And it sounds like Trump’s gearing up to fire Mueller, possibly very soon.
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team probes deeper into potential collusion between Trump officials and representatives of the Russian government, investigators are taking a closer look at political contributions made by U.S. citizens with close ties to Russia.
Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.
An example is Len Blavatnik, a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik’s family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.
Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik’s campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.
In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik’s political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.
In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund.
Intrater had no significant history of political contributions prior to the 2016 elections. But in January 2017 he contributed $250,000 to Trump’s Inaugural Committee. His six-figure gift bought him special access to a dinner billed as “an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees,” according to a brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.
Alexander Shustorovich, chief executive of IMG Artists, attempted to give the Republican Party $250,000 in 2000 to support the George W. Bush presidential campaign, but his money was rejected because of his ties to the Russian government, according to Quartz. So why didn’t the Trump team reject Shustorovich’s $1 million check to Trump’s Inaugural Committee?
Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. Redacted CIA documents released in 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act said “TNK president Kukes said that he bribed local officials.” The CIA confirmed the authenticity of the reports to The Guardian newspaper but would not comment further. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund. He had no significant donor history before last year’s election.
In total, Blavatnik, Intrater, Shustorovich and Kukes made $10.4 million in political contributions from the start of the 2015-16 election cycle through September 2017, and 99 percent of their contributions went to Republicans.
McConnell surely knew as a participant in high level intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, McConnell’s PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik’s AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik’s AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after former FBI Director James Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia’s interference in the election.
Edit: sorry to paste so much of the article, but this looks pretty damning. I imagine this is of interest to Mueller and his team. (Citizens United…the gift that keeps on giving.)
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He cant fire him…not gonna happen. Doesnt he need special approval or have to fire some other dude first? Plus firing 2 FBI directors is like admitting it happened
Trump can fire Rosenstein directly (he appointed him), then install someone in his place who can get rid of Mueller. Not sure if McCabe would need to go first (according to Trey Gowdy, McCabe might be fired this week).
Yes, it would clearly look like (and be) obstruction of justice. So the GOP’s big push right now to say Mueller is compromised could be because he’s gearing up to get rid of Mueller or just to discredit him. This whole Deep State bullshit is ridiculous since it’s Republicans as far as the eye can see (Mueller, Rosenstein, Comey, House/Senate committees, etc.)
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Its a bunch of crap Meuller was a Bush guy wasnt he? Rosenstein another Jew bites the dust in Trump land
Remember the Republican establishment hates this guy more than the Dems do. He took over their party with nothing but bombast. He built his run against the establishment and never misses a chance to dump on congressional reps or former Rep candidates when it suites him.
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Really?
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You couldn’t tell by the way they were bowing down and kissing his ring yesterday. They have no shame, lmfao!
During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.
Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.
The FBI opened their Russia investigation in July 2016. Christopher Steele (of the “Steele Dossier”), didn’t share his findings with the FBI until August. So it wasn’t the dossier that kicked off the Trump/Russia investigation; it was the drunken ramblings of a Trump campaign associate.
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Serious question. I can’t keep up with who is and who isn’t in the Trump “Fake News” orbit.
Where is the NYTimes?
Didn’t Trump just do an interview with them?
Heh…yes, they’re fake AF if he doesn’t like what they have to say (then again, he ripped into Fox many times as a primary candidate). And they’ve (NYT) taken flak for being too “easy” on Trump for that interview. I guess the reporter was just hanging out on the 19th (right) and Trump was in a talkative mood.
It’s all Fake news only real news is DJT twitter feed and unbiased Russian media. Other then that it is a big deep space conspiracy…uh I mean deep state conspiracy. Seriously it’s all there in Hillary’s e-mails don’t be fooled. Pull all your teeth out they talk to you through your fillings
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.
Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.
We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.
The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.
We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.
We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.
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"Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer purportedly offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton “treasonous,” according to a new book obtained by The Guardian.
The book, “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff, is based on hundreds of interviews, including ones with President Donald Trump and his inner circle. According to the Guardian, Bannon told Wolff that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia is centered on money laundering.
Referring to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Bannon reportedly told Wolff: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” Bannon continued, according to the Guardian. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
The White House declined to comment Wednesday about Bannon’s reported assertion."
And by way of a reminder:
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Trump is not spared. Wolff writes that Thomas Barrack Jr, a billionaire who is one of the president’s oldest associates, allegedly told a friend: “He’s not only crazy, he’s stupid.”
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Correct me on what the correct saying is…but it goes something like…
“This is what you get when you sleep with the Devil…” (or something like that).
Trump is now saying PUBLICLY, that “Bannon lost his mind when he lost his job…”
Let’s see how this all turns out. This isn’t the Republican Primary, Hillary Clinton or Kim Jung Un that Trump is picking a fight with…its “His Boy”…his “Chief Strategist”…
More importantly, this is the alt right’s boy. I can feeeeeeeel that base a crumblin.
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It will get interesting if Trump starts calling Breitbart fake news.