Mueller likely to probe Gates moonlighting as movie producer/Money Laundering

[Wwcd]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article183122106.html

Mueller likely to probe Gates’ moonlighting as movie producer

Rick Gates, indicted last week with his former boss and mentor Paul Manafort in the special counsel investigation of Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is best known as a political consultant and lobbyist. In tandem with Manafort, he raked in tens of millions from Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs and a pro-Moscow Ukrainian political party. And when Manafort chaired Donald Trump's bid for the White House, Gates was his deputy.

Less well known is his sideline as a Hollywood producer.
Gates has been involved in a handful of films, including this year’s Walk of Fame, which starred Clint Eastwood’s son Scott.

Some of Gates’ colleagues in those Tinseltown endeavors, however, have run into trouble with the law. Gates — who, with Manafort, was charged with money laundering and failing to disclose foreign banks accounts in the first public indictments to emerge from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe — was listed as providing backing for several films whose other producers have been accused of defrauding investors of millions of dollars.

SNIP

Williams and Steven J. Brown, another producer, along with Minnesota Republican fundraiser Jerry Seppala, were ordered in March 2016 to pay back $10.5 million to one of the duped investors, Bill Busbice Jr., owner of a hunting company in Louisiana and, until recently, star of the reality show Wildgame Nation.


Gates' ties to Brown go beyond being co-producers, though. Manafort’s former lobbying firm, where Gates also worked, paid Brown $40,000 for political and media outreach he did in 2012 and 2013 on behalf a Ukrainian political party, Ukrainian Party of Regions.


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Shell game

Rather than use Busbice’s money for films, Williams and Brown transferred it to personal accounts they used for lavish vacations, a Jaguar, payments on a yacht loan and initial payments on a $3.5 million home for Williams in Calabass, California, according to Busbice’s lawsuit. They sent Busbice and his lawyer false bank statements they created to mask their activity, the suit said.

The two producers also allegedly sent more than $100,000 of the fraudulently-obtained funds to a politically-oriented nonprofit called the Bipartisan Coalition for American Security, which was cochaired by former U.S. Sens. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and Scott Brown (R-MA) and whose advisory board was led by Elliott Broidy, a national deputy finance chair for the Republican National Committee. (Brown is now U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand.)

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Gates’s film connections also have a distinctly former Soviet flavor. An upcoming film that is backed in part by an entity tied to Gates is a Czech production directed and produced by Petr Jakl, a former Czech judo champion; Jakl appeared in several Hollywood films in the early 2000s, including xXx, starring Vin Diesel, and EuroTrip. Brown is listed as the film’s co-producer on the website for Jakl’s production company. Brown and Williams were also both executive producers for Jakl’s last production, 2015’s Ghoul, which was set and partially filmed in Ukraine.

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And from Twitter:

eplying to @ericgarland
Steve Mnuchin too. Great way to launder money, btw.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/news/avatar-borat-devil-wears-prada-a-look-at-all-films-trumps-treasury-pick-steven-mnuchin-helped-f



Eric Garland
@ericgarland
Multiple people in Trump's inner circle are movie producers.

Malaysia was laundering money through U.S. movies..

Bannon. Mnuchin. Bigly.

Replying to @ericgarland
Manafort did it too. Produced his daughter's movies.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ericgarland/status/928661590991425537
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Some have also questioned money laundering thru Trump's underaged modelling business & ties to the porn movie industry.

Makes you want to throw up.
This is who's running our country.