Kirill Dmitriev
SEE KUSHNER 11 25 UKRAINE
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Bill Gates has said he had affairs with two Russian women, which Epstein later discovered.
Somewhere along the way, Epstein struck up a relationship with Sergei Belyakov, Russia’s former deputy minister of economic development and a graduate of the FSB – Russian intelligence – academy. Epstein introduced him to contacts like Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who would go on to give $10 million to the super PAC that helped elect now-Vice President JD Vance to the Senate in 2022.
In 2015, Epstein warned Belyakov that “a Russian girl from Moscow … is attempting to blackmail a group of powerful biznessmen [sic] in New York.” It was, Epstein said, “bad for business for everyone involved.” Belyakov responded back with information about the woman who he said worked in the “sex and escort” business. The FSB academy graduate said he would meet with someone who knows her.
The following year, Belyakov told Epstein that he had a new position at the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the Russian sovereign wealth fund, headed by current Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev – the same guy who was caught in those friendly leaked phone calls with Steve Witkoff that I mentioned.
Masha Drokova, a former spokesperson for Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth movement, was in regular touch with Epstein in the last couple of years before his death in prison, ostensibly helping Epstein with his public relations. According to the Washington Post, she was “the subject of the 2011 documentary ‘Putin’s Kiss,’ whose title refers to a widely publicized awards ceremony in which she received a medal from Putin and spontaneously kissed him on the cheek.” In a 2017 email, Drokova asked Epstein to connect her with “adequate Russian oligarchs.” The Post reported in 2022 that her fundraising pitches highlighted her ties to wealthy Russians, although Drokova denied writing those emails and said she did not receive Russian funding. Epstein advised Drokova as she launched her Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and she introduced Epstein to the contacts she had made in the tech world.
In one emailed interaction in 2017, Drokova, after claiming to meet billionaire Jeff Bezos, tells Epstein she is “trying to understand what she is not understanding about him.” Epstein writes back that Bezos is “smart, fun, and visionary. He is a very nice person. Probalty [sic] the best in the valley among the Bs.”
The files also indicate that Epstein had dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire who the Treasury Department has identified as a money launderer for Putin. Deripaska also cultivated a friendship with Peter Mandelson, a senior figure in Britain’s Labour Party. It appears that Mandelson tried to use Deripaska’s contacts to acquire a last-minute Russian visa for Epstein in 2010. Correspondence also shows Epstein’s assistant trying to set up a meeting for Epstein and Deripaska in Moscow or Paris.
There’s also audio of Epstein advising then-Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak to have dinner with Putin to line up work after he leaves government.
There is at least one itinerary for a lengthy trip across Russia, and photos of Epstein and Ghislaine in what is believed to be Russia, including with people who appear to be Russian soldiers. Umar Dzhabrailov, a former Russian senator who committed suicide in recent days, described Maxwell as “a soulmate.” Epstein had a series of Russian visas between 2011 and his death in 2019.
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HE’S BAAAAACK! AN 11 25
The peace plan that President Donald Trump's administration offered to end the ongoing war in Ukraine has been widely criticized for being overly accommodating to Russia. Now, a new report shows that Russia may have been even more intricately involved in its composition than previously known.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the proposal — which Trump administration special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (who is also the president's son-in-law) — relied heavily on input from a "Kremlin insider." Kushner, Witkoff and the Kremlin advisor huddled behind closed doors in multiple "secret meetings" in Miami, Florida, according to the Journal.
That Kremlin advisor was identified as Kirill Dmitriev, who the Journal described as an envoy of Russian President Vladimir Putin who also has ties to Kushner. Witkoff also met Dmitriev during his April trip to Moscow. The 28-point plan has been described as a "framework" to end the war, though multiple senators allege Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio described it as "essentially the wish list of the Russians." (Rubio has denied making that comment)
The three men reportedly met for three days in late October at Witkoff's home in Miami, where Dmitriev communicated multiple items the Kremlin demanded in order to agree to end hostilities with Ukraine. The Journal reported that Dmitriev called for Ukraine to never be allowed to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), pull all troops out of the eastern Donbass region and other territory Russia wanted to control (like the Crimean Peninsula, which it illegally invaded in 2014). The Kremlin also wants Ukraine's military to be capped at a much lower number than its current 900,000-member force.
Dmitriev also specifically called on the Trump administration to engage in multiple economic agreements in the areas of artificial intelligence, energy and other industries. The Journal also reported that the bulk of the plan was written by both Kushner and Witkoff before they even engaged with Russia or Ukraine.
When Witkoff and Kushner attempted to engage senior Ukrainian officials to get their input on the peace plan, one told the two Trump administration envoys that the deal was better for Russia than for Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked the two men for working toward ending the war, but also said their plan needed revisions.
Trump administration officials maintain that the final version of the plan will be more accommodating to Ukraine, and suggested amending it to raise the cap on the size of the Ukrainian military beyond what Russia wanted, and that language permanently barring Ukraine's membership in NATO could be removed.
Click here to read the Journal's report in full (subscription required).
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the nation
Third, what does Bannon know about the role of Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and purveyor of mercenary armies, and his Russia connections? Prince, a Bannon ally, took part in a pair of meetings being scrutinized by Mueller. One involved Kushner, Gen. Michael Flynn, and Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan (aka MBZ), the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, who held a meeting in Trump Tower in December 2016, a meeting also attended by Bannon. For the second, a month later, Prince flew halfway around the world for a meeting in the Seychelles, an Indian Ocean archipelago, where he metKirill Dmitriev, a senior Russian financier, at the behest of MBZ.
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Josh Kovensky
January 30, 2019 10:44 am
There was something in the water going into the 2016 campaign.
A story today in the Daily Beast suggests that a company whose owner was interviewed by the special counsel simulated how a foreign power could use social media to covertly influence American politics before the 2016 presidential campaign began.
The company – Wikistrat – is owned by Israeli-Australian entrepreneur Joel Zamel, who was interviewed by special counsel prosecutors last year.
The wargaming effort yielded a report that included analysis from Wikistrat staffers on how successful such interference efforts – then speculative – might be. The Daily Beast story quotes an unnamed analyst in the report as writing that “foreign governments with a high stake in U.S. elections might be willing to hire cyber-mercenaries to influence election results.”
The concept of using mass-produced fake social media accounts to meddle in democratic processes was being discussed in many intelligence and political consulting firms at the time, the story says, calling it a “burgeoning market.”
Another, more secretive firm owned by Zamel – PsyGroup – later made a proposal to Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates on how to manipulate social media as part of the campaign’s efforts to beat Trump’s Republican primary opponents and Hillary Clinton, the New York Times reported in October.
Zamel himself appears to have cultivated connections with high-ranking Trump campaign officials during the campaign. He attended a meeting in August 2016 in Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and Middle East-U.S. relations fixer George Nader.
Prince and Nader would later meet with Russian Direct Investment Fund chief Kirill Dmitriev and an Emirati prince at a summit in the Seychelles nine days before Trump was sworn into office.
After the election, Nader reportedly paid Zamel a significant, but undisclosed sum of money. It’s unclear why the payment was made.
vox
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The secret Seychelles meeting Robert Mueller is zeroing in on, explained
Why did Erik Prince meet with a Russian fund manager shortly before Trump’s inauguration?
By Andrew Prokopandrew@vox.com Updated Mar 8, 2018, 7:48am EST
Erik Prince arrives to testify to the House Intelligence Committee last year. He met a Russian fund manager in the Seychelles in January 2017. Mark Wilson/Getty
Special counsel Robert Mueller has gotten a new cooperator in the Russia investigation. And he’s testifying about what, exactly, happened at a mysterious meeting between a Trump associate and a Russian fund manager in the Seychelles, an East African archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean.
The New York Times’s Mark Mazzetti, David Kirkpatrick, and Adam Goldman reported Tuesday night that George Nader — an adviser to the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates — is cooperating with Mueller’s probe. In a sign of his importance to the investigation, Nader testified before a grand jury last week.
That’s big because Nader helped organize, and attended, that curious Seychelles meeting on January 11, 2017, shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The meeting brought together Erik Prince, Trump donor and founder of the private security company Blackwater, with Kirill Dmitriev, who manages a Russian sovereign wealth fund and is thought to be close to Vladimir Putin.
Anonymous sources have long claimed to reporters that the purpose of the Seychelles meeting was for Trump’s team to covertly communicate with Putin’s team. After all, it happened just weeks after Jared Kushner reportedly told the Russians that he wanted to set up a back channel through which they could communicate.
But Prince has hotly denied that that’s what happened, including in sworn testimony last year. He said he just made the Seychelles trip for business reasons, that he was in no way representing Trump, and that the meeting with Dmitriev was both entirely unplanned on his end and completely uneventful.
It appears, though, that Nader is telling the grand jury otherwise. The Washington Post’s Sari Horwitz and Devlin Barrett reported Wednesday that Nader is saying the meeting was “an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin” — and that Mueller has other evidence to that effect, as well.
We don’t yet know the specifics of what Nader is saying as part of his semi-voluntary cooperation (the FBI questioned him at Dulles Airport after a flight last month and seized his electronics, per the Times). But if Prince was acting on the Trump’s team behalf, it would demolish months’ worth of denials from both him and the White House that he was doing any such thing. And it would raise serious questions about why, exactly, all parties involved were so set on keeping the Seychelles meeting secret.
The cast of characters for the Seychelles meeting
Trump wasn’t in the Seychelles, but Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan was. Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty
The people present to meet at the Seychelles on January 11, 2017, included the following:
Erik Prince is the founder of Blackwater, the private security/mercenary company that scored big contracts from George W. Bush’s administration (and some of whose employees were accused of killing Iraqi civilians). Prince has since sold Blackwater (which renamed itself) and gone out in search of new lines of mercenary business.
Prince donated about $250,000 to Trump’s campaign and to outside groups supporting Trump and was in contact with Steve Bannon during the transition. He also happens to be the brother of controversial Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
MBZ, or Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, is the crown prince and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. MBZ did business with Erik Prince several years ago — the UAE awarded Prince a contract worth several hundred million dollars “to help assemble an internal paramilitary force,” per the Washington Post. Diplomatically, the UAE regime is close to Saudi Arabia and unfriendly to Qatar and Iran.
George Nader, a Lebanese-American business executive who has a decades-long history in international diplomacy, has lately advised MBZ. He visited the White House several times in 2017. He also at one point consulted for Blackwater.
Kirill Dmitriev manages the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a $10 billion Russian government-established sovereign wealth fund that’s under US sanctions. He’s believed to be close to Vladimir Putin. His fund was until recently part of the Russian government-owned bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB.
Finally, there’s the setting — the Seychelles Islands is a tropical archipelago nation a few hundred miles off the coast of eastern Africa. Its government brags that it is “the kind of place where you can have a good time away from the media.”
The context of the Seychelles meeting
Jared Kushner. Mark Wilson/Getty
Potentially relevant context for the Seychelles meeting is that there were several other meetings of the various factions involved the month before, mostly happening in Trump Tower.
On December 1, 2016, Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn met secretly in Trump Tower with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. Kislyak reported back to his bosses that at this meeting, Kushner said he wanted to set up a secret communications channel between the Trump team and Russia. (Kushner denies that this happened.)
Days later, the Washington Post received an anonymous letter revealing that this secret meeting happened and who was present (though they couldn’t confirm it for several more months). The letter also claimed that at the meeting, Kushner, Flynn, and Kislyak discussed setting up a meeting between a Trump representative and a Russian in some third country, and concluded Flynn was too high-profile to go.
On December 12, Kislyak returned to Trump Tower and met with Kushner’s deputy. Then on the following day, Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian government-owned bank VEB, stopped by to meet with Kushner. Again, these meetings remained secret for months.
Then on December 15, 2016, a little over a month after Trump won the presidential election, the United Arab Emirates crown prince, MBZ, flew to the United States. There, he met with several Trump transition officials, including Flynn, Kushner, and Bannon. What was strange about this was that MBZ did not inform the Obama administration that he was traveling to the US, as major foreign leaders usually do. Trump’s team didn’t disclose the meeting either, and it too remained secret for several months.
Erik Prince also visited Trump Tower twice during the transition, to meet with Bannon, he later testified.
What happened in the Seychelles: Erik Prince’s account
Erik Prince testifies to Congress back in 2007
Erik Prince testifies to Congress back in 2007. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Prince’s story of how he ended up going to the Seychelles and what took place there, which he gave under oath to the House Intelligence Committee on November 30, 2017, is as follows:
One day, an aide to MBZ, the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, invited Prince to fly out to the Seychelles and meet MBZ, offering few details. Prince characterizes the invitation as: “His Highness would like to see you if you can come out to the Seychelles.” Prince says he understood this as an invitation “to talk about potential business.”
So Prince accepted and flew out there on January 11, 2017. A meeting of about an hour ensued with MBZ, “a couple of his brothers,” and others in his entourage. They discussed general issues in the field, but no specific business proposal was made.
Toward the end of the meeting, Prince testified, someone in MBZ’s party casually “mentioned a guy I should meet who was also in town to see them, a Kirill Dmitriev from Russia, who ran some sort of hedge fund.” (Prince did not name Nader in his testimony.)
Prince accepted, and met Dmitriev at the hotel bar one on one for no more than 30 minutes. They discussed general issues in the field, but no specific business proposal was made. Prince then stayed in the hotel that night and left the next morning.
Overall, the meeting with Dmitriev was so uneventful that, he claims, he couldn’t even remember the man’s name a few months later. There was no follow-up to it. And Prince certainly never claimed in any way to be acting on behalf of Donald Trump.
Was this the secret US-Russia backchannel meeting that Kushner reportedly wanted?
The Washington Post was the first to unearth the Seychelles meeting, in a report by Adam Entous, Greg Miller, Kevin Sieff, and Karen DeYoung published last April, which was sourced to anonymous “U.S., European and Arab officials.” Their account of why and how the meeting happened was very different from Prince’s. They write:
Following the New York meeting between the Emiratis and Trump aides, Zayed was approached by Prince, who said he was authorized to act as an unofficial surrogate for the president-elect, according to the officials. He wanted Zayed to set up a meeting with a Putin associate. Zayed agreed and proposed the Seychelles as the meeting place because of the privacy it would afford both sides.
So, per the Post’s sources, it was Erik Prince who said he wanted the meeting, who said he was acting as a surrogate for President-elect Trump, and who asked MBZ’s team to put him in touch with a Putin confidant. The whole purpose of the meeting was to be a back channel between Trump’s team and Putin’s team.
That would sure seem to make sense, since all this happened shortly after Kushner reportedly said he wanted to establish a secret back channel with Russia, and both MBZ and Prince made their own trips to see Trump officials not long after that. However, there was no actual proof of this.
Nader — and Mueller’s investigation more generally — could be providing the proof. It does not appear that Nader has been charged with anything, but the Times reported that when he landed at Dulles Airport on January 17 of this year, the FBI was waiting for him, at Mueller’s behest. They served him with a subpoena, questioned him, and seized his electronics. They’ve questioned him several more times since and he went before a grand jury for testimony last week.
It’s also worth noting that Michael Flynn has been cooperating with Mueller’s investigators since early December and we haven’t seen any of the fruits of his cooperation yet. Flynn was present in the meeting in which Kushner reportedly told Kislyak he wanted a back channel. He was also present when Kushner and Bannon met MBZ. He may well have told Mueller why the Seychelles meeting happened.
And if the Seychelles meeting was a back channel, what actually came of it?
If it were to be proven that the Trump team wanted to set up the Seychelles meeting, the question would remain about what actually happened there — and why those involved wanted so badly to keep it secret.
One potential topic is, of course, the incoming administration’s foreign policy. In the first Post report on the meeting, their sources claimed that one topic of discussion was “whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria,” a topic that was very much of interest to the UAE.
But if this were merely about essentially aboveboard foreign policy discussions, it’s unclear why they would have had to happen with such secrecy, through a back channel. (Rather than just waiting nine days for Trump to be sworn in.)
Was money involved? The Russian who went to the meeting, Kirill Dmitriev, is a moneyman, after all. So is Sergey Gorkov, who met with Jared Kushner in Trump Tower weeks earlier. What’s more, Dmitriev’s fund was until 2016 actually part of the Russian government-owned bank Gorkov runs, VEB.
Furthermore, this week’s Times report says that Mueller “appears to be examining the influence of foreign money on Mr. Trump’s political activities,” and has previously asked whether Nader “funneled money from the Emirates to the president’s political efforts.” So he does seem to be following some sort of money trail.
Finally, and perhaps most obviously of all, there’s the possibility that this happened so that Trump’s team and Putin’s could secretly communicate about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. So far, there’s no specific evidence that that’s the case. But we clearly haven’t heard the last of the Seychelles meeting.
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Erik Prince, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, contributed $150,000 to Mercer's Make America Number 1 PAC and another $100,000 to the Trump Victory Fund. Prince has recently testified to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his trip to the remote Seychelles for a secret meeting in December 2016 with a close ally of Putin, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The purpose of the meeting was allegedly to setup a back channel of communication between then president-elect Donald Trump and the Russians, though Prince has denied this allegation. Before the 2015-16 elections, Prince's political contributions totaled a mere $31,800 as far back as 2007, according to FEC records.
The hybrid super-PAC, The Committee to Defend the President, was formed in 2013 under the name Stop Hillary PAC. It is managed by Dan Backer, the lead attorney who won the McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commissioncase in 2014. The Supreme Court decision eliminated the cap on how much wealthy individuals can donate to federal candidates, parties and PACs in a single, two-year election cycle.
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