This is the kind of stuff that interests me. Any idea how CIM makes money from the E-5 Visa?
RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
Hood Critic
The Power Circle
So many back alley shady deals in this administration
Dorian Breh
Veteran
kelly conway too gone off then xans to know she should retire and go into hiding
OH shyt!!! THE 1MDB SCANDAL!!! YALL GOTTA READ ABOUT THIS!
THIS IS LINKED TO INTERNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATES!!!
Trump Ally Was in Talks to Earn Millions in Effort to End 1MDB Probe in U.S.
Emails indicate Republican donor and wife were negotiating fee if the Justice Department closed its investigation
Tom Wright and
March 1, 2018 10:48 a.m. ET
A top Republican fundraiser close to President Donald Trump was in negotiations to earn tens of millions of dollars if the U.S. Justice Department dropped its investigation into a multibillion-dollar graft scandal involving a Malaysian state investment fund, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
In emails dated during the past year, Elliott Broidy, a venture capitalist and a longtime Republican donor, and his wife, Robin Rosenzweig, an attorney, discuss setting up a consulting contract with Jho Low, the Malaysian businessman at the center of the 1Malaysia Development Bhd. scandal, which brought scrutiny to the country’s prime minister, Najib Razak. The messages include draft agreements between Ms. Rosenzweig’s California law firm and representatives of Mr. Low about the possible terms of their business engagement. In one draft, there is a proposal that includes a $75 million fee if the Justice Department quickly drops its investigation.
Along with the contract drafts, the emails also appear to show Mr. Broidy prepared talking points for Malaysia’s prime minister ahead of a 2017 visit to Washington that included a meeting with Mr. Trump and other officials. In the talking points, the prime minister was advised to state that Malaysia wanted to emphasize its work with the U.S. in confronting North Korea, while also arguing against the U.S. legal pursuit of the 1MDB matter. It isn’t clear what, if anything, came of the talking points.
The details of the purported effort to influence the Justice Department investigation were included in a cache of emails from Mr. Broidy’s and his wife’s email accounts that were provided to the Journal.
Mr. Broidy was a vice chairman for the Trump campaign’s joint fund with the Republican Party during the 2016 campaign, helping it raise more than $108 million. A longtime Republican donor, he gave more than $160,000 last year to the Republican National Committee, where he is currently a national deputy finance chairman. In March, Mr. Trump is set to attend a fundraiser in Los Angeles that Mr. Broidy helped organize.
Chris Clark of Latham & Watkins LLP, on behalf of Mr. Broidy and Ms. Rosenzweig, who runs Colfax Law Office Inc., said in a statement that Ms. Rosenzweig’s law firm was engaged by Pras Michel, a member of the 1990s hip-hop group the Fugees and a friend of Mr. Low, “to provide strategic advice as part of a broader team to Mr. Low.”
The statement adds: “During the course of this engagement a number of strategies were discussed with Mr. Broidy, Mr. Michel, and other members of the team. But at no time did Mr. Broidy or Ms. Rosenzweig, or anyone acting on their behalf, discuss Mr. Low’s case with President Trump, any member of his staff, or anyone at the U.S. Department of Justice.”
Mr. Clark said neither Colfax Law nor Mr. Broidy has ever represented Malaysia or any of its officials “in any capacity.”
“We are concerned that the Wall Street Journal is in possession of internal drafts of documents that were never used, and that were never intended to be shared with third parties,” he said. “We question the legality and propriety of the manner in which the documents were obtained.”
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Elliott Broidy, right, a venture capitalist, and his wife, Robin Rosenzweig, an attorney. Photo: Billy Bennight/UPPA/Zuma Press
Mr. Low didn’t respond to a request for comment on the arrangement. He has denied wrongdoing in the 1MDB matter. The 1MDB fund has denied any money is missing and said it would cooperate with any lawful investigation. Multiple investigations in Malaysia into 1MDB closed without finding wrongdoing.
Prime Minister Najib, who oversaw 1MDB and gave Mr. Low control over investment decisions, has been keen for the Justice Department to drop its probes.
The Justice Department alleges Mr. Low, a 36-year-old Malaysian financier, helped siphon off at least $4.5 billion from 1MDB, between 2009 and 2015. Mr. Low and conspirators from Asia and the Middle East allegedly used the proceeds to buy luxury homes in the U.S., frequent Las Vegas nightclubs and fund Hollywood movies, among other things. At least six countries are investigating the affair, including Singapore and Switzerland.
Since mid-2016, the Justice Department has sought, via civil lawsuits in California, to seize almost $2 billion in assets allegedly bought with the stolen money. On Wednesday, authorities in Indonesia seized Mr. Low’s $250 million yacht at a port on the resort island of Bali after a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
A representative for Mr. Low said in a written statement in the wake of the yacht seizure that the case was “completely without foundation’’ and that “rather than reflecting on the deeply flawed and politically motivated allegations, the DoJ is continuing with its pattern of global over-reach—all based on entirely unsupported claims of wrongdoing.”
U.S. authorities also allege in civil lawsuits that “Malaysian Official 1,” which people aware of the matter say is a reference to Mr. Najib, received $681 million from 1MDB into his personal accounts. The Justice Department in its asset-seizure suits identified tens of millions of dollars worth of jewelry purchased with funds originating from the alleged 1MDB fraud, including for Mr. Najib’s wife. Mr. Najib has denied taking money for personal gain and he was cleared by Malaysia’s attorney general of any wrongdoing.
In September 2017, Mr. Trump invited Mr. Najib to a meeting in the White House to discuss trade ties. Given the 1MDB scandal, and Mr. Najib’s alleged personal involvement, the timing of the trip sparked contention among the prime minister’s critics. Ahead of that trip, Mr. Broidy sent an email to a colleague at his venture-capital firm on Aug. 7, 2017, with the subject line “Malaysia Talking Points *Final*.”
The email appears to outline how Mr. Najib should approach his U.S. visit. The first-listed priority was to make it clear that Malaysia fully backed U.S. efforts to isolate North Korea, the email said. The talking points also list the 1MDB affair: The U.S. investigation “has caused unnecessary tension,” the talking points read, “and could cause a negative reaction among Malaysians.”
A spokesman for Mr. Najib didn’t respond to a request for comment on the purported talking points or his visit to Washington.
In his September 2017 visit to the White House, Mr. Najib met with Mr. Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and other U.S. officials. In a public appearance together, Mr. Trump identified Malaysia as a strategic national-security ally in Asia. “He does not do business with North Korea any longer,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Najib. “We find that to be very important.”
Ahead of Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Najib last fall, Gen. McMaster and a member of the White House Counsel’s Office advised him that the prime minister was under investigation by the Justice Department and that the issue might come up, a White House official said. Mr. Trump was advised that Mr. Najib might bring up the case and could lobby him to ask the Justice Department to shut it down, and that he should respond that he wouldn’t interfere, the official said.
Mr. Najib subsequently didn’t raise the issue in his private meeting with the president, nor did Mr. Trump, the official said.
The White House didn’t respond to a question about whether Mr. Trump had ever discussed the Justice Department probe with Mr. Broidy.
Legal experts said certain actions described in the emails had little precedent in Washington. An effort to approach White House officials to close a Justice Department investigation would be unusual because administrations have typically not had any involvement in federal investigations, to avoid giving the appearance of any political motivation. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has often waded into Justice Department matters, criticizing Attorney General Jeff Sessions as recently as Wednesday, when he labeled Mr. Sessions’ handling of a surveillance-related probe as “disgraceful.”
Mr. Broidy’s involvement with Malaysian politics dates to at least March 2017, when his wife, Ms. Rosenzweig drew up an agreement between her Beverly Hills law firm and Mr. Low, according to the emails.
On March 12, 2017, Ms. Rosenzweig emailed the agreement to Nickie Lum Davis, whose Hawaii-based firm, LNS Capital, acted as a consultant to Colfax on the deal with Mr. Low, the emails show. The unsigned draft stipulated various terms, including a $75 million payment if the firm could help get the Justice Department to drop its civil-asset forfeiture lawsuits within 180 days.
Ms. Rosenzweig later changed the details of the agreement to a flat fee, which she said was to ensure they complied with U.S. law, according to an email later in March to LNS’s Ms. Davis.
Ms. Davis didn’t respond to a question for comment.
By May, there was still no final agreement, according to the email chain. Mr. Low didn’t want to pay Ms. Rosenzweig directly, but through Mr. Michel, the former hip-hop star, the emails show. Mr. Michel was among the many celebrity friends Mr. Low made in the years after the alleged fraud began in late 2009. The emails didn’t state a reason for the payment structure.
Mr. Michel didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The emails the Journal viewed didn’t show whether Ms. Rosenzweig’s firm had finalized terms of the agreement with Mr. Low.
In 2009, Mr. Broidy pleaded guilty to a felony charge of rewarding official misconduct and admitted to making nearly $1 million in gifts to benefit four former top officials in the office that oversees New York state’s pension fund, which made $250 million in investments in Mr. Broidy’s firm, the Journal reported. As part of his guilty plea, he agreed to forfeit $18 million to New York state.
—Aruna Viswanatha contributed to this article.
Write to Bradley Hope at bradley.hope@wsj.com, Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com and Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com
@DonKnock @dza @88m3 @wire28 @smitty22 @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @.r. @Dorian Breh @Dameon Farrow @TheNig @VR Tripper @re'up @Blackfyre_Berserker @Cali_livin
Last edited:
GoddamnyamanProf
Countdown to Armageddon
and Sean Hannity
Man Maggie STAYS with Trump dikk in her mouth
Senate Intelligence Leaders Say House G.O.P. Leaked a Senator’s Texts
March 1, 2018
Senator Richard M. Burr, right, and Senator Mark Warner, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were so perturbed by the leak of Mr. Warner’s text messages that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul D. Ryan last month to inform him of their findings.Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were behind the leak of private text messages between the Senate panel’s top Democrat and a Russian-connected lawyer, according to two congressional officials briefed on the matter.
Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, were so perturbed by the leak that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul D. Ryan last month to inform him of their findings. They used the meeting with Mr. Ryan to raise broader concerns about the direction of the House Intelligence Committee under its chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the officials said.
To the senators, who are overseeing what is effectively the last bipartisan investigation on Capitol Hill into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the leak was a serious breach of protocol and a partisan attack by one intelligence committee against the other.
The text messages were leaked just days after the same House Republicans had taken the extraordinary step of publicly releasing, over the objections of the F.B.I., a widely disputed memorandum based on sensitive government secrets. Taken together, the actions suggested a pattern of partisanship and unilateral action by the once-bipartisan House panel.
Fox News published the text messages, which were sent via a secure messaging application, in early February. President Trump and other Republicans loyal to him quickly jumped on the report to try to discredit Mr. Warner, suggesting that the senator was acting surreptitiously to try to talk with the former British spy who assembled a dossier of salacious claims about connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia.
“Wow! -Senator Mark Warner got caught having extensive contact with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch,” Mr. Trump wrote at the time. “Warner did not want a ‘paper trail’ on a ‘private’ meeting (in London) he requested with Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame.”
“All tied into Crooked Hillary,” Mr. Trump added.
The messages between Mr. Warner and Adam Waldman, a Washington lawyer, show that the senator tried for weeks to arrange a meeting with the former spy, Christopher Steele. The Senate committee has had difficulty making contact with Mr. Steele, whom it views as a key witness. And Mr. Waldman, who knew Mr. Steele, presented himself as a willing partner.
The Fox News article made prominent mention of work by Mr. Waldman’s Washington lobbying firm on behalf of Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate who was once close to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s indicted former campaign chairman.
Copies of the messages were originally submitted by Mr. Waldman to the Senate committee. In January, one of Mr. Nunes’s staff members requested that copies be shared with the House committee as well, according to a person familiar with the request who was not authorized to talk about it publicly. Days later, the messages were published by Fox News, the person said. Fox’s report said that it had obtained the documents from a Republican source it did not name.
The documents published by Fox News appear to back up the senators’ accusation. Though they were marked “CONFIDENTIAL: Produced to USSSCI on a Confidential Basis,” suggesting that they had come from the Senate panel, known as the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the person familiar with the congressional requests said that the stamp was misleading and that other markings gave away their actual origin.
Specifically, the copy of the messages shared with the Senate was paginated, and the one submitted to the House — while preserving the reference to the Senate committee — was unpaginated.
A lawyer for Mr. Waldman independently concluded that the House committee had probably shared the document and sent a letter to Mr. Nunes complaining about the leak, according to a person familiar with the letter.
Mr. Burr appeared to make a veiled reference to the text messages during a public hearing with the heads of the government’s intelligence agencies last month.
“There have been times where information has found its way out, some of it recent, where it didn’t come from us, but certainly people have portrayed it did,” he said. “And that’s O.K., because you know and we know the security measures we’ve got in place to protect the sensitivity of that material.”
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Nunes, Jack Langer, did not dispute that the committee had leaked the messages, but called the premise of this article “absurd.”
“The New York Times, a prominent purveyor of leaks, is highlighting anonymous sources leaking information that accuses Republicans of leaking information,” he said. “I’m not sure if this coverage could possibly get more absurd.”
AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, declined to comment. In his meeting with the senators, Mr. Ryan made clear that he heard their complaints but noted that he did not run the committee himself, the officials briefed on the encounter said.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were briefed on their conclusions in recent weeks and on the meeting with Mr. Ryan.
In a joint statement, Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner acknowledged the meeting with Mr. Ryan and said they had not requested that the speaker take any specific action.
Mr. Waldman, the lawyer who communicated with Mr. Warner, could not be reached for comment.
The incident makes clear just how far the two intelligence committees — generally considered secretive refuges from the politics of Capitol Hill — have diverged over the course of their Russia investigations.
In the House, Republicans and Democrats have been consumed by partisan sniping, airing grievances on television and in the press, while the pace of witness interviews has slowed to a crawl. Democrats have repeatedly accused Mr. Nunes of using his position to protect Mr. Trump from the investigation.
The House committee spent much of the last month locked in a bitter dispute over the secret Republican memorandum, which accused top F.B.I. and Justice Department officials of abusing their powers to spy on one of Mr. Trump’s former campaign advisers. Republicans released the document over the objections of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., which warned in a rare public statement that it was dangerously misleading.
Democrats called the document reckless and said it was merely a political tool to tarnish the agencies investigating Mr. Trump’s potential ties to Russia. They eventually released their own memo, drawn from the same underlying material, rebutting it.
The Senate committee has conducted its investigation primarily in private, and Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner remained in lock step both publicly and privately. When Fox News published Mr. Warner’s text messages, for example, an aide to Mr. Burr told the network that he had been aware of Mr. Warner’s contacts with Mr. Waldman, and the two senators issued a joint statement condemning the leak.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida and another member of the Intelligence Committee, also defended Mr. Warner.
And while Mr. Nunes’s memo consumed Republicans in the House, as well as officials in the White House, Mr. Burr largely steered clear of it. He told CNNit ought not to have been released, and in private he discounted it.
In the hearing with the intelligence chiefs last month, he sought to draw a distinction between his committee’s approach and that of the House.
“I promised you when we started a year ago that the sensitive nature of that material would, in fact, be protected,” he said. “The vice chairman and I have done everything in our power to do that.”
@DonKnock @dza @88m3 @wire28 @smitty22 @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @.r. @Dorian Breh @Dameon Farrow @TheNig @VR Tripper @re'up @Blackfyre_Berserker @Cali_livin
Last edited:
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
Pras from the Fugees is involved??
Senate Intelligence Leaders Say House G.O.P. Leaked a Senator’s Texts
March 1, 2018
This is proof that the House investigation is a farce. :tchallascust1:
AZBeauty
Stop lyin' nicca.
:ALERTRED:
Questions linger about how Melania Trump, a Slovenian model, scored ‘the Einstein visa’
”
Time for the press conference, right?
Can you imagine a conversation between her and Carter Page :idiot: I just got a fukking headache.
I read that part at least 5 times.Pras from the Fugees is involved??
