trump tower mtg
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refers to june 2016 mtg, not the real estate deal in ussr
dec 2016 mtg flynn kushner
ivanka talked to russians in lobby about oppo
wiki
December 2016 Trump Tower meeting
In March, 2017, Trump's White House disclosed that Kushner, Kislyak, and Flynn had met at Trump Tower in December 2016. At that meeting, the Washington Post reported that Kushner requested that a direct, Russian-encrypted communications channel be set up to allow secret communication with Russia and to circumvent safeguards in place by the United States intelligence community.[46] Some sources told the Post that the purpose of such a link would have been to allow Flynn to speak directly to Russian military officials about Syria and other issues, while others pointed out that there would be no reason for such discussions to be concealed from appropriate US government officials. According to the sources, no such communications channel was actually set up.[47]
After the meeting, Kislyak sent a report of the meeting to the Kremlin using what he thought were secure channels, but the report was intercepted by American intelligence. Kislyak was reportedly taken aback by the request and expressed concern about the security implications at stake in having an American use secure communications between the Kremlin and diplomatic outposts.[46][48]
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sen comm: The committee also outright accused Blackwater founder and Trump supporter Erik Prince of stonewalling its investigation, saying that it was “hampered by a lack of cooperation” and that his account of a controversial 2017 meeting in the Seychelles alongside a Russian official was “brief and deceptive.”
6 25
Trump Tower meeting - Wikipedia
TALK
:{Donald Trump held press conference promising more dirt on Clinton hours after Donald Trump Jr's Russia emails. This appears to invalidate claims Donald Trump made about not knowing the intent of the meeting with the Russian lawyer and Don Jr's initial claims of another agenda.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-jr-hillary-clinton-russia-email-press-conference-dirt-democratic-us-president-election-2016-a7836826.html}:
Speech Transcript (one of several where Trump mentioned this plan to expose new dirt). https://time.com/4360872/donald-trump-new-jersey-victory-speech-transcript/ PaulWilliams Jupiter (talk) 21:27, 21 June 2023 (UTC)
MAIN
A meeting took place at Trump Tower in New York City on June 9, 2016, between three senior members of the 2016 Trump campaign – Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort – four other U.S. citizens, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting was arranged by publicist and long-time Trump acquaintance Rob Goldstone on behalf of his client, Russian singer-songwriter Emin Agalarov.[1] The meeting was first disclosed to U.S. government officials in April 2017, when Kushner filed a revised version of his security clearance form.[2]
:{:{Donald Trump Jr. made several misleading statements about the meeting.[3] He initially told the press that the meeting was held to discuss adoptions of Russian children by Americans. On July 8, 2017, after news reports stated that Trump Jr. knew the meeting was political, he admitted in a tweet that he had agreed to the meeting with the understanding that he would receive information damaging to Hillary Clinton, and that he was conducting opposition research.[4] }:
When The New York Times was about to report on email exchanges between Goldstone and Trump Jr., Trump Jr. himself published the emails.[5][6] In early July 2017, it was reported that then-President Donald Trump himself drafted Trump Jr.'s initial misleading statement.[7] The report was later confirmed by the president's attorneys.[8] In July 2018, the president denied knowledge of the meeting.[9]}:
Robert Mueller, the special counsel of the Department of Justice in charge of Russia-related investigations, investigated the emails and the meeting,[10] and their relation to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Background
Prior to the Trump Tower meeting, Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos met at least twice with Joseph Mifsud, who asserted his awareness that Russians had thousands of emails that were damaging to Hillary Clinton. This occurred before the hacking of the DNC computers had become public knowledge. Papadopoulos later shared this information with at least two other people, including an Australian diplomat to Britain. At a meeting on March 24, 2016, the professor brought along a Russian woman, Olga Polonskaya. Papadopoulos made multiple unsuccessful attempts to set up meetings in Russia between Trump or members of his campaign and Russian officials. He communicated his proposals and interactions to several Trump campaign officials.[11] In October 2017 he pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the FBI about his actions.
On June 3, 2016, before the public was made aware of potential Russian interference in the presidential election,[12] Donald Trump Jr. was contacted by Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist whose association with the Trumps dates back to the Miss Universe 2013 pageant held in Moscow; at that time, Trump Jr.'s father, businessman Donald Trump, had been co-owner of the pageant.[13] Goldstone's client, Emin Agalarov, an Azerbaijani singer, performed at the Miss Universe event. His father, Aras Agalarov, is a wealthy real estate developer in Moscow.[14][15][16]
In his June 3 email to Trump Jr., Goldstone wrote:
Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting.
The Crown prosecutor of Russia[a] met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.
This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin.[19]
Trump Jr. responded:
Thanks Rob I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?[19]
In a June 7 email, it was agreed that the material would be delivered to Trump Jr. by an unnamed "Russian government attorney".[19] At the meeting, Goldstone introduced this person as Moscow-based attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. She stated that she was not a government official;[19] however, she is known to have ties to the Russian government[20] and later described herself as an "informant" to the office of the Russian prosecutor general.[21] According to Goldstone, she had planned to be in New York for a court appearance on June 9.[19] Trump Jr. offered an in-person meeting that afternoon, which Goldstone confirmed.[19] Trump Jr. forwarded the email thread to Kushner and Manafort.[1]
Meeting
The arranged meeting took place at Trump Tower in the afternoon of June 9, 2016. At least eight people attended.[22] When the meeting first became known, conflicting accounts of who attended circulated. With time, more names came forward. At first, Donald Trump Jr. did not disclose that Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, Rob Goldstone, and Anatoli Samachornov attended the meeting.[23]
Participants
Trump campaign officials
News report from Voice of America
- Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, responsible for the campaign's digital, online, and social media operations.[24]
- Paul Manafort, campaign manager for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump from March 29, 2016, to August 19, 2016. He was formerly a lobbyist.[25]
- Donald Trump Jr., eldest son of Donald Trump, active in the presidential campaign[26] as a key political aide and advisor to his father.[27]
Russian lobbyists
- Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer best known in the United States for lobbying against the Magnitsky Act. According to The New York Times, in Moscow she is regarded as a "trusted insider" who has argued cases for government agencies and high-profile clients including Pyotr Katsyv, an official in the state-owned Russian Railways, and his son Denis, whom she defended against a money laundering charge in New York.[28][29] She has also been an informant in active communication with Yury Chaika, the Russian prosecutor general, since 2013.[21] Starting in 2014, she had worked with Fusion GPS, the firm that was later hired to do opposition research on Trump, to investigate an unrelated money-laundering case involving Prevezon Holding, and the "dirt" she brought with her to the meeting stemmed from that work. The work on the Prevezon case, and later on the dossier, were completely separate, and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that they were unaware that Veselnitskaya would meet with Trump campaign members or share anything from the Prevezon case with them.[30]
- Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet counterintelligence officer suspected of "having ongoing ties to Russian Intelligence",[31][32] although he denies it.[31] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he immigrated to the United States in 1993 and became a U.S. citizen in 2009.[33][34] According to The New York Times, Akhmetshin has "a history of working for close allies of President Vladimir V. Putin."[35][36]
Other participants
- Rob Goldstone, the publicist of Emin Agalarov, who said that Agalarov asked him to contact Trump Jr. New York attorney Scott S. Balber, who was retained by Emin and Aras Agalarov, denied that Goldstone's emails accurately outlined the origins of the meeting.[37]
- Anatoli Samochornov, a translator for Veselnitskaya. In the past, Samochornov worked for Meridian International and did contract work for the U.S. State Department as an interpreter. Samochornov is a citizen of the United States.[38][39]
- Ike Kaveladze, a Georgian-American, US-based senior vice president at Crocus Group, the real estate development company run by Aras Agalarov. Kaveladze's lawyer Scott Balber, who also represents Aras and Emin Agalarov, stated that Kaveladze attended the meeting as the Agalarov family's emissary "just to make sure it happened and to serve as an interpreter if necessary."[40][41]
Purpose
:{:{Trump Jr. initially told reporters that the meeting had been "primarily about adoptions".[2][42] He then released a statement saying it had been a "short introductory meeting" concerning "a program about the adoption of Russian children".[43] A few days later Trump Jr. acknowledged that he went into the meeting expecting to receive opposition research from Veselnitskaya that could hurt Clinton's campaign, adding that none was presented and that the conversation instead focused on the Magnitsky Act.[23][44][45]}:
Later a statement from Trump Jr.'s lawyer said Veselnitskaya had claimed to have information "that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton" but "it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information".[46] Trump Jr. said he felt the adoption issue was her "true agenda all along" and the claims of helpful political information were a pretext.[47] After learning that The New York Times was about to publish the series of emails setting up the meeting, Trump Jr. himself published the email chain via Twitter, and explained that he considered the meeting to be "political opposition research".[19][48] He summarized the meeting as "such a nothing... a wasted 20 minutes".[49]}:
Both Donald Trump and Trump Jr. have claimed this was "opposition research", but Steven D'Amico, an expert on the subject, denies the claim and describes proper opposition research: "All information gathered must be lawfully obtained....and you certainly don't sit in on meetings where a foreign attorney promises sensitive information obtained by a rival government."[50]
Veselnitskaya said that she intended to provide allegations to the Trump campaign about a firm connected to William Browder, a financier who lobbied for the Magnitsky Act. She said that the firm committed tax evasion in Russia and donated to Democrats.[51] She said in an interview, "I never had any damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton. It was never my intention to have that."[52] She initially denied the allegation that she was or is connected to the Russian government. At a later date she disclosed that she was in regular contact with the Russian Prosecutor General's office and with Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, about sharing information she acquired in her investigation relating to the Magnitsky Act.[51][52][53]
On July 14, Akhmetshin stated in an interview that Veselnitskaya had claimed to have evidence of "violations of Russian law by a Democratic donor", and added that she "described her findings at the meeting and left a document about them with Trump Jr. and the others."[33][54]
Disclosure timeline
:{:{The meeting, which took place on June 9, 2016, first came to the attention of authorities in April 2017, when Kushner reported on a revised security clearance form that he had met with Veselnitskaya.[55][2] On July 8, 2017, The New York Times first mentioned a June 2016 meeting with "a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin", arranged by Trump Jr. and including Kushner and Manafort.[2][42] Later that day, Trump Jr. released a statement calling it a "short introductory meeting" about American adoption of Russian children and "not a campaign issue".[2]}:
The next day it emerged that Goldstone had told Trump Jr. that the meeting would provide the Trump campaign with negative information about Clinton, and that this offer was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump", without mentioning adoptions or the Magnitsky Act.[42][19][4] Trump Jr. reacted by acknowledging that he had been expecting information about Clinton.[44] Over the next few days the identity of the attendees was established.[22]}:
On July 11 Trump Jr. tweeted the entire email chain leading up to the meeting, a few minutes before The New York Times published it as well.[19][56][57] Trump Jr. stated that he would have preferred to just have a phone call but that didn't work out.[56] He told Sean Hannity that the meeting had been fully arranged by email, and that he had received no further details by phone.[58] He would later contradict this statement during a closed-door interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 7, acknowledging three short phone calls with Agalarov prior to the meeting.[59]
On July 12, 2017, President Trump stated in a Reuters interview that he had only known about the meeting for a couple of days, and that "many people would have held that meeting".[60] Trump praised his son Don Jr. for his transparency in releasing the emails, and claimed that they were victims of a "political witch hunt".[61][62] The same day Trump Jr. denied having told his father about the meeting.[49] On July 13, Corey Lewandowski was asked on NBC's Meet the Press why he had not been invited to the meeting. He replied that he was at a Trump rally in Florida on the meeting date, but there was in fact no rally in Florida that day.[63] Instead, Trump attended a Trump Victory fundraising lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, and returned to Trump Tower at 1:02 PM, where he "remained for the rest of the afternoon". According to emails, the Veselnitskaya meeting was scheduled for 4:00 PM.[64]
:{:{The July 8 statement by Trump Jr. became controversial in its own right because of conflicting stories about who had written it. On July 11 it was reported that the statement had been drafted by presidential advisers aboard Air Force One on the way home from the G20 summit in Germany, and that it had been approved by President Trump.[65][66] On July 12 Trump's lawyer Jay Sekulow insisted that it had been written by Trump Jr. in consultation with his lawyer, and that Donald Trump "wasn't involved in that".[67][7] He repeated these statements on July 16.[68] On July 31 The Washington Post reported that Trump had indeed personally dictated, worked on, and released the statement in Trump Jr's name, with claims that "were later shown to be misleading".[66]}:
According to The Post, Trump had "overruled the consensus" of Trump Jr., Kushner, aides, and lawyers, who favored issuing a transparent account "because they believed the complete story would eventually emerge." Some advisors reportedly feared "that the president's direct involvement leaves him needlessly vulnerable to allegations of a coverup."[66][7][69] The next day, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated that Trump "certainly didn't dictate, but ... he weighed in, offered suggestions, like any father would do".[70] In January 2018, in a confidential letter from Trump's legal team to special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump's lawyers acknowledged for the first time that Trump had in fact dictated the first statement put out about the meeting in Trump Jr.'s name, thus contradicting prior representations.[71]}:
Although Goldstone's emails described Veselnitskaya as a "Russian government attorney",[19] Scott Balber, formerly a lawyer for Trump and now for Agalarov, said in a July 14, 2017, interview that she had no association with the Russian government.[72] For his part, Akhmetshin denied having ties to Russian intelligence, and said that the efforts by Veselnitskaya and himself "were not coordinated with the Russian government."[33] Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the government didn't know Akhmetshin or Veselnitskaya, or anything about the meeting.[73][74] In a November 2017 statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Veselnitskaya said "I have no relationship with Mr. Chaika, his representatives and his institutions other than those related to my professional functions as a lawyer."[21] However she also stated in April 2018: "I am a lawyer, and I am an informant," adding that "since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general," Yury Chaika.[21]
CNN reported on October 9 that Balber had obtained the memo which Veselnitskaya took to the meeting,[75] and it was released by Foreign Policy.[76] Veselnitskaya was Balber's only source for the document, as well as the only source of the claim that this is the same document that was brought to the Trump Tower meeting;[75] this matters because Veselnitskaya has elsewhere been indicted on charges of falsifying the origin of another document which she helped draft and release to US investigators in a separate investigation which is also related to William Browder and the Magnitsky Act.[77] The memo released by Veselnitskaya claimed that an American firm, Ziff Brothers Investments, illegally evaded tens of millions of dollars in Russian taxes, and contributed to Clinton's election campaign. Veselnitskaya reportedly coordinated this accusation in advance with Chaika, and Putin later repeated the charge.[78]
Two previously undisclosed emails from Rob Goldstone emerged on December 7, as discovered by congressional investigators. The recipients included Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort. In a June 14, 2016, email, five days after the meeting, Goldstone forwarded a news story about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails, describing the news as "eerily weird" in light of what had been discussed at Trump Tower.[79] This discovery contradicted the initial statement by Trump Jr. that "there was no follow up" after the meeting,[2] as well as his September 2017 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in which he stated: "Rob, Emin and I never discussed the meeting again".[79]
On May 16, 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee released emails and text messages in which Trump attorney Alan S. Futerfas provided a prepared statement for Goldstone, Agalarov and Kaveladze, further asserting that it "would be our preference" if they did not say anything else in response to inquiries about the meeting.[80][81]
In May 2018, transcripts released by Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya had met with Glenn Simpson who was the co-founder of Fusion GPS, both the day before and the day after she met with Donald Trump Jr. The two had worked together on an unrelated litigation matter from 2014 through mid- to late-2016.[82]
Michael Cohen asserted in July 2018 that the president knew of the Tower meeting in advance.[83]
Reactions
Congressional reactions
Democratic Representatives Brad Sherman and Al Green sponsored a resolution to impeach President Trump. Sherman argued that Trump Jr.'s emails "add credibility" to the theory that Trump dismissed James Comey as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an attempt to derail the ongoing investigation.[84]
:{:{On July 10, 2017, the Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democratic Senator Mark Warner, stated that "This is the first time that the public has seen clear evidence of senior level members of the Trump campaign meeting Russians to try to obtain information that might hurt the campaign of Hillary Clinton".[85] Warner also stated that the incident was part of a "continuing pattern" in which Trump officials and members of the Trump campaign have "conveniently forgotten meetings with Russians only when they are then presented with evidence, they have to recant and acknowledge those kind of meetings".[86]}:
Another member of the committee, the Republican Susan Collins, stated that Donald Trump Jr. and others who attended the meeting should testify before the committee.[87] Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, described the matter as "a very serious development", and that "It all warrants thorough investigation. Everyone who was in that meeting ought to come before our committee."[87]}:
Republicans in Congress have been for the most part muted with their comments about the event.[88] On July 10, 2017, Representative Ted Yoho (R-FL) when asked in an interview if he thought it was appropriate for Trump Jr. to take a meeting with a Russian national, responded that he "probably would have done the same thing" calling it "opposition research".[88][89] On July 11, 2017, Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) suggested that "the president's son may have been 'duped' into attending the meeting".[88][90]
Other reactions
The meeting was regarded by some commentators as evidence of attempted collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.[91][92][93]
A statement issued by Mark Corallo, former spokesperson for Trump's legal team, suggested that the meeting was a "setup" and that Veselnitskaya and her translator had "misrepresented who they were".[94]
Investigations
Congressional investigation
The Senate Intelligence Committee held a private hearing with Kushner on July 24. In the meeting he responded to questions by the Committee about his contacts with Russian officials and insisted that he had not colluded with foreign agents. He publicly released an 11-page written statement detailing four meetings he had with Russian officials during the campaign and transition periods, including the Trump Tower meeting.[95] He said he had not known all the details about that meeting because he did not read all of the email chain that Trump Jr. had forwarded to him.[96] The Intelligence Committee also met privately with Manafort on July 25.[97]
The Committee on the Judiciary scheduled a hearing on July 26 on the subject "Oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Attempts to Influence U.S. Elections: Lessons Learned from Current and Prior Administrations".[98] Trump Jr. and Manafort were originally scheduled to testify at that hearing, but each negotiated to meet privately with the committee on July 25 instead. They have also arranged to turn over requested documents to the committee. Among the documents Manafort turned over to congressional investigators were notes he took during the June 2016 meeting.[99][100] Manafort and Trump Jr. are expected to testify in public eventually.[96] William Browder testified before the Committee on the Judiciary on July 27, claiming that Veselnitskaya was representing the Kremlin's interests in the meeting, which was arranged for persuading the future lifting of the Magnitsky Act.[101]
On September 7, 2017, Donald Trump Jr. testified privately under questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee staffers. The New York Times reported that in his testimony, Trump Jr. acknowledged he had indeed sought the meeting in the hopes to obtain information about Clinton's "fitness".[102]
During sworn testimony before the House Oversight Committee on February 27, 2019, Michael Cohen repeated his assertion of July 2018[83] that the president was aware of the Tower meeting in advance. His prepared remarks included the following account:
Sometime in the summer of 2017, I read all over the media that there had been a meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016 involving Don Jr. and others from the campaign with Russians, including a representative of the Russian government, and an email setting up the meeting with the subject line, "Dirt on Hillary Clinton." Something clicked in my mind. I remember being in the room with Mr. Trump, probably in early June 2016, when something peculiar happened. Don Jr. came into the room and walked behind his father's desk – which in itself was unusual. People didn't just walk behind Mr. Trump's desk to talk to him. I recalled Don Jr. leaning over to his father and speaking in a low voice, which I could clearly hear, and saying: "The meeting is all set." I remember Mr. Trump saying, "Ok good…let me know."
What struck me as I looked back and thought about that exchange between Don Jr. and his father was, first, that Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world. And also, that Don Jr. would never set up any meeting of any significance alone – and certainly not without checking with his father.
I also knew that nothing went on in Trump world, especially the campaign, without Mr. Trump's knowledge and approval. So, I concluded that Don Jr. was referring to that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting about dirt on Hillary with the Russian representative when he walked behind his dad's desk that day -- and that Mr. Trump knew that was the meeting Don Jr. was talking about when he said, "That's good…let me know."[103]
Special Counsel investigation
Main article: Mueller special counsel investigation
As of July 2017, Robert Mueller, the special counsel of the Department of Justice in charge of Russia-related investigations, was looking into the Trump Tower meeting.[10] The inquiry was confirmed by Kaveladze's attorney, who said special counsel investigators are seeking information from his client.[40] On July 21, 2017, Mueller asked the White House to preserve all documents related to the Russian meeting in June 2016.[104] By August 3, 2017, Mueller had impaneled a grand jury in the District of Columbia that issued subpoenas concerning the meeting.[105] In April 2018, Mueller filed documents with the court that stated that the intended purpose of the raid on Manafort's home in July 2017 was to seek documents related to the Trump Tower meeting.[106]
Other meetings
Gulf states emissary
In August 2016, Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with an emissary representing Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The envoy offered help to the Trump presidential campaign.[107] The meeting included Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, Joel Zamel, an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation, and American businessman Erik Prince.[108][107][109][110]
Los Angeles based Emirati real-estate developer, Rashid al-Malik, who is close to Prince Mohammed and one of Trump's aides, is being investigated for running an illegal influence scheme. A whistle-blower has also accused the UAE of using cyberespionage techniques from former American operatives to spy on US citizens.[111]
George Papadopoulos
The Statement of Facts of Guilt, filed October 5, 2017, and unsealed October 30, 2017, showing the facts admitted by Papadopoulos as part of his guilty plea
George Papadopoulos joined Donald Trump's presidential campaign in early March 2016 as a foreign policy advisor.[112] Within two weeks he was approached by a London-based professor with Russian connections, later identified as Joseph Mifsud.[113] Mifsud told him that during a recent trip to Russia, he had learned that the Russians were in possession of thousands of stolen emails that were politically damaging to Hillary Clinton.[114][115] This occurred before there was public knowledge of the hack of Democratic National Committee computers and of John Podesta's emails, both of which U.S. intelligence agencies believe were carried out by Russia.[116]
Papadopoulos met with Mifsud on March 14, 2016, in Rome, as well March 24 and April 26 in London. At the March 24 meeting, Mifsud brought along Olga Polonskaya, a 30-year-old Russian woman from St. Petersburg.[11][117] Papadopoulos later received an email from Mifsud indicating that Polonskaya was trying to contact him. On April 10 and 11, Papadopoulos contacted Polonskaya asking about a meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, and Polonskaya responded that she had "already alerted my personal links to our conversation and your request…As mentioned we are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation would love to welcome him once his candidature would be officially announced."[118]
Papadopoulos sent emails concerning Vladimir Putin to at least seven campaign officials. Trump national campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis[119] encouraged Papadopoulos to fly to Russia to meet with agents of the Russian Foreign Ministry, after being told that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton it wanted to share with Trump's campaign.[120][121]
Between March and September 2016, Papadopoulos made at least six requests for Trump or representatives of his campaign to meet in Russia with Russian politicians. In May, campaign chairman Paul Manafort forwarded one such request to his deputy Rick Gates, 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." Gates delegated the task to the campaign's correspondence coordinator, referring to him as "the person responding to all mail of non-importance".[120][122][123]
In May 2016, Papadopoulos reportedly revealed Russia's possession of Clinton-related emails at a chance "romantic encounter" with a woman who knew the top Australian diplomat to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer. Papadopoulos later passed on the tip to him.[124] Over a large quantity of wine, Papadopoulos reportedly confirmed to Downer the existence of these emails. After the DNC emails stolen by Russia were published by Wikileaks as an intermediary on July 22, 2016, Australian officials relayed Papadopoulos' statements to American officials. The revelation of Papadopoulos' inside information about Russia's stolen DNC emails was a driving factor in the FBI opening an investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections in July 2016.[115]
Papadopoulos was arrested at Washington Dulles Airport on July 27, 2017, and he has since been cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation.[121] On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to making false statements to FBI agents relating to contacts he had with agents of the Russian government while working for the Trump campaign.[125][126] Papadopoulos's arrest and guilty plea became public on October 30, 2017, when court documents showing the guilty plea were unsealed.[127]
Carter Page
Carter Page served as a foreign policy adviser in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.[128] On November 2, 2017, Page testified[129] to the House Intelligence Committee that he had informed Jeff Sessions, Corey Lewandowski, Hope Hicks and other Trump campaign officials that he was traveling to Russia to give a speech in July 2016, and Corey Lewandowski approved the trip.[130][131][132] Page testified that he met with Russian government officials during this trip and had sent a post-meeting report via email to members of the Trump campaign.[133] He also indicated that campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis had asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement about his trip.[134] Elements of Page's testimony contradicted prior claims by Trump, Sessions, and others in the Trump administration.[130][133][135][136] Lewandowski, who had previously denied knowing Page or meeting him during the campaign, said after Page's testimony that his memory was refreshed and acknowledged that he had been aware of Page's trip to Russia.[137]
Page also testified that after delivering a commencement speech at the New Economic School in Moscow, he spoke briefly with one of the people in attendance, Arkady Dvorkovich, a Deputy Prime Minister in Dmitry Medvedev's cabinet, contradicting his previous statements not to have spoken to anyone connected with the Russian government.[138]
The Steele Dossier alleges that Igor Sechin, the president of state-run Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft, offered Page the brokerage of up to 19 percent of Rosneft if Trump worked to roll back the Magnitsky Act economic sanctions that had been imposed on Russia in 2012.[139][140][141] It also alleges that Page confirmed, on Trump's "full authority", that this was Trump's intent.[141][142][143][139][144][145] Page denied meeting with Sechin, but did acknowledge meeting with Andrey Baranov, Rosneft's head of investor relations.[139] Carter said that he did not "directly" express support for lifting the sanctions during the meeting with Baranov, but that he might have mentioned the proposed Rosneft transaction.[139]
See also
- Mueller Report
- Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
- Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections (July 2016–election day)
- Democratic National Committee v. Russian Federation which names attendees of the meeting as defendants
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12 24 david corn mojo
With Donald Trump tapping Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and grifter, to be FBI director, it’s time to revisit the Trump-Russia scandal. I know many folks think this is old news. The matter was long ago swept under the rug. Yet the basic facts remain incontrovertible:
Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation to help Trump win, and Trump aided and abetted that assault by denying it was underway—thus providing cover to a foreign adversary subverting American democracy—while seeking to exploit it. As president, Trump continued the cover-up by echoing and affirming Putin’s phony professions of innocence. Despite the clear evidence, Trump has gotten away with this act of profound betrayal. Patel is a big reason for that.
As an aide to then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Patel led an investigation after the 2016 election of the FBI’s probe of the Kremlin’s attack and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s important to remember that there were two different components of that probe.
The bureau was looking at the Russian operation—which entailed hacking Democratic officials and operatives and then publicly disseminating through WikiLeaks internal memos and private emails to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign—and it was also examining ties between the Trump crew and Russians. This inquiry was triggered when the bureau learned that a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos supposedly told a senior Australian diplomat he had been informed that Russia could secretly assist the Trump campaign by releasing derogatory information on Clinton.
After that, the FBI began looking at Trump associates with connections in Russia. One lead for the investigators was a campaign adviser named Carter Page, a business consultant who had mucked about in Russia for years and who made a trip to Moscow in July 2016 and met with Russian officials.
With Page of interest to the investigators, the bureau sought and received a secret surveillance warrant—in government parlance, a FISA warrant—to spy on Page. Here’s where things get tricky. The FBI used what became known as the Steele dossier in its applications for a series of FISA warrants for Page. This was the now infamous collection of private memos produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that contained a host of unproven accusations about Trump-Russia links. (Remember the golden showers?)
As a Justice Department inspector general later concluded, the FBI erred in using this document to justify its request for the FISA warrant on Page and screwed up in other disturbing ways in obtaining these warrants. That is, Page’s civil rights were violated. (Interest declared: I was the first reporter to reveal the existence of the Steele dossier—with an article in Mother Jones that appeared on October 31, 2016. But I did not publish the unsubstantiated memos.)
Now pay close attention to follow Nunes and Patel’s dodgy sleight of hand. They contended (loudly) that the FBI misconduct regarding its use of the Steele dossier and the Page warrants meant that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was a witch hunt and that all talk of the Russian attack mounted to boost Trump was a hoax.
And as some Trump critics and journalists raised the notion that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Putin’s operation, Patel and other Trump defenders used the Steele dossier mess-up to counter that accusation and to contend that the entire matter was nothing but a phony Democratic dirty trick. (Steele had written his memos as a consultant to an opposition research firm paid by a law firm working for the Clinton campaign.)
In a brilliant stroke of disinformation, Trump, Nunes, Patel, and others falsely asserted that it had been the Steele memos that had prompted the FBI to launch its Trump-Russia investigation—called Crossfire Hurricane—meaning the inquiry, based on a purportedly fraudulent document that was a product of a Democratic oppo initiative, was utterly illegitimate and illegal. The realscandal, they insisted, was not Moscow clandestinely helping Trump win the White House and Trump accepting and assisting that effort, but rather the Deep State fabricating this so-called scandal.
In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and Our Battle for Democracy, Patel claims credit for “breaking open the biggest criminal conspiracy by government officials since Watergate — Russia Gate.” He repeatedly boasts that by exposing this supposed scandal—the Deep State concocting a bogus investigation to sabotage Trump—he helped save American democracy. He also asserts over and over that the FBI’s Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, which he alleges was purposefully manufactured as part of a conspiracy against Trump—“a political hit job”—run by Democrats, the FBI, the “fake news mafia,” and the Deep State.
What Patel did from the start was to engineer a wonderful deflection to defend and protect Trump. He created a false narrative in which the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier delegitimized Crossfire Hurricane and proved the whole investigation was baseless and a criminal conspiracy against Trump—and nothing else mattered. This is the cover story that Trump and his acolytes have been deploying for years.
Patel’s book makes almost no mention of the actual Russian attack on the 2016 election. Absent is any reference to the material stolen by Moscow’s hackers and leaked to hurt Clinton and aid Trump. (The worst leaking began right after the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” video came out.)
Nor does he acknowledge that Trump and his team repeatedly issued false denials and covered for Putin. He doesn’t include the meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 between Trump’s senior aides and a Russian emissary who they were informed was part of a secret Kremlin operation to assist the Trump campaign. WikiLeaks does not appear in these pages.
Patel ignores Trump’s own secret efforts during the campaign to score a huge real estate deal in Moscow—and his company’s attempt to obtain assistance from Putin’s office. Not surprisingly, he leaves out the Justice Department IG’s finding that the FBI’s initiation of Crossfire Hurricane was not based on the Steele document and not the product of “political bias or improper motivation.”
It was legitimate. Also missing from the book is the key fact that John Durham, a special counsel handpicked by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate and advance the Patel-promoted conspiracy theory that the Deep State illegally whipped up the Russia “hoax” to destroy Trump, flopped and found no massive criminal plot or significant and widespread wrongdoing.
No, all that counts is the Steele dossier and the Page FISA warrants. In Patel’s world, the various government reports that confirmed that Russia waged information warfare to boost Trump do not exist. Most notably, there’s not a hint in his book that in 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, released a bipartisan 966-page report that detailed the Russian assault, stating it was designed to help elect Trump and that the “Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” That is, the Trump campaign helped the Russians.
This report disclosed that Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chair for months during 2016, repeatedly held covert meetings with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was a Russian intelligence officer, and “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with him. The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.”
Moreover, the committee reported it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” And the committee said it had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report’s discussion of that information, though, was redacted.
Trump’s top campaign adviser clandestinely huddling with a Russian intelligence officer who was possibly involved in Moscow’s attack—that sure smells like collusion. At the least, it’s a real, honest-to-God scandal. The committee’s conclusion: Manafort posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” (Manafort was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering. Trump pardoned him in late 2020.)
Manafort does not appear anywhere in Patel’s book. Not a single sentence. (Here’s a suggestion for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: Should Patel make it to a confirmation hearing, ask him if he read the Senate Intelligence Committee report and if he accepts its findings. If he says he hasn’t, he’s not a serious nominee for this job.)
For eight years, Patel has been engaged in Soviet-style revisionism. Create a sham story and airbrush out the truth. He bears much credit for concocting the fraudulent tale that Trump and MAGA have used for years to hide a truth they can’t handle: Trump was elected with covert Russian assistance, and, if the campaign didn’t collude directly with the Russians, Trump and his gang winked at this attack on America and joined Putin in the cover-up. In part thanks to Patel, this has never become the dominant narrative.
Put simply, Patel has been a useful idiot for Putin.
Given that Patel, a QAnon supporter who has peddled the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and championed the ridiculous idea that the January 6 riot Trump incited was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents, has sued his critics for defamation, let me be explicit:
By calling him a useful idiot I’m not suggesting he has been a Russian asset or in cahoots with Russian operatives. But his effort to help Trump escape the treasonous stench of the Trump-Russia scandal by promoting a misleading account of this affair has been of tremendous value to Moscow. Patel essentially created a false alibi for Trump and a distraction that took the heat off Trump and Russia.
And he has vowed to seek revenge against those Deep State schemers who he claims illegally plotted against Trump by investigating the Russia matter. In the distorted view of reality Patel pushes, they are the wrongdoers in this episode, not Trump and not Putin. Patel hasn’t stopped selling this bunk. Yesterday, he sent out an email solicitation for the foundation he operates—under the subject heading “The Deep State can not be trusted”—that opened with this exclamation: “Remember Russia Gate? Fraud!”
One component of the FBI’s mission is to counter Russian espionage and covert actions aimed at the United States. Is this a mission Patel can take on? There are few MAGA advocates who have done more than him to help Trump and Putin dodge accountability for their devious misdeeds of 2016. Placing Patel in charge of the FBI could be akin to putting it in the hands of a mole. One can imagine the joy within the Kremlin prompted by the prospect of Patel leading this critically important agency. The Russians certainly would have reason to call him “our man in the bureau.”
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guk wolff bk
Russia
Bannon was Wolff’s main source on how the White House reacted to Trump’s firing of the FBI director James Comey – which he says was Ivanka and Kushner’s idea – and the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller. guk
Bannon strenuously denies any involvement with Russia-related events but does not spare the rod on others: the meeting at Trump Tower was “treasonous”, “unpatriotic” and “bad shit” and there is “zero” chance Trump did not know of the meeting involving his son Donald Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. The president may have met the Russians himself, Bannon says.
He also suggests that Trump has never understood what trouble he is in over Russia and claims money-laundering charges, such as those denied by Trump’s onetime campaign chairman Manafort, are what will bring the Mueller investigation to its head, probably involving Deutsche Bank and the Kushner property empire.
Wolff quotes the former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes telling Trump: “You’ve got to get right on Russia. You need to take this seriously, Donald.”
“Jared has this,” Trump replies. “It’s all worked out.”
...
infighting
Trump’s response to Mueller is at the heart of the extensively quoted derision from staff members about the president’s mental state; the president himself is quoted deriding everyone around him, sons – known to White House staff as “Uday and Qusay”, after Saddam Hussein’s offspring – and daughter included.
“There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what,” Wolff writes. “For [the treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin and [the former chief of staff] Reince Priebus he was an ‘idiot’. For [the economic adviser] Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit’. For [national security adviser] HR McMaster, he was a ‘dope’. The list went on.”
Bannon is ranged against Kushner and Ivanka and in the words of Richard Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”
It seems perhaps the most hated entity is “Jarvanka”, AKA Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Wolff also writes that the couple had a much-mocked deal: that “the first woman president … would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
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ref 2
no lnx
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/politics/andrew-weissmann-mueller.html
Mueller’s Team Should Have Done More to Investigate Trump-Russia Links, Top Aide Says
A new book by one of the special counsel’s top deputies, Andrew Weissmann, is the first inside account of the investigation.
“We could have done more,” Andrew Weissmann, who was one of the top aides in the special counsel’s office, writes in a new book.
By Charlie Savage
Sept. 21, 2020
WASHINGTON — The team led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, failed to do everything it could to determine what happened in the 2016 election, shying away from steps like subpoenaing President Trump and scrutinizing his finances out of fear he would fire them, one of Mr. Mueller’s top lieutenants argued in the first insider account of the inquiry.
“Had we used all available tools to uncover the truth, undeterred by the onslaught of the president’s unique powers to undermine our efforts?” wrote the former prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, in a new book, adding, “I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more.”
The team took elaborate steps to protect its files of evidence from the risk that the Justice Department might destroy them if Mr. Trump fired them and worked to keep reporters and the public from learning what they were up to, Mr. Weissmann wrote in “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation,” which Random House will publish next week.
While he speaks reverently of Mr. Mueller, he also says his boss’s diffidence made him ill-suited for aspects of shepherding the politically charged investigation. He saw Mr. Mueller and his deputy, Aaron M. Zebley, as overly cautious.
Mr. Weissmann also defended against accusations by the president and his allies that he and other investigators were politically biased “angry Democrats”; Mr. Weissmann said his personal views had no bearing on the crimes that Russian operatives and Trump aides committed.
And he elevates particular details — for example, emphasizing that the same business account that sent hush payments to an adult film star who alleged an extramarital affair with Mr. Trump had also received “payments linked to a Russian oligarch.” The president has denied the affair; his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen controlled the account. Mr. Mueller transferred the Cohen matter to prosecutors in New York.
Previously a mafia and Enron prosecutor and then a lawyer at the F.B.I. for Mr. Mueller, who was the bureau’s director for 12 years, Mr. Weissmann ran one of three major units for the special counsel’s office. His “Team M” prosecuted Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for numerous financial crimes. The goal was to flip him and learn whatever he knew about any Trump campaign links to Russia.
Mr. Manafort had worked for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, and the investigation uncovered ties by his business partner, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, to Russian intelligence. The book builds toward investigators’ discovery that Mr. Manafort had shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, who flew to the United States to meet with Mr. Manafort during the campaign, asking whether Mr. Trump would permit a peace plan for Russia to essentially take over all of eastern Ukraine.
But while admitting this much, Mr. Manafort — seeing the dangle of a potential pardon from Mr. Trump — refused to cooperate further. Investigators did not obtain any final puzzle pieces and lacked the evidence to charge anyone in the campaign with a criminal conspiracy involving Russia’s covert electoral assistance.
“It would seem to require significant audacity — or else, leverage — for another nation to even put such a request before a presidential candidate,” Mr. Weissmann wrote of Mr. Kilimnik’s request. “This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t know to this day, monumentally disconcerting: Namely, why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to this Russian proposal if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return?”
Mr. Weissmann explained the significance of Mr. Manafort’s interactions with Mr. Kilimnik — also a major focus of a recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which explicitly labeled Mr. Kilimnik a Russian intelligence agent — more clearly than the Mueller report did.
Mr. Mueller had strictly forbidden leaks, and the special counsel team took extraordinary care to protect the high-profile, high-stakes investigation, Mr. Weissmann wrote. They kept window blind slats tilted at an angle to keep out prying eyes, shutting out natural light. They concocted an “almost comically elaborate and surreal” plan to sneak in “through the many hidden arteries of the courthouse” to obtain a grand jury indictment without tipping off reporters.
And worried about the possibility that Mr. Trump would fire them and the Justice Department would then seal off or destroy their evidence, the Mueller team members packed their numerous applications to judges for search warrants with extensive, up-to-date details about their investigation — ensuring they backed up their work beyond the reach of the executive branch.
Ty Cobb, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, also privately promised to be a “canary in the coal mine” and provide a heads up if Mr. Trump was going to fire the special counsel team, according to Mr. Weissmann. In an email, Mr. Cobb wrote that he “never made the commitment” described by Mr. Weissmann.
The investigation played out against the backdrop of regular vilification of the Mueller team by Mr. Trump and his allies like Fox News’s Sean Hannity — who turned out to be in regular contact with Mr. Manafort cooking up a “smear campaign” over text messages. Mr. Weissmann, a major target, wrote that such “ad hominem” insinuations of bias appealed to emotion rather than reason.
“I am a registered Democrat,” he wrote. “Does this make Paul Manafort or any of the other 32 people our office charged any less guilty? Did Russia not attack our democracy and disrupt our election with its self-described online information warfare operation? Which facts that we alleged in our various indictments — and to which many of those we indicted, including Manafort, would plead guilty — did our attackers believe were invented as a result of our alleged bias as ‘angry Democrats?’”
Mr. Trump’s allies have recently pointed with alarm to documents showing that cellphones issued to Mr. Mueller’s team were erased during the investigation; Mr. Weissmann twice entered an incorrect passcode too often, triggering a security measure that erased his phone. In an interview, he portrayed the concerns as a “tempest in a teapot” and said his understanding was that all emails and other such data from phones were backed up. He called on the Justice Department to release information about the special counsel’s data backup system.
Mr. Weissmann also wrote that he is not “anti-Trump” but rather “pro the rule of law.” Still, the distinction is less than clear in a book that also portrays Mr. Trump as a liar and a dangerous demagogue trying “to peel the world around him away from the rule of law — away from reason itself — and mold it to accommodate his desire for unchecked power.”
Mr. Weissmann was equally scathing about Attorney General William P. Barr, calling him an enabler and likening his misleading letter last spring about the then-still-secret Mueller report as a betrayal and “gut punch.”
Mr. Weissmann also criticized colleagues, portraying the special counsel team as divided between aggressive investigators like him, the F.B.I. special agent Omer Meisel and the prosecutor Jeannie Rhee — who headed “Team R,” which investigated Russian issues other than those centered on Manafort — and far more risk-averse law enforcement officials like Mr. Zebley who pulled punches.
In one episode in 2017, the Mueller team issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank for information about Mr. Manafort’s income in Ukraine. Deutsche Bank had also lent large sums to the Trump Organization, and the White House somehow found out about the still-secret subpoenas — though not their focus. The White House demanded to know what investigators were doing, andMr. Mueller authorized Mr. Zebley to tell the White House that they had not been seeking Mr. Trump’s financial information.
“At that point, any financial investigation of Trump was put on hold,” Mr. Weissmann writes. “That is, we backed down — the issue was simply too incendiary; the risk, too severe.”
The book provides many other examples of concessions large and small. Investigators did not try to question Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka — who had spoken in the lobby to a delegation of Russians who came to Trump Tower in June 2016to meet with campaign leaders who had been promised that they were offering dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.
They “feared that hauling her in for an interview would play badly to the already antagonistic right-wing press — look how they’re roughing up the president’s daughter — and risk enraging Trump, provoking him to shut down the special counsel’s office once and for all,” he wrote.
Similarly, they did not subpoena the Trump Organization for emails about its efforts to develop a Trump-branded building in Moscow, which were active deep into the 2016 campaign.
And they did not immunize Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., a step that would have prevented him from being able to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying about matters like the Trump Tower meeting. Bound by grand-jury secrecy rules, Mr. Weissmann did not come out and say whether Donald Trump Jr. was threatened with or actually issued a subpoena and used his right against self-incrimination to repel it.
Mr. Weissmann laid much of the blame for what he saw as a pattern of timidity on Mr. Zebley, portraying him as a primary decision maker. “Repeatedly during our 22 months in operation, we would reach some critical juncture in our investigation only to have Aaron say that we could not take a particular action because it risked aggravating the president beyond some undefined breaking point.”
Mr. Weissmann acknowledged, but did not clearly address, concerns that the aging Mr. Mueller had lost a step, both declaring that he was capable of making the tough decisions despite “speculative concerns” about his health but also describing him in one scene as looking drained and worn down by his years of grueling public service.
While Mr. Zebley obtained Mr. Mueller’s sanction for many of his cautious directives, in one striking episode, Mr. Zebley appeared in Mr. Weissmann’s telling to have unilaterally agreed — without Mr. Mueller’s knowledge — to a request by the office of the deputy attorney general overseeing them, Rod J. Rosenstein, not to coordinate with state prosecutors “as it would undermine the president’s pardon power.”
Two other former officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, disputed the account. Mr. Rosenstein did not decline any request to share information with state prosecutors, a person familiar with his thinking wrote in an email.
Another person familiar with how the special counsel’s office interacted with Mr. Rosenstein’s office denied that there had been any agreement about sharing evidence with or withholding it from state prosecutors, and said Mr. Zebley had consulted with Mr. Mueller on every material decision.
On the failure to subpoena Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller was determined to avoid “any public disagreements” with Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Weissmann wrote. Because the special counsel regulations required telling Congress about any instance in which Mr. Rosenstein overruled him, Mr. Mueller never actually proposed subpoenaing Mr. Trump, instead coyly asking what Mr. Rosenstein’s reaction would be. Mr. Rosenstein just kept demurring.
In the end, Mr. Weissmann said in an interview, the caution was more justified early on to avoid provoking Mr. Trump into firing them before they could get going. But he and Ms. Rhee, among others, believed the office should have been willing to be more aggressive later on, after they had learned much of what Russia had done and had already used indictments to drag it into public view.
“We would have subpoenaed the president after he refused our accommodations, even if that risked us being fired,” he wrote. “It just didn’t sit right. We were left feeling like we had let down the American public, who were counting on us to give it our all.”
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no lnx
National Security
Trump’s 2016 campaign chair was a ‘grave counterintelligence threat,’ had repeated contact with Russian intelligence, Senate panel finds
By
Karoun Demirjian and
Ellen Nakashima
August 18, 2020
President Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his interaction with people close to the Kremlin, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Tuesday that found extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services.
In its report, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee states that Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that purported Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.
It found that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, along with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016, had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report stated.
But the panel also concluded that the FBI’s handling of Russian threats to the election was “flawed” and that the bureau gave “unjustified credence” to allegations about Trump’s Russia ties made in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, “based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record.”
Document: Read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election]
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s three-and-a-half year investigation stands as Congress’s only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The panel, significantly, agreed that the FBI overestimated Steel’s reliability and that Manafort and other aides exposed the campaign to undue Russian influence. But its leaders were noticeably divided along party lines in how they interpreted the report’s significance, and several committee members — including its acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — endorsed dissenting conclusions about Trump’s own culpability.
The partisan divisions are a sign that the panel’s tome likely will not put to rest the political wrangling over how seriously to treat foreign interference in U.S. democracy as the country heads into its most divisive election in modern history.
“After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion,” a group of six panel Republicans, including Rubio, wrote in a statementinstead accusing the Democratic Party of coordinating with foreign actors to produce Steele’s dossier.
“In 2016, the Democratic Party, using a series of arm’s length transactions, hired a foreign citizen to seek out dirt on a political opponent, provided by foreign sources,” the Republicans wrote, attacking the FBI for “sloppy work and poor judgment.”
Five Democrat senators — including Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the party’s 2020 vice-presidential nominee — asserted the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.” Referring specifically to their findings on Manafort, the Democrats wrote, “This is what collusion looks like.”
The intelligence committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who did not sign onto the Democrats’ dissenting views, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”
The committee’s past chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who oversaw the bulk of the investigation and also steered clear of the GOP’s dissent, struck a position in the middle.
“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement. “Their aim is to sow chaos, discord, and distrust. Their efforts are not limited to elections. The threat is ongoing.”
Senate panel told Justice Dept. of suspicions over Trump family members’ Russia testimony
Burr and Warner launched the committee’s probe before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and sustained the bipartisan investigation over the following three and a half years, even as other Congressional investigations into the same matter faltered along partisan lines. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee began its probe, former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also released a 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — and Trump was impeached and acquitted after Democrats accused him of coercing Ukrainian leaders to interfere in the 2020 election.
Though the committee’s probe covers much of the same turf as Mueller’s investigation, it was different in nature. Mueller was running a criminal probe; the Senate committee was conducting an intelligence investigation — a distinction that helps to explain some of nuanced differences between their conclusions.
The Senate panel’s probe, which was mostly driven by the committee’s bipartisan staff, included more than 200 witnesses and considered evidence relating to Russian disinformation, Trump’s personal, business and campaign contacts with Russians and the transition period following the 2016 election.
At one point, the document all but concludes that Trump aides were duped and manipulated by Russian interests they were too callow to understand.
“Russian officials, intelligence services, and others” acting in concert with the Kremlin “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report concluded. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”
The report also presents a damning portrait of the Trump campaign’s hasty move in March 2016 to assemble a foreign policy team, asserting that it had recruited inexperienced people without thoroughly vetting them and thus potentially exposed itself to Russian influence.
“Ultimately,” the committee wrote, “the foreign policy team exposed the Trump Campaign to significant counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
The committee pointed to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who attempted to secure a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin through “highly suspicious” contacts with people close to the Russian government. Ultimately, investigators concluded, Papadopoulos “was not a witting co-optee of the Russian the Russian intelligence services. The panel also found that while Russia seemed to show an interest in campaign adviser Carter Page, investigators “found no indication that Page had useful Campaign information for the Russian intelligence services to extract, nor meaningful influence for them to exploit.”
The committee did find however that Putin personally directed the 2016 hack-and-leak campaign targeting the Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Clinton campaign. The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks “actively sought and played a key role in the Russian campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort,” the report stated, surmising that a Russian military spy agency, known as the GRU, transferred hacked emails to WikiLeaks likely because it offered a more effective platform for publicity than the GRU’s own methods.
Yet investigators could not “reliably determine the extent of authentic, nonpublic knowledge” Trump’s friend Roger Stone had about WikiLeaks’s coming releases and shared with the campaign.
The panel noted that its investigation was hampered by several witnesses’ refusing interviews and to produce documents, citing Fifth Amendment rights that protect against self incrimination. These included Stone, Manafort and Rick Gates, the campaign’s deputy chair at that time. The panel’s request to interview Julian Assange was rebuffed.
The committee also outright accused Blackwater founder and Trump supporter Erik Prince of stonewalling its investigation, saying that it was “hampered by a lack of cooperation” and that his account of a controversial 2017 meeting in the Seychelles alongside a Russian official was “brief and deceptive.”
The committee previously released other volumes detailing aspects of its inquiry. Those reports focused on U.S. election security, Russia’s use of social media in disinformation campaigns, the Obama administration’s response to the perceived threat in 2016 and the intelligence community’s joint assessment that Russia had interfered in an attempt to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.
Yet the panel’s effort to maintain a bipartisan approach has not saved it from partisan scrutiny. Last year, the panel came under fire from Senate Republicans after issuing a subpoena for Donald Trump Jr. to come in for a second round of testimony.
After his testimony, Trump Jr. was one of several witnesses that the panel referred to the Justice Department for closer scrutiny over discrepancies between their testimony and that of Gates, the ex-deputy campaign chair who was a key witness in Mueller’s probe.
Earlier this year, Burr stepped aside as panel chairman after coming under scrutiny over stocks he sold in industries hit badly by the coronavirus pandemic. Rubio has been serving as acting chairman in his place.
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daily beast?
no lnx
DOWNED
Russian Official Linked to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Trump Tower Lawyer, Is Dead
Russia’s Deputy Attorney General Saak Karapetyan was exposed this year for running a foreign recruitment operation with Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Nico Hines
London Editor
Updated 03.20.19 4:04PM ET / Published 10.04.18
A Russian official accused of directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met senior Trump campaign officials in 2016, has plummeted to his death in a helicopter crash.
Russian Deputy Attorney General Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was exposed in a Swiss court this year for a plot to enlist another nation’s law-enforcement official as a double-agent for the Kremlin.
Media reports in Russia say he died Wednesday night when his helicopter crashed into a forest during an unauthorized flight in the Kostroma region, northeast of Moscow.
Karapetyan, 58, was intimately familiar with some of the most notorious operations carried out under the orders of Vladimir Putin. He worked closely with Veselnitskaya as well as running some of Moscow’s most high-profile efforts to thwart international investigations into Russia’s alleged crimes.
It was Karapetyan who signed a letter from the Russian government refusing to help the U.S. in a civil case it was pursuing linked to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was trying to expose a $230 million fraud in Russia. Leaked emails have since shown that Veselnitskaya helped to draft the document sent with that letter.
HIT PARADE
Putin Critic-in-Exile Says He’s Living Under a Kill Order
Anna Nemtsova
CONSPIRACY
Trump Tower Russian Lawyer Exposed in Swiss Corruption Case
Nico Hines
Karapetyan has been involved in efforts to foil international investigations for more than a decade. The Daily Beast reported that he was present for a meeting in Moscow where British detectives claim they were poisoned during efforts to track down the killers of Alexander Litvinenko, who died after a dose of radioactive poison in London in 2006.
Despite claims that they were trying to help, the general prosecutor’s office did everything it could to block the Scotland Yard investigation.
Earlier this year, Karapetyan lashed out at Britain in the aftermath of the Novichok attack against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. He linked Skripal, Litvinenko, and Boris Berezovsky, a high-profile critic of Putin who died of suspected suicide in 2013.
“The British authorities have based the anti-Russian campaign surrounding the poisoning of former GRU officer Skripal and his daughter on a provocative scenario. A similar scenario was used in baseless allegations of Russia’s attempt on the life of Boris Berezovsky in London in summer 2003 and the circumstances surrounding the death of Alexander Litvinenko in the U.K. in November 2006,” Karapetyan said, according to Interfax.
On Wednesday night, the wreckage of a helicopter believed to have been carrying Karapetyan was found near the village of Vonyshevo. Video purported to be from the scene shows the chopper mangled and burnt out amid twisted tree trunks.
It is not known why experienced pilot Stanislav Mikhnov, 54, reportedly decided to take off after nightfall in adverse conditions without authorities’ approval. A third man, Arek Harutyunyan, was also killed, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.
NAMED AND SHAMED
Russia’s Global Hacking Op Busted, Seven Agents Indicted
Jamie Ross,
Betsy Swan
Karapetyan’s links to Veselnitskaya emerged this year, when a case in Switzerland exposed the pair’s operation to recruit a high-level law-enforcement official who was supposed to be investigating the Swiss bank accounts of Russian oligarchs and mobsters.
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"Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, April 22, 2018. Veselnitskaya who discussed sanctions with Donald Trump Jr. in New York during the 2016 campaign told The Associated Press in an interview that she has not been contacted by special counsel Robert Mueller and alleged that he was not interested in getting to the truth"
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The top investigator was fired for “unauthorized clandestine behavior,” and allegations of bribery and breaching secrecy laws. The Swiss authorities discovered that the officer—who was identified only as Victor K.—had met Karapetyan in Geneva and Zurich. Before Christmas 2016, Karapetyan telephoned the official and invited him to Moscow, where he was put up in a luxury hotel and asked to attend a meeting with Veselnitskaya.
It is likely that the meeting with Veselnitskaya concerned the fallout from the death of Magnitsky, who had been working to expose a massive fraud that implicated the Kremlin when he was incarcerated, beaten, and left to die.
In the aftermath of his death, the lawyer’s client, Bill Browder, campaigned to enact a series of anti-corruption laws all over the world in his name. The U.S. Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012.
Veselnitskaya was one of the top advocates lobbying to overturn these global Magnitsky laws, which have reportedly absolutely infuriated Putin.
When she arranged to meet Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in 2016, she was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton allegedly given to her by Karapetyan’s general prosecutor’s office, according to the emails of introduction, which have since been leaked. Once inside, we now know that she attempted to lobby the senior Trump officials on the Magnitsky case.
Karapetyan and Veselnitskaya also worked together on another job linked to Magnitsky. The U.S. authorities brought a civil case against a company called Prevezon for its alleged links to laundering proceeds of the fraud that Magnitsky uncovered.
In April, emails obtained by Dossier, an anti-Putin campaign set up by former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and published by The New York Times, showed that Veselnitskaya had helped to draft a document on behalf of the Russian government that explained why Moscow would not help with the fraud case against Prevezon.
Rather than engage with the allegations against Prevezon, much of the document was a personal attack on Browder. The cover letter that accompanied the document was signed by Karapetyan.
The refusal to help provide documents from inside Russia—orchestrated by Karapetyan and Veselnitskaya—likely contributed to the authorities’ ultimate decision to settle the case. Prevezon agreed to pay $5.9 million, but it did not admit any role in laundering the proceeds of the fraud.
Nico Hines
London Editor
@nicohines
nico.hines@thedailybeast.com
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One day after the midterm elections in which the Republicans lost the House majority, President Trump once again sought to flip the script by firing his longtime nemesis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He announced the dismissal in an especially sour press conference, during which he berated all the losing Republicans for failing to tether themselves close enough to him, which he of course insisted sealed their defeat.
This article was originally published at Salon
But firing Sessions didn’t lift Trump’s spirits as much as he might have hoped. He was reported to be depressed and upset because of the rumors that were flying all over town that his number one son, Donald Trump Jr., was about to be indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller. Vanity Fair reported:
In recent days, according to three sources, Don Jr. has been telling friends he is worried about being indicted as early as this week. One person close to Don Jr. speculated that Mueller could indict him for making false statements to Congress and the F.B.I. about whether he had told his father about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians to gather “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
It was already well known by this time that Junior had lied to the congressional committees, soft-pedalinghis knowledge of the Trump Tower project and failing to divulge the information that he’d met with other emissariesof foreign countries about possibly help for the Trump campaign. So the notion that he was in Mueller’s crosshairs as well wasn’t exactly a surprise.
Mueller never indicted Junior, obviously. But despite Trump and his allies’ insistence that the special counsel’s report “cleared” him, it’s not true. Mueller never interviewed Don Jr., and redactions in the report point strongly to the likely scenario that he was subpoenaed by the grand jury and took the Fifth. The general consensus is that Mueller concluded that Junior’s collusion was so dumb that he couldn’t possibly have been involved in a criminal conspiracy.
But Mueller isn’t the only game in town. As it turns out, the Senate Intelligence Committee still wanted Don Jr. to come back and testify again before the senators. (He’d previously only spoken to the staff.) They asked him nicely but unlike all the others who’d testified under the same agreement, including his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, Don Jr. apparently refused. So sometime between a month ago and a week ago (news reports differ on the timing) the committee issued a subpoena. When the news leaked on Wednesday, Trump Jr. and his allies completely lost their minds.
This hysterical statement was issued to the news media:
The “so-called ‘Republican’ Senator” described as “cowardly” would be Richard Burr of North Carolina, chair of the Intelligence Committee. That leak happened on the day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had declared “case closed,” which is probably not a coincidence. Someone on the committee likely thought it might be useful to have it out there that the only truly bipartisan Russia investigation on Capitol Hill was still in operation, making it clear that McConnell’s words were only rhetorical.
Trump’s allies raced to Junior’s rescue, particularly those who are facing re-election in 2020, reportedly after being reminded that they might not want to anger the president and cause him to endorse a primary opponent against them. Following the intemperate words of that “source” close to Trump Jr. calling Burr a coward, other Republicans came forward to condemn their colleague — a highly unusual occurrence, especially within the GOP — and call for the committee investigation to be shut down.
It was quite a temper tantrum, joined by the president himself:
It’s clear that Trump is only aware of the sunny Mueller Report Cliff Notes he sees on Fox News, so he probably unaware that Burr also acted as a back channel during the investigation, speaking to former White House counsel Don McGahn about whom the committee had interviewed. But Trump mentioned that Burr had said publicly that his committee had found no evidence of collusion and seemed confused since he had obviously considered Burr to be among his loyal henchmen.
Burr is a strange figure in all this. He has gone out of his way to avoid appearing publicly with Trump, supposedly to avoid the appearance of a conflict even as he shared info with the White House and intervenedwith the press on Trump’s behalf. He has managed to work congenially with Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s ranking Democrat, and by all accounts the committee investigation itself has not been compromised.
Why Burr has decided to subpoena the president’s son, if it’s simply a mopping-up exercise, as other Republicans on the committee have implied, remains mysterious. Some people assume it’s because Burr believes that lying to his committee under oath is wrong no matter what, and he wants to preserve the integrity of the process. Others think it’s because this is his last term in the Senate and he’s decided to take a stand. (Burr has said he will not run for re-election in 2022.)
It’s tempting to believe that. Burr’s back-channel activities with the White House are reminiscent of Sen. Howard Baker of Watergate fame, the Tennessee Republican known for his repeated question, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” It was later learned that Baker had secretly provided the Nixon White House with information about the Watergate committee’s investigation; his question was designed to protect Richard Nixon, under the assumption that Nixon hadn’t known anything about the criminal cover-up. When it could no longer be denied that Nixon knew everything, Baker changed sides and sealed his reputation as a man of integrity, even though the truth was much murkier than that.
There have been so many of these possible parallels between Republicans of the Watergate era and today, and none of them have panned out. I’m no longer willing to extend the possibility. That species of Republicans who are willing to do the right thing, however reluctantly, has gone extinct. I don’t know why Burr has gone that extra mile, but I doubt that he intends to nail Donald Trump Jr. with a perjury rap or to expose the president’s collusion with Russia. It may just be that Burr thought Don Jr. would end up complying and they could have a nice little sit-down to clear the air. In any case, the likelihood of the Republican Senate sending a criminal referral to William Barr for Don Jr.’s lies under oath are about the same as the chances President Trump will join the Space Force for its first trip to the moon.
This would all have probably blown over if the Trump administration, and Trump’s entire family as well, hadn’t decided to stonewall all congressional requests, no matter what they are, in order to put on a show for the base and run out the clock on the myriad of outstanding legal issues. But Don Jr., not being the sharpest fellow of all time, didn’t realize that stonewalling the Senate won’t really work — since the Senate is run by Republicans, after all — and he ended up causing a huge mess inside Trump’s own party. He’s a real chip off the old block.
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hmmn
https://www.reddit.com/r/RussiaLago/comments/9529qd/the_shadows_of_erik_prince_peter_thiel_and/
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Meeting at Trump Tower
Main article: Trump campaign–Russian meetings § Trump Tower meeting, June 9, 2016
On 7 June 2016, on behalf of Emin Agalarov, Goldstone emailed Donald Trump's son Donald Trump Jr., to request a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya (referred to in Goldstone's email as a "Russian government attorney").[8][9] According to Goldstone's email, Agalarov wanted to "provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information" that would help Donald Trump's campaign and damage the campaign of his rival, Hillary Clinton.[8] Trump Jr replied immediately: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”[10]
At the request of Don Jr, Goldstone attended the meeting, held on 9 June 2016, at Trump Tower. The gathering included Trump Jr, Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Aras Agaralov employee Ike Kaveladze, Russian lawyer Natalia Vesilnitskaya. former Russian counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin, and a translator.[11][12]
The existence of the meeting was reported in July 2017. Some news outlets took the meeting as evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.[13]
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Goldstone claimed: “When people said that [I was part of some Russian plot] I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. That doesn't mean that maybe there wasn't any Russian interference or Trump campaign collusion in other ways. I don't know. But I'm sure I wasn't part of it."
On 18 December 2017, Goldstone was interviewed by the US House Intelligence Committee.[14]
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