Trump admits colluding with Russians

NYT wrote:Donald Trump Jr admits attempted collusion with Russian sources. Manafort and Kushner also involved.

By Mark Sumner  
Monday Jul 10, 2017

Over the weekend, the New York TImes reported that Donald Trump Jr met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer for the express purpose of receiving information he hoped would prove useful against Hillary Clinton.

President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.
Trump Junior’s initial reaction to the story was, of course, to lie about it. He stated that the meeting had been about an adoption program. But, after the evidence was held very close to his face, Junior admitted that he had met with the woman for the express purpose of getting the goods on Hillary.

In fact, the lure of potential damaging information about Clinton provided by the Russian government, was so strong, that it drew campaign manager Paul Manafort and Son-in-law Jared Kushner to attend the meeting. The trio went into the meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya eager to get information for leverage against Hillary Clinton. But it turned out that the quality of the kompromat offered by the Kremlin-associate was sub-par. Instead, she was more was more interested in discussing the connection between sanctions against Russia and Russia closing down foreign adoptions—a result Trump Junior found disappointing.

In other words, Donald Trump Jr. is openly admitting that, when offered the opportunity to collude with Russia against Hillary Clinton, he jumped at the chance. And the idea of some Kremlin-quality dirt was so tantalizing that Manafort and Kushner crowded in to listen.

Trump Jr. confirmed that he went into the meeting expecting to receive information from the Russian lawyer that could hurt Clinton. That is a breathtaking admission.
The Times story drew from first three, then five sources. Which shows the continued willingness of associates to speak despite Trump’s constantly tightening grip. Still, this meeting would surely be open to cries of “Fake news!” except for the glaring fact that Donald Trump Jr. admitted not just that it took place, but that getting “helpful information” to use against Clinton was the purpose of the meeting.

In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
We tried to collude, but it didn’t work out … in this case. And that is the alibi.

Trump Senior hasn’t exactly tossed an arm around his #1 son. Instead, there’s been the sound of a bus warming up.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”
Junior hasn’t said just who dangled the lure of sweet Kremlin information that had Trump Jr, Kushner, and Manafort jumping like kittens after string. A pair of sources have pointed at British tabloid reporter turned PR agent Rob Goldstone. Goldstone was in Moscow just two weeks before the Junior, Kushner, Manafort meeting. And he has connections to a wealthy Russian real estate family that already had ties to Trump.

In an exclusive interview with FORBES, Emin Agalarov—a Russian pop singer, real estate mogul and son of one of the country’s richest people—described an ongoing relationship with the Trump family, including post-election contact with the president himself.
Trump Junior has been dismissive of the importance of this meeting.

But as a demonstration that the Trump campaign was ready, willing, and able to collude directly with Russian sources—in addition to the aid they were already actively and eagerly accepting via Russia’s hacking of Democratic sources—it would be hard to find a more definitive example.

New York Times wrote:Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

By MATT APUZZO, JO BECKER, ADAM GOLDMAN and MAGGIE HABERMAN  JULY 10, 2017

WASHINGTON — Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.

But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government attempted to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

Alan Futerfas, the lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump, said his client had done nothing wrong but pledged to work with investigators if contacted.

”In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he said to The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been given to him by others.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government. He has deferred questions on the content of the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.

A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

But at the White House, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was adamant from the briefing room lectern that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”

The president, a prolific Twitter user, did not address his son’s controversy on Monday, and instead sought to highlight other issues throughout the morning.

In a series of tweets, the president’s son insisted he did what anyone connected to a political campaign would have done — to hear out potentially damaging information about an opponent. He maintained that his various statements about the meeting weren’t in conflict.

“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen,” he wrote in one tweet. In another, he added, “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details.”

The younger Mr. Trump, who had a reputation during the campaign for having meetings with a wide range of people eager to speak to him, did not join his father’s administration. He runs the family business, the Trump Organization, with his brother, Eric.

On Monday, after news reports that he had hired a lawyer, he indicated in a tweet that he would be open to speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels investigating Russian meddling in the election. “Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Goldstone represents the Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Mr. Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Donald Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.

But Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him. “Never, never ever,” he said. Later, after the email was described to The Times, efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.

In the interview, he said it was his understanding that Ms. Veselnitskaya was simply a “private citizen” for whom Mr. Agalarov wanted to do a favor. He also said he did not know whether Mr. Agalarov’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Moscow real estate tycoon known to be close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was involved. The elder Mr. Agalarov and the younger Mr. Trump worked together to bring a Trump Tower to Moscow, but the project never got off the ground.

Mr. Goldstone also said his recollection of the meeting largely tracked with the account given by the president’s son, as outlined in the Sunday statement Mr. Trump released in response to a Times story on the June 2016 meeting. Mr. Goldstone said that the last time he had communicated with the younger Mr. Trump was to send him a congratulatory text after the November election, but added that he did speak to the Trump Organization over the past weekend, before giving his account to the media.

Donald Trump Jr., who initially told The Times that Ms. Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about the resumption of adoption of Russian children by American families, acknowledged in the Sunday statement that one subject of the meeting was possibly compromising information about Mrs. Clinton.

But he said that the Russian lawyer produced nothing of consequence, and that the meeting ended after she began talking about the Magnitsky Act — an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The 2012 law so enraged Mr. Putin that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.

Mr. Goldstone said Ms. Veselnitskaya offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments.

“It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I was actually feeling agitated by it. Had I, you know, actually taken up what is a huge amount of their busy time with this nonsense?”

Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, denied that the campaign or compromising material about Mrs. Clinton ever came up at all. She said she never acted on behalf of the Russian government. A spokesperson for Mr. Putin said on Monday that the Russian president did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya, and had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.

Ms. Sanders said at a press briefing that the American president had learned of the meeting recently but declined to discuss details.

The White House press office, however, accused Mrs. Clinton’s team of hypocrisy. The office circulated a January 2017 article published in Politico, detailing how officials from the Ukranian government tried to help the Democratic candidate conduct opposition research on Mr. Trump and some of his aides.

News of the meeting involving the younger Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort blunted whatever good feeling the president’s team had after his trip to Europe for the Group of 20 economic summit.

The president learned from his aides about the 2016 meeting at the tail end of the trip, according to one White House official. But some people in the White House had known for several days that it had occurred, because Mr. Kushner had revised his foreign contact disclosure document to include it.

The president was aggravated by the news of the meeting, according to one person close to him — less over the fact that it had happened, and more because it was yet another story about Russia that had swamped the media cycle.

Politico wrote:Conway: No evidence of collusion in Donald Trump Jr.'s Russian meeting

By KELSEY TAMBORRINO 07/10/2017

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway denied Monday morning that there was evidence of collusion between Donald Trump Jr. and Russia officials, amid reports that the president's oldest son had met with a Kremlin-tied lawyer in search of compromising information on Hillary Clinton.

"No information was received that was meaningful or helpful and no action was taken," Conway told "Good Morning America" on Monday.

Conway was pressed by George Stephanopoulos on why Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya under the premise of learning new information on Clinton from the Kremlin.

"Are you saying there's evidence of collusion? Because everybody is trying to convert wishful thinking into hard evidence and haven't been able to do that," Conway said.

Donald Trump Jr. confirmed on Sunday he met last year with Veselnitskaya, along with some members of the Trump campaign, where they had at least briefly discussed the presidential race and Clinton.

The president's oldest son first claimed the meeting was solely about a program for the adoption of Russian children, but went on to say after subsequent reporting that an acquaintance from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant had asked him to meet “with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.”

The New York Times first reported Donald Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya had met, along with senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, who at the time held the role of campaign chairman.

"Don Jr. was not aware of the lawyer's name before he got there and that the conversation quickly changed to what seemed to be the entire purpose of the meeting for that woman, which was Russian adoption. No information was received that was meaningful or helpful and no action was taken," Conway said.

Stephanopoulos also questioned why the meeting was not originally mentioned in White House disclosure forms, to which Conway responded by noting such forms had since been amended to reflect the meeting.

"As I understand it, George, people's disclosure statements have been amended to reflect meetings such as this. And Don Jr. came forth this weekend and gave more information about the meeting," she said.

Conway noted Donald Trump Jr. did not seek out the meeting and said there are "many different meetings" during a campaign.

"Some of them are unhelpful and not particularly meaningful," she said.

Conway told Stephanopoulos when she became campaign manager, no one turned over intelligence on Clinton. Instead, she said, it was the Obama White House, not the Trump administration, that failed to act accordingly on information alleging Russian influence.

"Look, the only information, the only people who had information about Russia meddling, in say, summer of 2016 did not work in the Trump campaign, they worked in the Obama White House," Conway said. "They were briefed, according to The Washington Post, about this kind of information and did absolutely nothing, because they never thought Donald Trump would win."

Asked about the reports, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday the Kremlin was unaware of a meeting between Trump senior staff and a Russian lawyer.

The Associated Press reports Peskov said the Kremlin does not know who the lawyer is and added that the Kremlin "cannot keep track" of every Russian lawyer and their meetings in Russia or abroad.

Nonetheless, Conway spent Monday morning on the defense, honing in on Donald Trump Jr.'s meet-up during a heated exchange on CNN's "New Day."

Conway told host Chris Cuomo that the meeting "quickly" turned to a pretext for Russian adoptions and that, according to Donald Trump Jr.'s own statements, the comments made by Veselnitskaya were vague.

"They were meaningless. Others exited the meeting very quickly. The meeting itself was very brief," Conway said. "There was no information given. There was no action taken. There was no follow-up."

Conway also defended Kushner and Manafort's involvement, noting that it was "standard operating procedure" for the campaign to have several people involved in such meetings.

"You're trying to have your viewers think because these three principals were in there, it was viewed with some type of seriousness. That simply is not true," Conway said in what turned to a lengthy interview spanning media coverage of the Trump administration.

Earlier on "Fox & Friends," Conway instead looked toward the G-20 summit.

"What we do know that actually happened is not Russian collusion, but Russian conversation, between President Trump and Vladimir Putin three days ago."

NBC News wrote:Former Soviet Counterintelligence Officer at Meeting With Donald Trump Jr. and Russian Lawyer
by KEN DILANIAN, NATASHA LEBEDEVA and HALLIE JACKSON

WASHINGTON — The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others on the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned.

The lobbyist, first identified by the Associated Press as Rinat Akhmetshin, denies any current ties to Russian spy agencies. He accompanied the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Donald Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump campaign.

Born in Russia, Akhmetshin served in the Soviet military and emigrated to the U.S., where he holds dual citizenship. He did not respond to NBC News requests for comment Friday, but he told the AP the meeting was not substantive. “I never thought this would be such a big deal, to be honest,” he told the AP.

He had been working with Veselnitskaya on a campaign against the Magnitsky Act, a set of sanctions against alleged Russian human rights violators. That issue, which is also related to a ban on American adoptions of Russian children, is what Veselnitskaya told NBC News she discussed with the Trump team.

But, given the email traffic suggesting the meeting was part of a Russian effort to help Trump’s candidacy, the presence at the meeting of a Russian-American with suspected intelligence ties is likely to be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate panels investigating the Russian election interference campaign.

As has been previously reported, the meeting was set up by music publicist Rob Goldstone, who told Donald Trump Jr. in an email chain that Veselnitskaya has "information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."

Goldstone called Veselnitskaya a "Russian government attorney" — though she disputes that — and said the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.”

The Associated Press quoted Akhmetshin saying that Veselnitskaya brought with her to the meeting a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was a flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee.

The lobbyist said Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump team, suggesting it could help the Trump campaign, he said.

“This could be a good issue to expose how the D.N.C. is accepting bad money,” The AP quoted Akhmetshin recalling her saying.

Veselnitskaya told a slightly different story in her interview with NBC News.

She said she brought with her a two-page document, one small part of which involved alleged D.N.C. funding issues. Most of it involved allegations against the Magnitsky sanctions, she said.

Donald Trump Jr., she said, asked if she had any further supporting documents.

“He clearly asked me if I had any financial records to back and support the idea that some funds from illegal sources went to DNC, went to Hilary Clinton," she told NBC News. “In reply to that, I told him that not only I don't have any financial records of that time — there was no chance that I could somehow, anyhow, have such records.”

She added that Trump Jr. ended the meeting by saying, “Well, the story that you've told us, it sounds very interesting but unfortunately at the moment, there is nothing that we, we can help you with about it. But maybe if we come to power, maybe one day, we will get back to you on that, because it really sounds interesting.”

Related: What's Next in the Trump-Russia Saga? Here's What We Know Now

Contacted by NBC News, representatives for Kushner and Manafort declined to comment.

On April 4, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to the Homeland Security department seeking information about Akhmetshin, saying that Akhmetshin admitted to having a background in Soviet counterintelligence. He reportedly served as a sergeant, a non-commissioned role in the Soviet military.

Grassley said Akhmetshin had failed to register as a foreign agent even though he had been lobbying in the U.S. for Russian interests. Grassley also charged that Akhmetshin had been working with Fusion GPS, an opposition-research firm that had compiled a highly disputed dossier on Donald Trump.

Fusion GPS has also worked on the campaign to raise questions about the story behind the Magnitsky Act.

Alan Futerfas, the attorney retained by Donald Trump Jr., told NBC News two other people accompanied Veselnitskaya to the meeting — someone Futerfas described as a translator and someone he described as a "friend of Emin [Agalarov]’s and maybe as a friend of Natalia [Veselnitskaya]’s.”

Futerfas said he has talked with that individual. "He is a U.S. citizen. He told me specifically he was not working for the Russian government, and in fact laughed when I asked him that question.”

It was not clear whether Futerfas was referring to Akhmetshin.

Agalarov is a pop star and a client of Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who arranged the meeting with Trump Jr. Agalarov appeared in a music video with Trump when the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time, was held in Moscow in 2013.

Futerfas confirmed that, “for the purpose of security or otherwise, the names were reviewed” but said Trump Jr. knew nothing about the man's background at the time of the meeting.

When asked about whether he had concerns, knowing what he knows now, Futerfas responded: “I have absolutely no concerns about what was said in that meeting.”

Veselnitskaya, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, denied having any connection to the Kremlin and insisted the meeting was to discuss sanctions, not the presidential campaign.

In an email exchange released by Trump Jr., the president's eldest son wrote "I love it" to Goldstone when told about possibly getting his hands on material potentially damaging to the Clinton campaign.

Goldstone told Trump Jr. that the meeting would be with a "Russian government attorney" and that the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. responded enthusiastically, "If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer."

Related: Trump's Lawyer Says President Was Unaware of Son's Russian Emails

Trump Jr. said after releasing the emails that, "in retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently."

President Trump has defended his son's decision to meet with Veselnitskaya, saying "most people would have taken that meeting."

"My son is a wonderful young man. He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer but a Russian lawyer," Trump said Thursday in a joint press conference in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. "From a practical standpoint most people would have taken that meeting. It's called opposition research or research into your opponent."

Ken Dilanian and Natasha Lebedeva reported from Washington. Hallie Jackson reported from Paris.

Grant Stern wrote:Trump Russia Dossier Decoded: Yes, There Really Was A Massive Oil Deal (UPDATED)


Circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that Fake President J. Trump and his campaign associates brokered a massive oil privatization deal, where his Organization facilitated a global financial transaction to sell Russian Oil stock to its Syrian War adversary, the Emirate of Qatar.

The Trump Russia Dossier describes a massive privatization deal to deliver a chunk of the state-owned Rosneft Oil company to Qatar and also a secret buyer in the Cayman Islands.

Qatar has been a tenant at Trump Tower since 2008, though recent reports indicate they may have recently vacated their state-run airlines’ corporate campus.

Donald Trump and Russia conducted the transaction in three phases; Phase 1 began in early 2016 with a meeting of the minds at The Mayflower Hotel to start the deal and a due diligence period, Phase 2 began just before the Republican National Convention and continued through Election Day, and Phase 3 happened after Trump’s shocking win and concluding just days before Buzzfeed published the bombshell dossier describing the deal.

The end result allowed Russia to trade stolen emails to help to Donald Trump’s election campaign (as well as that of many Republican Congressmen), in exchange for help circumventing American sanctions to transact the sale of Rosneft, which Putin desperately needed to finance his budget deficit.

The Rosneft transaction also purportedly sent a $500 million dollar brokerage fee to Carter Page, or perhaps the Trump Organization.

The Trump Campaign would’ve been extremely familiar with Rosneft, since top surrogate Rudy Giuliani listed the Russian oil giant as one of his law clients at Bracewell & Giuliani, LLP in 2014 according to Bloomberg.

For the first time here, we’ve broken down the entire Rosneft privatization transaction and US election, by using open source media stories to create a comprehensive timeline of events over three phases in a single graphic.

This is the transaction Ranking House Intel Committee Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) described when kicked off Congress’ Russia hearings discussing Rosneft’s privatization deal, and the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Putin’s allies.

The most deal significant milestone was the “meeting of the minds” which occurred last April 27th at the Center for National Interest gathering in Washington, D.C.

Four Ambassadors convened at The Mayflower Hotel, who represent the three countries definitely involved in the Rosneft privatization deal: Italy, Russia, Singapore, and also the Philippines.

They all attended Donald Trump’s foreign policy campaign speech.

Key players from every country involved were in that one room, for one night, one time only, and even now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was there.

The former Alabama Senator only admitted that he had two meetings with the Russian Ambassador, publicly excusing his own lies maintaining that contacts both weren’t campaigning discussions, even though one meeting was at the RNC in Cleveland. The April contact makes a third undisclosed meeting by Sessions with Ambassador Kislyak. Former US Ambassador Richard Burt is now a Russian lobbyist, and is thought to have written the speech that night, and serves on the Center’s Board of Directors.

After the-Republican candidate Donald Trump locked down the GOP nomination in early May against Ted Cruz, the plan described in Steele’s dossier leapt into action.

From the look of events, starting in July, a massive international oil privatization transaction began, and it was concluded in early January, right around the time the Electoral College certified Donald Trump as America’s 45th President.

The April 27th campaign speech at CNFI effectively concluded the due diligence or first phase of the Dossier’s privatization transaction and began a ‘quiet period’ before the pace of events quickened.

The second phase of the transaction began just before the Republican Convention and ran through election day.

The third phase happened after election day, and before the January 10th disclosure of the Steele Dossier, itself just a few short days after the Rosneft privatization sale finished.

Here’s our comprehensive infographic, the story continues below:



This week, the Democratic Coalition just released a 40-page report which factually confirms more than a dozen major allegations of the Trump Russia Dossier published by Buzzfeed on January 10th.

Our exhaustive research breaks down the findings of the Dossier chronologically and highlights the ties between Trump and the buyer of Russia’s oil company shares.

Oil-rich Gulf Arab nation of Qatar was the end buyer of a massive stake in the Russian, state-run oil company Rosneft’s privatization deal.

The new Democratic Coalition report (below) reveals that Trump has hosted a Qatari state-run business owned by the QIA — the buyer of Rosneft shares in this transaction — located in the Manhattan Trump Tower for many years, as well as numerous factual confirmations of the dossier’s findings.

Democratic Coalition Senior Advisor Scott Dworkin is set to advise a bipartisan group of Congresspeople this week on his factual findings, which back up the information contained in the Dossier that implicates President Trump in a foreign affair with Vladimir Putin.

He tells us this is his main advice:

“The Dossier and its contents are mostly real.”

The President’s son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador during the Transition period, with disgraced General Michael Flynn.

“Carter Page met with Rosneft in December to assist with the deal, and he’s on the record admitting it but claims he didn’t meet Igor Sechin,” said Dworkin incredulously. “Really? It must have been a webcast with an intermediary. Everything in the Dossier adds up, and it still leaves more questions than answers.”

A mighty brokerage fee to one of the Trump campaign advisors, Moscow-based investment banker Carter Page, is highlighted in the former MI-6 operative’s report.

Theoretically, the former Merrill Lynch investment banker, Page, may have only been the “bag man” or go-between and someone else is the recipient of the cash premium in the dossier. Five hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and conceivably, many members of the Trump Organization, or family, could be involved in a deal of that scope.

What is most unusual about the sale is that Qatar is on the opposite sides of the Syrian war from Russia.

Not only that but in 2004 Russian agents openly assassinated a top Chechen rebel in Doha, the capital of Qatar, by bombing his SUV.

However, friendship between Donald Trump and the Qatari state-run airline who paid him anywhere from $19,000–100,000 a month in rent since 2008, must run deep.

Rosneft began taking steps towards a sale in early 2016, which accelerated right around the time of the Republican National Convention.

Russia’s state oil companies both declared that they would not privatize in 2016, right after Trump’s feud with a gold star family whose patriarch Khizr Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

Putin announced the sale after new management changed the Trump campaign’s momentum in an exclusive Bloomberg interview in early September, which set the price at $11 billion dollars.



Six countries are known to have participated in the massive privatization deal of Russia’s jewel, its state-run oil company, which left the end ownership of the stake impenetrable, and a purchase price of roughly $10.7 billion dollars, which Reuters reported about in January as:

“How Russia sold its oil jewel: without saying who bought it.”

In early October, once Russia knew about their damaging cache of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta’s emails, they re-ignited the privatization sales.

Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin had already spent $5 billion dollars to buy out a foreign stake in Bashneft, another massive Russian oil partnership, whose oligarch was compromised, and charged (as Putin often does) with criminal offenses.

The Bashneft deal closed right before the damaging Access Hollywood political scandal, which would’ve swamped a presidential campaign without Trump’s collusive assistance from Putin’s massive propaganda machine.

After the Access Hollywood tape releases had seemed to doom Trump’s campaign, Putin even announced that the companies would buy their own shares if they had to — there was a serious budget hole to fill.

Nineteen and a half percent of Rosneft’s stock was agreed to be transferred on December 7th, before the board was informed of the transaction’s terms only after it took place.

The “matryoshka” (named after the famous nesting dolls) or complex deal structure is most likely designed to avoid American sanctions imposed over the Ukraine invasion against Rosneft, its CEO Igor Sechin, and its parent company Gazprom.

The highlighted yellow company in the below organization chart is a total mystery and based in the Cayman Islands law firm Walkers.

This is the kind of financial engineering it took for the Italian bank Intesa, to lend money to the buyers of the Rosneft stake.



Anonymous blogger The Trump Watchdog indicates that the Walkers law firm is linked to Trump economic advisor Steven Schwartzman, a co-founder of the Wall Street giant Blackstone, because they own the Intertrust Group, who provided the Singapore holding company (item 17.)

The shelf company owned by Intertrust Group was renamed QHG Holdings — which was discovered after internet sleuths tracked down a scrivener’s error — and which probably links US interests to the international transaction.

Coincidentally, the other co-founder of Blackstone Pete Peterson also happens to be on the Board of Directors for the Center for National Interest who booked The Mayflower Hotel at the last moment for the April 27th meeting with the four ambassadors, Trump, and Sessions.

Disgraced former Reagan National Security Advisor “Bud” McFarlane also attended The Mayflower Hotel speech on April 27th — in an especially ironic twist, where he attended another speech nearly 30 years earlier by Ronald Reagan, which he attended six short months before another international scandal erupted named Iran-Contra. Reagan’s speech that night demanded House Democrats to fund the Contra’s guerrilla war in Nicaragua, and like Trump’s speech proposing an unusual Russian “peace” deal, 30-years ago that Republican President described a foreign policy wish list, which eventually was revealed to have illegally transpired.

In November, despite Bud McFarlane’s public criticism in April, the Trump Transition team included the ex-felon’s compliments of Fox TV personality KT McFarland’s appointment as a Deputy NSA in their official press release.

Anyone who knows the Trump Administration, knows that they’re hypersensitive to criticism, yet oddly, this Trump critic was allowed to make a national security appointment so signficant that qualified applicants refused the job after Flynn’s dismissal, just to avoid KT McFarland being on their staff.

Then, Bud McFarlane mysteriously re-appeared at Trump Tower on December 5th, just two days before the Rosneft deal was announced, which didn’t make news when Henry Kissinger’s visit — he’s the Chairman Emeritus of the Center for National Interest — drew major headlines that day in Manhattan.

The end game for Russia was to funnel at least $5 billion dollars of new capital into state coffers to staunch some of the red ink expected to plague Putin’s budgets going into his 2018 elections, and through at least 2020 according to economists; and to do the deal while tiptoeing past American financial sanctions.

That’s where the cash-rich Gulf Arab nation stepped in to make a deal. The Qatari sovereign wealth fund (QIA) is the known buyer of 50% of these shares of Rosneft.

Yet still, nobody knows where well over $2 billion dollars of equity for the purchase came from, as Reuters reports:

Although Qatar has never publicly confirmed how much it has contributed to the deal or the size of the stake that it bought, Glencore and Rosneft say it contributed 2.5 billion euros. Along with the 300 million from Glencore and the 5.2 billion loaned by Intesa [an Italian bank], that still leaves a shortfall of 2.2 billion euros.

The QIA is coincidentally also the largest shareholder in the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore, who executed the purchase with a minimal direct investment, and used the “Singapore vehicle” or holding company to hold their Rosneft share.

Glencore guaranteed the Italian bank Intesa’s loan for only 1/3rd of its value.

Donald Trump has had business ties to Qatar’s government for years, according to a Jan. 10th report in Time:

Trump has stakes in four companies that appear to be tied in business in the desert nation. The country’s state-owned carrier, Qatar Airways, has leased an office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower since 2008. Ivanka Trump told Hotelier Middle East in 2015 that the Trump Hotel Collection was eyeing opportunities in Qatar.

It’s unclear when or if Qatari Airlines left Trump Tower, or when their lease actually expires, but a Jan. 28th story in Vox says that their operations have departed the President’s home building in New York.

What is clear is that Qatari Airlines’ CEO has publicly called Donald Trump a “good friend” and it is one of the countries excluded from the Muslim Ban, which coincidentally, does business with the President.

Recently, CEOs of American airliners met with Trump recently to decry government subsidized competition from Qatar and other foreign state-run carriers, which is an obvious conflict for President Trump.

If that wasn’t enough conflicted interest, Trump Organization announced a plan to build or license their brand in Qatar in 2015, but there are no further reports to substantiate the move.

The CEO of Qatari Airlines says that he was one of the first people to give congratulations after election day:

Qatar Airways’ Group Chief Executive Akbar al-Baker, who voiced support for Trump even after his comments about Muslims, welcomed his victory. “Our relationship goes way back, and I was one of the first to commend Donald on his well-deserved new leadership position,” he said in a statement to Reuters.

Qatari Airlines rented pricey office space at President Trump’s tower for many years. If their lease continues today, it would be a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prevents federal employees and the executive from accepting any foreign payments whatsoever.

Qatar’s complete and total involvement in the Rosneft deal is undeniable.

The small Emirate that just publicly participated in the purchase of Russia’s state-run oil and gas giant — happens to be extremely close to Donald Trump.

It’s unknown if the Philippines had any direct or indirect involvement in the Rosneft transaction, but their President Duarte is a staunch Trump supporter, who assigned one of the President’s business partners as a trade envoy.

The island nation took the unusual step of hosting Russian naval ships in early January, which is extremely out of the ordinary for the longtime US ally and former colony.

What we do know is that the Cayman Islands company investors were conspicuously missing whe Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin and Vladimir Putin met with their new partners at Intesa Bank, the Qatar Investment Authority and Glencore in January.

Why Russia Needed The Money

At the heart of the Dossier’s disclosures is the Russian goal of ending economic sanctions, some of which specifically target Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who was Putin’s top deputy in government service just a few short years ago, in a country where the lines between business and government can be blurry.

President Obama’s 2014 sanctions have crippled the Russian economy when compounded with low global oil prices.

That caused a massive budget gap last year, which led Putin to privatize assets to pay current costs for the Russian government.

After President Obama leveled retaliatory sanctions in December 2016 and expelled diplomats in late December for meddling in our election, Vladimir Putin announced and then stunningly reserved retaliation.

Last month, disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn was fired as NSA, apparently just for discussing Russian sanctions with the Russian Ambassador in late December.
At the time, Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats and spies sparked a highly unusual public “bromance” between the President-elect and the dictator, which sparked speculation about a quid pro quo when Trump tweeted a love letter to the Russian dictator.

Strategically, Russia is desperate to shake the larger economic sanctions, but America’s Congress is seeking more, not less economic retaliation against Putin’s regime.

Shortly after taking office, President Trump did indeed relax sanctions against Russia’s lead spy agency, the FSB, but most observers said was a minor concession.
Into that void, Trump’s lawyer and a group of his Ukrainian family connections and lawmakers, and the notorious Felix Sater appeared with a “peace plan” that would’ve accomplished the end of sanctions.

One of the ‘peacemakers,’ a Ukrainian relative of Trump’s trusted lawyer Michael Cohen, has already perished under mysterious circumstances since then.

If America lifts sanctions against the Putin regime, then the value of Russia’s public oil companies stands to skyrocket.

Already, Donald Trump’s presence has sparked a market rally on Moscow’s MICEX stock exchange.

US Media Is Connecting The Dots On Steele’s Dossier

Open source journalism confirms some of the more important political elements of the Trump Russia Dossier.

My original report two weeks ago revealed a major point of affirmation in CNN’s interview with former Trump campaign associate, J.D. Gordon, whose remarks confirmed a serious political allegation in the Trump Russia Dossier.

Then, Rachel Maddow echoed the essence of our report on MSNBC a few days later and added that Politico linked a participant in the RNC Ukraine policy changes to one of then-Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort’s associates, who is himself a foreign national being investigated by the FBI.

Wikileaks involvement to assist Russia in Trump’s campaign is a cornerstone of the dossier’s claims; it was seen as essential for Putin and Russia to maintain plausible deniability for political interference.

Sure enough, new factual data shows that the anti-secrecy organization switched to their web hosting to use a Russian DNS server right before releasing the most damaging email material during last year’s elections.

That means Vladimir Putin certainly has knowledge of the physical location of Wikileaks’ servers and allows their messages to be broadcast using Russian soil.
Trump’s former top advisor Roger Stone admitted to communicating with Russian hackers in August 2016, during the election about releases of information through Wikileaks.

This month, Gen. Flynn revealed that he was secretly an unregistered Turkish foreign agent ‘volunteering’ his time during the Trump campaign, and Congress revealed proof this week, which he was simultaneously on the payroll of Russian state-sponsored RT “News” and the Kaspersky security firm, who is thought to have been involved in the election hacks.

One must imagine that Flynn’s role as a secret, unregistered foreign agent of two nations (in other words, he’s a SPY) is one of the main targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation.

“When the dossier became public it generated more questions than answers,” says Scott Dworkin late at night via chat. “Over the last several months we’ve corroborated the dossier with the facts. The deeper we dig, the more truth we find in it. Just look at the author — Christopher Steele — who is a former MI-6 agent who’s saved more lives than Trump ever has.”

“He’s the real person people imagine James Bond to be.”

The Trump Russia Dossier describes the Rosneft privatization deal almost exactly, and Putin’s resulting purge of Russian allies and ex-officials looks like the kind of deadly cover up a dictator would apply, to erase his friends who knew about the deal.

Scott Dworkin says to expect full confirmation of the report within a week from official sources, or when Steele testifies in front of Congress in person or via remote link.

“A majority of the dossier and its contents are factual,” says the intrepid investigator Dworkin, who began making #TrumpLeaks posts in October. Now, when he tweets @funder 3 million people per day see and share his research. “The dossier is more real than anything Trump’s ever said.”

“A majority of it is factual and news reports over time have proven some of those facts.”

This weekend, the Republican Chair of the House Intel Committee said that only one person is being investigated for treason in the White House by the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence division.

There’s no way a deal of this magnitude would completely envelop the Trump Campaign, its manager, its outside affiliates and inside agents so thoroughly, without the principal or head of a group knowing that something was happening.

Any reasonable person would have to conclude that Donald Trump is the FBI’s target, based upon the bevy of circumstantial evidence tying RNC campaign events to Russian oil, economic sanctions, and the simmering conflict in Ukraine.

Nearly three decades ago, Trump admitted on national television to participating in a straw-man transaction with the Sultan of Brunei and infamous Iran-Contra middleman Adnan Khashoggi, through which he acquired a large yacht, so we’ve got proof that the Trump Organization has engaged these kinds of multi-national transactions in the Middle East.

The most important commodity traded in the oil business or politics is money.

The privatization deal described in Christopher Steele’s dossier has played out on the pages of Bloomberg and Reuters for a year — shows that there was a whole lot of money in brokering oil deals for Donald Trump’s associates, and a rapid profit by Qatar if sanctions are released this year.

The only question that’s not even pondered in these many public reports, and which must be a central focus of the American intelligence community’s investigations:

Where is the $500 million dollar brokerage fee today?

Where did the other $2 billion dollars come from?

What is Donald Trump’s true role in the deal?
https://thesternfacts.com/trump-russia-dossier-decoded-yes-there-really-was-a-massive-oil-deal-e33370349b67

veya_victaous wrote:The scary part is that trump is still trying to say it's fake news

http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/trump-don-jrs-russia-scandal-is-just-fake-news/news-story/5a5912d6fd66d9af1b9abd2a9843f51d

and his supporters are as unpredictable as him.
I would not be surprised if this is long and dragged out as it even has the potential for civil war, if trump can convince enough of his followers it's 'fake news'.

Ben Reilly wrote:

veya_victaous wrote:The scary part is that trump is still trying to say it's fake news

http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/trump-don-jrs-russia-scandal-is-just-fake-news/news-story/5a5912d6fd66d9af1b9abd2a9843f51d

and his supporters are as unpredictable as him.
I would not be surprised if this is long and dragged out as it even has the potential for civil war, if trump can convince enough of his followers it's 'fake news'.

Just remember, Nixon resigned years after Watergate began to be investigated. These things move slowly.

And only one in four Americans actually supports Trump these days. We'd kick their asses

Original Quill wrote:Speak of the devil:

Grant Stern wrote:Trump Russia Dossier Decoded: Yes, There Really Was A Massive Oil Deal (UPDATED)


Circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that Fake President J. Trump and his campaign associates brokered a massive oil privatization deal, where his Organization facilitated a global financial transaction to sell Russian Oil stock to its Syrian War adversary, the Emirate of Qatar.

The Trump Russia Dossier describes a massive privatization deal to deliver a chunk of the state-owned Rosneft Oil company to Qatar and also a secret buyer in the Cayman Islands.

Qatar has been a tenant at Trump Tower since 2008, though recent reports indicate they may have recently vacated their state-run airlines’ corporate campus.

Donald Trump and Russia conducted the transaction in three phases; Phase 1 began in early 2016 with a meeting of the minds at The Mayflower Hotel to start the deal and a due diligence period, Phase 2 began just before the Republican National Convention and continued through Election Day, and Phase 3 happened after Trump’s shocking win and concluding just days before Buzzfeed published the bombshell dossier describing the deal.

The end result allowed Russia to trade stolen emails to help to Donald Trump’s election campaign (as well as that of many Republican Congressmen), in exchange for help circumventing American sanctions to transact the sale of Rosneft, which Putin desperately needed to finance his budget deficit.

The Rosneft transaction also purportedly sent a $500 million dollar brokerage fee to Carter Page, or perhaps the Trump Organization.

The Trump Campaign would’ve been extremely familiar with Rosneft, since top surrogate Rudy Giuliani listed the Russian oil giant as one of his law clients at Bracewell & Giuliani, LLP in 2014 according to Bloomberg.

For the first time here, we’ve broken down the entire Rosneft privatization transaction and US election, by using open source media stories to create a comprehensive timeline of events over three phases in a single graphic.

This is the transaction Ranking House Intel Committee Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) described when kicked off Congress’ Russia hearings discussing Rosneft’s privatization deal, and the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Putin’s allies.

The most deal significant milestone was the “meeting of the minds” which occurred last April 27th at the Center for National Interest gathering in Washington, D.C.

Four Ambassadors convened at The Mayflower Hotel, who represent the three countries definitely involved in the Rosneft privatization deal: Italy, Russia, Singapore, and also the Philippines.

They all attended Donald Trump’s foreign policy campaign speech.

Key players from every country involved were in that one room, for one night, one time only, and even now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was there.

The former Alabama Senator only admitted that he had two meetings with the Russian Ambassador, publicly excusing his own lies maintaining that contacts both weren’t campaigning discussions, even though one meeting was at the RNC in Cleveland. The April contact makes a third undisclosed meeting by Sessions with Ambassador Kislyak. Former US Ambassador Richard Burt is now a Russian lobbyist, and is thought to have written the speech that night, and serves on the Center’s Board of Directors.

After the-Republican candidate Donald Trump locked down the GOP nomination in early May against Ted Cruz, the plan described in Steele’s dossier leapt into action.

From the look of events, starting in July, a massive international oil privatization transaction began, and it was concluded in early January, right around the time the Electoral College certified Donald Trump as America’s 45th President.

The April 27th campaign speech at CNFI effectively concluded the due diligence or first phase of the Dossier’s privatization transaction and began a ‘quiet period’ before the pace of events quickened.

The second phase of the transaction began just before the Republican Convention and ran through election day.

The third phase happened after election day, and before the January 10th disclosure of the Steele Dossier, itself just a few short days after the Rosneft privatization sale finished.

Here’s our comprehensive infographic, the story continues below:



This week, the Democratic Coalition just released a 40-page report which factually confirms more than a dozen major allegations of the Trump Russia Dossier published by Buzzfeed on January 10th.

Our exhaustive research breaks down the findings of the Dossier chronologically and highlights the ties between Trump and the buyer of Russia’s oil company shares.

Oil-rich Gulf Arab nation of Qatar was the end buyer of a massive stake in the Russian, state-run oil company Rosneft’s privatization deal.

The new Democratic Coalition report (below) reveals that Trump has hosted a Qatari state-run business owned by the QIA — the buyer of Rosneft shares in this transaction — located in the Manhattan Trump Tower for many years, as well as numerous factual confirmations of the dossier’s findings.

Democratic Coalition Senior Advisor Scott Dworkin is set to advise a bipartisan group of Congresspeople this week on his factual findings, which back up the information contained in the Dossier that implicates President Trump in a foreign affair with Vladimir Putin.

He tells us this is his main advice:

“The Dossier and its contents are mostly real.”

The President’s son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador during the Transition period, with disgraced General Michael Flynn.

“Carter Page met with Rosneft in December to assist with the deal, and he’s on the record admitting it but claims he didn’t meet Igor Sechin,” said Dworkin incredulously. “Really? It must have been a webcast with an intermediary. Everything in the Dossier adds up, and it still leaves more questions than answers.”

A mighty brokerage fee to one of the Trump campaign advisors, Moscow-based investment banker Carter Page, is highlighted in the former MI-6 operative’s report.

Theoretically, the former Merrill Lynch investment banker, Page, may have only been the “bag man” or go-between and someone else is the recipient of the cash premium in the dossier. Five hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and conceivably, many members of the Trump Organization, or family, could be involved in a deal of that scope.

What is most unusual about the sale is that Qatar is on the opposite sides of the Syrian war from Russia.

Not only that but in 2004 Russian agents openly assassinated a top Chechen rebel in Doha, the capital of Qatar, by bombing his SUV.

However, friendship between Donald Trump and the Qatari state-run airline who paid him anywhere from $19,000–100,000 a month in rent since 2008, must run deep.

Rosneft began taking steps towards a sale in early 2016, which accelerated right around the time of the Republican National Convention.

Russia’s state oil companies both declared that they would not privatize in 2016, right after Trump’s feud with a gold star family whose patriarch Khizr Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

Putin announced the sale after new management changed the Trump campaign’s momentum in an exclusive Bloomberg interview in early September, which set the price at $11 billion dollars.



Six countries are known to have participated in the massive privatization deal of Russia’s jewel, its state-run oil company, which left the end ownership of the stake impenetrable, and a purchase price of roughly $10.7 billion dollars, which Reuters reported about in January as:

“How Russia sold its oil jewel: without saying who bought it.”

In early October, once Russia knew about their damaging cache of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta’s emails, they re-ignited the privatization sales.

Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin had already spent $5 billion dollars to buy out a foreign stake in Bashneft, another massive Russian oil partnership, whose oligarch was compromised, and charged (as Putin often does) with criminal offenses.

The Bashneft deal closed right before the damaging Access Hollywood political scandal, which would’ve swamped a presidential campaign without Trump’s collusive assistance from Putin’s massive propaganda machine.

After the Access Hollywood tape releases had seemed to doom Trump’s campaign, Putin even announced that the companies would buy their own shares if they had to — there was a serious budget hole to fill.

Nineteen and a half percent of Rosneft’s stock was agreed to be transferred on December 7th, before the board was informed of the transaction’s terms only after it took place.

The “matryoshka” (named after the famous nesting dolls) or complex deal structure is most likely designed to avoid American sanctions imposed over the Ukraine invasion against Rosneft, its CEO Igor Sechin, and its parent company Gazprom.

The highlighted yellow company in the below organization chart is a total mystery and based in the Cayman Islands law firm Walkers.

This is the kind of financial engineering it took for the Italian bank Intesa, to lend money to the buyers of the Rosneft stake.



Anonymous blogger The Trump Watchdog indicates that the Walkers law firm is linked to Trump economic advisor Steven Schwartzman, a co-founder of the Wall Street giant Blackstone, because they own the Intertrust Group, who provided the Singapore holding company (item 17.)

The shelf company owned by Intertrust Group was renamed QHG Holdings — which was discovered after internet sleuths tracked down a scrivener’s error — and which probably links US interests to the international transaction.

Coincidentally, the other co-founder of Blackstone Pete Peterson also happens to be on the Board of Directors for the Center for National Interest who booked The Mayflower Hotel at the last moment for the April 27th meeting with the four ambassadors, Trump, and Sessions.

Disgraced former Reagan National Security Advisor “Bud” McFarlane also attended The Mayflower Hotel speech on April 27th — in an especially ironic twist, where he attended another speech nearly 30 years earlier by Ronald Reagan, which he attended six short months before another international scandal erupted named Iran-Contra. Reagan’s speech that night demanded House Democrats to fund the Contra’s guerrilla war in Nicaragua, and like Trump’s speech proposing an unusual Russian “peace” deal, 30-years ago that Republican President described a foreign policy wish list, which eventually was revealed to have illegally transpired.

In November, despite Bud McFarlane’s public criticism in April, the Trump Transition team included the ex-felon’s compliments of Fox TV personality KT McFarland’s appointment as a Deputy NSA in their official press release.

Anyone who knows the Trump Administration, knows that they’re hypersensitive to criticism, yet oddly, this Trump critic was allowed to make a national security appointment so signficant that qualified applicants refused the job after Flynn’s dismissal, just to avoid KT McFarland being on their staff.

Then, Bud McFarlane mysteriously re-appeared at Trump Tower on December 5th, just two days before the Rosneft deal was announced, which didn’t make news when Henry Kissinger’s visit — he’s the Chairman Emeritus of the Center for National Interest — drew major headlines that day in Manhattan.

The end game for Russia was to funnel at least $5 billion dollars of new capital into state coffers to staunch some of the red ink expected to plague Putin’s budgets going into his 2018 elections, and through at least 2020 according to economists; and to do the deal while tiptoeing past American financial sanctions.

That’s where the cash-rich Gulf Arab nation stepped in to make a deal. The Qatari sovereign wealth fund (QIA) is the known buyer of 50% of these shares of Rosneft.

Yet still, nobody knows where well over $2 billion dollars of equity for the purchase came from, as Reuters reports:

Although Qatar has never publicly confirmed how much it has contributed to the deal or the size of the stake that it bought, Glencore and Rosneft say it contributed 2.5 billion euros. Along with the 300 million from Glencore and the 5.2 billion loaned by Intesa [an Italian bank], that still leaves a shortfall of 2.2 billion euros.

The QIA is coincidentally also the largest shareholder in the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore, who executed the purchase with a minimal direct investment, and used the “Singapore vehicle” or holding company to hold their Rosneft share.

Glencore guaranteed the Italian bank Intesa’s loan for only 1/3rd of its value.

Donald Trump has had business ties to Qatar’s government for years, according to a Jan. 10th report in Time:

Trump has stakes in four companies that appear to be tied in business in the desert nation. The country’s state-owned carrier, Qatar Airways, has leased an office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower since 2008. Ivanka Trump told Hotelier Middle East in 2015 that the Trump Hotel Collection was eyeing opportunities in Qatar.

It’s unclear when or if Qatari Airlines left Trump Tower, or when their lease actually expires, but a Jan. 28th story in Vox says that their operations have departed the President’s home building in New York.

What is clear is that Qatari Airlines’ CEO has publicly called Donald Trump a “good friend” and it is one of the countries excluded from the Muslim Ban, which coincidentally, does business with the President.

Recently, CEOs of American airliners met with Trump recently to decry government subsidized competition from Qatar and other foreign state-run carriers, which is an obvious conflict for President Trump.

If that wasn’t enough conflicted interest, Trump Organization announced a plan to build or license their brand in Qatar in 2015, but there are no further reports to substantiate the move.

The CEO of Qatari Airlines says that he was one of the first people to give congratulations after election day:

Qatar Airways’ Group Chief Executive Akbar al-Baker, who voiced support for Trump even after his comments about Muslims, welcomed his victory. “Our relationship goes way back, and I was one of the first to commend Donald on his well-deserved new leadership position,” he said in a statement to Reuters.

Qatari Airlines rented pricey office space at President Trump’s tower for many years. If their lease continues today, it would be a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prevents federal employees and the executive from accepting any foreign payments whatsoever.

Qatar’s complete and total involvement in the Rosneft deal is undeniable.

The small Emirate that just publicly participated in the purchase of Russia’s state-run oil and gas giant — happens to be extremely close to Donald Trump.

It’s unknown if the Philippines had any direct or indirect involvement in the Rosneft transaction, but their President Duarte is a staunch Trump supporter, who assigned one of the President’s business partners as a trade envoy.

The island nation took the unusual step of hosting Russian naval ships in early January, which is extremely out of the ordinary for the longtime US ally and former colony.

What we do know is that the Cayman Islands company investors were conspicuously missing whe Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin and Vladimir Putin met with their new partners at Intesa Bank, the Qatar Investment Authority and Glencore in January.

Why Russia Needed The Money

At the heart of the Dossier’s disclosures is the Russian goal of ending economic sanctions, some of which specifically target Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who was Putin’s top deputy in government service just a few short years ago, in a country where the lines between business and government can be blurry.

President Obama’s 2014 sanctions have crippled the Russian economy when compounded with low global oil prices.

That caused a massive budget gap last year, which led Putin to privatize assets to pay current costs for the Russian government.

After President Obama leveled retaliatory sanctions in December 2016 and expelled diplomats in late December for meddling in our election, Vladimir Putin announced and then stunningly reserved retaliation.

Last month, disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn was fired as NSA, apparently just for discussing Russian sanctions with the Russian Ambassador in late December.
At the time, Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats and spies sparked a highly unusual public “bromance” between the President-elect and the dictator, which sparked speculation about a quid pro quo when Trump tweeted a love letter to the Russian dictator.

Strategically, Russia is desperate to shake the larger economic sanctions, but America’s Congress is seeking more, not less economic retaliation against Putin’s regime.

Shortly after taking office, President Trump did indeed relax sanctions against Russia’s lead spy agency, the FSB, but most observers said was a minor concession.
Into that void, Trump’s lawyer and a group of his Ukrainian family connections and lawmakers, and the notorious Felix Sater appeared with a “peace plan” that would’ve accomplished the end of sanctions.

One of the ‘peacemakers,’ a Ukrainian relative of Trump’s trusted lawyer Michael Cohen, has already perished under mysterious circumstances since then.

If America lifts sanctions against the Putin regime, then the value of Russia’s public oil companies stands to skyrocket.

Already, Donald Trump’s presence has sparked a market rally on Moscow’s MICEX stock exchange.

US Media Is Connecting The Dots On Steele’s Dossier

Open source journalism confirms some of the more important political elements of the Trump Russia Dossier.

My original report two weeks ago revealed a major point of affirmation in CNN’s interview with former Trump campaign associate, J.D. Gordon, whose remarks confirmed a serious political allegation in the Trump Russia Dossier.

Then, Rachel Maddow echoed the essence of our report on MSNBC a few days later and added that Politico linked a participant in the RNC Ukraine policy changes to one of then-Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort’s associates, who is himself a foreign national being investigated by the FBI.

Wikileaks involvement to assist Russia in Trump’s campaign is a cornerstone of the dossier’s claims; it was seen as essential for Putin and Russia to maintain plausible deniability for political interference.

Sure enough, new factual data shows that the anti-secrecy organization switched to their web hosting to use a Russian DNS server right before releasing the most damaging email material during last year’s elections.

That means Vladimir Putin certainly has knowledge of the physical location of Wikileaks’ servers and allows their messages to be broadcast using Russian soil.
Trump’s former top advisor Roger Stone admitted to communicating with Russian hackers in August 2016, during the election about releases of information through Wikileaks.

This month, Gen. Flynn revealed that he was secretly an unregistered Turkish foreign agent ‘volunteering’ his time during the Trump campaign, and Congress revealed proof this week, which he was simultaneously on the payroll of Russian state-sponsored RT “News” and the Kaspersky security firm, who is thought to have been involved in the election hacks.

One must imagine that Flynn’s role as a secret, unregistered foreign agent of two nations (in other words, he’s a SPY) is one of the main targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation.

“When the dossier became public it generated more questions than answers,” says Scott Dworkin late at night via chat. “Over the last several months we’ve corroborated the dossier with the facts. The deeper we dig, the more truth we find in it. Just look at the author — Christopher Steele — who is a former MI-6 agent who’s saved more lives than Trump ever has.”

“He’s the real person people imagine James Bond to be.”

The Trump Russia Dossier describes the Rosneft privatization deal almost exactly, and Putin’s resulting purge of Russian allies and ex-officials looks like the kind of deadly cover up a dictator would apply, to erase his friends who knew about the deal.

Scott Dworkin says to expect full confirmation of the report within a week from official sources, or when Steele testifies in front of Congress in person or via remote link.

“A majority of the dossier and its contents are factual,” says the intrepid investigator Dworkin, who began making #TrumpLeaks posts in October. Now, when he tweets @funder 3 million people per day see and share his research. “The dossier is more real than anything Trump’s ever said.”

“A majority of it is factual and news reports over time have proven some of those facts.”

This weekend, the Republican Chair of the House Intel Committee said that only one person is being investigated for treason in the White House by the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence division.

There’s no way a deal of this magnitude would completely envelop the Trump Campaign, its manager, its outside affiliates and inside agents so thoroughly, without the principal or head of a group knowing that something was happening.

Any reasonable person would have to conclude that Donald Trump is the FBI’s target, based upon the bevy of circumstantial evidence tying RNC campaign events to Russian oil, economic sanctions, and the simmering conflict in Ukraine.

Nearly three decades ago, Trump admitted on national television to participating in a straw-man transaction with the Sultan of Brunei and infamous Iran-Contra middleman Adnan Khashoggi, through which he acquired a large yacht, so we’ve got proof that the Trump Organization has engaged these kinds of multi-national transactions in the Middle East.

The most important commodity traded in the oil business or politics is money.

The privatization deal described in Christopher Steele’s dossier has played out on the pages of Bloomberg and Reuters for a year — shows that there was a whole lot of money in brokering oil deals for Donald Trump’s associates, and a rapid profit by Qatar if sanctions are released this year.

The only question that’s not even pondered in these many public reports, and which must be a central focus of the American intelligence community’s investigations:

Where is the $500 million dollar brokerage fee today?

Where did the other $2 billion dollars come from?

What is Donald Trump’s true role in the deal?
https://thesternfacts.com/trump-russia-dossier-decoded-yes-there-really-was-a-massive-oil-deal-e33370349b67

nicko wrote:Quill, do you really expect any one to read all that lot,i started to but then I realised i'd got some paint to watch drying !

nicko wrote:Quill, do you really expect any one to read all that lot,i started to but then I realised i'd got some paint to watch drying !