“Dirty Rubles”: Trump is an Existential Threat to America

One of the problems with keeping up with the Trump/Pence Russiagate scandal is the plethora of different threads to the story line.  Other than political junkies, many lack the time or the patience to try to stay on top of what is happening and the accumulating evidence that things are very rotten in America in 2018. Trump, of course adds to the confusion via his endless tweet storms aimed at distraction, especially whenever damaging news is leaking. I have noted how it now seems that America is lying a real life spy novel.  Now, a new book, "Dirty Rubles" pieces the multiple story lines together and paints a very damning portrait not only of Trump - and his lie repeater, Mike Pence - but the larger GOP that he believes is complicit in the Russiagate scandal.  A piece in Salon looks at the book with an interview of its author.  Here are some highlights:

Americans would do themselves a gigantic favor by reading the new nonfiction book from acclaimed novelist Greg Olear, “Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia.”

Olear brings his sharp literary scalpel to what promises to emerge as one of America’s most enormous and consequential scandals, operating under the belief that it takes a novelist’s ability to understand and tell stories to truly capture the essence of the “stranger than fiction” Trump-Russia conspiracy. The result is a riveting, infuriating and, against all the odds, uplifting book. It's essential reading for all Americans, especially those in the apathetic majority who view Russian meddling in U.S. elections as insignificant.

I recently interviewed Olear about “Dirty Rubles.”

I think it’s hard for people to square the avuncular guy on TV who cracked jokes and fired people with the real Donald J. Trump. The truth is, the guy’s been mobbed up for decades, with ties to both La Cosa Nostra and Russian organized crime. Trump is a money launderer for the latter, and has been for quite some time. “Money laundering” sounds cute, like something Danny Ocean and his merry men do, but it’s a euphemism for something unspeakable. The Russian mob has become so vast and successful because it eagerly participates in the worst of the worst: human trafficking, child pornography, sex slavery, opioids, illegal arms deals, blood diamonds — all the grisly, awful stuff that Trump accuses MS-13 of doing. By taking those dirty rubles and making them legitimate, Trump is a party to all of that.

The media also likes to forget that Trump is a serial rapist and sexual predator. We can use the “allegedly” qualifier if you like, but he has bragged about this on many occasions. There are more than 20 accusers now, and I believe them.

The kompromat, by the way, does not involve tinkling Moscow prostitutes, but far more heinous activities. This is a person who sexually assaulted a reporter from People magazine at his house -- while his wife was home. You don’t think he’s capable of greater depravity halfway around the world, when he thinks no one is watching?

Treason is a vague term. Unlike rape or murder or even petty larceny, it’s not visceral. But it’s the worst crime there is, because Trump actively betrayed 330 million Americans. He conspired with the Russians to contaminate the election, he lied about it, he continues to lie about it, and we have yet to find out exactly what he has promised his Russian master. I’d like to think that Americans across the political spectrum would agree that the POTUS should not be a compromised asset of the Russian Federation.

Helsinki reaffirmed what I’ve known for two years, and what Hillary told us in the debate: Trump is Putin’s puppet. Has a powerful world leader ever presented as submissively, as weakly, as Trump did in Finland? He makes Neville Chamberlain look like Rambo.

Real estate is a good way to launder money, as Trump well knows. Another is campaign finance. So much dark money, so many ways to donate anonymously. It seems clear now, given the latest round of indictments, that Russian money was funneled into the Republican National Committe via the NRA and other avenues. Anyone who took that money is complicit. This is why the Paul Ryans and Dana Rohrabachers and Devin Nuneses of the world have gone to great lengths to throw water on the Mueller investigation, in my estimation. And why so many GOP members of Congress are retiring. They are not trying to save Trump; they are trying to save themselves.

Trump/Russia is a complicated story, with a bunch of different threads. It’s just like a novel — except that it more or less proves the old saw about truth being stranger than fiction.

My book doesn’t cover any new ground. It takes the stuff we already know and gives it narrative structure, to make it easier to absorb for readers lucky enough not to know the difference between Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Gorkov. That’s all I’m trying to do. I’m not David Corn, a seasoned Washington bureau chief with sources out the wazoo. I’m not James Comey, who has intimate first-hand knowledge of the events.

And I’m certainly not Michael Wolff, who basically crashed the Trump party and wrote about it in a lurid but lame way. I’m a long-form writer who has carefully followed Trump/Russia, who has written and tweeted about it for almost two years — who has done the research, as a historical novelist might say — and I’m telling the story the best way I know how to tell it. I’m perfectly, if not uniquely, qualified to do that.

As I wrote in the book, Donald Trump comprises the gravest existential threat to the republic since the Civil War. That is not hyperbole. But here’s the thing: if the American experiment is going to end, it won’t be because of that fucking guy. In that, I have the fullest confidence.

Trump Was Warned By FBI About Russian Efforts to Infiltrate Campaign

Guilty of incompetence or guilty of collusion efforts?

One of the standard excuses of Donald Trump and his apologists when defending against concerns of collusion with Vladimir Putin's Russia is that Trump and his advisers were "inexperienced" and "unsophisticated in political and foreign policy matters" and, therefore, may have made some mistakes inadvertently.  Now, it turns out that (i) Trump had been specifically warned about potential Russian efforts to infiltrate his campaign and told to advise the FBI if any suspicious activities were observed, and (ii) despite this warning Trump officials seemingly went out of their way to make repeated, unusual contacts with Russian operatives. Personally, I am not surprised that Trump ignored this warnings.  Throughout his entire business career, Trump has ignored the laws and sought to use contacts with illicit individuals to further his own interests.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the take away from this new news of the FBI's prior warnings to Trump.  Here are excerpts:

Let me share a few thoughts about this news that during the campaign candidate Trump was warned to be on the lookout for foreign governments, including Russia, trying to infiltrate his campaign. If he saw anything suspicious, he was warned he should bring it to the FBI.

We can note a few caveats to this news. Hillary Clinton was apparently given the same briefing. . . . . So we cannot, on the basis of this report, say that the FBI was already so worried about Russian infiltration of Trump’s campaign that it thought it was necessary to give him a warning.

But there are a couple things I think we can say.  The first is the most obvious. According to this report and all other reporting on the Russia probe, no one from the Trump campaign ever reported any suspicious contacts to the FBI. Not the campaign itself. Not the candidate. Not any staffer for the campaign acting in some quasi-whistleblower capacity. No one.

As we have learned more and more over these last months about the Trump team’s numerous contacts with Russian nationals and government or intelligence officials, the key defense has always been that president-ing wasn’t their background. So if it looks fishy it was really just that they were naive or inexperienced.

Here’s where this additional fact becomes interesting. Let’s say it was just that: all these things were happening but Trump and his inner circle didn’t realize it was a problem. Okay, so far so good. Having received this warning, though, you would imagine someone might have said: “Wow, I sure hope these counter-intelligence guys don’t think our Russian friends who totally aren’t spies are spies. Maybe I should ring up that CI guy from the Bureau who told us to keep an eye out.”

It certainly seems like that thought did not occur to anyone. Not Trump. Not whoever else on his campaign was briefed. Not anyone he shared the warning with, if he did share it. . . . . I think that tells us what we should already know: that Trump and his top advisors knew they were doing something wrong, even if it might not have gone so far as ‘collusion’. This just makes it all the more clear. The second is one of the things that fascinates me the most about this whole story. . . . . FBI and FBI counter-intelligence agents knew that Trump had at least troubling ties to Russian organized crime, money-laundering and possibly intelligence operators long before the campaign. Long before.

A lot of these weird ties really didn’t matter that much as long as Trump was a has-been real estate developer and a TV star. They would matter a whole lot if he became President.

But this warning didn’t come in a vacuum, . . . . The report about this warning says it came in late July or early August. It was July 27th when Trump made his notorious public request for Russia to hack and release more of Hillary Clinton’s emails. So that bizarre statement might have come just after or just before that heads up. Wow.

So on the one hand, the FBI counter-intelligence officers were giving these standard, good-faith warnings. On the other, they already knew that Trump had made one of his five foreign policy advisors a man who the FBI had already put under FISA surveillance because they believed it was likely he’d been recruited as a Russian asset.  . . . . In other words, it probably looked like there was a good chance Trump’s campaign had already been infiltrated just on the basis of Carter Page’s role.

So either just after or just before this warning he’s out in public inviting foreign intelligence assistance to his campaign. Of course, it didn’t stop there. Both publicly and much more clandestinely Trump continued seeking out Russian assistance, friendship, understandings.

At some level I have to imagine that the people at the FBI charged with monitoring this stuff genuinely did not know what to make of it. They’re probably trained to assist people who are naive but acting in good faith. They’re probably trained to catch people who are acting clandestinely. But what about someone who is doing the latter, getting warned and also simultaneously flaunting what he and his aides are doing?

This backdrop, this knowledge that something was happening, while also needing to began briefing candidate Trump and watching him say things on the campaign trail that were a lot like what a Russian asset would say … well, I really want to understand that story from their perspective.

For our present purposes, I think this news is not terribly surprising . . . . It simply gives us more reason to believe what we largely already know: that Trump and his top advisors knew that they were doing something wrong. And since they knew it was wrong they worked hard to keep it secret and hidden. Just not that hidden and not that secret. Because after all, for most of them, it was their first time colluding.

Mueller Reveals New Manafort Link to Russian Organized Crime

Numerous previous posts on this blog have looked at the questionable ties between Donald Trump and his business ventures with underworld figures and how Russian money has propped up various real estate developments - and perhaps serve as a means to launder dirty Russian money.  New information in documents released by Robert Mueller show that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort kept similar underworld company, with Russian connections, of course.  And, of course, Manafort enriched himself in the process. Combine this new revelation with Carter Page's announcement today that he told Jeff Sessions about his trip to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign and the picture that emerges is one of lies and lots of Russia derived money.   A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the latest on Manafort's Russian mob ties.  Here are excerpts:

Buried deep in Robert Mueller’s indictment of Paul Manafort is a new link between Donald Trump’s former campaign and Russian organized crime.

The indictment (PDF), unsealed on Monday, includes an extensive look into Paul Manafort’s byzantine financial dealings. In particular, it details how he used a company called Lucicle Consultants Limited to wire millions of dollars into the United States.

The Cyprus-based Lucicle Consultants Limited, in turn, reportedly received millions of dollars from a businessman and Ukrainian parliamentarian named Ivan Fursin, who is closely linked to one of Russia’s most notorious criminals: Semion Mogilevich.

Mogilevich is frequently described as “the most dangerous mobster in the world.” Currently believed to be safe in Moscow, he is, according to the FBI, responsible for weapons trafficking, contract killings, and international prostitution. In 2009, he made the bureau’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

“Ivan Fursin was a senior figure in the Mogilevich criminal organization,” Taras Kuzio, a non-resident fellow at Johns Hopkins-SAIS’ Center for Transatlantic Relations and a specialist on the region told The Daily Beast.

That isn’t Fursin’s only connection to Manafort. He is also a lawmaker for the Party of Regions, which paid at least $17 million to Manafort’s firm.

In addition, Fursin’s longtime business associate, Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, has an off-again, on-again partnership with Manafort. Together, they tried to buy the Drake Hotel in Manhattan for a cool $850 million. Firtash also bankrolled Ukraine’s Party of Regions.

Firtash has his own legal complications. He is currently under indictment in U.S. federal court for allegedly orchestrating an international titanium mining racket. The acting U.S. attorney in Chicago recently dubbed him an “organized-crime member” and an “upper-echelon associat[e] of Russian organized crime.” His attorneys say those charges are mere “innuendo,” according to the Chicago Tribune. 

Donald Trump’s Disturbingly Deep Ties To Russia

Again and again Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, has denied that he has ties to Russia and/or that his campaign - perhaps even himself- colluded with Vladimir Putin/Russian intelligence agencies to flip the 2016 presidential election to Trump.  These lies denials have been made in tweets, in an interview with Lester Holt, and through his surrogates and henchmen.  Yet, as past posts have laid out, much of Trump's real estate empire has depended on Russian money to survive.  This influx of Russian money played two roles: (i) it kept Trump's projects afloat, and (ii) it provided a convenient means to launder Russian money derived from dirty/questionable sources.  Now, a piece in Fortune underscores the dishonesty of Trump's disavowals of connections with Russia.  Time magazine has made it's own statement via the cover shown above.  Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump said in a recent interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, "I have had dealings over the years where I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian many years ago. I had the Miss Universe pageant — which I owned for quite a while — I had it in Moscow a long time ago. But other than that, I have nothing to do with Russia."

The reality, however, is that Trump couldn’t be more wrong. The President has deep Russian connections that far exceed what he admitted to Holt.

In a 2007 deposition that Trump gave as part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien, he describes efforts to launch real estate ventures in Russia through Bayrock Associates, a shady Russian-connected outfit. Bayrock had partnered with Trump on at least four major but failed American projects: the Fort Lauderdale Trump Tower, the Trump Ocean Club in Fort Lauderdale, the SoHo condominium-hotel in New York, and a resort in Phoenix.

Bayrock had its office on the 24^th floor of Trump Tower, and its 2007 glossy brochure featured a photo of Trump and Tevfik Arif, a principal Bayrock partner, who served for 17 years in the Soviet government before emigrating to the United States. It called the Trump Organization a “strategic partner,” and listed Trump as their primary reference.

Felix Sater, the Russian-born managing director and majority shareholder in Bayrock, was convicted of assault in 1991. Then, in 1998, federal prosecutors convicted Sater of fraud, for running a $40 million penny stock fraud in collaboration with the New York and Russian Mafia. In return for a guilty plea, Sater reportedly agreed to work as a government informant.

The plaintiffs in a 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, among others, alleged in the civil lawsuit that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes.

In September 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Trump’s many deals with Bayrock unravels Donald Jr’s comments.

Trump’s 2013 sojourn in Russia for the Miss Universe pageant was far less innocent that he would have us believe. According to the Washington Post, the deal to bring the pageant to Russia was “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.”

While in Moscow, Trump met with Russian oligarchs who were closely aligned with President Vladimir Putin, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of the state-controlled Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.

The Bayrock Group’s Felix Sater emerges again during the Trump campaign and presidency. Sater contributed the maximum $5,400 to Donald Trump’s campaign. Then on February 19, 2017, the New York Times reported that “A week before Trump fired Michael Flynn resigned as national security advisor, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.”

The Times said that three men were responsible for developing and delivering the plan: Andrew Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, and Andrii V. Artemenko, a pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament.

The third man was none other than Trump’s former business partner and convicted fraudster, Felix Sater. How and why Sater became involved with a key member of the Trump administration in the most sensitive of diplomatic transactions between the United States and Russia remains one of the many mysteries to be resolved by congressional and FBI investigators.

If Trump's lips are moving, the safest assumption is that he is lying.  The Time article can be found here.

Trump Has Deep Ties to Organized Crime - Are Americans Finally Waking Up?

One of the reasons I have been inclined to believe claims that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian hackers and perhaps even the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential campaign is because of Donald Trump's long history of cutting deals with organized crime, including Russian crime figures, to further his own financial interests and real estate projects.  Moreover, real estate investments provide a wonderful means to launder dirty money and walk away with "clean" funds one the real estate investment is sold.  As an added bonus, for Russian crime figures, foreign real estate investments provide a means to set aside a "safe nest egg" should things go down the toilet on the home front.  A piece at Raw Story looks at Trump's ugly history of dealing with crime figures and how it has helped fuel the investigations into possible collusion - and treason - with Russian figures and the Kremlin.  Here are excerpts:

As President Trump discovers the prerogative of unilaterally making war, the media gaze has turned away from the ongoing FBI, House and Senate investigation of his Russia ties to the simpler dramas of cruise missiles, big bombs, and tough but loose talk on North Korea.

Yet even “the mother of all bombs” cannot obliterate the accumulating body of evidence about his relationship with Russian organized crime figures and the not unrelated question about whether he and his entourage colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 presidential election. The story, notes Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, is “Hiding in plain sight.”

The evidence of pre-election collusion between Trump and the Russians, while growing, is far from definitive. The evidence on Trump’s organized crime ties is stronger. Says Marshall:

“If we’d never heard about Russian intelligence hacking of the 2016 election or Carter Page or Paul Manafort or Sergei Kislyak this [Trump’s organized crime connections] would seem like an extraordinarily big deal. And indeed it is an extraordinarily big deal.”

Chronologically speaking, Trump’s ties to organized crime figures came first. Mutually beneficial transactions dating back to the 1990s led to closer relations in the 2000s and culminated in the contacts during the 2016 campaign. It all began with Russians who wanted to get their money out of the country.

As Donald Trump Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, told the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in September 2008 (on the basis, he said, of his own “half dozen trips to Russia in 18 months”):

“[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

A lot of this Russian organized crime money flowed through Cyprus, and one of its largest banks, the Bank of Cyprus. The bank’s chairman, Wilbur Ross, is now secretary of commerce. When senators considering Ross’ nomination asked about Cyprus, Ross said Trump had forbidden him from answering questions on the subject.

Not coincidentally, Illinois congressman Mike Quigley, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, recently traveled to Cyprus to investigate, according to the Daily Beast. . . . . the fact that Russians launder their money there to avoid sanctions, and the fact that key U.S. and Russia players were there—all make it really important for the Russia investigation,” Quigley explained in an interview.

According to the Associated Press, the records of Manafort’s Cypriot transactions were requested by the U.S. Treasury Department Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which works internationally with agencies to track money laundering and the movement of illicit funds around the globe.

The sheer proliferation of such contact indicates, at a minimum, that Russian organized crime figures felt comfortable in the Trump milieu.

Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for law enforcement in the Clinton administration, says that he was investigating Semion Mogilevich 20 years ago when “the brainy don” (as he was known) pioneered the laundering criminal proceeds through quasi-legitimate companies in the United States, especially in high-end real estate. . . . “These ties link up, coalesce, organize and resolve,” Winer says. These are “relationships that make some sense. So we need to get below what we can see on the surface and see what actually happened. … I don’t know who’s going to be indicted, but boy, do I know this: the American people needs to be to get the facts, and then justice can be done.”

Personally, I wonder when and what will be enough o force some of our  "friends" who voted for Trump to finally pull their heads out of their asses and open their eyes to reality.