Money Laundering

MERRI OK

OLD FASHIONED INT'L VS DOMESTIC POLITICAL:? distinction does not seem to be holding, on foreign see corruption

SEE CRYPTO- CURRENCY

SEE MONEY LAUNDER 2 (8/18)

see Dark Money on domestic

also shuffle shell

rich fink? IRS not doing its job?

http://www.alternet.org/print/investigations/big-banks-are-knee-deep-dirty-money-laundering-business

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/white-nationalists/

Historically, one of the ways in which opponents of White supremacists, neo-Nazis and other domestic terrorists have attacked them was by going after them monetarily. But extremists, according to the Associated Press and PBS' "Frontline," are finding a way around that: cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero.

In an article that is part of an AP/"Frontline" collaboration, reporters Erika Kinetz and Lori Hinnant explain, "Radical right provocateurs are raising significant amounts of money from around the world through cryptocurrencies. Banned by traditional financial institutions, they have taken refuge in digital currencies — which they are using in ever-more-secretive ways to avoid the oversight of banks, regulators and courts, finds an AP analysis of legal documents, Telegram channels and blockchain data from Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency analytics firm."

Kinetz and Hinnant point to the Daily Stormer, founded by White supremacist/neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin in 2013, as an example of an extremist website that has profited from cryptocurrencies in a major way.

"The Daily Stormer website advocates for the purity of the White race, posts hate-filled, conspiratorial screeds against Blacks, Jews and women and has helped inspire at least three racially motivated murders," Kinetz and Hinnant note. "It has also made its founder, Andrew Anglin, a millionaire. Anglin has tapped a worldwide network of supporters to take in at least 112 Bitcoin since January 2017 — worth $4.8 million at today's exchange rate — according to data shared with The Associated Press. He's likely raised even more."

The reporters add that when Anglin was "cut off by credit card processors and banned by PayPal," Bitcoin became "his main source of funding." When Anglin's "Retard's Guide to Using Bitcoin" was published in April 2020, he said that he had been funding the Daily Stormer through Bitcoin exclusively for four years. But Anglin, according to Kinetz and Hinnant, abandoned Bitcoin in favor of another cryptocurrency, Monero, because "the transactions are all hidden."

According to Beth Littrell, an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, cryptocurrencies are making it harder to sue violent extremists than it was in the past.

Littrell told "Frontline" and the AP, "We were able to sue the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization, in essence out of existence…. The law is evolving but lagging behind the harm."

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/deutsche-bank-trump-kushner.html

Deutsche Bank Staff Saw Suspicious Activity in Trump and Kushner Accounts

Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank employee, saw potentially suspicious transactions involving the company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, she said.

Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank employee, saw potentially suspicious transactions involving the company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, she said.Credit...Willie J. Allen Jr. for The New York Times

By David Enrich

May 19, 2019

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.

The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.

But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government.

The nature of the transactions was not clear. At least some of them involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious.

Real estate developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner sometimes do large, all-cash deals, including with people outside the United States, any of which can prompt anti-money laundering reviews. The red flags raised by employees do not necessarily mean the transactions were improper. Banks sometimes opt not to file suspicious activity reports if they conclude their employees’ concerns are unwarranted.

But former Deutsche Bank employees said the decision not to report the Trump and Kushner transactions reflected the bank’s generally lax approach to money laundering laws. The employees — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ability to work in the industry — said it was part of a pattern of the bank’s executives rejecting valid reports to protect relationships with lucrative clients.

“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens,” said Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank anti-money laundering specialist who reviewed some of the transactions. “It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”

Ms. McFadden said she was terminated last yearafter she raised concerns about the bank’s practices. Since then, she has filed complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators about the bank’s anti-money-laundering enforcement.

Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, said the company had intensified its efforts to combat financial crime. An effective anti-money laundering program, she said, “requires sophisticated transaction screening technology as well as a trained group of individuals who can analyze the alerts generated by that technology both thoroughly and efficiently.”

“At no time was an investigator prevented from escalating activity identified as potentially suspicious,” she added. “Furthermore, the suggestion that anyone was reassigned or fired in an effort to quash concerns relating to any client is categorically false.”

Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, the umbrella company for the Trump family’s many business interests, said: “We have no knowledge of any ‘flagged’ transactions with Deutsche Bank.” She said the Trump Organization currently has “no operating accounts with Deutsche Bank.” She did not respond when asked if other Trump entities had accounts.

Karen Zabarsky, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, said: “Any allegations regarding Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Kushner Companies which involved money laundering is completely made up and totally false. The New York Times continues to create dots that just don’t connect.”

Deutsche Bank’s decision not to report the transactions is the latest twist in Mr. Trump’s long, complicated relationship with the German bank — the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to do business with the real estate developer.

Congressional and state authorities are investigating that relationship and have demanded the bank’s records related to the president, his family and their companies. Subpoenas from two House committees seek, among other things, documents related to any suspicious activities detected in Mr. Trump’s personal and business bank accounts since 2010, according to a copy of a subpoena included in a federal court filing.

Mr. Trump and his family sued Deutsche Bank in April, seeking to block it from complying with the congressional subpoenas. The president’s lawyers described the subpoenas as politically motivated.

Suspicious activity reports are at the heart of the federal government’s efforts to identify criminal activity like money laundering and sanctions violations. But government regulations give banks leeway in selecting which transactions to report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Lenders typically use a layered approach to detect improper activity. The first step is filtering thousands of transactions using computer programs, which send the ones considered potentially suspicious to midlevel employees for a detailed review. Those employees can decide whether to draft a suspicious activity report, but a final ruling on whether to submit it to the Treasury Department is often made by more senior managers.

In the summer of 2016, Deutsche Bank’s software flagged a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner, now a senior White House adviser.

Ms. McFadden, a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office, said she had reviewed the transactions and found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals.She concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government — in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.

Ms. McFadden drafted a suspicious activity report and compiled a small bundle of documents to back up her decision.

Tracking 30 Investigations Related to Trump

Federal, state and congressional authorities are investigating Donald J. Trump’s businesses, campaign, inauguration and presidency.

Typically, such a report would be reviewed by a team of anti-money laundering experts who are independent of the business line in which the transactions originated — in this case, the private-banking division — according to Ms. McFadden and two former Deutsche Bank managers.

That did not happen with this report. It went to managers in New York who were part of the private bank, which caters to the ultrawealthy. They felt Ms. McFadden’s concerns were unfounded and opted not to submit the report to the government, the employees said.

Ms. McFadden and some of her colleagues said they believed the report had been killed to maintain the private-banking division’s strong relationship with Mr. Kushner.

After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.

Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said.

Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.

Mr. Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank spans two decades. During a period when most Wall Street banks had stopped doing business with him after his repeated defaults, Deutsche Bank lent Mr. Trump and his companies a total of more than $2.5 billion.Projects financed through the private-banking division include Mr. Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami and his transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into a luxury hotel.

When he became president, he owed Deutsche Bank well over $300 million. That made the German institution Mr. Trump’s biggest creditor — and put the bank in a bind.

Senior executives worried that if they took a tough stance with Mr. Trump’s accounts — for example, by demanding payment of a delinquent loan — they could provoke the president’s wrath. On the other hand, if they didn’t do anything, the bank could be perceived as cutting a lucrative break for Mr. Trump, whose administration wields regulatory and law enforcement power over the bank.

In the past few years, United States and European authorities have punished Deutsche Bank for helping clients, including wealthy Russians, launder funds and for moving money into countries like Iran in violation of American sanctions. The bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and is operating under a Federal Reserve order that requires it to do more to stop illicit activities.

On two palm-tree-lined campuses in Jacksonville, Deutsche Bank has thousands of employees who vet customers and transactions. Six current and former bank employees there said the operations were deeply troubled.

Anti-money laundering workers were pressured to quickly sift through transactions to assess whether they were suspicious, the employees said. As a result, they often erred on the side of not flagging transactions.

Two former employees said that they had raised concerns about transactions involving companies linked to prominent Russians, but that managers had told them not to file suspicious activity reports. The employees were under the impression that the bank did not want to upset important clients.

Several employees said they had complained about the bank’s anti-money laundering processesto Joshua Blazer, the head of Deutsche Bank’s financial crimes investigations division in Jacksonville, and had then been criticized for having a negative attitude. One employee said she resigned last summer over concerns about the bank’s ethics.

Mr. Blazer, hired by Deutsche Bank in 2017 to strengthen the bank’s financial crime-fighting apparatus, declined to comment.

Ms. McFadden’s job at Deutsche Bank was to inspect clients and transactions in the company’s private-banking division — the unit that lent money to Mr. Trump. She joined the bank in 2008, after working for Bank of America, also in Jacksonville.

Ms. McFadden had left Bank of America in 2005, and later sued for racial discrimination and wrongful termination. According to court records, her lawsuit was settled on confidential terms the same year she joined Deutsche Bank, where she went on to win multiple performance awards.

Around the time she flagged the Kushner Companies’ transactions, Ms. McFadden said, she also complained about how the bank was scrutinizing the accounts of high-profile customers, such as those in public office. Those customers — known as politically exposed persons — are regarded as at heightened risk of being involved in corruption. As a result, their accounts are subject to extra vetting.

Ms. McFadden said she had told her superiors that dozens of politically exposed clients of the private-banking division, including Mr. Trump and members of his family, were not receiving that added attention. Her superiors told her to stop raising questions, according to Ms. McFadden and the two former managers.

After taking her complaint to the human resources department, Ms. McFadden was transferred to another division. She was terminated in April 2018. The bank told her that she was not processing enough transactions.

Ms. McFadden disputed that. She said her superiors had reduced the number of transactions she was assigned to review after she voiced her concerns. She and the two former managers said they perceived her termination as an act of retaliation.

“They attempted to try to silence me,” she said. “I’m at peace because I know that I did the right thing.”

AH AN 619

DOJ money laundering probe of Deutsche Bank includes Kushner transactions

by Alex Henderson June 20, 2019

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is conducting a criminal investigation of possible money laundering violations by Deutsche Bank, and the New York Times is reporting that the probe will…

619 dc report

Cyprus Connection

Another major client of Burck was the corrupt FBME bank in Cyprus, which worked closely with Deutsche Bank to move money for its Russian-speaking clients.

In 2014, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) charged that FBME Bank was purposely promoting a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” approach to money laundering regulation compliance “to attract illicit finance business from the darkest corners of the criminal underworld.” FinCen is our government’s anti-money laundering agency. It is staffed with IRS agents who specialize in tracing illicit money flows.

BuzzFeed described FBME “as a major conduit for funds linked to terrorism, organized crime, and chemical weapons, and revealed how blue-chip Western institutions enabled its activities.”

After the Mueller investigation was launched soon after Trump was sworn in, in 2017, McGahn hired Burck as he was trying to navigate the shoals between his obligations as White House counsel and the requests of Mueller’s investigators. This may have been especially important as one of the U.S. attorneys who signed Sater’s cooperation agreement in 1998 was Andrew Weissmann, a financial fraud expert who was also on Mueller’s team.

see unger

key argument requires many qualifiers in the final summation (possibly after the intervention of libel lawyers): “Mogilevich and the Russian mafia’s compromising of Trump had begun by possibly using Trump real estate to launder their money,” he writes. “They had ensnared him with some form of kompromat, most likely, though exactly what form is unclear.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/putin-wants-trump-hand-over-three-dhs-agents-who-are-investigating-company-linked

Lost in all the controversy over President Vladimir Putin asking Donald Trump to turn over former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul to Kremlin investigators for questioning — in return for access to Russian officials indicted by the Justice Department for meddling in the 2016 election — was the fact that Putin had a whole list of Americans he wanted to be turned over.

According to Michael Weiss, writing for the Daily Beast, far down Putin’s shopping list are three Department of Homeland Security agents whom he has accused of running off with over $400 million in Russian money – when in fact they were investigating associates of Putin laundering that money.

The agents — identified as Todd Hyman, Aleksandr Schwartzman, and Svetlana Angert — were included by Putin, who reportedly explained to Trump that some of that stolen money was funneled to the 2016 presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "It might have been legal, the contribution itself, but the way the money was earned was illegal,” Putin offered at the Helsinki meeting.

As Weiss writes, “Hyman, Schwartzman, and Angert were not laundering money, as Putin and his prosecutor would suggest; they were investigating money launderers.”

According to a deep dive into their careers, the three agents were principals in a civil asset forfeiture case brought againstPrevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-registered company suspected of laundering Russian public funds — some of which was invested in Manhattan properties which raised red flags with federal investigators.

According to Weiss, “In 2013, $24 million of Prevezon’s U.S.-based assets were frozen in a civil asset forfeiture complaint brought by the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York. The case was settled out of court in May 2017, with the company agreeing to pay $5.9 million in damages in exchange for not having to admit to any wrongdoing.”

Where this circles back around to Trump — and possibly why he initially called Putin’s request an“incredible offer” — is a principal in Prevezon: Natalia Veselnitskaya, who later met with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign officials in a 2016 Trump Tower gathering that is currently being investigated by the FBI.

“So, fast-forwarding to the summer of 2018 and that press conference in Helsinki, it appears Putin was recapitulating in front of the whole world ‍the rough contours of risible guilt-by-association conspiracy theory first mooted hush-hush by Veselnitskaya to Trump’s son, son-in-law, and his now-indicted campaign chairman who currently is on trial,” Weiss writes.

You can read the whole in-depth report here.“That Putin for a moment thought this shambolic quid pro quo proposal would be entertained by the American establishment tells you quite a lot about the contempt in which he holds that establishment under its current leadership,” Weiss continued.”Putin clearly feels as if he doesn’t have to try very hard anymore to abase and undermine our country, perhaps because he is himself impressed at how easy that is to do.”

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https://www.alternet.org/greatest-intelligence-operation-our-time-investigative-journalist-details-how-trump-has-been

no lnx

An investigative journalist explained on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that President Donald Trump’s real estate business was essentially a money laundering front.

Craig Unger alleges in his new book, “House of Putin, House of Trump,” that the president had been compromised by Russian intelligence for years through his ties to mobsters who pumped money into his family’s real estate empire.

“I go back nearly 40 years, and I see essentially the greatest intelligence operation of our times,” Unger said. “It started off in 1984 with a man who has ties to the Russian mafia, and he meets with Donald Trump in the Trump Tower, the supreme moment of Donald Trump becoming a master of real estate in the United States — and what we end up seeing is Trump Tower become sort of a cathedral of money laundering.”

That mob associate paid $6 million in cash for five condominiums, and Unger tracked hundreds of similar transactions over the following three decades.

“That sets off a pattern that goes on for the next 30 years or so, in which over 1,300 condos are sold in what appears to be money laundering,” Unger said. “They have two characteristics. One, they are all cash purchases. Two, they are shell purchases, they’re anonymous purchases. The records don’t show who the true owners are.”

Unger said the illegal transactions had made Trump an asset of the Russian government and its president, Vladimir Putin — a former KGB operative — because he said there was no meaningful difference between the country’s organized crime network and its intelligence agencies.

“I can’t get inside Donald Trump’s mind, but he’s meeting with this guy,” Unger said. “We know there are about 1,300 other operations in which he’s profiting heavily from that. If he can go through that and doesn’t figure that out, he’s either inexplicably stupid or there is a legal concept of willful blindness, and perhaps that’s what’s going on.”

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https://www.occrp.org/en/laundromat/

https://www.alternet.org/russian-mob-made-its-move-trump-2002-when-he-was-hole-after-series-bankruptcies-documentary

documentary filmmaker appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday to talk about what he’s found while researching “Active Measures,” his new movie about Russian connections with President Donald Trump.

Specifically, filmmaker Jack Bryan told the program that Trump didn’t really start getting involved with members of the Russian mob until around 2002, when he claims they started “entering the Trump Organization.”

Bryan then claimed that Trump had to resort to taking Russian money after a “series of bankruptcies” at Trump properties throughout the 1990s that made it harder for him to raise capital from large American banks. The Russian mob saw this, Bryan said, and “made their move.”

When MSNBC’s Willie Geist asked Bryan to clarify what he meant by the mob “making its move” on Trump, the filmmaker elaborated about all the shady money that started pouring into Trump properties after Trump had been cut off by major banks.

“Starting in 2002, whereas before you’re seeing incidents of money laundering… you’re seeing particularly in buildings like the Trump Soho, the Toronto tower, the Panama tower to an extent, as well, and several others in development where the there is… what certainly appears to be Russian or post-Soviet mafia money going into it,” he explained.

Bryan went on to say that the money was coming “particularly from the Ukraine-Russia gas trade, which is an incredibly mobbed up operation” and that “it’s been going in there to basically start the building process.”

Watch the video below.

https://www.alternet.org/heres-how-shady-russian-cash-flowed-through-trumps-toronto-hotel-and-ultimately-back-president

A major investigation conducted by the *Financial Times* reveals howshady Russian cash flowed through the financial of President Donald Trump’s Toronto hotel — and, ultimately, back to the president himself.

In particular, the report zeroes in on actions taken by Alex Shnaider, the Russian-Canadian billionaire who served as Trump’s business partner in the construction of Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto.

According to the Financial Times’ reporting, Shnaider in 2010 made a secret $100 million payment to a group of so-called “introducers” who were representing the Kremlin. The goal of the payment to these “introducers” was to pave the way for Shnaider’s group to sell off its stake in the Zaporizhstal steel mill in eastern Ukraine. m Shnaider eventually succeeded in selling off the steel mill with the help of Russian state bank Vnesheconombank (VEB)— and the Financial Times’ reporting raises questions about whether the deal would have gotten financing from VEB without the massive payment to the “introducers.”

More importantly, writes the Financial Times, “legal filings in a recent commercial dispute between Shnaider and his business partner raised the possibility that some of the money could have ended up with Russian government officials.”

If the payments made by Shnaider did wind up in the hands of Russian officials, then the deal would likely be considered an illegal bribe under Canadian law.

After the sale of the steel mill, Shnaider used $40 million of the proceeds to further finance Trump’s Toronto hotel. Of that, a further $4 million went to the Trump Organization in the form of licensing fees.

Tom Keatinge, a former JPMorgan banker who now specializes in financial crime at London’s Royal United Services Institute, tells the Financial Times that, if the initial $100 million payment is found to be a bribe, then “you could argue that the Trump Organization is receiving the proceeds of crime and therefore is being used as a money-laundering opportunity.”

Read the whole report here.

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putin real estate

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-trump-tries-so-hard-be-putins-good-side

Trump's insistence on a summit with Vladimir Putin, disregarding the advice of aides and worries of allies, is consistent with his obsession with the Russian leader. But it’s inconsistent with his pattern of choosing policies that resonate with his supporters -- there’s no indication that Trump's followers condone this bromance.

So why does Trump pander to Putin?He won’t criticize him and incessantly flatters and coddles him. He has winked at the annexation of Crimea, threatened NATO, suggested that the G7 should readmit Russia, and done nothing to prevent Russian meddling in U.S. elections.

Many fear Trump will hand Putin unwarranted concessions, like unraveling U.S. sanctions against Russia. Trump was always soft on them anyway. After Russia requested a secretary of state who favored lifting them, Trump obliged, appointing Rex Tillerson instead of Mitt Romney. When Congress enacted sanctions on 15 Russian entities and individuals in 2017, Trump delayed implementing them for seven months and reversed a decision to impose more. What could be motivating Trump's largesse toward Russia? It's hard to argue that it's what’s best for America. A pattern of reported facts suggest it could be personal financial gain.

Throughout the 2000s, Russians bought many apartments in Trump Tower and $100 million worth of Trump properties in Florida. But these sales dropped precipitously in 2014 after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs for the Crimean incursion. Lifting sanctions would likely restore these sales, and the profits would flow through a trust run by Trump's sons, with the president as sole beneficiary. Indeed, Trump admitted that he’d “be looking at” lifting them.

Trump has many business aspirations in Russia that Putin can make or break. In 1986, Trump met with the Soviet ambassador about building a luxury hotel in Moscow, and announced a potential Trump International complex there. At the 2008 Russian Real Estate Summit, Trump touted plans for condos and hotels in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi. In 2011, he licensed his name to an aborted Azerbaijan hotel for $1 million and promoted a Trump Tower in Kazakhstan. Even as he campaigned for the Republican nomination, Trump signed a letter of intent to build Trump Tower in Moscow.

Trump’s business depends heavily on Russian money. Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008 that “Russians make up a … disproportionate cross-section of … our assets,” and later added, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Eric Trump told a journalist, “We don’t rely on American banks; we have all the funding we need out of Russia.” (He later denied saying that.)

In 2008, Deutsche Bank’s real estate group stopped lending to Trump after he defaulted on a $330 million loan. Inexplicably, he subsequently borrowed $75 million from another DB group. European and American regulators punished DB for laundering billions from Moscow.It’s not a huge leap to suspect that Trump’s DB money came from Russia.

The blackmail potential in all these financial shenanigans is abundant. Implicating Trump in almost any of these schemes could expose him to charges of money laundering and bank fraud.Since Trump’s nomination, 70 percent of Trump sales were tolimited liability companies frequently used by Russians to hide their identity, stow cash and, most likely, violate U.S. sanctions.Hundreds of millions of dollars from unidentified sources funded Trump’s unprofitable golf courses in Ireland and Scotland. Testimony before Congress suggests they were used to launder money for the Russian mafia. Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff, in speaking of White House corruption: “This is about money laundering … the path to …Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Junior and Jared Kushner.”

“America first” ideology has actually put Russia first. Leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Agreement lost America international forums where it communicated, led and influenced. Cutting the State Department’s budget and foreign aid weakened America’s global clout and allowed Putin to expand Russia's sphere of influence.

Trump’s threat to cut aid to Central America damaged trust in the U.S. Now Putin is providing aid there, reopening military bases and building a satellite-tracking station that could spy on the U.S. Trump’s rejection of Obama’s soft Cuba policy may result in a repeat of Cuba’s pivot to Russia after Dwight Eisenhower rejected Cuban efforts for diplomatic and trade ties. Trump’s trade tariffs and insults of EU and Canadian leaders threatens relationships with our closest allies. His escalating criticism of NATO make some worry the United States might actually leave the alliance – the ultimate gift to Putin.

Congressional Republicans are muting their nervousness about Trump giving away the store, settling for bromides about how there's nothing wrong with just talking to Russia. It's hard to imagine how talking under these conditions will serve America's interest, but on the other hand, we may finally see Trump Tower built in Moscow. In keeping his stakes in 500 foreign businesses -- no other president had any – Trump has unprecedented cause to tailor foreign policy for personal gain. He promised to “drain the swamp,” but there are more reptiles in it than ever, and many speak Russian

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-corrupt-financial-web-links-trump-and-kennedy-families

...What started the speculation about dirty money connecting Trump, Kennedy and his son is the revelation that Kennedy and Trump have had a longstanding relationship through their children and their children’s success. We knew about Trump’s dealings withDeutsche Bank, the only bank willing to do business with him. (It’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, the bank that seems to have the longest illegal relationship with laundered Russian money.In January 2017, it was fined $425 million by New York regulators to settle allegations that it helped Russian investors launder as much as $10 billion through its branches in Moscow, New York and London.) But we’re just finding out about the Trump relationship with Justin Kennedy, the justice’s son, who worked at Deutsche Bank for a decade.

Kennedy is bookish and abstract, while Mr. Trump is earthy and direct. But they had a connection, one Mr. Trump was quick to note in the moments after his first address to Congress in February 2017. As he made his way out of the chamber, Mr. Trump paused to chat with the justice.Media speculation about Trump’s surprising relationship with Justice Kennedy started with the New York Times:

“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”

Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.

During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history.

There’s more. New York is a set of villages. The Trumps and Kennedys live in the same one. As C’Zar Bernstein and Gabe Rusk wrote in a little-noticed March 2017 article:

-- At the invitation of Justice Kennedy, Donald Trump’s daughter and former businesswoman Ivanka Trump visited the High Court with her daughter to attend a Supreme Court argument.

-- According to reports, Kennedy and Ivanka had met at the congressional lunch after the inauguration.

But as Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC has reported, Justin Kennedy left Deutsche Bank long before the money laundering and had no direct connection to the bank's loans to Trump. The more interesting fact is where Justin Kennedy went next -- he became the co-CEO of LNR Property. And that brings us straight to the most immediately vulnerable member of the Trump family, Jared Kushner.

From the New York Times, in 2012:

The Kushners' purchase in 2007 of 666 Fifth Avenue for a record price of $1.8 billion is considered a classic example of reckless underwriting. The transaction was so highly leveraged that the cash flow from rents amounted to only 65 percent of the debt service.

As many real estate specialists predicted, the deal ran into trouble. Instead of rising, rents declined as the recession took hold, and new leases were scarce. In 2010, the loan was transferred to a special servicer on the assumption that a default would occur once reserve funds being used to subsidize the shortfall were bled dry.

Instead of foreclosingon the 39-story building, which stretches from 52nd Street to 53rd Street, the lenders agreed last month to reduce the principal and defer some of the interest payments on the interest-only loan and extend its maturity for two years, until February 2019.

Vornado has taken an ownership stake in several troubled Manhattan properties. But the 666 Fifth deal raised some eyebrows because Vornado is also a part-owner of the special servicer on the loan, LNR Partners, of Miami Beach.

The plot thickens. As Bernstein and Rusk note:

-- There was a direct business relationship between LNR and Kushner Companies at the time Justin Kennedy and Jared Kushner were both CEOs. Even the future President was aware of the deal and commented on its respective merits.

-- In 2011, the year in which some of these negotiations took place, Justin Kennedy for the first time was ranked on the New York Observer’s 100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate at #36. Donald Trump clocked in at #12. At that time, The New York Observer was owned by Jared Kushner.

The 666 Fifth Avenue deal is generally regarded as the all-time stinker in New York commercial real estate. What did LNR see as the upside? Better question: Was there any upside? As we know, 666 Fifth Avenue went badly for the Kushners, so badly that they were scrambling for a partner. Where might one be?

The Intercept reported earlier this year that Charles Kushner, Jared's father, had discussed a financing deal for 666 Fifth Avenue with Qatarifinance minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi in April 2017. A month after that deal cratered, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Jared Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. NBC News reported that Qatari government officials visiting the U.S. “considered turning over to Mueller what they believe is evidence of efforts by their country’s Persian Gulf neighbors in coordination with Kushner to hurt their country.”

...

RGA skirts campaign finance law/IRS?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/republican-governors-association-perry-michigan

The 20 Biggest Donors of the 2012 Election [2]

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Read more of our coverage of political dark money. [3]

Created in December 2009 and shut down shortly after the election, RGA Michigan 2010 had come out of nowhere to spend [4] nearly $8.4 million—54 percent more than any other PAC had poured into any election in Michigan history. Ninety-six percent of the group's donors lived outside the state, and its top three funders included Texas homebuilderBob Perry, Koch Industries' David Koch, and New York City hedge fund CEO Paul Singer.On the other side of the ledger, RGA Michigan 2010 had given $5.2 million to the Michigan Republican Party—no surprise there—but, mysteriously, it had also funneled $3 million into the campaign coffers of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

[4]

During the midterms, while many campaign finance observers were fixated on the proliferation of super-PACs and shadow-spending groups, the RGA spent [5] $132 million—more than the five biggest conservative super-PACs and 501(c) groups combined. It wasinstrumental in electing a slate of GOP governors—Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Ohio's John Kasich, Georgia's Nathan Deal, and Iowa's Terry Branstad, among others—who hastened to crack down on public-sector unions and roll back environmental regulations. These electoral successes were fueled in part by the creative campaign finance strategy that Robinson began to piece together.

Since 2008, he explains, the RGA has used a network of at least 15 state-level PACs to shuffle campaign cash around the country. Doing so serves a couple of purposes. First, it enables the RGA toscrub the identity of a donorto avoid image issues. For instance, Rick Perry taking $3 million from a Texas oil baron might be controversial, but if that baron gives $3 million to the national RGA, which then diverts the money to RGA Michigan PAC and then to Perry? Harmless.

The RGA's cash shuffle also allows it—and its corporate allies—to skirt campaign finance laws. For instance, in Michigan, corporations can't donate directly to candidates or political parties. But the state's Chamber of Commerce donated millions to the national RGA, which then directed some of the money to its PACs in Florida and Maine, where no such corporate-money bans exist. Why would a Michigan group want its money flowing to races in other states? Chamber CEO Rich Studley told [6]Maine Public Radio that its members supported funding "pro-business" candidates outside Michigan.

Robinson has a different theory. During the 2010 election cycle, the Michigan Chamber donated more than $5 million to the RGA. In turn, the RGA's Michigan PAC directed $5.2 million—contributions that largely came from individuals outside the state—to the Michigan Republican Party. Robinson believes that, through this roundabout process, the Chamber's corporate money was swapped out with individual contributions, allowing it to be deployed in Michigan in a more potent form. (The Chamber acknowledges that the RGA called the shots on where its money was spent. Studley says his group's political spending "has been in full compliance with all Michigan and federal laws." The RGA did not respond to a request for comment on this practice.)

Robinson and other campaign finance watchdogs liken the RGA's methods to the corporate-contribution laundering scheme that got former GOP congressman Tom DeLay indicted. "The whole thing," Robinson says of the RGA's tactics, "was about wiping the fingerprints off the money."

An RGA spokesman, Mike Schrimpf, says the group and its network of PACs "aren't really unique," but he declined to respond to specific questions. "The RGA and the [Democratic Governors Association] both have to use state PACs in some states to comply with the state campaign finance laws," he says. The RGA, however, is by far the more powerful of the two, outspending the DGA [7] in the last four election cycles by anywhere from $10 million (2004) to $67 million (2010).

The RGA wasn't always a political juggernaut. Founded in 1963 [8], the group for decades was content to convene meetings and publish the occasional white paper. That began to change in the early 1980s, when Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh became chairman and the RGA started to raise serious money. With the RGA's backing, the GOP netted seven governor's seats in the 1986 election.

In 1994, while Newt Gingrichand Co. took control [9] of Congress and rang in the Republican Revolution, the RGA was instrumental in the election of 11 GOP governors and successfully defended every Republican incumbent. When the dust settled, Republicans controlled 30 governorships, their first majority since 1970. The last time Republicans had performed so well in gubernatorial races was 1867.

Beyond its electoral victories, the RGA established itself as a launching pad for Republicans with presidential aspirations. The group helped to foster alliances between GOP governors and gave them access to deep-pocketed donors and top fundraisers, helping to catapult politicians like Ronald Reagan (an RGA chairman), George W. Bush, Rick Perry (twice chairman), Mitt Romney (2006 chairman), and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie [10] (current vice chair) onto the national stage.

The RGA's rise has been fueled by a close alliance with corporate America—especially tobacco companies and Big Pharma. In the mid-'90s, the organization awarded seats on its board to executives from Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, which each donated $40,000 a year. In November 1995, tobacco lobbyists swarmed the RGA's annual meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, pressing governors to write letters opposing pending tobacco regulations from the Food and Drug Administration. In exchange for their support, the tobacco companies pledged financial backing when election time rolled around. They came through: In February 1996, Philip Morris held a Washington, DC, gala for the RGA that raised $2.6 million.

The increasing influence of corporate donors turned off some Republican governors, including Arne Carlson, Minnesota's governor from 1991 to 1999. Carlson recalls attending a few RGA meetings, but he stopped going due to the group's increasingly partisan tenor and insistence that donors be given access to the governors. "It was no longer Republican governors getting together," Carlson says. "It was the moneyed interests getting together with governors. I found it detestable."

In June 2002, the McCain-Feingold Act went into effect [11], banning federal party committees from raising "soft money"—donations from labor unions and corporations outside the scope of federal campaign finance law. So to keep the corporate cash flowing, the RGA officially broke away [12] from the Republican National Committee (of which it had been an affiliate) and established itself as a 527tax-exempt group. That way it could continue raising soft money from banks, drug companies, and energy companies. (A few years earlier the DGA had parted ways with the Democratic National Committee for the same reasons.)

Today, RGA's donor list [5] reads like a who's who of corporate titans: Koch Industries, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, AT&T, and Pfizer. The organization's largest donor in both the 2008 and 2010 elections was Perry Homes, the homebuilding empire run by Bob Perry, which plunked down $1.15 million in 2008 and $8 million in 2010.

But as the corporate money gushed in, the RGA ran afoul of the law. In 2008, a top official with the North Carolina state elections board testified that the RGA had illegally funneled contributions to its North Carolina PAC. (The elections board ultimately declined to pursue the matter.) Last October, a Vermont judge ruled [13] that the RGA violated state elections law when it ran ads supporting the Republican gubernatorial candidate without registering as a state PAC. (The RGA argued the spots were merely issue ads.)

In 2012, the RGA promises to be a force to be reckoned with. Led by chief [14] fundraiser Fred Malek [15], the finance co-chairman of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, the RGA had by last fall raised $22 million (twice as much as the DGA) for the 2012 election cycle. Don't be surprised if that money starts turning up in odd places again, says Mike McCabe, who tracks money in state politics at the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign: "It's a deliberate strategy to keep the public in the dark about who is really buying our elections."

Mueller has some new material to work with as he continues his investigation of the Trump administration's ties to Russia. A new report shows that for 10 years, a Trump property in Panama City collected millions of dollars from the Russian mafia and Colombian drug cartels. An investigation from Global Witness, an international NGO that probes corruption and money laundering, reveals how the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower turned a blind eye to crime lords looking for a safe haven to stash their blood money.

The property, which the lead broker Alexandre Ventura Nogueira describes as “Ivanka Trump’s baby,” listed units for three times the going rate in Panama City, thanks to the Trump name. Nogueira worked closely with the Trump family; he claims he attended at least 10 meetings with Ivanka Trump, who challenged him to sell 100 units in the building. “The agreement was, I had a week to sell 100 units,” Nogueira told Reuters. “I said, ‘I’m going to do better, I’m going to sell without telling (the buyers) the price.'”

Nogueira later fled Panama after he was arrested for unrelated charges of real estate fraud. From his European asylum, he told NBC that at least half of his Trump Ocean Club customers were Russians, including some with “questionable backgrounds." Only later did he learn of their ties to Russian organized crime circles.

NBC reports that Mauricio Ceballos, a former prosecutor in Panama who investigated Trump’s business associates for financial crimes, called the Trump Ocean Club “a vehicle for money laundering.”

Among the shady buyers are:

David Murcia Guzmán, founder of a large Colombian marketing company, who purchased 10 units in the Trump Ocean Club. Guzmán is now in U.S. custody, convicted of laundering money on behalf of drug cartels, and will be extradited to Colombia. Guzmán also has financial ties to the terrorist organization FARC.
Louis Pargiolas, who pleaded guilty in 2009 in Miami to conspiracy to import cocaine.
Stanislav Kavalenka, a Russian national charged in Canada for compelling women into prostitution.
Arkady Vodovozov, convicted in Israel of kidnapping, according to Reuters.

By 2010, Donald Trump had made approximately $74.2 million through his association with the hotel. From 2014-2017, he was paid as much as $13.9 million.

As Global Witness explains:

“The warning signs were there from the outset. The Trump Ocean Club, one of Trump’s most lucrative licensing deals to date, was announced in 2006 and launched in 2011, a period when Panama was known as one of the best places in the world to launder money. Whole neighborhoods in Panama City were taken over by organized crime groups, and luxury developments were built with the purpose of serving as money laundering vehicles.

“Moreover, investing in luxury properties is a tried and trusted way for criminals to move tainted cash into the legitimate financial system, where they can spend it freely. Once scrubbed clean in this way, vast profits from criminal activities like trafficking people and drugs, organized crime, and terrorism can find their way into the U.S. and elsewhere.”

The Trump Organization has shrugged off responsibility in a statement following the news, but legal experts say it should have done its due diligence into the backgrounds of buyers. Arthur Middlemiss, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney and a former head of the global anti-corruption program at JPMorgan, blames the Trumps directly:

“Those who do business there should perform due diligence on others involved in their ventures. If they fail to do so, they risk being liable under U.S. law of turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.”

Watch Ivanka Trump promote the Trump Ocean Club below:

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https://www.alternet.org/video/watch-americas-mobster-president-new-evidence-dutch-documentary-trumps-international-money

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7/16

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/07/fec-dark-money-fine-shows-limits-of-disclosure-again/

This week, the Federal Election Commission did the unthinkable. The agency most frequently characterized by its constant, crippling deadlock levied a substantial fine against three large politically active nonprofit groups.

The decision also required the groups to amend past FEC filings to disclose who provided their funding. But because the source was, itself, another nondisclosing group, the public has learned very little.

The fine — first made public by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which originally brought the complaint in 2014 — totaled $233,000 split among three groups:Americans for Job Security, American Future Fund, and the 60 Plus Association.

The penalty now ranks among the top 25 highest total fines ever brought by the FEC, and the largest ever brought for activity in a post-Citizens United election, according to thislist of cases maintained by the FEC.

The violations at the heart of the enforcement action stretch all the way back to the 2010 midterms and the Tea Party wave that flipped the House into GOP control. The complaint centers on a group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR), a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, now called American Encore, which at the time was the hub of the Koch donor network.

CPPR didn’t report any political spending to the FEC in 2010, but it did send $25.5 million to the three other groups, who together reported spending tens of millions of dollars supporting Republican House candidates.

Normally, AJS and the other organizations wouldn’t have to report that CPPR was the source of funds for the ads; disclosure would only be required if the grants were “earmarked” for specific expenditures in specific races. Such earmarking is rare, which is why 501(c) groups almost never disclose their donors — and, hence, are referred to as “dark money” groups.

The FEC found, however, that the operative running CPPR, Sean Noble, was engaged in the selection of which races should be targeted, and his firm, Noble Associates, was sub-contracted to “produce and develop” some of the ads. Noble’s substantial involvement in content selection for the ads and race targeting was sufficient grounds for the FEC to find that the contributions should have been disclosed as if they were earmarked.

The involvement of Noble Associates also highlights the close ties between Noble’s firms and the groups he runs, an intertwining that in the past has led to allegations that he has profited handsomely from the political activities of his nonprofits.

The CREW complaint itself only materialized in 2014 because Noble described the set-up in detail for the National Review. By then, Noble’s propensity to chat about his activities and get his groups into very public disputes with regulators had already led the Kochs to cut him loose.

While the three recipient groups will have to pay fines — $50,000 for 60 Plus Association, $140,000 for American Future Fund, and $43,000 for Americans for Job Security — they are getting what amounts to a pass on their disclosure. The conditions of their conciliation state that they must amend their FEC filings to identify CPPR as a donor in 2010, but that has long been public. When *OpenSecrets Blog*first discovered CPPR in 2012, we reported its contributions to these and other groups.

The FEC’s donor reporting enforcement in this instance amounts to little more than a nondisclosure disclosure, because while the groups that ran the ads must reveal CPPR as their donor, CPPR doesn’t have to reveal the sources of its own funds. The individuals or organizations that kept it in business as a major distributor of cash in the Koch network are still not known beyond what *OpenSecrets Blog* has been able to ferret out.

While Noble’s ties to the Koch network at the time are clear, it is impossible to specify to what extent the Kochs themselves funded the group or who else in their orbit may have provided the money.

The lack of information becomes all the more stark when one considers that the FEC’s decision has no bearing on the 2012 election, by which point CPPR was part of a network that raised more than $400 million and was responsible for at least 1 in 4 dark money dollars spent.

CPPR and its grantees aren’t the first to manage to keep their donors secret despite forced disclosure, and they won’t be the last. The dark money churn — basically, the transfer of assets among connected groups to provide multiple layers of anonymity — is what keeps a lot of these groups in business. The FEC’s action this week, while important, proves the strategy works.

Tags: 60 Plus Association, American Future Fund, Americans for Job Security, center to protect patient rights,cppr, dark money, fec, Robert Maguire, Sean Noble, Shadow Money Trail

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CA prop 30/32

9/13

California FPPC issues record fine for failure to disclose source of mystery money

By Laurel Rosenhall

lrosenhall@sacbee.com

Published: Friday, Oct. 25, 2013 - 12:00 am

Last Modified: Friday, Oct. 25, 2013 - 6:16 am

Political groups with ties to the conservative Koch brothers acknowledged Thursday they gave about $15 million to block a tax increase and weaken union influence in California last year without properly reporting the source of the money.

In a settlement with the state Fair Political Practices Commission, the groups agreed to pay a $1 million fine, the largest the agency has ever levied for a campaign violation.

The Arizona-based groups, the Center to Protect Patient Rights and Americans for Responsible Leadership, are part of a network of nonprofits operated by billionaire businessmen Charles and David Koch, agency officials said. The brothers have used their groups, which aren’t required to reveal the names of donors, to fund a variety of pro-business and anti-union efforts.

The settlement didn’t require release of the original individual donors to the effort. But a sloppily redacted document released by the FPPC shows that all but six of 132 contributions came from California donors.

The commission also sent letters to two committees demanding they pay the state general fund the improperly reported $15 million they received.

The Arizona groups jumped into California politics for the first time last year to support Proposition 32 – intended to curb the ability of labor unions to raise political cash – and oppose Proposition 30, a tax increase pushed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.

A Koch representative issued a statement denying that the brothers played a role in the California election.

“We had no involvement whatsoever, financial or otherwise, neither directly nor indirectly, on anything to do with Prop 30 or Prop 32,” said an emailed statement from Rob Tappan, who represents the Koch brothers, their foundations and the Koch Industries companies. “In addition, we did not give directly or indirectly to any nonprofit group in support or defeat of these ballot initiatives.”

Representatives for the two Arizona groups said they simply made a reporting mistake.

“It was a good-faith error,” said Barrett Marson of Americans for Responsible Leadership. “There was no intent to skirt or deceive California officials.”

The lawyer representing the Center to Protect Patient Rights said his client got confused by California’s campaign finance laws because they create a “very complicated environment with many, many regulations.”

“This was the first contribution they had ever made in the state of California,” Malcolm Segal said. “They believed they were in compliance.”

Americans for Responsible Leadership gave $11 million to the combined effort just weeks before last November’s election, in the heat of California’s initiative wars. But it didn’t reveal that its money came from the Center to Protect Patient Rights until the FPPC brought the group to court. Americans for Responsible Leadership was a largely unknown group when the contribution came in, while the Center to Protect Patient Rights is more widely associated with the Kochs.

“Secrecy and money don’t mix well in a democracy,” Brown said in a statement. The Democratic governor said the case also shed more light on loopholes that allow some donors with political agendas to conceal their identity.

When donors give directly to a political campaign, their identities become public in campaign finance reports. When donors give to a nonprofit, however, the law does not require their identities be disclosed. Campaigns are allowed to use their money to expressly ask for votes, while the nonprofits are supposed to confine themselves to a broader discussion of issues.

“This is a nationwide issue. These groups exploit loopholes in the law to undermine the clear purpose of the law – to give essential information to the public,” Ann Ravel, the outgoing chair of the FPPC, said at a news conference announcing the settlement. “It’s important for people to know about campaigns, and who is financing them, in advance of elections so they can make thoughtful decisions when they vote.”

Ravel is scheduled to be sworn in Friday as a member of the Federal Elections Commission, which regulates campaign laws at the national level. She said she hopes the Legislature will reconsider a package of bills it rejected this year that would have required more disclosure in similar situations.

The partially redacted list the FPPC provided Thursday shows scores of donors from California.

The donor list includes more than $9 million from people with an address on Maritime Plaza inSan Francisco, where the management company of the Fisher family, which owns Gap Inc., has its office. The first names listed match those of the family members. Notably, Gap Inc. also employed Brown’s wife, Anne Gust Brown, from 1991 until she left as chief administrative officer in 2005.

Another $500,000 came from a man named Eli, his last name redacted, whose address is listed as being on the 12th floor of a building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Developer Eli Broad’s foundation is in an office on the 12th floor at 10090 Wilshire.

Foundations run by Broad and the Fisher family have poured millions into efforts to reduce the influence of teachers unions in public education.

The list also shows contributions totaling $400,000 from the California American Council of Engineering Companies, a trade group that has been in conflict with Caltrans engineers. One name that was not redacted was that of Ventura County businessman Gene Haas, who gave $800,000. Haas, who owns Haas Automation in Oxnard, served 16 months in a halfway house in 2008 and 2009 after pleading to conspiracy to commit tax evasion.

Neither he, the Fishers or Broad returned calls seeking comment.

Another $2 million appeared to come from financial services titan Charles Schwab. A San Francisco post office box that is listed as Schwab’s mailing address on several government fillings appears on a list with a donor named Charles who gave $2 million to the effort on Oct. 12, 2012.

Just a day earlier, someone whose name was redacted in an email released by the FPPC sent an email to Charles Koch asking him to give money to oppose Proposition 32.

“I have committed an additional $2 million today, making my total commitment of $7 million,” the sender of the email says. “It would be great if you could support the final effort with several million.”

Evidence the FPPC collected shows that the Koch approach of using nonprofit groups to fund issue campaigns was appealing to California donors who wanted to support Proposition 32 and oppose Proposition 30 without disclosure. Ravel said almost $29 million “was given by donors who chose not to stand up for their political views but instead wanted to influence elections but hide from public view.”

Tony Russo, who was working as a fundraiser for a conservative group called Americans for Job Security, told investigators he began talking about anti-tax efforts in October 2011 with Sean Noble of the Center to Protect Patient Rights.

Russo said he had talked to donors who “liked the Koch model ... the way they have a network of (nonprofit committees) do issue advocacy,” according to a transcript of his interview with the FPPC.

The following year, in the midst of the initiative campaigns, lawyers advised him that millions they had raised could not be spent in California because it was too close to the election and could be seen as seeking to directly influence the vote.

Russo said he needed a place to put the money, and thought the Koch network might be able to help. He called Noble.

“I said, ‘Sean, you know, I have a big hiccup in California. We have money raised ... but I don’t think we can spend it in California. ... Can we support some of your national efforts and, in turn, do you have groups that can help us in California?’ That was pretty much as simple as it was,” according to the transcript.

Ravel said Russo then sent the money “to the Koch network with no strings attached, hoping that because that network has tentacles all over the country, some of the money eventually would find its way back to California campaigns, where the money was originally intended to go.”

Russo told investigators he first asked Noble to spend $4 million on the California initiative effort, then later asked for $11 million more as Election Day approached.

“I think I texted him and asked him if he could get us $11 million for California,” he said. He said he assumed the money wouldn't come from the patient-rights group because that was the committee he had sent his own money to, and he had told Noble it couldn’t be spent in California.

The FPPC on Thursday directed the recipient of that money, the California-based Small Business Action Committee headed by Joel Fox, to turn that money over to the state. It instructed a committee called the California Future Fund to pay the state $4.08 million.

“It’s required under state law,” said Gary Winuk, the FPPC’s chief of enforcement. “Just receiving a contribution where the true source is not disclosed means you have to give it up.”

Actually getting the money, however, will likely be a challenge.

The California Future Fund has closed its fundraising committee. The attorney for the Small Business Action Committee said his group is not required to pay the money, arguing that the California laws governing such payments apply to political candidates – not ballot measures.

Furthermore, attorney Steve Churchwell said, his client was not found guilty of any violations and doesn’t have $11 million anyway.

“Not one dime of this money is sitting in a bank account,” Churchwell said. “It all was spent on Props. 30 and 32.”

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Call Laurel Rosenhall, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 321-1083. Follow her on Twitter@LaurelRosenhall Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/10/24/5850792/california-fppc-issues-record.html#storylink=cpy

Nonprofit Groups Funneled Money For Abramoff

Funds Flowed to Lobbying Campaigns

By Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Newly released documents in the Jack Abramoff investigation shed light on how the lobbyist secretly routed his clients' funds through tax-exempt organizations with the acquiescence of those in charge, including prominent conservative activistGrover Norquist.

The federal probe has brought a string of bribery-related charges and plea deals. The possible misuse of tax-exempt groups is also receiving investigators' attention, sources familiar with the matter said.

Among the organizations used by Abramoff was Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. According to an investigative report on Abramoff's lobbying released last week by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Americans for Tax Reform served as a "conduit" for funds that flowed from Abramoff's clients to surreptitiously finance grass-roots lobbying campaigns. As the money passed through, Norquist's organization kept a small cut, e-mails show.

A second group Norquist was involved with, theCouncil of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, received about $500,000 in Abramoff client funds; the council's president has told Senate investigators that Abramoff often asked her to lobby a senior Interior Department official on his behalf. The committee report said the Justice Department should further investigate the organization's dealings with the department and its former deputy secretary, J. Steven Griles.

Norquist has long been an architect of tax-cutting policies and political strategies that have boosted the Republican Party. He and Abramoff have been close since their days as young conservative leaders of the College Republicans more than two decades ago.

The Senate committee report also detailsAbramoff's dealings with two others from the College Republicans crowd: Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition executive director; and Amy Moritz Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, which sponsored a golf trip in 2000 to Scotland for then-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

"Call Ralph re Grover doing pass through," Abramoff wrote in a stark e-mail reminder to himself in 1999, a year in which Norquist moved more than $1 millionin Abramoff client money to Reed and Christian anti-gambling groups. Reed was working to defeat lotteries and casinos that would have competed with Abramoff's tribal and Internet gambling clients.

In a recent interview at The Washington Post, Norquist said that Americans for Tax Reform and Abramoff's gambling clients worked together because they shared anti-tax, anti-regulatory views. He denied that Americans for Tax Reform was used to conceal the source of funds sent to Reed.

Reed reiterated in a statement last week that he did not know the money he received originated as the proceeds of gambling at Indian casinos.

Ridenour, appearing before the Indian Affairs Committee last year, acknowledged that her organization had accepted grants lined up by Abramoff and disbursed funds at his suggestion. She insisted that she told Abramoff that the National Center for Public Policy Research would be willing to finance only programs consistent with the group's tax-exempt purpose, listed in tax records as "nonpartisan analysis, study and research."

But dozens of e-mails show that Abramoff and his team considered the national center and other tax-exempt groups a ready resource in their efforts to influence Congress.

In one instance, Abramoff's team wanted to send two lawmakers on a trip to the Mississippi Choctaw reservation in 2001, but one congressman's office had concerns about accepting such a trip from a gaming tribe.

"How about getting National Center for Public Policy Research to sponsor the trip?" Abramoff suggested. "Works for me," replied a lobbying colleague.

E-mails suggest Ridenour was well aware that Abramoff viewed her organization as a convenient pass-through.

In September 2002, Abramoff suggested to one of his associates placing $500,000 in client funds with the national center because the group "can direct money at our discretion, anywhere if you know what I mean."

The same morning Abramoff messaged Ridenour: "I might have $500K for you to run through NCPPR. Is this still something you want to do?" Ridenour was enthusiastic: "Yes, we would love to do it."

Ridenour did not respond to requests for comment on the Senate committee report or the e-mails released with it.

Earlier this year, after Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiring to ply lawmakers with gifts in exchange for favors, IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson said, "One of the most disturbing elements of this whole sordid story is the blatant misuse of charities in a scheme to peddle political influence."

Tax experts said it is impermissible for a tax-exempt organization to act as a pass-through for money destined for private business purposes.

"It's not a tax-exempt activity to act as a bag man for Jack Abramoff," said Marcus S. Owens, a tax lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale and a former Internal Revenue Service official.

'Hole in My Budget'

Norquist's relationship with Abramoff's gambling clients began in 1995 when Congress was considering taxing tribal casinos.

Abramoff, then a newly registered lobbyist with Preston Gates & Ellis, e-mailed a colleague that Norquist was willing to fight a tax opposed by another of his clients -- a beverage company -- if the firm became "a major player with ATR." Abramoff suggested the firm donate $50,000 to the group.

"What is most important however is that this matter is kept discreet," Abramoff said in an e-mail on Oct. 24, 1995. "We do not want the opponents to think that we are trying to buy the taxpayer movement." He promised that Norquist would be "very active" on the issue.

The following year, according to the Senate committee report, the Choctaw tribe donated $60,000 to Americans for Tax Reform to oppose a tax on Indian casinos. By 1999, ATR was getting large sums of Choctaw money. "What is the status of the Choctaw stuff?" Norquist asked Abramoff in an e-mail that May. "I have a 75g hole in my budget from last year. ouch."

All told in 1999, the Choctaws gave Americans for Tax Reform $1.15 million, most of which ATR passed on to Reed's for-profit political consulting company, Century Strategies, and Christian anti-gambling groups working to defeat a state lottery in Alabama.

Norquist said in The Post interview that the Choctaw tribe originally wanted ATR to direct the anti-lottery campaign, but his organization decided that it would be better to assist Christian groups already fighting the lottery.

"When we looked at it, we said they have an actual ongoing effort, we don't need to run it and [could instead] just contribute there, which was a continuation of the previous coalition," Norquist said. "They said fine."

But Choctaw representative Nell Rogers told Senate Indian Affairs Committee investigators that ATR "was not involved and was not considering getting involved in any efforts the Choctaw ultimately paid Reed and others to oppose," the committee reported. "Rogers told the committee staff that she understood from Abramoff that ATR was willing to serve as a conduit, provided it received a fee," the report said.

Rogers said the tribe had a long relationship with Americans for Tax Reform and assumed that the fee "would simply be used to support the overall activity of ATR."

Abramoff, however, grew annoyed at the amount that Norquist took off the top before sending the money on, e-mails show. "Grover kept another $25 k!" Abramoff wrote in a February 2000 note to himself.

John Kartch, a spokesman for Americans for Tax Reform, said Friday that the group was not involved in Abramoff's lobbying business. The Choctaw tribe, he said, "was a longtime supporter of ATR. They had no business dealings with Grover Norquist, nor did Jack Abramoff."

E-mails show that Abramoff also moved client money through a conservative Jewish foundation called Toward Tradition, run by longtime Abramoff friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin. In January 2000, when Reed sent Abramoff an $867,000 invoice to be billed to a Choctaw official, Abramoff responded: "Ok, thanks. Please get me the groups we are using, since I want to give this to her all at once." Reed responded: "Amy, Grover, Lapin and one other I will get you."

Abramoff tapped the same cluster of tax-exempt groups in 2000 to help defeat legislation to ban gambling on the Internet. Abramoff's client, an online gambling services company called eLottery, donated money to ATR, the policy research center and Toward Tradition.

In May 2000, just before a key vote on the anti-gambling bill, the research center paid for the Scotland trip for then-House Majority Whip DeLay. Toward Tradition hired the wife of DeLay aide Tony C. Rudy, who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to corrupt public officials, saying his wife was paid in exchange for his official actions. Lapin has said his hiring of Lisa Rudy was not connected to any eLottery donations.

Americans for Tax Reform received $160,000 from eLottery, and Norquist immediately sent most of the money to a state nonprofit group, which in turn sent the money to another Ralph Reed company to fund attack ads on Republicans who supported the gambling ban.

In the interview, Norquist denied that the purpose of the transfer was to hide the money's origin.

"Someone from eLottery talked to me or somebody on our staff and said, 'Will you help us with this campaign?' and we said, 'We're certainly supportive of it,' and they gave us resources and asked if we would contribute to the state group," Norquist said.

Norquist said he could not remember if he knew at the time that eLottery was an Abramoff client, but he said it would not have made any difference.

Trip to the Marianas

As far back as 1996, Abramoff was using Ridenour's National Center for Public Policy Research to hide the source of funding for trips and other ventures intended to boost the interests of his lobbying clients, e-mails show.

Douglas Bandow, a think-tank scholar and former Copley News Service columnist, received $10,000 that year from Abramoff clients through the center, according to an Abramoff e-mail. Bandow has acknowledged that he accepted money from Abramoff in exchange for writing articles supporting the lobbyist's clients in the 1990s.

Abramoff used the center to hide his sponsorship of an all-expenses-paid trip in 2000 for three congressional staffers to the Northern Mariana Islands that now figures in the investigation. The trip is listed as an illicit activity in the plea agreements of Abramoff and three associates.

The congressional staffers on the Marianas trip worked on the campaign of a Marianas politician who pushed through a $100,000-a-month government lobbying contract for Abramoff.

Abramoff e-mailed instructions to his assistant, Susan Ralston, and others to conceal the true source of funding for the "very important" trip. "The tickets should not in any way say my name or our firm's name," Abramoff wrote. "They should, if possible, say 'National Center for Public Policy Research.' We should pay using my Visa."

Ridenour readily agreed to help, e-mails show. A Marianas client wired about $25,000 to the center's bank account. Abramoff instructed Ridenour to write checks to cover the travel costs of the congressional staffers and Edwin A. Buckham, a former DeLay top aide and lobbyist.

"We'll call the bank first thing in the a.m. and confirm that the money has arrived, and then I will get checks out to you and Ed," Ridenour wrote.

"Yes, we should get invoices for these. This is not only good for us, but if the IRS should later inquire, it is proof for you and Ed that you do not owe income tax on this money. The invoices need not be fancy. Thanks, Amy."

Last year, Ridenour told the Senate committee that she thought the DeLay trip she agreed to sponsor in 2000 was "an educational trip" to Britain, not a golfing junket to Scotland. "The trip I believed I was approving -- and indeed the trip that I invited the member of Congress on . . . was simply to be a trip to London, meet with some members of Parliament and fly home," she said.

By this time, Abramoff was routinely juggling money among various groups. Months after the Scotland trip, Buckham complained to Abramoff that he was still awaiting reimbursement for costs incurred on the trip by DeLay and DeLay's chief of staff, Susan Hirschmann.

"Jack, I hate to bother you on this note, but I am still carrying the DeLay/Hirschmann etc. bills on my American Express Sign and Travel and the interest keeps adding up. Any hope on reimbursement by Amy's group?"

Abramoff replied: "Sorry about this Ed. How much is it again? Would it be alright to get the payment from somewhere other than Amy's group?"

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us coc ceo admits; wa monthly

t used similar tactics against health care reform, launching a campaign that was even larger and more elaborate. The Chamber recruited local political operatives and had them set up front groups to oppose the House and Senate bills, and it also coordinated a national ad onslaught. In Arkansas’s second district, for instance, the Chamber aired ads directly attacking Democratic Representative Vic Snyder for his support of the House bill. (Vic Snyder has since announced that he won’t seek reelection, such an uphill battle is he now facing.) It also established a branch of a front group, the Campaign for Responsible Health Reform, and hired a Little Rock Republican strategist to run it. The strategist, Bill Vickery, told me that his activities were “backed solely” by the Chamber.

In other words, a large part of what the Chamber sells is political cover. For multibillion-dollar insurers, drug makers, and medical device manufacturers who are too smart and image conscious to make public attacks of their own, the Chamber of Commerce is a friend who will do the dirty work. “I want to give them all the deniability they need,” says Donohue. That deniability is evidently worth a lot. According to a January article in the National Journal, six insurers alone—Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group, and Wellpoint—pumped up to $20 million into the Chamber last year.

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AlterNet [1] / By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

Elizabeth Warren Confronts the Atrocity of Drug Money Laundering by Big Banks

March 10, 2013 |

Heavens to Betsy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren leapt from the gate of her first term pummeling Ben Bernanke on too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Then she demanded to know why American banks were never brought to trial. Finally, last Thursday, looking for all the world like a school principal called to sort out teenage hooligans, she queried regulators [3] as to why HSBC bankers who launder money for drug lords and terrorists should go free. Quoth the senator:

"If you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you're going to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night.”

Game on! Naturally, the left is swooning. Elizabeth Warren says what we all wish we could say to the besuited jerks who defend a crooked industry. Except, instead of snatching them by the lapels and screaming obscenities as we might do, Warren sits calmly and repeats her inimitably direct questions like a blond Terminator. The big banks and their lackeys can’t stand her, and it looks as if the feeling is mutual.

Americans love her because we have serious unfinished business with the banking industry. We remember how the White House chose to protect the bankers from the pitchforks in the wake of the financial crisis. We’ve gritted our teeth as bankers have charted a course to record-breaking profits as the rest of us slogged through a shitty economy.

Now it feels like the day we hoped for. The one the banking industry feared as it tried to thwart Warren's victory in 2013. There's a new sheriff in town, a real champion for the 99 percent who will not accept a two-tiered justice system and who dares look the criminal and the complicit in the eye. That Warren's showdown in the Senate Banking Committee corral came just a day after Attorney General Eric Holder fessed up to the fact that some banks are so big and powerful they are really above the law felt like balm on a freshly salted wound.

Economist Robert Johnson, executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, who served as chief economist to the Senate Banking Committee under the leadership of William Proxmire, praised Warren's resolve in an email to me: "Elizabeth Warren has chosen to do something novel as a US senator: represent the people. In our money-drenched political system that is akin to defying gravity. God bless Elizabeth Warren."

Warren is certainly making welcome noises in these early days of her tenure. She is breaking a taboo in speaking up so forcefully this early in the game, as newbie senators are generally expected to keep their heads down. Cynics cannot deny the fact that it actually matters tremendously that someone knowledgeable is at the table. If regulators know they'll be cross-examined by a person who knows what they're up to, they may think twice about what they're (not) doing. They can't completely ignore congressional pressure, particularly as Warren is a majority member of the Senate. On HSBC, unfortunately, the case is probably closed. But banks certainly hate the negative light Warren shined on them with her latest confrontation. And that's welcome news. This is not small potatoes.

However, Warren will need to follow up her tough talk with serious legislative proposals that she could build support for as she takes the lead on banking issues. As Yves Smith has pointed out on Naked Capitalism [4], the real test of her tough-mindedness “will come through the letters, speeches, and positions she takes on banking matters outside the formal Committee sessions."

Early in the 20th century, a largely forgotten group of independent-minded populists came to Washtington to speak up for the needs of ordinary citizens against financial predators, like Nebraska's George W. Norris and South Dakota's Peter Norbeck, who appointed one Ferdinand Pecora as Chief Counsel to the U.S. Committee on Banking and Currency and thereby opened up a can of whup-ass on Wall Street following the crash of '29.

America hasn't seen the likes of these politicians in a long, long time. If Warren can withstand the forces that will want to pull her into the general White House PR machine, we might just get one.

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Matt Taibbi: You Can Go to Prison for Pot, While Big Banks Get Away With Laundering Drug Cartel Cash

The banking giant HSBC has escaped indictment for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and groups linked to al-Qaeda.

http://www.alternet.org/print/matt-taibbi-you-can-go-prison-pot-while-big-banks-get-away-laundering-drug-cartel-cash

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CA 11m koch

http://www.mercurynews.com/elections/ci_21932215/fppc-releases-names-donors-who-made-secret-11

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moyers:

Ralph Reed leaves the Christian Coalition to form Century Strategies, a political consulting/public affairs firm which claims to only accept clients who oppose abortion, higher taxes and gambling.

1999: Abramoff and Reed begin a campaign to protect the Choctaw casino against competition. Coordinating with Abramoff, Reed organizes Christians to oppose threats to Abramoff's client on moral grounds. In return, Abramoff funnels over $1 million of the Choctaw's payments to Reed through Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, allegedly to hide its origin.

(See how Abramoff made payments to Reed's company through a series of intermediaries from 1999 through 2002, including Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform)

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NY AG going after CoC, starr fnd

Now, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is training his investigative firepower on one of the most powerful dark money players, the *New York Times* reports. On Tuesday Schneiderman sent subpoenas to officials with the National Chamber Foundation, a nonprofit affiliated with the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the biggest-spending nonprofits in American elections. Schneiderman has asked for emails, bank records, and more concerning whether the National Chamber Foundation funneled $18 million to the US Chamber for politicking and lobbying purposes.

Here's more from the Times:

The investigation is also looking at connections between the chamber's foundation, the National Chamber Foundation, and another philanthropy, the Starr Foundation, which made large grants to the chamber foundation in 2003 and 2004. During the same period, the National Chamber Foundation lent the chamber $18 million, most of it for what was described as a capital campaign.

In a complaint filed last year with the attorney general, watchdog groups asserted that the loan had been used to finance lobbying for "tort reform" legislation in Congress and to run issue advertising in the 2004 presidential and Congressional campaigns, most of it against Democrats.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/06/new-york-us-chamber-schneiderman

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Created in December 2009 and shut down shortly after the election, RGA Michigan 2010 had come out of nowhere to spend [4] nearly $8.4 million—54 percent more than any other PAC had poured into any election in Michigan history. Ninety-six percent of the group's donors lived outside the state, and its top three funders included Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, Koch Industries' David Koch, and New York City hedge fund CEO Paul Singer. On the other side of the ledger, RGA Michigan 2010 had given $5.2 million to the Michigan Republican Party—no surprise there—but, mysteriously, it had also funneled $3 million into the campaign coffers of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Robinson, the executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, began to connect the dots. He remembered the phone calls from reporters in Maine and Florida asking if Robinson knew why money from the Michigan Chamber of Commerce had ended up with PACs in their states. The state's Chamber, which usually spent more than $1 million on TV ads during Michigan elections, officially didn't spend a dime on ads in 2010, according to Robinson. But it had given an unprecedented [4] $5.37 million to a national organization that, Robinson now realized, was at the root of the anomalous spending he'd uncovered: the Washington, DC-based Republican Governors Association.

During the midterms, while many campaign finance observers were fixated on the proliferation of super-PACs and shadow-spending groups, the RGA spent [5] $132 million—more than the five biggest conservative super-PACs and 501(c) groups combined. It was instrumental in electing a slate of GOP governors—Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Ohio's John Kasich, Georgia's Nathan Deal, and Iowa's Terry Branstad, among others—who hastened to crack down on public-sector unions and roll back environmental regulations. These electoral successes were fueled in part by the creative campaign finance strategy that Robinson began to piece together.

Since 2008, he explains, the RGA has used a network of at least 15 state-level PACs to shuffle campaign cash around the country. Doing so serves a couple of purposes. First, it enables the RGA to scrub the identity of a donor to avoid image issues. For instance, Rick Perry taking $3 million from a Texas oil baron might be controversial, but if that baron gives $3 million to the national RGA, which then diverts the money to RGA Michigan PAC and then to Perry? Harmless.

The RGA's cash shuffle also allows it—and its corporate allies—to skirt campaign finance laws. For instance, in Michigan, corporations can't donate directly to candidates or political parties. But the state's Chamber of Commerce donated millions to the national RGA, which then directed some of the money to its PACs in Florida and Maine, where no such corporate-money bans exist. Why would a Michigan group want its money flowing to races in other states? Chamber CEO Rich Studley told [6] Maine Public Radio that its members supported funding "pro-business" candidates outside Michigan.

http://motherjones.com/print/149261

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