Vekselberg

no merri

SEE BIDEN IMPEACHMENT

an 2 24

one name that has been heard a lot in right-wing media outlets is Tony Bobulinski, an investor who House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) and other Republicans have been touting as their greatest weapon against Hunter Biden.

Bobulinski, according to many MAGA Republicans, will be the downfall of Hunter Biden and, by extension, his father, President Joe Biden.

But in an article published on February 13, Daily Beast reporters William Bredderman and Roger Sollenberger lay out some reasons why Bobulinski's "ties" make him a problematic witness.

:{":{As Republicans examine Hunter Biden's questionable business ties," the journalists explain, "it turns out Bobulinski is connected to one particular character perhaps more unsavory than any other figure in the inquiry's constellation: Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg…. a Ukrainian-born energy magnate who's been a close ally of Vladimir Putin for decades.}:"

Bredderman and Sollenberger note that in 2017, Vekselberg "reportedly funneled $500,000 to an LLC run by Donald Trump's former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, supposedly with the intention of influencing the new administration to let Russia illegally occupy parts of Eastern Ukraine."

"U.S. law enforcement has placed sanctions on Vekselberg multiple times, citing Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, Moscow's aggression against Ukraine, and the oligarch's ties to Putin," the Daily Beast journalists explain. "Vekselberg tried to evade those sanctions with the help of an American attorney. But Republicans are trying to look past Bobulinski's ties to Vekselberg, as they paint Hunter Biden — dishonestly and without actual evidence — as a corrupt figure facilitating payments to his father."

Read the Daily Beast's full report at this link (subscription required).}}:

---

forbes

1 23 name came up on podcast chalupa?

w/ olig

Russian Oligarch's Cousin Funneled Cash to N.Y. Politician

https://www.thedailybeast.com › republican-george-dev...

Nov 30, 2022 — Andrew Intrater, money manager to Russian Viktor Vekselberg, gave $56100 to committees tied to Rep.-elect George Devolder-Santos, ...

Andrew Intrater - USC Shoah Foundation |

https://sfi.usc.edu › get-involved › donor-spotlights › a...

Intrater — whose company, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, invests in world-class information technology firms — emphasizes the importance of keeping memories ...

Zach Everson

Forbes Staff

I took an unusual route to get here. In a past life, I worked as a travel and food writer, which is how I got the assignment in 2016 to cover the grand opening of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., just a couple miles from my home. When Trump won the election and refused to divest his business, I stayed on the story, starting a newsletter called 1100 Pennsylvania (named after the hotel’s address) and contributed to Vanity Fair, Politico and NBC News.I’m still interested in Trump, but I’ve broadened my focus to follow the money connected to other politicians as well—both Republicans and Democrats.

4,683 views | May 13, 2022

Checks & Imbalances: Pro-Choice Billionaires, Abortion-Themed Ads

We continue looking at abortion’s impact on the midterm elections, as well as the latest district attorney who wants a crack at Donald Trump.

3,674 views | May 10, 2022

Checks & Imbalances:Cawthorn’s Check, Vela’s Whirl, Trump’s Cell

We look at who just donated to Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), the philosophy of Gordon Sondland and Donald Trump's latest reason to not comply with a subpoena.

15,989 views | May 9, 2022

Madison Cawthorn’s Campaign Gets Donation From Associate Of Sanctioned Russian Billionaire

The cousin and one-time asset manager for billionaire Viktor Vekselberg made his first-ever contribution to the controversial North Carolina Republican on Friday.

5,424 views | May 6, 2022..

chalk up one more controversy for Rep. Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina Republican who seems enveloped in it. Cawthorn’s cash-strapped campaign for re-election received a donation Friday from the cousin and business associate of a sanctioned Russian oligarch,according to a report filed Sunday night with the Federal Election Commission.

Andrew Intrater, a U.S. citizen who’s an asset manager for New York-based Sparrow Capital Holdings, contributed $1,000 to Cawthorn’s campaign.Intrater’s cousin and, at least at one time, biggest investor is billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who has been under U.S. sanctions since April 2018. Last month, Spanish police, with assistance from U.S. law enforcement, seized Vekselberg’s superyacht on the resort island of Mallorca.

Friday made for interesting timing for Intrater, who has donated $250,000 to Republican campaigns since 2017.Cawthorn, 26, has been through a tumultuous few months. Since the beginning of March, Cawthorn has been charged with driving with a revoked license, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “thug,” claimed he was invited to a “sexual get-together” with other politicians and witnessed some of them doing cocaine, been cited for having a loaded gun in his carry-on bag at the Charlotte airport and had a Republican Senator from his home state call on Congress to investigate him for insider stock trading.

Intrater’s check comes as Cawthorn’s campaign is underwater. Last week, it reported debts of $325,000 with $138,000 of cash on hand.

Polls have shown Cawthorn’s favorability rating and support declining among GOP primary voters in his district, but he still holds a double-digit lead over his closest rival. Voting ends May 17.

Intrater and a spokesperson for the Cawthorn campaign didn’t respond to inquiries.

[no doc]

After leaving the FEC, McGahn returned to the law firm Patton Boggs.^[16] In 2014 he moved to the law firm of Jones Day in Washington, D.C.^[17] He also worked for the Koch affiliated Freedom Partners.^[20] McGahn brought five Jones Day lawyers with him to the White House, and six more were appointed to senior posts in the Trump Administration.^[21] Jones Day has represented Alfa-Bank and done work for businesses belonging to a long list of Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, and Alexander Mashkevich.^[21]

nyt

sept 21

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, and Mr. 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 2016 to 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.”

ref no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/us/politics/michael-cohen-shell-company-payments.html

no lnx

Firm Tied to Russian Oligarch Made Payments to Michael Cohen

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s lawyer and fixer. His shell company received payments from a firm linked to a Russian oligarch, as well as corporations with business before the Trump administration.

By Mike McIntire, Ben Protess and Jim Rutenberg

May 8, 2018

A shell company that Michael D. Cohen used to pay hush money to a pornographic film actress received payments totaling more than $1 million from an American company linked to a Russian oligarch and several corporations with business before the Trump administration, according to documents and interviews.

Financial records reviewed by The New York Times show that Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, used the shell company, Essential Consultants L.L.C., for an array of business activities that went far beyond what was publicly known. Transactions adding up to at least $4.4 million flowed through Essential Consultants starting shortly before Mr. Trump was elected president and continuing to this January, the records show.

Among the previously unreported transactions were payments last year of about $500,000 from Columbus Nova, an investment firm in New York whose biggest client is a company controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, the Russian oligarch. A lawyer for Columbus Nova, in a statement on Tuesday, described the money as a consulting fee that had nothing to do with Mr. Vekselberg.

Other transactions described in the financial records include hundreds of thousands of dollars Mr. Cohen received from Fortune 500 companies with business before the Trump administration, as well as smaller amounts he paid for luxury expenses like a Mercedes-Benz and private club dues.

References to the transactions first appeared in a document posted to Twitter on Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star who was paid $130,000 by Essential Consultants to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump. The lawyer’s seven-page document, titled “Preliminary Report of Findings,” does not explain the source of his information but describes in detail dates, dollar amounts and parties involved in various dealings by Mr. Cohen and his company. Most of the transactions involved two banks: First Republic Bank and City National Bank.

The Times’s review of financial records confirmed much of what was in Mr. Avenatti’s report. In addition, a review of documents and interviews shed additional light on Mr. Cohen’s dealings with the company connected to Mr. Vekselberg, who was stopped and questioned at an airport earlier this year by investigators for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

[ImageViktor Vekselberg, left, the Russian oligarch, with Marat Khusnullin, deputy mayor of Moscow, before the inauguration ceremony of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia this week.]

Taken together, The Times’s findings and Mr. Avenatti’s report offer the most detailed picture yet on Mr. Cohen’s business dealings and financial entanglements in the run-up to the election and its aftermath. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Mr. Cohen for possible bank fraud and election-law violations, among other matters, according to people briefed on the investigation. Stephen Ryan, a lawyer representing Mr. Cohen, declined to comment.

Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, is suing Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump to break her nondisclosure agreement related to the $130,000.

It is unclear whether that or any of the other transactions were improper, but Mr. Avenatti has asserted that Mr. Cohen’s use ofEssential Consultantspotentially violated banking laws. The financial records indicate that at least some of the money that passed through Essential Consultants was from sources and in amounts that were inconsistent with the company’s stated purpose.

Mr. Cohen also used the company to collect $250,000 after arranging payments in 2017 and 2018 by a major Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, to a former Playboy model he allegedly impregnated, according to news reports last month.

Among the other payments to Mr. Cohen’s company described in the financial records were four for $99,980 each between October and January by Novartis Investments S.A.R.L., a subsidiary of Novartis, the multinational pharmaceutical giant based in Switzerland. Novartis — whose chief executive was among 15 business leaders invited to dinner with Mr. Trump at the World Economic Forum in January — spent more than $10 million on lobbying in Washington last year and frequently seeks approvals from federal drug regulators. Novartis said in a statement that its agreement with Essential Consultants had expired.

In addition,Korea Aerospace Industriespaid Mr. Cohen’s company $150,000 last November, according to the records. The company, an aircraft manufacturer, has teamed with the American defense contractor Lockheed Martin in competing for a multibillion-dollar contract to provide trainer jets for the United States Air Force that is expected to be awarded this year. A representative for Korea Aerospace declined to comment.

How Michael Cohen Is Connected to a Russian Oligarch

Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s lawyer and longtime fixer, met with a Russian oligarch at Trump Tower to discuss Russia and was later paid by a company connected to him.

AT&Tmade four payments totaling $200,000 between October 2017 and January 2018, according to the documents. AT&T, whose proposed merger with Time Warner is pending before the Justice Department, issued a statement on Tuesday evening confirming that it made payments to Mr. Cohen’s firm.

“Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration,” the statement said. “They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.”

The payments by Columbus Nova occurred between January and August of last year.Andrew Intrater, the company’s American chief executive and Mr. Vekselberg’s cousin, donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, campaign finance records show. He and Mr. Vekselberg attended the event together and met with Mr. Cohen there, according to a person briefed on the matter. Columbus Nova retained him as a consultant soon afterward.

The consulting deal was worth $1 million and was supposed to last for a year, according to documents reviewed by The Times. But Columbus Nova decided to end the agreement midway through after it yielded a few investment ideas but no actual deals.

A person close to Mr. Intrater said that the executive had no idea Essential Consultants was used for the separate payment to Ms. Clifford, and that he hired a number of other consultants at the time for similar prices.

“Columbus Nova is an investment management company solely owned and controlled by Americans,” said Richard Owens, a lawyer for Mr. Intrater and Columbus Nova, adding that Mr. Vekselberg has never owned the firm. “After the inauguration, the firm hired Michael Cohen as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.

“Reports today that Viktor Vekselberg used Columbus Nova as a conduit for payments to Michael Cohen are false. The claim that Viktor Vekselberg was involved in or provided any funding for Columbus Nova’s engagement of Michael Cohen is patently untrue,” Mr. Owens said. “Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else outside of Columbus Nova was involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provided funding for his engagement.”

A lawyer for Mr. Vekselberg did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to questioning Mr. Vekselberg, Mr. Mueller’s investigators have also interviewed Mr. Intrater, though there is no indication that either man is suspected of wrongdoing, The Times reported last week.

The person close to Mr. Intrater said that he was encouraged to attend the inauguration by an American friend, unrelated to Mr. Cohen, and that he had wanted to use the trip as an opportunity to meet with business associates in Washington.

Mr. Vekselberg has invested in Columbus Nova’s private equity funds through his sprawling Russian-based conglomerate, the Renova Group, which operates in the energy sector and elsewhere. Mr. Vekselberg was one of seven Kremlin-linked oligarchs hit with sanctions in April by the Trump administration, which also imposed the penalties on the Renova Group.

Renova has had a financial relationship with VTB, one of the largest state-owned banks in Russia, according to documents that were part of the “Panama Papers” leak of files from an offshore law firm. The documents show that Mr. Vekselberg’s companies received at least $350 million in loans or investments from VTB and a subsidiary, VTB Capital. The current state of the debt is unclear, though one document suggests it was discharged in 2010.

Mr. Cohen created Essential Consultants in Delaware less than two weeks before he completed his deal with Ms. Clifford, who is now contesting her contract with Mr. Cohen as invalid. Mr. Cohen initially said he paid her out of his own pocket by way of a home equity line of credit.

But last week, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York said that Mr. Trump had reimbursed Mr. Cohen through several $35,000 monthly transactions that amounted to more than $400,000 — covering the payment to Ms. Clifford and, he said, other “incidental expenses.”

update

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary**/2017**/12/15/putins-proxies-helped-funnel-millions-gop-campaigns

The Dallas Morning News

How Putin's oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns

FILED UNDER COMMENTARY AT MAY 8 SHARE

Editor's note May 8, 2018: This column originally published December 15, 2017. New allegations about $500k in payments from a Russian oligarch made to Trump attorney Michael Cohen have placed it back in the news.

As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team probes deeper into potential collusion between Trump officials and representatives of the Russian government, investigators are taking a closer look at political contributions made by U.S. citizens with close ties to Russia.

Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.

An example is Len Blavatnik, a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.

Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik's campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.

In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik's political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund.

Touch chart to see info:

So is this legal?

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democratic leader on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News in September: "Unless the contributions were directed by a foreigner, they would be legal, but could still be of interest to investigators examining allegations of Russian influence on the 2016 campaign. Obviously, if there were those that had associations with the Kremlin that were contributing, that would be of keen concern."

Under federal law, foreigner nationals are barred from contributing directly or indirectly to political campaigns in local, state and federal elections.

Should Blavatnik's contributions concern Mueller's team of investigators? Take a look at his long-time business associates in Russia.

The Oligarchs

Oleg Deripaska is said to be one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs, and he is founder and majority shareholder of Russia's Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world. Blavatnik holds a stake in Rusal with a business partner.

Further, nearly 4 percent of Deripaska's stake in Rusal is owned by Putin's state-controlled bank, VTB, which is currently under U.S. sanctions. VTB was exposed in the Panama Papers in 2016 for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Putin.

Earlier this year, The Associated Press reported that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, began collecting $10 million a year in 2006 from Deripaska to advance Putin's interests with Western governments. Deripaska's name turned up again in an email handed over to Mueller's team by Manafort's attorneys. According to The Washington Post, in the email dated July 7, 2016, just two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president, Manafort asked an overseas intermediary to pass a message on to Deripaska: "If he [Deripaska] needs private briefings, tell him we can accommodate."

Viktor Vekselberg is one of the 10 richest men in Russia. He and long-time business partner Blavatnikhold a 20.5 percent stake in Rusal. (They met while attending university in Russia.)

In 1990, Blavatnik and Vekselberg co-founded the Renova Group for large-scale investments in energy, infrastructure, aluminum and other metals. One of their earliest investments was in Tyumen Oil Co. (TNK), founded in 1995. TNK is best known for its contentious partnership with British Petroleum after the two entities formed a joint venture in 2003.That rocky relationship ended 10 years later when they sold out to the state-controlled energy giant, Rosneft, under pressure from the Russian government.

As for BP, that pressure took the form of growing harassment and intimidation from Russian authorities who at one point, according to Forbes, refused to renew visas for BP employees, forcing BP's joint venture chief Robert Dudley (who is now chief executive of BP) to flee Russia and manage TNK-BP from a foreign outpost in a secret location.

Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle. They are among several Americans who also merit Mueller's scrutiny.

Touch chart to see info:

The Americans

Andrew Intrater, according to Mother Jones, is Vekselberg's cousin. He is also chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova's U.S. investment arm located in New York. (FEC records list his employer as Renova US Management LLC.)

Intrater had no significant history of political contributions prior to the 2016 elections. But in January 2017 he contributed $250,000 to Trump's Inaugural Committee. His six-figure gift bought him special access to a dinner billed as "an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees," according to a brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Alexander Shustorovich, chief executive of IMG Artists, attempted to give the Republican Party $250,000 in 2000 to support the George W. Bush presidential campaign, but his money was rejected because of his ties to the Russian government, according to Quartz. So why didn't the Trump team reject Shustorovich's $1 million check to Trump's Inaugural Committee?

Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. Redacted CIA documents released in 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act said "TNK president Kukes said that he bribed local officials." The CIA confirmed the authenticity of the reports to The Guardian newspaper but would not comment further. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund. He had no significant donor history before last year's election.

Touch chart to see info:

There is no doubt that Kukes has close ties to the Putin government. When he left his job as CEO of TNK in June 2003, he joined the board of Yukos Oil, which at the time was the largest oil company in Russia owned by the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Four months after Kukes joined the board, authorities arrested Khodorkovsky at gunpoint on his private plane in Siberia on trumped up charges of tax evasion and tapped Kukes to be CEO. This decision could only have been made at the highest levels in the Kremlin. The arrest of Khodorkovsky rattled the nerves of international investors and was the first tangible sign that Putin was not going to be the kind of leader that global executives and Western governments had expected him to be when he first took office in 2000.

Khodorkovksy was given a 13-year sentence in a Siberian prison and served 10 years before being released by Putin in December 2013, a month before the start of the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, as a sign of goodwill. As for the fate of Khodorkovksy's company, its largest oil subsidiary was sold in a sealed bid auction to Baikal Financial Group, a shell company with an unpublished list of officers. Baikal was registered at an address that turned out to be a mobile phone store in Tver, Russia. Three days after the auction, all of Baikal's assets were acquired for an undisclosed sum by Rosneft, the Russian oil giant that went on to buy TNK-BP in 2013.

In total, Blavatnik, Intrater, Shustorovich and Kukes made $10.4 million in political contributions from the start of the 2015-16 election cycle through September 2017, and 99 percent of their contributions went to Republicans. With the exception of Shustorovich, the common denominator that connects the men is their association with Vekselberg. Experts who follow the activities of Russian oligarchs told ABC News that they believe the contributions from Blavatnik, Intrater and Kukes warrant intense scrutiny because they have worked closely with Vekselberg.

Even if the donations by the four men associated with Russia ultimately pass muster with Mueller, one still has to wonder: Why did GOP PACs and other Trump-controlled funds take their money? Why didn't the PACs say, "Thanks, but no thanks," like the Republicans said to Shustorovich in 2000? Yes, it was legal to accept their donations, but it was incredibly poor judgment.

McConnell surely knew as a participant in high level intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, McConnell's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after former FBI Director James Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.

And consider Steve Mnuchin, Trump's campaign finance chairman. Could he have known that the Trump Victory Fund, jointly managed by the Republican National Committe and Trump's campaign, took contributions from Intrater and Kukes? Mnuchin owned Hollywood financing company RatPac-Dune with Blavatnik until he sold his stake to accept Trump's appointment as the Treasury secretary.

Which PAC officials are making the decisions to accept these donations?

The Supreme Court

The contributions are legal because the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling, Citizens United, and several subsequent decisions, allowed American corporations and citizens to give unlimited amounts of money to PACs and non-profit 501c4 organizations, regardless of how they make their money, where they make their money, or with whom they make their money. The only caveat is that PACs and non-profits cannot coordinate their activities with the political candidates they support.

The man who led the winning fight for Citizens United was David Bossie, president of the conservative non-profit since 2001. In 1996, Bossie was hired by Republican Rep. Dan Burton to lead an investigation into President Bill Clinton's campaign fundraising. Burton fired him 18 months later for manipulating recordings of conversations among law officials and Webb Hubbell, a Clinton confidant who resigned as associate attorney general and pleaded guilty to tax fraud during the Whitewater investigation. CNN reported at the time that Newt Gingrich, who was speaker of the House, called Bossie's tampering with the Hubbell recordings an embarrassment to the Republicans.

Bossie served as Trump's deputy campaign chairman.

The Super PAC, Make America Number 1, is primarily funded by Trump's largest donor, Robert Mercer. His Renaissance Technologies hedge fund donated $15.5 million to the PAC.

Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, assumed control of Make America Number 1 in September 2016 and is now tainted by her role in the communications between Wikileaks and Cambridge Analytica, the firm that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hired for $5.9 million to handle the digital portion of the Trump campaign.

Robert and Rebekah Mercer are major investors in Cambridge Analytica. According to The Wall Street Journal, Rebekah Mercer asked Cambridge chief executive Alexander Nix if the firm could compile stolen emails related to Hillary Clinton so that they could be more easily searched. (This suggestion came from someone she met at an event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz, according to The Hill. Cambridge Analytica had worked on digital marketing for Cruz before he dropped out of the Republican primary.)

Nix confirmed that he had asked Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to forward the Clinton-related emails. Assange said he declined the request.

Rebekah Mercer also heads the non-profit Making America Great, formed in March 2017. The non-profit ran a seven-figure ad campaign highlighting Trump's achievements. Bossie is the group's chief strategist.

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 Commission case 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.

Like Bossie, Dan Backer helped to open the floodgates to millions of dollars of influence brought to bear on incumbents and their political challengers who are now pressured to kowtow to their donors with the biggest bank accounts, even if their billions are earned in Russian rubles.

Backer was born in Russia and emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1978.

The changes to our campaign finance laws created an avenue for Russia to try to influence our elections. There are holes in our firewall and they aren't on the internet.

Touch chart to see info:

Ruth May is a business professor at the University of Dallas and an expert on the economies of Russia and Ukraine. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @ruthcmay

lLegally, things are looking incredibly bleak for President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. On January 8, CNN and others reported that, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, Manafort :{shared polling data:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik when they met in 2016. This is on top of all the federal tax evasion and bank fraud charges Manafort was convicted on August 22, 2018. Yet despite his legal peril, Manafort’s family received a :{$1 million loan:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: during the Summer of 2017—and Bloomberg News has reported that the loan came a few weeks after his home had been raided by the FBI.

In a :{January 9 post:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: on Twitter, journalist Jeff Grocott (known for his Bloomberg articles) wrote, “This is wacky. Paul Manafort’s family got a $1 million loan in his moment of legal peril—just after FBI raided his home in summer 2017. So who loaned the money?”

Grocott has posted an entire Twitter thread about the loan, stressing that the identity of the lender remains a mystery.

The lender, Grocott explains, called itself Woodlawn LLC. It’s unclear exactly who Woodlawn LLC is, although the lender is connected to Hollywood producer Joey Rappa—whose name appears on a November 2018 filing that was made when Mueller moved to seize Manafort’s properties. In the filing, Rappa (who was a production associate on the 1996 film “The Nutty Professor”) is described as a “managing member” of the Nevada-based company that made the $1 million loan and is making a claim on the Manhattan condominium that Manafort’s family offered as collateral.

Bloomberg has reported that according to Rapp’s lawyer, he had nothing to do with making the loan. However, Rapp is, through his film work, linked to Andrew Intrater—an American financier and cousin of Ukraine-born oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who Mueller’s team :{questioned in 2018:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: about his connection to Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Intrater, Bloomberg reports, has been working on a film with Rapp.

According to California-based attorney Keith Berglund—who represents Woodland, LLC—Intrater had nothing to do with the loan either. Berglund told Bloomberg that Rappa agreed to be the public face of the loan because of the lender’s desire for secrecy.

On Twitter, Grocott posted, “But who’s behind Woodlawn? For four months, its ‘managing member,’ for legal purposes, was a guy named Joey Rappa. He’s worked in Hollywood and has had legal troubles over debt. Doesn’t look like his money.”

Grocott also noted, “The money behind the Manafort loan isn’t Intrater’s, the lawyers say. Rappa’s appearance on the court docs, according to Woodlawn’s lawyer, is the result of ‘some extremely unfortunate and unforeseeable coincidences.’….. Now, Rappa’s name is back off the court documents. Whose money went to Manafort remains a mystery.”

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary:{/2018/05/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:08/putins-proxies-helped-funnel-millions-gop-campaigns

no lnx infogragfix:

Blavatnik contributed a total of $3.5 million to a PAC associated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.Blavatnik contributed $1.5 million to the GOP Senate Leadership Fund PAC in the name of Access Industries and another $1 million in the name of AI-Altep Holdings during the 2015/2016 election season. And as of September 2017, he had contributed another $1 millionthis year through AI–Altep.

The Dallas Morning News

How Putin's oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns

FILED UNDERCOMMENTARY AT MAY 8 SHARE

Ruth May, Contributor

Connect with Ruth May Email

Don't miss a story. Like us on Facebook.

LIKE DALLAS NEWS'

Oligarch steered cash to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's account, Avenatti says

An example isLen Blavatnik,a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.

In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund.

[Blavatnik contributed a total of $3.5 million to a PAC associated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.Blavatnik contributed $1.5 million to the GOP Senate Leadership Fund PAC in the name of Access Industries and another $1 million in the name of AI-Altep Holdings during the 2015/2016 election season. And as of September 2017, he had contributed another $1 millionthis year through AI–Altep.]

Touch chart to see info:

So is this legal?

Under federal law, foreigner nationals are barred from contributing directly or indirectly to political campaigns in local, state and federal elections.

Should Blavatnik's contributions concern Mueller's team of investigators? Take a look at his long-time business associates in Russia.

GOP campaigns took $7.35 million from oligarch linked to Russia

The Oligarchs

Viktor Vekselbergis one of the 10 richest men in Russia. He and long-time business partner Blavatnik hold a 20.5 percent stake in Rusal. (They met while attending university in Russia.)

In 1990, Blavatnik and Vekselberg co-founded the Renova Group for large-scale investments in energy, infrastructure, aluminum and other metals. One of their earliest investments was in Tyumen Oil Co. (TNK), founded in 1995. TNK is best known for its contentious partnership with British Petroleum after the two entities formed a joint venture in 2003. That rocky relationship ended 10 years later when they sold out to the state-controlled energy giant, Rosneft, under pressure from the Russian government.

As for BP, that pressure took the form of growing harassment and intimidation from Russian authorities who at one point, according to Forbes, refused to renew visas for BP employees, forcing BP's joint venture chief Robert Dudley (who is now chief executive of BP) to flee Russia and manage TNK-BP from a foreign outpost in a secret location.

Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle. They are among several Americans who also merit Mueller's scrutiny.

Touch chart to see info:

The Americans

Andrew Intrater, according to Mother Jones, is Vekselberg's cousin. He is also chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova's U.S. investment arm located in New York. (FEC records list his employer as Renova US Management LLC.)

Alexander Shustorovich, chief executive of IMG Artists, attempted to give the Republican Party $250,000 in 2000 to support the George W. Bush presidential campaign, but his money was rejected because of his ties to the Russian government, according to Quartz. So why didn't the Trump team reject Shustorovich's $1 million check to Trump's Inaugural Committee?

Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. Redacted CIA documents released in 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act said "TNK president Kukes said that he bribed local officials." The CIA confirmed the authenticity of the reports to The Guardian newspaper but would not comment further. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund. He had no significant donor history before last year's election.

Touch chart to see info:

There is no doubt that Kukes has close ties to the Putin government. When he left his job as CEO of TNK in June 2003, he joined the board of Yukos Oil, which at the time was the largest oil company in Russia owned by the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.Four months after Kukes joined the board, authorities arrested Khodorkovsky at gunpoint on his private plane in Siberia on trumped up charges of tax evasion and tapped Kukes to be CEO. This decision could only have been made at the highest levels in the Kremlin. The arrest of Khodorkovsky rattled the nerves of international investors and was the first tangible sign that Putin was not going to be the kind of leader that global executives and Western governments had expected him to be when he first took office in 2000.

Khodorkovksywas given a 13-year sentence in a Siberian prison and served 10 years before being released by Putin in December 2013, a month before the start of the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, as a sign of goodwill. As for the fate of Khodorkovksy's company, its largest oil subsidiary was sold in a sealed bid auction to Baikal Financial Group, a shell company with an unpublished list of officers. Baikal was registered at an address that turned out to be a mobile phone store in Tver, Russia. Three days after the auction, all of Baikal's assets were acquired for an undisclosed sum by Rosneft, the Russian oil giant that went on to buy TNK-BP in 2013.

McConnell surely knew as a participant in high level intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, McConnell's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after former FBI Director James Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.

And consider Steve Mnuchin, Trump's campaign finance chairman. Could he have known that the Trump Victory Fund, jointly managed by the Republican National Committe and Trump's campaign, took contributions from Intrater and Kukes?Mnuchin owned Hollywood financing company RatPac-Dune with Blavatnik until he sold his stake to accept Trump's appointment as the Treasury secretary.

Which PAC officials are making the decisions to accept these donations?

The Supreme Court

The contributions are legal because the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling, Citizens United, and several subsequent decisions, allowed American corporations and citizens to give unlimited amounts of money to PACs and non-profit 501c4 organizations, regardless of how they make their money, where they make their money, or with whom they make their money. The only caveat is that PACs and non-profits cannot coordinate their activities with the political candidates they support.

The man who led the winning fight for Citizens United was David Bossie,president of the conservative non-profit since 2001. In 1996, Bossie was hired by Republican Rep. Dan Burton to lead an investigation into President Bill Clinton's campaign fundraising. Burton fired him 18 months later for manipulating recordings of conversations among law officials and Webb Hubbell, a Clinton confidant who resigned as associate attorney general and pleaded guilty to tax fraud during the Whitewater investigation. CNN reported at the time that Newt Gingrich, who was speaker of the House, called Bossie's tampering with the Hubbell recordings an embarrassment to the Republicans.

Bossie served as Trump's deputy campaign chairman.

The Super PAC, Make America Number 1, is primarily funded by Trump's largest donor, Robert Mercer. His Renaissance Technologies hedge fund donated $15.5 million to the PAC.

Nix confirmed that he had asked Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to forward the Clinton-related emails. Assange said he declined the request.

Erik Prince, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, contributed $150,000 to Mercer's Make America Number 1 PACand 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 byDan Backer, the lead attorney who won the McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission case 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.

Backer was born in Russia and emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1978.

The changes to our campaign finance laws created an avenue for Russia to try to influence our elections. There are holes in our firewall and they aren't on the internet.

Cyprus is at the center of a circle of corruption surrounding Trump

Touch chart to see info:

Ruth May is a business professor at the University of Dallas and an expert on the economies of Russia and Ukraine. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @ruthcmay

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mueller-probing-why-russian-billionaires-were-given-unusual-access-invitation-only

NEWS & POLITICS

Mueller is Probing Why Russian Billionaires Were Given 'Unusual' Access to 'Invitation-Only' Trump Inauguration Parties

One of the individuals was sanctioned by the U.S. government.

By Chris Sosa / AlterNet June 28, 2018, 7:36 AM GMT

no lnx

ABC News has obtained a guest list that shows several "billionaires with deep ties to Russia attended exclusive, invitation-only receptions during Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities."

The billionaires reportedly had access to events usually "reserved for top donors and close political allies" and included at least one individual now sanctioned by the U.S. government.

“This reflects a Russian strategy of gaining access to our political leaders at a time when they are just forming a government,” Matthew Olsen, a former senior national security official who now serves as an ABC News consultant, said. “They don’t need to be spies in the James Bond sense. They are powerful people with significant wealth who are in a position to exert influence on U.S. policy makers. And they’re in a position to report back to Russian intelligence services on what they’re able to learn.”

Inauguration guests included Victor Vekselberg, billionaire leader of the global conglomerate Renova Group, who was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury “for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team is now looking into the suspicious inauguration activity. The Washington Post had originally reported that individuals with Kremlin ties were at Trump's inauguration, but the obtained guest list demonstrates a new level of public detail about the connections

ref

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/special-counsel-eyeing-russians-granted-unusual-access-trump/story?id=56232847

Watch: Special counsel eyeing Russians granted unusual access to Trump inauguration parties

Special counsel eyeing Russians granted unusual access to Trump inauguration parties

By MATTHEW MOSK JOHN SANTUCCI Jun 28, 2018, 11:41 AM ET

PHOTO: President Elect Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 2017, in Washington.Scott Olson/Getty Images, FILE

WATCHSpecial counsel eyeing Russians granted unusual access to Trump inauguration parties

Several billionaires with deep ties to Russia attended exclusive, invitation-only receptions during Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities, guest lists obtained by ABC News show.

These powerful businessmen, who amassed their fortunes following the collapse of the Soviet Union -- including one who has since been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department -- were ushered into events typically reserved for top donors and close political allies and were given unprecedented access to Trump’s inner circle.

Their presence has attracted the interest of federal investigators probing Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Matthew Olsen, a former senior national security official who now serves as an ABC News consultant, said their presence at inaugural events is “very concerning.”

“This reflects a Russian strategy of gaining access to our political leaders at a time when they are just forming a government,” Olsen said. “They don’t need to be spies in the James Bond sense. They are powerful people with significant wealth who are in a position to exert influence on U.S. policy makers. And they’re in a position to report back to Russian intelligence services on what they’re able to learn.”

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller at an installation ceremony at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., October 28, 2013.

The presence of people with Kremlin ties in Washington for Trump’s inaugural celebration was first reported by The Washington Post. But the guest lists obtained by ABC News offer a new glimpse at the level of access granted to several well-connected oligarchs.

Several donated enough to the Presidential Inaugural Committee to qualify for tickets to a “Candlelight Dinner” in Washington’s Union Station on the eve of the inauguration, a perk for $1 million contributors, the list of attendees show. Guests were treated to a preview performance by singer Jackie Evancho, a one-time runner-up on "America's Got Talent," who would go on to sing at the inauguration the following day.

A handful celebrated Trump’s surprise victory at the black-tie “Chairman’s Global Dinner,” an exclusive 500-guest affair held the same night in the Greek-columned Andrew W. Mellon Auditoriumwhose attendees included close Trump friends, high-ranking campaign aides, and an array of foreign ambassadors and dignitaries. The inaugural committee treated them to a dinner of butter-poached lobster, coffee-crusted beef tenderloin and chocolate raspberry dome. For entertainment, casino mogul and Trump pal Steve Wynn flew in Las Vegas show girls to perform a Broadway-style rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.”

According to a source with knowledge of the congressional investigations, at least one oligarch was ushered into Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol for the traditional Inaugural Day luncheon, hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – an event typically out of reach to donors and even most rank-and-file members of Congress.

“It’s incredibly unusual,” said Stephen Kerrigan, who planned the 2009 and 2013 Obama inaugural festivities and said every guest was scrutinized for foreign ties. “Particularly if they were going to be within arm’s reach of the President, they went through an intensive vetting process.”

Names on the guest lists of the Candlelight Dinner included Victor Vekselberg, the billionaire head of the global conglomerate Renova Group, who was later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury “for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy,” and his American cousin Andrew Intrater. Late last year, Vekselberg was stopped at a New York airport by federal agents working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and questioned, according to the New York Times. The Times also reported that Intrater was separately interviewed by the special counsel.

Vekselberg and Intrater were seated at the dinner next to Michael Cohen and his family, according to a source familiar with the arrangements. Intrater’s firm, Columbus Nova, later signed Cohen to a $1 million consulting contract. Emails to Renova Group went unanswered. A spokesperson for Intrater declined to comment when reached by ABC News.

PHOTO: Renova Group Chairman Viktor Vekselberg attends a session during the Week of Russian Business, held by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), in Moscow, Feb. 7, 2018. Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

Renova Group Chairman Viktor Vekselberg attends a session during the Week of Russian Business, held by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), in Moscow, Feb. 7, 2018. more +

Investigators for both the Mueller team and the congressional probes have also expressed interest in several of the other Russian guests who had no obvious place in Trump’s diplomatic orbit, three sources told ABC News.

Some had given money to past Republican candidates, including Leonard Blavatnik,a Ukrainian-born billionaire philanthropist who holds American and British citizenship. He appeared on guest lists for both the Candlelight Dinner and the Chairman’s events. His global company, Access Industries, which holds a majority stake in Amedia, Russia’s largest producer of television series, gave $1 million to the inaugural fund.

A spokeswoman at Access Industries directed questions from ABC News to a company official who was not immediately available for comment.

Alexander Shustorovich, a Russian-born American music industry mogul with a background in nuclear energy, also donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration and attended Chairman’s Dinner. Nearly two decades ago, the Republican National Committee returned a six-figure political contribution from Shustorovich because of his past ties to the Russian government, according to the Wall Street Journal, which quoted a GOP official saying it wasn’t “worth the trouble.”

In response to questions from ABC News, John Evans, the chief operating officer of IMG Artists, a company owned by Shustorovich, said the wealthy businessman was maligned by that report and has since made sizable gifts to the Republican Party. He said Shustorovich has actually been under attack in Russia, where he has faced allegations of being an agent of American influence.

“Alex Shustorovich has not been contacted by anyone regarding his attendance at the Trump inauguration, except the press,” Evans said.

A Soviet-born billionaire Alexander Mashkevitch, who built a metals and mining empire in Kazakhstan, appears on the guest list for the Candlelight Dinner. Flight records show his private jet flew into Washington, D.C. on Jan. 19, 2017 and out two days later. European media reports indicate he settled money laundering charges with Belgian authorities in 2011 with no finding of wrongdoing by him. He has held an ownership stake in Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, one of the world’s largest mining and metals concerns, based in London.

ABC News has attempted to reach Mashkevitch through his companies for comment but they have not responded.

PHOTO: President Elect Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 2017, in Washington.Scott Olson/Getty Images, FILE

President Elect Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 2017, in Washington.

Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak joined numerous other ambassadors on the invite list for the Chairman’s dinner.

Guests dined alongside some of Trump’s closest friends and advisors, including private equity investor Thomas Barrack Jr., who chaired the inaugural fundraising effort; investment tycoon Carl Ichan, a longtime Trump friend; and Wynn, the casino boss who also became the Republican National Committee’s finance chairman. He stepped down earlier this year amid a swarm of sexual misconduct allegations, which he has denied.

Trump advisors who have faced criminal charges – such as former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI, and former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who awaits trial on charges related to financial crimes, were at the dinners. Manafort pleaded not guilty and is in jail awaiting trial.

Invited guests also included since-departed White House aide Steve Bannon and campaign advisor and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, both of whom have since been questioned in the Special Counsel’s probe.

The Trump inauguration brought in more than $107 million, double the amount of President Obama, to finance a week of festivities that was filled with far fewer events than past inaugurations – only three Presidential balls. In May, ABC News reported that the Special Counsel had questioned several witnesses about millions of dollars in donations from donors with connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Andrew Intrater was stopped at a New York airport alongside Victor Vekselberg. Only Vekselberg was stopped. The person who declined to comment on Intrater’s behalf was his spokesperson, not his lawyer.

https://themoscowproject.org/players/viktorvekselberg

Ex-Congressman with Russia Ties May Be the 'Missing Piece' in the Mueller Investigation: Report

Senate investigators think its important that they interview Curt Weldon. Here's why.

By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet June 7, 2018, 3:17 PM GMT

21 COMMENTS

Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Jim Varhegyi

Former Congressman Curt Weldon may be key to unraveling the extensive connections between President Donald Trump's associates and Russia, according to a new report from the Atlantic.

Weldon served as a Republican representative in Pennsylvania until 2006, when his campaign was mired in controversy when his daughter's house was subjected to an FBI raid in the weeks before election day. Though no charges were ever brought in the investigation — Weldon alleges the government betrayed him — but reports suggested that agents were scrutinizing his ties to Russia-linked business. He was also a vocal Trump supporter in 2016.

Now, as the Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand reports, Senate investigators are seeking to interview Weldon as a part of their probe into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election. A spokeswoman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) says Weldon has suspicious “connections to both Russia and the Trump campaign” that the senators would like to investigate, Bertrand reports.

ADVERTISING

Don't let big tech control what news you see. Get more stories like this in your inbox, every day.

email address

What are those connections? Bertrand details several surprising ties that give a few clues.

An anonymous source told Bertrand that Weldon had knowledge of a private meeting between Trump's fixer Michael Cohen, an ex-Ukrainian official, and business partner of Trump before the inauguration to discuss a peace plan between Russia and Ukraine. When that meeting was revealed in the press Weldon was reportedly "furious" that the plan fell through.

He also reportedly said that funding had already been obtained for the peace plan — fromViktor Vekselberg. Vekselberg is a Russian oligarch with ties to the company Columbus Nova, which was recently revealed to have given Cohen more than $500,000 via a shady shell company shortly after Trump's election

It's not clear what all these connections add up to — but if the Senate Intelligence Committee has its way, it will find out.

https://www.alternet.org/michael-cohen-met-russian-oligarch-and-top-inauguration-donor-trump-tower-during-transition

Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch who was recently questioned by special counsel Robert Mueller, met with Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen in Trump Tower during the transition, according to video footage that aired Friday on CNN.

The footage, taken at the lobby of Trump Tower during the presidential transition, shows Veskelberg and his cousin, Michael Intrater, entering an elevator on the ground floor of Trump Tower in New York. A source told CNN the pair met with Cohen to discuss “improving US-Russia relations.”

Vekselberg heads the Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate, an Intrater runs Columbus Nova, a subsidiary of Renova. As CNN notes, in January 2017, Columbus Nova paid Cohen $580,000 for consulting work.

https://www.propublica.org/article/columbus-nova-russian-oligarch-michael-cohen-trump-lawyer-marc-kasowitz

pro publ

that the same shell company that Michael Cohen, a longtime personal lawyer for Donald Trump, had used to pay $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels had also received about $500,000 in 2017 from a firm linked to a Russian oligarch set off a frenzy of commentary on Twitter and cable TV.

At the heart of the story is an investment firm called Columbus Nova, which has close links to Renova Group, a conglomerate founded by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. A Columbus Nova spokesman has said the payments to Cohen were for unspecified investment consulting.

Now there’s a new wrinkle: Another longtime Trump personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, also represented Columbus Nova in recent years in a commercial case. A spokesman for Kasowitz said the case settled in early 2017.

As ProPublica reported last year, Cohen spent a short period in February 2017 working at the offices of Kasowitz Benson Torres in midtown Manhattan, alarming several lawyers at the firm who worried about the brash attorney’s reputation. That was at the beginning of the period, between January and August 2017, when Columbus Nova made its payments to Cohen.

Cohen told ProPublica last year that he used Kasowitz’s offices “because we were working on several matters together after the inauguration.” Both he and Kasowitz have declined to specify what they collaborated on.

Trump’s Russia Lawyer Isn’t Seeking Security Clearance, And May Have Trouble Getting One

Colleagues say Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s attorney on the Russia investigation, has struggled with alcohol abuse and engaged in behavior that left employees uncomfortable.

A Columbus Nova spokesman said that the investment firm was not introduced to Cohen by Kasowitz. The spokesman said Kasowitz worked on only one commercial matter for Columbus Nova and that it was a coincidence that the firm had used two lawyers who also represent Trump.

Asked whether any of Cohen’s brief time at the Kasowitz offices related to matters for Columbus Nova, Renova, or Vekselberg, a Kasowitz spokesman said “no.” The spokesman added, “The firm did not do any substantive work with Michael Cohen after he left the Trump Organization.” Cohen resigned from the Trump Organization in January 2017.

Cohen didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Any work Cohen did with Kasowitz in 2017 could take on new relevance since the FBI raided Cohen’s home and office last month. Kasowitz, who was Trump’s lead lawyer in the Russia investigation for a brief period last year, has reportedly still been involved in advising the president in the case.

Kasowitz continues to represent Trump in other matters. That includes a suit by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who claims Trump defamed her by calling her a liar after she asserted that he had made unwanted sexual advances. Kasowitz Benson Torres specializes in commercial litigation and has represented many large U.S. and foreign companies.

Kasowitz’s work for Columbus Nova stretches back to at least 2010 in related cases filed in New York and Illinois. In Illinois, Fifth Third Bank sued Columbus Nova and several affiliated entities, alleging that they had caused the bank to lose tens of millions of dollars on loans to a life insurance financing program that was “permeated … by fraud and embezzlement.” In the New York case, Kasowitz and three other attorneys at his firm filed a separate suit alleging that it was Fifth Third Bank that had committed fraud and caused losses.

The name of Andrew Intrater, the CEO of Columbus Nova and the cousin of Vekselberg, comes up repeatedly in the litigation.

Kasowitz’s spokesman said the litigation settled in 2017. The terms do not appear to be public.

“The firm represented Nina Investments LLC and its affiliates, Santa Maria Overseas, Ltd., Columbus Nova Investments IV, Ltd., and Renova U.S. Management LLC, in a commercial litigation with Fifth Third Bank, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, over a failed investment in a company called Concord Capital Management, LLC,” the Kasowitz spokesman said. “The litigation was commenced in 2010 and settled in early 2017.”

A spokesman for Renova, Andrey Shtorkh, told ProPublica that he is not familiar with Kasowitz. He described Renova Group as a client of Columbus Nova. However, Renova’s website previously described Columbus Nova as one of its holdings. Columbus Nova’s website previously described itself “as the US investment vehicle for the Renova Group.”

Vekselberg was among those hit with sanctions last month by the Trump administration in response to “malign activity around the globe” by the Russian government. The New York Times subsequently reported that Vekselberg was questioned by investigators for special counsel Robert Mueller.

Along with the payments from Columbus Nova, Cohen also received payments from corporations including AT&T and Novartis. AT&T said it hired Cohen “to provide insights into understanding the new administration.” ProPublica recently reported that Kasowitz used his access to the Trump administration to help another client, a New York investor, with a casino in Vietnam.

5/18

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/viktor-vekselberg-mueller-investigation.html

hen the United States sought to punish Russia last month for its election interference and other aggressions, it targeted some of Russia’s wealthiest men, imposing sanctions on those viewed as enriching themselves off President Vladimir V. Putin’s government.

Now it turns out that one of the men, Viktor F. Vekselberg, was also singled out in another of the efforts to confront Russia’s election interference: the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

Federal agents working with Mr. Mueller stopped Mr. Vekselberg, a billionaire businessman, at a New York-area airport this year, searched his electronic devices and questioned him, according to people familiar with the matter. They confronted him after he stepped off a private plane about two months ago, according to one of the people.

There is no indication that Mr. Mueller suspects Mr. Vekselberg of wrongdoing. But Mr. Vekselberg attended the presidential inauguration last year, and the interest in him suggests that the special counsel has intensified his focus on potential connections between Russian oligarchs and the Trump campaign and inaugural committee.

Though it is unclear what prompted Mr. Mueller’s investigators to approach Mr. Vekselberg, his widespread corporate interests and attendance at Mr. Trump’s inauguration are among the potential avenues for examination. Mr. Vekselberg also attended a December 2015 dinner in Russia where Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, was also among the guests and sat beside Mr. Putin. The dinner was hosted by RT, the English-language television news network financed by the Kremlin.

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Flynn was ousted weeks after the inauguration amid revelations that he misled the vice president and others about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty in December to lying to the F.B.I. and is cooperating with the special counsel.

Another potential area of interest for Mr. Mueller is Mr. Vekselberg’s business in Cyprus, the Mediterranean nation considered a magnet for Russian money. Mr. Vekselberg has controlled a company that has been the largest single shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus. Around the same time that Mr. Vekselberg was investing in the bank, Mr. Trump’s future commerce secretary, Wilbur L. Ross, was its vice chairman.

Mr. Mueller’s interest in Mr. Vekselberg has not been previously reported. CNN has reported that investigators for the special counsel stopped an unnamed Russian oligarch at a New York-area airport.

A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment; a lawyer and a spokesman for Mr. Vekselberg did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, the spokesman confirmed that Mr. Vekselberg attended Mr. Trump’s swearing-in as president.

Mr. Vekselberg’s ticket to the inauguration came from his cousin and business associate, Andrew Intrater. Mr. Intrater, an American who lives in New York, donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, campaign finance records show.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Intrater, according to a person briefed on the matter, though there is no indication that he is suspected of wrongdoing. A person close to Mr. Intrater said that he was encouraged to attend the inauguration by an American friend, and that he had wanted to use the trip as an opportunity to meet with business associates in Washington. Documents the person provided indicated that Mr. Intrater intended to hold business meetings during the weekend of the inauguration.

Newsletter Sign Up

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Intrater is the chief executive of Columbus Nova, an investment management firm whose biggest client is the Renova Group, Mr. Vekselberg’s sprawling conglomerate that operates in the energy sector and elsewhere.

At one point, Renova donated$50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Mr. Vekselberg, who has a net worth estimated at more than $13 billion by Forbes, has primarily made his fortune in oil and metals. And as his wealth has risen, he appears to have maintained strong ties to the Kremlin.

Mr. Vekselberg is among the select Russian oligarchs who made their fortunes in the early post-Soviet period and managed to retain wealth under Mr. Putin while others went to prison or into exile. In 2010, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the Russian president at the time, appointed Mr. Vekselberg to help lead a technology-business project near Moscow.

Mr. Vekselberg, who is believed to have a favorable relationship with Mr. Putin, was one of seven Kremlin-linked oligarchs hit with sanctions in April by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration’s decision to target Mr. Vekselberg and the Renova Group with sanctions underscored his perceived closeness to the Kremlin. The sanctions — against seven of Russia’s richest men and their companies as well as 17 top government officials — were aimed at penalizing those seen as enriching themselves from Mr. Putin’s government.

And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Russian-American joint venture, according to an archived version of the company’s website .

And during a thaw in United States-Russian relations — the so-called reset orchestrated by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state — Mr. Vekselberg was appointed to help attract Silicon Valley investors to the technology park outside Moscow, known as Skolkovo.

“The whole country needs some sort of breakthrough,” he told The New York Times in a 2010 interview about the effort.

Mr. Vekselberg also donated to Fort Ross, a state park in California that is the site of a 19th-century Russian settlement, to keep it open during the state’s financial crunch in the recession.

After making his fortune in aluminum and oil in Siberia in the 1990s, Mr. Vekselberg, together with partners, closed in 2003 what was at the time the largest private transaction in Russian history by forming a joint oil-pumping venture with the British company BP, called TNK-BP.

But soon, BP executives came to suspect the Russian partners had close ties to the F.S.B., the main successor intelligence agency to the K.G.B., and other Russian security services. The F.S.B. classified oil field maps and closely tailed British employees. Once, during a business dispute with the Russians, BP’s office in Moscow was raided by police officers armed with assault rifles.

Amid this conflict with BP, one of Mr. Vekselberg’s partners, German Khan, turned up for a dinner with a BP executive at a remote hunting lodge in Russia with a chrome-plated pistol, according to a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks. Mr. Khan confided to the executive that he considered the 1972 film “The Godfather” a “manual for life.”

Mr. Khan, too, has crossed paths with the special counsel investigation: Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer sentenced to 30 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I., is his son-in-law.

Adam Goldman reported from Washington, and Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum from New York

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/a-russian-business-associate-of-wilbur-ross-was-just-sanctioned-by-the-trump-administration/

...Trump administration slapped sanctions on a small group of Russian oligarchs as punishment for what Treasury Secretary StevenMnuchincalled Moscow’s “malign activity around the globe,” including Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Ukraine, his support of the murderous Syrian regime, and his subversion of Western democracies. One of the oligarchs on the list was Viktor Vekselberg, who was identified as the founder and chairman of the Renova Group, which manages investment funds in several sectors of the Russian economy. But one intriguing bit of information was left out of the Treasury Department’s description of Vekselberg: he was recently a business associate of Wilbur Ross, President Trump’s commerce secretary.

Ross and Vekselberg were each a major investor in a Cyprus bank that had been linked to dirty Russian money—a connection that Ross tried to downplay when he faced confirmation before the US Senate last year.

In 2013, amid a financial crisis in Cyprus, the country’s largest financial institution, the Bank of Cyprus, collapsed and was bailed out. Billions of dollars in deposits were held by wealthy Russians, with presumably a good chunk of these funds deposited to evade notice or taxes. As part of the bank’s rescue, much of its holdings were converted into shares of the bank, giving Russian plutocrats majority ownership of a European bank—a notion that unnerved European financial powers. In swooped Ross, the billionaire investor whose specialty was snatching up troubled ventures. He led a 1 billion euro buyout of the Bank of Cyprus in 2014, and his group became the leading investorin the institution. On the heels of that deal, Vekselberg’s Renova Group entered the picture and became the bank’s second-largest shareholder.

As might be expected of any Russian financial titan, Vekselberg had the confidence of Putin. He had earned the Russian leader’s favor by spending more than $100 million to acquire the famous Fabergé eggs and repatriating them to Russia. Vekselberg was also placed in charge of a Russian initiative to bring high-tech firms into the country. So here was Ross in bed with a Russian oligarch, both of them looking to make big bucks by taking over a bank with a somewhat shady background.

After Trump nominated Ross to be commerce secretary, several Democratic senators asked Ross about his involvement with Vekselberg. A group of these lawmakers led by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) sent him a list of questions about his ties to the Bank of Cyprus and the oligarch. (After being nominated, Ross had said he would divest his financial interest in the bank.) In a conversation with Nelson, Ross dismissed talk of his relationship with Vekselberg and claimed that he had only met the Russian once for an hour. But prior to the confirmation vote, the White House refused to release Ross’ answers to the senators’ questions—a move that angered several Democrats in the body. And in a written response to one question submitted to Ross by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ross insisted that Vekselberg had not been his partner.

But Ross and Vekselberg had been working together. In October 2014, Ross announced his proposal for a new board of directors for the bank. The directors on his list would include Maksim Goldman, a representative of Vekselberg’s Renova. And the chairman of the board—recruited by Ross and Vekselberg—would be Josef Ackermann, a former CEO of Deutsche Bank who was then a director of Renova Management AG, an industrial holding company controlled by Vekselberg. As Bloomberg reported at the time, “Ross, whose group owns 17 percent of the bank, plans to share the vice-chairman post with Vladimir Strzhalkovskiy, who served with Putin in the KGB in the 1980s.”

So let’s rewind the tape: Ross was collaborating directly with Vekselberg to profit from the revival and reorganization of the Bank of Cyprus, and this included proposing to place Vekselberg’s associates in key leadership roles of the bank. This was not an unusual move, given Vekselberg’s large holdings in the institution. But Ross’ relationship with the oligarch went far beyond a one-time, hour-long meeting. A good follow-up question for the senators would be why Ross had indicated he had little to do with Vekselberg.

Ross is not Vekselberg’s only connection to Trump World. In early 2017, Andrew Intrater, the CEO of Columbus Nova, the lone American subsidiary of Renova Group, donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund. Intrater had no previous record of making large political contributions. In June 2017, he also kicked in $35,000 to a joint fundraising committee for Trump’s reelection and the Republican National Committee.Intrater, an American citizen, is Vekselberg’s cousin,accordingto filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In announcing its recent sanctions on Russia, the Treasury Department suggested that Vekselberg runs a corrupt outfit. Its press release noted, “In 2016, Russian prosecutors raided Renova’s offices and arrested two associates of Vekselberg, including the company’s chief managing director and another top executive, for bribing officials connected to a power generation project in Russia.” And Mnuchin declared, “Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from [Russia’s] corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities.” Well, Ross was doing business with this profiting-from-corruption oligarch until Ross was tapped by Trump to join his cabinet. And this remains one of the Trump-Russia connections that still warrants greater explanation

200 595 IND INTRATER, ANDREW $250,000 1/6/2017 151 EAST 58TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10022 Andrew Intrater, CEO and Chairman of.Columbus Nova .It is the U.S.-based affiliate of the Renova Group of companies, one of the largest Russian strategic investors. The Chairman of the Board of the Renova Group of companies is Victor Vekselberg, a prominent Russian industrialist. He is the cousin of Andrew Intrater. Andrew’s brother is Jonathan Intrater is the Managing Director of Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. which is also linked. http://sec.edgar-online.com/columbus-acquisition-corp/s-1a-securities-registration-statement/2007/05/18/section25.aspx

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/trump-commerce-pick-wilbur-ross-financial-ties-russians

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53475/trump-cabinet-russia-business/

I have to say that, judging from his press availability, and as a first impression, Congressman Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is a very impressively arrogant fellow. From contemptuously shuffling the Logan Act aside ("You a Logan Act guy?" he asked one reporter.) to his arch dismissal of the calls for a special prosecutor, to his clammy misuse of the word "McCarthyism," to his robotic insistence that the real problem here are the leaks about possible Russian influence over the administration—rather than, say, Russian influence over the administration—Nunes is going to be someone to watch going forward. But let's write something new about Russia anyway.

All of the Trump Administration's Ties to Russia

The essential folks at McClatchy have raised some questions about the ownership stake in a Cyprus bankheld by Wilbur Ross, who by eight o'clock tonight likely will be your Secretary of Commerce. The bank that does a lot of business with various Russian oligarchs, including, it is alleged, as a spin cycle for money that the Russian kleptocracy would like to have cleaned.

More recently, he led a rescue of Bank of Cyprus in September 2014 after the Cypriot government — in consultation with Russian President Vladimir Putin — first propped up the institution. "Cyprus banks have a long and painful history of laundering dirty money from Russians involved with corruption and criminality," said Elise Bean, a former Senate investigator who specialized in combating money laundering and tax evasion. "Buying a Cyprus bank necessarily raises red flags about suspect deposits, high-risk clients and hidden activities." The Russian business and government elite have often sought financial security in the Mediterranean island's banking system. Oligarch Dmitry Ryvoloviev took a nearly 10 percent stake in Bank of Cyprus in 2010. Two years earlier, amid the U.S. financial crisis when real-estate prices were softening, Ryvoloviev purchased Donald Trump's Palm Beach mansion for $95 million. The transaction generated questions because of its inflated market price, about $60 million more than Trump had paid for the Florida property four years earlier. When Europe's debt crisis spread and affected Cyprus in 2012 and 2013, that nation's second biggest bank, Laiki Bank, was closed. The government imposed losses on uninsured deposits, many belonging to Russians.

As you might imagine, this whole business came up to no great effect during Ross's confirmation hearings.

Ross had little history in global banking, but in 2011 he took an ownership stake in Bank of Ireland, the only bank in that nation the government didn't seize. Ross tripled his investment when he sold his Irish stake in June 2014, then months later, he took a gamble on Bank of Cyprus. Six Democratic senators, led by Florida's Bill Nelson, asked for details about his relationship with big Russian shareholders in Bank of Cyprus, including Viktor Vekselberg, a longtime Putin ally, and Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former vice chairman of Bank of Cyprus and a former KGB agent believed to be a Putin associate. Aides to several of the senators confirmed late Friday that Ross hadn't responded to their questions. The White House sent McClatchy to a Commerce Department transition aide, who didn't respond to questions.

(David Cay Johnson's DC Report adds that, when Ross took over the Bank of Cyprus, he installed as chairman a guy who had left Deutsche Bank under a cloud, including a $650 million fine for laundering Russian money. Deutsche Bank, Johnson reminds us, is the president*'s largest known lender.)

It is nothing close to McCarthyism to point out that the entire Cabinet will be full to the gunwales with people who have done serious business with the Russian kleptocrats. At least they'll all have a lot to talk about over vodka at lunch.

===

Vekselberg

Russian Oligarch's Cousin Funneled Cash to N.Y. Politician

Andrew Intrater - USC Shoah Foundation |

Read More

Trump’s Russia Lawyer Isn’t Seeking Security Clearance, And May Have Trouble Getting One

Colleagues say Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s attorney on the Russia investigation, has struggled with alcohol abuse and engaged in behavior that left employees uncomfortable.

Newsletter Sign Up