by Zev Shalev and Heidi Cuda

A suspected Russian asset was involved in organizing the January 6 attempted coup, including supplying accommodation and a gathering place for protest leaders in the weeks and days leading up to the storming of the Capitol.

Charles Bausman’s father was the Moscow Bureau Chief for Associated Press between 1968 and 1972, just the type of role Soviet officials would have targeted for recruitment to their intelligence services. It’s unclear if the elder Bausman was ever recruited, but Charles who has spent most of his adult life in Moscow, bears all the hallmarks of a man working for the Kremlin.

Bausman lived in Russia for 30 years before moving to Lancaster, PA in 2018 with enough money to buy three properties. On his arrival, he immediately launched US versions of his three Russian web sites pushing disinformation and propaganda, most notably Russia Insider, which included rabidly anti-semitic sentiment and Holocaust denialism. One of Bausman’s common themes is that America is “fractured.”

His websites were pro-Russian but the content decidedly focused on divisive U.S. domestic issues. Bausman promoted “Stop the Steal”— including appearing in and organizing anti-lockdown election protests in December and January outside the office and home of the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He was spotted at protests outside Speaker Brian Cutler’s home and office in December. 

On the season premiere of Narativ, we broke the story about Bausman’s barn being used as a venue to plan for the insurrection and also discussed Bausman’s relationship with Sean Moon. Our guests were “Cult of Trump” author Dr. Steven Hassan, a former “Moonies Rev” himself and Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who wrote the first expose of Bausman. Heidi Cuda co-produced the show. Scroll down for Part 2.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

In psychological warfare, there are no strange bedfellows, and the purported Russian sleeper agent Bausman and gun crazy Pastor Sean Moon, of the Rod Iron Ministries, also known as the World Peace Unification Sanctuary, have been linked together during the lead up to the January 6 insurrection.

Turns out the next-gen Moonies and the alleged Russian spy Bausman reportedly played a much bigger role in the January 6 Insurrection than previously known.

And on Jan. 3, Bausman allowed out of town groups to stay over at his Pennsylvania property, specifically Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron group from Warren County. In fiery speeches, Moon invoked God’s name and fear of a Chi Com planet to whip people into a Trump-defending frenzy. Moon’s brother owns a tommy gun warehouse, whose 2016 grand opening was attended by Eric and Lara Trump. Eric was the guest speaker at the event. Donald Trump is scheduled to spend the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with Moon’s mother, Hak Ja Han Moon, the widow of Moonies founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Trump is listed as the featured speaker at the billionaire widow’s conference.

MEET THE MOONIES

According to multiple media reports and its own website, Sean Moon’s “Moonies” splinter group, Rod of Iron Ministries, worships at the altar of the AR-15, and Moon recently purchased a Waco-style compound about 40 miles from Waco, Texas, to prep for a war with the “deep state,” he said. Political provocateur Steve Bannon has spoken at Rod of Iron events, and both Moon and Bausman were present at the Insurrection. Moon was seen at the Capitol leading members into scaffolding. Bausman advanced to the Capitol, according to news reports, and then fled the country for Moscow.  

The Moonies weren’t the only Russian friendly assets at the Insurrection. Putin’s favorite former Congressman Dana Rohrabacher was at the Capitol; Russian chants can be heard as windows are being smashed; a Russian expat now living in Florida, Stanislauv Doudnik, broadcast live to Russian news outlets blaming Antifa and BLM for the violence. Two Russian women–a mother and daughter, originally from Moldova–were arrested for illegal entry. The daughter, Kristina Malimon, is a GOP activist living in Portland, according to a McClatchy report. In addition, a Ukrainian infowars host who appears on a network with ties to oligarch Dmitry Firtash posed with the QAnon shaman, Jake Angeli, on January 6.

Bausman left Russia where he had been living for decades and arrived in the US in 2018, quickly establishing his pro-Russian pop-up blogs and acquiring three properties. He left the US on Jan 7 in such a hurry, he didn’t have time to take down the Christmas lights at his home. Neighbors a say a friend took down the decorations weeks later.

One of Bausman’s Lancaster properties is a barn not far from his family home in Lancaster, PA, which he acquired under an LLC. The barn has been used to host white nationalist events like the launch of the National Justice Party, which is virulently anti-Zionist.

The following year he and Bausman’s family traveled to Verona for the 2019 anti-LGBT World Congress of Families conference.

Handler? Leaked emails from Charles Bausman reveal he sought funding from Konstantin Malofeev through an intermediary Alesksei Komov.

RENDEZVOUZ IN VERONA

In Verona, Bausman would likely have met up with another delegate at the WCF that year – the organization’s Russian representative, Aleksei Komov. One of Komov’s many job titles was journalist for Bausman’s Russia Insider.

Bausman’s emails also revealed Komov often arranged financing for Bausman’s projects through the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. Komov served as head of foreign charities at the Foundation.

The charitable foundation is a philanthropic effort Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev. Malofeev also funds the WCF and is a staunch supporter of Russia’s Orthodox Church. He is also said to have been the architect of Putin’s invasion of Crimea. Komov is considered one of Malofeev’s right-hand men. Malofeev was sanctioned by the U.S., EU, and Canada for his alleged role in financing financing Russian military operatives in Ukraine.

After a couple of surprisingly successful financial years, Bausman encountered some financial trouble at his publications and shuttered them in late 2020, soon after the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael E. Hayden published an expose about him.

Part 2 of our podcast about Bausman and Moon: ‘A Bear in our House’

PLANNING PROTESTS

He may have quit his online news business, but Bausman kept engaged in politics, hosting Sean Moon and delegation from his “Rod Of Iron” Church overnight on Jan 2. The next day the heads of many insurrectionist groups were attending a secret closed-door meeting in an unknown location in the same PA town. It’s unclear if Bausman’s barn was used for the meeting or if he attended.

Bausman’s trail of strange associations with extremist groups, Russia’s Orthodox Church, and a continuing association with Konstantin Malofeev’s right hand-man, suggest Bausman’s pro-Russia agenda may have been operational in an espionage sense, or as we like to say on Narativ, he is likely a spy.

Bausman is now back in Moscow full-time and denies any link to the Russian state. His funder Aleksei Komov denies Malofeev funds Bausman or his publications.

If Bausman is an agent for the Kremlin, it would be standard operating procedure to wire up a meeting room like the barn for surveillance. Extremist leaders like Mike Peinovich of the National Justice Party and Sean Moon may have believed they were meeting in secret, when in reality they could have been meeting at a SVR-owned and monitored venue.

This is the first time we’ve been able to link a suspected Russian asset to the insurrection.

Narativ is made possible by viewers like you. Support our independent journalism. Patreon.com/Narativ

The post A Bear in Our House appeared first on Narativ.

The true story of Bibi Netanyahu’s role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election. How political revenge and a corruption trial endangered an alliance.

The unbelievably warm temperatures that signaled an early start to summer may have been to blame, but President Barack Obama’s famously relaxed demeanor was not on display on this June morning in 2009.

The world’s eyes were on Number 44, and his mood showed it. The newly inaugurated president took plenty of flack from Republicans as Iranians took to the streets.

I wasn’t having my best morning either. As the newly appointed executive producer of the CBS News Early Show, I was about to be late for an interview with the president of the United States.

A perfect storm roiled that morning, raining out a special broadcast live from the USS Intrepid and delaying my flight from New York to DC. Then, I was dropped off at the wrong White House gate—my DC colleagues’ idea of a hazing ritual, I thought.

With my hopes and dreams flashing before my eyes, and the temperature soaring, I ran the perimeter of the White House to find the correct entrance.

Robert Gibbs, Obama’s spokesperson, grabbed me on the way inside.

“We’ve changed things around on you,” Gibbs said, maintaining his cheerfulness, as he improvised reactions to real-time events.

“Harry is doing the Iran interview,” Gibbs said, referring to Harry Smith, the unflappable anchor of the CBS Early Show.

With those words, the interview went from casual to historically consequential in a matter of seconds.

Thankfully, Harry could handle anything, especially with this president. Harry was an early and regular reporter on Obama’s campaign.

I was drenched from the sweat or rain, or both, so much so that the White House butler offered me a napkin. I wiped my brow and made a mental note to take on less responsibility in the future. I pocketed the napkin embossed with the White House logo. I still have it today.

DEMOCRACY’S MOONSHOT

Three weeks earlier, Obama embarked on his first Middle east trip in pursuit of two critical and interconnected foreign policy initiatives: a Middle east peace deal and an Iranian nuclear solution.

Obama delivered a watershed address at Cairo University, lamenting the decades of blood spilled from proxy wars in the region, and offered the Arab world a new beginning. It was American-style democracy beginning a Middle East tour.

Democracy activists viewed the Cairo Address as a green light to confront the region’s dictatorial regimes. The series of protests, uprisings, and attempted revolutions that followed in the next few years became known as the ‘Arab Spring.’

In the end, democracy failed to usher a new era of openness into the region. While the Arab spring underlined the need for reform in the Middle East, the movement also exposed the limitations of democracy as an alternative to autocracy. 

Obama gave democracy a moonshot chance at success in the Middle East, but it didn’t work. World leaders were left wondering, “Now what?”

THE WORLD IS WATCHING

At the White House, a crew member placed a microphone on the lapel of Obama’s jacket. The president was in the zone.

A week earlier, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the Iranian election despite allegations that the vote had been rigged. Supporters of second-placed Mir-Hoessein Mousavi demanded a recount, taking to the streets in what became known as the Green Movement.

There was no question: this was an opportunity for Obama to advance the Iran issue, but if he supported the protesters, he risked losing a major nuclear deal with the Iranian regime that was already in the works.

Harry began with Iran. Obama constructed a powerful message that pressured the regime but fell short of declaring the elections stolen.

“The world is watching and is inspired by their participation, regardless of what the outcome of the election was.”

The protesters awaited additional support from Obama, but it never materialized. In New York the next morning, I felt a momentary flash of satisfaction when I saw other news networks running our interview. The banner on CNN read, “The World is Watching.”

That satisfaction subsided as it became clear that the dramatic media moment would yield very little for the Iranian protesters. It also foreshadowed an Iranian nuclear deal which would imperil a vital relationship.

BIBI AND BARACK

Perhaps not so coincidentally, something else had shifted the Middle East dynamic that week.

Benjamin Netanyahu was not Obama’s pick as a Middle East dance partner, but Netanyahu emerged victorious from the 2009 election in a coalition with religious and right-wing parties.

Obama welcomed Netanyahu to the White House in May 2009. He told the new Israeli PM he needed to stop building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Netanyahu bristled at the notion.

Their relationship went from bad to much worse. What began as mild irritation between the two leaders developed into animosity by the time Obama signed the Iranian deal eight years later.

In 2012, as Obama approached a second term, his advisors had all but given up on Netanyahu’s participation in a peace process. “They were never sincere in their commitment to peace,” Ben Rhodes would tell The New Yorker.

“They used us as cover,” Rhodes complained. “They were running a play, killing time, waiting out the Administration.”

Obama claimed their squabbles were like those of a married couple, but Netanyahu felt Obama’s policies threatened Israel’s national security and harmed his political prospects.

In a heated exchange, Obama reportedly said, “Bibi, you have to understand something. I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

A COALITION OF THE DISLOYAL

White House officials suspected Netanyahu secretly supported Mitt Romney in the 2012 election. A departure from the traditional neutrality with which Jerusalem approached US elections.

Romney would go on to lose the Israeli Prime Minister knew this spelled danger for his policies. 

At home, Netanyahu faced a criminal investigation into government corruption.  Sensing the power shift around him, Bibi shopped around for a political lifeline and found a willing ally in Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Putin and Netanyahu had become closer soon after Russia’s invasion of Crimea, which Jerusalem refused to criticize, despite pressure from Washington.

Soon after, Netanyahu and Putin agreed to establish a direct encrypted hotline between the Russian president’s office and Netanyahu’s home. “The Russians want to speak to Israel without anyone eavesdropping — in particular the US,” Russia expert Alex Tentzer told the news site Y-net. 

Netanyahu and Putin tested Obama’s willingness to intervene in Syria over chemical weapons. Obama was reluctant to sink the US into another war despite Syria’s crossing of the so-called red line. This, emboldened Netanyahu and Putin to step up Russia’s attack on anti-Assad forces in Syria.

Netanyahu found another willing accomplice in Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who felt Obama had abandoned Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak during a time of need.

As the second half of Obama’s term neared, it became clear that Hillary Clinton was to be his heir apparent.

The prospect of four more years of Obama-like policies under Hillary Clinton was a political death knell for Netanyahu’s policies.

Putin shared Netanyahu’s trepidation over a Clinton presidency, and recognized an opportunity to press for an unlikely and unprecedented alliance of like-minded nations with a strong preference for a US presidential candidate in a US election.

Expressing an affinity with a candidate is one thing, but coordinating an influence campaign in coordination with the candidate’s staff was tantamount to an act of war, but that is exactly what Netanyahu did. 

In 2015, Netanyahu dispatched George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman who had been a close advisor of Netanyahu since 1996, to meet with Arab leaders assembled on a yacht in the Red Sea. 

The yacht summit included Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, UAE Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Bahrain Crown Prince Salman, and Jordan’s King Abdullah.

Nader, who is currently serving a ten-year sentence in the US for trafficking a teenager and possessing child porn, unveiled a controversial proposal to remake the middle East.

It’s unclear if Nader was speaking on behalf of the Israelis or Emiratis but the proposal bore the presumed approval of both leaders. The plan involved establishing a new middle east alliance that would replace the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League and support US policy in the Middle East that countered Turkey and Iran, according to two unnamed sources quoted in the Middle East Eye.

Such a radical plan would need a US president who wasn’t as attached to traditional American policies like democracy. This ruled out Obama and Clinton. The group agreed to support the election of a unique political animal — an anti-democratic American president Donald Trump.

THE OPERATION TO ELECT

Nader promised to lobby US leaders to support the new alliance, but he did much more than that when he later became a fixture on the Trump campaign.

By February 25, 2016, key players connected to the countries represented at the yacht summit began to maneuver around the Trump campaign. Paul Manafort (connected to Russia) wrote to Thomas Barrack (connected to Saudi Arabia) for help in getting hired by the Trump campaign on a volunteer basis.

But arguably the most significant contribution to the Trump campaign came from Israel’s Psy- Group.   One of a handful of companies born out of Israel’s famed 8200 division of the Israeli Defense Force.  Netanyahu’s former national security advisor served on the advisory board of the company. 

What followed was a sequence of contacts and contracts between the Trump Campaign and Psy Group’s CEO Joel Zamel. By March, Manafort’s deputy Robert Gates had met and hired Zamel for an initial campaign.

Erik Prince met with Zamel about a mysterious project codenamed Black Jack or Jack Black, which both Zamel and Prince refused to explain to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers.

Prince and Zamel would meet again in August 2016, this time at Trump Tower with Donald Trump, Jr., Stephen Miller, and George Nader. 

Zamel outlined a plan to use Psy-Group’s algorithms to bend American sentiment ahead of the elections. The Saudis, Nader said, would foot the bill.

All told, Israel’s Psy-Group worked on the Trump campaign for almost a full year in varying capacities. Most notably, Psy-Group helped run a surveillance campaign on delegates at the Republican National Convention.

Psy-Group also worked for Oleg Deripaska in 2015 and Dmitry Rybolovlev in 2016, both oligarchs are close to Putin.

MICRO-DONATIONS

Winning a US election was an expensive endeavor with strict laws forbidding foreign funding but the alliance figured out a way to fund Trump while evading detection by the Federal Election Committee (FEC).

 Given Trump’s poor financial situation, the claim that his campaign was self-funded was hard to believe. Nevertheless, the campaign survived on a steady stream of micro-donations under the $200-per-donor limit the FEC allowed without tracking.

As much as $90 million flowed through the accounts of Trump’s digital chief, Brad Parscale, and into Facebook’s coffers for targeted social media advertising. Most of this money came from micro-donations 

The origins of this micro donations—and an equally significant amount that funded Bernie Sanders campaign—had not been scrutinized until a February 2021 article by BBC reporter Paul Woods about a Los Angeles–based smart payment entrepreneur Andy Khawaja.

According to Khawaja, the Saudis and the Emiratis illegally paid tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump campaign in 2016, disguising the money by using stolen identities and ‘virtual credit cards’ or gift cards to process donations of under $200.

Nader and Khawaja were partners in another foreign funding scheme that led to Khawaja and Nader’s arrest in a $3.5 million scheme to illegally conceal donations to political campaigns.   Although Khawaja’s claims were never proven, his cooperation with Nader on this scheme lends credence to his involvement in the overall scheme to support Trump’s electoral win.

ISRAEL FIRST 

Soon after the election, the incoming administration began to signal a new posture toward Russia, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps in an attempt to smoke out Netanyahu, the US supported an Egyptian UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. 

Netanyahu viewed the vote as a jab by Obama and sensed an opportunity to test the loyalty of his new friends in the incoming administration. Even though Obama was still in office, Trump and his transition team led by son-in-law Jared Kushner prioritized scuttling or delaying the vote.

Kushner acted on Netanyahu’s request and with Michael Flynn worked with their Russian allies to influence the vote. In the end, Obama abstained, and the vote failed.

The UN vote highlighted that for all the consternation about Putin’s ties to Trump, Bibi Netanyahu carried significant sway in the Trump White House, as evidenced by increasingly radical pro-Israeli policies, such as moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

We may never know the full extent of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE’s involvement in supporting Trump’s election campaign, but prima facie, the Trump administration was decidedly pro-Saudi Arabia and pro-Israel at the exclusion of former Palestinian partners and in opposition to fundamental human rights.

Netanyahu, like Putin and Mohamed bin Salman,  got much of what he wanted during the Trump years. 

Netanyahu’s involvement in electing Trump would eventually drive a wedge between America’s left-leaning Jewish population and Israel’s government. That rift grew even deeper with the election of Joe Biden. It soon became apparent to Israeli politicians that the US-Israel alliance would be at risk, if Netanyahu stayed in charge.

As Netanyahu successor Naftali Bennett was being sworn in, defense secretary Benny Gantz said of Netanyahu:  “No political move justifies the conflict you create[d] with the US.” 

The post Bibi’s Revenge appeared first on Narativ.

The biggest scandal of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Watch: Part 1 of Narativ Live’s podcast on ‘Covidgate’ with Dr. Bandy X. Lee and @LincolnsBible (above).

Judging by the number of home videos Donald Trump has posted since checking himself out of the Walter Reed Medical Facility; the president seems more desperate than ever to dominate every news cycle – even while in quarantine.

Trump has used his positive diagnosis for coronavirus to distract us from the $430 Million boondoggle of a scheme he perpetrated on the American taxpayer. At this very moment he is likely plotting an inevitable comeback tour. And, he’s inserted himself into Covid relief negotiations which means his tour may well include a last-minute ‘incentive’ to his loyal subjects desperate after seven months of suffering from the pandemic he allowed to happen.

Not withstanding all of that, the White House Press Corps and their affiliated punditry is giving the President a free pass, just like they did in 2016 when they failed to expose Trump’s mob ties.

In our new three-part podcast, we lay out a devastating fact pattern that suggests Trump and his staff have lied repeatedly about when and how he contracted the disease.

Super Spreader

Trump has covered-up when he got sick, risked the life of a former vice-president and likely future president and misused government assets in a vast conspiracy to obscure reality and mislead his voters on a scale never before seen in the U.S. His blatant disregard the for truth has plunged America into a national security crisis, left us unprotected globally and exposed the White House to the ravages of a deadly virus.

New detail are emerging about Trump’s sham response to his COVID-19 diagnosis . It’s now looking more likely that Trump’s ‘super spreader’ event was not the nomination ceremony of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. It’s important to know when he contracted the disease to understand what Trump knew at the first Presidential debate.

That night, Tuesday, September 29, the president and his brood descended from Air Force One in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time, at least four members of the presidential party were positive for the coronavirus.

The entire party arrived suspiciously late, making it practically impossible to have them tested in time. As they walked into the pavilion, Trump family members and staffers were living, breathing dispensers of coronavirus droplets. They took their seats directly in front of Vice President Biden. Remarkably, most of Trump’s family members took off their masks, shedding coronavirus aerosolized droplets into the room.

Biden says he took note of the Trump family’s flagrant disregard for the rules.

 “It was a little disconcerting to look out and see that his whole section, no one had masks on when my wife was sitting further down had a mask on, the people with us had masks on,” Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt in a town hall. “I didn’t quite get that.”

“You were able to see that from where you were?,” Holt asked

“Yes. When they came in, yes, because I was standing backstage and you could see people coming in and a lot of people didn’t have masks on.”

Cover-UP

The days following the debate represent nothing short of a stunning attempt to hide the facts and cloud the narrative. Trump’s own body would give the lie to Trump’s fictitious story. As the President’s health took a turn for the worst that Friday, he was helicoptered to the Walter Reed Medical Facility. His doctors and staff reluctantly asserting he had just got sick.

Yet Trump was immediately treated with an experimental therapy which, according to available research, should only ever be administered in severe cases of Covid -19 and certainly at least a week into the disease’s progression.

White House onlookers believe the contagion began at the nominating ceremony of Judge Amy Coney Barrett on September 26, but many of the people who have since tested positive in the outbreak weren’t there. We may never find out where the contagion began as the White House has mysteriously blocked any contact tracing.

Why would it be risky to alert everyone Trump or Melania came into contact with? It wouldn’t, unless you desperately didn’t want it revealed how you contracted the virus.

CONSISTENT WITH HIS PSYCHOLOGY

Dr Bandy Lee edited the New York Times’ bestseller “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” which featured the diagnostic opinions about Trump’s mind of the world’s leading psychiatrists. The book avoided a direct diagnosis of Anti Social Personality Disorder but other writers like Dr. Daniel Winarick have come forward with the exact diagnosis. This puts Donald Trump in the same category as Jeffrey Dahmer and other psychopaths or sociopaths.

Dr. Bandy is a forensic psychiatrist who often assesses the state of minds of violent criminals. On our recent podcast, she shared three questions she utilizes in her practice to assess patients with disturbed minds. First:

“We think about whether there are medical inconsistencies, and we already know there are a lot in [Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis]”

Two.

“Is there a secondary gain? Is there something to gain out of feigning illness”

Three.

“And then we think about someone’s psychological structure. What’s their likelihood of doing it? Are they capable of doing it?”

“The answer to all these questions is in the affirmative,” Dr. Bandy concluded about Trump.

“He doesn’t fight the virus, he doesn’t deal with the problem at hand rationally but he deals with very consistently when you think about his psychology and what he does is: he denies, he alters and he lies about reality because reality contains very frightening things for him, including his own inadequacy.”

Dr. Bandy X. Lee

APPEASEMENT

The collective failure of the media to hold the President to account for his nefarious intentions and malignant actions has been a constant feature of the media’s appeasement of an outlaw presidency.

The truth of Trump’s Coronavirus diagnosis may indeed include an attempt to sicken his opponent during debate. Think about what that means for a presidency compromised by Vladimir Putin.

If we keep measuring Trump and his ilk against our own moral standards, we may never fully regain our democracy.

The 211,000 victims of Covid-19 deserve to know how the president got sick and to whom he spread it. All Americans deserve to know about Donald Trump’s actions. It may be the clearest window into his mind and soul we can actually trace. Congress and voters should insist on a full forensic medical investigation. And the media should stop aiding and abetting Trump by normalizing his criminal pathology.

About the podcast

In part 1, I lay out the inconsistencies in Trump’s story and ask psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee to explain why Trump may have set out to sicken Joe Biden. (above)

Part 2 of Narativ’s Covidgate investigation will post by tomorrow morning.

Part 3 will drop on Saturday morning.

The post COVIDGATE appeared first on Narativ.

Did the coronavirus leak from a Wuhan lab?

By the time you start reading this post or watch the latest podcast, your mind has probably been bombarded by an extraordinary amount of disinformation from the U.S. and China over whether the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese virology lab? China obviously denies this possibility but the US isn’t so sure.

The global dispute resulted in an extraordinarily rare statement from the director of national intelligence confirming the U.S. is exploring claims the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

My independent investigation reveals that while the virus appears to be naturally occurring, it likely originated from cultures in the high security P4 laboratory in Wuhan.

These are my findings.

Support Narativ’s independent journalism by joining Narativ at Patreon for as little s $5 a month. Click on the “become a patron” button above to join.

There is much more to the disinformation war than meets the eye. Trump’s claims are also a strategic attempt to paint Democrats and Joe Biden as soft on China.

“This is what happens in a disinformation war. Two sides that are involved in something together start pretending to fight with each other. We saw it in Syria when Russia accused Turkey of profiting off the sale of ISIS oil. The truth is that faux fight was a smokescreen to hide the fact that they were both profiting off the sale of ISIS oil in Syria. The same thing is happening here.”

“What Happened in Wuhan?”

The post What Happened In Wuhan? appeared first on Narativ.

The symmetry between Chinese President Xi and Donald Trump’s strategies is too hard to ignore. Are the two leaders intentionally sickening the world?

Over the last four years, many of us who write about the Trump administration have suspected that behind the Russian interference and the Saudi connection is a China rising story. Beijing’s involvement has been visible on the fringes, but there were limited apparent ties to the Trump Administration to arrive at a conclusive collusion story. 

As #COVID-19 has become an everyday reality for most of us, the symmetry between Trump and Xi’s strategy has become more apparent. In the latest podcast, I break down why I think Xi and Trump are deliberately sickening the world and why America remains completely divided by it. 

Support Narativ’s independent journalist by clicking the button above. Memberships start at just $5 a month.

Watch the Narativ podcast above or on the podcast app of any Apple iOS device. You can listen to the podcast on most podcast apps like Spotify or Stitcher.

The post appeared first on Narativ.

Does SARS-CoV-2 slow down during Summer?

The National Academy of Sciences‘ Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats has weighed in on the question: Does the spread of the Coronavirus slow down in warmer conditions?

NAS claims studies have shown reduced transmission of the virus under warmer and humid conditions in the lab. One study found the virus does survive longer than other known pathogens like flu, monkeypox, tuberculosis or the 2002 SARS but still less than in colder conditions.

Out of the lab, the virus still spreads in countries with warmer weather but the countries with the biggest outbreaks all occurred during the northern Winter and early Spring and have subsided as the temperatures climbed.

More people are outside in the Summer which may help social distancing.

The unknown factor is the limited research into the two strains of SARS-CoV-2. One strain appears to have been more dominant in Europe and the East Coast of the USA and the other in Asia.

Here’s the National Academy of Sciences report on the Coronavirus survival in Summer.

Google has published a fully interactive map which allows local newsrooms (and anyone else frankly) access to a real-time visualization of COVID-19’s contagion in their local districts or anywhere in the U.S.

The post Coronavirus In Summer appeared first on Narativ.

As COVID-19 came to America, Donald Trump and Jared Kushner saw dollars not deaths.

For three critical weeks beginning in February, the White House could have stopped the spread of the coronavirus.

My investigation reveals Intelligence and National Security Council officials briefed Donald Trump about the scale and severity of the looming outbreak in January. Yet he officially failed to react and publicly denied the threat.

By February 24, as the stock market tumbled on the news the coronavirus had spread outside of China’s borders, to South Korea, Iran, and the U.S., Trump remained inexplicably in denial.

It took Trump until March 13 for Trump to declare the pandemic a national emergency, 19 days after the financial markets began their retreat.

Instead of putting America on a war footing, Trump kept talking down the severity of the coronavirus, calling it a hoax and downplaying the actual numbers and projections his advisers were giving him.

Those 19 days when Trump fiddled, could have saved America from this crisis.

TRUMP IN DENIAL AS COVID-19 SPREAD

On February 24, there were 15 confirmed cases of Americans with COVID-19. By March 13, the figure was 2163. There is no doubt that a more prompt and deliberate response to contain the virus would have suppressed its growth trajectory significantly.

South Korean officials acted decisively after their first COVID-19 case on January 20, diagnosed on the same day the U.S. had its first confirmed case.

The South Koreans began testing symptomatic cases, contact tracing anyone who was potentially infected and isolating suspected cases. As a result, the spread of the virus in South Korea was dramatically slowed.

The opposite was playing out in the United States. Trump declared the coronavirus “very much under control in the U.S.A.” when in reality it was spreading without any attempts to contain it on the ground. A ban on travel from China was instituted.

Yet even as he was downplaying the virus publicly, Trump was engaged behind the scenes as American pharmaceutical companies were bidding to acquire test manufacturers and vaccine makers. One of those companies doing the buying was Thermo Fisher Scientific.

On March 3, Thermo Fisher Scientific completed a $10 Bn acquisition of Qiagen, A Dutch company that developed a COVID-19 test.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Ten days later, On March 13, Trump’s opinion of the looming crisis suddenly shifted, and he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency.

The declaration allows the FDA and other government agencies to circumvent usual regulations for drug and test approvals.

Trump mentioned Thermo Fisher by name when he announced the national emergency, adding that FDA approval would not be far behind. It wan’t. Thermo Fisher’s test kits were approved by the FDA within 24 hours.

There are troubling murmurs of a conflict of interest but nothing iron-clad.

Trump owned shares in Thermo Fisher before becoming president. He says he divested them in 2017, but Trump may still hold them via a trust.

The CEO of Thermo Fisher’s China division, Gianluca Pettiti, was also one of 20 U.S. business leaders who attended a banquet for Trump and Melania during their 2017 state visit. In a social media post, President Xi is visible just feet away from Pettiti and Trump.

It’s hard to account for Trump’s coronavirus about-face: from hoax to national emergency within days. Some argue Trump was just being overly reassuring to Americans in the early stages, but how does that account for his lack of attention to disaster prevention?

The coronavirus and other bio-agents represent a brand new multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical sector. Thermo Fisher for example, intends to make 5 million COVID-19 tests a month. They will charge medicare $51 for each test (up from the CDC’s $31). That’s $3 Billion per year based on the Medicare price alone, which is vastly lower than other providers. And the taxpayers will shoulder the difference in cost.

Interestingly, Thermo Fisher also has ties to the Koch Brothers. Tyler Jacks headed the late David Koch’s cancer foundation at MIT. Jacks sits on the board of directors and the advisory board of Thermo Fisher.

Beyond testing, vaccines, masks, protective equipment, and surveillance tech represent other potential growth markets in this new sector. It’s not hard to see how the war against viruses will become the new war against terror.

While Trump managed Thermo Fisher’s FDA approval, he was also actively pursuing potential suitors of vaccine makers from around the world.

The CEO of Germany’s CureVac visited the White House on March 2. A visit arranged with just 24 hours notice. He was publicly fired a week later amid allegations Trump tried to buy the company’s vaccine production for the exclusive use of Americans, a claim which has been widely disputed.

It’s unlikely that CureVac will sell its entire vaccine supply to any country, let alone America. Still, there are 51 other vaccine studies around the world, and the first to market stands to make its owners a fortune. This is the race to watch as the sector heats up.

We also found out this week, Jared Kushner’s much-vaunted Google website initiative was neither successful nor Google’s. Jared’s brother’s health care company, Oscar, developed the site. Jared was a shareholder in the company until he allegedly disinvested from it.

While Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19 has been an unmitigated disaster, an unmistakable pattern of Trump’s hyper-focus on dealmaking rather than disaster response has emerged.

Trump is so fixated on being America’s CEO; he’s failed at the most crucial role of being its president: saving American lives.

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Special Counsel, Robert Mueller has submitted his report to the Attorney General, William Barr. Barr is expected to release the report to Congress as early as this weekend. We can’t tell you what Mueller concluded but here’s what to expect. (updated).

While it’s tempting to think of Trump-Russia as a single crime like a jewelry heist with the American Presidency substituting for priceless gems, it is not that simple. In reality, the operation was a series of interconnected, simultaneous crimes, all setting up the right conditions for the taking of the most powerful throne on the planet.

There is no crime called “Stealing the American Presidency,” so Mueller’s first task is to identify whether a crime was committed to effect the election result for the benefit of the conspirators. To continue our jewelry heist analogy, this would be akin to our jewelry thieves disrupting traffic to create a distraction so they can slip past police with the loot. Because of this, Mueller’s case will be largely circumstantial and we don’t expect a smoking gun.

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Mueller’s second task is to determine if the crime was a conspiracy. To qualify as one, Mueller needs to show two or more parties conspiring in the execution of a crime. Conspirators usually try to hide their involvement from being detected by using cut-outs or intermediaries to execute their crime. Mueller may not have any direct evidence that Putin and Trump were directly conspiring but he will likely have evidence their subordinates did.

Important note, even if the actual crime was never carried out, the very fact that two or more parties planned to execute an offense together makes it a conspiracy.

Mueller’s third task is to prove the involvement of Russia or its agents or agencies on the one hand, and the Trump campaign or its associates on the other hand, in the execution of this conspiracy and crime. That is the scope of Mueller’s mandate.

Does Mueller have the goods?

If Mueller can determine Trump-Russia was a conspiracy, he’ll need to show a coordinated operation to defraud America and its citizens during the 2016 Presidential Election. There’s an actual law called “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” (923.18 U.S.C Section 371) as defined by Hammerschmidt v. United States as:

To summarize, Mueller needs to determine if a crime was committed, whether it was a conspiracy and if it involved Russia and the Trump campaign or their delegates. Fortunately, Mueller already has a significant amount of evidence, and most of it has already been tested before grand juries and judges through various indictments and hearings.

Other countries, interest groups, politicians, organizations – criminal or otherwise – and some very wealthy people may also have been involved in the planning and execution of the conspiracy and the underlying crime or crimes. All told, we may find the number of people with direct knowledge of the crime to be in the hundreds or more, but Mueller’s primary interest is specifically Russia and the Trump Campaign.

One operation, many conspiracies.

Trump-Russia was one operation consisting of a many possible crimes, or conspiracies. These include known operations to influence the NRA, the use of stolen Facebook data to shift sentiment, an attempt to hand over dirt on HRC’s campaign and could even include the mysterious death of a GOP operative in Chicago.

Each of these operations appears to have their own conspiracies and their own crimes but one operation stands out among them as having the clearest connective tissue between the Russian state and the Trump campaign, and that is:

The DNC hack and the subsequent publication of emails by WikiLeaks is likely to be ground zero of Mueller’s report.

This operation has it all. Donald Trump himself pleading for help from Russia and WikiLeaks, an actual intrusion into the DNC servers by cyber hackers at Russia’s military intelligence, GRU, and a motley crew of Trump associates with a demonstrable timeline of contacts with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, including Roger Stone and the president’s son.

There are four known key nodes of this operation.

• The GRU hack of DNC servers. Twelve GRU officers were already indicted as part of this conspiracy.
• The publication of the contents from the hacked servers by WikiLeaks.
• Coordination between Trump associates and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange including regular contact with Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
• The GRU also coordinated its activities with a troll farm in St. Petersburg which spread fake news on social media.

Mueller’s indictment of the 12 GRU officers gives us a clear indication of the many crimes that could fall under this conspiracy. “From phishing attacks to gain access to Democratic operatives, to money laundering, to attempts to break into state elections boards, the indictment details a vigorous and complex effort by Russia’s top military intelligence service to sabotage the campaign of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton,” says the New York Times.

A note on the front page of Roger Stone’s indictment from January 24, 2019, refers to his possible inclusion in a more significant case of conspiracy. The related case number refers to the indictment of the twelve GRU officers. “The Stone indictment was a conspiracy indictment without any conspirators,” says legal analyst Glenn Kirshner.

In today’s announcement we learned that Stone’s prosecution will continue in November albeit under a different office. Another strand of prosecution into the inauguration committee will also continue.

Expect no more indictments from Mueller

Mueller let it be known today that there would be no further indictments from his office but this doesn’t preclude further indictments as a result of the remaining investigations or state investigations. Thos are still likely according Rep Adam Schiff and Senator Richard Blumenthal, who told MSNBC: “I think there’s a strong possibility of additional indictments, including the president’s family.”

We know that Paul Manafort’s deputy at the Trump Campaign, Rick Gates, has provided extensive cooperation to state investigator particularly in New York. The SDNY is also investigating campaign finance violations resulting from Michael Cohen plus other investigations.

One big question that remains unanswered is the involvement of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Israel in the Trump-Russia conspiracy. Mueller’s team has been investigating this thread but has obviously chosen not to indict anyone. Why he declined to prosecute will be an area of interest.

Mueller may also issue his findings on whether there was a Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice in the firing of James Comey. We will also watch with interest Michael Flynn’s involvement in an upcoming case relating to Turkey.

The investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible crimes does not end with the Mueller report, nor does it end with state or congressional investigations. Judgement on Trump will likely only be delivered at polling booths in 2020.

Will Mueller indict Donald Trump?

This is the big question. Mueller has evidence Trump was aware of the hacking, timing and context of the publication of the hacked material. This was one of the biggest revelations to emerge from Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee.

Trump also publicly conspired when he called on Russia and Wikileaks to help during the campaign. This suggests Trump could be an un-indicted co-conspirator but it seems likely he will escape exposure in the report. That does not mean he will escape indictment by the SDNY.

This has been a long road, and whatever Mueller decides, perhaps one of the most important results of the entire process is that he be allowed to complete it. It is actual proof that we still have a functioning Justice Department and that the “rule of law” still prevails in the U.S. Many challenges lie ahead, but Mueller’s decision needs to be peacefully accepted for what it is, no matter what it is.

We need to give investigators time to complete their work. Our impatience shouldn’t have any more influence over the timing of Mueller’s work than Donald Trump’s indignance. As one old proverb puts it, the wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine.

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Billionaire Oleg Deripaska is at the middle of the central crime of Trump-Russia. Is he a spy, the conspiracy’s mastermind or a double agent?

Showdown at Pikalevo

The 2009 global liquidity crisis ground Russian manufacturing to a near-halt. In Pikalevo, Russia, workers at the local aluminum refinery had gone unpaid for weeks. Oleg Deripaska, the plant’s 41-year-old owner, was inside and expecting word of a guest. Just months earlier, the oligarch had been named Russia’s richest man by Forbes – worth $28 Billion. Now he was facing financial ruin and a visit from the (then) Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Putin strode into town, media in tow, and into a meeting with the owners. He accused them of “ambition, incompetence and pure greed,” in a dramatic dressing down that was later broadcast on national TV.

“These are real people, and if you can’t [reopen the factory], we’ll do it without you,” he continued.

Putin then passed around contracts which committed the owners to pay the late salaries from their own pockets. That’s when he noticed a hold-out.

“Deripaska, have you signed?” The then 56-year-old Prime Minister stared at the oligarch.

Deripaska must have known that his boss was in no mood for negotiation. Despite the pretense of private ownership, Russia remains an oligarchy. Deripaska may be the aluminum king but like all the owners of Russia’s biggest companies, Putin exerts ultimate control over him.

Deripaska made his way to where Putin was seated at the front of the room, leaned his 6-foot frame over the table and signed using Putin’s pen, only to be further humiliated when Putin asked for his pen back.

The showdown in Pikalevo makes clear how Deripaska has survived as Putin’s closest oligarch for over two decades. His is a loyalty forged out of expediency.

Deripaska should have gone broke over this crisis, but Putin was there to facilitate a $50 Billion loan from the state bank, Vneshtorgbank (VTB). Putin uses access to money and loans from VTB as a way to control his oligarchs.

Putin’s secret agent

Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska has until recently run Russia’s global aluminum company ‘Rusal’ and the investment company ‘Basic Element.’ At 51 years old, he is still spectacularly wealthy (worth $3.5 Billion), Jewish and the father of two children. The oligarch is divorced and is dogged by rumours of a wild sex life. While his marriage didn’t fare so well, his loyalty to Putin seems unshakeable.

Deripaska is known as “Putin’s oligarch” and is often sent on state missions which exist outside the bounds of traditional diplomacy or legality – often on one of his private yachts or planes in order to ensure secrecy. “I don’t separate myself from the state,” he told the Financial Times in 2007.

The next year in 2008, Deripaska and his best friend, Nat Rothschild, were spotted on the deck of his yacht with British business secretary Lord Mandelson and shadow chancellor George Osbourne. The resulting scandal in the UK newspapers was huge and went on for years. What emerged was a pattern of buying influence through luxury vacations, which Deripaska continues until today.

The Russian magnate has a knack of turning politicians into puppets. Buying political influence abroad helps the oligarch in two ways. It gives him leverage against other oligarchs and Putin domestically, but it is mostly self-serving. In one 2012 trip with Rothschild and Lord Mandelson, Deripaska clinched a $500 million deal with Alcoa, America’s largest aluminum manufacturer.

It’s hard to tell where business ends and organized crime begins in Russia. They are one and the same thing, allowing the elite to get away with almost anything. Deripaska denies he has ties to organized crime but authorities have investigated him for money-laundering, murder, illegal wiretapping, bribery, extortion and racketeering. When the U.S. banned him from entering the country, Putin gave him a diplomatic passport to get around the travel ban. he has spent millions and lobbied the U.S. government for years to reverse the ban.

Deripaska, his companies or direct associates have been linked to intelligence operations which allegedly disrupted elections in at least four of Russia’s neighbouring states. In December, Russian intelligence agent Alekseyevich Boyarkin was linked to Deripaska in a plot to interfere in Montenegro’s 2016 election.

The oligarch is not a spy, nor does he work for Russia’s military intelligence, yet somehow wherever he goes, spies seem to follow. That could mean one of two things: He plays a role in state-run military intelligence operations or the GRU is freelancing for him. One exiled oil oligarch says both are possible if you think of the Kremlin as being run by mobsters. “The criminal gang in the Kremlin can sometimes call on the services of the GRU,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky told the BBC.

Either way, Deripaska’s involvement with the GRU and its political interference arm may have gained him inside knowledge of the operation to hack the DNC in 2016. The very crime for which Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers last July.

Deripaska’s proximity to power and his ties to military intelligence has also made him an attractive prospect for U.S. intelligence recruiting for over a decade.

Flipping Oleg

In 2014, The Justice Department began a documented two-year effort to recruit Deripaska as an informant as part of “Operation Outreach”. Intriguingly, it was former MI-6 spy Christopher Steele – the famous author of the dossier that bears his name – who approached DOJ to suggest potentially flipping Deripaska.

It wasn’t the first time Deripaska worked with the FBI. In 2009, the FBI enlisted the oligarch for an attempted rescue of Bob Levinson, the American held hostage in Iran. The mission didn’t succeed but Deripaska got enough information out of the Iranians to get what he wanted out of the deal: A legal U.S. visa.

The recent effort to flip Deripaska began in earnest in September 2015. The Justice Department’s Bruce Ohr met Deripaska to ask about Putin’s ties to organized crime. Deripaska reportedly rebuffed the advance but by the beginning of 2016, the oligarch’s rehabilitation was underway.

We know this because the FBI helped Deripaska get another U.S. visa in February 2016. The oligarch was “encouraged” by the “softening of the agency’s stance,” according to emails released by Republican lawmakers. “We reckon that the forthcoming OVD contact represents a good opportunity for the USG,” Steele texted Ohr. Deripaska’s initials are OVD.

Keep in mind, this was all happening at the same time Christopher Steele was writing his dossier. As it turns out, Steele had worked for Deripaska in 2012. While it’s unclear if the two men were in direct contact, Deripaska was sending Steele messages through his U.S. lobbyist, Adam Waldman. Was Steele working for Deripaska? No one can say for sure but FBI Director Christopher Wray refused to discuss it in an unclassified setting when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked him at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February last year.

Later in February 2016, Deripaska was the subject of a U.S. inter-agency meeting. Prior to the meeting, Steele shared sensitive documents which showed Putin was exerting pressure on the oligarchs and that “Deripaska was not a tool,” according to Steele.

Contacts between Steele, Deripaska, Waldman and Ohr, continued almost all the way up to the election. The last contact was in September 2016, when Ohr and Steele showed up unannounced at Deripaska’s New York apartment.

“We think Russia is colluding with the Trump campaign, and we think Manafort is the key guy,” a knowledgeable source told David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

According to the source, Deripaska responded: “I hate Manafort, and I’m suing him.”

That may have been true but it was also an artful dodge because we now know Deripaska was receiving regular updates from Manafort throughout 2016. It’s equally noteworthy Deripaska was in New York in September 2016, two months before the election, under a mile away from Donald Trump, his kids, Michael Cohen and Felix Sater on a visa provided to him because of the efforts of the FBI.

In Trump, Manafort saw a way out

Deripaska met Paul Manafort through Rothschild. The two billionaires hired Manafort in 2004 to help suppress a popular uprising in Ukraine. Deripaska teamed up his new American operative with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Soviet soldier with ties to the GRU. The two men worked side-by-side for the next 11 years in Ukraine, Georgia, Kryzghstan and the U.S., always with a pro-Putin agenda.

Manafort inked a lucrative a $10 million a year contract with the oligarch in 2005 to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.” That work allegedly continued through 2009. Deripaska’s spokespeople deny all these contacts and allegations.

Manafort’s directive was to get a president elected who would be more inclined to keep Ukraine out of NATO. Along with Kilimnik, Manafort’s American deputy Rick Gates and pollster Tony Fabrizio, Manafort remade the image of pro-Putin Victor Yanukovich and helped engineer his election as President in 2010. Manafort and Kilimnik stayed on as Yanukovich’s advisers until he was ejected from power in 2014 by the Maidan revolution.

Barely two years later, this same cast of political tricksters would turn their attention to the US elections, and what would soon become the single biggest scandal of all time.

After the revolution, Manafort faced an uncertain future. His work in Ukraine had rendered him unemployable, and his finances were in bad shape as the result of a court fight with Deripaska over a failed investment scheme worth $16 million.

By 2015, Manafort was down and out. His wife had discovered he was cheating. He was broke and ended up in a rehab facility in Arizona. It may have been the desert air or group therapy, but Manafort left that rehab center with a clear focus: Donald Trump.

Manafort had known Trump for decades and owned an apartment in Trump Tower, yet the prevailing narrative is that he needed his friend Thomas Barack to get him in contact with the Republican candidate. Barack came through and Trump hired Manafort, for no pay.

From the start, Deripaska was tracking Manafort

Manafort had barely been on the job at the Trump campaign for two weeks when he got word to his old patron Deripaska via Konstantin Kilimnik.

“I assume you have shown our friends my media coverage, right?” Manafort asked Kilimnik.

“Absolutely,” Kilimnik replied. “Every article.”

“How do we use to get whole,” Manafort asked. “Has OVD operation seen?

“Frankly the coverage has been much better than Trump’s,” Kilimnik quipped. “In any case, it will hugely enhance your reputation no matter what happens.”

Throughout those early days, Manafort kept Deripaska abreast of what was going on via Kilimnik. At one point Manafort shared internal campaign research with the oligarch via Kilimnik and at another time offered Deripaska regular briefings on the campaign.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe, Kilimnik confirmed Trump was a regular topic of their email correspondence. “We discussed a lot of issues, from Putin to women,” Kilimnik told Radio Free Europe. “Of course we discussed Trump and everything,” he said.

Kilimnik fled Kyiv as soon as he was indicted on Obstruction of Justice charges for attempting to convince witnesses to back Manafort’s cover-up story. He now lives in a gated community north of Moscow, out of the reach of the Special Counsel.

Deripaska’s involvement in Trump-Russia is no longer just conjecture. His history with Manafort, Kilimnik and Rick Gates, combined with emails and other evidence directly implicating him, along with his history of running destabilizing influence campaigns, reveals he was not only connected to the GRU at the time the DNC was hacked, but he was also tracking every move Manafort made as Trump’s campaign chair. And now we also know he was tapped into Julian Assange as well.

Finding Julian

Deripaska’s associates visited Julian Assange of WikiLeaks at least twelve times between 2013 and 2017. Paul Manafort alone visited Assange three times in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The last visit came in March 2016, while he was working for Donald Trump and a month before the GRU successfully hacked into the DNC servers. Manafort also attempted to secure Assange’s release on a visit to Ecuador.

The other Deripaska associate to visit Assange was the oligarch’s American lobbyist Adam Waldman, who visited Assange nine times in 2017. One of those visits came just days after Waldman was spotted with Deripaska at the oligarch’s hotel Aurelio in Lech, Austria. Video of Waldman and his wife at a bar with Deripaska was shot by Deripaska’s former mistress who until recently was imprisoned in a Thai jail.

Waldman claims Assange is a client and that at the time, he was attempting to negotiate the WikiLeaks founder’s a possible release with the DOJ. Waldman – like many D.C. lobbyists – is the very definition of ‘conflict of interest’ in a town where everyone is conflicted, but having Deripaska, Assange and Manafort as clients at the same time is a feat few would attempt.

Even if Waldman were solely acting for Assange, it’s suspicious that his outreach to the WikiLeaks founder, only began after Manafort’s had ended. Mysteriously, both men tried to secure Assange’s release. Why was Deripaska so invested in this relationship? Was he worried he’d be implicated if Assange was indicted? It does appear Assange has been indicted under seal.

Mastermind, secret agent or confidential source?

No matter how you look at it, Oleg Deripaska is the central figure connecting all aspects of the main crime of Trump-Russia. The oligarch is the only known person with access to the three identified nodes of the WikiLeaks operation: the GRU, Manafort’s campaign tenure and Julian Assange, at the time of the crime.

Was Deripaska a source for Christopher Steele’s dossier? We don’t know the answer, but there can be no doubt about his loyalty to Putin.

Lat month Deripaska used a million-dollar lobbying effort to convince U.S. senators to exclude his companies from sanctions. While he placed some of his Rusal shares in trust with VTB, the moves were mostly viewed as window-dressing as he still indirectly controls the majority of shares, only without the pressure of sanction bearing down on the company’s bottom line.

Deripaska remains unindicted.

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Henry Kissinger played a significant role in getting Donald Trump elected with Russian help, and it’s not the first time he betrayed his country for a Presidential nominee.

Richard Nixon would have taken the circumstances surrounding the Chennault Affair to his grave if it weren’t for a moment in space and time which placed the archived memos of Nixon’s Chief of Staff in historian John Farrell’s hands.

It was 2016. Farrell hit the historical equivalent of winning the Powerball when the Nixon Library granted him access to some of the last documents released from Nixon’s Presidency.  He came across memos by Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, from the 1968 presidential campaign.

Farrell recognized the notes as confirmation of a rumour which had persisted for decades. The Nixon campaign had colluded with the South Vietnamese to scuttle President Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks to end the Vietnam War, just as those talks appeared to be nearing a successful outcome.

In the Summer of ’68, Nixon’s election support was cratering as a result of Johnson’s overtures to the South Vietnamese. Nixon knew he’d lose the election to Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president if a peace deal were struck before election day.

Henry Kissinger, who would later become Nixon’s National Security Adviser, started the whole thing. In ’68 Kissinger was a little-known, 45-year-old Republican strategist who manoeuvred his way into the peace talks as an advisor and, in an act of considerable betrayal, leaked news of the negotiations to Nixon.

Kissinger’s calculus was personal and not political, although it certainly could have been influenced by his connections in Russia and China. He knew he’d get a cabinet position if either campaign won, but as a practitioner of realpolitik, he also knew a diplomat with his skill-set would have far greater opportunity under Nixon and a much higher profile in a prolonged war. He was also covering his bases.

Faced with a choice between peace and power, Nixon made a predictable decision. Along with Haldeman, he hatched a plan which would be tantamount to treason but would land Nixon the White House. It became known as the Chennault Affair.

As Kissinger leaked details of Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, Nixon hatched a plan that would become known as The Chennault Affair

Nixon and  Haldeman enlisted the help of a prominent Republican fundraiser with connections to China. Anna Chennault struck a glamorous figure as she wielded power, money and influence in the US-China lobby and within Republican circles.

The affair was named after her because Chennault was also Nixon’s back channel to the South Vietnamese government. She convinced them to stall the Johnson talks, promising a better deal, if Nixon were elected.

In four pages of notes attached to memos from his years as Chief of Staff, Haldeman had left behind clues for future investigators like John Farrell, to discover. They proved that the Chennault Affair, which Nixon often dismissed as a “canard,” was a true story.  In the memos, Haldeman hand-wrote that Nixon ordered him to “monkey wrench” the Vietnam peace negotiations and that Nixon wanted to “keep Anna Chennault working on SVN.”

As Farrell read Haldeman’s notes, the cruelty of Nixon’s plan struck him. There is no doubt the memos were held back for as long as they were because they revealed Nixon won the White House at the cost of American lives.

President Johnson was furious when he discovered Nixon’s betrayal, calling it treason, but he couldn’t prove it.  The spy agencies had obtained intercepts of calls between Chennault and the South Vietnamese ambassador, pleading with him to “hold on,” and assuring him “we are close to winning,” but there wasn’t conclusive evidence of  Nixon’s involvement.

Even as peace talks collapsed and the election lost, Johnson never spoke publicly about the affair, although he did confront Nixon in the Oval Office. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage [South Vietnam] not to come to the table,” Nixon is heard saying on White House recordings.

Nixon had good reason not to fess up.  The affair was likely a violation of the Logan Act. That would have meant far more severe consequences for Nixon than a break-in. Watergate meant impeachment; treason spelled death.

Watergate brought Nixon down, but as far as Presidential scandals go, the Chennault Affair was far more consequential, not only because it potentially extended the war for years but because it revealed the lengths to which Nixon would go to seize power.  The deaths of 1000’s of American soldiers in Vietnam was not too great of a price for the man who would become the 37th President.

Haldeman died in 1993 without ever revealing the affair. Chennault was buried in Arlington Cemetery. She always denied her role was consequential. Of the four main conspirators,  Kissinger is the only one still alive today.

Kissinger became a towering figure in global affairs by often favouring profit and practicality over principles, even if it meant skirting the law and cost lives.

Kissinger has had his foot on the scale of global power for over half a century. Over the years he’s been accused of committing genocide in Cambodia, encouraging death squads in Chile and Argentina and more recently, of looking passed Russia’s atrocities in Syria and the annexation of Crimea.  He believes the world would be a better place if strong US and Russia relations could co-exist with the Kremlin’s global misbehaviour.

“The long-term interests of both countries call for a world that transforms the contemporary turbulence and flux into a new equilibrium which is increasingly multi-polar and globalized,” he said. “Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.”

That thinking is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears. Kissinger has had a close relationship with Putin since they first met in the early 90’s. Next to actor Steven Seagal and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Kissinger is the closest connection Putin has to Washington, D.C. and the peculiar way it handles itself.   He is also friends with Donald Trump. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when it came to a political marriage between Putin and Trump, Kissinger was the inevitable matchmaker.

If Time Warner was the proposal, the Mayflower was the engagement party.

Henry Kissinger faced the prospect of a damp Manhattan reception as he made his way to the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle in March 2016. He was the star attraction at a swanky power lunch hosted by executives of the media company and was to speak about US-Russia relations.

The Center for National Interest co-hosted the lunch.  Nixon founded the Washington-based think tank in 1994 and Kissinger serves as its Honorary Chair. The Center is a remnant of a bygone era, a place where fossilizing former titans of business and politics can lay their hat when fate, age or circumstance counts them out of the game.

Dimitri Simes is the Center’s president and the publisher of its magazine, National Interest. The Center appears to operate like any other think-tank, but it has a reputation for an extremely pro-Russian ideology.

Jared Kushner sat quietly, absorbing the scene.  The soon-to-be son of the next President of the United States was invited by HBO president Richard Plepler and former Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, who both sit on the Center’s governing board (a fact which deserves greater scrutiny). CNN president Jeff Zucker, who at the time reported to Bewkes, was also present at the event.

After lunch, Kushner met Kissinger and Simes. The encounter was a formal introduction, not a chance New York meet and greet. Kissinger, it would emerge, was trying to broker a relationship between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

In the ensuing weeks, Kushner would ask Simes and the National Center to put together one of the pivotal events of the Trump campaign timeline: a foreign policy speech scheduled for April 2016, entitled “America First.”  It was to be a public announcement of Trump’s pro-Russia foreign policy platform.  If Time Warner was the proposal, The Mayflower was the engagement party.

From that moment, Kushner took over the bulk of the campaign’s foreign policy, while Simes began organizing the Mayflower event.

Simes invited Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak and other foreign diplomats, he arranged for the venue to be moved from the National Press Club to the Mayflower Hotel and organized a pre-event meet and greet which would include guests like Kislyak, Michael Fynn, Jeff Sessions and Kushner (who met Kislyak for the first time at the event).

Simes is himself an intriguing figure.  He is directly connected to Putin and keeps in regular touch with Kremlin insiders.  In 2013, he sat alongside the Russian President on a panel and was effusive as one can be. “I fully welcome President Putin’s tough stance, not because I am not a patriot of the United States, but because I believe that with regard to the great powers, baby talk is not the way to agreement. You need to understand what you can expect from another country, and you need to understand where there is resistance.”

Simes also chairs the Center’s advisory board which includes Alexey Pushkov, the former head of the Duma’s international-affairs committee.

The Center has also repeatedly intersected with key Kremlin figures in Trump-Russia, Alexander Torshin is Deputy Governor of Russia’s Reserve Bank.  Torshin and suspected Russian spy Maria Butina played a significant role in influencing the NRA to become an intermediary of Russian money funnelled to Trump’s campaign. Torshin and Butina had several interactions and meetings with the Center, which remain unexplained.

After Trump was elected, Kissinger felt emboldened to come out of the shadows.   A report in the German tabloid Der Bild headlined ‘Kissinger to prevent new Cold War’, claimed the former envoy was working towards a new relationship with Russia which included the U.S. accepting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Kissinger, now 95, had proved himself just as shrewd a diplomat as he was at 45. While it is clear Kissinger played a vital role in aligning Putin and Trump’s interests, it isn’t clear if he knew anything about Putin’s cyber plans to manipulate the electorate or hack DNC emails, not that it would have changed much. There’s a good reason the New Yorker trumpeted in a headline in 2016,  “Does Henry Kissinger have a conscience?”

The post Kissinger appeared first on Narativ.

Exclusive: Russia used Google and its advertisers to fund propaganda efforts in the 2016 election.

You’ve likely never heard of Veles. The tiny town of 55,000 people lies deep in Macedonia, a landlocked country nestled between Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. Macedonia has struggled to kickstart its economy since independence in 1991. The resulting high unemployment and a teenage population with a fair command of English, made Veles an unlikely centre of production for fake news during the 2016 election.

Two years ago, a cadre of Macedonian teenage web entrepreneurs began creating and publishing pro-Trump fake news content directed at a U.S. audience. Some of the teens were recruited via gaming forums or micro-work sites but they don’t seem to have had a direct connection to the Trump campaign or Russian intelligence, except for the curious feature that only their pro-Trump fake news found an audience.

Some of the fake news websites looked very similar to the sites of the New York Times and Huffington Post and contained fake news stories with headlines like:

“JUST IN: Obama Illegally Transferred DOJ Money To Clinton Campaign!” and “BREAKING: Obama Confirms Refusal To Leave White House, He Will Stay In Power!”

Google approved and provided advertising codes to these websites so commercials from the world’s largest advertiser network appeared alongside this fake content.

The internet giant paid out thousands of dollars to the fake news creators, essentially funding a propaganda effort. One of the fake news purveyors named Boris was profiled by Wired Magazine, which claimed: “Between August and November, Boris earned nearly $16,000 off his two pro-Trump websites.” The magazine noted the average monthly salary in Macedonia is $371.

Fake news spreads in other ways on YouTube, funded by the tech giant’s advertisers.

Williams and Kalvin Johnson filled their YouTube channel with drummed up anti-Hillary Clinton videos. The two aspirant YouTubers, who hail from either Atlanta or Nigeria, routinely warned viewers Clinton, “is going to stand for the Muslim.” The channel was actually part of a Kremlin propaganda effort to infiltrate the U.S., according to the Daily Beast.

Williams and Kalvin’s content has been pulled by YouTube, Facebook and Twitter but none of these platforms revealed if the creators generated revenue from advertisers on their channel. YouTube sells ads across its network, placing them before user-generated content and splitting revenue with creators. In many cases, advertisers may not even be aware they are unwittingly funding propaganda efforts because advertising is bought based on a users’ browsing history, not the content.

Over on Russia Today’s channel on YouTube, this practice continues until now. The DOJ is forcing RT to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act but somehow Google still serves up advertising from pro-American companies to their YouTube page – money which flows directly to the Russian propaganda operation. Google included RT as part their preferred channels network which gave the Kremlin mouthpiece access to blue-chip advertisers in the U.S., until two weeks ago.

Russia also manipulated Google news algorithms so RT’s news stories would appear with higher frequency than U.S. news sites in the run up to the election. “We saw manipulation of certain algorithms, so that if you Googled certain items, you got Russia news, R.T. News, other false news,” according to Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee.

Russian agents also bought tens of thousands of dollars of ads promoting pro-Trump policies on all of Google’s products include YouTube, Google search and Gmail. If you sent an election e-mail to a friend on Gmail, Russia targeted you with specific propaganda based on your private correspondence.

“We have a set of strict ads policies including limits on political ad targeting and prohibitions on targeting based on race and religion. We are taking a deeper look to investigate attempts to abuse our systems, working with researchers and other companies, and will provide assistance to ongoing inquiries,” Google said in a statement, without actually admitting anything.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are slow in acknowledging their involvement in Trump-Russia.

Google has followed the same path as Facebook and Twitter in denying, obfuscating and finally confessing to some of their involvement in Trump-Russia. The Washington Post discovered Russia’s ad-buying on Google on their own. “They haven’t admitted it,” said Post reporter Elizabeth Dwoskin. “We had to find it out from our own sources…we’ve only started to chip away at the tip of the iceberg of what we’re seeing,” said Dwoskin.

One open question is what was driving up the traffic to these YouTube sites? We’ve written about a Russian propaganda machine and bot farm in St. Petersburg which operated hundreds of fake Facebook groups, ran divisive ads and incited anger. They also retweeted, liked and shared content created by the fake news factories in Macedonia, Russia Today, Infowars and Sputnik. As the Russian bot farms and Facebook groups spread the word, traffic to the fake news sites and YouTube grew, giving the content higher rankings and generating revenue from U.S. brands via Google Adsense.

The Kremlin deployed a stealth data operation on Facebook, Twitter and Google, supported by an unprecedented invasion of privacy. Russian hackers breached DNC and state voters rolls to harvest data which was used to target fake and divisive content on the internet platforms. It’s unclear if this infringed on Americans’ right to exercise their vote.

Google, Facebook and Twitter are now the targets of an investigation by congressional committees who want to know what the companies knew and when. 

Investigations aside, the tech giants owe their users a better understanding of whether they were targeted and by what content. They should also come clean on how much they profited from the influence campaign and whether they (knowingly or otherwise) funded the fake news and propaganda operation launched by the Kremlin and, they should reveal which advertisers were involved.

The post Google Cash appeared first on Narativ.

Exposed: Vice President Mike Pence was installed by a Russian operative and has deep ties to “dark money”. 

Governor Eric Greitens is a Republican rising star. The 43-year-old former Navy SEAL rode the coattails of Donald Trump all the way to the Missouri Governor’s mansion in November, when he defeated Democrat Chris Koster 51%-45%.

Greitens has barely been in office for nine months and he’s attracting his fair share of critics. In March, The St Louis Post-Dispatch called his tenure “creepy” and The Kansas City Star published an editorial criticizing Greitens for “secret fundraising and secret spending”.

Just a block away from the Governor’s Mansion in Jefferson City, Greitens’ former campaign manager is running “A New Missouri Inc”, a slush fund masquerading as a social welfare nonprofit. The governor operates the nonprofit so he can accept unfettered contributions from foreign and corporate interests, skirting state election rules.

Greitens’ election campaign was powered by a single $1.9 million donation from a super PAC funneled through the American Policy Coalition run by lawyer David Langdon who has been dubbed “the nexus of dark money” by the Center of Public Integrity. Langdon is among a small group of lawyers “working to keep secret the origins of millions of dollars coursing through the American political system.”

It’s emerged that Greitens’ other big donor included the DeVos family who have been grooming Mike Pence for years and his election was run by Nick Ayres, Pence’s Chief of Staff.

Pence’s pick as VP was engineered by Paul Manafort. The two had daily phone calls during transition. 

Donald Trump initially wanted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to serve as his Vice President but Campaign Manager Paul Manafort had a different idea. On July 12 last year, Manafort concocted a tall tale about mechanical problems with Trump’s plane to force the then presumptive nominee to overnight in Indianapolis and meet Indiana Governor Mike Pence for breakfast the next morning.

“What had previously been reported as a “lucky break” by the New York Times was actually a swift political maneuver devised by the now fired campaign manager. Set on changing Trump’s mind,” CBS News reported.

The entire Trump family met Pence and his brood at the Governor’s mansion the next day and the two politicians sealed a deal to run on the same ticket. Pence declared he was “honored’ and “humbled” to be considered and Trump sidelined Christie by telling the New Jersey Governor, “it would tear my family apart if I gave you VP,” a source said.

Within a month, Manafort was officially exiled from the Trump campaign after it was revealed he illegally took $12.7 million from a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician. It later emerged Manafort was also being paid $10 million a year by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on behalf of Vladimir Putin between 2006 and 2009, “to greatly benefit the Putin Government,”

While Manafort officially disappeared from the campaign in August, he kept in close contact with Mike Pence well after Election Day and throughout the transition. “I think he is weighing in on everything,” a former official told The Daily Beast. “I think he still talks to Trump every day. I mean, Pence? That was all Manafort. Pence is on the phone with Manafort regularly.”

It’s worth recalling Pence headed the Trump transition team and was responsible for appointing Lt-Gen Michael Flynn as the National Security Adviser despite having been warned Flynn was compromised by Turkey and Russia. Flynn would later be forced to resign for his compromising contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Pence’s role in any Obstruction of Justice related to Flynn and the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Mueller’s investigators are also probing Manafort’s financial dealings with Russia, Deripaska and donations to the Republican Party. Pence has also lawyered up with seasoned criminal attorney Richard Cullen of the law firm McGuireWoods to “assist him in responding to inquiries by the special counsel.”

Pence’s ties to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska date back to before the campaign and may involve an illegal private email account Pence maintained while Indiana Governor.

Another sign Russian fingerprints were all over the Pence appointment came in the form of a ringing endorsement from Sergei Millian, president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, and a long-time Deripaska associate. Millian called Pence an “excellent’ candidate” all while being under FBI investigation as a Russian spy recruiter. “He works well in his post and gets by without scandals,” Millian said.

Deripaska used to be one of Russia’s richest men but a series of bankruptcies has left him and his company Rusal beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016, then Indiana Governor Mike Pence led an economic mission to Israel and later picked up a lucrative deal from Rusal’s Israeli partner Omen to open an aluminum parts factory in Pence’s state of Indiana.

It’s around that time that Pence had an email scandal of his own. Pence’s private AOL email account was compromised by a Russian hacker. Pence took six months to turn over his emails to Indiana officials, raising the specter that Russia may have kompromat on Pence and that he may have attempted to delete important emails before handing over the documents to investigators.

Pence has also been close to mercenary Erik Prince for over a decade. Prince met with Pence at the Trump transition offices in December 2016 before undertaking a secret mission to meet with Russian officials in the Seychelles In January this year.

Republican dark money and Russia operatives are backing a new team in the event Trump is impeached.

With the Trump administration in trouble, Vice President Mike Pence has taken the unusual move of forming his own fundraising committee, raising millions for a political action committee and a legal defense fund for the Trump-Russia affair. Pence’s fund is the brainchild of Nick Ayres, who also became the Vice President’s Chief of Staff on July 28.

There are signs the group of billionaire funders and Russian operatives who helped install Trump are preparing for his impeachment and readying Pence for the presidency with Missouri Governor Eric Greitens being groomed for vice-president.

Those dreams may be short-lived. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Vice President Mike Pence is himself a person of interest in Robert Mueller’s investigation. Pence had extensive and daily interactions with Paul Manafort, a known Russian asset, even after Manafort left the campaign. Pence’s financial deals involving satellite companies of Oleg Deripaska and “dark money” political operations remain the subject of increased scrutiny complicated by Pence’s own hacked email scandal. Most troubling to investigators must be the notion that Pence himself was installed at the behest of the Kremlin.

The post Dark Shadows appeared first on Narativ.

New: The same people involved in a failed Moscow Trump Tower also tried to end U.S. sanctions on Russia.

Every politician needs a good spin doctor, and for Vladimir Putin, that man is Dmitry Peskov. Peskov’s official salary as the spokesman for Vladimir Putin is about $200,000 a year, but his lavish lifestyle belies his public servant income, according to Russian anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny.

Peskov and his wife Tatyana Navka live in a $17 million mansion in Moscow, and he sports a limited edition Richard Mille wristwatch on his arm worth more than three times his annual salary. Peskov’s son from an earlier marriage, Nicholas Choles, is the proud owner of a fleet of cars which includes a Tesla, Ferrari, Mercedes CLA and a Harley Davidson. Nikolai has no apparent means of support of his own except for on-air work at the pro-Kremlin network Russia Today. He also has a rap sheet that includes 116 traffic fines, failure to pay alimony and an assault conviction for beating up a youth in Cambridgeshire in the U.K, where he occasionally resides.

“Nikolai is an example of how in Russia, where 20 million people live below the poverty line, where 70 percent of residents dream of a salary of 45,000 rubles ($750), one can live happily at the highest level and at the same time not have to do anything,” says Navalny, who has been tracking Peskov’s outsized lifestyle for two and a half years.

Now Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, has been linked to a failed bid to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

With the U.S. elections in full swing, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen reached out to Putin’s press secretary for help in saving a stalled bid to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

The Trump organization has tried to build a Moscow tower for over three decades. It’s a shiny object Donald Trump has always coveted. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment,” Trump said in a 2007 court deposition. “We will be in Moscow at some point.”

In 2013, Trump tried to build a tower with Putin-linked oligarch Aras Agalarov who was indirectly involved in a Russian plot to smear Hillary Clinton during that now-infamous June 2016 meeting with Trump’s son, Don Jr.

Now it’s been revealed Trump made another attempt to build a tower in Moscow between September 2015 and January 2016, in the midst of the 2016 campaign.

The deal was being brokered by 50-year-old Russian-born businessman Felix Sater, who has deep ties to the Kremlin. In 1991, Sater was convicted of assault charges for slashing a man in the face with the stem of a broken margarita glass in a barroom brawl. In 1998, he was convicted on one count of racketeering for his part in a $40 million stock fraud scheme which artificially inflated Wall Street stock prices. Sater never went to prison because he turned state witness against his cohorts.

In January of last year, Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney, reached out to Putin’s press secretary Peskov via email.

“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower – Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote Peskov, according to the Washington Post. “Without getting into lengthy specifics the communication between our two sides has stalled.”

“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote.

Felix Sater and Donald Trump were partners in building Trump Towers around the world for over a decade.

Felix Sater has been cultivating a relationship with Donald Trump since he joined Bayrock Group as Managing Director in 2001. In the following years, Sater made regular visits to Trump, had an office in the Trump organization and even carried Trump branded business cards. Since at least 2005, Sater and Trump have had a business agreement to build Trump Towers across the US and around the world.

The relationship has had its bumps. Aggrieved condo buyers from the Fort Lauderdale Trump International Hotel sued Trump and Sater after construction stalled in 2009, partly because Trump had failed to tell them about Sater’s criminal past. In November 2013, Trump said in a deposition about Sater, “If he was sitting in the room right now I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”

A similar lawsuit was brought against Trump and Sater by the condo owners of a 46-story luxury Trump building on Spring Street in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo. That lawsuit claimed Trump had misled the condo owners about the value of their properties and “undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan,” according to the New York Times.

In 2015, Sater reached out to Trump’s lawyer Cohen with a proposal to kickstart a new attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, predicting it would propel Trump’s rise to the White House. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email excerpted in the New York Times. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Sater also boasted he had arranged for Ivanka Trump to sit in Putin’s chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.

Sater claimed he had arranged funding for the project from Russia’s VTB Bank which is sanctioned by the U.S. but this effort clearly stalled. That’s why in January 2016, Cohen reached out to Peskov, in the email obtained by the Washington Post.

Peskov flew to New York City three days after Trump was elected to attend the start of the World Chess Championship match. “[He] was clearly trying to meet Trump people,” Laura Rosen, a reporter for AIMonitor tweeted.

There may have also been an underlying agenda item involved in negotiating the Moscow Trump Tower deal that was financed by a Russian bank under U.S. sanctions, namely, the very sanctions themselves.

Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and Felix Sater also attempted to negotiate a Putin plan to end the conflict in Ukraine.

A few weeks after Putin’s spokesman Peskov visited New York City for a chess tournament, Trump’s business associate Sater and his attorney Cohen met at the Loews Hotel on Park Avenue with Andrii Artemenko, a pro-Putin Ukrainian politician. The three discussed a plan to end the conflict in Ukraine by exposing corruption by Ukrainian President Petro O. Poroshenko, a plan that had received encouragement from “top aides to Mr. Putin,” according to the New York Times.

The proposed plan by Cohen, Sater and Artemenko would later reach the desk of former National Security Adviser Lt.Gen. Michael Flynn, a week before he resigned after the Justice Department said he’d been “compromised” by Russia.

Sater has a long history of providing evidence to law enforcement regarding his dealings with the underworld. In 2015, Loretta Lynch testified during her confirmation hearings to become U.S. Attorney General that Sater had provided “valuable and sensitive information” for more than ten years, and that his work had been “crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”

Is Sater now providing investigators at the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller with information regarding Donald Trump’s dealings with Russia? Time will tell. If he does, he’ll not only be able to provide insight into his part in the proposed Moscow Trump Tower with lawyer Michael Cohen, but also the two men’s attempt to negotiate a Putin-endorsed plan to end the conflict in Ukraine and drop U.S. sanctions against Russia.

The post Pulling Strings appeared first on Narativ.

New details of how the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin forged a deal during the 2016 Campaign and the mysterious role of a pro-Russian mercenary who has close ties to Mike Pence.

With additional reporting by Tracie McElroy

By July 2016, former MI6 Russia Desk head, Christopher Steele, had become frustrated. Despite a growing dossier of compromising evidence against Donald J. Trump’s collusion with Russia, the media and law enforcement narrative was instead focused on what seemed like a much lesser investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.

Steele became convinced the Trump campaign had been intentionally amplifying the Clinton e-mail scandal because they knew Russia had been hacking the DNC emails and may have had possession of Clinton’s 30,000 missing e-mails. Publicly, a number of Trump campaign operatives had been championing this narrative – notably former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone and Erik Prince, America’s most famous mercenary.

Prince, the 48-year-old former CEO of Blackwater, was too radioactive to be officially named as a member of Trump’s campaign but all indications are that he played a crucial role. Prince personally donated $250,000 to the Trump coffers and to a pro-Trump super PAC led by Rebekah Mercer (a major christian conservative donor). Mercer owns Breitbart, then run by Stephen Bannon, and Prince made several appearances on Bannon’s Breitbart Radio to spin up conspiracy theories about the Clinton e-mails, according to the Washington Post.

By all accounts, Prince’s role was far larger than just your typical donor relationship with a politician. “A former senior U.S. official who has advised the Trump transition told The Intercept that Prince has been advising the team on matters related to intelligence and defense, including weighing in on candidates for the defense and state departments,” according to PJ Wilcox. He was seen in the Trump transition offices in New York in December.

Then, in January this year, Prince held a meeting with a representative of Putin’s government and the UAE in the Seychelles in order to open up a back-channel between Trump and Russia.

Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, serves as education secretary in the Trump administration and his brother-in-law, Dick DeVos, owns Spectrum Health.

Unusual spike in Spectrum Server activity as Trump Adviser visits Russia for secret meeting.

Spectrum Health is particularly important to investigators of the Trump-Russia conspiracy. A server registered to the company is very deeply intertwined in the caper that is the becoming the greatest political crime in history.  It’s Spectrum’s server which is believed to have been consolidating and washing private email addresses with voters information hacked by Russian-paid hackers via a server at Trump Tower and one run by Russia’s Alfa Bank. The illegally obtained information was used to create a database which Breitbart, Infowars, RT and Sputnik News used to bombard voters with fake and hyped news to help turn the electorate towards Trump.

Independent analysis of the server activity by David Schiminovich points to a significant spike in traffic between Spectrum’s servers and the one in Trump Tower on July 9 and 31. The first, on July 9, came on the same day Carter Page, another Trump adviser, held a secret meeting in Moscow with Putin’s handpicked CEO of Russia’s main oil company, Rosneft. It’s at that meeting that a quid-pro-quo was believed to have been negotiated, Trump would drop sanctions against Russia in exchange for help with the election. According to the Steele Dossier, a sizable portion of Rosneft would also trade hands for the effort.

While Christopher Steele is well-regarded in intelligence circles, his account of Page’s meeting with the Rosneft CEO is yet to be publicly confirmed. What is clear, is that on Page’s return from Moscow, the Trump campaign began an earnest campaign to put in place the lessening of sanctions against Russia.

After secret Russian meeting, Trump team makes public moves in support of dropping sanctions.

Back in the U.S., Page attended the GOP’s platform planning week in Cleveland which began on July 11, a week before the Republican National Convention. One of the first orders of business was a surprising plank proposal to water down support for Ukrainian troops fighting Russian-backed rebels. Instead of sending the Ukrainians “lethal weapons”, the GOP pledged “appropriate support”.

Page attended a follow-up meeting with Jeff Sessions, Trump advisor JD Gordon and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy event staged by the Heritage Foundation on July 19. “Much of the discussion focused on Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and Georgia,” according to delegate Victor Ashe.

Trump was officially nominated to lead the Republican ticket at the Republican Convention in Cleveland.  The day after the convention ended, July 22, Wikileaks published the first hacked DNC emails which they obtained from Russian hackers.  It’s notable that the Trump/Alfa/Spectrum servers showed increased activity at the same time.

The next day, July 23, Christopher Steele penned a memo to the FBI stating that Trump’s campaign team had agreed to a Russian request to dilute attention on Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine.

Trump got a boost in the polls from the Wikileaks DNC e-mail dump. On July 27, he publicly asked Moscow for even more help. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing,” Trump said at a press conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be nice.”

At the same news conference, Trump made a less noticed but equally significant comment about Russian sanctions which lent credence to the details of what Steele alleged happened at the Page meeting on July 9 in Moscow. German reporter, Mareike Aden, asked Trump whether he would recognize Crimea, if elected. Trump replied: “Yes. We would be looking at that.”

On July 31, the Spectrum server had another unusual spike.

Behind the scenes, mercenary Erik Prince proposed dropping Russian sanctions and worked to build a back-channel with Russia.

Wherever you look behind the Trump campaign, the same names keep coming up: Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Stephen Bannon, Peter Thiel, Betsy and Dick DeVos and Erik Prince. These seven continue to pull the strings of the administration, Russia collusion and the mass disinformation campaign which supported it.

It’s Prince who is known to have worked behind the scenes to open a back-channel between the Trump Administration and Moscow. Prince’s world-view also closely aligns with Trump’s foreign policy of detente.

“Think about it: If FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, can deal with Stalin to defeat German fascism in World War II, certainly the United States of America could work with Putin to defeat Islamic fascism. We don’t have to agree with the Russians on everything, or even on a lot, but we can at least agree that crushing ISIS in the Middle East is a very good idea.,” Prince is quoted in The Intercept. It may be coincidental, but it’s unusual that Prince’s brother-in-law owns the company whose server had repeated unusual links with the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank. It should be noted Prince’s company “Frontiers Services Group” also worked for the Chinese Government.

Mike Pence has close ties to pro-russian mercenary Erik Prince.

Which brings us to Vice President Mike Pence, who seems to be operating as a President-in-waiting, pending a Trump impeachment. This should trouble Americans because behind the scenes Pence is powered by the very same people who put Trump in office and is closely aligned to Erik Prince.

The Prince and DeVos clans have a long history of supporting right-wing causes from  bankrolling Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” to supporting anti-gay, anti-abortion organizations and ballot initiatives. Erik, was very close to Charles “Chuck” Colson, Richard Nixon’s “Watergate hatchet man” who Pence calls “a dear friend and mentor.” Erik Prince donated to Pence’s PAC “Principles Exalt a Nation”. After Prince’s Blackwater gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in 2007, Pence organized a welcoming reception for Prince in Washington D.C.  The Prince and Devos clans also support and believe in establishing a Christian government in the US, just like Pence. 

While Pence claims he is not aware of any collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign, it’s clear Prince not only acted in an advisory capacity for Pence when he headed the Trump transition team, he was actively involved in setting up a back-channel with Russia. Prince and Pence have been close friends and allies for at least a decade.

If President Trump is impeached and Mike Pence becomes President, the group of evangelical supporters who helped elect Trump may be closer to achieving their and Vladimir Putin’s goal. Jeremy Scahill puts it all in a far more Machiavellian way, “Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors,” says Jeremy Scahill.

Opinion: Is John Kelly our Alexander Haig?

The post Trojan Horse appeared first on Narativ.

What does the FBI takedown of a Russian money-laundering organization mean to Vladimir Putin and the man he helped install as U.S. President?

President Vladimir Putin was angry. He kept a group of his key cabinet ministers up until nearly 1 am on a recent Russian morning to lecture them on the country’s crypto-currency sector.

“I can straight-up tell you the president is completely mad about this,” recalls Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov. “The most significant issues about growth revolve around the digital economy and technological leadership,” Shuvalov told a bitcoin conference in St. Petersburg.

Putin has reason to be worried. Oligarchs have syphoned $335 Bn out of Russia since 2005. Putin himself is believed to be worth $200 Bn. When you’re stealing that kind of money, you need a fast and effective way to launder it and bitcoin is perfect for that type of money-laundering. The crypto-currency’s anonymity and global reach also makes it ideal for Russia’s interference campaigns in foreign elections.

This week, the FBI took down one of Russia’s biggest bitcoin exchanges, BTC-e.

Alexander Vinnick, 38, was arrested in Greece for laundering $4 Bn in dirty money through his bitcoin exchange. $2.2 Bn stolen from the Japanese bitcoin exchange, MtGox, and $1.8 Bn from hackers, drug traffickers and embezzlers. The FBI claims Vinnick is one of the world’s biggest crime dons.

Investigators also seized the exchange’s servers. The data on those servers could provide important evidence linking Russia’s organized crime organizations and the hacking of last year’s U.S. election.

Vinnick’s arrest comes as the U.S. has begun to systematically dismantle Russian organized crime networks around the world. Last week, they shut down dark web AlphaBay and they’ve arrested spam lord Pyotr Levashov, who has been linked to the hacking of the DNC.

Deputy PM says Putin is completely “mad” about this.

As investigators close in on the font of his power, Putin faces a real liquidity crisis.

Soon after that late-night tirade about bitcoin with his ministers, Putin met with Vitalik Buterin, the 23-year-old Russian founder of the world’s second most popular crypto-currency, Etherium, perhaps with an eye to ‘nationalizing’ it.

At the same time, Putin’s state-run Sberbank announced it intends to launch its own national crypto-currency. Sberbank CEO Herman Gref let it be known the new Russian bitcoin will be “the only cryptocurrency freely buyable and sellable in Russia” and will likely operate on its own blockchain, evading international prosecutors.

Trump loves bitcoin, too. 

Herman Gref has close ties to President Donald J. Trump. They were introduced to each other at the 2013 Moscow Miss Universe by a Russian oligarch whose deputy offered Donald Trump Jr. dirt on Hillary Clinton in June 2016. Gref and Trump are also both linked to the money-laundering Bank of Cyprus. Perhaps not too coincidentally, the Trump administration has been enthusiastic about introducing bitcoin into the U.S. government bureaucracy.

Russia’s unprecedented cyber attack on the U.S. election in 2016 was a multi-layered campaign which included disinformation, an unexplained server link to Alfa Bank in Trump Tower, hacking DNC servers, voters rolls and voting machine vendors, along with Wikileaks disclosures. (Wikileaks itself was saved by millions of dollars in bitcoin deposits despite an international blockade).

An operation of the scale of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election is not cheap and requires the very kind of anonymity and global reach crypto-currencies provide. The FBI is now surely following the BTC-e blockchain (bitcoin’s ledger) for links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

In Watergate, investigators followed the money. In Trump-Russia, they follow the bitcoin.

The post Bitcoin & Consequence appeared first on Narativ.

President Trump needs to answer questions about the Trump Organization’s ties to terrorist organizations and his support for their state-funders.

On May 10, President Donald Trump invited Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-ambassador Sergey Kislyak into the Oval Office. During that meeting, he revealed to his guests key information which compromised an Israeli spy who had infiltrated ISIS.

“Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat,” Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe wrote in the Washington Post. “The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the US ally or intelligence capability involved.”

Russia has supported ISIS extensively both directly and indirectly for some time.

ISIS supplies oil to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Russian-made weapons from Assad’s arsenal regularly find their way into the hands of ISIS. A former FSB counter-terrorism specialist has revealed that Russian security forces helped recruit thousands of Russian-speaking Jihadis for ISIS, and that Russia deployed air defense capabilities to prevent U.S. air attacks on ISIS. To be clear, ISIS is secretly funded and armed by Russia even as Moscow declares the terror group an ‘enemy’ in public. It’s convenient for Putin to control both sides of the war. So much easier to win.

If all of this sounds outlandish, consider how Putin came to power and its historical echo of Hitler’s Reichstag fire. In September 1999, as the Yeltsin era was coming to an end in Russia, four apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. Putin’s response was resolute: “We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If they are in an airport, then in an airport, and, forgive me, if we catch them in the toilet, then we’ll rub them out (mochit) in the toilet…. The question is closed once and for all.”

That was then. What we know now, is that Russia’s FSB was behind blowing up those apartment buildings. According to Boris Berezovskiy, a Yeltsin-era businessman, the explosions were “intended to unite Russians in fear and in a desperate desire for a new, decisive, even aggressive leader who would spare no enemy.” Putin is quite adept at acting tough in the face of a threat he has created, even terrorism against his own people.

Trump hands Syria, Russia, Turkey and Iran a major victory.

Russia’s main mid-east ally in the war for Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria is Turkey, which has the world’s 6th largest military. On July 19th, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency leaked the positions of 10 U.S. military posts in northern Syria, drawing swift criticism from the Pentagon. “The release of sensitive military information exposes Coalition forces to unnecessary risk and has the potential to disrupt ongoing operations to defeat ISIS,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway said.

Why would Turkey, a NATO ally, compromise the U.S. and help ISIS? Under President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, Turkey has been folded into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. With Putin’s guidance, Erdo?an has quashed democracy in Turkey and openly supports the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. Erdo?an also enjoys the support of President Trump who, In May, praised Erdogan’s efforts to bring stability to Syria.

Now, Trump has handed Turkey and Russia a significant victory by ending a CIA program to arm Syrian rebels fighting Assad and working alongside the U.S. to defeat ISIS. “Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump’s interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests,” according to the Washington Post.

The U.S. is also conspiring with Russia in a cease-fire in parts of Syria which analysts believe protects and emboldens a re-emerging al-Qaeda. “Current US strategy empowers al-Qaeda, which has an army in Syria, is preparing to replace ISIS .?.?. [and] is more dangerous than ISIS,” says a recent report from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). It’s a play right out of Putin’s playbook and helps Russia more than any other nation state.

It’s worth recalling Trump’s former national Security Adviser Michael Flynn was on the Turkish payroll to the tune of $500,000, and also compromised by the Kremlin. Facts he failed to disclose before taking office.

Trump Organization linked to Iran, terror funding.

Azerbaijan is a former Soviet Republic which is a vital conduit between Russia and Iran. Along with Georgia and Armenia, the countries form the South Caucasus, and Vladimir Putin considers the area as a major goal for Russian expansionism.

Baku in Azerbaijan is not the type of place you’d find an ultra-luxury Trump Hotel, but there is one, although it never opened. A brilliant and exhaustive article by Adam Davidson in The New Yorker details the ties between the Trump organization and Zika Mammadov, a corrupt Azerbaijani with deep ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. While the Trumps don’t own the hotel, they did receive licensing and other fees for their role in building it. Ivanka Trump was involved in every design detail and even showed off her work on Instagram.

Davidson posits that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (which funds Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations) laundered drug and nuclear arms material trafficking money through the Trump Hotel.

“Investigators of financial fraud like to say that government corruption, money laundering, and other illicit behavior often form a “nexus” with even more troubling activity, such as financing terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction,” wrote Davidson. “This appears to be true in the Baku deal.”

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) believes the Trump Azerbaijan project needs to be investigated as a possible violation of The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “The Trump Organization’s Baku project shows the lack of ‘extreme vetting’ Mr. Trump applied to his own business dealings in corruption-plagued regimes around the globe. . . . Congress—and the Trump Administration itself—has a duty to examine whether the President or his family is exposed to terrorist financing, sanctions, money laundering, and other imprudent associations through their business holdings and connections.”

Warm-water ports, by any means necessary.

This week, Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan will begin joint military exercises in the Caspian Sea. This should be viewed as a pivotal turning point in Kremlin’s expansion into the South Caucasus. If Putin continues his march into Georgia and consolidates power in Azerbaijan, the new “Russian Empire” will have direct access to the Mediterranean Sea through Turkey and Syria, and to Asia through Iran. Russia’s has long sought access to warm-water ports, in an attempt to gain dominance over liberal-leaning democracies like the U.S. and its allies.

The military exercises and geo-political realignment also underline a growing partnership between Russia and Iran – two countries actively supporting and funding terror organizations like ISIS and Hezbollah.

Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran’s involvement in terrorism and state funding of terrorism are also war crimes and warrant investigation by domestic prosecutors and the International Criminal Court in the Hague (although Russia, Iran the U.S. are not currently party to the ICC). It would be an astounding turn of events if a sitting U.S. President is openly aiding and abetting Russia and Iran and if his businesses have profited from dealings with these states.

The post Crimes Of War appeared first on Narativ.

There’s more to Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails than meets the eye.

In the shadow of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Donald Trump was feted by Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his pop-star son, Emin. “I’m in Moscow for Miss Universe tonight,” Trump tweeted on November 9. “Picking a winner is very hard, they are all winners. Total sellout of arena. Big night in Russia!”

Trump’s Russia visit in 2013 was far more than just an exercise in showmanship. Agalarov arranged at least one two-hour dinner for Trump at Moscow’s Nobu with high-powered Kremlin officials. Noteworthy among them, was Herman Gref, CEO of state-run Sberbank. “[Trump] is lively with a positive energy and a good attitude toward Russia,” Gref said in an interview. Trump was equally effusive. “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people,” Trump told Hugh Hewitt in 2015.

Post sanctions, an effort to launder Russian money.

A year after the Moscow Miss Universe, the U.S. and E.U. imposed sanctions on Sberbank after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Sberbank CEO Herman Gref began looking for a way to move roubles out of the country. He found it in 2015. Gref’s son and another oligarch bought the Bank of Cyprus as a go-between for illegal Russian funds. A Russian laundromat, if you will. The deal was overseen by the bank’s vice-chairman, Wilbur Ross.

“Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions,” Rep. Mike Quigley told The Daily Beast. Paul Manafort, Trump’s Campaign Manager, also used the Bank of Cyrus to launder some of his own dirty money, including $12.7m he illegally got from a pro-Kremlin party in the Ukraine. Wilbur Ross, the chief engineer of the Russian-Cyprus deal, is now Trump’s Commerce Secretary, linking a key presidential ally to the Cyprus-based ruble washing machine.

Russian oligarch offers dirt on Hillary Clinton.

A year after the Bank of Cyprus was acquired by the Russians, on June 3 last year, an e-mail popped into Donald Trump Jr.’s inbox from British Publicist Rob Goldstone. Goldstone represents Emin Agalarov, the pop-star whose father, Aras, partnered with Trump in Miss Universe. The same oligarch who introduced Trump to Sberbank CEO, Herman Gref, who indirectly owns the Bank of Cyprus. The e-mail offered the Trump campaign explosive “kompromat” on Hillary Clinton:

“The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with [Emin’s] father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” Goldstone wrote to Don Jr.

“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin,” Goldstone said.

“If it’s what you say, I love it,” Don Jr. replied.

The eldest Trump son looped in then Campaign Manager Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner has ties to another Russian bank and diplomats. A few days later, Manafort and Kushner attended the follow-up meeting with Russian state attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower on June 9, 2106.  Also present was Ike Kaveladze, Aras Agalarov’s US based deputy, who is suspected of laundering $1.4Bn in Russian dirty money through fake Citibank accounts in 2000.

Senate, House committees probe Trump’s role in Russian money laundering.

Donald Trump’s personal connection to Russian oligarchs, their money-laundering deputies and Wilbur Ross raises an important question. What role, if any, does the Trump Organization play in laundering dirty Russian money? Furthermore, did Trump’s Russia support come as part of a cash-fueled relationship?

Senate and House Intelligence Committees are now looking for specific ties to money laundering. This week, they finally began receiving data from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN’s mission is to combat money laundering and protect national security from illicit use. If investigators find proof of Trump’s role in Russian money laundering, it seems like the probe could reach a very different level of criminality.

The post Trump’s Role In Russian Money Laundering Investigated appeared first on Narativ.

Over 12 weeks, beginning last Spring, the Trump campaign and Putin’s emissaries sealed a deal that could unravel his presidency.

In Washington scandals, all roads lead to The Mayflower Hotel. JFK stayed there in a permanent private suite, Bill Clinton taped his testimony in the Lewinsky scandal in the Presidential Suite, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was busted for cocaine possession there, and Eliot Spitzer hired high-end prostitutes in room 871. So it seems fitting that the biggest scandal in our nation’s history finds a setting in the hotel’s sumptuous Senate Room.

Jared Kushner was the first to approach National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn about hosting an event where Kushner’s father-in-law, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, could outline his vague foreign policy. Whether the meeting achieved its goal remains an open question, but it has become a significant point of interest for FBI investigators probing the Trump-Russia scandal.

As the National Interest editor explains, the magazine arranged everything about the meeting: “The menu, the venue, the seating,” to borrow a lyric from Hamilton. The Mayflower was chosen over the originally booked National Press Club, perhaps because the Press Club doesn’t offer hotel rooms on-site where personal or political business can take place in complete privacy behind closed doors.

The April 27 event was attended by a typical mix of Trump loyalists, interested observers, and a handful of ambassadors, including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Kislyak’s attendance was symbolic, designed to underscore Trump’s main talking point: lessening Russian sanctions and building an alliance with Moscow.

After the speech, two dozen high-profile guests attended a small reception at the hotel. “Trump certainly knows how to put everyone at ease,” recalls Heilbrunn.

“He bounded into the room with a hearty ‘Hello, everybody!’ A kind of impromptu receiving line formed in deference to the man—as though he were already president. Trump doesn’t work the room. You come to him.” 

Senator Jeff Sessions was also present. While details of his activities at the Mayflower remain primarily undisclosed, the FBI has confirmed that it intercepted communications from Ambassador Kislyak, in which he informed his superiors in Moscow about a private meeting with Sessions at the hotel.

Despite numerous photos showing Kislyak close to Sessions at the Mayflower, the now-Attorney General denies any meeting took place. “I did not have any private meetings, nor do I recall any conversations with any Russian officials at the Mayflower Hotel,” Sessions testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. When pressed by senators, he adjusted his language to say, “It’s conceivable.” A conversation occurred, but he had “no recollection.”

SENATOR ROY BLUNT (R-MO): You didn’t have a room at that event where you had private meetings, did you?

SESSIONS: No, I did not.

BLUNT: So when you said you possibly had a meeting with Mr. Kislyak, did you mean you possibly met him?

SESSIONS: I didn’t have any formal meeting with him. I’m confident of that, but I may have had an encounter during the reception.

BLUNT: Alright, so you were there. You’ve read since he was there, you may have seen him, but you had no room where you were having meetings with individuals to have discussions at the Mayflower Hotel that day.

SESSIONS: No, that is correct.

Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, and Senator Jeff Sessions simultaneously take their seats at the Mayflower.

All of this is inconsistent with Sessions’ role as chairman of the Trump Campaign’s national security advisory board. Why wouldn’t he talk to the Russian ambassador? Time will tell if Sessions’ Senate testimony and FBI scrutiny stand the test of time.

To Moscow, with love.

Sessions introduced Donald Trump to Carter Page in March 2016. At the time of their meeting, Page was a little-known energy consultant with deep ties to Russia’s oil and energy sector. He quickly became a trusted advisor for the campaign.

Six weeks after the Mayflower event and ten weeks into the campaign, Carter Page traveled to Moscow at the invitation of the New Economic School. During his visit, he delivered a scathing critique of what he called “hypocritical” US policies. Page arrived on Friday, July 9, and by Sunday, he reportedly held a clandestine meeting with Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russian oil and energy giant Rosneft.

The secret meeting between Page and Sechin has been publicly confirmed, though the details remain speculative, based mainly on former MI-6 spy Christopher Steele’s findings. Steele reported that a quid-pro-quo was arranged: if Trump lifts sanctions, he would receive 19.5% of Rosneft or a portion thereof.

Steele’s source is believed to have been Sechin’s former Chief of Staff, who was fatally shot in Moscow in December. It’s also speculated in Russiagate circles that there was another leg to the Trump-Russia deal. Page is believed to have asked Russian officials for help with hacking on behalf of the Trump campaign. This seems to line up with an FBI-sourced report by CNN: “The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

Page was only in Moscow for three days. He returned in time to join fellow Republicans at the GOP’s platform planning week, which began on July 11, a week before the Republican National Convention. One of the first orders of business was a surprising plank proposal to water down support for Ukrainian troops fighting Russian-backed rebels. Instead of sending the Ukrainians “lethal weapons,” the GOP pledged “appropriate support.”

The following week, as the convention got underway in Cleveland, Page, Sessions, and Trump advisor JD Gordon met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy event staged by the Heritage Foundation on July 19. “Much of the discussion focused on Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and Georgia,” according to delegate Victor Ashe. Russia’s crippling sanctions are primarily a result of their incursion into Ukraine. Under oath, Sessions initially denied that this meeting took place but later admitted to meeting Kislyak when confronted by media reports to the contrary.

So let’s thread this needle. Sessions has a meeting he can’t recall with the Russian ambassador at the Mayflower on April 27th. A member of his National Security Advisory Board, Carter Page, heads to Moscow in July and takes a top-level meeting with the CEO of Russia’s state-run oil company, Rosneft. A deal is allegedly struck: a piece of Rosneft in exchange for dropping sanctions and, to grease the wheels, some hacking help from Russia’s state-authorized team of cyber-criminals to help Trump get elected.

That hacking help came on July 22 – three days after Sessions met Kislyak in Cleveland. Wikileaks published the first hacked DNC emails obtained from Russian hackers. As Trump got a boost in the polls, he publicly asked Moscow for even more help. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing,” Trump said at a press conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be nice.”

All of this happened under the watch of then-Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, who received $12.7 million in kickbacks from Ukraine’s former Russian-backed president and was paid $10 million a year on behalf of Putin’s ally, oligarch Oleg Deripaska, to further Russian interests around the world.

If the walls of the Mayflower could talk, they’d spill some of Washington’s seediest secrets.  That may not be necessary in today’s world of electronic surveillance. After all, any meeting involving Kislyak could well have been in earshot of the FBI, who had been surveilling him for quite some time.

The post Meet Me At The Mayflower appeared first on Narativ.

Opinion. There is something wrong with the Attorney General.  At best, he has selective amnesia. At worst, he helped a foreign government seize control over the executive branch of the US. In either case, he is unfit to serve. If the latter is true, not even the 10,000 lawyers at the DOJ can save Jeff Sessions from his great fall.

The Attorney General can’t recall with whom he met, when he met them, what they discussed, what he’s recused from and why he and his boss can’t agree on why they fired the FBI Director. And he can’t tell you why he can’t tell you what he can’t recall.

The AG feigns indignation about scurrilous rumors and innuendo he claims hurt his reputation. Mr. Sessions is far more concerned about himself than he is about the perilous state of the US democracy. The nation’s top law enforcement official says Russia meddled in the election and believes crimes were committed yet he can’t explain why he’s done absolutely nothing about it. This is a massive dereliction of duty.

Sessions says he recommended FBI Director James Comey be fired for his mishandling of the Clinton e-mail scandal. President Trump says it was for the “Russian thing.” The Attorney General would like us to believe Comey was a failure as FBI Director, but the real failure is Mr. Sessions. A failure to lead, a failure to uphold the constitution and a failure of conscience.

Sessions claims he met Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak on Sept 8 at a routine meeting in his then capacity as member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. At first, the Attorney General denied he met Kislyak. Then he denied talking about sanctions. Now he denies he was acting on behalf of the Trump campaign when he discussed sanctions at the meeting with the Russian ambassador. Mr. Attorney General, your pants are on fire.

Sessions can’t recall yet another meeting with Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel on April 27. Is he really expecting us to believe he was inches away from Kislyak, as pictured, but never discussed anything with the ambassador? It strains credulity that there was no conversation of substance at a speech in which then-candidate Trump proposed improving the US-Russia relationship.

The Attorney General’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee was so ludicrous, it makes a mockery of the very word justice. His reluctance to answer questions, without a legal basis for his refusal, is a clear indication he is complicit in an ill-conceived and treachorous plot to steal the election on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Mr. Sessions must resign and face the consequences.

The post Jeff Sessions Must Resign appeared first on Narativ.

President Donald J. Trump is having a bad day, and things are about to get worse.

Tuesday, January 24, was relatively warm for a winter day in Washington DC. The town was still smarting from the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump the previous Friday and already, the administration was under investigation.

On that day, FBI investigators paid a visit to Trump’s National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn. They wanted to ask Flynn some questions about the nature of his relationship with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Investigators had inadvertently picked up the National Security Adviser’s texts and phone calls in their surveillance of the Russian ambassador. Flynn seemed to be leaking confidential information to the Russians, even promising to ease sanctions as soon as soon as Trump took office.

The interview deeply troubled investigators. He not only lied to them about the nature of the contacts with Kislyak but he seemed to have lied to the Vice President, and others, in the administration. A lie which was being repeated again and again, as fact, in public interviews.

Investigators returned to their office and sent a message up the chain to the Justice Department. They had sobering news for the Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. Flynn had likely been compromised by the Russians. At the very least, the Russians had significant leverage over the National Security Adviser.

First thing on Thursday morning, Yates called Trump’s Counsel Don McGhan at the White House. She needed to see him immediately on a matter of extreme urgency.  When she arrived at the White House later that afternoon, she told McGhan about the DOJ’s concerns about Flynn. After inquiring how Flynn had done in his interview, he asked Yates to return the next day, to answer some additional questions.

That Friday marked the end of the first week of the 45th President. Early that morning, President Trump picked up the phone. He dialed the FBI Director James Comey.

“Can you come over for dinner tonight?” President Trump asked his FBI Director.

“Yes, sir,” Comey replied.

“Will 6:00 work?” Trump inquired.

“I was going to invite your whole family but we’ll do it next time,” the President said. “Is that a good time?”

“Sir, whatever works for you,” Comey replied.

“How about 6:30?” Trump offered.

“Whatever works for you, sir,” Director Comey responded.

The FBI Director hung up the phone and called his wife. He had to break the news to her that he’d have to cancel their dinner date that night. While Comey adjusted his evening plans. His boss, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, returned to the White House Counsel’s office.

“Why does it matter to the Department of Justice if one White House official lies to another White House official?” Yates recalls McGhan asking. Yates explained DOJ’s concern about Flynn’s actual conduct – which involved subversive contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Then, she added. “Flynn had lied to the vice president and others, the American public had been misled.” The “others” was likely a reference to the FBI. McGhan asked Yates if he could take a look at the underlying evidence. She said she would arrange that over the weekend.

James Comey arrived for dinner with the President at 6:30 and was surprised he was the only guest. The two of them sat at a small oval table in the center of the Green room. A couple of Navy stewards waited on them but they only entered the room to serve food and drinks, then left.

Twice before, the President assured Comey he would stay on as FBI Director so Comey was surprised the President brought it up again. Trump broached the uncomfortable topic by questioning the FBI Director’s reliability.

“I am not “reliable” in the way politicians use that word, but you could always count on me to tell you the truth,” Comey responded, assuring the President he wasn’t on anyone’s side politically.

“I need loyalty,” the President said.

“You will always get honesty from me,” Comey responded.

“That’s what I want, honest loyalty,” Trump insisted.

“You will get that from me,” Comey responded though still unsure of what that term meant to the President.

As the FBI Director left the White House that Friday night, he felt the message was clear.  He could keep his job, only if he demonstrated loyalty.

Over the weekend, Sally Yates worked on arranging a meeting for McGhan to view the underlying evidence. She called him first thing that Monday morning to share details but didn’t hear back from him until later that afternoon. She would never find out if he got to see the evidence. Trump fired Yates that night in tersely worded statement that said she had “betrayed” her country for not supporting his immigration ban. In hindsight, her “betrayal” may have had more to do with her handling of the Flynn investigation.

Flynn was forced to resign after just 18 days on the job. President Trump said it was because Flynn had lied to the Vice President. Trump failed to mention Flynn had also lied to FBI investigators. A felony.

Comey returned to the White House on February 14th for a counter-intelligence briefing of the President. Also there: the Vice President, the new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner. As the meeting drew to a close, Trump indicated he wanted Comey to stay behind, alone.

“Why would you kick everyone out of the office?” Comey mulled in his mind.

“I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” The President said.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” He asked. “He is a good guy.”

“He is a good guy,” Comey agreed, recalling their positive interactions when Flynn was Director of Defense Intelligence but Comey said nothing of letting anything go.

The President and Comey had two other phone calls in the coming weeks. On March 30th, Trump asked if he was personally under investigation. Comey told him he wasn’t.

On April 11, Trump called to ask Comey if he could “lift the cloud” of suspicion being created by the Russia investigation, by publicly stating Trump wasn’t a target of the probe. Comey said he had referred that matter to the Deputy Attorney General.

By May 9th, as the Russia investigation began to close in on Trump’s family and Jared Kushner in particular, Trump fired Comey. The official reason for the dismissal was for Comey’s role in the Clinton e-mail investigation but the public face of the firing wore thin quickly. Within days, Trump was on TV admitting he fired Comey because of Russia.

“When I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russian thing with Trump and Russia … is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

Now back at home as a private citizen, Comey bristled at the shifting excuses Trump had offered for his firing and the President’s labeling of the FBI as being in disarray. “Those were lies, plain and simple, and I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them and I’m so sorry that the American people were told them,” Comey testified before a Senate Committee today.

In fact, Comey himself had become “Exhibit A” for Obstruction of Justice. In firing the FBI Director, Trump had likely committed an impeachable act. “I have no doubt in my mind, I was fired because of the Russia investigation,” Comey told the hearing. What could be more obstructive than firing the lead investigator?

Up until that point, there was some evidence to suggest interference, but merely hoping someone “lets go” of something wouldn’t pass the high bar necessary for impeaching a President. Firing the FBI Director, and the Acting Attorney General for that matter, would. And by linking it all back to Flynn, Trump had also proved collusion with Russia.

In his testimony, Comey likened Trump’s request to “let go” the Flynn investigation to that of King Henry II, who was able to get Thomas Beckett killed in 1179 by asking his knights “who will rid me of the meddlesome priest?”.  The ending here looks to be far less fatal except, in all likelihood, to a Presidency without any respect for rule of law.

The post The Meddlesome Priest appeared first on Narativ.

Opinion: Democrats could retake the White House in next year’s mid-term elections and Joe Biden could become the next President. 

In the heat of the 2012 Presidential election campaign, senior White House chief political strategist David Axelrod approached his boss, then President Barack Obama, with a sobering message.  Democratic enthusiasm for Obama had begun to wane. Axelrod offered a suggestion to turn the tide. The President needed to call in former President Bill Clinton to reinforce his re-election campaign effort.

To be clear, there is no love lost between the two former presidents. “Bill Clinton’s animosity toward Obama is legendary.” The New York Post reported in June 2013. Just a year earlier, Clinton was urging his wife to oppose Obama’s re-election. Hillary deferred, citing loyalty, but her husband was offended by what he perceived was Obama’s slight against him. According to sources quoted in Edward Klein’s book “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House”, Clinton fumed:

“I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president — none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!”- Bill Clinton, as quoted in “The Amateur”

As the 2012 campaign took its toll on Obama’s approval ratings (mainly due to the IRS scandal and, ironically, Hillary’s Benghazi and e-mail scandal), Obama was left no choice but to reach out to Bill. Clinton proposed a deal.

Clinton agreed to give the nominating address at the Convention. In exchange, he demanded Obama endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor. Bill held up his side of the agreement stumping on Obama’s behalf on the campaign trail and giving a rousing speech at the convention. Obama was re-elected but once back at the White House, he began to have second thoughts, sending signals he preferred to stay neutral in the next election, as is tradition with sitting Presidents.

When word of this reached Bill Clinton, he insisted Obama go on 60 Minutes with Secretary Clinton, to publicly affirm his support for Hillary. The result was a hastily organized and somewhat uncomfortable interview with Hillary and Obama on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

What made Obama’s deal with Bill Clinton personally heartbreaking for the sitting President, was it meant his Vice President and good friend, Joseph Biden, would have to go it alone in the 2016 election, should he run. After all, Vice Presidents Gore, Bush and Mondale all secured their party’s nomination after serving as deputies to successful sitting presidents.

Biden briefly toyed with a 2016 run against Hillary, but the death of his son, Beau, wore heavily on him, emotionally and financially.  At one point, he told President Obama that he and Jill would have to sell their home, to care for Beau’s family. As Biden recalls it, “[Obama] said, ‘I’ll give you the money. Whatever you need, I’ll give you the money. Don’t, Joe — promise me. Promise me.’ I said, ‘I don’t think we’re going to have to anyway.’ He said, ‘promise me'”.

Biden enjoys a close relationship with Hillary and was acutely aware of the historic potential for a first female President. Since Clinton’s loss to Trump in November last year, Biden has been frank in his assessment of her Presidential campaign. “You didn’t hear a word about that husband and wife working, making 100,000 bucks a year, two kids, struggling and scared to death. They used to be our constituency,” Biden told the LA Times. “I don’t think she ever really figured it out, and by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run,” the former VP says.

Instead of launching his own Presidential run, Biden campaigned tirelessly for his friend, Hillary Clinton, appearing at no less than 83 campaign events, all while mourning the loss of Beau.

Last week, Biden announced he’s launching a Political Action Committee as a way to ‘stay involved’ in politics, but many are speculating the move will lead to a Presidential run in 2020. There is a scenario, which could see Biden in the White House two years earlier. The following is my opinion and is based solely on what is publicly known about the investigation of the Trump-Russia affair.

As I’ve previously explained, in my post on the seriousness of the investigation into Donald Trump’s involvement with Russia, impeachment would be the likely course of events in more ordinary times. These, however, are not ordinary times. Far from it.

Even after FBI Director James Comey lays out the case for obstruction of justice against Trump before senate committee on Thursday this week, Republicans are unlikely to launch impeachment proceedings. This is based on political expediency but also because it’s now suspected House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) both accepted Russian money for the their part’s 2016 election season. (I wrote about it in my post “What America Needs Now”.) They are not only beholden to Trump, but they may be owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin and very possibly complicit in the entire affair.

This could mean voters have to wait until the 2018 mid-term elections to exercise their vote in opposition to Donald J. Trump. In so doing, they will also have a chance to elect the next President of the US. If Democrats win the house (which would mean flipping 22 Republican house seats) and launch impeachment proceedings, they could put a new President in the White House before 2020.

Should Joe Biden run for one of those House seats and win, he could become the House Speaker. The House could then impeach President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Michael Pence, paving the way for Biden to become the 46th President of the United States. Biden will be 74 on mid-term Election Day in November 2018 and 75 when the new Congress takes office in January 2019. The next presidential election will still happen in November 2020.

Obvioulsy, this scenario holds for whomever is House Speaker in the event of a Democratic win. Hillary Clinton and even Barack Obama could run for the House (the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow for a President to be elected for a third term, but it doesn’t prohibit a third term, through succession) but Clinton and Obama would both receive serious opposition from the Trump base, at a time of considerable division in the country. Biden’s blue collar appeal, hopeful vision, impeccable credentials and no ties to a corruptable money machine will appeal across the board as the man to lead America out of the gloom in which we find ourselves. “Joe always says, ‘If you’re not on your way up, you’re on your way down,” the New York Times quoted someone close to Biden as saying in 2013. Sometimes, you’re down so much, the only way to go is back up.

The post How Joe Biden Could Be President By January 2019 appeared first on Narativ.

Jared Kushner and his father-in-law, President Donald J. Trump, have more connecting them than Ivanka Trump. 

On April 19 last year, Donald J. Trump was taking a victory lap after winning the Republican Party nomination. In his speech, he mentioned by name a number of bold-named businessmen who were there to hear him crow. Carl Icahn, Howard Lorber and Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Trust.

“The great Steven Roth,” Trump extolled. “Steve’s building a big building on Central Park South, it’s a tremendous success.”

“I said, ‘Steve, congratulations on the building,'” The newly-minted Republican presidential nominee said.

“He said, ‘Donald, it’s nothing compared to what’s happening with you.’ Is that right? My man!”

Trump and Roth have been friends (and sometimes business foes) for over 30 years.  They jointly own the 1290 Sixth Avenue office tower. Trump and Roth became business partners after Trump threatened to sue his former partners for trying to sell it to another party without his permission. 1290 Sixth Avenue became the second largest in Vornado’s portfolio but by no means the only marquee property in Roth’s sprawling Manhattan empire.

One other is 666 Fifth Avenue, which Roth’s Vornado Trust co-owns with Jared Kushner’s family. Jared made news in Manhattan’s real estate circles when he purchased the trophy building for $1.8 billion, using mostly borrowed money. By all accounts, Kushner overpaid for the building by paying twice as much per-square-foot than any other Manhattan building sale before it, according to the New York Post. Tellingly, the deal closed on Jared’s 26th birthday, Jan. 10, 2007.

It was an expensive birthday gift by any measure but for the young real estate scion it represented a giant statement to Manhattan. Two years earlier, his father, Charles Kushner, was imprisoned for 14 months after pleading guilty for tax evasion charges and for making illegal campaign contributions. Before exiting prison, Charles turned over his holdings to his eldest son to manage a business free of an ex-convict CEO. Jared was just 25. If his father’s prison sentence wasn’t enough for the young heir to handle, the circumstances that led to it, tore the Kushner clan apart.

Before being charged in 2005, Charles Kushner heard his brother-in-law was talking to investigators about his misdeeds. To gain leverage over him, Kushner paid a “very attractive, high-end call girl $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a Bridgewater, NJ, motel after she pretended to need a ride when her car broke down,” according to the Post. Jared’s father had the whole motel encounter taped and sent it to his sister, Esther. She turned the tape into the feds. Classic kompromat.

Now it seems, Kushner family history could be repeating itself. Investigators want to know if Jared has kompromat all of his own. Only this time, the disparaging evidence is financial in nature and it’s the Russians who could be holding it over him.

666 Fifth Avenue, The trophy building Jared bought for $1.8 Bn in 2007 has proved to be a financial noose around him and the family. By 2008, the building was generating just 70 cents on every dollar it owed.  Under pressure, Jared was forced to sell the pricey store space for $525 million to a partnership in 2008 and a 49 percent stake in the office portion to Stephen Ross’ Vornado in 2011. Yes, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump share more than wife and daughter, they share a business partner. A $1.2 Bn mortgage on Jared’s trophy building is due in just two years which unpaid, could destroy the family fortune.

Congressional investigators and the FBI are now probing a secret meeting Jared had with Vladimir Putin’s banker at Trump Tower in New York in December last year. The White House and the Russian bank have offered conflicting explanations for the meeting between Kushner and Sergei Gorkov.

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Russia hacked vital election infrastructure before the election. Did they rig the vote?

Some time within the week of November 3, 2016, the FBI held a hastily convened conference call with Florida’s 67 county election supervisors who operate a specific type of election voting system. They had sobering news for the officials: Russia had successfully hacked the vendor of Florida’s electronic voting machines. The FBI and Homeland Security were so concerned, a second call was organized with Florida state officials to share information on the cyber threat

The Russian hack of a voting machine manufacturer came amidst a frenzy of activity by Kremlin hackers who had successfully gained access to the State Voters Rolls in Arizona and Illinois. What gave investigators pause, however, was the fact that the Florida hack had a different target. It wasn’t just collecting voter identities; it was aimed at the manufacturers of the voting machines across the state.

Almost 20 percent of Americans vote on digital systems that don’t produce a paper trail. This includes several states such as New Jersey, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina as well as several jurisdictions in swing or battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Indiana. Many of the machines are more than 10 years old and contain software no longer maintained by its manufacturers – we’re talking Microsoft XP or older – and are not updated with the latest security patches. James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology,  posed a rhetorical question in an interview with NPR:

“With the kind of stealth and sophistication that’s already out there, why wouldn’t a nation-state, cyber-criminal gang or activist group go into election systems that are completely vulnerable?”

Tampering with an electronic voting booth is fairly simple. According to a study by the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012, voting machines can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education. All you’d have to do is unlock or pick the lock, switch out the memory card, and reboot the machine. This was ably demonstrated by Andrew Appel, a Princeton professor in a 2014 YouTube video. Once in place, the hacked machine could count a completely different vote than the one intended by the voter. Most polling stations are in gyms or schools and machines are set up well before voting day so it’s not impossible to gain access to them. Also, every machine needs to be reset before every poll so they have to be opened by someone.

This kind of invasion would require a carefully coordinated attack on thousands, or at least hundreds, of voting machines. Of course you could reprogram the machines in each state at once, if you gained access to the source codes for the machines allowing you to reprogram all the memory cards at once.

According to Salon:

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results.

But a determined hacker could gain access to those source codes by hacking the manufacturer’s mainframe, as Russia is suspected of doing. They could theoretically access the codes, change them, and resave them without anyone actually knowing.

And that’s not the only weak spot. Experts warn that the entire ecosystem is vulnerable. For example, once votes are cast, the data is transferred into a database for immediate counting. The tabulation equipment is also dated and doesn’t have the basic security like encryption or strong passwords, so if you didn’t rig the vote in the actual machines, you could do it at the counting point.

To be clear, the FBI only knows there were hacks of Russian origin of the voting machine manufacturer server, and hacks of state voters rolls in at least two states but no actual manipulation of data voting machines. There are clues, however, that something went awry on voting day. Data analysts have been poring over the election results and they are finding some serious head-scratchers.

Take Wisconsin, for example. President Donald J. Trump won the state by a mere 3,000 votes, but statistical analysis of the result showed Hillary Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that voted on electronic-voting machines.

There are other discrepancies, too. Exit polls, normally reliable predictors of actual poll outcomes, seemed way off compared to actual results last year. Shortly after the election, the National Association of Voting Officials, a group of polling experts, sent a letter to election officials across the country:

“Our examination of the exit data collected by Edison Exit Polling shows a large number and unprecedented discrepancy between the exit polling and the final vote count at minimum in certain states – the so-called swing states of Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida. It strongly suggests inappropriate and external meddling of our nation’s most sacred act – the act of its citizens voting.” 

NAVO points to the following:

The hacking of the most recent software updates that are applied to the machines before the election.

Modifying the running code in the machine via wireless technology.

Physically hacking the machines while voting.

And…

Modifying the tallying software local to the precinct or the database at the election center.

The NAVO analysis of exit polls vs. actual results (the full letter can be read here: 2016-election-not-democratic) points to the same vulnerabilities I’ve detailed above. There’s also anecdotal evidence of votes being counted incorrectly on voting day. In Florida, for example, there were widespread examples of voting machine malfunctions, as Ruben Major points out in his blog:

On November 7, 2017 at 3:39PM, during early voting, a report came into the U.S. Department of Justice Voting Section stating that there was a “paper trail showing Donald Trump” when the voter selected Hillary Clinton.  

The election results have been widely accepted as fair since the election, except by the current administration (for different reasons… I’ll go into in another post). But now we’ve seen a pattern of an extraordinary efforts by Kremlin officials to meet with Trump’s key advisors, discussing top-secret information with them, attempts to set up secret back-channel communications with Moscow, the firing of FBI Director James Comey who was in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, unexplained Trump server connections with a Russian bank, and an extraordinary fake news operation, it’s becoming harder to gloss over the hacks of voter registration rolls and equipment manufacturers.

We may never know what happened in Florida, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania to deliver the anomalies in counties that used electronic voting machines or between exit and actual polling results, because the machines don’t leave a paper trail. The FBI is still actively investigating Russia’s hacks of voters rolls and voting machines and, considering the context of the unprecedented effort by Russia to undermine the US democracy, investigators cannot be letting any of this go.

The post The Fix appeared first on Narativ.

Levashov hails from St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city. From there, he made a small fortune peddling stolen data he gathered through phishing expeditions and building a botnet called “Kelihos,” described in his US indictment as “a network of computers infected with a malicious software that allows a third party to control the entire computer network without the knowledge or consent of the computer owners.”

Levashov allegedly controlled and operated the Kelihos botnet to, among other things, harvest personal information and means of identification [including email addresses, usernames and logins, and passwords] from infected computers.

“The Kelihos virus, which had been devised to spread spam, was used during the Russian election in 2012 to send political messages to email accounts on computers with Russian I.P. addresses. The emails linked to fake news stories saying that Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the businessman running for president against Vladimir V. Putin, had come out as gay.”

“Prison for Russian hacker accused of computer attacks during US elections.”

Citing FBI investigators, El Pais had confirmed sources Levashov was arrested for involvement in the hacking of DNC servers and other Kremlin operated attempts to destabilize the US Democracy.

“[Levashov participated] in a battery of computer attacks aimed at influencing the Presidential elections […] According to FBI investigators, Moscow organized an alleged hacking of Democratic Party computers, later filtering manipulated emails from Hillary Clinton and thus paving the way for Trump’s victory.”

Levashov’s wife, who was in the apartment with their son when the spam lord was arrested, told Russia Today: “I talked to my husband on the phone when I was at the police station and he told me that he was told something about a virus that he supposedly had created and that was related to Trump’s victory”.

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The Republican Party is imploding. Young Republicans are fleeing and President Donald J. Trump’s support is eroding as quickly as you can spell ‘Russia’. 

On the eve of Montana’s special election to elect a new congressman, Republican front-runner Greg Gianforte body-slammed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. Gianforte’s attack was in response to Jacobs’ question about a health care bill which threatens to rob many in the party’s base of affordable health coverage. The brutality of the assault, and subsequent lie about what happened, is a canary in the coal mine for a Republican Party falling apart, devoid of values and wholly owned by Russian autocrats.

“I’m sick and tired of you guys,” Gianforte yelled as he body-slammed Jacobs. “The last guy who came here did the same thing. Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of here. The last guy did the same thing. Are you with the Guardian?”

All that for asking a question. Almost unnoticed in the scuffle, is evidence the Guardian Newspaper dug up about Gianforte’s investments in two Russian Index Funds which invest heavily in sanctioned Russian companies.

Both are indexed to the Russian equities market and have significant holdings in companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft that came under US sanctions in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of the Crimea.

Gianforte is an independently wealthy tech entrepreneur (he’s estimated worth is $315M) but his investment in the Index funds is a clear bet on Russia’s economy. Why would he do that unless he believed Russian sanctions would be lifted?

Gianforte may be a canary, but he is not alone. The rot inside the Republican rank and file runs deep, is well-funded and operates with unparalleled sophistication in coordination with its Russian overlords. Together, ‘Russia-GOP’ prey on people’s fears and keep opponent supporters at home, by peddling fake news micro-targeted to people’s Facebook and other social media accounts.

Take Cambridge Analytica, the murky “psychographic” marketing company which figures out your personality profile and targets your fears by amplifying them with conflated or blatantly false content. The company is thought to be responsible for the unexpected ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK, the inexplicable campaign of Ben Carson, the bizarre rise of Ted Cruz and of course, the election of Donald Trump.

According to Newsweek,  The company is principally owned by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who supported Trump and was a leading investor in Breitbart.  Stephen Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman (after Manafort) and now chief strategist at the White House, was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica’s board as well as the executive chairman of Breitbart before joining Trump’s team in August.

Investigators want to know how Cambridge Analytica is linked to Russia’s unprecedented cyber operation to manipulate the election, according to Time.

It’s common knowledge, Robert Mercer backed Cruz in the Republican primaries but when that campaign couldn’t seal the deal, Mercer swung towards Trump, deploying Cambridge Analytica on behalf of number 45. It’s also believed Mercer’s daughter, Bekah, was instrumental in installing National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Trump cabinet. According to the Washington Post, Flynn returned the favor by granting Cambridge Analytica’s parent company a lucrative contract, during his 18 day tenure as National Security Advisor.

I’ve already reported that Flynn, Sessions, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and Carter Page were all involved in a secret meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last Summer, in an effort to soften the party’s plank on Ukraine and who-knows-what-else. The photo below reportedly snapped minutes after one Trump-Russia meeting shows Kislyak, Manafort and Sessions returning from one of their sideline meetings.

Intelligence Community leaks now suggest there are intercepted recordings of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis) accepting Russian money from Kislyak during the Republican convention. And now it’s emerged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) super-PAC accepted $2.5 Million from a pro-Putin Ukrainian businessman during the last election cycle (images below). The Republican Party has, in essence, become a money-laundering operation for Russia’s murderous regime and its oligarchs.

It’s almost hard to believe the Republican Party, which was founded by anti-slavery activists built on the principles of the revolution and which gave the country Abraham Lincoln has been so thoroughly defiled by this extent of corruption. The future of the Republic – and democracy – requires a strong GOP founded on the values it holds dear. Voters – especially poor white ones – across the country have been betrayed by their leadership.

At the same time, Citizens United needs to be overturned. The Supreme Court decision to label corporations as citizens has corrupted our politics top to bottom, left and right. If Republicans are true patriots, and have any chance of survival, they will fight to return power to its citizenry.  And if any unccorupted Republicans still exist, when will they stand up to their leaders and root out the disease which is eating its way through their party? What America needs now, more than ever, is a rebirth of the Grand Old Party – the party of Lincoln – flushed of its corruption and ready to serve the people. If the politicians can’t do it, the people will.

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President Donald J. Trump has become a clear and present danger to the republic and US lives. Trump shared classified information about an ISIS plot to blow up commercial planes using laptop bomb with our enemies, endangering US lives. But that’s only the beginning of the constitutional crisis we’re heading into.

The Washington Post and the New York Times just reported President Donald J. Trump shared secret code-word information with the Russians that could isolate the US from the free world and endanger the lives of Americans. Trump handed over the classified information to the Russians when he held a closed-door meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, on Wed May 10.  The code word intel (which is classified above top secret) was acquired by a foreign intelligence agency and provided to the US under strict intelligence rules.

The information Trump revealed would help the Russians identify a secret agent within ISIS who had revealed a plot to use “laptop bombs” aboard commercial planes. The Kremlin would be keen to eliminate or disrupt the asset because of their reprehensible support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The result could mean US lives are at risk whenever Americans fly.

Although the foreign country is not named in the reports, the United States is part of the “Five Eyes” global international community which means intelligence agencies from New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and the US share information on their common good. Other alliances exist with allies who may be less forgiving of such a lapse of judgment by the US President. Even though President Trump can declassify information “at will”,  that doesn’t extend to information gathered by non-US agencies.  In short, Trump threatens the US relationship with our key allies if he reveals information the US didn’t obtain directly.

Trump’s breach of allies’ trust comes just days after Trump potentially committed another serious crime – obstruction of justice – when he colluded with Vice President Michael Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire FBI Director James Comey.

The White House’s public pretext for the firing was related to Comey’s handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation, as outlined in a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein but that memo was easy bait for a President looking for a reason to fire the FBI Director.

In a deft move, Rosenstein threatened to resign over the use of his memo as cause for Comey’s ouster. The next day, absent a pretext, Trump sat down for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and was forced to reveal the truth. The emperor, it seems, had no clothes.

“When I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russian thing with Trump and Russia … is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

Trump also copped to Holt he asked Comey on three separate occasions if he was under investigation personally.  That’s not a question you would ask once, never mind three times, if you really believed the whole thing was “a made up story”, “a ruse” or “a hoax”, as the President has said in his many tweets.  It’s also now clear that Trump summoned Comey to the White House and asked him to “pledge his loyalty” just days after acting attorney General Sally Yates alerted the White House that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was “compromised by the Russians”. Yates was later fired. A second count of obstruction of justice.

A just released memo written by Comey after Flynn was fired reveals President Trump asked the FBI Director to drop the entire investigation.  “I hope you can let this go,” Comey quotes Trump in the memo he wrote as part of a paper trail documenting the President’s efforts to obstruct justice. As an F.B.I. agent, Comey’s notes will be used in court as credible evidence.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

It’s also been reported by the New York Times, the President and Vice-President secretly conspired to remove Comey. Vice President Mike Pence, who parroted the White House lie, could have been the next President of the US but he’s now been infected by the corruption virus by Trump. Pence should face an indictment on obstruction of justice charges and needs to be impeached. By conspiring with Trump, Pence has placed the US into a succession crisis.

However, even if the Justice Department indicts Trump and Pence along with the exhaustive list of co-conspirators, nothing can force the House, controlled by the Republicans, to begin impeachment proceedings. Up until now Republicans seem hesitant to even appoint an independent prosecutor so impeachment hearings seem unlikely, unless something else happens. And that something else is beginning to emerge.

Russia’s efforts to destabilize US Democracy ran very deep and now threaten to embroil the entire leadership of the GOP – including House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator Ted Cruz and others. Ryan has been full-throatedly supporting Trump recently framing the President as “a driven, hands-on leader, with the potential to become a truly transformational American figure.” Now it’s emerging, there’s good reason Ryan is Trump’s pocket. According to “Kremlingate” watchers, Ryan also accepted money from Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to fill the GOP coffers. If Ryan and other Republican leaders are removed from office too, the balance of power and sheer political survival in 2018 should compel remaining Republicans in the House to act.

I asked Associate Professor Gary Darden, who teaches US Civil War at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey to explain how impeachment would work if such an indictment was coming:

“An impeachment is constitutionally speaking an indictment issued by the House for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” while the trial itself would take place in the Senate with senators as jury and chief justice as presiding judge. If the president were to be indicted in a court of law, then that would be, I think, the basis for articles of impeachment in the House. If 2/3 of the House votes in favor of any article (or charge) if impeachment, then it mandates a trial in Senate, where a conviction requires 2/3 of that body.”

The House could be reluctant to act but Darden believes:

“If criminal charges come out of the Justice Dept against the President, then it would be the basis for the House to act. If it didn’t it would be political negligence of the highest order.” 

Still, Darden points out Republicans who supported Trump hold a disproportionate number of seats in the house so the impeachment seems unlikely, but just the threat of it, and a potential lengthy prison sentence for the entire Trump family, could render the President impotent and force a resignation, as it did with Nixon.

If you’re keeping track, that now leaves Trump, Pence and Ryan all out of the running to take over as  President. The next in line for the White House is Senator Orrin Hatch (UT-R), the President pro tempore of the United States Senate. After Hatch, It’s the Secretary of State, Putin-buddy Rex Tillerson (likely to be indicted too) and then Jeff Sessions (clearly already compromised) and the rest of the cabinet.  This is why there are two potential outcomes to an impeachment crisis: President Orrin Hatch or the next Speaker of the House, if Ryan is implicated.

Whomever it is, would be President until 2020 as there simply is no mechanism for a snap election in the US. Even under these extraordinary times.

“Hate is a far better motivator than love,” a boastful Roger Stone told NPR this week. “It’s one of Stone’s golden rules.”  Stone is the political operative who helped put Donald Trump in the White House.  He says of the President, “I was like a jockey looking for his horse. You can’t win a race without a horse.” Stone is about to see his golden rule work against his winning horse.  Trump has now threatened American lives, betrayed the country, our allies, the rule of law and made his bed – with Vladimir Putin – the end result will enrage the American population which should have brutal consequences for both the President and the Russian autocrat.

The post Trump-Russia Is Far More Serious Than You Ever Imagined appeared first on Narativ.

Sally Yates revealed much more than you’ve read at today’s Senate Judiciary Hearing. She revealed an attempt by President Trump to cover-up his administration’s ties to Russia. She may have lost her job for it, but she could save the Republic. 

Sally Yates had no way of knowing it would be her last day on the job when she picked up the phone to call the White House counsel first thing on a cold and snowy last Monday morning in January.  The acting Attorney-General had promised WH Counsel Don McGhan she’d arrange for him to view the “problematic” evidence the FBI had on the National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s connection to Russia. She had made those arrangements over the weekend and it was her first priority on Monday to finalize those plans.

McGhan didn’t return the call until much later that afternoon.  By 9 PM that Monday night, Yates had been fired, so we don’t know if McGhan ever followed up to view the evidence. In a press release that night, President Trump said she had “betrayed” the American people.

On the face of it, Yates’ betrayal was not related to the Flynn matter but her refusal to implement an unconstitutional executive order banning nationals from 7 mostly-Muslim countries from entering the US but the newly revealed Flynn timeline, may explain why she was given 2 minutes to vacate her job after learning about her dismissal via this aggressively worded press release.

During the previous week,  Yates made two extraordinary visits on consecutive days to meet with McGhan at the White House. She had vital information to share: the National Security Adviser was not only lying to the Vice-President but was susceptible to blackmail by Russia. Appearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee today, Yates outlined the timeline and content of the meetings.

“The first meeting occurred on January 26, I called Don McGahn  and told him that I had a very sensitive matter that I needed to discuss with him, that I couldn’t talk about it on the phone and that I needed to come see him. And he agreed to meet with me later that afternoon.”

McGhan’s office was a “skiff” – intelligence parlance for a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility”. In that secure location, Yates could share confidential information about the “problematic” FBI investigation into Flynn. Yates says she went into a great amount of detail about Flynn’s potentially illegal activities and revealed Russia was in a position to blackmail Flynn because they were in possession of the identical information. “We believed Flynn was compromised by the Russians,” Yates says.

The Russians likely had the identical information because the FBI obtained it during surveillance of Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.  The Washington Post would later report, Flynn was leaking sensitive information to Kislyak via phone and texts and illegally coordinating policy using this back channel to Russia’s most powerful envoy.  To make matters worse, Yates told McGhan, Flynn was lying to the Vice-President about it. She said action needed to be taken.

“We also told the White House Counsel that General Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI on January 24. Mr. McGahn asked me how he did and I declined to give him an answer to that. And we then walked through with Mr. McGahn essentially why we were telling them about this and the first thing we did was to explain to Mr. McGahn that the underlying conduct that General Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself,” Yates revealed today.

The following afternoon, Yates went back to McGahn’s office at the White House to answer 4 key questions. McGahn wanted to know why the Justice Department would care if one White House official was lying to another, even if it’s the National Security Adviser and the Vice-President? McGhan also wanted to know about the applicability of criminal statute to Flynn’s actions. He also asked if the White House acted, would it interfere with a current investigation and he requested to look at the underlying evidence. Yates said she would look into this and by Monday morning had arranged this request. Later that day, she had been fired.

It took 18 days for the president to act on Flynn.  He publicly defended his National Security Adviser’s unprecedented contacts with Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and only fired Flynn when the Washington Post obtained leaked documents revealing Flynn’s flagrant violations, even though he knew Flynn had lied to the Vice President and FBI investigators two and a half weeks earlier.

During those 18 days, Flynn participated in a call with Vladimir Putin, a dinner with the Japanese PM, was involved in national security matters related to North Korea and put Iran “on notice” for new sanctions.

Senator Al Franken at today’s hearings had this to say:

“Maybe, just maybe, he didn’t get rid of a guy who lied to the vice president, who got paid by the Russians, who went on Russia Today, because there are other people in his administration who met secretly with the Russians and didn’t reveal it until later, until they were caught. That may be why it took him 18 days, until it became public, to get rid of Mike Flynn, who is a danger to this republic.”

Flynn (and others) will be prosecuted for lying to the FBI, failing to disclose contacts with Russian officials under oath, failing to register as foreign agents and for failing to disclose payments from a foreign governments, among many other charges.

Sitting next to Yates at the Senate hearing today, the former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper sounded an alarm.

“If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundation of our democratic political system, this episode is it.”

Why did Trump say Sally Yates “betrayed” the US? How could he call her “weak on protecting our borders” when she was the one courageous enough to sound the alarm on a clear and present danger within his administration? How could he fail to act on this information until the Washington Post revealed it? And how long does it take for what he calls a “hoax” to turn into a cover-up? Not long, thanks to Sally Yates.

The post The Sally Effect appeared first on Narativ.

Unnamed sources say the FBI now has details of how the operation to elect Trump colluded with Russia to win. Here’s what to expect.

Back in the Spring of 2012, the campaign of the incumbent President of the US offered one lucky supporter a “Dinner with Barack”.  Not just any dinner, mind you. Dinner with former President Barack Obama was going to take place at the West Village Brownstone of Sarah Jessica Parker with the “Sex and the City” star and other celebrities in attendance.

This extraordinary intersection of pop culture and US political power was no accident. It was the result Obama’s extraordinary data machine figuring out that some his supporters had an affinity to certain celebrities, Jessica Parker among them. The dinner contest was just one example of how the Obama campaign utilized “big data” to galvanize support for the president in a way no other president had ever done before him.

To be fair, Facebook was only 4 years old when Obama was elected the first time, 8 years-old the second time around, so being first was good fortune as much as foresight.   But to his campaign’s credit, they realized social media was a way to upend the establishment and win an election. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” declared then campaign manager Jim Messina.

As President Obama took a victory lap for his wins in 2008 and 2012, a team of geeky data crunchers were doing their own high-fiving for their role in winning and re-winning the White House.  Time Magazine revealed this effort after the election in a story about how data won the election for Obama.

What they revealed was:

“a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”

Flash forward to 2016, and reality TV star and property mogul Donald J. Trump was eyeing the White House. As a “self-funded” campaign the billionaire was not utilizing much of his own cash to power his campaign but now it has emerged, he was relying heavily on a big data campaign of his own.  Not funded by his own wallet, but by the coffers of a foreign nation.

Trump had little to no celebrity support and he certainly wasn’t organized enough to build a date machine in the Obama mold but with Russia’s help he was able to create a data machine with impressive results. Central to their operation was a server housed at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The server, was described as “odd” by FBI investigators.  The server made regular check-ins with two other servers owned by Russia’s Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health.

Alfa Bank outwardly operates independently of the Kremlin but is largely believed to be a front operation for Vladimir Putin. Spectrum Health is a medical facility chain run by Dick DeVos, husband of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Brother-in-law to Erik Prince, The Blackwater CEO and Trump ally who is believed to have held a secret meeting in the Seychelles between UAE officials and Russia, on behalf of Trump.

“From May 4 until September 23, the Russian bank looked up the address to this Trump corporate server 2,820 times — more lookups than the Trump server received from any other source,” according to CNN. This accounted for 80% of connections to the server. The remaining 20% (714), were look-ups by Spectrum Health servers.

Now a few online bloggers, including Tea Pain and Conspirador have concluded that the server was reconciling a SQL databases – basically updating a giant spreadsheet of voter information, contact info and social media data so Trump and his Russian partners could spam, intimidate and influence the election.

This would be just like the Obama data machine only this time the data was illegally gotten by a foreign government.  Here’s a sample of the IP look-ups which has led analysts to believe what was going on here was a reconciliation of voters data.

The post Dial ‘C’ For Collusion appeared first on Narativ.

Washington is witnessing “the biggest scandal since Watergate”. President Donald J. Trump is dismissing it all as a “witch hunt” but that will not be enough to make it go away. 

Buried inside a CNN report with the headline “More Trump advisers disclose meetings with Russia’s ambassador” is this retelling by a former Trump adviser, J.D Gordon, of a meeting with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that occurred on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention which nominated President Donald J. Trump as their candidate in July last year. Also present at this meeting were advisers Carter Page and Walid Phares.

Gordon stressed to the Russian envoy that he would like to improve relations with Russia…Gordon had advocated for language in the GOP platform that the Ukrainians not be armed in their battle against pro-Russian separatists, an effort [which] was ultimately successful. But Gordon says he was simply advocating what Trump himself had expressed — that he did not wish to see major war break out over the situation in Ukraine.

The event in Cleveland on July 20, 2016, was billed as the Global Partners in Diplomacy program and was held at Case Western University and included some notable Trump officials, speaking on panels and a variety of diplomats from around the world. In that context, it’s not unusual several Trump officials broke off into side meetings. What should raise eyebrows is that the discussion with Kislyak revolved around language in the RNC platform which softened Republican opposition to Russia’s incursion into the Ukraine – the main reason sanctions against Russia exist.

Even more suspect, is that the meeting included Trump adviser Carter Page, who just 12 just or 13 days earlier allegedly met a key Putin ally in Moscow. The meeting is described in the dossier of compromising material collated by former Mi-6 spy Christopher Steele. Steele quotes a source alleging Page was offered a deal: one-fifth of Russia’s oil in exchange for the lifting of sanctions:

[Putin] was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page a 19% (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return. Page had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.

The context of that meeting may explain why Trump’s advisers were working overtime during the RNC to soften language in the party’s political platform on Ukraine. The original language in the RNC Platform was proposed by a Ted Cruz supporter, Diana Denman, and called for providing “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukrainians fighting Russian-backed rebels.  It read, in part:

“Today, the post-Cold War ideal of a ‘Europe whole and free’ is being severely tested by Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine. The Ukrainian people deserve our admiration and support in their struggle.”

“I was troubled when they put aside my amendment and then watered it down,” Denman told the Washington Post. “I said, ‘What is your problem with a country that wants to remain free?’ It seems like a simple thing.”  The final amendment adopted by the convention dropped the words “lethal defensive weapons” in favor of “appropriate assistance”.

All of this, in concert with Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s private citizen diplomacy with ambassador Kislyak, promising a roll-back of sanctions just as President Obama imposed them and revelations Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner also had meetings with Kislyak, can only lead you to one conclusion. Trump officials were working behind the scenes to create a less hostile environment against Russia and were planning to not only drop their support for Ukrainian independence, but also intended to work towards dropping sanctions against Russia.

What isn’t yet proven but is surely the most important question for the Trump administration is this: Was there a deal struck in exchange for this unprecedented effort? More importantly, what did President Trump know and when did he know it?

It’s entirely plausible that  Trump was merely trying to avoid “a world war 3” over Ukraine, but it’s hard to simply discard the Steele Dossier allegations that a monetary deal was struck. Especially, since one month after Trump was elected, 19.5% of Rosneft was sold off to an unknown shell company, just as Steele had alleged it would be in his dossier.

What also needs to be investigated is the enormous effort by both Russia and the Trump administration to cover-up the trail of evidence. Former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn lied and lost his job. Former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Mannafort was fired for his connections with Russia. Carter Page was dismissed from the campaign for his ties to Russia. Now, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been caught lying about his meeting with the Russian ambassador. While President Trump, continues to offer public support for these men, decrying a “witch hunt” it seems logical, he soon will have to account for the meetings and the cover up.

On the Russian side, 6 senior diplomats have died mysteriously in the last 4 months, one key source of the Steele dossier, an ex-KGB General is dead, and 4 alleged US spies have been arrested by the Kremlin for treason in Russia. While conspiracy theories abound, it seems at least possible, Putin is covering the tracks of his operation to destalbalize the US elections.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Trump’s ties to Russia is “the most serious scandal since Watergate and I don’t say that as any form of exaggeration or hyperbole.” The drip, drip, drip is taking down Trump’s key men, and it won’t be long before the the rising waters reach the Oval Office. Trump should act quickly to reveal what he knows or he’ll be in danger of being swept away, too.

The post What Did Trump Know and When Did He Know It? appeared first on Narativ.

Amidst all the squabbling about numbers, are we missing what’s really going on in our country?

The idyllic 90’s alt rock-band, “Counting Crows” is best known for its catchy hit “Mr Jones.” You know the one? “Sha, la, la, la, la, la, la”? The Crows took flight in an era of ironically worn lumberjack shirts and work boots set against a soundtrack of “Nirvana” and a backdrop of the Gulf War and AIDS. The band took its name from an old English nursery rhyme which dates back to the early 1800’s about predicting the future by counting the number of magpies, or crows, which crossed your path.

“One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told, eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, ten for a time of joyous bliss,” the rhyme goes. Of course, there’s no actual basis for this type of prophecy, but in an unsure time, when science and logic weren’t plentiful, counting crows was a good a method, as any, of predicting the future.

As the 45th president of the United States was being sworn in on Friday, we were all aflutter over a different count. This time we were counting attendance as if it foretold a President’s success. How many people showed up? Counting crowds, not crows, is the fashion of the day.

One concludes that democracy is alive and well in the Republic, but all is not well. Crows are symbolic harbingers of change in many of the world’s mythologies, and it struck me, amid all the squabbling over numbers, we may be missing ours. So just for a minute, let’s put aside the partisan squabbling, and look at what President Trump is doing that many would agree on –  even Bernie Sanders.

To be sure, Trump’s inauguration address, was dark. After 8 years of remarkable hope and progress under President Barack Obama, the idea of America as a dystopian wasteland littered with empty “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” is hard to fathom, but it’s as true as the remarkable legacy of the outgoing president.

While America has prospered and our standard of living has improved, free trade has filled our homes and stores with cheap Chinese goods but it has also come at a cost – ripping out our nation’s heart. It has robbed us of a vibrant industrial sector, left hundreds of thousands in poverty and created an epidemic killing Americans at an alarming rate. Mostly in states in the middle of the country. States Trump won. States you need to win to be president.

How did we get here?  Ask any two economists whether global trade costs US jobs, and you’re likely to get an argument. Economists, like crows, are not always accurate foretellers of things to come.

The US runs large trade deficits with almost every one of our trading partners – 90%, to be sure. The largest deficits are with China, Mexico, Japan and Germany.  The U.S.-Mexico trade balance, for example,  swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014. Economists will argue endlessly about the cause and effect of NAFTA, but while modernization has made up for some of those lost jobs, the economy in parts of the country have been obliterated.

Mexico’s deficit pales in comparison to China’s $318 billion, “The deficit is five times bigger, says Wharton’s Mauro Guillen. For every job we have lost in the U.S. to Mexico, five [jobs] were lost to China.”

Respected economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson published a study last year called “The China Shock” analyzing the cost to Americans of China’s trade explosion.  They found, “wages and labor-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated” a decade after China’s global trade boom.

You’re not at fault for not knowing this. No-one reports it. It’s easier to count crowds than actually travel to Idaho to show a rusted factory. Anyone who has worked in a network newsroom, as I have, will tell you if it can’t be reported in the Tri-State region, it rarely gets coverage. Consequently, the networks have missed what’s been going on in the rust belt. The people who elected President Trump are not all racists, misogynist or narrow-minded people the media would like you to think.  They are our fellow Americans crying out for work.

Yes, the unemployment rate is at an all time low but it doesn’t tell the whole story Basically, if you’re not getting unemployment help, you don’t get counted. In most cases, government insurance lasts 26 weeks. If you’ve run out of insurance, you’re considered out of the labor force. Consequently, almost a quarter of 25-54 year olds (the prime working years) are not working and the labor participation rate is down 4%, from 66% in 2006 to 62% now.

Along with this jobs flight, a despondent and disheartened population has turned to drugs. The Opioid crisis in the heartland is out of control. 55,403 people died from drug overdoses in 2015, more than guns or car crashes. The second biggest killer, suicides, are also up. (For white men aged 35-64 suicides are up 40% between 1999-2010.) Families have been broken apart, children left homeless, dreams shattered.

When President Donald J. Trump talks of “neighborhoods blighted by crime, drugs and gangs,” he is not wrong.  Whether it’s drugs, suicides or malaise, America’s white uneducated men are dying at increasing rate. Since 1999, the number of deaths of middle-aged, uneducated white American men has increased 22%, while dropping for other demographics.

This is not a moral issue, it’s economics. Restarting a pointless war on drugs with draconian measures and incarceration will reinforce a cycle of suffering. If President Trump brings purpose and jobs back to the heartland, he’ll stem the crisis, as Portugal did when it decriminalized drugs and invested in jobs (The number of overdose deaths plummeted to among the lowest in the EU).

We are witnessing the rise of the Precariat, as British economist Guy Standing calls it. “A multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them.”

This week, President Trump will meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May.  She leads a country which, like ours, is moving away from large economic unions. Brexit is Trump for the same reasons. A disconnect between the elite and the middle class in the middle of the country. Trump and May will likely forge a new type of economic union which encourages what she describes as an “active industrial strategy” or bringing manufacturing back home.

Yesterday, Trump withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership and is promising to renegotiate NAFTA. He’s threatening to increased tariffs, reduce corporate taxation and slash regulation (worryingly at the EPA if it hurts the environment). It may not work, but it’s the best plan America’s heartland has heard for a long time.

The Counting Crows imagine a better world in “Mr. Jones” as they sing about a different time with equally despairing prospects.

“Believe in me because I don’t believe in anything
and I want to be someone to believe.”

Trump is not perfect, and untested in public life, but he has responded to a yearning cry from our fellow Americans who are suffering. If this was happening in other parts of the world, our compassion would stir us to action. Yes, we have to be watchful of allowing the new administration to roll back rights, enter thoughtless wars for enrichment or cozy up to corrupt dictators but we’d be hurting our brothers and sisters if we didn’t seek to help them now as they try to bring their lives back. What could be more American than that?

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After years of unprecedented support for LGBT rights under President Barack Obama, gay activists are unnerved at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. Should they be?

Well before Donald J. Trump was hiring an apprentice on his NBC show of the same name, he was an “apprentice” himself – to one of the most feared lawyers in America. Roy Cohn was gay but he did not share the modern-day liberal values of the gay movement.

Cohn was famously fictionalized by Tony Kushner in “Angels in America”, as a self-loathing, power-hungry hypocrite who is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he lies dying of AIDS.

“I hear Roy in the things [Trump] says quite clearly,” said Peter Fraser, Cohn’s lover for the last two years of his life. “That bravado, and if you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth — that’s the way Roy used to operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice.”

Cohn was born February 20, 1927, in New York City, and grew up in Manhattan. His father, Albert, was a justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. At 21, he was hired by the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, after graduating from Columbia Law School at twenty.

In 1951, Cohn’s interrogation of a witness at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, sent the couple to the electric chair. Two years later, Cohn became chief legal counsel to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis) during the torrid days of communist-hunting that bore the Senator’s name.

After McCarthy was condemned and Cohn faced charges, he left politics and started his private practice in Manhattan. It’s there he met a young Donald J. Trump and began molding his protege into a real-estate mogul. In the heady 70’s Cohn and Trump were inseparable as friends – Cohn introduced Trump to New York’s elite. They plotted together, celebrated birthdays together and spent nights partying together at the famed Studio 54. The relationship was close and complicated.

Cohn’s sexual identity was a closely guarded secret but Trump was one of the handful of people who knew Cohn was gay. When Trump married Ivana, it was Cohn who insisted on the pre-nup. The Trumps frequently hosted Cohn and Fraser at Trump Towers.

In 1986, Cohn was disbarred for “unethical,” “unprofessional” and “particularly reprehensible” conduct. He died of AIDS in August of that year, though until his end, he insisted it was liver cancer. Trump summed up his former friend in one word, “loyalty”.

Their friendship conveys Trump has no personal prejudice against gays. In the tradition of his mentor, he has never believed LGBT rights deserves public utterance or broad protections – except for basic anti-discrimination legislation. Those openly gay and lesbian men and women who’ve worked with Trump, describe a man who shows no hostility to LGBT staffers

“First of all, I live in New York. I know many, many gay people. Tremendous people. And to be honest with you, as far as civil unions are concerned, I haven’t totally formed my opinion. But there can be no discrimination against gays,” Trump said in 2011.

The president-elect’s personal principles however, haven’t stopped him from hiring operatives who’ve grown up in the anti-gay movement and there are no out gay or lesbian members of his cabinet.

Communications czar, Kelly-anne Conway, found her national profile as a spokesperson for the National Organization for Marriage – an anti-gay marriage lobby group. Trump’s Chief Strategist, Stephen Bannon urged his writers to take anti-gay stances when he presided over Breitbart News. He even allowed them to use terms like “faggot” in a derogatory way. Trump’s VP, Mike Pence’s anti-gay positions during his term as Indiana Governor is the stuff of legend. Trump’s attorney-general appointee, Senator Jeff Sessions, is opposed to the expansion of hate crimes to include LGBT victims. Then there’s, Dr Ben Carson, who once said: “a lot of people … go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay”.

Alarmingly, as the President-elect ushers in a new administration, there are those who hope his new cabinet will launch a cleansing of some US departments which have turned gay rights into a policy of foreign activism.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a Trump supporter, said recently, “the incoming administration needs to make clear that these liberal policies will be reversed and the ‘activists’ within the State Department promoting them will be ferreted out and will be replaced by conservatives who will ensure the State Department focuses on true international human rights like religious liberty which is under unprecedented assault.”

Not everyone in Trump’s circle is openly hostile to gay rights. Founders Fund chief and PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, was a key contributor to the campaign and also received a highly coveted speaker position during the GOP National Convention. The first time in 16 years a gay person was given such a platform.

“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom,” Thiel told the Convention in Cleveland. “This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”

Trump himself dismissed his personal views on the topic as irrelevant during an interview with 60 Minutes. He told Lesley Stahl, he did not support reversing the historic Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage. “It’s done,” he said. “These cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And I’m — I’m fine with that,” he said.

Despite filling his cabinet with socially conservative appointees, gay rights have been one notable exception to Trump’s “go back to the old days” strategy. In fact, the President-elect had done what no Republican president has ever done. A week before the election, Trump held up a rainbow flag with the words “LGBT for Trump” written on it to a cheering crowd of thousands in Colorado. No other Republican Presidential nominee in history has embraced the LGBT community in that way.

Trump is not the first Republican President to privately support gay rights. Ronald Reagan, who is broadly criticized for his failed handling of the AIDS crisis, was privately non-judgmental of homosexuality.

In 2003, Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, wrote in a Time magazine her father explained homosexuality to her while watching a Rock Hudson movie on TV in the 60’s.  He told her, certain men, like Rock, were more interested in kissing men than women. Davis recalls the exchange in a completely positive, non-judgmental way. Like the Trumps, the Reagans had close gay friends throughout their lives, including their years in Washington.

One has to wonder, did the years with Cohn soften Trump’s stance or did political expediency suggest LGBT rights were not a battle worth picking in a year where every vote counted? Maybe both. Relative to the extraordinary advances under President Obama, Trump’s positions are prosaic at best, but he could be the most pro-LGBT Republican presidents in recent history.

The post How ‘Gay’ is Donald Trump? appeared first on Narativ.

How Vladimir Putin’s ‘Kremlin, Inc.’ is pulling the levers of power in the next White House and why President-elect Donald J. Trump doesn’t mind.

To understand the relationship, we need to understand how Putin rules. The Russian President controls his country through his party, the congress (Duma) and the liberal civil service which oversee the day-to-day operation of the government. He also wields power through a handful of Russian billionaires, commonly referred to as “the oligarchs” or as one Russian magazine calls them, “Kremlin, Inc.” As a unit, they represent one fifth of Russia’s annual economic output.

Putin inherited the oligarch system from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Under Putin, the faces have changed and power has been consolidated but its vast control over all of Russia’s key industries remains. He is the undisputed Chairman who blesses any deal made by the oligarchs and retains the right to hire and fire any oligarch at any time.

The Russian President meets with his heads of business often, either at regular evening parties at his dacha in Barvikha, West of Moscow, or at his Black Sea home, near Sochi. While Putin still controls the day to day operations of the government, he largely exerts power through the oligarchs, often using the companies as foreign policy instruments of power, as he did with Gazprom in the Ukraine.

Trump’s Secretary of State appointee and outgoing ExxonMobil CEO, Rex Tillerson’s relationship with Putin goes back almost two decades. Tillerson has been jockeying for power in Putin’s inner circle since. His break came in 2012, in an apparent coup of Russia’s oil industry co-ordinated with Putin’s Energy Tsar and ally, Sergei Sechin.

At the time, Russia’s oil output was controlled by two entities, state-controlled Rosneft and privately-held TNK-BP (a joint-venture between British Petroleum and a group of oligarchs led by Mikhael Fridman).

At this point, it may be useful to give you a bit of history on Mikhael Fridman. Forbes ranks him as Russia’s second richest man, valued at more than $15.3 Bn dollars. In the years following the demise of the USSR, he went from owning a window washing company to purchasing a biscuit factory and then, with his friends, launched Alfa Bank. He recruited Pyotr Aven, a Russian insider who back in the 90’s was able to help Vladimir Putin avoid corruption charges in the St. Petersburg government. Fridman climbed the ranks and was an undisputed oligarch at “Kremlin, Inc.”

As the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia once ruled, after considering a libel suit filed by the bankers, “Aven and Fridman have assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation.”

Fridman was at once a Moscow insider and a thorn in Putin’s side. As TNK-BP was unraveling, Fridman and his partner began to lose influence at “Kremlin, Inc.” One former Alfa Bank employee recalled a ceremony a decade ago at which Putin awarded Aven a government honor. In typical Putin style, he couldn’t resist a wry remark as he presented the award.

Putin: “Remind me, why am I giving this to you?”
Aven: “Because I haven’t done anything you can put me in jail for.”
Putin: “No, not yet.”

In 2012, Fridman resigned as TNK-BP’s CEO, after falling out with his British partners and Putin. BP began looking elsewhere for access to the Russian market, and found it in a deal with state-controlled Rosneft to develop the prized Arctic resources in Russia – but Fridman blocked the deal.

Enter ExxonMobil Chief Executive and now Secretary of State appointee, Rex Tillerson. He threw Exxon’s weight into the Arctic deal and won it in exchange for Rosneft’s access to energy projects in the US and globally. For his work, Tillerson was awarded the Order of Friendship by Putin – one of Russia’s highest honors. He was now firmly entrenched in Putin’s oligarch circle of power at “Kremlin Inc.” Fridman was on his way out.

Mr Putin – who presided over the deal signing at his Black Sea resort – called it one of the most important deals involving Russia and the US, potentially valued at $500 Bn. The deal was subsequently killed by President Obama’s sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Ukraine. As many have noted, the lifting of Russian sanctions will not only stand to enrich Exxon, it also gives Russia a substantial stake in the global oil market including, in the US.

In 2013, Rosneft consolidated its hold over the Russian oil industry. They bought out the oligarch’s share of TNK-BP for $27BN in a $55 Bn cash and stock deal, again presided over by Vladimir Putin – this time at his mansion outside Moscow. The deal made the state-run company one of the world’s largest producer of oil.

After the collapse of TNK-BP, Fridman and his co-horts left Russia, distancing themselves from Putin and have been left largely unaffected by US sanctions. In October, Slate magazine published an article citing well-regarded cyber-security sources who uncovered what they say is an unusual regular server connection between Alfa Bank and Trump Towers.

Which brings us to Carter Page – President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s now ex-foreign affairs advisor and point-man on all things Moscow. While fashioning himself as a foreign affairs analyst, his roots are as an investment advisor with a mixed track record in Russia.

In March, Trump listed Page as one of his top foreign affairs advisers when he spoke to the Washington Post Editorial Board but by July, Trump’s team was at pains to point out that he is not a representative of the campaign.

Page may no longer represent Trump, but he remains an advisor to sanctions-targeted Gazprom, run by another of Putin’s oligarchs, Alexey Miller.  Gazprom, is the crown jewel of Putin’s resource companies at “Kremlin, Inc.” The gas corporation has been heavily affected by US sanctions, yet Page has been involved in some of its biggest deals – including the development of The Sakhalin Oil And Gas Field. Gazprom’s former deputy CFO is now an official adviser to Page’s firm, Global Energy Capital LLC.

Gazprom is more than just a gas company, it is a Russian instrument of foreign policy and power. It was Gazprom that shut off gas to its biggest and most lucrative customers during the military incursion into Crimea. The company maintains a private army, employs a half million people and runs entire cities around Russia. Gazprom’s Alexey Miller has also hosted Secretary of State appointee Rex Tillerson in public forums.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov says, “although Gazprom is an international corporation, the largest shareholder is the Russian state. There is nothing strange in the fact that the relationship between the government and Gazprom is really very close.”  In, 2001, Gazprom, led a forceful takeover of NTV, a popular television channel that was openly critical of the government.

In July this year, Carter Page – still acting as a Trump adviser – met with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, and Igor Diveykin, a high–ranking Russian intelligence official.

The meeting alarmed Washington’s intelligence community and outgoing Democratic Senator Harry Reid, who scribed a letter to FBI Director James Comey asking, “whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interest due to investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July of 2016, well after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee?”

Page has denied the meeting took place calling the accusations, “absolute garbage” but regardless of whether the meeting took place or not, Trump’s advisor has been very vocal about President Obama’s policy of exporting American values.

Page recently told the New Economic School in Moscow, “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change.”

In February 2015, Page described the West as “football team bullies” citing “condescending mistreatment” of Russia, Iran and China. He likened the treatment of these nations to the treatment of slaves and blamed the US for spurring “economic disaster” in Russia and Ukraine.

Now Senator Reid, is calling on FBI Director James Comey to be investigated, comparing him to another famed Bureau Chief with political ambitions. “I did not believe Comey was the new J. Edgar Hoover,” Senator Reid said. “I thought that he would do the right thing for the country.”

So, what we know is that Trump is now indirectly connected to at least two of the biggest oligarchs in Russia. His Secretary of State appointee, Rex Tillerson is one of Putin’s closest non-Russian friends and tied directly to business deals with Rosneft CEO Sechin. Trump’s ex-advisor, Carter Page, reportedly met Sechin in July and  is also an investment advisor to another oligarch, Alexey Miller of Gazprom.

Retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for National Security Adviser is also connected to Putin. Flynn appears regularly on the Kremlin sponsored English language cable news network RT. Flynn flew to Moscow last year for RT’s gala and sat with Putin.

Then there’s John Bolton, who is being touted as a potential Deputy Foreign Secretary. Bolton is connected to the group of oil oligarchs and to Dick Cheney but that’s a story for another day.

And if you’ve been keeping score, Trump’s former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, worked as an adviser to Viktor Yanukovych, who was Putin’s puppet president of Ukraine.

There’s another factor driving a deep connection between Trump and Putin and that is liquid cash. While his net-worth is estimated at $3 Bn, his debt has climbed from $350M last year to $650 m this year. To finance this ballooning line-item, Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia because US banks have mostly black-balled Trump.

According the Washington Post, “since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump isn’t denying his appreciation of all things Putin. It’s his calculation that closer ties with Moscow are a benefit to Washington. He believes America’s policy of advancing human rights ahead of economic benefit is working against US interests. In a Trump world, anything that advances the country’s power is worth the price of doing business – even if it’s with autocratic rulers with a poor human rights record.

It should be noted, Putin’s aggressive stance on US politics comes at a time when sanctions have left him with a large deficit. Last week on Wednesday, the state sold off a 19% stake in Rosneft to Swiss Commodity firm, Glencore, with a sovereign wealth fund in Qatar as secondary funders. The $11 Bn dollar deal will help Kremlin pay for the growing deficit but it won’t turn the tables on the US.

Putin is betting “Kremlin, Inc.” can do that with its new ally in the West, President-elect Donald J. Trump. With Tillerson at State and Flynn as National Security Adviser, Putin will have direct influence over world affairs and the country’s military strategy, potentially working around the President-elect. This would represent an unparalleled intrusion into the most important levers of foreign influence and give Putin unprecedented power to not only benefit Russia, but to exert pressure on any nation on the planet.

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