The Russian Connection 3: Mueller is Coming

[GrumpyGran]

51 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Aaaaaand.... Gates has flipped!

 

You mean that guy who's the third cousin of the woman who walked by the campaign office in that little town in South Dakota back in 2016, long before we had anything to do with anything?

[Howl]

These guys should do hard time for stupidity.  Gates LIED to Mueller in the course of a proffer?  WTaF?

But then, I'm kinda glad, because he'll rat somebody out, unless he thinks he can keep lying. 

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Gates? Yes I know all about gates. Most fantastic gates like what I have around my properties.

Gates? All I know about gates is that there won't be any in my wall. You know, my bigly beautiful wall to keep all of the scary brown people out, the one that Mexico is going to pay for.

[Cartmann99]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I'm baking pies and cakes and am currently on a little break checking FJ

That's awesome because I forgot to make dessert!

 I'm caramelizing onions for French onion soup. Hopefully, some others will show up with more sides and a couple of entrées so we're not just having soup, cake, and pie! 

 

[AmazonGrace]

The last page of the indictment says Gates lied about a meeting attended by a member of congress. Any ideas who that might be?

[onekidanddone]

58 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

That's awesome because I forgot to make dessert!

 I'm caramelizing onions for French onion soup. Hopefully, some others will show up with more sides and a couple of entrées so we're not just having soup, cake, and pie! 

 

There is an amazing Indian place near me which serves this curried goat. OY!  So good.

[AmazonGrace]

30 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

The last page of the indictment says Gates lied about a meeting attended by a member of congress. Any ideas who that might be?

Never mind, I found it: Rohrabacher, of course.

 

[apple1]

I suspect Rohrabacher is as dirty as can be.

I guess eventually we will see.

[fraurosena]

Phew! Well, all the baking's finally done. The last butter cake is in the oven right now. All I have to do is whip two large batches of cream (dairy and non-dairy) before the party can start.

I've filled the coffee maker with a fresh batch of beans, and set out the tea boxes (there will be a choice of about 12 different kinds), and I've stocked up on prosecco and fruit wine. There's a large bottle of Amaretto and bottles of Sambucca and Kahlua too. I think there's still some vodka left from when I made some home made strawberry liqueur, and a half bottle of gin in the back of the cupboard.

I made an attempt to make pizza-tortilla chips from scratch, but I'm afraid they're a tad burnt around the edges. Although DH and DS don't mind, they've already had some and declared them good enough to eat.

So, I'm good to go!

That said, Gates flipping is exciting news of course. I do have to admit that I was a little disappointed it turned out to be Rohrabacher. I had so hoped it was Nunes. 

 

[GrumpyGran]

9 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Phew! Well, all the baking's finally done. The last butter cake is in the oven right now. All I have to do is whip two large batches of cream (dairy and non-dairy) before the party can start.

I've filled the coffee maker with a fresh batch of beans, and set out the tea boxes (there will be a choice of about 12 different kinds), and I've stocked up on prosecco and fruit wine. There's a large bottle of Amaretto and bottles of Sambucca and Kahlua too. I think there's still some vodka left from when I made some home made strawberry liqueur, and a half bottle of gin in the back of the cupboard.

I made an attempt to make pizza-tortilla chips from scratch, but I'm afraid they're a tad burnt around the edges. Although DH and DS don't mind, they've already had some and declared them good enough to eat.

So, I'm good to go!

That said, Gates flipping is exciting news of course. I do have to admit that I was a little disappointed it turned out to be Rohrabacher. I had so hoped it was Nunes. 

 

Now you're just being cruel.

[fraurosena]

Never cruel, @GrumpyGran, at least not intentionally so! It really is the way I like to prep for a party. It's DH's birthday tomorrow, you see.

Besides, the invitation to my friends here on FJ still stands.

In other news, Seth Abramson has a new thread out on the Gates' flip. It's not too long, and has lots of links to interesting articles.

 

[LeftCoastLurker]

4 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

That's awesome because I forgot to make dessert!

 I'm caramelizing onions for French onion soup. Hopefully, some others will show up with more sides and a couple of entrées so we're not just having soup, cake, and pie! 

 

I make a kick ass potatoes au gratin with fennel, onions and gruyere. Can I come?

[onekidanddone]

49 minutes ago, LeftCoastLurker said:

I make a kick ass potatoes au gratin with fennel, onions and gruyere. Can I come?

I make a basil pesto chicken thing.  I'll bring that and my triple chocolate raspberry cake

[GreyhoundFan]

The WaPo published an interesting article comparing and contrasting Mueller and Dumpy: "Mueller and Trump: Born to wealth, raised to lead. Then, sharply different choices.". It's a long article, so I'm only quoting some passages.

Spoiler

They are the sons of wealth, brought up in families accustomed to power. They were raised to show and demand respect, and they were raised to lead.

They rose to positions of enormous authority, the president of the United States and the special counsel chosen to investigate him. They dress more formally than most of those around them; both sport meticulously coiffed hair. They have won unusual loyalty from those who believe in them. They attended elite all-male private schools, were accomplished high school athletes and went on to Ivy League colleges. As young men, each was deeply affected by the death of a man he admired greatly.

Yet Robert Swan Mueller III and Donald John Trump, born 22 months apart in New York City, also can seem to come from different planets. One is courtly and crisp, the other blustery and brash. One turned away from the path to greater wealth while the other spent half a century exploring every possible avenue to add to his assets.

At pivotal points in their lives, they made sharply divergent choices — as students, as draft-age men facing the dilemma of the Vietnam War, as ambitious alpha males deciding where to focus their energies.

Now, as they move toward an almost inevitable confrontation that could end in anything from deeper political discord to a fatal blow to this presidency, Trump, 71, and Mueller, 73, are behaving much as they have throughout their lives: As the president fumes about a “witch hunt” and takes his frustrations to his supporters, the special counsel remains publicly mute, speaking through inquiries and indictments.

The months flip by and the showdown looms: Mueller and Trump, the war hero and the draft avoider, two men who rise early and live mainly at the office, two men who find relief on the golf course. They circle each other, speaking different languages. Their aides talk in fits and starts about whether and when the two will meet, but it remains unclear whether that will happen. So they continue on their missions, one loudly, the other in silence. Neither knows how this will end.

From Princeton to the Marines

Mueller was born to a social rank that barely exists anymore, a cosseted WASP elite of northeastern families who sent their sons to New England prep schools built with generations of inherited wealth.

Mueller’s father was an executive at DuPont, part of a family firmly planted in the country’s plutocracy. Mueller, who grew up in Princeton, N.J., and the Philadelphia Main Line, was sent to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where the Astor, Vanderbilt and Mellon families educated their boys. At the Episcopal school, Mueller became captain of the soccer, hockey and lacrosse teams. He played hockey with his classmate John F. Kerry, a future secretary of state and one of three St. Paul’s alumni who would run for president.

...

Mueller was, from early on, a role model. As a group of boys gathered one day at The Tuck, a snack shop at St. Paul’s, a student made a derogatory comment about someone who wasn’t there. “Bob said he didn’t want to hear that,” King said. “I mean, we all said disparaging things about each other face to face. But saying something about someone who wasn’t there was something that Bob was uncomfortable with and he let it be known and just walked out.”

At Princeton, which his father also had attended, Mueller was accepted into one of the most socially exclusive eating clubs, where he often was seen before dinner playing bridge by the sitting room fireplace. Mueller had planned to go to medical school, but as a classmate who studied with him recalled, organic chemistry got the better of him. Mueller pronounced himself defeated by the subject; he realized he would not be a doctor.

Just a few weeks after he finished Princeton with a degree in politics in 1966, Mueller enlisted in the Marine Corps, a rare choice for an Ivy League graduate at a time when many young men were casting about for ways to avoid the draft. Mueller, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has often said he was inspired to join the Marines by his lacrosse teammate David Hackett, who had graduated from Princeton a year earlier and gone off to fight in Vietnam.

“As we were graduating, we . . . faced the decision of how to respond to the war in Vietnam,” Mueller said in a speech last year. “And a number of [Hackett’s] friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.” In April 1967, as he led his platoon in evacuating fallen Marines from a battleground, Hackett was shot in the back of the head by a North Vietnamese sniper. Mueller to this day speaks of Hackett’s death as a turning point, as the event that pushed him to a career of public service.

Before beginning his military training, and while recovering from a knee injury, Mueller studied international relations at New York University. Then he started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Va., where he excelled, although he did get a D in delegation. Mueller followed that, according to military records, by going through the Army’s grueling Ranger School and Airborne School — unusual training for a Marine, signaling that he was going places.

By November 1968, he was leading a rifle platoon in the jungles of Vietnam.

Off to military school

Like Mueller, Trump was raised in rare comfort. The Trumps had a family chef and chauffeur, but they never considered themselves part of the country’s ruling class. Theirs was immigrant stock, from Germany and Scotland, hardy entrepreneurs who tackled the new land with a blitz of new businesses — restaurants, hotels and, finally, real estate.

...

Donald Trump grew up in a 23-room manse in Queens, a faux Southern plantation house with a Cadillac limousine in the driveway. He attended private school from kindergarten on; his focus in school, Trump told The Washington Post in 2016, was “creating mischief, because, for some reason, I liked to stir things up and I liked to test people. . . . It wasn’t malicious so much as it was aggressive.”

In second grade, he said, he punched his music teacher in the face. He got into trouble often. Before eighth grade started, his father sent him to military school.

At New York Military Academy, where the rules were so strictly enforced that a desperate cadet was said to have leaped into the Hudson River in an attempted escape, Trump thrived. Although he ate in a mess hall instead of being served steaks by the family cook, and although he slept in a barracks rather than his own room in a mansion, he for the first time took pride in his grades. He won medals for neatness and order. He also won notice from fellow cadets for touting his father’s wealth and boasting to friends that “I’m going to be famous one day.”

Trump competed to become a cadet leader and enjoyed wielding authority. As a junior supply sergeant in E Company, he ordered that a cadet be struck on the backside as punishment for breaking formation. Another time, while inspecting dorm rooms, Trump saw cadet Ted Levine’s unmade bed and blew up, ripping off the sheets and tossing them on the floor, Levine said. Levine threw a combat boot at Trump and hit him with a broomstick. Trump, infuriated, grabbed Levine and tried to push him out a second-story window, Levine said.

Promoted to captain of A Company, Trump won respect from some of the other boys, who said they never wanted to disappoint him. Trump introduced them to a world of fun, setting up a tanning salon in his dorm room, bringing beautiful women to campus, and leading the baseball team to victory.

But other cadets said Trump tried to break boys who didn’t bend to his will. During Trump’s senior year, when one of his sergeants shoved a new cadet against a wall for not standing at attention quickly enough, Trump was relieved of his duty in the barracks, said Lee Ains, the student who was shoved.

Trump denied being demoted, saying he was actually moved up. “You don’t get elevated if you partake in hazing,” he told The Post in 2016. He was put in charge of a drill team that would perform in New York City’s Columbus Day Parade.

Fleeting victories and fiery retreats

Mutter’s Ridge was a killing ground, a craggy hellscape in Quang Tri province where the Marines had been fighting for years, setting up and abandoning bases as they tried over and over to assert control of one of the main routes the North Vietnamese used to infiltrate the South.

...

As his platoon suffered heavy casualties, “Second Lieutenant Mueller fearlessly moved from one position to another, directing the accurate counterfire of his men and shouting words of encouragement to them,” the account said.

Mueller set up a defensive perimeter and “with complete disregard for his own safety, he then skillfully supervised the evacuation of casualties from the hazardous fire area,” as the Marines put it. Mueller led a team across the smoldering terrain and into a North Vietnamese-controlled area to recover a mortally wounded Marine. For that, he earned a Bronze Star medal with “V” distinction for combat valor. He was promoted to first lieutenant.

Four months later, the North Vietnamese attacked a squad of about a dozen Marines from Mueller’s platoon. Responding to the ambush, Mueller led the rest of his men to assist the Marines under assault. They pushed ahead against heavy fire, and Mueller was shot in the thigh.

“Although seriously wounded during the fire fight, he resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force,” said the citation on the medal Mueller received.

His year in Vietnam was a turning point, friends said. “He never speaks to that horror and what he did,” said Thomas B. Wilner, a longtime friend and Washington lawyer.

A lifelong friend said that after Vietnam, Mueller “went from being this affable, good guy, good athlete” to having the “backbone and the steel that he has today.” But Mueller doesn’t talk about those harrowing months in the jungle. “That is not his style. He doesn’t brag about himself.”

Draft deferments

The country felt as though it was coming apart at the seams. At the University of Pennsylvania, where Trump had transferred after two years at Fordham University in the Bronx, protests against the Vietnam War grew larger and more insistent. There were sit-ins, candlelight vigils, demonstrations against university contracts with the military, a metastasizing culture of conflict as a new generation pushed back against war, segregation, dress codes and curfews.

Trump took part in none of that. Nor did he pay much attention to his coursework, fellow students said. He was already spending nearly as much time working for his father’s real estate business in New York as he was on campus in Philadelphia. He said he spent many of his off-hours while at school scouring the neighborhood for apartments to buy so he could rent them to students.

...

‘Mueller, Homicide’

Mueller spent the first two decades of his legal career putting bad guys behind bars. He worked as a prosecutor in San Francisco and Boston. And in Washington, he headed the Justice Department’s criminal division as an assistant attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, supervising high-profile cases such as the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega and the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

But by 1995, he was ensconced in the $400,000-a-year luxury of a white-collar litigation job in the Washington office of a Boston law firm, Hale and Dorr. It was not a happy time.

“He hated it,” said Wilner, his longtime friend. “He couldn’t stand selling his services to defend people he thought might be guilty. . . . There was no hesitation for Bob in leaving a lucrative job to . . . do what he thought was helping make the world a better place.”

So one day, Mueller called the District’s local prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Eric H. Holder Jr., and asked for a job, not handling the office’s big national cases, but working the line, prosecuting homicides on the streets of D.C. He wanted no title, no supervisory position. He told Holder that he was shaken by all the killings in Washington, then the nation’s murder capital, and that he just wanted to try homicide cases.

“I was taken aback,” Holder recalled. He reminded Mueller that coming to work at the “Triple Nickel” — as the prosecutors’ office at 555 Fourth Street NW was called — would mean a pay cut of more than 75 percent, a big step down in stature and a daunting job. The District, plagued with a crack cocaine epidemic and about 400 homicides a year, was a nightmare for prosecutors, who faced huge caseloads and witnesses who were too scared to talk.

Mueller said he knew what he was getting into. Holder hired him, but insisted on giving him a title — senior litigation counsel — and eventually made him head of the homicide section. Day to day, though, Mueller was “just a line guy,” Holder said. “He would be in those parts of Washington that were most affected by the violence. . . . He would be interviewing people at crime scenes, going to people’s homes to build cases, working with street cops.”

He got a kick out of answering his phone, “Mueller, Homicide.”

...

Through the decades, Mueller has often said that what matters even more than the content of one’s work is “how we do it,” as he put it in a commencement address in 2013. “You are only as good as your word. You can be smart, aggressive, articulate, and indeed persuasive, but if you are not honest, your reputation will suffer, and once lost, a good reputation can never be regained.”

...

 

After Mueller did a stint as U.S. attorney in San Francisco, President George W. Bush nominated him to direct the FBI. He was sworn in on Sept. 4, 2001, one week before the planes hit the twin towers.

For the next 12 years, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, Mueller led the FBI through one of the most difficult periods in its history. The bureau shifted from a domestic law enforcement agency largely focused on criminal threats to a global intelligence organization reoriented to fight terrorism.

Although more terrorist attacks were feared, Mueller was intent on protecting civil liberties, according to those who worked with him. “He didn’t allow FBI agents in the post 9/11 era to engage in interrogation techniques that he thought were inconsistent with American law and tradition,” said Holder, who, as President Barack Obama’s attorney general, was his boss once again.

Mueller worked around the clock, traveling from his Georgetown home to FBI headquarters in a black SUV that arrived shortly after 6 a.m. for morning security briefings, heading back late at night. He wore a traditional J. Edgar Hoover-era G-Man uniform: dark suit, red or blue tie and white shirt — always white.

“He won’t wear a blue shirt,” Wilner said. “He is so straight, he always wears a white shirt. He’s a pain in the ass in many ways because he is so straight. . . . He’s conscious that he’s a public figure and he doesn’t want anything to compromise his integrity. Even a blue shirt.”

Around the building, some privately dubbed him “Bobby Three Sticks,” a reference to both the Roman numeral at the end of his name and the three-finger Boy Scout salute. No one dared use the nickname in his presence, former Justice Department officials said.

Mueller usually avoided the limelight. He frustrated his speechwriters by crossing out every “I” in speeches they wrote for him. It wasn’t about him, he told them: “It’s about the organization.”

Family and politics

Mueller burrowed into the bureaucracy and won allies by eschewing publicity. Trump charged into one industry after another, from casino gambling to steaks to for-profit education and finally to politics. The only through line in his career was his own celebrity — the power and allure of his name.

In nearly every possible way, from their family relations to their political involvement, the two men have presented themselves in opposite ways.

Three months after he was graduated from college, Mueller married his girlfriend, Ann Standish, whose ancestors had come to the United States on the Mayflower. The couple, who met at a party when they were 17, have two daughters. One of them has spina bifida, and at one point, Mueller took a job in the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston in part to be near the treatment she needed.

Mueller has asked reporters not to discuss his family life; Trump for decades regularly sought coverage of his love life by gossip columnists and talked about his dates and bedroom activities with radio host Howard Stern.

Trump has five children by three wives, each of them newcomers to New York City, two from Central Europe and one from a small town in Georgia. None was born to privilege. Like his father before him, Trump was distant from his children when they were very young, but grew close to them once they were mature enough to learn the family business and join him on his daily rounds.

Mueller is a lifelong Republican who has worked for administrations of both parties; Trump was raised in a Republican home by a father who spent many weekends visiting the Democratic clubs of Brooklyn, building relationships with the politicians who might help him get his projects built.

For four decades, Trump toyed with the idea of entering politics. He changed his party registration seven times between 1999 and 2012 — he was a Democrat twice, a Republican three times, and an independent. In 2000, he briefly ran for president under the Reform Party banner. Once, when asked in a TV interview why he was a Republican, he said, “I have no idea.”

A friendly conversation

In the Rose Garden on June 21, 2013, Obama announced that James B. Comey would replace Mueller as FBI director. “Like the Marine that he’s always been, Bob never took his eyes off his mission,” Obama said. “It’s a tribute to Bob’s trademark humility that most Americans probably wouldn’t recognize him on the street, but all of us are better because of his service.”

Four years later, last May, the new president invited Mueller back to the White House. President Trump had abruptly fired Comey and now, at the suggestion of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mueller was coming in to talk about his former job. On his way into the Oval Office, Mueller met then-chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a former Navy officer, and teased him for letting his daughter go to West Point.

Mueller and Trump spoke for about 30 minutes, according to a person familiar with the interview. It was a friendly conversation, but seemed almost pro forma because Mueller made it clear from the start that he was unlikely to take the job he had held for 12 years.

Trump liked Mueller, according to the person. “He thought he was smart and tough,” a type Trump admires more than almost any other.

The question became moot within days, as Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed Mueller as the special counsel to investigate whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.

Trump heard the news and asked one of his aides, “Wasn’t that guy just in here interviewing for the FBI?”

 

[Cartmann99]

10 hours ago, LeftCoastLurker said:

I make a kick ass potatoes au gratin with fennel, onions and gruyere. Can I come?

 

9 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

I make a basil pesto chicken thing.  I'll bring that and my triple chocolate raspberry cake

I see that both of you are members of the cooking club. Would you please post your recipes over there, or give me !inks if you've already posted these? Thanks! 

[fraurosena]

Has anyone read the Nunes-rebuttal memo yet? As predicted, it's a doozy!

Here's a link so you can read it for yourself.

Seth Abramson has a mega-thread about it.

Short, sharp and shocking version:

• Nunes deliberately and by design deceived, misrepresented and mislead with the intent of undermining the FBI and DOJ, the Special Counsel and Congress' Investigations. 
• New information: by September 2016, the FBI was already actively investigating at least 5 people connected with the Trump campaign (Carter Page, George Papadapoulos, Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates) - a fact redacted in the text itself, but revealed in an un-redacted footnote.
• Carter Page lied before Congress (a federal crime)
• The FBI did not pay Christopher Steel for the 'dossier'
• The FBI contemporaneously had corroborating evidence of Steele 'dossier' information

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

I vote lying! It's not like he has a sterling reputation as an honest guy, now is it?

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

Gotta love it when even his lawyers are like, dude, of course he will lie if given a chance.

[Cartmann99]

The man with his mouth open is my congresscritter. I wrote about my experience going to one of his town halls here: 

When asked about looking into Trump's finances, he said:

Quote

"I don't see the link at this stage," Rep. Mike Conaway, the Texas Republican leading the House Russia investigation, told CNN. "Deutsche Bank is a German bank -- I don't see the nexus."

Asked about exploring Russian-Trump business transactions, Conaway was not moved. "I bet every big bank has a Russian customer somewhere," he said.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/02/26/politics/russia-republicans-trump-finances/index.html?__twitter_impression=true

He's also a CPA, so bless his heart, he can't look too hard at Trump's financials for fear that he'd see something that would cause the denial blanket he's always clutching to spontaneously combust. 

He's got three challengers for his seat this time. My husband and I will be early voting this week for one of his Democratic challengers. I don't want to jinx anything, but I've read that the numbers of Texas voters requesting Democratic ballots are up this year. 

[Howl]

20 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

He's also a CPA, so bless his heart, he can't look too hard at Trump's financials for fear that he'd see something that would cause the denial blanket he's always clutching to spontaneously combust. 

We were in Big Bend at the annual mountain bike festival over President's Day weekend, and the "local" TV station in Midland was playing a lot of Conaway political adds.   Interestingly, these ads didn't discuss his political platform or a chicken in every pot or how Conaway was a REAL conservative.  Nope! Not one word about Trump! Instead, it was a parade of incredibly cheerful people who had known Conaway for X number of years saying Wow! What an incredibly nice guy!  

Quote

"I don't see the link at this stage," Rep. Mike Conaway, the Texas Republican leading the House Russia investigation, told CNN. "Deutsche Bank is a German bank -- I don't see the nexus."

How idiotic and disingenuous.  As a CPA, Conaway already knows that, as a businessman, Trump cooked the books and is a con man who is as dirty as they come (Trump University, anyone?).  My CPA hubby has been disgusted by Trump business practices since day one.  Like I've said before, when US banks would no longer lend to Trump, Trump turned to Russian money and all Russian money is dirty money.   Trump helped out his Russian lenders by laundering their dirty Russian money through his real estate. 

I think Meuller has the incriminating records from enabler Deutsche Bank that could possibly bring down the entire Trump house of cards. 

[fraurosena]

Their refusal is an answer in itself.

NRA refuses to answer senator’s questions about funding from Russia

Quote

Much of the focus on the NRA over the past week has remained, understandably, on the group’s response to the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida. However, the NRA has also recently been forced to shed some light on another controversy: its suspected ties to Russia.

Earlier this month, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) issued a pair of letters demanding information on any financial links between the NRA and Moscow, or between the NRA and Russian nationals. The questions came after McClatchy reported that the FBI was investigating whether Alexander Torshin — a Russian national who happens to be an NRA member, as well as the NRA’s main liaison in Russia — had used the NRA to funnel funds to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Torshin, described by The Daily Beast as a “Putin ally,” has a history of laundering Russian money in Europe, according to Spanish investigators.

Instead of answering Wyden’s request, however, the NRA issued a terse letter denying that it received any funds from Moscow specifically designed to influence the election.

“As a longstanding policy to comply with federal election law, the NRA and its related entities do not accept funds from foreign persons or entities in connection with United States elections,” NRA secretary and general counsel John Frazer wrote to Wyden. Frazer added that the FBI has not contacted the NRA, and that McClatchy’s coverage “refers to an investigation of Mr. Torshin — not of the NRA.”

As it is, the letter is not an outright denial that the NRA has received funding from foreign entities like the Kremlin. It does not address the notorious trip NRA higher-ups took to Moscow in late 2015. It does not mention the provenance of the $30 million the NRA funneled to Trump’s campaign — money that stemmed from an arm of the NRA that isn’t forced to disclose its donors.

If anything, the letter doesn’t actually answer any of the questions Wyden initially issued, which focused on any Russian funding wholesale, not just funding limited to the election. (Nor does the letter mention Russians’ attempts to use the NRA to lobby the White House.) A Wyden aide told ThinkProgress that the senator “is reviewing the NRA’s response and considering additional follow-up questions.”

Wyden also issued a separate letter to the Treasury Department requesting documents pertaining to ties between Russia and the NRA — especially as it pertains to “shell companies or other illicit funding mechanisms suspected of being connected to these reported links.” The Treasury Department hasn’t yet replied to Wyden’s request.

 

[fraurosena]

Oh dear. I hope for him he has truly gone to ground and that nothing untoward has happened to him. We all know how dangerous it can be when the Russians view you as a possible liability. 

Academic at heart of Clinton 'dirt' claim vanishes, leaving trail of questions

Quote

Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese academic suspected of being a link between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, was once a regular on the foreign policy circuit, attending conferences the world over.

Now, after being identified as a key figure in the US special counsel investigation into Russian influence over the 2016 US presidential election, Mifsud has gone to ground.

Last Thursday he disappeared from the private university in Rome where he teaches. Repeated attempts to reach him since have been unsuccessful, though he appears to have read some messages from CNN.

But more details are emerging of the background and contacts of the man who emerged last week as "the professor" in court filings relating to charges brought against former Trump aide George Papadopoulos.

In the US affidavit, Papadopoulos claims Mifsued -- referred to as "Foreign Contact 1" -- told him in April 2016 that the Russians had "thousands of emails" relating to Hillary Clinton. An associate also told CNN that he repeatedly bragged about how Moscow had "compromising material" on the Clinton campaign in spring 2016, contradicting Mifsud's assertion that he never talked about Russian "dirt" on the Democratic presidential bid.

At that time, according to US officials and independent analysts, Russian agencies or proxies were rummaging around the stolen emails of both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The intrusion would not become public for several months.

The associate, who spoke to CNN at length, also said that Mifsud told him that he had been interviewed by the FBI while on a visit to the US earlier this year. That chimes with Mifsud's own account -- in an interview last week with Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he refers to a discussion with the FBI.

Mifsud was in Washington in February -- he spoke at an event organized by Global Ties, which describes itself on its website as a non-profit partner organization of the US State Department.

Last week, Mifsud described Papadopoulos' claim that he knew about Russia's material on Clinton as "baloney."

"I absolutely exclude the fact that I spoke of secrets regarding Hillary Clinton," he told La Repubblica.

Those were his last words in public on the subject.

The Moscow connection

Mifsud first met Papadopoulos in March 2016 in Rome, according to his own account. They met again shortly after Papadopoulos was first publicly named as an adviser to the Trump team around March 21. Days later, Papadopoulos wrote to colleagues on the Trump team that he "had just finished a very productive lunch with a good friend of mine... who introduced me to both Putin's niece and the Russian ambassador," according to court filings.

The "good friend" was Mifsud. After discovering Papadopoulos' elevation to the Trump campaign, he moved swiftly to put the two sides in contact. (It has since become clear that the woman attending the lunch was not Putin's niece.)

The following month, Mifsud travelled to Moscow to give a talk at the Valdai Club, a think-tank with close connections to the Kremlin. "We have to open up trade to the Russian Federation," he said at the event, on April 19. "Imposing sanctions for example is suicidal in our case -- and because of the pressure... from the United States."

The FBI affidavit implies Mifsud may have been "played" by the Russians.

"The Russian government and its security and intelligence services frequently make use of non-governmental intermediaries to achieve their foreign policy objectives," it said. "The Russian government has used individuals associated with academia and think-tanks in such a capacity."

Mifsud's associate told CNN that seemed very plausible. Anything he was told would soon be repeated to others, the associate said.

A long courtship

Even before encountering Papadopoulos, Mifsud had been a regular visitor to Russia. He attended events sponsored by the Valdai Club between 2014 and 2016 and and other educational conferences in the past four years.

Mifsud also met the Russian ambassador to London Alexander Yakovenko in 2014 after returning from an academic conference in Moscow.

For an academic with modest credentials and few publications to his name, he had surprisingly high-profile connections among Russian officials.

Mifsud's former assistant has told CNN that she set up meetings between Mifsud and Russian academics and officials. They included Ivan Timofeev, who is on the Russian International Affairs Council, and Evgeny Bazhanov, President of the Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy.

CNN cannot confirm the assistant's account; she requested not to be named.

His most recent visit was in September this year when he moderated two panels during Moscow State University's "Global Congress." The university has an exchange agreement with the private Link University in Rome, where Mifsud teaches.

The state-funded Russia24 network has heaped praise on Link's director Vincenzo Scotti, describing him as "an experienced politician who thinks that cultural exchange and 'soft power' democracy will lead to lifting of the anti-Russian sanctions."

At Moscow State University there are still several photographs displayed of Mifsud with the Dean of the Institute of Global Studies. He is also featured on a poster as one of three prominent lecturers from abroad.

Two of the Institute's faculty told CNN Tuesday that Mifsud presented himself as someone who could build contacts to foreign universities and institutes. They said several of the institute's officials visited the London Academy of Diplomacy, which Mifsud helped run.

People who know him say Mifsud was always networking and often exaggerated his access to decision-makers. His stories are frequently contradictory. He has denied knowing anyone in the Russian government yet had previously claimed to have had an exchange with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at an event. Nor is there any evidence to support a claim by Mifsud that he met President Putin.

On at least one occasion he was described at a conference as an ambassador. In fact, he has never held such a post. His resume claims he has been a member of a French presidential panel called the "Comite du Risque" -- but no such organization exists, the French Presidency told CNN.

Mifsud's relationships with several academic institutions have ended badly. For a time he was President of the London Academy of Diplomacy, whose degrees were certified by the University of East Anglia. Mifsud visited the University with a Russian diplomat -- Ernest Chernukhin -- in July.

The university says the connection has now ended, and the academy is now defunct. His resume has also been deleted from another London institution with which he was connected, the London Centre of International Law Practice.

Mifsud left his position as President of Euro-Mediterranean University in Slovenia in 2012. The university claimed he owed 39,000 euros in unexplained expenses.

However, Mifsud's credentials were enough for him to be offered a teaching position at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Earlier this year an email written by deputy principal John Gardner said Mifsud had "truly global contacts in the world of diplomacy and is on first name terms with a wide variety of ambassadors from across the globe."

The email was obtained by STV, a Scottish television network. Stirling University would not comment on its content but said Mifsud remained employed at the university.

Mifsud's history of exaggerations, and his enthusiasm to be seen as an important player in demand at conferences the world over, may now be coming back to haunt him.

The "Putin niece" that Papadopoulos mentioned to the Trump campaign was, after all, no relation of the Russian President, Mifsud admitted last week.

He told La Repubblica: "She is a simple student, very beautiful. Like many other students, I introduced her at the London Center where Papadopoulos was, and he showed an interested in her that was not academic."

His associate told CNN that Mifsud had introduced the woman to him as a Russian journalist, one of several he'd met during his dealings with the Russians. The associate says he warned Mifsud about the danger of being played by the Russians.

For the most popular talk-show on Russian television, Mifsud's activities are now the object of ridicule. On Sunday, the show's host, Dmitry Kiselev, said that Papadopoulos was introduced to the fictional Putin niece by "a fly-by Maltese professor called Joseph Mifsud, a retired bottom-feeder diplomat."

 

[fraurosena]

I think we can safely conclude that recusals mean nothing anymore.

 

[fraurosena]

I'm posting this in the knowledge that it will make your blood boil. But I think it's important to know what kind of rhetoric is being used on the 'other side' of the gun control issue.