07/27/16

Trump’s Deep Involvement With Russian Oligarchs: Follow The Money

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Hat Tip: Trevor Loudon / Renee Nal

For some time now, I have been pointing out the connections between Donald Trump and Russia. Long before it was popular with the Left by the way. He has literally populated his campaign with those who are deeply involved with Russia’s dealings and intentions. See my piece here on the Russian Connection. But that is not the only thing I suspect that is connecting Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. As George Will points out below, his tax returns almost assuredly show a deep connection to financial dealings with Russia.

From RealClearPolitics:

BRET BAIER: Both the campaign chair and anybody you talk to, including Senator Murphy would not go down that road once pressed on the connection between Russia and the Trump campaign. But they have thrown it out there. George?

GEORGE WILL: Well, it’s the sort of thing we might learn if we saw the candidates’ tax returns. Perhaps one more reason why we’re not seeing his tax returns because he is deeply involved in dealing with Russia oligarchs and others. Whether that’s good, bad or indifferent it’s probably the reasonable surmise.

Right now, Hillary Clinton is playing up Trump’s connections to Russia. But people in glass houses should not throw Vodka. Clinton is also deeply tied to Vladimir Putin through her uranium dealings and since WikiLeaks has hacked her emails, he surely has a ton of material to blackmail her with should he choose to do so. And if she becomes president, trust me, Putin will. The Kremlin is not denying the email hack by the way. The Russians are expert wordsmiths and very accomplished liars.

Just because Democrats are now using that as a weapon doesn’t also mean it isn’t true. Follow the money. During a time when the casino and hotel industries are struggling, Trump claims to be making money. But does anyone know really where that money is coming from? The Russian and Chinese mobs are big in those industries and it is a good bet that money from those entities is involved somehow, some way.

When you have the likes of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and RT claiming Russia has nothing to do with the email leaks or pushing Trump as president, my BS monitor goes off big time. You can pretty much count on the opposite being true.

Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Meme, laid it out in succinct terms:

…At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

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2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here’s a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration …

Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

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Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US 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.

Trump’s tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you’re keeping score at home: no, that’s not reassuring.

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4. Then there’s Paul Manafort, Trump’s nominal ‘campaign chair’ who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump’s campaign.

5. Trump’s foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you’re not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom’s role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin’s policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump.

7. Here’s where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump’s larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. … The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump’s backing but because he simply didn’t care. With one big exception: Trump’s team mobilized the nominee’s traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. (editor’s note: see my post on this for more details) For what it’s worth (and it’s not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue – in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform – speaks volumes.

This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin’s orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. …

Add to this that his most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin’s positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump’s suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.

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To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump’s direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin’s policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He’s the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out ‘what’s going on’ as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

That’s funny, because you have Trump’s son saying one thing and Trump saying another. Here it is again: Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” And yet, yesterday, Trump came out and denied ANY investments in Russia. Sounds like word games to me and exceedingly dishonest and downright alarming.

All of this makes you wonder whether Trump is owned by the Kremlin, or merely rented as a useful idiot. Only a fool would believe that as much Russian cash as has flowed through Trump’s accounts wouldn’t have a marker that would be called in at some point. That day is almost here I fear.

From the beginning I have said that Trump has no morals or ethics, therefore he would have no qualms about striking lucrative deals with the likes of oligarchs and dictators. Ask yourself why Trump won’t release his tax returns. If you are honest with yourself, you will come to the conclusion that either he’s not worth what he claims to be worth and/or he has dealings with people he would rather not expose. Having been involved in and connected to the gaming industry for decades, I will tell you that I find it highly credible that Trump has mob connections in the industry and I’m betting on the Russian mob here. I’m not the only one who suspects it either. Both Romney and Cruz have brought up the same issue.

In the end, whether Clinton or Trump wins, it is a win for Russia and a brutal loss for America. If Russia is seeking to cause chaos and collapse within the US, they must see this election as an opportunity undreamed of. Both sides are selling America out to the highest bidder and our bill is about to come due.

07/27/16

What Does Putin Have on Hillary?

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Andrew Rosenthal of The New York Times examines the question of who hacked the Democratic National Committee and whether the trail leads to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We know from reliable reporting that Russian hackers are not independent actors, and that they have been busy,” he writes. “And it’s eerie, at best, that Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks chose this moment to release the stolen emails (and complete a strange triangle that runs from him to Putin to Edward Snowden).”

For his part, on his Twitter page, Snowden said, “If Russia hacked the #DNC, they should be condemned for it. But during the #Sony hack, the FBI presented evidence.”

This is funny on Snowden’s part. Snowden sits in Russia, a guest of Putin, and Assange has acted like an agent of Russia. Trevor Loudon’s report on Assange documents his service to Moscow and associations with a number of Marxist or pro-Russian groups. Snowden is probably personally involved in the leak and could easily get to the bottom of why it happened.

“This has the appearance of a foreign power directly interfering in an American election, and that’s not something to take lightly,” Noah Rothman writes in Commentary. He goes on, “Rather than applaud and leverage this development, as he has, Donald Trump would be much better served by condemning it. If the Russians are set on undermining the Democratic Party in this election, it won’t be long before the public is asked to consider why that might be.”

Rothman has a point, but the more important issue is why the DNC and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used private or unsecure servers that were open to these foreign adversaries. One can argue that Mrs. Clinton, in particular, invited this foreign meddling in the election. Who knows what the Russians still have in their bag of tricks? The point is that Mrs. Clinton is a security risk and the Russians may still have emails to use against her.

Pro-Putin commentator Don Hank reported back in June, “I was invited to participate in a conversation among a group of friends who are hoping that the Kremlin will turn over their cache of Hillary emails obtained via the Romanian hacker ‘Guccifer’ just in time to smear her prior to the November election.”

Even earlier, Catherine Herridge of Fox News reported back in May that the Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” had claimed he easily—and repeatedly—breached former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal email server in early 2013. The Clinton campaign denied the charge, but Herridge reported that “Guccifer” said “he first compromised Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal’s AOL account, in March 2013, and used that as a stepping stone to the Clinton server.”

“Guccifer” has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a protected computer, aggravated identity theft, cyberstalking and obstruction of justice.

Mrs. Clinton’s emails may be even more valuable than the documents stolen and released by Snowden. After all, Clinton’s emails discussed the intentions of U.S. policymakers.

This is actually an old story involving the Clintons. As Reed Irvine and I reported back in 1998, the Ken Starr report on President Clinton revealed that Clinton had warned his sexual plaything Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, “that a foreign government may be monitoring their telephone conversations and that they should concoct a cover story to explain them.” Here is exactly what the Starr report says about this matter: “According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had a lengthy conversation that day. He told her that he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones, and he proposed cover stories. If ever questioned, she should say that the two of them were just friends. If anyone ever asked about their phone sex, she should say that they knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone sex was just a put-on.”

Nothing has really changed, except that emails have now been monitored and compromised in Mrs. Clinton’s case.

As we said back in May, “The evidence demonstrates that she is a full-blown security risk who should be indicted for her reckless criminal conduct as Secretary of State.” Hillary made herself into a security risk.

Now we are waiting for the next shoe to drop. Does it have something to do with Bill Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, or Hillary’s own personal scandals?

Whatever the scandal, it’s not the fault of Donald J. Trump. Trump may have something to explain regarding his own ties to the Kremlin, but so does Hillary. If the truth doesn’t come out before Election Day, it means that Moscow may have blackmail power over the possible first female president of the United States.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected].View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

07/27/16

WATCH! Clinton tells activists: ‘black children being killed by police’ (video)

By: Renee Nal | New Zeal

Hillary Clinton addresses Netroots Nation July 16

Hillary Clinton addressed the activist-left Netroots Nation (#nn16) conference earlier this month, where she:

claimed that police officers were killing black children,
said she wants to earmark $1 billion dollars in her first budget to combat “implicit bias, which remains a problem across our society and even in the best of our police departments,”
encouraged left-wing bloggers, socialists and community organizers to engage in a vile left-wing (and often successful) tactic of strategic litigation by “seek[ing] out cases to challenge Citizen’s United in the courts,” so that she can bolster a case for a constitutional amendment to overturn the supreme court’s ruling.

Right off the gate, Hillary Clinton echoed the oft-repeated false premise of Black Lives Matter that black Americans are being indiscriminately murdered by racist police officers.

Clinton starts her address by saying,

“It’s been nearly two years since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. With the help of activists including those in the Black Lives Matter movement, our country is truly engaged in a difficult but critical conversation about systemic racism and injustice. But now we need to turn talk into action. Last week’s tragedies [presumably the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile] only underscore the urgency of end-to-end criminal justice reform and stopping the tragedy of black men and women and black children being killed by police or dying in custody.”

Hillary Clinton bashed police in a shameless attempt to win over the most radical leftists, doubling down on the fake charge that police are racist.

Read more here…