Trump's Top Targets in the Russia Probe Are Experts in Organized Crime
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Source: The Atlantic
Some of President Trumps favorite targets in the Russia probe have spent their careers in the Justice Department and FBI investigating organized crime and money laundering, particularly as they pertain to Russia.
Natasha Bertrand
6:14 PM ET
... snip
Trumps fixation with seeing Ohr ousted from the Justice Department could be perceived as yet another attempt to undermine the credibility of the people who have investigated him. It could also be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to, including Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob boss, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Putin who did business with Trumps campaign chairman Paul Manafort. (Incidentally, another Manafort associate, the Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, admitted he only managed to be in business because Mogilevich allowed him to be, according to a leaked 2008 State Department cable.) Ohr was involved in banning Deripaska from the U.S. in 2006, due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate. Nearly a decade later, Ohr and the FBI sought Deripaskas help in taking down overseas criminal syndicates.
And then theres Andy McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI who spent over a decade investigating Russian organized crime and served as a supervisory special agent of a task force that scrutinized Eurasian crime syndicates. McCabe is a 21-year FBI veteran who handled aspects of the Russia investigation until Mueller was appointed last May, an appointment McCabe says he pushed for. He was fired in March, just two days short of being eligible to receive his pension and other benefits from the bureau. The official reason was that he had lacked candor when describing his interactions with the press to the Inspector Generals office. But Trump and his allies relentless attacks on McCabe on Twitter and cable news made it difficult for many to believe that Attorney General Jeff Sessions decision to fire him was completely devoid of political considerations.
One member of Muellers team, meanwhile, has provoked more ire from the presidents allies than others: Andrew Weissmann, a seasoned prosecutor who oversaw cases against high-ranking organized criminals on Wall Street in the early 1990s and, later, against 30 people implicated in the Enron fraud scandal. Trump has also villainized former Mueller team member Lisa Page, a trial attorney in the Justice Department's organized-crime section whose cases centered on international organized crime and money laundering. She has been targeted by the president and his allies for mocking Trump in text messages she exchanged with Peter Strzok, a Russian counterintelligence expert in the FBI, during a period in which both briefly worked on the Mueller investigation. Strzok was fired earlier this month for writing similarly caustic messages. Trump says the texts showed outrageous bias and has cited them as evidence that Muller is out to get him.
Muellers probe is first and foremost a counterintelligence investigation, and Trump famously declared last year that any examination of his personal finances would cross a red line. But Russias criminal syndicates have become increasingly intertwined with its intelligence services, blurring the line between mafia dons and spies. (As Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in his book The Vory: Russias Super Mafia, Putins Kremlin has consolidated power by not simply taming, but absorbing, the underworld.)
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trumps-top-targets-in-the-russia-probe-are-experts-in-organized-crime/569056/
I think it's a BFD that a journalist used "Trump" and "organized crime" in the headline.
MelissaB
(16,420 posts)By the early 2000s, a third of the buyers of Trump Towers most expensive condos were Russia-linked shell companies or individuals from the former Soviet Unionincluding Eduard Nektalov, a mob-connected diamond dealer from Uzbekistan, and David Bogatin, a Russian emigre mobster who specialized in bootlegging gasoline. Bogatins brother was involved in an elaborate stock fraud with top Russian mob boss Mogilevich, who himself is allied with Alimzhan Tokhtakhounovanother Russian mob leader who ran an entire gambling and money-laundering network out of unit 63A in Trump Tower, just three floors below Trumps own residence. (Tokhtakhounov was a VIP attendee at Trump's Miss Universe pageant in Moscow just seven months after the gambling ring was busted by the FBI.) Trumps own sons have boasted of the Trump Organizations dependence on Russian money. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008. We don't rely on American banks, Eric Trump reportedly told a golfing buddy in 2014. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.
dalton99a
(81,450 posts)etc. etc.
MelissaB
(16,420 posts)Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)....one Putin's ring to find them all, and in the darkness, bind them.
Chilling article...and with the McCain film expose of Trump's Russian mob connections out tomorrow...how long can Putin's Puppet carry on being so naked without being figuratively lynched by the nation? How long can Fox carry water for this leaking empty vessel of a man?
bucolic_frolic
(43,128 posts)his father doing in the 1920s? Era of Prohibition, bootlegging, Canadian rum-running (see Bronfmann history, not exactly the lily-whites we were always told), Klan activity (even in NY and even with bootlegging). The family history is what, brothels in the gold rush? Then casinos? Do you begin to see some connections?
MelissaB
(16,420 posts)Fox "News" won't report it until The Don is in handcuffs.
bucolic_frolic
(43,128 posts)That's why they're all absent. It's not exactly that they're involved, it's that they understand. Implied complicity. A new meaning of the Silent Majority.
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,321 posts)And a reminder:
The Budapest Bridge: Hungarys Role in the Collusion Between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Secret Service
Introduction
It was during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, and for the first time in American electoral history, that a hostile foreign power, aided and abetted by one of the candidates, was able to decisively intervene and significantly influence the outcome of an American election.
American public opinion, the mass and social media, the political establishment and, the countrys secret services, are bitterly divided about the veracity of the relationship between the Russian secret services and Donald Trumps campaign team. Most commentators claim that even if conclusive evidence of collusion were to be found, it is well nigh impossible to prove, that the relationship had any tangible impact on the outcome of the election.
This first, of a two part series, summarizes some fresh evidence about the nature of the collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. It will provide some empirically verifiable evidence of the electoral impact of the Russian leaks, in the context of the strategic aspirations of the Trump campaign.
We do not claim to have any insight into the evidence at the disposal of the FBI about the alleged collusion between the Trump team and the Russian secret service. What we have, is evidence, that the FBI is forbidden by law to investigate, because it lies outside the territory of the USA.
http://hungarianfreepress.com/2017/04/13/the-budapest-bridge-hungarys-role-in-the-collusion-between-the-trump-campaign-and-the-russian-secret-service/
pecosbob
(7,536 posts)So much of this relates to Europe and Russia that European journalists have been on it from day one. Meanwhile we get constant noise from corporate media.
FakeNoose
(32,633 posts)Chapter 12 but don't just read that chapter. The entire book is riveting!
Haggis for Breakfast
(6,831 posts)I am reading this right now. Nance connects ALL the dots and follows the money and the history from decades ago to right up to the present day. I will admit that some of the book has made my blood boil, as these guys were not exactly the sharpest tools in the shed and it was there for all to see years ago, yet nothing was done to stop the forward march of these criminals and murderers into our lives. And then there were parts that chilled me to the bone. These people have a very long reach into so much of our country, it's downright scary.
Nance recently said that one of the things the Russian hackbots are doing is sewing contentious dissent in our chat-rooms and news stories, strictly for the purpose of dividing us as communities, and setting us against one another. He cited several instances of this from last year when there was a spate of pro- and anti-vaccine stories. The anti-vaxxer crowd about incites me to riot, and I remember reading a number of these stories. It never occurred to me that this was the work of Russian interlopers.
Now when I read things that seem to have but one goal - to rile people, I make it a point to find the source of the story.
We should all be wary of these kinds of encroachment in our media. The Russians are winning when they tear us apart and make us vulnerable to this kind of disruption.
FakeNoose
(32,633 posts)spike jones
(1,678 posts)I remember hearing that the mob had taken over the roll of the government.
DonViejo
(60,536 posts)Forum Hosts feel this is a feature story with opinion and analysis.