Russian Connection 5: In Which We Plan Sleepovers

[Howl]

10 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Fuckerberg likes the Russians sowing chaos.

Quite an eye-opener, isn't it?  I love fb.

I get to keep up with friends both near by and in other states doing fun stuff.  As it happens, almost everyone is in the same lane re: political views, and I just hide the few who show up making Ever-Trumper rants on the posts of friends.

And I hate the vile shit that fb has allowed/promoted that has had a huge adverse impact on our country. 

I have stopped "liking" political posts and memes, even if I agree 100%.  I don't provide my phone number or other identifying information, other than b-day. 

Also, about a week ago, I started to respond to a friend's post about Russian activities.  Mid post, facebook logged me out and I had to log back in with log on and password. This has not happened since I joined facebook EIGHT YEARS AGO.  It was one of those things that made me go Hmmmmmm. 

Edited December 24, 2018 by Howl

[AmazonGrace]

Donald Trump: AMERICA IS RESPECTED AGAIN! 

Russia Today: 

 

[Howl]

Russia has actually announced that they are getting ready to do some bad shit in Ukraine.  Just kind of giving everybody a head's up, like, Hey, look, over here, we're getting ready to be bad global actors. Over here!  Bad shit! 

[AmazonGrace]

 FB and Yandex join forces. I'm sure it will be fine

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

@AmazonGrace, Bill Browder just tweeted that this allows Russia to find out anything about anybody and he's very happy that he never joined FaceBook.  

In other news: 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"A Russian bank gave Marine Le Pen’s party a loan. Then weird things began happening."

Spoiler

PARIS — When French politician Marine Le Pen needed cash for her far-right party, an obscure Russian bank agreed to help.

Four years later, the bank has gone bust. The owner is facing a warrant for his arrest. Former Russian military officers are demanding money. And the party’s treasurer is sending off some $165,000 every few months to a woman in Moscow, unsure of where the payments ultimately will go. 

The money failed to deliver Le Pen the French presidency in last year’s election, denying the Kremlin a powerful ally in the heart of Europe. Instead, the 9.4 million-euro loan, then worth $12.2 million, dragged her party into the shadowy underworld of Russian cross-border finance, putting it in league with people accused of having ties to Russian organized crime, money laundering and military operations.

The mysterious saga of the loan offers a rare look inside the Russian influence engine, demonstrating how people, companies and networks outside the Kremlin pursue President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aims, often without a centralized plan. 

“It was in the interest of Russia to support Marine Le Pen,” said Aymeric Chauprade, a member of the European Parliament who advised Le Pen on foreign policy before leaving her party. “Every time you have a political leader who says we should change our policy regarding Russia . . . they are interested in supporting him.”

After Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, the intelligence community concluded that Putin himself had signed off on “active measures” to bolster Donald Trump. The assessment added to a perception in the United States and beyond that the Russian president personally orchestrates all of Moscow’s covert operations. 

But Moscow’s foreign influence efforts also bubble up from below, or percolate on the margins, with power brokers offering support to Kremlin sympathizers abroad in ways that do not always require Putin’s upfront blessing.

The Le Pen loan, analysts say, is an example of how it works. After Putin sets out the vision, agents inside and outside the government begin executing it, hoping to score points with him if their gambits succeed.

The money is also perhaps the best evidence in recent years that Russian influence operations abroad involve not only Internet trolling and military adventurism but secretive financing as well.

The network that facilitated the deal, according to Joshua Kirschenbaum, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy — which has authored a study on the loan along with the Washington think tank C4ADS — is “the purest distillation of how illicit finance intersects with foreign interference.”

Financial needs

Like most loans, the one Le Pen’s party took out in 2014 began with a need for cash.

At the time, Le Pen’s modern touches were breathing momentum into a far-right movement started decades earlier by her father and known for its anti-Semitic and xenophobic views. Le Pen presented a cleaned-up version of the party’s politics, deftly mixing calls to pull France out of NATO and possibly the European Union with broadsides against immigration and Islam. 

But the party, then known as the National Front and now called the National Rally, was having difficulty securing credit from traditional French banks. Le Pen accused the banks of discrimination for refusing to offer a loan. 

In search of money from a non-French bank, party officials turned to Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a member of the European Parliament elected as part of Le Pen’s party bloc.

For years, Schaffhauser wanted to build an alliance between Europe and Russia to act, he said, as a Christian bulwark against Asia and the Middle East. In between working as an international consultant for French oil and aerospace firms, he said, he dreamed of one day running a pro-Russian foundation that would distribute Russian money to organizations in Europe and drive the continent closer to Moscow.

Through what he described as work on a French-Russian development-bank project in 2004 or 2005, Schaffhauser said he met a Russian businessman and member of parliament named Alexander Babakov, who in 2012 became the Kremlin’s special envoy for Russian organizations abroad.

Schaffhauser, looking for a loan for Le Pen, said he reconnected with Babakov through a mutual contact in the Russian Orthodox Church and arranged a meeting in mid-2014.

“It was face-to-face,” Schaffhauser recalled, speaking English in an interview. “He says he has a possibility.”

The “possibility” Babakov proposed, according to Schaffhauser, was a loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank. Through a spokeswoman, Babakov declined to comment for this report.

'For me, it was safe'

First Czech started out as a joint venture between a Czech state bank and a Russian lender. In the early 2000s, it became part of a Russian pipeline construction company that was subsequently acquired by the firm of a billionaire friend of Putin’s, Gennady Timchenko.

The bank spun out on its own under the personal ownership of one of the pipeline company’s executives, a Russian financier named Roman Popov. A subsidiary of the bank secured a European license in the Czech Republic. 

For Schaffhauser, the bank’s European license was a green light for the party, despite some questions about its lending practices. Popov had been facilitating transactions in Iran and working with a businessman the U.S. Treasury Department recently hit with sanctions for allegedly being an “overseer” in a Russian organized-crime syndicate.

When asked whether the party was suspicious of the bank’s activities, Schaffhauser cited the European license and said, “For me, it was safe.”

Sometime in September 2014, the National Front’s treasurer, Wallerand de Saint Just, went to Moscow.

At the bank’s headquarters, he had lunch with Popov and his colleagues and signed a contract that lent the National Front 9.4 million euros at an interest rate of 6 percent per year. The final repayment date was Sept. 23, 2019.

De Saint Just described the process as “very amicable.”

At the time, Le Pen and her fellow politicians were making pro-Russian pronouncements in public but had not disclosed the loan.

The secrecy didn’t last long.

An investigative journalist at the French publication Mediapart exposed the deal 2 1/2  months after it was signed, setting off a firestorm of criticism and more reports from Mediapart and others about financial links between Russian individuals and the French far right.

Le Pen dismissed the furor, saying at the time that she had no choice but to turn abroad for a loan and denying that the money influenced her political positions. Le Pen’s party did not respond to a request for comment. 

Schaffhauser, for his part, said he received 140,000 euros, or about $181,000 at the time, for brokering the loan. His fee was deposited in what he described as a family foundation. He said people close to Babakov, the Russian member of parliament and special envoy, also discussed investing in his think tank.

At the same time, Schaffhauser was railing against sanctions imposed on Russia and promoting other pro-Russian positions in the European Parliament. He said he did not think that advocating for Russia while arranging a Russian loan to Le Pen’s party and a fee for himself presented a conflict of interest.

“What’s the problem? I have the right to be against this,” he said of the sanctions.

A loan on the move

Back in Moscow, strange things began happening with the loan.

In early 2016, First Czech started mysteriously shedding assets. Russian authorities alleged that millions of dollars in assets fraudulently flowed out the door as regulators closed in on the bank. Among them — the loan extended to Le Pen’s party.

Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Russian Central Bank, was leading a broad crackdown on questionable banks, many of which had become playthings for Russian businessmen, mob bosses and politicians.

With backing from Putin, she began closing banks with bad loans and insufficient reserves that threatened Russia’s economic stability. The effort shut down nearly 100 financial institutions by the end of 2016.

Russian regulators described First Czech’s assets as low-quality, saying the company had made loans to shell companies in excess of 19.2 billion rubles, or $277 million at the time. They placed the distressed bank under the management of provisional administrators. 

But as they seized the company, regulators said they encountered serious obstruction, with bank officials concealing asset withdrawals.  

Within months, the bank had lost its Russian license, and later it was formally declared insolvent. Czech regulators later pulled the European license, too. 

By then, Le Pen’s loan had disappeared from the books. 

Some six days before Russian regulators placed the bank in the hands of the provisional administrators, First Czech sold the loan to an obscure Russian company that corporate registration records describe as a machinery and equipment rental company.

The loan didn’t stay there for long. 

At the end of 2016, it was transferred to a Moscow-based aircraft supply company called Aviazapchast, according to Russia’s deposit insurance agency. 

A private company, Aviazapchast grew out of the foreign sales arm of the Soviet aviation ministry, which repaired and replaced plane and helicopter equipment that the Soviet Union sold abroad. Among its clients today is the Syrian air force, which human rights groups have accused of committing atrocities against civilians by dropping barrel bombs for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The company is deeply intertwined with the Russian military. Three of the four executives listed on its website spent decades in the Soviet and Russian armed forces. The company holds a government-secrets license from Russia’s FSB security service.

The No. 2 executive on the leadership team listed on the company’s website is Yevgeny Barmyantsev, a retired military officer who served as an attache at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. In 1983, as a 39-year-old Soviet military spy, he was expelled from the United States after federal agents caught him retrieving documents from the base of a tree in Maryland. 

Why Aviazapchast acquired the Le Pen loan is unclear. The company’s owner is a Russian businessman, Valery Zakharenkov, who, according to filings for another company he controls, keeps an apartment near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.  

'Ms. Romanova'

Whether the aviation company in fact owns the loan is a question pending in Russian courts. 

Russia’s state deposit agency filed a case in Moscow’s arbitration court in 2016 arguing that the frantic deals First Czech made in the days before its collapse were illegitimate. The agency said the assets should go to the Russian financial authorities that seized the bank. 

Le Pen’s party agrees. 

“When a commercial company is liquidated, no one can take an asset out and dispose of it. This can only be done by the person in charge of the liquidation,” said de Saint Just, the party’s treasurer. “Since it wasn’t done by the person in charge of the liquidation and this was a person we didn’t know at all, we obviously refused.”

What’s more, he added, “we found it a little odd that this should be handed to a company that sells equipment to planes.”

De Saint Just said that when Aviazapchast tried to collect interest payments, he contacted Russian authorities. 

For now, he says he is sending interest payments to a notary in Moscow named Ms. Romanova, who will hold the cash until a final Russian court ruling indicates where the money should go. He declined to provide evidence of the payments.

Asked whether Aviazapchast had links to Russian military intelligence, de Saint Just waved his hand in dismissal. 

“In Russia, they’re all former members of the KGB,” he said. “All of them.”

Aviazapchast declined to comment.

Earlier this year, Moscow’s arbitration court ruled that Aviazapchast was in fact the rightful owner of the loan. But Russian regulators have appealed, according to the deposit insurance agency. An official there said the next hearing is in February. 

While Russian regulators attempt to recover the assets First Czech sold before its collapse, criminal prosecutors in Moscow have been pursuing the bank’s managers and owners, including Popov. 

Russian police arrested a senior vice president of the bank who worked there for only two weeks and oversaw the asset sales, accusing him of financial fraud in an ongoing criminal case. He has denied wrongdoing. In April, Russian authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Popov and his deputy on accusations of large-scale embezzlement. 

An attorney for Popov said that the case remained open and that his client was not in Russia. He did not say where he is. Another attorney for the firm said Popov has denied wrongdoing in the proceedings. Popov could not be reached for comment.

Despite all that has transpired with the loan, de Saint Just said he would do it again under similar circumstances.

“If I could, I would have seen Mr. Popov again to tell him things had worked well the last time and ask him to loan us money again,” de Saint Just said in an interview in his Paris office, where he sat under a poster of Le Pen. “But the bank was shut down. It’s over.”

De Saint Just said he has a phone number only for the bank’s administrative director, who he said was laid off as the bank collapsed. 

“I hope she found a job,” he said, “because she was very pretty and very competent.”

'No standard playbook'

As the case unfolds in Russia’s courts, the loan has become a cautionary episode for recipients of Russian backing abroad and a case study for officials in Washington and Brussels looking to understand how Russian influence-peddlers wield financial power. 

The Alliance for Securing Democracy and C4ADS describe the loan in their forthcoming report as an example of how Russian state actors leverage allegedly illicit financial networks for political purposes. What is unclear is how often they do so, given that few such transactions have been exposed and political parties rarely receive formal loans from foreign banks.

Moscow did not regard the loan as successful, particularly after Le Pen lost the presidency, said Mark Galeotti, an expert in Russian security affairs and a fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He said Russia is now more likely to use smaller amounts of untraceable “black cash” in financial influence operations. 

The story of the loan agreement again demonstrates how Russia is not the “kind of ruthlessly disciplined, lockstep state” many have imagined, Galeotti added. 

“Most of these things are experimental,” he said. “The Russians have no standard playbook. They just try things and see what works.”

 

[fraurosena]

I don't believe for a minute that it's the meagre amount they're admitting to. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

NRA Admits Accepting Money from 23 Russia-linked Donors

Quote

The National Rifle Association has accepted contributions from at least 23 Russia-linked donors since 2015, the gun rights group revealed in a letter addressed to Congress. The admission came after Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, prodded the NRA as part of an investigation into what political organizations may have been used by Russia to influence the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.  

The money totaled $2,500, with most of it coming from subscriptions or membership dues, according to the letter, which was released Wednesday and first reported on by NPR. About $525 of that money came from "two individuals who made contributions to the NRA," wrote John Frazer, the general counsel for the gun rights group. The 23 people "may include U.S. citizens living in Russia," the NRA said. 

Kremlin-linked politician Alexander Torshin, a "life member" of the NRA since 2012, was among the list of donors, but Frazer said the organization was "currently reviewing our responsibilities with respect to him" after the Russian national was listed last week in new U.S. sanctions. In January, McClatchy DC first reported that FBI officials were investigating whether Torshin, who is also a deputy head of Russia's central bank, had illegally funneled money to the NRA in an effort to help Trump.

Although a paltry sum compared with the millions the NRA's lobbying arm has already spent this year, the $2,500 in donations paints a different picture than previous on-the-record disclosures. The gun rights group told ABC News that it had only one contribution from a Russian individual since 2012.

Newsweek has reached out to the NRA for comment but has not heard back.

At the end of the letter, Frazer told Congress that the NRA wouldn't be providing additional information. 

"Given the extraordinarily time-consuming and burdensome nature of your requests, we must respectfully decline to engage in this beyond the clear answers we have already provided," he wrote.

Wanna bet that Congressional subpoena's will follow?

[fraurosena]

Welp. Tea Pain has a point here.

 

[AmazonGrace]

This is a bit weird 

 who has four passports

[Howl]

Whelan has passports for four countries, but possibly legit for all.  He also received a dishonorable discharge (Marines?) for larceny, which was news to his family.  I think there is more to this story, but I can't tell which way it's going to go. 

[Howl]

Massive hacking attack in Germany.  Speculation that it has Russian finger prints all over it. 

@fraurosena, are you on top of this?  I assume it's going to get heavy coverage in the European press. 

It's a hack that highly coordinated, organized, "professional".  

Edited January 5, 2019 by Howl

[AnnaSofia]

6 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

This is a bit weird 

 who has four passports

He's from the Commonwealth, so it's not really *that* unusual. He was born in Canada to British parents, I think that alone entitled him to the Canadian and UK passports, and he would have been able to get an Irish one fairly easily if he had Irish ancestry. The family moved to Michigan when he was a kid. Serving in the Marines probably qualified him for US citizenship (if he didn't already have it at that point). A lot of people think that you need to renounce non-US citizenship(s) in order to serve in the military, but that's not strictly true. Someone who wants to be a commissioned officer would need to, but since Whelan was an NCO he was probably allowed to retain them. He might have needed to surrender any non-US passports at the time, but if he didn't renounce his respective citizenships, he could re-apply for passports after leaving (or in his case, being kicked out of) the Marines.

That said, I do completely agree that there's way more to Whelan's story.

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, Howl said:

Massive hacking attack in Germany.  Speculation that it has Russian finger prints all over it. 

@fraurosena, are you on top of this?  I assume it's going to get heavy coverage in the European press. 

It's a hack that highly coordinated, organized, "professional".  

Apart from the “Bild” article, I’ve read some Dutch articles about this attack, but it’s not getting a lot of attention. This is probably because German authorities are only sparingly giving information about the attack as the investigation is still ongoing.

- There is some speculation that the far-right AfD is involved, as no one from that party was hacked and the non-political victims (such as a comedian who made fun of them) were critical of that party. 

- The hacks have been traced back to a man based in Hamburg.

- The NSA has been asked for their assistance, the irony of which is not lost in the Germans (remember that in 2015 the NSA had tapped Merkel’s phone).

And that’s about all that is being reported about it.

This could be due to two things, and I believe it’s a bit of both:

1) as I said, the investigators are keeping their information very close to their chest. 

2) the German press (and the Dutch too, for that matter) aren’t that sensationalist — at least the serious press that I read. 

There have been no reports and/or speculation that Russians were involved.

[Howl]

Thanks, @fraurosena.  I'll follow this carefully, perhaps through The Guardian.  Russian or not, it's cyber warfare waged on democracy.  Keep us up to date! 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

Quote

Putin said Russia would supply soy beans and poultry meat to China and that the United States had effectively given up on that market.

Another Trump move that ultimately benefits Putin via bolstering the Russian economy.  Gosh, coincidence? 

[AmazonGrace]

If you can't trust a Russian spy who can you trust. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

https://apnews.com/7352643762ff4151861f3e49a3ea5fca?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP&utm_campaign=SocialFlow

AP story about the indictment. She's believed to be in Russia

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Here's the indictment itself.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

If you want to see Emin live he's touring NY and Toronto later this month. Mother Jones is wondering  if Mueller wants a chat.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Some insight from Estonia. Of course the difference would be that Trump wouldn't want a truthful account out.

[fraurosena]

And there you have it. This was already known in August of 2017, and then added to in May of 2018. You can bet it's the tip of the iceberg.

Oh, look! Who'd've thunk? One of them is Lindsey Graham's campaign. McTurtle is also a glad recipient, as is Marco Rubio. And the presidunce. Of course.

How Putin's oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns

Quote

Editor's note May 8, 2018: This column originally published December 15, 2017. New allegations about $500k in payments from a Russian oligarch made to Trump attorney Michael Cohen have placed it back in the news.

As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team probes deeper into potential collusion between Trump officials and representatives of the Russian government, investigators are taking a closer look at political contributions made by U.S. citizens with close ties to Russia.

Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.

An example is Len Blavatnik, a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.

Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik's campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.

In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik's political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund.

[touch chart embedded in article, highly reccommend a look]

So is this legal?

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democratic leader on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News in September: "Unless the contributions were directed by a foreigner, they would be legal, but could still be of interest to investigators examining allegations of Russian influence on the 2016 campaign. Obviously, if there were those that had associations with the Kremlin that were contributing, that would be of keen concern."

Under federal law, foreigner nationals are barred from contributing directly or indirectly to political campaigns in local, state and federal elections.

Should Blavatnik's contributions concern Mueller's team of investigators? Take a look at his long-time business associates in Russia.

The Oligarchs

Oleg Deripaska is said to be one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs, and he is founder and majority shareholder of Russia's Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world. Blavatnik holds a stake in Rusal with a business partner.

Further, nearly 4 percent of Deripaska's stake in Rusal is owned by Putin's state-controlled bank, VTB, which is currently under U.S. sanctions. VTB was exposed in the Panama Papers in 2016 for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Putin.

Earlier this year, The Associated Press reported that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, began collecting $10 million a year in 2006 from Deripaska to advance Putin's interests with Western governments. Deripaska's name turned up again in an email handed over to Mueller's team by Manafort's attorneys. According to The Washington Post, in the email dated July 7, 2016, just two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president, Manafort asked an overseas intermediary to pass a message on to Deripaska: "If he [Deripaska] needs private briefings, tell him we can accommodate."

Viktor Vekselberg is one of the 10 richest men in Russia. He and long-time business partner Blavatnik hold a 20.5 percent stake in Rusal. (They met while attending university in Russia.)

In 1990, Blavatnik and Vekselberg co-founded the Renova Group for large-scale investments in energy, infrastructure, aluminum and other metals. One of their earliest investments was in Tyumen Oil Co. (TNK), founded in 1995. TNK is best known for its contentious partnership with British Petroleum after the two entities formed a joint venture in 2003. That rocky relationship ended 10 years later when they sold out to the state-controlled energy giant, Rosneft, under pressure from the Russian government.

As for BP, that pressure took the form of growing harassment and intimidation from Russian authorities who at one point, according to Forbes, refused to renew visas for BP employees, forcing BP's joint venture chief Robert Dudley (who is now chief executive of BP) to flee Russia and manage TNK-BP from a foreign outpost in a secret location.

Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle. They are among several Americans who also merit Mueller's scrutiny.

[another touch chart embedded in the article]

The Americans

Andrew Intrater, according to Mother Jones, is Vekselberg's cousin. He is also chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova's U.S. investment arm located in New York. (FEC records list his employer as Renova US Management LLC.)

[ Here's a thought: Could this be the company that's fighting tooth and nail from giving information to Mueller in the courts right now? ]

Intrater had no significant history of political contributions prior to the 2016 elections. But in January 2017 he contributed $250,000 to Trump's Inaugural Committee. His six-figure gift bought him special access to a dinner billed as "an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees," according to a brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Alexander Shustorovich, chief executive of IMG Artists, attempted to give the Republican Party $250,000 in 2000 to support the George W. Bush presidential campaign, but his money was rejected because of his ties to the Russian government, according to Quartz. So why didn't the Trump team reject Shustorovich's $1 million check to Trump's Inaugural Committee?

Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. Redacted CIA documents released in 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act said "TNK president Kukes said that he bribed local officials." The CIA confirmed the authenticity of the reports to The Guardian newspaper but would not comment further. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund. He had no significant donor history before last year's election.

[Yet another interesting touch chart]

There is no doubt that Kukes has close ties to the Putin government. When he left his job as CEO of TNK in June 2003, he joined the board of Yukos Oil, which at the time was the largest oil company in Russia owned by the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Four months after Kukes joined the board, authorities arrested Khodorkovsky at gunpoint on his private plane in Siberia on trumped up charges of tax evasion and tapped Kukes to be CEO. This decision could only have been made at the highest levels in the Kremlin. The arrest of Khodorkovsky rattled the nerves of international investors and was the first tangible sign that Putin was not going to be the kind of leader that global executives and Western governments had expected him to be when he first took office in 2000.

Khodorkovksy was given a 13-year sentence in a Siberian prison and served 10 years before being released by Putin in December 2013, a month before the start of the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, as a sign of goodwill. As for the fate of Khodorkovksy's company, its largest oil subsidiary was sold in a sealed bid auction to Baikal Financial Group, a shell company with an unpublished list of officers. Baikal was registered at an address that turned out to be a mobile phone store in Tver, Russia. Three days after the auction, all of Baikal's assets were acquired for an undisclosed sum by Rosneft, the Russian oil giant that went on to buy TNK-BP in 2013.

In total, Blavatnik, Intrater, Shustorovich and Kukes made $10.4 million in political contributions from the start of the 2015-16 election cycle through September 2017, and 99 percent of their contributions went to Republicans. With the exception of Shustorovich, the common denominator that connects the men is their association with Vekselberg. Experts who follow the activities of Russian oligarchs told ABC News that they believe the contributions from Blavatnik, Intrater and Kukes warrant intense scrutiny because they have worked closely with Vekselberg.

Even if the donations by the four men associated with Russia ultimately pass muster with Mueller, one still has to wonder: Why did GOP PACs and other Trump-controlled funds take their money? Why didn't the PACs say, "Thanks, but no thanks," like the Republicans said to Shustorovich in 2000? Yes, it was legal to accept their donations, but it was incredibly poor judgment.

McConnell surely knew as a participant in high level intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, McConnell's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after former FBI Director James Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.

And consider Steve Mnuchin, Trump's campaign finance chairman. Could he have known that the Trump Victory Fund, jointly managed by the Republican National Committe and Trump's campaign, took contributions from Intrater and Kukes? Mnuchin owned Hollywood financing company RatPac-Dune with Blavatnik until he sold his stake to accept Trump's appointment as the Treasury secretary.

Which PAC officials are making the decisions to accept these donations?

The Supreme Court

The contributions are legal because the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling, Citizens United, and several subsequent decisions, allowed American corporations and citizens to give unlimited amounts of money to PACs and non-profit 501c4 organizations, regardless of how they make their money, where they make their money, or with whom they make their money. The only caveat is that PACs and non-profits cannot coordinate their activities with the political candidates they support.

The man who led the winning fight for Citizens United was David Bossie, president of the conservative non-profit since 2001. In 1996, Bossie was hired by Republican Rep. Dan Burton to lead an investigation into President Bill Clinton's campaign fundraising. Burton fired him 18 months later for manipulating recordings of conversations among law officials and Webb Hubbell, a Clinton confidant who resigned as associate attorney general and pleaded guilty to tax fraud during the Whitewater investigation. CNN reported at the time that Newt Gingrich, who was speaker of the House, called Bossie's tampering with the Hubbell recordings an embarrassment to the Republicans.

Bossie served as Trump's deputy campaign chairman.

The Super PAC, Make America Number 1, is primarily funded by Trump's largest donor, Robert Mercer. His Renaissance Technologies hedge fund donated $15.5 million to the PAC.

Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, assumed control of Make America Number 1 in September 2016 and is now tainted by her role in the communications between Wikileaks and Cambridge Analytica, the firm that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hired for $5.9 million to handle the digital portion of the Trump campaign.

Robert and Rebekah Mercer are major investors in Cambridge Analytica. According to The Wall Street Journal, Rebekah Mercer asked Cambridge chief executive Alexander Nix if the firm could compile stolen emails related to Hillary Clinton so that they could be more easily searched. (This suggestion came from someone she met at an event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz, according to The Hill. Cambridge Analytica had worked on digital marketing for Cruz before he dropped out of the Republican primary.)

Nix confirmed that he had asked Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to forward the Clinton-related emails. Assange said he declined the request.

Rebekah Mercer also heads the non-profit Making America Great, formed in March 2017. The non-profit ran a seven-figure ad campaign highlighting Trump's achievements. Bossie is the group's chief strategist.

Erik Prince, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, contributed $150,000 to Mercer's Make America Number 1 PAC and another $100,000 to the Trump Victory Fund. Prince has recently testified to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his trip to the remote Seychelles for a secret meeting in December 2016 with a close ally of Putin, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The purpose of the meeting was allegedly to setup a back channel of communication between then president-elect Donald Trump and the Russians, though Prince has denied this allegation. Before the 2015-16 elections, Prince's political contributions totaled a mere $31,800 as far back as 2007, according to FEC records.

The hybrid super-PAC, The Committee to Defend the President, was formed in 2013 under the name Stop Hillary PAC. It is managed by Dan Backer, the lead attorney who won the McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission case in 2014. The Supreme Court decision eliminated the cap on how much wealthy individuals can donate to federal candidates, parties and PACs in a single, two-year election cycle.

Like Bossie, Dan Backer helped to open the floodgates to millions of dollars of influence brought to bear on incumbents and their political challengers who are now pressured to kowtow to their donors with the biggest bank accounts, even if their billions are earned in Russian rubles.

Backer was born in Russia and emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1978.

The changes to our campaign finance laws created an avenue for Russia to try to influence our elections. There are holes in our firewall and they aren't on the internet.

[another interesting touch chart]

(text in blue are my thoughts)