RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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David Pecker Granted Immunity in Cohen Case
Publishing executive met with prosecutors to describe involvement of Cohen, Trump in hush-money deals to women ahead of 2016 election
David Pecker, chief executive officer of American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer. PHOTO: FRANCOIS DURAND/GETTY IMAGES
151 COMMENTS
By
Nicole Hong and
Lukas Alpert
Updated Aug. 23, 2018 12:59 p.m. ET
David Pecker, the chief executive of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Michael Cohen and Donald Trump in the criminal investigation into hush-money payments for two women during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.
In exchange for immunity, Mr. Pecker, CEO of American Media, Inc., has met with prosecutors and shared details about payments Mr. Cohen arranged in an effort to silence two women who alleged sexual encounters with Mr. Trump, including Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals, some of the people said. Prosecutors have indicated that Mr. Pecker won’t be criminally charged for his participation in the deals, the people said.
Mr. Pecker has previously said he is a longtime friend of Messrs. Trump and Cohen.
Prosecutors have indicated Dylan Howard, chief content officer of American Media, also won’t be criminally charged in the Cohen investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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Mr. Pecker’s assistance appeared to have informed the charging documents made public on Tuesday as part of Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea to eight criminal charges, including campaign-finance violations tied to the payments.
During his guilty-plea hearing, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, said that at Mr. Trump’s direction, he broke federal laws on campaign contributions by coordinating payments to the two women for the purpose of suppressing negative information about Mr. Trump and influencing the 2016 election.
American Media executives were involved in both hush-money deals that formed the basis of Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea to campaign-finance violations, prosecutors said. One was a $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford—a former porn actress who goes professionally by Stormy Daniels—to keep her from publicly discussing an alleged affair with Mr. Trump.
The second was a $150,000 payment made to former Playboy model Karen McDougal for her exclusive story of an alleged extramarital affair with Mr. Trump, a story that was purchased by American Media in August 2016 at Mr. Cohen’s urging, and then never published.
The immunity status of Mr. Pecker was first reported by Vanity Fair. The Wall Street Journal published Wednesday that Mr. Pecker provided information to prosecutors.
Write to Nicole Hong at nicole.hong@wsj.com and Lukas Alpert at lukas.alpert@wsj.com
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Dameon Farrow
Superstar
Speed picking up. We made it outta 2nd gear.
Feds been on Manafort for at least a decade
Paul Manafort went to Kyrgyzstan to 'strengthen Russia's position'
Yep. I think we'll be hearing about Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr very soon with the Trump Foundation stuff as they were all chairmen + Cohen snitching. What a time to be alive
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
that was definitely a CIA move bro. This is what happens when you poke them too much. When he told Paris "Get Out" was probably code word for "fukk him up"
They sat on this story breh. That's how CIA works. They let u push them and push them until they tell you "we pulling up with smoke and confetti"
Because Paris Dennard is seen as a leader that needs to be made an example of?
If the CIA really cared that much about silencing/intimidating/punishing people who cast aspersions on their personnel they’d be doing it to someone that actually matters.
You got big time right wingers with millions of followers accusing the CIA of treason, murder etc., and no one has touched them. And they probably have even worse skeletons in their closets.
CIA official #1: guys we need to initiate reputation destruction protocols, Paris needs to be taught a lesson.
Official #2: Paris Hilton? We leaked her video years ago
Official #1: No you fukking idiot, don’t you watch the news? You kids nowadays are so obsessed with your computers and toys and don’t realize that most of our work is derived from open sources.
Official #2: Michael Jackson’s kid? Her name is Paris right?
Official #1: Not yet, we’ll deal with her when the time comes. This threat is existential.
Official #2:
Official #1: you goddamn fukking idiot cocksukker im talking about Paris Dennard - the mother fukker is going to get all of our clearances pulled - no more big bucks from MSNBC!
Official #2: *searches CIA intelligence sharing database*
Looks like we got a hit. San Francisco has this guy coming *snickers* in and out of the bath house at all times of the night. We have video. And. It’s quite, how do I say.......let me just say there are glow sticks involved...
Official #1: you’re a sick motherfukker, but we can’t go there yet...let’s go easy on him first
Official #3 *runs in frantic*: sir sir sir we have a situation, one of our sources in China made it out and we need to get him and his family....
Official #1: that can wait...we have more important things to deal with...*strokes chin* so Monseiur Dennard....what shall we do with you.....
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
Feds been on Manafort for at least a decade
Paul Manafort went to Kyrgyzstan to 'strengthen Russia's position'
New maha conspiracy theory if Manafort flips:
Manafort was a FBI/CIA plant the entire time! They made him join the campaign to illegally spy on trump!
Trump only brought him on to try and find out the truth!!
Now More Than Ever, Manafort Looks Like a Kremlin Agent
By John R. Schindler • 08/23/18 9:44am
Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Michael Cohen’s guilty plea in Federal court Tuesday afternoon dealt a powerful blow to the president, and it was followed in one-two-punch fashion by a potentially devastating hook from Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, who’s been making the rounds explaining that his client will be “more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows” about any crimes, collusion and hacking. Yesterday, investigators added yet another slap to the face with a subpoena for Cohen in their investigation into the Trump Foundation.
But the deadlier blow—the one that kills you days or weeks later— may have come from Paul Manafort. The president’s campaign manager in the pivotal mid-2016 period was found guilty on eight felony charges and is now facing decades in prison. (In predictable contrast, the president publicly praised his newly convicted friend as a “brave man” for not “breaking” like Cohen did.) But Manafort’s ordeal—legal and political—has only just begun. Unless the president exercises his pardon power, Manafort will die in prison.
Unlike Cohen, Manafort is deeply enmeshed in Kremlin affairs, stemming from his near-decade as a political fixer in Kyiv for Ukraine’s Russian-linked strongman Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Moscow after being deposed in early 2014. With so many counts, pleas and convictions—on what Kremlin-friendly Fox News talkers like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson will try to convince you are charges that have nothing to do with Russia or collusion—it’s easy to forget that Manafort’s sketchy millions gained in Ukraine as a political consultant were at the very heart of his Virginia trial, and promise to loom large in his next trial too.
While Manafort’s long-term relationship with Oleg Deripaska, one of the top Russian oligarchs and a close associate of President Vladimir Putin, is no secret, what exactly Manafort’s ties to the Kremlin are remains a subject of tantalizing mystery. Here an indispensable role has been played by Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort’s sidekick, translator, and go-to guy for just about everything in the former Soviet Union. That Kilimnik was once associated with Russian military intelligence or GRU has been known for years, in fact I reported it three months before the 2016 election—noting that, per Putin’s own dictum, Russia has no “former” intelligence officers.
Indeed, the realization that Candidate Trump’s campaign manager’s all-purpose fixer and Mini-Me was a Russian spy caused Manafort’s firing in August 2016, and the Special Counsel has looked closely at who Kilimnik actually is, concluding that he is a GRU operative. Barely masking his identity as “Person A” in court papers, Robert Mueller’s team fingered Kilimnik with the “assess[ment] that Person A has ties to Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.”
To anyone versed in Russian espionage, Kilimnik is a thinly concealed Kremlin operative, a fact that leads unavoidably to grave counterintelligence concerns about Paul Manafort and the Trump campaign. Not least because Manafort included his Mini-Me in important campaign decisions regarding Russian interests, such as changing the GOP party platform on Ukraine in a direction pleasing to Moscow. Manafort’s two in-person meets with Kilimnik during the period he headed the president’s election campaign deserve scrutiny.
This is difficult because Kilimnik avoids the media and fled to Russia as the heat rose. His only interview, with Radio Free Europe in April, was rocky, with Kilimnik exploding when his photo was taken: “Don’t show that picture. If you show that picture I will kill you … GRU will kill you as well.” Nevertheless, yesterd an outlet at last provided important details about Moscow’s mystery man. Proyekt (Project), an independent journalist collective, just exposed a lot about Kilimnik in its bombshell piece, “The Absolute Soviet Man.”
Proyekt finally got a decent photo of Kilimnik, and its portrayal of him is troubling, since it reveals that the “former” GRU man is living in luxury in an elite suburb of Moscow. Describing him as “probably the main clue in the Mueller investigation,” the exposé leaves no doubt that during his years by Manafort’s side, Kilimnik was working for Russia’s interests well ahead of anyone else’s. “He is absolutely a Soviet man, a patriot,” as one of Kilimnik’s friends memorably described him.
Although the Proyekt profile fleshes out what Kilimnik was doing in partnership with Manafort in Ukraine for several years, its real revelation is that the twosome worked in Kyrgyzstan for several years beginning in 2005, explicitly for Moscow and against Washington. Putin and his ruling clique didn’t like that the U.S. military had established a foothold in the former Soviet republic to support our war in Afghanistan. Our airbase at Manas, near the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, was considered an affront in Moscow, which views Central Asia as its own playground, and the Kremlin pushed hard for base closure, which eventually happened in 2014 (though local outcry curtailed U.S. operations there beginning in 2009).
Manafort and Kilimnik were lobbying for the closure of Manas too. “They went there,” meaning Kyrgyzstan, “to strengthen Russia’s position,” one of Manafort’s Kyiv colleagues told Proyekt. Running the Americans out of Manas was a fetish for Russia’s special services, and their propaganda for years agitated to evict the Pentagon from that Central Asian country. Paul Manafort was one of Moscow’s helpers in that effort (as was Rinat Akhmetshin, the onetime GRU affiliate turned Washington lobbyist, who was present on the Kremlin’s side at the infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting).
This raises more troubling questions about Manafort’s relationship with Russia. To anyone versed in Chekist tradecraft, Manafort’s involvement alongside Kilimnik in a Kremlin-approved propaganda operation against the Pentagon means that Trump’s former campaign manager is unquestionably considered “their” man by Russian spies. In professional terms, the Kremlin considers Manafort to be at least a “trusted person,” that is someone who helps Moscow clandestinely, while the possibility that Putin’s intelligence services consider him to be their full-blown agent cannot be ruled out based on the evidence at hand.
That the political operative-turned-convicted felon who helped Donald Trump win the White House in 2016 is some sort of clandestine fixer for Moscow now seems certain. And he may be even worse than that. The possibility that Paul Manafort wound up at the heart of the Trump campaign not despite his deep Kremlin connections, rather because of them, is a matter that needs explanation urgently, and may hold the key to the entire mystery about the president’s secret relationship with Russia.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
I think Slater was telling the truth about the CT work.
He's managed to stay completely out of it for the most part.
The Fukin Prophecy
RIP Champ
*Makes post*
*Checks back in with thread in an hour*
*Got to catch up with 10 new pages*
*Checks back in with thread in an hour*
*Got to catch up with 10 new pages*
Hood Critic
The Power Circle
We are all ok with what Jamie has the capacity to do in his search for redemption, but his character is not redeemable. He tried to kill a child, and would have, if the baby one eyed crow wasn’t a someone that has magic ability, is part of the ruling class so got the best treatment available, and who’s story is probably the most important in the series. At the end of the day, Jaimie, in the real world, wouldn’t get/doesn’t deserve forgiveness, the reader is willing to give because, he is a cool character, and Bran didn’t die.