Firm with Kremlin Ties Made Payments to Cohen Firm that Paid Stormy Daniels

While Donald Trump was seemingly hoping that his announcement to blow up the Iran nuclear deal would keep the mainstream news media completely preoccupied so that other breaking news reflecting badly on Trump and/or stories that make the Trump/Michael Cohen operations look even more suspicious and sinister.   Among the stories Trump did not want noticed are (i) Penthouse Magazine's interview with Stormy Daniels - a must read - and (ii) suspicious Russian payments to Michel Cohen's shell entity which ultimately paid hush money to Stormy Daniels.  Risking new wars in the Middle East seemingly is less concern to Trump than covering his large, nasty ass. Here are highlights from a piece in the New York Times that looks at the attention getting payments by a Russian oligarch to Cohen's shell entity:

A shell company that Michael D. Cohen used to pay hush money to a pornographic film actress received payments totaling more than $1 million from an American company linked to a Russian oligarch and several corporations with business before the Trump administration, according to documents and interviews.

Financial records reviewed by The New York Times show that Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, used the shell company, Essential Consultants L.L.C., for an array of business activities that went far beyond what was publicly known. Transactions totaling at least $4.4 million flowed through Essential Consultants starting shortly before Mr. Trump was elected president and continuing to this January, the records show.

Among the previously unreported transactions were payments last year totaling about $500,000 from Columbus Nova, an investment firm in New York whose biggest client is a company controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, the Russian oligarch.

Other transactions described in the financial records range from hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments by Fortune 500 firms with business before the Trump administration, to small amounts related to unexplained activities in foreign countries.

References to the transactions first appeared in a document posted to Twitter on Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star who was paid $130,000 by Essential Consultants to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Mr. Trump.

The Times’s review of financial records confirmed much of what was in Mr. Avenatti’s report. In addition, a review of emails and interviews shed additional light on Mr. Cohen’s dealings with the company connected to Mr. Vekselberg, who was stopped and questioned at an airport earlier this year by investigators for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Mr. Cohen for possible bank fraud and election-law violations, among other matters, according to people briefed on the investigation. Stephen Ryan, a lawyer representing Mr. Cohen, declined to comment.

Mr. Cohen also used the same company to collect $250,000 after arranging payments in 2017 and 2018 by a major Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, to a former Playboy model he allegedly impregnated, according to news reports last month.

Among the other payments to Mr. Cohen’s company described in the financial records were four for $99,980 each between October 2017 and January 2018 by Novartis Investments SARL, a subsidiary of Novartis, the multinational pharmaceutical giant based in Switzerland.

AT&T made four payments totaling $200,000 between October 2017 and January 2018, according to the documents. AT&T, whose proposed merger with Time Warner is pending before the Justice Department, issued a statement on Tuesday evening confirming that it made payments to Mr. Cohen’s firm. 

“Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration,” the statement said. “They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.”

So far, no proof of criminal activities, but many of the payments would seem inexplicable other than providing a slush fund to Cohen/Trump.

Eighth Person in Trump, Jr., Meeting Linked to Money Laundering

For years Donald Trump, Sr., has skirted the edge of the law and cut deals with both domestic and Russian mobsters, often in connection with his real estate projects.  The latter have for years provided a means for dirty Russian money to be used to acquire real estate in America - the USA, unlike many other nations has few restrictions on foreigners buying property - which when sold effective launders the money and makes it "clean."  Hence it should be no surprise that the now identified 8th person in the June, 2016, meeting with Trump, Jr., at Trump Tower had ties to money laundering. Literally, with every passing day some new sleazy and/or questionable detail of the meeting unfolds which further underscores the lies that were first used to explain the meeting which sought to collude with Russian operatives.  Here are details from Politico on this new information (Note Senator Mark Warner's pointed comment): 

The eighth attendee at a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between top Trump associates and a politically connected Russian lawyer is a business associate of a top Moscow oligarch and was once the focus of a congressional money-laundering probe.

Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, until now the mysterious eighth person in the room, attended the meeting on behalf of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate magnate with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a Trump family friend. A lawyer for Agalarov has confirmed Kaveladze’s attendance to other news outlets, though he did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO.

Business filings list Kaveladze as founder of a company called IBC Group, which shares a New Jersey address — 333 Sylvan Ave. in Englewood Cliffs — with several shell companies connected to Aras Agalarov.

One of those firms is Saffron Property Management, which Agalarov reportedly used to purchase an $11 million condo in Florida last year.

A POLITICO reporter visiting the nondescript office building where all of these companies are based found that the suite linked to Agalarov and Kaveladze was empty, with unopened mail by the door. A sign in the lobby indicated that the suite belonged to IBC and Russian Art Mall, which was founded in 2000 and registered to Emin Agalarov, who is a partner in his father's business.

"They're current on the rent. They're on our rent roll, they're just quiet," said George Sayrafe, who said he has managed the building for 20 years. "I hadn't heard anything. Some tenants bother you, you know what I mean? These people, I haven't seen them in a long time."

Kaveladze’s identity is among many facts about the 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr. has failed to disclose in multiple public statements. And his background may add to the questions members of Congress and investigators have about the meeting, which Trump officials say was brief and inconsequential but which Democrats call evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, told reporters on Tuesday.

Kaveladze was named in a round of news stories in November 2000, after the General Accounting Office issued a report on Russian money laundering through U.S. financial institutions.

At the time, Kaveladze was identified in contemporaneous news reports as the originator of thousands of Delaware-based shell corporations.

Through his company, which was at the time called International Business Creations, Kaveladze formed 2,000 corporations for Russian brokers, which helped steer more than $1.4 billion in wire transactions through U.S. banks, according to the congressional inquiry.

The Agalarovs and Kaveladze are represented by Scott Balber, a New York white-collar defense attorney and former legal partner with Abbe Lowell, an attorney handling Russia matters for Kushner. Balber told The Washington Post on Tuesday he got a call this weekend from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office seeking an interview with Kaveladze — an ask that marks the first public signal the special counsel is investigating the Russia meeting.

Special Prosecutor Working with Large Number of FBI Agents

With new reports out that Russia hacked the election systems of 39 different states and may have targeted large Democrat voting cities, Der Trumpenführer continues to rant that it is all "fake news" and a "witch hunt."  Clearly special prosecutor Robert Mueller and the FBI believe otherwise based on the testimony of acting FBI director Andrew McCabe yesterday.  In fact, McCabe made it clear that the FBI is providing a large amount of man/woman power to Mueller's probe of Russiagate.  Meanwhile, other news reports suggest that Trump may have been involved in money laundering efforts with Russian oligarchs and mob figures.  He certainly has ties to known criminals and unsavory figures.  Politico looks at McCabe's testimony before Congress.  Here are excerpts:

The acting head of the FBI said Wednesday that his agency is providing a substantial number of personnel to support the special prosecutor appointed last month to look into alleged Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, including possible connections to the Trump campaign.

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who took over after President Donald Trump fired FBI chief James Comey on May 9, told a House appropriations subcommittee that the FBI is giving special counsel Robert Mueller all the help he needs.

"We have a great number of folks that have already been detailed to that team and I have assured Director Mueller that we will do everything necessary to deliver the resources and meet the needs that he has to do that work," McCabe said.

McCabe, temporarily elevated from the position of deputy FBI director, said discussions to coordinate the FBI's assistance to Mueller are ongoing.

"I've had many, many interactions with the special counsel and his representatives. In fact, we are meeting in the next 24 hours to discuss exactly that," McCabe said.

The FBI official stressed that Mueller isn't taking over all the FBI's counterintelligence work, or even all such work related to Russia.

"The FBI continues to maintain responsibility for counterintelligence issues write large against all of our foreign adversaries. We still do work in the Russia counterintelligence space but we’re careful to leave for the special counsel what is the special counsel’s," McCabe said.

Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) asked McCabe whether he'd been asked for a loyalty oath by Trump, as Comey has said he was, and how he would reply.

"I have taken an oath already to the United States of America to protect and defend the Constitution. That is the only oath I will take, so that's really not an issue for me," McCabe said. He added that it wouldn't be appropriate "in this forum" to discuss his conversations with the president.

As in past testimony, McCabe did dispute claims by Trump and other officials that morale at the FBI suffered under Comey.

"Director Comey enjoyed a great relationship with the men and women of the FBI. So, his removal took many many people by surprise. It was a shock. It's something that we’ve all had to come to terms with," McCabe said.

"We understand it is the president's privilege to remove the FBI director or any appointee, whenever he chooses to do so. ... It's been my challenge to keep people focused on the mission during this time of transition."

Most disturbing is the fact that most Congressional Republicans remain indifferent to Russia's attack on America's electoral system.  Remaining in power is all that matters to them, the interest of the nation and the Constitution be damned.

Special Counsel Investigating Trump for Obstruction of Justice

For those of us who are of a certain age, the unfolding of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's ultimate decision to resign from the presidency rather than face impeachment remain clearly in our memory.  Now, with a new Washington Post story reporting that special prosecutor Robert Mueller has expanded to include whether or not Der Trumpenführer is guilty of obstruction of justice in connection with his efforts to quash the Russiagate investigation and the investigation of Michael Flynn., those memories are again springing back to mind.  Some continue to try to denigrate those who see stark parallels.  Needless to say, most of such naysayers have prostituted themselves to Trump and/or his base and, in my view, sold their souls for power or financial gain.   The sad truth is that if one looks at Trump's history of bullying and shady dealings with Russian oligarchs, Mafia figures, and others, it would be difficult to conclude that trump would not have tried to derail an investigation likely to expose unsavory and likely criminal activities of Trump and his companies and associates.  Here ar are excerpts from the Post piece:

The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.

The move by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump’s conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.

Trump had received private assurances from then-FBI Director James B. Comey starting in January that he was not personally under investigation. Officials say that changed shortly after Comey’s firing.

Five people briefed on the requests, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said that Daniel Coats, the current director of national intelligence, Mike Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, and Rogers’s recently departed deputy, Richard Ledgett, agreed to be interviewed by Mueller’s investigators as early as this week. The investigation has been cloaked in secrecy, and it is unclear how many others have been questioned by the FBI.

The officials said Coats, Rogers and Ledgett would appear voluntarily, though it remains unclear whether they will describe in full their conversations with Trump and other top officials or will be directed by the White House to invoke executive privilege. It is doubtful that the White House could ultimately use executive privilege to try to block them from speaking to Mueller’s investigators. Experts point out that the Supreme Court ruled during the Watergate scandal that officials cannot use privilege to withhold evidence in criminal prosecutions.

The obstruction-of-justice investigation of the president began days after Comey was fired on May 9, according to people familiar with the matter. Mueller’s office has taken up that work, and the preliminary interviews scheduled with intelligence officials indicate that his team is actively pursuing potential witnesses inside and outside the government.

The interviews suggest that Mueller sees the question of attempted obstruction of justice as more than just a “he said, he said” dispute between the president and the fired FBI director, an official said.

Officials said one of the exchanges of potential interest to Mueller took place on March 22, less than a week after Coats was confirmed by the Senate to serve as the nation’s top intelligence official.

Coats was attending a briefing at the White House with officials from several other government agencies. When the briefing ended, as The Washington Post previously reported, Trump asked everyone to leave the room except for Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

Coats told associates that Trump had asked him whether Coats could intervene with Comey to get the bureau to back off its focus on former national security adviser Michael Flynn in its Russia probe, according to officials. 

As part of the probe, the special counsel has also gathered Comey’s written accounts of his conversations with Trump. The president has accused Comey of lying about those encounters.

Mueller is overseeing a host of investigations involving people who are or were in Trump’s orbit, people familiar with the probe said. The investigation is examining possible contacts with Russian operatives as well as any suspicious financial activity related to those individuals.

Investigators will also look for any statements the president may have made publicly and privately to people outside the government about his reasons for firing Comey and his concerns about the Russia probe and other related investigations, people familiar with the matter said.

What The CIA and FBI Knew About Trump Before 2016

With coverage of Donald Trump's Russian ties resurgent in the news again and more and more stories about his campaign officials and surrogates having on going contact with Russian officials, it is a timely question to ask what did the FBI and CIA know about Trump's Russia ties prior to the beginning of the 2016 presidential campaign.  As a very lengthy piece in Talking Point Memo lays out, the answer is plenty and none of it positive.  As it turns out, one individual on the Trump organization had a history of securities fraud, ties to Mafia crime families and the Russian mob.  In fact, it looks likely that Trump Soho in New York City was largely financed by Russian money and funds from favored Russian money launderers.  The take away?  That Trumps claims that he has no previous ties to Russia are utter lies.  Here are article highlights (read the entire piece):

As you've likely inferred from my recent posts I've spent a lot of time in recent days and weeks piecing together different elements of the Trump/Russia story. I've brought other colleagues into the work and plan to expand that once we have people hired for the three new investigative positions I discussed last month. Today everyone is talking about the inexplicable news about Jeff Sessions. But there's another dimension of the Trump/Russia story which has only become clear to me recently but which provides a critical backstory for understanding the background of this scandal and news story.

Let's go back to the story of Felix Sater, the Russian-American immigrant, convicted felon and longtime Trump business associate we discussed last week.

Let me review two separate streams of information which are critical to understanding the story. First, here are some basic and well-attested facts about Felix Sater.

The US government went and continues to go to extreme lengths to keep Sater's cooperation and work for the government a secret. Until quite recently, it went to great lengths to keep Sater's conviction itself, and all documents related to it, a secret. It took the extraordinarily rare step of managing the entire adjudication of Sater's crimes in secret, with all documents kept secret. Federal judges even pursued what might reasonably be called a vendetta against two lawyers who used leaked information about Sater's case in lawsuits growing out of a failed Trump building venture, Trump Fort Lauderdale, as well as lawsuits on behalf of victims in the original pump and dump scheme.

The federal government also kept Sater on as a cooperating witness for fully 11 years before finally sentencing him in 2009 for the plea deal in 1998. In a $42 million securities fraud case, Sater received no jail time, was not forced to pay restitution and was fined a mere $25,000. In other words, he walked away from the crime with close to no punishment. 

It is impossible to know precisely what Sater was doing during this decade. But statements from government officials, news reports and Lauria's book make clear that it required him to have extensive associations with and knowledge of the mafia and touched not just on organized crime but specifically on critical matters of national security. Based on published reports and Lauria's book, it seems extremely likely that it also required him to have extensive knowledge of and contacts in the criminal underworld in the former Soviet Union. Clearly the US government saw Sater's cooperation as highly important. Otherwise it would not have gone to such lengths to get it, to keep it secret and to protect Sater after the fact. 

My aim here is simply to demonstrate who Felix Sater is, his connections with a transnational criminal underworld stretching from New York's Outer Boroughs to Central Asia and (quite likely but not totally proven) meeting up with the weapons market where organized crime touches on international terrorist networks.

We don't just know this information about Sater. Just as importantly we know that the FBI, attorneys in the Eastern District of New York and almost certainly the CIA also knew about Sater's connections with these worlds since they were enlisting his apparently extremely valuable cooperation to help conduct investigations and national security operations in those realms.

Here's where I think this becomes significant to the present moment. If you line up Sater's story and his time as a cooperating witness with his time as a top business associate and finally employee of Donald Trump, they overlap almost exactly.

Trump first met Sater and got into business with Bayrock Capital, where Sater was a cofounder, in 2003. In Bayrock, Sater partnered with Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet trade and commerce official from Kazakstan. Trump and Bayrock partnered together on numerous building projects and Sater was the point man on most of them. The most notable is Trump Soho, which was financed with money from Russia and Kazakstan. There was also Trump Fort Lauderdale, the Sater-managed project whose collapse first triggered the revelation of Sater's 1998 securities fraud conviction. Trump's work with Bayrock continued until 2010 when Sater went to work for the Trump Organization full time - again, putting together deals and financing for Trump-branded building projects.

Let's put this together.

The federal government knew who Sater was, his ties to the criminal underworld, business ties into that world in the former Soviet Union, etc. They also had to know of his deep and longstanding association with Donald Trump, his key role in numerous Trump projects during the first decade of this century and his role arranging financing for these projects. We don't know if the federal government had specific knowledge of the details of these business transactions or whether or how deeply Donald Trump was reliant on capital from Russia and more generally the murky world of oligarchs and underworlds that Sater is clearly immersed in and from which he appeared to draw investment capital. But they likely would have suspected as much, at least that Trump had uncomfortably close ties to someone like Sater.

As long as Donald Trump was just a high-profile and frequently clownish real estate tycoon from New York and the star of The Apprentice, this probably didn't matter very much. After all, as I've noted, there's no specific evidence that Trump was involved in any of Sater's criminal activity.

But at some point in 2014 or 2015, Donald Trump started moving toward having a credible shot at becoming the President of the United States. By early 2016 that became a real possibility.

It seems quite probable that as Trump moved closer to the presidency in the early months of 2016, alarm bells started to go off in the FBI and the CIA, as the relevance of business partnerships with Sater and reliance on capital out of the former Soviet Union suddenly became dramatically more relevant. Again, as I said, as long as Donald Trump was just Donald Trump this didn't matter that much. There's plenty of dirty money sloshing around the New York real estate world. But when it started to seem plausible that he might become the next President, this would start to be a matter of great concern.

All of what I've said here would be an issue even if the Russian government had never inserted itself into the US election. It almost certainly predates any awareness within the US national security and law enforcement worlds that that was happening. But I suspect it is a critical backdrop for how this evidence was interpreted once it began to come to light. It quite possibly also informed and drove some of the scrutiny that was applied to Trump and his associates once it did.

What Is Trump Hiding By Not Releasing His Tax Returns?

Other than Kool-Aid drinking Trump supporters, I suspect most Americans have caught on to the fact that Donald Trump has something to hide and the disingenuous IRS audit excuse aside, he is refusing to release his tax returns because there is something damning in them.  Or at least damning in The Donald's mind, if for example, the returns show his income/wealth to be far less than he likes to boast.  Another hypothetical is that the returns would confirm that Trump gives little or nothing to charities despite his claims to the contrary.  Then, of course, there is the renewed speculation over possible ties to Russian money.  A piece in Salon takes a look at what Trump may be hiding from voters.  Here are excerpts:

First things first, Donald Trump: Release. Your. Tax. Returns. No excuses.

Second, if we have to have a cartoon character running for president, I would prefer Bart Simpson. He has better writers and a healthier sense of self-awareness.  Like Donald Trump, Bart clings to a life’s philosophy best summed up as, “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it, unless it’s something good, in which case I did do it, even if I didn’t do it.”

But back to those tax returns. According to experts, the old “I’m being audited and can’t release them” argument does not hold water. For the umpteenth time, what is Trump hiding?

Of course, many have speculated for months that his obfuscating is because he has much less money than he claims; some have suggested that the returns would reveal that Trump is a complete chiseler when it comes to contributing to charity.

No, what’s truly disturbing is the prospect of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, each an exemplar of thuggish ultra-nationalism, joining hands and merrily dragging the rest of us down the lane to a kleptocratic, even fascist hell. And in the end, it’s all about the money.

Like others, I believe that what’s in those documents would reveal how deeply in hock Trump is to overseas investors, especially the Russian oligarchs. How could we have a president with hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign debt? How effectively could Trump engage as a leader of the United States when he personally owes other countries’ financiers a fortune? This is almost as frightening as the prospect of Trump waking up in a cranky pants mood and eighty-sixing the planet. Almost.

The relationship among Trump, his advisors and Russia is deeply troubling and not because of Cold War-era paranoia about the Communist threat (although it is fascinating to see how the possible involvement of Russia in this election is both stirring up that nostalgic paranoia while at the same time opening old fissures on the left, as if we were back debating Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin and the cult of personality).

You don’t have to be a hawk on these issues or an hysteric on the dangers of Russia — and I’m neither — to be deeply concerned that outside influences could so easily manipulate a potential president. Worrying, too, to see the recent interference, reportedly by Trump staffers, with the Republican Party platform plank calling for the protection of Ukraine’s security against Russia, as well as Trump’s own comments praising Putin and Russia while questioning America’s continuing role as the linchpin member of NATO. Not to mention a campaign manager, Paul Manafort, whose work as a political consultant to former Ukrainian president and Putin pal Viktor Yanukovych is deeply suspect and an advisor, Carter Page, who has ties to Gazprom, the Russian, state-controlled energy giant. In July, Page spoke at Moscow’s New Economic School and said that the chance for better relations with Russia has been diminished because, “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote a couple of weeks ago, “Those associations might simply be unsavory if the candidate were an experienced political figure or surrounded by knowledgeable advisers. Neither is the case…My own concern is mainly that this kind of mix of ignorance, grifters and disorganization is the kind of seed bed where influence operations and malign influence tend to thrive and take root. We’ve seen more than enough to know this knot of connections requires deep scrutiny, extreme vetting as Trump might say. This is no joke.”

But most important, follow the money. Trump denies that he has any investments in Russia, which as many have pointed out is not for lack of trying, and which essentially raises the question, what have the Russians invested in Trump? “There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump’s coffers,” Marshall wrote late last month, “and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.”

We know that Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets…We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” The Guardian reports there are “several Russian billionaires tied to Trump” and notes Trump’s sale of a Palm Beach mansion for $95 million to Russian fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, “who was reported in the Panama Papers leaks to have used offshore law firms to hid more than $2 billion worth of artworks, including pieces by Picasso, Van Gogh and Leonardo, from his wife in advance of their divorce.”

Perhaps most damning is The New York Times’s April account of accusations that arose from the building of Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo tower in downtown Manhattan, “one of several instances in which Mr. Trump’s boastfulness — a hallmark of his career and his campaign — has been accused of crossing the line into fraud.”

Times reporter Mike McIntire wrote that one of the associates at Bayrock, the development company behind the Trump project, “brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians ‘in favor with’ President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives.” Another lawsuit “was filled with unflattering details of how Bayrock operated, including allegations that it had occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia.”

The aforementioned Josh Marshall has been taking all of this in and covering Trump’s Russia ties with the persistence and eagle eye of a superb investigative reporter. He writes:

“Trump has been blackballed by all major U.S. banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major U.S. presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

“…Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump’s financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That’s simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.”

Yes, the body of evidence, while large, is circumstantial. But where there’s smoke, which makes it all the more imperative that Trump let the press and public see his tax returns so we have a chance at piecing together the truth.

There is no sense in allowing a man with this potentially monstrous amount of foreign debt to be our president, especially when he is someone monumentally indifferent to understanding America’s place in the world, a fool whose entire worldview seems equivalent to that of the blowhard at the local tavern whose total knowledge comes from something he heard from a guy once. 

Trump and the Russian Oligarchs

Donald Trump continues to disingenuously claim that he has no ties to Vladimir Putin and his cirvle of cronies and oligarchs. Like so much o the drivel that comes out of Trump's mouth, these denials are lies.  Lies - something that are the norm with Donald trump.  A piece in Politico looks at the lie of such denials and protestations are in fact.  The reality is that Donald Trump is desperately dependent on Russian money - money that doesn't leave Russia without the blessing of Russian dictator Vladimir Puti - to keep his empire afloatn.  Here are article highlights: 

The house wasn’t built for a Russian oligarch, although it looked the part. The 62,000-square-foot, 17-bedroom mansion is a palace of new-money flash, featuring Greek fountains, tennis courts, trompe l’oeil murals, underground parking for dozens of cars, and a 100-foot swimming pool and hot tub overlooking the ocean. It even had a faux-aristocratic name: “Maison de l’Amitie,” or the House of Friendship. It was the trophy of a Boston-area nursing home magnate, until he lost his fortune in 2004. That’s when Donald Trump scooped it up.

After paying $41 million for the place in November 2004, Trump called it “the finest piece of land in Florida, and probably the U.S.” He vowed to upgrade the structure into “the second-greatest house in America.” (Second, of course, to his nearby Mar-a-Lago resort.) But Trump had no intention of living there. He intended to flip it for a quick—and huge—profit. His initial asking price, less than two years after buying it, was $125 million. By the time Trump listed the property, in early 2006, the real estate market was already cooling off. The property sat on the market for about two years as a frustrated Trump churned through real estate brokers and slashed his price 20 percent. It wasn’t at all clear who might pay Trump three times his buying price for a neoclassical palace amid a looming recession.

In the summer of 2008, Trump found a solution to his problem in the form of one of the world’s hundred richest men: a 41-year-old Russian billionaire named Dmitry Rybolovlev. Then with a net worth that Forbesestimated at $13 billion, Rybolovlev had made his fortune in the wild west of 1990s post-Soviet Russia. He’d spent a year in prison on murder charges (he was later cleared) and wore a bulletproof vest when his own life was threatened. He would pay Trump $95 million for Maison L’Amitie in what was widely described as the most expensive U.S. residential property sale ever.

 

The nature of Trump’s connection to Russia has exploded recently as a campaign issue, thanks to his friendly comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin; the ties that several of his advisers have to Moscow; his contrarian views on NATO and Ukraine, which happen to echo Putin’s; and his startling call on Wednesday for Moscow to find and release Hillary Clinton’s deleted private emails.

But the connection isn’t just political. Trump has repeatedly explored business ventures in Russia, partnered with Russians on projects elsewhere, and benefited from Russian largesse in his business ventures. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said at a real estate conference in 2008.

 

Why did a Russian billionaire pay Trump so much money for a house the new owner is believed never to have set foot in, which he has denied owning, and which he now intends to tear down? The answer offers an important window into Trump’s kinship with Russia’s oligarchs, and what he likely sees in them as business allies. It is also a story of a classic Trump deal: a lucrative flip, figures on both sides that don’t really add up, and at the center, a house that may not have been what either party claimed.

In an interview, Trump shrugged off the Maison de l’Amitie sale as a “small deal,” compared to his other ventures, the way some people might refer to a summer cabin in the woods. “That was a house I bought for fun,” Trump said. He also downplayed his personal investment in the place, saying that he only made minor improvements to the property. “I cleaned it up a little bit, but not too much,” Trump told POLITICO. “The primary thing was, I painted it.” The implication, of course, would be that the price differential between his purchase and sale was almost entirely profit.

Back when Trump was trying to flip the house at a dizzying price, however, he claimed to have done far more. “I bought the land and gutted the house,” Trump told a reporter in late 2005. After the property went on the market, Shawn McCabe, vice president of Trump Properties in Florida, told Forbes that Trump had put in at least $25 million of his own money.

 

Documents submitted in March to Palm Beach’s architectural commission by a private firm retained by the buyer suggest that the actual work was modest. They say Trump had the main house’s interior “remodeled, updating with a new kitchen and dividing a large room to create additional bedrooms and bathrooms,” along with “some minor interior alterations of doors, frames & windows.”

Perhaps Trump understood that the payoff he was demanding would have to come from outside the U.S. A new generation of ultra-wealthy foreigners had emerged in the previous decade, many of them Russians who had reaped mind-boggling wealth as formerly state-controlled industries were privatized, the spoils mostly shared among political cronies. By then, Trump had pursued or completed multiple deals with Russian partners. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” Donald Jr., said at that 2008 real estate conference.

Enter Dmitry Rybolovlev. Barely over 40 and worth a Forbes-estimated $12.5 billion in 2008, Rybolovlev was not exactly a familiar name on the Palm Beach social circuit. A former medical student who became a stock broker as the country transitioned from socialism to a market economy in the 1990s, he invested in heavy industry. In 1995, then just 29 years old, he was chairman of the Russian fertilizer giant Uralkali. Dubbed “the fertilizer king,” he would become one of the world’s wealthiest men, peaking at No. 59 on the Forbes 500 list.

 

Today, Rybolovlev is better known for other things. There was his record-setting purchase of an $88 million Manhattan apartment for his 22-year-old daughter; his ownership of Monaco’s pro soccer team; and recent accounts in the New York Times and The New Yorker of claims that an art broker who helped him purchase works by the likes of Picasso and da Vinci overcharged him by hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

Trump has much in common with Russia’s oligarchs—billions in wealth, supreme self-confidence, a taste for trophies and a love of flaunting riches—and in recent years, he has gravitated toward them. In 2013, he partnered with the Russian real estate mogul Aras Agalarov to bring the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time, to Moscow. Trump later boasted that “all the oligarchs” had attended the event. While in Moscow, Trump discussed plans for real estate projects there.

It is hard to verify the claim Trump made this week that he has no investments in Russia and that his dealings with Russians are very limited. His company is private and is not required to disclose its finances. In a break from modern presidential norms, Trump refuses to release his personal tax returns.

“The big question is whether any hard evidence comes out about whether Trump has any financial interests linked to Russia,” says Democratic consultant Jeremy Rosner, who served on Bill Clinton’s national security council staff. “And that’s why it’s so important that he release his tax records. Otherwise, we could have a Manchurian Candidate with the keys to the Oval Office who is under the control of a foreign power. And voters deserve very clear evidence that that is not the case.”