Oh look. Another important link by a reputable news source.
If only there was a way to share that information with excitement and alarm to warn people to pay extra attention to it without fielding stupid complaints about it.
Trump campaign bodyguard linked to ex-con who’s key in Russia probes
Trump campaign bodyguard linked to ex-con who’s key in Russia probes
By Ben Wieder and Kevin G. Hall
khall@mcclatchydc.com
WASHINGTON
Russian emigre Felix Sater, shown here in a screenshot from a YouTube video he posted on Aug. 8, 2014, is in the crosshairs of investigators probing possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Wieder, Ben
September 21, 2017 5:00 AM
Another connection has emerged between Donald Trump and Felix Sater, the Russian emigre and ex-con who's become a key figure in widening investigations into ties between Trump associates and Russian figures.
Trump plays down his relationship with Sater, despite growing evidence of links between the two, including recently published emails detailing how Sater worked with a top Trump Organization lawyer on a planned Moscow property deal as late as 2016, during the presidential campaign.
McClatchy’s investigation now shows that a trusted Trump security aide hired in 2015 had intimate knowledge that Sater, twice convicted, had a criminal past and underworld connections.
Before he became Trump’s bodyguard, Gary Uher was an FBI agent involved in a complex deal to bring Sater back from Russia in the late 1990s. The resulting plea deal allowed Sater to avoid prison time in a Wall Street probe by serving as a government informant until his sentencing in 2009. During much of the time that he was a secret informant, Sater was a Trump Organization business associate, working on projects in New York, Florida and Arizona.
It’s not clear if Sater and Uher maintained an active relationship. Sater declined comment, and Uher did not respond to multiple requests for a response.
But the new information raises more questions about Trump’s ties to the Russian-born felon, Sater, and those in Sater’s orbit. “This latest revelation adds yet another connection between Trump and Russian criminals,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University
law professor in St. Louis, who specializes in government ethics and national security law.
The Trump Organization did not respond to detailed questions about the two, and whether its executives or Trump himself were aware of Uher’s role in Sater’s federal plea deal.
But court documents from almost two decades ago, obtained by McClatchy, show that Uher played an important part in Sater’s decision to return from Russia.
This snipped section of a 2000 court deposition of then-informant Lawrence Ray shows how FBI agent Gary Uher worked to bring Felix Sater back from Russia. Almost 20 years later they both were in Donald Trump’s orbit.
Uher was a young FBI agent when he helped convince Sater to stay out of U.S. prison by cooperating in an operation that uncovered a $40 million scam by criminally connected Wall Street firms. Numerous members of the New York-area Mafia were eventually sent to prison.
FBI veterans loosely divide agents into two categories: the brainy, whose talents tend toward pursuing paper trails, and the brawny, who prefer to be out on the street and can be more inclined to be part of a security detail.
Tall, thick and imposing, Uher fell into the latter category.
“He was a good agent,” recalled Lewis Schiliro,
an expert on organized crime who at the time was the assistant director of the FBI’s New York office. He referred to the late 1990s as “a really wild time” for Russia-linked crime.
Recent court documents obtained by McClatchy show that Uher, after leaving the bureau, was referred to the Trump Organization in 2015 by Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner and onetime nominee to head the federal Department of Homeland Security. Kerik withdrew his nomination and was imprisoned in 2010 after pleading guilty to tax fraud and making false statements in a federal bribery probe.
Kerik is also a former business partner of high-profile Trump surrogate Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor.
Uher said in a court deposition that he and Kerik had known each other since the early 1980s in New Jersey, when Kerik trained Uher in the Passaic County Sheriff’s Department.
The December 2016 deposition came after Uher briefly made headlines in the early days of Trump’s campaign. He and other members of Trump’s security detail were accused in a lawsuit of roughing up protestors in front of Trump Tower during a book signing in September 2015.
Uher indicated in the deposition that he had worked for both the campaign and the Trump Organization, reporting directly to Keith Schiller, who headed security for the organization and went on to a similar position at the White House this year. (Schiller left that post this month.)
Uher appears to no longer work for either the Trump campaign or Trump Organization, though his current employer’s website touts those past positions.
Oshirak Group International, headquartered in suburban Virginia, shows a picture of Uher on its website and lists him as director of law enforcement. The first item on
his website bio cites his work as “Body guard for Donald Trump and family.”