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Democrats now in control of the U.S. House of Representatives are working out which House panels will take the lead in investigating President Trump’s business ties to Deutsche Bank.
As the new Democratic House of Representatives majority launches a range of investigations into the Republican president and his businesses, the Intelligence Committee and Financial Services Committee are poised to dig into his ties with Deutsche, one of the world’s largest financial institutions.
Democratic lawmakers’ aides are discussing how to divide up the investigative work among committees and prevent overlap on requesting documents, aides said.
Since U.S. voters on Nov. 6 shifted majority control of the House from the Republicans to the Democrats, the party has been promising to probe the first two years of Trump’s administration and possible conflicts of interest presented by his hotel, golf course and other ventures, as well as Trump family members.
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that he plans to subpoena information on Trump’s transactions with the bank because of the German financial institution’s longtime relationship with Trump and its past ties to Russian money laundering.
Schiff, who Trump has referred to as “little Adam Schitt,” said the answer to whether Trump was involved with Russian money laundering could exist in the Deutsche Bank records.
“The concern about Deutsche Bank is that they have a history of laundering Russian money,” Schiff said. “And this, apparently, was the one bank that was willing to do business with the Trump Organization.”
“If this is a form of compromise, it needs to be exposed,” he added.
A Deutsche Bank spokesman said: “Deutsche Bank takes its legal obligations seriously and remains committed to cooperating with authorized investigations. Our recent record of cooperating with such investigations has been widely recognized by regulators. We intend to keep working in this spirit.”
The Financial Services Committee, chaired by Democrat Maxine Waters, has the broadest power to look into Trump’s relationship with Deutsche.
When the Republicans still controlled the House, Waters tried in 2017 to request documents from the bank on its dealings with Trump and his businesses, as well as information about potential Russian money laundering through the bank.
But the bank told Congress that privacy laws prevented it from handing over such information without a formal subpoena. Committee Republicans ignored Waters’ request. As chairwoman, Waters can now issue subpoenas herself.
In recent weeks, Waters has been publicly quiet about her plans.
In a speech on Monday on committee priorities, she made no mention of the bank.
A Waters spokesman declined to comment.
Democratic aides outside the committee said Waters plans to move quietly on the Deutsche inquiry.
She cannot begin formally issuing subpoenas until after the committee holds its first business meeting, expected by the end of January.
Trump has been associated with the German bank since the late 1990s, a time when the big Wall Street banks wouldn’t lend to him following a series of business mishaps.
Deutsche has extended millions of dollars in credit to the Trump Organization, making the bank one of few willing to lend extensively to Trump in the past decade.
A 2017 financial disclosure form showed liabilities for Trump of at least $130 million to Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, a unit of German-based Deutsche Bank AG.
House Intelligence Committee Democrats also want to investigate Trump and his Deutsche links, said three congressional officials familiar with committee discussions.
When Trump nearly went personally bankrupt in the early 1990s, he left a handful of major U.S. banks on the hook for about $3.4 billion in loans he couldn’t repay (and about $900 million of which he had personally guaranteed).
Hotels, casinos, real estate, an airline and other parts of his debt-ridden portfolio went into bankruptcy protection.
In the wake of that collapse, Trump became a pariah among major U.S. banks, and he had to find unique ways of lining up money for the infrequent and small-bore
deals he pursued thereafter.
That left him borrowing money from labor unions and small, local lenders. Deutsche, keen at the time to make a name for itself in U.S. investment banking and commercial lending, was less hesitant to do business with Trump.
Deutsche’s first transaction with Trump involved a modest renovation loan for 40 Wall Street, a Manhattan skyscraper Trump controls, in 1998.
Trump did little to merit Deutsche’s involvement after that until the early 2000s, when it agreed to loan him as much as $640 million for a Chicago project — the Trump International Hotel and Tower.
Others in Trump’s orbit have also benefited from a relationship with Deutsche Bank; his son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner’s floundering real-estate empire has also received massive loans from Deutsche Bank, including $285 million one month before the 2016 election.
After multiple outlets reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank’s records on Trump’s accounts, Trump reportedly attempted to fire Mueller, only to pull back when Mueller’s team told him those reporters were inaccurate.
A U.S. official has, however, told Reuters that Mueller is investigating whether Deutsche Bank may have sold Trump Organization debts to sanctioned Russian banks.
Trump once told The New York Times he considers investigating his and his family’s finances “a red line” and “a violation”, but Mueller has not stopped looking into the Trump Organization.
Related House Democrats Preparing To Put Trump Business & Financial Deals Under A Microscope
The House intelligence committee's incoming Democratic majority is taking its first steps to follow Donald Trump's money, planning to hire money-laundering and forensic accounting experts. Incoming chairman Adam Schiff, who Trump mocked this week as "little Adam Schitt", has said publicly that he’s interested in Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank,…
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 Deutsche Bank About To Go Under House Microscope - Trump Owes German Bank Over $300 Million
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is looking into investigating President Trump's business records with Deutsche Bank, recently stating that there might be potential money laundering charges. “We are going to be looking at the issue of possible money laundering by the Trump Organization, and…
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Trump blasts FBI counterintel probe into whether he worked for Russia
Japan Today-Jan 13, 2019
Trump has repeatedly criticized the Mueller investigation as a "witch ..... in all interests in property of major Russian banks, including Sberbank, ...
How Putin's Oligarchs Got Inside the Trump Team
TIME-Sep 20, 2018
In the months before the 2016 elections, Manafort, then Trump's ... 14 to charges stemming from the Mueller investigation, Manafort agreed to ..... The state's largest lender, Sberbank, even agreed to finance around 70% of the ...
Why Britain Needs Its Own Mueller
The New York Review of Books-Nov 16, 2018
At the end of January 2017, days after Donald Trump's inauguration, .... America has the Mueller investigation. .... further meetings and evidence of a trip to Moscow to meet Sberbank officials, who were providing the financing.
 Why Commerce Secretary Ross and his Russian ties may be next in ...
<a href="http://NJ.com" rel="nofollow">NJ.com</a>-May 13, 2018
Ross's labyrinth of Russian bank ties may have paid off Trump's five bankruptcies ... The Bank of Cyprus has extensive dealings with Sberbank and is widely seen as ... East, is currently under FBI investigation for Russian money laundering. ... He may have some explaining to do there, as well as to Mueller.
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| How Putin's Oligarchs Got Inside the Trump Team | Time | ||
Putin relies on Russia’s richest men to project power. From left: ViktorVekselberg, Oleg Deripaska, Evgeny Prigozhin and Aras Agalarov. Paul Manafort, center, worked for Deripaska.
Photo-illustration by John Ritter for TIME; Kremlin, Manafort: Shutterstock; Putin, Vekselberg, Deripaska: Getty Images; Prigozhin, Agalarov: Reuters
The message from Moscow reached Paul Manafort at a crucial moment in the U.S. presidential race, just as he was about to secure the official Republican nomination for his client, Donald Trump. Manafort’s overture had been received, the July 2016 message informed him. And Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, would be back in touch soon.
In the months before the 2016 elections, Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chairman, had tried repeatedly to reach out to Deripaska through intermediaries, according to emails revealed last year by the Washington Post and the Atlantic. The two men’s relationship went back a decade; Manafort had worked as a political consultant for Deripaska’s business interests in Eastern Europe in the mid-2000s.
The messages used coded language–apparent references to money, for instance, were sometimes rendered as “black caviar.” But the aim of the exchange seems clear. Manafort wanted to offer “private briefings” about the Trump campaign to one of Russia’s wealthiest men.
That offer has since come under the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential race. His investigators want to know whether the Trump campaign had a secret back channel to the Kremlin, and Manafort has agreed to help them answer that question. As part of his guilty plea on Sept. 14 to charges stemming from the Mueller investigation, Manafort agreed to cooperate “fully, truthfully, completely, and forthrightly” with the special counsel.
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Already Mueller’s probe has shown the range of assets Putin brought to bear on the 2016 campaign. Russian hackers stole and leaked the private emails of Trump’s opponents and worked to polarize and enrage voters by manipulating social media, according to evidence made public by Mueller. Russian diplomats wooed Trump’s advisers, who were eager for information that could hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances.
But it is oligarchs like Deripaska, wielding extraordinary wealth and global connections, who may have played the most important role in the Russian influence campaign. Putin himself has suggested as much. Onstage with Trump at a press conference in Helsinki on July 16, the Russian leader said he “can imagine” private Russian businessmen supported Trump’s bid for the presidency. “And so what?” Putin demanded. “They don’t represent the Russian state.”
In fact, their ties to the state are a lot closer than Putin let on. From the very beginning of his 19 years in power, the Russian President has turned his country’s wealthiest men into a loose but loyal band of operatives. In exchange for lucrative deals with the government, or simply protection from the authorities, these billionaires have gathered contacts at the highest levels of U.S. politics, high enough to influence policy in the service of the Russian state. “These are cats that like to bring dead mice to the Kremlin,” says Mark Galeotti, a leading expert in Putin’s influence operations at the Prague-based Institute of International Relations.
And in the Trumps, the oligarchs found plump targets. One Russian billionaire hosted Ivanka Trump and her husband, the President’s senior adviser, Jared Kushner, at a gala in Moscow in 2014. Another has links to a $500,000 payment to Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen in 2017. A third ran a propaganda operation that pumped pro-Trump content into the news feeds of millions of American voters. In the heat of the presidential race, a fourth tycoon arranged the meeting where a Russian lawyer offered dirt on Clinton to Trump’s closest aides. And then of course there was Deripaska, whose years of fishing for friends in Washington eventually got the chairman of a presidential campaign on the line.
The U.S. has begun to hit back. In February, the Justice Department indicted one oligarch, Evgeny Prigozhin, for his role in the 2016 social-media-influence operation. In April, the Treasury Department sanctioned two others, Deripaska and investor Viktor Vekselberg, freezing their assets and limiting their travel, in retaliation for their work for Putin.
The oligarchs say they are doing nothing wrong in advancing Russia’s interests at home and abroad. Reviews of legal records and interviews with oligarchs and their associates in Russia and the West show just how far they have gone. They also show how deeply they penetrated the 2016 U.S. presidential contest, and the campaign of Donald Trump.
 
On a warm day in 2000, during the first months of his tenure as President, Putin arranged to meet his country’s richest men at a barbecue on the edge of Moscow. The gathering had not been his idea. One of the bankers closest to the Kremlin had suggested it, hoping it would allay their concerns about Russia’s new leader. “He was a black box,” recalls Sergei Pugachev, the financier behind the meeting, who was once known as the Kremlin’s Banker. “No one knew what was inside.”
Many of the oligarchs assumed in those days that Putin would be a pushover. With no power base in Moscow, the young KGB veteran from St. Petersburg seemed incapable of challenging their hold over the government, the media and much of the economy. Entire industries had been auctioned off to these men during Russia’s transition to capitalism in the 1990s, often in exchange for loans to save the state from bankruptcy. Some of them had urged President Boris Yeltsin to choose Putin as his successor. They assumed the new President would be at least as pliable as the old one.
Putin was quick to correct them. In choosing a venue for the meeting, he decided against the Kremlin, the normal spot for such a conclave. Instead he chose to send a more pointed message. “The meeting was at Stalin’s dacha,” Pugachev recalls. “That was very symbolic.”
Hidden among thick forests on the western outskirts of the city, the estate in Kuntsevo was the home of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin for two decades before his death in 1953. It was also the place where Stalin drew up lists of enemies among Russia’s political and economic elites, who were sent to their deaths in Siberia and elsewhere by the untold thousands in what became known as the Great Purge. The tyrant’s old office, right down to his desk and the couch where he used to take naps, was still preserved at Kuntsevo when the oligarchs pulled up to the gates for their meeting with Putin. In the presence of these memento mori, no one challenged the young President with any difficult questions, says Pugachev. “It’s enough that he let us leave,” he recalls one of the guests saying afterward.
Not all of them were so easily intimidated. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil mogul with political ambitions of his own, understood the new rules that Putin was trying to enforce. “He wanted us to understand that we, as big businessmen, may have some power,” he tells TIME. “But it is nothing compared to his power as the head of state.” Khodorkovsky did not take that message to heart. After publicly clashing with Putin and his loyalists, he was arrested on charges of tax evasion in 2003 and subjected to a trial criticized by human-rights activists as a settling of scores. He wound up serving 10 years in prison.
The lesson to the oligarchs was clear. Their fortunes could stand or fall on Putin’s whim, and most accepted the need to do favors for the Kremlin as part of the cost of doing business. “If the state says we need to give it up, we’ll give it up,” Deripaska said of his own business empire during an interview with the Financial Times in 2007. In a remark that would come to define the position of the oligarchs in Putin’s Russia, he added, “I don’t separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.”
The oligarchs stuck to their specialties. Some focused on banking and finance, others on mining and energy. And they paid their dues to the state in different ways.
Aras Agalarov, a flashy real estate tycoon with a taste for mafia movies–his family once filmed a remake of The Godfather for his birthday with him in the starring role–was known for accepting construction projects that might endear him to Putin. When the President decided that he wanted to host a summit in 2012 on a deserted island at Russia’s eastern edge, Agalarov spent $100 million of his own money building a vast white-elephant campus for the event, with new roads and infrastructure. Putin was pleased. “Your contribution to our country’s development cannot be measured in money,” the President said after pinning the Order of Honor to the mogul’s chest in 2013.
Another of Putin’s favorite businessmen has taken a more active role in Russia’s foreign adventures. Convicted of fraud and other crimes in the Soviet Union, Prigozhin found lawful success in the late 1990s with a St. Petersburg restaurant called New Island, where Putin would often dine with friends and foreign dignitaries. He won catering contracts with the Kremlin and the Russian army, earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef”–which has stuck despite Prigozhin’s moves into other industries.
In 2015, he emerged as a key player in Russia’s military campaigns in Ukraine and Syria. Documents and legal records published in the Russian press have linked his companies to the Wagner Group, a private military outfit that has sent fighters into both conflicts, often taking on missions that seemed too dangerous, or sensitive, for regular Russian troops. Prigozhin also bankrolled the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm that blasted out Kremlin propaganda through hundreds of fake social-media accounts, according to the U.S. charges unveiled against him earlier this year. Asked about these ventures, his spokesperson replied that Prigozhin does not speak to reporters “on principle.”
The more subtle and sensitive work of cultivating influence among power brokers in the U.S. and Western Europe generally goes to Russia’s wealthiest tycoons. Prominent among them is Viktor Vekselberg, who was one of the guests at Stalin’s dacha back in 2000. With a short silver beard and ice blue eyes, he earned much of his fortune in oil and metals. Later on, he decided to direct it, with the Kremlin’s blessing, to the tech sector.
Vekselberg quickly made friends in Silicon Valley, in part through investments managed by his cousin’s firm out of New York City. But Vekselberg’s partnerships with U.S. companies, like a billion-dollar deal he helped negotiate with Cisco in 2010, soon attracted the attention of the FBI, which issued a highly unusual warning to the industry in 2014. Vekselberg’s foundation, the bureau wrote, “may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research, development facilities and dual-use technologies.”
The concerns of U.S. authorities were even more acute when it came to Deripaska. He had emerged as the winner of a brutal competition for control of Russia’s aluminum industry–a billionaire since his 30s. The U.S. revoked his visa in 2006, effectively banning him from the country, reportedly because of alleged ties to Russian organized crime. That only seemed to improve his standing with the Kremlin. He had already married into the family of Putin’s predecessor, Yeltsin, and later became “a more or less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad,” according to a 2006 U.S. embassy cable.
Even without a U.S. visa, Deripaska still managed to develop ties with some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, including Manafort and his then partner, Rick Davis. The consultants introduced Deripaska in early 2006 to several Republican Senators, including John McCain. When the late Senator celebrated his 70th birthday in the tiny Balkan nation of Montenegro that summer, Deripaska was among the revellers.
The partnership between Manafort and Deripaska was especially rich with opportunities for the Kremlin. The American lobbyist even pitched Deripaska a plan in 2005 to shape political events across the U.S. and much of Europe, according to the Associated Press, which published parts of the plan last year. The aim, the AP reported, was to “greatly benefit the Putin Government” with influence operations in a several Western capitals. One tactic Manafort reportedly touted would be to “train a cadre of leaders who can be relied upon in future governments.”
Deripaska has denied ever agreeing to such a plan and Manafort denies working for Russia. “I have always publicly acknowledged that I worked for Mr. Deripaska and his company, Rusal, to advance its interests,” Manafort said in March 2017. “I did not work for the Russian government.”
The year after Manafort sent his plan to Deripaska, they worked together on a project that redrew the map of Europe. In the spring of 2006, Montenegro held a referendum on independence from neighboring Serbia. Manafort has admitted helping stage the vote with financial backing from Deripaska. “It probably couldn’t have happened without their help,” says a Montenegrin official involved in the referendum. “They made a very good team.”
 
Putin at Platon International Airport in February with tycoon Vekselberg, center right
Alexei Druzhinin—TASS/Getty Images
The network of relationships cultivated by the oligarchs over the past two decades covered almost every sphere of influence at home and abroad, and it was partly by chance that Trump got caught in it. Trump’s desire to do business in Russia began well before Putin and the oligarchs rose to power. During his first visit to Moscow, arranged in 1987 by the USSR’s ambassador to Washington, Trump visited sites for a new hotel, including one near Red Square. “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” Trump recalls in The Art of the Deal.
Vladimir Rubanov, who was a senior KGB officer at the time, says Trump may have been targeted for surveillance during that visit. “I’d say there is a 50-50 chance,” he tells TIME. The brash American certainly had the qualities that Soviet spies would have looked for. “He’s connected. He’s famous. He’s wealthy,” says Rubanov. “So for us this person would not be treated like just another visitor.”
As the communist system began to break up in the late 1980s, the talks about a Trump Tower in Moscow fizzled. They were only revived in earnest a quarter-century later, but this time it was not the government handling the negotiations. It was Agalarov, Putin’s favorite builder.
In the fall of 2013, Agalarov collaborated with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. They spent a couple of days together while hosting the event, attending parties and dinners with the Russian elite. The result was a plan to build a $3 billion complex of hotels, shopping malls and office space in Moscow, including a tower that was to bear Trump’s name. The state’s largest lender, Sberbank, even agreed to finance around 70% of the project, which would have been the biggest commercial real estate loan in its history at the time. But Trump’s political ambitions apparently wound up getting in the way. “If he hadn’t run for President, we would probably be in the construction phase today,” Agalarov’s son Emin told Forbes last year.
As the elections approached, the Agalarov family kept in touch with the Trumps. With the help of his publicist in London, Emin reached out to Trump’s eldest son Donald Jr. to arrange a meeting in June 2016 that has since become a focus of the special counsel investigation. Held on the 25th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan, its nominal purpose was for the candidate’s top advisers–including Manafort and Kushner–to receive dirt on Clinton from a lawyer with close ties to Russian law enforcement. The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, has denied having any information to offer, and Trump says he wasn’t aware that the meeting was taking place. Mueller has yet to disclose his findings on the gathering. But the role of the Agalarov family in setting it up shows just how deep into Trumpland their contacts reached.
Then there was Vekselberg, whose ventures in Silicon Valley had caused such concern at the FBI. The tech billionaire scored an invitation to Trump’s Inauguration, thanks to his cousin Andrew Intrater, whose American firm, Columbus Nova, had made many of his tech investments in the U.S. Columbus Nova also made a surprising, different kind of investment early in Trump’s presidency. The firm paid Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, at least $500,000 in consulting fees in 2017, according to the New York Times. Although Vekselberg was Columbus Nova’s biggest client, the company’s lawyers say he had no role in the payments to Cohen.
There may be other, earlier connections between Vekselberg and those who would become involved in Trump’s campaign. Documents obtained by TIME show that Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser from March to September 2016, sought out Vekselberg via intermediaries in 2013 when Page was launching a natural gas business. The documents name Vekselberg as a hoped-for investor and refer to a senior executive in his foundation as a point of contact. The documents show Page planned dinner with the senior executive on July 3, 2013, and refer to a draft Memorandum of Understanding between Page’s firm and Russian energy giant Gazprom.
At that time, Page was being wooed by a Russian intelligence operative in New York City with promises of contracts in the Russian energy sector, according to court documents. “He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could be [sic] rise up,” one of the spies wrote another, according to transcripts of intercepted conversations included in a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department in January 2015. “I will feed him empty promises.” The two Russians were later arrested by the FBI and expelled from the country.
Page told the House Intelligence Committee last year that in late June 2013 he met with two FBI officials who interviewed him about his contacts with the Russian spy. In his testimony, Page said he did not ask for anything of value from the spy, who Page said was the “least relevant” Russian he was speaking with about Gazprom at the time. Reached by TIME and asked about his attempted outreach to Vekselberg and any role the oligarch played in the Gazprom talks, Page said, “I can neither confirm nor deny, beyond noting that you’re being led far astray once again.” Page has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Early this year, Vekselberg was stopped and questioned by Mueller’s investigators, who searched his electronic devices, according to the New York Times. It is not clear whether Page ever met with Vekselberg or the senior executive. Through a spokesperson, Vekselberg said his Skolkovo Foundation has no means of accessing U.S. sensitive research or technologies and that he had never met Carter Page, and referred TIME to his senior executive, who did not respond to requests for comment. Vekselberg declined to comment on the Mueller investigation until it is over.
Other oligarchs managed to play a role in the 2016 elections without ever setting foot on U.S. soil. The Internet Research Agency, which Prigozhin ran out of an office building in St. Petersburg, flooded social media with pro-Trump content that reached millions of American voters in 2016, according to Facebook’s internal investigation and a U.S. indictment issued against Prigozhin in February. Putin, for his part, did not seem to think these efforts were such a big deal. “This is only connected to private persons,” he said of his former chef’s alleged meddling in the U.S. election. “Not the state.”
That argument would be harder for Putin to make in the case of Deripaska. His links to the state are so tight that in order to resolve his U.S. visa problems, the Russian government granted him a diplomatic passport, which he admitted using 10 times to visit New York, in court documents filed in 2016.
It’s not known whether the private briefing allegedly offered by Manafort ever happened, but Deripaska was in close contact with the Kremlin around the time. In August 2016, he allegedly met on his yacht with one of Putin’s top foreign policy advisers, Sergei Prikhodko, and discussed U.S.-Russian relations. “We’ve got bad relations with America,” the billionaire told the Kremlin official, according to a brief audio recording of their conversation made by an escort on the boat and later leaked online. But that isn’t Russia’s fault, Deripaska added. It’s because of the ill will felt toward Russia in the Obama Administration, he said. Contacted for this story, Deripaska’s spokesperson said the line of questioning was based on “biased and false information,” but offered no further comment.
None of the oligarchs would have needed specific instructions to know that helping Trump beat Clinton, a long-standing critic of Putin’s, would earn them their President’s gratitude, experts say. “They put their imaginations to work,” says Galeotti, “leveraging whatever resources and contacts they had.”
But the price they paid for meddling in the U.S. elections was likely higher than any of them expected. The sanctions many have faced as a result are some of the toughest the U.S. has ever imposed on private businessmen. Bloomberg News estimated that Russia’s wealthiest tycoons lost a combined $16 billion of their net worth on that black Monday, April 9, after the sanctions were announced. Vekselberg reportedly had up to $2 billion of his U.S. assets frozen. Deripaska has been scrambling to distance himself from his companies in the hope of shielding them from the impact of the sanctions. The damage to their reputations among Western investors and banks is likely to hurt their businesses for years to come.
The only winner in this saga would seem to be Putin, whose taming of the oligarchs at the start of his tenure continues to pay political dividends. It allowed him to stand before the cameras in Helsinki and shift the blame away from the Russian state. And as a means of covertly exercising influence abroad, Putin could hardly ask for a better toolkit than the one the oligarchs provide.
In that sense the U.S. Treasury Department may have gotten the story backward when it pledged in April that the oligarchs “will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities.” In fact it is the businessmen of Russia who insulate the state and act on its behalf when necessary. For Putin, that is what makes them so useful, and that is not likely to change.
With reporting by Tessa Berenson and Massimo Calabresi/Washington
Contact us at editors@time.com.
This appears in the October 01, 2018 issue of TIME.
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| Why Commerce Secretary Ross and his Russian ties may be next in Mueller's investigation | ||
Is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Jr. in special counsel Robert Mueller's sights?
Ross has local ties, born and raised in Weehawken. His mother graduated valedictorian from Sacred Heart Academy in Hoboken and taught third grade in North Bergen for 40 years. His father was a judge and served as commissioner of finance in North Bergen. Though mostly under the radar among the Trump chaos, Ross has found himself in the news recently, thanks to President Donald Trump's insistence on trade standoffs.
That media footprint may now change. Ross's labyrinth of Russian bank ties may have paid off Trump's five bankruptcies when no U.S. bank would. Many have asked how Ross was named secretary of commerce, seemingly out of nowhere.
Stormy Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, has just reported, and the New York Times and NBC among others have confirmed, documents showing payments to Daniels right before the election through the Russian-sanctioned bank of Cyprus, where Ross had a controlling interest and was its head.
On a "Morning Joe" show segment last month, Joe Scarborough asked: "What does Vladimir Putin have over Donald Trump? You have to look at the finances. Maybe it goes though Cyprus where Wilbur Ross had a bank." CNN's Jake Tapper also asked Ross about his role with the bank.
It isn't surprising by now that elements of quid pro quo were at work when forming the nascent Trump administration back in 2016.
So how much does it cost to get a seat at the table in the Trump administration?
If you had connections to Trump's ballooning casino empire in the early 1990s, that number could be around $675 million. That's the figure Trump paid for the Taj Mahal in 1990, with a 14 percent interest rate. Rothschild bankruptcy division was then headed by Ross and specialized in distressed asset management. No assets were more distressed than Trump's Atlantic City casino empire. Ross swept in, representing the bondholders and getting Trump to give up a 50 percent stake while allowing him to remain in charge of the casinos with better interest rates. Trump ended his bankruptcy.
Even though the casinos went bankrupt twice more, Trump didn't forget the favor. When it came time to pick a commerce secretary, he chose Ross, paying him for saving his skin back in Atlantic City. "This guy knows how to make money, folks," Trump said.
After his career as a venture capitalist (sometimes a corporate raider), Ross got into private equity in 2000 and continued to invest in a variety of business interests. Navigator Holdings, in which Ross' investment firm holds a 31 percent stake, does business with Russian energy giant Sibur.
One of its major shareholders is the owner of a U.S. and E.U. sanction list company (for helping Russia invade Ukraine), Eastern Europe's biggest bank, Sberbank, the Russian state-owned bank based in Moscow. Ross conveniently forgot to disclose this information in his confirmation hearings. Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov, along with other members of his inner circle, is also a primary shareholder in Sibur.
"When you start doing business with Russian energy companies like Gazprom and Sibur, you're ... getting into bed with the Russian state," Amos Hochstein, a top energy diplomat in the Obama administration, told the New York Times.
Several of Sberbank's chairmen were people with direct links to Putin, including Putin's son-in-law. In 2015, while Ross served as vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the bank's Russia-based businesses were sold to a Russian banker and consultant, Artem Avetsayan, who Putin had appointed to lead an agency building businesses with Russian connections.
Equally concerning is Ross' vice presidency of the Bank of Cyprus, which he only resigned from after his confirmation to the Cabinet in March 2017. The Bank of Cyprus has extensive dealings with Sberbank and is widely seen as a financial haven for Russian oligarchs. A subsidiary, the now-defunct Federal Bank of the Middle East, is currently under FBI investigation for Russian money laundering.
Incidentally, Ross was a registered Democrat until 2016, proving that unseemly dealings with Russia are not a partisan issue, but a national security one.
Former Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann was chairman of the Bank of Cyprus at this time. Deutsche Bank, which recently had to pay $10 billion after being found guilty of money-laundering for Russian oligarchs, has loaned Trump a staggering $3.5 billion since 1998 to pay off his other bankruptcies.
During Ross' few public appearances in the White House briefing room, including one in April 2017 regarding lumber trade with Canada, the press corps has neglected to press him on these troubling allegations. Other than Rachel Maddow and Scarborough on MSNBC, and Tapper on CNN, there has been little other coverage to date.
Ross will be speaking at the National Press Club on Monday. He may have some explaining to do there, as well as to Mueller.
Robert Weiner, A Paterson native, is a former spokesman for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
Kyle Fleck is analyst for Robert Weiner Associates and Solutions for Change.
Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find <a href="http://NJ.com" rel="nofollow">NJ.com</a> Opinion on Facebook.
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| Why Commerce Secretary Ross and his Russian ties may be next in Mueller's investigation - Google Search | ||
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| Explanations for Kushner’s meeting with head of Kremlin-linked bank don’t match up - The Washington Post | ||
Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret channel with Kremlin
(Alice Li,McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)
Why did Jared Kushner ask to set up a secret communications channel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin? (Video: Alice Li, McKenna Ewen/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Investigative reporter focused on the intersection of money and politics in Washington
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — The White House and a Russian state-owned bank have very different explanations for why the bank’s chief executive and Jared Kushner held a secret meeting during the presidential transition in December.
The bank maintained this week that the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business. The White House says the meeting was unrelated to business and was one of many diplomatic encounters the soon-to-be presidential adviser was holding ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The contradiction is deepening confusion over Kushner’s interactions with the Russians as the president’s son-in-law emerges as a key figure in the FBI’s investigation into potential coordination between Moscow and the Trump team.
The discrepancy has thrust Vnesheconombank, known for advancing the strategic interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin and for its role in a past U.S. espionage case, into the center of the controversy enveloping the White House. And it has highlighted the role played by the bank’s 48-year-old chief executive, Sergey Gorkov, a graduate of the academy of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic intelligence arm of the former Soviet KGB, who was appointed by Putin to the post less than a year before his encounter with Kushner.
Untangling the web of Jared Kushner
(Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
(Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
Either account of the meeting could bring complications for a White House undergoing intensifying scrutiny from a special counsel and multiple congressional committees.
A diplomatic meeting would have provided the bank, which has been under U.S. sanctions since 2014, a chance to press for rolling back the penalties even as the Obama administration was weighing additional retaliations against Moscow for Russia’s interference in the U.S. election.
A business meeting between an international development bank and a real estate executive, coming as Kushner’s company had been seeking financing for its troubled $1.8 billion purchase of an office building on Fifth Avenue in New York, could raise questions about whether Kushner’s personal financial interests were colliding with his impending role as a public official.
VEB, as Vnesheconombank is known, did not respond to a list of questions about the Kushner meeting and the institution’s history and role in Russia. The bank declined to make Gorkov available for an interview.
Gorkov could draw new attention to the clashing story lines Friday, when he is scheduled to deliver public remarks to an economic conference in St. Petersburg. Gorkov, cornered Wednesday by a CNN reporter on the sidelines of the conference, responded “no comments” three times when asked about the Kushner meeting.
The Kushner-Gorkov meeting came after Kushner met with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, in early December. At the meeting, Kushner suggested establishing a secure communications line between Trump officials and the Kremlin at a Russian diplomatic facility, according to U.S. officials who reviewed intelligence reports describing Kislyak’s account.
 President Vladimir Putin, right, meets with Vnesheconombank Chairman Sergey Gorkov at the Kremlin in August. (Michael Klimentyev/Sputnik via AP)
The bank and the White House have declined to provide the exact date or location of the Kushner-Gorkov meeting, which was first reported in March by the New York Times.
Flight data reviewed by The Washington Post suggests that the meeting may have taken place on Dec. 13 or 14, about two weeks after Kushner’s encounter with Kislyak.
A 19-seat twin-engine jet owned by a company linked to VEB flew from Moscow to the United States on Dec. 13 and departed from the Newark airport, outside New York City, at 5:01 p.m. Dec. 14, according to positional flight information provided by FlightAware, a company that tracks airplanes.
The Post could not confirm whether Gorkov was on the flight, but the plane’s previous flights closely mirror Gorkov’s publicly known travels in recent months, including his trip to St. Petersburg this week.
After leaving Newark on Dec. 14, the jet headed to Japan, where Putin was visiting on Dec. 15 and 16. The news media had reported that Gorkov would join the Russian president there.
White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks and Kushner’s attorney said Kushner intends to share with investigators the details of his meeting with Gorkov.
“Mr. Kushner was acting in his capacity as a transition official and had many similar discussions with foreign representatives after the election,” Hicks told The Post in a statement this week. “For example, he also started conversations with leaders from Saudi Arabia that led to the President’s recent successful international trip.”
The bank this week told The Post that it stood by a statement it issued in March that, as part of its new investment strategy, it had held meetings with “leading world financial institutions in Europe, Asia and America, as well as with the head of Kushner Companies.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the bank’s activities “have nothing to do with the Kremlin.” Peskov, like Trump, has frequently dismissed revelations about the meetings as “fake news” and “a witch hunt.”
Officially, VEB is Russia’s state economic development bank, set up to make domestic and foreign investments that will boost the Russian economy.
Practically speaking, according to experts, the bank functions as an arm of the Kremlin, boosting Putin’s political priorities.
It funded the 2014 Sochi Olympics, a project used by Putin to signal that Russia holds a key role on the world stage.
VEB has also been used to promote the Kremlin’s strategic aims abroad, experts say, financing projects across the Eastern bloc.
“Basically, VEB operates like Putin’s slush fund,” said Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Center and a Russia expert who follows the bank’s activities. “It carries out major Kremlin operations that Putin does not want to do through the state budget.”
Before the United States imposed sanctions, VEB sought to extend its international reach to draw more investment to Russia. Among those named by the bank to an advisory board for a new global fund was Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of the Blackstone Group and now an outside adviser to the Trump White House. Schwarzman declined to comment through a spokeswoman, who said the fund’s advisory board has been inactive.
Gorkov was named to head VEB in February 2016, after eight years as a senior manager at Russia’s largest state-owned bank, Sberbank. While Gorkov was a deputy head of Sberbank, it was one of the sponsors of the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow produced by Trump, who owned the pageant.
Gorkov’s personal relationship with Putin is unclear.
Some Russia watchers described Gorkov, who was not seen as being especially close to the Kremlin before his appointment, as an unlikely diplomatic link between the Kremlin and the Trump administration.
“I can think of many back channels that one might cultivate to have close, discreet, indirect communications with Putin. VEB’s Gorkov would not make my list,” said Michael McFaul, who was the U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama.
Other observers suggested that Gorkov, the recipient of a “service to the Fatherland” medal, may have earned Putin’s trust as a discreet go-between.
“He indeed is an FSB academy graduate, and for the Kremlin today it is a sign of trustworthiness,” said Andrey Movchan, who heads the economic program at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank.
VEB has played a role in Russian espionage efforts in the past, serving as the cover for a Russian operative convicted last year of spying in New York.
According to court documents, Evgeny Buryakov posed as the second-in-command at the bank’s Manhattan office for at least three years while secretly meeting dozens of times with a Russian intelligence officer who tasked him with gathering intelligence on the U.S. economic system.
The court records show that Buryakov’s handlers were also recorded discussing attempts to recruit an American whom government officials have confirmed was Carter Page, an energy consultant who later served as an informal adviser to Trump’s campaign. Page has said he assisted the FBI with its investigation into the spy ring and provided the Russians no sensitive information.
The court documents show that the FBI recorded a conversation in which one of Buryakov’s handlers described hearing an intelligence officer tell Buryakov’s VEB boss that Buryakov worked for a Russian intelligence service.
VEB paid for Buryakov’s legal fees after his arrest, the court documents show. The Russian Foreign Ministry at the time blasted the charges and accused the U.S. government of “building up spy hysteria.”
Buryakov was sentenced to 30 months in prison but was released in April for good behavior. He was immediately deported to Moscow. Efforts by The Post to reach Buryakov through family members were unsuccessful.
VEB, along with other Russian state-owned institutions, has suffered financially since 2014, when the United States imposed economic sanctions following Russia’s incursion into Crimea.
Gorkov’s meeting with Kushner took place at a time of major changes within the bank.
On Dec. 21, VEB announced that its proposed 2021 development strategy — which Gorkov dubbed “VEB 2.0” — had been approved by its supervisory board, which is chaired by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
As a result of the sanctions, U.S. companies are prohibited from lending the bank money or buying equity in the institution, an attempt to drain resources from the Russian economy.
The sanctions would not prohibit Kushner from conducting a business negotiation with VEB or even prevent the Russian bank from investing in a U.S. firm.
Experts on Russia’s security services said that it would have been unlikely for Gorkov to meet with Kushner and not discuss sanctions.
Gennady Gudkov, a reserve colonel in the FSB who is now a leader of a small opposition party, said that Russian business leaders are looking for ways to lobby for the softening of sanctions. “This activity is constant,” Gudkov said in an interview. “They are trying however they can, even informally, to lower the sanctions.”
In late December, Gorkov told Russian state television that he hoped “the situation with sanctions will change for the better.”
In February, Gorkov met with Putin to update him on the bank’s status. “We are confident of its future,” he told the Russian leader, according to a transcript released by Putin’s office, asserting the bank had many new deals in the works.
“Good,” Putin said.
Brittain, Helderman and Hamburger reported from Washington. Natalya Abbakumova in Moscow and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
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| Donald Trump, the Kremlin and the ghost of Alger Hiss | ||
Judging from the weekend’s ‘modern presidential’ tweets – always a decent metric of Donald Trump’s mood swings – the Special Counsel investigation into his Russian links is weighing heavily on our 45th president.
And no wonder. New reports indicate that Donald J. Trump may be in a lot hotter water than his MAGA legions want to believe. According to the New York Times, the FBI in the opening months of Trump’s administration opened a counterintelligence investigation into the new president to assess whether he is a pawn of the Kremlin, wittingly or otherwise.
Then the Washington Post reported that President Trump concealed the content of his one-on-one discussions with his Russian counterpart, even from senior administration officials and the US intelligence community. Whatever he and Vladimir Putin discussed is something President Trump doesn’t want known, even in classified channels of the government he heads. Calling this abnormal is being very charitable.
Airing of these troubling matters flummoxed the president, and during a softball interview with Fox News – whose nightly talkers fulfill a role in Trump’s Washington roughly analogous to KCNA’s in Pyongyang – Trump waffled a straight-up query, ‘Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia?’ The president replied in his customary word-salad fashion how ‘insulted’ he was by the Times’sreport, never answering the up-or-down question.
Read the rest at Spectator USA …
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| Yulia Tymoshenko: A ghost of Ukraine's past - New Eastern Europe | ||
Yulia Tymoshenko: A ghost of Ukraine's past New Eastern Europe
Is Ukraine in need of a comeback by the “Gas Princess” and her not so transparent connections? January 21, 2019 - Ariana Gic - Articles and ...
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| Our view: Reveal full Mueller report | Columns | ||
If he is confirmed, William Barr, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, should make special counsel Robert Mueller’s report public upon the completion of Mueller’s investigation. If he does not, Congress should subpoena Mueller to reveal the results through his testimony.
As we have said before, if a foreign power meddled in our election — and it appears that Russia did — our primary concern must be securing our democracy against such an intrusion. Mueller’s investigations should provide a clear explanation of how the Russians interfered and influenced the election and reveal whether Trump or his associates cooperated with a foreign power to subvert our electoral process. That information will be essential in holding Russia accountable and blocking further intrusions. Without a clear report, the American electorate cannot reach appropriate conclusions.
However, the special counsel doesn’t make a public report or pass the information on to Congress. He can bring indictments, though the Justice Department takes the position that a sitting president cannot be indicted. By regulation, Mueller will prepare a “confidential report” at the conclusion of his investigation and present it to the attorney general. From that report, the AG must send a brief report to Congress explaining why the investigation has ended.
It is up to the AG what information is presented after that. During his confirmation hearing, Barr has indicated that he wanted to release as much of what Mueller found as possible. He said he would examine and follow the regulations. He has said he may present his own report summarizing the Mueller findings. That isn’t good enough.
With some exceptions, the full results of Mueller’s investigation should be revealed. Only that will resolve the questions raised in this mess. Exceptions include: Intelligence information that might reveal sources and methods, sensitive national security information, and grand jury testimony sealed by law unless an appropriate court order permits its release.
The White House has made it clear that it intends to claim executive privilege to suppress much of the information. Congress should be ready to challenge such claims.
The public and Congress must demand answers. Revelation of the full report with supporting evidence is vital to our shaken democracy.
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| Reveal full Mueller report - Google Search | ||
Our view: Reveal full Mueller report
Joplin Globe-10 hours ago
With some exceptions, the full results of Mueller's investigation should be revealed. Only that will resolve the questions raised in this mess.
Will We Ever See Mueller's Report on Trump? Maybe
New York Times-Jan 16, 2019
He also may withhold classified information that could reveal ... If any Mueller report is leaked, that would most likely cause a firestorm, ...
Mueller publicly disputed the BuzzFeed report. Here's why it's a such ...
Washington Post-Jan 19, 2019
[In a rare move, Mueller's office denies BuzzFeed report that Trump told Cohen to ... to revealspecifics about the testimony or documents presented. ... jury secrecy and do not cover the investigation as a whole, he explained.
BuzzFeed journalist: 'Our reporting is going to be borne out'
<a href="http://wreg.com" rel="nofollow">wreg.com</a>-Jan 20, 2019
BuzzFeed Defends Story on Mueller Probe, Saying It Will Be 'Borne ...
International-KTLA-15 hours ago
Special Counsel Mueller's Office Says 'Buzzfeed' Report Is 'Not Accurate'
International-NPR-Jan 18, 2019  In a rare move, Mueller's office denies BuzzFeed report that Trump told ...
Washington Post-Jan 18, 2019
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's office on Friday denied an ... Justice Department to “reveal the leakers” behind BuzzFeed's reporting and ...
President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen To Lie To ...
Highly Cited-BuzzFeed News-Jan 18, 2019
'Total phony story': Trump thanks Mueller's office for speaking out ...
International-Stars and Stripes-Jan 18, 2019  Trump and Russia: What to expect from Mueller in 2019
<a href="http://NBCNews.com" rel="nofollow">NBCNews.com</a>-Dec 31, 2018
The Mueller probe has led to criminal charges against 33 people, including ... News that Mueller is nearing the end stages of his investigation, and a report ... harmed the prosecutor's image among a subset of Americans, polls show. .... he or she knew the full contours of it — could be charged with felonies.
 Trump shutdown announcement: Democrats reject president's Daca ...
The Independent-Jan 19, 2019
Show all 15 .... It's almost a full month since the president refused to sign a government ... The White House has denied the bombshell report claiming Trump ... statement by Robert Mueller disputing the Trump-Cohen report: ...
 The Mueller Thread: Poppycock and the Pending War Over Executive ...
OZY-2 hours ago
The Mueller Thread: Poppycock and the Pending War Over Executive Privilege ... Because a battle over executive privilege lies between the Mueller report and ... without worrying about having to reveal such deliberations.
 Barr fields questions on Mueller probe, independence from Trump at ...
Washington Post-Jan 15, 2019
5:55 p.m.: Barr reiterates that Mueller report might not be fully public. Near the ... though he seemed to be managing expectations about a full airing of Mueller's findings. .... The public seems to want Barr to reveal everything.
William Barr Hearing: Senators Press Barr on Criminal Justice Overhaul
International-New York Times-Jan 15, 2019  The FBI can't neutralize a security threat if the president is the threat
Washington Post-Jan 13, 2019
This is where Mueller's report comes in. ... criminal, the court filings do not reveal the full breadth of what Mueller may have discovered. Only by ...
Mueller Team Breaks Usual Silence To Dispute Buzzfeed's Cohen ...
NPR-Jan 19, 2019
Mueller Team Breaks Usual Silence To Dispute Buzzfeed's Cohen Perjury Report ... Then last night, the office of special counsel Robert Mueller said the report is not accurate. ... It's certainly not a full-throated denial. ... really urge them to reveal which characterization because it's very hard to respond to.
 A Justice Department Veteran Explains Why Trump Can't Suppress ...
Rolling Stone-Jan 10, 2019
WASHINGTON — As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation ... that could revealattempts made by the president to obstruct justice. ... to play if Whitaker or Barr (if confirmed) try to stymie him and his full report.” ... “Bottom line: the President can try to hide the Mueller Report,” Katyal tweeted.
 Exclusive: Robert Mueller met with Trump's pollster
CNN-Jan 10, 2019
Mueller's team met with pollster Tony Fabrizio in February 2018, ... attorneys revealed Tuesday that Mueller's team is still interested in how ...
Paul Manafort's big, accidental reveal: He shared Trump campaign ...
International-Salon-Jan 9, 2019  Mueller believes Manafort fed information to Russian with intel ties
CNN-Jan 8, 2019
Washington (CNN) Special counsel Robert Mueller believes that Paul Manafort was sharing polling data and discussing Russian-Ukrainian ...
Manafort Accused of Sharing Trump Polling Data With Russian ...
International-New York Times-Jan 9, 2019  The Mueller Report May Reveal Nothing Damning About Trump: What ...
The Inquisitr-Jan 3, 2019
The Mueller report, when it is finally released, may reveal very little when it comes to information about Donald Trump that Congress can ...
 Ken Starr on Mueller's office disputing accuracy of Buzzfeed report that ...
Yahoo News-Jan 19, 2019
Ken Starr on Mueller's office disputing accuracy of Buzzfeed report .... The Telegraph can reveal that Emma Fairweather, 45, was the ... Lunar eclipses occur when the moon is full and in alignment with both the Earth and sun.
 Predictions on the Mueller Report
Legal Talk Network-Jan 11, 2019
So what will the Mueller report reveal? .... Is Mueller circumventing that whole issue about report by issuing these indictments and telling this ...
 BuzzFeed Reporter: Trust Us, Our Trump-Russia Story That Was ...
Townhall-12 hours ago
So, how does BuzzFeed respond after Mueller gutted its story like a fish? ... Our reporting is going to be borne out to be accurate, and we're 100% ... Cormier, who wouldn't reveal his sources when asked, said the story had ...
 Tom Fitton: What could Mueller's final report reveal?
Canada Free Press-Dec 26, 2018
... in on the special counsel probe's impact over the last year and what it could mean for Mueller'sfinal report, reportedly expected by February.
 The 5 biggest Trump-Russia events to watch for in 2019
Vox-Jan 2, 2019
Rumors that Mueller will soon complete his investigation continue to swirl, .... And there are the reports that Kushner urged Trump to fire then-FBI ... which is why experts say he's using his indictments to reveal part of what he's ...
 Law firm that represented Russian interests part of mystery Mueller ...
CNN-Jan 9, 2019
CNN's reporting of the law firm's identity is among the first details revealed about a case that's progressed to the Supreme Court under extreme ...
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| Mueller probe ‘purposely and illegally‘ deleted Peter Strzok and Lisa Page texts – Stock Standard | ||
By – The Washington Times – Tuesday, December 18, 2018
President accused special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation on Tuesday of “purposely and illegally” erasing thousands of text messages between former employees and .
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz recently released a report that explained how around the DOJ lost 19,000 text messages when it reset the government phones for , a former agent, and , a former lawyer, so that other employees could use them.
The messages were included in a list of documents about the Russia investigation that originally ordered declassified in September.
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| Compromise: Before Trump Won His First Primary, Putin Collected His First Receipt | ||
In this post, I noted that, while important, the Buzzfeed story on Trump’s role in Michael Cohen’s lies to Congress did not advance our understanding of how the Trump Tower deal fits into the larger Trump conspiracy with Russia.
But there is a piece of the Cohen statement of the offense the significance of which hasn’t gotten sufficient attention. That’s the detail that Dmitry Peskov’s personal assistant took detailed notes from a 20-minute January 20, 2016 phone call with Cohen, which led to Putin’s office contacting Felix Sater the next day.
Cohen had lied about this, claiming that he had emailed Peskov’s public comment line just once, but gotten no response.
This language is important not just because it shows that Cohen lied. It’s important because of what Cohen would have said to Peskov’s assistant. And it’s important because a written record of what Cohen said got handed on to Putin’s office, if not Putin himself.
BuzzFeed’s piece from May reveals that Cohen would have been in discussions with one of two banks in January 2016: VTB or GenBank.
Both were sanctioned. While Sater (who seems to have knowingly set this trap) dismissed the import of the sanctions, Cohen clearly knew — and left record that he knew in communications with Sater — that they were the intended funders.
A former GRU officer contact of Sater’s was key to obtaining funding from VTB.
Obtaining funding from GenBank would have relied on Putin and Peskov.
The BuzzFeed article makes it clear that Sater’s GRU contact got back involved after Cohen’s conversation with Peskov’s assistant.
All of which is to say that when Cohen called Peskov’s assistant, he would have told her that he was speaking on behalf of Donald Trump, that Trump remained interested in a Trump Tower in Moscow (as he had been in 2013, the last time Putin had dangled a personal meeting with Trump), and that on Trump’s behalf Cohen was willing to discuss making a deal involving both a sanctioned bank (whichever one it was) and a former GRU officer.
So it’s not just that Trump was pursuing a real estate deal while running for President. He was pursuing a real estate deal involving a sanctioned bank — possibly one sanctioned for its involvement in Crimea — and involving someone with ties to the intelligence agency that was preparing to hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.
Cohen told Peskov’s assistant Trump was willing to negotiate that deal while running for President. The assistant wrote all that down (how Mueller knows this is an interesting question on its own right). And then she or Peskov passed on at least the content of the notes to get Putin’s office to contact Sater.
And all that happened before Trump performed unexpectedly well in the Iowa caucuses on February 1.
Last year, I argued that — pee tape or no — the kompromat Putin has on Trump consists of a series of receipts of Trump formally communicating his willingness to enter into a conspiracy with Russia, receipts that would be devastating if Putin released them.
What Cohen’s plea deal makes clear is that Putin pocketed the first of those receipts — a receipt showing Trump’s willingness to work with both sanctioned banks and the GRU — even before the first vote was cast. Even before GRU hacked its first Democratic target (though APT 29 had been spying on the Democrats since the previous summer).
Discussing a real estate deal is not, as Trump has repeated, illegal. If that’s all this were about, Trump and Cohen might not have lied about it.
But it’s not. Even before the GRU hacked John Podesta, even before Don Jr told his June 9 visitors that his dad would consider lifting sanctions if he got elected, Michael Cohen let a key Putin deputy know that Trump would be happy to discuss real estate deals that involved both partnering with the GRU and with sanctioned banks.
And Putin has been sitting on that receipt ever since.
Update: 22-paragraphs into a 1400-word story on the latest developments in the Trump Tower Moscow story yesterday, the NYT revealed the name of the officer, without explaining why the connection is important to the larger story of a GRU-led operation targeting the US election.
As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
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| Yes, There Was Collusion. Look at the Manafort Case - Mother Jones | ||
Yes, There Was Collusion. Look at the Manafort Case Mother Jones
For years now, Donald Trump has been screeching “No collusion!” It's been a hollow cry, because throughout the 2016 campaign (and afterward as president), ...
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| Shutdown has ‘hindered’ FBI’s ability to conduct operations, union says | US news | ||
A union representing FBI agents warned on Tuesday that the partial federal government shutdown has “hindered” the bureau’s ability to conduct operations and pursue investigations. Thousands of union members are among hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors now without pay for a fifth week.
As the FBI Agents Association released a report containing firsthand accounts of how the 32-day shutdown has affected operations, its president, Tom O’Connor, demanded Congress and Donald Trump fully fund the FBI.
“The failure to fund the FBI undermines essential FBI operations, such as those designated to combat crimes against children, drug and gang crime and terrorism,” O’Connor told reporters.
He declined to say whether Americans were less safe as a result of the shutdown.
“I will leave that question up to you to answer,” he said.
The union’s plea came as the shutdown continued to affect government services across the country.
The Transportation Security Administration said the percentage of its airport screeners missing work hit 10% on Sunday, up from 3.1% on the comparable Sunday a year ago.
The screeners, who are without pay, have been citing financial hardship as the reason they cannot report to work. Even so, the agency said it screened 1.78 million passengers on Sunday with only 6.9% having to wait 15 minutes or longer to get through security.
In Washington, Senate Republicans released legislation designed to meet Trump’s offer to break the impasse and end the shutdown. The measure would include temporary relief from deportation for young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers and other threatened groups, in exchange for meeting the president’s demand for $5.7bn to build a southern border wall.
But Democrats have vowed opposition to Trump’s wall, calling it an impractical, “medieval solution” to a “21st-century problem”.
Voting is not expected to unfold until later in the week. Even then it seems doubtful the 1,300-page Senate measure, the “End the Shutdown and Secure the Border Act”, has any chance of passing swiftly.
Senate Republicans hold a 53-47 majority but would need Democratic support to reach the 60-vote threshold for bills to advance. Not a single Democrat has publicly expressed support for Trump’s proposal. Party leadership rejected it before he spoke.
The office of the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, reiterated on Monday that Democrats are unwilling to negotiate until Trump reopens the government.
“Nothing has changed with the latest Republican offer,” spokesman Justin Goodman said. “President Trump and Senate Republicans are still saying: ‘Support my plan or the government stays shut.’ That isn’t a compromise or a negotiation – it’s simply more hostage taking.”
McConnell’s spokesman, David Popp, said on Monday that the GOP leader “will move” to vote on consideration of the president’s proposal “this week”.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley was asked by Fox News on Tuesday if Trump had given McConnell his word he would sign the legislation if it cleared both houses.
“Well, that’s a big if,” Gidley said. “We don’t know what the final bill would look like. But the president has been clear about what he wants.”
On Twitter, Trump wrote: “Never seen [McConnell] and Republicans so united on an issue as they are on the Humanitarian Crisis & Security on our Southern Border. If we create a Wall or Barrier which prevents Criminals and Drugs from flowing into our Country, Crime will go down by record numbers!”
The president has lashed out at the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, accusing her of acting “irrationally”. House Democrats are pushing ahead with voting on their own legislation to reopen the government and add $1bn for border security – including 75 immigration judges and infrastructure improvements – but no funding for the wall.
The status of the annual state of the union address remains unclear, one week after Pelosi requested that Trump postpone it. On Tuesday, Fox News reported that the White House sent a letter to the House sergeant-at-arms to schedule a walk-through for the address, which is due to be held on 29 January.
Gidley said Trump could deliver the address from another venue if Pelosi blocks him from doing so in the House chamber.
“There are many ways he can deliver the state of the union address,” Gidley said. “I’m not going to get ahead of anything he would announce.”
In his offer to Democrats on Saturday, Trump offered to extend temporary protections for Dreamers and those fleeing disaster zones. On Tuesday, the supreme court said it would not pick up a case concerning Trump’s previous attempt to end protection for Dreamers, meaning they will remain in limbo for the next few months.
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| Supreme Court releases censored appeal by foreign government in mystery Mueller case | ||
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By Associated Press
WASHINGTON — An unidentified foreign government is asking the Supreme Court to get involved in a case that may be part of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
The justices on Tuesday granted the government's request to file a censored version of an appeal to the high court in which the country is fighting a grand jury subpoena and a $50,000-a-day fine for not complying with the subpoena.
The appeal doesn't identify the country, a company it controls or even the lawyers who are representing it. But the appeal says the justices should make clear that a federal law that generally protects foreign governments from civil lawsuits in the U.S. also shields them in criminal cases.
The justices had previously refused to block the subpoena and fine on an emergency basis.
A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington had in December upheld the issuance of the subpoena and a contempt order issued by a district court judge when the company, identified only as wholly owned by a foreign country, failed to comply.
The country says that the appellate ruling would upset foreign relations in a big way if allowed to stand. It says the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is "the first appellate court in American history to exercise criminal jurisdiction over a foreign state."
The country says it is immune from being subpoenaed under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and that complying would require it to violate its own laws.
The U.S. government has until Feb. 21 to respond to the appeal. An uncensored, sealed version of the appeal also has been filed with the court.
Both Politico and The Washington Post have reported that the subpoena apparently relates to the Mueller investigation. Prosecutors have been trying to obtain information from the foreign-owned company since last summer, Judge Stephen Williams wrote in an opinion that was released by the appeals court earlier in January.
The case has been shrouded in secrecy as it has moved through the court system. Federal marshals closed an entire floor of the federal courthouse in Washington last month when the case was argued before the three-judge appellate panel. The move stymied the efforts of a group of about 15 reporters to see whether any Mueller team members or other participants had entered the hearing room.
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| Bijan Rafiekian, Michael Flynn associate, pleads not guilty to working as unregistered foreign agent – Stock Standard | ||
By – The Washington Times – Tuesday, December 18, 2018
A former associate of ex-national security adviser pleaded not guilty in a Virginia federal court on Tuesday to charges of working as an unregistered foreign agent.
A trial is set for February 11.
Bijan Kian, also known as Bijan Rafiekian, is accused of illegally lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government to influence U.S. officials. Charges against Mr. Kian and another associate, Kamil Ekim Alpetkin, were unsealed Monday.
Mr. Kian’s not guilty plea came the same day a federal judge in Washington, D.C. delayed ’s sentencing for lying to the FBI. The delay came after the judge lambasted for his crimes.
has cooperated with federal investigators in the case against his two former associates and is expected to testify if there is a trial, his defense attorney said in a Washington, D.C. courtroom Tuesday.
Prosecutors in Virginia say Kian worked “covertly and illegally” to advance the Turkish government’s agenda. Specifically, they sought to influence U.S. government officials, urging them to extradite cleric Fethullah Gulen.
Mr. Gulen has been blamed by the Turkish government for a failed coup attempt in 2016. He has lived in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999.
Mr. Alpetkin is currently evading authorities in Istanbul and is unlikely to appear in court.
Prosecutors say Mr. Alptekin and Mr. Kian hid their connections to the Turkish government through ’s international lobbying group. As part of the effort to conceal Turkey’s involvement, they named Alpetkin’s company as the client rather than the Turkish government.
A prosecutor with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team said Tuesday Flynn could have been indicted in that case had he not agreed to cooperate with the government.
The charges against the two defendants appear to stem from Mueller’s Russia investigation. However, the charges were brought by prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia and not Mueller’s team.
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| Russian spy chief met Saudi counterpart and Crown Prince - Ifax | ||
World
The head of Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency Sergei Naryshkin on Monday met Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as the head of the kingdom's intelligence services, the Interfax news agency said on Wednesday.
MOSCOW: The head of Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency Sergei Naryshkin on Monday met Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as the head of the kingdom's intelligence services, the Interfax news agency said on Wednesday.
Naryshkin discussed cooperation in the fight against international terrorism with his Saudi counterpart, Interfax cited Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service as saying.
(Reporting by Polina Ivanova; Writing by Polina Nikolskaya; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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| “fbi” – Google News: Government shutdown posing ‘risks to national security,’ FBI union says in 72-page report – Philly.com | ||
Government shutdown posing ‘risks to national security,’ FBI union says in 72-page report Philly.com
The FBunion said it released the report, full of personal stories from FBI special agents across the country, “to ensure that Congress, the Administration, and the …
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