Goldstone – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Natalia Veselnitskaya was no stranger, she was important to Trump’s business

David Posnett — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 19:41:18 +0000

Posted on Daily Kos

Tuesday Jul 11, 2017 · 2:25 PM EDT

Sean Hannity’s name may rhyme with sanity, but Donald Trump’s favorite Fox has never been the poster boy for rationality. As the dominoes have started falling ever faster in the Trump–Russia scandal, Hannity has been bouncing all over the place in a storm of twisted logic, misplaced sarcasm, and desperate attempts at misdirection. But in the middle of this Hanni-cane, he actually dropped a line that’s … interesting.

“Why did the Obama administration let [the lawyer] into the country in 2016?” he asked.

Good question. And there’s a good answer.

Natalia Veselnitskaya did not mark up her visa application with “coming to America to give Donald Trump high-level information straight from the Kremlin.” Which, considering the stealth that Trump Junior displayed at the other end of the pipeline, is really rather surprising. Instead, Veselnitskaya’s official reason for coming to the United States really did have to do with the Magnitsky Act. Not lobbying against the act, but acting as an attorney in a lawsuit against a Russian company accused of money-laundering for the mob.

The specific case in question here is against Prevezon Holdings Ltd., a Cyprus-registered company.

How did Prevezon Holding supposedly move mob money into the United States? By snapping up expensive condos and other real estate. And who was it that Veselnitskaya had come to fight after she made her pitch to Donald Trump Junior?

U. S. District Attorney Preet Bharara.

In March, Donald Trump fired Bharara even though he had previously assured the US attorney that he would be staying to complete current cases.

Mr. Bharara was a highly public prosecutor who relished the spotlight throughout more than seven years in office. He pursued several high-profile cases involving Wall Street, and he was in the midst of investigating fund-raising by Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, and preparing to try former top aides to the governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, who are both Democrats. It was not immediately clear how his departure would affect those cases and others that were pending.

But Trump’s desire to get Bharara out of his office was unlikely to have anything to do with his willingness to go after Democratic targets as well as those on the right. Before his firing, Trump tried to make the same moves to secure the attorney’s loyalty that he had also made toward former FBI director James Comey.

“It appeared to be that he was trying to cultivate some kind of relationship [with me],” he told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, citing several chummy phone calls that Trump tried to initiate with him. “It’s a very weird and peculiar thing for a one-on-one conversation without the attorney general, without warning, between the president and me or any United States attorney who has been asked to investigate various things and is in a position hypothetically to investigate business interests and associates of the president.”

But Donald Trump’s personal attorney has openly bragged that he was the one who told Trump to sack Bharara … for a very specific reason.

According to four sources that spoke to ProPublica, Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s personal lawyer and his primary counsel on matters related to the Russia investigation, had bragged that he was largely responsible for getting the U.S. attorney for New York’s Southern District fired. “This guy is going to get you,” Kasowitz recalled saying to Trump, according to one of the sources.

The connection between Bharara’s cases and Trump–Russia wasn’t immediately obvious. But Bharara hinted heavily that he had been ousted to close down a investigation of corruption related to Trump.

Until now, the case didn’t seem to be a peek into corruption inside the Trump regime. But with the spotlight now falling on Natalia Veselnitskaya, the actions of Prevezon Holdings Ltd are coming squarely to the center. Prevezon appears to be yet another holding company created expressly for the purpose of turning Russian mob money into American real estate in deals that allow oligarchs to clean their stolen funds and US real estate moguls to pocket fat profits. Deals exactly like those Trump is known to have used to escape bankruptcy.

When Donald Trump Jr. says that Veselnitskaya came to his office to discuss “adoption,” what he means is that she wanted to discuss the Magnitsky Act. And that discussion not only reflects on the US sanctions and blacklisting of Russian officials that resulted from the act, it directly plays into the Russian use of US real estate for money-laundering. Which was something Trump Jr. knew very, very well.

“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, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

So even the part of the conversation that Donald Trump Jr. has been passing off as “inane nonsense” was actually directly related to his business, and directly related to an investigation that Trump was anxious to see closed.

One more thing. No matter how many times Trump Jr. pretended to not know who Veselnitskaya was in his statements [Twitter page omitted] Emin Agalarov was more than just someone Trump Jr. had met during the Miss Universe pageant. He was a key contact for the Trump Organization, and their partner on potential deals in Moscow. Natalia Veselnitskaya was also clearly someone other than the nameless woman who showed up to give Trump Jr. a talk he didn’t want to hear. Both of them go right back to the core of Trump’s business—which was money laundering.

If all of this is making the world seem pretty small … it’s because it’s all connected. And the center of that connection is Donald Trump.

New details emerge on Moscow real estate deal that led to the Trump-Kremlin alliance

David Posnett — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:11:21 +0000

Remember when Trump disavowed any business dealings with anyone in Russia? Someone found a thread to pull…

Michael Isikoff

Yahoo News July 11, 2017

View photos

Donald Trump, Aras Agalarov and Rob Goldstone. (Photos: Sean Gallup/Getty Images; Sergei SavostyanovTASS via Getty Images; Adriel Reboh/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

While in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in November 2013, Donald Trump entered into a formal business deal with Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, to construct a Trump Tower in the Russian capital. He later assigned his son, Donald Trump Jr., to oversee the project, according to Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who arranged the controversial 2016 meeting between the younger Trump and a Kremlin-linked lawyer.

Trump has dismissed the idea he had any business deals in Russia, saying at one point last October, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

But Goldstone’s account, provided in an extensive interview in March in New York, offers new details of the proposed Trump project that appears to have been further along than most previous reports have suggested, and even included a trip by Ivanka Trump to Moscow to identify potential sites.

According to the publicist, the project — structured as a licensing deal in which Agalarov would build the tower with Trump’s name on it — was only abandoned after the Russian economy floundered. The economic downturn resulted in part from sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

Goldstone’s version of events implies a possible explanation for Trump’s interest in lifting sanctions on Russia — a policy move his administration quietly pursued in its first few weeks until it ran into strong opposition from members of Congress and officials within the State Department.

Goldstone placed Donald Trump Jr. at the center of the Trump Tower deal, saying that his father assigned his eldest son the job of moving the project to fruition after the signing of a “letter of intent” between the Trump Organization and Agalarov’s company, the Crocus Group. It is not clear if the future president personally signed the “letter of intent,” but Michael Cohen, a longtime lawyer for Trump, told Yahoo News Tuesday that it would have been standard practice for Trump, as president of the Trump Organization, to do so.

Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 18, 2016. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Goldstone also said that Ivanka Trump flew to Moscow in 2014 and met with Emin Agalarov, the oligarch’s son, a pop singer and a vice president of the Crocus Group, to identify sites for the project.

Trump “put Donald Jr. in charge and then Ivanka went to Moscow to look around for what the location would be,” Goldstone said. But the plans for a Trump Tower fell apart because “the economy tanked in Russia’’ after the imposition of Western sanctions, he said.

Goldstone, a British-born publicist who once did worked for Michael Jackson, represents Emin Agalarov in his music career and was present in Moscow during the Miss Universe pageant when the Trump Tower project was discussed by Trump and Aras Agalarov. His role has gotten new attention this week after the New York Times disclosed that Goldstone emailed Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 urging him to meet with a Russian lawyer to receive damaging information from the Russian government about Hillary Clinton.

Trump Jr. released his email exchange with Goldstone on Tuesday, confirming the key role of the publicist and, more significantly, the Agalarovs, in offering negative information about Clinton on behalf of the Kremlin. “Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote Trump Jr. on June 3, 2016.

A chief prosecutor in Russia “offered to provide the Trump campaign some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and would be very useful to your father. This is very high-level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin.”

Alan Garten, the chief lawyer for the Trump Organization, did not respond to requests for comment. In a telephone interview, Cohen, who is Trump’s personal lawyer, did not dispute any specific details of Goldstone’s account but offered to check them. He did not later respond. But Cohen adamantly rejected the idea there was anything improper about meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, given that Trump Jr. was told she might have information helpful to Trump’s campaign. “The purpose of the election is to win,” said Cohen, adding, “Why is this any different?” than the unverified “dossier” on Trump’s ties to Russia prepared by a former British spy working for a Washington research firm hired by his political opponents.

Trump Jr., accompanied by then campaign manager Paul Manafort and senior adviser Jared Kushner, met with the Russian lawyer at Goldstone’s request to review the information she purported to have. “He met with her face-to-face to determine” the validity of the advertised documents and “no information was provided.”

Goldstone had played a key role in helping to broker the initial decision by the Miss Universe pageant — then owned by the Trump Organization and NBC — to hold its 2013 contest in Moscow.

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According to Goldstone, he pitched the idea to Paula Schugart, then chief executive of Miss Universe, as a way to promote the music career of Emin Agalarov. Schugart was initially hesitant because of concerns about red tape in Moscow. “What if you had a partner who owns the biggest venue in Moscow?” Emin Agalarov responded, according to Goldstone’s account. “Between myself and my father, we can cut through the red tape. You have a new partner.”

The plans to bring Miss Universe to Moscow was announced by Trump in Las Vegas in June 2013 during the Miss USA contest. Trump at the time quickly expressed hope that it would lead to a meeting with Putin. “Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump had tweeted at the time.

A meeting with Putin never came off during Trump’s Moscow trip; the Kremlin expressed regret that the Russian president wouldn’t be able to fit it into his schedule on the day in question because he had a meeting with the King of Holland. But the trip gave Trump an opportunity to discuss the plans for the Trump Tower in Moscow with Agalarov, a billionaire who has been called “the Trump of Russia” and “Putin’s builder” because of massive construction projects he has done on behalf of the Kremlin. Just 10 days before the Miss Universe pageant, Putin had given Agalarov a prestigious award at a ceremony at the Kremlin: Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.

In an interview with Forbes this March, Emin Agalarov confirmed the plans for Trump Tower in Moscow. “We thought that building a Trump Tower next to an Agalarov tower — having the two big names — could be a really cool project to execute,” Emin Agalarov told the magazine. Agalarov blamed the abandonment of the project on Trump’s decision to run for president, rather than the imposition of sanctions. “He ran for president, so we dropped the idea,” Agalarov said. “But if he hadn’t run, we would probably be in the construction phase today.”

But Emin Agalarov said he and the now president have continued to stay in touch, saying that Trump sent a handwritten note to the Agalaovs in November after they congratulated him on his victory. “Now that he ran and was elected, he does not forget his friends.”