RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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Congressional Democrats want counterintelligence probe of Chinese American massage parlor founder connected to Trump
4-5 minutes
Top Democrats in Congress want the FBI to conduct criminal and counterintelligence probes into a Chinese American business executive accused of using her personal access to President Trump to facilitate business opportunities for Chinese executives, activities that came to light after a Florida massage parlor she founded was exposed as part of a sex trafficking and prostitution ring.
In a letter to the heads of the directors of the FBI, national intelligence agencies and Secret Service, the top intelligence and judiciary committee Democrats from the Senate and House asked for investigations into “credible allegations of potential human trafficking, as well as unlawful foreign lobbying, campaign finance and other activities” by Li “Cindy” Yang, a naturalized U.S. citizen from China.
Yang, a Republican donor, has made frequent visits to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and attended the president’s Super Bowl party this year, snapping a selfie of herself with the president during the event.
It is that level of contact — though it appears that Yang often had to pay her way into events — that has congressional investigators concerned that her activities “could permit adversary governments or their agents access to these same politicians to acquire potential material for blackmail or other ever more nefarious purposes.”
[Former spa owner and frequent Mar-a-Lago guest sparks concerns about ‘porous’ environment at president’s club]
Yang founded a chain of Florida spas and massage parlors, including Orchids of Asia, the establishment in which Patriots football team owner Bob Kraft was accused of soliticing prostitution in a recent sting. Though Yang has not been personally charged in that investigation — and sold the day spa in question six years ago, her lawyer said — the episode has increased scrutiny of Yang’s other businesses, at least one of which congressional investigators worry could pose national security concerns.
Yang operates a company called GY U.S. Investments, which offered prospective clients a chance to rub elbows with Trump and other powerful politicians through dinners, fundraisers and other events — including at Mar-a-Lago. In one instance in late 2017, the Miami Herald reported, Yang boasted of bringing a group of Chinese executives to a fundraiser in New York — something that is legal as long as they were guests and didn’t reimburse Yang for their entry. Democrats suspect, however, that they might have.
In their letter, Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) asked whether Yang or others were “offering foreigners access to the President, those close to him, or other senior officials in exchange for money” — and if the Trump campaign was doing a thorough job to ensure that the funds weren’t “being contributed illicitly or through straw donors.”
They also asked whether Yang or her clients had violated foreign lobbying laws — and whether her actions had brought her to the attention of law enforcement, whether for her business ties, national security concerns or human trafficking.
The FBI declined to comment on whether it is or was investigating Yang or plans to. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Secret Service also did not comment on the letter.
Lawyers for Yang and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The authors of the letter requested a response by the close of business Thursday.
reuters.com
Why an unbuilt Moscow Trump tower caught Mueller's attention
Jan Wolfe
7-9 minutes
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An intriguing area of focus in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Kremlin’s role in the 2016 U.S. election is a proposed Moscow real estate deal that Donald Trump pursued while running for president despite denying at the time any links to Russia.
The special counsel has revealed in court filings numerous details about the project, which never came to fruition. Further information has come from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer who was instrumental in the negotiations, in congressional testimony and in his guilty plea to a charge of lying to Congress about the project.
Mueller’s team said in a December 2018 court filing that “the Moscow Project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government. If the project was completed, the Company (the Trump Organization) could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues.”
The project is significant because it shows Trump was chasing a lucrative business deal in Russia at the same time that President Vladimir Putin’s government, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, was conducting a hacking and propaganda campaign to boost his candidacy. The project also coincided with Trump’s positive comments as a candidate about Putin and his questioning of U.S. sanctions against Russia.
Mueller is preparing to submit to U.S. Attorney General William Barr the report on his investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia and whether the Republican president has unlawfully tried to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied election interference.
Here is an explanation of the Trump Moscow tower project and what the president has said about it.
FILE PHOTO: Special Counsel Robert Mueller (R) departs after briefing members of the U.S. Senate on his investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 21, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photo
WHAT IS TRUMP’S HISTORY IN MOSCOW?
Trump, a wealthy New York real estate developer, had discussed expanding his business empire into Russia for more than three decades. In 2013, after visiting Russia and hosting his Miss Universe pageant there, he wrote on Twitter: “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next.” The Trump Organization’s longtime partner in the project was Felix Sater, a Russian-born, Brooklyn-raised real estate developer, according to company emails released to congressional investigators.
WHAT WAS THE TRUMP TOWER MOSCOW PROJECT?
Trump in October 2015 signed a non-binding letter of intent to move forward with a Moscow tower project with a Russian development firm. The firm, I.C. Expert Investment Co, agreed to construct the skyscraper, and the Trump Organization agreed to license its name and manage the building’s operations. The letter of intent described a building in a Moscow business district with 250 luxury residential condominiums, at least 150 hotel rooms and a luxury spa.
Sater, who has served prison time in the United States for assault and later became an FBI informant on organized crime, assured Cohen in a November 2015 email he could get the Russian government to support a Trump property in Moscow.
“I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this,” Sater told Cohen in that email.
Trump had announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015.
In testimony last month to the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee, Cohen said Sater came up with a “marketing stunt” of offering Putin a free penthouse in the tower to drive up unit prices, “no different than in any condo where they start listing celebrities that live in the property.”
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump arrives aboard Air Force One to rally with supporters in Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S. November 4, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
Cohen’s House testimony portrayed Trump as keenly interested in completing the deal even as he campaigned for president. “Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project,” Cohen testified.
In his guilty plea, Cohen admitted he had lied to Congress in a 2017 letter that claimed he had only discussed the negotiations with Trump three times and that the project talks ended in January 2016. Cohen said he lied to Congress to minimize links between Trump and the project and give the false impression that the proposal had ended before key early milestones in the 2016 race to determine the Republican presidential nominee.
Cohen in his guilty plea said the project was discussed within the Trump Organization multiple times and that he spoke with Sater about obtaining Russian governmental approval as late as June 2016, after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination.
O’Rourke raises $6.1M in campaign’s first day
WHY DID THE NEGOTIATIONS END?
Legal filings in Cohen’s plea deal did not make clear why the negotiations ended. But June 2016 was the month when the Washington Post first reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee’s computers, a cyber operation that was a key part of Moscow’s interference in the presidential race, as described by U.S. intelligence.
One of Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, indicated in January 2019 that the Moscow tower discussions had continued through the November 2016 election, though he later backtracked.
WHAT HAS TRUMP SAID?
Trump’s public statements about business dealings in Russia have evolved over time. In July 2016, Trump told a news conference: “I have nothing to do with Russia.” Nine days before becoming president, Trump wrote on Twitter, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
In November 2018, after Cohen’s guilty plea, Trump told reporters that in 2016 he was in a position “to possibly do a deal to build a building of some kind in Moscow.” Trump added, “There would be nothing wrong if I did do it. I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business. And why should I lose lots of opportunities?” Cohen told the House panel Trump made clear to him that he should lie about when the negotiations ended.
Trump and his allies have called Cohen a liar trying to reduce his prison time after pleading guilty to a series of federal criminal charges.
WHAT ROLE DID TRUMP’S CHILDREN PLAY?
Cohen told the House panel that he briefed the president’s son and daughter, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, about the tower negotiations. Donald Trump Jr., an executive at the Trump Organization, told Congress in September 2017 he was only “peripherally aware” of the talks during the campaign. Ivanka Trump, a former Trump Organization executive, told ABC News last month she knew “literally almost nothing” about the project, saying there were “40 or 50 deals like that were floating around, that somebody was looking at.”
Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham
nytimes.com
Lobbying Case Against Democrat With Ties to Manafort Reaches Key Stage
11-14 minutes
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Gregory B. Craig, the White House counsel under President Barack Obama, is under investigation for work he did on behalf of the president of Ukraine.CreditCreditMark Wilson/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — A long-running federal investigation into a former White House counsel in the Obama administration is reaching a critical stage, presenting the Justice Department with a decision about whether to charge a prominent Democrat as part of a more aggressive crackdown on illegal foreign lobbying.
The case involving the lawyer, Gregory B. Craig, was transferred in January from federal prosecutors in New York to those in Washington. The previously undisclosed move was driven by Justice Department officials in Washington, and reflects an eagerness within the department to prosecute violations of lobbying laws after the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, focused on foreign influence in his investigations.
A decision about whether to prosecute Mr. Craig, who was White House counsel for President Barack Obama during his first year in office, is expected in the coming weeks, people familiar with the case said. The investigation centers on whether Mr. Craig should have disclosed work he did in 2012 — while he was a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom — on behalf of the Russia-aligned government of Viktor F. Yanukovych, then the president of Ukraine.
The work was steered to Mr. Craig by Paul Manafort, who was then a political consultant collecting millions of dollars from clients in former Soviet states. Mr. Manafort, who went on to become President Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, was sentenced this month to seven and a half years in prison on charges brought by Mr. Mueller’s team related to obstruction of justice and violations of banking, tax and lobbying laws stemming from his work in Ukraine.
The Manafort case, and others developed by Mr. Mueller, marked the first high-profile criminal charges in years under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. The 1938 law requires Americans to disclose detailed information about lobbying and public relations work for foreign governments and politicians.
It had rarely been used in prosecutions, even as prominent Washington lobbyists, consultants, lawyers and former public officials collected ever-larger, often six- and seven-figure paydays from foreign interests looking to burnish their sometimes unsavory reputations in the United States capital.
Mr. Manafort’s case, and the investigations into Mr. Craig and other high-profile consultants who worked with Mr. Manafort, have left Washington’s K Street lobbying corridor scrambling to deal with the heightened scrutiny.
The Justice Department recently signaled that its enforcement efforts were just getting started, indicating that scrutiny of foreign influence in American politics will continue after Mr. Mueller’s investigation, which began with a focus on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign.
One of the first significant initiatives under the new attorney general, William P. Barr, was the reorganization of the unit that oversees FARA, suggesting that enforcing laws on foreign lobbying will become a priority of his tenure.
The prosecutor brought in to run the unit, Brandon L. Van Grack, worked until recently in the special counsel’s office. The unit falls within the Justice Department’s national security division, which investigated Skadden Arps’s Ukraine work and must approve any charges against Mr. Craig.
Mr. Craig, 74, would be the first Democrat to be charged in a case spinning out of the special counsel’s investigation — a distinction that could be used to rebut accusations leveled by Mr. Trump and his supporters that the investigation is a partisan witch hunt.
An Ivy League-educated lawyer who moved easily between elite law firms and government for more than four decades, Mr. Craig worked on foreign policy and other issues during the administrations of President Bill Clinton and President Obama, and joined Skadden Arps in 2010 to create a division focused on what he called “international troubleshooting.”
His Democratic bona fides and ties to the Obama administration were among the main reasons he was recruited by Mr. Manafort as part of an effort to build support in Washington for Mr. Yanukovych, according to lobbyists who worked on the account. They were told to emphasize to Democratic members of Congress and the media that Mr. Craig was involved in the effort.
For Skadden Arps, the work was lucrative; Mr. Manafort arranged for the firm to be paid more than $5.2 million in 2012 and 2013, primarily from a Ukrainian oligarch. In exchange, a team led by Mr. Craig was to produce a report that Mr. Manafort intended to use to quell Western criticism of the prosecution and jailing by Mr. Yanukovych’s government of one of his rivals, the former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, and to train Ukrainian prosecutors handling matters related to the case.
Mr. Craig and the other Skadden Arps lawyers who worked on the account did not register as foreign agents under FARA, despite inquiries from the Justice Department at the time about whether they should have. The department initially concluded in 2013 that Skadden Arps was obligated to register, but it reversed itself the following year after Mr. Craig made the case that the law did not apply to his work on behalf of Ukraine.
The issue started getting renewed scrutiny from the Justice Department in 2017 as Mr. Mueller’s team traced the flow of overseas cash to fund Mr. Manafort’s lobbying efforts. The special counsel had subpoenaed or requested documents from Skadden Arps and two lobbying firms recruited by Mr. Manafort’s team to help build support for Mr. Yanukovych’s government, and Mr. Mueller’s investigators had interviewed people who worked with all three firms, including Mr. Craig. But last year, Mr. Mueller’s team referred the matters related to the three firms to federal prosecutors in Manhattan for potential prosecution as FARA violations.
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The investigations into Mr. Craig and others who worked with Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, have left Washington’s K Street lobbying corridor scrambling.CreditBrian Snyder/Reuters
According to people familiar with the case, Manhattan prosecutors have retained control of the investigations of the two lobbying firms. They are Mercury Public Affairs, whose lead partner on the account was Vin Weber, a former Republican member of Congress, and the Podesta Group, led by Tony Podesta, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser whose business collapsed in 2017 under the glare of Mr. Mueller’s scrutiny.
The prosecutors have interviewed lobbyists who worked with Mercury and Podesta on the Ukraine account as recently as January, but people familiar with the interviews said the prosecutors provided no clues about their plans.
The investigation of Mr. Craig, on the other hand, was moved in January to Washington, where the government has signaled that it is moving quickly toward a decision about an indictment, people familiar with the case said.
The Justice Department’s national security division announced a settlement with Skadden Arps in January that brought even more attention to Mr. Craig. He left the firm last year as scrutiny of his work with Mr. Manafort escalated and after a former associate of the firm pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his work on the effort.
In exchange for a pledge by the Justice Department not to prosecute Skadden Arps, the firm agreed to pay $4.6 million, to retroactively register its Ukraine work under FARA, to beef up its compliance processes and to cooperate with government investigations of the work on Ukraine.
The settlement accused Mr. Craig of working with Mr. Manafort to hide the funding from the Ukrainian oligarch for Skadden Arps’s work, and of making “false and misleading” statements to other partners at the firm and the Justice Department about his interactions with a reporter for The New York Times related to the Tymoshenko report. Those representations led the Justice Department’s FARA unit to conclude in January 2014 that Skadden Arps was not required to disclose the work under FARA, according to the settlement.
In announcing the settlement, John C. Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, said Skadden Arps’s failure to register under FARA “hid from the public that its report was part of a Ukrainian foreign influence campaign,” depriving Americans of the ability “to consider the identity of the speaker as they evaluate the substance of the speech.”
Neither the settlement nor Mr. Demers named either Mr. Craig or The Times and its reporter, David E. Sanger, but their identities are clear from the context. At issue is whether Mr. Craig proactively contacted Mr. Sanger to provide and promote the report, which could fall under the public relations prong of FARA, or merely responded to inquiries from The Times and other media outlets about Skadden Arps’s analysis.
William W. Taylor III and William J. Murphy, lawyers for Mr. Craig, said their client “did nothing that required him to register in connection with his work on the Tymoshenko report. The Skadden settlement was done without his knowledge, and the assertion that he made intentionally false statements to the FARA unit is entirely untrue.”
Mr. Craig’s allies reject the characterization that he was integrally involved in the public relations strategy surrounding the report. And they say that in his conversation with Mr. Sanger, Mr. Craig was not speaking on behalf of the Ukrainian government, but rather correcting mischaracterizations of the report as exonerating Mr. Yanukovych’s government from accusations that it prosecuted Ms. Tymoshenko for political reasons.
Supporters of Mr. Craig bristled earlier this month when Mr. Demers appeared to again call out both Mr. Craig and Skadden Arps at an American Bar Association conference in New Orleans. The firm “was on the hook” for FARA violations because it “made a series of representations to the Justice Department that were not accurate” based on Mr. Craig’s misleading statements, Mr. Demers said, though he did not identify Mr. Craig by name.
He said at the conference that FARA would no longer be considered “an administrative obligation” by the Justice Department, but rather would now be regarded as “an enforcement priority.”
Mr. Craig’s allies contend that the case against him is inconsistent with the Justice Department’s previous interpretations of FARA.
Statements made by Justice Department leaders have contributed to this view. In the summer of 2017, Adam Hickey, an official in the National Security Division, told lawmakers that FARA was designed to make foreign influence campaigns transparent, “not to discourage that conduct itself.”
His description of FARA focused largely on transparency through voluntary registration and ongoing records keeping. “Although it contains a criminal penalty for certain willful conduct,” Mr. Hickey said, “the statute’s focal point is an administrative reporting regime.”
A different statute, Section 951, was designed to punish and deter criminal behavior, he said.
While the Justice Department would not comment on Mr. Craig’s case, a spokesman said that there is no discrepancy between Mr. Demers’s comments and Mr. Hickey’s testimony.
“The purpose of enforcement is increased transparency” and “lying to the government has always been a crime,” said Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman. “That is not new, nor should it be portrayed as such.”
Adam Goldman contributed reporting from Washington, and William K. Rashbaum from New York.
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Trump overvalued some real estate assets by as much as 70% and Deutsche Bank didn’t realize until after inspecting his personal and corporate finances
there's something really wrong when you have to issue a statement to prove you're not a white supremacist.
