paul manft 2 bak
619 capt
5/18
all 4 capt 7/18
must not lose track of manfort origins in ukraine BLT, it was a mirror operation to deflect corruption charges
FIRTASH PAID MANAFORT? FOR?
MUELLER WENT AFTER OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, TOLD FBI DOING CTR-INTELL BUT NO ONE DID?!
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:{Alternet+ no lnx
Trump’s appointees are the Trojan horse that could lead to America’s strategic collapse
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Thom Hartmann November 21, 2024
The mainstream media is baffled: Why would Trump promote candidates to oversee critical agencies with millions of employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets who have little to no management experience and have openly expressed hostility toward the institutions they’ll oversee?
I’ve seen legendary reporter Bob Woodward, who wrote several books about Trump, on three different TV shows this week asking to the effect of, “What could Trump possibly gain from these incompetent appointments?
If he just wanted loyalty, there’s no shortage of rational, competent members of the military and intelligence community who’re loyal to Trump.
So why is he selecting people like Hegseth, Gaetz, and Gabbard to run agencies that could directly involve confrontations with Russia?
Trump wants Gaetz for the job as our nation’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General (who oversees the FBI), where he could block the FBI from investigating Trump’s embrace of Putin and Russia’s spying and disinformation efforts here in the US.
Why? Gaetz, after all, has called for Trump to “defund, get rid of, abolish the FBI…”; he apparently hates the agency that investigated and threatened to prosecute him.
Pete Hegseth, who Trump wants to put in charge of our Department of Defense, is openly critical of our NATO allies, saying they are, “self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to.”
:
Who else hates NATO? Vladimir Putin. Hegseth has also echoed Putin’s assertion that he doesn’t have designs on the Baltic states, arguing that he doubted Putin would go “much further” than the Polish border.
And both Hegseth and Gaetz have a history of lurid, possibly illegal sexual activity that could subject them to blackmail by a foreign power…like Russia.
Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump wants to put in charge of all 18 of America’s intelligence agencies — giving her full access to America’s darkest secrets and our spies buried deep within Russia and China — has repeatedly and openly embraced Vladimir Putin’s positions on world affairs.
Regarding Ukraine, she argued that Russia was forced to invade that country because, echoing Putin, she falsely claimed Ukraine was developing (with US help) biological weapons and conspiring with NATO to put troops on Russia’s border.
Former Secretary of State Clinton said Russia was “grooming” Gabbard, and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was equally blunt:
“There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”
And JD Vance, also selected by Trump and now our vice-president elect, has famously said:
“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” no doubt bringing cheers from the Kremlin.
So, what’s really going on here?
Is it possible that Trump isn’t trolling us or trying to do “dominance plays” with Congress, but actually wants these people to injure or destroy the agencies he’s putting them in charge of?
Is it even conceivable that Trump, in league with Putin (or at least sharing his goal of weakening and damaging America), actually wants our intelligence, defense, and investigative agencies to be gutted to the point of impotence?
That these appointees could be Trojan horses he’s planning to use to destroy America from within?
That he’s that angry with the country whose past leaders have ridiculed him, whose elites have rejected him all his life, and that has even tried to put him in prison?
That he’d like our country — which he disdains — to be brought to its knees?
That his loyalty, perhaps for years, has been to a country and system of government very different from America and what our founders envisioned?
In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).
Just months ago, we discovered that he and Elon Musk have both been having regular, secret conversations with Putin for at least the past two years.
This embrace of a foreign dictator first cranked into visibility in 2016.
The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documented more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump 2016 campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to that year’s election.
The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.
Throughout the campaign, he let them know where Trump needed help, and when. Speculation is that they used that information for their successful 2016 Facebook campaigns.
Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison; he’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.
As The New York Times noted in 2020:
“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”
There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Washington Post reported two years ago last August that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.
Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or for bragging rights to impress dignitaries, businessmen, or ladies he brings back to his room?
Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can make money off them.
“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”
When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled by the Trump administration.
The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to criminally obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit former FBI Director Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.
As the Mueller Report noted:
“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.
“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”
It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:
“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence agencies that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.
And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.
In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli/American asset/spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.
The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.
That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that another longtime American spy, this one buried deep inside the Kremlin, was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.
As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):
“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.
“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”
The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.
Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’ translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the large empty ballroom in which they met.
The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:
“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”
Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press he believed it was a “personal” letter of some sort.
Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:
“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:
“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed that information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”
Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.
In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.
In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.
As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:
“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”
On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.
The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…
But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all of our spies) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Did Trump ever return that document to the intelligence agencies? I can find no record of a news story suggesting that he did. It appears to have vanished.
Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:
“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.
“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”
If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, a Trojan horse right here in America, how long might this have been going on?
Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bildwhen the StB’s files were declassified.
It began when Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey after she fell down a flight of stairs and died.
Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.
As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:
“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”
An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.
Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.
Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.
The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.
Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.
Trump’s ad laid it on the line:
“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”
As The Guardian reported in 2021:
“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.
“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”
Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.
In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor; he also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also charged as an unregistered agent of a foreign government (Turkey) while working in the White House: prosecutors said he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.
Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.
The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957.
It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.
And it wouldn’t stop there. As Donald Moynihan wrote for Slate about this “Schedule F” Executive Order:
“Schedule F would burn down the civil service system. It would be a government of the lawless leading the incompetent. …
“Government data unfavorable to the administration would be suppressed or altered. Public statements about what government actors are actually doing would become rarer and less believable. And questionable actions by the security forces to target political enemies and protect friends could become routine.
“Career public employees would be forced to choose between their oath to the Constitution—in effect, their oath to serve the public—and keeping their job. They will have their loyalty questioned based on which political organizations they associated with in college, or voter registration, or social media activity. Some will not go along with the program. They will be fired. Or never join the government in the first place.”
Trump didn’t have the time to push that executive order through the federal bureaucracy, but it gives us a clear picture of his vision for a second Trump administration, particularly since this is still on the Project 2025 agenda.
Campaigning to destroy NATO; opposing aid to Ukraine; demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential; utterly destroying our senior-most intelligence and military agencies; installing Trojan horses to lead them: Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”
What are Trump’s real goals with these appointments?
As the old saying goes, “Watch what he does, not what he says.”
NOW READ: Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America
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an 920
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/ex-top-prosecutor-mueller-didnt-investigate-trump-finances-or-interview-ivanka-over-fears-of-a-blowback/
Igor Derysh / Salon September 23, 2020
A former prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team said in a new book that the special counsel decided not to pursue President Donald Trump’s finances or interviews with his children over…
a former prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team said in a new book that the special counsel decided not to pursue President Donald Trump’s finances or interviews with his children over fears that the president would shut down the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Andrew Weissmann, who :{led the prosecution of former Trump campaign chief :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Paul Manafort:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}:, blamed Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s top deputy in the investigation, for stopping investigators from looking into the president’s finances in his new book “Where the Law Ends,” according to excerpts published by The Washington Post.
Weissmann wrote that Zebley also pushed another prosecutor to “stand down” from pursuing Trump Organization documents because it risked affecting the negotiations with the president’s legal team to set up an interview with Trump. Trump ultimately did not appear for an interview and submitted written answers largely claiming not to recall key details.
“Aaron had a way of gaslighting you, of making you question your own reality, that you were being too aggressive in your drive to pursue leads and push harder — like you were not enough of an adult,” he wrote. "Repeatedly during our 22 months in operation, we would reach some critical juncture in our investigation only to have Aaron say that we could not take a particular action because it risked aggravating the president beyond some undefined breaking point,” he added, according to a New York Times report on the book.
Weissmann also argued that Mueller was wrong not to issue a subpoena to compel Trump’s testimony.
“What are we saying to future presidents, and to future investigators, who will have our decision thrown in their face?” Weissmann said he told Mueller. “If we do not subpoena the president in this investigation, how can others justify the need to do so?”
Weissmann said he wonders whether the team had “given it our all” in light of the questions left unanswered by the probe.
“As proud as I am of the work our team did — the unprecedented number of people we indicted and convicted and in record speed for any similar investigation — I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more,” Weissmann wrote.
The former prosecutor listed a number of unanswered questions left open by the decision not to pursue Trump’s financial records.”We still do not know if there are other financial ties between the president and either the Russian government or Russian oligarchs,” he wrote. “We do not know whether he paid bribes to foreign officials to secure favorable treatment for his business interests, a potential violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that would provide leverage against the president. We do not know if he had other Russian business deals in the works at the time he was running for president, how they might have aided or constrained his campaign, or even if they are continuing to influence his presidency.”
Weissman noted elsewhere in the book that the same business account used to send hush money payments to Stormy Daniels after her alleged affair with Trump was also used to receive “payments linked to a Russian oligarch,” according to excerpts published by The New York Times.
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ref 2
no lnx
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/politics/andrew-weissmann-mueller.html
Mueller’s Team Should Have Done More to Investigate Trump-Russia Links, Top Aide Says
A new book by one of the special counsel’s top deputies, Andrew Weissmann, is the first inside account of the investigation.
“We could have done more,” Andrew Weissmann, who was one of the top aides in the special counsel’s office, writes in a new book.
By Charlie Savage
Sept. 21, 2020
WASHINGTON — The team led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, failed to do everything it could to determine what happened in the 2016 election, shying away from steps like subpoenaing President Trump and scrutinizing his finances out of fear he would fire them, one of Mr. Mueller’s top lieutenants argued in the first insider account of the inquiry.
“Had we used all available tools to uncover the truth, undeterred by the onslaught of the president’s unique powers to undermine our efforts?” wrote the former prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, in a new book, adding, “I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more.”
The team took elaborate steps to protect its files of evidence from the risk that the Justice Department might destroy them if Mr. Trump fired them and worked to keep reporters and the public from learning what they were up to, Mr. Weissmann wrote in “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation,” which Random House will publish next week.
While he speaks reverently of Mr. Mueller, he also says his boss’s diffidence made him ill-suited for aspects of shepherding the politically charged investigation. He saw Mr. Mueller and his deputy, Aaron M. Zebley, as overly cautious.
Mr. Weissmann also defended against accusations by the president and his allies that he and other investigators were politically biased “angry Democrats”; Mr. Weissmann said his personal views had no bearing on the crimes that Russian operatives and Trump aides committed.
And he elevates particular details — for example, emphasizing that the same business account that sent hush payments to an adult film star who alleged an extramarital affair with Mr. Trump had also received “payments linked to a Russian oligarch.” The president has denied the affair; his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen controlled the account. Mr. Mueller transferred the Cohen matter to prosecutors in New York.
Previously a mafia and Enron prosecutor and then a lawyer at the F.B.I. for Mr. Mueller, who was the bureau’s director for 12 years, Mr. Weissmann ran one of three major units for the special counsel’s office. His “Team M” prosecuted Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for numerous financial crimes. The goal was to flip him and learn whatever he knew about any Trump campaign links to Russia.
Mr. Manafort had worked for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, and the investigation uncovered ties by his business partner, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, to Russian intelligence. The book builds toward investigators’ discovery that Mr. Manafort had shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, who flew to the United States to meet with Mr. Manafort during the campaign, asking whether Mr. Trump would permit a peace plan for Russia to essentially take over all of eastern Ukraine.
But while admitting this much, Mr. Manafort — seeing the dangle of a potential pardon from Mr. Trump — refused to cooperate further. Investigators did not obtain any final puzzle pieces and lacked the evidence to charge anyone in the campaign with a criminal conspiracy involving Russia’s covert electoral assistance.
“It would seem to require significant audacity — or else, leverage — for another nation to even put such a request before a presidential candidate,” Mr. Weissmann wrote of Mr. Kilimnik’s request. “This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t know to this day, monumentally disconcerting: Namely, why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to this Russian proposal if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return?”
Mr. Weissmann explained the significance of Mr. Manafort’s interactions with Mr. Kilimnik — also a major focus of a recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, which explicitly labeled Mr. Kilimnik a Russian intelligence agent — more clearly than the Mueller report did.
Mr. Mueller had strictly forbidden leaks, and the special counsel team took extraordinary care to protect the high-profile, high-stakes investigation, Mr. Weissmann wrote. They kept window blind slats tilted at an angle to keep out prying eyes, shutting out natural light. They concocted an “almost comically elaborate and surreal” plan to sneak in “through the many hidden arteries of the courthouse” to obtain a grand jury indictment without tipping off reporters.
And worried about the possibility that Mr. Trump would fire them and the Justice Department would then seal off or destroy their evidence, the Mueller team members packed their numerous applications to judges for search warrants with extensive, up-to-date details about their investigation — ensuring they backed up their work beyond the reach of the executive branch.
Ty Cobb, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, also privately promised to be a “canary in the coal mine” and provide a heads up if Mr. Trump was going to fire the special counsel team, according to Mr. Weissmann. In an email, Mr. Cobb wrote that he “never made the commitment” described by Mr. Weissmann.
The investigation played out against the backdrop of regular vilification of the Mueller team by Mr. Trump and his allies like Fox News’s Sean Hannity — who turned out to be in regular contact with Mr. Manafort cooking up a “smear campaign” over text messages. Mr. Weissmann, a major target, wrote that such “ad hominem” insinuations of bias appealed to emotion rather than reason.
“I am a registered Democrat,” he wrote. “Does this make Paul Manafort or any of the other 32 people our office charged any less guilty? Did Russia not attack our democracy and disrupt our election with its self-described online information warfare operation? Which facts that we alleged in our various indictments — and to which many of those we indicted, including Manafort, would plead guilty — did our attackers believe were invented as a result of our alleged bias as ‘angry Democrats?’”
Mr. Trump’s allies have recently pointed with alarm to documents showing that cellphones issued to Mr. Mueller’s team were erased during the investigation; Mr. Weissmann twice entered an incorrect passcode too often, triggering a security measure that erased his phone. In an interview, he portrayed the concerns as a “tempest in a teapot” and said his understanding was that all emails and other such data from phones were backed up. He called on the Justice Department to release information about the special counsel’s data backup system.
Mr. Weissmann also wrote that he is not “anti-Trump” but rather “pro the rule of law.” Still, the distinction is less than clear in a book that also portrays Mr. Trump as a liar and a dangerous demagogue trying “to peel the world around him away from the rule of law — away from reason itself — and mold it to accommodate his desire for unchecked power.”
Mr. Weissmann was equally scathing about Attorney General William P. Barr, calling him an enabler and likening his misleading letter last spring about the then-still-secret Mueller report as a betrayal and “gut punch.”
Mr. Weissmann also criticized colleagues, portraying the special counsel team as divided between aggressive investigators like him, the F.B.I. special agent Omer Meisel and the prosecutor Jeannie Rhee — who headed “Team R,” which investigated Russian issues other than those centered on Manafort — and far more risk-averse law enforcement officials like Mr. Zebley who pulled punches.
In one episode in 2017, the Mueller team issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank for information about Mr. Manafort’s income in Ukraine. Deutsche Bank had also lent large sums to the Trump Organization, and the White House somehow found out about the still-secret subpoenas — though not their focus. The White House demanded to know what investigators were doing, andMr. Mueller authorized Mr. Zebley to tell the White House that they had not been seeking Mr. Trump’s financial information.
“At that point, any financial investigation of Trump was put on hold,” Mr. Weissmann writes. “That is, we backed down — the issue was simply too incendiary; the risk, too severe.”
The book provides many other examples of concessions large and small. Investigators did not try to question Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka — who had spoken in the lobby to a delegation of Russians who came to Trump Tower in June 2016 to meet with campaign leaders who had been promised that they were offering dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.
They “feared that hauling her in for an interview would play badly to the already antagonistic right-wing press — look how they’re roughing up the president’s daughter — and risk enraging Trump, provoking him to shut down the special counsel’s office once and for all,” he wrote.
Similarly, they did not subpoena the Trump Organization for emails about its efforts to develop a Trump-branded building in Moscow, which were active deep into the 2016 campaign.
And they did not immunize Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., a step that would have prevented him from being able to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying about matters like the Trump Tower meeting. Bound by grand-jury secrecy rules, Mr. Weissmann did not come out and say whether Donald Trump Jr. was threatened with or actually issued a subpoena and used his right against self-incrimination to repel it.
Mr. Weissmann laid much of the blame for what he saw as a pattern of timidity on Mr. Zebley, portraying him as a primary decision maker. “Repeatedly during our 22 months in operation, we would reach some critical juncture in our investigation only to have Aaron say that we could not take a particular action because it risked aggravating the president beyond some undefined breaking point.”
Mr. Weissmann acknowledged, but did not clearly address, concerns that the aging Mr. Mueller had lost a step, both declaring that he was capable of making the tough decisions despite “speculative concerns” about his health but also describing him in one scene as looking drained and worn down by his years of grueling public service.
While Mr. Zebley obtained Mr. Mueller’s sanction for many of his cautious directives, in one striking episode, Mr. Zebley appeared in Mr. Weissmann’s telling to have unilaterally agreed — without Mr. Mueller’s knowledge — to a request by the office of the deputy attorney general overseeing them, Rod J. Rosenstein, not to coordinate with state prosecutors “as it would undermine the president’s pardon power.”
Two other former officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, disputed the account. Mr. Rosenstein did not decline any request to share information with state prosecutors, a person familiar with his thinking wrote in an email.
Another person familiar with how the special counsel’s office interacted with Mr. Rosenstein’s office denied that there had been any agreement about sharing evidence with or withholding it from state prosecutors, and said Mr. Zebley had consulted with Mr. Mueller on every material decision.
On the failure to subpoena Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller was determined to avoid “any public disagreements” with Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Weissmann wrote. Because the special counsel regulations required telling Congress about any instance in which Mr. Rosenstein overruled him, Mr. Mueller never actually proposed subpoenaing Mr. Trump, instead coyly asking what Mr. Rosenstein’s reaction would be. Mr. Rosenstein just kept demurring.
In the end, Mr. Weissmann said in an interview, the caution was more justified early on to avoid provoking Mr. Trump into firing them before they could get going. But he and Ms. Rhee, among others, believed the office should have been willing to be more aggressive later on, after they had learned much of what Russia had done and had already used indictments to drag it into public view.
“We would have subpoenaed the president after he refused our accommodations, even if that risked us being fired,” he wrote. “It just didn’t sit right. We were left feeling like we had let down the American public, who were counting on us to give it our all.”
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/report-points-to-trump-1-as-the-ringleader-of-a-global-conspiracy/
"huge" rudy
no lnx
Report points to Trump, ‘-1,’ as the ringleader of a global conspiracy
Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board December 4, 2019
The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.
But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.
The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.
Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.
As mentioned in previous editions of the Editorial Board, Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.
This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.
On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”
Coincidence? Unlikely.
The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.
It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.
Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.
The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.
Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”
I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.
This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That wonGiuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)
As I said, giant.
But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.
TRUMP REPEATS PUTIN LINE THAT CRIMEA WANTS TO BE RUSSIAN
MANAFORT WAS UNEMPLOYED AND THUS OFFERED TO WORK FOR TRUMP CAMP FOR FREE (but owed millions to deripaska oligarch, so feed info; why wd that be worth millions unless putin could use it to get trump aND RID of sanctions, even early crimea ones could set off russian recession?!
impeach BS BO gave blankets while trump gave javelins (actually extortion)
maidan revo 20124, YaNU dic fled to russia 2/22/14; replaced in election by poroshenko
invaded 2014; RNC convention 2015, trump back channels to putin kremlin multiple, NRA, blackwater...
The Ukrainian revolution of 2014 (also known as the Euromaidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity; Ukrainian: Революція гідності, Revoliutsiia hidnosti) took place in Ukraine in February 2014, when a series of violent events involving protesters, riot police, and unknown shooters in the capital, Kiev, culminated in the ousting of the elected Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, MANAFORT and the overthrow of the Ukrainian Government.[34]
2014 Ukrainian revolution - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › 2014_Ukrainian_revolution
2.
:{Jump to :(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:Advance toward **Maidan** - The Ukrainian revolution of 2014 (also known as the Euromaidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity; Ukrainian: Революція гідності, Revoliutsiia hidnosti) took place in Ukraine in February 2014, when a series of violent events involving protesters, riot police, and unknown shooters in the capital, Kiev, culminated in ...
List of people killed during the ... · Berkut (special police force) · Arseniy Yatsenyuk
==
new 1119
manafort, solomon black ledger nunes
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/19/republicans-use-impeachment-hearings-smear-ukrainian-helped-expose-manafort
no lnx many
Republicans Urge Americans to Follow Them Through the Fox News Looking Glass on Ukraine
Robert Mackey
November 19 2019
AMERICANS WHO DO NOT get all of their information about Ukraine from Fox News or right-wing Twitter and Facebook feeds have no doubt been baffled by the Republican cross-examination of witnesses called to give public testimony in the House impeachment hearings.
There have been frequent, context-free references to something called “the black ledger,” invocations of the supposedly nefarious role of George Soros in supporting Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, and even suggestions that Donald Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, who is serving seven and a half years in federal prison for financial crimes stemming from his work in Ukraine, might have been framed.
All the President’s Crimes
Read Our Complete Coverage
All the President’s Crimes
The resulting spectacle has confused viewers unfamiliar with a series of conspiratorial reports about Ukraine from the conservative columnist John Solomon, whose work has been promoted relentlessly on Fox, and caused many to simply tune the proceedings out. Virginia Tilley, a political scientist at Southern Illinois University, suggested on Twitter that making the impeachment hearings nearly unwatchable might even be the Republican strategy.
Virginia Tilley
@unpetrifiedop
Scariest thing about our national crisis: lying GOP has made even impeachment hearing so repellent that few can bear to listen. They win by just repelling us with inane babble, demoralizing the principled with shrieking stupidities. Is this how democracy dies? Through BS fatigue?
This bizarre performance stretched into a second week on Tuesday, as Republicans sought to distract from the testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council expert on Ukraine, and Jennifer Williams, a Russia adviser for Vice President Mike Pence, both of whom heard President Donald Trump press his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open sham investigations of his Democratic political rivals.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the senior Republican on the House intelligence committee, devoted a significant part of his opening statement at Tuesday’s first hearing to complaining that recent criticism of Solomon’s shoddy, misleading reports on Ukraine’s supposed “meddling in the 2016 election to oppose the Trump campaign” was some sort of plot directed by the mainstream media’s Democratic “puppet masters.”
Justin Baragona
?
@justinbaragona
Devin Nunes uses his opening statement this morning to blast reporters for being very nasty and unfair to John Solomon.
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“The media,” Nunes said, “is furiously smearing and libeling Solomon.”
Nunes went on to claim that there was a “concerted campaign by the media to discredit and to disown some of their own colleagues,” including Solomon and New York Times reporter Ken Vogel. What that characterization elides, however, is that there are good reasons to question the work of both Solomon and Vogel, who have helped propel far-right conspiracy theories about Ukraine by choosing to focus on certain facts and omit others. Solomon, whose work is now being reviewed by his former employer, The Hill, also recently joined Fox News as a contributor, which makes him a primary source of information about Ukraine for Americans overly reliant on Fox News, including the president of the United States.
In the hearings, the government officials called to testify so far have seemed at a loss when asked by Republicans to comment on claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election presented as fact by the president’s defenders in Congress.
Bill Taylor, the senior American diplomat in Ukraine, looked dumbfounded last Wednesday when he was asked by Steve Castor, the lawyer for House Republicans, if he would agree that the decision by a Ukrainian journalist and lawmaker to publicize evidence of Manafort’s crimes during the 2016 campaign proved that “there were elements of the Ukrainian establishment that were out to get the president.”
Heath Mayo
@HeathMayo
In a single clip, you can see here the utter disconnect between Taylor’s reality-based worldview and the conspiracy-based partisan blinders of the current GOP. This is precisely the reaction Castor deserved.
The GOP used to be more like Taylor.
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As Fox News viewers are well aware, the so-called black ledger mentioned repeatedly by Castor refers to a book of handwritten accounting records discovered among the papers of the deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party after he fled to Russia following a popular uprising in 2014.
Those records, which were posted online by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau in August 2016, appeared to document secret payments, including $12.7 million to Yanukovych’s former political adviser, Manafort. One day after the records were made public, Sergii Leshchenko, a Ukrainian investigative journalist who was elected to parliament after the uprising, displayed pages from the ledger at a news conference in Kyiv, and Manafort resigned from Trump’s campaign.
[111819_corruption-1574129738In August 2016, Sergii Leshchenko, a Ukrainian investigative journalist then serving in parliament, showed reporters records of apparent secret payments to Paul Manafort, a former adviser to Ukraine’s deposed president. He was accompanied by Sevgil Musayeva-Borovyk, the editor of Ukrainska Pravda, which published the leaked records, and Anton Marchuk, an anti-corruption expert. Photo: Sergii Leshchenko, via YouTube]
Leshchenko, an anti-corruption activistwho continued to work as a journalist while serving in parliament, has never been, as Castor suggested, a pillar of Ukraine’s establishment, so the idea that his publication of pages from the ledger was akin to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election is absurd.
Leshchenko himself explained in a September Washington Post opinion piece that his motivation for exposing Manafort’s corruption was not, as Republicans now claim, part of a Ukrainian government plot to defeat Trump.
“I will always be angry at Manafort,” Leshchenko wrote. “His work contributed greatly to Yanukovych’s election victory in 2010; Yanukovych then used his position as president to enrich himself and his inner circle. I have no doubt that Yanukovych paid Manafort for his services out of the funds he robbed from Ukrainian taxpayers.”
“My desire to expose Manafort’s doings was motivated by the desire for justice,” he continued. “Neither Hillary Clinton, nor Joe Biden, nor John Podesta, nor George Soros asked me to publish the information from the black ledger. I wanted to obtain accountability for the lobbyist whose client immersed Ukraine in a blood bath during the Revolution of Dignity and the subsequent war in eastern Ukraine, when Yanukovych called on Russia to send troops.”
Despite claims by Manafort to the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that the ledger was a forgery, bank records described in an FBI search warrant, and reviewed by the Associated Press, confirmed that at least $1.2 million in payments listed in the records next to Manafort’s name were actually deposited in one of his firm’s bank accounts in Virginia. (A record of one of those deposits was subsequently made public by Leshchenko.)
Andrew Kramer, the New York Times foreign correspondent who first revealed the secret payments to Manafort, also reported at the time that others in Ukraine who were named in the ledger had confirmed that the records were genuine.
Undeterred by the fact that there is no credible evidence that these records were forged, the lawyer for the House Republicans suggested on Friday to Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who was forced out following a smear campaign by Trump loyalists, that “some have questioned whether the information that Mr. Leshchenko published was all correct, or whether it was doctored.” Yovanovitch, who is clearly not a dedicated viewer of Fox News, said that she had never heard that false claim.
Justin Baragona
?
@justinbaragona
So the GOP's counsel is now apparently on a fishing expedition, introducing conspiracies straight from Hannity world about the Ukrainian black ledgers featuring Paul Manafort and asking Marie Yovanovitch whether she's aware they may have been "doctored"
Embedded video
“It is a real document, with real signatures,” Leshchenko told me in a telephone interview in September, explaining that it had been examined by Ukrainian law enforcement experts. “Giuliani is continuing to misinform American society” about the ledger, Leshchenko added, “by saying it’s fraudulent.”
On Friday, Leshchenko, who has been appalled by the Republican effort to rehabilitate Manafort by attacking him, drew attention on Twitter to a section of Yovanovitch’s testimony where she told Castor: “I think from a Ukrainian perspective — I realize we are looking at this from an American perspective — from a Ukrainian perspective, what Mr. Leshchenko and others who were looking into the black ledger were most concerned about was actually not Mr. Manafort, but former president Yanukovych and his political party and the amount of money that they allegedly stole and where it went.”
Leshchenko
@Leshchenkos
To Steve Castor re his question Masha Yovanovitch. 1) Black Ledger was never found phony document. 2) Expertise of Ukraine law enforcement authorities proved that there are authentic signatures 3) Mr. Manafort was paid by money stolen from my country https://youtu.be/UbC-y-V-FtY?t=1948 …
YouTube ?@YouTube
When Castor then asked Yovanovitch if she could see why Trump might have seen the publication of records damaging Manafort by a Ukrainian lawmaker as an attack on him, the former ambassador replied that Leshchenko is an investigative journalist, “and he got access to the black ledger and he published it as I think journalists would do.”
“I don’t have any information to suggest that that was targeting President Trump,” she added.
But if there is no credible evidence that the payment records incriminating Manafort were fake, how did the president’s defenders on cable news and in the House impeachment inquiry get this idea? In an interview with CNN in September, Giuliani referred to the ledger as “a completely fraudulent document that was produced in order to begin the investigation of Manafort.” People in Ukraine who knew about this plot, he claimed, “were trying to get to us, but they were being blocked by the ambassador, who was a Obama appointee, in Ukraine, who was holding back this information.”
That was a reference to extremely dubious reporting from Washington by Solomon, who relied on the word of a disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky. Last year, Kholodnytsky was wiretapped by Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption bureau and caught on tape advising suspects in a corruption probe on how not to get caught. Kholodnytsky told Solomon that the ledger “was not authenticated.”
After Kholodnytsky was caught in that sting operation, Ambassador Yovanovitch, who was the top American diplomat in Ukraine until May, called for him to be fired. Kholodnytsky retaliated by helping Solomon and other right-wing pundits smear Yovanovitch as an anti-Trump, deep-state plotter, prompting the State Department to recall her from Kyiv.
Solomon’s other main source for the claim that the ledger was false turns out to have been Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort’s former Ukrainian business partner, who has been linked to Russian intelligence and was indicted last year and charged with obstruction of justice by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Despite the questionable nature of his sources, Solomon’s reporting that the black ledger records were fake has been accepted as fact by the president and his surrogates. In June, two years after the bank records of payments to Manafort’s firm had been revealed, Solomon appeared on Fox Business Network, telling Lou Dobbs that the black ledger “was likely false, likely fake, a fraud.”
Lou Dobbs
?
@LouDobbs
#DeepState – @jsolomonReports: “FBI agents must use evidence that’s factually true. In this case, they cited the black ledger in 4 search warrants after they knew it was false, fake & a fraud. They knew the docs were wrong & still put it in the search warrant.” #MAGA #Dobbs
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Solomon seems to have concluded that the black ledger records were fake by screening out all evidence to the contrary. That technique was on full display in a long Skype interview he conducted with Leshchenko in July, in which he essentially ignored the Ukrainian’s clear explanation that Manafort’s bank records suggested the ledger was real.
Later in that interview — which was posted on YouTube in two parts (1 and 2) — Leshchenko told Solomon that the ledger was not introduced as evidence in criminal proceedings because the chain of custody for the records was unclear (the pages in his possession had come to him in an email from an anonymous source).
Solomon responded by claiming that the ledger must be fake because the former accountant for the corrupt former president Yanukovych’s party insisted that it “was not an accurate representation of his books, and that his books, the official books of the party, burned during a looting” of the party’s headquarters in 2014.
Treating the accountant’s claim as undisputed fact, Solomon then asked Leshchenko if he had any regrets about releasing some of the ledger, “knowing that it turned out to be not an accurate representation,” of the truth. “No,” Leshchenko replied, since “we have no proof that the black ledger is a fake document.”
The smearing of Leshchenko by Solomon’s fans in Congress comes as other anti-corruption activists, like Daria Kaleniuk of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, known as Anatc, have also found themselves condemned by the president’s allies based on misleading reports from the same journalist. The unhinged accusation against Kaleniuk is that her group is supposedly collaborating in a plot secretly orchestrated by George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has funded civil society groups in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
In his CNN interview in September, Giuliani referred to Kaleniuk’s group as “Soros’s charity or whatever the hell it was, Antac,” and claimed falsely that the activists had “developed all of the dirty information that ended up being a false document that was created in order to incriminate Manafort.”
In fact, Antac, which has received less than 20 percent of its funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, played no role in the publication of the ledger.
Behind all these lies there is an ugly truth. Under the guise of fighting corruption, the Trump administration and its Republican allies have thrown the full force of the United States government, and Fox News, into supporting what amounts to a counter-revolution in Ukraine. In a stunning reversal, Trump and his supporters have taken the side of the corrupt oligarchs and former officials ousted in 2014, as they seek to claw back power by undermining the reformers and anti-corruption activists supported by the Obama administration, under the leadership of former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Vice President Joe Biden.
In a column for the Kyiv Post published during Tuesday’s impeachment hearings, Leshchenko urged Republicans to stop lying about him to the American public. The former lawmaker wrote that it was absurd to argue that he had “tried to undermine Trump’s candidacy in 2016 by targeting his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort,” given that the 22 pages from the black ledger he published in May of that year included no reference to Manafort.
“I was not the original source of information about Manafort’s shady payments in Ukraine,” Leshchenko explained, contradicting the story told repeatedly by Republicans at the hearings. “I found out about it the same way that everyone else did — from a New York Times article.”
“I have been openly critical of Manafort since the time he worked as a political mentor to Yanukovych. And, of course, the fact of Manafort’s involvement in Trump’s presidential campaign, along with the change of the Republican Party’s attitudes towards Ukraine on the eve of the American elections in 2016, could not but cause a critical reaction from Ukrainians,” Leshchenko wrote.
“Many Ukrainian politicians and journalists have spoken out against Trump on social media. However, such criticism has always been made openly and published on personal accounts,” he added. “And such criticism has nothing to do with the whole set of measures to undermine American democracy on Russia’s part in 2016, which were established by the U.S. investigation. Now it appears that Russia, using some U.S. politicians as well as its agents of influence in Ukraine, is trying to shift the responsibility for interfering in the 2016 elections to my country.”
Speaking by telephone from Kyiv on Tuesday, Leshchenko told me that the conspiracy theory about him interfering in the 2016 election against Trump had originated in Ukraine. “I believe in the beginning it was crafted by Lutsenko,” he said, referring to Ukraine’s former chief prosecutor, who met several times with Giuliani and was a source for Solomon. “But now,” Leshchenko said, the conspiracy theory has mutated in the collective Republican imagination and “it lives its own separate life.”
==
new update sum
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/hes-back-trumps-former-campaign-manager-resurfaces-at-the-heart-of-ukraine-inquiry
...
00:0300:33
Let’s also remember where Manafort carried out the crimes that landed him in prison: Ukraine. According to the Washington Post, as part of a plea deal, “Manafort acknowledged that he made more than $60 million in Ukraine, laundering more than $30 million of it through foreign companies and bank accounts to hide it from the IRS and cheating the government out of $15 million in taxes. He also agreed that he had lobbied in the United States on behalf of Ukrainian officials without registering and that he conspired to tamper with witnesses in his case.”
And where do we find ourselves today? Right back in Ukraine. This time it’s Manafort’s former boss, Donald Trump himself, who has been personally managing the campaign to get the Ukrainian government to help his re-election efforts. In fact, it was this week that we learned from George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state in charge of Ukraine, how Trump wanted Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden and the 2016 election. Kent told House impeachment investigators that Trump “wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to a microphone and say investigations, Biden and Clinton,” according to the Washington Post.
Even the minor characters are similar. In 2016, we had low-lifes like Kilimnik and “Professor” Joseph Mifsud running around on the fringes of Russia’s efforts to penetrate the Trump campaign and influence the presidential election. For 2020, we’ve got a couple of real jewels by the names of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both born in the former Soviet Union, and you guessed it! Both are currently under indictment on federal campaign finance charges. In 2016, the connections to Trump were made through Manafort and campaign advisers like George Papadopoulos. This time, it’s Giuliani who is Trump’s cut-out to these foreign-born scam artists. And what was Giuliani using Parnas and Furman for? According to The New York Times, beginning in January of this year, “Mr. Giuliani had enlisted Mr. Parnas and Mr. Furman to collect information and make connections in Ukraine that could be used to damage Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential contender, and to undermine the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
Even the way they have been moving funny money around was reminiscent of 2016. Back then, Manafort had pulled in millions from his work for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, which he laundered through shell companies and bank accounts in Cyprus. This year, Parnas and his buddies used a company called Fraud Guarantee, that apparently had no employees and no customers, to funnel money to Giuliani through a complicated deal with a Long Island lawyer and a shell company in Belize
...
Parnas and Fruman were tapped out, having recently made the illegal $325,000 contribution to America First Action, a super PAC supporting Donald Trump, for which they are now under indictment. But they wanted a connection to Giuliani they could use back in Ukraine to drum up business deals, and apparently the way you get connected to Giuliani is to give him money. So they got a Long Island lawyer named Charles Gucciardo, who was a Trump supporter and large-money donor, to invest in their company, and then used the good offices of Fraud Guarantee to funnel $500,000 to Giuliani.
...
==
manafort ukraine hit on Julia PM
https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/05/ex-trump-aide-paul-manafort-approved-black-ops-to-help-ukraine-president
no lnx docs
The Guardian -
Former Trump aide approved 'black ops' to help Ukraine president
Exclusive: Paul Manafort authorised secret media operation that sought to discredit key opponent of then Ukrainian president
by Luke Harding
Thu 5 Apr 2018 11.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 5 Apr 2018 20.00 EDT
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort authorised a secret media operation on behalf of Ukraine’s former president featuring “black ops”, “placed” articles in the Wall Street Journal and US websites and anonymous briefings against Hillary Clinton.
The project was designed to boost the reputation of Ukraine’s then leader, Viktor Yanukovych. It was part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort carried out by Manafort on behalf of Yanukovych’s embattled government, emails and documents reveal.
The strategies included:
• Proposing torewrite Wikipediaentries to smear a key opponent of the then Ukrainian president.
• Setting up a fake thinktank in Vienna to disseminate viewpoints supporting Yanukovych.
• A social media blitz “aimed at targeted audiences in Europe and the US”.
• Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton when she was US secretary of state.
Manafort’s Ukraine strategy anticipated later efforts by the Kremlin and its troll factory to use Twitter and Facebook to discredit Clinton and to help Trump win the 2016 US election. The material seen by the Guardian dates from 2011 to 2013.
Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, has indicted Manafort on multiple counts. Manafort is accused of “laundering profits” from his lobbying work in Ukraine, carried out over a period of a decade for Yanukovych and his political party.
Mueller also accuses Manafort of hiring retired European politicians to lobby on behalf of Yanukovych, and paying them more than €2m (£1.74m, $2.45m) via offshore accounts.
The documents reveal another surreptitious operation to influence international opinion. In 2010 Yanukovych defeated his rival Yulia Tymoshenko in presidential elections. The following summer Ukrainian prosecutors arrested Tymoshenko and put her on trial. This provoked severe criticism from the Obama administration and the EU, which accused Yanukovych of locking up Tymoshenko for political reasons.
In 2011 Manafort approved a clandestine strategy to discredit Tymoshenko abroad. Alan Friedman, a former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter, based in Italy, masterminded this project. Friedman has previously been accused of concealing his work as a paid lobbyist.
Also involved were Rick Gates, Manafort’s then deputy, and Konstantin Kilimnik, another senior Manafort associate who the FBI believes has links to Russian military intelligence.
In July 2011 Friedman sent Manafort a confidential six-page document titled Ukraine - A Digital Roadmap. It laid out a plan to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko via videos, articles and social media. Yanukovych deferred to Manafort, who gave the project the go-ahead, sources in Ukraine’s former government say.
Friedman’s proposed operation was ambitious. It included producing anonymous videos attacking Tymoshenko and comparing the opposition leader to a drunk Boris Yeltsin. “The social media space offers great opportunities for guilt by association,” Friedman wrote in the document.
He continued: “We know that video exists of Tymoshenko uttering some of her outrageous claims in court … The video can be floated into the social space to reinforce the impression that she is at best reckless and unstatesmanlike and at worst malicious, defamatory and antisemitic.”
[An anonymous video attacking Yulia Tymoshenko.
Twitters users, including “those ‘known’ to us”, could retweet hostile content. The “roadmap” included a website, blogposts and “blast emails”, sent out to a “targeted audience in Europe and the US”. One section was called “Black Ops”. It said: “This could include Wikipedia page modification to highlight [Tymoshenko] corruption and trial and modify the tone of the language being used.”
Friedman worked with Eckart Sager, a one-time CNN producer. Emails show they liaised closely with “Paul”, who in turn briefed Yanukovych’s chief of staff, Serhiy Lyovochkin. Lyovochkin declined to comment. He appears in correspondence as “SL”.
“He was under the radar,” one source said of Friedman. “Alan kept a low profile. Without Paul’s authorisation Alan would never have got a contract with the [Yanukovych] government.”
Friedman’s company FBC Media was retained on a “rolling contract”. It was paid around €150,000 every three months, sources in Kiev suggest. The money was deposited in an offshore account in Seychelles, they allege. Often the payments were late, prompting Friedman to complain, they add.
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Contacted by the Guardian, Friedman said these earnings were “declared”. He confirmed his company worked for Ukraine from late summer 2011 on what he called “a public relations and country profiling project”. He said: “It was not a secret or covert plan. We had PR people proposing interviews and features to newspapers very openly.”
He said its goal was to promote the Ukraine government’s then policy of moving closer to a partnership agreement with the EU. “Our aim was to keep a steady communication going in favour of dialogue between Brussels and Kiev. That was our message.
“We never supported a pro-Moscow stance and had already ended our relationship when the Ukrainian president abandoned closer ties with Europe.”
Asked whether he had registered with the US Department of Justice, Friedman said he had never worked as a lobbyist for Ukraine. He added: “I never registered as a foreign agent because I never was one.
“I was a communications guy, doing PR media strategy work in Europe for a client, like dozens of London PR companies that work for a variety of governments.”
The documents show Friedman reported directly to Kiev. In spring 2012 he told the foreign minister, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, he had “generated dozens of positive op-eds/interviews/articles for print and TV” and “disseminated positive news stories” to nearly 2,000 publications.
Key to this strategy was a fake thinktank, the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics (CXSSR), set up with Manafort’s backing. Friedman used it to publish dozens of positive stories about Yanukovych, many of them authored by a “Matthew Lina”.
Lina’s comment pieces criticising Tymoshenko and Obama’s state department ran on the conservative US website RedState. Friedman told Manafort his editorial team ghostwrote an article by Yanukovych published by the Wall Street Journal.
He claimed credit for a Tymoshenko profile written by the Journal’s Matthew Kaminski. Kaminski said Friedman was never a source, “or even someone that as far as I can remember I had any contact whatsoever with”.
In April 2012 Friedman sent another “highly confidential” two-page document to Manafort. It set out plans to launch a “special website” entitled The Tymoshenko Files. The site would purport to belong to Inna Bohoslovska, a Ukrainian deputy and Tymoshenko critic.
In fact, Friedman would “discreetly prepare, implement and maintain” the site, the document said. It would include “ghost-penned” blogs and “a quasi-novella serialisation”. Asked about the website, Friedman said he had never written “any content”.
Emails seen by the Guardian show a regular pattern of interaction between Manafort, Friedman, Gates, Kilimnik and Ukrainian officials. Gates, who went on to work with Manafort on the 2016 Trump campaign, wrote several messages. In February Gates , and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.
At the time Kilimnik was the Russian manager of Manafort’s Kiev office. Kilminik is understood to be “Person A” in Mueller’s latest indictment, filed last week. It says theFBI believes Kilimnik has ties to Moscow’s GRU spy agency, and adds that Gates was aware of this. Kilimnik denies a connection. Friedman confirmed he had met Manafort and Gates but said he had done so “because the client asked me to”.
Manafort’s media operation included attacks on Clinton. In October 2012 Gates emailed Manafort and Friedman, flagging a piece written by the journalist BenShapiro. TheBreitbart article criticised Clinton for her public support of Tymoshenko, who had recently made an electoral pact with the far-right Svoboda party.
The article cited a Jewish “leader” who accused Clinton anonymously of creating a “neo-Nazi Frankenstein”. Gates wrote: “Gentlemen – Here is the first part of a series of articles that will be coming as we continue to build this effort. Alan, you get full credit for the Frankenstein comment.”
The alleged use of offshore accounts is likely to interest the FBI. Manafort is accused of concealing more than $75m earned from his work in Ukraine.
Yanukovych’s attempts to woo western leaders ended in October 2013 when he accepted a bailout from Moscow. He fled to Russia after anti-government protests. In 2015 Friedman wrote an authorised biography of Silvio Berlusconi. Manafort continued to work for Yanukovych’s party up until he joined Trump’s campaign. Manafort denies wrongdoing and has said he will fight Mueller’s charges.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ben-shapiro-trump-used-irregular-channels-because-he-was-rightfully-paranoid/
ben Shapiro, a right-wing political commentator and the editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, attempted to defend President Donald Trump in light of testimony from Bill Taylor, the United States’ top diplomat in Ukraine. Taylor testified that the Trump administration had circumvented normal diplomatic channels and that Trump ordered that foreign aid to the country be dependent on Ukraine’s president launching an investigation into one of Trump’s political enemies.
:{During }
:{ of his podcast, Shapiro defended Trump’s behavior surrounding Ukraine. }::{In part of that defense, Shapiro argued that government is a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which leaders rule according to their perception of what the government is like. Because Trump had good reason to believe the government was corrupt since he was being targeted by Democrats, Shapiro argued, he chose to use “improper channels” to do his political bidding.}:
“He also feels as if he has been targeted, and correctly so. He feels that he is being targeted by people inside his own administration, to the cheers of the media. And that’s true, he is being targeted by people in his own administration to the cheers of the media,” Shapiro said.
To back up his claims that Trump was right to feel targeted, Shapiro cited recent news reports that the author of an anonymous New York Times op-ed last year, identified only as a senior official in the Trump administration, will be publishing a book called “A Warning.” He argued that the book was the type of thing that would rightly motivate Trump to set up improper communications channels.
“That’s not good for the presidency. It’s not good for the country. And of course, it’s going to underscore how suspicious Trump is of people inside his administration, and it’s going to encourage Trump to set up exactly the sort of irregular channels that Bill Taylor was talking about,” Shapiro said. “Why would you set up an irregular channel? The only reason to set up an irregular channel is because you don’t trust the regular channel. One of the reasons you might not trust the regular channel is it feels like the regular channel is being used as a method of hurting you.”
Shapiro added, “It’s hard to argue with Trump about why Trump should feel differently.”
The anonymously authored book set to come out later this year is, according to Shapiro, “underscoring the president’s distrust in government, which leads him to set up irregular channels, which leads them to make mistakes, which leads him into traps, which leads the Democrats to seem to believe that they have material to impeach.”
Later in the same episode of his podcast, Shapiro argued that Trump’s comparison of the impeachment process to “lynching” was not actually problematic.
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a h
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/heres-the-damning-evidence-of-felony-coordination-between-trump-campaign-and-russians-that-the-mueller-report-overlooked-report/
Some Democrats and critics of President Donald Trump have been railing against Republicans for admitting that they haven’t read former special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation and for saying that they don’t plan to. But journalist and Trump critic Jed Shugerman takes a different approach in an in-depth piece published in the Daily Beast this week: rather than attacking Republicans and Trump supporters for not bothering to read the report, Shugerman argues that Mueller’s report isn’t as damning of the president and his allies as it should have been — and that Mueller isdownplaying the importance of some key events.
“The bottom line is that the Mueller Report is a failure not because of Congress or because of public apathy, but because it failed to get the law, the facts or even the basics of writing right,” Shugerman asserts. “When Mueller testifies before Congress on July 17, he should be pressed on all of this."
In his report, Mueller concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians, although questionable, didn’t rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But Shugerman views Mueller’s analysis as flawed.
“It seems Mueller did not hire any legal experts with experience in campaign finance regulation,” Shugerman complains. “Given that this investigation was about campaign crimes, this appears to a revealing oversight with serious consequences.”
Shugerman goes on to say that Mueller’s “errors meant that, first, he failed to conclude that the Trump campaign criminally coordinated with Russia.” And the Daily Beast writer adds that Mueller “failed to indict campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, for felony campaign coordination."
In 2018, Manafort was vigorously prosecuted in federal court for a long list of financial crimes thanks to Mueller’s investigation — and Gates became the prosecution’s star witness. But neither of them was accused of “felony campaign coordination,” Shugerman writes.
Shugerman, in his article, goes on to list and describe, in detail, interactions between Trump’s campaign and Russians in 2016 — and those interactions, he believes, are more damning than Mueller concludes in his report.
For example, Shugerman asserts, “Mueller should have concluded that both Manafort and Gates engaged in felony campaign coordination, and he should have indicted Manafort for it. Manafort is a lawyer with decades of experience working for presidential campaigns: it would be less difficult to establish knowing and willful violations. And Manafort’s extraordinary record of lying to prosecutors — and coordinating his lies with Trump’s lawyers — would help prove the case as an inference of consciousness of guilt.”
Shugerman concludes his piece by stressing that when Mueller publicly testifies before two committees in the House of Representatives on July 17, he hopes members of Congress will address some of the ways in which his report falls short — and why the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians three years ago were more damning than the report indicates...“Given Mueller’s failure and Trump’s exploitation of that failure,” Shugerman stresses, “it is now Congress’ duty to the public, the candidates under investigation and future candidates to identify the law clearly and to explain that some of this behavior was a civil violation — and in fact, a criminal violation.”
‘Unbelievable’: Paul Manafort’s texts with Sean Hannity revealed in court filing
Texts between former Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort and Fox News host Sean Hannity were released on Friday as a court filing entered in Manafort’s sentencing. Manafort is currently in…
basically go between manafort and trump to get pardon?! we have text msg b/c he and his lawyer were violating gag order to keep from skewing witness pool (so they just used hannity to do it for them)
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619 dn
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/heres-the-larger-trump-conspiracy-hiding-behind-paul-manaforts-sordid-career/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/why-a-shady-meeting-in-a-cigar-bar-could-provide-key-evidence-of-a-trump-russia-conspiracy/
Since the release of heavily redacted court documents on Feb. 7, another get-together has been vying to beat out the Trump Tower meeting as the most important face-to-face between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. That meeting took place at the Grand Havana Room, a private cigar club that apparently also serves food, for those who can stand to eat in the presence of cigars. And while the meeting may have lacked the presence of Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, it does seem to have what the House and Senate investigations into Trump have suggested was missing from their data—direct evidence of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The Grand Havana gathering took place on Aug. 2, 2016, less than two weeks after the Republican convention. It featured Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates, and the Russian political operative who makes frequent appearances in other Manafort-related documents, Konstantin Kilimnik. Both Kilimnik and Manafort have maintained that the meeting was a “personal” meeting about “clients” they shared, but investigators are not buying it.
According to the *Washington Post*, prosecutors with the special counsel’s office believe that at that meeting, Manafort and Gates provided Kilimnik with “key information” in the form of internal polling data from the Trump campaign. That information could have been vital to assisting Russia in its social media attacks on the U.S. election.
Kilimnik also seems to have brought to the meeting a few topics of discussion that weren’t exactly client-related, including a resolution to the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine—a topic that had just been debated at the Republican convention, where the Trump campaign insisted on a softer position toward Russia. It’s not clear if they also discussed the Magnitsky Act, which was a major topic at the Trump Tower meeting.
The information about the Grand Havana meeting is not appearing now because it’s emerged as part of a leak or a deliberate release by the special counsel. It’s because Manafort’s statements about the meeting are a key feature of charges that he continued to lie to investigators even after agreeing to provide evidence to the special counsel in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. And one of the things that Manafort appears to have lied about was just how much of a two-way street there was between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Before, during, and after the campaign, Kilimnik acted as the go-between for Manafort and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.There have been still-unconfirmed stories that Manafort met with Kilimnik in Europe for the same reason that they were in the Grand Havana: to exchange data. On multiple occasions, Manafort offered to “brief” Deripaska on behind-the-scenes aspects of the Trump campaign. He certainly briefed Kilimnik.
But even if he didn’t meet with Deripaska during the campaign, Manafort does seem to have deliberately given Russia information from the Trump campaign. And Manafort clearly thought that information had value, as he offered it to Kilimnik in recognition that he still owed millions to Deripaska.
Whatever information was exchanged at the Grand Havana Room, there’s a very good reason to believe that it wasn’t just “a personal meeting.” The attendees of the meeting knew they were doing something wrong at the time the meeting was held — because they all make a point of leaving the building alone, through separate entrances,
There’s also a very good reason why the special counsel’s office might be suspicious about this particular incident, and might have a firm basis to believe that Manafort lied. Rick Gates was there, and Gates has also agreed to provide information in return for a reduced sentence. If the story that Gates is telling disagrees with the story being shopped by Manafort they both could be lying, but one of them certainly is.
Russia timelines have noted that Deripaska’s private jet landed briefly at a New Jersey airport on Aug. 3, just one day after the cigar room meeting. It seems likely that Kilimnik left on this plane to make a swift return to Moscow with the data provided by Manafort. Or maybe Deripaska got his through an in-person briefing from Manafort after all.
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AN
Legally, things are looking incredibly bleak for President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. On January 8, CNN and others reported that, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, Manafort :{shared polling data:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik when they met in 2016. This is on top of all the federal tax evasion and bank fraud charges Manafort was convicted on August 22, 2018. Yet despite his legal peril, Manafort’s family received a :{$1 million loan:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: during the Summer of 2017—and Bloomberg News has reported that the loan came a few weeks after his home had been raided by the FBI.
In a :{January 9 post:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: on Twitter, journalist Jeff Grocott (known for his Bloomberg articles) wrote, “This is wacky. Paul Manafort’s family got a $1 million loan in his moment of legal peril—just after FBI raided his home in summer 2017. So who loaned the money?”
Grocott has posted an entire Twitter thread about the loan, stressing that the identity of the lender remains a mystery.
The lender, Grocott explains, called itself Woodlawn LLC. It’s unclear exactly who Woodlawn LLC is, although the lender is connected to Hollywood producer Joey Rappa—whose name appears on a November 2018 filing that was made when Mueller moved to seize Manafort’s properties. In the filing, Rappa (who was a production associate on the 1996 film “The Nutty Professor”) is described as a “managing member” of the Nevada-based company that made the $1 million loan and is making a claim on the Manhattan condominium that Manafort’s family offered as collateral.
Bloomberg has reported that according to Rapp’s lawyer, he had nothing to do with making the loan. However, Rapp is, through his film work, linked to Andrew Intrater—an American financier and cousin of Ukraine-born oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who Mueller’s team :{questioned in 2018:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: about his connection to Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Intrater, Bloomberg reports, has been working on a film with Rapp.
According to California-based attorney Keith Berglund—who represents Woodland, LLC—Intrater had nothing to do with the loan either. Berglund told Bloomberg that Rappa agreed to be the public face of the loan because of the lender’s desire for secrecy.
On Twitter, Grocott posted, “But who’s behind Woodlawn? For four months, its ‘managing member,’ for legal purposes, was a guy named Joey Rappa. He’s worked in Hollywood and has had legal troubles over debt. Doesn’t look like his money.”
Grocott also noted, “The money behind the Manafort loan isn’t Intrater’s, the lawyers say. Rappa’s appearance on the court docs, according to Woodlawn’s lawyer, is the result of ‘some extremely unfortunate and unforeseeable coincidences.’….. Now, Rappa’s name is back off the court documents. Whose money went to Manafort remains a mystery.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/blockbuster-manafort-revelations-should-finally-end-witch-hunt-talk-conservative-columnist/
A conservative Washington Post columnist has written a column in which she argues the latest revelations about former Trump campaign boss Paul Manafort sharing confidential campaign polling data with accused Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik is “a blockbuster revelation should end talk of a ‘witch hunt.’”
Jennifer Rubin points to the apparent exchange between Trump’s inner circle and the Russians, in what appears to now be a two-way street.
“This is not the first piece of evidence of collusion between the Trump camp and Russian figures, to be sure,” she said. “The Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 between Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr., and Russians promising ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton has been known for some time. But here we see Manafort giving something of value (insider polling data) to a Russian.”
As Rubin notes, we need to know why Manafort wanted to pass polling to Kilimnik. She quotes former Department of Justice spokesman Matthew Miller in explaining that there likely isn’t an innocent explanation.
“It’s hard to see what good polling data would be to a Russian oligarch, so it raises the question of whether Manafort’s actual goal was to get the information to the Russian government itself,” Miller said.
As Rubin notes, this is yet another bullet-hole in Trump’s original claim to have nothing to do with Russians during the campaign.
“We have, at the very least, yet another previously undisclosed contact between the Trump campaign and Russians,” she writes. “We’ve come a long way since Trump claimed neither he nor anyone on the campaign had contacts with Russians… It’s hard to describe how bizarre this many contacts between a campaign and a hostile foreign government — one trying to influence the campaign to that side’s favor — truly is. Keep in mind that no major party presidential campaign of which we are aware ever had a single contact with the Russians.”
Read the full column here.
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pled guilty
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AN
President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair was pressured by a Russian oligarch over his debts, Timemagazine reported Saturday.
Former Russian intelligence officer Victor Boyarkin “was a key link” between Manafort and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.
He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin says. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.”
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Trump's Ex-Lawyer Tried to Funnel White House Legal Defense Funds to Paul Manafort: Report
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big 180: patten pro-democ for Ukraine gop freedom house, but manafort supports corrupt oligarch Yanukovich, massacre protestors (orange revo?); Deripaska tries to buy up co [// USSR oligarch] money get stolen by manafort, stops communicating with D, then gets trump gig offers breifings, uses KK to parlay.
note many enemies of tymoshenko, legit ukraine
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/7/3/1777649/-Paul-Manafort-and-Konstantin-Kilimnik-used-International-Republican-Institute-to-promote-Russia
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik to develop a strategy of media manipulation and propaganda to cripple the fledgling democracy in Ukraine and turn the country into a satellite state for Vladimir Putin. The Associated Press is reportingthat Manafort and Kilimnik began their strategy while working secretly through the International Republican Institute (IRI).
During the first few rounds of court filings and indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Kilimnik was known only as “Person A.” It wasn’t until he earned his own indictment that the man who both Paul Manafort and Rick Gates communicated with frequently during the 2016 campaign was revealed as a Russian intelligence operative who had also worked with the pair in their efforts to damage NATO, thwart US interests, and help bring Ukraine under Russian control. Court filings are now highlighting the way that Manafort and Kilimnik worked together to develop an anti-democratic, anti-Western strategy.
At the outset of their effort, Kilimnik realized that Russia had fallen behind when it came to propaganda skills in a world of shifting media markets.
“The West is just a little more skillful at playing the modern game, where perception by the world public opinion and the spin is more important than what is actually going on. Russia is ultimately going to lose if they do not learn how to play this game.”
— Konstantin Kilimnik writing to Paul Manafort, December 2004
Working together, Manafort and Kilimnik made sure that Russia developed that skill. Manafort, who had worked for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan strong man Jonas Savimbi, and Lebanese arms merchants—in between running Republican conventions—was already an expert on media manipulation. Kilimnik helped Manafort polish his anti-democratic, totalitarian message into a pitch that would catch the ear of Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska. And Kilimnik began that work at the International Republican Institute—a nonprofit funded by the US government explicitly to support democracy and pro-Western positions. According to the AP, Kilimnik’s work was valuable both to Putin and to Paul Manafort.
The records show Kilimnik helped conceive strategies that Manafort sold to clients, and that he served as a key liaison between Manafort and principal financial backers, including Deripaska.
Deripaska attempted to sue the AP over reports that he had loaned $10 million to Manafort—which is somewhat problematic now that Mueller’s investigation has identified the loan on Manafort’s tax forms. That $10 million appears to be in addition to another $18.9 million which Deripaska claimed Manafort and Gates “lost,” and in addition to another $7 million which he paid them for supposedly managing his investments. And it’s still not clear that any of that money matches the $12 million that Ukrainian prosecutors had identified as under-the-table payments to Manafort … before Ukraine stopped investigating Manafort out of concerns they would upset Trump.
Altogether, it seems that Paul Manafort, who is now complaining that the cost of defending himself from Robert Mueller has left him broke, took well over $35 million from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and perhaps as much as $50 million. Which leaves open the question of just what Manafort, who also stands indicted for illegal foreign lobbying, did with all that cash.
In his Ukraine work, Kilimnik became the perfect partner for Manafort. Fresh out of the military after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kilimnik moved into the International Republican Institute and became head of its Moscow office in time for the 2004 "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine. But while the IRI was publically championing Ukraine's split from Russia, Kilimnik was already working inside the organization, with Manafort, to reverse the revolution.
Manafort gave the Russians insight into how to manipulate multiparty elections and undermine democracies. Kilimnik provided Manafort with connections to the highest levels, and deepest pockets, in the Russian government. Together they build propaganda organizations, both on the ground and on the Internet, created training programs for a new generation of Russian and pro-Russian leaders, and helped organize faux-protests against NATO and the United States.
Those organizations and those skills didn’t just become the means for Russia to control Ukraine. They were the pattern for Manafort’s work with the Trump campaign. And not only did Manafort and Rick Gates continue to work with Kilimnik during the campaign, they worked with him after.
In April, Kilimnik was still playing his manipulation game, this time with witnesses involved in Robert Mueller’s case against Manafort.
“Hey. This is Konstantin,” Kilimnik wrote via the WhatsApp messenger, according to the filings. “My friend is looking for ways to connect to you to pass you several messages. Can we arrange that?”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/the-astonishing-tale-of-the-man-mueller-calls-person-a/562217/
.... But then, last winter, Robert Mueller described Kostya as a “long-time Russian colleague of Manafort’s” with “ties to a Russian intelligence service.” The reference came in a casual aside, buried in a brief arguing that Manafort should be subjected to stringent bail conditions. It was a strange way to inject such a crucial fact. But Mueller repeated the allegation a few months later, as if to remove ambiguity. These ties weren’t vestiges of a distant past, but were said to be active through 2016. In a footnote, Mueller asked for permission to submit evidence substantiating the charge in a sealed filing.
All the while, Manafort and Kilimnik remained attached to each other. During the past few months, Manafort’s inner circle has collapsed. Rick Gates, his primary American deputy for the past decade, pleaded guilty and began supplying evidence against him. Manafort’s ex-son-in-law also cut a deal to cooperate with Mueller. Through it all, Kilimnik has continued to trail after Manafort. When Manafort allegedly hatched a ploy to tamper with witnesses this past February, Kilimnik seems to have served as his loyal co-conspirator. When Manafort wanted a dose of positive press, Kilimnik attempted to arrange an op-ed in the Kyiv Post.
When I recently emailed Kilimnik, he responded quickly. He wanted to let me know that he disapproved of the media’s coverage of Manafort, including my own, which he ascribed to “a hatred against certain people in the US Government.” He told me, “I don’t want to play a role in this zoo.” I replied and asked Kilimnik about his present whereabouts, a question he left hanging. In December, Robert Mueller hinted, in passing, that Kostya had relocated to Russia. When I asked around Kiev, nobody had any evidence to the contrary. It was a prospect that Kostya suggested was a possibility last year in a text to Christopher Miller. “I hope I am able to get out of the country. Before ‘patriots’ start hunting me down.” Fleeing the accusation of spying for Vladimir Putin, he has apparently taken refuge with him.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/404530-manafort-associate-charged-with-illegal-lobbying-report
Sam Patten, a former associate of Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty in federal court on Friday to illegally acting as a foreign agent and is now cooperating with the government.
Patten was charged with failing to register as a foreign agent in the United States.
The charges are related to Patten’s work lobbying on behalf of a political party in Ukraine, known as the Opposition Bloc, according to the criminal information document federal prosecutors filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday.
The criminal information filing typically comes before a subject pleads guilty, according to Bloomberg, who first reported on the charges.
Patten is accused of knowingly and willfully acting as an agent for a Ukrainian political party and its members without registering with the attorney general, a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The government alleges he worked with a Russian national, known only in court documents as Foreigner A, on lobbying and political consulting services, and helped Foreigner A and a prominent Ukraine oligarch set up meetings with members of Congress, specificallysenators on the Foreign Relations Committee andrepresentatives on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, as well as officials in the State Department and members of the media.
Patten is scheduled to enter a plea at an arraignment hearing Friday morning before federal District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson in D.C.
The news comes as Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, readies for a second federal trial in D.C. stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Manafort, who was convicted on eight counts of bank and tax fraud earlier this month, faces charges including conspiracy to launder money and failing to register as a foreign agent.
Patten is a Washington-based political operative who reportedly once worked for Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign during the 2016 race and that was embroiled in a scandal earlier this year when it was revealed it had obtained data on millions of Facebook users without their consent.
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https://www.newsweek.com/heres-where-paul-manafort-did-business-corrupt-dictators-1061470
no lnx pix
WORLD
HERE’S WHERE PAUL MANAFORT DID BUSINESS WITH CORRUPT DICTATORS
BY CRISTINA MAZA ON 8/7/18 AT 3:11 PM
Manafort Trial: Rick Gates Testifies He Committed Crimes With Former Trump Campaign Aide
As the trial against Paul Manafort enters its sixth day, many observers are focusing on his work for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians. However, he has had a long history of dealing with unsavory foreign leaders during his decades-long career as a political lobbyist.
Prosecutors in Virginia’s federal court claim that President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager avoided paying taxes on millions of dollars he made working for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine—the Party of Regions of former President Viktor Yanukovych.
Much has been made of Manafort’s connections to figures like Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine for Russia after being ousted from power by a pro-Western uprising in 2014, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch whom Manafort offered to brief on the Trump campaign. After all, Manafort’s allegedly illegal activities were revealed after special counsel Robert Mueller began investigating potential links between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Manafort has previously worked in other continents.His first lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, which he ran with fellow Trump aid and political consultant Roger Stone, has been nicknamed the"torturers’ lobby" for having represented so many political leaders involved in human rights abuses.
“Last year, Kenya received $38 million in U.S. foreign aid, and spent over $1.4 million on Washington lobbyists to get it. Nigeria received $8.3 million and expended in excess of $2.5 million. Whom did both countries call upon to do their bidding before the U.S. government? The lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly Public Affairs Co., which received $660,000 from Kenya in 1992-1993 and $1 million from Nigeria in 1991,” details a report from the Center for Public Integrity published in the early 1990s.
166202411-594x594
Former Nigerian President General Sani Abacha (right) and his Gambian counterpart attend a summit. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked for Abacha.
“Former Reagan political operative Paul Manafort oversees foreign accounts; his partner, Charles R. Black, was a senior political strategist in the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign. Their firm's fees to represent Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines and Angola's UNITA rebel group in 1991 totaled more than $3 million. All four receive U.S. aid and abuse human rights,” the report continued.
The lobbying firm’s work with dictators predates the 1990s, however. Established in 1980, Manafort’s lobbying firm began working for the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, a kleptocratic dictator from the Philippines, in 1985. During the two decades Marcos was in power, around 34,000 people were tortured while he amassed a fortune of at least $10 billion, worth around $22 billion in today's money. His regime paid Manafort’s company almost $1 million a year, or around $2.2 million today.
Later, in 1998, Nigeria’s former president, the Army Officer Sani Abacha, turned to Manafort’s team to help clean up his public image. Manafort personally handled his account, according to reports. The U.N. noted that Abacha’s regime “carried out widespread repression of human rights advocates, pro-democracy activists, journalists and critics of his government,” and that “extrajudicial killings, torture, assassinations, imprisonment and general harassment of critics and opponents were the hallmark of his administration.”
Meanwhile, former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, accused Manafort’s lobbying firm of having lengthened the civil war in Angola by supporting Jonas Savimbi. The firm helped secure support in Washington for Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which was trying to oust a Marxist government from power in the 1980s. According to Human Rights Watch, UNITA “used terror as a policy, to obtain supplies and coerce and intimidate civilians. Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears, and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA.”
57643400-594x594
Indonesian students hold a rally as they protest against the decision to drop the graft case against former dictator Suharto (right), in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, on May 18, 2006. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked for Suharto.
BAY ISMOYO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Manafort has also worked for Indonesian military leader and former president Suharto—who has been described as one of the most brutal and corrupt leaders of the 20th century—and forSomalia’s dictatorial leader Siad Barre, whose regime committed widespread atrocities in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Generally, these brutal leaders shared one thing in common: a fierce opposition to communism. Support for figures fighting communist movements was generally in line with the foreign policy goals of the Republican Party at the time. Nevertheless, Manafort’s decision to work with Russians and pro-Russian politicians in the former Soviet Union was a notable departure from his party’s priorities.
According to one of his former employees, Manafort’s work has been characterized by his lack of moral compass and motivation for money and influence.
“I told Manafort it didn’t seem like a promising strategy to march into a murderous dictator’s office and point out to him and his lieutenants that he had a public relations problem. ‘Are we sure we want this guy as a client?’ I asked, in a garish display of naïveté,” K. Riva Levinson, who worked for Manafort early in her career, wrote in an op-ed last year.
“Manafort sounded annoyed, as if I had asked the right question at the wrong time. He waved off my concerns as he settled into his large leather armchair in his spacious corner office overlooking the Potomac River, the walls adorned with photos of past presidents, senators, congressmen and other notables,” Levinson described.
==
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/paul-manafort-ostrich-jacket-705933/
cyprus bank
...
ederal prosecutor Greg Andres asked a witness who had worked at one of Manafort’s favored boutiques, “Do the payments on these documents come from a particular country?”
“Yes,” the witness said.“Cyprus.”
Prosecutors spent most of the day showing how Manafort funded his lifestyle with money that flowed through various banks in Cyprus, the island nation in the Mediterranean that has faced :{accusations:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;font-weight:400"):}: of being a :{money-laundering conduit:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;font-weight:400"):}: for wealthy Russians and international criminal organizations. One witness, Maximillian Katzman, the aptly named and impeccably dressed 29-year-old manager of Alan Couture, said his store had 40 regular customers and Manafort was the only one who paid by international wire transfer. In addition, Manafort bought his wife a Mercedes and his daughter a $1.9 million house in Arlington, Virginia, with wire transfers through Cyprus.
The DOJ’s lawyers put eight witnesses on the stand, and all of them attested to Manafort’s habit of paying his bills through shell companies and Cypriot banks. It became a parlor game of sorts to see which witnesses could correctly pronounce Nicosia, the capital and finance hub of Cyprus.
Manafort’s defense lawyers have said they :{plan to blame:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;font-weight:400"):}: Manafort’s former business partner, Rick Gates, for any alleged crimes. In response, prosecutors supplied evidence showing that it was Manafort’s name and signature — not Gates’ — on the paperwork documenting that lavish spending. They pressed each witness on who had paid the bills and called the shots: Manafort or Gates?
The day’s first witness was an advertising consultant named Daniel Rabin who worked with Manafort in Ukraine. Rabin testified that he had sent his invoices and flight itineraries to Gates. If he needed to get urgent information to Manafort, he went through Gates: “Rick was a gatekeeper.” But the remaining witnesses said they knew little or nothing about Gates, and Manafort’s lawyers offered little by way of cross-examination for the bulk of Tuesday’s witnesses.
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war is boring 2017
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/trump-aides-and-russian-mobsters-pulled-strings-in-putins-massive-ukraine-gas-scheme-2ec3e6cef803
Trump Aides and Russian Mobsters Pulled Strings in Putin’s Massive Ukraine Gas Scheme
Follow the money
by BRIAN E. FRYDENBORG
Before Donald Trump was president or a candidate, and when he was hurting for investors as Wall Street had all but shut down loaning operations to him, his businesses established extensive ties to Russian oligarchs, including some allegedly affiliated with organized crime.
At the same time, associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Russian government and future associates of Trump — most notably Paul Manafort, his future campaign chairman — were allegedly involved in a massive Eurasian natural gas and money laundering scheme worth billions of dollars, and part of Putin’s grand plan to control Ukraine.
At best, Trump may have had no knowledge of this scheme and these ties, but even this scenario highlights serious deficiencies in Trump’s judgment in terms of who he did business and politics with — and it is of urgent interest to the American people as Trump manages the nation as president.
While there is no direct proof of Trump’s knowing involvement or collusion in any single aspect of these dealings, the sheer number of them over a period of years and his close association with a number of key players, combined with his public statements as a presidential candidate, create a picture that stinks to high heaven and makes it more likely — not less — that something nefarious is going on between Team Trump and Team Putin.
We may never know exactly what happened or exactly who is responsible or exactlywhat Trump was and wasn’t aware of, but, despite ludicrous claims to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the media or with irresponsible speculation.
With so many questionable people, actions and circumstances, the only sane and responsible course forward is to continue to vigorously demand more answers to the questions Trump and his associates have raised because of their actions, especially since their accounts of these events and people keep shifting as more and more evidence comes to light.
After all, contrary to American civil criminal law, in the court of public opinion, the burden on a sitting president with so many questionable connections is for him to shed light on his dealings and to clear any hint of suspicion if he wants to earn the benefit of the doubt.
Time to go over what we do know, and what that information — when put together and given proper context — makes clear and what it suggests.
To begin to understand the big picture, let’s go back to 2004.
In 2004, Carter Page — later a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser — moved to Moscow to set up a branch for the New York investment firm Merrill Lynch. His bio on the website of Global Energy Capital LLC, which Page founded and where he is currently a managing partner, states that “[h]e spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”
As Page was setting up shop in Moscow, future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort began running Victor Yanukovych’s political life.
Yanukovych is a notorious, scandal-ridden Ukrainian politician who first attracted global attention during the 2004 Ukrainian elections. Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president during these elections, had appointed Yanukovych as his prime minister in 2002 and had backed him as a pro-Russian — and pro-Putin — candidate to succeed him in 2004.
Kuchna’s support extended to trying to rig the election for Yanukovych, which sparked the Orange Revolution that, in turn, led to victory for the more pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost been killed by a mysterious poisoning incident.
Yanukovych had already developed a reputation for extreme corruptionby this time, but that did not stop Manafort from running Yanukovych’s 2004 campaign. Despite the loss, Manafort stuck around and was hired to take charge of both rehabilitating the disgraced Yanukovych and strategizing for his political party, the Party of Regions.
This type of work was hardly out of the ordinary for Manafort, and his client list over the years has included dictators such as Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi. Other clients included Jonas Savimbi of the Angolan guerrilla group UNITA, and the Kashmiri American Council, a front group for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.
Interestingly enough, the Associated Press recently published a bombshell of a story in which it was revealed that Manafort proposed in 2005 — through a formal memo, no less — a massive lobbying effort designed to discreetly promote Putin, the Russian government and their agenda while undermining their critics, with efforts concentrated in the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics.
Manafort sent the proposal to Oleg Deripaska, a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime who has a very close, generally good —
— relationship with Putin and who was then working with Manafort to promote Russian interests in Montenegro.
Under the terms Manafort proposed, a contract was agreed upon in 2006 and lasted until at least 2009, one in which Manafort was paid $10 million a year and used a Delaware shell company — LOAV Ltd.— to conduct official business and transactions. AP obtained numerous documents, memos, and wire transfer records to corroborate its story.
In 2014, Deripaska and Manafort had a dramatic falling out, resulting in a $19 million Cayman Islands court battle related to their alleged efforts to launder money for Yanukovych and his allies, but not before the aforementioned working relationship was well established.
The AP story broke just hours before CNN would report that FBI officials have information describing how “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
The AP soon after reported that U.S. Treasury officials are investigating Manafort’s offshore financial dealings. If these interactions seem dramatic, Manafort’s machinations involving Ukraine are even more so
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no lnx
Dirty gas money
Court documents allege that Manafort first became acquainted with Yanukovych in 2003, a time when he also began cozying up to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs allied with Yanukovych and Putin.
Throughout the rest of the decade, Manafort entered into a variety of shady business deals with some of these oligarchs and others, deals that generally seemed to have some ulterior motive in advancing Putin’s agenda in the background.
In particular, around the same time he began interacting with Yanukovych, Manafort befriended Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, natural gas businessman and Putin ally, according to court documents.
Firtash, featured in the Panama Papers revelations, had been the main middleman bringing in both Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine since 2002 and was linked to Semion Mogilevich, the essential head, or “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. Mogilevich is also a friend of Putin’s and was one of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives from 2009–2015.
In mid-2004, Putin and outgoing Ukrainian president Kuchma created a Swiss-registered company called RosUkrEnergo [RUE] to replace the company represented by Firtash that handled Ukraine’s Russian-related natural gas imports.
The imports ostensibly came from Turkmenistan, but also involved shady deals that seemed mostly orchestrated and subsidized by Gazprom dominated by Putin allies. Additionally, the gas traveled through pipes wholly owned by Gazprom that went mostly through Russian territory.
But not much changed with RUE in that Firtash ended up owning 45 percent of the new company, a stake that is partially a front for Mogilevich to control the company. Gazprom owned 50 percent of RUE, making clear the incestuous nature of the entire arrangement.
But there was a bigger picture, a greater purpose, to all these machinations than just Gazprom dominance of the region’s gas industry, and the specifics of the deal make the following scheme quite easy to understand.
Gazprom would basically sell billions of dollars of gas to Firtash through RUE at a steal of a price. Next, Firtash would sell billions of dollars of gas at hiked-up prices to Ukraine, with the profits directed to funding pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. Finally, Putin’s allies in the financial industry would open up lines of credit for Firtash in the billions of dollars so he could buy key Ukrainian assets and multiply his influence further.
It’s no coincidence that this scam came into being not long after Yanukovych’s defeat at the hands of a more pro-Western candidate. Unsurprisingly, some of the disputes between Ukraine and Russia involved fighting over gas deals. This all culminated in January 2006 when Russia shut its gas flow into Ukraine and therefore into much of Europe as well, which received the vast majority of its gas from pipes passing through Ukrainian territory.
After the shutoff, Firtash and his allies rearranged their business.
First, RUE became the exclusive and direct supplier of all natural gas coming from Central Asia and Russia, and, along with Gazprom and Gazexport?—?a subsidiary?—?it would sell to Ukrainian industrial customers via a joint venture with Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company.
The new joint venture was called UkrGazEnergo, and would sell gas to Naftogaz to distribute among Ukrainian households and municipalities.
But there was another key factor in the deal: RAO UES?—?Russia’s state-owned power company?—?would buy and import Ukrainian-generated electricity into European Russia, with the Ukrainian government providing that energy from the gas that RUE was being paid by Ukraine to import from Turkmenistan. And again, RUE would act as the intermediary.
One of the reasons for this confusing complexity is that at each stage along the way there was the possibility of marking up or down the price when it suited the purposes of those who set up the system in the first place.
Naturally, this overall deal was so unpopular with Ukrainians?—?who felt cheated at getting sold gas at hiked-up prices by entities with little supervision and with opportunities for massive corruption?—?that Ukraine’s parliament voted against the deal, albeit it ended up being a nonbinding vote and the agreement went ahead anyway.
This arrangement would last from 2006 through early 2009, when another dispute derailed it.
Carter Page in February 2017. PBS NewsHour screen capture
Page-Manafort connection
Which brings us back to Carter Page. It is important here to note that Page’s tenure at Merrill Lynch was from 2004–2007, and the only two companies his aforementioned current bio mentions in relation to this tenure are Gazprom and RAO EUS, claiming that he was an adviser on “key transactions” of theirs.
It is hard to imagine transactions more “key” than those involving natural gas being transported from Central Asia and Russia to Ukraine and Europe, the creation of RUE, and RAO’s subsequent deal with Ukraine.
If Page is telling the truth about his role, then it is virtually inconceivable?—?considering that he advised both Gazprom and RAO and the way they would be tied together starting in 2006?—?that he would not be aware of what was going on.
And after all, as someone with a Ph.D. and an MBA and a graduate the U.S. Naval Academy, Page would certainly have been aware of the geopolitics of these deals, and that they went against American interests at a time when Ukraine was trying to escape the stranglehold of the Kremlin.
However, Julia Ioffe’s profile of Page raises important questions about whether Page is exaggerating his role, and her story is filled with anecdotes from people knowledgeable about these types of deals who had never heard of Page?—?and people who did know of him suggested he was a nobody.
Read ‘Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism’]
Maybe Page deliberately kept a low profile. Without a more formal investigation, it is impossible to know what the full picture is. Even if Page exaggerated his role, if he was still talking to people at both Gazprom and RAO at this time?—?even if his discussions interactions may have been more informal than formal?—?it is certainly a realistic possibility that he still knew a lot and performed an advisory role, one that was perhaps unknown by his colleagues at Merrill.
Finally, if he knew what was going on and was involved, there is certainly a possibility of interest being piqued if he came to know that Manafort?—?another American?—?was involved on the other side of these deals, with the same being the case with Manafort. Interest on either side could have led to either one making contact with the other, which may have led to some sort of coordination.
This is admittedly speculative, but a real possibility nonetheless, and is certainly not one bit less speculative than an enormous portion of the mainstream media discussion and reporting on both the e-mail/server situation with Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.
The question of a possible Manafort and Page link, and the fact that they were involved on one level or another in the massive Eurasian gas scheme, deserve more official scrutiny and need to be answered through a formal investigation, because it is clear that those in question have no intention of sharing the truth.
Yulia Tymoshenko in June 2008. European People’s Party photo
Manafort and Putin’s allies prep Yanukovych’s comeback
As for the dispute that derailed the 2006 gas deal, the foundations were laid with the unpopular deal itself.
In 2007, Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and gas tycoon in her own right and a co-leader of the Orange Revolution, rose to become prime minister again. It was clear that she was on a mission to drive out Russian domination of the whole gas system and push against Russian influence in Ukraine overall.
This meant taking on Firtash, Mogilevich and the Russian mafia, and RUE.
Tymoshenko’s first step was to get rid of UkrGazEnergo, run by RUE and Naftogaz, but then Tymoshenko set her sights on taking RUE and Firtash?—?and thus Mogilevich and the Russian mobsters?—?out of the loop, which lead to a series of hostile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine.
In October 2008, Tymoshenko finally worked out a deal with Putin to remove RUE from Ukrainian gas deals, but they were subsequently unable to agree on pricing, leading to Russia to again shut off gas going into Ukraine, and by extension, most of Europe, for almost three weeks in January.
But on Jan. 19, 2009, a long-term, 10-year agreement was reached, and only a few days later normal flows were restored, much to the relief of not only Ukraine, but also Europe, as it was the middle of winter. Additionally, the parties agreed to take future disputes to arbitration in an international commercial dispute court in Stockholm, Sweden.
If it seemed the players of Team Putin gave up too easily on having RUE taken out of the game, they had other plans in motion to counter Tymoshenko’s effort to limit Russian influence in Ukrainian politics.
Manafort linked to possible money laundering during crackdown
Even before Putin agreed to let Tymoshenko shut down RUE, his agents?—?including Firtash, Mogilevich and Yanukovych (the latter with Manafort acting as his right-hand man)?—?were already putting in place plans to go around and escape her efforts.
Some of these involved setting up a U.S. investment fund initially capitalized with $100 million. Firtash paid Manafort and Rick Gates?—?who had joined Manafort’s efforts as part of his consulting firm in 2006?—?$1.5 million to handle the money. The main purpose of the fund was to allegedly act as a conduit to launder money from the Firtash gas dealings that were being scrutinized by the Tymoshenko government.
Among the various deals Firtash and Manafort went into was one in 2008 for $895 million for the site of the famous Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in New York, with Firtash wiring $25 million toward the project to make it look legitimate, and a further $25 million was later launderedthrough the project, according to a U.S. court indictment.
But rather than move forward and apply the money to the project, the Drake property was never actually purchased.
The deal, like their other deals, never closed and eventually fell through after many third parties had spent a lot of time and money trying to close it out and after many employees were not paid, but not before Manafort, Firtash, Mogilevich, Yanukovych and their allies were able to keep substantial funds away from the prying eyes of Tymoshenko and Ukrainian authorities during crucial periods of her time as prime minister.
Unfortunately for Firtash, Mogilevich and their backers, natural gas is not something that can be laundered. In early 2009, Tymoshenko orchestrated a seizure by Ukraine’s own state-run Naftogaz —allowed under the agreement she made with Putin?—?of 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RUE’s gas stockpiles, a quantity worth billions of dollars at the time.
Tymoshenko had effectively cut out the middlemen who had been hiking up prices and using those profits to poison and pollute Ukrainian politics.
Playing a longer-term game, Firtash initiated a lengthy arbitration process through Stockholm.
Other planted crops were already bearing fruit. Unfortunately for Tymoshenko, though she had risen to be prime minister late in 2007, in that election and even in the prior 2006 parliamentary elections, Manafort had built Yanukovych’s Party of Regions into a political force that campaigned with modern, highly effective techniques and tactics.
In both elections, the Party of Regions ended up having the most seats in parliament of any single party by significant margins, but ended up being in the opposition because of alliances made between Tymoshenko’s bloc and other parties.
Of course, Manafort and the Party of Regions were operating with a gigantic advantage?—?the enormous amount of money flowing from the massive Eurasian gas scam.
All this meant that Yanukovych’s opposition was certainly within striking distance of taking over the government, and that even by 2006 Manafort and the gas scheme had already achieved great success in rehabilitating Yanukovych and his party.
The distance would close in 2010.
Russia’s then-president Dmitry Medvedev, left, and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2011. Kremlin photo
The downfall of Tymoshenko
Early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential race, defeating Tymoshenko in a runoff election, the culmination of over five years of work with Manafort and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence.
Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms, curbing democratic freedoms in areas ranging from the courts to the press. Most notably, in December 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011.
Paul Manafort and Rick Gates actually lobbied American lawmakers on behalf of Yanukovych’s government from 2012–2014,defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenko and trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of their client and his government. They did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law.
Incidentally, these efforts were paid in part by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest man for the last eight years, a client of Manafort’s since his earliest days in Ukraine, and for whom Manafort helped arrange a meeting with U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.
Manafort and Akhmetov utilized the services of two Washington, D.C. lobbying firms, including Podesta Group Inc., run by the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman and later victim of Russian-government hacking and WikiLeaks disclosures.
The day after this information was made public in mid-August 2016, Manafort resigned from his role as the chairman of the Trump campaign. As for Gates, it was unclear at the time if he had stayed on board or left and the Trump campaign refused to clarify the matter.
Lobbying efforts throughout the Yanukovych period were also hardly limited to Manafort and Gates, with those efforts having for years been tied to prominent Republicans in the United States.
Perhaps most prominent among the lobbyists, former Kansas senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole?—?for whom Manafort had been a strategist?—?was paid more than half a million to lobby for Deripaska, who was then, and is still, denied a U.S. visa for his links to the Russian mafia.
Yuri Bokyo, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician and a close Yanukovych ally, and a former minister of several energy-related sections of Ukraine’s government?—?and was heavily involved in setting up the Eurasian gas scheme?—?paid nearly $100,000 to a Washington lobbyist to meet with top Republicans.
Barbour Griffith & Rogers,co-founded by the former Republican governor of Mississippi and influential GOP insider Haley Barbour, was also paid more than $800,000 for lobbying efforts by a lawyer who “structured” the legal aspects of the Eurasian gas deal.
Though Mogilevich had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, he strangely enough has been able to retain the lawyerly services of William Sessions, a Republican who was the FBI director from 1987–1993, to lobby on Mogilevich’s behalf for deals with the U.S. government to clear his charges.
Those talks, which failed, were arranged by Neil Livingston, a prominent consultant whose firm, GlobalOptions, serviced many Russian and former-Soviet-republic-businessmen. GlobalOptions was introduced by Barbour Griffith & Rogers to a shell company called Highrock Holdings used by none other than Firtash as a prominent vehicle for money laundering in the Eurasian gas scheme.
Highrock paid GlobalOptions for at least two projects, one a mysterious “special operation” as named in a subsequent lawsuit for an unnamed member of the Ukrainian government. And just to give one example of Firtash’s European outreach, his relationship with several Conservative MPs in the United Kingdom may prompt an official investigation.
For his part in engineering Yanukovych’s comeback and Tymoshenko’s downfall, Firtash also got some $3 billion in gas assets returned to him that had been seized by Tymoshenko’s government as a result of proceedings at the arbitration court in Sweden.
Which was a logical move. Once Yanukovych was in power, Ukraine and Firtash essentially became the same party in the case, with Ukraine’s lawyers dropping opposition to Firtash’s attempts to recover the seized gas?—?and now quite happy to see $3 billion in gas go from the ownership of the Ukrainian people back to Firtash.
It was clear that Yanukovych’s government was willing to fight for the interests of Putin and Firtash, but not its own people. Without Ukraine’s representatives making any case whatsoever, the court simply sided with Firtash in June 2010.
Firtash also got his aforementioned credit lines from Putin’s bankers not long after Yanukovych’s victory, specifically some $11 billion in credit from a consortium of banks arranged by Gazprombank, the flagship banking arm of Gazprom.
Gazprombank would not disclose which other banks were part of this arrangement, but by itself it lent him $2.2 billion, the largest possible amount under Russian law and almost one-quarter of the bank’s total capital, making him Gazprombank’s single largest individual borrower.
Firtash used this cash to expand his holdings?—?especially in the chemical and fertilizer industries?—?and power in Ukraine, all while staying close to Yanukovych. These moves actually made him the fifth-biggest fertilizer maker in Europe and helped him establish relationships with politicians throughout the continent.
When reporters asked him where all the money came from to enable him to do all this, he coyly replied: “It’s a secret.”
From January 2011 on, Firtash was again buying Gazprom gas at a discount through shady international front companies, then selling that gas back at a far higher price to his new assets, to the tune of billions in questionable profits to his shell companies, in something of a return to the old system before Tymoshenko had rocked the boat.
But the spirited Tymoshenko was not content to only be on defense during this period. During her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011. In it she named Firtash, Manafort, Mogilevich, Yanukovych and their front companies as defendants, including initially RUE?—?although RUE was switched out to name the front companies that controlled it for Firtash and Mogilevich in later amended complaints.
The suit accused them of setting up a series of racketeering, fraud and money laundering enterprises in the United States designed to keep dirty gas money away from Ukrainian authorities when she was prime minister, and that such activities resulted in material harm for her since they contributed to the downfall of her government and her unjust trial and imprisonment.
After being rejected several times, a fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September 2015. While not ruling out criminal wrongdoing on the part of the defendants, the judge ruled that the higher-than-average standards for convictions under the RICO statute were not met.
Still, in the longer ruling rejecting the third complaint, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’?—?albeit by unidentified actors?—?and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”
Berkut riot police in Kiev during Euromaidan. Ivan Bandura photo via Flickr
Putin allies expelled from Ukraine
Yes, after the 2010 election, everything was going perfectly in regards to Ukraine for Putin, Yanukovych, Manafort, Gates, Firtash, Mogilevich and their teams. But, as in 2004, there was one thing that they did not plan well for, and it was the same thing that confounded Soviet leaders for decades and led to the downfall of the USSR.
The people had other ideas.
Many Ukrainians?—?especially younger ones?—?realized what was happening to their country, and were hopeful of better opportunities and a better future by having Ukraine orient itself more to the West, toward Europe and the United States. Yanukovych sought to placate these desires by courting a major trade deal with the European Union.
But in November 2013, protests erupted over Yanukovych’s about-face backing out of this long-desired E.U. trade deal in the face of a Russian counteroffer.
Protests erupted in a main square in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, which became known as the Euromaidan protests. After months of a tense situation, security forces shot and killed dozens of protesters on Feb. 20, 2014. In response to state violence, the protests swelled exponentially, fueled by mass public outrage at the bloodshed. By Feb. 22, the Ukrainian parliament had voted Yanukovych out of office.
Tymoshenko was freed from prison?—?in a wheelchair, recovering from what she said was physical abuse and ill-treatment at the hands of her guards and authorities?—?and Yanukovych fled the city. Soon, he would flee the country to Russia with the help of none other than Putin. Today, he is still wanted by Ukrainian authorities for the deaths of the protesters, but he hopes to one day return to Ukraine again as president, which he still contends he is legally.
Putin had overplayed his hand. His royal straight flush of an ace of natural gas, a king in Yanukovych, a queen in Firtash, a jack in Mogilevich, and a 10 in Manafort did not anticipate a wild-card joker in the form of Yanukovych’s allies fleeing him.
But Putin had invested a lot into Ukraine over many years?—?and into controlling its politics and energy sector through gas. Faced with his whole house of cards collapsing in on itself in the face of popular resistance, and with a government hostile to him, Putin went to Plan B?—?the dismemberment of Ukraine and war.
Firtash has fled Ukraine as well, and is also wanted by U.S. authorities for a separate racketeering and bribery scheme. He was living in a sort of exile in Austria, but just late last month, a U.S. extradition request based on bribery and corruption charges in a Chicago-based case was approved in Austrian court, though in a bizarre twist he was arrested mere minutes after the ruling by Austrian authorities on a Spanish warrant related to charges of money laundering and organized crime.
In light of ties to Manafort and the related implications for Trump’s presidency, the scandals and ensuing war in Ukraine, the connections to the Russian organized crime, and importance to Putin, this could be one of the most sensational and important internationally focused trials in many years.
And, not to be macabre, but it is highly doubtful that either Putin or the Russian mobsters will give Firtash the chance to prove his loyalty or show his disloyalty, as powerful men willing to orchestrate murder for far less have little reason to allow him to be tried and risk so much.
Meanwhile, Manafort and Gates made millions.
Hand-written records from the office of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions show the party had set aside payments totaling $12.7 million specifically for Manafort from 2007–2012 alone. Gates was also involved with Manafort in the $19 million Cayman Islands fiasco with Deripaska, who accused both of the other two of illegally bailing out on him.
The fate of that $19 million is still unknown. All of this is totally apart from the newly-revealed annual $10 million Manafort got from his Deripaska-brokered deal.
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"Paul Manafort's former son-in-law, real estate developer Jeffrey Yohai, has agreed to plead guilty in connection with a criminal investigation in Los Angeles, multiple sources familiar with the investigation said Thursday."
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Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted Paul Manafort, the former chairman of President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the White House has already begun to revive its efforts to distance itself from Manafort and play down the role he had on the campaign. But try as they might, the Trump team can’t change the facts. Manafort worked on the Trump campaign for five crucial months in 2016 and was its chairman from May through August 2016, when he resigned under pressure. Plus, the relationship between Trump and Manafort goes back much further.
When it started to become clear that Manafort was likely in serious legal jeopardy, the White House pushed the idea that his role on the campaign was minimal. In March, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary at the time, said Manafort was someone “who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time” during the presidential campaign. Another campaign aide told *Politico* in May that he “wasn’t part of the core campaign team,” and that Trump and Manafort “didn’t have a relationship” until Tom Barrack, a real estate investor and close friend of Trump’s and Manafort’s for several decades, recommended that Trump allow him to join the team as a volunteer. Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, also recommended Trump hire Manafort.
After Manafort’s Virginia home was raided by FBI agents in August, Trump said, “I know Mr. Manafort—I haven’t spoken to him in a long time, but I know him—he was with the campaign, as you know, for a very short period of time—for a relatively short period of time. … But I’ve always known him to be a good man.”
The goal of this messaging was clear: Whatever bad stuff Manafort did, Trump barely knew him and his role on the campaign was minimal. That the Trump team was already seeking to disown Manafort suggested they knew more bad news was coming.
But reports from the time Manafort joined the campaign describe him as “firmly in charge of all major aspects of Trump’s campaign,” and “asserting a more active role in shaping the direction of the campaign and the candidate.” Manafort was known to call Trump “Donald,” and one person close to the campaign said about Trump, “He’s calling Manafort like 20 times a day.”
The Trump team has also downplayed how well the president and Manafort knew each other before the 2016 campaign. Manafort himself has said, “Donald Trump and I had some business in the 1980s but we had no relationship until the Trump campaign called me.”
The depth of their relationship pre-2016 isn’t well-known, but it’s clear Trump and Manafort have been operating in close circles for decades. In 1980, Manafort, Charles Black, and Roger Stone (all Ronald Reagan campaign officials) opened a lobbying shop in Washington, D.C. One of their very first clients: Donald Trump, who employed the lobbying firm of Black, Manafort & Stone through the early 1990s.
Plus, both men have mutual close friends, including Barrack and Stone, whom Manafort and Trump have been close with for decades. Both Manafort and Trump were active in the New Jersey political scene in the 1980s, and later, both men were involved in lobbying Capitol Hill on American Indian gaming issues. Since 2006, Manafort has owned a condo in Trump Tower in Manhattan, and around the same time, became involved in the Manhattan real estate scene.
It’s certainly possible both men didn’t know each other well before 2016, but to say they had “some business in the 1980s” does not capture the many ways Trump and Manafort have been crossing paths for decades.
Here is a timeline to help piece together a clearer picture of their connections.
***
1972:Paul Manafort and Roger Stone are active in the College Republicans. Their candidate to lead the group, John “Terry” Dolan, runs against KarlRove, whose key aide was Lee Atwater. Rove won.
1973:Trump, 27, meetsRoy Cohn, a former aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy who went on to become Trump’s lawyer and mentor. At the time, the Justice Department was suing the Trumps for not renting to black people, and Trump hired Cohn, a New York attorney “who representedNew York power brokers, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the mob boss Carlo Gambino,” to represent them in the matter.
1977: Stone, 25, wins the presidency of the Young Republicans in a campaign managed by Manafort.
Late 1970s:Tom Barrack meets Manafort in Beirut around this time.
“A roommate at Barrack’s Beirut apartment introduced him to Manafort, who represented a firm doing business with aSaudi construction company. They became close friends,” reported the Washington Post.
1979: Roger Stone meets Roy Cohn and Trump.
From the Weekly Standard (Nov. 5, 2007):
Around the time he became northeast chairman of Reagan’s 1980 campaign, [Stone] had another awakening when he started working with the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, former McCarthy henchman and also a Reagan supporter. “I’m still kind of a neophyte,” Stone admits, “still kind of thinking everything’s on the level. ‘Cause the truth is, nothing’s on the level.” At a 1979 meeting at Cohn’s Manhattan townhouse, he was introduced to major mobster and Cohn client Fat Tony Salerno. “Roy says to Tony, ‘You know, Tony, everything’s fixed. Everything can be handled.’ Tony says, ‘Roy, the Supreme Court’ Roy says, ‘Cost a few more dollars.’ ” Stone loved Cohn: “He didn’t give a s— what people thought, as long as he was able to wield power. He worked the gossip columnists in this city like an organ.
Around 1980:As the Guardianreported,xxx “There are multiple versions of how Trump and Manafort met.” The most widely reported version is that Cohn introduced Manafort to Trump around the same time he introduced Stone to Trump.
1980:Manafort, Stone, and Charles Black (all Reagan campaign officials) open their lobbying shop in Washington, D.C.
From *Vanity Fair*:
Their first client, Stone recalled, was none other than Donald Trump, who retained him, irrespective of any role Manafort might have had in the firm, for help with federal issues such as obtaining a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the channel to the Atlantic City marina to accommodate his yacht, the Trump Princess.
Stone described the lobbying work he did for Trump on Frontline, saying Trump had a number of small but important issues.
For example, the Treasury Department is rewriting the currency transaction rules as they pertain to casinos. He has an interest there. He’s built a couple of skyscrapers that are five feet taller than the FAA-allowed limit. He needs a waiver there. He buys the Trump Princess from [Saudi businessman Adnan] Khashoggi, but it’s too big to come into the Atlantic City harbor without dredging. He needs dredging permits. Those usually take three years. We got them for him in a couple months.
Stone oversaw Trump’s business at the lobbying firm, but as Franklin Foer wrote in ***Slate***, “Manafort didn’t own the Trump account at the firm. But one of his former partners told me that he would dispense advice and pitch in, winning Trump’s trust.”
1987:Tom Barrack, Manafort’s close friend at this point, meets Trump.
“Barrack received a phone call to come to Trump Tower to meet a rising star in New York real estate,” the Washington Post reported. Barrack and Trump become close friends.
1988:According to Stone, Trump first met Manafort at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans. From *U.S. News and World Report*:
Manafort was the deputy convention manager for Vice President George H.W. Bush. Trump was in town and curious to see how a convention was really run;Manafort thought it’d be neat to get his picture with The Donald. The two convened in a trailer outside the Louisiana Superdome during a steamy weekday for a friendly chitchat.
1989: A New York Times article from May 1989 covers the scandals enveloping the New Jersey governor’s race, where Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly (Peter Kelly, a top Democratic political adviser, joined the firm later) are working for the Republican candidate Jim Courter. Manafort’s controversial involvement in obtaining a $43 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for a development project in Seabrook, N.J. (in which he later became a 20 percent partner), threatens to derail Courter’s campaign. The spokesman for the Democratic candidate says Courter’s relationship to Manafort and Stone’s lobbying firm “could be dangerous because the firm also represents powerful special interests, including the developer and casino owner Donald J. Trump.”
1991:Burson–Marsteller, the large public relations agency, acquires Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly.
October 1993: Trump and Stone testify before the House Native American Affairs subcommittee on Indian Gaming. “Black Manafort has represented Trump for years, providing advice on housing matters,” wrote the *Hartford Courant* at the time.
Asked why he even needed someone to help him around town, Trump laughed.
“I don’t know if this lobbying does anything,” he said, “but they’ve represented me over the years, and I’m very loyal.”
Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly are heavily involved in Indian gaming issues on Capitol Hill. In addition to Trump, they also represent the Casino Association of New Jersey and MGM Grand.
1996: Manafort has a new consulting firm called DMS in Virginia.
1999: Stone is working for Trump as chief political adviser as he toys with running for president. By that time, Manafort has accumulated significant experience in presidential campaigns.
Early 2000s:Manafort begins working for Donbas billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest oligarch.
2001: Paul Cohen and Julius Nasso launch Manhattan Pictures International, a New York-based motion picture distribution and production company. Manafort is part of the team behind the new company. Nasso is arrested in 2002 by federal agents, and pleads guilty in 2003 for usingGambino family mob enforcers to extort money from the actor Steven Seagal. He spends more than a year in prison.
Nasso was friendly with Trump. In a story in the New York Post from December 1999, Nasso says he asked Trump’s opinion of Abe Hirschfeld before deciding to do business with him on the film The Prince of Central Park.
“I checked him out with Donald Trump. Donald said he was a nice guy,” Nasso told the paper.
Julius Nasso has an uncle who is also named Julius Nasso. The elder Nasso owned the Julius Nasso Concrete Company, which, in 1975, entered into a joint venture with the S&A Concrete Company, owned by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family. Cohn was Salerno’s lawyer. At the time, most of Manhattan’s major development projects had mob involvement, Trump’s included. S&A Concrete “suppliedbuilding material to the Trump Plaza on Manhattan’s East Side.”
2004: Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian politician, hires Manafort as a political consultant following the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. He wants to save his political career after Viktor Yushchenko is elected president.
2005: Manafort starts a new firm called Davis Manafort Partners Inc. with Rick Davis. It has staff in the U.S., Ukraine, andRussia.
2006:Manafort reportedly begins working for Russian aluminum billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who has close ties to Vladimir Putin. The Associated Press reportedthat Manafort signed a $10 million contract with Deripaska in 2006 to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe, and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.” A spokesman for Deripaska has denied this.
November 2006: Manafort buys a condo in Trump Tower for $3.7 million through an LLC called John Hannah. John is Manafort’s middle name, and Hannah is the middle name of his then–business partner, Rick Davis. This is the first of several multimillion-dollar real estate deals Manafort does between 2006 and 2012, often all in cash.
Foer in ***Slate***: “When Manafort took an apartment in Trump Towers in 2006, he would kibitz with his old client when they’d run into one another on the elevator.”
2007: Barrack helps Manafort, “loaning Trump’s future campaign manager $1.5 million to refinance a home in the Hamptons. Barrack said the loan was repaid in 14 months and was the only financial transaction between the two,” the Washington Post reported.
March 2007: Manafort and his partners (political consultant Rick Davis and lobbyist Rick Gates) set up a private equity fund, Pericles Emerging Market Partners, to buy smaller Ukrainian firms and merge them into larger ones and then sell them. The fund is registered in the Cayman Islands. Also involved in the business are Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Manafort in his Kiev political consulting operation since 2005, Ukraine political consultant Philip Griffin, and Party of Regions flack Alexander Balanutsa.
Deripaska, the aluminum oligarch and one of Russia’s richest men, transfers $18.9 million to the fund so that it could purchase Black Sea Cable, a Ukrainian telecommunications company.The money disappears. As Bloomberg reported:
It’s not clear what became of the money that Deripaska provided for the venture. Years after the deal, Deripaska’s company sued, seeking an accounting of how the money was spent. The details are now even more clouded because lawyers for the men have since agreed to resolve the matter outside court — and outside public view, according to one of the people.
2008: Rick Davis arranged for Deripaska to meet then–presidential candidate John McCain at an international economic conference in Switzerland. At the time, Davis was McCain’s campaign manager, having taken a leave from his company with Manafort.
June 2008:CMZ Ventures, described as “one of the more bizarre development teams ever assembled in the city,” forms and attempts to buy the Drake Hotel in Manhattan for $850 million. CMZ was made up of Manafort, Arthur G. Cohen, a former top developer in the city, and Brad Zackson, who had served as a right-hand man to Fred Trump Sr. Zackson had been “the exclusive broker and manager for Fred Trump of the original Trump Organization.”
Zackson gained “access to society’s inner circle through the Trumps.” According to the Commercial Observer, Zackson had wanted to buy a property in the Bahamas, but needed help navigating the bureaucracy there, so he teamed up with Cohen and Manafort.
The Real Deal reported:
Manafort and Zackson were neighbors in the Hamptons, and soon became friends and business associates. Zackson says he invested in Manafort’s film production business, Manhattan Pictures, best known for the 2005 film The Dying Gaul.
Manafort had “an uncanny ability to conjure investors, such as Ukrainian billionaire gas king Dmitry Firtash, for projects,” the Commercial Observerreported in 2011.
Mr. Manafort then met withUkranian billionaire Mr. Firtash,a part owner of Eural Transgas, in Kiev, and secured the promise of an initial $112 million for the project, but that fell apart when Mr. Firtash became distracted by an investment in troubled Bank Nadra back home. Grasping, Mr. Zackson wrote in an email in March 2009: “I have an idea to bring [Donald] Trump in on the Drake. I think it solves a lot of issues right away.”
Court documents show Deripaska was also “set to make a $56 million investment in the Drake,” through the Pericles fund.
But the company, designed to be a billion-dollar fund to buy distressed luxury real estate, never made a single purchase.
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko allegedin a lawsuit that “Firtash used CMZ as a front in order to hide income illegally skimmed from his natural gas company RosUkrEnergo,” but a judge ultimately dismissed the suit.
2010: Manafort helps elect Yanukovych as president of Ukraine.
2014:Yanukovych is forced to flee Ukraine for Russia in the face of widespread public protests.
2014:Deripaska dissolves the private equity fund being managed by Manafort. He accuses Manafort in a Cayman Islands court of taking nearly $19 million.
Feb. 29, 2016:Manafort reportedly reaches out to Trump via their mutual friend Tom Barrack with two memos, which laid out the case for why he’d be a good fit for the campaign. These memos were reported on by the New York Times in April 2017. In one of them, Manafort “refers vaguely to work he performed, years ago, to clear noisy airspace over Mr. Trump’s Florida resort.” He stresses that he’ll work for free.
The*Washington Post*: “ ‘I really need to get to’ Trump, Manafort said, according to Barrack. He told Barrack he wanted to work as Trump’s convention manager, helping him navigate what they expected would be a contentious affair.”
March 2016: Manafort meets Barrackat the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills to talk about joining the Trump campaign.
March 28, 2016: Trump campaign hires Manafort to work unpaid.
May 2016: Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Manafort in his Kiev political consulting operation since 2005, and Manafort meet.
May 19, 2016: Manafort is named chairman of the Trump campaign.
July 2016:Manafort reportedly offers private briefings on the campaign to Deripaska over email.
Aug. 2, 2016: Manafort and Kilimnik meetat the Grand Havana Club, an upscale cigar bar in Manhattan, to talk “caviar,” which is believed to be a reference to earlier payments made to Manafort by Deripaska.
August 2016: A phone belonging to one of Manafort’s daughters is hacked and hundreds of her text messages are eventually posted on a darknet website. The texts reveal Manafort’s daughters were worried about the work he did in Ukraine and that someone had tried to blackmail him, suggesting they could reveal a secret meeting Manafort had supposedly arranged for Trump in 2012 with a Yanukovych ally.
Aug. 19, 2016:Manafort submits his resignation from the Trump campaign.
January 2017: The Steele dossier is published. Manafort calls “Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to push back against the mounting controversy” and the claims made in the dossier. Conversations between Trump and Manafort reportedly continued after the president took office.
More from Just Security:
Facebook Users Have the Right to Know How They Were Exposed to Russian Propaganda
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https://truthout.org/articles/paul-manafort-s-role-in-the-republicans-s-notorious-southern-strategy/
sue s
as part of the ongoing probe into Russian efforts to help Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, Special Counsel Robert Mueller last week handed down
criminal indictments of three Trump campaign associates, among them former campaign chair Paul Manafort of Virginia.
In a 12-count indictment that also named his business partner, Manafort was charged with conspiracy to launder money, serving as an unregistered agent of a foreign power, making false statements and other crimes. The charges relate to his laundering through foreign shell companies millions of dollars made lobbying for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine — work he failed to properly disclose — and using it to buy luxury goods and property while avoiding taxes. Manafort surrendered to the FBI, pleaded not guilty and was placed under house arrest. If convicted, the 68-year-old faces up to 80 years in prison.
The charges against Manafort — a Connecticut native with business and law degrees from Georgetown University — cap off a controversial career in politics. Much of it he spent lobbying for notorious human rights abusers such as Angolan anti-communist rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and dictators Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Mohammed Siad Barre of Somalia and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
...ping the Republican Party gain advantage by embracing the politics of racism at home.
After launching his political career in 1976 as a delegate-hunt coordinator for the President Ford Committee, Manafort went on to co-found a political consulting firm. In that capacity he served as Southern coordinator for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, in which he exploited the GOP’s “Southern Strategy”— an effort to build political support for the Republican Party among white Democratic voters in the South through dog-whistle appeals to racism against African Americans. It can be traced back to Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run and was used with great success by the Nixon campaign in 1968.
Two weeks after Reagan became his party’s nominee at the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit, Manafort arranged to have him speak at Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair, a traditional forum for right-wing politics. The visit was hosted by **Trent Lott**, at the time a Mississippi congressman who would go on to serve in the US Senate only to lose his leadership position in 2002 after praising the segregationist politics of former Dixiecrat-turned-Republican US Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
The Neshoba County Fair takes place just seven miles from the county seat of Philadelphia, Mississippi. That’s where during Freedom Summer of 1964 members of the Ku Klux Klan with help from the local sheriff and police murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, young civil rights workers who had been registering rural black residents to vote.
Mississippi declined to prosecute anyone involved in the killings at that time, so the federal government stepped in. After a lengthy battle, US prosecutors finally managed to indict 18 people on federal charges of depriving the victims of their civil rights by murder. Held before an all-white jury and a white judge with a record of hostility to the civil rights movement, the trial resulted in convictions for seven men. None served more than six years in prison, so it’s possible they attended the fair to hear Reagan speak.
In that historically and racially charged setting, what was the Reagan campaign’s message to the overwhelmingly white crowd of 10,000? “States’ rights” — the rallying cry for secessionists during the Civil War and for segregationists during the civil rights movement. Reagan said:
I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.
He went on to pledge to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.” As Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote years later in response to Republican efforts to cast Reagan’s Neshoba County appearance in a more benign light, “Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.”
A More Abstract Racism
Reagan went on to win a landslide victory over incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter of Georgia and racked up a record hostile to civil rights.
He cut funding for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He sided with the Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina in a case over whether institutions that discriminate on the basis of race can get federal funds.He even vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act requiring publicly funded institutions to comply with civil rights laws, though Congress overrode him.
The day after the 1984 general election, in which Reagan won a second term in an even more overwhelming landslide, Republican political consultant and White House political aide Lee Atwater of South Carolina became a senior partner in Manafort’s consulting firm.
Atwater was known for his use of aggressive and racially charged tacticsin his work with congressional campaigns, such as fake surveys implying an opponent was a member of the NAACP. In his work with Manafort’s firm, Atwater masterminded the racially charged
run by the George H. W. Bush campaign in 1988 accusing Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis of being weak on crime.
Atwater had discussed the origin and thinking behind the Southern Strategy in a 1981 interview with a political scientist. It surfaced in an audio recording obtained by The Nation magazine in 2012. In it he said:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Before he died in 1991, Atwater apologized for the tactics he used, noting that while he didn’t invent negative politics he was “one of its most ardent practitioners.”Manafort, though, has offered no apologies.
Making a Monster
The racially divisive tactics pioneered by Manafort and his colleagues remain a feature of US politics today, though they’ve been adapted to the times by exploiting white resentment toward Latinos and immigrants as well as African Americans.
After Manafort joined the Trump operation as chair in March 2016, political observers noticed a change in the campaign’s tone. Trump stopped with the blatantly outrageous statements, such as saying protesters deserve to be punched in the face, and instead deployed new messaging about threats to “our way of life,” and of crime and violence and the need for safety to “be restored.”
And in a nod to history, the Manafort-led campaign had Donald Trump Jr. speak at the Neshoba County Fair that July. The crowd chanted, “Build that wall” while some waved Confederate flags. Asked before his speech about the controversy over the Mississippi state flag with its Confederate symbolism, Trump Jr. answered, “There’s nothing wrong with some tradition.”
But by August 2016, Manafort’s work on behalf of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had begun drawing scrutiny in the US press, which reported that Manafort may have illegally received millions of dollars in off-the-books payments from Yanukovych’s party. Manafort resigned from the campaign on Aug. 19, 2016. But Republican leaders continued to praise his work for Trump.
“Nobody should underestimate how much Paul Manafort did to really help get this campaign to where it is right now,” said political consultant Newt Gingrich,the former congressional leader from Georgia and GOP presidential candidate who served as an adviser for the Trump operation.
How did the Southern Strategy as refined by Manafort work for Trump? In the end,Southern states delivered 160 Electoral College votes to him — more than half of the 306 total that sent him to the White House. White voters favored Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton by 21 points. Trump won among white men, white women, whites with and without college degrees, and whites of every voting age group.
One analysis found that had only white people voted in the election, Trump would have captured over 80 percent of all electoral votes — an outcome that Manafort and other Republicans helped engineer over the course of decades. As Jeet Heer observed in the New Republic, “The Southern Strategy was the original sin that made Donald Trump possible.”
Manafort’s trial is now tentatively set for April 2018. Regardless of what happens to him next, though, the political monsters he helped create live on.
==
bannon sez money laundering russian:
putin real estate
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-trump-tries-so-hard-be-putins-good-side
Trump's insistence on a summit with Vladimir Putin, disregarding the advice of aides and worries of allies, is consistent with his obsession with the Russian leader. But it’s inconsistent with his pattern of choosing policies that resonate with his supporters -- there’s no indication that Trump's followers condone this bromance.
So why does Trump pander to Putin?He won’t criticize him and incessantly flatters and coddles him. He has winked at the annexation of Crimea, threatened NATO, suggested that the G7 should readmit Russia, and done nothing to prevent Russian meddling in U.S. elections.
Many fear Trump will hand Putin unwarranted concessions, like unraveling U.S. sanctions against Russia. Trump was always soft on them anyway. After Russia requested a secretary of state who favored lifting them, Trump obliged, appointing Rex Tillerson instead of Mitt Romney. When Congress enacted sanctions on 15 Russian entities and individuals in 2017, Trump delayed implementing them for seven months and reversed a decision to impose more. What could be motivating Trump's largesse toward Russia? It's hard to argue that it's what’s best for America. A pattern of reported facts suggest it could be personal financial gain.
Throughout the 2000s, Russians bought many apartments in Trump Tower and $100 million worth of Trump properties in Florida. But these sales dropped precipitously in 2014 after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs for the Crimean incursion. Lifting sanctions would likely restore these sales, and the profits would flow through a trust run by Trump's sons, with the president as sole beneficiary. Indeed, Trump admitted that he’d “be looking at” lifting them.
Trump has many business aspirations in Russia that Putin can make or break. In 1986, Trump met with the Soviet ambassador about building a luxury hotel in Moscow, and announced a potential Trump International complex there. At the 2008 Russian Real Estate Summit, Trump touted plans for condos and hotels in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi. In 2011, he licensed his name to an aborted Azerbaijan hotel for $1 million and promoted a Trump Tower in Kazakhstan. Even as he campaigned for the Republican nomination, Trump signed a letter of intent to build Trump Tower in Moscow.
Trump’s business depends heavily on Russian money. Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008 that “Russians make up a … disproportionate cross-section of … our assets,” and later added, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Eric Trump told a journalist, “We don’t rely on American banks; we have all the funding we need out of Russia.” (He later denied saying that.)
In 2008, Deutsche Bank’s real estate group stopped lending to Trump after he defaulted on a $330 million loan. Inexplicably, he subsequently borrowed $75 million from another DB group. European and American regulators punished DB for laundering billions from Moscow.It’s not a huge leap to suspect that Trump’s DB money came from Russia.
The blackmail potential in all these financial shenanigans is abundant. Implicating Trump in almost any of these schemes could expose him to charges of money laundering and bank fraud.Since Trump’s nomination, 70 percent of Trump sales were tolimited liability companies frequently used by Russians to hide their identity, stow cash and, most likely, violate U.S. sanctions.Hundreds of millions of dollars from unidentified sources funded Trump’s unprofitable golf courses in Ireland and Scotland. Testimony before Congress suggests they were used to launder money for the Russian mafia. Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff, in speaking of White House corruption: “This is about money laundering … the path to …Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Junior and Jared Kushner.”
“America first” ideology has actually put Russia first. Leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Agreement lost America international forums where it communicated, led and influenced. Cutting the State Department’s budget and foreign aid weakened America’s global clout and allowed Putin to expand Russia's sphere of influence.
Trump’s threat to cut aid to Central America damaged trust in the U.S. Now Putin is providing aid there, reopening military bases and building a satellite-tracking station that could spy on the U.S. Trump’s rejection of Obama’s soft Cuba policy may result in a repeat of Cuba’s pivot to Russia after Dwight Eisenhower rejected Cuban efforts for diplomatic and trade ties. Trump’s trade tariffs and insults of EU and Canadian leaders threatens relationships with our closest allies. His escalating criticism of NATO make some worry the United States might actually leave the alliance – the ultimate gift to Putin.
Congressional Republicans are muting their nervousness about Trump giving away the store, settling for bromides about how there's nothing wrong with just talking to Russia. It's hard to imagine how talking under these conditions will serve America's interest, but on the other hand, we may finally see Trump Tower built in Moscow. In keeping his stakes in 500 foreign businesses -- no other president had any – Trump has unprecedented cause to tailor foreign policy for personal gain. He promised to “drain the swamp,” but there are more reptiles in it than ever, and many speak Russian
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RELATED COVERAGE
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Both Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates were indicted last year for money laundering and other financial crimes committed while, the charges said, they tried to hide the money they received for their Ukraine work.Last month, Mr. Gates pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators and has agreed to cooperate with Mr. Mueller’s investigation.
Mr. Manafort has vowed to fight the charges. In February 2017, he told The New York Times he had “never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government of the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”
But, he added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’ ”
Mr. Kilimnik was born in Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union, and he served in the Russian Army as a linguist. Last year, as scrutiny mounted of his work with Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates in Ukraine, he steadfastly denied any association with Russian intelligence. An investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors into Mr. Kilimnik’s possible links to Russian spy agencies was closed late last year without charges.
Mr. Kilimnik has maintained residences in Moscow and Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, and has traveled regularly between them during years of working for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates on behalf of various Russia-aligned oligarchs and political parties.
The new document is a sentencing memorandum for Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer who pleaded guilty in February to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with Mr. Gates in 2016 about work the two men did in Ukraine.
Mr. van der Zwaan was an attorney at a firm that worked with Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates to prepare a report used to defend Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president, from international criticism over the prosecution and incarceration of one of his political rivals.
Mr. van der Zwaan “worked closely” on the report with Mr. Gates and Person A, according to a court filing submitted Tuesday night by Mr. van der Zwaan’s lawyers asking the judge for leniency in sentencing.
Mr. van der Zwaan originally told Mr. Mueller’s investigators that he had not spoken to Mr. Gates since August 2016, but subsequently admitted he had lied after prosecutors confronted him with evidence of conversations.
The sentencing document describes an observation by one unidentified witness in the investigation who said Mr. van der Zwaan had “gone native.”
“That is, he had grown too close to Manafort, Gates, and Person A,” the document stated.
According to the filing by his lawyers, Mr. van der Zwaan “had explored opportunities to leave Skadden to work directly for Gates and Manafort” in 2012 and 2013.
Kenneth P. Vogel
https://themoscowproject.org/players/rickgates