russia – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

There is a Bear in the Woods

David Posnett — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 21:37:51 +0000

From Bryan Erwin. T.A.S.C.

I have exciting news.

Now, we have our first ad.

We are running this ad starting tomorrow.

We based it on the famous Reagan “Bear in the Woods” ad from 1984. We even got the same narrator! (Different bear though-ha!)

We are hoping this gets attention and goes viral.

Please support TASC if you believe in the mission and want to see more ads like this:

www.takeactionsuffolk.org

our ad:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qc00fumt8hzyuro/THERE_IS_A_BEAR_R1%20YOUTUBE%20SPEC.mp4?dl=0

based on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpwdcmjBgNA

Glenn Simpson Transcript: Summary

David Posnett — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 05:32:58 +0000

Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Thomson Reuters

One of us has actually read the Glenn Simpson transcript! Mr. Simpson is the man behind an explosive dossier — produced at his firm, Fusion GPS, with a former British spy, Christopher Steele — outlining possible connections between the president, his associates and Russian officials.

John Tepper Marlin reports:

Here is a guide of what is actually in the transcript released by Diane Feinstein!

It’s very readable. It covers some of the same ground as the book Fire & Fury, but it is much more scientifically sound.

Here are a couple of notes I took:

Pages 1-66 – groundwork for the interview

Page 67 – Felix Sater (not mentioned again) and other Russians.

Page 68 – Prevezon, mentioned again p 136

Page 70 – Trump seemed to be okay with organized crime, Italian or Russian (very different)

Page 71 – Trump claims to be poor on his tax forms for federal state and local govts.

Page 73 – Law suit in Scotland revealing

Page 77 – Trump gets its goods for its branded products from sweatshops

Pages 80-95 – Chris Steele, what he reported, old MI5 hand.

Pages 96-136 – Lots of Russians. One after the other.

The entire document is 311 pages!

You can also read the whole thing here.

Or you can use the New York Times interactive version here.

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

By Mark Sumner

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.

View photos

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.”

This is what kleptocracy looks like

David Posnett — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 15:03:58 +0000

Trump, Arif and Sater, at right, Trump Soho launch party, 2007 Photographer: Mark Von Holden/WireImage

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is looking at “suspicious financial activity” involving “Russian operatives.” Bloomberg’s Timothy L. O’Brien reports that the other shoe to drop may involve “a troubling history of Trump’s dealings with Russians exists outside of Russia: in a dormant real-estate development firm, the Bayrock Group, which once operated just two floors beneath the president’s own office in Trump Tower.” O’Brien writes that “one of Bayrock’s principals was a career criminal named Felix Sater who had ties to Russian and American organized crime groups. Before linking up with the company and with Trump, he had worked as a mob informant for the US government, fled to Moscow to avoid criminal charges while boasting of his KGB and Kremlin contacts there, and had gone to prison for slashing apart another man’s face with a broken cocktail glass.” Lots of other shady details at the link.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-21/trump-russia-and-those-shadowy-sater-deals-at-bayrock

Smirnoff mocks Trump’s Russia scandals in new ad

David Posnett — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 15:54:30 +0000

AUTHOR

Emma Liem @emma_liem

PUBLISHED ON FOOD DIVE

June 13, 2017

Dive Brief:

Vodka maker Smirnoff released an outdoor ad campaign that mocks the Trump administration’s alleged collusion with the Russian government, according to Adweek. The ad, which sparked a wave of social media buzz, features an image of the iconic Smirnoff bottle with the text: “Made in America. But we’d be happy to talk about our ties to Russia under oath.”
The ad alludes to President Trump’s recent claims that he will testify to Congress under oath about a special prosecutor’s probe into accusations that Russia influenced the 2016 election in his favor.
Smirnoff vodka dates back to an 1860s Moscow distillery, but is now part of British-based global beverage maker Diageo. Today’s Smirnoff vodka is distilled at a Diageo facility in Plainfield, Illinois.

Dive Insight:

In the aftermath of a divisive election and in the midst of a controversial, scandal-ridden presidency, brands may be tempted to distance themselves from the political sphere for fear of alienating valuable consumers. Ignoring consumers’ feelings toward today’s politics could be a risky move, however, as this could cause people to view some brands as out of touch.

Russell Zack, senior vice president of products and solutions at HelloWorld, told Food Dive that in today’s marketplace, brands can’t afford to be completely apolitical.

“Brands who have a global audience really do need to make a statement about where they stand politically, and you’re seeing those big global brands like Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola make those statements — most of which are about inclusion,” Zack said. “There’s also so much consumer choice out there, so brands need to be very clear about their position in the world.”

Smirnoff’s ad campaign deftly makes light of an issue that is plaguing both sides of the political spectrum, though it will likely be interpreted as anti-Trump by some consumers. It’s important for brands to have a deep understanding of the behavior of their consumer base before launching a political marketing blitz. Companies want to avoid having to backpedal after launching an ad that toes the line as Smirnoff’s does. Businesses that decide to try such a campaign should have a response and game plan ready in case of backlash.

“Anything can be misrepresented, anything can be possibly misconstrued, and if brands are making these statements, they need to be prepared for any type of response — good or bad — that consumers will have in response to those comments,” Zack said.

It will be interesting to see how consumers react to the ad in the coming days, and if Smirnoff will experience any sales hits as a result. So far, social media users have been commending the poster as a “good burn”, driving the ad to Reddit’s front page during the weekend.

When Anheuser-Busch aired its “Born The Hard Way” Super Bowl commercial, which depicts the immigration of co-founder Adolphus Busch from Germany to the U.S. in the 1800s, the ad garnered both praise and criticism. Some consumers called for a boycott of Budweiser products, claiming the commercial was made in response to President Trump’s immigration ban. Smirnoff’s ad doesn’t seem to have inspired the same vitriol, but only time will tell if the politically charged campaign will help or hurt the company’s sales and brand image.

What James Comey Told Me About Donald Trump

David Posnett — Fri, 19 May 2017 22:30:20 +0000

Published by the Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With

By Benjamin Wittes

Thursday, May 18, 2017, 8:02 PM

The New York Times is reporting tonight:

President Trump called the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, weeks after he took office and asked him when federal authorities were going to put out word that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation, according to two people briefed on the call.

Mr. Comey told the president that if he wanted to know details about the bureau’s investigations, he should not contact him directly but instead follow the proper procedures and have the White House counsel send any inquires to the Justice Department, according to those people.

After explaining to Mr. Trump how communications with the F.B.I. should work, Mr. Comey believed he had effectively drawn the line after a series of encounters he had with the president and other White House officials that he felt jeopardized the F.B.I.’s independence. At the time, Mr. Comey was overseeing the investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

I did not know this particular fact, but it doesn’t surprise me at all. The principal source for the rest of this story is, well, me—specifically a long interview I gave to reporter Michael Schmidt on Friday about my conversations with FBI Director James Comey over the last few months, and particularly about one such conversation that took place on March 27 over lunch in Comey’s FBI office.

This story breaks hard on the heels of this week’s revelation—also by the Times—that Trump had asked Comey to bury the investigation of Gen. Michael Flynn. A few words of elaboration are in order.

I called Schmidt Friday morning after reading his earlier story, which ran the previous evening, about Comey’s dinner with President Trump and the President’s demands at that dinner for a vow of loyalty. Schmidt had reported that Trump requested that Comey commit to personal loyalty to the President, and that Comey declined, telling the President that he would always have Comey’s “honesty.” When I read Schmidt’s account, I immediately understood certain things Comey had said to me over the previous few months in a different, and frankly more menacing, light. While I am not in the habit of discussing with reporters my confidential communications with friends, I decided that the things Comey had told me needed to be made public.

As I told Schmidt, I did not act in any sense at Comey’s request. The information I provided, however, dovetails neatly with the Times‘s subsequent discovery of the personal confrontation described above between Comey and the President over investigative inquiries and inquiries directly to the Bureau from the White House.

I did this interview on the record because the President that morning was already issuing threatening tweets suggesting that Comey was leaking things, and I didn’t want any room for misunderstanding that any kind of leak had taken place with respect to the information I was providing. There was no leak from Comey, no leak from anyone else at the FBI, and no leak from anyone outside of the bureau either—just conversations between friends, the contents of which one friend is now disclosing. For the same reason, I insisted that Schmidt record the conversation and give me a copy of the recording, so that we had a good record of what was said: both what was said by Comey as reported by me, and what was said by me about the conversation. Schmidt and I have had a few clarifying phone calls since then that were not recorded.

Before I go on, let me pause briefly to explain my relationship with Comey, which has been the subject of a lot of misinformation since I disclosed that we are friends in a piece in his defense a few months back. Ever since then, and particularly since Gizmodoused me as forensic evidence in its weird effort to out a supposed Comey Twitter account, people have developed this idea that Comey and I are especially close. Some people have even started following me on Twitter because they think I’m channeling Comey or am some secret line into his thinking. The truth is rather more pedestrian: We’re friends. We communicate regularly, but I am not among his close intimates or advisers. I know nothing about the Russia investigation that isn’t public. Comey has never talked to me about a live investigative matter—and I’ve never asked him to.

That said, sometimes, as friends do, we have lunch, and when we do so, we talk about things of mutual interest, like how Lawfare is going or how life running the FBI is going. And those latter conversations necessarily involve President Trump—and President Obama before him.

Note that in the conversations I’m going to describe here, I was not interviewing Comey. There are any number of follow-up questions I would ask were I meeting him in a journalistic capacity that I did not ask. So in the conversations I’m about to relate, the answers to all questions about whether I followed up on this or that point is that I did not. I never expected to be giving a public account of his thinking during this period. I took no notes. What follows is just my recollection of things he told about his interactions with Trump that I now believe flesh out the relationship between the two men in the weeks after that dinner about which the New York Times reported and in the period in which Trump also apparently asked Comey to back off of Flynn—and in which I now learn that Comey also told the President to stop asking the FBI about investigative matters.

The first point is a general one: Comey was preoccupied throughout this period with the need to protect the FBI from these inquiries on investigative matters from the White House. Two incidents involving such inquiries have become public: the Flynn discussion and Reince Priebus’s query to Andrew McCabe about whether the then-Deputy FBI Director could publicly dispute the New York Times’ reporting regarding communications between Trump associates and Russian officials. Whether there were other such incidents I do not know, but I suspect there were. What I do know is that Comey spent a great deal of energy doing what he alternately described as “training” the White House that officials had to go through the Justice Department and “reestablishing” normal hands-off White House-Bureau relations.

Comey never said specifically that this policing was about the Russia matter, but I certainly assumed that it was—probably alongside other things. While I do not know how many incidents we’re talking about, how severe they were, or their particular character, I do know this: Comey understood Trump’s people as having neither knowledge of nor respect for the independence of the law enforcement function. And he saw it as an ongoing task on his part to protect the rest of the Bureau from improper contacts and interferences from a group of people he did not regard as honorable. This was a general preoccupation of Comey’s in the months he and Trump overlapped—and the difference between this relationship and his regard for Obama (which was deep) was profound and palpable.

Second, Comey described at least two incidents which he regarded as efforts on the part of the President personally to compromise him or implicate him with either shows of closeness or actual chumminess with the President.

The first incident he told me about was the infamous “hug” from Trump after the inauguration:

The hug took place at a White House meeting to which Trump had invited law enforcement leadership to thank them for their role in the inauguration. Comey described really not wanting to go to that meeting, for the same reason he later did not want to go to the private dinner with Trump: the FBI director should be always at arm’s length from the President, in his view. There was an additional sensitivity here too, because many Democrats blamed Comey for Trump’s election, so he didn’t want any shows of closeness between the two that might reinforce a perception that he had put a thumb on the scale in Trump’s favor. But he also felt that he could not refuse a presidential invitation, particularly not one that went to a broad array of law enforcement leadership. So he went. But as he told me the story, he tried hard to blend into the background and avoid any one-on-one interaction. He was wearing a blue blazer and noticed that the drapes were blue. So he stood in the back, right in front of the drapes, hoping Trump wouldn’t notice him camouflaged against the wall. If you look at the video, Comey is standing about as far from Trump as it is physically possible to be in that room.

And for a long time, he reported, Trump didn’t seem to notice him. The meeting was nearly over, he said, and he really thought he was going to get away without an individual interaction. But when you’re six foot, eight inches tall, it’s hard to blend in forever, and Trump ultimately singled him out—and did so with the most damning faint praise possible: “Oh, and there’s Jim. He’s become more famous than me!”

Comey took the long walk across the room determined, he told me, that there was not going to be a hug. Bad enough that he was there; bad enough that there would be a handshake; he emphatically did not want any show of warmth.

Again, look at the video, and you’ll see Comey preemptively reaching out to shake hands. Trump grabs his hand and attempts an embrace. The embrace, however, is entirely one sided.

Comey was disgusted. He regarded the episode as a physical attempt to show closeness and warmth in a fashion calculated to compromise him before Democrats who already mistrusted him.

The loyalty dinner took place five days later.

Comey never told me the details of the dinner meeting; I don’t think I even knew that there had been a meeting over dinner until I learned it from the Times story. But he did tell me in general terms that early on, Trump had “asked for loyalty” and that Comey had promised him only honesty. He also told me that Trump was perceptibly uncomfortable with this answer. And he said that ever since, the President had been trying to be chummy in a fashion that Comey felt was designed to absorb him into Trump’s world—to make him part of the team. Comey was deeply uncomfortable with these episodes. He told me that Trump sometimes talked to him a fashion designed to implicate him in Trump’s way of thinking. While I was not sure quite what this meant, it clearly disquieted Comey. He felt that these conversations were efforts to probe how resistant he would be to becoming a loyalist. In light of the dramatic dinner meeting and the Flynn request, it’s easy to see why they would be upsetting and feel like attempts at pressure.

On March 27, he described one incident in particular that had bothered him. Comey was about to get on a helicopter when his phone rang. It was the White House saying that the President wanted to speak with him. Figuring there must be something urgent going on, he delayed his flight to take the call. To his surprise, the President just wanted to chitchat. He was trying to be social, Comey related; there was no agenda, much less an urgent one. Notably, since the President has claimed that Comey told him in two phone conversations that he was not under investigation, Comey said nothing to me about the subject coming up in this call. Indeed, he regarded the call as weird for how substanceless it was. What bothered Comey was twofold—the fact that the conversation happened at all (why was Trump calling him to exchange pleasantries?) and the fact that there was an undercurrent of Trump’s trying to get him to kiss the ring.

By the time we had lunch that day, Comey thought he had the situation under control. It had required a lot of work, he said, to train the White House that there were questions officials couldn’t ask and that all contacts had to go through the Justice Department. But he thought the work had been done. After reading the top few paragraphs of the Times story, I now have no doubt that he was referring among other things to the conversation with the President, which he did not mention specifically to me. He also thought that policing the lines he had established was going to require constant vigilance on his part in the future.

He said repeatedly that it was going to be a very long few years. And he joked that the hashtag I use on Twitter—#NotesFromUnderTrump, which identifies the particular day of the Trump presidency—was ticking very slowly.

He said one other thing that day that, in retrospect, stands out in my memory: he expressed wariness about the then-still-unconfirmed deputy attorney general nominee, Rod Rosenstein. This surprised me because I had always thought well of Rosenstein and had mentioned his impending confirmation as a good thing. But Comey did not seem enthusiastic. The DOJ does need Senate-confirmed leadership, he agreed, noting that Dana Boente had done a fine job as acting deputy but that having confirmed people to make important decisions was critical. And he agreed with me that Rosenstein had a good reputation as a solid career guy.

That said, his reservations were palpable. “Rod is a survivor,” he said. And you don’t get to survive that long across administrations without making compromises. “So I have concerns.”

In retrospect, I think I know what Comey must have been thinking at that moment. He had been asked to pledge loyalty by Trump. When he had declined, and even before, he had seen repeated efforts to—from his point of view—undermine his independence and probe the FBI’s defenses against political interference. He had been asked to drop an investigation. He had spent the last few months working to defend the normative lines that protect the FBI from the White House. And he had felt the need personally to make clear to the President that there were questions he couldn’t ask about investigative matters. So he was asking himself, I suspect: What loyalty oath had Rosenstein been asked to swear, and what happened at whatever dinner that request took place?

I don’t want to make a unified field theory out of these incidents, which are pieces of a much larger mosaic—a mosaic that surely includes whatever Comey knew about the Russia investigation, among many other things. But I am confident that these incidents tell a story about Comey’s thinking over the months that he and Trump were in office together. And I think they also sketch a trajectory in which Trump kept Comey on board only as long as it took him to figure out that there was no way to make Comey part of the team. Once he realized that he couldn’t do that—and that the Russia matter was thus not going away—he pulled the trigger.

Watch Dutch TV for Trump-Mob Connection!

David Posnett — Sun, 14 May 2017 01:44:18 +0000

Dutch TV did what no American TV network dares, suggesting Trump’s past includes illegal racketeering.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet

May 12, 2017

Picture legend: Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater attend the Trump Soho Launch Party on Sept. 19, 2007 in New York.

Donald Trump’s business partners have included Russian oligarchs and convicted mobsters, which could make the president guilty of criminal racketeering charges.

That’s one of the eyebrow-raising takeaways from a 45-minute Dutch documentary that aired last week, titled The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump, Part I: The Russians. The first installment of the investigative reporting series, produced by Zembla, does what no American TV network has yet dared to do—take a deep look at the organized crime links and corrupt international business strategies used by Trump and his partners in his properties. And now there is also part two:

It starts with Trump’s luxury tower in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of Soho, where his partner was Bayrock LLC, whose primary investor was a Russian mining oligarch and another major investor was a convicted Russian mobster named Felix Sater.

“Why did 60 Minutes pass on the Bayrock story in 2016? Why did ABC News’ Brian Ross pass on the Trump Soho [Tower] story in 2015? Why has no major network done any kind of documentary on what the Dutch just did?” asks James Henry, a corporate lawyer-turned-financial investigative reporter who writes for DCReport.org. Henry is one of several investigative reporters whose work on Trump’s shady business empire is profiled in the film.

The documentary shows how Trump not only helped hide the identity of his mobster business partner, prompting an ongoing lawsuit accusing Trump of criminal racketeering but also how Trump used that internal company crisis to demand more money. It goes on to show how Russian oligarchs saw Trump’s properties as a way to get their money out of Russia and describes the international financial networks that are akin to a pyramid scheme for money laundering. It also notes how the law firm of Trump’s political adviser, former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani, helped set up a money-laundering account in the Netherlands used by Bayrock.

The exposed financial trail raises questions about whether Trump fired FBI director James Comey because the FBI investigation of his campaign’s collusion with Russia was encroaching into Trump’s world of dark money and dubious business partners.

“Although still in its early days, Donald Trump’s presidency is coming under fire. The Russians are alleged to be in possession of sensitive information about Trump. And that exposes Trump to blackmail. Fake news, tweets Trump: ‘I have nothing to do with Russia—no deals, no loans, no nothing!’ Trump swears he has no ties with the Russians. But is that actually the case?

They go on to show that while Trump denies his ties with Russia, many Russians have deep financial ties to him.

“For months, the FBI has been investigating Russian interference in the American presidential elections,” the filmmakers continue. “Zembla is investigating another explosive dossier concerning Trump’s involvement with the Russians: Trump’s business and personal ties to oligarchs from the former Soviet Union. Powerful billionaires suspected of money laundering and fraud, and of having contacts in Moscow and with the mafia. What do these relationships say about Trump and why does he deny them? How compromising are these dubious business relationships for the 45th president of the United States? And are there connections with the Netherlands? Zembla meets with one of Trump’s controversial cronies and speaks with a former CIA agent, fraud investigators, attorneys, and an American senator, among others.”

The documentary’s YouTube description barely does justice to the film’s investigative reporting. While American journalists are following Trump’s tweets and tantrums, they followed the money into a world where the lines between outright profiteering and organized crime are blurred. What they found on a fact-based money trail reveals much about who the real Trump is and how he operates.