A Republican lobbyist was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote one of Vladimir Putin’s top geopolitical priorities at the same time he was helping to shape Donald Trump’s first major foreign policy speech.

In the first two quarters of 2016, the firm of former Reagan administration official Richard Burt received $365,000 for work he and a colleague did to lobby for a proposed natural-gas pipeline owned by a firm controlled by the Russian government, according to congressional lobbying disclosures reviewed by POLITICO.

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Burt’s lobbying work for New European Pipeline AG, the company behind the pipeline known as Nord Stream II, began in February. At the time, the Russian state-owned oil giant Gazprom owned a 50 percent stake in New European Pipeline AG. In August, five European partners pulled out and Gazprom now owns 100 percent.

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This spring, Burt helped shape Trump’s first major foreign policy address, according to Burt and other sources. Burt recommended that Trump take a more “realist,” less interventionist approach to world affairs, as first reported by Reuters.
Trump’s April 27 speech sounded those themes and called for greater cooperation with Russia.

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The Russian ambassador to the United States broke the diplomatic norm against attending campaign events to sit in the front row.

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In addition to helping shape Trump’s speech, Burt attended two dinners this summer hosted by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who had been named chairman of Trump’s national security committee.
Burt was invited to discuss issues of national security and foreign policy, and wrote white papers for Sessions on the same subjects, according to Burt and another person with knowledge of the situation.

According to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, one of the papers was about “key foreign policy themes” and another was about “national security decision-making and structure; relationships between Defense, State, [the National Security Council] and so on and how to sort of think about the transition.”
According to a second person with knowledge of the situation, Sessions was “very impressed” with the latter paper.

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All the while, Burt continued to be paid for his Nord Stream II lobbying work, which is ongoing.

Asked about the simultaneous lobbying and advising, both sides downplayed the relationship.

“We have no knowledge of this,” wrote Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks in an email. “In fact, our team cannot verify his self-proclaimed contributions to Mr. Trump's speech and, I don't believe Mr. Trump or our policy staff has ever met Mr. Burt. To our knowledge he had no input in the speech and has had no contact with our policy team.”

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Burt said that he has discussed Trump with Russian officials,

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According to congressional disclosures signed by Burt and another member of the firm, the lobbying work consists of “monitoring and supplementing Washington discussion of EU energy security.”

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But in August, he told a POLITICO reporter that he had advised Sessions and sent him white papers: “I’ve sent him some papers and given him some ideas and sent him some people. I won’t name them but they’re Washington types,” Burt told POLITICO in August.

This week, Burt acknowledged, “I did write a one-pager on national security organization but it was for a think tank.

I also attended two dinners, each with 8-10 people, to discuss foreign policy issues and Sessions was present.

But it was made clear that this was designed to discuss foreign policy substance not campaign issues. In fact, one participant in the dinners later endorsed Hillary.”

Burt said he delivered his written advice for the Trump campaign through an intermediary whom he declined to name, and that he has not had contact with Sessions or anyone else working with the campaign since the dinners this summer.

Burt’s connections to Russia go back many decades. In 1989, former President George H.W. Bush appointed Burt to negotiate the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the USSR, which was concluded in 1991.

In recent years, the 69-year-old Burt said he has advised Russia’s Alfa Bank, and he continues to work with the bank’s co-founder, Mikhail Fridman.

Burt has also registered for recent lobbying work on behalf of the Ukrainian construction firm TMM,
the Polish government-owned airline LOT and
the Capital Bank of Jordan.

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In recent years, the Kremlin has made influencing Western think tanks a more prominent component of its soft power strategy.

“He’s (Burt) a tremendously sophisticated operator. He comes across as a tremendously polished, knowledgeable doyen of the foreign service,” said a person who witnessed Burt sell the pipeline at a meeting at the Atlantic Council last month and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was meant to remain private. “

“If we want to speak to people in the United States, he helps us set up meetings with people,” said Jens Mueller, a spokesman for the pipeline project,

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Said Burt of the apparent attempts to subvert the election, “It does appear to be a lot of suspicious activity on the part of the Russian government.”

Most of the information was collected “incidentally” during the transition, from November through January, Rep. Devin Nunes said at a press conference Wednesday. Nunes emphasized that he believes it was all obtained legally, and noted that none of the information was related to Russia.

The details about the people associated with the Administration had “little or no apparent foreign intelligence value” Nunes said, but were widely disseminated in intelligence reporting.

“It was a lot of information on the President-elect and the transition team and what they were doing,” Nunes said.
Sources came to him legally with this information, he said.

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”
And that requires money?
“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

Baku-APA.  Rosneft and Socar Turkey Enerji AS [subsidiary of Azerbaijan’s SOCAR] signed an agreement on supplies of oil and oil products at the World Energy Congress, the Russian oil major said in the press release.
 
“The parties will examine cooperation potential within the scope of new Star Refinery with the capacity about 10 mln tonnes, under construction by Socar Turkey Enerji. Companies will consider the opportunity of organizing Rosneft supplies to the entity, particularly oil and other raw materials,” Rosneft said.

SOCAR has been considering possibility of buying some assets of Rosneft company in Russia. “Within several weeks the documents could be possibly signed.
The assets have been named, but there are many candidates, because everyone would like to cooperate with Rosneft,” SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev told journalists after his talks with Rosneft President Igor Sechin at IP Week.
Two sources familiar with the situation told Interfax that SOCAR has considered purchase of Polyarnoye Siyaniye company from Rosneft, which has been eventually purchased by the company owned by Aleksei and Yurii Khotin (including ConocoPhillips’s share).
Commenting on SOCAR’s interest in Polyarnoye Siyaniye, representative of Azeri company told journalists: “There are many assets in Russia that are under consideration.”
In May 2014 SOCAR and Rosneft created a joint venture, which is also involved in production. But the JV has not been operating yet.

The State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) announced on May 24th that it had entered a joint venture (JV) agreement with a Russian state-owned energy firm, Rosneft.
The agreement enables SOCAR and Rosneft to co-operate on the exploration and production of oil and gas projects within Azerbaijan, Russia and in third countries.

The parties agreed upon creation of a joint venture on a parity basis, and to include shares of participation in producing assets in Russia, Azerbaijan, and third countries into its authorized capital. The list of assets will be agreed upon further.

The document was signed in follow-up of Cooperation Agreement between Rosneft and SOCAR from 13 August 2013, in which the parties intended to develop oil and gas exploration and production projects in Russia and Azerbaijan by creation of a joint venture.