MANAFORT 2

5/18

all 4 capt 7/18

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PARDONED but 4 22 will be retried on deadlocked charges?

fox/rw said solitary but basically gt sep cell home office w/ perks?]

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MUELLER WENT AFTER OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, TOLD FBI DOING CTR-INTELL BUT NO ONE DID?!

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MOJO

...Pinchuk appears to have long-standing ties to Yanukovych. According to emails released by the State Department, Pinchuk, a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, met in 2011 with an aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to convey a message that Yanukovych, whose growing Kremlin ties worried US officials, remained committed to Ukraine’s integration with Europe.

In 2012, Pinchuk allegedly secretly bankrolled a report by Skadden, Arps, a prominent law firm, that defended the legal basis of Yanukoych’s imprisonment of his predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko. Skadden revealed Pinchuk’s role in January when the firm agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a Justice Department case that grew out of Mueller’s investigation into Manafort, who helped arrange for the firm’s report. Pinchuk has denied funding the report....

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TRUMP BOASTS LIES WORLD NOW RESPECTS US AGAON, BUT OPPOSITE; HEGSETH JDV UNDO POSTWAR SYSTEM; NEGOIT UKR 3 DICTATOR PETRO-STATES SAUDI

2 25

Last week in Europe, the United States sent some very strong messages it is prepared to upend the established global order.

US Vice President JD Vance warned a stunned Munich Security Conference that Europe has an “enemy within”, referring to leaders who ignore their citizens’ concerns and values. He also advocated for right-wing political groups to be brought into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, at a meeting of NATO defence ministers, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth talked about hard power, the warrior ethos and the need for NATO members to spend up to 5% of their GDPs on defence. Most have only just climbed to about 2%, the longstanding NATO guideline.

In Poland, he reaffirmed the US commitment to the defence of Poland (and NATO) and committed to bolstering the US military presence there. So, despite the mixed messaging, the United States is not leaving Europe anytime soon. YOU SURE?

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is reportedly demanding a significant levy from Ukraine as payback for US protection and support.

The combination of remarks has left pundits and policymakers wondering – is the US-led international order, with its multilateral institutions, nearing its end?

The demise of the rules-based order?

The United States played a leading role in establishing the rules-based international order from the ashes of the second world war.

Critics have decried the UN-related institutions that arose at this time. But the rules-based order is perhaps best viewed as Voltaire saw the Holy Roman Empire: “no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. Those proclaiming the demise of the rules-based order should be careful what they wish for.

Such a system of trusted international exchanges barely existed prior to 1945. And while superpowers have carved out many exceptions for themselves, the rules-based order has nonetheless resulted in a time of remarkable stability and prosperity for the world.

So, why would the United States now appear to be retreating from this arrangement? The declining centrality of US influence goes some way to explain this.

China’s rise and the rise of Trump

To place the current events in proper context, we need to go back 25 years, when China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

This move was supported by and facilitated by then US President Bill Clinton in a belief that market liberalisation would eventually lead to political liberalisation.

Since then, China’s growth has skyrocketed thanks to its ready access to global markets. But it’s retained a strong mercantilist approach, counter to the spirit of the WTO. This has generated much resentment and nervousness among Western powers about the changing global power balance.

Since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, in particular, China has taken on an adversarial position to the rules-based order, following its own set of rules.

In effect, the world got neither the political nor the trade liberalisation that it once sought from China. Rather, the rules as they applied in China (and to an extent in Russia) allowed state-owned enterprises to co-opt – if not outright steal – technology shared by their international industry partners.

Foreign companies were squeezed out of China and had difficulty competing with lower-priced Chinese products at home.

Trump’s rise is, in part, a reaction to these developments. During his first term from 2017–20, Trump fitfully attempted to take a retaliatory, transactional approach to international relations. Now, as he begins his second term, he has a much more clear-eyed plan of action.

What Trump expects now

What became startlingly clear at the Munich Security Conference was Trump’s new vision of transactional alliances with America’s traditional partners.

In his view, the United States is not so much retreating into isolationism as much as it’s acting as a great power with its own economic interests at heart. Trump is eager for the US to assert its place in a world where spheres of influence matter as much – if not more – than any particular set of rules.

Evidently, the US is no longer advocating for multilateralism, in which states cooperate as equals. Now, it’s focused more on multi-polarity – a world with several great powers, in which the US puts its own interests first. As Trump frequently reminds us, “America First”.

According to this world view, allies and adversaries have equally been taking unfair advantage of:

America’s famous openness (notably its borders)
its liberal trade policies (which, according to Trump, has led to the de-industrialisation of the American heartland).

Its allies have also taken advantage of the generosity of its security umbrella, leading to their cavalier approach to security.

The Trump administration’s remedy to all of this involves doling out sanctimonious advice. An example of this: Vance telling European allies they should.JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference.

It’s also doling out some tough medicine, apparently trying to provoke a reaction in European capitals so they significantly increase their defence spending. This would enable the US to step back from being Europe’s security guarantor and finally undertake its long-talked-about pivot to Asia and focus on its main adversary: China.

Russia evidently features as part of this plan. Trump appears intent to try to cleave Russia from its Chinese embrace in order to either isolate or weaken China. A hard-nosed deal with Russia over Ukraine may well be the price he’s willing to pay to make that happen. JUST HAD ANOTHER GREAT CALL W XI

For America’s close security and economic partners, this presents an unprecedented challenge. The old preconceptions and expectations no longer seem to apply. What’s important now is not so much America’s shared values with Europe, it’s their overlapping interests.

For America’s allies, as well as its adversaries, this is going to require some hard thinking and new strategies, both economically and militarily.

John Blaxland, Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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NO LNK AN

Why is Trump bending the knee?

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Thom Hartmann February 19, 2025

What if Putin owns Trump?

I mean, seriously, what the hell is up with this? The BBC reported yesterday that Trump gave Russia everything they want with regard to Ukraine, rewarding Putin’s invasion of a sovereign European nation, and even took steps to help rebuild Russia’s economy that sanctions and the war damaged:

“The Americans said they agreed to four principles with the Russians, maintaining talks between the delegations, restoring broader diplomatic ties, enabling teams to work on a path to end the war in Ukraine, and then what the US called historic economic and investment opportunities with Russia.

“But what of any concessions being demanded of Moscow? Mr. Rubio wouldn't set any out to reporters after the meeting, saying only that it would be a matter for future talks. Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, made clear European peacekeeping forces were out of the question. …

“Pressed on why the US wasn’t laying down conditions for Moscow in order to agree to a durable peace, Mr Rubio said the two sides would only agree to ending the war on terms they were each happy with.” (emphasis mine)

Trump, in other words, has ordered Lil’ Marco to give Russia whatever they want and to hell with Ukraine. It’s a complete betrayal of Ukraine, America, democracy, and our European allies.

He even incoherently blamed Ukraine for Russia invading them, killing their people, stealing their children, and destroying their cities:

“Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it.

“You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down.”

This morning, Trump went even farther, lying with Russian talking points about how much money America has spent in Ukraine and calling President Zelenskyy a “dictator.”

Why?

ALSO READ: 'Outrageous lies': Trump floats kicking millions off of Social Security

What if Trump is working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? And has been running him as an asset since at least 2017?

That would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).

That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through his operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for this second term?

And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow documented last night?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his last 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).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 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, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when.

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 was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 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 because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.

“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 FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to 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 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 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 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 a longtime American spy buried deep in 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’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Postreported, 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 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 freaked out 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 given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man 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 the 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 our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

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.”

And now, to complicate matters, Elon Musk has access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, himself, has also reportedly been having secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, 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, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

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 much of 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, who 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 an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had also 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, aka Schedule F.

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 now Musk is doing it for him. Deconstructing the American government. For Trump. Or for Putin.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine this week to demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a rightwing coup attempt before in this country: wealthy Republican industrialists tried to kidnap and kill President Franklin Roosevelt 92 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.”

Not a single one of those traitors, some aligned with Hitler, was ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

NOW READ: Trump's view of the world is becoming clear

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an 1 25

During Donald Trump's first term as president, Paul Manafort was among the many Trump allies who faced criminal charges. The veteran GOP operative was sentenced to 47 months in prison in 2019 after being found guilty on multiple charges of tax fraud and bank fraud, but in 2020, Trump granted him a presidential pardon.

Manafort has a long history of lobbying for extreme far-right figures in Europe, Latin America and other parts of the world. And in 2025, according to the **Daily Beast's Sean Craig, Manafort and "his team" have been offering their "services" to the far right in Ukraine and France (including a "billionaire backer of" National Front leader Marine Le Pen).

Craig, in an article published on January 13, reports, "A memo pitching the services of Manafort's team — including Trump's 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and his 2024 pollster Tony Fabrizio — was circulated in Kyiv recently, the (New York) Times reported, to anxious reception….. Manafort told the Times that he has been contacted 'by numerous parties in Ukraine,' though said he 'never submitted a proposal on any matter to anyone in Ukraine.'"

READ MORE:['Fascist ideology': Veteran actor slams 'orange idiot' Trump for 'nonsense' claims about LA wildfires

Craig adds, "LaCivita said he and Fabrizio “are not currently under contract” with Manafort’s team, adding 'successful political consultants on both the right and left routinely do political consulting overseas.'"

Manafort served as one of Trump's campaign managers in 2016 before Kellyanne Conway joined the campaign. Craig notes that although Manafort's "connections to people with Russian intelligence ties" worried members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, his "prospects on the global consulting circuit have been revived by Trump's election victory in November."

"A pitch memo sent to French billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin, who plans to invest $150 million in the next decade in far-right parties in his country — including Le Pen’s —offered to 'develop a state-of-the-art and multidimensional campaign plan' that would target voters and use opposition research to discredit opponents," Craig explains. "Stérin’s associate Arnaud Rérolle told the (New York) Times that he held a call with Manafort, whose team agreed to provide the memo."

Craig adds, "They opted not to sign a contract with his team, however. Manafort may turn to Peru, where the Times said he spoke with a representative of Lima Mayor Rafael López Aliaga last month. Aliaga leads the conservative Popular Renewal and is a likely presidential candidate in 2026."

12 24 david corn mojo

With Donald Trump tapping Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and grifter, to be FBI director, it’s time to revisit the Trump-Russia scandal. I know many folks think this is old news. The matter was long ago swept under the rug. Yet the basic facts remain incontrovertible:

Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation to help Trump win, and Trump aided and abetted that assault by denying it was underway—thus providing cover to a foreign adversary subverting American democracy—while seeking to exploit it. As president, Trump continued the cover-up by echoing and affirming Putin’s phony professions of innocence. Despite the clear evidence, Trump has gotten away with this act of profound betrayal. Patel is a big reason for that.

As an aide to then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Patel led an investigation after the 2016 election of the FBI’s probe of the Kremlin’s attack and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s important to remember that there were two different components of that probe.

The bureau was looking at the Russian operation—which entailed hacking Democratic officials and operatives and then publicly disseminating through WikiLeaks internal memos and private emails to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign—and it was also examining ties between the Trump crew and Russians. This inquiry was triggered when the bureau learned that a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos supposedly told a senior Australian diplomat he had been informed that Russia could secretly assist the Trump campaign by releasing derogatory information on Clinton.

After that, the FBI began looking at Trump associates with connections in Russia. One lead for the investigators was a campaign adviser named Carter Page, a business consultant who had mucked about in Russia for years and who made a trip to Moscow in July 2016 and met with Russian officials.

With Page of interest to the investigators, the bureau sought and received a secret surveillance warrant—in government parlance, a FISA warrant—to spy on Page. Here’s where things get tricky. The FBI used what became known as the Steele dossier in its applications for a series of FISA warrants for Page. This was the now infamous collection of private memos produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that contained a host of unproven accusations about Trump-Russia links. (Remember the golden showers?)

As a Justice Department inspector general later concluded, the FBI erred in using this document to justify its request for the FISA warrant on Page and screwed up in other disturbing ways in obtaining these warrants. That is, Page’s civil rights were violated. (Interest declared: I was the first reporter to reveal the existence of the Steele dossier—with an article in Mother Jones that appeared on October 31, 2016. But I did not publish the unsubstantiated memos.)

Now pay close attention to follow Nunes and Patel’s dodgy sleight of hand. They contended (loudly) that the FBI misconduct regarding its use of the Steele dossier and the Page warrants meant that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was a witch hunt and that all talk of the Russian attack mounted to boost Trump was a hoax.

And as some Trump critics and journalists raised the notion that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Putin’s operation, Patel and other Trump defenders used the Steele dossier mess-up to counter that accusation and to contend that the entire matter was nothing but a phony Democratic dirty trick. (Steele had written his memos as a consultant to an opposition research firm paid by a law firm working for the Clinton campaign.)

In a brilliant stroke of disinformation, Trump, Nunes, Patel, and others falsely asserted that it had been the Steele memos that had prompted the FBI to launch its Trump-Russia investigation—called Crossfire Hurricane—meaning the inquiry, based on a purportedly fraudulent document that was a product of a Democratic oppo initiative, was utterly illegitimate and illegal. The realscandal, they insisted, was not Moscow clandestinely helping Trump win the White House and Trump accepting and assisting that effort, but rather the Deep State fabricating this so-called scandal.

In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and Our Battle for Democracy, Patel claims credit for “breaking open the biggest criminal conspiracy by government officials since Watergate — Russia Gate.” He repeatedly boasts that by exposing this supposed scandal—the Deep State concocting a bogus investigation to sabotage Trump—he helped save American democracy. He also asserts over and over that the FBI’s Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, which he alleges was purposefully manufactured as part of a conspiracy against Trump—“a political hit job”—run by Democrats, the FBI, the “fake news mafia,” and the Deep State.

What Patel did from the start was to engineer a wonderful deflection to defend and protect Trump. He created a false narrative in which the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier delegitimized Crossfire Hurricane and proved the whole investigation was baseless and a criminal conspiracy against Trump—and nothing else mattered. This is the cover story that Trump and his acolytes have been deploying for years.

Patel’s book makes almost no mention of the actual Russian attack on the 2016 election. Absent is any reference to the material stolen by Moscow’s hackers and leaked to hurt Clinton and aid Trump. (The worst leaking began right after the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” video came out.)

Nor does he acknowledge that Trump and his team repeatedly issued false denials and covered for Putin. He doesn’t include the meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 between Trump’s senior aides and a Russian emissary who they were informed was part of a secret Kremlin operation to assist the Trump campaign. WikiLeaks does not appear in these pages.

Patel ignores Trump’s own secret efforts during the campaign to score a huge real estate deal in Moscow—and his company’s attempt to obtain assistance from Putin’s office. Not surprisingly, he leaves out the Justice Department IG’s finding that the FBI’s initiation of Crossfire Hurricane was not based on the Steele document and not the product of “political bias or improper motivation.”

It was legitimate. Also missing from the book is the key fact that John Durham, a special counsel handpicked by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate and advance the Patel-promoted conspiracy theory that the Deep State illegally whipped up the Russia “hoax” to destroy Trump, flopped and found no massive criminal plot or significant and widespread wrongdoing.

No, all that counts is the Steele dossier and the Page FISA warrants. In Patel’s world, the various government reports that confirmed that Russia waged information warfare to boost Trump do not exist. Most notably, there’s not a hint in his book that in 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, released a bipartisan 966-page report that detailed the Russian assault, stating it was designed to help elect Trump and that the “Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” That is, the Trump campaign helped the Russians.

This report disclosed that Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chair for months during 2016, repeatedly held covert meetings with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was a Russian intelligence officer, and “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with him. The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.”

Moreover, the committee reported it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” And the committee said it had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report’s discussion of that information, though, was redacted.

Trump’s top campaign adviser clandestinely huddling with a Russian intelligence officer who was possibly involved in Moscow’s attack—that sure smells like collusion. At the least, it’s a real, honest-to-God scandal. The committee’s conclusion: Manafort posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” (Manafort was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering. Trump pardoned him in late 2020.)

Manafort does not appear anywhere in Patel’s book. Not a single sentence. (Here’s a suggestion for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: Should Patel make it to a confirmation hearing, ask him if he read the Senate Intelligence Committee report and if he accepts its findings. If he says he hasn’t, he’s not a serious nominee for this job.)

For eight years, Patel has been engaged in Soviet-style revisionism. Create a sham story and airbrush out the truth. He bears much credit for concocting the fraudulent tale that Trump and MAGA have used for years to hide a truth they can’t handle: Trump was elected with covert Russian assistance, and, if the campaign didn’t collude directly with the Russians, Trump and his gang winked at this attack on America and joined Putin in the cover-up. In part thanks to Patel, this has never become the dominant narrative.

Put simply, Patel has been a useful idiot for Putin.

Given that Patel, a QAnon supporter who has peddled the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and championed the ridiculous idea that the January 6 riot Trump incited was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents, has sued his critics for defamation, let me be explicit:

By calling him a useful idiot I’m not suggesting he has been a Russian asset or in cahoots with Russian operatives. But his effort to help Trump escape the treasonous stench of the Trump-Russia scandal by promoting a misleading account of this affair has been of tremendous value to Moscow. Patel essentially created a false alibi for Trump and a distraction that took the heat off Trump and Russia.

And he has vowed to seek revenge against those Deep State schemers who he claims illegally plotted against Trump by investigating the Russia matter. In the distorted view of reality Patel pushes, they are the wrongdoers in this episode, not Trump and not Putin. Patel hasn’t stopped selling this bunk. Yesterday, he sent out an email solicitation for the foundation he operates—under the subject heading “The Deep State can not be trusted”—that opened with this exclamation: “Remember Russia Gate? Fraud!”

One component of the FBI’s mission is to counter Russian espionage and covert actions aimed at the United States. Is this a mission Patel can take on? There are few MAGA advocates who have done more than him to help Trump and Putin dodge accountability for their devious misdeeds of 2016. Placing Patel in charge of the FBI could be akin to putting it in the hands of a mole. One can imagine the joy within the Kremlin prompted by the prospect of Patel leading this critically important agency. The Russians certainly would have reason to call him “our man in the bureau.”

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:{Alternet+ no lnx

Trump’s appointees are the Trojan horse that could lead to America’s strategic collapse

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.

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:

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.

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:

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

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):

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

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.”

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.

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”:

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.

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.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

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.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

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.

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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ALTERNET+ NO LNX

Inside the Trump Crime Syndicate

Gregg Barak May 07, 2024

Before Donald Trump criminalized the White House, Republican Party and perhaps the Supreme Court, he was the CEO of the Trump Organization — a fraudster, racketeer and patriarchal Boss of a family owned and operated criminal enterprise. He spent five decades in New York and beyond avoiding charges and prosecutions for sexual harassment, tax evasion, money laundering and nonpayment of employees.

If this wasn’t enough, Trump also busied himself by allegedly defrauding tenants, customers, contractors, investors, bankers, attorneys, students and charities, not to mention making use of undocumented workers.

In retrospect, Trump’s lifetime of lies and lawlessness appear to have prepared him for the fateful moment in which he now finds himself — in a court of law, answering for the first 34 of 88 felony counts that stem from alleged crimes he committed immediately before, during and after his presidency. Trials involving Trump’s alleged 2020 election interference and illegal retention of national secrets loom.

As the fraudster-in-chief and Benedict Arnold of our time, Trump continues to maintain his innocence and blames everybody but himself while attempting to make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

In light of Trump’s defiance, and the potential for more illegal Trumpian interference during the 2024 election, in which he is almost certain to be the Republican Party’s nominee, now is a good time to go beyond Trump and explore the criminal culpability of Trump Crime Syndicate lieutenants and Trump’s kitchen cabinet of MAGA knaves and rogues.

These are the people who have aided and abetted Trump, and continue to assist him in his single-minded quest to become the most powerful man in America.

They are worth your attention precisely because of the danger to democracy that they represent.

Criminalizing the power of the pardon with the intent to defraud

At the federal level, a gaggle of powerful Republican actors were deeply involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. These include — and are not limited to — Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

At the state level, dozens of Republican fake electors and Trump stakeholders have been criminally indicted in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada.

All of these criminal indictments for election interference like Trump’s indictments are “basically telling the same story of corruption and venality” except for their “different charges” according to Kenneth F. McCallion, a former Special Attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney with the DOJ who also worked for the New York attorney’s general office as a prosecutor on Trump-related racketeering cases.

But before proceeding further with this examination of presidential crime, politics and accountably, it is important to highlight Trump’s unprecedented usage of the pardon power, which facilitated the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021, as well as Republican electioneering of 2024.

Prior to Trump, the presidential power of the pardon had always been about showing mercy and compassion. It was most certainly not a tool for rewarding criminal loyalty and weaponizing criminal conduct.

Excluding Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” and former “partner in crime,” the Boss pardoned several of his other loyal associates, especially those within the Trump Crime Syndicate.

For example, in relation to Russian election interference in 2016, Trump pardoned his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Revealed for the man he is in the 1992 Center for Public Integrity report The Torturers’ Lobby, Manafort in 2019 was found guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia of two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one count of failing to disclose an offshore bank account.

Manafort also pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and to witness tampering in the federal District of Columbia. Most of these crimes were connected to his lobbying work in Ukraine.

Then, just days before his longtime friend and campaign adviser Roger Stone’s 48-month incarceration was scheduled to begin for seven felony convictions, including impeding a congressional inquiry, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence.

And when Trump was literally leaving the Oval Office and almost out the door, he granted clemency to his former chief political strategist Steve Bannon who had defrauded Trump donors out of more than $1 million to allegedly help build the border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Trump also pardoned retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the only one-time White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russian investigation carried out by special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

In the cases of both Stone and Flynn, Trump’s “forgiveness” cameafter Bill Barr, Trump’s third of five attorneys general, failed to shut down these investigations on the spurious grounds that these two perpetrators, Stone and Flynn, had been the victims of witch hunts and overzealous prosecutors.

ALSO READ: Trump vs. history: Former presidents typically implode on their comeback tours

We have also known for nearly two years since former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before a House select committee that the pardon power does not prohibit preemptive pardons. Nine members of Trump’s kitchen cabinet requested them in the wake of Jan. 6, demonstrating their full knowledge and intent of criminal wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Manafort, Stone, Bannon, and Flynn are back supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign as they did in 2016 and 2020. And, Trump and Putin are closer than ever. The Russian president has even publicly endorsed him this time round . It didn’t hurt that Trump seemed to have Putin’s back most, if not, all the time since he took office. Trump opposing NATO as well as Ukraine helped as well. Trump’s pardoning his own men involved in the 2016 interference seemed to condone it. His illiberal authoritarian and anti-democratic credo was another plus.

Trump’s minions began their election interference in 2015 and never stopped

Let’s begin with the criminal prosecutions related to the 2016 Russian election interference investigated by Mueller.

Mueller’s investigation led to the indictments of 34 individuals and three Russian companies. Five Trump associates and campaign officials were convicted of felonies including those mentioned above. Mueller’s final report, while finding insufficient evidence of a Trump-Russian conspiracy, did conclude that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, and expected to benefit from Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Key players in the 2016 Russian collusion affair

Paul Manafort (discussed above) according to the U.S. intelligence community was also believed to have passed internal Trump campaign and polling strategy information to Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik.

Rick Gates, a longtime business associate of Manafort and also a former Trump campaign official, was also charged in two separate federal courts and he too plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy against the United States, lying to federal prosecutors, financial crimes, and lobbying without a license.

Michael Flynn was also pardoned by Trump and worked on the 2020 as well as the 2024 presidential campaigns. Since 2022 Flynn has had a ReAwaken roadshow with the Army of God for Trump. He was the first to plead guilty in 2017 after admitting that he made false statements and omissions in FBI interviews only days after Trump was sworn in to office. The former Army general “impeded and otherwise had a material impact on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.”

Roger Stone (discussed above) was the subject of the video, The Roger Stone tapes, that reveals Stone working from the Willard hotel in D.C. with Giuliani and others, and quickly checking out while the riots were taking place.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney and “fixer” for more than a decade,pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to one count of making a false statement to Congress as well as to other crimes committed in his taxi related business in the Southern District of New York. He spent almost three years in prison serving time concurrently for both convictions.

Cohen and David Pecker are two of the key, among, many witnesses from Trump’s inner circle testifying against their former Boss in the New York presidential election interference case.

By contrast, defendant Trump has no witnesses on his behalf. He also has no family or friends except son Eric who showed up in court on April 30 for the first time. Otherwise surrounded by only his attorneys who are devoid of any facts and some twisted law, maybe, if they are lucky.

And through testimony on Friday the defense had scored no points during cross-examination that so far could create reasonable doubt.

2020 Election Interference as part of Trump’s Kitchen Cabinet

Turning next to a review of three of the 2020 Trump election interference cases. I do so without concern with the consequences for or accountability of the fake electors because none of these individuals were either affiliated with the Trump Crime Syndicate or members of the former president’s kitchen cabinet.

Although a number of them were or are elected state officials and high-ranking members of the Republican presidential campaigns of 2020 as well as 2024.

Jeffrey Clark, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia

John Eastman, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia and Arizona

Rudy Giuliani, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona

Jenna Ellis, convicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona

Sidney Powell, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia

Kenneth Chesebro, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia

Peter Navarro, convicted and in prison

Steve Bannon, convicted and out on appeal

Mark Meadows, DOJ witness, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona

Boris Epshteyn, unindicted co-conspirator in Georgia, indicted in Arizona

An unidentified political consultant is also a DOJ unindicted co-conspirator

Nixon’s Watergate was ‘much ado about nothing’ compared to Trump’s failed coup and insurrection

To put Trump’s minions in perspective, a brief examination of President Richard Nixon’s henchmen is required.

In response to the criminal cover-up of the crimes involved in the attempted burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. Nixon was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" on March 1, 1974, by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia. This was a wide conspiracy case that sent some of Washington's biggest names at the time to prison.

Compared to Trump’s failed coup, Nixon’s Watergate break-in and cover-up was no big deal; it certainly was not an existential threat to democracy and the rule of law. There was no violence toward the Capitol or danger to members of Congress and the vice president.

Forty federal officials were indicted or jailed in the case. These included Nixon's highest-ranking officials such as the former Attorney General and chairman of his 1972 presidential campaign John Mitchell. Along with the disgraced Mitchell there was John Dean, White House legal counsel, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Halderman (White-House senior staff), Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, and James McCord, Security Director of CREEP. They were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in the January cover-up trial of 1975. All of these men carried out orders that, directly or indirectly, originated with Nixon himself.

What stands out as a huge difference between the Watergate crimes responsible for forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency of the US and the Jan 6 insurrection was that Nixon became an unindicted co-conspirator while still in office. And he received his comeuppance after only a little over two years since the crimes occurred. At the time, Nixon had been president for the better part of six years.

Trump after eight years of election interference and four years as president has yet to receive his criminal comeuppance. Even if he is convicted later this month on 34 felony counts in Manhattan, his appeals could delay his well-deserved imprisonment from occurring for at least another year or two.

By contrast, three years after Jan.6, and the violent assault on the Capitol building there have been 749 convicted and sentenced offenders. At least 467 rioters have been incarcerated in either jail or prison for an array of offenses including assaulting law enforcement officers, felonious obstructing, impeding, or interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder.

More than a dozen members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy were convicted of the serious charges of seditious conspiracy. Additionally, 53 persons have been indicted as fake electors, many of whom have been high ranking Republican officials in the states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona.

Compared to racketeering, Trump and company’s very complex and organized election interference that included more than 2000 rioters besieging the Capitol on Jan. 6, and hundreds more working away in seven swing states including Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.

Paradoxically, it may seem strange given the reaction of the Republicans and the Department of Justice to Nixon and Watergate, that Trump and his election interference crimes have been given a free pass by the Supreme Court.

With respect to Trump’s inner circles, a few have already pleaded guilty and many more will be held to account regardless of whether Trump is, although this is certainly a reflection on a man who boasted of surrounding himself with the “best and brightest” the nation has to offer.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

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3 18 24 trms recap, up for gop convention head

an 3 24

Trump's one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort is paying a whopping $3.2 million in fines to finally settle federal tax-dodging charges.

A judgment against Manafort was entered for his "willful" failure to file timely legally required annual reports disclosing his ownership — or control — of more than three dozen offshore companies and accounts, according to the watchdog news site The Florida Bulldog. The penalties and interest assessed against him covered the tax years 2013 and 2014.

The $3.2 million settlement was approved by Miami U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz last week.

Trump pardoned Manafort before he left office in 2021, which freed him from jail, but didn't let him off hook for tax fines.

Manafort served as Trump's campaign manager from May to August of 2016. He left his job before he was charged with any crimes, following a flurry of concerns about his ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin and his firm’s lobbying on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs.

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He was convicted of eight criminal counts in 2018, including tax and bank fraud. He later pleaded guilty to two other counts ― one against the U.S. and the other conspiracy to obstruct justice — as part of his plea deal. He was sentenced to a total of 7.5 years.

According to Palm Beach County records, the IRS withdrew federal tax liens totaling $6.3 million against Manafort for the years 2010-2014 and 2017 after he apparently paid those back taxes in 2021.

https://www.propublica.org/article/lets-recall-what-exactly-paul-manafort-and-rudy-giuliani-were-doing-in-ukraine

3/22

no lnx dox

alhough Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort.

One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one of the journalists who dug into all the connections, as part of the Trump, Inc. podcast with ProPublica and WNYC. (I was in Kyiv, retracing Manafort’s steps, when Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine’s president was revealed in September 2019.)

Given recent events, I thought it’d be helpful to put all the tidbits together, showing what happened step by step.

Americans Making Money Abroad. What’s the Problem?

Paul Manafort was a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist who’d developed a speciality working with unsavory, undemocratic clients. In 2004, he was hired by oligarchs supporting a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was a tough assignment: The Party of Regions needed an image makeover. A recent election had been marred by allegations that fraud had been committed in favor of the party’s candidate, prompting a popular revolt that became known as the Orange Revolution.

In a memo for Ukraine’s reportedly richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Manafort summed up the polling: Many respondents said they associated the Party of Regions with corruption and considered it the “party of oligarchs.”

Manafort set to work rebranding the party with poll-tested messaging and improved stagecraft. Before long, the Party of Regions was in power in Kyiv.One of his key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy.The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia.”

Kilimnik has denied he is a Russian spy. He was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to get witnesses to lie in testimony to prosecutors in the Manafort case. Kilimnik, who reportedly lives in Moscow, has not been arrested. In an email to The Washington Post, Kilimnik distanced himself from Manafort’s legal woes and wrote, “I am still confused as to why I was pulled into this mess.”

Manafort did quite well during his time in Ukraine. He was paid tens of millions of dollars by pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and other clients, stashing much of the money in undeclared bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean. He used the hidden income to enjoy some of the finer things in life, such as a $15,000 ostrich jacket. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of wide-ranging financial crimes.

“We Are Going to Have So Much Fun, and Change the World in the Process”

In 2014, Manafort’s plum assignment in Ukraine came to an abrupt end. In February of that year,Yanukovych was deposed in Ukraine’s second uprising in a decade, known as the Maidan Revolution, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed in Kyiv. He fled to Russia, leaving behind a vast, opulent estate (now a museum) with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a galleon on a lake and a 100-car garage.

With big bills and no more big checks coming in, Manafort soon found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He eventually pitched himself for a new gig in American politics as a convention manager, wrangling delegates for an iconoclastic reality-TV star and real estate developer.

“I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote to the Trump campaign in early 2016. Manafort was hired that spring, working for free.

According to the Senate report, in mid-May 2016 he emailed top Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack, “We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.” (Barrack was charged last year with failing to register as a foreign agent, involving his work for the United Arab Emirates. He has pleaded not guilty. The case has not yet gone to trial.)

A few months later, the Trump campaign put the kibosh on proposed language in the Republican Party platform that expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.

One Trump campaign aide told Mueller that Trump’s view was that “the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.”

According to the Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.

Senate investigators wrote in their report that they suspected Kilimnik served as “a channel for coordination” on the Russian military intelligence operation to hack into Democratic emails and leak them.

The Senate intel report notes that in about a dozen interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort “lied consistently” about “one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.”

Manafort’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manafort didn’t make it to Election Day on the Trump campaign. In August 2016, The New York Times revealed that handwritten ledgers recovered from Yanukovych’s estate showed nearly $13 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party. Manafort was pushed out of his job as Trump’s campaign chairman less than a week later.

After Trump won the election, the Senate report says, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together on a proposed “plan” for Ukraine that would create an Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southeast Ukraine, on the Russian border. Manafort went so far as to work with a pollster on a survey on public attitudes to Yanukovych, the deposed president. The plan only would need a “wink” from the new U.S. president, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in an email.

Manafort continued to work on the “plan” even after he had been indicted on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy, according to the Senate report. It’s not clear what became of the effort, if anything.

“Do Us a Favor”

With Manafort’s conviction in 2018, Rudy Giuliani came to the fore as the most Ukraine-connected person close to President Trump. Giuliani had long jetted around Eastern Europe. He’d hung out in Kyiv, supporting former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko’s run for mayor. One of Giuliani’s clients for his law firm happened to be Russia’s state oil producer, Rosneft.

By 2018, Giuliani had joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani saw that Ukraine could be a key to that effort.

Giuliani ended up working with a pair of émigré business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to make contacts in Ukraine with corrupt and questionable prosecutors, in an effort to turn up “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Giuliani also worked to sow doubt about the ledger that had revealed the secret payments to Manafort, meeting with his buddies in a literally smoke-filled room.

Parnas and Fruman told the president at a donor dinner in 2018 that the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv was a liability to his administration.

Credit:(Transcript courtesy of rev.com)

Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had been a vocal opponent of corruption in Ukraine, from Kyiv in May 2019.

Two months later, Trump had his infamous call with Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy asked Trump for anti-tank Javelin missiles. You know what happened next. Trump said he needed Zelenskyy to first “do us a favor” and initiate investigations that would be damaging to Joe Biden. He also pressed Zelenskyy to meet with Giuliani, according to the official readout of the call:

These events became publicly known in September 2019, when a whistleblower complaint was leaked.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.

In December 2019, as animpeachmentinquiry was at full tilt, Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions. Derkach, a former member of the Party of Regions, went on to release a trove of dubious audio “recordings” that seemed to be aimed at showing Biden’s actions in Ukraine, when he was vice president, in a negative light.

Within months, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing him as “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who tried to undermine U.S. elections. Derkach has called that idea “nonsense.”

In a statement, Giuliani said, “there is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all.” Giuliani has consistently maintained that his actions in Ukraine were proper and lawful. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Where They Are Now...

Many of Trump’s allies have been charged or investigated for their work in and around Ukraine:

Paul Manafort: convicted of financial fraud — then pardoned by Trump

Rick Gates: a Manafort aide who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI

Sam Patten: another Manafort associate convicted for acting as a straw donor to the Trump inaugural committee on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch

Rudy Giuliani: reportedly under criminal investigation over his dealings in Ukraine; his lawyer called an FBI search of his home and seizure of electronic devices “legal thuggery”

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman: convicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. elections; Parnas’ attorney said he would appeal

Key Documents

US Senate Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report

Many of the exhibits from Paul Manafort’s 2018 trial are available for free with a CourtListener account

an raw 8 22

In an interview with Business Insider, former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort admitted he was in contact with the Russians and sharing information during the former president's 2016 presidential run.

For years, questions have been raised about Russian involvement in the campaign that saw the New York businessman beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Manafort is now stating that he handed polling data over to the Russians -- in particular to "Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate with suspected ties to Russian intelligence."

According to the report, "Kilimnik then passed the data on to Russian spies, according tothe US Treasury Department, which has characterized the data as 'sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.'"

In the interview, Manafort excused his actions stating he wasn't looking for help getting Trump elected and did it purely to make money, with Business Insider reporting, "Manafort told Insider that he directed his deputy, Rick Gates, to feed Kilimnik polling data via email to 'keep Konstantin informed.' The goal was to use his access to Trump to drum up business for himself.

"The data that I shared with him was a combination of public information and stuff for the spring that was — it was old," the former Trump, advisor explained.

The report adds, "Manafort said he had no reason to think Kilimnik was spying for Russia and pointed out that Kilimnik had been vetted and cleared by Yanukovych's staff, stating, "None of us believed KK worked for Russian intelligence."

You can read more here -- subscription required

Ed Buckham? chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Zach Everson

Forbes Staff

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

4,683 views | May 13, 2022

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

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

3,674 views | May 10, 2022

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

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

15,989 views | May 9, 2022

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

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

5,424 views | May 6, 2022..

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

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

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

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

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

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

[no doc]

ggl 5 22

Hollywood bit player had curious walk-on role in Manafort loanhttps://www.stuff.co.nz › americas › donald-trumps-america

Jan 10, 2019 — Intrater is perhaps better known as the CEO of Columbus Nova, a New York-based investment firm that has managed money for Vekselberg's Renova ...

Paul Manafort's family got a $1 million loan in 2017, but the ...https://www.salon.com › ... › Alex Henderson's Articles

Jan 9, 2019 — Yet despite his legal peril, Manafort's family received a $1 ... “The money behind the Manafort loan isn't Intrater's, the lawyers say.

Hollywood Bit Player Had Curious Walk-On Role in Manafort ...https://www.bqprime.com › OnWeb

Jan 9, 2019 — Hollywood Bit Player Had Curious Walk-On Role in Manafort Loan. Intrater is perhaps better known as the CEO of Columbus Nova, ...

Hollywood Bit Player Had Curious Walk-On Role in Manafort ...https://www.bloomberg.com › news › articles › hollyw...

Jan 9, 2019 — Joey Rappa, lender's front man, did movie with Andrew Intrater · Neither is behind $1 million loan, lawyers say, but who is?

1 DOCUMENT REQUESTS Please produce the ... - Just Security https://www.justsecurity.org › andrewintrater-doc-...PDF

Andrew Intrater. 1. DOCUMENT REQUESTS. Please produce the documents set forth in Schedule A, provided, however, that in order to.

1 DOCUMENT REQUESTS Please produce the ... - Just Securityhttps://www.justsecurity.org › georgenader-doc-re...PDF

Donald Trump Jr., Natalia Veselnitskaya, Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, ... Cohen and any of the following: Viktor Vekselberg, Andrew Intrater, ...

Analysis: 81 people and organizations looped into Trump ...https://www.mcall.com › opinion › mc-opi-trump-investig...

Mar 5, 2019 — Who he is: A pollster who had worked for Paul Manafort and who did work ... Why he's important: Intrater, as founder of a company linked to ...

https://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-opi-trump-investigations-house-81-who-20190305-story.html

Manafort's Mystery Lender Steps Forward After Gaffe in Filing https://www.bloombergquint.com › Politics

Man Who Secretly Lent Paul Manafort $1 Million Has Finally Come Forward ... Andrew Intrater, only as he was being questioned by Bloomberg News in December.

How Putin's Oligarchs Got Inside the Trump Team | Timehttps://time.com › World › russia

Sep 20, 2018 — Moscow reached Paul Manafort at a crucial moment in the U.S. presidential ... thanks to his cousin Andrew Intrater, whose American firm, ...

https://newrepublic.com/article/165782/republicans-putin-history-relationship-manafort

no lnx many

Craig Unger/March 18, 2022

How Republicans Spent Decades Cozying Up to Putin’s Kremlin

The man who once worked to connect Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff to Russia is now chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Any questions?

“Do you think Americans give a fuck about Ukraine?!”

—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking to NPR broadcaster Mary Louise Kelly in January 2020

Whatever Americans were thinking two years ago, when Pompeo gave his NPR interview, they now do give a fuck about Ukraine—and therein lies a problem: For more than 25 years, the party of Reagan has been transforming itself into the party of Putin, only to discover that Vladimir Putin may not be a great role model after all. As a result, one leading Republican after another has begun to perform Simone Biles–level gymnastics in their bids to condemn their party’s most powerful patron.

Consider that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis now calls Putin “an authoritarian gas station attendant with some legacy nuclear weapons.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Putin “a ruthless thug who’s just invaded another sovereign country and killed thousands of innocent people.” And on Twitter, Senator Lindsey Graham openly called for Putin’s assassination. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” he tweeted. “You would be doing your country—and the world—a great service.”

For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives.

But if you think this is hard-line Cold War tough talk from the Reagan-era GOP of yore, think again. It’s not just Donald Trump who’s in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives funding and working with K Street lobbyists, political consultants, super PACs, campaign fundraising operations, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, social media operations, cyber-warfare efforts, money laundering schemes, think tanks harboring Russian intelligence operatives, and much, much more.

Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, has observed the relationship for years. “If you go back to the days of Jack Abramoff, when Americans started going to Moscow in the ’90s, and then to Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and so on, you start to see the spine of a secret influence campaign between the Republicans and Russia that has been built up over decades,” he said. “It goes right up to Tucker Carlson rooting for Putin on Fox today. It has been built up over decades, and it is not new, and it deeply infects the Republican Party. You have two forces with deep political ties that are fighting American democracy in order to keep Putin in power and install a Putin-like system in America. And to that end, they have penetrated deep into our think tanks, our media, our journalism—everything.”

Take Ed Buckham, the recently appointed chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today, Buckham handles a congresswoman who proudly attends “white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin” rallies, as Congresswoman Liz Cheney characterized them, and has become renowned for touting conspiracy theories about how the California wildfires were started byJewish space lasers. On Thursday, when the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, Greene, not surprisingly, was one of eight Republicans who voted against it.

Buckham’s ties to Russian interests date back 25 years to 1997—before Putin came to power—when he served as an aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. This was the heyday of “Casino Jack” Abramoff, the lobbyist-conman who took on pay-for-play clients ranging from the Choctaw Indian tribe of Mississippi to the Kremlin with a panache made for Hollywood. At the time, Buckham, in addition to his job with DeLay, oversaw a lobbying outfit called the U.S. Family Network, which presented itself as a public advocacy group but was really a vehicle funded largely by clients of Jack Abramoff.

In this case, the relevant clients linked to Abramoff were executives from Naftasib, the Russian energy giant. If DeLay’s lavish six-day excursion to Moscow in 1997 is any indication, the Russians made cultivating DeLay a high priority and spared little expense, as the junket involved golf, lavish dinners, and a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. But the icing on the cake was a $1 million contribution by the Russians to the U.S. Family Network. According to The Washington Post, Buckham told the former president of the U.S. Family Network that Russians made the $1 million contribution specifically to influence DeLay’s vote on legislation to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.

Ultimately, DeLay was forced out of Congress, indicted, convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison for money laundering and conspiracy charges relating to campaign financing. In 2013, however, his conviction was overturned on appeal. Abramoff served 43 months in jail for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials, and tax evasion. As for Buckham, he is now back in the fray, a top aide to one of the most controversial and extreme members of Congress. (Buckham did not respond to multiple requests for an interview for this article.)

But Buckham’s and DeLay’s Russian intrigues paled next to those of Paul Manafort, the Roy Cohn–trained fixer and political consultant who represented the interests of corrupt despots the world over—the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Romania’s Nicolai Ceausescu, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko—and Vladimir Putin. Manafort’s ties with Russia go back to 2004, when he began his journey into the shadowy world of flight capital, offshore companies, and Russian intelligence. In all, over $75 million in Russian funds flowed through Manafort’s operations into his offshore accounts. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Manafort appointed his constant companion, a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik, as head of his Ukraine operations with full “power of attorney” to interact with pro-Putin oligarchs who were funding Manafort.

Manafort set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives.

He also set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives. As Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, once explained, “Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure.… In every ministry, he has a guy.” And much of it was in service to Putin’s objective of taking over Ukraine, not by military force as we are seeing today but from the inside, via the pro-Putin Party of Regions, whose oligarchs paid Manafort, and its candidate Viktor Yanukovych, an oligarch worth $12 billion.

Manafort launched Yanukovych into the Ukrainian presidency in 2010. But by 2013 the pro-European facade he had created for his candidate had been stripped away, revealing Yanukovych to be merely another of Putin’s pawns. After the massive protests in Maidan Square in 2014, when nearly 100 activists were killed, Yanukovych was forced to leave the presidency and flee to Moscow.

Text messages between Manafort’s two daughters, Andrea and Jessica, suggest they felt their father was responsible for the deaths that took place at Maidan. “Don’t fool yourself,” Andrea Manafort texted her sister. “That money we have is blood money.”

So by the time Manafort became Donald Trump’s campaign manager, the die had been cast. Deeply in debt to Putin’s oligarchs, he maintained, according to the report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020 cited above, ongoing contacts with Kilimnik that “represented a grave counterintelligence threat” because his “presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”

According to the Mueller Report, in August 2016, Manafort met with Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Club in New York and, according to an assessment by the Treasury Department, provided “Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and strategy,” presumably for use in influence campaigns on behalf of Trump.

Of course, Manafort was not alone among Republican lobbyists in carrying water for Putin. According to Open Secrets,quite apart from Manafort, Russian interests have spent about $182 million on lobbying, influence operations, and propaganda in the last six years.

As I reported in American Kompromat,Jones Day,the fourth-largest law firm in the land, represented at least 10 major corporations and organizations close to Putin. These included: Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element; the Alfa Group and Access-Renova Group, which jointly own billions in oil and gas assets; Alfa Bank, the largest private commercial bank in Russia; Letterone, a $30 billion holding company for assets in technology, oil, and gas; Rosneft, the world’s largest listed oil company; the Sapir Organization, which helped fund Bayrock’s Trump SoHo; and more.

Likewise, Kirkland and Ellis is the biggest law firm in the world, with a star-studded cast of GOP power brokers in its ranks—among them, former Attorney General William Barr; former solicitor general and GOP attack dog Kenneth Starr; Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh; Viet Dinh, chief legal and policy officer of Fox Corporation, and as such the secret power behind Fox News; and former national security adviser John Bolton, to name but a few. Its most prized Russian clients have included Alfa Bank, whose key figures, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, were entirely dependent on Putin for their wealth, and Oleg Deripaska’s En+ Group, the largest producer of aluminum in the world outside of China.

Now that Putin has begun waging an old-fashioned war with bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground, and is doing so in an astonishingly brutal and clumsy fashion, it is tempting to forget that in recent years, he has been far, far more successful with the kind of asymmetric hybrid warfare we saw in the 2016 election. So as the horrifying carnage in Ukraine flickers across our television screens, let’s not forget Russian trolls activating strategic influence operations on multiple social media platforms, the money laundering through real estate that enriched Donald Trump and his associates, and the Russian conspiracy theories that just happen to be echoed by QAnon, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and the like.

Of course, now that there are far more forceful sanctions in play and Russia has become a pariah state and Operation Kleptocapture is underway, the once-close relationship between figures on the American right and the Kremlin was bound to change. It wasn’t that long ago that Steven Brogan, the powerful managing partner of Jones Day, could interact withpartners Don McGahn and Vladimir Lechtman, the head of Jones Day’s Russia practice, and in doing so talk to one man who served as Donald Trump’s attorney and another who was likely the single most trusted corporate counsel to Putin’s oligarchs. Things can’t be quite that cozy these days.

“The sanctions that have been put into place are intended to choke Putin’s entire system of economic as well as military power. In the near term, there is nothing but risk for those who engage with Russia, and intense pressure to withdraw from Russian relationships,” says Jonathan Winer, who is credited with coming up with the Magnitsky Act, applying sanctions to Russian officials who were responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the tax accountant for Hermitage Capital Management who uncovered massive corruption by Russian officials and was tortured to death. “The international law firms and accounting firms operating in Russia are mostly shutting down for now,” he added.

“Russian security state influence networks are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s all over between Russia and the GOP. When Lindsey Graham calls for the head of Vladimir Putin, me thinks he doth protest too much. The relationship will continue. “Russia has been in the influence business a very long time, and it’s a core part of its military doctrine, especially during what others think of as peacetime,” says Winer. “Russian security state influence networks are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person. Instead, they are likely to just go deeper underground.

“The oligarchs relied on twin pillars for support, both of which are under attack right now,” Winer adds. “Putin was the wallet, and the West provided entry into the global elite.”

As for the first pillar, the whole world can monitor Putin’s fate day by day, hour by hour, as his army slowly slogs its way across Ukraine getting shelled mercilessly in a showdown that had been billed as an easy win.

And as for the second, the consequences of truly harsh sanctions, of Task Force KleptoCapture, and of other efforts will become evident over time in terms of how much Putin’s oligarchs will be able to enjoy the riches of the West. “That is the great question,” said Winer. “What is our capacity to enforce money laundering? The EU finally made it illegal for corporations to pay bribes. But how will they enforce it?”

And finally, there are other areas, such as cryptocurrency, that are so new that one can’t make any predictions at all. “We know for sure the Russians use crypto for influence operations working out of their St. Petersburg troll farm,” Winer added. “But it is grossly unregulated.” What happens with crypto may be the biggest question of all.

Craig Unger is the author of five books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including, most recently, NYT bestsellers House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat, which has just been published in paperback.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/manafort-removed-from-flight-to-dubai-over-revoked-passport-report/

any doubt on this?

an 521

Unredacted records show Paul Manafort lied to investigators about sharing polling data with Russia

Meaghan Ellis May 25, 2021

Newly unredacted court documents in the case of former President Donald Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort show that he provided false claims regarding the information Russia received about U.S. polling data, according to MSBNC.

According to federal prosecutors, Manafort was not completely forthcoming about the arrangements made to share polling data about U.S. citizens with a Russian spy.

The latest development came to light on Monday, May 24 when the court documents were unsealed by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson. Per Huff Post, the unredacted documents highlight a number of Manafort's false claims.

"Manafort lied about his relationship with spy Konstantin Kilimnik during the time Robert Mueller was the special counsel investigating suspected Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in order to manipulate the presidential election, according to records."

The publication also reports that Manafort and his campaign deputy Rick Gates were accused of "periodically" sharing internal the Trump campaign's internal polling data on voters with Kilimnik. In addition to the files shared with Kilimnik, documents show that Manafort is also accused of "lying about several discussions he had with the spy about Kilimnik's Ukraine 'peace plan,' which investigators considered a strategy to divide the nation and provide a 'backdoor way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine.'"

In 2019, Manafort was convicted of "conspiracy against the U.S., conspiracy to obstruct justice, and tax and bank fraud." Although he was sentenced to seven years behind bars, he was pardoned by Trump in December 2020.

While Manafort claimed he hadn't had "'direct or indirect communication with anyone' in the Trump administration 'on any subject matter,'" prosecutors determined that was also a lie.

"The evidence demonstrates that Manafort lied ... Manafort had contacts with Administration officials," prosecutors wrote. Manafort's attorney, Kevin Downing, has yet to release a statement about the latest reports.

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2014 Ukrainian revolution - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › 2014_Ukrainian_revolution

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:{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

manafort, solomon black ledger nunes

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/19/republicans-use-impeachment-hearings-smear-ukrainian-helped-expose-manafort

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-campaign-changed-ukraine-platform-lied-about-it

The Trump campaign went out of its way to dramatically alter the Republican Party’s official position on Ukraine—against the wishes of GOP hawks and despite senior Trump aide Paul Manafort’s insistence that they weren’t involved.

The move, first reported by *The Washington Post*, alienated Republicans who have made up the party’s foreign policy base for decades, and indicates that the Trump campaign has a particular interest inUkraine, where Manafort had previously worked for a pro-Putin leader.

Manafort said on NBC’s *Meet the Press* this past weekend that the change in language on Ukraine “absolutely did not come from the Trump campaign.”

But this account is contradicted by four sources in the room, both for and against the language.

Eric Brakey, a Maine delegate who identifies as a non-interventionist, said he supported the change, which was pushed in part by the Trump campaign.

“Some staff from the Trump campaign came in and… came back with some language that softened the platform,” Brakey told The Daily Beast. “They didn’t intervene in the platform in most cases. But in that case they had some wisdom to say that maybe we don’t want to be calling… for very, very clear aggressive acts of war against Russia.”

“They substantively changed it,” added Washington, D.C., delegate Rachel Hoff, who was present during the meeting. “It absolutely was my understanding that it was Trump staff.”

According to two Republican delegates, the Trump campaign’s efforts were led in part by J.D. Gordon, a Trump campaign official and a former spokesman at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, records for the meeting seem to have disappeared.A co-chair for the national security platform subcommittee told The Daily Beast that the minutes for the meeting have been discarded. The Republican National Committee had no comment when asked whether this was standard procedure for all the subcommittees.

During the meeting, pro-Cruz delegate Diana Denman proposed language that called for “providing lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine.

Her amendment was put on hold so that Republican staff could work with Denman on the language. What followed was a back and forth between Denman and the Trump campaign, according to Denman.

“They were over sitting in chairs at the side of the room,” Denman said of two men who said they working for the Trump campaign, one of whom was Gordon. “When I read my amendment, they got up and walked over and talked to the co-chairmen and they read it. That’s when I was told that it was going to be tabled.”

hard core?

https://themoscowproject.org/dispatch/ukrainian-weapons-and-the-rnc-platform/

Two interesting Ukrainian weaponry threads are in the news this week. First, of course, is the fact that Ukrainian investigators are freezing their cooperation with the Mueller investigation so as not to upset the administration amid anti-tank missile sales.

Second, Mueller is still reportedly investigating a decision to remove language supporting lethal weapons for Ukraine from the GOP party platform, a surprising reversal of a key attack on President Obama’s Ukraine policy. While Republicans—House Intel Committee members in particular—have tried to downplay that event, consider it in the broader timeline of Trump-Russia collusion. This could be a down payment on a quid for Russian interference quo. In other words, the platform change is a clear and tangible deliverable from Trump to Russia.

It was an odd change.

Initially, a draft of the RNC platform called for “providing lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine to combat Russian incursions. This was a common demand made by GOP senators since 2014 and the basis for frequent Republican attacks on Obama.
Days later, the language was softened: The final version called instead for “providing appropriate assistance” to Ukraine.
After weeks of intrigue, the motive became clear: It happened because the Trump campaign asked for it.
In fact, Trump adviser J.D. Gordon intervened to make the change at the convention.

But it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Other events in July of 2016 show a broader pattern: the Trump campaign repeatedly handing the Kremlin gifts.

Campaign adviser Carter Page, already on the FBI’s radar as a potential Russian infiltrator, traveled to Moscow’s New Economic School to and discuss the campaign with high-ranking Russian officials and oligarchs.
On July 20, Gordon, Page, and then-Senator Jeff Sessions met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyakat the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
While ordinarily this might be written off as mundane diplomatic box-checking, in this case Kislyak made no such appearance at the Democratic National Convention to check in with the clear front-runner in the race.
Two days later, WikiLeaks began releasing emails from the DNC. By July 26, it was clear the Kremlin was behind the hack. Trump not only refused to denounce this, but encouraged Russia to hack into his opponent’s inbox.
Trump ended the month by telling George Stephanopoulos that Putin was “not going into Ukraine” and that “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”

For the Kremlin who, like everyone else, didn’t think Trump would become president, softening the platform of a historically hawkish party would be a huge foreign policy achievement.

Considering the platform change in the broader context of small but tangible pro-Russia deliverables—moves that would barely register in a heated campaign, but would make waves abroad—shows a concerning larger pattern.

rudy impeach confers from jail

both pushed ukraine BS but did they cooperate/coordinate? yuop, w/ kilimnik

wapo

no lnx

Analysis

Surprise: Trump allegedly got his Ukraine conspiracy theory from the Russia-tied criminals on his campaign

Aaron Blake

November 4, 2019 at 10:21 AM EST

The fact that the two biggest controversies of the Trump presidency have revolved around Russia and Ukraine — two former Soviet republics in a state of perpetual conflict — might have seemed like a strange coincidence.

More and more, we’re learning it's not.

A trove of documents from Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation released over the weekend show that Trump’s Ukraine conspiracy theory appears to have been propagated by two top aides who were central figures in the special counsel’s investigation: Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. The conspiracy theory also was apparently fertilized by Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik.

The three of them appear to have played a role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine. Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani have since set about trying to get Ukraine to investigate the allegations, including by allegedly leveraging hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and a much-sought Oval Office meeting for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The alleged corrupt quid pro quos are now at the center of the House’s impeachment inquiry of Trump.

To recap, that’s three people with controversial ties to Russia, two of whom are convicted criminals (Manafort and Flynn) and another who has been indicted (Kilimnik). Trump is apparently trying to prove their theory, to this day.

Rick Gates, a former Manafort deputy and Trump campaign aide, told investigators that the three of them were pushing the theory to Trump. According to the newly released Mueller documents, Gates told investigators that “Flynn was adamant the Russians did not carry out the hack” and that Flynn told Trump that U.S. intelligence “was not capable of figuring it out.” He also said that Manafort said the hack of Democratic emails “was likely carried out by the Ukrainians, not the Russians.” And Gates said Manafort’s theory was “parroted” from Kilimnik, who “also opined the hack could have been perpetrated by Russian operatives in Ukraine.”

Gates pleaded guilty to lying to investigators before he began cooperating with Mueller’s team.

Mueller’s investigators concluded that Kilimnik, Manafort’s associate in Ukraine, had ongoing ties to Russian intelligence during this whole period. They have indicted him for witness tampering, although he is unlikely to ever face the charges, given that he is overseas.

But he is hardly the only one with a controversial relationship with Russia.

Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, has ties to Russia and Russian interests dating back more than a decade, as Philip Bump has documented. He was indicted after documents revealed nearly $13 million in undisclosed payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. The New York Times reported in July 2017 that Manafort was $17 million in debt to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. He and Gates were also in business with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who sued them in 2018 for allegedly defrauding him to the tune of $19 million. There is evidence that Manafort signed a $10 million a year contract with Deripaska in 2006 to push a proposal that was pitched as something that “can greatly benefit the Putin Government,” and there is also evidence that Manafort took out a $10 million loan from Deripaska at one point.

Flynn’s ties to Russia are more tenuous, but he has made a series of curious decisions involving himself with it. In 2013, as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration, he became the first U.S. official to visit Russia’s GRU, its military intelligence agency. Flynn then reportedly sought to invite GRU officers to the United States, even after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. After leaving the Obama administration, Flynn sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a gala in 2015 for the English-language Russian propaganda channel RT and was paid $45,000 for his trip. He was paid another $23,000 by Russia-tied entities that year, according to documents released in 2017.

When serving briefly as Trump’s national security adviser in early 2017, Flynn lied to Vice President Pence and investigators about his talks with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, claiming they had not discussed sanctions during the transition period even though they had. It was enough to cause Sally Yates, then acting attorney general, to warn the White House that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the investigators.

So we have two men who have been convicted of offenses related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine, and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years. Flynn’s alleged effort to push Trump to be skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community in which Flynn served seems to have proven particularly long-lasting, despite Flynn’s conviction and his predilection for conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate.

And now Trump has pushed the theory so far, despite its baselessness, that it has put him on course for impeachment. Given that Russia’s goal has always been more about destabilizing the West rather than necessarily supporting Trump, it’s about the best that the Kremlin could have hoped.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/treasure-trove-of-mueller-memos-shows-trump-benefited-the-russians-beyond-their-wildest-expectations/

Sunday morning, an MSNBC “AM Joy” panel took up the release of a batch of memos from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that were released on Saturday that shed light on even more connections between aides to the president and Russian officials.

Reviewing the documents obtained by Buzzfeed News, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin said Russia lucked out with Trump as a presidential candidate...

ref

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/mueller-report-secret-memos-1

no lnx many docs

THE MUELLER MEMOS

The Mueller Report’s Secret Memos

BuzzFeed News sued the US government to see all the work that Mueller’s team kept secret. We have published the first installment, with revelations about the Ukraine conspiracy theory, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, and more.

Posted on November 2, 2019, at 12:08 p.m. ET

Paul Manafort was pushing the unfounded conspiracy theory — now part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump — that Ukraine hacked the Democratic National Committee's emails as early as 2016.

The president’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, "had to keep Trump out of the messaging related to Russia” in preparation for his testimony to Congress under oath and that the false testimony was "not his idea."

Top Trump campaign aide Rick Gates said the campaign was “very happy” when a foreign government helped release the hacked DNC emails.

These are some of the revelations that BuzzFeed News pried loose after pursuing five separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for all the subpoenas and search warrants that then–special counsel Robert Mueller’s team executed, as well as all the emails, memos, letters, talking points, legal opinions, and interview transcripts it generated.

[Read the documents here.]

In response to a court order, the Justice Department released the first installment of documents: hundreds of pages of summaries of FBI interviews with witnesses, available here for the first time. Another installment will be released every month for at least the next eight years.

The documents revealed Saturday, known as “302 reports,” are summaries of interviews with former White House official and Trump campaign manager Stephen Bannon, Cohen, Gates, and more. They are some of the most important and highly sought-after documents from Mueller’s investigation. They reveal what key players in the campaign told FBI agents about Russia, Trump, the email hack during the 2016 presidential campaign, and Trump's associates’ handling of the special counsel’s investigation.

Mueller’s 448-page report last March was the most hotly anticipated prosecutorial document in a generation, laying out the evidence of Russia's interference in the 2016 election and the Trump administration’s efforts to obstruct the inquiry. The report, however, reflected only a small fraction of the billions of primary-source documents that the government claims Mueller’s team may have amassed over the course of its two-year investigation.

[We want your help! If you see something in these memos, you can email reporter Jason Leopold at jason.leopold@buzzfeed.com or reach us securely at tips.buzzfeed.com.]

Those documents are a crucial national legacy, a key to understanding this important chapter in American history. But the public has not been allowed to see any of them. Until now.

After years of speculation and accusation, these documents offer a chance for everyone to view a key function of American democracy. That opportunity — hard-won, but enshrined anew with each additional FOIA release — commences today. It will last long after all the players have departed.

Some takeaways from the memos:

Manafort was pushing the conspiracy theory that Ukraine hacked the DNC as early as 2016

In an April 2018 interview with the special counsel’s office, Rick Gates, who had served as deputy Trump campaign chair and had long been Paul Manafort’s right hand, told investigators that after the campaign learned the DNC had been hacked, Manafort pushed the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had orchestrated the attack. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s persisted in right-wing circles, even after the US Intelligence Community concluded Russia was involved, and one that Trump brought up in his July 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In a written memorandum of the July call released by the White House, Trump at one point says to Zelensky, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Prosecution of former White House counsel sets K Street on edge — again

Charges against Gregory Craig over working with foreign interests follow the high-profile case of Paul Manafort.

By THEODORIC MEYER

04/11/2019 09:21 PM EDT

Robert Mueller’s investigation is over. But the government crackdown on unregistered foreign agents may be just getting started.

The Justice Department’s indictment of Gregory Craig, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama, on Thursday sent a clear signal to K Street that lobbyists who work for foreign interests without registering have reason to be afraid.

Some Washington lobbyists have been on edge since Mueller indicted Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, in 2017 on charges of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, previously a rarely enforced law requiring lobbyists and others who work on behalf of foreign governments and political parties to disclose their activity to the Justice Department.

Though Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election has concluded, the Justice Department last month signaled its willingness to continue prosecuting potential violations of foreign lobbying law by tapping Brandon Van Grack, a former prosecutor on Mueller’s team, to head its FARA unit. Craig’s indictment is likely to reverberate on K Street as the crackdown continues, according to half a dozen Washington lawyers who have advised clients on complying with the law.

A letter from the FARA enforcement unit now “has to be taken as seriously as a heart attack,” said Matthew Sanderson, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale who advises clients on the law.

Craig was charged with misleading the Justice Department about his role in writing a report in 2012 on the prosecution of Yulia Tymoshenko, a former Ukrainian prime minister, while he was a partner at the law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom. Manafort arranged to hire Skadden on behalf of the Ukrainian government, although a Ukrainian oligarch paid most of the firm’s fees, according to the indictment.

When the report was finished, Craig helped to promote it to reporters in Washington and gave interviews to them. When the Justice Department sent a letter to Skadden to determine whether Craig’s actions meant he needed to register as a foreign agent, Craig made “false and misleading statements” to avoid registering, according to the indictment.

Craig has maintained he did nothing wrong.

“I did not participate in a scheme to mislead the government or conceal material facts,” he said ina video statement posted to YouTube on Thursday. “I was always honest about the reasons for my contacts with the media. This prosecution is unprecedented and unjustified. I am confident that both the judge and the jury will agree with me.”

But Skaddenadmitted in a settlement in January that the firm had misled the government and agreed to pay nearly $4.7 million it had earned for the work as a penalty. “We have learned much from this incident and are taking steps to prevent anything similar from happening again,” the firm said in a statement at the time.

David Laufman, a former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section who oversaw FARA enforcement, said the prosecution of Craig was likely to lead other law firms and public relations shops to be more careful.

“The cost of not doing so now is potentially devastating,” said Laufman, who now advises clients on complying with the law.

Skadden isn’t the only firm that’s suffered as the government has cracked down. The Podesta Group, one of the top lobbying firms in Washington, collapsed in 2017 shortly after Manafort’s was charged with breaking foreign lobbying law.

While the Podesta Group didn’t face any charges, the firm retroactively registered for lobbying work it did with Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, on behalf of the Ukrainian government.

LEGAL

Grand jury indicts former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

The Justice Department is also prosecuting Bijan Kian, a former business partner of President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser, Michael Flynn, on charges of violating FARA. And a Maryland man, Nisar Ahmed Chaudhry, pleaded guilty last year to failing to register as an agent of the Pakistani government.

Unlike those men, however, Craig is a longstanding member of the Washington establishment — a Yale Law School graduate who worked in two White Houses and as an aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) between stints in private practice. His indictment as part of the FARA crackdown signals “there’s really no scalp that is too high-profile for them to go after,” said Sanderson, the Caplin & Drysdale lawyer.

Lobbyists are often reluctant to register as foreign agents, in part because doing so requires them to disclose their meetings and phone calls with government officials in more detail than if they register under domestic lobbying rules. And lawyers such as Craig who don’t lobby may not want to register at all if they can help it.

“I don’t want to register as a foreign agent under FARA,” Craig wrote in a 2012 email to another Skadden partner cited in the indictment. “I think we don’t have to with this assignment, yes?”

The Justice Department’s willingness to go after Craig underscores that lobbyists need to be careful not only to make sure they register as foreign agents if necessary, but also to answer follow-up inquiries from the government carefully, lawyers said.

“Sometimes it really is the fact that the cover-up is worse than the crime,” said Joshua Rosenstein, a lawyer at Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock who advises clients on complying with FARA. “It’s unclear that any of this would have happened if Mr. Craig was forthright with the government to begin with.”

Many firms “are no longer quite as willing to take risks or operate in gray areas,” Rosenstein added.

The fear of a crackdown has led to a surge in demand for lawyers with FARA expertise. Thomas Spulak, a lobbyist at King & Spalding who also advises clients on FARA matters, said on Thursday that he’d been on the phone with a client trying to figure out whether to register as a foreign agent right before taking a call from a reporter.

WHITE HOUSE

Republicans confront Trump amid cascading controversies

By BURGESS EVERETT and ELIANA JOHNSON

Two lawyers said they expected the Justice Department to look into companies with ties to Chinese, Russian and Middle Eastern countries as part of the crackdown, as well as nonprofits with potential foreign ties.

Some lobbying and public relations firms have started to register as foreign agents as a precautionary measure even if they might not be strictly required to do so.

The public relations firm Burson Cohn & Wolfe registered as a foreign agent to represent Huawei, the embattled Chinese telecommunications company, last month even though some firms working for Huawei in Washington have elected to register under less-stringent domestic lobbying rules.

“It is our understanding that Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is a private, employee-owned company,” Burson noted in its disclosure filing. “That understanding and our responses to Question 8(b) above are based on publicly available information. We have requested, but have not obtained, confirmation of this information from Huawei.”

Registering and complying with FARA may be less painful than not doing so now, Rosenstein said.

“It seems to be increasingly palatable for many firms to incur the compliance burden when the alternative may be a very public prosecution,” he said.

This article tagged under:

Mueller's Most Lasting Legacy May Be on K Street – Foreign Policy

https://foreignpolicy.com/.../muellers-most-lasting-legacy-may-be-on-k-street-fara-lob...

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:{Mar 28, 2019 - ... Department to enforce the :{Foreign Agents Registration Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (:{FARA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:), a law first ... and Kamil Ekim Alptekin, business associates of Michael :{Flynn:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Trump's former ... :{FARA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: for his lobbying activity on behalf of :{Ukrainian:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: figures.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Washington lobbyists put on notice over foreign agent law - AP News

https://www.apnews.com/94e36f308ffd46c591e2ad88207b6fc6

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:{May 22, 2018 - Washington lobbyists put on notice over :{foreign agent law:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... :{agent:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: despite being paid millions from a pro-Russian :{Ukrainian:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... As the investigations of Manafort and :{Flynn:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: drew public attention, :{FARA registrations:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: spiked in ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Prosecution of former White House counsel sets K Street on edge ...

https://www.politico.com/story/.../gregory-craig-lobbying-foreign-interest-1271840

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:{Apr 11, 2019 - ... campaign chairman, in 2017 on charges of violating the :{Foreign Agents Registration Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, ... Manafort arranged to hire Skadden on behalf of the :{Ukrainian:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... national security adviser, Michael :{Flynn:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, on charges of violating :{FARA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. ... “I don't want to register as a foreign agent under :{FARA:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:,” Craig wrote in a ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

nyt 3/19?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/us/trump-investigations-new-york.html?module=inline

The investigation into the Trump inaugural committee partly grew out of a recording that F.B.I. agents seized when they raided Mr. Cohen’s home and office. On the recording, Mr. Cohen is heard discussing potential irregularities with one of the main contractors for the inauguration. The Southern District is investigating, among other things, whether the committee made false filings with the Federal Election Commission and received illegal donations from foreign nationals, a subpoena from the investigation shows.

In addition, the Southern District took on two investigations stemming from the cases against Mr. Manafort, who was prosecuted by Mr. Mueller’s office and was recently sentenced to more than seven years in prison for a litany of crimes.

In one of the investigations, the prosecutors are weighing charges against the officer of a bank that Mr. Manafort has acknowledged defrauding, according to people briefed on the matter.

In the other, Mr. Mueller’s team referred investigations involving three firms that worked with Mr. Manafort — the lobbying firms Mercury Public Affairs and Podesta Group, and the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom — to the Southern District for potential prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Since then, Skadden reached a settlement with the Justice Department. But prosecutors in Washington are weighing charges against Skadden’s lead lawyer on the firm’s work in consultation with Mr. Manafort in 2012 on behalf of the Ukrainian government, while the Southern District has retained control of the investigations of Mercury and the Podesta Group, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Southern District’s reputation for nonpartisanship — and history of autonomy from the Justice Department in Washington, giving it the nickname “Sovereign District” — may make it less vulnerable to attacks from the president and his allies. The president’s lead lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, led the office from 1983 to 1989 and later became New York’s mayor.

The Southern District’s role in Trump-related cases comes at a time of transition for the office, which is led by Geoffrey S. Berman, who was appointed in January 2018 by the Trump administration.

Mr. Berman notified Justice Department officials early last year of a possible appearance of a conflict of interest in the Cohen investigation, and officials concluded that he should be recused, for reasons that have not been disclosed.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/paul-manaforts-legal-problems-keep-going-from-bad-to-worse

In 2018, Manafort’s federal prosecution and trial in Alexandria, Virginia were a result of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Manafort was never accused of criminally conspiracy with Russian government officials, and when Mueller wrapped up his investigation earlier this year, he concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians — although questionable — never reached the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But Mueller’s team found a mountain of evidence of tax and bank crimes on Manafort’s part, and he was convicted on multiple counts last year.

Trump has made it abundantly clear that he considers the Russia investigation a joke and believes that Manafort never should have been prosecuted in the first place. And there has been much speculation among legal analysts on whether or not Trump will grant Manafort a presidential pardon for his federal crimes — which he has the power to do.

Trump, however, does not have the power to pardon Manafort at the state level, and Vance’s prosecution of Manafort is a New York State prosecution — not a federal prosecution. In Manhattan, Manafort has been indicted on 16 counts, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office alleges that the long-time Republican Party operative gave false information when applying for residential mortgages in 2015, 2016 and early 2017.

Another subject that legal analysts have been debating is whether or not the indictment in New York State might constitute double jeopardy. Manhattan prosecutors have insisted that there are no double jeopardy problems in their indictment, asserting that there is no overlap between their charges and the charges Manafort has battled at the federal level. But Manafort’s attorneys are expected to challenge his New York State prosecution on double jeopardy grounds.

...

‘Unbelievable’: Paul Manafort’s texts with Sean Hannity revealed in court filing

Cody Fenwick

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)

619 dn

:{DOJ:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Intervenes to Keep Paul Manafort Out of Rikers

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/heres-the-larger-trump-conspiracy-hiding-behind-paul-manaforts-sordid-career/

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.

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.”

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.

pled guilty

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.”

Trump's Ex-Lawyer Tried to Funnel White House Legal Defense Funds to Paul Manafort: Report

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

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?”

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.

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.

...

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

...

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.

...

"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."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/a_:{timeline_:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:of_paul_manafort_s_relationship_with_the_trump_world.html

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

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

RELATED COVERAGE

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Manafort Associate Has Russian Intelligence Ties, Court Document Says DEC. 4, 2017

Trump Team’s Links to Russia Crisscross in Washington MARCH 3, 2017

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