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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/business/vnesheconombank-veb-bank-russia-trump-kushner.html">https://www.nytimes.com/<b>2017</b>/06/04/business/vnesheconombank-veb-bank-russia-trump-kushner.html</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Bank at Center of U.S. Inquiry Projects Russian ‘Soft Power’</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Video</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">TRANSCRIPT</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">0:00/2:17</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Jared Kushner’s Meeting With a Russian Banker</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Jared Kushner is now under congressional and F.B.I. scrutiny after his meeting with a close ally of Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Here’s how the Russian banker Sergey N. Gorkov could benefit from meeting President Trump’s senior adviser.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">They met for a half-hour in December: Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser and Sergey Gorkov, a prominent Russian banker and close associate of Vladimir Putin. NATPOP: Vladimir V. Putin meeting with Gorkov [Rossiya 24. February 2017]: How is it going at the bank? - All Normal Who is this Russian banker and why is his meeting with Kushner now under Congressional and FBI’s scrutiny? TITLE: When a Putin’s Ally Meets Trump’s Advisor Sergey Gorkov is the chief of Vnesheconombank, the state-owned Russian bank that was deeply intertwined with Russian intelligence and that was hit with sanctions after the annexation of Crimea. SOT Rossiya 24, Dec 29 - Gorkov: “We are preparing to work under sanctions, pay our debt.” The White House said the meeting between the men was just a routine diplomatic encounter. But Gorkov has no known diplomatic role for Putin. The White House has also said there were no discussions of sanctions against Vneshekonombank during the Kushner-Gorkov meeting. But removing sanctions would greatly expand the ability of Gorkov’s bank to do business in the United States, and the issue was clearly on his mind. In this interview on Russian TV right around the time of the meeting, Gorkov had been expressing optimism that the sanctions would be lifted. SOT: Gorkov Rossiya 24, Dec 29: “Let’s hope hope that the situation with sanctions will change for the better next year.” Interviewer: “” That’s right, after the new administration takes over.” Gorkov: “Yes, that’s possible Putin personally appointed Gorkov to lead Vnesheconombank in 2016. Experts say it was in part because of his ties to Russia’s security services - he studied law at the university known to train spies. Here’s Gorkov reporting on Vneshekonombank successes to the Russian president. SOT Vladimir V. Putin [Moscow, Aug. 2016 - Channel One News on Youtube]: It seems that as a new head of the bank, you’re overcoming the challenges you encountered. Three months after the meeting with Kushner, Gorkov said it had been part of his bank strategy to discuss promising trends with influential businesses abroad. What remains unclear, and what investigators are looking into, is what exactly Mr. Kushner and Mr. Gorkov wanted from each other.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Jared Kushner is now under congressional and F.B.I. scrutiny after his meeting with a close ally of Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Here’s how the Russian banker Sergey N. Gorkov could benefit from meeting President Trump’s senior adviser.CreditCredit...Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters..</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By Ben Protess, Andrew E. Kramer and Mike McIntire</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">June 4, 2017</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It has offices in a sleek Manhattan skyscraper. Its bonds are accessible to millions of American investors. And it holds ties to some of New York’s biggest banks.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Despite this presence on Wall Street, detailed in previously unreported financial records, Vnesheconombank, or VEB, is no normal bank. It is wholly owned by the Russian state. It is intertwined with Russian intelligence. And the Russian prime minister is, by law, the chairman of its supervisory board.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Now VEB is at the center of an international firestorm that threatens the Trump presidency because the bank’s chief — a prominent graduate of Russia’s spy school — met with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, during the presidential transition. That meeting is a focus of a federal counterintelligence investigation about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Three years ago, in response to Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on VEB that have effectively kept it from taking on most new business in the United States. Since then, however, VEB has quietly kept up appearances on Wall Street in the event that sanctions would be lifted, according to interviews with American bankers and former government officials.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That moment appeared to be nearing with Mr. Trump’s victory. And so the bank’s chief, Sergey N. Gorkov, traveled to New York in December for what he described as a “roadshow” promoting the bank that was largely hinged on the prospect of improved diplomatic and business relationships between the United States and Russia.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>During that trip, The New York Times has found, Mr. Gorkov met with bankers at JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and another, unidentified American financial institution.</b> Goldman Sachs bankers also tried to arrange a meeting but ultimately had a scheduling conflict. The meetings, which are not prohibited by sanctions, were confirmed by three people briefed on the discussions but unauthorized to speak publicly about them.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">None of the American banks were new to VEB. Citi and JPMorgan had long, established relationships clearing financial transactions for VEB in the United States, activities not affected by the sanctions. And before the sanctions, securities filings show, Goldman and others had helped the Russian bank issue bonds, activity that was blocked by the sanctions and that VEB was eager to resume.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After a few painful years, continuing Western borrowing had become a pressing priority for Moscow. The Russian Finance Ministry has spent about $10 billion to prop up the bank over the past three years, according to banking analysts.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On that same trip, Mr. Gorkov met with Mr. Kushner. The nature of the meeting, which remains in dispute, followed a session between Mr. Kushner and the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, about opening a communications channel with Russian officials during the presidential transition, according to current and former American officials.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The F.B.I. and congressional investigators are now scrutinizing whether Mr. Kushner may have met with Mr. Gorkov to help establish a direct line to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, or for other reasons not cited by the White House.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The White House and VEB have issued contradictory statements about the purpose of the Gorkov meeting.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The White House has said that Mr. Kislyak requested the meeting and that “Mr. Kushner was acting in his capacity as a transition official.” But VEB said Mr. Gorkov had met with Mr. Kushner, who was still running his family’s real estate company, to discuss business. The statement said VEB’s management had met with “a number of representatives of the largest banks and business circles of the U.S.,” a claim supported by the Times’s reporting about Mr. Gorkov’s meetings with banks in New York.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">VEB has not disclosed specifics of the conversation with Mr. Kushner, which is of keen interest to investigators.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Kushner’s hunt for overseas investors for his company’s financially troubled Manhattan office tower on Fifth Avenue has been documented by The Times. While such an investment would not fit the profile of VEB’s past lending, it would have been possible for Mr. Gorkov to relay such information to other Russian banks. It is not known, however, whether the subject was raised in the meeting.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ImageVnesheconombank, or VEB, has offices on Third Avenue in New York. Sanctions have limited the bank’s United States activities.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Vnesheconombank, or VEB, has offices on Third Avenue in New York. Sanctions have limited the bank’s United States activities.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The subject of sanctions was also freshly topical in December. The rolling back of sanctions was an essential part of Mr. Gorkov’s strategy in visiting New York, and was central to the health of his bank. The next month, during Mr. Trump’s first week in office, administration officials signaled they were considering lifting the sanctions that stemmed from the conflict in Ukraine.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Separately, Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, had several phone conversations late last year with Mr. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. In one, the two men discussed additional sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in response to the Russian government’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The meeting with Mr. Kushner was not VEB’s only connection to Mr. Trump’s campaign or associates.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A banker who pleaded guilty last year to spying for Russia out of VEB’s office in New York was part of an unsuccessful Russian scheme to recruit <b>Carter Page,</b> an American businessman who later became a Trump campaign adviser, as a spy. VEB also obtained shares in a Ukrainian steel smelter when it was sold by a business partner of Mr. Trump’s who built a Trump hotel in Toronto, according to previously undisclosed documents from the vast leak known as the Panama Papers. The VEB involvement in the smelter deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">These interactions have stirred concerns over whether the bank, which few Americans have heard of despite its ties to Wall Street and big companies like Boeing, has been spreading Russian influence along with its financial footprint.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A representative for the bank would not comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>‘This Is Not a Bank’</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>VEB and Mr. Putin are inextricably linked.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The bank stepped up lending after 2008 when Mr. Putin, then prime minister, became chairman of the board. And during the oil boom, VEB was seen as embodying Russia’s new financial might.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Under a 2007 law, VEB’s mandate was to lend to important but underfinanced sectors of the Russian economy, including infrastructure and businesses that help diversify the economy beyond oil dependence.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>There are other government-controlled banks in Russia, Sberbank and VTB, but they are primarily retail banks. VEB serves a very different role, lending mostly to large borrowers, many of them politically connected.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To that end, VEB over the last decade has lent freely in ways that dovetail with government priorities and make it a tool of Russian soft power. The purse strings opened for two influential groups in particular: oligarchs building Olympic sites in Sochi and companies in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">“This is not a bank,” said Karen Vartapetov, a public finance analyst at Standard & Poor’s. “We should rather treat this bank as a government agency. It is used by the government as a tool to invest in politically and socially important but not always financially viable projects.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>VEB’s role as a projector of state influence was on display in 2010 with a deal that potentially affected a Trump hotel in Toronto.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At the time, Alex Shnaider, a Russian-Canadian businessman developing the hotel, was looking to sell a steel plant in Ukraine. His Midland Resources Holding Ltd., which owned the Zaporizhstal steel factory, sold at least half its stake to a collection of five offshore companies that received funding from VEB, according to documents in the trove of files from the law firm<b> Mossack Fonseca </b>that were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The documents show that one year after acquiring the Zaporizhstal stake, the five companies — based in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands — transferred it to Russian control.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In each case, the companies’ shares were “charged in favor of” VEB, meaning the bank effectively took ownership of them in exchange for financing the steel plant acquisition.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Court papers in Canada show that Mr. Shnaider’s deal to sell the steel plant coincided with his need to cover cost overruns in the Trump deal. His lawyer initially told The Wall Street Journal last month that about $15 million from the Ukraine sale went into the $500 million Toronto project, but he later backtracked.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Nothing in the Panama Papers linked VEB’s financing to the Trump project, which Mr. Trump did not own. Rather, the deal underscored VEB’s strategy to venture into Ukraine at the behest of the Russian government.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">More broadly, the bank’s plan had been to tap capital markets in New York to help finance the Ukraine lending, but the plan collapsed with the imposition of sanctions in 2014.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The bank today, not unlike Mr. Putin’s government, expanded its sway abroad in a way that appears unsustainable. Weighed down by sanctions and the oil price collapse, the Russian economy has slipped to 12th in the world, below South Korea’s, according to a World Bank ranking.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At the time sanctions were imposed, the bank’s total debt ran about $20 billion. It has since been reduced to $17 billion, according to financial disclosures at the end of last year. But the Ukraine lending in particular is affecting the balance sheet, with outstanding Ukraine debt totaling $14.2 billion at the current exchange rate, banking analysts say.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Last week, the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti reported that about 40 percent of VEB’s loans were at risk of default.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Gorkov, who previously worked at the Yukos oil company and was a senior executive at Sberbank, became director of VEB in February 2016, partly with a mandate to find market solutions to the bank’s financial woes.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For Mr. Gorkov, fixing VEB would require a new focus, and that, according to the bank’s statement, became the reason for a meeting with Mr. Kushner.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The two met as Mr. Gorkov traveled to gather ideas for a new strategy for the bank, published a month after the meeting with Mr. Kushner in a document called “Strategy 2021.” It called for shifting some risks directly to the Russian budget, selling assets not considered central to the bank and trying to resume borrowing in places like the United States.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The document suggested that the bank was expecting some relief from sanctions. “The forecasts for the term of the strategy predict certain decrease of geopolitical risks and gradual weakening of the restricted access to global capital markets,” it said.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Gorkov’s former boss at Yukos, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, said it was essential that sanctions be lifted for the VEB turnaround to succeed.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Putin doesn’t have to worry about what the voters think of him,” Mr. Amsterdam said. “Putin has to think about the top 100. And the top 100 are those who are sanctioned.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">American Ties</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Long before VEB became saddled with sanctions, it had deep ties to Washington and Wall Street.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">In 2010, Mr. Gorkov’s predecessor appeared at the<b> U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington to unveil a pact with the Export-Import Bank of the United States,</b>the federal agency that supports American exports. Under the deal, the two institutions agreed “to cooperate in financing U.S. exports to Russia.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The arrangement was followed by two little-noticed deals. In 2013, the Export-Import Bank guaranteed a loan of about $500 million so that, in effect, a VEB subsidiary could acquire a number of Boeing 777 aircraft — planes that VEB then leased to Aeroflot Russian Airlines. A year later, shortly before the sanctions hit, the American agency guaranteed another loan of about $700 million for a similar deal.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Export-Import Bank said, “These transactions all supported the sale of U.S. exports and thus supported American jobs.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Since the sanctions took effect, the spokeswoman said, there have been no new VEB transactions, and deals involving any Russian entities have been placed on “administrative hold.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The sanctions also limited VEB’s relationship with American banks. The sanctions prohibit United States banks and companies from “transacting in, providing financing for or otherwise dealing” in new long-term debt.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For years, issuing debt was a good business for both Wall Street and VEB. Between 2006 and 2013, Goldman, Citi and Morgan Stanley helped the Russian bank issue one bond deal after another, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Now, American banks can work for VEB only in more limited roles.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>JPMorgan, Citi and BNY Mellon, for example, remain registered to clear VEB’s transactions through the United States,</b> clearinghouse records show, though such transactions have waned since the sanctions were imposed. Many major American banks and investment firms also continue to include VEB debt in mutual funds, including those of Fidelity and Pimco, securities filings show.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It would not be out of the ordinary, then, for a VEB official to have brief courtesy meetings with New York bankers about continuing business, though they would not be allowed to discuss new bond deals, said Aaron Wolfson, a partner at Lewis Baach who previously worked at JPMorgan and prosecuted banks for skirting sanctions.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Still, Zachary K. Goldman, a former Treasury Department official who worked on financial sanctions issues, said the banks needed to be cautious.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>“Just because limited interactions with VEB may be legally permissible doesn’t mean that there aren’t reputational and other kinds of risks involved,</b>” said Mr. Goldman, now the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. “The concern for me with this particular entity would be its reported ties to the Russian security services.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Spies in Suits</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Gorkov, 48, graduated in 1994 from the university of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the K.G.B. — a school for spies. Like many in his generation of security agents in the early post-Soviet period, he ventured into banking and the oil business.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In fact, say businessmen who have worked in Russia, so many F.S.B. agents are in the upper management of state-owned companies that the roles of spy and executive blend almost seamlessly.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“In Putin’s Russia, they don’t draw a distinction,” said Mr. Amsterdam, the lawyer who represented Mr. Gorkov’s former employer.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Highly educated and often speaking foreign languages, former F.S.B. officers include Mr. Putin himself, senior officials throughout his government, and board members and top executives at state-run corporations.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Gorkov’s biography on VEB’s website does not suggest he ever served in the F.S.B. The bank did not respond to questions about whether he worked for the agency.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the bank has been known to employ spies. In 2015, federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington announced charges against Evgeny Buryakov, an employee at VEB’s New York office, accusing him of acting as a covert agent of the S.V.R., the Russian foreign intelligence agency.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Buryakov, who was charged alongside two other Russian men accused of trying to recruit Mr. Page, later pleaded guilty, and VEB paid his legal bills.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At the time, the authorities suspected that some VEB managers were aware of Mr. Buryakov’s spy activities, according to a person briefed on the investigation. Federal authorities recorded a conversation between the two co-defendants discussing how an S.V.R. official told Mr. Buryakov’s supervisor at VEB that Mr. Buryakov was an “employee of the service.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.newsweek.com/2017/12/29/donald-trump-russia-secret-deutsche-bank-753780.html"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.<b>newsweek.com/2017</b>/12/29/donald-trump-russia-secret-deutsche-bank-753780.html</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It sounded like an exhausted parent scolding a tantrum-prone toddler with a penchant for tossing toys from his stroller.In November 2008, Steven Molo, an attorney for Deutsche Bank, wrote a letter to the Supreme Court of New York about one of the company's most troublesome clients. At issue was $640 million that client had borrowed in 2005 to fund construction of a new hotel in Chicago. The client had personally guaranteed the loan, but a few years later, the Great Recession devastated the economy, and he defaulted on his payment, with $330 million outstanding. Deutsche was seeking an immediate $40 million from the client, plus interest, legal fees and costs.The debtor in question: Donald Trump, the future president of the United States.Instead of paying up, the New York real estate mogul countersued, claiming the 2008 crash was a force majeure event—one that Deutsche had helped precipitate. Therefore, he argued, he wasn't obliged to pay back the money. Instead, he claimed Deutsche owed him money—about $3 billion in damages.In response, Molo drew up a withering document, contrasting Trump's frivolous writ with his long career of boasting about how rich he was:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump proclaims himself "the archetypal businessman, a deal-maker without peer."<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Trump has stated in court he is worth billions of dollars. In addition to substantial cash, personal investments and various other tangible assets, he maintains substantial interests in numerous extraordinary properties in New York and around the country.Those assets included hotel projects in seven U.S. cities, as well as in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Panama and Dubai, United Arab Emirates</span>, the lawyer noted. There were also casinos and golf courses scattered all over the world.The same day Trump argued that the Great Recession meant he didn't need to pay back his debts, he gave an interview to The Scotsman newspaper. After a two-year fight, he had gotten approval from the Scottish government for a new resort near Balmedie in Aberdeenshire—and he was thrilled. "The world has changed financially, and the banks are all in such trouble," he told the paper, "but the good news is that we are doing very well as a company, and we are in a very, very strong cash position." Trump said he didn't have any exposure to the stock market, had bought the Scottish land for cash and was now well placed to build "the world's greatest golf course." Two weeks later, George Sorial, a Trump Organization executive, assured The Scotsman that the tycoon had a billion dollars earmarked for the course.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If those statements weren't damning enough, Molo's affidavit cited the real estate tycoon's literary works, which summarized his insouciant attitude toward paying back other people's money. Trump, the attorney observed, provided extensive advice on how to do business in his half-dozen or so books. In How to Get Rich, Trump advises readers to use the courts to "be strategically dramatic." In Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life, he boasts of how he "love[s] to crush the other side and take the benefits." Trump's strategy—honed during his terrible financial struggles with lenders during the 1990s—"was to turn it back on the banks…. I figured it was the bank's problem, not mine," Molo quoted him as saying, in connection with unpaid debt.As a result of these maneuvers, by the mid-2000s, U.S. financial institutions had stopped lending to Trump for his building projects. Deutsche was the only one still willing to work with him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump Denies Russia Collusion—Again and Again</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After Trump burned the bank, Deutsche shunned him as well. But Trump soon found a creative way to get off its blacklist—and return to solvency.'Are You Fucking Kidding Me?'Two years after Molo wrote his letter to the court, Trump settled his feud with the German bank. How he did it was bizarre: He paid back Deutsche with a massive lifeline—from Deutsche.</span> Only this time he eschewed its real estate team—which wanted nothing to do with him—and got a loan from its private wealth division. This group typically deals with high-net-worth individuals, not real estate transactions, but in 2010 it not only lent him the money he owed its real estate team but also reportedly gave Trump another $25 million to $50 million in credit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Deutsche employees in New York were surprised by the bank's decision.</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When asked whether it was normal to give more money to a customer who was a bad credit risk and liked to sue, one former senior staff member at the bank put it succinctly: "Are you fucking kidding me?"</span>Over the next few years, the money kept rolling in for Trump. He took out two mortgages against a resort in Miami and a $170 million loan to finish his hotel in Washington, D.C. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to Bloomberg, by the time Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2016, he owed Deutsche around $300 million, an unprecedented debt for an incoming president. (His June financial disclosure showed he owes the bank $130 million, which is due in full in 2024.)The loans to Trump weren't the only abnormal behavior at Deutsche. Around the same time he received his new line of credit, the<b> bank was laundering money,</b> according to the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS). Russian money. Billions of dollars that flowed from Moscow to London, then from London to New York—part of a scheme for which European and American regulators eventually punished the bank.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></b></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Was the timing of this illicit operation and the loans to Trump coincidental? Or evidence of something more sinister</b>—a critical chapter in the president's long history of suspicious business deals with Russian and post-Soviet oligarchs? In January, Trump claimed the former, tweeting in his usual bombastic style: "I have nothing to do with Russia—no deals, no loans, no nothing." But the president's refusal to accept the assessment of his intelligence agencies—that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election—has, among other things, fueled suspicions about his ties to Russia.Robert Mueller is now trying to find out the truth about those suspicions. The special counsel is investigating Russian interference—from the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow. So far, his team has charged key Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates with money laundering, as well as other offenses. He's also gotten two former advisers, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, to plead guilty to lying to the FBI and cooperate with the probe.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Now, however, Mueller appears to be following the money, trying to determine if Trump has a financial connection to Russia—one that might at least partly explain his behavior</b>. In December, the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the <b>special counsel's office has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank</b>, demanding data and documents related to people or entities tied to the president and those close to him. The White House says the subpoena doesn't directly pertain to Trump or his family's accounts. But if the president has a dark Russian secret, the German banking giant's money-laundering scandal may be key to finding out what it is.Friends With Kremlin Benefits</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The story of how Deutsche became embroiled in the Trump-Russia probe dates back to 2005, when the German lender bought UFG, a boutique investment bank, to acquire an entry point into Moscow. UFG's co-founder and chairman was Charles Ryan, a charming American banker with libertarian views. Ryan's partner was Boris Fyodorov, a finance minister under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The bank straddled West and East, and was international and local.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The man behind Deutsche Bank's aggressive expansion was <b>Anshu Jain, its future co-CEO. He persuaded Ryan to stay on and head up Deutsche's new Moscow office, and he came up with a controversial strategy to tap into potentially huge Russian profits:</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b> forge relationships with state partners. He wanted, in effect, to become friends with the Kremlin.</b> One way of doing this was to hire people with connections. Among them: Russia's most powerful banker, Andrey Kostin, who had served as a Soviet diplomat in Sydney and London. (Intelligence sources think he was a KGB spy. Like many others who spoke to me for this story, they did so anonymously because they weren't authorized to talk to the press.) In the 1990s, he became head of Vnesheconombank (VEB), a state development institution described by one former CIA analyst as the "Kremlin's cookie jar." </span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Then Vladimir Putin made Kostin head of Vneshtorgbank (VTB), another state-run bank, after which Kostin expanded it to operate in 19 countries.VTB worked in many countries with minimal oversight, which meant the Kremlin could use it for espionage. In 2005, VTB absorbed two banks traditionally used in Soviet times for spying and shifting currency to Western communist parties. These were the Moscow Narodny Bank, based in London, and Euro-bank, in Paris.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, Jain and Deutsche Bank recruited Kostin's 20-something son, Andrey. In spring of 2007, the young Kostin moved from a posting in London to Deutsche Bank in Moscow.Suddenly, Kostin's son got massive flows of business, a high-level banking source told me. And it appeared his father may have helped: Deutsche did a series of lucrative trades with VTB. According to the source, the German bank's Moscow subsidiary began posting profits of $500 million to $1 billion a year, with VTB generating somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of all revenue.</font></div><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jain came up with a controversial strategy to tap into potentially huge Russian profits: forge relationships with state partners. He wanted, in effect, to become friends with the Kremlin.</font></span></div><div><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></b></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Other investment banks based in Moscow were chagrined and suspected that Deutsche owed its success to its alliance with Russian state interests</b>. "They were doing some very curious things," says Christopher Barter, the CEO of Goldman Sachs Moscow at the time. "Nobody could make sense of their business. We found the nature and concentration of their business with VTB quite galling. Nobody else could touch VTB."Everyone in Moscow understood that VTB was more than a bank. It had ties to Russian intelligence. Putin's Federal Security Service (FSB) spy chief, Nikolai Patrushev, and his successor, Alexander Bortnikov, both sent their sons to work at VTB. The bank's deputy chief executive, Vasily Titov, chaired the FSB's public council.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">VTB may have also had contacts with Trump associates, according to The New York Times. In November 2015, a few months after Trump announced he was running for president, one of his business partners, <b>Felix Sater, wrote an email to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, saying VTB had agreed to bankroll a Trump Tower Moscow project. Trump signed a letter of intent for the deal. When the project stalled, Cohen tried reaching out to Putin's spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, to help jump-start it. But it ultimately failed.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Kostin, the VTB banker, says he doesn't know Sater and never had any role in the real estate deal. "We never, ever heard about this case," he told the Times. "It's absolutely wrong information; it's absolutely <b>fake news.</b>"During those negotiations, Sater—the son of a Russian mafia boss—saw things differently. "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it," he wrote to Cohen about the Trump Tower Moscow plans. "I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this, I will manage this process."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shady Trades and Endless Vodka Shots</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Well before Sater went looking for a deal there, the Russian capital was awash with petrodollars and opportunity. At the start of the new millennium, Moscow was an alluring destination for Western expatriates. Especially for young single males. There were the devushki—long-legged Russian girls, some from Moscow, some newly arrived from the provinces—who were keen to meet foreigners and practice their English. There were the nightclubs, the parties, fueled by toasts and endless vodka shots. And the friendships, always more intense than those at home.But there was a dark side to this new Russia—as one of those attracted by its offer of riches discovered. Tim Wiswell grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, about 100 miles northeast of New York City. He was more of a repatriate than an expat: His father had worked in oil and gas in Russia. When he was 17, Wiswell spent a year at the Anglo-American School in Moscow and then returned to the United States for college. In his mid-20s, Wiswell went back to Moscow and got a job with <b>Alfa, the private bank owned by the oligarch Mikhail Fridman. </b>From there, he moved to Deutsche Bank. By age 29, he was head of Russian equities. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He found a Russian girlfriend—Natalia Makosiy, an art historian whom he met at a Moscow dinner party and later married.In the wake of the 2007-2008 crash, profits from the bank's Russian business plummeted. Traders were now under pressure to increase revenue. But after Wiswell took over around 2009, business was suddenly improving. And Barter suspects that "something nefarious" was going on at <b>Deutsche during that time period.After the crash, Barter says, he was approached by "broker types, not very senior," seeking to do large</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>, unexplained volumes of trades with Goldman Sachs. </b>These were on behalf of major Russian clients. The brokers declined to identify their counterparties. Their names were concealed beneath "shell company after shell company," Barter says, making a due diligence impossible. </span>He turned this business down "in five seconds."The same entities approached Wiswell and company, and got better results. Between 2011 and February 2015, Wiswell presided over a money-laundering scheme run from the equities desk of Deutsche Bank's Moscow office, according to a report from the DFS, and more than $10 billion was shifted from Russia to the West.The method was simple but effective. In Moscow, a Russian client bought blue-chip Russian stocks from Deutsche Bank Moscow in companies like Gazprom or Sberbank. The payments were in rubles. The size of a typical order was $2 million to $3 million. Shortly afterward, a non-Russian "customer" sold exactly the same number of securities to Deutsche Bank in London, paying in dollars.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Deutsche Bank AG’s regional head office on Wall Street.] Deutsche Bank sued Donald Trump in 2008 for defaulting on a $640 million loan. Deutsche later bailed Trump out through its own private wealth division.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></b></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>There was no economic logic to these "mirror trades," the DFS report found. The buyers and sellers were ostensibly different, but in reality, one in the same.</b> At least 12 entities used the scheme to surreptitiously convert rubles into dollars. The money was interred in offshore accounts. Those involved moved billions out of one Deutsche location in Moscow to another location in New York through offshore territories such as Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands. There were nearly 6,000 of such transactions, and nobody in New York, London, Frankfurt or any other international financial centers seemed to notice.When outsiders raised concerns—like a European bank, for example—Wiswell swatted them aside. The DFS report said he told the European bank not to worry. Wiswell approved the trades with anonymous Russian clients. He "threatened" and browbeat his colleagues on several occasions, a New York regulator said, according to the report, "when it appeared they had not moved quickly enough to facilitate transactions."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Moscow, Wiswell's 20-person equities desk was made up of Russians and Americans. One of its duties was to keep clients happy. That might mean extravagant skiing trips and visits to elite nightclubs. One of Wiswell's business (and skiing) partners was Dmitry Perevalov, the owner of a Moscow fund called Lanturno. About seven years ago, for his 40th birthday, Perevalov flew a group of people on a private jet to Mauritius. The jet belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church's most important bishop, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, but Perevalov chartered it for the occasion. His guests stayed at the luxurious Four Seasons hotel in Anahita, on the east coast of the Indian Ocean island. Some invitees scarcely knew their host, a former bartender. Those who were his friends—including Wiswell—called him Dima.One guest who met Wiswell at the party described him as charismatic and charming, a tall, handsome, all-American guy. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This person also said Wiswell came across as a "major lightweight" in terms of banking and finance. "He had nothing special going for him. I remember him speaking pretty poor Russian. We wondered whether he was doing kosher business."Perevalov flew in a popular performer to crown his birthday celebration—the Russian rapper Timati, who gave a concert. Under a starry sky, guests danced to Timati's hit "Welcome to St. Tropez":Too much money in the bank accountHands in the airMake you scream and shout Drinks, private villas, waterskiing in the lagoon—everything was taken care of. "I was wondering: Who the fuck is paying for all this?" the guest told me. "It was crazy."Lightweight or not, Wiswell was getting rich. While the mirror trades were happening, Wiswell's wife became the owner of two offshore companies—one in the British Virgin Islands, one in Cyprus. In 2015, a counterparty paid $250,000 into her account. This was for "financial consulting." Similar payments, totaling $3.8 million, were made through two companies in Belize. These payments were "undisclosed compensation," the DFS found—"a bribe." Which bank cleared them? </font></div><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Russia’s most powerful banker, Kostin, had served as a Soviet diplomat in Sydney and London. (Intelligence sources think he was a KGB spy.) Vladimir Putin made Kostin head of state-run VTB Bank, after which Kostin expanded it to operate in 19 countries.</font></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to journalist Ed Caesar, there were further payments made to the Wiswells. The idea of the money was "to hook you, so you are not going to do unexpected things," one Moscow broker told Caesar in an article published in The New Yorker. These payments were always made in cash and always delivered in a bag.The end of this scheme came in August 2015, when Deutsche Bank suspended Wiswell and then fired him. After that, he disappeared. There were Facebook postings from Southeast Asia and Bali, where the Wiswells went with their two small children. (He is now allegedly back in Moscow.) His lawyer, Ekaterina Dukhina, declined to comment on his case, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">but in his wrongful-dismissal suit against Deutsche, Wiswell said he was merely the fall guy for the bank's wrongdoing. He also claimed that around 20 colleagues, including two senior managers in London, knew all about the trades.The scandal was a grievous blow to Deutsche Bank's reputation. And an expensive one. About 10 days before Trump's inauguration, the <b>DFS—which has the power to suspend any bank with a branch in New York—fined the bank $475 million.</b> London's Financial Conduct Authority imposed a £163 million ($218 million) penalty. (The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York are still investigating the bank's role in the scandal.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The bank carried out an internal review, which didn't identify the Russians behind the scheme</b>. It's still unclear who they were or where the billions went. Or where the money came from in the first place.What is clear, however, from the DFS report and conversations with sources in Moscow is that a Kremlin bank, VTB, run by proxies of the FSB, had seemingly captured Deutsche Bank's Moscow outpost. The German bank's London and New York divisions were economic beneficiaries of this arrangement, as they facilitated the illegal flight of capital by some well-connected Kremlin insiders.<b>While this was going on, Deutsche Bank in New York was lending hundreds of millions of dollars to the future American president, a man known to be litigious and a credit risk. </b>My Guardian colleague Nick Hopkins and I wanted to find out if Trump's loans and the money-laundering scandal were connected. But Deutsche Bank stonewalled us; its policy was to say nothing about its clients, including the president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Russian Laundromat</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In late 2016, that question and others led Hopkins and me to a man now at the center of Mueller's inquiry: Christopher Steele. </b>This was before the world knew he was behind the famous dossier, raw intelligence alleging, among other things, that Russian intelligence had years of compromising information on Trump, some of it sexual in nature. Hopkins knew Steele, but neither of us were aware of what he was sitting on in that dossier.We met on a Thursday afternoon, weeks before Christmas, when London's streets were crowded with shoppers. Steele had agreed to chat over 4 o'clock tea. We tried a café and wine bar called Balls Brothers—and found a tucked-away table. I went to the bar and came back with drinks: beer for Steele, Coke for Nick, pot of tea for me.Steele clearly likes being in the shadows, away from publicity or fuss. In the world of corporate intelligence, the fewer people who know what you are doing, the better. "Have you heard of me?" he asked.I confessed I hadn't. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I knew most of the people in London who were focused on Russia, but not Steele."Good," he said. "That's how I like it."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>For the next 45 minutes or so, we asked Steele about Trump's connections to Moscow. </b>He offered helpful hints about following the money but little more.In addition to questions about Deutsche Bank, we inquired about another Russian money-laundering operation, one that involved Putin's cousin Igor. Between 2010 and 2014, Moscow bankers were sending cash out of the country through something called the Global Laundromat—a scheme that cleaned at least $20 billion, according to investigators in Moldova and the Balkans, though the true figure may be much greater.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This is how it worked: Shell companies in the United Kingdom "lent" money to one another, at least on paper. Russian businesses underwrote these "loans." Company A would default on paying back Company B. Typically, a Moldovan citizen was involved. The companies would obtain a court judgment in Moldova asking the Russian firms to settle the debt. </span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>And voilà! The Russian businesses would legally transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to a bank in Moldova's capital, Chisinau. </b>From Chisinau, the money went to a bank in Latvia, Trasta Komercbanka. From there, the cash went everywhere, to 92 countries, much of it vanishing offshore.The Latvian bank required a corresponding Western financial institution to process its dollar-denominated transactions. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Most U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase, refused to offer banking services to Trasta, given the city of Riga's reputation as a European money-laundering hub.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Only two Western banks agreed, according to Moldovan and Latvian investigators. Both were German: Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. Once again, Deutsche was the entry point for criminal Russian money into the global financial system, the investigators found. (The bank severed its relationship with Trasta shortly before Latvian officials shut down the bank in 2016 for money laundering.) According to the DFS, Deutsche was reluctant to classify Russia as a "high-risk" location for money laundering.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b style="">Sergei Gorkov, chairman of Vnesheconombank (VEB Bank)</b>,</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> which Andrey Kostin had run and whom Putin had promoted<b>. Gorkov met directly with Jared Kushner</b> in New York.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Hopkins and I asked Deutsche Bank about the scandal, we were rebuffed. So we talked to current and former Deutsche Bank staff. According to one senior ex-employee, who worked in equities in Asia and New York<b>, the bank's problems went way beyond these scams. The 2008 crash hit Deutsche Bank hard, the employee said. In order to cover up holes in the balance sheet, a few members of staff took part in risky, complex and possibly illegitimate forms of finance.</b>These practices were extensive, the person alleged. They might have involved innovative and opaque ways of getting outside parties to underwrite risky loans, the banker added, using structures to disguise who ultimately are the lenders and the beneficiaries.Such impenetrable structures have led some to wonder whether Deutsche's unusual loans to Trump and its Russian money-laundering schemes were connected.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Adding to the intrigue: the statements of Trump's own children. In May, for instance, golf writer James Dodson said that during an interview more than three years ago, Trump's son Eric boasted that his father's company had access to Russian money. "<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">We don't rely on American banks," Dodson said Trump told him. <b>"We have all the funding we need out of Russia." (Eric Trump later denied he made this claim.)</b> Years earlier, at a real estate conference in 2008, <b>Donald Trump Jr. said, "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.</b>" He later added, "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In an interview with Prospect magazine, Richard Dearlove, the former head of British secret intelligence service MI6, summed up the suspicions surrounding the alleged connection between Trump, Russia and Deutsche Bank. "What lingers for Trump may be what deals—on what terms—he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the West would not lend to him.</span>"<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to our sources inside Deutsche Bank,<b> Trump's bid to become president made him a politically exposed person, or PEP. Banks scrutinize such individuals carefully because they're often targets for illicit financial schemes. </b>Deutsche reviewed its lending to Trump and his relatives. Its goal was to discover if there was a Russian connection to Trump's loans. The DFS also requested information from the bank about its dealings with Russia. The sources were vague about the review, who carried it out and what its precise conclusions were. But they insist that no trail to Moscow was ever discovered.Other sources suggest the review was cursory, but Deutsche hasn't released any information about it, so there's no way to evaluate either claim. Meanwhile, Trump refuses to release his tax filings, breaking decades of precedent.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over the past year, U.S. lawmakers such as Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, have urged the bank to privately hand over its internal review—along with information about Trump's accounts—but Deutsche declined to do so, citing privacy rules.Now, nearly a year after BuzzFeed published Steele's dossier, the bank is handing records over to Mueller, as the special counsel tries to figure out if there is a connection between the Russian laundromat and the president of the United States.They Went to Jared The special counsel's inquiry could also reach people in Trump's orbit. Many were clients of Deutsche Bank—and also credit risks.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Among them is Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, who is trying to salvage a massive—and reportedly imperiled—investment in 666 Fifth Avenue, a prominent piece of Manhattan real estate. His relationship with Deutsche emerged in 2013, when he apparently <b>ordered a flattering profile of Trump's wealth manager, Rosemary Vrablic, by his newspaper, The New York Observer</b>.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a letter this spring to Bill Woodley, Deutsche Bank's U.S. CEO, Senator Chris Van Hollen expressed concerns about the bank's lending to Kushner, who had a $25 million line of credit with the German institution. In October 2016, it loaned him $285 million. The cash was used to replace an existing loan on the old New York Times building, which Kushner had bought the previous year from Lev Leviev, a businessman from the former Soviet Union.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The bank made the loan at a time when Kremlin representatives were eager to speak to Trump's son-in-law, according to a timeline laid out in Kushner's testimony to Congress</b>. In April, he first met Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, when Trump gave his foreign policy speech at D.C.'s Mayflower Hotel—just a handshake and pleasantries, Kushner said. <b>Next came a meeting at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya</b>, the Moscow lawyer who sat down with Kushner, Manafort and Trump Jr. They talked about dirt on Hillary Clinton and repealing the Magnitsky Act, an Obama-era law that leveled sanctions against Russians accused of human rights abuses. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Then, on November 16, Kislyak got in touch again. By this point, it was clear that Kushner would become senior adviser to the president.There was another Kushner-Kislyak meeting, on December 1 at Trump Tower. Flynn, Trump's adviser, was present too, as Kushner made an unusual proposal: He asked Kislyak if it would be possible to set up a secret and secure communications channel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin. The purpose, it seems, was to keep their conversations hidden from the outgoing Obama administration and U.S. intelligence. Could this be done, Kushner wondered, by using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States? The inquiry was staggeringly naïve. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Kushner or Flynn were to drop by the Russian Embassy, U.S. intelligence would certainly notice.The FBI hadn't bugged that conversation but learned of it when Kislyak reported to his superiors back in Moscow. According to FBI intercepts of those Russian communications, <b>Kislyak was taken aback by Kushner's request</b>. It was unlikely Moscow would allow any American to use its encrypted networks. The Trump transition team said nothing about these secret negotiations. One person who knew the details was so alarmed he sent The Washington Post an anonymous note about it, explaining what had happened.Russia, it seemed, didn't need to expend much effort to get close to Trump's aides.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b> Kislyak came up with a suggestion of his own</b>, according to Kushner's testimony. Perhaps Kushner would like to meet with another person from Moscow, someone with "a direct relationship" to Putin?  During a meeting between Kislyak and <b>Kushner's assistant, Avi Berkowitz, </b>on December 12, they agreed on the details of this meeting. Putin's emissary turned out to be a banker, or, more accurately, a banker-spy. <b>His name was Sergey Gorkov, and he was the head of VEB</b>, the state development bank, which Kostin had run, and whose board Putin had chaired during his four years as prime minister. </span>He had trained in the 1990s at the FSB's academy before joining energy company Yukos and state-run Sberbank. Like VTB, Sberbank was allegedly an arm of the Kremlin. It was the official sponsor of the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow, attended by Trump and<b> hosted by Emin Agalarov, the pop-star son of Aras Agalarov, who worked with Trump to bring the pageant to Russia</b>. Eight days after the contest,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Sberbank announced it was lending Agalarov $1.3 billion to finance new projects. One of those under consideration was Trump Tower Moscow. In <b>February 2016, Putin promoted Gorkov to VEB chief.</b></span></font></div><div><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></b></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Deutsche Bank loaned Jared Kushner $285 million to replace an existing loan on the old New York Times building, which Kushner had bought from Lev Leviev, a businessman from the former Soviet Union. The bank made the loan at a time when Kremlin representatives were eager to speak to Trump’s son-in-law.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The bank's mission was to support Moscow's political programs. It provided capital to build facilities at the Sochi Olympics and fund secessionist rebels in eastern Ukraine</b>. These top-down ventures lost money. VEB had large debts. The United States had included VEB, VTB and Sberbank in the sanctions it passed in 2014 after Putin annexed Crimea. And <b>Gorkov's job was to restore the bank's fortunes.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Gorkov was well prepared for his meeting with Kushner. He was, after all, a graduate of the Dzerzhinsky Higher School, a KGB training center.</b> He flew in from Moscow bearing gifts. Among them: soil from the town of Novogrudok in northwest Belarus, where Kushner's paternal grandmother grew up. In 1941, the German army arrived, and the town's Jewish inhabitants were rounded up and forced to live and work in an agricultural college. Around half were executed. The survivors dug a tunnel, and in September 1943 they crawled out, fleeing into the forest.This information and much more would have been included in the FSB's Kushner file.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b> Gorkov's presents were chosen to remind the young Trump adviser of his origins in a part of the world that once belonged to the Soviet Union</b>, and of his spiritual roots. (This subtlety was wasted. In his written testimony to Congress, Kushner said Putin's messenger had given him a "bag of dirt." It came from "Nvgorod," he wrote, spelling his grandmother's birthplace incorrectly.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This meeting occurred on December 13, and according to <b>Kushner, Gorkov introduced himself and "made some statements about the Russian economy.</b>" The banker said he was friendly with Putin, expressed disappointment about the state of U.S.-Russian relations under President Barack Obama and "his hopes for a better relationship" in the future, Kushner told congressional committees.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">There was no discussion of lifting sanctions, Kushner said. Nor was he offered any commercial deals. Kushner characterized the encounter as brief, meaningless. But there's no official record of what was said in the meeting, so this is hard to verify. After all, it was difficult to discuss the Russian economy without mentioning its depressed state. <b>Gorkov then flew directly from New York to Japan, where Putin was attending a summit. He would likely have reported the details of the meeting then.Kushner's official account to Congress on his dealings with Kremlin representatives is 11 pages lon</b></span><b>g. </b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's a flat, sterile document, clearly reviewed by his lawyers. In his version, there was no wrongdoing, just a series of inconsequential meetings during a hectic campaign. Kushner said in written evidence to Congress that he even forgot Kislyak's name. There was no secret channel. Nor did he rely on "Russian funds" to finance his business. In short, a nothing burger with Russian dressing.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Despite these protestations, it's clear Russian intelligence found it easy to access Trump's inner circle. Ambassadors, lawyers, bankers...all made their way to Trump Tower in 2016. All were welcomed and listened to.<b> Gorkov was part of them, but the cast also included Kislyak, Veselnitskaya and the Agalarovs and other unknown actors working behind the scenes.</b></span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Targeting Kushner was logical. He was soon to become a federal employee. His White House portfolio included tax policy, the military and international affairs. In a protean White House—where anyone could be fired—Kushner's status as the president's son-in-law made him unfireable.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">During his meetings with Russians, Kushner apparently said nothing about Moscow's attack on American democracy during the presidential campaign, nothing about hacking the Democratic National Committee or circulating fake news on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. He also kept his meetings with the Russians secret. So did the Trump administration. <b>In his security clearance form, Kushner didn't mention Gorkov or Kislyak</b>. (Kushner said this was an accident, an administrative error by an underling.)The American public found out about these meetings only because of a steady stream of leaks—leaks that would eventually offer Mueller some important clues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ursa Major</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, the questions Mueller is asking seem to be the same questions that led us to meet with Christopher Steele last year. Namely: Was Trump hiding a connection to Russian money? And if so, was Moscow blackmailing him with that information? And how?On the campaign trail—and well before he became a candidate—Trump's praise of Putin was effusive and unwavering. He called him a strong leader and claimed they'd spoken and gotten along well. His fidelity to Russia's president has continued in the White House, even as he lambasted other world leaders, turned on aides and allies, fired the head of the FBI and publicly humiliated his attorney general. Shunning Putin would have been the savvy political move, but he has refused to do so.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Mueller, then FBI director, testifies during a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee on Capitol Hill, on May 16, 2013. Mueller appears to be following the money, trying to determine if Trump has a financial connection to Russia.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Republicans have criticized Steele's dossier because the DNC and Clinton campaign helped pay for it. <b>But the document offers a compelling explanation for the president's unusual behavior vis-à-vis Russia. First, there was Moscow's alleged kompromat operation against Trump going back three decades. If the president had indulged in compromising behavior, whether sexual or otherwise, Putin likely knew of it. Second, </b>there was the <b>cash from Russian oligarchs that went into Trump's real estate ventures</b>—and the prospect of a lucrative deal to build a hotel and tower in Moscow, a project that was still being negotiated as Trump addressed adoring crowds on the campaign trial. <b>Finally, there were the Deutsche Bank loans that rescued Trump after the crash.</b> They had come from a bank that was simultaneously laundering billions of dollars of Russian money. (Though parts of Steele's dossier remain unverified, some of his claims have been substantiated. The former spy told his friends he believes the document is about 70 to 90 percent accurate.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And then there are the people in the president's inner circle. Wherever you look, there is a link to Russia. His pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the country's Order of Friendship. Former national security adviser? Flynn, a beneficiary of undeclared Russian money. Campaign manager? Manafort, longtime confidant to ex–Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, whom Russia tried to recruit as a spy. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Cohen, who sent emails to Putin's press secretary. Business partner? Sater, who sent Flynn a plan to lift Russian sanctions. And so on<b>.It was almost as if Putin had picked Trump's Cabinet</b>. The U.S. president, of course, did the choosing, but the pattern of all these individuals, and their alignment with Russian interests, forms a constellation. Call it Ursa Major. A big Russian bear Robert Mueller is now hunting—at Deutsche Bank and beyond.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article was adapted from Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Trump Win by Luke Harding</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></p>

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<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><b>Sergey Gorkov</b></font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A graduate of the FSB’s finishing school for spies, Gorkov heads </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">V</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">nesh</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">e</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">conom</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">b</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ank, Russia’s state-owned development bank—effectively Putin’s slush fund.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> With its board seeded with Kremlin ministers, including Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, the bank was the majority lender for the Sochi Olympics, has helped Russia gain financial power in Ukraine, and is currently under US sanctions because of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. In December 2016, Gorkov attended a meeting with Jared Kushner brokered by Kislyak—after which Gorkov appears to have gone directly to meet with Putin.</span></font></p>

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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But if this were merely about essentially aboveboard foreign policy discussions, it’s unclear why they would have had to happen with such secrecy, through a back channel. (Rather than just waiting nine days for Trump to be sworn in.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Was money involved? The Russian who went to the meeting, Kirill Dmitriev, is a moneyman, after all. So is <b>Sergey Gorkov, who met with Jared Kushner in Trump Tower weeks earlier. What’s more, Dmitriev’s fund was until 2016 actually part of the Russian government-owned bank Gorkov runs, VEB.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Furthermore, this week’s Times report says that Mueller “appears to be examining the influence of foreign money on Mr. Trump’s political activities,” and has previously asked whether Nader “funneled money from the Emirates to the president’s political efforts.” So he does seem to be following some sort of money trail.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Finally, and perhaps most obviously of all, there’s the possibility that this happened so that Trump’s team and Putin’s could secretly communicate about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. So far, there’s no specific evidence that that’s the case. But we clearly haven’t heard the last of the Seychelles meeting.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">src?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div>

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<p style=" margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And this tired old GOP mantra about running government like a business is like saying that you should build boats like you wash dishes. They are completely different tasks. And Kushner is a particularly poor choice, even if you buy the argument. As Maloy pointed out, Kushner is a lot like his father-in-law in that he inherited his father’s New Jersey real estate business and, well, that’s about it.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Actually, after Chris Christie put Kushner’s father in jail for corruption (it’s a <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-fathers-scandal-the-genesis-of-jared-kushners-unflinching-loyalty/2016/11/27/1e9497ba-b378-11e6-840f-e3ebab6bcdd3_story.html?utm_term%3D.23685e9d3a2f&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNE_ELOuTThkc0u6C0vm_tF1Pa9RAQ" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-fathers-scandal-the-genesis-of-jared-kushners-unflinching-loyalty/2016/11/27/1e9497ba-b378-11e6-840f-e3ebab6bcdd3_story.html?utm_term=.23685e9d3a2f" target="blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">long story</a>), Jared took the reins of the business and jumped into Manhattan real estate where he is known for <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/realestate/commercial/the-kushner-companies-deal-for-666-fifth-avenue-avoids-foreclosure.html&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNEPBVabIsy2UNMa93QJkxkJRut5uQ" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/realestate/commercial/the-kushner-companies-deal-for-666-fifth-avenue-avoids-foreclosure.html" target="blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">one very big deal</a>. Unfortunately, also like his father-in-law, it turns out Kushner is not very good at what he does. Kushner <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/kushners-troubled-tower-debt-empty-offices-and-rising-fees&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNGmO4rcMYbJQf4oxxWdwn8xIhpRUw" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/kushners-troubled-tower-debt-empty-offices-and-rising-fees" target="blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">sold his stake in that project</a> to his family recently, ostensibly to avoid a conflict of interest. It was actually a smart business decision because <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/kushners-troubled-tower-debt-empty-offices-and-rising-fees&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNGmO4rcMYbJQf4oxxWdwn8xIhpRUw" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/kushners-troubled-tower-debt-empty-offices-and-rising-fees" target="blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">the building’s finances</a> are in big trouble at the moment. The <b>Kushners may receive a <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/nyregion/kushner-companies-anbang-insurance-group.html&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNFKK3K3zmp7I38lEvvE-1dZtgREMw" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/nyregion/kushner-companies-anbang-insurance-group.html" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">bailout from a powerful Chinese insurance company</a>.</b> So it’s a good thing that we’ve decided that Republicans enriching their immediate family while in office isn’t corruption — or that might look bad.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kushner’s new job is just an addition to his already bulging portfolio. Recall that a while back he was given the special task of <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.766226&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNFW-Lqdiw-x3x-sCl-43qTkGhzKXg" href="http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.766226" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue</a>. One might assume he’s even less qualified for that job than he is for heading up a “SWAT team” of business leaders, but apparently being an observant Jew is all that’s required. It’s surprising that nobody ever thought of that before.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Monday we found out <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/27/press-briefing-press-secretary-sean-spicer-3272017-29&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNGzgn65QmtDky1SM41u4QlqfFkEJg" href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/27/press-briefing-press-secretary-sean-spicer-3272017-29" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">from White House press secretary Sean Spicer</a> that “throughout the campaign and the transition, Jared served as the official primary point of contact with foreign governments and officials until we had State Department officials up.” That’s correct: This 36-year-old with no experience in government or foreign affairs served as the new president’s primary contact with foreign governments. Apparently, no one who knew what he (or she) was doing was available.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This important task seems to have landed young Kushner into a spot of trouble, however. We also learned on Monday that the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating possible Russian ties to the Trump campaign, has asked to speak to Kushner about his meeting during the transition with the Russian ambassador. Apparently there was more than one, including a meeting </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">previously unacknowledged by the Trump administration with a Russian banker named

...head of the state-owned development bank Vnesheconombank, which just happens to be one of the Russian banks facing U.S. sanctions(<b>Gorkov</b> is reportedly close to Vladimir Putin and graduated from what was formerly the KGB academy.

===</span></font></p></div>

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/03/27/senate-committee-question-jared-kushner-over-russia-meetings</font>...</div><div>
</div><div>Senate investigators plan to question Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a close adviser, as part of their broad inquiry into ties between Trump associates and Russian officials or others linked to the Kremlin, according to administration and congressional officials.</div><div>
 

<p times="times" new="new" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.125em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); list-style: none; line-height: 1.75em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The White House Counsel’s Office was informed this month that the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, wanted to question Kushner about meetings he arranged with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, according to the government officials. The meetings, which took place during the transition, included a previously unreported sit-down with the head of Russia’s state-owned development bank.

Until now, the White House had acknowledged only an early December meeting between Kislyak and Kushner, which occurred at Trump Tower and was also attended by Michael T. Flynn, who would briefly serve as the national security adviser.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Later that month, though, Kislyak requested a second meeting, which Kushner asked a deputy to attend in his stead, officials said. <b>At Kislyak’s request, Kushner later met with Sergey N. Gorkov, the chief of Vnesheconombank, </b>which the United States placed on its sanctions list after President Vladimir Putin of Russia annexed Crimea and began meddling in Ukraine.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A White House spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, confirmed those meetings, saying in an interview that nothing of consequence occurred and portraying them as routine diplomatic encounters that went nowhere. </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But Gorkov, who previously served as deputy chairman of the board at Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank,</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> said in a statement issued by </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">his bank that he met with Kushner in Kushner’s capacity as the then-chief executive of Kushner Cos., </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">his family’s sprawling real estate empire.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Members of presidential transition teams routinely meet with foreign officials, and there is nothing inherently improper about sitting down with the Russian ambassador. Part of Kushner’s role during the campaign and the transition was to serve as a chief conduit to foreign governments and officials, and Hicks said he met with dozens of officials from a wide range of countries.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She added that Kushner was willing to talk to Senate investigators about the meetings with Kislyak and the banker, saying, “He isn’t trying to hide anything and wants to be transparent.”..[boston globe]Still, meetings between Trump associates and Russian officials or others linked to Putin are now of heightened interest as several congressional committees and FBI investigators try to determine the scope of the Russian intervention in the election and links between Russians and anyone around Trump.<the senate="Senate" panel="panel" s="s" decision="decision" to="to" question="question" kushner="Kushner" would="would" make="make" him="him" the="the" closest="closest" person="person" president="president" be="be" called="called" upon="upon" in="in" any="any" of="of" investigations="investigations" and="and" only="only" one="one" currently="currently" serving="serving" white="White" house="House" officials="officials" who="who" initially="initially" described="described" that="that" inquiry="inquiry" new="New" york="York" times="Times" did="did" so="so" on="on" condition="condition" anonymity="anonymity" order="order" speak="speak" candidly="candidly" about="about" trump="Trump" son-in-law="son-in-law" /></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The FBI declined to comment. There are no indications that Kushner is a focus of its investigation, and Hicks said he had not been questioned by the bureau.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Kislyak</b>’s contacts with Trump administration officials have proved problematic: Flynn was fired for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of the conversations he had with the Russian envoy, claiming he had not discussed the sanctions against Russia when communications intercepts showed he had.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from any Russian inquiries led by the Justice Department after he failed to disclose at his Senate confirmation hearing that he had met with Kislyak during the campaign.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The meetings Kushner arranged with Kislyak all took place in December, during the transition,</b> Hicks said. Kushner attended the initial meeting with Kislyak to explore whether a channel could be set up between the Russian government and the incoming administration to improve relations between the United States and Russia, Hicks said. They also discussed how the United States and Russia could cooperate on issues in the Middle East, an area Kushner has been deputized to take the lead on, she said.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kislyak asked for a second meeting to “deliver a message,” Hicks said. Kushner sent Avrahm Berkowitz, a White House aide and longtime associate. At that session, </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Kislyak told Berkowitz that he wanted Kushner to meet Gorkov, the Russian banker, </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Hicks said.</span></font>

<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gorkov is a graduate of the academy of Federal Security Service of Russia, a training ground for Russian intelligence and security forces. And as the head of Vnesheconombank, Gorkov presides over a bank whose supervisory board is controlled by members of Putin’s government, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. It has been used to bail out oligarchs favored by Putin, as well as to help fund pet projects like the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.</font></span>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Around the time the Russian ambassador asked that Kushner meet with Gorkov, US intelligence agencies were concluding that Russian spies, acting on the orders of Putin, had sought to sway the election by hacking political targets, like the Democratic National Committee, and passing stolen emails to WikiLeaks.</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kushner had not yet stepped aside as chief executive of Kushner Cos., which was trying to attract investment for the company’s crown jewel, an overleveraged Manhattan office tower on Fifth Avenue. The company was in the midst of negotiations to redevelop the building with Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese company with ties to the Beijing government.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Senate investigators plan to ask Kushner if he discussed ways to secure additional financing for the building during his meeting with the Russian banker, a government official said. Hicks said that no such business was discussed at the half-hour session, during which Gorkov expressed a desire for an open dialogue. Nor did the issue of the <b>US sanctions against Russian entities like Vnesheconombank</b> arise, she added.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It really wasn’t much of a conversation,” she said.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gorkov, in the statement, went further. He said that bank managers, as part of a new strategy for the institution, met with international financial institutions in Europe, Asia and the United States to talk about promising trends and sectors. He also met with representatives of “business circles of the U.S., including with the head of Kushner Cos., Jared Kushner.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And in an interview on the state-owned Rossiya 24 TV channel on<b> Dec. 29, the same month that he met with Kushner, Gorkov said he hoped that the situation caused by Ukraine sanctions imposed by the United States against Russian banks like his “would change for the better.”</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The inquiry into Kushner’s dealings with the ambassador and Gorkov may further complicate Trump’s efforts to move past the Russia situation. Last week,<b> FBI Director James B. Comey confirmed in testimony to Congress that his agency had begun a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference </b>and whether any associates of the president might have colluded with the Russian government.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has been under scrutiny in the FBI investigation because of his ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.</b> In August, he was forced to step down as the chairman of Trump’s campaign amid reports that his name emerged in a secret ledger in Ukraine listing off-the-books payments for consulting work he did for a Russian-backed government there. He has denied any wrongdoing and has said he never worked for the Russian government.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Other Trump associates who have been drawn into the FBI investigation include <b>Roger J. Stone Jr</b>., a longtime Republican operative who has acknowledged contacts with Guccifer 2.0, the mysterious online figure that is believed to be a front for Russian intelligence officials, and Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the campaign who has done extensive business in Russia. Both have denied doing anything unlawful.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Senate investigation is proceeding on a separate track from the FBI investigation while drawing on some of the same material, like routine electronic surveillance of the Russian ambassador and his embassy cohort. The committee chairman, Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, has told the White House he plans to interview all Trump aides who had contact with Russian officials, according to White House officials. Depending on those interviews, some may be called upon to testify in closed-door sessions.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Burr and Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat</b> who is the committee’s vice chairman, said in a statement: “Mr. Kushner has volunteered to be interviewed as part of the committee’s investigation into the Russian activities surrounding the 2016 election.” They added that their inquiry would “follow the intelligence wherever it leads.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The extent of Kushner’s interactions with Kislyak caught some senior members of Trump’s White House team off guard, in part because he did not mention them last month during a debate then consuming the White House: how to handle the disclosures about Flynn’s interactions with the Russian ambassador.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hicks said that Trump had authorized Kushner to have meetings with foreign officials that he felt made sense, and to report back to him if those meetings produced anything of note. She said that because in Kushner’s view the meetings were inconsequential, it did not occur to him to mention them to senior staff members earlier.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“There was nothing to get out in front of on this,” she said....</font></p>

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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/politics/senate-jared-kushner-russia.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/politics/senate-jared-kushner-russia.html</a></font></div>

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