Donald Trump, Jr. meeting with Russian lawyer: unlawful?
AM Joy 7/15/17
Did Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer and others generate any indications of collusion, or conspiracy? Joy Reid's guests[, including Malcolm Nance,] debate. Duration: 14:22
Donald, Jr. meeting: Was it collusion? Legal experts weigh in
AM Joy 7/15/17
The legality of Donald Trump, Jr.’s statements surrounding a meeting with a Russian lawyer are debated by MSNBC analyst Paul Butler and former Bronx prosecutor Seema Iyer. Duration: 9:31
Trump, Jr. meeting with Russian lawyer alleged ‘treasonous’
AM Joy 7/15/17
Watch Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer and others receive expert analysis by former White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, Richard Painter, and more AM JOY guests. Duration: 12:06
Rep. Al Green filed articles of impeachment against Donald Trump this week, and joined in the growing calls to revoke Jared Kushner’s security clearance. Joy Reid and her panel discuss. Duration: 16:56
Phil Donahue calls Trump era ‘darkest political moment’
AM Joy 7/15/17
Talk show great Phil Donahue—who interviewed Donald Trump three times on his iconic show—shares his views on the president now versus then in this one-on-one with Joy Reid. Duration: 10:19
Curiously, that was more than the party itself reported spending in the same period for its entire operation — the national political organization’s expenses, salaries, printing outlays and other incidentals.
And in a broader sense, they underscore the dangers that lurk for foreigners who, tempted by potentially rich payoffs, cast their lot with politicians in countries that at best have different laws about money in politics, and at worst are, like Ukraine in those years, irredeemably corrupt.
Mr. Yanukovych was driven from office in the Maidan Revolution of 2014, after having stolen, according to the current Ukrainian government, at least $1 billion. In the years before his fall, Mr. Manafort took lavish payments to burnish the image of Mr. Yanukovych and the Party of Regions in Washington, even as the party acknowledged only very modest spending.
Handwritten ledgers that surfaced last year indicated that the party had actually spent about $2 billion over the past decade or so, much or most of it illegally. Some outlays like payments to an election official possibly amounted to criminal bribery.
Mr. Manafort has not been charged with breaking any laws regarding the reporting of income derived from his efforts on behalf of the party. The disclosures cap lengthy negotiations between Mr. Manafort and officials at the Justice Department, which monitors the activities of Americans who work on behalf of foreign political parties and governments.
In a statement, Mr. Manafort’s spokesman, Jason Maloni, suggested that the Party of Regions was accountable for the contradiction between the two disclosures.
“Any questions about the reporting obligations of the Party of Regions should be directed to those within the party responsible for such reporting,” he said in a statement. Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine “was widely known and the firm was paid only for the work it performed. In fact, just last month Ukraine officials indicated that there is no proof of illicit payments.”
Though documents discovered after the 2014 revolution show the party’s coffers were padded with donations from Ukraine’s ultrawealthy steel and natural gas tycoons, it tried to keep up a populist image and declared only a modest, even minuscule, annual budget.
“It means either Manafort is lying, or the Party of Regions was lying,” Serhiy Leshchenko, an investigative journalist and a member of Parliament who has been critical of Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine, said in an interview.
A Ukrainian investigation of this discrepancy is not likely. The Party of Regions is now disbanded, and prosecutors are looking into far more serious crimes than campaign finance filing errors.
Moreover, at the time the party made its declarations, filing a false campaign finance report was considered an administrative offense akin to a parking ticket and punishable by no more than a fine of a few hundred dollars, said Ostap Kuchma, a party finance analyst at the anticorruption group Chesno.
Mr. Manafort’s reports to the Justice Department do not cover the entire period he worked in Ukraine. Last summer, The New York Times reported [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html ] that the party’s handwritten ledgers showed $12.7 million in undisclosed payments designated for Mr. Manafort’s firm from 2007 to 2012.
Anticorruption officials in Ukraine assert that the payments were part of an illegal off-the-books system. Mr. Manafort, who resigned from his campaign post shortly after the article appeared, has denied receiving any cash, and state prosecutors in Ukraine have not accused him of wrongdoing.
Ukraine’s chief anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, reiterated that assessment last month, telling Ukrainian television that ledger entries provided no proof of Mr. Manafort’s having receiving illegal payments.
But the investigation into the accounting book, including the entries mentioning Mr. Manafort, is still open, and recently shifted from one branch of the prosecutor’s office to another, Serhiy Gorbatyuk, the prosecutor in charge of the case, said in an interview.
“The Party of Regions was spending a lot of cash, to bribe voters and for illegal advertising,” Daria M. Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, said in an interview. “Manafort took the money to whitewash its reputation in the West.”
New York Seeks Bank Records of Former Trump Associate Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort is among the Trump associates at the center of federal and congressional investigations into Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election. Photo: Matt Rourke/Associated Press
Loans issued by a bank run by former campaign adviser Steve Calk are focus of subpoena
The subpoena by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to the Federal Savings Bank, a small Chicago bank run by Steve Calk, sought information on loans the bank issued in November and January to Mr. Manafort and his wife, the person said. The loans were secured by two properties in New York and a condominium in Virginia, real-estate records show.
Asked about the subpoena Monday, Mr. Calk said he had no comment.
Russia has denied meddling in the election, and Mr. Trump and his representatives have said there was no collaboration. Mr. Manafort hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing and has said any suggestion that he coordinated with Russia is unfounded.
The Wall Street Journal reported in May [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-trump-adviser-paul-manaforts-bank-records-sought-in-probe-1494637248 ] that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had begun examining real-estate transactions by Mr. Manafort, who has spent and borrowed tens of millions of dollars in connection with property across the U.S. over the past decade. Investigators at both offices are examining the transactions for indications of money-laundering and fraud, people familiar with the matters have said.
The Journal reported that at the time of the loans from Federal Savings Bank, Mr. Manafort was at risk of losing a Brooklyn, N.Y., townhouse and his family’s investments in California properties being developed by his son-in-law, real-estate and court records show.
The bank’s loans to Mr. Manafort equaled almost 24% of the bank’s reported $67 million of equity capital, according to a federal report. Around the time they were issued, Mr. Calk had expressed interest in becoming Mr. Trump’s Army Secretary, the Journal previously reported, citing three people briefed on the Army interactions.
A veteran whose bank caters to former members of the military, Mr. Calk didn’t get the job, and previously declined to comment on it.
Mr. Calk has previously said that the loans to Mr. Manafort were standard with more than sufficient collateral.
Mr. Manafort’s Brooklyn townhouse was in foreclosure after a loan against the property, which was used for the son-in-law’s project elsewhere, went into default, a lawyer working with Mr. Manafort has said. Loans for the son-in-law’s California projects also went into default last year, jeopardizing $4.2 million that Mr. Manafort, his wife and daughter had put into those projects, real-estate and bankruptcy court records show.
As part of its probe into Mr. Manafort, the New York attorney general’s office in recent weeks sought information about investment deals involving his son-in-law in New York, a person familiar with the matter said. The son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai, was accused in a civil suit in New York in November of defrauding a photographer of a $2.9 million investment. Mr. Yohai has denied any wrongdoing in a court filing, calling the allegations “extremely derogatory.” That suit is pending.
Mr. Yohai couldn't be reached for comment.
A Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in the Los Angeles area requested information on the same deals involving Mr. Yohai, according to the person familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether that request related to the federal investigation of Mr. Manafort or an inquiry into the son-in-law.
Manafort Was in Debt to Pro-Russia Interests, Cyprus Records Show
Paul J. Manafort at Trump Tower in Manhattan last August, days before he resigned as Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager. Carlo Allegri/Reuters
By MIKE McINTIRE JULY 19, 2017
Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016.
The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort’s business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions. The Cyprus documents obtained by The New York Times include audited financial statements for the companies, which were part of a complex web of more than a dozen entities that transferred millions of dollars among them in the form of loans, payments and fees.
President Vladimir V. Putin with the Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska in 2013. In a 2015 court complaint, Mr. Deripaska claimed that Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business. Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
The records, which include details for numerous loans, were certified as accurate by an accounting firm as of December 2015, several months before Mr. Manafort joined the Trump campaign, and were filed with Cyprus government authorities in 2016. The notion of indebtedness on the part of Mr. Manafort also aligns with assertions made in a court complaint filed in Virginia in 2015 by the Russian oligarch [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/us/politics/oleg-deripaska-paul-manafort.html ], Oleg V. Deripaska, who claimed Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business.
After The Times shared some of the documents with representatives of Mr. Manafort, a spokesman, Jason Maloni, did not address whether the debts might have existed at one time. But he maintained that the Cyprus records were “stale and do not purport to reflect any current financial arrangements.”
A financial statement for a Cyprus shell company, Lucicle Consultants, showing a $9.9 million loan to a Delaware company connected to Mr. Manafort.
“Manafort is not indebted to Mr. Deripaska or the Party of Regions, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign,” Mr. Maloni said. “The broader point, which Mr. Manafort has maintained from the beginning, is that he did not collude with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.” (Mr. Manafort resigned as campaign manager last August amid questions about his past work
Still, the Cyprus documents offer the most detailed view yet into the murky financial world inhabited by Mr. Manafort in the years before he joined the Trump campaign.
Mr. Manafort’s political consulting operation was run out of a first-floor office on Sofiivska Street in Kiev, Ukraine. Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times
Mr. Manafort is one of several former Trump associates known to be the focus of inquiries into Russian meddling in the presidential election. He was among those in attendance at a meeting in June 2016 [ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/18/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-meeting.html ] at which Donald Trump Jr. was told they would receive compromising information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.
Mr. Manafort’s Cyprus-related business activities are under scrutiny by investigators looking into his finances during and after his years as a consultant to the Party of Regions in Ukraine. He recently filed a long-overdue report with the Justice Department disclosing his lobbying efforts in Ukraine through early 2014, when his main client, President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, was ousted in a popular uprising and fled to Russia.
LOAV Advisers, a Cyprus company linked to Mr. Manafort, reported a $7.8 million loan from an entity associated with Mr. Deripaska.
The Cyprus documents detail transactions that occurred in 2012 and 2013, during the peak of Mr. Manafort’s decade-long tenure as a political consultant and investor in the former Soviet republic, where his past work remains a source of controversy. Last year, his name surfaced in a handwritten ledger showing $12.7 million [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html ] designated for him by the Party of Regions, and documents recovered from his former office in Kiev suggest some of that money was routed through offshore shell companies and disguised as payment for computer hardware.
The byzantine nature of the transactions reflected in the Cyprus records obscures the reasons that money flowed among the various parties, and it is possible they were characterized as loans for another purpose, like avoiding taxes that would otherwise be owed on income or equity investments.
Ivan Fursin, a Party of Regions lawmaker, appears to have ties to Lucicle Consultants. UNIAN (Ukrainian Independent News and Information Agency)
One of the Manafort-related debts listed in the Cyprus records, totaling $7.8 million, was owed to Oguster Management Limited, a company in the British Virgin Islands connected to Mr. Deripaska. The debtor was a Cyprus company, LOAV Advisers, that the Deripaska court complaint says was set up by Mr. Manafort to make investments with Mr. Deripaska, a billionaire close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The loan is unsecured, bears 2 percent interest and has “no specified repayment date,” according to a financial statement for LOAV.
The other debt, for $9.9 million, was owed to Lucicle Consultants, a Cyprus company that appears to have ties to a Party of Regions member of Parliament, Ivan Fursin. Lucicle, whose precise ownership is unclear, is linked to Mr. Fursin through another offshore entity, Mistaro Ventures, which is registered in St. Kitts and Nevis and listed on a government financial disclosure form that Mr. Fursin filed in Ukraine. Mistaro transferred millions to Lucicle in February 2012 shortly before Lucicle made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C., a Delaware company that Mr. Manafort previously used to buy real estate in New York. The loan to Jesand was unsecured, with a 3.5 percent interest rate, and payable on demand.
There is no indication from the financial statements that the loans had been repaid as of the time they were filed in December 2015. The statements contain a note saying that as of January 2014, the debts and assets for Lucicle and LOAV had been assigned to “a related party,” which is not identified. The records define related parties as entities that are under common control, suggesting that the assignment did not affect the ultimate debtors and creditors. The statements also said there had been no other changes after the financial reporting period covered by them, which was for the 2013 calendar year.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska declined to comment. Mr. Deripaska appears to have stopped pursuing his court action against Mr. Manafort and his former investment partners, Rick Gates and Rick Davis, in late 2015. In addition to the $19 million he said he had invested with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Deripaska claimed he paid Mr. Manafort an additional $7.3 million in management fees.
Mr. Manafort has previously said any payments he received for his Ukraine activities were aboveboard and made via wire transfers to an American bank. The Cyprus records suggest that at least some transactions originated with shell companies in tax havens like the Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands, and passed through financial institutions on Cyprus, including Hellenic Bank and Cyprus Popular Bank.
Mr. Manafort’s name does not show up in the Cyprus records. However, hints of his dealings in Ukraine appear throughout.
A 23-page financial statement for a Cyprus shell, Black Sea View Limited, lists transactions that include one with Pericles Capital Partners. Both Black Sea View and Pericles Capital are identified in court papers filed by Mr. Deripaska in the Cayman Islands as part of the corporate structure that Mr. Manafort put together to invest in a Ukrainian telecommunications business, Black Sea Cable. The same statement also reports what are described as $9.2 million in loans received in 2012 from four other entities, including one controlled by two Seychelles companies, Intrahold A.G. and Monohold A.G., which Ukrainian authorities have asserted were involved in the looting of public assets by allies of the Yanukovych government. The Black Sea Cable business was controlled at one point by Monohold and Intrahold.
Similarly, Manafort-connected entities appear in the financial records for Lucicle Consultants, the Cyprus shell that received financing from a company associated with Mr. Fursin, the Party of Regions politician in Ukraine. Mr. Fursin did not respond to a request for comment. Lucicle received money from Black Sea View and PEM Advisers Limited, another firm identified in court papers as controlled by Mr. Manafort. It also made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C.
Jesand appears to be a conflation of Jessica and Andrea, the names of Mr. Manafort’s two daughters. In hacked text messages belonging to Andrea Manafort that were posted last year on a website used by Ukrainian hackers, Jesand is mentioned in the context of financial dealings involving the Manaforts. Jesand was used by Mr. Manafort and his daughter Andrea in 2007 to buy a Manhattan condominium for $2.5 million.
The condo was one of several expensive pieces of real estate that Mr. Manafort bought, often with cash, during and after his time in Ukraine. He also invested millions with his son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/us/politics/paul-manafort-jeffrey-yohai.html ], who set up a business to buy and redevelop luxury properties in the Los Angeles area. The business failed amid accusations of fraud by another former investor, who claimed Mr. Yohai had exploited his connection to Mr. Manafort to raise funds.
Last year, while trying to salvage his investments with Mr. Yohai, Mr. Manafort embarked on a borrowing spree in the United States, obtaining mortgages totaling more than $20 million on properties controlled by him and his wife. The F.B.I. and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating some of Mr. Manafort’s real estate dealings, including the loans he obtained last year.
Special Counsel Investigating Possible Money Laundering by Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s onetime campaign manager, is being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for possible money laundering. Photo: carlo allegri/Reuters
Probe by Mueller into former Trump campaign manager is part of examination of Russian meddling in election
By Erica Orden July 20, 2017 5:52 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON—Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating possible money laundering by Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, as part of his criminal investigation into what U.S. intelligence agencies say was a Kremlin-backed campaign to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The inquiry into the issue by Mr. Mueller, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and his team began several weeks ago, this person said. A spokesman for Mr. Manafort, Jason Maloni, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Mr. Mueller.
Mr. Mueller’s investigation is focusing on Russian meddling as well as whether any members of the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow. Mr. Trump has denied any collusion and described investigations into the issue a “witch hunt.” Russia has denied meddling.
The Senate and House intelligence committees also are probing possible money laundering by Mr. Manafort, according to people with knowledge of those investigations.
The Senate committee also has received reports from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which tracks illicit money flows, to learn if any of Mr. Trump’s businesses may have financial ties to Russian interests, these people said. Mr. Trump has said he has no such ties.
Mr. Manafort, a Republican political consultant, spent years working for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine. He served as Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign manager for roughly three months in 2016 before resigning.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. also are investigating Mr. Manafort’s real-estate transactions [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-trump-adviser-paul-manaforts-bank-records-sought-in-probe-1494637248 ], The Wall Street Journal has reported, with both offices examining his dealings for possible money-laundering and fraud. Messrs. Schneiderman and Vance are Democrats.
Through his spokesman, Mr. Manafort has said his “personal investments in real estate are all ordinary business transactions.”
In April, before Mr. Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, the Justice Department requested Mr. Manafort’s banking records as part of the Russia probe that is now being led by Mr. Mueller, the Journal reported.
Mr. Manafort and two other top Trump campaign aides—Donald Trump Jr. and the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner —are expected to speak with Senate committees next week as part of their inquiries.
Shane Harris and Aruna Viswanatha contributed to this article.
Appeared in the July 21, 2017, print edition as 'Mueller Probes Manafort Finances.'
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