds a new twist the parallel mystery of what Rupert knew about the Trump campaign’s games of Russian footsie and when did he know it?
Here’s something we can add to the list of ‘things Roger Stone does that we should be keeping an eye on’: lobbying the US government for military operations on behalf of clients who would benefit from those military operations:
“Stone recently disclosed that he had done lobbying work for a Buffalo-area company that acts as a middleman for the sale of African livestock to clients around the world. In his disclosure form, he formally said that he is pressing for “commodity rights and security” in Somalia and working on issues related to economic policy and commodity trading.”
That’s how Roger Stone described his lobbying work on his disclosure forms: work on issues related to economic policy and commodity trading. But based on his text messages with the Daily Beast it sounds like his ‘economic policy and commodity trading’ lobbying involves quite a bit of foreign policy lobbying with an emphasis on promoting US military operations:
“The goal, he said, is to achieve a more stable security situation in Somalia that will allow his client to more freely conduct business in that country. And that, he said, calls for an aggressive U.S. military posture.”
And note the timing of Stone’s lobbying work: he begins working for Capstone in May of 2017, just as the Trump administration was increasing military operations in Somalia. But it doesn’t appear that Stone actually registered as lobbyist for this work until the end of 2017.
So what’s Stone’s explanation? Well, he insists he didn’t actually do any “reportable lobbying” until November and that reportable lobbying consistently of two casual conversations with a single member of Congress:
So Capstone hired Stone in May, just as the US government was significantly reshaping its policies regarding Somalia, and the company didn’t have him do no actual lobbying on the matter until November. And by claiming that the lobbying effort started in November, instead of May, Stone avoids violating the lobbyist disclosure rules that state he has 45 days to register as a lobbyist. In other words, the story about how he barely did any lobbying work and it didn’t start until November of 2017 is the necessary story to avoid getting in trouble for not filing as a lobbyist.
And don’t forget that it would have been really inconvenient for Stone to have registered as a lobbyist in the middle of 2017 given all the focus on around regarding the #TrumpRussia investigation. So this story about his casual lobbying starting in November would also have served the purpose of allowing him to avoiding that awkward disclosure.
And note how Stone refers to “reportable lobbying” that only began in November. That raises questions about any unreportable lobbying Stone may have been engaging in during this period. Because if there’s one area that Roger Stone is a suitable lobbyists for it’s lobbying Donald Trump. Obviously. And yet here was have this odd tale about Roger Stone getting hired by a firm doing something other than lobbying, and then suddenly doing some casual lobbying in November. And during this same time frame, starting in May of 2017, the goals of Stone’s client — like seeing a much greater US military involvement in Somalia — have been achieved.
Also note how this is the first lobbying client Stone has had in 17 years:
So it’s not like this is routine work for Stone. It used to be routine for Stone to lobby decades ago when he part of the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, and Stone. But it’s been 17 years since he did that. And now, when his long-time friend Trump becomes President, Stone jumps back into the lobbying business.
All in all, it sure looks like Roger Stone is now selling his services as a Trump Whisperer, without actually admitting to it. Maybe that’s not what’s happening, but it’s hard to imagine Stone’s deep and long-standing ties to Trump weren’t part of why they hired him. It’s obvious he’s talking to Trump on regular basis. Might he mention some of his clients’ work to the President? Well, if you listen to Stone’s explanation, he explicitly says he did not lobby anyone in the Executive branch:
““I did not lobby anyone in the Executive branch so [the Capstone contract] had no impact on U.S./Somalia policy,” Stone added.”
That sure sounds like Stone is ruling out the possibility that he mentioned any of his client’s issues to Trump during their many private conversations that are likely taking place on a regular basis despite the denials. The way Stone puts it, he wasn’t actually hired to be a lobbyist. It just sort of happened casually and now he’s registering as a lobbyist as a precautionary measure:
That’s Stone’s story and he’s sticking to it. #DrainTheSwamp.
Also keep in mind that, with Erik Prince’s private contractors already operating in Somalia, Roger Stone isn’t the only shady figure in Trump’s orbit who might be Trump-Whispering regarding the US policy in Somalia. #TheSwampLovesMercenaries.
This should be interesting: The House Intelligence Committee unanimously voted to release a declassified version of the congressional testimony of Fusion GPS Founder Glenn R. Simpson. This is a week after after Senator Feinstein released a transcript of his Senate Intelligence Committee interview, so it’s not like the Committee necessarily wanted this released. But it’s out there and filled with all sorts of tidbits.
For starters, Simpson basically described Bill Browder as a scofflaw tax cheat.
But check out this interesting unconfirmed report Simpson relayed about Nigel Farage and Julian Assange that provides potentially significant explanation of how the hacked DNC data made its way to Wikileaks: Simpson heard unconfirmed reports that it was Nigel Farage who delivered it via a thumb drive during one of his trips to the Ecuadoran embassy in London:
““I’ve been told and have not confirmed that Nigel Farage had additional trips to the Ecuadoran Embassy than the one that’s been in the papers and that he provided data to Julian Assange,” Simpson testified.”
So Simpson hears an unconfirmed report that Farage provided some sort of data to Assange. And it was in a digital format since it was a thumb drive:
And that was just one of the interesting things he passed along about the Trump team, the UKIP movement, and Assange. Because when you look at the fully declassified testimony, Simpson arrived at the conclusion that Steve Bannon’s relationship with the UKIP movement figures prominently in this story. Additionally, hwne they looked into Roger Stone and his relationships “the trail led to sort of international far right.” And while Simpson doesn’t believe Cambridge Analytica specifically acted as the “nucleus” for all this, but he does feel the Mercers are significant. And this all appeared to be information that was gathered near the end of their work on this issue and was independent of “the Steele stuff” (Christopher Steele’s work). Here’s an excerpt of that testimony (from pages 99–101 of the declassified document):
“MR. SCHIFF: And didn’t you, during the course of your work, uncover any information regarding a connection between Trump or those around him and Wikileaks?”
‘Uncover any connections between the Trump team and Wikileaks?’ Yeah, that seems like a pretty important question. And based on Simpson’s response, a lot more questions should follow:
“And so I have formed my own opinions that went through — that there was a somewhat unacknowledged relationship between the Trump people and the UKIP people and that the path to Wikileaks ran through that. And I still think that today.”
And the specific people Simpson views as important to this Trump campaign/UKIP/Wikileaks connection was a Ted Malloch — a US businessman who Trump tried to appoint as the ambassador to the EU but chose to drop him after EU protests over Malloch’s anti-EU views — and the Mercers:
And note how, while none of this has been confirmed, Simpson suggested that these things can actually be sorted out by an official inquiry:
Yeah, an officially inquiry into this seems in order:
So Simpson testifies that he heard about Farage made more trips to Assange than previously reported and delivered a thumb drive during one of those trips. But he hasn’t confirmed this. So, at a minimum, there should obviously be an official inquiry into the timing of that trip involving the thumb drive? Like, did it happen before or after the release of the DNC documents by Wikileaks? And if there isn’t an official inquiry after this public revelation...well, that will confirm something else.
This should be interesting: The House Intelligence Committee unanimously voted to release a declassified version of the congressional testimony of Fusion GPS Founder Glenn R. Simpson. This is a week after after Senator Feinstein released a transcript of his Senate Intelligence Committee interview, so it’s not like the Committee necessarily wanted this released. But these twin testimonies are now out there and filled with all sorts of tidbits.
For starters, Simpson basically described Bill Browder as a scofflaw tax cheat during the Senate testimony.
But check out this interesting unconfirmed report Simpson relayed about Nigel Farage and Julian Assange that provides potentially significant explanation of how the hacked DNC data made its way to Wikileaks: Simpson heard unconfirmed reports that it was Nigel Farage who delivered it via a thumb drive during one of his trips to the Ecuadoran embassy in London:
““I’ve been told and have not confirmed that Nigel Farage had additional trips to the Ecuadoran Embassy than the one that’s been in the papers and that he provided data to Julian Assange,” Simpson testified.”
So Simpson hears an unconfirmed report that Farage provided some sort of data to Assange. And it was in a digital format since it was a thumb drive:
And that was just one of the interesting things he passed along about the Trump team, the UKIP movement, and Assange. Because when you look at the fully declassified testimony, Simpson arrived at the conclusion that Steve Bannon’s relationship with the UKIP movement figures prominently in this story. Additionally, hwne they looked into Roger Stone and his relationships “the trail led to sort of international far right.” And while Simpson doesn’t believe Cambridge Analytica specifically acted as the “nucleus” for all this, but he does feel the Mercers are significant. And this all appeared to be information that was gathered near the end of their work on this issue and was independent of “the Steele stuff” (Christopher Steele’s work). Here’s an excerpt of that testimony (from pages 99–101 of the declassified document):
“MR. SCHIFF: And didn’t you, during the course of your work, uncover any information regarding a connection between Trump or those around him and Wikileaks?”
‘Uncover any connections between the Trump team and Wikileaks?’ Yeah, that seems like a pretty important question. And based on Simpson’s response, a lot more questions should follow:
“And so I have formed my own opinions that went through — that there was a somewhat unacknowledged relationship between the Trump people and the UKIP people and that the path to Wikileaks ran through that. And I still think that today.”
And the specific people Simpson views as important to this Trump campaign/UKIP/Wikileaks connection was a Ted Malloch — a US businessman who Trump tried to appoint as the ambassador to the EU but chose to drop him after EU protests over Malloch’s anti-EU views — and the Mercers:
And note how, while none of this has been confirmed, Simpson suggested that these things can actually be sorted out by an official inquiry:
Yeah, an officially inquiry into this seems in order:
So Simpson testifies that he heard about Farage made more trips to Assange than previously reported and delivered a thumb drive during one of those trips. But he hasn’t confirmed this. So, at a minimum, there should obviously be an official inquiry into the timing of that trip involving the thumb drive? Like, did it happen before or after the release of the DNC documents by Wikileaks? And if there isn’t an official inquiry after this public revelation...well, that will confirm something else.
Here’s another story related to the question of how Wikileaks actually obtained the hacked DNC data. It’s about Andy Müller-Maguhn, a German hacker close to Julian Assange who makes monthly trips to visit Assange in the Ecuador’s London embassy. US investigators have reportedly had a keen interest in him in relation to understanding how Wikileaks operates.
During one of those trips in 2016 he delivered a thumb drive. But he assures us that it just contained personal messages for Assange. Although he also says that he doesn’t actually know what was on the thumb drive.
Müller-Maguhn also characterizes the idea of passing that hacked info to Wikileaks via a thumb drive as “insane”. He asserts it would only make sense to transmit data of that nature through encrypted channels. A former WikiLeaks associate said that Müller-Maguhn was one of the people who oversaw submissions through WikiLeaks’ anonymous submission server in 2016, although Müller-Maguhn denies this.
So that’s something to keep in mind given the recent story about Glenn R. Simpson testifying that he heard that Nigel Farage gave Assange a thumb drive during a trip to visit Assange in 2016: Assange gets monthly visits from a German hacker who admits to delivering a thumb drives in 2016:
“Exactly how the Russians delivered the email trove to WikiLeaks is the subject of an ongoing examination by U.S. and European intelligence officials. As part of their effort to understand the group’s operations, these officials have taken an intense interest in Müller-Maguhn, who visits Assange monthly, U.S. officials said.”
Monthly visits because Assange stopped using email for security reasons. Yeah, this seems like someone who would be a person of interest for US officials. And any other officials around the world who are trying to understand how Wikileaks operates. Especially if this guy really was one of the people administering Wikileaks’s submission server:
So the guy who allegedly oversaw submissions to Wikileaks is also making monthly visits to Assange. Huh, yeah, that seems like a pretty good reason to suspect he might be transmitting the actual leaked info to Assange. And yet Müller-Maguhn totally denies that he would think about transmitting the information in such a manner because, “that would be insane”:
But here’s what’s so odd about that assertion that it would be “insane” to transport information to Assange on thumb drive: He clearly has the capacity to give Assange information via thumb drive because he just admitted to doing exactly that. IN 2016! So why exactly is it “insane” for him to do so? It seems like a tried and true method.
This all raises the question of how confident Assange is about getting sensitive information at all over the internet from the Ecuadoran embassy. After all, it’s not like governments around the world don’t know where he is. So he’s presumably relying on all the various Cypherphunk tools popularized by Edward Snowden to interface with the internet like Tor to obscure his traffic and strong end-to-end encryption for communication. And yet Wikileaks has no doubt seen the reports about how Tor — which was developed with US government money — is potentially vulnerable to nation-state adversaries. Especially the NSA. And while strong encryption with a standard that hasn’t been compromised should theoretically protect the internet traffic from being decrypted (until super quantum computers or something like gets developed), there’s still going to be the danger of Assange having his internet-connected computers getting compromised by some undisclosed vulnerability. But if he has a computer that isn’t connected the internet at all for security reasons, a thumb drive for delivering materials would be the only real option for accessing the various submissions Wikileaks is routinely getting.
We already saw how Assange stopped using email over security reasons, which is why he was getting these monthly visits. And that indicates Assange is worried about internet traffic getting monitored. In other words, for someone like Assange, who is no doubt be a prime target for surveillance, it seems like a thumb drive handed to him from his friend who visits once a month might be the less risky method of delivery. Especially if this guy is making these visits on a monthly basis and it’s established that he can do so without too much trouble.
And note this strange admission that ties back to the reports about Assange conversing with Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 campaign over Twitter direct messages (DMs): According to Müller-Maguhn, the only way to reliably contact Assange is over Twitter DMs:
So Assange won’t use email out of security reasons. But he will user Twitter DMs, something that Twitter could potentially make accessible to all sorts of law enforcement agencies.
And keep in mind that Twitter direct messages aren’t a great way to send anything other than text messages or images and videos. So that might explain the need for thumb drive visits from Müller-Maguhn: it’s the only way he can access anything other than personal messages from the rest of the Wikileaks team because he’s justifiably too paranoid about getting those files over the internet. And that would imply he’s only sending things over Twitter DMs that he doesn’t mind governments learning about. You have to wonder how Don Jr. feels about that.
Here’s a story that was pretty much inevitable: Felix Sater just opened up to BuzzFeed about his years of work as an undercover US informant. He says he’s doing this to clear up his reputation.
Most of the content in the article has been reported on before. But there were some new things. For instance, it turns out his his value as a CIA informant on al Qaeda draws heavily from the relationship he developed with an intelligence officer working for the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. And this officer, in turn, has ties to Mullah Omar’s personal secretary, who was at the time living inside a cave with Osama bin Laden. So Sater really was a significant intelligence source regarding al Qaeda.
And the range of topics he was providing the US government information went far beyond tracking al Qaeda. For more than a decade he was providing the FBI with intelligence on everything from the mob to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. And according to to current FBI agents, Sater is still a source for the bureau. He apparently never stopped being a source and actually has past working relationships with six of the members of Robert Mueller’s ‘Russia probe’ team
He also started working as an informant before he was caught in the a stock pump-and-dump scheme, so it doesn’t appear that he become an informant under threat of prosecution. Even more remarkable, it was confirmed by two people working for the government that Sater did all this work for free. Or, as Sater puts it, for love of country and the “thrill” of it:
“Effectively, he has been a spy — but for the United States. For the first time, BuzzFeed News has verified the surprising sweep of Sater’s undercover work and many of his specific exploits. He worked as an asset for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (or DIA) and tracked Osama bin Laden. Then he worked for more than a decade for the FBI, providing intel on everything from the mob to North Korea’s drive for nuclear weapons. He still operates as a source for the bureau, according to two current FBI agents.”
Felix Sater, the international man of mystery, is a little less mysterious now. But still pretty mysterious.
Part of that mystery revolves around the apparent fact that Sater started working as a US informant even before he was in legal trouble over the pump-and-dump scheme:
And that work as a US informant apparently happened somewhat spontaneously in 1995 while Sater was in Russia working on some telecommunications deals for AT&T and others. Sate was having dinner with a group of Russians in Moscow when he was introduced to an American defense contractor, Milton Blane. Blane sets up a meeting with Sater, informs Sater that the people he was having dinner with were high-level Russian intelligence agents, Blane asked Sater if he would work as an asset, and Sater accepted. That’s the story for how Sater’s life as an international man of mystery who works for free began:
And some of this spy work includes work on the North Korean nuclear missile program and catching Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminals:
But it’s Sater’s work as an informant on al Qaeda where he appears to have been a truly invaluable asset. And that was largely due to Sater developing a relationship with a Northern Alliance intelligence officer who kept feeding Sater valuable information:
And that information from this Northern Alliance intelligence officer would pass along to Sater was apparently coming from Mullah Omar’s personal secretary:
And this invaluable intelligence is why the US government couldn’t sing Sater’s praises enough during his belated sentencing hearing for the stock pump-and-dump charges that eventually took place in 2009:
And to top if all off, Sater is still described as a reliable US asset to this day:
And that’s all something to keep in mind regarding the mystery of sort of role Felix Sater played in the whole #TrumpRussia situation: He was a US government informant the whole time.
So what was he telling the US government during that 2015–2016 Trump campaign period? That’s still a mystery.
Here’s another Roger Stone-related twist to the #TrumRussia investigation: According to two sources, Roger Stone had a phone conversation in the spring of 2016 where he said he learned from Julian Assange that Wikileaks had obtained emails that would torment senior Democrats such as John Podesta.
And that date range, the spring of 2016, makes this a very interesting revelation because it suggests Stone really did have advance notice of the DNC hacks. And not just the DNC server hack but also the hack John Podesta’s Gmail account.
Both of those hacks have been determined to have taken place in March of 2016 and attributed to ‘Fancy Bear’. So learning that Stone was telling people in the “spring of 2016” that he learned from Julian Assange that Wikileaks has the emails of senior Democrats like John Podesta is a potentially important data point in terms of understanding who knew what when. Albeit a vague data point since “spring” could indicate any date from mid-March to mid-June. Recall that the first dump of documents by “Guccifer 2.0” happened in mid-June of 2016. Also recall that he dump of John Podesta’s hacked emails didn’t happen until October of 2016 (right after the release of the “Hollywood Access” tape)
It’s also worth recalling that Trump campaign operative George Papadopoulos was apparently told by Joseph Mifsud — the mysterious Maltese professor with ties to the Kremlin — that the Kremlin had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including thousands of Clinton’s emails, in April of 2016. So it’s unclear whether or not these alleged claims by Roger Stone that he learned from Assange about Wikileaks obtaining emails from senior Democrats took place before or after Papadopoulos’s April meeting with Mifsud.
And don’t forget that we’ve already learned about a middle-man between Stone and Assange: Randy Credico, who freely admits to meeting with Assange, but insists he would never do something to help Trump.
One of the two sources of these new claims about Stone is Sam Nunberg, the former Trump campaign aid who had a public drunken meltdown on television recently. According to Nunberg, Stone told him at one point that he actually met with Assange. Stone has responded to Nunberg’s claims by saying he was just joking with Nunberg at that moment. ““I said, ‘I think I will go to London for the weekend and meet with Julian Assange.’ It was a joke, a throwaway line to get him off the phone. The idea that I would meet with Assange undetected is ridiculous on its face.’?” Nunberg insists that he didn’t think it was a joke at the time:
“In the spring of 2016, longtime political operative Roger Stone had a phone conversation that would later seem prophetic, according to the person on the other end of the line.”
The “spring of 2016”. That’s the critical detail here because it encompasses the period of time right after the hacks are presumed to have taken place leading up to the period when “Guccifer 2.0” went public in mid-June. So if Stone knew about Podesta’s emails getting hacked during this period that’s pretty significant.
And note that this is based solely on the testimony of Sam Nunberg. There’s a second unnamed Stone associate backing up these claims that Stone claimed to have had contact with Assange in 2016:
“The second, former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg, said in an interview Monday that Stone told him that he had met with Assange — a conversation Nunberg said investigators for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III recently asked him to describe”
And in response to these claims, Stone asserts that he was just joking with Nunberg when talked about going to London to meet with Assange:
Whereas Nunberg says he didn’t interpret that as a joke:
And don’t forget that Stone himself routinely demonstrated foreknowledge of Wikileak’s document dumps, and even openly said in August 2016 that he communicated with Assange:
So on the on hand, we have two Stone associates who assert that Stone told them he met Assange and knew about the email hacks at some point in the spring of 2016. And all the prior claims of Roger Stone about communicating with Assange.
On other hand, we have Roger Stone and Julian Assange denying it all. It’s not exactly a trustworthy collection of characters on either side. But given all the circumstantial evidence we already have it’s sure hard to believe that Stone and Assange weren’t in contact somehow.
That said, it does seem quite possible that Stone never personally met with Assange and limited his contact to things like Twitter or using middle-men like Credico. And that brings us to another Stone-related detail that just emerged: according to Morgan Pehme, a producer for “Get Me Roger Stone”, Stone was trying to meeting with Assange in the summer of 2016. So we have Sam Nunberg claiming that Stone told him he was going to fly to London to meet Assange and this conversation presumably took place in the spring of 2016. And now we have a producer about a documentary on Stone telling us that Stone did actually try to meeting with Assange, but not until the summer of 2016:
“Roger Stone was attempting to meet with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in the summer of 2016, a producer for “Get Me Roger Stone” said on Tuesday.”
So Stone’s attempts to meet with Assange were apparently so open that a documentary producer could see it happening. And this was at some point in the summer of 2016. But this producer doesn’t know if Stone’s attempts were successful:
So, putting this all together, we have two Stone associates asserting Stone appeared to be in contact with Assange in the spring of 2016 and knew about the Democratic party hacks. And Sam Nunberg recounts Stone saying he was going to actually travel to London and meet Assange. And then we have the producer of a documentary on Roger Stone saying Stone was actively trying to meet with Assange, but this was in the summer of 2016.
Taken together, it doesn’t seem outlandish that Stone didn’t actually meet with Assange, at least not in the spring of 2016. Maybe in the summer or perhaps never. He had Randy Credico for actual meetings, after all. Or private direct messages on Twitter.
But when you look at all the instances of foreknowledge Stone demonstrated upcoming about Wikileaks’ email dumps it does seem pretty unlikely that Stone and Assange weren’t at least in contact with each other. And it also seems extremely implausible that what Stone knew about these matters wasn’t somehow fed to the Trump campaign. So while there’s a great deal of ambiguity about what Roger Stone knew and when he knew it, it seems like a safe bet from these two new reports that Stone knew Wikileaks had those Democratic emails some time in the spring of 2016 and therefore so did the Trump campaign.
Stone has at least admitted to trying to contact Wiki-Leaks Founder Julian Assange all the way in London. And interestingly enough, Stone put in a good word to Trump about Far Right British Politician Nigel Farange after meeting him in 2016. This article suggests the Possibility that there may be more than causual contacts with Nigel Farange and Julian Assange and that Farange provided Assange with a Thumb Drive. Could Nigel Farange have been Assanges back-door Channel.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/roger-stone-says-he-visited-the-ecuadorian-embassy-in-london-where-julian-assange-is-in-hiding
Roger Stone Says He Visited the Ecuadorian Embassy in London Where Julian Assange Is In Hiding
The former Trump campaign adviser told The Daily Beast that he had dropped by the embassy and left his business card for the WikiLeaks founder.
Nico Hines
NICO HINES
01.31.18 6:29 PM ET
LONDON—Former Trump presidential campaign adviser Roger Stone paid a visit to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Wednesday where Julian Assange has been holed up for the last five years.
Stone is in Britain for a short speaking tour that will include addresses at the Oxford and Cambridge Unions. He told The Daily Beast that he had taken time out to drop by the embassy where Assange has been in hiding from an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct.
The connection between Stone and Assange has become a focal point in the investigation of links between Russia and the Trump campaign after it emerged that Stone had a communications backchannel with WikiLeaks, an organization described by the CIA as a “hostile intelligence service” “abetted by Russia.”
Stone said he had traveled to the embassy in Central London. He said he had not seen Assange in person but left his contact details for the controversial founder of WikiLeaks.
“I didn’t go and see him, I dropped off a card to be a smart ass,” he told The Daily Beast.
Stone was at an event in West London organised by the Bow Group, Britain’s oldest conservative think tank.
In the bar after giving a speech in support of Brexit, he chatted with a small group of people to whom he insisted that Assange was no agent of Russia but simply “a journalist.”
Stone said he was glad to have missed Assange earlier in the day because he would have been asked about their conversation by Russia probe investigators in D.C.
“I dropped in my card, I don’t even think he’s there anymore,” Stone said, speculating that he might have been secretly “extracted” in recent weeks.
In a wood-paneled room at the RAF private members club, Stone said that he had used a backchannel to communicate with Assange before the presidential election, explaining that he’d only asked an old friend who also knew Assange to confirm something the WikiLeaks head had said in a TV interview.
Ten days later, Stone said that his friend—who he didn’t explicitly say had spoken to Assange came back to confirm what WikiLeaks had.
WikiLeaks published stolen emails in the run up to the 2016 vote that may have helped sway the election toward Trump. U.S. security services believe that Russian agents were involved in obtaining the leaked Democratic emails.
While the Ecuadorian Embassy—and nearby Harrods department store—were on Stone’s itinerary, he said he had not had any meetings with Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign.
Stone said he had only met Farage once, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July 2016, where the the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party had said he wanted to meet Trump. Stone said he arranged it for him—and said he didn’t even know if Farage was aware that it was Stone who’d put in a good word for him.
Farage is also known to have been a visitor to the Ecuadorian Embassy. He was spotted leaving the building in March last year after a meeting with Assange. In testimony to the House intelligence committee, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS said he had been told—but could not confirm—that Farage was a regular visitor to the embassy and had even passed data to Assange on a thumb drive.
Farage, who has previously expressed his admiration for President Putin, was a regular on Russia’s state-backed propaganda channel RT but denies that his campaign to break up the European Union has ever been funded by the Kremlin.
Stone, who declined to name his backchannel to the House intelligence committee, said that Farage had not been his conduit to Assange.
Stone did not name his contact—who CNN and others have reported was comedian and New York political gadfly Randy Credico, who the House intelligence committee subpoenaed in November—in his conversation Wednesday.
Here’s an interesting update regarding the alleged role Randy Credico, a left-wing activist and New York radio host, played as a middle-man between Roger Stone and Julian Assange.
First, recall that Stone told the House Intelligence Committee, ““On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange, announced that he was in possession of Clinton DNC emails. I learned this by reading it on Twitter...I asked a journalist who I knew had interviewed Assange to independently confirm this report, and he subsequently did...This journalist assured me that WikiLeaks would release this information in October and continued to assure me of this throughout the balance of August and all of September. This information proved to be correct.” Stone later privately told the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017 that Credico was indeed this middle-man and later confirmed this on Facebook after his claims to the committee were reported.
Also recall how Credico had indeed hosted Assange on his radio show in August of 2015 so there does appear to be some sort of relationship between Credico and Assange.
Well, it turns out that Credico completely denies Stone’s assertions about Credico and Assange in the new Russian Roulette book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. Credico told Corn and Isikoff that he was being set up as the fall guy by Stone and that none of it was true. Credico also claims that he never even spoke to Assange until he had Stone as a guest on his radio show on Aug. 26, 2016, and that he never knew anything about WikiLeaks’ plans to publicly release the Clinton campaign emails.
Credico then goes on to suggest that Stone never actually had any contact with Assange and Stone was basically acting like “Walter Mitty” and puffing up his contacts with Wikileaks in order to get back into Trump’s good graces after getting kicked out of Trump’s campaign in the fall of 2015. Keep in mind that Stone’s departure from the campaign always looked highly orchestrated and designed to put distance between Stone and the campaign for the purpose of freeing Stone up for dirty tricks and Stone’s subsequent behavior was in keeping with that. So Credico’s suggestion that there was a real divide between Stone and Trump and that Stone never actually contacted Assange is the kind of narrative that effectively helps protect both Stone and the Trump campaign by framing Stone as a hapless showboat.
So when Credico he had never spoken with Assange at all until the August 26, 2016, radio show, it’s unclear how we should interpret that, especially given Credico had Assange on his radio show in August of 2015. So the primary thing that’s clear here is that it’s still unclear what happened between Stone, Credico, and Assange:
“In a new interview on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Credico shared with co-hosts Daniel Klaidman and Michael Isikoff email messages he said he had received from Stone in just the last few days.”
As we can see with Credico’s release of Roger Stone’s angry emails, Stone is as horrible a person in private as he is in public:
Of course, this could all be theatrics between Stone and Credico. A planned strategy to have Credico refute Stone’s claims about Credico in order to discredit the larger assumption that Stone was indeed in contact with Assange during the 2016 campaign.
But that’s Credico’s stance now. A stance he adopted in his comments to David Corn and Michael Isikoff in their new book “Russian Roulette”. Along with the stance that he never even spoke to Assange until he had Stone as a guest on his radio show on Aug. 26, 2016. Which, again, is a confusing statement for Credico to make if, as we saw before, Credico hosted Assange on his show in August of 2015 and then hosted a series of other figures in a “Free Assange” series of shows. But that’s Credico’s stance now:
“But in “Russian Roulette,” Credico rejected Stone’s account as nonsensical. Credico told the authors he never even spoke to Assange until he had the Trump adviser as a guest on his radio show on Aug. 26, 2016, and that he never knew anything about WikiLeaks’ plans to publicly release the Clinton campaign emails.”
And Credico combines his denials that he ever even spoke with Assange until August of 2016 with the suggestion that Stone never really had any contact with Assange at all and it was all just Stone puffing himself up to get back into Trump’s good graces:
And this whole dispute with Credico is happening a month after close Stone associate Sam Nunberg had his bizarre drunken spectacle on the cable news channels for a day. And according to Nunberg, Stone emailed him on August 4, 2016, saying, “I dined with my new pal Julian Assange last nite.”:
Stone claims it was all a joke with Nunberg. And perhaps it was. Or perhaps “I dined with my new pal Julian Assange last nite” was a way of saying he spoke with Assange over the internet. It’s unclear. What is clear is that people close to Roger Stone make for interesting witnesses.
Oh look at that, Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor who allegedly informed George Papadopoulos that Moscow had ‘thousands of Hillary’s emails’, just got a little more mysterious: In addition to his Russian government ties, it turns out Mifsud appears to have ties to the Saudi government too.
This is has emerged as a result on some new reporting about Mifsud’s last know trip to Moscow back in October. Mifsud was invited by the Russian Council of International Affairs (RIAC), a think tank close to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to attend a seminar about security challenges in Yemen organized by RIAC and Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. And according to two sources at the RIAC, Mifsud attended as a member of the official delegation of Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz.
If true, that’s quite a twist to the mystery of Mifsud. After all, one of the broader mysteries around the #TrumpRussia situation at this point is why on earth was the crown prince of the UAE so deeply involved in setting up an alleged ‘back channel’ between the Trump team and Moscow and why was George Nader, another man or mystery, apparently sitting in on those back channel meetings.
Additionally, we’ve learned how George Nader was acting as a lobbyist on behalf of the UAE and Saudi Arabia when he arranged for the deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee, Elliott Broidy, to lobby the US government on behalf of his clients.
So to learn that Joseph Mifsud was allegedly also working for the Saudi only adds to the question of what is going on with this Middle Eastern angle to the Trump campaign’s international shenanigans?
It’s also somewhat of a twist to learn that the Saudis are hosting seminars in Moscow about the war in Yemen, which seems rather notable given Russia’s ties to Iran and Iran’s backing of the Houthi rebels in Yemen’s conflict. But that’s apparently what happened and Joseph Mifsud apparently attended this conference as a member of the Saudi delegation:
“The Maltese professor was formally invited to Moscow by the Russian Council of International Affairs (RIAC), a think tank close to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to a visa dated Oct. 4, 2017.”
So a few weeks before Joseph Mifsud’s name becomes splashed across the pages of news reports as an apparent Kremlin contact with Papadopoulos, Mifsud makes his last know trip to Moscow. As part of a Saudi delegation, according to two sources at RIAC:
And it sounds like this wasn’t a one time thing for Mifsud. He’s been speaking at other events in Saudi Arabia at the King Faisal Center:
So one obvious question raised by this is whether or not Mifsud’s ties to Moscow are largely driven by his ties to Saudi Arabia or vice versa. In other words, who is Mifsud actually working for in this relationship? Moscow? Riyadh? A bit of both? That seems like a pretty important question to answer in this whole #TrumpRussia investigation given all the other Middle East connections.
Unfortunately, getting those answers might not be so easy since Mifsud appears to have disappeared. Not even his Ukrainian girlfriend has heard from him:
So it’s worth noting one little tidbit about Mifsud and Saudi Arabia that we’ve learned from his now-scorned girlfriend: Mifsud claimed to be in Saudi Arabia at the same time of Trump’s visit in May of 2017:
“In a series of WhatsApp messages sent in May 2017, Mifsud also told Anna he was in Saudi Arabia at the same time as President Donald Trump’s visit, and in Sicily, Italy, for the G7 Summit.”
So that’s pretty notable.
It’s also worth noting what his girlfriend, Anna, has to say about how Mifsud would say about his ties to Russian’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov:
And this gives us a sense of why the Saudis would like to hire Mifsud: he really does appear to have high-level Kremlin connections.
At the same time, he also appears to have high-level Saudi connections, which brings us back to the question of who is Mifsud actually working for, especially during that March-April 2016 period when he was meet with George Papadopoulos?
So, along those lines, it’s worth recalling that one of the initial fun facts about Mifsud that was pointed out to highlight his ties to the Kremlin was his appearance at the Valdai Club. And it turns out that Mifsud has a post from April 2016 at the Valdai Club’s website. And guess what the focus of the post is: the need for Moscow and Riyadh to strengthen their ties:
“As more and more differences emerge between Saudi Arabia and the United States, it is time for Moscow and Riyadh to intensify their relations, Mifsud believes. After Russia brought Iran in from the cold, scoring a major diplomatic success, it should try and take Saudi Arabia on board, he said. “I feel there is a taste for this relationship to develop between the Russian Federation and Saudi Arabia,” the scholar concluded.”
Yep, back in April of 2016, which overlaps with the period when Mifsud was in contact with Papadoulos, Mifsud was writing about strengthening ties between Moscow and Riyadh. So, again, we have to ask: who was Mifsud actually working for during this period? And it doesn’t have to be exclusive. Perhaps he was engaged in outreach to the Trump campaign on behalf of the Kremlin and Riyadh? We don’t know. And we might never know since he has apparently disappeared.
But it’s pretty amazing how, in one person, we find ties to Moscow, the Middle East, and Ukraine, the three focal points of the #TrumpRussia investigation. Mifsud certainly doesn’t disappoint in the mystery department.
So remember that fascinating 2015 piece by Mark Ames about Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, and how Pomerantsev was co-authoring white papers with neocon figures like Michael Weiss and writing about a Russian information war being waged against the West? And remember Pomerantsev’s close ties to Bill Browder, and Pomerantsev even lobbyied the British parliament in favor the Magnitsky Act sanctions? And remember how that article talked about the founders of the Legatum Institute, the billionaire Chandler brothers, and how they made their billions from the mass privatization of Russian stat assets in the 90’s before falling out with the Putin regime?
Well, all of those fun facts about kind of work and people associated with the Legatum Institute need to be kept in mind when reading the following articles, because it sounds like Legatum’s ties to the pro-Brexit forces in the UK have resulted in an attempt to portray Legatum as a tool of the Kremlin:
“In a speech made in the Commons under parliamentary privilege, Bob Seely alleged that Christopher Chandler had been an “object of interest” to French intelligence. Chandler, who founded the Legatum thinktank, rejected the claim as “complete nonsense”.”
And here we are: the founders of the neocon Legatum Institute are being described possible Kremlin spies. Or at least assets of Kremlin spies. Not uber vulture capitalists. Kremlin spies. It’s rather remarkable.
So what is the basis for these suspicions? Well, the primary driver is the fact that Legatum appears to have played a significant role in the pro-Brexit campaign. And for some bizarre reason it’s generally assumed that some group was pushing for the Brexit they must be tools of the Kremlin. And those suspicions around Legatum have resulted in people discovering that the founders of Legatum, the billionaire Chandler brothers, have a bunch of old ties to Russia which, inevitably, would put them in contact with people associated with Russian intelligence:
The Chandler brothers, of course, deny any such ties to Russian intelligence or the Russian state:
And these denials are, of course, silly denials because they clearly had ties to the Russian state at one point in the past given their extensive holdings in Gazprom (which were sold off in 2002–2003).
But it’s no less silly to ignore the fact that they’re the financiers of a neocon think tank that portrays Russia as the greatest threat in the world. After all, Bill Browder also had extensive ties to Russian government at on point given his large investments there, so should we consider Browder a Kremlin dupe at this point? It’s similar ahistorical logic at work here.
But was is clear is that Legatum did play a significant role in the Brexit campaign, with Legatum’s economics director, Shanker Singham, playing a leading role:
So now let’s take a look at that Mail on Sunday piece from last year that has more on the Chandler brothers’ Kremlin ties and the role Legatum play in the pro-Brexit side of referendum.
The article does indeed include some other relevant facts that would appear to raise suspicions about Legatum’s ties to Russian intelligence. Specifically, there’s the fact that Legatum Institute ‘senior fellow’ Matthew Elliott was chief executive of Gove and Johnson’s ‘Vote Leave’ referendum campaign. And Elliott was involved with a 2012 controversy when he was targeted by a man the Home Office now believes was a Russian spy. And those are indeed interesting links. It’s just that those interesting links become far less interesting in the broader context of what Legatum stands for, like the ‘Russia is waging an information war against the West’ policies that Legatum routinely promotes. And in these article searching for evidence of Kremlin ties to Legatum that broader context is never mentioned:
“This newspaper has established that a secret letter sent by the Cabinet Ministers to the Prime Minister was co-ordinated by a senior figure in a free-market UK think-tank founded by a tycoon who made a fortune in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Yep, Legatum Institute economics director Shanker Singham did indeed help coordinate a secret letter from from Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to Theresa May laying out their Brexit ‘ultimatum’. And that’s what has led to the focus on the Chander brothers’ possible Russian intelligence ties:
Next the article mentions how the Chandlers built a business empire in Russia in the 1990 by taking advantage of the state privatizations, leading to a substantial holding in Gazprom (although it doesn’t mention those holdings being sold off in 2002–2003)
Then the article mentions how Christopher Chandler went on to start the Legatum Institute which continues to get the vast majority of its annual funding from the Legatum Foundation (i.e. from the Chandlers). And no mention of the staunch neocon orientation of Legatum or its fixation on fighting Russian information warfare:
But there is one somewhat notable tie between Legatum and the pro-Brexit forces: Legatum Institute ‘senior fellow’ Matthew Elliott was chief executive of Gove and Johnson’s ‘Vote Leave’ referendum campaign and Elliott was also caught up in a 2012 controversy when it was discovered that the “Conservative Friends of Russia” group had ties to Russian intelligence:
So that’s at least kind of an interesting link between Legatum, the pro-Brexit forces, and the Kremlin. It’s certaintly not conclusive or a bombshell. But it’s interesting. At least, it would be an interesting link if you completely ignore Legatum’s extensive track record promoting the ‘Russian information warfare is going to destroy us’ meme.
It’s all a reminder that Legatum is at least half correct: we should indeed all be quite worried about the impact of information warfare on society. Just not exclusively Russian information warfare.
Here’s a story that’s almost like Chapter 2 of the recent revelation about a August 3, 2016 Trump Tower meeting. That’s the new discovered meeting where Erik Prince and George Nader informed Donald Trump, Jr. and Stephen Miller about how “eager” the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE were to help Donald Trump win the election and pitched the use of an Israeli private intelligence firm with a plan for social media manipulation. And as part of that recent revelation we also learned about a lobbying effort George Nader was engaged in shortly after Trump’s inauguration to push an economic destabilization campaign against Iran along with a large Arab private contractor force to fight in Yemen.. In other words, the Saudis and UAE wanted Trump to win so they could see an array of major US foreign policy changes, in particular regarding Iran, the Syria, and Qatar.
The following article basically fleshes out the second half of that story: the post-victory secret Saudi/UAE lobbying effort of the US government and Trump administration to see those desired policy changes through. It’s a chapter of this story we’ve read about before. Specifically, the reports back in March of the lobbying efforts by RNC financier Elliot Broidy and George Nader starting in early 2017 on behalf of the Saudis and UAE.
The following article has a lot more on that whole effort, including President Trump’s response to the lobbying effort. And it sounds like Trump was highly receptive to the various proposals of Broidy and Nader. Surprise! So if there was indeed a quid pro quo arrangement between the Trump team and the Saudis/UAE during the 2016 campaign, it looks like the ‘quo’ was getting worked out by Broidy and Nader’s lobbying effort.
One of the key areas of lobbying Broidy and Nader were pitching to the US involved Qatar. In particular, they wanted to see the US move its massive airbase out of Qatar to either Saudi Arabia or the UAE. They also wanted to see former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson replaced over his stances that were seen as overly friendly to Qatar.
Interestingly, Nader and Broidy’s lobbying efforts have the appearance of lobbying both sides. The US and the Saudi/UAE side. For instance, one of the plans Broidy and Nader were pitching to the Saudis and UAE was for the creation of an all-Muslim fighting force of 5,000 troops. A second was a proposal to help the UAE gather intelligence. Other proposals included strengthening Saudi maritime and border security and setting up counter-terrorism centers in Saudi Arabia. All proposals that sound like they could have come from the UAE and Saudi governments.
So was it really the case that Broidy and Nader were conceiving of all of these plans on their own and pitching them to both the US and Saudi/UAE sides? Well, recall from the previous story about the the Trump Tower meeting about how it was unclear if George Nader’s proposals were his own or he was secretly making these proposals on behalf of one of his clients. And in the following article we get an idea of why Broidy and Nader may have wanted to cast their lobbying effort as one where they lobby both sides, as opposed to one where they’re hired by the Saudis/UAE to lobby the US: as long as they can maintain the pretense that all of these proposals were their own ideas, they don’t have to register as foreign lobbyists in the US.
And, sure enough, Broidy and Nader did indeed neglect to register as foreign lobbyists while lobbying the US government and instead maintain the pretense that all of these proposals were all their own ideas. Which makes sense from a lobbying standpoint. These kinds of proposals are going to be a lot less persuasive if they’re coming from registered foreign lobbyists. So we’re probably looking at a scenario where Broidy and Nader quietly got ideas from their Saudi/UAE clients about policy changes and new project they wanted to happen and then formally lobbied those same clients for the purpose of maintaining the pretense that they weren’t acting on their behalf.
Another interesting aspect of the part of this story contained in the following article is that much of the behind the scenes information about this lobbying effort is from hacked emails provided to the Associated Press. And there is strong suspicion that the hacking was done by Qatar for the purpose of exposing this anti-Qatar lobbying effort. So it’s entirely possible that we’re looking at a second example of a state-backed hack intended to influence US policy. It’s a far more understandable hack than the 2016 hacks of the Democrats but it’s still a stand-backed hack intended to influence US public policy. It’s a sign of the times and a reminder that there’s probably no shortage of countries with sophisticated hacking capabilities and a willingness to use them to affect the policies of other countries.
Note that there’s no actual mention of the newly discovered Trump Tower meeting in the following article, presumably because it article was published just a day after the big Trump Tower meeting story. But they’re really covering the same big story. A the same big story about about a massive quid pro quo:
“The AP has previously reported that Broidy and Nader sought to get an anti-Qatar bill through Congress while obscuring the source of the money behind their influence campaign. A new cache of emails obtained by the AP reveals an ambitious, secretive lobbying effort to isolate Qatar and undermine the Pentagon’s longstanding relationship with the Gulf country.”
Hacked emails. That’s the source for this report.
So what do these hacked emails portray? In part, it depicts a scenario where Nader and Broidy effectively pitched themselves as a backchannel between the White House and Saudi and UAE governments. That’s the pitch they made to the Saudi/UAE crown princes. And that’s exactly what they proceeded to do throughout 2017, heavily pushing an anti-Qatar lobbying effort with the full expectation that they would be rewarded with lucrative Saudi/UAE contracts:
And this kind of arrangement, where Broidy and Nader lobby the US with the expectation that they would be paid in the form of lucrative Saudi/UAE contracts, appears to be the scheme they used to avoid having to register in the US as foreign lobbyists:
“Broidy has maintained he was not required to register because his anti-Qatar campaign was not directed by a foreign client and came entirely at his own initiative.”
LOL! Yeah, Broidy’s anti-Qatar campaign was all his own idea and he felt so strongly about it that he just did all this lobbying on his own! That’s the pretense we’re asked to believe here.
And notice how this joint lobbying effort started in early 2017, which is right around the same time Broidy and Nader apparently met each other for the first time at the Trump inauguration in January of 2017:
It’s a pretty remarkable initiative to start up with someone you just met. A secret backchannel initiative with your brand new friend. It raises the obvious question of whether or not Broidy was essentially paired up with Nader by someone in Trump team orbit. Don’t forget that the Trump team and George Nader had already been working quite closely in the final months of the Trump campaign as part of that Saudi/UAE effort to help Trump win.
Also don’t forget that Nader and the crown prince of the UAE had their secret Trump Tower meetings in December 2016 to set up the Seychelles backchannel. So by the start of 2017 the Trump team already had a secret backchannel set up with the UAE and Saudis so it seems pretty likely like Broidy was basically tapped by someone on the Trump side to work with Nader and maintain that backchannel after Trump moved into the White House.
In other words, while it’s a virtual certainty that Nader was working on behalf of the Saudis and UAE for this lobbying effort, the question of who Broidy may have been working for is potentially far more scandalous if it turns out he was basically working on behalf of the Trump team for the very beginning of this arrangement because that would strongly suggest a backchannel getting set up by the Trump and and UAE/Saudis for the purpose of executing the ‘quo’ part of a qui pro quo.
So Broidy and Nader meet for the first time during Trump’s inauguration (Jan 20th, 2017), and by February 7, emails shows Broidy writing to a staffer for the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee about a bill aimed at sanctioning Qatar. That’s how fast this joint lobbying effort began:
And the very next day, Broidy was email Nader about their plan to get Saudi Arabia to train an all-Muslim fighting force of 5,000 troops for the war in Yemen. And that was just one of the proposals Broidy and Nader had for the Saudis and UAE worth over $1 billion. Other pitches included helping the UAE gather intelligence, strengthen Saudi maritime and border security, and set up counter-terrorism centers in Saudi Arabia. All the kinds of ideas we would expect the Saudis and UAE to come up with on their own and all the kinds of projects that would involve massive lucrative contracts.
So when we’re asking who in the Trump team may have arranged for Broidy to be Nader’s partner in this bachchannel, we also have to ask what kind of cut they were requesting for all these highly lucrative deals Broidy and Nader were trying to make happen. Don’t forget that a quid pro quo between the Trump team and Saudis/UAE could have involved something like ‘we’ll help you win and give you lucrative contracts (the quid) if you advance our policy agenda after winning (the quo). In other words, the proceeds from these highly lucrative contracts Broidy and Nader were trying to arrange with the Saudis and UAE may have been intended to shared among the larger Trumpian cabal:
But before those lucrative contracts could be secured, Broidy and Nader apparently had to focus on the anti-Qatar lobbying campaign in the US:
And these anti-Qatar lobbying efforts weren’t cheap. $2.5 million was funneled to Broidy through a obscure Canadian company run by one of Broidy’s friends, effectively hiding the source of the money (and hiding the reality that Broidy was basically acting like a foreign agent):
And once that $2.5 million is made available to Broidy for the lobbying effort, Broidy proceeded to commission the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a US-based think tank, to write 200 articles in the foundation’s name that would push an anti-Qatar line and hold an anti-Qatar conference. Broidy and Nader even got to review drafts of op-ed pieces that showed up in the Wall Street Journal under the Foundation’s name (it’s something to keep in mind when you read op-eds):
Later, in what is no doubt a sign of the Trump team’s conspicuously close ties to the Saudis, Trump makes the very first foreign trip of his presidency not to a close ally in Europe. Nope, he heads to Saudi Arabia and helps to unveil their new counter-terrorism center. And now we know that counter-terrorism centers were one of the lucrative projects Broidy and Nader were pitching to the Saudis just months earlier. Which raises the question: how many people in on the Trump team were getting a cut of the contracts associated with that new counter-terrorism center?
Then, two weeks after Trump’s trip, the Saudis and UAE launch a travel and trade embargo against Qatar and Trump tweets out his support one day later. Keep in mind that the largest US airbase in the region is in Qatar, which is reflected by the fact that US official had to work to walk back Trump’s tweets:
But despite the fact that Trump and the US government were sending conflicted messages about the anti-Qatar campaign, the lobbying effort continued throughout 2017. And that included a late September 2017 meeting between Broidy and Trump himself, where one of the object objectives was to basically as Trump to keep the US out of the regional dispute with Qatar. So they clearly scaled back their ambitions (of getting the US to support their anti-Qatar campaign) and were trying to merely keep the US from picking Qatar’s side. Another object of the meeting was to sell Trump on the idea of creating an all Muslim fighting force to fight in Yemen (this would presumably involve large contracts for Erik Prince’s mercenary business), and arrangig for a “discreet” (secret) meeting between Trump and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi:
Interestingly, the emails exchanged between Broidy and Nader in anticipation of the meeting with Trump showed them using codenames for Trump and the crown princes. Trump was “The Chairman”, and the crown princes are “Two Big Friends”:
So it’s worth recalling that the reporting on the secret August 3, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower apparently involved George Nader repeatedly referring to the crown princes as “my friends.” And Nader asked Broidy to tell Trump about Nader’s close connections to the “Two Big Friends.” And since Nader had been working with the Trump team closely for over a year at this point and it had to be totally obvious that he was close to the crown princes you have to wonder if that was intended to send a message specifically in reference to that August 3 Trump Tower meeting. Could it have been a “you owe us for all that help we gave you” message, perhaps?
So Broidy goes to the meeting with Trump on October 6, 2017, and, surprise!, reports back that Trump was “extremely enthusiastic” and wanted to know what the next step would be:
Nader then goes on to request a photo of himself with Trump, presumably to further impress his clients and make it clear that this backchannel is still viable. The hoped for venue for the meeting is a fundraiser for Trump and the RNC on October 25, co-hosted by Broidy. But the Secret Service won’t allow the meeting for some reason (perhaps because Nader is a convicted pedophile?). Broidy appears to find a way to be more pursuasive and Nader ends up getting his picture with Trump while Broidy ends up making a $189,000 donation to the RNC. So while we don’t know which strings were pulled to get around that initial Secret Service block on Nader meeting Trump, strings were clearly pulled:
“One of my companies does deep vetting for the US government...We ran all data bases including FBI and Interpol and found no issues with regard to Mr. Vader.” So one of Broidy’s companies does “deep vettig” for the US government. Umm...maybe someone should look into that.
Broidy then meets Trump again on December 2, 2017, offering the crown princes’ help with Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan. Although it sounds like Nader and his clients mostly just have contempt for Kushner:
And just days after Broidy’s December meeting with, the UAE awards Broid with a $600 million contract over 5 years to help the UAE gather intelligence. It sounds like that December meeting with Trump was a pretty productive one for Broidy:
There was a third meeting planned for January of this year during the celebrations of Trump’s first year in office. And both Broidy and Nader were supposed to show up to this third meeting. But when Nader arrived at Dulles Airport in DC a team of FBI agents show up to question Nader and that more or less was the beginning of the end this Nader/Broidy backchannel:
And don’t forget that much of this story is only available because some source started anonymously leaking Broidy’s hacked emails to news sources starting in February:
Also don’t forget that Broidy is the same person who was recently caught up in a scandal that sounds awfully familiar at this point: he had Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pay a Playmate $1.6 million for a non-disclosure agreement over an affair that resulted in an abortion:
And as recent reports point out, there’s growing evidence that Broidy was actually covering for Trump and Trump was the one who actually knocked up a Playmate and had her get an abortion. And beyond being a typical salacious story, it highlights the extent to which Broidy may have been trusted by Trump’s inner circle and Trump himself. You don’t pick someone you don’t trust to take that kind of fall for you. Especially in politics.
So, all in all, it’s looking a lot like the story of George Nader and Elliot Broidy is really just the ‘distributing the spoils’ chapter in what is looking like the biggest foreign collusion story of 2016. #TrumpSaudiUAE #SwampyBackchannels
Here’s a pair of articles that flesh out what we know about the efforts by Michael Cohen and Felix Sater to get a Trump Tower Moscow deal worked out: First, recall the previous stories that made is sound like the Trump Tower Moscow efforts wound down in January of 2016 after Michael Cohen’s comical outreach to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov’s using Peskov’s official email address went unanswered. But then Sater apparently kept trying to restart the deal and tried to get Cohen to attend the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in June of 2016.
Well, according to the following two articles, messages between Cohen and Sater reveal that they both continued to pursue a Trump Tower Moscow meeting after the January 2016 rebuff until at least May of 2016. But many of those messages were sent using the “Dust” app which automatically deletes them. So while we don’t know the content of what Sater and Cohen were discussing between January and May of 2016, we now know they were indeed continuing to discuss how to make the Trump Tower Moscow deal happen.
Another thing to keep in mind with all this is that we recently learned that George Nader — the representative of the UAE and Saudis at the heart of the Seychelles ‘backchannel’ story and the Saudi/UAE offer to help the Trump campaign win with a sophisticated social media campaign — apparently started trying to contact the Trump campaign shortly after it appeared Trump locked up the GOP nomination. And Trump was already looking like the likely nominee by January of 2016 even if he wasn’t technically the nominee until the convention. So this period when Cohen and Sater switched to using “Dust” for their communications probably overlaps with the same period with Nader was approaching the Trump campaign and representing interests who were effectively trying to lobby the Russian government to shift its alliances in the Middle East.
And as we’ll see in the second article below, Sater had another figure helping him with this deal: an unnamed former GRU officer who worked with Sater when Sater was helping the FBI and CIA on its anti-terror operations. Specifically, this is the individual who delivered to Sater Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone numbers in 1998 and, later, handed over photographs of a North Korean official seeking nuclear weapons. So when Sater brags about his Russian contacts, this mysterious former GRU appear with a history of working with the US government to be one of the individuals. Also recall that previous reports on this chapter of Sater’s life indicated that it was a relationship Sater developed with a Northern Alliance officer in Afghanistan that resulted in Sater obtaining bin Laden’s satellite phone number, so this former GRU officer was presumably involved with that.
Ok, so let’s take a look an article from Yahoo News about text messages and emails showing Cohen and Sater continued to work on the Trump Tower Moscow scheme as late as May 2016, contradicting Cohen’s previous story that the initiative was dropped in January 2016:
“Cohen has said that, beginning in September 2015, he worked with a Russian-born developer named Felix Sater to build a luxury hotel, office, and apartment complex called Trump World Tower Moscow. In a statement to Congress, Cohen claimed he gave up on the project in late January 2016, when he determined the “proposal was not feasible for a variety of business reasons and should not be pursued further.””
That’s what Cohen claimed: he gave up in January of 2016. But text messaged and emails tell a different story. And Felix Sater apparently provided them to US investigators :
And those texts and emails show Cohen and Sater discussing the deal well into 2016, with Sater insisting that high-level Russians needed to be involved and that he could make that happen:
And yet Cohen told the House Intelligence Committee that the project was abandoned in January 2016, so these revelations probably didn’t do great things for Cohen’s legal jeopardy:
And it sounds like we have a new date on when Sater finally gave up on the project: December 2016:
So keep in mind that, if Sater was actually pursuing this Trump Tower Moscow deal through December 2016, that would heavily overlap with the Ukrainian ‘peace’ negotiations/nuclear power deal he and Michael Cohen were trying to work with Ukrainian politician Andreii Artemenko starting in the Fall of 2016.
Ok, now let’s take a look a recent Buzzfeed article that expands on the discovery of these new texts and emails showing the Sater/Cohen Trump Trump initiative went well into 2016. As the article notes, Cohen and Sater were using the “Dust” app with self-deleting messages for many of their communications as Cohen’s request. That’s why Cohen and Sater’s conversations during this period appear to “go dark”. So while Sater claims to have turned over all of these communications to investigators, those communications are gone.
The article also notes that one of Sater’s main contacts in trying to get Cohen and Trump in contact with high-level Russians was an unnamed former GRU agent who happened to work with Sater when he was helping the FBI and CIA on anti-terror operations and delivered to Sater Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone numbers in 1998 and, later, handed over photographs of a North Korean official seeking nuclear weapons. CIA officials say his life could be in jeopardy if named:
“While fragments of the Trump Moscow venture have trickled out — most recently in a report last night by Yahoo News — this is the definitive story of the Moscow tower, told from a trove of emails, text messages, congressional testimony, architectural renderings, and other documents obtained exclusively by BuzzFeed News, as well as interviews with key players and investigators. The documents reveal a detailed and plausible plan, well-connected Russian counterparts, and an effort that extended from spearfishing with a Russian developer on a private island to planning for a mid-campaign trip to Moscow for the presidential candidate himself.”
So this BuzzFeed article more or less covers what is known about this whole scheme thanks to the discovered communications and Sater’s willingness to talk about. And according to this new information, Cohen and Sater were working on this project until at least into June. But for much of this period they were using the “Dust” encrypted self-deleting messaging app, so the full extent of their conversations will never be know:
Here’s the start of the timeline: Trump announces his candidacy in July of 2015, and that’s apparently Sater decided to start promoting the Trump Tower Moscow plan. Although keep in mind that Trump had been working on a Trump Tower Moscow deal for years through the Agalarov’s before that initiative was dropped after Trump’s announced candidacy. There was a September meeting between Cohen and Sater where Sater agreed to line up a developer and the financing and Cohen would get Trump to sign on the dotted line:
With that initial arrangement worked out, Sater then reaches out to his business and intelligence contact to line up potential suitors. And by October 12, 2015, Sater appeared to have the financing worked out: VTB Bank President and Chairman Andre Kostin was on board. Sater also lined up a developer: IC Expert:
Recall that Sater knew the head of IC Expert, Andrey Rozov, from back in 2008 when they both served on the board of Mirax, a real estate development firm head by a man convicted of fraud in a Moscow court. Sater managed to avoid prosecution.
Ok, now here’s the section that talks about this unnamed former GRU spy who was working with Sater during his time as a CIA informant. Sater reportedly knew the guy for decades and this mystery man was close to Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s Judo buddy:
Interestingly, this former GRU was also key to getting VTB on board, according to Sater. So this individual appears to remain quite influential in Moscow:
And possibly related to this unnamed GRU individual, note how FBI agents told BuzzFeed that Cohen was was in frequent contact with foreign individuals about Trump Tower Moscow and that some of these individuals had knowledge of or played a role in 2016 election meddling:
Part of what makes this an intriguing admission from the FBI with respect this unnamed GRU individual is that the key piece of evidence that the Kremlin did indeed order the ‘Fancy Bear’ hacking of the DNC came from a sourece deep inside the Russian government. Which raises the question: is this unnamed form GRU spy that source? That would certainly be a remarkable twist.
So the scheming continues into December 2015, but it doesn’t look like Sater can deliver and Cohen is starting to get impatient. On December 30, 2015, Cohen tells Sater to drop the whole thing:
But Sater doesn’t drop it, and the next morning Sater sends Cohen an image of a letter from a different bank, GenBank, inviting the two of them to Moscow. This pissed off Cohen even more and he insists he’ll do it all on his own:
And that decision to do the deal on his own is apparently what led Cohen to send the laughable email directly to Dmitry Peskov’s general email address for media inquiries on January 21, 2016. He didn’t get a response:
But four days later (Jan 25), Cohen gets a letter from a Russian mortgage tycoon, Andrey Ryabinskiy. Messages show Sater and Cohen once again talking about travel dates that same afternoon. And the next day (Jan 26) Sater asks Cohen to take a call from the former GRU officer:
And it’s on January 27, 2016, one day after Cohen takes that call with the former GRU agent, that Sater and Cohen start using “Dust” and their communications go dark. Sater told investigators that using Dust was Cohen’s suggestion. And no regular text messages are sent between Sater and Cohen until May 3, 2016, according to record:
And by May 4th, Cohen and Sater are talking about when Cohen and Trump, then the presumptive nominee, should take trips to Moscow. Cohen is planning on traveling before the GOP convention but thinks Trump should wait until after:
Then, on May 5, 2016, Sater tells Cohen that Dmitry Peskov would like to invite Cohen as his guest to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he will possibly be introduced to Putin or Medvedev:
By June 13, 2016, Sater fowards Cohen a formal invite from the head of the Russian economic organization that hosts the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Everything appear to be on track but Cohen demurred for some reason and the trip was put off. According to Sater, Cohen decided that he will also go to Moscow after the GOP convention.
Keep in mind the June 13, 2016, was literally one day before the story of the hacking of the DNC hit the news and Russian government hackers were named as the culprits. So it’s not a stretch to suspect that Cohen’s decision to put off the trip was influence by that.
But Sater kept holding out hope until Trump announced on July 26, 2016, that “I have ZERO investments in Russia”. At that point he apparently gave up on the deal:
So that’s an overview of what’s know so far about this Sater/Cohen Trump Tower Moscow initiative. But keep in mind what Sater said in the previous article: he didn’t really give up until December of 2016. In other words, there’s a lot still left under this rock.
And we have another secret meeting between the Trump campaign and people offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. And this one is a doozy even by #TrumpRussia standards:
So it turns out that both Roger Stone and Trump campaign communications official Michael Caputo BOTH inexplicably forgot about approached by a Russian man named Henry Greenberg back in late May of 2016. Recall that late May was a weeks after George Papadopoulos was approached by Joseph Mifsud and told Russia had “thousands” of Hillary’s email and a couple weeks before the notorious June 9, Trump Tower meeting. Greenberg offered to sell them damaging information on Hillary Clinton for $2 million but nothing came of this offer according to Stone.
Stone and Caputo both claim that they didn’t disclose this during their testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence because they both forgot. Yep. But their memories were jogged by text messages that Caputo was shown during a May 2 interview with Mueller’s team that Caputo no longer had in his possession.
So it sounds like Mueller’s team showed Caputo a text message involving Greenberg and Caputo ‘suddenly remember’ and was like, “oh yeah, that whole thing. I totally forgot about that!” Stone then had to also ‘suddenly remember’ and now they are both talking to the press about it. Along with Greenberg.
And note that this isn’t in the news due to something the Mueller team released so either Caputo, Stone, or Greenberg made this a story. It certainly has the feel of Stone and Caputo trying to ‘get ahead’ of the fuller story before it comes out.
But there’s a significant twist to this story (of course) that might explain why Stone and Caputo want to talk about it now. It’s a very Felix Sater-ish twist: it turns out Henry Greenberg claims to have been an FBI informant for 17 years. And some documentation he provided appears to back up this assertion. Specifically, in a 2015 court declaration, Greenberg declared that he’d been giving information to the FBI since returning to Russia from the United States in 2000. “Wherever I was, from Iran to North Korea, I always send information to” the FBI, he wrote. “I cooperated with the FBI for 17 years, often put my life in danger. Based on my information, there is so many arrests criminal from drugs and human trafficking, money laundering and insurance frauds.”
So Greenberg was sending the FBI information for 17 years on things from drugs to human trafficking, money laundering and insurance fraud, from Iran to North Korea. That was what Greenberg claimed to the federal government in 2015. And in texts to the Washington Post Greenberg claimed, “I risked my life and put myself in danger to do so, as you can imagine.” This FBI informant work allegedly ended in 2013, making Greenberg an informant from ~1996–2013.
Greenberg was repeatedly extended permission to enter the United States under a “significant public benefit parole” between 2008 and 2012, according to records. The documents list an FBI agent as a contact person.
It definitely has a Felix Sater feel to it. Stone and Caputo are portray this is evidence of an FBI frame up and sting operation.
But Greenberg is an interesting figure for additional reasons. Greenberg married a Russian actress and moved to Los Angeles in the 1990’s. In 1994 he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. According to a declaration he filed in court, Greenberg spent almost two years in the custody of the U.S. immigration service. Since he apparently started working as an FBI informant in 1996 you have to wonder if his informant status was established during this time with the US immigration service.
Greenberg said he decided in 2000 to return to Russia, where he resumed a glamorous life according to reports. He even shared an apartment with John Daly, a producer of hit films including “The Terminator,” and he was well known by expats from the Moscow club scene. According to Russian media, Greenberg was arrested in 2002 and charged in a $2.7 million fraud scheme. Authorities found three passports with false names in his apartment and photographs that appeared to show him posing with Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone. So, yeah, Greenberg is an interesting figure.
Michael Caputo also spent time in the 90’s living in Moscow while he was working a “Rock the vote” style campaign for Boris Yeltsin. Caputo and Greenberg reportedly didn’t know each other.
It was Caputo who Greenberg first approached. More precisely, it was Caputo’s business partner who Greenberg first approach under the pretense of a potential business deal. Greenberg showed up uninvited to a gallery opening in Florida in late May 2016 organized by Caputo’s public relations firm. This is according to Caputo’s busienss partner, Sergey “George” Petrushin.
Petrushin said Greenberg initially approached him about looking at a site for a restuarant Greenberg was trying to open. But later Greenberg said he knew that Petrushin was partners with Caputo and wanted to talk with Caputo about information he wanted to share that would help the Trump campaign. Petrushin then called Caputo and handed the phone to Greenberg. Caputo says he recalls telling Greenberg, “Let me get somebody to vet it for you.” Roger Stone was the ‘somebody’ he had in mind.
Stone later met Greenberg at the Sunny Isles restaurant. Greenberg apparently showed them a picture on his phone of Greenberg posing with Trump at a Trump rally and told Stone, “we really want to help Trump”. Greenberg asked for $2 million in exchange for the information. Stone replied “You don’t understand Donald Trump...He doesn’t pay for anything,” and rejected the offer. And as the following article notes, both Stone and Greenberg used the same precise language to the journalist when recounting what Stone said to Greenberg about Trump not paying.
But there are a couple of extremely notable divergence in their stories. According to Stone, it was just himself and Greenberg at the meeting. But according to Greenberg there was a third man present at the meeting. Alexei, a Ukrainian friend of Greenberg, was also there and did most of the talking with Stone. Alexei was allegedly a former Clinton Foundation who was fired and disgruntled. Greenberg could provide no evidence of this employment and the Clinton Foundation denies employing anyone named Alexei. But that’s what Greenberg is claiming. Greenberg also says he believes Alexei has moved back to Ukraine and that they are not in contact.
The second big divergence in their stories is that Greenberg denies any money was requested. Interestingly, Greenberg told the journalist in a text about Alexei’s conversations with Stone that, “he was very upset, and he wants to tell his story...He told Mr. Stone what he knew and what he want.” So it’s unclear “what he [Alexei] want” from that proposed transaction, but Greenberg says it wasn’t money.
So Greenberg is a Russian national with ties to Hollywood who allegedly acted as an FBI informant from around 1996–2013. And that’s the guy who shows up unannounced to make a pitch to Michael Caputo. Caputo has Stone vet the guy and Stone claims that he turned the offer down. That part of the story they all agree appear to agree on. But then it gets extra weird, with Stone claiming it was just Greenberg and himself who met in person but Greenberg claiming his friend Alexei was there and did most of the talking. And Stone claims Greenberg wanted $2 million but Greenberg says that’s not the case. As far as new twists go it doesn’t disappoint:
“One day in late May 2016, Roger Stone — the political dark sorcerer and longtime confidant of Donald Trump — slipped into his Jaguar and headed out to meet a man with a “Make America Great Again” hat and a viscous Russian accent.”
In late May 2016, weeks after George Papadopoulos’s approach by Joseph Mifsud and weeks before the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, Michael Caputo, a Trump communications officials, gets approached with an offer dirt and contacts Roger Stone to vet it. It’s a prime example of what a farce the ‘split’ between Trump and Stone was back in 2015. It was obvious Stone was putting distance between himself and the Trump campaign in order to carrying out dirty tricks and this is just one example of that. Stone was the dirty tricks ‘go-to’ guy for Caputo, a Trump campaign official.
But nothing came from Stone’s meeting with the mysterious Henry Greenberg, according to Stone, because Greenberg wanted $2 million for this damaging information and Trump ‘doesn’t pay for things’:
And this entire encounter was apparently forgotten by both Stone and Caputo until Caputo was shown a text message during his May 2, 2018, interview with the Mueller probe. Suddenly, he remembered. And then Roger Stone suddenly remembered too:
“However, Stone and Caputo said their memories were refreshed by text messages that Caputo said he no longer has in his possession but was shown during a May 2 interview.”
LOL. Although, if the texts are no longer in Caputo’s possession, it suggests he deleted them which raises the question of how the Mueller probe got their hands on those text messages? If not from Stone, who? Greenberg? That’s a possibility if the texts included Greenberg, but the texts described in the article were all between Stone and Caputo so you have to wonder how they were obtained.
And according to Caputo, the Mueller team was intensely interested in this interaction:
Notably, Greenberg initially denied any meeting happened at all when contacted by a reporter. Later, he acknowledged that such a meeting took place in texts to the reporter and, unprompted, used the same language Stone used to describe Stone’s reaction saying, with Stone saying, “Trump will never pay for anything”:
And it’s extra interesting that Greenberg spontaneously used the same language as Stone to describe Stone’s statement about Trump not paying for anything because Greenberg also asserts that no request for money was made. And he’s also asserting that there was a third person at the meeting who did most of the negotiating with Stone, Alexei, an alleged former Clinton Foundation employ and friend of Greenberg. So despite the overlap of some key facts in their stories, Stone and Greenberg still have wildly divergent descriptions of what happened:
“Greenberg denied that he asked for money, saying that it was his friend who spoke with Stone.”
Note that the phrasing of that statement about Greenberg’s denials he asked for money leave open the possibility that Greenberg merely denied that he didn’t ask for money but maybe Alexei did. It’s unclear.
But their stories do appear to largely align in terms of how they got in touch with each other. Greenberg showed up without an invitation at a gallery opening organized by Caputo’s public relations firm. He approached Caputo’s business partner, Sergey “George” Petrushin, and eventually said he knew Petrushin was partners with Caputo and wanted to share information that would be helpful to Trump’s campaign. It was during that exchange that Petrushin called Caputo and the initial offer of information was made by Greenberg to Caputo. Caputo then turns to Roger Stone to do the ‘vetting’:
But when it comes to the story of Stone actually meeting with Greeberg, the accounts suddenly diverge: Stone says he only met with Greeberg, but Greenberg claims that brought Alexei, a Ukrainian friend, to the meeting who did most of the talking with Stone. Alexei has since moved back to Ukraine according to Greenberg:
And now that Stone and Caputo both claimed to have suddenly remembered this encounter, they are both asserting that this is point of a US law enforcement operation to set them up, citing the fact that Greenberg claims to have been an FBI informant for 17 years and his immigration documents appear to be consistent with that claim:
And while Greenberg didn’t deny to the journalists those claims of his past work as an FBI informant, he does deny being an informant at the time of his approach, saying that he stopped his FBI cooperation sometime after 2013:
So one of the obvious questions raised by Greenberg’s claims that he used to be an FBI informant for 17 years and suddenly stopped after 2013 is why did he stop? If someone is an informant for 17 years do they formally stop being an informant at some point? Or do they just hit a phase of life where they have nothing to inform on?
Fueling the Stone/Caputo claims that this was an FBI setup is the recent story about longtime FBI and CIA informant Stefan A. Halper approaching George Papadopoulos and two other Trump campaign advisers on behalf of the FBI starting in July 2016 for the expressed purpose of investigating possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. So it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of response Greenberg has to these FBI informant charges because the alternative is someone proving that he was indeed acting on behalf of some people who wanted to get dirt on Hillary to the Trump campaign, which isn’t going to be an easy thing to prove without giving up a lot of additional information on ‘Alexei’ and anyone else he was working with:
Adding to the mystery of Greenberg is his Hollywood background: He married a Russian actress and moved to Los Angeles in the 90’s. In 1994 he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. And according to court documents he spent almost two years in the custody of US immigration services. He later returns to Russia in 2000 and ends up sharing an apartment with John Daly, the producer of hit films including “The Terminator”. And then, 2002, he was charged with a decade-old fraud in Russia. Russian authorities reportedly found in his apartment his three passports with false names and photographs that appeared to show him posing with movie directors Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone. So, from an informant perspective, Greenberg was probably in quite a few situations surrounded by people deemed important enough to be informed on. Especially people in Hollywood:
But when Greenberg described his own work as an informant in a 2015 court declaration, it didn’t sound like he was informing on Hollywood. He was acting as an informant starting from 2000 and was sending information from everyone he went, from Iran to North Korea. And records show he was repeatedly extended permission to enter the United States under a “significant public benefit parole” between 2008 and 2012. His records list an FBI agent as a contact person:
“Wherever I was, from Iran to North Korea, I always send information to” the FBI, he wrote. “I cooperated with the FBI for 17 years, often put my life in danger. Based on my information, there is so many arrests criminal from drugs and human trafficking, money laundering and insurance frauds.”
Note timeline discrepancy: In that 2015 statement Greenberg said he had been giving information to the FBI since returning to Russia in 2000. But he also claimed that he stopped being an FBI informant sometime after 2013 and that he’s been an informant for 17 years. So what’s the actual timeline because you can’t have all of those thing true at the same time. Unless he was also acting as an informant pre-2000 while still in the US and just didn’t include that in his court declaration.
So let’s review this remarkable situation:
1. Henry Greenberg reportedly initially approached Michael Caputo’s business partner Sergey “George” Petrushin in late May of 2016. Greenberg eventually made it clear to Petrushin that he was interested in meeting with Caputo because he had information he wanted to share that would be helpful to Trump’s campaign (so Greenberg was willing to share with Petrushin his plan).
2. Petrushin calls Caputo and allows Greenberg and Caputo to chat. Caputo sets up a meeting with Roger Stone, who was apparently the dirty tricks ‘vetting’ guy for the Trump campaign.
3. Roger Stone shows up at a restaurnt to meeting Greenberg. According to Stone it was just him and Greenberg. But according to Greenberg there was a third person there: ‘Alexei’, a Ukrainian friend of Greenberg who was also recently fired from the Clinton Foundation. It appears that Alexei had the actual dirt to offer. Alexei did most of the talking with Stone, according to Greenberg.
4. Stone claims that Greenberg wanted $2 million for the dirty information. Stone said he rejected the offer, saying “You don’t understand Donald Trump...He doesn’t pay for anything.” Greenberg also recounted Stone saying something like, “Trump will never pay for anything.” But Greenberg also denies he ever requested any money at all.
5. Stone and Caputo now assert that this was an FBI setup, citing Greenberg’s claims of spending 17 years as an FBI informant.
6. Greenberg’s immigration document do indeed appear to suggest he was an informant, starting from 2000 when Greenberg left the US and returned to Russia. He claims this included reports “from Iran to North Korea.” Between 2008 and 2012 Greenberg repeatedly was extended permission to enter the United States under a “significant public benefit parole,” according to immigration documents. Those documents list an FBI agent as a contact person. Greenberg claims he stopped acting as an FBI informant some time after 2013.
7. Roger Stone and Michael Caputo both ‘forget’ about this entire episode. They had their memories jogged after Caputo was shown texts during a May 2 interview with the Mueller team.
How are we to interpret all this? It doesn’t seem like the entire episode is a fabrication because the Mueller team were the ones who reportedly brought it up during the May 2 interview of Michael Caputo. And Greenberg’s past as an apparent FBI informant is a part of public record. While ‘Alexei’ might be a fiction, Greeberg appears to be a real person. So did the FBI send in a long-time informant in late May of 2016 to entice the Trump campaign with dirt from Russia?
Let’s also not forgot that there was already one long-time FBI informant, Felix Sater, working closely with the Trump team’s secret ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ push. We also recently learned that Sater’s drive to make the ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ project happen went well into 2016 and didn’t really end until December 2016, according to Sater. And the presence of Sater in all this raises a fascinating question: So did Sater and Greenberg know each other? Sater, like Greenberg, was also an informant for a number of areas that involving Russia, money-laundering and both apparently provided information about North Korea (Sater reportedly helped inform on North Korea’s nuclear program). So you have to wonder if they ever crossed paths or worked with each other. There’s no evidence of that at this point but wouldn’t that be a twist.
And since it’s going to be widely assumed that Greenberg represented an outreach attempt to the Trump campaign by the Russia government, it’s worth noting what a twist that would be too. Because the Russian government would presumably know Greeberg acted as an FBI informant 17. Greenberg was getting special immigration treatment from 2008–2012 with an FBI agent as a contact and Greenberg himself declared this history in his 2015 immigration documents. And anyone else looking into Greenberg’s background could presumably suss this out too. So, from the Russian government’s perspective, using someone with public documentation indicating he’s an FBI informant as an outreach agent to the Trump campaign would be a fascinating choice.
We also have to wonder about the timing of this story because. Don’t forget that this wasn’t prompted by the Mueller team. At least there’s no indication it was prompted by Mueller’s team. So the people who leaked this to the press were almost certainly Stone or Caputo. Are they trying to get ahead of something? Don’t forget that Caputo said the Mueller team was keenly interested in this during his May 2 testimonry. So are Stone and Caputo getting this story out in the public ahead of an eventual Mueller team revelation? If so, based on what we know so far indicates Stone and Caputo might be in luck. Because if you’re forced to get ahead of a story it helps if the story is so bizarre it’s hard to know what to believe.
Here’s a fascinating set of stories that tie the Saudi government’s assassination to Jamal Khashoggi with George Nader, Erik Prince, and Joel Zamel (of Psy Group) and their various secret lobbying efforts involving the Trump team in 2016 and 2017:
First, recall the role George Nader and Erik Prince played in the ‘Seychelles back channel’ mystery that we are told represented a back channel between the Trump team and the Kremlin but appeared to be some sort of Saudi/UAE/Trump negotiation with a Kremlin representative for the purpose of drawing Russia away from Iran and Syria. Also recall how Nader, Prince, and Zamel were part of the team offering support, on behalf of the Saudis and UAE, for the Trump team during the 2016 election using Cambridge Analytica-style social media manipulation. Then, after the inauguration, Nader was promoting a plan to use private contractors to carry out economic sabotage against Iran nad met with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner to discuss this plan. Nader was also in discussions with Erik Prince to convince the Saudis to pay $2 billion to set up a private army to fight in Yemen. Finally, recall how Nader teamed up with Elliot Broidy, the RNC financier, to lobby the Trump administration on behalf of the the Saudi and UAE governments in 2017 and the Trump administration was reportedly highly receptive to their overtures.
Now here’s where this Nader/Prince/Zamel network tie in to the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi: The Saudi intelligence official who led the operation to assassinated Khashoggi, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, was at a meeting in March of 2017 in Riyahd where “a small group of businessmen” met with top Saudi officials to pitch the idea of using private companies to assassinate Iranians. This was part of a larger pitch for a $2 billion plan to use private intelligence operatives to sabotage the Iranian economy. And the top aides for General Assiri, who is known to be very close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, inquired about killing Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The following article doesn’t specifically precisely who comprised the “small group of businessmen”, but it does state that George Nader arranged for the meeting. Joel Zamel of Psy Group was also there. So given all the previous reporting we’ve seen on Nader’s proposals for exactly this kind of operation — a privatized campaign to destabilize Iran — it seems highly likely that this was a meeting about that same proposal from those earlier reports.
When the Saudis raised the idea of assassinations, the businessmen reportedly said they would need to consult their lawyer. And when the lawyer rejected the plan, Nader told the Saudis about a unnamed London-based company run by former British special operations troops that might take the contract. And that raises the question of whether or not this unnamed company was SCL Group, parent company of Cambridge Analytica. Roger Gabb, one of the directors of SCL Group who is also a major investor (along with being the owner of South African wine company Kumala), was indeed a former British special forces officer. Does does SCL Group do contract killings? That seems like an important question to answer at this point.
There’s no indication that the London-based firm was hired by the Saudis. And in the case of the killing of Khashoggi, that appears to have been in in-house operation. But the whole story makes clear that the rise of MBS in the Saudi power structure coincides with a growing openness of the Saudi government to use private contractor to carry out all sort black ops, and one of the groups who appeared to be lobbying them the hardest to go down this path of privatized black ops was George Nader, Erik Prince, and Joel Zamel. Also keep in mind that the fact that Nader and Zamel and the other unnamed business decided to consult their lawyer before turning down the request for assassination services suggests that they were at least open to the idea.
The following article includes another important revelation: while it sounds like the Saudis were very much interested in Nader’s proposal to use private contractors to wage an economic/information war against Iran, it was considered so controversial that they wanted to get the Trump administration’s approval first. It’s the kind of detail that raises the question of how many other highly provocative and controversial actions by the Saudi government under MBS’s rule involved prior approval by the Trump team:
“The Saudis inquired at a time when Prince Mohammed, then the deputy crown prince and defense minister, was consolidating power and directing his advisers to escalate military and intelligence operations outside the kingdom. Their discussions, more than a year before the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, indicate that top Saudi officials have considered assassinations since the beginning of Prince Mohammed’s ascent.”
As we can see, the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi appears to be so premeditated that it likely just one of numerous assassinations the Saudis were considering. Because as the article describes, it as March of 2017 when top aides to General Assiri were inquiring about private assassination teams to target Iranian officials and this was coming up in the context of a pitch by unnamed ‘businessmen’ friends for a $2 billion scheme to use private intelligence teams to sabotage and destabilize Iran’s economy:
And while the article doesn’t tell us who exactly the businessmen were at this meeting, we’re told George Nader was there along with Joel Zamel. And that makes it very likely that we’re looking at exactly the same Nader/Zamel/Prince/Broidy network of schemers that we’ve seen show up in so many previous stories about schemes involving the Saudis, UAE, and Trump administration before and after the 2016 election:
And when these businessmen turned down the Saudi request for “conducted kinetics” (assassinations) after consulting with their lawyer, they told the Saudis of London-based company that might take the contract. Might this be a reference to SCL Group?
And General Assiri just happens to be the same scapegoat ‘rogue’ officer the Saudi government is publicly blaming for the Khashoggi killing despite Assiri being one of MBS’s close allies within the Saudi power structure. And this March 2017 meeting happened around the same time George Nader was meeting with MBS himself:
And we already know based on the prior reports that Nader and meeting with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner after the inauguration to discuss the Nader’s privatized Iranian destabilization scheme. This report informs us that Nader and Zamel “enlisted Erik Prince” to promote the proposal, so that’s another figure close to the Trump administration that would have been pushing this plan. And the Saudis apparently wanted to get the Trump administration’s approval before actually going through with it:
And that fact that the Saudis sought out approval from the Trump administration before committing to the Nader/Zamel privatized destabilization scheme out of concerns that it would be too provocative raises the obvious question of whether or not they also sought permission from the Trump administration before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It also raises the obvious question of whether or not the Saudis did ultimately find a private assassination service provider and how many private assassinations may have already taken place.
So we now know that private assassinations was something the Saudis were very much interested in and they wanted the George Nader/Joel Zamel/Erik Prince network of black ops service providers to provide that assassination service. We also now know that the Saudis didn’t want to engage in overly provocative actions using these private intelligence services without getting approval from the Trump administration first. And keep in mind that the meeting where the topic of assassination came up took place in March of 2017, whereas George Nader and Joel Zamel were already discussion this Iranian destabilization scheme starting in 2016 under the assumption that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election and so Nader and Zamel initially just pitched the plan to the Saudis and UAE under the assumption that a Clinton presidency wouldn’t be on board with the plan:
So it seems like a safe bet to assume that the Saudis and UAE had already agreed to Nader’s scheme at the time of the August 3, 2016, meeting where Nader and Zamel met with the Trump team to offer Psy Group’s social media services to help elect Donald Trump. If they were willing to get that directly involved in the US campaign against Hillary Clinton these governments must have had some big plans in mind. And the fact that Nader was reportedly meeting with the Trump team repeatedly in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign strongly hints at the Trump team ultimately accepting Nader and Zamel’s offer for campaign help despite their denials. There would have been an abundance of opportunities for someone to have quietly floated this Iranian destabilization proposal with the Trump team throughout 2016. And that implies that by the time General Assiri’s aides floated the idea of private assassinations in March of 2017, the Saudis, UAE, and Trump team had all already been thinking about the Nader/Zamel Iranian destabilization plan for quite a few months. And as the following Daily Beast article points out, General Assiri himself would have had plenty of opportunities to run this Iranian destabilization plan past the Trump administration to get its approval because he was meeting with Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, George Nader, and Joel Zamel to discuss Iranian regime change plans days before the inauguration:
“Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the Saudi intelligence chief taking the fall for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, hobnobbed in New York with Michael Flynn and other members of the transition team shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The topic of their discussion: regime change in Iran.”
As we should have expected, Michael Flynn was also participating in these meetings with General Assiri about Iranian regime change plants. And Steve Bannon too:
Interestingly, it sounds like the person who introduced Joel Zamel to George Nader years ago was John Hanna, an employee of one of Zamel’s companies, Wikistrat, who also happens to be a former aide to Dick Cheney:
And as the article notes, weeks before this meeting, the crown prince of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), traveled to Trump Tower to meet with Bannon, Flynn, and Kushner where they also discussed policies towards Iran and Qatar:
Recall that this trip to Trump Tower by MBZ breached diplomatic protocol because the Obama administration wasn’t informed by MBZ was traveling to the US. Also recall that this is the trip where the Seychelles ‘back channel’ meeting was allegedly arranged. So it would appear that Iran regime change plots were a focus of that meeting where the Seychelles ‘back channel’ meeting was set up.
As we can see, when that March 2017 meeting took place where General Assiri’s aides brought up the assassinations proposal, this was months into intense negotiations. Negotiations that appear to have always involved George Nader. So if there is a back channel in all this, it appears to be George Nader. And he appears to primarily be a back channel between the Saudis, UAE, and the Trump team.
Here’s a set of articles about another interesting set of relationships between a figure close to Trump and Ukrainian oligarchs: Rudolph Giuliani. It turns out Giuliani has found quite a bit of work ‘consulting’ for the Ukrainian government starting in 2017. And it turns out the trips Giuliani took Ukraine since this work has coincided with some pretty significant events in the US-Ukraine relationship.
One of those oligarchs is Pavel Fuchs (Fuks). Fuchs is a native of Kharkiv, although he built his wealth in Moscow in the 90’s and 2000’s. One of Fuchs’s Moscow projects was Moscow-City, a complex of skyscrapers. And it was during that project that one of the earlier attempts at building a “Trump Tower Moscow” took place. Fuchs and the Trump Organization were in negotiations to name one of the towers in the complex “Trump Tower” back in 2008. That plan obviously never panned out. By 2017, Fuchs had relocated to Ukraine, the same year he appears to have met with Giuliani for the first time.
Fuchs is quite close to the current mayor of Kharkiv, Gennady Kernes. Kernes’s city hired U.S. lobbyist Shai Franklin in 2016 to represent the city’s economic interests in Washington. And in May of 2017, Giuliani was hired to do some sort of cybersecurity work for the city through his company Giuliani Security. Giuliani was also working on creating “a U.S. office for supporting investment in the city.”
Giuliani also had a number of meetings with Ukrainian officials with interesting timing: Shortly before one of Giuliani’s trips to Ukraine in June of 2017, President Trump allowed Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin into the Oval Office for a photo-op. This was the same day of the infamous meeting Trump had with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the White House. Giuliani again traveled to Ukraine in November of 2017, where he met with President Poroshenko in Kiev. They “discussed ways to overcome Russian aggression and the course of reforms in Ukraine” and “noted special importance of Ukraine-USA cooperation in cyber security sphere,” according to Ukrainian government accounts. One week before this meeting, the US National Security Council greenlit the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. It also appears that November 2017 was the month the Ukrainian government decided to end its cooperation with the US over the Mueller investigation. Recall how the nature of Ukrainian investigation into Paul Manafort and the “Black Ledger” threatened to expose widespread corruption across the parties in Ukraine, making it the kind of investigation that many in the Ukrainian political establishment would have probably liked to see stopped.
In addition to Fuchs, Giuliani also appears to have met with two other Ukrainian oligarchs: Victor Pinchuk and Alexander Rovt. Recall how it was Rovt who reportedly helped conceived of the initial “peace plan” scheme that Michael Cohen and Felix Sater ended up promoting.
First, here’s a recent TPM covering Giuliani, Pavel Fuchs, the previous ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ plans, and the bizarre cybersecurity contract Giuliani received for the city of Kharkiv:
“Now, more light has been shed on Giuliani and his oddball Ukrainian associates – according to a new profile of Russian-Ukrainian oligarch Pavel Fuchs, Giuliani is working to “create a U.S. office for supporting investment in the city.” The profile was published Nov. 12 in the Ukrainian magazine Novoye Vremya.”
A U.S. office for supporting investment in the city of Kharkiv. That appears to be one of the projects Giuliani has been hired to do thanks to his relationship with Pavel Fuchs, a native of Kharkiv.
But Fuchs’s business empire wasn’t initially rooted in Ukraine. He was primarily a Moscow developer in 90’s and 2000’s, which included a failed plan to build ‘Trump Tower Moscow’:
But by 2017, Fuchs was back in Ukraine, the year he appears to have met with Rudy Giuliani for the first time. Fuchs is also close to the mayor of Kharviv, Gennady Kernes. Kernes hired a US lobbyist to represent the city’s interests in Washington in 2016, so it’s unclear if Giuliani’s work to create an office supporting invested in Kharkiv is part of that same contract or separate. But in May of 2017, Giuliani’s company managed to get a cybersecurity contract to review the city’s security services, which is a pretty odd area for Giuliani to get into given that he doesn’t appear to have any sort of cybersecurity experience:
It’s worth recalling how Ukraine became directly involved with the investigation of the 2016 hacks of the Democrats when they unveiled “the Profexer”, a Ukrainian hacker who claimed he was hired by Russian hackers to develop some of the software used by Russian hackers. This was reported in May of 2017. You have to wonder if Giuliani’s ‘cybersecurity’ work involved anything related to the Ukrainian government’s investigation of the
Next, here’s an article from July of this year with more on Giuliani’s Ukrainian relationships and trips, including a number of meeting with Petro Poroshenko. The article notes that Giuliani was named an informal cybersecurity adviser to President Trump in January of 2017, so that’s apparently where he got his cybersecurity ‘cred’. It also notes that Giuliani’s cybersecurity contract with the city of Kharkiv started in May of 2017, the same month Petro Poroshenko paid Michael Cohen $400,000 to get face time with Trump during a trip to Washington. And that’s just one example of the interesting timing regarding his trips to Ukraine and significant US government decisions regarding Ukraine, like the sale of Javelin missiles and cutting off cooperating with the Mueller investigation:
“While engaging with foreign governments may appear consistent with Giuliani’s past work, his Ukrainian activities have all occurred since January 2017, when Giuliani was named an “informal” Cybersecurity Advisor to President Trump (“informal” meaning unpaid and therefore not subject to the same ethics requirements of government employees). In an interview with Politico the month he assumed this role, Giuliani stressed “the federal government was far behind the private sector companies” and described his task as “to travel the world to find leading experts and introduce them and their ideas to Trump”. He said he would “stay in the private sector” and “would never use my access—I’m not a lobbyist. I’m not going to do any lobbying. I just do solutions.””
In January of 2017, Giuliani gets named Trump’s informal Cybersecurity Advisor. And just a few months later, in May of 2017, Giuliani gets a cybersecurity contract for Kharkiv. And yet Giuliani told the Washington Post that his work there only started in 2018:
Interestingly, it was the spring of 2017 when Poroshenko paid Michael Cohen a $400,000 bribe to secure a face to face meeting with Trump. So Giuliani’s contract with Kharkiv happened shortly after that bribe. Given the speculation that the eventual arms deal involved a quid pro quo, might Giuliani have been acting as a back channel for that quid pro quo?
Giuliani also appears to have done some sort of work with the city of Kiev, including a report on the need to create a municipal police:
Keep in mind that one of the most disturbing trends in Ukraine these days is the cooperation between municipal police and neo-Nazi vigilantes like C14. You have to wonder of that was one of Giuliani’s recommendations.
Giuliani also visited Kiev in June of 2017. Shortly before that visit, Trump allowed Ukraine’s foreign minister into the Oval Office for a photo op:
And one week before a trip in November 2017 to Kharkiv and Kiev, the US National Security Council gave the green light for the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles:
So as we can see, Giuliani’s visits appeared to follow significant US decision. Given that $400,000 bribe paid to Cohen, you have to wonder what other deals were getting worked out between the Trump team and Ukraine. And that raises the obvious question of whether or not Giuliani was helping to negotiate these deals.
Finally, the article notes that, in addition to Pavel Fuchs (Fuks), Giuliani was meeting with Victor Pinchuk and Alexander Rovt too. Again, don’t forget that Rovt was reportedly one of the architects of the ‘peace plan’ getting pushed by Cohen and Sater. And Giuliani wasn’t just meeting with these figures. He gave a paid speech for Pinchuk and his trip to Kharkiv in November 2017 was on Rovt’s private plane:
Next, here’s an article from a couple of weeks ago about Russia declaring sanctions on a range of sanctions of Ukrainian businesses and oligarchs, including Victor Pinchuk and Pavel Fuchs:
“Several businessmen were also sanctioned, including the billionaire Victor Pinchuk and Pavel Fuchs, a property developer who once unsuccessfully tried to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.”
While Fuchs may have started his fortune as a Moscow developer, that chapter of his life appears to be over.
All in all, it’s pretty clear that Giuliani has a murky relationship with a number of Ukrainian figures. A murky relationship that suddenly started in 2017 after he somehow became a ‘cybersecurity expert’.
The adventures of Michael Cohen and Felix Sater were back in the news this week following Cohen’s guilty plea about lying to congress. Specifically, lying about the extent of his efforts to get Trump Tower Moscow built and whether or not he involved Donald Trump himself in these negotiations. Cohen now admits that Trump himself was aware of these efforts and that Cohen tried to arrange for Trump to make a trip to Moscow in 2016 following the Republican convention. Cohen also now admits that Donald Trump, Jr., was aware of these negotiations too, potentially putting Trump Jr. in legal jeopardy over his congressional testimony where he stated he was only “peripherally aware” of the negotiations. We’re also learning that, contrary to Cohen’s previous denials, he did actually hear back from the Kremlin following his direct outreach to Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in January of of 2016. All in all, none of these revelations were particularly surprising, but the legal implications still make them potentially significant.
These revelations also happened to take place right before the G20 summit in Argentina, prompting many to speculate that Trump’s last minute decision to call off a planned meeting with Putin at the summit just hours after thew news of Cohen’s guilty plea had more to do with that news than the official reason of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict in the Sea of Azov. Trump and Putin still ended up informally meeting. So we’ll see if we end up with a repeat of the awkward ‘Trump meets Vlad’ situation we saw in Helsinki.
And as the following article notes, there was another pretty amusing revelation in this week’s Cohen/Sater news that could lead to all sorts of awkward encounters for Trump at the G20 meeting. Awkward encounters with all the other world leaders that Trump is no doubt trying to also negotiation tower and hotel deals with: Sater and Cohen planned on giving the penthouse of Trump Tower Moscow — projected to be worth $50 million — to Vladimir Putin as part of the sales pitch. The idea was that if Putin had the penthouse, all the other oligarchs would be clamoring for a spot in the tower.
It sounds the penthouse plan this was Sater and Cohen’s idea and it’s unclear if Trump himself was on board with the ‘Putin’s penthouse’ idea. But we’re also learning that Trump himself was regularly updated on these negotiations, so it seems quite likely to Trump himself would have approved the idea. And that means story invariably sets a new bar for all those other trump and hotel negotiations Trump must be engaged with at a summit like this. Now every world leader is going to expect the prime penthouse spot in their country’s Trump-branded building. Awkward!
Sure, world leaders would have probably started demanding penthouses of their own anyway had the deal gone through and the Tower got built. But that could have happened in the future and right now Trump is presumably trying to pack in as many international business deals as possible, especially at something like the G20 summit. And we still don’t know if Trump himself backed the idea. But that’s the new standard now for world leaders dealing with Trump: if you don’t get a penthouse offer, Trump is stiffing you:
“The two men worked furiously behind the scenes into the summer of 2016 to get the Moscow deal finished — despite public claims that the development was canned in January, before Trump won the Republican nomination. Sater told BuzzFeed News today that he and Cohen thought giving the Trump Tower’s most luxurious apartment, a $50 million penthouse, to Putin would entice other wealthy buyers to purchase their own. “In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin,” Sater told BuzzFeed News. “My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units. All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin.” A second source confirmed the plan.”
Sell Putin on the idea of building the tower with the penthouse offer and then use Putin’s penthouse as a way of enticing more oligarchs to buy into the property. It’s quite a sales pitch.
And while the idea is described at this point being just Sater’s and Cohen’s idea, we’ve also learned from this week’s Cohen plea that Trump was regularly briefed on the negotiations and Trump signed a letter of intent to build the Tower in October of 2015:
We also learned that Cohen did indeed speak with a Russian government official in January of 2016 following his email to Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. It was, in fact, in inauguration day, January 20, 2016, when Cohen spoke with a person who appears to be an assistant of Peskov for about 20 minutes:
Intriguingly, we are also told that some of the foreign individuals Cohen was in frequent contact with about the Trump Tower deal “had knowledge of or played a role in 2016 election meddling”. This is according to two FBI agents, although we aren’t told who these foreign individuals are:
And that hint that multiple people Cohen was in “frequent contact” with over this Trump Tower negotiation was also involved with or played a role in the election meddling raises the big question of who exactly these people were. Is this a reference to Aras and Emin Agalarov and their role in the infamous June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with the Russian delegation? Or might it be someone else? And that’s part of what makes the following article extra interesting.
Because remember how we previously learned that one of Felix Sater’s main Russian contacts in setting up the Trump Tower deal is an ex-GRU military officer who Felix got to know during his years as an FBI/CIA informant working on anti-terrorism operations? Well, we just learned this guy’s identity in a story that came out a couple days ago: General Evgeny Shmykov. It’s unclear why Shmykov’s identity is now being revealed.
As the following article notes, it was Shmykov we apparently worked on getting Trump and Cohen visas to travel to Russia. The visas had to take place via an invitation by a bank, VTB bank, instead of from the Russian government for diplomatic reasons. Note that VTB bank denies being involved and this is actually consistent with earlier reporting that indicated that Sater ultimately got the invitations for Trump and Cohen issued by GenBank, not VTB bank.
So now that we’ve learned the identity of Shmykov, a former GRU officer, and the role he played in arranging the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations, it raises an interesting question: recall how one of key intelligence sources that allegedly led the US government to conclude that Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hacking campaign against the Democratic Party back in August of 2016 was some described as “deep inside the Kremlin”. So now that we know Shmykov’s identity it’s easier to ask the question of whether or not that source may have been Shmykov himself. Because don’t forget that Shmykov’s previous work with Sater on anti-terror operations, including the tracking of Osama bin Laden, implies some sort of working relationship between Shmykov and the US government. Might Shmykov have been that source deep inside the Kremlin who assured the US government that Putin himself was behind the hacking campaign? Is Shmykov someone who still has contacts deep inside the Kremlin? Based on role Shmykov played in the Trump Tower Moscow misadventures it suggests he still has at least some sort of contacts. And he was was general in the GRU so he still presumably has some sort of significant Kremlin contacts and, more importantly, GRU contacts. So we have to ask, was Shmkov the US government’s super secret source? If so, that would be quite a twist:
“To get the project off the ground, Mr. Sater dug into his address book and its more than 100 Russian contacts — including entries for President Vladimir V. Putin and a former general in Russian military intelligence. Mr. Sater tapped the general, Evgeny Shmykov, to help arrange visas for Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump to visit Russia, according to emails and interviews with several people knowledgeable about the events.”
It’s notable that Sater apparently has an address book of more than 100 Russian contacts, and it was general Shmykov had ended up working with on this. It certainly suggests Shmykov may have been the most well-connected of Sater’s contacts.
And they maintained this working relationship on the negotiations until July of 2016, when he hacks were already public and blamed on the Russian government, making a Trump Tower Moscow deal effectively impossible, at which point the negotiations were apparently abandoned:
Note previous reports where Sater indicates that he continued trying to work on a Trump Tower Moscow deal until December of 2016. So it’s keep in mind we still are working with somewhat conflicting storylines.
But it’s the fact that Shmykov previously worked with Sater when Sater was secretly working for US intelligence agencies that makes the choice of Shmykov for this role so fascinating. We have a former GRU general who presumably has some sort of past working relationship with US intelligence who partnered with Sater. And we’ve already learned that US authorities allegedly arrived at the conclusion that the GRU waged a high profile hacking campaign against the Democratic Party based on a deep Kremlin source. Did US authorities possibly contact Shmykov as they were frantically investigating the hacks in 2016? If so, what did Shmykov tell them?
It’s also interesting that Shmykov was apparently going to get Trump and Cohen their Russian visas via VTB bank:
But don’t forget that, as we’ve learned earlier, VTB bank didn’t issue the invitations to Trump and Cohen. It was GenBank, a far less prominent bank, that actually issued the invitations to Cohen and Trump to get the visas in December 2015. And it was at that point that Cohen became angry with Sater’s failure to get the deal done and led Cohen himself to contact Peskov in January 2016. Although it sounds like Cohen continued to rely in Sater and Shmykov during these negotiations even after contacting Peskov. And that adds an interesting question to keep in mind regarding the possible role Shmykov could have played in working with US intelligence on the hacking investigation: How did Cohen and Sater’s abandonment of the deal in July of 2016 impact Shmykov? Might it have pissed him off? It’s a question worth asking given the possibility that US investigators may have contacted him about the hacks around that time.
So that’s all part of the Cohen revelations of this week. Revelations that were notable, albeit largely unsurprisingly, with the exception of the revealing of Shmykov’s identity. That was definitely surprising.
@Pterrafractyl–
I am taking the time to do a deep dive into “Destiny Betrayed” and the JFK assassination because that event, consummately important in and of itself, gives us an “insight template” into other intel operations.
As noted many times before in programs and written posts, the Trump Machine Russian overtures, headed by spook Sater, give EVERY indication of being an intelligence penetration “op.”
Not unlike Lee Harvey Oswald, except this is an organization.
Just as KGB/Soviet intel almost certainly channeled Marina Prusakova, a spook herself, to meet Oswald and marry him, so, too Russian intel channeled Shmykov to deal with Sater.
Shmykov had had worked on anti-Taliban ops for Russia in the ’90s and early part of this century, so he may well have had contact with Sater before.
Sater was deeply involved with matters Afghan/al-Qaeda.
Has the Trump Tower materialized?
Nope.
FSB/Putin/Russian intel are almost certainly as aware of the real nature of Trump’s Russian ventures.
The JFK assassination template is absolutely INVALUABLE when analyzing the present.
https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-1036-interview-6-with-jim-dieugenio-about-destiny-betrayed/
Keep up the great work!
Dave
Much attention has been given to Friday filings by Robert Mueller’s office that included a seemingly new detail about how Michael Cohen spoke to an unnamed Russian national back in November of 2015 who “claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.’” The term “political synergy” is widely seen as potentially significant in relation to the hacking of the Democrats despite the fact that Cohen turned the offer down because he was already pursuing the deal being worked out by Felix Sater (that’s the deal involving Sater’s old GRU contact during his time as a CIA informant).
As we’re going to see, this unnamed Russian national turns out to be an Dmitry Klokov, an Olympic weightlifter who doesn’t actually appear to have the kinds of Kremlin contacts he was claiming. And that’s part of what makes this report so interesting regarding the Trump team’s quest to get Trump Tower Moscow built: one of the questions that’s been lingering over the #TrumpRussia story is the extent to which the various people contacting the Trump team and touting their Kremlin contacts were actually hyping their contacts. It’s a question that becomes particularly relevant when you consider that the Trump Tower Moscow deal never actually happened after multiple failed attempts. And as we’re going to see, in the case of Klokov it looks like more hype than actual Kremlin connections.
First, here’s a story covering Friday’s court filings. And in addition to charges that appear to implicate President Trump in the campaign finance violations involving the payoff of Trump’s porn star mistresses, the report includes the tantalizing prospect that an unnamed Russian national was offering Michael Cohen Kremlin contacts and ‘political synergy’:
“In one of the filings, Mueller details how Cohen spoke to a Russian who “claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.’” The person repeatedly dangled a meeting between Trump and Putin, saying such a meeting could have a “phenomenal” impact “not only in political but in a business dimension as well.””
That was the dangle by the unnamed Russian national: he was a “trusted person” in the Russian Federation who could offer the Trump campaign “political synergy” and “synergy on a government level”. Given the context of this investigation it’s not hard to see what there would be so much interest in this contact. And yet nothing came of it:
So Cohen never actually followed up with the unnamed guy offering “political synergy” and “synergy on a government level” because Cohen and Sater were already working on the deal with Sater’s contact.
But the question still remains of who this unnamed person was and whether or not they really did have the high level Kremlin contacts they were claiming. And as we’ve subsequently learned from the reporters who initially reported on this unnamed person back in June, this mystery Russian national was Dmitry Klokov. And it’s very unclear he has the Kremlin contacts he was claiming. We also learned that Ivanka Trump was the person who arranged Klokov’s contact with Cohen, implying that Ivanka was also involved in the Trump Tower Moscow project:
“There is no evidence that Ivanka Trump’s contact with the athlete — the former Olympic weightlifter Dmitry Klokov — was illegal or that it had anything to do with the election. Nor is it clear that Klokov could even have introduced Trump to the Russian president. But congressional investigators have reviewed emails and questioned witnesses about the interaction, according to two of the sources, and so has special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, according to the other two.”
Dmitry Klokov, the unnamed person who was offering political and government level synergy in Mueller’s recent filing, was offering to introduce Trump to Putin. And yet, despite being an Olympic weightlifter, Klokov doesn’t actually appear to be a close Putin associate or have any public role in Russia’s politics and it’s not clear he could have actually introduced Trump to Putin:
So in this case it looks like one of this Russian contacts promising high level government assistance was just hyping himself, which raises the question of how typical this is in Russia. Is hyping connections to Putin and the Kremlin just something people do when dealing with international business interests?
And if Klokov doesn’t actually have the Kremlin connections he was selling does that make this whole story of a big ‘nothingburger’? Well, a Russian businessman hyping Kremlin connection seems potentially relevant simply as an example of the kind of hyping that may have been going on with the other various Russian nationals making similar promises to the Trumps.
But the fact that Ivanka Trump was actively involved in the hunt for a Russian partner in the Trump Tower Moscow deal also makes this a notable story, especially if it places her in potential legal trouble. And while there’s no indication that Ivanka is in any legal trouble over this probe, the fact that her spokesperson was strongly downplaying her involvement in all this does suggest she’s been lying to someone about this. Because based on the sources for this article, it appears Ivanka was wanted to see Cohen pursue this offer:
And yet Ivanka’s spokesperson is denying Ivanka knew anything about the Trump Tower Moscow project “until after a nonbinding letter of intent had been signed” and even then her involvement was only minimal:
And when Cohen gave Klokov a ‘no’ response, Ivanka questioned Cohen’s decision. That sure sounds like she was more than just fleetingly involved with this:
Also keep in mind that Don Jr. is the only one of the Trump kids who has testified under oath about the Trump Tower Moscow efforts in 2015–2016. So if Ivanka is lying about her involvement in this she’s presumably not going to be in legal trouble over that lying. But that doesn’t mean Don Jr. didn’t lie about Ivanka’s involvement in this.
So, given that the story of this Russian national offering Cohen Kremlin contacts and Trump a meeting with Putin appears to be a story about a Russian businessman hyping his Kremlin contacts to an international investor, you have to wonder if the Ivanka angle was the primary reason this story was released in the special prosecutor’s public filings on Friday.
A number of eyebrows were raised when Rudy Giuliani joined President Trump’s legal team in April of this year. And that response was, in part, simply because Giuliani, himself, triggered an FBI investigation over the 2016 election due to his comments on Fox News about how he knows about a “big surprise” that was coming days before FBI director James Comey publicly reopened Hillary Clinton’s email server investigation days before the election.
But the raised eyebrows at Giuliani’s hiring were also raised simply because Giuliani was basically getting hired to be a TV lawyer for Trump, someone who could go out and argue with the media, and yet he doesn’t appear to actually be very skillful at the art of rhetorical deflection (‘truth isn’t truth!’) and is a giant gaffe machine.
And that brings us to Giuliani’s statements over the weekend, when Giuliani was on the Sunday morning news shows. As the following article notes, not only did Giuliani try to make the case that it would have been fine if Roger Stone was giving the Trump campaign heads up about impending Wikileaks dumps during the 2016 election (not the kind of case Trump’s TV lawyers probably want to be publicly making), but Giuliani also assert that the answers Trump himself gave to written questions from Mueller’s team included the answer that the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations went up to November 2016. Yep, Giuliani just basically confirmed to the world that Trump was aware of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations going on up through the elections, which seems like the kind of thing Trump’s legal team would prefer the public not know even if that was indeed what Trump answered to Mueller’s questions.
Recall that we’ve already heard from Felix Sater that his attempts to work out the Trump Tower Moscow deal went up to December of 2016, so it’s not a revelation to learn that the negotiations went up to November of 2016, but it’s still revelatory to hear Trump’s own lawyer spontaneously disclosing this on TV. And it was never really clear to what extent Sater’s attempts in those later months were largely driven by Sater himself or still under the direction of Trump. Giuliani’s disclosure makes it sound a lot more like Sater’s efforts were still ongoing under Trump’s direction.
And that all raises the question: was Giuliani’s admission part of some sort of legal strategy intended to normalize the Trump Tower Moscow dealings or was this just Rudy being a gaffe machine as usual?:
““According to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to November of 2016,” Giuliani said on ABC’s “This Week,” apparently referring to President Trump’s written answers to special counsel Robert Mueller regarding the deal.”
So that gives us a better sense of how seriously those Trump Tower Moscow negotiations were even in the latter half of 2016. But it’s still unclear why Giuliani made this disclosure at this point in time.
And then Giuliani goes on to excuse Roger Stone hypothetically giving Trump a heads-up during the 2016 campaign about hacked emails being released by asserting that it didn’t happen but even if it did happen it wouldn’t have been illegal:
This assertion by Giuliani is much more understandable since it’s of the ‘we didn’t do it, but if we did it wouldn’t be illegal’ variety of denial. Denials that have becoming more important as information about Roger Stone’s back channel to Wikileaks via Jerome Corsi gets continues to dribble out:
““Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi wrote on Aug. 2, 2016, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to the draft court papers. “One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.””
So Jerome Corsi writes to Roger Stone on August 2, 2016, that “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps...One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.” And investigators have this email. That’s pretty damning. Let’s also not forget that Stone himself tweeted about how it will soon be John Podesta’s ‘time in the barrel’ on August 21, 2016, demonstrating foreknowledge of the Podesta email dump.
Even more damning is that Corsi reportedly told investigators that Stone asked him to get in contact with Wikileaks in a July 25, 2016, email that investigators also have:
Laughably, Corsi is apparently denying that he carried out Stone’s request, despite the August 2nd email to Stone:
All in all, it doesn’t look like Stone and Corsi have much a cover story and yet they are continuing to build a wall of denials. Corsi is even suing Mueller for illegally surveilling him as part of the investigation.
So it’s looking like things could get extra awkward for the Trump team on the Roger Stone legal front and, at this point, we have every reason to suspect that evidence is going to come out of a back channel from Wikileaks to the Trump campaign via Stone. And in that light, Giuliani’s defense of “we didn’t get info from Stone, but if we had that would have been fine” makes sense. It might look horrible, but prepping the public for that eventuality could still be worth it if the Trump team expects this information to come out eventually.
Still, why did Giuliani willingly disclose that the Trump Tower Moscow dealings went on up to November of 2016 with Trump’s knowledge? Might evidence of that be coming out soon too? We’ll see, but as this investigation continues to be fleshed out and we learn more and more about who was engaged with what, it’s worth noting one of the more interesting patterns that’s emerged: If you look at the teams of people working on the Trump Tower Moscow deal and the email hacking operations, those teams don’t overlap except for the Trump family.
Look at the list of people involved in the Trump Tower Moscow deal: Michael Cohen and Felix Sater doing the bulk of the work under Donald Trump’s direction, with Ivanka and Don Jr. apparently doing some side work on the initiative.
And then there’s the people involved with the email hack operations: There was Roger Stone with his Wikileaks outreach effort. And there was the Peter Smith operation that included Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Sam Clovis. And Trump himself was presumably at least somewhat aware of that operation.
Notice how little overlap there is between those two groups of operators. And that raises an interesting question: did the email hacking team even know about the Trump Tower Moscow effort and vice versa? Or were they completely blind to each others efforts? Might Trump himself have been the only ones that knew about both efforts? Maybe just Trump and Don Jr.? Part of what makes that such an intriguing possibility is that if the hacking team didn’t know about the Trump Tower moscow operation, it’s possible they could have arranged for the hacks to be covered with “I’m a Russian hacker” ‘clues’ without realizing that the the Trump team was simultaneously pursuing a deal with the Kremlin, which could explain this bizarre situation where the Trump team is allegedly colluding with the Kremlin on a high-profile hacking operation at the same time Trump is trying to get a tower built in Moscow. Might a lack of mutual awareness on the part of these different teams explain that extreme conflict? If so, would be pretty hilarious.
There was a failed attempt in the US Senate to block the lifting of sanctions on two companies controlled by Oleg Deripaska after Deripaska. The lifting of the sanctions were initially announced by the Treasury department last month after Deripaska sold enough shares to drop his ownership levels in two companies below a threshold that would technically allow for the lifting for sanctions. So Deripaska would still be under the sanctions, but these two companies would have the sanctions lifted. The move was being characterized as ‘letting Russia off easy’. 11 Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to block the move but that wasn’t enough because 60 votes were needed. So, since this move is undoubtedly going to be characterized as the Trump administration caving to pressure/blackmail from the Kremlin, it’s worth noting that the governments of the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Sweden sent the US a joint letter advocating for the lifting of these sanctions because the EU aluminum industry is heavily reliant on the aluminum from Deripaska’s sanctioned companies:
“Ambassadors to the U.S. representing the U.K., France, Germany and the European Union are among those who wrote a joint letter addressed to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel saying that lifting the sanctions would “safeguard” more than 75,000 workers across the EU’s aluminum industry.”
The UK, France, Germany, and the broader EU were all part of a joint letter asking the US to lift the sanctions from these these two companies that are deemed to be crucial to the EU’s aluminum industry. Austria, Italy, and Sweden also signed the letter:
So that presumably factored into the US government’s decision to lift these sanctions.
But it’s also worth keeping in mind one of the other reasons the US government might have an interest in not going too hard on Oleg Deripaska: It turns out the FBI had been trying to recruit Deripaska as an informant from 2014–2016 and Deripaska. It was part of a broader clandestine US effort to assess the possibility of gaining cooperation from around a half-dozen Russian oligarchs.
And in a fascinating twist, it was none other than Bruce Ohr — one of the FBI agents who worked on the Mueller team — and Christopher Steele — the author of the Steele dossier — who were leading that recruitment effort. So while, on the surface, the US government is officially very angry with Deripaska over the alleged role he played in Kremlin meddling in the 2016 elections, the full relationship between the US and Deripaska is probably a lot more complicated:
“Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant. They signaled that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States or even explore other steps to address his legal problems. In exchange, they were hoping for information on Russian organized crime and, later, on possible Russian aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to current and former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska.”
So between 2014 and 2016, the FBI and Justice Department were trying to recruit Deripaska. And this was just one of around a half-dozen oligarchs targeted for recruitment. Bruce Ohr led the effort and Christopher Steele acted as the US’s intermediary:
It also sounds like Deripaska specifically became a recruitment target before Trump announced his campaign in 2015. Specially, on November 21, 2014, seven months before Trump announced his candidacy. But it wasn’t until September of 2015 that Deripaska actually met with the FBI:
The recruitment attempt didn’t work, but it’s interesting to note that not only did Deripaska have a history of help the US government — when he helped free an FBI agent captured in Iran — but Steele also appears to have concluded that Deripaska and other oligarchs aren’t actually the simple “tools” of Putin that is typically alleged but instead individuals who are operating under Kremlin pressure to toe the Russian government line (implying they don’t necessarily agree with that line):
Yep, Deripaska previously spent $25 million of his own money to get a captured FBI agent released. And Steele had concluded that Deripaska and other oligarch might be a lot more independent of Putin than we are typically told.
So while it’s unclear to what extent this particular history may have played in the US decision to lift the sanctions of Deripaska’s two companies, the fact that the FBI was running a Russian oligarch recruitment campaign from 2014–2016, Derpiska was one of the main targets, Bruce Ohr ran the program, Christopher Steele was acting as the middle-man, and Deripaska had a history of helping the US government on a covert operation does seem like pretty important context when looking at that US decision to lift those sanctions. And pretty important context for the whole #TrumpRussia thing.
So now New York Times is openly pushing the “Cultural Marxism” narrative that the Alt-Right has been pushing, but with a twist.
Instead of the usual narrative which is that the USSR infiltrated the US through academics, intellectuals, and political figures to influence the youth towards Marxism and that the Left we see today are the aftermath of such influence and not because of how the economy has been screwed, its now a different narrative on how “fake news” and the like were originally created by, and based off of, Soviet “active measures” and that the “disinformation” campaigns we see today are really the relics of the USSR’s meddling, with the Russians continuing the “legacy” and Trump and his supporters being the result of it.
Link if you really want to bother watching the series, can’t archive it unfortunately without losing the videos:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html
Keep in mind that the whole Cultural Marxism usage originated in Nazi Germany, where Kulturbolschewismus (“Cultural Bolshevism”) was used to abuse political opponents.
There was an interesting new story about Michael Cohen’s shenanigans that appears to be a relatively minor story in the scheme of things but is potentially illustrative of a casual willingness to cheat in the political arena by Donald Trump. It’s also another example of the close ties between Trump and Jerry Falwell Jr’s Liberty University: John Gauger, the chief information officer at Liberty University, is claiming that Michael Cohen hired him for $50,000 to perform various online services but was only paid less than $13,000 (in cash). Cohen also gave him a boxing glove that Mr. Cohen said had been worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter as part of the compensation. Cohen promised the rest of the $50,000 would be paid eventually but this never happened. This was in early 2015, before Trump announced his candidacy.
So what were these services that Cohen hired Gauger to do: Well, it generally involved raising the internet profile of Cohen and Trump. For instance, in January of 2014, Cohen asked Gauger to help Trump score well in a CNBC online poll to identify the country’s top business leaders by writing a computer script to repeatedly vote for him. In other words, but rigging the poll. Gauger’s script doesn’t appear to have worked. Trump didn’t even make it into the top 100. Then in February of 2015, Cohen asked Gauger to use his script again for a Drudge Report poll of potential GOP presidential candidates. Trump ended up ranked 5th in that poll with about 5 percent of the votes. Now, online polls are notoriously unreliable and riggable, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Trump’s rivals in that 2015 presidential poll were doing the same thing.
This whole affair also has ties to the Trump payoff of Stephanie Clifford aka Stormy Daniels: When Cohen filed with the Trump Organization to be reimbursed for the money he spent paying off Stormy, he also requested an additional $50,000 for “technology service”. This is for the services Gauger was providing according to sources.
And as we’re going to see, Cohen might be involved in another story involving Liberty University. A story that, based on what we know at this point, has the potential to be even more salacious than the payoff of Stormy Daniels: Jerry Falwell, Jr., the head of Liberty University, is involved in a rather bizarre lawsuit. Back in 2012, Falwell and his wife were guests at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach where they developed a “friendly relationship” with a 21 year old pool boy, Giancarlo Granda. It was so friendly that the Falwells eventually decided to go into business with Granda and purchase the Alton Hostel, a low-cost dorm-style youth hostel in Miami. Granda was offered a share in this business because he lived in Miami and would act as the manager. Falwell himself didn’t technically invest in this business but Falwell’s wife and son (Falwell III) were partners in the company that owned the hostel and Falwell did loan the company the down payment to purchase the $4.65 million property.
Here’s where the lawsuit comes in: a father and son named Jesus Fernandez Sr. and Jesus Fernandez Jr. claim that after Falwell Jr. offered to help Granda, Fernandez and his son came up with the idea of Alton Hostel and were promised a part of the business. The suit was file in 2015 and refiled in 2017. It has since been dismissed.
All in all, the lawsuit isn’t all that interesting...unless, of course, this “friendly relationship” between Falwell and Granda was actually of the ‘rent boy’ variety of friendly relationships. But so far we have no evidence of that. It’s just hard to rule out given the history of these things with hyper-homophobic religious figures.
And here’s where Michael Cohen comes in: First, it sounds like Cohen actually discussed lawsuit with Falwell. That may or may not be very interesting. It largely depends on the nature of that “friendly relationship” with Granda. Lets not forget that one of Cohen’s specialties is paying off people who had affairs with his clients. So if Granda was basically acting as Falwell’s ‘rent boy’ as part of this bizarre business relationship, the fact that Falwell was talking with Cohen about a lawsuit that involved Granda raises some interesting questions. But, again, we don’t have any evidence pointing in a ‘rent boy’ direction at this point. It’s just an amusing possibility given the available facts.
More important, it sounds like Cohen was actually quite instrumental in securing Falwell’s endorsement for Donald Trump in early 2016 and this turned out to the first endorsement Trump received from an evangelical leader. It was Cohen who initially recommended it during one of Trump’s trips to Liberty University in early January 2016 trip and it was Cohen who reached out to Falwell after that trip to remind Falwell that he had agreed to endorse Trump. This was a crucial endorsement for Trump at that point in the primary because, up until Falwell’s endorsement, Trump was seen as a candidate who was very obviously NOT a ‘family values’ candidate. Other endorsements from evangelicals soon followed.
The source that claims he is “sure” Falwell discussed his lawsuit with Cohen is also described as being familiar with Falwell’s decision to endorse Trump, so it seems like that this lawsuit discussion and the decision to endorse Trump happened right around the time Falwell discussed his lawsuit with Cohen. That could must be coincidental timing, but if we’re looking at a ‘rent boy’ kind of situation that would obviously put this all in a very different context.
According to a different source, Cohen was so confident that Falwell would endorse Trump that he assured others that Falwell would issue an endorsement even before Trump announced his candidacy.
So, to summarize this bizarre Cohen/Falwell pair of stories, it turns out that Cohen agreed to pay hired Liberty Universities CTO, John Gauger. to rig online polls in Trump’s favor. But Cohen didn’t actual pay Gauger the full $50,000, although he did get reimbursed $50,000 from the Trump Org for that project (so Cohen was stiffing both Gauger and Trump). And that $50,000 reimbursement was requested by Cohen at the same time he requested $130,000 for the hush money payoff to Stormy Daniels. And it also turns out that Cohen was instrumental in getting Falwell’s 2016 endorsement of Trump, which was crucial for Trump at that point in the primary season. And that decision to endorse Trump appears to have happened around the same time Falwell and Cohen discussed the lawsuit involving a highly unusual business involving Falwell, his wife, his son, and a pool boy who the Falwell’s developed a “friendly relationship” with.
Ok, here’s the first article that talks about Cohen hiring Liberty University’s CTO to rig (unsuccessfully) online polls for Trump, Cohen stuffing this CTO, and Cohen asking from reimbursement (for the money he didn’t pay) from the Trump organization at the same time he was asking to be reimbursed for the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels:
“In January 2014, Mr. Cohen asked Mr. Gauger to help Mr. Trump score well in a CNBC online poll to identify the country’s top business leaders by writing a computer script to repeatedly vote for him. Mr. Gauger was unable to get Mr. Trump into the top 100 candidates. In February 2015, as Mr. Trump prepared to enter the presidential race, Mr. Cohen asked him to do the same for a Drudge Report poll of potential Republican candidates, Mr. Gauger said. Mr. Trump ranked fifth, with about 24,000 votes, or 5% of the total.”
So starting January of 2014, this poll-rigging-for-hire relationship started between Michael Cohen and John Gauger. And this continue in early 2015, before Trump formally announced his candidacy. At a minimum, it indicates Trump was interested in a presidential run by that point and will to rig things like polls.
Gauger just happens to be the CTO of Liberty University. He claims he was never never paid the $50,000 promised to him and only got $12,000-$13,000 and an MMA fighter’s boxing glove as compensation. And yet Cohen still asked to be reimbursed by the Trump Org in early 2017 for $50,000 for those services that he was supposed to have paid to Gauger. It’s all rather sleazy, because of course it was. This is a Trump Org story, after all:
And note that Cohen confirms this happened and claims that he did it all under Trump’s direction. Amusingly, this work continued in 2016, when Cohen tasked Gauger with creating a @WomenForCohen twitter account that promoted Cohen’s appearances and statements boosting Trump:
Interestingly, it sounds like Cohen’s reimbursement request to the Trump Org for this $50,000 was appended onto his $130,000 reimbursement request for the hush money paid out to Stormy Daniels. And because this was described as “tech services”, this could constitute a campaign finance violation:
So how did Cohen end up hiring Liberty University’s CTO to do this work? That relationship appears to go back to 2012, when Falwell invited Trump to give a speech. Cohen met Gauger, who helped Cohen set up an Instagram account. And the rest is history:
So here’s an article with the rest of that history. The history of how Cohen played a key role in getting Falwell to endorse Trump in early 2016, at a time when the evangelical community was still tepid about a candidate as anti-‘family values’ as Trump. This appears to have happened when Trump made a trip to Liberty University in January of 2016. It was during that trip that Cohen encouraged Falwell to endorse Trump. And based on a source, it sounds like it was during this time that Falwell also discussed with Cohen the lawsuit he was facing over this bizarre business venture involving a youth hostel and young pool boy who the Falwell’s developed some sort of special relationship with:
“The suit, which has not been previously reported, was brought by a father and son who claim that after they helped conceive of the business, the pool attendant and Falwell wrongly cut them out of it. The suit says that while Falwell Jr. and his wife were guests at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach in 2012, they developed a “friendly relationship” with the pool attendant, Giancarlo Granda; flew Granda in a private jet; and eventually backed him in a business venture, setting up a hostel that offers low-cost dorm-style nightly accommodations to visitors. The pool attendant, according to public records databases, was 21 when he met the Falwells.”
That’s quite a friendly relationship. They meet the pool boy and decide to go into business with them. But the Falwell’s relationship with Jesus Fernandez Sr. and Jesus Fernandez Jr. wasn’t so friendly. they sued that they were also promised part of the business since they came up with the idea of Alton Hostel:
And this lawsuit was discussed with Cohen. How extensively we don’t know. But the source who says he is “sure” Falwell discussed the lawsuit with Cohen is also apparently familiar with Falwell’s decision to endorse Trump:
Did that decision to endorse Trump happen at the same time Cohen and Falwell were discussion this lawsuit? That’s unclear. But what does appear to be clear is that Cohen played an important role in securing Falwell’s endorsement of Trump, which was crucial for Trump at that point in the 2016 primaries:
So that’s the strange story about Michael Cohen, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Falwell’s key endorsement of Trump. What more might be under this rock? Who knows, but Cohen definitely doesn’t disappoint when it comes to bizarre stories.
President Trump’s TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is continuing to raise questions. Some of those questions revolve around his general mental competence and why in the world President Trump hasn’t fired him yet. Especially after Giuliani...
1. Claimed that the Trump team was engaged in the Trump Tower Moscow meeting negotiations with the Russian government up until election day of November 2016 on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday
2. Then gives a non-answer answer about it on CNN’s State of the Union, also on Sunday, when asked about that claim that the negotiations went into November 2016.
3. Got quoted in the New York Times on Sunday claiming that Trump said the discussions were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won.”
4. Issued a general statement on Monday asserting that any claims he made about when Trump may or may not have had discussions about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations were purely hypothetical.
5. Gave an interview the New Yorker on Monday claiming that he never actually told the New York Times that Trump told him the negotiations were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won.” When asked if the New York Times just made up the quote, Giuliani replied, “I don’t know if they made it up. What I was talking about was, if he had those conversations, they would not be criminal.”
So, according to the latest iteration of Giuliani’s story, when he initially claimed that the Trump team was involved with the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations up through election day of 2016, he was just speaking hypothetically and making the point that if Trump had engaged in such negotiations up through election day of 2016 that wouldn’t have been illegal. What should we believe? Well, it seems likely that his first claims were true, but given how wildly he kept changing his story in the span of 24 hours it’s hard to take anything he says at face value. And that demonstrates the potential effectiveness of the technique Giuliani used for walking back statements when necessary: as long as he utterly discredits himself by making multiple contradictory statements in a short period of time, it’s hard to take anything he says seriously, which effectively walks back the initial offending statement. It’s advanced TV lawyer-ing:
“In at least five interviews with the press over a two-day period, Giuliani made confusing and often contradictory statements while attempting to spin reports that President Trump and Michael Cohen were in contact about constructing a Trump Tower Moscow in the months leading up to the 2016 election.”
It’s one thing to have a history of making contradictory statements. That’s inevitably going to happen to everyone. But it’s another thing to make a string of contradictory statements in over two days to multiple media outlets. First, we have Giuliani appearing to make big news when he tells NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that Trump remembers that the negotiations could have gone as late as October or November and that the Trump team’s answers to the Mueller probe “cover until the election. So anytime during that period, they could’ve talked about it”:
Later on Sunday, Giuliani is on CNN’s State of the Union, were he basically dodges the question of whether or not the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations went through November 2016:
Then, in the Sunday New York Times, Giuliani appears to quote Trump directly, saying Trump said the discussions were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won”:
Then, on Monday, Giuliani attempts to portray ALL of his statements from Sunday as purely hypothetical:
Finally, also on Monday, Giuliani denies that he gave that quote to the New York Times and when asked if he thinks the New York Times just made up the quote, he gives another confusing explanation about how everything he’s been saying is hypothetical. He goes on to assert that this was all done to make the point that if Trump had hypothetically been involved with Trump Tower Moscow negotiations up through November that wouldn’t have been criminal:
And that 24 hour public relations nightmare is why the question of how Rudy keeps his job remains one of the top mysteries of the entire #TrumpRussia sage. Because this is either some sort of sophisticated Machiavellian disinformation scheme or Giuliani is just bad at being a TV lawyer.
So Giuliani’s answers may not of been elucidating. But they were somewhat illuminating in the sense that, even when you factor in all the walk backs and denials, it appears that the Trump legal team would like to establish that it would have been legally find for Trump to have been engaged in the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations up until he won the election. And that raises the obvious question: so if it was legally fine for Trump’s team to be engaging in these negotiations up through election day, would they have really suddenly dropped those negotiations after his surprise win? It seems like that period after winning would be the time when he would be negotiating most furiously for a deal.
And that question makes it worth keeping in mind something Felix Sater told journalists at back in May of 2018: Sater didn’t end his attempts to get a Trump Tower Moscow until December of 2016, when Trump officially declared that he wouldn’t be doing any new business deals as president:
“According to Sater, he eventually gave up on the project in December 2016 when Trump, who had just been elected, said his company would do “no new deals” while he was in office.”
Yep, according to Sater, he didn’t give up on the Trump Tower Moscow project until December 2016, when Trump declared his company would do “no new deals” while he was in office, which was made on December 12, 2016. So were any negotiations actively taking place during that the period between Election Day and December 12, 2016? Hopefully Rudy Giuliani will spend a couple days giving contradictory answers about that question.
Well, Roger Stone finally got his indictment. Along with a pre-dawn arrest by the FBI.
The indictment covers a range of crimes obstruction of justice, lying, and witness tampering regarding the investigation into Stone’s back channel with Wikileaks in the 2016 campaign. It charges Stone with making false statements to the House Intelligence Committee about his interactions with WikiLeaks, lying to Congress about possessing records that documented those interactions, and that he “attempted to persuade a witness to provide false testimony” to investigators. The attempts to persuade a witness to provide false testimony is presumably about Stone threatening Randy Credico (and Credico’s poor little dog Bianca)
The indictment refers to Stone’s communications with Organization 1 (Wikileaks), Person 1 (Jerome Corsi), and Person 2 (Randy Credico). The indictment also refers to ‘senior Trump campaign officials’ who were in contact with Stone about the timing and nature of the Wikileaks releases. One of those senior campaign officials appears to be Steve Bannon:
“The indictment alleges that Stone made false statements to the House Intelligence Committee about his interactions with WikiLeaks, lied to Congress about possessing records that documented those interactions, and “attempted to persuade a witness to provide false testimony” to investigators.”
Obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, and witness intimidation. That sounds like Roger.
According to the indictment, Stone had two apparent back channels to Wikileaks: Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico:
Interestingly, the indictment charges that Stone “informed senior Trump Campaign officials that he had information indicating Organization 1 had documents whose release would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign,” by June or July of 2016. That’s notable in part because it’s pretty vague. “By June or July” is a pretty big window that encompasses the period both before and after the initial reporting and release of hacked DNC documents. Recall that initial reports on the hacking of the DNC took place on June 14th of 2016 and “Guccifer 2.0” popped up a day later. So did Stone inform senior campaign officials that Wikileaks had these hacked documents before the DNC hack became public knowledge or not? We don’t know at this point:
The indictment also refers to an unnamed “high-ranking Trump Campaign official” who was directly communicating with Stone about the October 2016 release of John Podesta’s hacked emails. That individual appears to be Steve Bannon:
So did the buck stop with Bannon? Well, critically, as the following article notes, the indictment refers to this “high-ranking” Trump campaign official getting directed to contact Stone about Wikileaks. And that raises the obvious question of whether or not the person doing that directing was a member of the Trump family or Trump himself. When directly asked whether it was Trump who did the directing, Sarah Sanders never directly denied it:
“According to the indictment, “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.” Organization 1 refers to WikiLeaks.”
There aren’t that many people that could have directed Steve Bannon, the campaign manager, to do anything. There’s Trump. Maybe Jared Kushner or Don Jr. But other than that it’s hard to see who else it could have been. Robert Mercer, perhaps?
Adding to the evidence that Bannon was the high-ranking Trump campaign official in contact with Stone is the fact that the email exchange described in the indictment matches an email exchange between Bannon and Stone that was published in November:
And, curiously, when directly asked if Trump is the person who directed Bannon to contact Stone, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t deny it. She gave lots of answers, but never a direct denial:
Keep in mind that one of the big questions about this whole affair has been whether or not Trump himself was directly involved with directing the Trump campaign’s attempts to exploit the hackings or if he left that to his associates and played dumb. Based on this indictment, and Sanders’s tepid denials, it would appear that Trump himself was indeed directly involved.
If Trump was directly involved, that raises the question of whether or not Trump denied this in his written answers to Mueller’s questions. And as the following report from November indicates, Trump was indeed asked by Mueller about contacts with Stone about Wikileaks and Trump denied any such communications in his answers. So if it turns out Trump direct Steve Bannon to contact Stone, it’s going to be interesting to see how that legally plays out regarding Trump’s answers to Mueller:
“President Donald Trump told special counsel Robert Mueller in writing that Roger Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks, nor was he told about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his son, campaign officials and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, according to two sources familiar with the matter.”
So Trump told Mueller Stone never to him about Wikileaks back in November and a couple of months later we have Stone getting indicted with charges that a high-ranking campaign official (Bannon) was directed to contact Stone. So it’s looking like Bannon’s working as a middle-man between Stone and Trump could end up being a crucial legal area for Trump. Because as the article notes, Trump could potentially be subject to criminal charges:
And Stone himself told reporters at the time that Mueller was wants Trump to answer questions about his contacts with Stone about Wikileaks:
And that’s all part of what makes this indictment such a significant development. There are enough bread crumbs in that indictment to lead right back to charges against Trump of lying to Mueller.
So we’ll see how this plays out, but now that the legal threats to Trump could hinge on whether or not there was direct contact between Stone and Trump, it’s worth recalling one of the earliest bizarre episodes that took place in the Trump campaign that doubled as an early hint that some major dirty tricks were planned for the 2016 race and Stone would be leading that effort: Recall how, back in August o 2015, days after the first Republican debate, Roger Stone left the Trump campaign. According to the campaign, Stone was fired.
But Stone claimed quit. Why did he allegedly quit? Well, according to Stone, he was so upset with Trump’s “circus-like” behavior during that first debate and lack of focus, in particular his feuding with Megyn Kelly and post-debate comments about Kelly “bleeding from her eyes...bleeding from her wherever...”, that Stone just could take it anymore. So he quit. But Stone also declared that he still supports Trump and would vote for Trump in the primaries and continue working to ensure Trump wins. This was always a highly suspect explanation. After all, creating a circus-like atmosphere and feuding with Kelly was a classic Stone-style political tactic. Don’t forget both Stone and Trump learned from Roy Cohn.
And that highly suspect explanation for why Stone left the campaign raises the question of whether or not Stone was intentionally putting distance between himself and the campaign for plausible deniability purposes. Which, in turn, raises the question of what kind of dirty tricks operation the Trump campaign had in mind back in August of 2015:
“Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday it has fired top political adviser Roger Stone — who promptly denied being let go and insisted he had quit.”
It was a he said/he said moment. Who dumped who? According to the Trump campaign, they dumped Stone because Stone was bring negative attention the Trump campaign. As if the Trump campaign, which was predicated on garnering negative attention, would care about being associated with someone like Stone:
Then there’s Stone’s explanation, which is that he was very disappointed with Trump for not being focused and creating controversy. Which is utterly absurd coming from someone like Stone:
But, the end, Stone assured us that he still supported Trump:
And as history has since demonstrated, Stone went on to become a key middle-man between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks. So given everything we know now, we have to ask whether or not the role Stone ended up playing in this whole affair was anticipated back in August of 2015.
Also recall how all of this fits into the larger timeline of the hacks. The initial hacking the DNC server took place some time around May of 2015 (the ‘Cozy Bear’ hack) and this hack was alleged watched in real-time by Dutch intelligence, which informed the NSA. The US government was also aware of the widespread spearphishing operation at the time since the Pentagon was attacked too. The NSA informed the FBI in September of 2015 that the DNC was hacked and the FBI then informed the DNC, leading to that bizarre seven month period where the DNC did nothing because their IT person didn’t think these were real warnings from the FBI and the FBI barely tried to make it clear these were real warnings.
Also recall that the secret GOP operation by Barbara Ledeen, Newt Gingrich, and Judicial Watch to find Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails that Republicans were convinced were floating around on the dark web was assembled at some point in 2015. So is it possible the Trump team had word of the DNC hacks by August of 2015 and decided to send Roger Stone on a mission to find them? Was Barabara Ledeen’s group assembled before Stone left the Trump campaign? We don’t know yet but those seem like increasingly relevant questions following this indictment? But given Stone and Trump’s long-standing relationship and the implausible nature of his tiff with Trump that led up to leaving the Trump campaign, if Stone left for the purpose of putting distance between himself and the Trump campaign for the purpose of running a secret dirty tricks operation it seems highly likely that Trump would have known about it.
Here’s an interesting story from back in December that relates to both the illegal foreign donations flowing into the Trump inaugural fund and the recent subpoena by federal prosecutors in the district of New York for all documents related to Imaad Zuberi who appeared to be making straw donations to the Trump inaugural on behalf of the government Qatar:
It turns out that after Paul Manafort was fired as Trump’s campaign manager in August of 2016 following the discovery of his name in the Ukrainian “black ledger”, billionaire financier Thomas Barrack tried to find Manafort some new clients. Barrack is one of Mr. Trump’s closest friends and planned Trump’s inaugural. Barrack also started the Rebuilding America Now super PAC for Trump in the summer of 2016 when Trump’s presidential campaign was short on cash and out of favor with a number of major Republican donors. It was reported Paul Manafort, then the campaign manager, who suggested that Barrack start the super PAC. Barrack went on to raise funds for both the super PAC and Trump’s inaugural fund.
Barrack reportedly told investigators in 2017 that Manafort seemed to veiw the Rebuilding America PAC as an extension of the Trump campaign despite the rules that super PAC’s can raise unlimited funds for ONLY if they don’t coordinate their activities with a campaign. Manafort sent to friends from the campaign to run the operations of the super PAC in violation of federal law requiring a cooling-off period of at least 120 days before campaign staff members can join a political committee backing the same candidate.
According to the Federal Election Commission, the super PAC raised $23 million, making it one of the most important sources of funds for advertisements, polls and other political expenditures on Mr. Trump’s behalf. And that’s led to both Mueller’s investigators and federal prosecutors asking whether or not anyone from Qatar or other Middle Eastern countries contributed to the super PAC, perhaps using American intermediaries. Barrack happens to have extensive business contacts in the Persian Gulf.
And now we’re learning that, following Manafort’s firing as Trump’s campaign manager, Barrack and Manafort went on cruise where Barrack was helping Manafort find new clients. And one of the figures Barrack introduced Manafort to on that cruise was Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar.
So in addition to the host of questions related to the multiple Saudi/UAE offers to help Trump win using the services of Psy Group, there’s also the question of whether or not there were illegal Middle Eastern funds flowing into Tom Barrack’s super PAC in the summer of 2016, which would have been driven, in part, by the fact that so many Republican establishment mega-donors had cooled on Trump at that point. And based on the fact that Barrack managed to introduce Paul Manafort to the former prime minister of Qatar following Manafort’s firing, that raises a big question about how much Qatari money was flowing into the Trump campaign during 2016 in addition to Saudi and UAE money:
“The inquiry focuses on whether people from Middle Eastern nations — including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — used straw donors to disguise their donations to the two funds. Federal law prohibits foreign contributions to federal campaigns, political action committees and inaugural funds.”
Were Middle Eastern figures donate to Trump’s super PAC during the campaign in addition to donating to the inaugural fund? That’s the question federal investigators appear to asking, in part because such donations would have been illegal. And at the heart of this line of inquiry of Trump’s close friend Tom Barrack, the billionaire financier with extensive Middle Eastern connections who created the Rebuilding America Now super PAC in the summer of 2016 after Paul Manafort suggested it during a period when the Trump campaign was running low on cash due to Trump falling out of favor with so many Republican donors:
Barrack’s super PAC may have broken the law whether or not there was any illegal foreign donations simply because it was being run by two of Manafort’s friends from the campaign, violating the rule that super PACs can’t coordinate with a campaign:
And those questions of foreign donations to the super PAC are inevitably going to specifically involved questions of Qatari donations following the revelation that Tom Barrack and Paul Manafort went on a cruise following Manafort’s firing where Barrack introduced Manafort to one of the world’s richest men, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar:
But given Barrack’s extensive Middle Eastern ties, those questions of Barrack’s connections leading to illegal Middle Eastern donations aren’t limited to Qatar:
So it sounds like investigators looking into the question of foreign collusion during the 2016 campaign are asking questions that haven’t been asked much thus far during the entire 2016 fiasco: questions of simple illegal foreign donations to the Trump campaign.
And that points towards more the chilling aspects of these questions of illegal foreign donations: given all of the other questions about hackings and social media manipulation campaigns, questions of illegal foreign donations are now quaint by today’s Trumpian standards.
There was no shortage of tantalizing remarks during Michael Cohen’s under oath congressional testimony on Wednesday. As we’re going to see, there was his recollection of Donald Trump, Jr. telling his dad about the June 9th, 2016, Trump Tower meeting in Cohen’s presence. Or Trump taking a phone call from Roger Stone in July of 2016 saying he just spoke with Assange about an upcoming email dump. Or Cohen’s general description of Trump as a massive racist in private. In general, the testimony seemed to confirm a number of suspicions that have been swirling around the whole #TrumpRussia investigation and the larger #TrumpCorruption investigations into general Trumpian corruption.
But Cohen also refuted a number of #TrumpRussia theories that emerged from the Steele Dossier. Specifically, that dossier claimed that Cohen was a central figure in the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. It also had the explosive claim that Cohen traveled to Prague in August or September of 2016 and met with a number of Russians and the hackers. The goal of the alleged meeting was to limit negative news reports about the Russia-friendly relationships of Carter Page and Paul Manafort and ensure that European hackers were paid and told to “lie low”, according to the dossier. Recall how this Prague has been repeatedly pushed by McClatchy news citing anonymous sources close to the investigation, and yet it’s never been confirmed and questions have grown about the veracity of those sources. So if the Prague story turns out to be untrue, that points strongly towards individuals in the feeding journalists BS reports. And recall that the McClatchy reports defended these anonymous sources by saying they were sources for a number of other stories that have indeed panned out. So these anonymous sources who may have been wittingly or unwittingly been pushing disinformation are important sources for this team of McClatchy reporters.
And now we have Cohen testifying under oath and refuting that he’s ever been to Prague or had anything to do with being a middle-man in a #TrumpRussia hacking collusion scheme. Cohen was unambiguously the middle-man between the Trump Organization and the Russian government when it came to 2015–2016 push to get the Kremlin’s approval for a Trump Tower Moscow deal so he was clearly in contact with Russian officials. And he does claim that he suspected there may have been collusion (which is not an outrageous suspicion given what he witnessed, all things considered). But Cohen continues to insist that he’s seen no direct evidence of collusion and has never been to Prague.
So given the fact that we have repeatedly seen the ‘Prague’ story pushed by anonymous sources claiming that Mueller team has evidence of such a meeting, if we assume that Cohen isn’t lying about never having been to Prague one thing we can conclusively establish from Cohen’s testimony is that at least some of these anonymous sources who have been feeding information to journalists over these past two years have been feeding disinformation designed to promote aspects of the Steele dossier that have turned out to be false:
“We did learn new information, but it raised yet more questions than it answered about the president and his associates. Still, if you thought Cohen’s cooperation would make Robert Mueller’s case that Trump conspired with Russia, think again. Indeed, the mere fact that the Justice Department permitted Cohen to speak about all this may suggest that none of this information is crucial to Mueller’s investigation.”
That’s a good way to summarize Cohen’s testimony: it raised yet more questions than it answered.
But we did learn some things. Like the fact that Trump never directly had to tell Cohen to lie to Congress in 2017 about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations because Trump had a way of given orders without directly giving them. It’s not a blockbuster revelation but certainly relevant to the larger investigation:
We also learned that Trump apparently talked with Roger Stone days before the July 2016 Wikileaks dump of the Democrats’ emails and Stone informed Trump that he has just spoken with Assange on the phone and was told the dump would be coming within a couple of days. Trump responded to Stone’s news by saying something like, “wouldn’t that be great.” This testimony doesn’t answer the lingering questions over whether or not Stone directly spoke with Assange or instead did so via a cut-out like Randy Credico or Jerome Corsi. But it does indicate that Trump had foreknowledge of the email dumps and approved of them. But, of course, we already knew that Trump was highly approve of the hacks because he repeatedly made that clear on the campaign trail. And once “Guccifer 2.0” started leaking documents in June of 2016 it was obvious the Democrats experienced a major hack and that documents were going to be leaking out. But the timing of this call does appear to indicate that a Wikileaks back-channel of communication with Trump campaign was already up and running by that point which is certainly notable:
Then we learn that Don Jr. likely told Trump about the upcoming June 9th, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with the Russian delegation. Although what Cohen recounts is somewhat ambiguous. Still, it’s long been almost inconceivable that you would have a meeting of that nature involving Don Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort that Trump didn’t know about. So this is potentially sort of a revelation, but the kind of revelation that has been long suspected:
It’s also worth keeping in mind that, while that June 9th meeting is seen as strong circumstantial evidence that the Russia government was working out some sort of deal with Trump over the distribution of hacked materials (especially given the message in Rob Goldstone’s initial email to Don Jr. about how ‘the Russian government wants to help you!’), the fact that the Trump Org was repeatedly secretly trying to get a Trump Tower deal worked out with the Kremlin would have made some sort of ‘we want to help you’ message to the Trump campaign a real possibility whether or not there was any hackings involved. In other words, that meeting could have basically been a response to the repeated Trump Tower Moscow outreach efforts by the Trump Org.
Finally, we have Cohen asserting that he’s seen no “direct evidence” of collusion and that he’s never been to Prague, both of which were important claims in the Steele dossier:
“The only news outlet that claims to have information indicating otherwise is McClatchy. A pair of reporters there filed a series of stories last year claiming there was some evidence that such a trip happened. But no other major media outlet has published anything similar.”
Yep, it’s only been McClatchy that repeatedly had stories citing sources claiming that Mueller’s team did indeed have evidence that such a trip to Prague did happen. Sources that McClatchy’s reporters claimed were important sources for a number of stories over the last two years. It would appear that those anonymous sources really have been pushing lies, wittingly or unwittingly, raising the obvious question about what other disinformation has been pushed out by these anonymous sources and what other stories and news outlets these sources have been sources for.
So there weren’t any major bombshells about the #TrumpRussia investigation, but Cohen’s testimony was still filled with noteworthy details. And there was indeed one pretty big bombshell: Cohen asserted that part of the reason he was willing to testify in the first place is his concern that Trump won’t leave office peacefully in 2020 if he loses the election. And if that sounds like an absurd scenario, don’t forget that, following the final 2016 debate, Trump promised to respect the results of the 2016 election, but only “if I win.” So while many Americans will no doubt be upset if Trump doesn’t end up being driven out of office based on the Mueller investigation, if Cohen’s grim prediction is correct there might be another very big reason coming up for removing Trump from office: a refusal to leave office.
It begins. The beginning of the end of the Mueller investigation is upon us and the beginning of whatever comes next. The report has been delivered to Attorney General Bill Barr and Washington is left waiting to hear what the report actually says. Or rather, what Barr decides to release.
It also sounds like there aren’t going to be any new indictments. Now, because the Justice Department has a longstanding policy of not indicting a president, the fact that there aren’t any new indictments doesn’t mean that the report is going to explicitly say there was no evidence President Trump or the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. There’s still a range of possibilities even without any new indictments.
But if the Mueller report does end up painting a picture that appears to maybe point towards collusion with Russia due to circumstantial evidence that just makes the report a kind of Rorschach test that allows anyone to see what they want in the report. It’s kind of a worst case scenario for the US. The American public doesn’t handle political Rorschach tests well. But it’s increasingly looking like a very real possibility.
One consequence of a Rorschach test report is that the ongoing public fight over the credibility of the sources for that circumstantial evidence is likely going to become a much more intense fight. In other words, while it might seem like the American media has been fixated on the minutia of all the evidence and allegations that have come out thus far over the last two years, there’s actually a lot of room for that coverage of the minutia to become even more intense in part because the report will inevitably lead to a focus on particularly avenues of inquiry and particular sources.
So when the Mueller report is finally released it seems like a safe bet that there’s going to be a renewed focus on the integrity of the sources for that report and who these sources were actually working for. With that in mind, it’s worth taking a closer look at one of the sources for a number of the most explosive allegations in the Steele Dossier: the allegations that Putin is blackmailing Trump with a “pee tape” and that there was a well developed conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that was being managed by Paul Manafort. The same Steele dossier sources were behind those allegations, sources “D” and “E”. And it turns out the same figure is both sources: a Belurussian businessman named Sergei Millian. Millian doesn’t appear to have directly told this information to Steele but rather told it to an associate who passed the information along to Steele. To this day Millian insists he wasn’t a source for the Steel dossier.
It’s worth noting that an anonymous source will telling Joseph Cannon back in January of 2017 that Source E was actually Boris Epshteyn. So there appears to be a disinformation campaign related to the identity of “Source E”, which might have to do with the questions that would arise from having one person be both Source D and E (since sources D and E appear to corroborate each other in the report).
Millian turns out to be a fascinating figure. The kind of figure that raises a lot of questions about what exactly was going on and whether or not he should be considered a key source in the first place. He claims to have high level Kremlin ties. And he does unambiguously have some sort of Kremlin ties. But it’s very unclear how meaningful those ties are which is a big issue for Millian as a source in the Steele dossier because he’s a source for significant claims about the Russian government involvement in the hacks and the direct collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. He’s described in the dossier as “a close associate of Trump.” And while Millian is definitely an associate of Trump, the evidence of him being a close associate appears to be rather thin. At the same time, Millian appeared to really be working as a kind of Trump campaign surrogate in the 2016 campaign and had a number of contacts with George Papadopoulous, so he was in a position to see possible Trump campaign contacts with the Russian government. In terms of his credibility as a source, he’s sort of like the wrong person in the right place at the right time.
Millian was born in Belarus as Siarhei Kukuts and went to college in Minsk, where he claims to have been trained as a military translator. He moved to Atlanta in the early 2000s and changed his name to Sergei Millian. He worked in real estate and translating and founded a trade group called the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA. It’s through this group that Millian has been cultivating ties to business and government leaders in the US and Russia. So Millian does appear to have Russian government ties, but they appear to largely be through his made up chamber of commerce group, raising questions about the extent of those ties.
Similarly, Millian’s ties to the Trump organization appear to be rather tenuous, at least based on publicly available information. Millian has boasted of a relationship with Trump and in his literature he has a photo of himself meeting with Trump at a Miami horse track in 2007 which is where he says mutual associates introduced them. But it’s unclear if they’ve ever met on any other occasions. So it’s possible that this figure who is described as a “close associate of Trump” in the Steel dossier may have just met him once in 2007.
But that hasn’t stopped Millian from claiming much closer ties. In April of 2016, Millian gave an interview with RIA Novosti where he claimed that, after meeting Trump at that race track in 2007, Millian traveled to New York to meet Michael Cohen and signed a contract to sell Trump real estate in Florida. He described himself as the Trump Org’s “exclusive broker” for the Russian market during this 2007–2008 period. Cohen denies all of this. Note that Felix Sater’s Bayrock was working with the Trump Org on some of its Florida properties around this time so it would be somewhat surprising of Millian’s claims of an exclusive contract were true. But that’s what Millian was claiming to a Russian news outlet in April 2016. When asked during the interview how often he spoke to Trump or his associates, Millian responded, “The last time was several days ago.”
So Millian was creating a public profile in April of 2016 that, yes, he was close to Trump and the Trump campaign. Was he actually close to the Trump campaign? That remains very unclear. But in the Steele dossier he was described as a “close associate” of Trump and making some of the central claims about a Trump-Russia conspiracy. So if Millian’s claims end up being used in the final Mueller report to paint a picture of circumstantial evidence, the questions about the nature of Millian’s relationships to the Trump campaign, the Russian government, and any other entities that may have had an interest in feeding the FBI disinformation are pretty important.
But even if Millian’s claims ended up being dismissed as uncredible by the Mueller team, the questions about his credibility and possible motives are still pretty important in terms of understanding what actually happened. And the fact that Millian’s claims were being passed along to the Fusion GPS team behind the Steele dossier in the summer of 2016 does potentially provide a pretty good explanation for the US government’s alarm in 2016 about a Trump-Russia conspiracy...assuming US authorities didn’t have reason to question the credibility of Millian’s claims at the time. One of the utterly bizarre charges frequently used by Trump and the GOP is that the US government was colluding with the Russian government to conspire against Trump. It’s a claim that makes no sense given the broader geopolitical context of the situation, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of the US government relying on Russian sources (or a Belarussian source in this case) who turned out to be feeding Fusion GPS a bunch of garbage.
Millian also had some interesting interactions with George Papadopoulos. Recall how Papadopoulos’s claims to an Australian diplomat in London were what apparently triggered the opening of the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in May of 2016. Papadopoulos told the diplomat about being approached by Joseph Mifsud and informed that the Russian government had thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails. So it turns out that Millian also approached Papadopoulos
According to Papadopoulos, Millian first approached him on July 22, 2016, the same day Wikileaks published the DNC’s emails. Millian portrayed himself as both a business associate of Trump and a Trump adviser. Millian offered to help explain to Papadopoulos the U.S.-Russia relationship. Given that Papadopoulos was, himself, a member of the Trump team, it seems rather odd that Millian had to introduce himself as a Trump adviser and wasn’t instead introduced to Papadopoulos as a Trump adviser by someone else on the Trump campaign if Millian was indeed working with the Trump campaign as he claimed.
So Papadopoulos and Millian developed a correspondence and met several times. Millian also claimed he had connections to a Russian energy company, Bashneft, and was looking for American investors. And in October of 2016, Millian made Papadoupoulos a job offer: working a New York public relations firm on bahalf of a Russian national for $30,000/month. But the offer came with a catch. When Millian flew out to Chicago to meet with Papdopoulos in the fall of 2016, Millian explained that Papadopoulos would have to continue working for the Trump administration after the campaign as part of this job. It seems like an ambitious offer given that polls consistently showed Trump was unlikely to win. But that’s what Papadopoulos claims.
Papadopoulos goes on to make an explosive charge about who Millian was actually working for, although it’s the kind of charge that seems somewhat questionable: Papadopoulos claims that when he met with Millian at the Russia House restaurant in Washington DC right around the time of Trump’s inauguration, Millian came with a friend from Atlanta, Aziz Choukri, a Moroccan American music producer. And while Choukri, Papadopoulos, and Millian were chatting, Choukri said something about Millian working with the FBI. Millian apparently looked sheepish at this point. Papadopoulos says this made him later suspect all of his interactions with Millian were part of an FBI set up. Millian and Choukri both deny this ever happened. So unless Millian was trying to warn Papadopoulos that he had been working with the FBI, it’s unclear why Millian would have told Choukri and had Choukri tell Papadopoulos this. At the same time, keep in mind that Millian was indeed a Fusion GPS source, but an indirect source. He made claims to an unknown associate who made claims to Fusion GPS. So if Millian learned about this after the fact it’s possible he could have been trying to warn people like Papadopoulos about this. It was a week after this meeting at the Russian House restaurant that FBI agents first showed up to question Papadopoulos.
There’s one more interesting figure tied to Millian. A Florida-based Russian-born theologian and author named Mikhail Morgulis. Morgulis also serves as honorary consul of Belarus. From 2014 to 2018, Morgulis served from 2014 to 2018 on the coordinating council of a group called the Russian Community Council of the USA which describes itself as a nonprofit cultural enrichment organization for Russian emigres living in the United States. He also has a show on YouTube which does appear to have at least some real Russian government ties. For instances, here’s a video of Morgulis interviewing Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Morgulis and Millian have apparently known each other for about seven or eight years. Millian contacted Morgulis in July of 2016, around the same time he reached out to Papadoulos, and told Morgulis that he was going to be soon meeting with the Trump campaign and offered to pass along to the campaign any messages Morgulis wanted to send to them. Morgulis said that Millian told him he had become “close to the Trump campaign, since he knew someone in Trump’s group.” Morgulis told Millian to send along the message that he would be happy to work with the campaign to help get out the Russian-American vote for Trump. Interestingly, the emails showing this correspondence between Morgulis and Millian were sent to the Washington post by an anonymous person claiming to represent a group monitoring Russian activities against Ukraine. Morgulis confirmed to the Washington Post that the emails were real and suggested they were stolen.
Morgulis also claims he never heard from the Trump campaign and beliefs that Millian was exaggerating his ties to the campaign and had a history of self-promotion and exaggeration. At the same time, Morgulis took credit in interviews with Russian media for helping to elect Trump by organizing Russian-speaking voters, claiming, “I personally visited 11 cities in Florida, where I said that if you want our new president to be a homosexual ... vote for Hillary.” In the interview, he also said he had briefly met both Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
So it remains unclear to what extent Morgulis or Millian were working with Trump campaign, in part because these are just wildly untrustworthy figures who all appear to have a tendency to make wild claims and self-promote. And that’s all part of why the questions about the nature of Sergei Millian’s ties to both the Trump campaign and the Russian government are going to become increasingly important after the Mueller report comes out. Millian unambiguously has some sort of ties to both the Trump campaign and Russian government, but the nature of those ties remains highly ambiguous:
“Millian, who has denied being a source for the dossier, has largely disappeared from public view, despite efforts by congressional investigators to interview him — taking with him potential answers about the president’s links to Russia and some of the dossier’s still-unproved claims.”
Millian is quite the man of mystery. Mystery that he refuses to meet with congressional investigators about unless he is granted immunity. And that’s important to keep in mind for the post-Mueller report period when congressional investigations will inevitable ensue:
The mysteries around Millian also include the mystery of what his actual ties were to the Russian government. He was born in Belarus, moved to the US in the early 2000’s, and started the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA. That entity appears to be the source of his ties to the Russian government. And yet, in April of 2016, he told ABC News that he has high-level Russian government contracts:
And then there’s the mystery of his ties to Trump campaign. He definitely met Trump once in 2007 at a race track. But beyond that, there’s no evidence they’ve ever met again. And he, in April of 2016, Millian gave an interview to RIA Novosti where he claimed to have had exclusive rights to sell Trump real estate to Russians in Florida and also claimed to have been in recent contact with the Trump campaign:
Then there’s Millian’s mysterious outreach to the Russian-American theologian/author Mikhail Morgulis. Millian reached out to Morgulis in July of 2016, offering to act as a middle-man between Morgulis and the campaign to orchestrate a Russian-American outreach effort. Morgulis offered his help but claims nothing came of this and that he questions Millian’s actual ties. And yet Morgulis did tell Russian media after the election that he helped the Trump campaign in Florida and that personally met Trump and Jared. So, as with the rest of this story, he have questionable characters making lots of contradictory statements:
Adding to the intrigue around Morgulis is that fact that the Washington Post received emails confirming this correspondance between Millian and Morgulis from an anonymous source claiming to represent a group monitoring Russian activities against Ukraine:
And then there’s the mystery surrounding Millian’s claims to George Papadopoulos. Millian contacts Papadopoulos the day of the Wikileaks July 22 DNC email dump and presents himself as a Trump adviser who will help Papadopoulos understand US-Russian relations:
Then, in October, Millian made Papadopoulos a job offer: $30,000 a month, but Papadopoulos would have to be working for the Trump administration after the election. So it was an offer that would presumably be contingent on Trump winning:
But Papadopoulos’s most explosive claims involve his claim that Millian’s friend admitted Millian was working for the FBI. This was during a meeting right around the time of the inauguration. Millian and his friend deny this:
So that’s all part of what makes Millian such an interesting figure and could become an increasingly controversial figure after the Mueller report comes out.
Now here’s a report from March of 2017 that gives some additional information on the particulars of the claims Millian was making to his friend who happened to be a source for Fusion GPS. Claims like Paul Manafort being the primary coordinator of the alleged collusion with the Kremlin:
“In addition to the salacious allegations that gained widespread attention, the dossier attributed other claims to Millian. For instance, Steele wrote that Millian asserted that there was a “well developed conspiracy of cooperation between [Trump] and Russian leadership,” claiming the relationship was managed for Trump by former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. A Manafort spokesman said “every word in the dossier about Paul Manafort is a lie.””
Was Paul Manafort, the figure who actually appeared to be working as a pro-Western change agent in Ukraine, coordinating a conspiracy with the Kremlin? That’s apparently what Millian was telling his friend. And that friend went on to tell Christopher Steele.
Who was this mystery friend? We don’t know, but we do know that Millian apparenly met with Oleg Deripaska in June of 2016 and a Russian government-sponsored summit in St. Petersburg, the same month he was telling his mystery friend about this Trump-Kremlin plot:
Recall that Bruce Ohr and Christopher Steele worked together in an attempt to flip Oleg Deripaska as a US informant from 2014–2016. So you have to wonder if the mystery friend who was feeding these claims by Millian was actually Deripaska himself. Might Deripaska have been punking the FBI? Did the FBI know it was a punking and decide to go along with it? Those are the kinds of questions that are inevitably going to be asked during this post-Mueller report phase of the #TrumpRussia experience.
So we’ll see what’s actually in the report. At least the parts that are released to the public. But it seems inevitable that the mystery of Sergei Millian is going to be a much more topical mystery in the aftermath of the Mueller report.
What a long, strange, and highly confined trip it’s been: Julian Assange is out of the London Ecuadoran embassy and in British police custody after he was effectively kicked out by the Ecuadoran government. Now the big question is whether or not he’ll be extradited to the United States. US prosecutors already indicted Assange in March of 2018, so we already have a sense of the nature of the charges that could be brought against him, at least initially.
And while a trial against Assange has long been expected to center around charges of publishing classified information, it turns out the charges in that US leveled against Assange in last year’s indictment are focused on something very different: hacking US government computers. Specifically, Assange was charged with working with Chelsea Manning (then Bradley Manning) to help crack a password that would give Manning additional access to US military files while obscuring her identity. This allegedly took place Manning had already transferred thousands of files to Assange. According to the indictment, Manning transferred to Assange a portion of a password that was stored as a hash. Assange, or someone working for Assange, then tried to crack that hash to get the original piece of the password. It’s not clear if Assange or WikiLeaks was ever able to crack to the password but Manning did end up downloading hundreds of thousands of State Department cables after sending Assange the password hash. So it’s Assange’s efforts to crack that password in order to give Manning access to more US government files while obscuring her identity that Assange was indicted for by the US government last year:
“The allegations that prosecutors lay out appear unrelated to Assange’s publishing activity. Instead, they focus on conduct that apparently occurred after Manning transferred the bulk of the military files to Assange.”
So Assange might face trial in the US for nothing to do with publishing classified materials, blunting charges that Assange’s prosecution is going to be an attack on the freedom of the press. Instead, Assange is charged with assisting the hacking of a US government computer through his work trying to crack a hashed password Manning gave him:
But note htat it’s note clear Assange actually succeeded. Still, he clearly tried to crack that password based on the available evidence:
So it’s going to be very interesting to see how an Assange trial, and the public support or lack of support for Assange, plays out assuming Assange does get extradited to the US. Don’t forget that there’s nothing preventing US prosecutors from later deciding to indict Assange over the publishing of classified materials later. But for now it appears that US prosecutors are going to try to steer clear of charges that could be preceived as an attack on the freedom of the press.
Another host of obvious questions raised by all of this is what might Trump do to assist Assange given the enormous help WikiLeaks provided Trump in the 2016 campaign. Let’s not forget that, in addition to Roger Stone’s alleged contacts with WikiLeaks and ‘Guccifer 2.0’ during the 2016 campaign via intermediaries like Randy Credico and/or Jerome Corsi, there was also the remarkable correspondence between Donald Trump Jr. and Assange using Twitter’s private direct messages starting in September of 2016 and going through at least July 2017. Following the election, Assange apparently lobbied Trump Jr. to get his dad to arrange for Assange to become the Australian ambassador to the US.
So Assange has been actively scheming with the Trump family about his future to some extent. We just don’t know the extent or what types of schemes they may have come up with. And that’s all part of what makes the following article from August of last year interesting today, especially in light of the US indictment against Assange focusing on hacking related crimes and not the publishing of classified materials along with the wrapping up of the Mueller probe: Back in August, Roger Stone was openly claling for Trump to pardon Assange. Ostensibly ‘for the sake of journalism’. But Stone warned that even if Trump has plans on pardoning Assange, he still might have an incentive to issue the pardon after Assange goes through a trial. Why? Because the trial of Assange might reveal WikiLeak’s source of the Democrats’ emails in 2016 and reveal that Wikileaks never got them from the Russian government. Granted, these were the musings of Roger Stone so they should all be taken with a big grain of salt. But one person who does appear to take Roger Stone seriously is Donald Trump. So you have to wonder if Trump is fearing that the trial of Julian Assange goes into the 2016 hacks or if he’s hoping for it:
““Journalists everywhere should be disturbed if Assange is kidnapped and put on trial. It is a blow to independent journalism and a free press,” Stone told the Washington Examiner in an interview published Wednesday.”
That was how Stone was framing the potential trial of Julian Assange. A blow to independent journalism and a free press. These statements were presumably made under the assumption that Assange would be indicted for publishing classified information.
But then Stone suggests that Trump still might have an incentive to see a trial of Assange, as long as that trial involves exposing the actual source of the hacked Democratic emails:
Given that Assane’s indictment focus on an earlier hacking-related crime, you have to wonder if Stone’s suggestion is now part of Trump’s calculus on what he might do. Does Trump actually want Assange to potentially testify about the hacking of the DNC? Especially after he’s already received a ‘no collusion’ finding from Mueller’s investigation? After all, if Assange’s trial somehow raised major public doubts about whether or not the Russian government really was the source of those hacked materials that would reopen the question of who did it and whether or not the Trump campaign was more directly involved and might actually create more troubles for Trump. And let’s also not forget that there’s no reason to assume the Trump team isn’t hoping for/planning on a pro-Trump WikiLeaks role in the 2020 election and even if Assange is jailed that doesn’t stop the operation of WikiLeaks. So pleasing, or at least not pissing off, WikiLeaks could be seen as a political necessity for the Trump campaign.
So we’ll see what, if anything, Trump himself does regarding the the arrest of Assange and his possible extradition to the US. There no shortage of possible reasons Trump has to have an interest in the outcome of the an Assange trial but also no shortage of complications that make it unclear what kind of outcome Trump would like to see.
Deutsche Bank was recently back in the news again for all the wrong reasons. Yes, it’s another story about rampant high-level corruption at the bank. Corruption intended to protect the bank’s shady clients. And, yes, the shady clients in this story happen to be Donald Trump and Jared Kushner but the story describes the kind of systemic corruption at the bank that would apply to all sorts of other shady clients.
So what was the shady activity that Deutsche Bank was up to? Well, according to multiple former Deutsche Bank employees, back in 2016 and 2017 the bank’s anti-money-laundering experts flagged suspicious transactions by both Trump and Kushner entities. One of the entities was the notoriously corrupt Donald J. Trump Foundation. Deutsche bank’s compliance department staff then reviewed the transactions and prepared suspicious activity reports that they thought should be sent to the US Treasury Department. But, of course, the bank’s high-level executives stepped in and squashed the idea. The reports were never sent to Treasury. This is typical behavior for the bank when it comes to its biggest clients according to these former employees. As Tammy McFadden, one of the former anti-money laundering specialist at the bank who reviewed some of the transactions, put it, “It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”
The article also notes that the nature of the suspicious transactions remains unclear. So we know there were suspicious transactions in 2016 and 2017 involving the transfer of money back and forth with overseas individuals, including Russians, that both Trump and Kushner companies were involved with, we just don’t know anything else about them.
But as we’re going to see, it turns out back in July 2017 there were a series of stories about a suspicious transaction by Jared Kushner’s real estate company at Deutsche Bank. And as we’re also going to see, the other figure involved in that suspicious transaction has a number of fascinating connections to a host of characters involved in the #TrumpRussia fiasco. Why? Because at least some of Jared Kushner’s suspicious transactions at Deutsche Bank involved Lev Leviev, one of the characters associated with the Magnitsky Act saga and Kushner purchased a New York property from this figure in 2015 and investigators assert this person used Manhattan property to launder the stolen funds at the heart of the Magnitsky investigation. Yep, Kushner and one of the characters behind the Magnitsky Act saga had a big business deal in 2015 and this deal involved a number of suspicious transactions in 2016 at Deutsche Bank which are presumably related to that 2015 purchase of a property and Leviev is accused by investigators of laundering Magnitsky-related stolen funds through Manhattan property. It’s all pretty scandalous. Or at least should be.
Recall the now-infamous June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower where the Trump team apparently thought it was going to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. When the meeting was revealed to the public in 2017, the Trump team initially asserted that the meeting was primarily about Russian adoptions which had the appearance of being odd cover story. But the topic Russian adoptions turns out to be directly related to one of the biggest points of contention between the US and Russian governments. Following the passage of the Magnitsky Act and the imposition of US sanctions on targeted Russian officials, Russia responded by banning US adoptions of Russian children. So a discussion about the Russian adoption ban is really a discussion about the Magnitsky Act. There may have been other topics discussed at the meeting but the Magnitsky Act is still a very plausible topic that a Russian delegation would want to lobby a US campaign about. And as we’re going to see, the figures involved in that meeting were all highly likely to be extremely focused on the Magnitsky Act. That’s how the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting is connected to Jared Kushner’s suspicious financial transactions at Deutsche Bank. The Trump Tower meeting was requested by people directly working for entities charged in the Magnistky Act investigation and Kushner made a major 2015 purchase from one of those individuals.
In the complicated fraud investigated by Sergei Magnitsky that got him killed involved the use of Manhattan real estate for money-laundering from an important part of that investigation. One of the companies implicated in this was Prevezon Holdings, owned by Russian-Isreali businessman Dennis Katsyv. And it turns out that Russian delegation at the Trump Tower meeting was filled with people working for Prevezon’s defense in that investigation. The leader of the Russian delegation, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was Prevezon’s legal counsel in the case. Another figure who attended the Trump Tower meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin, also received a number of payments from Prevezon in the months before and after that meeting. After Donald Trump Jr. released the emails from publicist Rob Goldstone, where Goldstone announced they wanted to give the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton, Veselnitskaya told reporters that the ‘dirt’ they provided to the Trump team at that meeting involved a law firm that was working for Bill Browder (the figure who hired Sergei Magnitsky to investigate the stolen funds) had dodged taxes and was donating to the Democrats. So the idea that the ‘dirt’ handed over at this meeting was primarily just Magnitsky-case-related dirt, and not a bunch of hacked DNC emails as is widely assumed, is consistent with the backgrounds of the people at that meeting. They were literally hired by the companies targeted by the Magnitsky Act to get it overturned.
Here’s were Kushner’s 2015 purchase ties into the Magnitsky case: In 2015, Jared Kushner purchased part of the old New York Times building in Manhattan for $295 million. The person who sold him that property was is Lev Leviev, an Uzbekistan-born Russian-Israeli billionaire who made his fortunes in real estate and diamonds. Leviev is known as the “king of diamonds”.
Leviev is a highly interesting character with a number of connections, including close ties to Felix Sater. Leviev’s company, Africa Israel Investments (AFI), was a partner of Prevezon and suspected of playing a role in the money laundering at the heart of the Magnitsky investigation. In 2008, Prevezon bought a 30% stake in four AFI subsidiaries in the Netherlands for €3m. Five years later, AFI tried to return the money to Prevezon, but the money was intercepted and frozen by Dutch authorities at the request of the US government as part of the Prevezon money-laundering investigation.
Prevezon and AFI also engaged in a number of Manhattan real estate transactions that came under the scrutiny of investigators. AFI sold condominiums to Prevezon Holdings from one of its landmark developments at 20 Pine Street. Those condos were later frozen by US prosecutors who alleged this was part of an attempt to launder money stolen from the Russian treasury as part of the Magnitksy investigation. The US case against Prevezon was suddenly dropped in May of 2017 with Prevezon paying a $6 million fine and admitting no guilt.
So in 2015, Jared Kushner purchased New York real estate from Lev Leviev, who owns one of the companies accused of using New York real estate to laundering money stolen from the Russian treasure that was at the heart of the Magnitksy Scandal. Then, in 2016 in 2017, Deutsche Bank’s software flagged a bunch of suspicious transactions involving Trump’s and Kushner’s accounts. Are these stories related? That remains unclear, but as we’re also going to see, Kushner recieved a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank about a month before the 2016 election as part of a refinancing deal for the $295 million purchase of the old New York Times building from Leviev, so based on that alone it would appear that Kushner was using Deutsche Bank for the financing of this deal with Leviev. A deal involving the purchase of Manhattan property from someone who prosecutors allege used Manhattan property to launder the funds stolen from the Russian treasury.
How does Lev Leviev tie into the larger #TrumpRussia landscape? Well, what’s so remarkable about Leviev is the more apt question is what parts of the #TrumpRussian landscape doesn’t he tie into.
Beyond being a diamond magnet, Leviev is one of the biggest patrons of the Chabad branch of Judaism in the world. And he plays a particularly important role for Judaism in Russia: in 1999, Vladimir Putin reportedly enlisted Leviev and Roman Abramovich to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities with the intent of replacing the existing Russian Jewish Congress which was led by a rival oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. Leviev and Abramovich declared Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar as the head of their organization and the Kremlin proceeded to recognize Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, despite the fact that Russia already had a chief rabbi, Adolf Shayevich. Shayevich was removed from Russia’s religious affairs council and ever since Lazar and Sharevich have had rival claims to ‘chief rabbi’ title. So Leviev has had a warm relationship with Putin for the past two decades as a result of this mutually beneficial arrangement. Abramovich is also described as being one of Putin’s closest allies and was reportedly the figure who recommended to Boris Yeltsin that he be followed by Putin.
Leviev’s ties to the Trump family appear to run through Bayrock. Felix Sater, it turns out, is quite active in the Chabad movement. In addition to sitting on the board of the Port Washington Chabad house, Sater sits on the board of numerous Chabad organizations around the world. Bayrock employee, Daniel Ridloff, is also a member of the Port Washington Chabad house. Ridloff went on to work for the Trump Organization. Bayrock’s founder, Tevfik Arif, is also a major donor to the Port Washington Chabad house. The founder of the Port Washington Chabad house, Shalon Paltiel, is reportedly close to Berel Lazar.
Tamir Sapir, the Georgian-born billionaire founder of Bayrock’s partner organization, the Sapir Organization, also has ties to Lev Leviev and is a Chabad donor. In December 2007, the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, was hosted by Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump has called Sapir “a great friend”. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Leviev’s AFI. Month later, Trump and Leviev reportedly met to discuss possible Moscow real estate projects. A month after that, a bris was held for Zina and Rotem’s new son. Leviev personally arranged for the bris to take place at Chabad’s holiest site. Trump attended the bris along with Jared Kushner and Ivanka. While his family is Modern Orthodox Jewish, Kushner was active in his university’s Chabad house while an undergrad at Harvard. When Jared and Ivanka purchased a home in DC in 2017 they chose the city’s Chabad synagogue as their house of worship.
Jared and Ivanka have another tie to this network that highlights how closely Rubert Murdoch’s family is to this story: First, recall that Trump and Rupert Murdoch reportedly spoke daily based on reports from 2017. Also recall how Jared and Ivanka are close friends with Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendy Deng and all three are close friends with Leyla Aliyeva, the daughter of the long-time president of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev. Leyla was married to Emin Agalarov, the pop star son of Aras Agalarov. It was Emin’s manager, Rob Goldstone, who initiated the June 9th, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with the email declaring that the Russian government wanted to give Trump dirt on Hillary Clinton. Goldstone worked for a Murdoch publication back in the 80’s. Matthew Freud, the husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, helped ‘launch’ Leyla’s status as a London socialite. So Jared and Ivanka have strong social connection to the Murdochs, the Agalarovs, and and Lev Leviev’s family. As we’re going to see, Jared and Ivanka are close friends with the wife of Roman Abramovich, Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova even attended Trump’s inauguration as Ivanka Trump’s guest. As we should expect at this point, Zhukova is a friend and business partner of Wendy Deng. She’s also friends with Karlie Kloss, the longtime girlfriend of Jared’s brother, Josh.
So that’s all what makes the report of suspicious transactions involving Jared Kushner at Deutsche Bank so fascinating with respect to the broader #TrumpRussia fiasco. The Trump and Kushner families simply have extensive business and social ties to both Leviev and Abramovich. Social ties with a heavy overlap with the Murdoch clan. Leviev’s company AFI was accused of using Manhattan real estate to launder Magnitsky-related stolen funds and Jared made a major Manhattan real estate purchase from Leviev in late 2015. And that June 9th, 2016, Trump Tower meeting was requested by and led by the people working for Prevezon holdings, the partner of AFI in those suspect Manhattan real estate transactions. So one of the big, still unanswered questions that’s barely been asked in this entire #TrumpRussia mess is whether or not those suspcious Trump/Kushner Deutsche Bank transactions are somehow involved with laundering or some other shady activity involving one of the figures at the heart of the Magnitsky Act investigation. It’s quite a spectacular mess.
Ok, let’s start with the article about the multiple Deutsche Bank staff whistleblowers talking to reporters about how the company’s software was flagging suspicious activities in both the Trump and Kushner accounts in 2016 and 2017 but the bank’s management stopped them from reporting these transactions to government officials:
“The nature of the transactions was not clear. At least some of them involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious.”
We don’t know what the nature of these transactions were. We just know that at least some of them were Russian individuals and they involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities which employees considered suspicious. Suspicions the management didn’t agree with which is normal for Deutsche Bank according to these employees:
We also know that the Donald J. Trump Foundation was involved with at least one of these suspicious transactions:
Beyond that, we aren’t really told much else about these suspicious transactions. But we can certainly make educated guesses what they may have involved. For example, as the following article notes, one month before election day, Jared Kushner’s real estate company finalized a $285 million loan as part of a refinancing package for its 2015 purchase of the old New York Times building:
“The Deutsche Bank loan capped what Kushner Cos. viewed as a triumph: It had purchased four mostly empty retail floors of the former New York Times building in 2015, recruited tenants to fill the space and got the Deutsche Bank loan in a refinancing deal that gave Kushner’s company $74 million more than it paid for the property.”
So we can be confident that Kushner was using Deutsche Bank to finance that 2015 purchase of part of the old New York Times building. That’s what makes the following report from July 2017 so interesting: it’s all about why that purchase was so suspicious. As the article notes, Kushner purchased the property from Lev Leviev’s firm, AFI, which was a partner with Prevezon holdings in Manhattan real estate deals investigators determined were used to launder the stolen money in the Magnitsky investigation. And Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who led the Russian delegation to the June 9th, 2016, Trump Tower meeting, represents Prevezon. So in terms of what the mystery transactions were that Deutsche Bank’s employees flagged in 2016 and 2017, transactions involving this purchase of property from Leviev seems like a pretty likely suspect:
“Among the overlapping connections is the 2015 deal in which Kushner paid $295m to acquire several floors of the old New York Times building at 43rd street in Manhattan from the US branch of Leviev’s company, Africa Israel Investments (AFI), and its partner Five Mile Capital. The sale has been identified as of possible interest to the Mueller investigation as Kushner later went on to borrow $285m in refinancing from Deutsche Bank, the German financial house that itself has been embroiled in Russian money laundering scandals and whose loans to Trump are coming under intensifying scrutiny.”
Yep, the 2015 sale of part of the old New York Times building to Kushner was so suspicious it was part of what Mueller’s team investigated because of who sold the purchase and the fact that it was financed through Deutsche Bank which has a history of facilitating Russian money laundering. And that highly suspicious person is Lev Leviev, whose AFI was a business partner of Prevezon Holdings in a number of the transactions suspected of using Manhattan real estate deals to launder the stolen money at the heart of the Magnitksy investigation. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the legal counsel for Prevezon, led the June 9th, 2016, Trump Tower meeting and asserts that the Magnitsky Act was the focus of the meeting:
So it seems highly likely that at least some of the suspicious transactions flagged by the Deutsche Bank employees involved this particular sale of Lev Leviev’s property to Kushner. And given who Lev Leviev is and his relationship to the Magnitsky Act saga, it also seems quite likely that the Trump Tower meeting really did have a focus on the Magnitsky Act.
Next, here’s a fascinating piece on Lev Leviev and the prominent role he plays in the world of the Chabad hasidic movement and how that leadership role in the Chabad movement connected him to both Putin and the Trump circle:
“Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him. On the other side of the world, the brash Manhattan developer was working to get a piece of the massive flows of capital that were fleeing the former Soviet Union in search of stable assets in the West, especially real estate, and seeking partners in New York with ties to the region.”
As we can see, Lev Leviev has a lot of powerful friends. One of those key friendships, with Vladimir Putin, came about as a result of Leviev and Roman Abramovich effectively setting up a parallel Jewish civil society organization to replace the existing Russian Jewish Congress that was run by Putin’s rival oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky:
And then there’s Leviev’s extensive ties to the Trump circle. Ties that largely go through the Port Washington Chabad house but also include a direct relationship with Trump that appears to have emerged from the fact that Tamir Sapir’s daughter, Zina, married Rotem Rosen, the CEO of the American branch of Leviev’s AFI. The wedding was held in 2007 at Mar-a-Lago. Trump and Leviev reportedly discussed possilbe Moscow real estate projects in May of 2008:
And then there’s Jared and Ivanka’s ties to Roman Abramovich. The two are apparently quite close to Abramovich’s wife Dasha Zhukova, who they met via Wendy Deng:
As we can see, the ties between the Trump circle and Lev Leviev’s circle were pretty extensive and go back over a decade now. And based on the available information it appears those ties likely include suspicious Deutsche Bank transactions that could have been related to some sort of money-laundering activity. The kind of activity that investigators already suspected Leviev’s AFI of being a part of with the Prevezon case.
So while it’s long been clear that the highly improper and outrageous secret Trump Tower Moscow negotiations — led by Felix Sater — were taking place between the Trump team and the Kremlin during the 2016 elections, evidence suggests there may have been another highly improper and outrageous transaction taking place too: the possible laundering of Lev Leviev’s money in relation to Jared Kushner’s purchase of part of the old New York Time building.
Oh, and guess which company that’s highly related to the whole #TrumpRussia scandal was doing work on behalf of Prevezon in the money-laundering case against it: Fusion GPS. Yep. It’s a complicated mess.