The Russian Connection

[fraurosena]

For those of you with a little time on your hands, here are two MEGA-threads (both 100+) by Seth Abramson. Very, very interesting threads.

This one from August 14, deals with meetings between Russians and people in the campaign. 

And then there is yesterday's thread, that links a helluva lot of interesting facts about how Putin may have gotten kompromat on the presidunce as early as 2002, when the toddler crowned Putin's mistress Miss Universe in an obvious attempt to ingratiate himself with the Russian leader.

Like I said, these are humongous threads. But they are very much worth the time to read them.

[fraurosena]

This links to an Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump

Quote

From the outset, Donald Trump has called the search for the truth about connections between his 2016 campaign and Russia a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Along the way, he has taken unprecedented steps to stop it. As President Trump foments chaos and confusion about what actually happened — and what continues to happen — this Trump/Russia timeline seeks to offer order and clarity.

Since we first launched it in February, the timeline has grown from 24 entries to more than 400 — and the saga is far from over. Reading it from start to finish is a daunting task, so we’ve added tools that enable users to narrow its content by individual. And, of course, we’ll continue updating it.

Are several congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller wasting their time on a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”? Review the timeline, follow updates as they appear and decide for yourself.

Click the link above to view the timeline, which I found both enlightening and frightening.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Lobbyist at Trump Campaign Meeting Has a Web of Russian Connections'

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian immigrant who met last summer with senior Trump campaign officials, has often struck colleagues as a classic Washington mercenary — loyal to his wife, his daughter and his bank account. He avoided work that would antagonize Moscow, they suggested, only because he profited from his reputation as a man with valuable connections there.

But interviews with his associates and documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that Mr. Akhmetshin, who is under scrutiny by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, has much deeper ties to the Russian government and Kremlin-backed oligarchs than previously known.

He has an association with a former deputy head of a Russian spy service, the F.S.B., and a history of working for close allies of President Vladimir V. Putin. Twice, he has worked on legal battles for Russian tycoons whose opponents suffered sophisticated hacking attacks, arousing allegations of computer espionage. He helped federal prosecutors bring corruption charges against an American businessman in the former Soviet Union who turned out to be working for the C.I.A.

He also helped expose possible corruption in government contracting that complicated American efforts to keep troops at an air base in Kyrgyzstan — an American presence that the Russians fiercely opposed.

In short, Mr. Akhmetshin’s projects over two decades in Washington routinely advanced the Kremlin’s interests, especially after he became an American citizen in 2009. American counterintelligence agents took notice of his activities, but drew no conclusions about where his allegiances lay, according to a former law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing government secrecy rules.

Mr. Akhmetshin’s meeting with Trump campaign officials is of keen interest to Mr. Mueller, who is investigating the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Of all the visitors who attended the June 2016 session at the Trump Tower, he appears to have the most direct ties to Russian intelligence. The session was arranged by a Russian businessman close to Mr. Putin whose emissary promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Mr. Akhmetshin, who did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this article, has said he was a last-minute guest at an inconsequential get-together. Trump campaign officials have dismissed the meeting as part of an effort to amend an American law that placed sanctions on Russians for human rights abuses. The 2012 law, known as the Magnitsky Act, infuriated Mr. Putin, whose government retaliated by restricting adoptions of Russian children by Americans.

Ronald J. McNamara, a former staff member of the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe who met with Mr. Akhmetshin about Central Asian issues, said Mr. Akhmetshin openly alluded to involvement with Russian intelligence. “My understanding was that he had come from the security agencies in the Soviet Union-Russian Federation,” Mr. McNamara said. “He did not make it a secret.”

Mr. Akhmetshin, 49, said he is no Russian spy. “I am the target of a well-coordinated and financed smear campaign,” he said last month in a text message to The Times.

Keenly intelligent, relentlessly charming and assiduously opaque about his work, Mr. Akhmetshin sometimes referred to his contacts by pseudonyms and collected his salary in stacks of hundred-dollar bills. A trained biochemist who speaks four languages, he described himself on one official document as a “househusband. ” He identified himself as the head of a Washington think tank for years after it was officially dissolved.

“I think he works for us. I don’t think he works for them,” said Lanny Wiles, a veteran Republican political operative who has worked with Mr. Akhmetshin for more than 15 years. “But I don’t know what he really does.”

Rise of an Influence Peddler

Born in Kazan, Russia, about 500 miles west of Moscow, Rinat Rafkatovitch Akhmetshin was drafted at age 18 into the Soviet army’s war against Afghanistan. He served from 1986 to 1988 and again in 1991. He described himself on his visa application for the United States as a sergeant who rose to the rank of lieutenant in the military police, specializing in communications. He told some journalists that he worked with a military counterintelligence unit, but said he never joined Russian intelligence services — unlike his father, sister and godfather.

In 1992 he graduated with honors from Kazan Federal University, and two years later arrived in Washington as a graduate student in chemistry at the Catholic University of America. He married a fellow Russian chemistry student and received his Ph.D. But he immediately abandoned his esoteric study of mechanistic enzymes and burrowed into Washington’s foreign lobbying scene, promoting clients from Russia and former Soviet states.

He never formally studied English, he said, or owned a car: He pedaled about Washington on a bright orange bicycle. But he was witty and erudite, a lover of literature, opera and snowboarding. Matthew Bryza, a former staff member in charge of Central Asia issues at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, remembers Mr. Akhmetshin as “very smart, slick guy” serving as “the paid drone of unsavory, out-of-fashion former Soviet leaders looking to launder their reputations.”

“He would boast about ties and experience in Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence to give himself some cachet and make himself a mystery man,” he said.

Mr. Akhmetshin’s gateway to Washington was Edward Lieberman, a lawyer with corporate and political clients in former Soviet countries who was married to President Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, Evelyn S. Lieberman, who died in 2015. He called Mr. Lieberman, who could not be reached for comment, a personal adviser.

Together the two started the Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research. Supposedly set up to promote democratic reforms in former Soviet states, it was essentially a vehicle to burnish the reputation of one client, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, an ex-K.G.B. officer and the former prime minister of Kazakhstan. Mr. Kazhegeldin had fled under a cloud of corruption charges and was seeking Washington’s support to challenge his rival, Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Mr. Akhmetshin worked to undercut his client’s rival by funneling information to American prosecutors pursuing bribery charges against James Giffen, an American businessman close to the Kazakh president, according to people involved with the case. The prosecutors discovered only belatedly that Mr. Giffen had worked for the C.I.A. in the former Soviet Union.

By 2005 the government of another former Soviet republic, Kyrgyzstan, had hired Mr. Akhmetshin to investigate whether Washington had bribed the family of the country’s former president to keep an American air base there. The Manas base, established as a staging ground for American forces in Afghanistan, was a major source of friction with the Russians.

The Kyrgyz ambassador to Washington at the time, Zamira Sydykova, said Mr. Akhmetshin arranged an interview with a Times reporter and escorted her to it. The resulting article helped set off a Washington controversy and ultimately, a congressional investigation. Kyrgyzstan finally forced the United States to abandon the base in 2014.

In an affidavit that year, Mr. Akhmetshin said he worked closely with the American government about the location of the base. But Thomas Graham, the National Security Council’s Russia specialist from 2002 to 2007, said the controversy put Washington on the defensive. “Looking into allegations of fraud or bribery — anything that would complicate our presence at that air base — was in Russia’s interests,” he said.

Mr. Akhmetshin’s work took him back and forth to Europe more than once a month, on trips lasting a few days each. Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has sought to determine whether his travel pattern raised concerns among immigration officials who approved Mr. Akhmetshin’s application for American citizenship in 2009.

Once naturalized, Mr. Akhmetshin began traveling regularly to Moscow and taking on more overtly pro-Russian projects. The new work led him into legal entanglements, the halls of Congress and eventually Trump Tower.

The Hacking Campaigns

Few episodes from Mr. Akhmetshin’s past seem more relevant to Mr. Mueller’s investigation than his work for two Russian billionaires accused of infiltrating their adversaries’ computers during nasty legal battles.

The Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 took place less than a week before revelations that hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee’s computers and obtained a trove of emails. Investigators have traced digital espionage to Russian spy agencies. There is no public evidence that Mr. Akhmetshin played any role in the D.N.C. hack.

The first hacking case, which has not previously been reported, began when Mr. Akhmetshin served an alliance of businessmen led by Suleiman Kerimov — a financier close to Mr. Putin in a commercial and political dispute with a Russian competitor, Ashot Egiazaryan.

In early 2011, two London lawyers on Mr. Egiazaryan’s team separately received suspicious emails and hired forensic experts to scrutinize them, according to people involved in a Scotland Yard investigation. The experts found that the messages concealed spyware meant to infiltrate their computers, and they fed traceable documents into the spyware that were then opened by computers registered at the Moscow office park of one of Mr. Kerimov’s companies.

After an inquiry of more than 18 months, Scotland Yard investigators concluded in January 2013 that they lacked sufficient evidence to bring any charges, a spokesman said. Representatives of the lawyers targeted declined to comment.

Mr. Akhmetshin has said in court papers that he was paid only by one businessman in the alliance with Mr. Kerimov, but coordinated with Mr. Kerimov’s team.

Two years later, hacking accusations arose in another case, this time lodged directly against Mr. Akhmetshin. He worked as a consultant to a law firm representing EuroChem, a fertilizer and mining company controlled by another Russian billionaire close to Mr. Putin — Andrey Melnichenko. Mr. Akhmetshin’s target was a rival mining company, International Mineral Resources.

Within months, documents stored in International Mineral Resources’s computer systems began surfacing outside the company, leaked to journalists and others. The company concluded that its computers had been hacked, and replaced its servers. In lawsuits filed in federal court in Washington and state court in New York, the company accused EuroChem and Mr. Akhmetshin of computer espionage.

EuroChem’s information technology chief, Vladimir Chibisov, previously worked in the Russian government. He had written a book promoted as “a hacker’s Bible,” which he described as a book “about us — about Russian programmers, men of the ’80s and ’90s” who “had done programming, and even a bit of hacking.”

Mr. Akhmetshin personally handed a thumb drive containing stolen documents to a lawyer engaged in another matter potentially damaging to the rival company, according to a person familiar with the matter. The same thumb drive was later obtained by investigators, and someone using the initials “R.A.” had gained access to its contents, according to court papers.

A spokesman for Mr. Melnichenko said in a statement that he has never condoned hacking or other illegal activity, nor had he ever met or known Mr. Akhmetshin. The spokesman said Mr. Chibisov’s book was “tongue in cheek” and “cannot possibly be taken seriously.”

An investigator for the targeted company also testified that he had followed Mr. Akhmetshin in January 2014 to a meeting at London’s Cafe Royal and watched him hand over an external hard drive to another individual. He said he had overheard Mr. Akhmetshin claim that he had paid a team of Russian hackers “a lot of money” for the records.

Mr. Akhmetshin acknowledged in a deposition that he had turned over a hard drive with information about the firm’s owners. But he said he had obtained the data from a Kazakh contact through a loose network he called the “London Information Bazaar.” Asked about computer hacking, he replied, “I do not know a single person who could do that.”

International Mineral Resources dropped the lawsuits without explanation in early 2016, withdrawing all allegations before they could be adjudicated. The company said in a statement Friday that it dropped the charges “after careful consideration.”

A Key Kremlin Contact

During the same period that Mr. Akhmetshin was accused of being involved in various hacking schemes, he appears to have been nurturing a relationship with Viktor Ivanov, once the deputy head of Russia’s intelligence service, the F.S.B., and until last year a top aide to Mr. Putin.

From 2009 to 2014, Mr. Ivanov led the Russian side of a joint effort with the Americans to combat drug trafficking in Afghanistan, part of an early Obama administration initiative to improve relations between Moscow and Washington.

When Mr. Ivanov traveled to Washington to promote the effort in October 2010, Mr. Akhmetshin helped shepherd him around town. In a deposition filed in one of the hacking cases, Mr. Ahkmetshin testified that he helped facilitate the Washington visit with one of Mr. Ivanov’s aides, with whom he had served in the Red Army.

In an affidavit in that same case, Mr. Akhmetshin said he had been in email contact with Mr. Ivanov on matters ranging “from narco-trafficking and terrorism in Afghanistan to surveillance of undercover agents, suspected undercover agents and their identities.”

Reporters who encountered Mr. Akhmetshin during his travels to Afghanistan said he grew a beard and wore a skullcap to blend in with the local population. He never identified whom he worked for, but two former American officials involved with the counternarcotics program said the American side did not hire him.

Mr. Ivanov, who retired early last year, could not be reached for comment about whether Mr. Akhmetshin was on the Russian government’s payroll.

Russia ended the counternarcotics cooperation in 2014 after the United States imposed sanctions on Mr. Ivanov and other Putin allies in retaliation for Russia’s invasion and seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

There, too, Mr. Akhmetshin had tried to ally with Ukraine’s pro-Moscow elements. Before the 2014 invasion, he told reporters, he unsuccessfully sought consulting work with the political party dominated by the nation’s pro-Putin president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. A popular revolt forced Mr. Yanukovych to flee to Russia.

Mr. Akhmetshin told journalists that he was a longtime acquaintance of Paul J. Manafort, who served as a high-paid consultant to Mr. Yanukovych for years before becoming chairman of the Trump campaign. Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort, said, “Paul doesn’t know and hasn’t worked with the man.”

Last year, Mr. Akhmetshin took on a new project high on the Kremlin’s agenda: a $240,000 lobbying campaign to amend the Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on Russians for human rights abuses. The law was named after Sergei L. Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who died in custody after he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud allegedly tied to Russian officials. Several wealthy Russian businessmen financed a nonprofit group to spearhead the campaign, which was represented by Mr. Akhmetshin and a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Donald J. Trump Jr. has said the promise of damaging information about Hillary Clinton was just an excuse for Ms. Veselnitskaya to get into Trump Tower to talk about why the law should be changed. Mr. Akhmetshin, a Washington resident, has told reporters that he just happened to be lunching with Ms. Veselnitskaya in Manhattan that day when she spontaneously invited him to the meeting with the president’s son, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Manafort. He did not explain why she wanted him there.

After Mr. Akhmetshin’s presence came to light, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters: “We don’t know anything about this person.”

Definitely a shady character.

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Lobbyist at Trump Campaign Meeting Has a Web of Russian Connections'

  Hide contents

WASHINGTON — Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian immigrant who met last summer with senior Trump campaign officials, has often struck colleagues as a classic Washington mercenary — loyal to his wife, his daughter and his bank account. He avoided work that would antagonize Moscow, they suggested, only because he profited from his reputation as a man with valuable connections there.

But interviews with his associates and documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that Mr. Akhmetshin, who is under scrutiny by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, has much deeper ties to the Russian government and Kremlin-backed oligarchs than previously known.

He has an association with a former deputy head of a Russian spy service, the F.S.B., and a history of working for close allies of President Vladimir V. Putin. Twice, he has worked on legal battles for Russian tycoons whose opponents suffered sophisticated hacking attacks, arousing allegations of computer espionage. He helped federal prosecutors bring corruption charges against an American businessman in the former Soviet Union who turned out to be working for the C.I.A.

He also helped expose possible corruption in government contracting that complicated American efforts to keep troops at an air base in Kyrgyzstan — an American presence that the Russians fiercely opposed.

In short, Mr. Akhmetshin’s projects over two decades in Washington routinely advanced the Kremlin’s interests, especially after he became an American citizen in 2009. American counterintelligence agents took notice of his activities, but drew no conclusions about where his allegiances lay, according to a former law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing government secrecy rules.

Mr. Akhmetshin’s meeting with Trump campaign officials is of keen interest to Mr. Mueller, who is investigating the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Of all the visitors who attended the June 2016 session at the Trump Tower, he appears to have the most direct ties to Russian intelligence. The session was arranged by a Russian businessman close to Mr. Putin whose emissary promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Mr. Akhmetshin, who did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this article, has said he was a last-minute guest at an inconsequential get-together. Trump campaign officials have dismissed the meeting as part of an effort to amend an American law that placed sanctions on Russians for human rights abuses. The 2012 law, known as the Magnitsky Act, infuriated Mr. Putin, whose government retaliated by restricting adoptions of Russian children by Americans.

Ronald J. McNamara, a former staff member of the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe who met with Mr. Akhmetshin about Central Asian issues, said Mr. Akhmetshin openly alluded to involvement with Russian intelligence. “My understanding was that he had come from the security agencies in the Soviet Union-Russian Federation,” Mr. McNamara said. “He did not make it a secret.”

Mr. Akhmetshin, 49, said he is no Russian spy. “I am the target of a well-coordinated and financed smear campaign,” he said last month in a text message to The Times.

Keenly intelligent, relentlessly charming and assiduously opaque about his work, Mr. Akhmetshin sometimes referred to his contacts by pseudonyms and collected his salary in stacks of hundred-dollar bills. A trained biochemist who speaks four languages, he described himself on one official document as a “househusband. ” He identified himself as the head of a Washington think tank for years after it was officially dissolved.

“I think he works for us. I don’t think he works for them,” said Lanny Wiles, a veteran Republican political operative who has worked with Mr. Akhmetshin for more than 15 years. “But I don’t know what he really does.”

Rise of an Influence Peddler

Born in Kazan, Russia, about 500 miles west of Moscow, Rinat Rafkatovitch Akhmetshin was drafted at age 18 into the Soviet army’s war against Afghanistan. He served from 1986 to 1988 and again in 1991. He described himself on his visa application for the United States as a sergeant who rose to the rank of lieutenant in the military police, specializing in communications. He told some journalists that he worked with a military counterintelligence unit, but said he never joined Russian intelligence services — unlike his father, sister and godfather.

In 1992 he graduated with honors from Kazan Federal University, and two years later arrived in Washington as a graduate student in chemistry at the Catholic University of America. He married a fellow Russian chemistry student and received his Ph.D. But he immediately abandoned his esoteric study of mechanistic enzymes and burrowed into Washington’s foreign lobbying scene, promoting clients from Russia and former Soviet states.

He never formally studied English, he said, or owned a car: He pedaled about Washington on a bright orange bicycle. But he was witty and erudite, a lover of literature, opera and snowboarding. Matthew Bryza, a former staff member in charge of Central Asia issues at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, remembers Mr. Akhmetshin as “very smart, slick guy” serving as “the paid drone of unsavory, out-of-fashion former Soviet leaders looking to launder their reputations.”

“He would boast about ties and experience in Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence to give himself some cachet and make himself a mystery man,” he said.

Mr. Akhmetshin’s gateway to Washington was Edward Lieberman, a lawyer with corporate and political clients in former Soviet countries who was married to President Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, Evelyn S. Lieberman, who died in 2015. He called Mr. Lieberman, who could not be reached for comment, a personal adviser.

Together the two started the Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research. Supposedly set up to promote democratic reforms in former Soviet states, it was essentially a vehicle to burnish the reputation of one client, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, an ex-K.G.B. officer and the former prime minister of Kazakhstan. Mr. Kazhegeldin had fled under a cloud of corruption charges and was seeking Washington’s support to challenge his rival, Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Mr. Akhmetshin worked to undercut his client’s rival by funneling information to American prosecutors pursuing bribery charges against James Giffen, an American businessman close to the Kazakh president, according to people involved with the case. The prosecutors discovered only belatedly that Mr. Giffen had worked for the C.I.A. in the former Soviet Union.

By 2005 the government of another former Soviet republic, Kyrgyzstan, had hired Mr. Akhmetshin to investigate whether Washington had bribed the family of the country’s former president to keep an American air base there. The Manas base, established as a staging ground for American forces in Afghanistan, was a major source of friction with the Russians.

The Kyrgyz ambassador to Washington at the time, Zamira Sydykova, said Mr. Akhmetshin arranged an interview with a Times reporter and escorted her to it. The resulting article helped set off a Washington controversy and ultimately, a congressional investigation. Kyrgyzstan finally forced the United States to abandon the base in 2014.

In an affidavit that year, Mr. Akhmetshin said he worked closely with the American government about the location of the base. But Thomas Graham, the National Security Council’s Russia specialist from 2002 to 2007, said the controversy put Washington on the defensive. “Looking into allegations of fraud or bribery — anything that would complicate our presence at that air base — was in Russia’s interests,” he said.

Mr. Akhmetshin’s work took him back and forth to Europe more than once a month, on trips lasting a few days each. Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has sought to determine whether his travel pattern raised concerns among immigration officials who approved Mr. Akhmetshin’s application for American citizenship in 2009.

Once naturalized, Mr. Akhmetshin began traveling regularly to Moscow and taking on more overtly pro-Russian projects. The new work led him into legal entanglements, the halls of Congress and eventually Trump Tower.

The Hacking Campaigns

Few episodes from Mr. Akhmetshin’s past seem more relevant to Mr. Mueller’s investigation than his work for two Russian billionaires accused of infiltrating their adversaries’ computers during nasty legal battles.

The Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 took place less than a week before revelations that hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee’s computers and obtained a trove of emails. Investigators have traced digital espionage to Russian spy agencies. There is no public evidence that Mr. Akhmetshin played any role in the D.N.C. hack.

The first hacking case, which has not previously been reported, began when Mr. Akhmetshin served an alliance of businessmen led by Suleiman Kerimov — a financier close to Mr. Putin in a commercial and political dispute with a Russian competitor, Ashot Egiazaryan.

In early 2011, two London lawyers on Mr. Egiazaryan’s team separately received suspicious emails and hired forensic experts to scrutinize them, according to people involved in a Scotland Yard investigation. The experts found that the messages concealed spyware meant to infiltrate their computers, and they fed traceable documents into the spyware that were then opened by computers registered at the Moscow office park of one of Mr. Kerimov’s companies.

After an inquiry of more than 18 months, Scotland Yard investigators concluded in January 2013 that they lacked sufficient evidence to bring any charges, a spokesman said. Representatives of the lawyers targeted declined to comment.

Mr. Akhmetshin has said in court papers that he was paid only by one businessman in the alliance with Mr. Kerimov, but coordinated with Mr. Kerimov’s team.

Two years later, hacking accusations arose in another case, this time lodged directly against Mr. Akhmetshin. He worked as a consultant to a law firm representing EuroChem, a fertilizer and mining company controlled by another Russian billionaire close to Mr. Putin — Andrey Melnichenko. Mr. Akhmetshin’s target was a rival mining company, International Mineral Resources.

Within months, documents stored in International Mineral Resources’s computer systems began surfacing outside the company, leaked to journalists and others. The company concluded that its computers had been hacked, and replaced its servers. In lawsuits filed in federal court in Washington and state court in New York, the company accused EuroChem and Mr. Akhmetshin of computer espionage.

EuroChem’s information technology chief, Vladimir Chibisov, previously worked in the Russian government. He had written a book promoted as “a hacker’s Bible,” which he described as a book “about us — about Russian programmers, men of the ’80s and ’90s” who “had done programming, and even a bit of hacking.”

Mr. Akhmetshin personally handed a thumb drive containing stolen documents to a lawyer engaged in another matter potentially damaging to the rival company, according to a person familiar with the matter. The same thumb drive was later obtained by investigators, and someone using the initials “R.A.” had gained access to its contents, according to court papers.

A spokesman for Mr. Melnichenko said in a statement that he has never condoned hacking or other illegal activity, nor had he ever met or known Mr. Akhmetshin. The spokesman said Mr. Chibisov’s book was “tongue in cheek” and “cannot possibly be taken seriously.”

An investigator for the targeted company also testified that he had followed Mr. Akhmetshin in January 2014 to a meeting at London’s Cafe Royal and watched him hand over an external hard drive to another individual. He said he had overheard Mr. Akhmetshin claim that he had paid a team of Russian hackers “a lot of money” for the records.

Mr. Akhmetshin acknowledged in a deposition that he had turned over a hard drive with information about the firm’s owners. But he said he had obtained the data from a Kazakh contact through a loose network he called the “London Information Bazaar.” Asked about computer hacking, he replied, “I do not know a single person who could do that.”

International Mineral Resources dropped the lawsuits without explanation in early 2016, withdrawing all allegations before they could be adjudicated. The company said in a statement Friday that it dropped the charges “after careful consideration.”

A Key Kremlin Contact

During the same period that Mr. Akhmetshin was accused of being involved in various hacking schemes, he appears to have been nurturing a relationship with Viktor Ivanov, once the deputy head of Russia’s intelligence service, the F.S.B., and until last year a top aide to Mr. Putin.

From 2009 to 2014, Mr. Ivanov led the Russian side of a joint effort with the Americans to combat drug trafficking in Afghanistan, part of an early Obama administration initiative to improve relations between Moscow and Washington.

When Mr. Ivanov traveled to Washington to promote the effort in October 2010, Mr. Akhmetshin helped shepherd him around town. In a deposition filed in one of the hacking cases, Mr. Ahkmetshin testified that he helped facilitate the Washington visit with one of Mr. Ivanov’s aides, with whom he had served in the Red Army.

In an affidavit in that same case, Mr. Akhmetshin said he had been in email contact with Mr. Ivanov on matters ranging “from narco-trafficking and terrorism in Afghanistan to surveillance of undercover agents, suspected undercover agents and their identities.”

Reporters who encountered Mr. Akhmetshin during his travels to Afghanistan said he grew a beard and wore a skullcap to blend in with the local population. He never identified whom he worked for, but two former American officials involved with the counternarcotics program said the American side did not hire him.

Mr. Ivanov, who retired early last year, could not be reached for comment about whether Mr. Akhmetshin was on the Russian government’s payroll.

Russia ended the counternarcotics cooperation in 2014 after the United States imposed sanctions on Mr. Ivanov and other Putin allies in retaliation for Russia’s invasion and seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

There, too, Mr. Akhmetshin had tried to ally with Ukraine’s pro-Moscow elements. Before the 2014 invasion, he told reporters, he unsuccessfully sought consulting work with the political party dominated by the nation’s pro-Putin president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. A popular revolt forced Mr. Yanukovych to flee to Russia.

Mr. Akhmetshin told journalists that he was a longtime acquaintance of Paul J. Manafort, who served as a high-paid consultant to Mr. Yanukovych for years before becoming chairman of the Trump campaign. Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort, said, “Paul doesn’t know and hasn’t worked with the man.”

Last year, Mr. Akhmetshin took on a new project high on the Kremlin’s agenda: a $240,000 lobbying campaign to amend the Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on Russians for human rights abuses. The law was named after Sergei L. Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who died in custody after he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud allegedly tied to Russian officials. Several wealthy Russian businessmen financed a nonprofit group to spearhead the campaign, which was represented by Mr. Akhmetshin and a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Donald J. Trump Jr. has said the promise of damaging information about Hillary Clinton was just an excuse for Ms. Veselnitskaya to get into Trump Tower to talk about why the law should be changed. Mr. Akhmetshin, a Washington resident, has told reporters that he just happened to be lunching with Ms. Veselnitskaya in Manhattan that day when she spontaneously invited him to the meeting with the president’s son, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Manafort. He did not explain why she wanted him there.

After Mr. Akhmetshin’s presence came to light, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters: “We don’t know anything about this person.”

Definitely a shady character.

Yeah, how shady is that. He's into hacking,  and he's a personal friend of the tangerine toddler. What a coincidunce, eh? 

 

(not a typo there btw)

[GreyhoundFan]

Another good one from Jennifer Rubin: "Trump’s obsession: Russia, Russia, Russia"

Spoiler

It’s odd, isn’t it, that President Trump’s campaign had so many advocates on behalf of friendly relations with Russia and so many people wanting to establish connections to Russia — and not, say, China, Germany, Brazil or some other world power? Hmm. Likewise, it’s weird, I think, that Trump, who cares not at all about health-care policy or taxes or anything else substantive (he just wants wins!) should make so many calls to lawmakers about — wouldn’t you know it? — Russia.

Politico reports:

Trump expressed frustration over a bipartisan bill sanctioning Russia and tried to convince Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) that it wasn’t good policy, according to three people familiar with the call. Trump argued that the legislation was unconstitutional and said it would damage his presidency. Corker was unrelenting, these people said, and told Trump the bill was going to pass both houses with bipartisan support. …

Trump dialed up Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Aug. 7, two days before a blunt call with the Senate majority leader that spilled over into a public feud. Tillis is working with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) on a bill designed to protect Robert Mueller, the independent counsel investigating the president’s Russia connections, from any attempt by Trump to fire him.

And, of course, Trump’s feud with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), which reportedly devolved into an obscenity-laden screaming match about — yup! — Russia sanctions and not protecting Trump from Russia investigators, spilled out into public. The non-denial denial from McConnell’s office amusingly did not take issue with that account. (“The President and I, and our teams, have been and continue to be in regular contact about our shared goals. … We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we are committed to advancing our shared agenda together and anyone who suggests otherwise is clearly not part of the conversation.”)

This comes at a time when evidence has surfaced that Trump’s now-deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn, according to a CNN report, “sent a brief email to campaign officials last year relaying information about an individual who was seeking to connect top Trump officials with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.” The report continued:

Sources said the email occurred in June 2016 around the time of the recently revealed Trump Tower meeting where Russians with Kremlin ties met with the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. While many details around the Dearborn email are unclear, its existence suggests the Russians may have been looking for another entry point into the Trump campaign to see if there were any willing partners as part of their effort to discredit — and ultimately defeat — Hillary Clinton.<

Dearborn’s name has not been mentioned much as part of the Russia probe. But he served as then-Sen. Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff, as well as a top policy aide on the campaign. And investigators have questions about whether he played a role in potentially arranging two meetings that occurred between the then-Russia ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, and Sessions, who has downplayed the significance of those encounters.

It’s not clear whether Dearborn or anyone acted on the individual’s request.

These new revelations do not demonstrate that the Trump campaign covertly cooperated with Russian meddling (although Trump openly invited the hacking of Clinton’s emails and touted the WikiLeaks revelations in the final days of the campaign), but they sure do show that Russian officials took an unusual interest in his campaign. There can hardly be any doubt that Putin wanted to help Trump — and did meddle in the election, as 17 U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed. The most recent information about Trump’s fixation on Russia then re-raises the $64,000 question: If Trump has nothing to hide, why is he so obsessed about halting the Russia investigation and staying on Putin’s good side?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"7 times Trump tried to call off the dogs on Russia"

Spoiler

In a must-read piece, Politico reports that President Trump appeared to pressure two Senate Republicans to back off their Russia-related efforts. Josh Dawsey and Elana Schor report that Trump vented frustrations about Congress's Russia sanctions bill to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and tried to get Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) to back off a planned bill to protect Russia special counsel Robert S. Mueller III from being fired.

Add them to the list.

Trump's attempts to influence actions related to Russia and the investigation that is now focused on him personally constitute a growing volume. Last weekend, in fact, the New York Times reported on another example that some may have missed.

Below, we recap all of them. If I missed one, email me.

1) Trying to get Tillis to back off

From Politico's report:

Trump dialed up Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Aug. 7. … The Mueller bill came up during the Tillis-Trump conversation, according to a source briefed on the call — the latest signal of the president's impatience with GOP senators' increasing declarations of independence from his White House. Trump was unhappy with the legislation and didn't want it to pass, one person familiar with the call said.

Trump's ability to fire Mueller has been chewed over for months, especially after an ally, Newsmax Media chief executive Christopher Ruddy, said in June that Trump was considering it. Tillis stepped forward this month in a somewhat surprising effort to protect Mueller. The bill would check the executive branch's ability to fire any special counsel by putting it in front of a panel of three federal judges.

2) Venting to Corker about sanctions bill

Also from Politico:

Trump expressed frustration over a bipartisan bill sanctioning Russia and tried to convince Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) that it wasn't good policy, according to three people familiar with the call. Trump argued that the legislation was unconstitutional and said it would damage his presidency. Corker was unrelenting, these people said, and told Trump the bill was going to pass both houses with bipartisan support.

“He was clearly frustrated,” one person said of Trump’s call with Corker earlier this month.

This is a particularly odd move from Trump, given the sanctions bill had overwhelming congressional support and was basically a foregone conclusion. Also, Trump's complaint that this would damage his presidency is a familiar theme.

3) Complaining to McConnell about not getting protection

The Times story last weekend about Trump's and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) strained relationship included a tantalizingly brief mention of Trump complaining to McConnell about McConnell not doing enough to protect the president from the Russia probe:

During the call, which Mr. Trump initiated on Aug. 9 from his New Jersey golf club, the president accused Mr. McConnell of bungling the health care issue. He was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader’s refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Republicans briefed on the conversation.

Again, it's notable here that Trump believes McConnell should be protecting him. (More of that to come.)

4) Asking Comey for loyalty

The New York Times reported in May that Trump sought then-FBI Director James B. Comey's loyalty in the early days of the Russia investigation:

As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.

Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.

After Trump fired him, Comey testified and recounted their conversations. Comey said Trump said, “I expect loyalty,” and he also suggested that Trump subtly threatened his job. Comey said Trump asked him whether he wanted to remain FBI director, which he found “strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to.”

5) Suggesting Comey be lenient on Michael Flynn

Separately, Comey has said Trump asked him whether he could take it easy on Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser. “I hope you can let this go,” Comey quoted Trump as saying in a memo written shortly after a meeting with Trump in February, as first reported by the Times.

Comey said in his later testimony that he understood it to be a direct request from Trump. “I mean, this is a president of the United States with me alone saying, 'I hope this.' I took it as, this is what he wants me to do,” Comey said. “I didn't obey that, but that's the way I took it.”

6) Asking Comey to say Trump wasn't under investigation

Comey said in his testimony that Trump asked him to say publicly what Comey had said privately: that Trump wasn't personally under investigation (at the time).

“He asked what we could do to ‘lift the cloud,’ ” Mr. Comey said of a March 30 phone call. “I responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could, and that there would be great benefit, if we didn’t find anything, to our having done the work well. He agreed, but then reemphasized the problems this was causing him.”

Comey also said he didn't want to have to recant his statement if Trump ever were to be the subject of investigation, which later turned out to be the case.

7) Asking Coats and Rogers to deny evidence of collusion

The Washington Post reported in May that Trump had, in March, tried to enlist Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers to push back against the FBI investigation into ties between his campaign and Russia:

Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.

Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.

In later testimony, Coats and Rogers did not directly respond to questions about this matter, but they did say they never felt pressured to intervene in the investigation.

 

[fraurosena]

Seth Abramson has another one of his mega threads up. I really like his insightful and comprehensive overviews which he gives from his perspective as an attorney. This time it deals with Flynn's Russian connections, the TT's possible promiss of a pardon, and a very plausible idea why the presidunce is so angry with Sessions. 

It's a sixty plus thread, but worth the read!

[GrumpyGran]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Seth Abramson has another one of his mega threads up. I really like his insightful and comprehensive overviews which he gives from his perspective as an attorney. This time it deals with Flynn's Russian connections, the TT's possible promiss of a pardon, and a very plausible idea why the presidunce is so angry with Sessions. 

It's a sixty plus thread, but worth the read!

Thanks for this @fraurosena. I went through the whole thing and it's a great layout of the issues. But near the start something hit me-Flynn is a former Army general and so one could assume he had access to classified material. In what world is it okay for him to then be taking money from a government that is not considered one of our allies? I know that is what we're talking about, on the surface, but I guess it never occurred to me that this man could be selling information to Russia. Current information once he entered the White House as a staff member. Would he really be more worried about Trump's wrath, or approval, than he would being executed for treason?

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

Flynn is a former Army general and so one could assume he had access to classified material. In what world is it okay for him to then be taking money from a government that is not considered one of our allies

That's just it. It's not ok. In fact, if any general (retired or not) wants to take money from foreign governments, they are mandated to ask permission from the US to do so. Flynn didn't. Which is a rather nice fact for Mueller right now, wouldn't you think?

[GrumpyGran]

23 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

That's just it. It's not ok. In fact, if any general (retired or not) wants to take money from foreign governments, they are mandated to ask permission from the US to do so. Flynn didn't. Which is a rather nice fact for Mueller right now, wouldn't you think?

I hope Mueller has protection. Serious protection. I don't doubt that some of these people would do anything to save their asses.

[GreyhoundFan]

4 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

I hope Mueller has protection. Serious protection. I don't doubt that some of these people would do anything to save their asses.

I have no doubt that he is very savvy about security. I can't imagine any of the shady characters being able to get to him in a meaningful way.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I have no doubt that he is very savvy about security. I can't imagine any of the shady characters being able to get to him in a meaningful way.

I hope they can't but Dump does have a lot of lunatics around him. I could see Stone doing him a "favor." Or Miller finding an old "friend" to arrange an "accident." And of course all the humpers would claim that Hillary was behind it because Mueller was just about to declare Dump innocent of all charges! And everyone he's ever know is also innocent of all charges!

I'm worried for Mueller, there are no ethical people among that crew of soulless clowns. 

[onekidanddone]

Trump likes to drop "hints" via twitter to his TDs.  It worries me as well.

[fraurosena]

Oh my!

Special Counsel Examines Possible Role Flynn Played in Seeking Clinton Emails From Hackers

Spoiler

Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining what role, if any, former national security adviser Mike Flynn may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The effort to seek out hackers who were believed to have stolen Mrs. Clinton’s emails, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was led by a longtime Republican activist, Peter W. Smith. In correspondence and conversations with his colleagues, Mr. Smith portrayed Mr. Flynn as an ally in those efforts and implied that other senior Trump campaign officials were coordinating with him, which they have denied. He also named Mr. Flynn’s consulting firm and his son in the correspondence and conversations.

The special counsel is investigating potential coordination between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.

Mr. Smith believed that some 33,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton said were personal and had been deleted had been obtained by hackers. Last year, in the final months of the presidential campaign, he made contact with what he said were five groups of hackers, two of which he believed were comprised of Russians, who claimed to have obtained the emails.

“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Mr. Smith told the Journal in an interview in May.

Mr. Smith suspected the emails could reveal embarrassing details about Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the Benghazi terrorist attacks, as well as her work with the Clinton Foundation, and wanted to release them publicly to harm Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. There is no evidence that the server was ever hacked.

Investigators working for Mr. Mueller have been conducting interviews and collecting information as they seek to determine whether Mr. Flynn was involved in Mr. Smith’s effort, and if his son, Michael G. Flynn, and the consulting firm Flynn Intel Group had a role, the people said. At the time Mr. Smith was trying to find the emails, Mr. Flynn was a senior adviser to the Trump campaign and had been on a short list of potential vice presidential candidates.

A lawyer for Mr. Flynn and a lawyer for his son declined to comment. Mr. Flynn’s firm has been dissolved.

The investigators’ inquiries show Mr. Mueller considers Mr. Smith’s effort to be potentially significant in the context of the wider probe into whether there was any collusion between people associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Mr. Mueller’s mandate from the Justice Department allows him to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the [Trump] campaign.” Investigators had already been focused on Mr. Flynn, using a grand jury to assist in a criminal investigation of the former White House adviser focused on his work in the private sector on behalf of foreign interests.

Mr. Mueller’s team is also inquiring about the nature of Mr. Smith’s relationship with several Trump campaign advisers and aides to the president, the people familiar with the matter said.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a campaign that was directed by the highest levels of its government. Its tactics included hacking state election systems; infiltrating and leaking information from party committees and political strategists; and disseminating through social media and other outlets negative stories about Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and positive ones about Mr. Trump, according to an intelligence report issued in January.

The Russian government has denied any meddling. President Trump has described Mr. Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt” and denied any collusion by the campaign.

Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel, declined to comment.

U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence said investigators also have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.

It isn’t known if those hackers are ones that Mr. Smith contacted.

In a document Mr. Smith used to explain his efforts and recruit assistance, he named several Trump campaign officials he said were working “in coordination” with him, including Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist for the president, and Kellyanne Conway, the former campaign manager and now White House counselor. They both said they were unaware of Mr. Smith’s work and played no role in it.

The investigators have also been trying to determine whether Mr. Smith or anyone working with him paid hackers for Mrs. Clinton’s emails, the people with knowledge of the investigation said. Mr. Smith set up a limited-liability company in Delaware, called KLS Research LLC, that he intended to use to pay people assisting him with his work and to collect contributions, people with direct knowledge of Mr. Smith’s efforts said.

Mr. Smith told the Journal that he never intended to pay for any of the emails found by hackers. Ultimately, he said, he couldn’t verify that all the emails the hacker groups claimed to have found were genuine, and so he didn’t acquire them. Instead, Mr. Smith said he encouraged the hackers to give the emails to WikiLeaks.

The website released emails that intelligence officials have said were stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Mr. Smith’s comments about his work are believed to be the only ones he gave to a journalist. On May 14, about 10 days after the interview, Mr. Smith died after asphyxiating himself in a hotel room in Rochester, Minn., according to local authorities. He was 81 years old.

Mr. Smith’s body was found in the Aspen Suites hotel, located across the street from the Mayo Clinic, according to a medical examiner’s report. An associate of Mr. Smith said that he had recently visited the clinic.

In a note found near Mr. Smith’s body, he apologized and said that “no foul play whatsoever” had occurred with his death, according to local authorities.

So, both Flynn senior and junior are being investigated.

[GrumpyGran]

19 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh my!

Special Counsel Examines Possible Role Flynn Played in Seeking Clinton Emails From Hackers

  Hide contents

Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining what role, if any, former national security adviser Mike Flynn may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The effort to seek out hackers who were believed to have stolen Mrs. Clinton’s emails, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was led by a longtime Republican activist, Peter W. Smith. In correspondence and conversations with his colleagues, Mr. Smith portrayed Mr. Flynn as an ally in those efforts and implied that other senior Trump campaign officials were coordinating with him, which they have denied. He also named Mr. Flynn’s consulting firm and his son in the correspondence and conversations.

The special counsel is investigating potential coordination between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.

Mr. Smith believed that some 33,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton said were personal and had been deleted had been obtained by hackers. Last year, in the final months of the presidential campaign, he made contact with what he said were five groups of hackers, two of which he believed were comprised of Russians, who claimed to have obtained the emails.

“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Mr. Smith told the Journal in an interview in May.

Mr. Smith suspected the emails could reveal embarrassing details about Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the Benghazi terrorist attacks, as well as her work with the Clinton Foundation, and wanted to release them publicly to harm Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. There is no evidence that the server was ever hacked.

Investigators working for Mr. Mueller have been conducting interviews and collecting information as they seek to determine whether Mr. Flynn was involved in Mr. Smith’s effort, and if his son, Michael G. Flynn, and the consulting firm Flynn Intel Group had a role, the people said. At the time Mr. Smith was trying to find the emails, Mr. Flynn was a senior adviser to the Trump campaign and had been on a short list of potential vice presidential candidates.

A lawyer for Mr. Flynn and a lawyer for his son declined to comment. Mr. Flynn’s firm has been dissolved.

The investigators’ inquiries show Mr. Mueller considers Mr. Smith’s effort to be potentially significant in the context of the wider probe into whether there was any collusion between people associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Mr. Mueller’s mandate from the Justice Department allows him to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the [Trump] campaign.” Investigators had already been focused on Mr. Flynn, using a grand jury to assist in a criminal investigation of the former White House adviser focused on his work in the private sector on behalf of foreign interests.

Mr. Mueller’s team is also inquiring about the nature of Mr. Smith’s relationship with several Trump campaign advisers and aides to the president, the people familiar with the matter said.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a campaign that was directed by the highest levels of its government. Its tactics included hacking state election systems; infiltrating and leaking information from party committees and political strategists; and disseminating through social media and other outlets negative stories about Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and positive ones about Mr. Trump, according to an intelligence report issued in January.

The Russian government has denied any meddling. President Trump has described Mr. Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt” and denied any collusion by the campaign.

Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel, declined to comment.

U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence said investigators also have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.

It isn’t known if those hackers are ones that Mr. Smith contacted.

In a document Mr. Smith used to explain his efforts and recruit assistance, he named several Trump campaign officials he said were working “in coordination” with him, including Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist for the president, and Kellyanne Conway, the former campaign manager and now White House counselor. They both said they were unaware of Mr. Smith’s work and played no role in it.

The investigators have also been trying to determine whether Mr. Smith or anyone working with him paid hackers for Mrs. Clinton’s emails, the people with knowledge of the investigation said. Mr. Smith set up a limited-liability company in Delaware, called KLS Research LLC, that he intended to use to pay people assisting him with his work and to collect contributions, people with direct knowledge of Mr. Smith’s efforts said.

Mr. Smith told the Journal that he never intended to pay for any of the emails found by hackers. Ultimately, he said, he couldn’t verify that all the emails the hacker groups claimed to have found were genuine, and so he didn’t acquire them. Instead, Mr. Smith said he encouraged the hackers to give the emails to WikiLeaks.

The website released emails that intelligence officials have said were stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Mr. Smith’s comments about his work are believed to be the only ones he gave to a journalist. On May 14, about 10 days after the interview, Mr. Smith died after asphyxiating himself in a hotel room in Rochester, Minn., according to local authorities. He was 81 years old.

Mr. Smith’s body was found in the Aspen Suites hotel, located across the street from the Mayo Clinic, according to a medical examiner’s report. An associate of Mr. Smith said that he had recently visited the clinic.

In a note found near Mr. Smith’s body, he apologized and said that “no foul play whatsoever” had occurred with his death, according to local authorities.

So, both Flynn senior and junior are being investigated.

And let's hope that there's a big fat file for Ms. KellyAnne Conway!

[fraurosena]

16 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

And let's hope that there's a big fat file for Ms. KellyAnne Conway!

I wouldn't be surprised at all, seeing as her hubby has Russian connections too.

[fraurosena]

Well, we don't have to worry that Mueller is being idle.

Mueller Seeks Grand Jury Testimony from PR Execs Who Worked With Manafort

Spoiler

Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued grand jury subpoenas in recent days seeking testimony from public relations executives who worked on an international campaign organized by Paul Manafort, people directly familiar with the matter told NBC News.

This is the first public indication that Mueller's investigation is beginning to compel witness testimony before the grand jury — a significant milestone in an inquiry that is examining the conduct of President Donald Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, among others.

It is also further indication that Manafort, Trump's onetime campaign chairman, could be in serious legal jeopardy.

According to one executive whose firm received a subpoena, Mueller's team is closely examining the lobbying campaign, which ran between 2012 and 2014. Some of the firms involved in the campaign received subpoenas for documents weeks ago, the executive said, and now the Mueller team is seeking testimony.

"We think they are trying to figure out, was this a legitimate project?" the executive said. "From our perspective it was — we did a lot of work. We took it seriously."

Manafort, whose Alexandria, Virginia, apartment was raided by FBI agents last month, has emerged as a key figure in the Mueller probe. The inquiry into the lobbying campaign appears to be part of a larger investigation into his work for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party, his offshore banking transactions, his tax compliance and his real estate dealings, people familiar with the probe have told NBC News.

Manafort also was present at a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lobbyist and a Russian lawyer, along with Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner. NBC News has previously reported that Kushner is under scrutiny by investigators, and that Mueller is examining whether President Trump obstructed justice.

The executive said six firms participated in the public relations effort that Manafort coordinated, paid for by a Brussels-based non-profit called the European Center for a Modern Ukraine. The stated goal was to build support for Ukraine's entry into the European Union.

Two of the firms, Podesta Group and Mercury LLC, worked in Washington with Manafort partner Rick Gates, according to lobbying disclosure records. Three other firms worked in Europe, the executive said. NBC News could not confirm the identity of those three.

At the time, Ukraine was run by a pro-Russian political party that had paid Manafort $17 million for consulting in 2013 and 2014, according to Manafort's latest foreign lobbying disclosure filing, which he filed belatedly under Justice Department pressure.

The party's leader, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia during a popular uprising in 2014.

Manafort's spokesman, Jason Maloni, declined to comment.

The Associated Press first revealed the pro-Ukraine lobbying campaign in August 2016, while Manafort was still running the Trump campaign.

The report said the campaign was designed to sway public opinion and included attempts to solicit favorable press coverage in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

At the time, neither Manafort nor the firms had registered as foreign agents. The executive told NBC News that was because the non-profit said that it was not funded by a government or a political party.

In recent months, the Justice Department told the Mercury and Podesta firms that they should have registered as foreign agents, and they did so.

Under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments, leaders or political parties must file detailed disclosures about their spending and activities to the Justice Department. Willful failure to file the forms violation is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison — but such prosecutions are extremely rare.

It certainly looks like the heat is being applied to Manafort's feet. Let's hope he'll start to squeal in hopes of making a deal, and that the dominoes begin to fall, one by one, and ultimately all.

[fraurosena]

Phew, that's a relief then.

Although we'lll have to wait and keep our fingers crossed that the repugs come to their senses or that the Dems win in 2018.

[GreyhoundFan]

Color me unsurprised: "Trump’s business sought deal on a Trump Tower in Moscow while he ran for president"

Spoiler

While Donald Trump was running for president in late 2015 and early 2016, his company was pursuing a plan to develop a massive Trump Tower in Moscow, according to several people familiar with the proposal and new records reviewed by Trump Organization lawyers.

As part of the discussions, a Russian-born real estate developer urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the proposal and suggested that he could get President Vladimir Putin to say “great things” about Trump, according to several people who have been briefed on his correspondence.

The developer, Felix Sater, predicted in a November 2015 email that he and Trump Organization leaders would soon be celebrating — both one of the biggest residential projects in real estate history and Donald Trump’s election as president, according to two of the people with knowledge of the exchange.

Sater wrote to Trump Organization Executive Vice President Michael Cohen “something to the effect of, ‘Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?’ ” said one person briefed on the email exchange. Sater emigrated from what was then the Soviet Union when he was 6 and grew up in Brooklyn.

Trump never went to Moscow as Sater proposed. And although investors and Trump’s company signed a letter of intent, they lacked the land and permits to proceed and the project was abandoned at the end of January 2016, just before the presidential primaries began, several people familiar with the proposal said.

Nevertheless, the details of the deal, which have not previously been disclosed, provide evidence that Trump’s business was actively pursuing significant commercial interests in Russia at the same time he was campaigning to be president — and in a position to determine U.S.-Russia relations. The new details from the emails, which are scheduled to be turned over to congressional investigators soon, also point to the likelihood of additional contacts between Russia-connected individuals and Trump associates during his presidential bid.

White House officials declined to comment for this report. Cohen, a longtime Trump aide who remains Trump’s personal attorney, and his lawyer have also declined to comment.

In recent months, contacts between high-ranking and lower- level Trump aides and Russians have emerged. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a U.S. senator and campaign adviser, twice met Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Donald Trump Jr. organized a June 2016 meeting with campaign aide Jared Kushner, campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer after the president’s eldest son was promised that the lawyer would bring damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help the campaign.

Internal emails also show campaign adviser George Papadopoulos repeatedly sought to organize meetings with campaign officials, including Trump, and Putin or other Russians. His efforts were rebuffed.

The negotiations for the Moscow project ended before Trump’s business ties to Russia had become a major issue in the campaign. Trump denied having any business connections to Russia in July 2016, tweeting, “for the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia” and then insisting at a news conference the following day, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

Discussions about the Moscow project began in earnest in September 2015, according to people briefed on the deal. An unidentified investor planned to build the project and, under a licensing agreement, put Trump’s name on it. Cohen acted as a lead negotiator for the Trump Organization. It is unclear how involved or aware Trump was of the negotiations.

As the talks progressed, Trump voiced numerous supportive comments about Putin, setting himself apart from his Republican rivals for the nomination.

By the end of 2015, Putin began offering praise in return.

“He says that he wants to move to another, closer level of relations. Can we really not welcome that? Of course, we welcome that,” Putin told reporters during his annual end-of-the year news conference. He called Trump a “colorful and talented” person. Trump said afterward that the compliment was an “honor.”

Though Putin’s comments came shortly after Sater suggested that the Russian president would speak favorably about Trump, there is no indication that the two are connected.

There is no public record that Trump has ever spoken about the effort to build a Trump Tower in 2015 and 2016.

Trump’s interests in building in Moscow, however, are long-standing. He had attempted to build a Trump property for three decades, starting with a failed effort in 1987 to partner with the Soviet government on a hotel project.

“Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment,” he said in a 2007 court deposition.

“We will be in Moscow at some point,” he promised in the deposition.

Sater was involved in at least one of those previous efforts. In 2005, the Trump Organization gave his development company, the Bayrock Group, an exclusive one-year deal to attempt to build a Moscow Trump Tower. Sater located a site for the project — an abandoned pencil factory — and worked closely with Trump on the deal, which did not come to fruition.

In an unrelated court case in 2008, Sater said in a deposition that he would personally provide Trump “verbal updates” on the deal.

“When I’d come back, pop my head into Mr. Trump’s office and tell him, you know, ‘Moving forward on the Moscow deal.’ And he would say, ‘All right,’ ” Sater said.

In the same testimony, Sater described traveling with Trump’s children, including joining Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. on a trip to Moscow at their father’s request.

“They were on their way by themselves, and he was all concerned,” Sater said. “He asked if I wouldn’t mind joining them and looking after them while they were in Moscow.”

Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, told The Washington Post last year that Sater happened to be in Moscow at the same time as Trump’s two adult children. “There was no accompanying them to Moscow,” he said.

Neither Sater nor his attorney responded to requests for comment.

Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Sater, who served time in jail after assaulting a man with the stem of a broken margarita glass during a 1991 bar fight and then pleaded guilty in 1998 to his role in an organized- crime-linked stock fraud. Sater’s sentencing was delayed for years while he cooperated with the federal government on a series of criminal and national security-related investigations, federal officials have said.

During that time, Sater worked as an executive with Bayrock, whose offices were in Trump Tower, and brokered deals to license Trump’s name for developments in multiple U.S. and foreign cities. In 2010, Trump allowed Sater to briefly work out of Trump Organization office space and use a business card that identified him as a “senior adviser to Donald Trump.”

Still, when asked about Sater in 2013 court deposition, Trump said: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” He added that he had spoken with Sater “not many” times.

 

[onekidanddone]

1 minute ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Color me unsurprised: "Trump’s business sought deal on a Trump Tower in Moscow while he ran for president"

Rut row..

[fraurosena]

The NYT has more on that Felix Slater slip up about the tower deal in Moskow that @GreyhoundFan posted above.

Trump Associate Boasted That Moscow Business Deal ‘Will Get Donald Elected’

Spoiler

A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.

The associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin. He predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

>partial email copy<

The emails show that, from the earliest months of Mr. Trump’s campaign, some of his associates viewed close ties with Moscow as a political advantage. Those ties are now under investigation by the Justice Department and multiple congressional committees.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 presidential election to try to help Mr. Trump. Investigators want to know whether anyone on Mr. Trump’s team was part of that process.

Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow.

“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote.

Mr. Sater said he was eager to show video clips to his Russian contacts of instances of Mr. Trump speaking glowingly about Russia, and said he would arrange for Mr. Putin to praise Mr. Trump’s business acumen.

“If he says it we own this election,” Mr. Sater wrote. “Americas most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald is a good guy to negotiate.”

There is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had stalled. But Mr. Cohen did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.

The project never got government permits or financing, and died weeks later.

“To be clear, the Trump Organization has never had any real estate holdings or interests in Russia,” the Trump Organization said Monday in a statement. Mr. Trump, however signed a nonbinding “letter of intent” for the project in 2015. Mr. Cohen said he discussed the project with Mr. Trump three times.

The Trump Organization on Monday turned over emails to the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian meddling in the presidential election and whether anyone in Mr. Trump’s campaign was involved. Some of the emails were obtained by The Times.

>another partial email copy<

The emails obtained by The Times do not include any responses from Mr. Cohen to Mr. Sater’s messages.

In a statement on Monday that was also provided to Congress, Mr. Cohen suggested that he viewed Mr. Sater’s comments as puffery. “He has sometimes used colorful language and has been prone to ‘salesmanship,’” the statement said. “I ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.”

The emails obtained by The Times make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the hacking of Democrats’ emails. Mr. Trump, who began praising Mr. Putin years before the presidential campaign, has said there was no collusion with Russian officials. Previously released emails, however, revealed that his campaign was willing to receive damaging information about Mrs. Clinton from Russian sources.

Mr. Sater said it would be “pretty cool to get a USA President elected” and said he desired to be the ambassador to the Bahamas. “That my friend is the home run I want out of this,” he wrote.

Mr. Sater — a former F.B.I. informant who is famous for having once smashed a martini glass stem into another man’s face — has maintained a relationship with Mr. Cohen over the years. The two men have spent decades operating in the world of New York commercial real estate, where the sources of funding can be murky.

Mr. Sater’s lawyer did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Mr. Sater was a broker for the Trump Organization for several years, paid to deliver real estate deals. A company he worked for, Bayrock, played a role in financing the Trump SoHo Hotel in New York. Mr. Sater and Mr. Cohen even worked together on a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia that they sought to get in front of Mr. Trump’s national security adviser earlier this year.

As a broker for the Trump Organization, Mr. Sater had an incentive to overstate his business-making acumen. He presents himself in his emails as so influential in Russia that he helped arrange a 2006 trip that Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, took to Moscow.

“I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,” he said.

Ms. Trump said she had no involvement in the discussions about the Moscow deal other than to recommend possible architects. In a statement, she said that during the 2006 trip she took “a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin” as a tourist. She said it is possible she sat in Mr. Putin’s chair during that tour but she did not recall it. She said she has not seen or spoken to Mr. Sater since 2010. “I have never met President Vladimir Putin,” she said.

The Times reported earlier this year on the plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow, which never materialized. On Sunday, The Washington Post reported the existence of the correspondence between Mr. Sater and Mr. Cohen, but not its content.

Spokespeople for the House Intelligence Committee had no comment on the documents.

Mr. Cohen has denied any wrongdoing, and the Trump Organization turned over the emails to the House as part of his ongoing cooperation with the investigation.

Earlier this month, Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen M. Ryan, wrote a letter to congressional investigators that contained what he said was a point-by-point refutation of a dossier suggesting that Mr. Cohen colluded with Russian operatives. That dossier, compiled by a retired British spy and briefed to Mr. Trump during the transition, was published online early this year.

“We do not believe that the committee should give credence to or perpetuate any of the allegations relating to Mr. Cohen unless the committee can obtain independent and reliable corroboration,” Mr. Ryan wrote.

So he arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin's chair. And of course she says it may have happened but she doesn't recall. Par for the course. Every single one of them has such a faulty memory about anything Russian. I wonder if it's contagious, as so many in this administration suffer from this condition.

[GreyhoundFan]

Another good one: "Putin saw the Panama Papers as a personal attack and may have wanted revenge, Russian authors say"

Spoiler

Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan first published “The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries” in 2015. In that book, the pair used investigative reporting and sharp analysis to show how the Kremlin was using the Internet to its advantage.

Two years later, Russia's alleged use of covert online operations became a topic of discussion all around world. And so Soldatov and Borogan began investigating again.

Now they have released a new version of their book that includes an additional chapter on the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The new chapter provides important context about Russian President's Vladimir Putin's possible motivations — as well as evidence of apparent links between WikiLeaks and the Kremlin, and details of the ongoing fallout in Russia.

WorldViews conducted an interview about this new chapter with Soldatov and Borogan over email. The new edition of the book came out last week in the United States.

Q: When you published the first edition of your book, could you have envisaged having to add a chapter on Russia allegedly trying influence the U.S. election?

A: No, our assumption was that the Kremlin was losing the battle for control of the Internet, sticking to old, conventional methods of control. But it proved correct for the situation inside of Russia. Outside, the Kremlin used a completely different toolkit dealing with things online.

Q: What do you think is the strongest public evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in attempts to disrupt the U.S. election himself?

A: The Kremlin has been for years using outsourcing and contractors as the tactics to lower the costs for sensitive operations abroad; that's why it was so tricky to prove Putin himself was involved. The most telling part for us, as the people who saw the crisis unfolded from inside of Russia, is what happened in the fall and winter 2016.

While publicly Putin has always denied Russian government involvement, all the top-level Russian gatekeepers between the Russian cyber agencies and the West were either sent to jail or quietly dismissed, for the obvious reason to prevent them from leaking.

We also believe that the meeting of the Russian Security Council on April 8, when Putin urgently gathered only the most trusted officials — most of them with secret services background — could be the meeting when a very sensitive matter was discussed, such as the need for a retaliatory response to the Panama Papers exposés.

Q: Your book suggests that Russia’s alleged interference in the U.S. might be a response to the Panama Papers, the enormous 2016 leak of documents from an offshore banking network. Why do you think that leak of financial data angered the Kremlin so much?

A: It was seen as an attack on personal friends of Putin, his immediate circle. It's a line you cannot cross with Putin, and the Russian media learned that in a hard way. When a small Moscow publication reported in 2008 that Putin divorced and was going to marry a famous gymnast, the publication was immediately shut. When the RBC media holding published stories about Putin's daughter in 2015, the media holding's owner corporation was raided by police, and the media holding soon changed hands.

Worse, Putin believed the Panama Papers attack was sponsored by Hillary Clinton's people — this, in a way, provided him with a “justification” for a retaliatory operation.

Q: Could you describe some of what you uncovered about WikiLeaks’ alleged links to the Russian government?

A: It is a very sad story for us personally, as we believed back in 2010 in the mission of WikiLeaks — we've been writing about the Russian secret services since 2000, and we run our website Agentura.ru as a security services watchdog, thus transparency and holding power in check are important words for us. We also have friends who are investigative journalists who cooperated with WikiLeaks in the past.

The most horrible thing we found out that in the spring and summer of 2016 WikiLeaks suddenly compromised the very principles [founder Julian] Assange proclaimed, and didn't stop from attacking the very journalists the group had been working with. And he knew full well the danger these journalists faced exposing the offshore schemes of Putin's personal friends. For us, it's a story of betrayal, both principles and people.

Q: What has the fallout over the alleged U.S. election interference been in Russia’s cybersecurity world?

A: Since December, the Kremlin and the FSB [Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB] have been trying to shut all doors to the West for the Russian cybersecurity professionals, strongly discouraging them from communicating with their colleagues in other countries.

It's a sad story in itself, as the world of cyber investigations is global by definition, and the Russian experts have been always widely respected and proud, quite rightly, of their international reputation. And look, you just cannot hunt down Russian hackers only in Russia— it's not how this works — they tend to live and operate in many countries!

Q: Do you think that the Russian government would be likely to try something like this again?

A: The problem is that the U.S. response may have been fine for the United States, but it won't help other countries to resist. As Russians, we obviously know nothing about the secret part of the sanctions, but one thing is clear — the open part of the response could hardly set an example the other countries could follow. You cannot expect the Baltic countries, say, to expel dozens of Russian diplomats. That could provoke the adventurous people in the Kremlin to try their hand elsewhere, as the costs seem to be not very high.

Worse still, it's not only about Russia — lots of cyber experts told us that even a country with very basic level of technology needs only five years to come to the level sufficient for launching a cyberattack.

Q: Have you faced any repercussions for your reporting on this book?

A: It was very hard to get people talking, especially after the December arrests of FSB people. We also got some death threats by email, which is, unfortunately, a very common thing for journalists in Russia.

But the important thing to say is that there are many of our colleagues, especially in the regions, who keep reporting bravely, sometimes for very small publications, which makes things very dangerous to them. And these are people we admire.

 

[AmazonGrace]

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-knew-moscow-tower-proposal-campaign-lawyer/story?id=49472342

Trump signed 'letter of intent' for Russian tower during campaign, lawyer says

By BRIAN ROSS

MATTHEW MOSK

 

Aug 28, 2017, 4:00 PM ET

Four months into his campaign for president of the United States, Donald Trump signed a “letter of intent” to pursue a Trump Tower-style building development in Moscow, according to a statement from the then-Trump Organization Chief Counsel Michael Cohen.

Spoiler

 

The involvement of then-candidate Trump in a proposed Russian development deal contradicts repeated statements Trump made during the campaign, including telling ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in July 2016 that his business had “no relationship to Russia whatsoever.”

The disclosure from Cohen, who has described himself as Trump’s personal lawyer, came as Cohen’s attorney gave congressional investigators scores of documents and emails from the campaign, including several pertaining to the Moscow development idea.

“Certain documents in the production reference a proposal for ‘Trump Tower Moscow,’ which contemplated a private real estate development in Russia,” Cohen’s statement says. “The decision to pursue the proposal initially, and later to abandon it, was unrelated to the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign.”

In a separate statement texted to ABC News, Cohen added that “the Trump Moscow proposal was simply one of many development opportunities that the Trump Organization considered and ultimately rejected.”

Cohen specifically says in his statement that Trump was told three times about the Moscow proposal.

“To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Trump was never in contact with anyone about this proposal other than me on three occasions, including signing a non-binding letter of intent in 2015,” his statement says.

Trump's Russian Business Connections Under the Microscope

Memory Lapse? Trump Seeks Distance From 'Advisor' With Past Ties to Mafia

Cohen also makes clear that he himself engaged in communication directly with the Kremlin about the proposal during the ongoing 2016 presidential campaign. His statement says he wrote to the press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin at the request of Felix Sater, a frequent Trump Organization associate who had proposed the Trump Moscow development.

“In mid-January 2016, Mr. Sater suggested that I send an email to Mr. Dmitry Peskov, the Press Secretary for the President of Russia, since the proposal would require approvals within the Russian government that had not been issued,” Cohen’s statement says. “Those permissions were never provided. I decided to abandon the proposal less than two weeks later for business reasons and do not recall any response to my email, nor any other contacts by me with Mr. Peskov or other Russian government officials about the proposal.”

The Trump Moscow development proposal, which was first reported Monday by The Washington Post, provides a new look at the relationship between the president’s real estate firm and Sater, a convicted felon who served a year in New York state prison for stabbing a man during a bar fight.

Sater is a controversial figure who served for many years as a federal government cooperating witness on a host of matters involving organized crime and national security. Sater had also traveled in Moscow with Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., in the mid-2000s and handed out business cards identifying himself as a “senior adviser” to Donald Trump Sr.

Trump had taken pains to distance himself from Sater. In one sworn deposition, regarding a Trump development in Florida on which Sater had worked, Trump said “I don't know him very well … if he were sitting in the room right now I really wouldn't know what he looked like.”

The emails show Sater and Cohen – friends since their teenage years growing up in Brooklyn – sharing their dreams of a Trump presidency.

In one, made public Monday by The Washington Post and New York Times, Sater writes: “I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy, our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it.”

And Sater adds, pointedly: “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this.”

On Sept. 30, 2015, Trump Organization officials told ABC News that Sater had inflated his connections to the company. Alan Garten, a senior Trump Organization attorney, told ABC News that “there's really no direct relationship” between Sater and the real estate firm.

“To be honest, I don't know that he ever brought any deals,” Garten said.

That was the same month Sater brought the company the Trump Moscow development proposal, according to Cohen’s statement. Cohen’s statement notes that he did not share the proposal with others in his firm.

“Mr. Sater, on occasion, made claims about aspects of the proposal, as well as his ability to bring the proposal to fruition. Over the course of my business dealings with Mr. Sater, he has sometimes used colorful language and has been prone to ‘salesmanship,’” Cohen wrote. “As a result, I did not feel that it was necessary to routinely apprise others within the Trump Organization of communications that Mr. Sater sent only to me.”

Garten and an attorney for Sater did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

For five months, the Trump Organization gave serious consideration to the Moscow development idea. But Cohen told ABC News he scuttled the plan in January 2016, one year before Trump was sworn in as president.

“I abandoned the Moscow proposal because I lost confidence that the prospective licensee would be able to obtain the real estate, financing, and government approvals necessary to bring the proposal to fruition,” Cohen said. “It was a building proposal that did not succeed and nothing more.”

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Trump alternative history: 

 

So their hair is pretty similar but one is dressed in black and one in red and one seems to be a bit older. 

It seems like Potus isn't paying a whole lot of attention to what's going on around him. 

[fraurosena]

Well, Mueller's keeping busy and getting overtly closer to the presidunce's personal conduct. I wonder how TT is taking this news?

Oh, and I see Seth Abramson has a thread about this.