RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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A Company Whose Director Represents Joseph Mifsud Changed Its Name To “No Vichok Ltd” After The Salisbury Attack
A Novichok nerve agent was identified as being used to poison Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. One person later died as a result of the attack.
Alberto Nardelli BuzzFeed News Europe Editor 
Reporting From
London
Posted on February 11, 2019, at 5:14 p.m. ET
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Jack Taylor / Getty Images
An emergency workers in a protective suit in Salisbury last year.
LONDON — A company whose director is a lawyer representing Joseph Mifsud was renamed “The No Vichok Ltd” a month after the nerve agent attack in Salisbury.
According to the official registry of UK companies, Companies House, a resolution confirming “Inverhold Ltd” had changed its name to The No Vichok was made on 23 April last year.
Stephan Roh — a 51-year-old Swiss lawyer representing Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor at the heart of the Trump-Russia probe — is listed as the company’s only director on the Companies House website. Roh did not respond to a request to comment on the name change.
A Novichok nerve agent was identified as being used to poison Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury in March 2018. The Skripals and a police officer who responded to them falling ill all spent time in hospital before being discharged. Two other people were later poisoned, one of whom died. UK prosecutors have named two Russian nationals, later identified by investigative journalists at Bellingcat as officers from Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, as being responsible for the poisoning.
Accounts for The No Vichok were signed by Roh on behalf of the dormant company’s board on 17 Oct. last year.
It’s unclear what The No Vichok, which was incorporated as Inverhold by Roh in 2013, does.
Companies House
"The No Vichkok Ltd" as it appears on the Companies House website.
Roh told BuzzFeed News last November that he was Mifsud’s lawyer, and that the Maltese academic wanted to testify before the US Senate.
Mifsud disappeared after he was identified as the unnamed professor alleged by FBI investigators in court documents unsealed in October 2017 to have told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails, months before the Democrats themselves were aware that their computer system had been hacked.
Mifsud has not been seen in public since November that year. His former girlfriend in Ukraine says he disappeared, prosecutors in Italy investigating a decade-old case couldn’t locate him, and US investigators have complained they weren’t able to interrogate the professor thoroughly when he was last in the US in February 2017. Democratic National Committee lawyers even suggested he may be dead.
Juan Manuel Herrera / OAS / Flickr / Via Flickr: oasoea
Joseph Mifsud
Last October, Roh emailed a photograph of Mifsud purportedly taken in May 2018 to several news organizations, including BuzzFeed News. Despite several requests, Roh has not granted BuzzFeed News or other outlets permission to publish the photo, the existence of which was first reported by the Associated Press.
In the photo, the Maltese professor, sporting stubble and with his stare fixed on the camera, is pictured seated at a table with the May 17, 2018, edition of a Swiss newspaper. According to Roh, who was interviewed by the FBI last year as part of the Trump-Russia investigation, Mifsud, 58, was in Zurich days later, instructing legal representation and recording a witness statement with Roh’s law firm. A power-of-attorney document dated May 21 of this year can also clearly be seen in the photograph.
Roh claims that Mifsud has done nothing wrong and was set up — and denies having ever told Papadopoulos the Russians had dirt on Clinton.
The No Vichok is one of at least seven UK-registered companies that Roh is a director of. In January this year another of these companies changed its name from the “London Center for International Law and Diplomacy” to “Checkpoint News Limited.” The company was originally called “Global Global Ltd” when it was first incorporated in 2016.
Mifsud and Roh’s careers have intertwined at several junctions: Mifsud was a consultant at Roh’s law firm. The Swiss lawyer was advertised as a visiting fellow in a brochure promoting the diplomacy academy where Mifsud was a director. The two men, who have known each other for more than a decade, co-authored a number of reports between 2015 and 2017. They spoke on the same panel at a Valdai Discussion Club in April 2016, an annual gathering of Russian and international political, media, and academic elites backed by the Kremlin. And both men have long had a professional relationship with Rome’s Link Campus University where Mifsud worked since the 2000s, and Roh was an investor through a London-registered company called Drake Global, of which, according to Companies House, the Swiss lawyer is the only director.
Last March the BBC reported that Roh bought a small British nuclear firm called Severnvale Nuclear Services Ltd in 2005. Under its previous owners, the company's turnover had been £42,000 a year. According to the BBC, within three years, Severnvale Nuclear was turning over more than £24 million a year, despite having only two employees.
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QUID PRO QUO REDUX, PART ONE: THE TRUMP TOWER DANGLE
February 11, 2019/157 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
Last May, I wrote a series using the questions (as imagined by Jay Sekulow) Mueller had posed to Trump to lay out what theory of investigation Mueller might be pursuing — and what details we know about it. We’ve learned a lot more about the investigation and confirmed that the investigation focusing on Trump personally includes both a criminal and a counterintelligence component. I wanted to update the series. Because we know so much more about both sides of this quid pro quo, the organization of the series will be somewhat different.
NOVEMBER 9, 2013: DURING A 2013 TRIP TO RUSSIA, WHAT COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONSHIPS DID YOU HAVE WITH THE AGALAROVS AND RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS?
On November 9, 2013, Aras Agalorov helped Trump put on Miss Universe in Moscow; Trump Tower meeting attendees Rob Goldstone and Ike Kaveladze were both involved, as were Don Jr, Michael Cohen, and Keith Schiller. If the pee tape — or any kompromat involving “golden showers,” as Jim Comey claims Trump called it — exists, it was made on November 8, 2013.
The prior trip set up the 2016 quid pro quo in several ways. First, it deepened Trump’s desire for a Moscow Trump Tower — an effort the Agalrovs and Trumps pursued for years after the meeting. It established Trump’s enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin — though Putin reportedly disappointed Trump’s desire for a meeting on that prior occasion. It also introduced Trump to a bunch of other oligarchs.
Just after Trump kicked off his presidential bid, Emin invited Trump to his father’s birthday party in Moscow on November 8 (PDF 17), the first of a series of outreaches during Trump’s campaign which would continue through the election. The Agalarovs would remain the key handlers of the Trump family until shortly after the election, when first Sergei Kislyak, then Putin himself, would take over interacting with Trump and his family.
SEPTEMBER 25, 2015 TO NOVEMBER 2016: WHAT COMMUNICATION DID YOU HAVE WITH MICHAEL D. COHEN, FELIX SATER, AND OTHERS, INCLUDING FOREIGN NATIONALS, ABOUT RUSSIAN REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE CAMPAIGN
By September 25, 2015, Felix Sater and Michael Cohen already had a Moscow design study completed for a Trump Tower in Moscow. Days later, Andrey Rozov was promising to build Donald Trump the tallest tower in Europe. In October 2015, Felix Sater (whose actions in brokering this deal seemed designed to ensure that Trump’s willingness to work with Russian military intelligence and sanctioned banks would leave a digital paper trail) started pitching the centrality of Putin to the deal. On October 28, at a time when his presidential bid was meeting unexpected success, Trump signed a Letter of Intent on a deal that stood to make him a fantastic sum of $300 million.
In the days after getting the signed letter of intent and in response to Trump publicly complimenting Putin at a press conference, Sater bizarrely tied the deal to getting Trump elected. He claimed to believe that if Putin complimented Trump’s deal-making prowess at a press conference tied to a then hypothetical Trump trip to Moscow, it would help Trump’s election chances.
Michael my next steps are very sensitive with Putins very very close people, we can pull this off. Michael lets go. 2 boys from Brooklyn getting a USA president elected.
Sater first tried to get commitments for both Cohen and Trump to travel to Moscow (with the documents to prove it) in December 2015. While Cohen was willing to share his passport, he held off on Trump’s. Perhaps as a result of Cohen’s increasing impatience with Sater’s swapping out a lightly sanctioned bank for a more compromising one, Cohen said he wanted to take more control. That led to him to reach out to Dmitry Peskov directly (who had been involved in Trump’s efforts to meet Putin in 2013), which in turn led him to have a 20 minute call with Peskov’s personal assistant on January 21, 2016. Over the course of that conversation, she would have taken notes recording Cohen committing to Trump’s willingness to work through a former GRU officer and with sanctioned banks to get his $300 million deal. By the next day, Putin’s office had that in hand, the first of many receiptshe would obtain on Trump, making him susceptible to compromise regardless of what happened.
Cohen smartly shifted negotiations to the encrypted communication app Dust for a time. But when Sater renewed discussions about a trip to Russia to make this happen in May 2016, he did so on texts that would be accessible to law enforcement. And Cohen made it clear Trump had to seal the nomination before he would risk making his coziness with Putin public, making it crystal clear that the election and the Trump Tower deal remained linked in his brain.
Both Trump and Don Jr were thoroughly briefed on these negotiations. That means when Don Jr accepted a meeting offering dirt on Hillary as part of Russia’s support for Trump, he would have known that a $300 million real estate deal might depend on taking the meeting. Don Jr took the June 9, 2016 meeting and — per four sworn witnesses’ statements — agreed to revisit Magnitsky sanctions if his father won.
At almost exactly the moment that meeting broke up, Felix Sater texted Cohen to take the next step on a deal, a trip for him to St. Petersburg, potentially to meet with Putin personally. Oleg Deripaska and Sergei Millian (the latter of whom Cohen had also worked with in the past) would also have been at the event.
In the days after the Trump Tower meeting, Sater and Cohen were scrambling to put together the trip to St. Petersburg at the last minute. But they looked like they would pull it off, only to have the WaPo report, on June 14, 2016, that Russia hacked the DNC postpone the plans for the trip.
That said, Cohen only said, “he would not be traveling at that time.” The news that Russia hacked Trump’s opponent didn’t kill the deal. It just made it more difficult.
On July 22, 2016 — the day that WikiLeaks released the DNC emails — George Papadopoulos (possibly with the coaching of Ivan Timofeev) and Sergei Millian seem to have picked up keeping discussions of a deal alive from Cohen and Sater.
According to the President’s current teevee lawyer, Trump answered Mueller’s questions on this topic to allow for the possibility that the Russian deal remained active through November. He’s just not committing to any story about how long the deal remained (or remains) active.
One thing to remember about this Trump Tower deal. The deal was too good to be true (and to some degree that’s the point!). But it fed all of Trump’s character weaknesses. The promise of having the tallest tower in Europe would feed Trump’s narcissism. The fairly ridiculous claim Trump Organization stood to make $300 million off of it would have been irresistible to the highly indebted family.
And in exchange for that, Trump showed repeated and sustained willingness to deal with GRU-tied individuals and sanctioned banks. And at the June 9 meeting, his spawn made it clear he’d trade policy considerations to get the deal.
As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
RESOURCES
These are some of the most useful resources in mapping these events.
Mueller questions as imagined by Jay Sekulow
CNN’s timeline of investigative events
Majority HPSCI Report
Minority HPSCI Report
Trump Twitter Archive
Jim Comey March 20, 2017 HPSCI testimony
Comey May 3, 2017 SJC testimony
Jim Comey June 8, 2017 SSCI testimony
Jim Comey written statement, June 8, 2017
Jim Comey memos
Sally Yates and James Clapper Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, May 8, 2017
NPR Timeline on Trump’s ties to Aras Agalarov
George Papadopoulos complaint
George Papadopoulos statement of the offense
Mike Flynn 302
Mike Flynn statement of the offense
Mike Flynn cooperation addendum
Peter Strzok 302 (describing Flynn’s interview)
Michael Cohen statement of the offense
Internet Research Agency indictment
GRU indictment
Senate Judiciary Committee materials on June 9 meeting
BuzzFeed documents on Trump Tower deal
Text of the Don Jr Trump Tower Meeting emails
Jared Kushner’s statement to Congress
Erik Prince HPSCI transcript
