Lawfare just dropped an interesting story (re: yesterday's WSJ reports about a GOP operative and Flynn)

Also under scrutiny is how forthcoming Mr. Kushner was with his father-in-law about the nature of the June meeting. He met with Mr. Trump to discuss the issue, according to advisers to the White House, around the time he updated his federal disclosure form to include Ms. Veselnitskaya’s name on a list of foreign contacts that Mr. Kushner was required to submit to the F.B.I. to obtain a security clearance.

Mr. Kushner supplemented the list of foreign contacts three times, adding more than 100 names, people close to him said.

Turtleneck wrote:

Also under scrutiny is how forthcoming Mr. Kushner was with his father-in-law about the nature of the June meeting. He met with Mr. Trump to discuss the issue, according to advisers to the White House, around the time he updated his federal disclosure form to include Ms. Veselnitskaya’s name on a list of foreign contacts that Mr. Kushner was required to submit to the F.B.I. to obtain a security clearance.

Mr. Kushner supplemented the list of foreign contacts three times, adding more than 100 names, people close to him said.

Still has security clearance.

LooseGoose wrote:

Turtleneck wrote:

Still has security clearance.

So your theory is that anyone that has extensive foreign contacts shouldn't have a security clearance? If that's wrong please expand and clarify.

LooseGoose wrote:

Turtleneck wrote:

Still has security clearance.

So your theory is that anyone that has extensive foreign contacts shouldn't have a security clearance? If that's wrong please expand and clarify.

Democratic congressmen on the House Judiciary Committee want to know why Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly settled a money laundering case in May involving the same Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential election to offer “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The civil forfeiture case was filed in 2013 by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — who was fired by Trump in March. The case alleged that 11 companies were involved in a tax fraud in Russia and then laundered a portion of the $230 million they got into Manhattan real estate.

The forfeiture case was heralded at the time as “a significant step towards uncovering and unwinding a complex money laundering scheme arising from a notorious foreign fraud,” Bharara said. “As alleged, a Russian criminal enterprise sought to launder some of its billions in ill-gotten rubles through the purchase of pricey Manhattan real estate.”

But Instead of proceeding with the trial as scheduled, the Trump Justice Department settled the case two days before it was due to begin. By then, Bharara had already been axed by the president. Bharara’s assistant did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Turtleneck wrote:

Democratic congressmen on the House Judiciary Committee want to know why Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly settled a money laundering case in May involving the same Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential election to offer “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The civil forfeiture case was filed in 2013 by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — who was fired by Trump in March. The case alleged that 11 companies were involved in a tax fraud in Russia and then laundered a portion of the $230 million they got into Manhattan real estate.

The forfeiture case was heralded at the time as “a significant step towards uncovering and unwinding a complex money laundering scheme arising from a notorious foreign fraud,” Bharara said. “As alleged, a Russian criminal enterprise sought to launder some of its billions in ill-gotten rubles through the purchase of pricey Manhattan real estate.”

But Instead of proceeding with the trial as scheduled, the Trump Justice Department settled the case two days before it was due to begin. By then, Bharara had already been axed by the president. Bharara’s assistant did not immediately respond to request for comment.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/12/doj-settled-massive-russian-fraud-case-involving-lawyer-who-met-with-trump-jr/?utm_content=buffera9206&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

DWags wrote:I think I said this in another thread:  I'll bet anyone the NYTimes has so much shit right now it's not funny.   They'll slow play the hell out of this.

To understand the roots of the collusion, set aside Putin and follow the money.

In the endless pursuit of the Russia-Trump collusion story, we sometimes forget a key element: this whole mess began with money, not with election interference. The connections between Trump and Russia were forged years ago, well before he developed any serious political inspirations, and were focused on the shady schemes of Russian oligarchs and their dealings with Trump. Understanding the roots of the collusion means setting aside the usual narrative – Putin wants to destroy American democracy – and following the money first.

In 2015, for example, Trump Taj Mahal settled a federal case that accused it of being involved in Russian money laundering. Trump has been doing business with Russian oligarchs like the Alagarovs for years; it’s possible their money may have even kept him out of bankruptcy. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Jr., said in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump’s Russian business partners despise the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which limits their ability to do business abroad, and would like nothing better than to see it repealed. Trump’s unexpected election gave Russian oligarchs a chance to claw back their losses: end the sanctions, cancel the Magnitsky Act, and settle the Prevezon case.

The Prevezon case may not be familiar territory yet, but it’s likely to be an important part of the Mueller investigation. Essentially, it is a holding company linked to the Russian elite, accused of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars through New York City real estate. It is also part of the giant tax-fraud scheme that Magnitsky uncovered in 2008, leading to his death.

What all this means is that Putin may not even be the protagonist of the story. The “disrupting American democracy” narrative we often hear may have been the cherry on top, not the main goal. It may even be a side effect of a process that Putin did not initiate and was unaware of, and which is now backfiring for Russia. There is sometimes a tendency to see Putin as a mastermind with his tentacles in every corner of his country (and beyond), but the Russian government is more decentralized (and disorganized) than we think. That is not to say that the hacking and troll campaigns aren’t real or important – only that Trump’s ties to Russia are rooted in something else.

Even Putin has important supporters to keep in mind, people who have begun to itch after seventeen years of his rule and are deeply unhappy about the sanctions. Wherever the story goes, Trump’s financial linkages to Russian billionaires will be at the center.

Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-jrs-russia-meeting-sure-sounds-like-a-russian-intelligence-operation/2017/07/14/5f7f3dfe-6762-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html?utm_term=.4da367e9f60f

Turtleneck wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:

So your theory is that anyone that has extensive foreign contacts shouldn't have a security clearance?  If that's wrong please expand and clarify.

No.

Too often he has failed to disclose contacts with foreign agents. The latest meeting should have absolutely been disclosed. The process by which security clearance is obtained identifies both the vital importance of listing contacts with foreign agents, as well as the consequences for failing to do so. Based on the premis of the June 2016 meeting, there is no excuse for the meeting not to have been disclosed. More importantly, if we are now at three revisions with over 100 additions, he has unquestionably and knowingly violated the rules by which security clearance is obtained.

There is also the matter of his conflicts of interests, and how security clearance might be a source of leverage in his personal finances. For example, how his family attempted to solicit money from Qatar for a development project. These waters are murky, and this is not as cut and dry as his clear failure to respect the rules that govern security clearance.

U.S. officials probing Russian lobbyist who met Trump team:
Investigators are concerned about a suspected Russian intelligence operative's role in a controversial 2016 meeting arranged by Donald Trump Jr.

U.S. officials are examining what role a Washington-based lobbyist who they consider a Russian intelligence operative may have played in a controversial June 2016 meeting he attended between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer.

Rinat Akhmetshin, a dual U.S.-Russia citizen, told The Associated Press on Friday that he attended the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump’s son and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a politically connected Russian lawyer who the Trump team believed had damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort also attended the meeting, which was arranged by Trump Jr.

Turtleneck wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:

So your theory is that anyone that has extensive foreign contacts shouldn't have a security clearance? If that's wrong please expand and clarify.

No.

Too often he has failed to disclose contacts with foreign agents. The latest meeting should have absolutely been disclosed. The process by which security clearance is obtained identifies both the vital importance of listing contacts with foreign agents, as well as the consequences for failing to do so. Based on the premis of the June 2016 meeting, there is no excuse for the meeting not to have been disclosed. More importantly, if we are now at three revisions with over 100 additions, he has unquestionably and knowingly violated the rules by which security clearance is obtained.

There is also the matter of his conflicts of interests, and how security clearance might be a source of leverage in his personal finances. For example, how his family attempted to solicit money from Qatar for a development project. These waters are murky, and this is not as cut and dry as his clear failure to respect the rules that govern security clearance.

With nearly each passing day, the public learns more sordid details of the Russia scandal engulfing the Trump administration. It’s far from clear just how deep the Russia affair goes; in today’s climate, one progressive’s collusion is a conservative’s perfunctory opposition research meeting. As with much in our polarized society, much lies in the eye of the beholder.

But the latest revelations undeniably have raised additional questions about the judgment of key figures in President Trump’s orbit, namely his eldest son Donald Jr., his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Only Kushner, however, holds an administration position and, as a result, a Top Secret security clearance.

While Veselnitskaya was not allowed to testify in Congress, she did secure a prime, front-row seat for a June 14 hearing in the House on Russia-related issues.

Her high-profile spot in the room gained notice this week with the circulation of a photo in which she looms over the shoulder of former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, an adviser to President Barack Obama and a witness before the panel. Some conservative blogs this week have said the photo suggests she had accompanied McFaul and was a Democratic plant.

In fact, her seat had been reserved for her by a Republican consultant with close ties to the Trump campaign.

Lanny Wiles, whose wife, Susie, was then chairing the Trump campaign in Florida, said in an interview that he came early to scout out the seat and was there at the request of Akhmetshin, with whom he was working as a consultant on the sanctions-related adoption issue.

Lanny and Susie Wiles both said she was unaware of his role in the lobbying effort. Lanny Wiles said he was unaware that the Russian lawyer whose seat he was saving had just days earlier met with Trump Jr.

Turtleneck wrote:And yet some of the information that has dribbled out over the course of the day suggests even more than this. The meeting may well have gone beyond the simple feeling-out process Mowatt-Larssen describes. One of the attendees at the meeting turns out to be Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet intelligence officer who U.S. authorities believe has continued ties to Russian intelligence. Akhmetshin has been accused in federal court of “hacking into two computer systems and stealing sensitive and confidential materials as part of an alleged black-ops smear campaign,” reports the Daily Beast, which cited court records.


Akhmetshin, who attended the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, has provided the alibi (of sorts) that he offered to share “printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee.” Chuck Ross points out that, nine days after the meeting, Guccifer 2.0 published materials meeting precisely that description.

So the meeting at Trump Tower, which was held on the explicit promise of furthering Russian support for the Trump campaign, included a hacker, and the materials the Russians say they brought were among those published by the Russian hacking cutout.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/the-trump-tower-russian-meeting-gets-way-more-suspicious.html

Turtleneck wrote:And yet some of the information that has dribbled out over the course of the day suggests even more than this. The meeting may well have gone beyond the simple feeling-out process Mowatt-Larssen describes. One of the attendees at the meeting turns out to be Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet intelligence officer who U.S. authorities believe has continued ties to Russian intelligence. Akhmetshin has been accused in federal court of “hacking into two computer systems and stealing sensitive and confidential materials as part of an alleged black-ops smear campaign,” reports the Daily Beast, which cited court records.


Akhmetshin, who attended the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, has provided the alibi (of sorts) that he offered to share “printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee.” Chuck Ross points out that, nine days after the meeting, Guccifer 2.0 published materials meeting precisely that description.

So the meeting at Trump Tower, which was held on the explicit promise of furthering Russian support for the Trump campaign, included a hacker, and the materials the Russians say they brought were among those published by the Russian hacking cutout.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/the-trump-tower-russian-meeting-gets-way-more-suspicious.html

Don't look now, but a new front has opened in L'Affaire Russe. It will be a quiet one at first, but I suspect it won't stay quiet for long.

The new front is civil litigation.

Last week, a group called United to Protect Democracy filed suit against the Trump campaign and Roger Stone on behalf of three people whose emails and personal information were among the material stolen by the Russians and disclosed to Wikileaks. The suit alleges that the campaign and Stone conspired with the Russians to release information about the plaintiffs—who are not public figures—in a fashion that violates their privacy rights under D.C. law. and intimidates them out of political advocacy.

An American-based employee of a Russian real estate company took part in a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump Jr., bringing to eight the number of known participants at the session that has emerged as a key focus of the investigation of the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians.

Ike Kaveladze’s presence was confirmed by Scott Balber, an attorney for Emin and Aras Agalarov, the Russian developers who hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in 2013. Balber said Kaveladze works for the Agalarovs’ company and attended as their representative.

A Congressional inquiry has found that it is ''relatively easy'' for foreigners to hide their identities and form shell companies here that can launder money through American banks.

In a a nine-month inquiry that subpoenaed bank records, the investigators found that an unknown number of Russians and other East Europeans moved more than $1.4 billion through accounts at Citibank of New York and the Commercial Bank of San Francisco.

The accounts had been opened by Irakly Kaveladze, who immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1991, according to Citibank and Mr. Kaveladze. He set up more than 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian brokers and then opened the bank accounts for them, without knowing who owned the corporations, according to the report by the General Accounting Office, which has not been made public.

The report said the banks had failed to conduct any ''due diligence'' into identifying the owners of the accounts.

Gunitsky, who was raised in Russia, has followed the evolving relationship between Donald Trump and Russia for more than a decade. He says the prevailing narrative about Putin interfering in the American election in order to undermine democracy is wildly overstated.

Putin is happy to sow confusion and distrust in America’s system, of course, but to assume that’s the basis of this operation is to overlook a much simpler motive: money.

The financial connections between Trump and various Russian banks and oligarchs (business elites with ties to the Kremlin) stretch back decades, which is likely a big reason why Trump won’t release his tax returns. Trump’s election, Gunitsky contends, presented Russian oligarchs with an opportunity to recoup losses and leverage Trump’s debts for political gain.

I asked Gunitsky to lay it out for me as clearly as possible, and to explain the financial dealings between Trump and his Russian business partners.

Turtleneck wrote:Matthew Yglesias‏Verified account @mattyglesias 11h11 hours ago
Look, just because Sessions hasn't actually been convicted of a crime is no reason we can't start seizing his property now.

-----------

Turtleneck wrote:Niels Lesniewski‏ @nielslesniewski 1m1 minute ago
Carl Levin has informed Mueller, Burr & Warner that he's got information on Iraky Kaveladze from a 2000 PSI money laundering investigation.

On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany this month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.

The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.

But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared a story, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”

Herbie Green wrote:Didng Turtleneck say the other day he wasnt posting about the Russian investigation?  Or was that somebody else?

Turtleneck wrote:

1) I never participated in any of the Russia threads until the Lawfare piece was posted last month, and then started a new thread and have said multiple times this whole Russia thing needs to be approached on a "wait and see" basis.
2) So basically you admit to doing what you have long criticized others for doing...yet continually call other posters hypocrites every chance you get.
3) You are unhinged. Please consult a doctor.