Experts Uncover $500k Gift From Russia To Trump

[L. Coyote]

Experts Just Uncovered A $500k Gift From Russia To Trump
Benjamin Locke April 27, 2017

A surprising $500,000 donation by the Venezuelan state oil company Citgo Petroleum to Trump’s inauguration in January is now being linked to Russia, through its state-owned oil company Rosneft.

It was a surprise because Venezuela is run by a dictator who is a sworn enemy of the United States, and Citgo had never before made a donation to a U.S. presidential inauguration. It came at a time people in Venezuela are starving and there have been riots over the disastrous economy and ‘the authoritarian regime’s brutality.

The size of the donation was also unusual, as it was larger than what was donated by any American oil company or even retail giant Walmart.

Here is what makes this whole question of Russian influence credible: To make a pending bond payment, Citgo mortgaged 49 percent of its equity to Rosneft, an oil company controlled by Putin’s Russia, that is currently under sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department. Rosneft is run by Igor Sechin, who is very close to Russian President Putin.

The oil company under Sechin has been used in recent years as a way for Russia to exercise its geopolitical influence.

................

[panader0]

1. Rosneft will soon own Citgo outright.

Please media, (except Rachel) start covering this stuff.
Thanks for your posts.

[ashling]

24. Sounds plausible

They already own the GOP

[L. Coyote]

28. Giving Putin control of important oil pipelines in the USA.

Putin will have his hand on the spigot of the US economy.

CBS March 9, 2017, How Russian oil giant Rosneft could claim U.S. oil

EcoWatch Putin's Ties to the Keystone XL Pipeline

Link to tweet

[riversedge]

2. Link in story lead to Miami New Times..story about this from April 20....

I am not familiar with publication. This do not mention Rosneft.


http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/nicolas-maduros-regime-gave-donald-trump-500000-for-inauguration-as-venezuela-starves-9290672


As Venezuela Starves, Maduro's Regime Gave Trump $500K for Inauguration Party

Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 8:54 a.m.
By Tim Elfrink




Venezuela's dire situation needs no embellishment: Millions are starving. There's hardly any food, no gas, and little medicine. Toilet paper has been scarce for so long that Caracas' airport bathrooms don't even pretend they have any. The dire situation has snowballed into massive protests against President Nicolás Maduro's authoritarian regime, including yesterday's "Mother of All Protests," which brought out hundreds of thousands and left at least three dead.

Amid all of the misery and chaos, $500,000 could go an awfully long way. Think of how many Caracas mothers could feed their families for a month with just a fraction of that sum.

Instead, newly filed federal campaign records show, Maduro's regime gave half a million bucks to Donald Trump to help him throw a party in Washington, D.C. Through the state-owned Citgo Petroleum, Maduro's government dropped that cash to Trump's inaugural committee: one of the largest corporate donations listed on the newly filed federal disclosures.

If it seems odd that a self-branded socialist revolutionary who blames most of his ills on evil American plots would give so much cash to the new U.S. president, it shouldn't. Maduro, though talking tough domestically, has worked hard not to overly antagonize Trump. ...............

[pnwmom]

6. And here is an article from Money about Citgo's money infusion from Russia.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/10/news/economy/russia-us-oil-company-citgo/

So Russia gives money to Venezuela's Citgo -- and then Venezuela/Citgo (a US adversary) give money to DT.

[nikibatts]

3. Sure glad he didn't have a private server and personal e-mails.

[RKP5637]

20. Phew, so glad we were saved from that horrible fate! n/t

[malaise]

4. Wasn't there another generous donation from an empty lot in

New Jersey ($400,000)?

[pnwmom]

8. They claim they have identified an actual woman who made the donation, an Isabel Tonelli (I think)

whose husband's first name is John -- hence the paperwork error. (There is no Isabel John.)

The empty lot was a lot owned by the bank from which she wired the payment.

Very weird.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

14. Devious. Skulduggery. Conniving. Maybe criminal fraud. What do Isabel & John Tonelli have to gain?

Or are they a front for some other entity?

[L. Coyote]

9. The ongoing crowd source investigation of the inauguration donations is turning up a lot of scandal.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Follow Christina Wilkie? to get up to date.

Link to tweet

[BumRushDaShow]

5. What's even more interesting

is that Venezuela just announced that it is pulling out of the OAS due to the bad bad U.S.!

[triron]

7. Sent this to Rachel.

[sarah FAILIN]

10. I think she's already covered it

Might be wrong, but don't think so.

[L. Coyote]

11. Excess Donald Trump Inauguration Cash, $107 million, Pairs With Donor Access - Rachel Maddow

[Leith]

21. She's Reporting on It NOW!

An update.

Whoo HOO!

[L. Coyote]

23. VIDEO: Trump refuses to provide Mike Flynn docs to House Russia Investigation

[BigmanPigman]

25. Huge crowd at a very expensive inaugeration, HUGE!

[C Moon]

12. That is a lot of frigging money!

[Achilleaze]

13. Sleazy republican family values

[Bernardo de La Paz]

15. What happens to the excess Inaugurinal cash?

[Initech]

16. Venezuela is the GOP's wet dream.

State run oil with all the profits laundered to the 1% with no accountability or taxes, no healthcare or food for the poor or middle class, big wealthy business interests running the show behind the scenes, and a brutal dictator willing to pull off their every evil deed.

[L. Coyote]

17. Trump inaugural committee admits there were errors in its donor list

After crowdsourced investigation, Trump inaugural committee admits there were errors in its donor list

President Trump's inaugural committee has acknowledged that it made errors in a list of donors that it submitted to the Federal Election Commission, according to a report published Tuesday by HuffPost.

That admission followed an unusual crowdsourced reporting project, in which HuffPost reporter Christina Wilkie asked the public to examine more than 1,500 listings of individual donors and their addresses. That effort — along with others from other news organizations — seemed to turn up more than 300 examples where the data seemed not to match reality.

In one case, flagged by the Intercept, a $25,000 donation seemed to be mistakenly attributed to NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, one of the subjects of the movie “Hidden Figures.” In another, spotted by Wilkie's volunteers, an address came from a nonexistent person listed as living in a vacant lot in New Jersey.

Inaugural committee spokesman Alex Stroman told HuffPost that both of those listings were in error. He said the committee would update its report. ....

The Trump inaugural committee is a nonprofit entity, legally separate from the Republican National Committee and Trump's presidential campaign. It was required to report its donors to the government — but not required to report what it spent its money on. The data filed with the FEC last week showed that the inaugural committee raised $107 million, a record sum.

The inaugural committee did not give information about its expenditures. It promised to give any leftover money to charity, but provided no details about what would be donated or when..........

[kentuck]

18. He is part of the Russian Mafia that specializes in money laundering.

They are experts at it.

[Amaryllis]

19. "A surprising $500,000 donation"...we are all surprised, yes? And shocked.

[YoungDemCA]

22. Making America Great Again...by selling it off to the highest bidder.

Who are, in this case, Vladimir Putin and his fellow gangster oligarchs.

K&R.

[ProfessorPlum]

26. So do we make fun of Trump for selling out America

For a measly $500,000, thus prompting him to brag that he actually got millions more for selling us out?

[Hekate]

27. That actually sounds like a viable plan.Dangle that bait in front of Trumpty Dumpty & watch him bite

[ProfessorPlum]

29. "Mr. Trump, are you really such a loser

That it only took half a million for you to commit treason?"

[annabanana]

32. +1 .. . .n/t

[xor]

35. I know, right? You'd think someone like Trump would be able to negotiate way more

money to sellout the US and the American people. I guess he isn't as good of a negotiator as he claims. What a loooooooooooooooser. If he had any skill then he could have received orders of magnitude more. He's a horrible businessman and negotiator.

[ProfessorPlum]

36. I like the direction you are going . . .

[SCVDem]

30. Let's build a Trump jail

Since everyone is crooked, we're going to need a bigger prison!

Of course we could rename Gitmo!

[Lil Missy]

31. Move along, nothing to see here. We're too busy with Obama's paid speeches and Clinton Foundation

[ailsagirl]

33. I like to think we're inching closer to expulsion of that clod

Last edited Fri Apr 28, 2017, 06:16 PM - Edit history (1)

[neohippie]

34. There was also a million dollar donation from a Russian Oligarch

https://qz.com/963801/trumps-inauguration-committee-took-1-mln-from-alexander-shustorovich-a-russian-american-whose-money-the-republicans-rejected/

Trump’s inaugural committee took $1 million from a Russian-American whose money the GOP rejected

In 2000, Alexander Shustorovich, a Russian-American millionaire, tried to give $250,000 to the Republican party in support of then-Texas governor George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. The check bounced due to a clerical error, and once party officials looked into Shustorovich, they realized this was someone whose name they didn’t want (paywall) attached to them. They told him to keep his money.
Not long before, a potential uranium deal between Russia and the US had fallen through, after the Clinton administration sounded warning notes (paywall) over Shustorovich’s connections to the Russian government. (His company, Pleiades Group, would have been a middleman in the deal.) However, in 2017, the Trump Inaugural Committee decided to take $1 million from Shustorovich, according to a Federal Election Commission filing (pdf).
In 2012, Shustorovich, who was born in Moscow and moved to the US as a child, implied in an interview with Wired that he had good relations with Russian president Vladimir Putin and prime minister Dmitri Medvedev. He had earlier been engaged to Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of Putin’s earliest political benefactor. (Long rumored to be the Russian president’s goddaughter, Sobchak later turned against him.)
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why Shustorovich was deemed a suitable donor after the Republican party had previously said no to him.
The committee also took $1 million from Access Industries, which is owned by oligarch Len Blavatnik, an American citizen who was born in the USSR and made his fortune investing in commodities in post-Soviet Russia. In 2015, Oxford University came under heavy pressure to reject tens of millions of pounds donated by Blavatnik, over his alleged “corporate abuses” in Russia; it took the money.
Trump’s inauguration committee received $106 million in total—eclipsing the $53 million president Obama raised for his inauguration in 2009.
Correction (4/20/17): This article has been amended to more clearly reflect that Len Blavatnik does not have Russian citizenship.

[red dog 1]

37. K&R

[DFW]

38. Not surprising. You know what "Rosneft" means?

It's an abbreviation of the words for "Russian Oil."

Russian Oil Does what Russian Leader vants.