Trump's Pet Ukrainians, Lev and Igor, Arrested Trying To Flee The Country. Trump: "Lev Who? Igor Who?"

The gang's all here

When I read that Russian spies Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman had been arrested Wednesday night--after lunch with Giuliani-- I thought their names sounded very familiar. I vaguely recalled they had been money-laundering large sums of money from the old Soviet Union into Trump's campaign (and pockets). I wrote about it it in July. What we saw back then was how a BuzzFeed team reported that two unofficial envoys reporting directly to Giuliani have waged a remarkable back-channel campaign to discredit Trump's rivals and undermine Mueller's inquiry into Russian meddling in U.S. elections. In a whirlwind of private meetings, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman-- who pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican campaigns and dined with the illegitimate U.S. president-- gathered repeatedly with top officials in Ukraine and set up meetings for Giuliani, as they turned up information that could be weaponized in the 2020 presidential race. The 2 criminals were there to urged prosecutors to investigate the Bidens.

The two men-- who both have troubled financial histories-- rose to prominence in Republican circles, meeting with party leaders while injecting hundreds of thousands of dollars into top Republican committees and dozens of candidates’ campaigns.

As they carried out their campaign, they used their proximity to the White House to tout a new business they set up to sell natural gas in Ukraine, with photos posted on Facebook showing Parnas posing with President Trump in the White House and top House members on Capitol Hill.

Their work proved influential. Prosecutors in Kiev announced in March they would investigate the officials accused of trying to steer the election in Clinton’s favor-- a month after meeting with Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani-- and Trump applauded the plan in an interview with Fox News, calling the allegations “big” and “incredible.” The next month, Attorney General William Barr announced he had appointed a federal prosecutor to lead a probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation.

Parnas said he expected the information that he and Fruman advanced to become an important focus of Barr’s inquiry, and to dominate the debate in the run-up to the 2020 election. “It’s all going to come out,” he said. “Something terrible happened and we’re finally going to get to the bottom of it.”

In an exclusive interview with BuzzFeed News at the Trump International Hotel, the 47-year-old former stock broker insisted he and Fruman were not paid for acting as intermediaries between the Ukrainian officials and Giuliani. “All we were doing was passing along information,” he said. “Information was coming to us-- either I bury it or I pass it on. I felt it was my duty to pass it on."

...Kenneth McCallion, a former federal prosecutor who once represented Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said Parnas and Fruman were “playing with fire” by carrying out their campaign in the U.S. and Ukraine without registering as foreign agents or being vetted by the State Department.

“Trump has either authorized Giuliani to engage in private diplomacy and deal-making, or even worse, remains silent while Giuliani and his dodgy band of soldiers of fortune engage in activities that severely undermine US credibility and are contrary to fundamental US interests,” he said.

...What’s clear is that, for Parnas and Fruman, the stakes were more than just political. While they launched a new energy company to operate in Ukraine, large sums of money were flowing into various bank accounts belonging to the men that are now the focus of legal complaints.

In one transaction in 2018, more than $1 million was wired to a bank account belonging to Parnas from the client trust account of a Florida lawyer specializing in real estate and foreign investments. Parnas and Fruman then redirected $325,000 to a Trump-supporting super PAC-- without declaring the original source of the funds, records and interviews show.

The money is now the target of a complaint before the Federal Election Commission by a non-profit watchdog group.

Parnas tried scratching out Pete Sessions' name

Meanwhile Parnas and Fruman were shoveling hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal foreign money into the campaign coffers as bribes to crooked Republicans besides Trump-- like Rick Scott (R-FL), Pete Sessions (R-TX), aka "Congressman 1" in the Parnas and Fruman indictment, Joe Wilson (R-SC). Most of their bribes went to the GOP through the RNC and through Republican state parties in New York, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, California, North Dakota, North Carolina, Louisiana, Wyoming, Alabama, Virginia, Connecticut, Kansas, Minnesota, and Illinois. I wonder who directed them to put the money into those particular pots, someone who is likely to eventually head off to prison.

Trump literally wants more immigrants like these two

USA Today helped bring all this up to date in their report of the arrest last night as Parnas and Fruman were caught at Dulles trying to flee the country.

Two Ukrainian-born business partners, who showered Republican campaign committees with nearly $500,000 and dined with President Donald Trump at the White House, were arrested late Wednesday on campaign finances charges, federal authorities said Thursday.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman helped Rudy Giuliani meet a key Ukrainian prosecutor as the president's personal lawyer sought to discredit Trump's political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Both of the men also are among the prospective witnesses House Democrats want to question in their impeachment inquiry.

The indictment charges Parnas, Fruman, David Correia and Andrey Kukushin with federal campaign finance law violations.

It alleges they “conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with candidates, campaigns and the candidates’ governments.”

Parnas and Fruman began attending campaign fundraising events in March 2018, the indictment alleged.

They had no significant prior history of political donations, and “sought to advance their personal financial interests and the political interests of at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working,” the indictment charges.

In order to hide their sources of funding and capital, Parnas and Fruman created a limited liability company called Global Energy Producers and “intentionally caused certain large contributions to be reported in the name of GEP instead of their own names,” the indictment charged.

When media reports about the Global Energy Producers' contributions first surfaced, an individual working with Parnas said “{t]his is what happens when you become visible… the buzzards descend,” the indictment charged. “[t]hat’s why we need to stay under the radar…” Parnas responded, according to the indictment.

The indictment also alleges that Parnas, Fruman, Correia and Kukushmin schemed with an unidentified foreign national to get retail marijuana licenses in particular states, including Nevada. In or about September and October 2018, Correia drafted a table of prospective political donations. The table allegedly described a multi-state licensing strategy that would funnel $1 million to $2 million in contributions to federal and state political committees.

The plan also included a funding schedule of two $500,00 transfers. The foreign national arranged for the funds to be wired on or about September 18, 2018, and October 16, 2018 from overseas accounts to a U.S. corporate bank account controlled by Fruman and another individual,” the indictment charged.

The alleged conspirators took steps to hid the foreign national’s involvement and role in the funding “to, in Kukushkin’s words, “his Russian roots and current political paranoia about it,” the indictment charged.

Parnas and Fruman, who were born in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union but who now live in Florida, have become political players in recent years. In May 2018, Parnas posted pictures on Facebook of himself and Fruman with Trump in the White House and with his son, Donald Trump Jr., in California. That was the same month their company, Global Energy Producers LLC, was credited for giving $325,000 to a campaign committee that supports Trump's re-election.

But in a legal dust-up that appears unrelated to the Ukraine scandal, the campaign contribution sparked a complaint to the Federal Election Commission-- and at least two lawsuits-- because of questions about the source of the money. Despite the generous political contributions, Parnas faces a $510,000 federal judgment in a case over a debt for a movie that never got made.

Three House committees-- Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight and Reform-- scheduled depositions Thursday with Parnas and Friday with Fruman to ask how they fit in with Trump's dealings with Ukraine. Those panels have also subpoenaed documents from Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Committee chairs Adam Schiff, Elijah Cummings and Eliot Engel sent subpoenas to Lev and Igor yesterday via their attorney, John Dowd, reminding them all that they are "private citizens who are not employees of the Executive Branch. They may not evade requests from Congress for documents and information necessary to conduct our inquiry. They are required by law to comply with the enclosed subpoenas. They are not exempted from this requirement merely because they happen to work with Mr. Giuliani, and they may not defy congressional subpoenas merely because President Trump has chosen the path of denial, defiance, and obstruction... In addition to providing the subpoenaed documents, the Committees also expect your clients to appear to testify about these matters at a later date."

Trump blatantly lied to reporters yesterday, saying I don’t know those gentleman. Now, it’s possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody. I don’t know them, I don’t know about them, I don’t know what they do. I don’t know, maybe they were clients of Rudy’s. You’d have to ask Rudy." He also said he doesn't know if Giuliani is about to be indicted. "I haven't spoken to Rudy about it I will say this, from what I heard... they said we have nothing to do with it." And by the way, there are dozens of pictures of Trump with Lev and Igor, sometimes as a pair, sometimes as individuals. No one asked Trump is he plans to give back the $400,000 he's taken in bribes from the two criminals.

Like the Mafia... but worse

What Can Be Done About A Criminal Presidency? Just Grin And Bear It? Pelosi Still Refuses To Protect The Country And The Constitution

Remember when fact-checking Trump and reporting how many lies he had told was a national sport? [Update, according to PolitiFact, 84% of the Trump statements they've checked have been false or partially false. Biden, who lies just 61% of the time, almost seems like a paragon of virtue compared to Trump.] But now Jonathan Chait is starting a new game. How many impeachable acts has Trump committed today?

Yesterday, he wrote that Trump had committed 5 more just this week. I know; it's not funny and it's not a game. But with Pelosi's partisan calculations making it impossible for Democrats to even begin the process of holding him accountable, what can we do other than look on in horror? Chait wrote that at his MAGA rally in an airplane hanger in tiny Montoursville, Pennsylvania this week, "Trump’s characteristic threats of vengeance against his enemies took an especially chilling turn. 'There was treason!' he announced, summarizing the investigation into the Mueller probe. The crowd began chanting, 'Lock them up! Lock them up!'"

Trump initially returned to his prepared text, itself a creepily ethno-nationalist paean to his narrow Electoral College win. “You reclaimed your destiny, you defended your dignity, and you took back your country,” he read, in a passage that probably sounded better in the original German. But the “Lock them up!” chants persisted, and, with his showman’s gift for timing, Trump turned back to his audience and paused as the chants increased, then theatrically relented to the demands of the crowd that he had stoked. “We have a great new attorney general who will give it a very fair look, very fair look,” he promised... As Trump said “very fair,” he wore an arch expression. Trump of course does not use “fair” in anything like the dictionary definition of the term. Trump’s notion of “fairness” is purely positional, revolving entirely around his own self-interest. With his expression, Trump-- unusual for him-- brought the crowd in on the joke. “Very fair” was a punch line.

Trump’s notion of a “fair” attorney general, as he has stated many times, is one who loyally protects the president’s political interests. His frequent expressions of confidence in William Barr are therefore an important indicator. Barr conspicuously refused to answer a question about whether he had been ordered to investigate anybody, then announced a new, third, investigation into the origins of the Russia probe. Barr has also repeatedly prejudged the outcome of that probe in public. Trump “has told close confidants that he ‘finally’ had ‘my attorney general,’ according to two Republicans close to the White House,” reports the Associated Press. Every indicator suggests Trump believes, correctly or otherwise, that his attorney general shares his peculiar, mob-family sense of fairness.

In a pre-Trumpian world, this sequence of events would set off a political crisis. In the surreal landscape we inhabit, it barely registers. But it is worth noting that Trump continues to commit impeachable offenses at an unprecedented pace. Last night’s threats to make good on his “lock them up” promises are merely one more in another recent flurry. The space between Trump’s long-standing authoritarian rhetoric and the deployment of his powers of office is slowly collapsing on several fronts.

Consider some of the events of recent days. Sunday, the New York Times revealed that Deutsche Bank’s internal investigators raised concerns that the portfolios of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner involved money laundering. Trump is suing Deutsche Bank to block it from complying with congressional investigators. The notion that the president is entitled to engage in red-flagged dealings with money launderers, and conceal it from Congress and the public, is a wild transgression of transparency norms.

The same day, the Times reported Trump is preparing pardons for several American war criminals. Trump has long fantasized about war crimes and human-rights violations as part of his idealized military, from repeating a fantasized historical account of General Pershing shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood to proposing that the United States seize Iraqi oil as spoils of war. His prospective pardoning of war criminals are steps toward institutionalizing this vision as de facto law.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Michael Cohen told a closed House panel that Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, encouraged him to lie to Congress in 2017. Cohen’s lie concerned his handling of a deal to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. The subject of the lie is itself a massive scandal: Vladimir Putin, who habitually corrupts foreign politicians with bribes disguised as lucrative deals, was dangling a contract worth several hundred million dollars, with no financial risk or downside to Trump.

Cohen has testified that Trump encouraged him to lie by repeating, in his characteristic mobster code-- “There’s no Russia”-- a cover story both men knew to be false. (Trump of course signed the letter of intent for the Moscow Project.) The new report shows that Sekulow was involved in crafting his false testimony, and that, far from the president’s lawyer freelance ordering perjury, Cohen understood Trump to be working through Sekulow.

The new disclosure fleshes out more evidence that the president suborned perjury to conceal evidence that he was deeply compromised by Russia during the campaign.

Also yesterday, former White House Counsel Don McGahn refused to appear at a House hearing to testify to yet another serious presidential crime. According to the Mueller report, Trump ordered McGahn to tell Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller, an order McGahn refused. Trump later told McGahn to falsely deny Trump had ever told him this.

Trump has publicly insisted none of this has happened, a denial that makes McGahn’s testimony highly pertinent. There is no basis for refusing to let McGahn testify. It’s not executive privilege, a right McGahn already waived by discussing it with Mueller. Instead, the White House is advancing the novel and extreme argument that Congress can never compel testimony from a senior White House official. That precedent, if accepted, would negate vast swathes of Congress’s long-standing investigative powers.

What’s more, Trump is backstopping his demand with financial blackmail. The AP reports that “Trump has mused about instructing Republicans to cease dealing with the firm” currently employing McGahn, which relies on Republican connections for its business. So Trump, in short, is using financial blackmail in support of a fallacious legal argument in order to cover up a clear instance of obstruction of justice-- a seamless garment of corruption.

What cynics had waved off as Trump’s cartoonish musings is slowly seeping its way into sanctioned government policy. The question of whether or not to impeach Trump has attached itself to the discrete drama of the Mueller report, which contains a large cache of Trumpian misconduct. But the misconduct is also an ongoing process with no clear endpoint. The impeachable offenses just keep coming.

Reporting from Pam and Russ Martens on Monday is even more of a deep drive into the criminal conspiracy that has taken grip of the executive branch of the U.S. government. Foreign money flows is their topic. Trump tweeting that the NY Times bombshell about Deutsche Bank employees having flagged suspicious activity in Trump's and Kushner-in-law's bank accounts involving those aforementioned foreign money flows was par for the course, but... turned out to be not quite enough to gaslight the country with. Their Deutsche Bank superiors stopped them from reporting the suspicious activities to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). But what Trump claimed in his tweets was that the employees being anonymous sources that were fabricated and didn't exist. That was odd since the source wasn't anonymous, but a legitimate whistleblower, Tammy McFadden, one of the five sources for their story. She is described as "a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office," who "found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals," and "concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government-- in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions"-- clearly money laundering. When McFadden wrote up a suspicious Activity Report it was blocked from being sent to FinCEN by Deutsche Bank's Private Bank and McFadden was fired.

Deutsche Bank settled with U.S. and U.K. authorities over a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme in 2017, paying a combined fine of $630 million.  Deutsche Bank’s offices in Frankfurt, Germany were raided in November of last year by 170 law enforcement officials. The probe involved potential money laundering. The draft report released by Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 13 of last year contained this paragraph:

“Donald Trump’s finances historically have been opaque, but there have long been credible allegations as to the use of Trump properties to launder money by Russian oligarchs, criminals, and regime cronies. There also remain critical unanswered questions about the source of President Trump’s personal and corporate financing. For example, Deutsche Bank, which was fined $630 million in 2017 over its involvement in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme, consistently has been the source of financing for President Trump, his businesses, and his family. We have only begun to explore the relationship between President Trump and Deutsche Bank, and between the bank and Russia.”

Over the years, Deutsche Bank has loaned Trump “a total of well over $2 billion,” according to an earlier report in the New York Times. A significant part of that money was loaned when other major banks would not loan to Trump due to his defaults and business bankruptcies.

The current New York Times article has this to say about bank accounts directly involving Donald Trump:

“After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.

“Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said.

“Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.”

Historically, the Justice Department has avoided jailing, or even prosecuting, banksters. Really? Oh yes In 1999 the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations exposed the international money dealings at Citigroup’s commercial bank, Citibank. In his opening remarks, Senator Carl Levin explained how the bank operated:

Today we are looking at the private bank of Citibank. It is the largest bank in the United States, and it has one of the largest private bank operations. It has the most extensive global presence of all U.S. banks, and it had a rogues’ gallery of private bank clients. Citibank has been private banker to:

• Raul Salinas, brother to the former President of Mexico; now in prison in Mexico for murder and under investigation in Mexico for illicit enrichment; [Salinas had his murder conviction overturned on appeal and was released from prison in 2005.]
• Asif Ali Zardari, husband to the former Prime Minister of Pakistan; now in prison in Pakistan for kickbacks and under indictment in Switzerland for money laundering;
• Omar Bongo, President of Gabon; subject of a French criminal investigation into bribery;
• sons of the General Sani Abacha, former military leader of Nigeria; one of whom is now in prison in Nigeria on charges of murder and under investigation in Switzerland and Nigeria for money laundering;
• Jaime Lusinchi, former President of Venezuela; charged with misappropriation of government funds;
• two daughters of Radon Suharto, former President of Indonesia, who has been alleged to have looted billions of dollars from Indonesia…
• General Albert Stroessner, former President of Paraguay and notorious for decades for a dictatorship based on terror and profiteering.

During the hearing the subcommittee's counsel, Robert Roach, explained the services that Citibank had provided to then Mexican President Carlos Salinas' brother Raul:

“The private bank…established a shell company for Mr. Salinas with layers of disguised ownership. It permitted a third party using an alias to deposit funds into the accounts, and it moved the funds out of Mexico through a Citibank concentration account that aided in the obfuscation of the audit trail. Cititrust in the Cayman Islands activated a Cayman Island shell corporation called a PIC, or private investment corporation, called Trocca, Ltd., to serve as the owner of record for the Salinas private bank accounts…

“Cititrust used three Panamanian shell companies to function as Trocca’s Board of Directors. Cititrust also used three Cayman Island shell companies to serve as Trocca’s officers and principal shareholders. Cititrust controls all six of these shell companies and routinely uses them to function as directors and officers of PICs that it makes available to private clients. Later, Citibank established a trust, identified only by a number, to serve as the owner of Trocca, Ltd. Raul Salinas was the secret beneficiary of the trust.

“The result of this elaborate structure was that the Salinas name did not appear anywhere on Trocca’s incorporation papers. The Trocca, Ltd. accounts were established in London and Switzerland…

“To accommodate Mr. Salinas’ desire to conceal the fact that he was moving money out of Mexico, Ms. [Amy] Elliott [a Relationship Manager at Citibank] introduced Mr. Salinas’ then-fiancee Paulina Castanon as Patricia Rios to a service officer at the Mexico City branch of Citibank. Operating under that alias, Ms. Castanon would deliver cashiers checks to the branch where they would be converted into dollars and wired into a concentration account in New York. The concentration account is a business account established by Citibank to hold funds from various destinations prior to depositing them into the proper accounts. Transferring funds through this account enables a client’s name and account number to be removed from the transaction, thereby clouding the audit trail. From there, the money would be transferred to the Trocca, Ltd. accounts in London and Switzerland…

“Between October 1992 and October 1994, more than $67 million was moved from Mexico to New York and then on to London and Switzerland by way of this system…Yet no one questioned Mr. Salinas about the origin of these funds. Far from inquiring about the sources of the funds, Ms. Elliott wrote to her colleagues in June 1993 that the Salinas account ‘is turning into an exciting, profitable one for us all. Many thanks for making me look good.'"

Roach further expounded on how the Relationship Manager’s need to “please the client” trumped their responsibilities under the law, stating that “After Mr. Salinas was arrested, Hubertus Rukavina, the head of Citibank Private Bank at the time, suggested that the Salinas accounts in London be transferred back to Switzerland because they would be afforded more secrecy there.”

Amy Elliott, according to Roach, even advised Mrs. Salinas “that it might be wise to move the Trocca, Ltd. account out of Citibank because it might be more difficult for Mexican authorities to obtain account information from a non-U.S. bank.”

At one point during the hearing, Senator Levin questioned Amy Elliott on the transcript of a phone conversation she had with a colleague:

Senator Levin: “On another matter, the day after Mr. Salinas was arrested, you said the following: ‘Everybody was on board on this.’ Later, in the same conversation, you said, ‘I mean, this goes in the very, very top of the corporation this was known, Okay? On the very top.’ Then you said, ‘We are little pawns in this whole thing, Okay?’ Who were you referring to when you said ‘this goes in the very top of the corporation this was known’? Who are you referring to at the very top of the corporation?”

Amy Elliott: “Bill Rhodes…I am sitting four or five down from the chairman, and Bill Rhodes was and is the vice chairman of the bank. To me, that’s pretty top.”

The Martens made it clear to their readers what I hope you have already figured out on your own: "It should be crystal clear that the U.S. Department of Justice can’t be in charge of this new investigation if America expects to ever extricate itself from this unprecedented era of corruption." A new poll released by Monmouth today found the highest percentage yet of registered voters saying they do not think Trump deserves a second term-- 60%. Just 37% say he should be reelected in 2020.

Benedict Trump? Individual 1

What's crazier-- Trump's furious twitter stream howling at the moon about his legal jeopardy (above)-- much of which was certainly written by his current lawyer-- or the very timely Trump Code of Dishonor (below). Yesterday, tacitly admitting he directed Michael Cohen to pay off the hookers Trump feared would derail his presidential bid, Individual 1 claimed he did not direct Cohen to break the law while making the payoffs. Trumpanzee tweet: "I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law." At his sentencing session, Cohen attributed his offenses to his "duty to cover up [Trump's] dirty deeds."

Salon published an essay by Lucian Truscott, Maria Butina’s plea is the worst news ever for Trump and Trump is yet to make up what cockamamie story he wants his moron, primarily lo-education white evangelical followers to repeat to each other. The Russian spy plead guilty to engaging in a conspiracy against the U.S. The conspiracy, she admitted, was acting as an illegal foreign agent. Spies gotta spy.

She admitted to acting under the direction of Putin crony Alexander Torshin (who seems to have disappeared a couple of days ago). And here's the bad news for Trump and the Republican Party and the now bankrupt NRA: "She agreed to turn over any evidence of crimes she is aware of, submit a full accounting of her financial assets, sit for interviews with law enforcement (and waive right to counsel during those interviews) and testify before grand juries or in trials in Washington or elsewhere." Presumably she will have the goods on how the Russians laundered tens of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign through the NRA.



Back to Truscott who makes the point that this is the worst news Señor Trumpanzee has faced in months. Before she appeared and 'fessed up Thursday morning, Truscott wrote that she would "admit to conspiring with a Russian official believed to be Alexander Torshin 'to establish unofficial lines of communication with Americans having power and influence over U.S. politics . . . for the benefit of the Russian Federation' (Torshin recently retired from being a deputy director of the Russian central bank). She will also admit to attempting to influence the National Rifle Association and 'Political Party 1,' believed to be the Republican Party. Butina will admit to setting up a meeting between senior officials of the NRA and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in December 2015, in the early months of the Trump campaign. She later reported to Torshin, 'We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later.'

Butina has been indicted by the U.S. Attorney of the District of Columbia, whose investigation was separate from that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, so you would think that would come as good news to Trump. But Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also charged by the D.C. U.S. attorney and the U.S.attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia as well, and it is known that Mueller has been cooperating with the U.S. attorneys for D.C., Eastern Virginia, and the Southern District of New York as well. So the fact that Butina is pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate means that Mueller will be a beneficiary of what she knows about Russian influence in the election of 2016. But even that isn’t the worst news Trump got this week.

No, what Trump should really be worrying about is what Butina’s guilty plea says about his friend Vladimir Putin in Russia. Butina was obviously operating as an intelligence agent of the Russian state, and she wouldn’t be agreeing to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators for Mueller or anyone else if she hadn’t been given the go-ahead by her bosses back in Moscow. Butina faces a sentence of zero to six months under the federal statute she was charged with, and even if she ends up serving time, she will be deported immediately upon her release from prison.

Marina Butina wouldn’t have anyplace to go in Russia if her handlers at the Kremlin hadn’t told her it was okay to tell U.S. prosecutors everything she knows about how her attempt to influence American politics worked from 2015 through 2016. If Putin has decided to cut Butina loose, he’s cutting Trump loose as well.

...With all of the guilty pleas and sentencings in court this week, speculation has been flying that Special Counsel Mueller is reaching the end of his investigation. Don’t believe it. The Washington Post reported this week that 14 Trump friends, associates, and campaign and transition officials had contacts with Russians during the 18 months of his campaign.

Note: Congressman Lieu, a former Air Force JAG officer, serves on the House Judiciary Committee

Every single one of them lied about Russia. They started out by flatly denying they had any contacts at all with any Russians. Then they admitted they had a few, but the contacts were innocuous. When numerous meetings with Russians came to light, they said the contacts didn’t amount to anything. When it turned out the contacts were serious, they began denying there had been any “collusion” with the Russians. Trump made it a refrain, that there had been “no collusion” with Russians during the many times he now had to admit his people had met with them.

Robert Mueller, who has indicted and/or taken guilty pleas from 33 individuals and at least three companies, is turning from indictments of Russians to indictments of their American counterparts. He is focusing his investigation not on “collusion,” but on conspiracy to defraud the United States of America. That’s what he indicted 13 Russians who worked for the Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg: conspiracy “to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”

Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents for “Conspiracy to Commit an Offense against the United States” by hacking into Democratic Party emails and to “stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.” He accused the Russians of using false identities and making false statements to hide their connections to “Russia and the Russian government.”

Mueller has been after a conspiracy between Trump and the Trump campaign and the Russian government all along. And he’s using fraud and conspiracy statutes under the U.S. Code to do it.

Mueller is going to connect Donald Trump and his campaign directly to the government of Vladimir Putin. This week, with the guilty plea of his agent Maria Butina, Putin appears ready to help him.

Robert Mueller has never cared about “collusion.” All he has cared about is breaking the law, which Donald Trump has done plenty of. Trump can tweet all he wants, but he can’t stop the big truck coming straight at him driven by Robert Mueller.

Facebook Launches TV News Feed; Fox News Prominently Featured

 The Cult of the High Tech Billionaire

by Gaius Publius

The very rich aren't like the rest of us, but they're a whole lot like each other. That puts people like Rupert Murdoch, David Koch (who is ailing, by the way), Donald Trump, Russian gangsters and oligarchs, Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg in a much more shared world than most of us care to think about.

For example, recent reports show how money from Russian oligarchs, $21 billion between 2010 and 2014 alone, and laundered through places like Moldava and Latvia, ends up at places like HSBC and Citibank. It makes sense: banks are in the business of acquiring money, and global criminal-political activity is where great big piles of it are found. Banks go where the customers are.

The money-laundering bank BCCI, now defunct, didn't set that pattern, but they were the most prominent to get caught at it. Not too long ago, Jamie Dimon's bank JP Morgan Chase was also caught with its hand in the money-laundering till, but no one thinks of Dimon and his operation as a money-launderer. The BCCI scandal was back in the 1990s, when banks could be accused of crimes. Starting in 2009, that flaw's been fixed.

I suspect at this point that the whole of Donald Trump's operation, or at least the major part of it, involves money-laundering, and that this will be seen by historians as his actual crime. It's also the reason he could be blackmailed out of office, if his enemies would want to go that route. ("Planning to return to that nice little business you have? Want it to exist when you're done here? I think we can work something out; consider this an exit interview.")

The Koch political machine, of course, is a massive money laundering operation, since its donors are invisible and there's so much money involved. Whose money is being hidden? Who knows? Can any source be excluded? None, not even foreign money from who-knows-where.

(There's an obvious side story here, but no one with real power wants to tell it. The global big-money network is also a bad-money network that encompasses almost every one in it. Not just Trump; everyone who floats on money floats on dirty money to some degree or another. Why aren't they all prosecuted? Maybe they're all in the game, including owners of the media that might do the reporting.)

Mark Zuckerberg's News Shows

This brings us to Mark Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch.

You wouldn't think these fellow billionaires would have much else in common. After all, Murdoch is in charge of the massive right-wing propaganda machine known as Fox News, Trump's favorite network and a fortress of evil and destruction to many observers, while Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is a Silicon Valley billionaire, one of the brightest lights in a culture with a largely left following.

Like Steve Jobs, high tech billionaires supposedly see the better future first and will lead us there. As the poster at the top makes clear, they're seen by many as the better angels of our aspirations.

Thomas Middleditch, actor and star of the hit series Silicon Valley, taking "sellout money" (his phrase) and shilling for Verizon, the company most strongly associated with killing net neutrality

The Cult of the High Tech Billionaire is remarkably similar to the "cult of the airman" from the early 1900s, airmen and women being the supposed far-seeing, kindly futurists of a previous era. For more on that earlier cult, see the introduction to this piece: "Google Scores a Pro-Monopoly Seat on Trump Transition Team."

If you thought, though, that Murdoch and Zuckerberg had little in common but their money, you'd be wrong. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are launching a TV news feed called Facebook Watch.

Facebook’s First Wave of Funded News Shows Will Debut July 16, With More on the Way

The first fruits of Facebook’s multimillion-dollar investment in news programming from brand-name TV networks and digital media companies will go live next week — and the social giant has announced another half-dozen news shows that it’s funding.

Starting on Monday, July 16, programming from CNN, Fox News Channel, Univision, ABC News and others will be featured in a dedicated news section in Facebook Watch, its recently launched video platform for episodic programming. The Watch news section will feature news videos from national and local news orgs, and users will see a personalized feed based on the publishers they follow and what their friends are watching. (Facebook users also can access the shows directly from their show pages.)

The first lineup of previously announced shows from news publishers include those from ABC News, Advance Local, ATTN:, CNN, Fox News, Mic, Quartz, and Univision. Over the course of the next few months, Facebook will bring out additional news shows from ABC-owned stations, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed News, McClatchy, Group Nine Media’s NowThis and Tegna.

And guess whose programming is prominently featured? The above report, from Variety, might lead you to believe the mix of shows would be fair and balanced. That's true, but only in the most ironic sense. Here's their schedule:

Facebook Watch's initial programming schedule (click to enlarge)

The very rich aren't like the rest of us. But they're a whole lot like each other.

GP
 

Trump’s Dishonesty Has Been A Central Story Of His Presidency

Moscow's Mule by Chip Proser

On Saturday morning, Axios put together a quickie post, "3 lies heard 'round the world," and I'm sure you know exactly who told the 3 whoppers. He claimed he bent NATO members to his will, which never happened. He tried walking back his trazodone-fueled interview with The Sun, calling it "fake news," even though they released a tape. Trump countered that he has his own tape and told reporters to "get it from Sarah." Huckabee's daughter has no tapes. Her drug-addled boss also claimed that the indictments of a dozen GRU officers for helping Putin steal the election for him is a "rigged witch hunt," after being briefed by his own Justice Department "on the most extensive foreign invasion into our elections since we won independence... The disregard for honesty in the Trump era... is eliciting new research and polemics from philosophers, literary critics, political analysts and social scientists."

Saturday's Toronto Star led with a piece by DC Bureau Chief Daniel Dale on Saturday, Trump has said 1,340,330 words as president. They’re getting more dishonest, a Star study shows. The words of the vile and disgusting Russian cut-out masquerading as an illegitimate "president," are, he wrote, "getting more dishonest over time, the Star has found in the first detailed statistical analysis of his inaccurate statements in office. The analysis relies on some subjective judgments, which we’ll explain in detail below. But it provides the most comprehensive picture yet available of what historians say is an unprecedented avalanche of serial lying." And they deliver.

Trump’s dishonesty has been a central story of his presidency, a daily problem that has confounded members of Congress and foreign leaders, confused policy debates and made it difficult for many members of the American public to trust the commander-in-chief.

We’ve tried to quantify the issue. Since Trump’s inauguration speech on Jan. 20, 2017, we’ve fact-checked every word Trump has spoken or tweeted since his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, 2017. Up until July 1, 2018, the end date for the analysis, we had counted 1,929 false claims.

Readers wanted more than just this raw number. They asked us, for example, to explain why the number of false claims per week has increased since early 2017. The key question: is Trump just talking more, or are his words denser with dishonesty than they used to be?

Thanks to never-before-released data, we can now offer an answer: it’s a bit of both, but there’s no doubt he’s getting worse per word spoken.

Our conclusions:

There’s a lot of dishonesty: Of all the words Trump said and tweeted as president as of July 1, 5.1 per cent were part of a false claim. Expressed differently: Trump uttered a false word every 19.4 words.

Trump’s dishonesty density is increasing: The issue isn’t just that he’s talking more these days. It’s that what he’s saying is less truthful.

In weeks that started in 2017, 3.8 per cent of Trump’s words were part of a false claim. In 2018, it’s 7.3 per cent. Expressed differently: in 2017, Trump said about 26 words for every one false word. In 2018, it’s down to about 14 words per one false word.

Word count aside, his raw number of false claims has spiked: Trump made 2.9 false claims per day in 2017. He’s made 5.1 false claims per day in 2018.

He is talking 20 per cent more than he used to: Though it’s not the whole issue, some of the 2018 increase in false claims is indeed happening because Trump is speaking more.

The number of words Trump utters in a week varies widely depending on what happens to be on his schedule-- it often jumps in weeks when he holds one of his hour-long campaign rallies, for example-- but it is generally increasing over time. Trump has averaged 484 more public words per day in 2018 than he did in 2017-- 2,856 vs. 2,372, a 20 per cent increase.

There is a strong statistical correlation-- .73, on a scale that goes up to 1-- between the number of words Trump speaks in a week and the number of false claims he makes in a week. The correlation is getting stronger with time: it was .55 in 2017, .89 in 2018.

So: when Trump spoke more in 2017, his number of false claims increased measurably but moderately; when he spoke more in 2018, his number of false claims increased more dramatically.

We have a theory about why there is now a stronger correlation between how much Trump talks and how many false claims he makes: he appears to have started ad-libbing more frequently in recent months than he did at the beginning of his term, when he was less comfortable. We know from experience that Trump makes more false claims when he is improvising rather than reading from a staff-written speech.

He’s quite dishonest in interviews: Unsurprisingly, Trump has uttered more false claims in his many speeches, 648 of the 1,925, than anywhere else.

What’s more notable about the data: Trump makes the second-most-false claims, 380, in interviews. This is interesting because of how few interviews he gives-- it depends on how you count, but it’s under 60-- and how friendly most of the interviewers are. According to presidential tracker Mark Knoller, a CBS reporter, Trump had given 26 interviews to Fox News since taking office as of mid-June; he’d given no more than six to any other outlet. So Trump is usually not being pressured into false claims because of tough questioning, he’s just making them.

The bulk of his daily lies isn't meant to convince normal people of anything. Normal people know he's a congenital liar who can't be trusted. Polling shows the overwhelming majority of Americans recognize he's a liar. Some care and some don't. His barrage of lies is meant to give his supporters some kind of plausible deniability that they made a huge, historic mistake based on their own stupidity and gullibility and that they should probably lose the right to vote either permanently or until they've passed a civics course. But then there are the self-serving lies-- the swamp lies that move forward his kleptocratic agenda. Adam Davidson covered a perfect example in the July 13th New Yorke, Where Did Donald Trump Get Two Hundred Million Dollars To Buy His Money-Losing Scottish Golf Club? Short version: the Russian Mafya's money laundering operation. Turnberry is a loser, shedding tens of millions of dollars that has cost the Trump Organization hundreds of millions of dollars-- and it isn't just because Trump is one of the worst businessmen in history.

Trump has proclaimed himself the “king of debt,” a proud master of “doing things with other people’s money.” So it was quite surprising when Jonathan O’Connell, David A. Fahrenthold, and Jack Gillum revealed in a Washington Post story in May that Trump had abruptly shifted strategies and begun spending hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to fund projects. In the nine years before he ran for President, the Post reported, the Trump Organization spent more than four hundred million dollars in cash on new properties-- including fourteen transactions paid in full. In fifteen years, he bought twelve golf courses (ten in the U.S., one in Ireland, and a smaller one in Scotland), several homes, and a winery and estate in Virginia, and he paid for his forty-million-dollar share of the cost of building the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C.-- a property leased to Trump by the U.S. government. But his largest cash purchase was the Turnberry, followed by tens of millions of dollars in additional cash outlays for rehabbing the property.

Using what appears to be more than half of the company’s available cash to purchase Trump Turnberry makes no obvious sense for any business person, but especially for Donald Trump. It is a bizarre, confounding move that raises questions about the central nature of his business during the years in which he prepared for and then executed his Presidential campaign.

While Trump has portrayed himself as uniquely aggressive in his use of debt, borrowing money is central to any real-estate business. By borrowing money, developers increase their profits when successful, reduce their losses when they fail, and are able to diversify their holdings to increase the likelihood of success. By 2014, Trump was seen by lenders as a high-risk bet because he had so many bankruptcies and so few successful projects. But, if he had used the three hundred million dollars he spent on Turnberry as a pledge, he could have surely received several hundred million in loans at a competitive rate. With, say, a billion dollars total, he could have invested in projects around the world. Instead, he chose to put nearly all of his available cash in an old, underperforming course in a remote corner of Scotland.

...Even before the financial crisis of 2008, Trump found it increasingly difficult to borrow money from big Wall Street banks and was shut out of the rapidly growing pool of institutional investment. Faced with a cash-flow problem, he could have followed other storied New York real-estate families and invested in the ever more rigorous financial-due-diligence capabilities required by pension funds and other sources of real-estate capital. This would have given him access to a pool of trillions of dollars from investors.

Instead, Trump turned to a new source of other people’s money. He did a series of deals in Toronto, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Azerbaijan, and Georgia with businesspeople from the former Soviet Union who were unlikely to pass any sort of rigorous due-diligence review by pension funds and other institutional investors... He also made deals in India, Indonesia, and Vancouver, Canada, with figures who have been convicted or investigated for criminal wrongdoing and abuse of political power.

We know very little about how money flowed into and out of these projects. All of these projects involved specially designated limited-liability companies that are opaque to outside review. We do know that, in the past decade, wealthy oligarchs in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere have seen real-estate investment as a primary vehicle through which to launder money. The problem is especially egregious in the United Kingdom, where some have called the U.K. luxury real-estate industry “a money laundering machine.” Golf has been a particular focus of money laundering. Although the U.K. has strict transparency rules for financial activity within the country, its regulators have been remarkably incurious about the sources of funds coming from firms based abroad. All we know is that the money that went into Turnberry, for example, came from the Trump Organization in the U.S. We-- and the British authorities-- have no way of knowing where the Trump Organization got that money.

The goal of laundering money is to take the proceeds of a criminal activity-- government corruption, tax fraud, drug trade, or many others-- and to disguise its origin. Many oligarchs in the former Soviet Union who made their money by expropriating the state’s wealth want to move their money into a more stable nation with greater rule of law. This presents a challenge: How can one insert illegally obtained funds into a system that requires due diligence? The answer, quite often, is to use shell companies to disguise the flow of funds. Although we cannot say that Trump himself knowingly engaged in money laundering, we do know with certainty that much of his business in the past decade was in the industries most known for money laundering, in the locations most conducive to money laundering, and with people who bear the key hallmarks of money launderers.

If Only My Gramps Had Stayed In Russia, Maybe I'd Own My Own Jet Now Too!

Mafiya by Chip Proser

Before I retired a few years ago, I was president of one of the divisions of TimeWarner, Reprise Records, a label started by Frank Sinatra as a refuge for artists, like himself, who didn't want to be pushed around by suits or by a producer. By the time I took it over, Sinatra had sold the company to Warner Bros. but I tried to run the company the way he intended it to be run. I took that seriously. Our artists did too. The roster included artists like Green Day, Neil Young, Morrissey, Joni Mitchell, Depeche Mode, Lou Reed, Rickie Lee Jones, Fleetwood Mac, Chaka Khan, the Barenaked Ladies, the Replacements (and a hundred others)-- and none of these people fool around when it comes to artistic freedom.

After I retired the place started falling apart... actually, the whole music business was falling apart. For real. I was hired for a one-off job by Deutsche Bank. They wanted me to put my imprimatur on a bond offering they were doing for the company, basically so they could make a plausible claim to due diligence. They paid me an enormous sum of money to rubber stamp the bond offering. But I recognized it was a fraud almost immediately, a ponzi scheme. I was horrified, refused to give it a thumbs up and they told me to take my money and STFU.

Not long after, Time Warner sold the Warner Music Group to a Russian gangster, Len Blavatnik. He seemed to want the company, not because he was a fan of Ministry or Prince or even Cher or Madonna. Nope, as far as I could tell, Sir Leonid, wanted the storied record giant as a money-laundering operation for dirty Russian money.

He's also contributed many millions of dollars to the Republican Party, Republican candidates and, of course Señor Trumpanzee. Like many Putin cronies, he cut the Trumpanzee inauguration a cool million dollar check, money that has never been accounted for but is widely assumed to have gone right into fat-ass' pockets. Sir Leonid, by the way, is the richest man in Britain and Forbes ranks ranks him the 16th richest in the world. Still, laundering the billions and billions Putin stole from Russia-- now we're talking about the actual richest man of earth-- takes a lot of laundering. Trump's idol.

Yesterday Matthew Mosk and John Santucci broke a scoop for ABC News: Special counsel eyeing Russians granted unusual access to Trump inauguration parties. Hello, Sir Leonid! "Several billionaires," they wrote, "with deep ties to Russia attended exclusive, invitation-only receptions during Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities, guest lists obtained by ABC News show." Who remembers when it was a big deal just to be a plain old millionaire? That's how old I am.

These powerful businessmen, who amassed their fortunes following the collapse of the Soviet Union -- including one who has since been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department -- were ushered into events typically reserved for top donors and close political allies and were given unprecedented access to Trump’s inner circle.

Their presence has attracted the interest of federal investigators probing Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Matthew Olsen, a former senior national security official who now serves as an ABC News consultant, said their presence at inaugural events is “very concerning.”

“This reflects a Russian strategy of gaining access to our political leaders at a time when they are just forming a government,” Olsen said. “They don’t need to be spies in the James Bond sense. They are powerful people with significant wealth who are in a position to exert influence on U.S. policy makers. And they’re in a position to report back to Russian intelligence services on what they’re able to learn.”

The presence of people with Kremlin ties in Washington for Trump’s inaugural celebration was first reported by the Washington Post. But the guest lists obtained by ABC News offer a new glimpse at the level of access granted to several well-connected oligarchs.

Several donated enough to the Presidential Inaugural Committee to qualify for tickets to a “Candlelight Dinner” in Washington’s Union Station on the eve of the inauguration, a perk for $1 million contributors, the list of attendees show. Guests were treated to a preview performance by singer Jackie Evancho, a one-time runner-up on "America's Got Talent," who would go on to sing at the inauguration the following day.

A handful celebrated Trump’s surprise victory at the black-tie “Chairman’s Global Dinner,” an exclusive 500-guest affair held the same night in the Greek-columned Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium whose attendees included close Trump friends, high-ranking campaign aides, and an array of foreign ambassadors and dignitaries. The inaugural committee treated them to a dinner of butter-poached lobster, coffee-crusted beef tenderloin and chocolate raspberry dome. For entertainment, casino mogul and Trump pal Steve Wynn flew in Las Vegas show girls to perform a Broadway-style rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.”

Kerchhhhhing! Another few cents into Sir Leonid's account.

According to a source with knowledge of the congressional investigations, at least one oligarch was ushered into Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol for the traditional Inaugural Day luncheon, hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies-- an event typically out of reach to donors and even most rank-and-file members of Congress.

“It’s incredibly unusual,” said Stephen Kerrigan, who planned the 2009 and 2013 Obama inaugural festivities and said every guest was scrutinized for foreign ties. “Particularly if they were going to be within arm’s reach of the President, they went through an intensive vetting process.”

Names on the guest lists of the Candlelight Dinner included Victor Vekselberg, the billionaire head of the global conglomerate Renova Group, who was later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury “for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy,” and his American cousin Andrew Intrater. Late last year, Vekselberg was stopped at a New York airport by federal agents working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and questioned, according to the New York Times. The Times also reported that Intrater was separately interviewed by the special counsel.

Vekselberg and Intrater were seated at the dinner next to Michael Cohen and his family, according to a source familiar with the arrangements. Intrater’s firm, Columbus Nova, later signed Cohen to a $1 million consulting contract. Emails to Renova Group went unanswered. A spokesperson for Intrater declined to comment when reached by ABC News.

Investigators for both the Mueller team and the congressional probes have also expressed interest in several of the other Russian guests who had no obvious place in Trump’s diplomatic orbit, three sources told ABC News.

Some had given money to past Republican candidates, including Leonard Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born billionaire philanthropist who holds American and British citizenship. He appeared on guest lists for both the Candlelight Dinner and the Chairman’s events. His global company, Access Industries, which holds a majority stake in Amedia, Russia’s largest producer of television series, gave $1 million to the inaugural fund.

A spokeswoman at Access Industries directed questions from ABC News to a company official who was not immediately available for comment.

...A Soviet-born billionaire Alexander Mashkevitch, who built a metals and mining empire in Kazakhstan, appears on the guest list for the Candlelight Dinner. Flight records show his private jet flew into Washington, D.C. on Jan. 19, 2017 and out two days later. European media reports indicate he settled money laundering charges with Belgian authorities in 2011 with no finding of wrongdoing by him. He has held an ownership stake in Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, one of the world’s largest mining and metals concerns, based in London.

...The Trump inauguration brought in more than $107 million, double the amount of President Obama, to finance a week of festivities that was filled with far fewer events than past inaugurations-- only three Presidential balls. In May, ABC News reported that the Special Counsel had questioned several witnesses about millions of dollars in donations from donors with connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Is there one billionaire in Russia who's not an arch criminal? You're kidding, right? Their parents were happy with a bowl of shchi and a sip of sbiten. And now they all have their own planes and access to Trumpanzee. How did that happen? So many lucky people!

Trickery, deceit, law-breaking by Chip Proser