Monday, July 17, 2017 11:32:03 PM
Killer Of Putin Critic Boris Nemtsov Is Sentenced To 20 Years In Prison
Zaur Dadayev (right) was convicted of carrying out the assassination of politician Boris Nemtsov in February 2015. He's seen here in court last month, inside a defendants' cage during a hearing at the Moscow District Military Court.
Boris Nemtsov in 2011. He was assassinated in 2015.
[ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/world/europe/boris-nemtsov-putin-russia.html ]
July 13, 2017
The triggerman in the drive-by murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. The bold killing of Nemtsov, 55, on a bridge near the Kremlin shocked many Russians; questions remain about who reportedly placed a large bounty on his life.
Prosecutors had sought a life sentence for Zaur Dadayev, a former officer in the security force of the Russian province of Chechnya, for killing Nemtsov in February of 2015. Instead, he was sentenced to 20 years. His four accomplices were handed sentences of 11 to 19 years. All five were also fined around $1,650. Their defense lawyers say they will appeal.
"The men were allegedly offered 15 million rubles ($240,000) to murder the politician," reports The Moscow Times [ https://themoscowtimes.com/news/Nemtsov-killers-sentenced-to-lengthy-prison-terms-58381 ], citing the same figure that has been reported elsewhere.
An advocate of democratic reforms, Nemtsov was once seen as the political heir [ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/27/389598306/putin-critic-boris-nemtsov-shot-dead ] to Russia's former President Boris Yeltsin, under whom he served as a deputy prime minister in the 1990s.
"Nemtsov was a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing his government of corruption and fighting a covert war in Ukraine," NPR's Lucian Kim reports from Moscow. "A trail of clues led to Chechnya, which is ruled by a government fiercely loyal to Putin — and the Nemtsov family has criticized the investigation for not focusing on who ordered and planned the murder."
Dadayev and his fellow Chechens were convicted of killing Nemtsov in late June [ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/29/534879414/five-men-convicted-in-killing-of-putin-foe-boris-nemtsov ]. At the time, his daughter, journalist Zhanna Nemtsova, noted that no high-profile Chechen officials were ever questioned about the case.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/13/536992366/killer-of-putin-critic-boris-nemtsov-is-sentenced-to-20-years-in-prison a also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=111270845 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=112895246 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119496514 and preceding (and any future following), http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132785538 and preceding and following (earlier this string)]
Who killed Boris Nemtsov? We will never know
Boris Nemtsov at an anti-Putin rally in Moscow in 2012.
Critics of Vladimir Putin have an uncanny habit of ending up dead. Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is the latest to be gunned down in mysterious circumstances – and the Kremlin is already blurring the details
3 March 2015
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/02/boris-nemtsov-never-know-who-killed-moscow-vladimir-putin-russian-opposition [with comments] [id.]
After Boris Nemtsov’s Assassination, ‘There Are No Longer Any Limits’
Medics put the the body of Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition leader, on a stretcher in Moscow, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2015.
FEB. 28, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/magazine/after-boris-nemtsovs-assassination-there-are-no-longer-any-limits.html [with comments] [id.]
A Final Interview With Boris Nemtsov
2/28/15
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/13/final-interview-boris-nemtsov-310392.html
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/13/final-interview-boris-nemtsov-310392.html [id.]
*
Ramzan Kadyrov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzan_Kadyrov [id.]
Putin’s Dragon
Ramzan Kadyrov, whom Vladimir Putin chose to govern Chechnya, has brought the war-weary region into the Russian fold—but at what price to Putin?
Is the ruler of Chechnya out of control?
February 8 & 15, 2016 Issue
...]
Last year, on February 27th, Boris Nemtsov—a former deputy prime minister, who had become one of Putin’s best-known opponents—was walking on a bridge near the Kremlin when an assassin approached from behind and shot him. Some days later, Putin told a meeting of high-ranking law-enforcement officials that “the brazen murder of Boris Nemtsov right in the center of the capital” was a “shame and tragedy” that the country must not tolerate.
Putin’s moral outrage may have been a cynical performance, but his anger appeared genuine. “He was obviously stunned,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a former political adviser to Putin who left the Kremlin in 2011 and became a critic of it, told me. “As a political assassination, this is direct interference in the politics of the federal center, and, what’s more, right under Putin’s nose.” He went on, “If you can do something like this just outside Spassky gate”—a Kremlin landmark, whose spire overlooks the bridge where Nemtsov was killed—“then maybe you could do this inside Spassky gate as well.”
The arrests came relatively fast: in the first week of March, the F.S.B. detained five suspects. All were ethnic Chechens; two were arrested in Moscow, and three in Ingushetia, a small republic bordering Chechnya. Security forces said that as they moved in to arrest another suspect in Grozny he blew himself up with a grenade.
Attention quickly focussed on the alleged triggerman: a decorated thirty-three-year-old Chechen officer named Zaur Dadaev, a former deputy commander of Sever. The timing of Dadaev’s departure from Sever was curious: his resignation letter was dated December, 2014, but it was processed on February 28th, the day after Nemtsov’s murder. At first, investigators implied that Dadaev and his suspected accomplices were enraged by Nemtsov’s support for the French cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, but that theory fell apart after it came to light that his killers had begun trailing him in the fall of 2014, months before the attack in Paris. “Dadaev doesn’t really have his own motives; he’s not a bird of very high altitude, as we say,” Vadim Prokhorov, Nemtsov’s lawyer, told me. “It’s clear that he takes orders from someone else.”
Nemtsov’s supporters, including his family, immediately pointed to Kadyrov and his inner circle. Two days after Dadaev’s arrest, Kadyrov took to Instagram in Dadaev’s defense. “I knew Zaur as a genuine patriot of Russia,” he wrote. Dadaev was one of the “most fearless and brave warriors in his regiment . . . genuinely devoted to Russia, ready to give up his life for his motherland.”
Putin’s mood was hard to read. Orkhan Djemal, a journalist with extensive sources inside Chechnya, told me he had heard that for days Putin wouldn’t take Kadyrov’s calls, which caused Kadyrov to panic. Kadyrov apparently managed to smooth relations with Putin, but the fact that people even tangentially related to Chechnya’s political élite had been arrested on murder charges marked an unprecedented moment in Putin-era politics. “The arrests may seem modest, but it’s actually a revolution—they are a genuine achievement for investigators, and a blow to Kadyrov,” Elena Milashina, who covers Chechnya for Novaya Gazeta, said. Since Politkovskaya’s death, Milashina has become one of the most deeply committed reporters covering the region.
On December 30th, Russian investigators named the alleged organizer of the crime: Ruslan Mukhudinov, a low-ranking officer in the Sever unit. No one knew where he was, and the indictment was issued in absentia. Yet, all along, the Russian press, citing law-enforcement sources, had pointed not so much to Mukhudinov as to his senior officer, Ruslan Geremeyev, for whom Mukhudinov worked as a driver. Other suspects detained with Dadaev told investigators that Geremeyev had spent time during the weeks before the killing at the Moscow apartment where the hit team was staying. Dadaev and Geremeyev were close after many years in Sever, and the day following the murder they drove to the Moscow airport together and flew back to Chechnya, according to airport surveillance photos.
Geremeyev has deep connections to the Chechen political élite: he is related to both Delimkhanov, Kadyrov’s closest ally, and another high-ranking Kadyrov associate who represents Chechnya in the upper house of Russia’s parliament. Over the past year, investigators have twice tried to issue an indictment against Geremeyev, only to be rebuffed by their boss, the powerful head of the country’s Investigative Committee—he refused to sign the warrant, according to a report published last month by RBK, a Russian daily. More than that, investigators can’t even talk to Geremeyev: leaks from the security services imply that he fled to the United Arab Emirates, then quietly returned to Chechnya, where requests summoning him for questioning have got nowhere. Clearly, Putin could have Geremeyev arrested if he wished; the fact that he hasn’t suggests that stability in Chechnya is more important to him.
One night toward the end of my time in Grozny, I paid a visit to Shakhrudi Dadaev, Zaur Dadaev’s older brother. Shakhrudi, who is sixty and raises sheep, lives in a large, immaculately clean house that would be the pride of any Chechen extended family. He set out a tray of fruit and candies, made a pot of strong black tea, and had me sit in a far corner facing the door, the seat of honor for guests in a Chechen home. Zaur is the youngest of four brothers, Shakhrudi told me. Their parents returned to Chechnya in the nineteen-fifties, when Khrushchev cancelled Stalin’s deportation order. After serving for several years with Russian federal forces, Zaur joined Kadyrov’s personal guard, and in 2006 he enlisted in Sever. “That was a time when not everyone wanted to join,” Shakhrudi said. “Now that Kadyrov is President, there is some order and quiet, but back then it was dangerous. You didn’t know who was shooting at whom.”
Zaur Dadaev proved himself as a fighter, and in 2010 was awarded a medal for leading an assault against a group of militants. He rose to become Sever’s deputy commander, and was known as a strong leader, a former Sever fighter told me: “If he found himself in a group of ten guys, the other nine would wait for him to do something.” Another Sever member, still active in the unit, told me that few on the unit’s base now talk of Dadaev. “Everyone has forgotten about him; it’s as if he never existed.”
In Chechnya, I heard several versions of why Dadaev left Sever for Moscow: he wanted to get a law degree or open a café, or maybe find work as a driver or security guard. No one heard much from him until, in early March, a few days after Nemtsov was killed, he returned to Grozny. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. “He was in a great mood—he was the same Zaur as always, same laugh,” one of his Sever colleagues told me. He hadn’t even changed his cell-phone number. No one who knew Dadaev thought that he could be involved in gunning down Nemtsov. “We have a rule: if a person is walking away, you don’t shoot them,” an officer from Sever told me. “To kill someone like that would be a great disgrace. Zaur is a smart guy, not dumb, and you’d have to be an idiot to go for something like this.”
Shakhrudi, in his living room, showed me two letters he had received from his brother in jail. “Everything is fine, by the will of the Almighty,” Zaur wrote in June. “I didn’t do anything against the law. Everything I said after I was arrested I said under pressure. It was dictated to me—the pressure was serious, not a joke.” The next month, he wrote again, “Don’t worry, brother, my conscience is clean, not only before you and our relatives but before all of Chechnya.” Shakhrudi grew more animated as we spoke. Chechen tradition would never allow such a thing, he said; he was the elder in the family, and Zaur hadn’t consulted him—he never would have got himself mixed up in such a plot without checking with him first. “I don’t believe that he did this,” Shakhrudi told me. “For me and our whole family, it is a shame even that there are rumors that my brother could have shot an unarmed man in the street.”
In the months since the murder, Kadyrov has said little about Nemtsov or the detained suspects. When I asked a high-ranking official in the Chechen security forces about the case, he waved off any suggestion that there was cause for worry. “If a particular person commits a crime, it doesn’t matter who this person was in the past or what kind of medals he received—he should be arrested, tried, and punished,” he said.
In Russia, how you see the plot is determined largely by how you think Putin’s state works. The fact that Dadaev carried himself with apparent nonchalance after his return to Chechnya from Moscow, for example, showed either that he had nothing to hide and had been set up or that he operated with impunity, certain that those who ordered the crime would cover for him. Many other mysteries loom. Were Kadyrov and his clique involved and, if so, did they act without Putin’s permission, thinking that they would please the President? Or had Putin ordered the hit? Investigators are conspicuously avoiding these questions. The lack of information has led to a flourishing trade in conspiracy theories. The murder, it is said, could be anything from a plot by the security services to discredit Kadyrov to an attempt by Kadyrov to compel Putin to rely on force alone in propping up his rule.
A trial will begin sometime this spring, but in a case like this a courtroom is an unlikely place for new facts to emerge. “I have the sense that the highest authorities in Moscow know full well who carried out this murder and where these people are—they are getting the full picture from investigators,” Olga Shorina, a longtime employee and confidante of Nemtsov’s, told me. Yet she doesn’t expect to learn much herself. “The regime wants all conflicts between its component parts to be resolved in private.”
[...]
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/putins-dragon [id.]
*
Ramzan Kadyrov says there are no gay men in Chechnya — and if there are any, they should move to Canada
Chechen regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov attends an international friendly soccer match between Russia and Romania in Grozny, Russia, on Nov. 15, 2016.
In an interview, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov denies reports that gay men are being detained and tortured in the Russian republic — not because such abuses would not be allowed, but because he thinks there are no gay men in Chechnya.
“This is nonsense,” Kadyrov said when asked about the allegations. “We don't have those kinds of people here. We don't have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada.”
“Praise be to god,” the Chechen leader adds. “Take them far from us so we don't have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.”
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/15/ramzan-kadyrov-says-there-are-no-gay-men-in-chechnya-and-if-there-are-any-they-should-move-to-canada/ [with embedded video, and comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6t5PwzMkn4 [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi3sKVrvuOs [with comment], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUvsG2TC-Uc [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFLTTI0Jl88 [with comments] [id.]
--
Trump’s Russian Laundromat
Illustration by Alex Nabaum
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
By Craig Unger
July 13, 2017
In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.
A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren. Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire. From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold [ http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/01/sports/trump-building-the-generals-in-his-own-style.html ] in the first few months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices. The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated [ https://books.google.com/books?id=ZQ_9CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT262&lpg=PT262&dq=wayne+barrett+david+bogatin&source=bl&ots=3lJSjqqJqv&sig=KbeeubmObDNupn4_iWDDb3HDj0Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiR_drszf_UAhUCCT4KHQkACsgQ6AEINDAC#v=onepage&q=wayne%20barrett%20david%20bogatin&f=false ] the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.
If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports [ https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-making-of-donald-trump/ ] in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded [ http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/12/nyregion/brooklyn-fuel-distributor-pleads-guilty-in-tax-plot.html ] guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized [ http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/30/nyregion/entrepreneur-who-left-us-is-back-awaiting-sentence.html ] his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed [ https://archive.org/stream/russianorganized00unit/russianorganized00unit_djvu.txt ] that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran [ http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/ruslobby-mogilevich-04172007.pdf ] a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers [ https://www.villagevoice.com/1998/05/26/the-most-dangerous-mobster-in-the-world/ ] the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.
In 1987, on his first trip to Russia, Trump visited the Winter Palace with Ivana. The Soviets flew him to Moscow—all expenses paid—to discuss building a luxury hotel across from the Kremlin.
Maxim Blokhin/TASS
Since Trump’s election as president, his ties to Russia have become the focus of intense scrutiny, most of which has centered on whether his inner circle colluded with Russia to subvert the U.S. election. A growing chorus in Congress is also asking pointed questions about how the president built his business empire. Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for [ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/ ] a deeper inquiry into “Russian investment in Trump’s businesses and properties.”
The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.
But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.
It’s entirely possible that Trump was never more than a convenient patsy for Russian oligarchs and mobsters, with his casinos and condos providing easy pass-throughs for their illicit riches. At the very least, with his constant need for new infusions of cash and his well-documented troubles with creditors, Trump made an easy “mark” for anyone looking to launder money. But whatever his knowledge about the source of his wealth, the public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians—including the dirtiest and most feared of them all.
* * *
Trump made his first trip to Russia in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invited [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/from-the-archives-when-trump-hoped-to-meet-gorbachev-in-manhattan/2017/07/10/3f570b42-658c-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html ] by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was flown to Moscow and Leningrad—all expenses paid—to talk business with high-ups in the Soviet command. In The Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the lunch meeting with Dubinin that led to the trip. “One thing led to another,” he wrote [ https://www.vox.com/world/2017/2/17/14622504/trump-russia-business-ties-fact-check ], “and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-may-not-have-leverage-over-trump-russians-are-another-matter ] five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted [ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/02/15/donald-trumps-ties-russia-go-back-30-years/97949746/ ] at a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out [ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/12/19/the-curious-world-of-donald-trumps-private-russian-connections/ ] of Russia since the 1990s.
Semion Mogilevich.
At the top of the sprawling criminal enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian was the key money-laundering contact for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Brotherhood, one of the richest criminal syndicates in the world. Before long, he was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide racket of his own. Mogilevich wasn’t feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. The FBI has credited [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/08/05/semion_mogilevich_fbi_ten_most_wanted_list_this_obese_mob_boss_is_twice.html ] the “brainy don,” who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says [id.], “but to influence governments and their economies.”
In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded [ http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-418652/Why-I-believe-Putin-wanted-dead-.html ] an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.
Vyachelsav Ivankov.
Sergey Ponomarev/AP
Mogilevich’s greatest talent, the one that places him at the top of the Russian mob, is finding creative ways to cleanse dirty cash. According to the FBI, he has laundered [ http://www.businessinsider.com/semion-mogilevich-2014-11 ] money through more than 100 front companies around the world, and held bank accounts in at least 27 countries. And in 1991, he made a move that led directly to Trump Tower. That year, the FBI says [ https://books.google.com/books?id=F1IqGCc7P8cC&pg=PT84&lpg=PT84&dq=mogilevich+bribed+judge+ivankov&source=bl&ots=OHacdxngxQ&sig=5PpRKdp2bGjneYVA__klDMIQesw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwii7s7M4f_UAhUI8z4KHYhsB44Q6AEIMDAC#v=onepage&q=mogilevich%20bribed%20judge%20ivankov&f=false ], Mogilevich paid a Russian judge to spring a fellow mob boss, Vyachelsav Kirillovich Ivankov, from a Siberian gulag. If Mogilevich was the brains, Ivankov was the enforcer—a vor v zakone, or “made man,” infamous for torturing his victims and boasting about the murders he had arranged. Sprung by Mogilevich, Ivankov made the most of his freedom. In 1992, a year after he was released from prison, he headed to New York on an illegal business visa and proceeded to set up shop in Brighton Beach.
In Red Mafiya, his book about the rise of the Russian mob in America, investigative reporter Robert I. Friedman documented [ https://archive.org/stream/RedMafiyaHowTheRussianMobByRobertI.Friedman2000/Red%20Mafiya-%20How%20the%20Russian%20Mob%20by%20Robert%20I.%20Friedman%20(2000)_djvu.txt ] how Ivankov organized a lurid and violent underworld of tattooed gangsters. When Ivankov touched down at JFK, Friedman reported, he was met by a fellow vor, who handed him a suitcase with $1.5 million in cash. Over the next three years, Ivankov oversaw the mob’s growth from a local extortion racket to a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. According to the FBI, he recruited two “combat brigades” of Special Forces veterans from the Soviet war in Afghanistan to run the mafia’s protection racket and kill his enemies.
Like Mogilevich, Ivankov had a lot of dirty money he needed to clean up. He bought a Rolls-Royce dealership that was used [ http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/29/nyregion/businessman-of-mystery-arts-patron-dogged-by-fbi-claim-of-russian-mob-ties.html ], according to The New York Times, “as a front to launder criminal proceeds.” The FBI concluded that one of Ivankov’s partners in the operation was Felix Komarov, an upscale art dealer who lived in Trump Plaza on Third Avenue. Komarov, who was not charged in the case, called the allegations baseless. He acknowledged that he had frequent phone conversations with Ivankov, but insisted the exchanges were innocent. “I had no reason not to call him,” Komarov told a reporter.
The feds wanted to arrest Ivankov, but he kept vanishing. “He was like a ghost to the FBI,” one agent recalls. Agents spotted him meeting with other Russian crime figures in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, and Toronto. They also found he made frequent visits to Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which mobsters routinely used to launder huge sums of money. In 2015, the Taj Mahal was fined [ https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-trump-taj-mahal-casino-resort-10-million-significant-and-long ] $10 million—the highest penalty ever levied by the feds against a casino—and admitted to having “willfully violated” anti-money-laundering regulations for years.
The FBI also struggled to figure out where Ivankov lived. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around,” James Moody, chief of the bureau’s organized crime section, told Friedman. “We had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.”
There is no evidence that Trump knew Ivankov personally, even if they were neighbors. But the fact that a top Russian mafia boss lived and worked in Trump’s own building indicates just how much high-level Russian mobsters came to view the future president’s properties as a home away from home. In 2009, after being extradited to Russia to face murder charges, Ivankov was gunned down [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/world/europe/14mobster.html ] in a sniper attack on the streets of Moscow. According to The Moscow Times, his funeral was a media spectacle in Russia, attracting [ https://www.google.com/search?q=moscow+times+ivankov+funeral&oq=moscow+times+ivankov+funeral&aqs=chrome..69i57.5028j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ] “1,000 people wearing black leather jackets, sunglasses, and gold chains,” along with dozens of giant wreaths from the various brotherhoods.
* * *
Throughout the 1990s, untold millions from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s luxury developments and Atlantic City casinos. But all the money wasn’t enough to save Trump from his own failings as a businessman. He owed [ http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-bankruptcies-insig-idUSKCN0ZX0GP ] $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with a mind-boggling $800 million of it personally guaranteed. He spent much of the decade mired in litigation, filing for multiple bankruptcies and scrambling to survive. For most developers, the situation would have spelled financial ruin. But fortunately for Trump, his own economic crisis coincided with one in Russia.
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground [ http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/16/nyregion/trump-starts-a-new-tower-near-the-un.html ] on his biggest project yet. Rising to 72 stories in midtown Manhattan, Trump World Tower would be the tallest residential building on the planet. Construction got underway in 1999—just as Trump was preparing [ https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+trump+reform+party+1999&oq=trump+reform+party+&aqs=chrome.5.69i57j0l5.6700j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ] his first run for the presidency on the Reform Party ticket— and concluded in 2001. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-16/behind-trump-s-russia-romance-there-s-a-tower-full-of-oligarchs ] earlier this year, it wasn’t long before one-third of the units on the tower’s priciest floors had been snatched up—either by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg.
Sunny Isles, Florida, became known as “Little Moscow,” thanks to Trump’s high-rises.
Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty
Among the new tenants was Eduard Nektalov, a diamond dealer from Uzbekistan. Nektalov, who was being investigated by a Treasury Department task force for mob-connected money laundering, bought a condo on the seventy-ninth floor, directly below Trump’s future campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway. A month later he sold his unit for a $500,000 profit. The following year, after rumors circulated that Nektalov was cooperating with federal investigators, he was shot down [ http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/10490/ ] on Sixth Avenue.
Trump had found his market. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in. Dolly Lenz, a New York real estate broker, told [ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/03/28/trump-business-past-ties-russian-mobsters-organized-crime/98321252/ ] USA Today that she sold some 65 units in Trump World Tower to Russians. “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald.”
To capitalize on his new business model, Trump struck a deal with a Florida developer to attach his name to six high-rises in Sunny Isles, just outside Miami. Without having to put up a dime of his own money, Trump would receive a cut of the profits. “Russians love the Trump brand,” Gil Dezer, the Sunny Isles developer, told Bloomberg. A local broker told [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/at-trumps-properties-his-name-face-and-tastes-are-ever-present/2017/01/17/7c88d6ae-d84b-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html ] The Washington Post that one-third of the 500 apartments he’d sold went to “Russian-speakers.” So many bought the Trump-branded apartments, in fact, that the area became known as “Little Moscow.”
“Russians love the Trump brand,” said developer Gil Dezer, (left, with Trump). One Florida tenant, Anatoly Golubchik (right) was busted in a major money-laundering ring run out of Trump Tower.
Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan/Getty; John Marshall Mantel/ New York Times/Redux
Many of the units were sold by a native of Uzbekistan who had immigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1980s; her business was so brisk that she soon began bringing Russian tour groups to Sunny Isles to view the properties. According to a Reuters investigation in March, at least 63 buyers with Russian addresses or passports spent [ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/ ] $98 million on Trump’s properties in south Florida. What’s more, another one-third of the units—more than 700 in all—were bought by shadowy shell companies that concealed the true owners.
Trump promoted [ http://www.trump.com/real-estate-portfolio/florida/trump-towers/ ] and celebrated the properties. His organization continues to advertise the units; in 2011, when they first turned a profit, he attended [ http://www.businessinsider.com/wealthy-russians-invested-nearly-100-million-in-trump-buildings-2017-3 ] a ceremonial mortgage-burning in Sunny Isles to toast their success. Last October, an investigation by the Miami Herald found [ http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article108150442.html ] that at least 13 buyers in the Florida complex have been the target of government investigations, either personally or through their companies, including “members of a Russian-American organized crime group.” Two buyers in Sunny Isles, Anatoly Golubchik and Michael Sall, were convicted for taking part in a massive international gambling and money-laundering syndicate that was run [ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/03/28/trump-business-past-ties-russian-mobsters-organized-crime/98321252/ ] out of Trump Tower in New York. The ring, according to the FBI, was operating under the protection of the Russian mafia.
* * *
The influx of Russian money did more than save Trump’s business from ruin—it set the stage for the next phase of his career. By 2004, to the outside world, it appeared that Trump was back on top after his failures in Atlantic City. That January, flush with the appearance of success, Trump launched his newly burnished brand into another medium.
“My name’s Donald Trump,” he declared [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgiWk4zWnJo (next below; with comments)]
But it wouldn’t be Trump without a better story than that. “It wasn’t always so easy,” he confessed, over images of him cruising around New York in a stretch limo. “About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won. Big league. I used my brain. I used my negotiating skills. And I worked it all out. Now my company’s bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was.… I’ve mastered the art of the deal.”
The show, which reportedly paid [ http://moneynation.com/how-much-money-does-trump-make-in-a-year/ ] Trump up to $3 million per episode, instantly revived his career. “The Apprentice turned Trump from a blowhard Richie Rich who had just gone through his most difficult decade into an unlikely symbol of straight talk, an evangelist for the American gospel of success, a decider who insisted on standards in a country that had somehow slipped into handing out trophies for just showing up,” journalists Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher observe [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/trumprevealed/ ] in their book Trump Revealed. “Above all, Apprentice sold an image of the host-boss as supremely competent and confident, dispensing his authority and getting immediate results. The analogy to politics was palpable.”
But the story of Donald Trump, self-made business genius, left out any mention of the shady Russian investors who had done so much to make his comeback narrative possible. And Trump’s business, despite the hype, was hardly “stronger than it ever was”—his credit was still lousy, and two more of his prized properties in Atlantic City would soon fall into bankruptcy, even as his ratings soared.
To further enhance his brand, Trump used his prime-time perch to unveil another big project. On the 2006 season finale of The Apprentice, as 11 million viewers waited to learn which of the two finalists was going to be fired, Trump prolonged the suspense by cutting to a promotional video for his latest venture. “Located in the center of Manhattan’s chic artist enclave, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in SoHo is the site of my latest development,” he narrated [ http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160526/BLOGS02/160529884/yet-another-reason-why-donald-trump-doesnt-want-to-release-his-tax-returns ] over swooping helicopter footage of lower Manhattan. The new building, he added, would be nothing less than a “$370 million work of art … an awe-inspiring masterpiece.”
Trump SoHo was the brainchild of two development companies—Bayrock Group LLC and the Sapir Organization—run by a pair of wealthy émigrés from the former Soviet Union who had done business with some of Russia’s richest and most notorious oligarchs. Together, their firms made Trump an offer he couldn’t refuse: The developers would finance and build Trump SoHo themselves. In return for lending his name to the project, Trump would get [ https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-21/trump-russia-and-those-shadowy-sater-deals-at-bayrock ] 18 percent of the profits—without putting up any of his own money.
One of the developers, Tamir Sapir, had followed [ http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/02/20/trumps-soho-project-the-mob-and-russian-intelligence/ ] an unlikely path to riches. After emigrating from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, he had started out driving a cab in New York City and ended up a billionaire living in Trump Tower. His big break came when he co-founded a company that sold high-tech electronics. According to the FBI, Sapir’s partner in the firm was a “member or associate” of Ivankov’s mob in Brighton Beach. No charges were ever filed, and Sapir denied having any mob ties. “It didn’t happen,” he told [ http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/09/nyregion/brass-knuckles-over-2-broadway-mta-landlord-are-fighting-it-over-rent.html ] The New York Times. “Everything was done in the most legitimate way.”
Trump, who described [ https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+sapir+great+friend&oq=trump+sapir+great+friend&aqs=chrome..69i57.7771j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=trump+sapir+great+friend+new+york+magazine ] Sapir as a “great friend,” bought 200 televisions from his electronics company. In 2007, he hosted [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/the-happy-go-lucky-jewish-group-that-connects-trump-and-putin-215007 ] the wedding of Sapir’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago, and later attended her infant son’s bris.
In 2007, Trump celebrated the launch of Trump SoHo with partners Tevfik Arif (center) and Felix Sater (right). Arif was later acquitted on charges of running a prostitution ring.
Mark Von Holden/WireImage/Getty
Sapir also introduced [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-donald-trumps-empire-why-he-didnt-run-for-president-in-2012 ] Trump to Tevfik Arif, his partner in the Trump SoHo deal. On paper, at least, Arif was another heartwarming immigrant success story. He had graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. Practically overnight, Arif became a wildly successful developer in Brooklyn. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Trump worked closely with Bayrock on real estate ventures in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. “Bayrock knew the investors,” he later testified [ http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/donald-trump-russia-2/ ]. Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me.” He boasted about the deal he was getting: Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. “It was almost like mass production of a car,” Trump testified.
But Bayrock and its deals quickly became mired in controversy. Forbes and other publications reported [ https://www.google.com/search?q=forbes+trump+the+trio&oq=forbes+trump+the+trio&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j69i64.3565j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ] that the company was financed by a notoriously corrupt group of oligarchs known as The Trio. In 2010, Arif was arrested [ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1316831/NY-real-estate-mogul-Tevfik-Arif-arrested-suspicion-running-prostitute-ring.html ] by Turkish prosecutors and charged with setting up a prostitution ring after he was found aboard a boat—chartered by one of The Trio—with nine young women, two of whom were 16 years old. The women reportedly refused to talk, and Arif was acquitted. According to a lawsuit filed that same year by two former Bayrock executives, Arif started [ https://casetext.com/case/kriss-v-bayrock-grp-llc-4 ] the firm “backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people.” In addition, the suit alleges, Bayrock “was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated.” The company’s real purpose, the executives claim, was to develop hugely expensive properties bearing the Trump brand—and then use the projects to launder money and evade taxes.
The lawsuit, which is ongoing, does not claim that Trump was complicit in the alleged scam. Bayrock dismissed the allegations as “legal conclusions to which no response is required.” But last year, after examining title deeds, bank records, and court documents, the Financial Times concluded [ https://www.ft.com/content/33285dfa-9231-11e6-8df8-d3778b55a923?mhq5j=e1 ] that Trump SoHo had “multiple ties to an alleged international money-laundering network.” In one case, the paper reported, a former Kazakh energy minister is being sued in federal court for conspiring to “systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets” and then purchasing three condos in Trump SoHo to launder his “ill-gotten funds.”
Felix Sater had a Trump business card long after his criminal past came to light.
During his collaboration with Bayrock, Trump also became close to the man who ran the firm’s daily operations—a twice-convicted felon with family ties to Semion Mogilevich. In 1974, when he was eight years old, Felix Sater and his family emigrated from Moscow to Brighton Beach. According to the FBI, his father—who was convicted for extorting local restaurants, grocery stores, and a medical clinic—was [ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-trump-tower/ ] a Mogilevich boss. Sater tried making it as a stockbroker, but his career came to an abrupt end in 1991, after he stabbed [ http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-sater-trump-20170223-story.html ] a Wall Street foe in the face with a broken margarita glass during a bar fight, opening wounds that required 110 stitches. (Years later, in a deposition, Trump downplayed [ http://www.npr.org/2017/03/01/517988044/trump-denies-links-to-russian-american-businessman ] the incident, insisting that Sater “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”) Sater lost his trading license over the attack, and served a year in prison.
In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to racketeering—operating a “pump and dump” stock fraud in partnership with alleged Russian mobsters that bilked investors of at least $40 million. To avoid prison time, Sater turned informer. But according to the lawsuit against Bayrock, he also resumed “his old tricks.” By 2003, the suit alleges, Sater controlled the majority of Bayrock’s shares—and proceeded to use the firm to launder hundreds of millions of dollars, while skimming and extorting millions more. The suit also claims that Sater committed fraud by concealing his racketeering conviction from banks that invested hundreds of millions in Bayrock, and that he threatened “to kill anyone at the firm he thought knew of the crimes committed there and might report it.” In court, Bayrock has denied the allegations, which Sater’s attorney characterizes as “false, fabricated, and pure garbage.”
By Sater’s account, in sworn testimony, he was [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-mafia-linked-figure-describes-association-with-trump/2016/05/17/cec6c2c6-16d3-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html ] very tight with Trump. He flew to Colorado with him, accompanied Donald Jr. and Ivanka on a trip to Moscow at Trump’s invitation, and met with Trump’s inner circle “constantly.” In Trump Tower, he often dropped by Trump’s office to pitch business ideas—“just me and him.”
Trump seems unable to recall any of this. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” he told [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/memory-lapse-trump-seeks-distance-advisor-past-ties/story?id=34600826 ] the Associated Press in 2015. Two years earlier, testifying in a video deposition, Trump took the same line. If Sater “were sitting in the room right now,” he swore under oath, “I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” He added: “I don’t know him very well, but I don’t think he was connected to the mafia.”
Trump and his lawyers say that he was unaware of Sater’s criminal past when he signed on to do business with Bayrock. That’s plausible, since Sater’s plea deal in the stock fraud was kept secret because of his role as an informant. But even after The New York Times revealed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/nyregion/17trump.html ] Sater’s criminal record in 2007, he continued to use office space provided by the Trump Organization. In 2010, he was even given [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/felix-sater-the-crook-behind-the-trump-russia-peace-plan ] an official Trump Organization business card that read: FELIX H. SATER, SENIOR ADVISOR TO DONALD TRUMP.
Sater apparently remains close to Trump’s inner circle. Earlier this year, one week before National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired for failing to report meetings with Russian officials, Trump’s personal attorney reportedly hand-delivered to Flynn’s office a “back-channel plan” for lifting sanctions on Russia. The co-author of the plan, according to [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-russia.html ] the Times: Felix Sater.
In the end, Trump’s deals with Bayrock, like so much of his business empire, proved to be more glitter than gold. The international projects in Russia and Poland never materialized. A Trump tower being built in Fort Lauderdale ran out of money before it was completed, leaving behind a massive concrete shell. Trump SoHo ultimately had to be foreclosed and resold [ https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+ivanka+managers+trump+soho&oq=trump+ivanka+managers+trump+soho&aqs=chrome..69i57.5285j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=trump+ivanka+managers+trump+soho&start=10 ]. But his Russian investors had left Trump with a high-profile property he could leverage. The new owners contracted with Trump to run the tower; as of April, the president and his daughter Ivanka were still listed [ https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-resigning-from-businesses-finally-almost-done ] as managers of the property. In 2015, according to the federal financial disclosure reports, Trump made $3 million from Trump SoHo.
* * *
In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-russian-mobster-tokhtakhounov-miss-universe-moscow/ ] into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called “the world’s largest sports book,” was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States. The entire operation, prosecutors say, was working under the protection of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whom the FBI identified as a top Russian vor closely allied with Semion Mogilevich. In a single two-month stretch, according to the federal indictment, the money launderers paid Tokhtakhounov $10 million.
Tokhtakhounov, who had been indicted [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-russian-mobster-tokhtakhounov-miss-universe-moscow/ ] a decade earlier for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only suspect to elude arrest. For the next seven months, the Russian crime boss fell off the radar of Interpol, which had issued a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he suddenly appeared live on international television—sitting in the audience at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, just a few seats away from the pageant owner, Donald Trump.
Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov.
Dmitry Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty
After the pageant, Trump bragged about all the powerful Russians who had turned out that night, just to see him. “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” he told [ http://rew-online.com/2013/11/12/hotel-trio-aims-to-bring-manhattan-to-moscow/ ] Real Estate Weekly. Contacted by Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov insisted [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-russian-mobster-tokhtakhounov-miss-universe-moscow/ ] that he had bought his own ticket and was not a VIP. He also denied being a mobster, telling [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/world/europe/tokhtakhounov-says-criminal-charges-are-just-a-misunderstanding.html ] The New York Times that he had been indicted in the gambling ring because FBI agents “misinterpreted his Russian slang” on their Trump Tower wiretaps, when he was merely placing $20,000 bets on soccer games.
Both the White House and the Trump Organization declined to respond to questions for this story. On the few occasions he has been questioned about his business entanglements with Russians, however, Trump has offered broad denials. “I tweeted out that I have no dealings with Russia,” he said [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-may-not-have-leverage-over-trump-russians-are-another-matter ] at a press conference in January, when asked if Russia has any “leverage” over him, financial or otherwise. “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all.” In May, when he was interviewed [ http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/pres-trump-s-extended-exclusive-interview-with-lester-holt-at-the-white-house-941854787582 ] by NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump seemed hard-pressed to think of a single connection he had with Russia. “I have had dealings over the years where I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian many years ago,” he said. “I had the Miss Universe pageant—which I owned for quite a while—I had it in Moscow a long time ago. But other than that, I have nothing to do with Russia.”
But even if Trump has no memory of the many deals that he and his business made with Russian investors, he certainly did not “stay away” from Russia. For decades, he and his organization have aggressively promoted his business there, seeking to entice investors and buyers for some of his most high-profile developments. Whether Trump knew it or not, Russian mobsters and corrupt oligarchs used his properties not only to launder vast sums of money from extortion, drugs, gambling, and racketeering, but even as a base of operations for their criminal activities. In the process, they propped up Trump’s business and enabled him to reinvent his image. Without the Russian mafia, it is fair to say, Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.
Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob’s “boss of bosses,” also declined to respond to questions from the New Republic. “My ideas are not important to anybody,” Mogilevich said in a statement provided by his attorney. “Whatever I know, I am a private person.” Mogilevich, the attorney added, “has nothing to do with President Trump. He doesn’t believe that anybody associated with him lives in Trump Tower. He has no ties to America or American citizens.”
Back in 1999, the year before Trump staged his first run for president, Mogilevich gave [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqfgpLP9fm8 (next below; with comments)]
“How can you say that there is a Russian mafia in America?” he demanded. “The word mafia, as far as I understand the word, means a criminal group that is connected with the political organs, the police and the administration. I don’t know of a single Russian in the U.S. Senate, a single Russian in the U.S. Congress, a single Russian in the U.S. government. Where are the connections with the Russians? How can there be a Russian mafia in America? Where are their connections?”
Two decades later, we finally have an answer to Mogilevich’s question.
Copyright 2017 © New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
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Trump to Brigitte Macron: 'you're in such great shape'
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by Washington Post [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHd62-u_v4DvJ8TCFtpi4GA / https://www.youtube.com/user/WashingtonPost , https://www.youtube.com/user/WashingtonPost/videos ]
President Trump praised French first lady Brigitte Macron’s physique July 13, during his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Trump Pulled a ‘Creepy Uncle’ Move on the French First Lady and Now the Whole World Has the Creeps
July 15, 2017
http://theladiesfinger.com/trump-french-first-lady/ [no comments yet]
Trump praised a woman’s body. A [female] foreign minister wondered ‘if she could say the same of him.’
[ https://twitter.com/Reebok/status/885959875393712128 (with {over 6,000} comments)]
July 16, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/16/trump-praised-a-womans-body-a-foreign-minister-wondered-if-she-could-say-the-same-of-him/ [with embedded video, and comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5wpa14ORW4 [with comments]
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President Trump Holds a Joint Press Conference with President Macron
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by The White House
Paris, France
Remarks by President Trump and President Macron of France in Joint Press Conference | July 13, 2017
Élysée Palace
Paris, France
July 13, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/07/13/remarks-president-trump-and-president-macron-france-joint-press [official transcript]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlHZuZizu1M [with comments] [also at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQP63GrN4ck (with comments)]
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Trump's never-ending handshake with Macron
Published on Jul 14, 2017 by CNN
Before President Trump left France he shared a 29-second handshake with French President Emmanuel Macron, the latest in a string of awkward moments between the two world leaders.
The Trump-Macron Handshake: A Play in Four Acts
How two leaders ruined a perfectly good gesture
Jul 14, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/trump-macron-handshake/533688/ [with embedded videos, and comments]
All the President’s Handshakes
Analyzing President Trump’s handshakes with world leaders has become something of a sport, so we had two professionals do it.
JULY 14, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/us/politics/president-donald-trump-handshakes.html [with embedded videos (including this YouTube), and comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DwijJfVbBg [with comments]
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Sessions releases questionnaire excerpt that omitted meetings with Russians
07/13/2017
The Justice Department released a portion of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' background check questionnaire Thursday, confirming that he did not report meetings with the Russian ambassador or any other foreign nationals when he was being vetted for a security clearance earlier this year.
Sessions' aides confirmed in May [ http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/24/sessions-russia-security-clearance-238796 ] that he had not listed two meetings with the Russians or hundreds of other meetings with foreign officials, but a liberal watchdog group filed a lawsuit for a copy of the relevant question and answer [ https://www.americanoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/20170713_AO_Sessions_SF86_Section20B6.pdf ] from Sessions' questionnaire, known as Standard Form 86 or more commonly, an SF-86.
[...]
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2017/07/13/jeff-session-doj-questionnaire-240501 [with comments]
AG Sessions, the Russian lawyer, and the money laundering case that went away
In this file photo taken on Tuesday, July 11, 2017, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to journalists in Moscow, Russia. A billionaire real estate mogul, his pop singer son, a music promoter, a property lawyer and Russia's prosecutor general are unlikely figures who surfaced in emails released by Donald Trump Jr. as his father's presidential campaign sought potentially damaging information in 2016 from Russia about his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
by Will Bunch
July 16, 2017 Updated July 16, 2017
Remember last week when I noted here that “follow the data [ http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/the-key-to-the-trump-russia-scandal-follow-the-data-20170713.html ]” is the modern version of the Watergate mantra “follow the money” — meaning that the key to collusion between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia may be learning how “fake news creators halfway around the globe [ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russian-trolls-hilary-clinton-fake-news-election-democrat-mark-warner-intelligence-committee-a7657641.html ] figured out exactly which voters in Wisconsin and Michigan to target with their Hillary-hating memes? Here’s the thing, though: Modern political corruption is a little bit like the upscale department store at your local mall: Cash is still accepted, too.
The broad outlines of the Trump-Russia scandal have emerged: The GOP presidential candidate and his minions wanted dirt on Hillary Clinton and help in depressing Democratic voter turnout [ http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/don-jr-and-the-email-chain-that-devoured-american-democracy-20170712.html ]. That help was provided in the form of hacked Democratic Party emails and the overcaffienated “fake news” from Russian content farms that flooded voters’ Facebook feeds. Russia wanted a new American president who would drop the sanctions imposed on their homeland for invading Crimea in 2014, among other policy favors. But was there another angle to the story — one that involves the almighty dollar?
It didn’t make a lot of news in May when the U.S. Department of Justice abruptly settled a case against a Russian firm, Prevezon Holdings, that stood accused of laundering ill-gotten gains through Manhattan real estate [ http://www.businessinsider.com/why-was-russian-money-laundering-case-dismissed-house-dems-2017-7 ]. Reports said the case, which was about to go to trial, was settled for $6 million — far less than expected — and that the Russian firm was not required to make any admission of guilt. Officials with Prevezon at the time said (echoing “The Godfather” without irony) that the offer from the Jeff Sessions-led Justice Department “was too good to refuse.”
At that moment, it seemingly meant nothing that one of the lawyers in the case — representing the family of Pyotr Katsyv, the former vice governor of the Moscow region, whose son, Denis owned Prevezon — was a virtually unknown Russian named Natalia Veselnitskaya. She said in May that the favorable deal her client was offered by Trump’s Justice Department was “almost an apology from the (U.S.) government [ http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/democrats-want-to-know-if-trump-quashed-a-russian-money-laundering-case-in-return-for-dirt-on-hillary-clinton/ ].”
Today, anyone who follows American politics knows who Veselnitskaya is: The woman whose June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as a former Russian counter-intelligence officer turned lobbyist, has become the biggest bombshell revelation in the quest to learn the extent of any Trump-Russia collusion in last year’s election.
Not surprisingly, some Democratic members of Congress now want to know if the Trump campaign’s dealings — or dealing, anyway — with the Russian lawyer had any connection with the Justice Department’s decision to settle the lawsuit on terms so seemingly favorable [ http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341695-democrats-want-to-know-why-doj-dismissed-money-laundering-case ] to a client of the woman who came to Trump Tower billed as “a Russian government lawyer” peddling dirt on Clinton. The 17 Democrats sent a letter to Trump’s attorney general Sessions, stating: “We write with some concern that the two events may be connected — and that the Department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts.” They want to know if Veselnitskaya had any role in the settlement talks, whether Sessions — who’d been a campaign adviser to Trump — knew of the earlier contact, whether any Trump administration officials had contacted the Justice Department about the case. and they also asked for documents explaining the abrupt decision to settle.
Originally, the case would have been tried by the office of then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was known as something of a pit bull on business corruption cases, including money laundering. It’s hard to imagine that Bharara — who’d initially been told he would stay on despite the change in administrations — would have signed off onto such a milquetoast settlement with the Russian schemers. But in March, Trump surprised legal observers by abruptly firing Bharara along with 45 other incumbent U.S. attorneys. (President Trump had tried to call Bharara the day before the firing, but the prosecutor refused to speak with him [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/politics/preet-bharara-us-attorney.html ].) The settlement with Prevezon came just weeks later.
Cases of alleged business dirty-dealing — involving money laundering and a complex tax fraud scheme — rarely capture the public’s imagination. But this matter seems to intersect with too many key signposts of the burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal to ignore. You may have heard that the main goal of the Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya and the spy-turned-lobbyist who accompanied her to Trump Tower was overturning the Magnitsky Act [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/14/the-magnitsky-act-explained/ ] — strict economic sanctions that the U.S. imposed on Vladimir Putin’s Russia three years ago. The law was named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow attorney who blew the whistle on what he said was a massive scheme involving Russian mobsters, shady businessmen and the highest levels of the Kremlin to defraud the government of taxes and launder the money in the U.S. and elsewhere. Russian authorities arrested Magnitsky — who turned up dead a year later, victim of an alleged beating and poor medical care [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/sergei-magnitsky-murder-114878 ]. One of the companies in the scheme that Magnitsky blew the whistle on was Prevezon Holdings.
It doesn’t help matters that Sessions — the nation’s highest-ranking law officer — has already disgraced his office with his rank dishonesty over his dealings with Russia. The former Alabama senator lied at his Senate confirmation hearing [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-spoke-twice-with-russian-ambassador-during-trumps-presidential-campaign-justice-officials-say/2017/03/01/77205eda-feac-11e6-99b4-9e613afeb09f_story.html ] and said he’d had no contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign; a short time later it was revealed that he’d met the then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak on at least two known occasions. Sessions’ over-the-top dishonesty is part of a broader mosaic of lies [ https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/07/12/trumpclips/BHWNkZjqDCwaSs07Cw58AL/story.html ] that have permeated Team Trump’s contacts with the Russians, and which make it impossible to believe these dealings were fully above-board. What’s more, Sessions — after the debacle of his Senate testimony — announced with great fanfare that he was recusing himself from the Russia investigation, but there’s no reason to believe that he recused himself from the Prevezon settlement, tainted now by the same scandal.
[...]
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/ag-sessions-the-russian-lawyer-and-the-money-laundering-case-that-went-away-20170717.html [with comments]
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Jeff Sessions Tells ‘Hate Group’ DOJ Will Issue Religious Freedom Guidance
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks in Atlanta on June 6.
Christopher Aluka Berry / Reuters
by Mary Emily O'Hara
Jul 13 2017, 6:46 pm ET
Right-wing news website The Federalist published on Thursday an exclusive transcript [ http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/13/heres-the-speech-jeff-sessions-delivered-to-christian-first-amendment-lawyers/ (in full next below)] of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — a conservative Christian law firm that was designated a "hate group" [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/law-firm-linked-anti-transgender-bathroom-bills-across-country-n741106 ] in 2016 by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Justice Department confirmed in an email to NBC News that the transcript was legitimate. ADF did not respond to multiple requests for comment delivered on Wednesday and Thursday.
In his off-camera, closed-door speech about religious freedom delivered Tuesday night, Sessions announced new federal guidance is on the way.
"Since he was elected, President Trump has been an unwavering defender of religious liberty," Sessions stated. "The president has also directed me to issue guidance on how to apply federal religious liberty protections. The department is finalizing this guidance, and I will soon issue it."
The Justice Department would not comment on the impending guidance.
"The guidance will also help agencies follow the Religious Freedom Restoration Act," Sessions continued in his prepared remarks. "Congress enacted RFRA so that, if the federal government imposes a burden on somebody’s religious practice, it had better have a compelling reason."
When the speech at Alliance Defending Freedom's Summit on Religious Liberty appeared on the Attorney General's public schedule [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-criticized-speaking-hate-group-n782356 ], it was cause for concern among LGBTQ advocacy groups and Democrats — many of whom issued statements questioning why Sessions would speak to what some call an anti-LGBTQ hate group due to its history of litigating against LGBTQ rights [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/law-firm-linked-anti-transgender-bathroom-bills-across-country-n741106 ].
But after reading the transcript and learning of the Justice Department's plans to create a new federal policy on protecting religious liberties and doubling down on enforcing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, advocates suggested Sessions was more interested in protecting the right to discriminate than the freedom of religion.
"Here he goes again. It appears [what] the Attorney General is saying is that he will only enforce a 'civil rights' law that is meant as an excuse to discriminate; but he won’t enforce longstanding, real civil rights laws like Title IX, Title IX and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act," Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in an email sent to NBC News.
JoDee Winterhof, senior vice president for policy and political affairs at the Human Rights Campaign, also assailed Sessions' speech and his promise of federal guidance on religious liberty protections.
"Sessions’ alarming comments proved what LGBTQ and civil rights leaders know to be true — that he cannot be trusted," Winterhof told NBC News via email. "A month ago, he vowed to protect transgender women from violent attacks and now we find him promoting license to discriminate laws. This is another predictable step for the anti-LGBTQ Trump-Pence Administration."
The Trump administration has promised several times to enact some form of increased religious liberty protections. During the campaign, Trump said he would sign the First Amendment Defense Act [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/first-amendment-defense-act-would-be-devastating-lgbtq-americans-n698416 ], a bill that would allow businesses to turn away LGBTQ people as well as unmarried couples and single mothers.
Before being confirmed as Attorney General, then-senator Sessions was a sponsor of the First Amendment Defense Act [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/first-amendment-defense-act-looms-over-sessions-confirmation-vote-n714226 ].
In May, President Trump signed an executive order on religious liberty [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-signs-religious-liberty-executive-order-allowing-broad-exemptions-n754786 ] that allows companies to reject the Affordable Care Act's mandate on birth control coverage. Trump's administration has been criticized by LGBTQ advocates for a series of actions ranging from erasing LGBTQ content from federal websites one day after the inauguration to the Department of Education's revocation of an Obama-era policy that increased transgender students' rights.
Sessions has also faced criticism from LGBTQ rights advocates. In a January interview, the mother of slain gay college student Matthew Shepard told NBC News [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/mother-matthew-shepard-speaks-out-against-sessions-confirmation-n714656 ] that Sessions fought against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Act when it was being debated in 2009. In a lengthy speech decrying the legislation designed to help victims, Sessions said that "gays and lesbians have not been denied access" to anything, and that hate crimes were "thought crimes."
In his senate career, Sessions displayed strong anti-LGBTQ leanings. According to a report issued by the Human Rights Campaign [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/mother-matthew-shepard-speaks-out-against-sessions-confirmation-n714656 ], then-senator Sessions argued in favor of anti-sodomy laws used to imprison gay men, opposed same-sex marriage, sought to terminate National Endowment for the Arts funding because it once went to black lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, opposed repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy keeping lesbian and gay service members in the closet, and tried to block federal funding for HIV-prevention programs if they appear to “promote sexual activity and behavior” among “homosexual men and women.”
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/jeff-sessions-tells-hate-group-doj-will-issue-religious-freedom-n782756
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Here’s The Speech Jeff Sessions Delivered To Christian First Amendment Lawyers
Jeff Sessions is the 84th Attorney General of the United States.
Photo By Wikimedia
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By Jeff Sessions
July 13, 2017
Prepared remarks of the Attorney General to the Alliance Defending Freedom on July 11, 2017:
Thank you for that introduction. And thank you for the important work that you do every day to uphold and protect the right to religious liberty in this country. This is especially needed today.
While your clients vary from pastors to nuns to geologists, all of us benefit from your good work—because religious liberty and respect for religion have strengthened this country from the beginning. In fact, it was largely in order to enjoy and protect these rights that this country was settled and founded in the first place, as those in this room especially know.
Our concepts of religious freedom came to us through the development of the Western heritage of faith and reason. In America, Madison and Jefferson advanced those concepts. Their victory was to declare religious freedom to be a matter of conscience inherent in each individual, not as a matter of toleration granted from the top. I propose that in America our understanding of religious freedom can only be understood within that heritage.
Our Founders wisely recognized that religion is not an accident of history or a passing circumstance. It is at the core of the human experience, and as close to a universal phenomenon as any. Each one of us considers with awe the stars in the sky and at the moral code within our hearts. Even today, in a rapidly changing world, a majority of the American people tell Gallup that religion is “very important” in their lives.
With this insight into human nature, they took care to reserve a permanent space for freedom of religion in America. That space is the very first line of the Bill of Rights.
And not just that line. Twelve of the 13 colonies authored state constitutions that protected the free exercise of religion. Six of the original 13 states had established churches, but almost every state made accommodations for religious minorities like Quakers or Mennonites. They did not insist that all follow the same doctrines. Every state constitution at the time of our Founding—and now—mentions God.
Our first president, George Washington, called for a national day of prayer. And he wrote to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island that in America, “all possess alike liberty of conscience.”
In his farewell address, President Washington famously called religion the “indispensable support of political prosperity [and a] great pillar of human happiness.” He warned, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
And Thomas Jefferson did not mention on his tombstone that he had served as president. He named three accomplishments: that he had founded the University of Virginia, authored the Declaration of Independence, and authored the statute of religious freedom in Virginia.
This national commitment to religious freedom has continued throughout our history, and it has remained just as important to our prosperity and unity ever since. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited this country, he noted “in France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”
And of course it was faith that inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to march and strive to make this country stronger yet. His was a religious movement. The faith that truth would overcome. He said that we “must not seek to solve the problem” of segregation merely for political reasons, but “in the final analysis, we must get rid of segregation because it is sinful.” It undermined the promise, as he described it, that “each individual has certain basic rights that are neither derived from nor conferred by the state…they are gifts from the hands of the Almighty God.”
So our freedom as citizens has always been inextricably linked with our religious freedom as a people. It has protected both the freedom to worship and the freedom not to believe as well.
To an amazing degree, the value of religion is totally missed by many today. Our inside-the-beltway crowd has no idea how much good is being done in this country every day by our faith communities. They teach right behavior, they give purpose to life, and they support order, lawfulness, and personal discipline while comforting the sick, supporting families, and giving support to those in need. They are there at birth and death.
But the cultural climate has become less hospitable to people of faith and to religious belief. And in recent years, many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack. This feeling is understandable. Just last year, a Harvard Law professor publicly urged judges to “take aggressively liberal positions…The culture wars are over. They lost; we won…Taking a hard line is better than trying to accommodate the losers.”
A lot of people are concerned about what this changing cultural climate means for the future of religious liberty in this country. The challenges our nation faces today concerning our historic First Amendment right to the “free exercise” of our faith have become acute. I believe that this recent election was significantly impacted by this concern and that this motivated many voters. President Trump made a promise that was heard. In substance, he said he respected people of faith and he promised to protect them in the free exercise of their faith. This promise was well received.
How, then, should we deal with this matter? America has never thought itself to be a theocracy. Our founders, at least the most articulate of them, believed our government existed as a protector of religious rights of Americans that were essential to being a created human being.
The government did not exist to promote religious doctrine nor to take sides in religious disputes that had, as they well knew, caused wars and death in Europe. Nor was it the government’s role to immanetize the eschaton, as Bill Buckley reminded us. The government’s role was to provide the great secular structure that would protect the rights of all citizens to fulfill their duty to relate to God as their conscience dictated and to guarantee the citizen’s right to exercise that faith.
The government would not take sides, and would not get between God and man. Religious rights were natural rights, not subject to government infringement, as the Virginia Assembly once eloquently declared.
Any review of our nation’s policies must understand this powerful constraint on our government and recognize its soundness. Yet this understanding in no way can be held to contend that government should be hostile to people of faith and is obligated to deprive public life of all religious expression.
In all of this litigation and debate, this Department of Justice will never allow this secular government of ours to demand that sincere religious beliefs be abandoned. We will not require American citizens to give intellectual assent to doctrines that are contrary to their religious beliefs. And they must be allowed to exercise those beliefs as the First Amendment guarantees.
We will defend freedom of conscience resolutely. That is inalienable. That is our heritage.
Since he was elected, President Trump has been an unwavering defender of religious liberty. He has promised that under a Trump Administration, “the federal government will never, ever penalize any person for their protected religious beliefs.” And he is fulfilling that promise. First, President Trump appointed an outstanding Supreme Court justice with a track record of applying the law as written, Neil Gorsuch. I have confidence that he will be faithful to the full meaning of the First Amendment and protect the rights of all Americans.
The president has also directed me to issue guidance on how to apply federal religious liberty protections. The department is finalizing this guidance, and I will soon issue it.
The guidance will also help agencies follow the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Congress enacted RFRA so that, if the federal government imposes a burden on somebody’s religious practice, it had better have a compelling reason. That is a demanding standard, and it’s the law of the land. We will follow it just as faithfully as we follow every other federal law. If we’re going to ensure that religious liberty is adequately protected and our country remains free, then we must ensure that RFRA is followed.
Under this administration, religious Americans will be treated neither as an afterthought nor as a problem to be managed. The federal government will actively find ways to accommodate people of all faiths. The protections enshrined in the Constitution and our laws protect all Americans, including when we work together, speak in the public square, and when we interact with our government. We don’t waive our constitutional rights when we participate fully in public life and civic society.
This administration, and the upcoming guidance, will be animated by that same American view that has led us for 241 years: that every American has a right to believe, worship, and exercise their faith in the public square. It has served this country well, and it has made us not only one of the tolerant countries in the world, it has also helped make us the freeist and most generous. Thank you.
Copyright © 2017 The Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media,
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Judge Tosses Jury’s Conviction Of Woman Who Laughed At Jeff Sessions, Orders New Trial
A D.C. judge tossed out the conviction of a woman arrested after laughing during Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing.
07/14/2017 Updated July 14, 2017
WASHINGTON - A D.C. judge has tossed out a jury’s conviction [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-laugh-congressional-hearing_us_590929bbe4b05c39768420ef ] of a protester who laughed during Attorney General Jeff Sessions [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/jeff-sessions/ ]’ Senate confirmation hearing, finding on Friday that the government had improperly argued during the trial that her laughter was enough to merit a guilty verdict. The judge ordered a new trial in the case, setting a court date for Sept. 1.
Desiree Fairooz, 61, who was associated with the group Code Pink, had been convicted of disorderly and disruptive conduct and demonstrating inside the Capitol. Fairooz was taken into custody [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/laughing-congressional-hearing-jeff-sessions-code-pink_us_59076a93e4b05c3976810a3a ] during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January after she laughed when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) claimed Sessions had a “clear and well-documented” record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” (The Senate rejected [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-attorney-general-jeff-sessions-racist-remarks_us_582cd73ae4b099512f80c0c2 ] Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship in the 1980s over concerns about his views on race.)
But Chief Judge Robert E. Morin of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia tossed out the guilty verdict on Friday because the government had argued that the laugh alone was enough to warrant the verdict.
Morin said it was “disconcerting” that the government made the case in closing arguments that the laughter in and of itself was sufficient.
“The court is concerned about the government’s theory,” Morin said. He said the laughter “would not be sufficient” to submit the case to the jury, and said the government hadn’t made clear before the trial that it intended to make that argument.
The rookie officer who seized Fairooz had never made an arrest [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/laughing-congressional-hearing-jeff-sessions-code-pink_us_59076a93e4b05c3976810a3a ] and had no experience securing congressional hearings. Nevertheless, prosecutors pressed forward, insisting that “laughter is enough [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-laughter_us_5908c55ee4b0bb2d08726a91 ]” to merit criminal charges of disorderly and disruptive conduct and demonstrating inside the Capitol. She was convicted in May.
Fairooz’s attorney had argued that she had the right to object to her arrest as she was being taken out of the room, and that a conviction based upon her conduct after the initial laugh could not stand. Attorney Sam Bogash asked the judge to toss out the jury verdict [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/laughing-jeff-sessions-desiree-fairooz_us_594c1a4de4b01cdedf020398 ]. The jury, Bogash wrote, “was not reasonable” in its evaluation of the evidence.
“Ms. Fairooz’s brief reflexive burst of noise, be it laughter or an audible gasp, clearly cannot sustain a conviction for either of the counts in the information,” Bogash wrote in a court filing. “So the only other basis for her conviction to anything are her statements after the U.S. Capitol Police arrested her for that laughing. Those statements merely expressed surprise at being arrested.”
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/protester-laughed-jeff-sessions-sentenced_us_5967de92e4b0d6341fe7a9e2 [with embedded video, and comments] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132907879 and preceding (and any future following)]
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Jeff Sessions used our research to claim that sanctuary cities have more crime. He’s wrong.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions waits before speaking to federal, state and local law enforcement officials about sanctuary cities and efforts to combat violent crime on July 12 in Las Vegas.
(John Locher/AP)
By Loren Collingwood and Benjamin Gonzalez-O'Brien
July 14, 2017
On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech [ https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-delivers-remarks-las-vegas-federal-state-and-local-law ] in Las Vegas on sanctuary cities and local law enforcement. He announced, “According to a recent study from the University of California, Riverside, cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t.” Almost certainly, the reference is to our study [ http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1078087417704974 ], which we first published here at the Monkey Cage in The Washington Post [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/03/sanctuary-cities-do-not-experience-an-increase-in-crime/ ] last October and later in the academic outlet Urban Affairs Review.
The attorney general’s summation of our study, however, is not true. In fact, our study suggests a different conclusion: Municipalities that chose to designate themselves as sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants experience crime rates no higher than they otherwise would. We state this clearly throughout our study.
How could our findings have been so misrepresented? Although we do not know for sure, it is possible that Sessions’s speechwriters at the Department of Justice based this inaccurate characterization on an article [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/30/crime-drops-in-phoenix-after-city-drops-sanctuary-city-status-former-cops-say.html ] published on Fox News or an article [ http://www.wnd.com/2017/04/data-in-sanctuary-cities-have-higher-crime-rates/ ] published on World Net Daily.
In the WND article, the author mischaracterized and repackaged our findings. She simply ignored the statistical uncertainty underlying our analyses — something loosely akin to ignoring the margin of error in polling. She then claimed that sanctuary cities had higher crime rates than non-sanctuary cities, ignoring the fact that these differences were not large enough to be statistically significant. This erroneous conclusion contributed to an increasingly popular but inaccurate narrative that sanctuary cities — and their immigrant populations — are dangerous.
In this particular analysis — summarized in the graph below — we matched each sanctuary city to a non-sanctuary city that was otherwise similar in its demographics and other factors associated with crime rates. This was our attempt to identify pairs of cities that are as similar as possible with the exception of sanctuary policy.
The vertical lines — known as “confidence intervals” — in the graph capture the statistical uncertainty. These confidence intervals were deleted in the WND article. Because the confidence intervals are relatively large compared with the difference in crime rates, we cannot conclude that the crime rates in sanctuary and non-sanctuary cities are significantly different from each other. Further analysis in our paper, which accounted for even more differences between the two city types, revealed the same finding.
In a third analysis, we compared crime rates in sanctuary cities pre- and post-passage of sanctuary city policies. This analysis, summarized in the graph below, also showed that sanctuary policies had no consistent effect on crime: Some cities saw increases, some saw no change and some saw decreases after becoming sanctuary cities.
In short, we find no evidence that crime is higher in cities that become sanctuaries. We hope that the attorney general will accurately state that finding in the future.
Loren Collingwood is an assistant professor of political science at University of California, Riverside, whose research interests include U.S. politics, political behavior, and race and ethnic politics.
Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien is a professor of political science at Highline College, whose research interests include American politics, immigration policy, racial and ethnic politics and American political development.
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/14/jeff-sessions-used-our-research-to-claim-that-sanctuary-cities-have-more-crime-hes-wrong/ [with comments]
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Full Show - Pelosi Anoints Herself Savior Of Democrats, Megyn Kelly’s Nose Dive Reaches Overdrive - 07/13/2017
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
Thursday, July 13th 2017[, with Jon Rappoport hosting the fourth hour]: DOJ Let Russian Lawyer In US - Obama's DOJ allowed the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr. into the country without a visa. Roger Stone will be in studio to discuss a lawsuit filed against him days before his testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee. Jack Posobiec and Bob Barr also join today's broadcast to cover the ongoing Russian witch-hunt and Trump's remarkable economic delivery.
Detroit Iraqi Christians hysterical as families rounded up
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by Fox News
Watch: Iraqi Christian (Chaldean) families hysterical and saying goodbye to family members who were rounded up to be sent to an ICE detention center in Ohio, awaiting deportation as the legal situation unfolds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kahA_ctuliU [with comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBAom59IlTo [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GESUbZ5nOs (additional text adapted from; with comments)]
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The True Evil of Russia’s Cyber War on America | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann | GQ
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by GQ
It was a terror attack. Donald Trump’s lack of concern is mind-boggling.
I was an FBI agent. Trump’s lack of concern about Russian hacking shocks me.
Is the president breaking his oath to protect and defend the country from foreign attacks?
By Asha Rangappa
June 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/06/10/i-was-an-fbi-agent-trumps-lack-of-concern-about-russian-hacking-shocks-me/ [with embedded video, and comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP7jiuWcMNk [with comments]
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George W. Bush, Bill Clinton Conversation on Leadership From the George W. Bush Presidential Center
Streamed live on Jul 13, 2017 by ABC News [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBi2mrWuNuyYy4gbM6fU18Q / https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCNews , https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCNews/videos ]
The former presidents lead discussion at graduation ceremony for presidential leadership scholars program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrMBoI6co2c [with comments]
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Infowars Nightly News LIVE - President Trump Commits To Fighting Child Sex Pedophiles
Streamed live on Jul 13, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFND-X76Jf0 [with comments]
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Peter W. Smith, GOP operative who sought Clinton's emails from Russian hackers, committed suicide, records show
July 13, 2017
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html [with embedded video]
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Rep. Swalwell: We will learn truth about Trump & Russia
All In with Chris Hayes
7/13/17
Congressman Eric Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, tells Chris Hayes that a more complete picture is beginning to emerge of the connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Duration: 5:21
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/rep-swalwell-we-will-learn-truth-about-trump-russia-996601411841
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Chris Hayes: Why Kellyanne Conway said 'yet'
All In with Chris Hayes
7/13/17
Everyone has been laughing about Kellyanne Conway's show and tell on Fox News. But did you catch exactly what she said there? Duration: 2:25
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-hayes-why-kellyanne-conway-said-yet-996603459964 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw0yjP7vksE [with comments]
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Donald Trump knows what 'a lot of people don’t know'
All In with Chris Hayes
7/13/17
President Donald Trump has often suggested 'a lot of people don't know' something that pretty much everyone knows. Duration: 1:48
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/donald-trump-knows-what-a-lot-of-people-don-t-know-996608067781
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Joy Reid: Trump can make Republicans accept anything
All In with Chris Hayes
7/13/17
Joy Reid and Lawrence Wright join Chris Hayes to discuss how the Republican Party has lowered the bar in the era of Trump. Duration: 9:23
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/joy-reid-trump-can-make-republicans-accept-anything-996613187795
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Trump lawyer e-mail meltdown raises questions of competence
The Rachel Maddow Show
7/13/17
Rachel Maddow looks at the oddly aggressive streak in Donald Trump's legal team and reports on an angry meltdown by the head of Trump's legal team, Marc Kasowitz, in which Kasowitz replied to a stranger's e-mailed criticism with curses and threats. Duration: 17:51
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-lawyer-e-mail-meltdown-raises-questions-of-competence-996730435530 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YNN04o0MPM [with comments]
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Russian 2016 online propaganda likely needed American guidance
The Rachel Maddow Show
7/13/17
Michael Carpenter, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Russia would have needed American help in implementing tailored online propaganda to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Duration: 5:34
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/russian-2016-online-propaganda-likely-needed-american-guidance-996851779548
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Trump role in publishing hacked material draws lawsuit
The Rachel Maddow Show
7/13/17
Walter Dellinger, former U.S. solicitor general, talks with Rachel Maddow about a lawsuit filed against Donald Trump for his role in the public sharing of materials hacked by Russians during the 2016 election. Duration: 7:03
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-role-in-publishing-hacked-material-draws-lawsuit-996875331601
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Lawrence: Trump's story on Russian lawyer meeting isn't adding up
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
7/13/17
New details suggest Trump may have known weeks ago about the meeting his son, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, contradicting his statements he only just found out about it. Nancy Soderberg and Jeremy Bash join Lawrence O'Donnell. Duration: 13:46
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-trump-s-story-on-russian-lawyer-meeting-isn-t-adding-up-996790339846 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxpcwB8aUd4 [with comments]
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Trump lawyer in threatening emails: 'Watch your back, b---h'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
7/13/17
ProPublica reports Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz doesn't have a security clearance to handle classified info in the Russia case, and Lawrence O'Donnell says he'll never get one after sending profanity-laced email threats. Duration: 7:17
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/trump-lawyer-in-threatening-emails-watch-your-back-b-h-996792387910 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ICKQbMAH2k [with comments]
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Trump says 'health care is hard' as GOP bill flounders
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
7/13/17
Lawrence O'Donnell weighs in on Trump's sit-back-and-wait approach to passing major health care legislation. And Ezra Klein explains why he thinks the newest GOP bill "is terrible for anyone who is sick, has been sick, or will be sick." Duration: 4:30
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/trump-says-health-care-is-hard-as-gop-bill-flounders-996788291608
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Report: Kushner wants to go on offense over Trump Jr. meeting
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
As Pres. Trump defended his son's meeting with a Russian lawyer while visiting France, back home a new report says Kushner wants the White House to come out swinging. Our panel reacts. Duration: 7:46
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/report-kushner-wants-to-go-on-offense-over-trump-jr-meeting-996875331998
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Trump previously denied campaign had any contact with Russia
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
At his only solo news conference as president, Trump denied his campaign had any contact with Russia. But Donald Trump Jr's email thread about his Russian lawyer meeting shows that's not true. Duration: 2:35
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-has-previously-denied-campaign-had-any-contact-with-russia-996885059572 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGHWJiZMdOE [with comments]
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Veteran foreign journalist: Many Europeans think Trump's 'insane'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
With Pres. Trump in France plagued by Russia probes & the scandal around his son's meeting with a Russian attorney, veteran foreign journalist Christopher Dickey assesses how Europe sees Trump. Duration: 1:23
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/veteran-foreign-journalist-many-europeans-think-trump-s-insane-996865603747 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fYoNRxfxgs [with comments]
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Fmr. Watergate prosecutor: There is proof Jared Kushner lied
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, says the fact Pres. Trump aide & son-in-law Jared Kushner changed his security form three times adding dozens of names shows he has lied. Duration: 8:08
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/fmr-watergate-prosecutor-there-is-proof-jared-kushner-lied-996902467969
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Trump on foreign nations: at home vs. abroad
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
On his own turf, Pres. Trump sounds pretty downtrodden about a lot of foreign nations and leaders. But when he heads overseas, he seems to change his tune quite a bit. Duration: 1:12
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-on-foreign-nations-at-home-vs-abroad-996906563820 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_jOzdAwUbU [with comments]
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Terrible Outbreak - The President Show
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by Comedy Central [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUsN5ZwHx2kILm84-jPDeXw / https://www.youtube.com/user/comedycentral , https://www.youtube.com/user/comedycentral/videos , https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD7nPL1U-R5o-p0I_6RGUR2MZus6O8cpX ]
The president urges everyone to remain calm in the face of an extremely aggressive virus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjStUJzYkYM [with comments]
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Executive Orders: A Little Less Transparency - The President Show - Comedy Central
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by Comedy Central
With his sweet baby boy by his side, the president signs a stack of executive orders -- including a health care bill for the ailing health care bill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7FihAeAkCA [with comments]
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The Translators - Interpreting Donald Trump: The Daily Show
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Desi Lydic sits down with translators from around the world to get their take on the unique challenge of interpreting the words of President Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qL1un6NPZA [with comments]
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Trump Slot Machines: Hit A Truth To Win!
Published on Jul 14, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Here it is! The hottest item at the liquidation sale of Trump's bankrupted Taj Mahal casino auction.
[originally aired July 13, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjp6ZwQw8ZY [with comments]
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Trump Said More Than 'Bonjour' To France's First Lady'
Published on Jul 14, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Donald Trump is putting past presidents to shame when it comes to overseas faux pas.
[originally aired July 13, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfnZdfz8xeI [with comments]
*
Stephen Recreates Kellyanne Conway's 'Fun With Words'
Published on Jul 14, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Kellyanne Conway went from White House advisor to Stephen's muse after she broke out some ridiculously nonsensical visual aids on Fox News.
[originally aired July 13, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAtClXJJ5pY [with comments]
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this is part 9 of a 10-part post which proceeds (point arising on the given) day by (point arising on the given) day from July 5, 2017 through July 14, 2017 -- the preceding part is the post to which this is a reply; the concluding part 10 is a reply to this post -- the following 'see also (linked in)' listing, updated for intervening posts along the way, is common to all 10 parts
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3967329 and preceding and following;
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119496514 and preceding (and any future following);
earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132785538 and preceding and following
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131488509 and preceding (and any future following);
earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131914404 and preceding and following,
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Zaur Dadayev (right) was convicted of carrying out the assassination of politician Boris Nemtsov in February 2015. He's seen here in court last month, inside a defendants' cage during a hearing at the Moscow District Military Court.
Boris Nemtsov in 2011. He was assassinated in 2015.
[ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/world/europe/boris-nemtsov-putin-russia.html ]
July 13, 2017
The triggerman in the drive-by murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. The bold killing of Nemtsov, 55, on a bridge near the Kremlin shocked many Russians; questions remain about who reportedly placed a large bounty on his life.
Prosecutors had sought a life sentence for Zaur Dadayev, a former officer in the security force of the Russian province of Chechnya, for killing Nemtsov in February of 2015. Instead, he was sentenced to 20 years. His four accomplices were handed sentences of 11 to 19 years. All five were also fined around $1,650. Their defense lawyers say they will appeal.
"The men were allegedly offered 15 million rubles ($240,000) to murder the politician," reports The Moscow Times [ https://themoscowtimes.com/news/Nemtsov-killers-sentenced-to-lengthy-prison-terms-58381 ], citing the same figure that has been reported elsewhere.
An advocate of democratic reforms, Nemtsov was once seen as the political heir [ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/27/389598306/putin-critic-boris-nemtsov-shot-dead ] to Russia's former President Boris Yeltsin, under whom he served as a deputy prime minister in the 1990s.
"Nemtsov was a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing his government of corruption and fighting a covert war in Ukraine," NPR's Lucian Kim reports from Moscow. "A trail of clues led to Chechnya, which is ruled by a government fiercely loyal to Putin — and the Nemtsov family has criticized the investigation for not focusing on who ordered and planned the murder."
Dadayev and his fellow Chechens were convicted of killing Nemtsov in late June [ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/29/534879414/five-men-convicted-in-killing-of-putin-foe-boris-nemtsov ]. At the time, his daughter, journalist Zhanna Nemtsova, noted that no high-profile Chechen officials were ever questioned about the case.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/13/536992366/killer-of-putin-critic-boris-nemtsov-is-sentenced-to-20-years-in-prison a also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=111270845 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=112895246 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119496514 and preceding (and any future following), http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132785538 and preceding and following (earlier this string)]
Who killed Boris Nemtsov? We will never know
Boris Nemtsov at an anti-Putin rally in Moscow in 2012.
Critics of Vladimir Putin have an uncanny habit of ending up dead. Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is the latest to be gunned down in mysterious circumstances – and the Kremlin is already blurring the details
3 March 2015
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/02/boris-nemtsov-never-know-who-killed-moscow-vladimir-putin-russian-opposition [with comments] [id.]
After Boris Nemtsov’s Assassination, ‘There Are No Longer Any Limits’
Medics put the the body of Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition leader, on a stretcher in Moscow, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2015.
FEB. 28, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/magazine/after-boris-nemtsovs-assassination-there-are-no-longer-any-limits.html [with comments] [id.]
A Final Interview With Boris Nemtsov
2/28/15
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/13/final-interview-boris-nemtsov-310392.html
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/13/final-interview-boris-nemtsov-310392.html [id.]
*
Ramzan Kadyrov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzan_Kadyrov [id.]
Putin’s Dragon
Ramzan Kadyrov, whom Vladimir Putin chose to govern Chechnya, has brought the war-weary region into the Russian fold—but at what price to Putin?
Is the ruler of Chechnya out of control?
February 8 & 15, 2016 Issue
...]
Last year, on February 27th, Boris Nemtsov—a former deputy prime minister, who had become one of Putin’s best-known opponents—was walking on a bridge near the Kremlin when an assassin approached from behind and shot him. Some days later, Putin told a meeting of high-ranking law-enforcement officials that “the brazen murder of Boris Nemtsov right in the center of the capital” was a “shame and tragedy” that the country must not tolerate.
Putin’s moral outrage may have been a cynical performance, but his anger appeared genuine. “He was obviously stunned,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a former political adviser to Putin who left the Kremlin in 2011 and became a critic of it, told me. “As a political assassination, this is direct interference in the politics of the federal center, and, what’s more, right under Putin’s nose.” He went on, “If you can do something like this just outside Spassky gate”—a Kremlin landmark, whose spire overlooks the bridge where Nemtsov was killed—“then maybe you could do this inside Spassky gate as well.”
The arrests came relatively fast: in the first week of March, the F.S.B. detained five suspects. All were ethnic Chechens; two were arrested in Moscow, and three in Ingushetia, a small republic bordering Chechnya. Security forces said that as they moved in to arrest another suspect in Grozny he blew himself up with a grenade.
Attention quickly focussed on the alleged triggerman: a decorated thirty-three-year-old Chechen officer named Zaur Dadaev, a former deputy commander of Sever. The timing of Dadaev’s departure from Sever was curious: his resignation letter was dated December, 2014, but it was processed on February 28th, the day after Nemtsov’s murder. At first, investigators implied that Dadaev and his suspected accomplices were enraged by Nemtsov’s support for the French cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, but that theory fell apart after it came to light that his killers had begun trailing him in the fall of 2014, months before the attack in Paris. “Dadaev doesn’t really have his own motives; he’s not a bird of very high altitude, as we say,” Vadim Prokhorov, Nemtsov’s lawyer, told me. “It’s clear that he takes orders from someone else.”
Nemtsov’s supporters, including his family, immediately pointed to Kadyrov and his inner circle. Two days after Dadaev’s arrest, Kadyrov took to Instagram in Dadaev’s defense. “I knew Zaur as a genuine patriot of Russia,” he wrote. Dadaev was one of the “most fearless and brave warriors in his regiment . . . genuinely devoted to Russia, ready to give up his life for his motherland.”
Putin’s mood was hard to read. Orkhan Djemal, a journalist with extensive sources inside Chechnya, told me he had heard that for days Putin wouldn’t take Kadyrov’s calls, which caused Kadyrov to panic. Kadyrov apparently managed to smooth relations with Putin, but the fact that people even tangentially related to Chechnya’s political élite had been arrested on murder charges marked an unprecedented moment in Putin-era politics. “The arrests may seem modest, but it’s actually a revolution—they are a genuine achievement for investigators, and a blow to Kadyrov,” Elena Milashina, who covers Chechnya for Novaya Gazeta, said. Since Politkovskaya’s death, Milashina has become one of the most deeply committed reporters covering the region.
On December 30th, Russian investigators named the alleged organizer of the crime: Ruslan Mukhudinov, a low-ranking officer in the Sever unit. No one knew where he was, and the indictment was issued in absentia. Yet, all along, the Russian press, citing law-enforcement sources, had pointed not so much to Mukhudinov as to his senior officer, Ruslan Geremeyev, for whom Mukhudinov worked as a driver. Other suspects detained with Dadaev told investigators that Geremeyev had spent time during the weeks before the killing at the Moscow apartment where the hit team was staying. Dadaev and Geremeyev were close after many years in Sever, and the day following the murder they drove to the Moscow airport together and flew back to Chechnya, according to airport surveillance photos.
Geremeyev has deep connections to the Chechen political élite: he is related to both Delimkhanov, Kadyrov’s closest ally, and another high-ranking Kadyrov associate who represents Chechnya in the upper house of Russia’s parliament. Over the past year, investigators have twice tried to issue an indictment against Geremeyev, only to be rebuffed by their boss, the powerful head of the country’s Investigative Committee—he refused to sign the warrant, according to a report published last month by RBK, a Russian daily. More than that, investigators can’t even talk to Geremeyev: leaks from the security services imply that he fled to the United Arab Emirates, then quietly returned to Chechnya, where requests summoning him for questioning have got nowhere. Clearly, Putin could have Geremeyev arrested if he wished; the fact that he hasn’t suggests that stability in Chechnya is more important to him.
One night toward the end of my time in Grozny, I paid a visit to Shakhrudi Dadaev, Zaur Dadaev’s older brother. Shakhrudi, who is sixty and raises sheep, lives in a large, immaculately clean house that would be the pride of any Chechen extended family. He set out a tray of fruit and candies, made a pot of strong black tea, and had me sit in a far corner facing the door, the seat of honor for guests in a Chechen home. Zaur is the youngest of four brothers, Shakhrudi told me. Their parents returned to Chechnya in the nineteen-fifties, when Khrushchev cancelled Stalin’s deportation order. After serving for several years with Russian federal forces, Zaur joined Kadyrov’s personal guard, and in 2006 he enlisted in Sever. “That was a time when not everyone wanted to join,” Shakhrudi said. “Now that Kadyrov is President, there is some order and quiet, but back then it was dangerous. You didn’t know who was shooting at whom.”
Zaur Dadaev proved himself as a fighter, and in 2010 was awarded a medal for leading an assault against a group of militants. He rose to become Sever’s deputy commander, and was known as a strong leader, a former Sever fighter told me: “If he found himself in a group of ten guys, the other nine would wait for him to do something.” Another Sever member, still active in the unit, told me that few on the unit’s base now talk of Dadaev. “Everyone has forgotten about him; it’s as if he never existed.”
In Chechnya, I heard several versions of why Dadaev left Sever for Moscow: he wanted to get a law degree or open a café, or maybe find work as a driver or security guard. No one heard much from him until, in early March, a few days after Nemtsov was killed, he returned to Grozny. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. “He was in a great mood—he was the same Zaur as always, same laugh,” one of his Sever colleagues told me. He hadn’t even changed his cell-phone number. No one who knew Dadaev thought that he could be involved in gunning down Nemtsov. “We have a rule: if a person is walking away, you don’t shoot them,” an officer from Sever told me. “To kill someone like that would be a great disgrace. Zaur is a smart guy, not dumb, and you’d have to be an idiot to go for something like this.”
Shakhrudi, in his living room, showed me two letters he had received from his brother in jail. “Everything is fine, by the will of the Almighty,” Zaur wrote in June. “I didn’t do anything against the law. Everything I said after I was arrested I said under pressure. It was dictated to me—the pressure was serious, not a joke.” The next month, he wrote again, “Don’t worry, brother, my conscience is clean, not only before you and our relatives but before all of Chechnya.” Shakhrudi grew more animated as we spoke. Chechen tradition would never allow such a thing, he said; he was the elder in the family, and Zaur hadn’t consulted him—he never would have got himself mixed up in such a plot without checking with him first. “I don’t believe that he did this,” Shakhrudi told me. “For me and our whole family, it is a shame even that there are rumors that my brother could have shot an unarmed man in the street.”
In the months since the murder, Kadyrov has said little about Nemtsov or the detained suspects. When I asked a high-ranking official in the Chechen security forces about the case, he waved off any suggestion that there was cause for worry. “If a particular person commits a crime, it doesn’t matter who this person was in the past or what kind of medals he received—he should be arrested, tried, and punished,” he said.
In Russia, how you see the plot is determined largely by how you think Putin’s state works. The fact that Dadaev carried himself with apparent nonchalance after his return to Chechnya from Moscow, for example, showed either that he had nothing to hide and had been set up or that he operated with impunity, certain that those who ordered the crime would cover for him. Many other mysteries loom. Were Kadyrov and his clique involved and, if so, did they act without Putin’s permission, thinking that they would please the President? Or had Putin ordered the hit? Investigators are conspicuously avoiding these questions. The lack of information has led to a flourishing trade in conspiracy theories. The murder, it is said, could be anything from a plot by the security services to discredit Kadyrov to an attempt by Kadyrov to compel Putin to rely on force alone in propping up his rule.
A trial will begin sometime this spring, but in a case like this a courtroom is an unlikely place for new facts to emerge. “I have the sense that the highest authorities in Moscow know full well who carried out this murder and where these people are—they are getting the full picture from investigators,” Olga Shorina, a longtime employee and confidante of Nemtsov’s, told me. Yet she doesn’t expect to learn much herself. “The regime wants all conflicts between its component parts to be resolved in private.”
[...]
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/putins-dragon [id.]
*
Ramzan Kadyrov says there are no gay men in Chechnya — and if there are any, they should move to Canada
Chechen regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov attends an international friendly soccer match between Russia and Romania in Grozny, Russia, on Nov. 15, 2016.
July 15, 2017
In an interview, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov denies reports that gay men are being detained and tortured in the Russian republic — not because such abuses would not be allowed, but because he thinks there are no gay men in Chechnya.
“This is nonsense,” Kadyrov said when asked about the allegations. “We don't have those kinds of people here. We don't have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada.”
“Praise be to god,” the Chechen leader adds. “Take them far from us so we don't have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.”
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/15/ramzan-kadyrov-says-there-are-no-gay-men-in-chechnya-and-if-there-are-any-they-should-move-to-canada/ [with embedded video, and comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6t5PwzMkn4 [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi3sKVrvuOs [with comment], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUvsG2TC-Uc [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFLTTI0Jl88 [with comments] [id.]
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Trump’s Russian Laundromat
Illustration by Alex Nabaum
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
By Craig Unger
July 13, 2017
In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.
A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren. Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire. From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold [ http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/01/sports/trump-building-the-generals-in-his-own-style.html ] in the first few months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices. The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated [ https://books.google.com/books?id=ZQ_9CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT262&lpg=PT262&dq=wayne+barrett+david+bogatin&source=bl&ots=3lJSjqqJqv&sig=KbeeubmObDNupn4_iWDDb3HDj0Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiR_drszf_UAhUCCT4KHQkACsgQ6AEINDAC#v=onepage&q=wayne%20barrett%20david%20bogatin&f=false ] the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.
If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports [ https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-making-of-donald-trump/ ] in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded [ http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/12/nyregion/brooklyn-fuel-distributor-pleads-guilty-in-tax-plot.html ] guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized [ http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/30/nyregion/entrepreneur-who-left-us-is-back-awaiting-sentence.html ] his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed [ https://archive.org/stream/russianorganized00unit/russianorganized00unit_djvu.txt ] that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran [ http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/ruslobby-mogilevich-04172007.pdf ] a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers [ https://www.villagevoice.com/1998/05/26/the-most-dangerous-mobster-in-the-world/ ] the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.
In 1987, on his first trip to Russia, Trump visited the Winter Palace with Ivana. The Soviets flew him to Moscow—all expenses paid—to discuss building a luxury hotel across from the Kremlin.
Maxim Blokhin/TASS
Since Trump’s election as president, his ties to Russia have become the focus of intense scrutiny, most of which has centered on whether his inner circle colluded with Russia to subvert the U.S. election. A growing chorus in Congress is also asking pointed questions about how the president built his business empire. Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for [ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/ ] a deeper inquiry into “Russian investment in Trump’s businesses and properties.”
The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.
But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.
It’s entirely possible that Trump was never more than a convenient patsy for Russian oligarchs and mobsters, with his casinos and condos providing easy pass-throughs for their illicit riches. At the very least, with his constant need for new infusions of cash and his well-documented troubles with creditors, Trump made an easy “mark” for anyone looking to launder money. But whatever his knowledge about the source of his wealth, the public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians—including the dirtiest and most feared of them all.
* * *
Trump made his first trip to Russia in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invited [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/from-the-archives-when-trump-hoped-to-meet-gorbachev-in-manhattan/2017/07/10/3f570b42-658c-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html ] by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was flown to Moscow and Leningrad—all expenses paid—to talk business with high-ups in the Soviet command. In The Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the lunch meeting with Dubinin that led to the trip. “One thing led to another,” he wrote [ https://www.vox.com/world/2017/2/17/14622504/trump-russia-business-ties-fact-check ], “and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-may-not-have-leverage-over-trump-russians-are-another-matter ] five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted [ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/02/15/donald-trumps-ties-russia-go-back-30-years/97949746/ ] at a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out [ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/12/19/the-curious-world-of-donald-trumps-private-russian-connections/ ] of Russia since the 1990s.
Semion Mogilevich.
At the top of the sprawling criminal enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian was the key money-laundering contact for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Brotherhood, one of the richest criminal syndicates in the world. Before long, he was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide racket of his own. Mogilevich wasn’t feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. The FBI has credited [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/08/05/semion_mogilevich_fbi_ten_most_wanted_list_this_obese_mob_boss_is_twice.html ] the “brainy don,” who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says [id.], “but to influence governments and their economies.”
In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded [ http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-418652/Why-I-believe-Putin-wanted-dead-.html ] an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.
Vyachelsav Ivankov.
Sergey Ponomarev/AP
Mogilevich’s greatest talent, the one that places him at the top of the Russian mob, is finding creative ways to cleanse dirty cash. According to the FBI, he has laundered [ http://www.businessinsider.com/semion-mogilevich-2014-11 ] money through more than 100 front companies around the world, and held bank accounts in at least 27 countries. And in 1991, he made a move that led directly to Trump Tower. That year, the FBI says [ https://books.google.com/books?id=F1IqGCc7P8cC&pg=PT84&lpg=PT84&dq=mogilevich+bribed+judge+ivankov&source=bl&ots=OHacdxngxQ&sig=5PpRKdp2bGjneYVA__klDMIQesw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwii7s7M4f_UAhUI8z4KHYhsB44Q6AEIMDAC#v=onepage&q=mogilevich%20bribed%20judge%20ivankov&f=false ], Mogilevich paid a Russian judge to spring a fellow mob boss, Vyachelsav Kirillovich Ivankov, from a Siberian gulag. If Mogilevich was the brains, Ivankov was the enforcer—a vor v zakone, or “made man,” infamous for torturing his victims and boasting about the murders he had arranged. Sprung by Mogilevich, Ivankov made the most of his freedom. In 1992, a year after he was released from prison, he headed to New York on an illegal business visa and proceeded to set up shop in Brighton Beach.
In Red Mafiya, his book about the rise of the Russian mob in America, investigative reporter Robert I. Friedman documented [ https://archive.org/stream/RedMafiyaHowTheRussianMobByRobertI.Friedman2000/Red%20Mafiya-%20How%20the%20Russian%20Mob%20by%20Robert%20I.%20Friedman%20(2000)_djvu.txt ] how Ivankov organized a lurid and violent underworld of tattooed gangsters. When Ivankov touched down at JFK, Friedman reported, he was met by a fellow vor, who handed him a suitcase with $1.5 million in cash. Over the next three years, Ivankov oversaw the mob’s growth from a local extortion racket to a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. According to the FBI, he recruited two “combat brigades” of Special Forces veterans from the Soviet war in Afghanistan to run the mafia’s protection racket and kill his enemies.
Like Mogilevich, Ivankov had a lot of dirty money he needed to clean up. He bought a Rolls-Royce dealership that was used [ http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/29/nyregion/businessman-of-mystery-arts-patron-dogged-by-fbi-claim-of-russian-mob-ties.html ], according to The New York Times, “as a front to launder criminal proceeds.” The FBI concluded that one of Ivankov’s partners in the operation was Felix Komarov, an upscale art dealer who lived in Trump Plaza on Third Avenue. Komarov, who was not charged in the case, called the allegations baseless. He acknowledged that he had frequent phone conversations with Ivankov, but insisted the exchanges were innocent. “I had no reason not to call him,” Komarov told a reporter.
The feds wanted to arrest Ivankov, but he kept vanishing. “He was like a ghost to the FBI,” one agent recalls. Agents spotted him meeting with other Russian crime figures in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, and Toronto. They also found he made frequent visits to Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which mobsters routinely used to launder huge sums of money. In 2015, the Taj Mahal was fined [ https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-trump-taj-mahal-casino-resort-10-million-significant-and-long ] $10 million—the highest penalty ever levied by the feds against a casino—and admitted to having “willfully violated” anti-money-laundering regulations for years.
The FBI also struggled to figure out where Ivankov lived. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around,” James Moody, chief of the bureau’s organized crime section, told Friedman. “We had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.”
There is no evidence that Trump knew Ivankov personally, even if they were neighbors. But the fact that a top Russian mafia boss lived and worked in Trump’s own building indicates just how much high-level Russian mobsters came to view the future president’s properties as a home away from home. In 2009, after being extradited to Russia to face murder charges, Ivankov was gunned down [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/world/europe/14mobster.html ] in a sniper attack on the streets of Moscow. According to The Moscow Times, his funeral was a media spectacle in Russia, attracting [ https://www.google.com/search?q=moscow+times+ivankov+funeral&oq=moscow+times+ivankov+funeral&aqs=chrome..69i57.5028j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ] “1,000 people wearing black leather jackets, sunglasses, and gold chains,” along with dozens of giant wreaths from the various brotherhoods.
* * *
Throughout the 1990s, untold millions from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s luxury developments and Atlantic City casinos. But all the money wasn’t enough to save Trump from his own failings as a businessman. He owed [ http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-bankruptcies-insig-idUSKCN0ZX0GP ] $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with a mind-boggling $800 million of it personally guaranteed. He spent much of the decade mired in litigation, filing for multiple bankruptcies and scrambling to survive. For most developers, the situation would have spelled financial ruin. But fortunately for Trump, his own economic crisis coincided with one in Russia.
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground [ http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/16/nyregion/trump-starts-a-new-tower-near-the-un.html ] on his biggest project yet. Rising to 72 stories in midtown Manhattan, Trump World Tower would be the tallest residential building on the planet. Construction got underway in 1999—just as Trump was preparing [ https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+trump+reform+party+1999&oq=trump+reform+party+&aqs=chrome.5.69i57j0l5.6700j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ] his first run for the presidency on the Reform Party ticket— and concluded in 2001. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-16/behind-trump-s-russia-romance-there-s-a-tower-full-of-oligarchs ] earlier this year, it wasn’t long before one-third of the units on the tower’s priciest floors had been snatched up—either by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg.
Sunny Isles, Florida, became known as “Little Moscow,” thanks to Trump’s high-rises.
Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty
Among the new tenants was Eduard Nektalov, a diamond dealer from Uzbekistan. Nektalov, who was being investigated by a Treasury Department task force for mob-connected money laundering, bought a condo on the seventy-ninth floor, directly below Trump’s future campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway. A month later he sold his unit for a $500,000 profit. The following year, after rumors circulated that Nektalov was cooperating with federal investigators, he was shot down [ http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/10490/ ] on Sixth Avenue.
Trump had found his market. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in. Dolly Lenz, a New York real estate broker, told [ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/03/28/trump-business-past-ties-russian-mobsters-organized-crime/98321252/ ] USA Today that she sold some 65 units in Trump World Tower to Russians. “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald.”
To capitalize on his new business model, Trump struck a deal with a Florida developer to attach his name to six high-rises in Sunny Isles, just outside Miami. Without having to put up a dime of his own money, Trump would receive a cut of the profits. “Russians love the Trump brand,” Gil Dezer, the Sunny Isles developer, told Bloomberg. A local broker told [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/at-trumps-properties-his-name-face-and-tastes-are-ever-present/2017/01/17/7c88d6ae-d84b-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html ] The Washington Post that one-third of the 500 apartments he’d sold went to “Russian-speakers.” So many bought the Trump-branded apartments, in fact, that the area became known as “Little Moscow.”
“Russians love the Trump brand,” said developer Gil Dezer, (left, with Trump). One Florida tenant, Anatoly Golubchik (right) was busted in a major money-laundering ring run out of Trump Tower.
Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan/Getty; John Marshall Mantel/ New York Times/Redux
Many of the units were sold by a native of Uzbekistan who had immigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1980s; her business was so brisk that she soon began bringing Russian tour groups to Sunny Isles to view the properties. According to a Reuters investigation in March, at least 63 buyers with Russian addresses or passports spent [ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/ ] $98 million on Trump’s properties in south Florida. What’s more, another one-third of the units—more than 700 in all—were bought by shadowy shell companies that concealed the true owners.
Trump promoted [ http://www.trump.com/real-estate-portfolio/florida/trump-towers/ ] and celebrated the properties. His organization continues to advertise the units; in 2011, when they first turned a profit, he attended [ http://www.businessinsider.com/wealthy-russians-invested-nearly-100-million-in-trump-buildings-2017-3 ] a ceremonial mortgage-burning in Sunny Isles to toast their success. Last October, an investigation by the Miami Herald found [ http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article108150442.html ] that at least 13 buyers in the Florida complex have been the target of government investigations, either personally or through their companies, including “members of a Russian-American organized crime group.” Two buyers in Sunny Isles, Anatoly Golubchik and Michael Sall, were convicted for taking part in a massive international gambling and money-laundering syndicate that was run [ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/03/28/trump-business-past-ties-russian-mobsters-organized-crime/98321252/ ] out of Trump Tower in New York. The ring, according to the FBI, was operating under the protection of the Russian mafia.
* * *
The influx of Russian money did more than save Trump’s business from ruin—it set the stage for the next phase of his career. By 2004, to the outside world, it appeared that Trump was back on top after his failures in Atlantic City. That January, flush with the appearance of success, Trump launched his newly burnished brand into another medium.
“My name’s Donald Trump,” he declared [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgiWk4zWnJo (next below; with comments)]
in his opening narration for The Apprentice, “the largest real estate developer in New York. I own buildings all over the place. Model agencies. The Miss Universe pageant. Jetliners, golf courses, casinos, and private resorts like Mar-a-Lago, one of the most spectacular estates anywhere in the world.”
But it wouldn’t be Trump without a better story than that. “It wasn’t always so easy,” he confessed, over images of him cruising around New York in a stretch limo. “About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won. Big league. I used my brain. I used my negotiating skills. And I worked it all out. Now my company’s bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was.… I’ve mastered the art of the deal.”
The show, which reportedly paid [ http://moneynation.com/how-much-money-does-trump-make-in-a-year/ ] Trump up to $3 million per episode, instantly revived his career. “The Apprentice turned Trump from a blowhard Richie Rich who had just gone through his most difficult decade into an unlikely symbol of straight talk, an evangelist for the American gospel of success, a decider who insisted on standards in a country that had somehow slipped into handing out trophies for just showing up,” journalists Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher observe [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/trumprevealed/ ] in their book Trump Revealed. “Above all, Apprentice sold an image of the host-boss as supremely competent and confident, dispensing his authority and getting immediate results. The analogy to politics was palpable.”
But the story of Donald Trump, self-made business genius, left out any mention of the shady Russian investors who had done so much to make his comeback narrative possible. And Trump’s business, despite the hype, was hardly “stronger than it ever was”—his credit was still lousy, and two more of his prized properties in Atlantic City would soon fall into bankruptcy, even as his ratings soared.
To further enhance his brand, Trump used his prime-time perch to unveil another big project. On the 2006 season finale of The Apprentice, as 11 million viewers waited to learn which of the two finalists was going to be fired, Trump prolonged the suspense by cutting to a promotional video for his latest venture. “Located in the center of Manhattan’s chic artist enclave, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in SoHo is the site of my latest development,” he narrated [ http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160526/BLOGS02/160529884/yet-another-reason-why-donald-trump-doesnt-want-to-release-his-tax-returns ] over swooping helicopter footage of lower Manhattan. The new building, he added, would be nothing less than a “$370 million work of art … an awe-inspiring masterpiece.”
Trump SoHo was the brainchild of two development companies—Bayrock Group LLC and the Sapir Organization—run by a pair of wealthy émigrés from the former Soviet Union who had done business with some of Russia’s richest and most notorious oligarchs. Together, their firms made Trump an offer he couldn’t refuse: The developers would finance and build Trump SoHo themselves. In return for lending his name to the project, Trump would get [ https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-21/trump-russia-and-those-shadowy-sater-deals-at-bayrock ] 18 percent of the profits—without putting up any of his own money.
One of the developers, Tamir Sapir, had followed [ http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/02/20/trumps-soho-project-the-mob-and-russian-intelligence/ ] an unlikely path to riches. After emigrating from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, he had started out driving a cab in New York City and ended up a billionaire living in Trump Tower. His big break came when he co-founded a company that sold high-tech electronics. According to the FBI, Sapir’s partner in the firm was a “member or associate” of Ivankov’s mob in Brighton Beach. No charges were ever filed, and Sapir denied having any mob ties. “It didn’t happen,” he told [ http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/09/nyregion/brass-knuckles-over-2-broadway-mta-landlord-are-fighting-it-over-rent.html ] The New York Times. “Everything was done in the most legitimate way.”
Trump, who described [ https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+sapir+great+friend&oq=trump+sapir+great+friend&aqs=chrome..69i57.7771j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=trump+sapir+great+friend+new+york+magazine ] Sapir as a “great friend,” bought 200 televisions from his electronics company. In 2007, he hosted [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/the-happy-go-lucky-jewish-group-that-connects-trump-and-putin-215007 ] the wedding of Sapir’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago, and later attended her infant son’s bris.
In 2007, Trump celebrated the launch of Trump SoHo with partners Tevfik Arif (center) and Felix Sater (right). Arif was later acquitted on charges of running a prostitution ring.
Mark Von Holden/WireImage/Getty
Sapir also introduced [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-donald-trumps-empire-why-he-didnt-run-for-president-in-2012 ] Trump to Tevfik Arif, his partner in the Trump SoHo deal. On paper, at least, Arif was another heartwarming immigrant success story. He had graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. Practically overnight, Arif became a wildly successful developer in Brooklyn. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Trump worked closely with Bayrock on real estate ventures in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. “Bayrock knew the investors,” he later testified [ http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/donald-trump-russia-2/ ]. Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me.” He boasted about the deal he was getting: Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. “It was almost like mass production of a car,” Trump testified.
But Bayrock and its deals quickly became mired in controversy. Forbes and other publications reported [ https://www.google.com/search?q=forbes+trump+the+trio&oq=forbes+trump+the+trio&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j69i64.3565j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ] that the company was financed by a notoriously corrupt group of oligarchs known as The Trio. In 2010, Arif was arrested [ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1316831/NY-real-estate-mogul-Tevfik-Arif-arrested-suspicion-running-prostitute-ring.html ] by Turkish prosecutors and charged with setting up a prostitution ring after he was found aboard a boat—chartered by one of The Trio—with nine young women, two of whom were 16 years old. The women reportedly refused to talk, and Arif was acquitted. According to a lawsuit filed that same year by two former Bayrock executives, Arif started [ https://casetext.com/case/kriss-v-bayrock-grp-llc-4 ] the firm “backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people.” In addition, the suit alleges, Bayrock “was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated.” The company’s real purpose, the executives claim, was to develop hugely expensive properties bearing the Trump brand—and then use the projects to launder money and evade taxes.
The lawsuit, which is ongoing, does not claim that Trump was complicit in the alleged scam. Bayrock dismissed the allegations as “legal conclusions to which no response is required.” But last year, after examining title deeds, bank records, and court documents, the Financial Times concluded [ https://www.ft.com/content/33285dfa-9231-11e6-8df8-d3778b55a923?mhq5j=e1 ] that Trump SoHo had “multiple ties to an alleged international money-laundering network.” In one case, the paper reported, a former Kazakh energy minister is being sued in federal court for conspiring to “systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets” and then purchasing three condos in Trump SoHo to launder his “ill-gotten funds.”
Felix Sater had a Trump business card long after his criminal past came to light.
During his collaboration with Bayrock, Trump also became close to the man who ran the firm’s daily operations—a twice-convicted felon with family ties to Semion Mogilevich. In 1974, when he was eight years old, Felix Sater and his family emigrated from Moscow to Brighton Beach. According to the FBI, his father—who was convicted for extorting local restaurants, grocery stores, and a medical clinic—was [ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-trump-tower/ ] a Mogilevich boss. Sater tried making it as a stockbroker, but his career came to an abrupt end in 1991, after he stabbed [ http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-sater-trump-20170223-story.html ] a Wall Street foe in the face with a broken margarita glass during a bar fight, opening wounds that required 110 stitches. (Years later, in a deposition, Trump downplayed [ http://www.npr.org/2017/03/01/517988044/trump-denies-links-to-russian-american-businessman ] the incident, insisting that Sater “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”) Sater lost his trading license over the attack, and served a year in prison.
In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to racketeering—operating a “pump and dump” stock fraud in partnership with alleged Russian mobsters that bilked investors of at least $40 million. To avoid prison time, Sater turned informer. But according to the lawsuit against Bayrock, he also resumed “his old tricks.” By 2003, the suit alleges, Sater controlled the majority of Bayrock’s shares—and proceeded to use the firm to launder hundreds of millions of dollars, while skimming and extorting millions more. The suit also claims that Sater committed fraud by concealing his racketeering conviction from banks that invested hundreds of millions in Bayrock, and that he threatened “to kill anyone at the firm he thought knew of the crimes committed there and might report it.” In court, Bayrock has denied the allegations, which Sater’s attorney characterizes as “false, fabricated, and pure garbage.”
By Sater’s account, in sworn testimony, he was [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-mafia-linked-figure-describes-association-with-trump/2016/05/17/cec6c2c6-16d3-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html ] very tight with Trump. He flew to Colorado with him, accompanied Donald Jr. and Ivanka on a trip to Moscow at Trump’s invitation, and met with Trump’s inner circle “constantly.” In Trump Tower, he often dropped by Trump’s office to pitch business ideas—“just me and him.”
Trump seems unable to recall any of this. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” he told [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/memory-lapse-trump-seeks-distance-advisor-past-ties/story?id=34600826 ] the Associated Press in 2015. Two years earlier, testifying in a video deposition, Trump took the same line. If Sater “were sitting in the room right now,” he swore under oath, “I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” He added: “I don’t know him very well, but I don’t think he was connected to the mafia.”
Trump and his lawyers say that he was unaware of Sater’s criminal past when he signed on to do business with Bayrock. That’s plausible, since Sater’s plea deal in the stock fraud was kept secret because of his role as an informant. But even after The New York Times revealed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/nyregion/17trump.html ] Sater’s criminal record in 2007, he continued to use office space provided by the Trump Organization. In 2010, he was even given [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/felix-sater-the-crook-behind-the-trump-russia-peace-plan ] an official Trump Organization business card that read: FELIX H. SATER, SENIOR ADVISOR TO DONALD TRUMP.
Sater apparently remains close to Trump’s inner circle. Earlier this year, one week before National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired for failing to report meetings with Russian officials, Trump’s personal attorney reportedly hand-delivered to Flynn’s office a “back-channel plan” for lifting sanctions on Russia. The co-author of the plan, according to [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-russia.html ] the Times: Felix Sater.
In the end, Trump’s deals with Bayrock, like so much of his business empire, proved to be more glitter than gold. The international projects in Russia and Poland never materialized. A Trump tower being built in Fort Lauderdale ran out of money before it was completed, leaving behind a massive concrete shell. Trump SoHo ultimately had to be foreclosed and resold [ https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+ivanka+managers+trump+soho&oq=trump+ivanka+managers+trump+soho&aqs=chrome..69i57.5285j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=trump+ivanka+managers+trump+soho&start=10 ]. But his Russian investors had left Trump with a high-profile property he could leverage. The new owners contracted with Trump to run the tower; as of April, the president and his daughter Ivanka were still listed [ https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-resigning-from-businesses-finally-almost-done ] as managers of the property. In 2015, according to the federal financial disclosure reports, Trump made $3 million from Trump SoHo.
* * *
In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-russian-mobster-tokhtakhounov-miss-universe-moscow/ ] into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called “the world’s largest sports book,” was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States. The entire operation, prosecutors say, was working under the protection of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whom the FBI identified as a top Russian vor closely allied with Semion Mogilevich. In a single two-month stretch, according to the federal indictment, the money launderers paid Tokhtakhounov $10 million.
Tokhtakhounov, who had been indicted [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-russian-mobster-tokhtakhounov-miss-universe-moscow/ ] a decade earlier for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only suspect to elude arrest. For the next seven months, the Russian crime boss fell off the radar of Interpol, which had issued a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he suddenly appeared live on international television—sitting in the audience at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, just a few seats away from the pageant owner, Donald Trump.
Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov.
Dmitry Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty
After the pageant, Trump bragged about all the powerful Russians who had turned out that night, just to see him. “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” he told [ http://rew-online.com/2013/11/12/hotel-trio-aims-to-bring-manhattan-to-moscow/ ] Real Estate Weekly. Contacted by Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov insisted [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-russian-mobster-tokhtakhounov-miss-universe-moscow/ ] that he had bought his own ticket and was not a VIP. He also denied being a mobster, telling [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/world/europe/tokhtakhounov-says-criminal-charges-are-just-a-misunderstanding.html ] The New York Times that he had been indicted in the gambling ring because FBI agents “misinterpreted his Russian slang” on their Trump Tower wiretaps, when he was merely placing $20,000 bets on soccer games.
Both the White House and the Trump Organization declined to respond to questions for this story. On the few occasions he has been questioned about his business entanglements with Russians, however, Trump has offered broad denials. “I tweeted out that I have no dealings with Russia,” he said [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-may-not-have-leverage-over-trump-russians-are-another-matter ] at a press conference in January, when asked if Russia has any “leverage” over him, financial or otherwise. “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all.” In May, when he was interviewed [ http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/pres-trump-s-extended-exclusive-interview-with-lester-holt-at-the-white-house-941854787582 ] by NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump seemed hard-pressed to think of a single connection he had with Russia. “I have had dealings over the years where I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian many years ago,” he said. “I had the Miss Universe pageant—which I owned for quite a while—I had it in Moscow a long time ago. But other than that, I have nothing to do with Russia.”
But even if Trump has no memory of the many deals that he and his business made with Russian investors, he certainly did not “stay away” from Russia. For decades, he and his organization have aggressively promoted his business there, seeking to entice investors and buyers for some of his most high-profile developments. Whether Trump knew it or not, Russian mobsters and corrupt oligarchs used his properties not only to launder vast sums of money from extortion, drugs, gambling, and racketeering, but even as a base of operations for their criminal activities. In the process, they propped up Trump’s business and enabled him to reinvent his image. Without the Russian mafia, it is fair to say, Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.
Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob’s “boss of bosses,” also declined to respond to questions from the New Republic. “My ideas are not important to anybody,” Mogilevich said in a statement provided by his attorney. “Whatever I know, I am a private person.” Mogilevich, the attorney added, “has nothing to do with President Trump. He doesn’t believe that anybody associated with him lives in Trump Tower. He has no ties to America or American citizens.”
Back in 1999, the year before Trump staged his first run for president, Mogilevich gave [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqfgpLP9fm8 (next below; with comments)]
a rare interview to the BBC. Living up to his reputation for cleverness, the mafia boss mostly joked and double-spoke his way around his criminal activities. (Q: “Why did you set up companies in the Channel Islands?” A: “The problem was that I didn’t know any other islands. When they taught us geography at school, I was sick that day.”) But when the exasperated interviewer asked, “Do you believe there is any Russian organized crime?” the “brainy don” turned half-serious.
“How can you say that there is a Russian mafia in America?” he demanded. “The word mafia, as far as I understand the word, means a criminal group that is connected with the political organs, the police and the administration. I don’t know of a single Russian in the U.S. Senate, a single Russian in the U.S. Congress, a single Russian in the U.S. government. Where are the connections with the Russians? How can there be a Russian mafia in America? Where are their connections?”
Two decades later, we finally have an answer to Mogilevich’s question.
Copyright 2017 © New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
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Trump to Brigitte Macron: 'you're in such great shape'
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by Washington Post [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHd62-u_v4DvJ8TCFtpi4GA / https://www.youtube.com/user/WashingtonPost , https://www.youtube.com/user/WashingtonPost/videos ]
President Trump praised French first lady Brigitte Macron’s physique July 13, during his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Trump Pulled a ‘Creepy Uncle’ Move on the French First Lady and Now the Whole World Has the Creeps
July 15, 2017
http://theladiesfinger.com/trump-french-first-lady/ [no comments yet]
Trump praised a woman’s body. A [female] foreign minister wondered ‘if she could say the same of him.’
[ https://twitter.com/Reebok/status/885959875393712128 (with {over 6,000} comments)]
July 16, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/16/trump-praised-a-womans-body-a-foreign-minister-wondered-if-she-could-say-the-same-of-him/ [with embedded video, and comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5wpa14ORW4 [with comments]
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President Trump Holds a Joint Press Conference with President Macron
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by The White House
Paris, France
Remarks by President Trump and President Macron of France in Joint Press Conference | July 13, 2017
Élysée Palace
Paris, France
July 13, 2017
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/07/13/remarks-president-trump-and-president-macron-france-joint-press [official transcript]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlHZuZizu1M [with comments] [also at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQP63GrN4ck (with comments)]
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Trump's never-ending handshake with Macron
Published on Jul 14, 2017 by CNN
Before President Trump left France he shared a 29-second handshake with French President Emmanuel Macron, the latest in a string of awkward moments between the two world leaders.
The Trump-Macron Handshake: A Play in Four Acts
How two leaders ruined a perfectly good gesture
Jul 14, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/trump-macron-handshake/533688/ [with embedded videos, and comments]
All the President’s Handshakes
Analyzing President Trump’s handshakes with world leaders has become something of a sport, so we had two professionals do it.
JULY 14, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/us/politics/president-donald-trump-handshakes.html [with embedded videos (including this YouTube), and comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DwijJfVbBg [with comments]
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Sessions releases questionnaire excerpt that omitted meetings with Russians
07/13/2017
The Justice Department released a portion of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' background check questionnaire Thursday, confirming that he did not report meetings with the Russian ambassador or any other foreign nationals when he was being vetted for a security clearance earlier this year.
Sessions' aides confirmed in May [ http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/24/sessions-russia-security-clearance-238796 ] that he had not listed two meetings with the Russians or hundreds of other meetings with foreign officials, but a liberal watchdog group filed a lawsuit for a copy of the relevant question and answer [ https://www.americanoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/20170713_AO_Sessions_SF86_Section20B6.pdf ] from Sessions' questionnaire, known as Standard Form 86 or more commonly, an SF-86.
[...]
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2017/07/13/jeff-session-doj-questionnaire-240501 [with comments]
AG Sessions, the Russian lawyer, and the money laundering case that went away
In this file photo taken on Tuesday, July 11, 2017, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to journalists in Moscow, Russia. A billionaire real estate mogul, his pop singer son, a music promoter, a property lawyer and Russia's prosecutor general are unlikely figures who surfaced in emails released by Donald Trump Jr. as his father's presidential campaign sought potentially damaging information in 2016 from Russia about his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
by Will Bunch
July 16, 2017 Updated July 16, 2017
Remember last week when I noted here that “follow the data [ http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/the-key-to-the-trump-russia-scandal-follow-the-data-20170713.html ]” is the modern version of the Watergate mantra “follow the money” — meaning that the key to collusion between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia may be learning how “fake news creators halfway around the globe [ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russian-trolls-hilary-clinton-fake-news-election-democrat-mark-warner-intelligence-committee-a7657641.html ] figured out exactly which voters in Wisconsin and Michigan to target with their Hillary-hating memes? Here’s the thing, though: Modern political corruption is a little bit like the upscale department store at your local mall: Cash is still accepted, too.
The broad outlines of the Trump-Russia scandal have emerged: The GOP presidential candidate and his minions wanted dirt on Hillary Clinton and help in depressing Democratic voter turnout [ http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/don-jr-and-the-email-chain-that-devoured-american-democracy-20170712.html ]. That help was provided in the form of hacked Democratic Party emails and the overcaffienated “fake news” from Russian content farms that flooded voters’ Facebook feeds. Russia wanted a new American president who would drop the sanctions imposed on their homeland for invading Crimea in 2014, among other policy favors. But was there another angle to the story — one that involves the almighty dollar?
It didn’t make a lot of news in May when the U.S. Department of Justice abruptly settled a case against a Russian firm, Prevezon Holdings, that stood accused of laundering ill-gotten gains through Manhattan real estate [ http://www.businessinsider.com/why-was-russian-money-laundering-case-dismissed-house-dems-2017-7 ]. Reports said the case, which was about to go to trial, was settled for $6 million — far less than expected — and that the Russian firm was not required to make any admission of guilt. Officials with Prevezon at the time said (echoing “The Godfather” without irony) that the offer from the Jeff Sessions-led Justice Department “was too good to refuse.”
At that moment, it seemingly meant nothing that one of the lawyers in the case — representing the family of Pyotr Katsyv, the former vice governor of the Moscow region, whose son, Denis owned Prevezon — was a virtually unknown Russian named Natalia Veselnitskaya. She said in May that the favorable deal her client was offered by Trump’s Justice Department was “almost an apology from the (U.S.) government [ http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/democrats-want-to-know-if-trump-quashed-a-russian-money-laundering-case-in-return-for-dirt-on-hillary-clinton/ ].”
Today, anyone who follows American politics knows who Veselnitskaya is: The woman whose June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as a former Russian counter-intelligence officer turned lobbyist, has become the biggest bombshell revelation in the quest to learn the extent of any Trump-Russia collusion in last year’s election.
Not surprisingly, some Democratic members of Congress now want to know if the Trump campaign’s dealings — or dealing, anyway — with the Russian lawyer had any connection with the Justice Department’s decision to settle the lawsuit on terms so seemingly favorable [ http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341695-democrats-want-to-know-why-doj-dismissed-money-laundering-case ] to a client of the woman who came to Trump Tower billed as “a Russian government lawyer” peddling dirt on Clinton. The 17 Democrats sent a letter to Trump’s attorney general Sessions, stating: “We write with some concern that the two events may be connected — and that the Department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts.” They want to know if Veselnitskaya had any role in the settlement talks, whether Sessions — who’d been a campaign adviser to Trump — knew of the earlier contact, whether any Trump administration officials had contacted the Justice Department about the case. and they also asked for documents explaining the abrupt decision to settle.
Originally, the case would have been tried by the office of then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was known as something of a pit bull on business corruption cases, including money laundering. It’s hard to imagine that Bharara — who’d initially been told he would stay on despite the change in administrations — would have signed off onto such a milquetoast settlement with the Russian schemers. But in March, Trump surprised legal observers by abruptly firing Bharara along with 45 other incumbent U.S. attorneys. (President Trump had tried to call Bharara the day before the firing, but the prosecutor refused to speak with him [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/politics/preet-bharara-us-attorney.html ].) The settlement with Prevezon came just weeks later.
Cases of alleged business dirty-dealing — involving money laundering and a complex tax fraud scheme — rarely capture the public’s imagination. But this matter seems to intersect with too many key signposts of the burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal to ignore. You may have heard that the main goal of the Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya and the spy-turned-lobbyist who accompanied her to Trump Tower was overturning the Magnitsky Act [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/14/the-magnitsky-act-explained/ ] — strict economic sanctions that the U.S. imposed on Vladimir Putin’s Russia three years ago. The law was named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow attorney who blew the whistle on what he said was a massive scheme involving Russian mobsters, shady businessmen and the highest levels of the Kremlin to defraud the government of taxes and launder the money in the U.S. and elsewhere. Russian authorities arrested Magnitsky — who turned up dead a year later, victim of an alleged beating and poor medical care [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/sergei-magnitsky-murder-114878 ]. One of the companies in the scheme that Magnitsky blew the whistle on was Prevezon Holdings.
It doesn’t help matters that Sessions — the nation’s highest-ranking law officer — has already disgraced his office with his rank dishonesty over his dealings with Russia. The former Alabama senator lied at his Senate confirmation hearing [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-spoke-twice-with-russian-ambassador-during-trumps-presidential-campaign-justice-officials-say/2017/03/01/77205eda-feac-11e6-99b4-9e613afeb09f_story.html ] and said he’d had no contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign; a short time later it was revealed that he’d met the then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak on at least two known occasions. Sessions’ over-the-top dishonesty is part of a broader mosaic of lies [ https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/07/12/trumpclips/BHWNkZjqDCwaSs07Cw58AL/story.html ] that have permeated Team Trump’s contacts with the Russians, and which make it impossible to believe these dealings were fully above-board. What’s more, Sessions — after the debacle of his Senate testimony — announced with great fanfare that he was recusing himself from the Russia investigation, but there’s no reason to believe that he recused himself from the Prevezon settlement, tainted now by the same scandal.
[...]
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/ag-sessions-the-russian-lawyer-and-the-money-laundering-case-that-went-away-20170717.html [with comments]
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Jeff Sessions Tells ‘Hate Group’ DOJ Will Issue Religious Freedom Guidance
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks in Atlanta on June 6.
Christopher Aluka Berry / Reuters
by Mary Emily O'Hara
Jul 13 2017, 6:46 pm ET
Right-wing news website The Federalist published on Thursday an exclusive transcript [ http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/13/heres-the-speech-jeff-sessions-delivered-to-christian-first-amendment-lawyers/ (in full next below)] of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — a conservative Christian law firm that was designated a "hate group" [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/law-firm-linked-anti-transgender-bathroom-bills-across-country-n741106 ] in 2016 by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Justice Department confirmed in an email to NBC News that the transcript was legitimate. ADF did not respond to multiple requests for comment delivered on Wednesday and Thursday.
In his off-camera, closed-door speech about religious freedom delivered Tuesday night, Sessions announced new federal guidance is on the way.
"Since he was elected, President Trump has been an unwavering defender of religious liberty," Sessions stated. "The president has also directed me to issue guidance on how to apply federal religious liberty protections. The department is finalizing this guidance, and I will soon issue it."
The Justice Department would not comment on the impending guidance.
"The guidance will also help agencies follow the Religious Freedom Restoration Act," Sessions continued in his prepared remarks. "Congress enacted RFRA so that, if the federal government imposes a burden on somebody’s religious practice, it had better have a compelling reason."
When the speech at Alliance Defending Freedom's Summit on Religious Liberty appeared on the Attorney General's public schedule [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-criticized-speaking-hate-group-n782356 ], it was cause for concern among LGBTQ advocacy groups and Democrats — many of whom issued statements questioning why Sessions would speak to what some call an anti-LGBTQ hate group due to its history of litigating against LGBTQ rights [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/law-firm-linked-anti-transgender-bathroom-bills-across-country-n741106 ].
But after reading the transcript and learning of the Justice Department's plans to create a new federal policy on protecting religious liberties and doubling down on enforcing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, advocates suggested Sessions was more interested in protecting the right to discriminate than the freedom of religion.
"Here he goes again. It appears [what] the Attorney General is saying is that he will only enforce a 'civil rights' law that is meant as an excuse to discriminate; but he won’t enforce longstanding, real civil rights laws like Title IX, Title IX and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act," Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in an email sent to NBC News.
JoDee Winterhof, senior vice president for policy and political affairs at the Human Rights Campaign, also assailed Sessions' speech and his promise of federal guidance on religious liberty protections.
"Sessions’ alarming comments proved what LGBTQ and civil rights leaders know to be true — that he cannot be trusted," Winterhof told NBC News via email. "A month ago, he vowed to protect transgender women from violent attacks and now we find him promoting license to discriminate laws. This is another predictable step for the anti-LGBTQ Trump-Pence Administration."
The Trump administration has promised several times to enact some form of increased religious liberty protections. During the campaign, Trump said he would sign the First Amendment Defense Act [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/first-amendment-defense-act-would-be-devastating-lgbtq-americans-n698416 ], a bill that would allow businesses to turn away LGBTQ people as well as unmarried couples and single mothers.
Before being confirmed as Attorney General, then-senator Sessions was a sponsor of the First Amendment Defense Act [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/first-amendment-defense-act-looms-over-sessions-confirmation-vote-n714226 ].
In May, President Trump signed an executive order on religious liberty [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-signs-religious-liberty-executive-order-allowing-broad-exemptions-n754786 ] that allows companies to reject the Affordable Care Act's mandate on birth control coverage. Trump's administration has been criticized by LGBTQ advocates for a series of actions ranging from erasing LGBTQ content from federal websites one day after the inauguration to the Department of Education's revocation of an Obama-era policy that increased transgender students' rights.
Sessions has also faced criticism from LGBTQ rights advocates. In a January interview, the mother of slain gay college student Matthew Shepard told NBC News [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/mother-matthew-shepard-speaks-out-against-sessions-confirmation-n714656 ] that Sessions fought against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Act when it was being debated in 2009. In a lengthy speech decrying the legislation designed to help victims, Sessions said that "gays and lesbians have not been denied access" to anything, and that hate crimes were "thought crimes."
In his senate career, Sessions displayed strong anti-LGBTQ leanings. According to a report issued by the Human Rights Campaign [ http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/mother-matthew-shepard-speaks-out-against-sessions-confirmation-n714656 ], then-senator Sessions argued in favor of anti-sodomy laws used to imprison gay men, opposed same-sex marriage, sought to terminate National Endowment for the Arts funding because it once went to black lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, opposed repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy keeping lesbian and gay service members in the closet, and tried to block federal funding for HIV-prevention programs if they appear to “promote sexual activity and behavior” among “homosexual men and women.”
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/jeff-sessions-tells-hate-group-doj-will-issue-religious-freedom-n782756
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Here’s The Speech Jeff Sessions Delivered To Christian First Amendment Lawyers
Jeff Sessions is the 84th Attorney General of the United States.
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By Jeff Sessions
July 13, 2017
Prepared remarks of the Attorney General to the Alliance Defending Freedom on July 11, 2017:
Thank you for that introduction. And thank you for the important work that you do every day to uphold and protect the right to religious liberty in this country. This is especially needed today.
While your clients vary from pastors to nuns to geologists, all of us benefit from your good work—because religious liberty and respect for religion have strengthened this country from the beginning. In fact, it was largely in order to enjoy and protect these rights that this country was settled and founded in the first place, as those in this room especially know.
Our concepts of religious freedom came to us through the development of the Western heritage of faith and reason. In America, Madison and Jefferson advanced those concepts. Their victory was to declare religious freedom to be a matter of conscience inherent in each individual, not as a matter of toleration granted from the top. I propose that in America our understanding of religious freedom can only be understood within that heritage.
Our Founders wisely recognized that religion is not an accident of history or a passing circumstance. It is at the core of the human experience, and as close to a universal phenomenon as any. Each one of us considers with awe the stars in the sky and at the moral code within our hearts. Even today, in a rapidly changing world, a majority of the American people tell Gallup that religion is “very important” in their lives.
With this insight into human nature, they took care to reserve a permanent space for freedom of religion in America. That space is the very first line of the Bill of Rights.
And not just that line. Twelve of the 13 colonies authored state constitutions that protected the free exercise of religion. Six of the original 13 states had established churches, but almost every state made accommodations for religious minorities like Quakers or Mennonites. They did not insist that all follow the same doctrines. Every state constitution at the time of our Founding—and now—mentions God.
Our first president, George Washington, called for a national day of prayer. And he wrote to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island that in America, “all possess alike liberty of conscience.”
In his farewell address, President Washington famously called religion the “indispensable support of political prosperity [and a] great pillar of human happiness.” He warned, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
And Thomas Jefferson did not mention on his tombstone that he had served as president. He named three accomplishments: that he had founded the University of Virginia, authored the Declaration of Independence, and authored the statute of religious freedom in Virginia.
This national commitment to religious freedom has continued throughout our history, and it has remained just as important to our prosperity and unity ever since. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited this country, he noted “in France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”
And of course it was faith that inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to march and strive to make this country stronger yet. His was a religious movement. The faith that truth would overcome. He said that we “must not seek to solve the problem” of segregation merely for political reasons, but “in the final analysis, we must get rid of segregation because it is sinful.” It undermined the promise, as he described it, that “each individual has certain basic rights that are neither derived from nor conferred by the state…they are gifts from the hands of the Almighty God.”
So our freedom as citizens has always been inextricably linked with our religious freedom as a people. It has protected both the freedom to worship and the freedom not to believe as well.
To an amazing degree, the value of religion is totally missed by many today. Our inside-the-beltway crowd has no idea how much good is being done in this country every day by our faith communities. They teach right behavior, they give purpose to life, and they support order, lawfulness, and personal discipline while comforting the sick, supporting families, and giving support to those in need. They are there at birth and death.
But the cultural climate has become less hospitable to people of faith and to religious belief. And in recent years, many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack. This feeling is understandable. Just last year, a Harvard Law professor publicly urged judges to “take aggressively liberal positions…The culture wars are over. They lost; we won…Taking a hard line is better than trying to accommodate the losers.”
A lot of people are concerned about what this changing cultural climate means for the future of religious liberty in this country. The challenges our nation faces today concerning our historic First Amendment right to the “free exercise” of our faith have become acute. I believe that this recent election was significantly impacted by this concern and that this motivated many voters. President Trump made a promise that was heard. In substance, he said he respected people of faith and he promised to protect them in the free exercise of their faith. This promise was well received.
How, then, should we deal with this matter? America has never thought itself to be a theocracy. Our founders, at least the most articulate of them, believed our government existed as a protector of religious rights of Americans that were essential to being a created human being.
The government did not exist to promote religious doctrine nor to take sides in religious disputes that had, as they well knew, caused wars and death in Europe. Nor was it the government’s role to immanetize the eschaton, as Bill Buckley reminded us. The government’s role was to provide the great secular structure that would protect the rights of all citizens to fulfill their duty to relate to God as their conscience dictated and to guarantee the citizen’s right to exercise that faith.
The government would not take sides, and would not get between God and man. Religious rights were natural rights, not subject to government infringement, as the Virginia Assembly once eloquently declared.
Any review of our nation’s policies must understand this powerful constraint on our government and recognize its soundness. Yet this understanding in no way can be held to contend that government should be hostile to people of faith and is obligated to deprive public life of all religious expression.
In all of this litigation and debate, this Department of Justice will never allow this secular government of ours to demand that sincere religious beliefs be abandoned. We will not require American citizens to give intellectual assent to doctrines that are contrary to their religious beliefs. And they must be allowed to exercise those beliefs as the First Amendment guarantees.
We will defend freedom of conscience resolutely. That is inalienable. That is our heritage.
Since he was elected, President Trump has been an unwavering defender of religious liberty. He has promised that under a Trump Administration, “the federal government will never, ever penalize any person for their protected religious beliefs.” And he is fulfilling that promise. First, President Trump appointed an outstanding Supreme Court justice with a track record of applying the law as written, Neil Gorsuch. I have confidence that he will be faithful to the full meaning of the First Amendment and protect the rights of all Americans.
The president has also directed me to issue guidance on how to apply federal religious liberty protections. The department is finalizing this guidance, and I will soon issue it.
The guidance will also help agencies follow the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Congress enacted RFRA so that, if the federal government imposes a burden on somebody’s religious practice, it had better have a compelling reason. That is a demanding standard, and it’s the law of the land. We will follow it just as faithfully as we follow every other federal law. If we’re going to ensure that religious liberty is adequately protected and our country remains free, then we must ensure that RFRA is followed.
Under this administration, religious Americans will be treated neither as an afterthought nor as a problem to be managed. The federal government will actively find ways to accommodate people of all faiths. The protections enshrined in the Constitution and our laws protect all Americans, including when we work together, speak in the public square, and when we interact with our government. We don’t waive our constitutional rights when we participate fully in public life and civic society.
This administration, and the upcoming guidance, will be animated by that same American view that has led us for 241 years: that every American has a right to believe, worship, and exercise their faith in the public square. It has served this country well, and it has made us not only one of the tolerant countries in the world, it has also helped make us the freeist and most generous. Thank you.
Copyright © 2017 The Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media,
http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/13/heres-the-speech-jeff-sessions-delivered-to-christian-first-amendment-lawyers/ [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3967329 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54833454 and preceding and following]
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Judge Tosses Jury’s Conviction Of Woman Who Laughed At Jeff Sessions, Orders New Trial
A D.C. judge tossed out the conviction of a woman arrested after laughing during Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing.
07/14/2017 Updated July 14, 2017
WASHINGTON - A D.C. judge has tossed out a jury’s conviction [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-laugh-congressional-hearing_us_590929bbe4b05c39768420ef ] of a protester who laughed during Attorney General Jeff Sessions [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/jeff-sessions/ ]’ Senate confirmation hearing, finding on Friday that the government had improperly argued during the trial that her laughter was enough to merit a guilty verdict. The judge ordered a new trial in the case, setting a court date for Sept. 1.
Desiree Fairooz, 61, who was associated with the group Code Pink, had been convicted of disorderly and disruptive conduct and demonstrating inside the Capitol. Fairooz was taken into custody [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/laughing-congressional-hearing-jeff-sessions-code-pink_us_59076a93e4b05c3976810a3a ] during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January after she laughed when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) claimed Sessions had a “clear and well-documented” record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” (The Senate rejected [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-attorney-general-jeff-sessions-racist-remarks_us_582cd73ae4b099512f80c0c2 ] Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship in the 1980s over concerns about his views on race.)
But Chief Judge Robert E. Morin of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia tossed out the guilty verdict on Friday because the government had argued that the laugh alone was enough to warrant the verdict.
Morin said it was “disconcerting” that the government made the case in closing arguments that the laughter in and of itself was sufficient.
“The court is concerned about the government’s theory,” Morin said. He said the laughter “would not be sufficient” to submit the case to the jury, and said the government hadn’t made clear before the trial that it intended to make that argument.
The rookie officer who seized Fairooz had never made an arrest [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/laughing-congressional-hearing-jeff-sessions-code-pink_us_59076a93e4b05c3976810a3a ] and had no experience securing congressional hearings. Nevertheless, prosecutors pressed forward, insisting that “laughter is enough [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-laughter_us_5908c55ee4b0bb2d08726a91 ]” to merit criminal charges of disorderly and disruptive conduct and demonstrating inside the Capitol. She was convicted in May.
Fairooz’s attorney had argued that she had the right to object to her arrest as she was being taken out of the room, and that a conviction based upon her conduct after the initial laugh could not stand. Attorney Sam Bogash asked the judge to toss out the jury verdict [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/laughing-jeff-sessions-desiree-fairooz_us_594c1a4de4b01cdedf020398 ]. The jury, Bogash wrote, “was not reasonable” in its evaluation of the evidence.
“Ms. Fairooz’s brief reflexive burst of noise, be it laughter or an audible gasp, clearly cannot sustain a conviction for either of the counts in the information,” Bogash wrote in a court filing. “So the only other basis for her conviction to anything are her statements after the U.S. Capitol Police arrested her for that laughing. Those statements merely expressed surprise at being arrested.”
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/protester-laughed-jeff-sessions-sentenced_us_5967de92e4b0d6341fe7a9e2 [with embedded video, and comments] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132907879 and preceding (and any future following)]
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Jeff Sessions used our research to claim that sanctuary cities have more crime. He’s wrong.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions waits before speaking to federal, state and local law enforcement officials about sanctuary cities and efforts to combat violent crime on July 12 in Las Vegas.
(John Locher/AP)
By Loren Collingwood and Benjamin Gonzalez-O'Brien
July 14, 2017
On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech [ https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-delivers-remarks-las-vegas-federal-state-and-local-law ] in Las Vegas on sanctuary cities and local law enforcement. He announced, “According to a recent study from the University of California, Riverside, cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t.” Almost certainly, the reference is to our study [ http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1078087417704974 ], which we first published here at the Monkey Cage in The Washington Post [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/03/sanctuary-cities-do-not-experience-an-increase-in-crime/ ] last October and later in the academic outlet Urban Affairs Review.
The attorney general’s summation of our study, however, is not true. In fact, our study suggests a different conclusion: Municipalities that chose to designate themselves as sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants experience crime rates no higher than they otherwise would. We state this clearly throughout our study.
How could our findings have been so misrepresented? Although we do not know for sure, it is possible that Sessions’s speechwriters at the Department of Justice based this inaccurate characterization on an article [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/30/crime-drops-in-phoenix-after-city-drops-sanctuary-city-status-former-cops-say.html ] published on Fox News or an article [ http://www.wnd.com/2017/04/data-in-sanctuary-cities-have-higher-crime-rates/ ] published on World Net Daily.
In the WND article, the author mischaracterized and repackaged our findings. She simply ignored the statistical uncertainty underlying our analyses — something loosely akin to ignoring the margin of error in polling. She then claimed that sanctuary cities had higher crime rates than non-sanctuary cities, ignoring the fact that these differences were not large enough to be statistically significant. This erroneous conclusion contributed to an increasingly popular but inaccurate narrative that sanctuary cities — and their immigrant populations — are dangerous.
In this particular analysis — summarized in the graph below — we matched each sanctuary city to a non-sanctuary city that was otherwise similar in its demographics and other factors associated with crime rates. This was our attempt to identify pairs of cities that are as similar as possible with the exception of sanctuary policy.
The vertical lines — known as “confidence intervals” — in the graph capture the statistical uncertainty. These confidence intervals were deleted in the WND article. Because the confidence intervals are relatively large compared with the difference in crime rates, we cannot conclude that the crime rates in sanctuary and non-sanctuary cities are significantly different from each other. Further analysis in our paper, which accounted for even more differences between the two city types, revealed the same finding.
In a third analysis, we compared crime rates in sanctuary cities pre- and post-passage of sanctuary city policies. This analysis, summarized in the graph below, also showed that sanctuary policies had no consistent effect on crime: Some cities saw increases, some saw no change and some saw decreases after becoming sanctuary cities.
In short, we find no evidence that crime is higher in cities that become sanctuaries. We hope that the attorney general will accurately state that finding in the future.
Loren Collingwood is an assistant professor of political science at University of California, Riverside, whose research interests include U.S. politics, political behavior, and race and ethnic politics.
Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien is a professor of political science at Highline College, whose research interests include American politics, immigration policy, racial and ethnic politics and American political development.
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/14/jeff-sessions-used-our-research-to-claim-that-sanctuary-cities-have-more-crime-hes-wrong/ [with comments]
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Full Show - Pelosi Anoints Herself Savior Of Democrats, Megyn Kelly’s Nose Dive Reaches Overdrive - 07/13/2017
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
Thursday, July 13th 2017[, with Jon Rappoport hosting the fourth hour]: DOJ Let Russian Lawyer In US - Obama's DOJ allowed the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr. into the country without a visa. Roger Stone will be in studio to discuss a lawsuit filed against him days before his testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee. Jack Posobiec and Bob Barr also join today's broadcast to cover the ongoing Russian witch-hunt and Trump's remarkable economic delivery.
Detroit Iraqi Christians hysterical as families rounded up
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by Fox News
Watch: Iraqi Christian (Chaldean) families hysterical and saying goodbye to family members who were rounded up to be sent to an ICE detention center in Ohio, awaiting deportation as the legal situation unfolds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kahA_ctuliU [with comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBAom59IlTo [with comments] [also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GESUbZ5nOs (additional text adapted from; with comments)]
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The True Evil of Russia’s Cyber War on America | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann | GQ
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by GQ
It was a terror attack. Donald Trump’s lack of concern is mind-boggling.
I was an FBI agent. Trump’s lack of concern about Russian hacking shocks me.
Is the president breaking his oath to protect and defend the country from foreign attacks?
By Asha Rangappa
June 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/06/10/i-was-an-fbi-agent-trumps-lack-of-concern-about-russian-hacking-shocks-me/ [with embedded video, and comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP7jiuWcMNk [with comments]
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George W. Bush, Bill Clinton Conversation on Leadership From the George W. Bush Presidential Center
Streamed live on Jul 13, 2017 by ABC News [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBi2mrWuNuyYy4gbM6fU18Q / https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCNews , https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCNews/videos ]
The former presidents lead discussion at graduation ceremony for presidential leadership scholars program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrMBoI6co2c [with comments]
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Infowars Nightly News LIVE - President Trump Commits To Fighting Child Sex Pedophiles
Streamed live on Jul 13, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFND-X76Jf0 [with comments]
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Peter W. Smith, GOP operative who sought Clinton's emails from Russian hackers, committed suicide, records show
July 13, 2017
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html [with embedded video]
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Rep. Swalwell: We will learn truth about Trump & Russia
All In with Chris Hayes
7/13/17
Congressman Eric Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, tells Chris Hayes that a more complete picture is beginning to emerge of the connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Duration: 5:21
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/rep-swalwell-we-will-learn-truth-about-trump-russia-996601411841
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Chris Hayes: Why Kellyanne Conway said 'yet'
All In with Chris Hayes
7/13/17
Everyone has been laughing about Kellyanne Conway's show and tell on Fox News. But did you catch exactly what she said there? Duration: 2:25
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-hayes-why-kellyanne-conway-said-yet-996603459964 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw0yjP7vksE [with comments]
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Donald Trump knows what 'a lot of people don’t know'
All In with Chris Hayes
7/13/17
President Donald Trump has often suggested 'a lot of people don't know' something that pretty much everyone knows. Duration: 1:48
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/donald-trump-knows-what-a-lot-of-people-don-t-know-996608067781
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Joy Reid: Trump can make Republicans accept anything
All In with Chris Hayes
7/13/17
Joy Reid and Lawrence Wright join Chris Hayes to discuss how the Republican Party has lowered the bar in the era of Trump. Duration: 9:23
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/joy-reid-trump-can-make-republicans-accept-anything-996613187795
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Trump lawyer e-mail meltdown raises questions of competence
The Rachel Maddow Show
7/13/17
Rachel Maddow looks at the oddly aggressive streak in Donald Trump's legal team and reports on an angry meltdown by the head of Trump's legal team, Marc Kasowitz, in which Kasowitz replied to a stranger's e-mailed criticism with curses and threats. Duration: 17:51
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-lawyer-e-mail-meltdown-raises-questions-of-competence-996730435530 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YNN04o0MPM [with comments]
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Russian 2016 online propaganda likely needed American guidance
The Rachel Maddow Show
7/13/17
Michael Carpenter, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Russia would have needed American help in implementing tailored online propaganda to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Duration: 5:34
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/russian-2016-online-propaganda-likely-needed-american-guidance-996851779548
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Trump role in publishing hacked material draws lawsuit
The Rachel Maddow Show
7/13/17
Walter Dellinger, former U.S. solicitor general, talks with Rachel Maddow about a lawsuit filed against Donald Trump for his role in the public sharing of materials hacked by Russians during the 2016 election. Duration: 7:03
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-role-in-publishing-hacked-material-draws-lawsuit-996875331601
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Lawrence: Trump's story on Russian lawyer meeting isn't adding up
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
7/13/17
New details suggest Trump may have known weeks ago about the meeting his son, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, contradicting his statements he only just found out about it. Nancy Soderberg and Jeremy Bash join Lawrence O'Donnell. Duration: 13:46
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-trump-s-story-on-russian-lawyer-meeting-isn-t-adding-up-996790339846 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxpcwB8aUd4 [with comments]
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Trump lawyer in threatening emails: 'Watch your back, b---h'
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
7/13/17
ProPublica reports Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz doesn't have a security clearance to handle classified info in the Russia case, and Lawrence O'Donnell says he'll never get one after sending profanity-laced email threats. Duration: 7:17
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/trump-lawyer-in-threatening-emails-watch-your-back-b-h-996792387910 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ICKQbMAH2k [with comments]
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Trump says 'health care is hard' as GOP bill flounders
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
7/13/17
Lawrence O'Donnell weighs in on Trump's sit-back-and-wait approach to passing major health care legislation. And Ezra Klein explains why he thinks the newest GOP bill "is terrible for anyone who is sick, has been sick, or will be sick." Duration: 4:30
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/trump-says-health-care-is-hard-as-gop-bill-flounders-996788291608
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Report: Kushner wants to go on offense over Trump Jr. meeting
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
As Pres. Trump defended his son's meeting with a Russian lawyer while visiting France, back home a new report says Kushner wants the White House to come out swinging. Our panel reacts. Duration: 7:46
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/report-kushner-wants-to-go-on-offense-over-trump-jr-meeting-996875331998
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Trump previously denied campaign had any contact with Russia
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
At his only solo news conference as president, Trump denied his campaign had any contact with Russia. But Donald Trump Jr's email thread about his Russian lawyer meeting shows that's not true. Duration: 2:35
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-has-previously-denied-campaign-had-any-contact-with-russia-996885059572 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGHWJiZMdOE [with comments]
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Veteran foreign journalist: Many Europeans think Trump's 'insane'
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
With Pres. Trump in France plagued by Russia probes & the scandal around his son's meeting with a Russian attorney, veteran foreign journalist Christopher Dickey assesses how Europe sees Trump. Duration: 1:23
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/veteran-foreign-journalist-many-europeans-think-trump-s-insane-996865603747 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fYoNRxfxgs [with comments]
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Fmr. Watergate prosecutor: There is proof Jared Kushner lied
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, says the fact Pres. Trump aide & son-in-law Jared Kushner changed his security form three times adding dozens of names shows he has lied. Duration: 8:08
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/fmr-watergate-prosecutor-there-is-proof-jared-kushner-lied-996902467969
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Trump on foreign nations: at home vs. abroad
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
7/13/17
On his own turf, Pres. Trump sounds pretty downtrodden about a lot of foreign nations and leaders. But when he heads overseas, he seems to change his tune quite a bit. Duration: 1:12
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/brian-williams/watch/trump-on-foreign-nations-at-home-vs-abroad-996906563820 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_jOzdAwUbU [with comments]
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Terrible Outbreak - The President Show
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by Comedy Central [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUsN5ZwHx2kILm84-jPDeXw / https://www.youtube.com/user/comedycentral , https://www.youtube.com/user/comedycentral/videos , https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD7nPL1U-R5o-p0I_6RGUR2MZus6O8cpX ]
The president urges everyone to remain calm in the face of an extremely aggressive virus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjStUJzYkYM [with comments]
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Executive Orders: A Little Less Transparency - The President Show - Comedy Central
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by Comedy Central
With his sweet baby boy by his side, the president signs a stack of executive orders -- including a health care bill for the ailing health care bill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7FihAeAkCA [with comments]
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The Translators - Interpreting Donald Trump: The Daily Show
Published on Jul 13, 2017 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Desi Lydic sits down with translators from around the world to get their take on the unique challenge of interpreting the words of President Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qL1un6NPZA [with comments]
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Trump Slot Machines: Hit A Truth To Win!
Published on Jul 14, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Here it is! The hottest item at the liquidation sale of Trump's bankrupted Taj Mahal casino auction.
[originally aired July 13, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjp6ZwQw8ZY [with comments]
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Trump Said More Than 'Bonjour' To France's First Lady'
Published on Jul 14, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Donald Trump is putting past presidents to shame when it comes to overseas faux pas.
[originally aired July 13, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfnZdfz8xeI [with comments]
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Stephen Recreates Kellyanne Conway's 'Fun With Words'
Published on Jul 14, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Kellyanne Conway went from White House advisor to Stephen's muse after she broke out some ridiculously nonsensical visual aids on Fox News.
[originally aired July 13, 2017]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAtClXJJ5pY [with comments]
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this is part 9 of a 10-part post which proceeds (point arising on the given) day by (point arising on the given) day from July 5, 2017 through July 14, 2017 -- the preceding part is the post to which this is a reply; the concluding part 10 is a reply to this post -- the following 'see also (linked in)' listing, updated for intervening posts along the way, is common to all 10 parts
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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