RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
thedailybeast.com
Cohen Called CEO Tied to Russian Oligarch Hundreds of Times
Justin Miller05.22.19 1:56 PM ET
5-7 minutes
Michael Cohen exchanged hundreds of phone calls with an executive tied to a sanctioned Russian oligarch, according to newly unsealed federal search warrants that show the two sides were closer than either previously admitted.
Columbus Nova CEO Andrew Intrater and Cohen exchanged 320 phone calls and 920 text messages beginning on Election Day 2016, according to the warrants pursued by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office. Columbus Nova paid Cohen $500,000 for consulting work for what the company called “potential sources of capital and potential investments.” Intrater introduced Cohen to and his uncle and business associate, the billionaire industrialist Viktor Vekselberg. Cohen was even added to Columbus Nova’s office security list.
The chatter between Cohen and Intrater was part of the network of relationships between Russian-linked interests and the former lawyer to President Trump.
Cohen’s attorneys did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this story. Intrater’s spokesperson downplayed the significance of the thousand-plus conversations between the two men.
“They were working together so of course texted and called each other. This was all known and investigated, and wasn't even deemed worthy of being included in the Special Counsel's report,” the spokesperson told The Daily Beast.
Intrater’s company, Columbus Nova, is an American-based asset management firm that counts as its biggest client the Renova Group, a company controlled by Vekselberg. Through Renova, Vekselberg owns interests across the world, including a minority stake in aluminum company Rusal, which was sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2018 for allegedly profiting from Russia’s “malign activities.” Vekselberg himself was sanctioned at the same time.
A source familiar previously told The Daily Beast that Vekselberg used Intrater as a “cut-out” for his access to Cohen—a claim Intrater and Vekselberg’s representatives strenuously deny to this day.
“The claim that Viktor Vekselberg was involved in or provided any funding for Columbus Nova’s engagement of Michael Cohen is patently untrue,” Richard Owens of the law firm Latham & Watkins previously said in a statement. “Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else outside of Columbus Nova was involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provided funding for his engagement.”
Cohen was not paid directly by Columbus Nova, according to the warrants, but rather by a subsidiary known as Renova U.S. Management. The money was “wired through” Columbus Nova and the government said it was investigating why. It’s unknown if a conclusion was reached.
Vekselberg and Intrater met Cohen at least twice around the time he was hired by Columbus Nova, which has invested in numerous American media and technology firms, including Gawker Media, streaming-music pioneer Rhapsody, and a company called Tomfoolery Incorporated.
Related in Politics
Vekselberg, Intrater and Cohen first huddled in Trump Tower in New York in January 2017 before Trump took office, Bloomberg News previously reported. Vekselberg then attended Trump’s inauguration with Intrater, who donated $250,000 to the president’s inaugural committee. (Vekselberg was questioned by federal agents working for Mueller during his investigation of Russian election interference.)
In March 2017, they met again at Intrater’s request. This time the subject appears to have been the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, a business lobby based in Moscow which counts Vekselberg as a board member. “This is the organization that Victor [sic] was mentioning yesterday,” Intrater wrote to Cohen, according to the warrant. Bloomberg News previously reported the meeting was about a potential oil deal in the U.S. that did not materialize.
The FBI said in the warrants it was investigating whether the payments between the company tied to Vekselberg, who is under sanctions, were connected to Cohen delivering a plan to the White House to lift sanctions on Russia—including a previously unknown phone call between Cohen and Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor.
In late January 2017, the same month Columbus Nova started paying him, Cohen met with a Ukrainian lawmaker in New York promising a “peace plan” to end the conflict between Ukraine and Russia that led the U.S. to place harsh sanctions on Moscow in 2014.
The meeting was set up by Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who previously worked with Cohen on a project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Sater and Cohen began to exchange phone calls on January 5, according to the warrants, followed by a January 10 phone call between Cohen and Flynn.
Weeks later, Cohen met Trump in the Oval Office and then hand-delivered the plan to Flynn’s office, the New York Times previously reported.
Cohen is currently serving a prison term for unrelated financial and campaign-finance charges while Flynn awaits sentencing for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. regarding sanctions.
Last edited:
politico.com
FBI search warrants detail Michael Cohen Russia ties
By NATASHA BERTRAND
6-8 minutes
In the early stages of its investigation, Robert Mueller’s team were focused on tracking the foreign entanglements of Michael Cohen. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
legal
Newly unsealed warrants reveal how closely the special counsel's team was tracking the foreign entanglements of Trump’s most loyal fixer.
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer, was in constant contact with — and received thousands of dollars from — a Russia-linked firm starting on Election Day in 2016, newly unsealed court documents show.
The transactions soon caught the attention of investigators, as the FBI zeroed in on what it considered to be suspicious emails and bank transfers from Cohen’s accounts — including his Trump Organization email account. With special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in full swing, authorities filed a series of search warrants between July and November 2017 to investigate whether the exchanges violated foreign agent laws and constituted wire fraud and money laundering.
Story Continued Below
The search warrants were unsealed as part of a case brought by several media organizations, including POLITICO.
Much of what the warrants reveal has already been well-documented — Cohen is now serving three years in prison for making false statements to Congress, as well as tax and bank fraud. But the warrants document how focused agents with Mueller’s team were in the early stages of its investigation on tracking the foreign entanglements of Trump’s most loyal fixer.
At the heart of investigators’ interest in Cohen was a company he set up in October 2016 called Essential Consultants, LLC. Cohen told the bank that the company was a real estate consulting firm whose clients would be “high-worth domestic individuals,” and used his Trump Organization account as a point of contact, according to the search warrants. One of the warrants sought permission to look at Cohen’s Trump Organization email account.
Soon after Essential Consultants was opened, the FBI found, the company's bank account began receiving large deposits from a New York City investment manager firm, Columbus Nova, connected to the influential Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
And starting on Election Day, Cohen began direct communications with the founder of Columbus Nova, Vekselberg’s cousin Andrew Intrater. Between Election Day and July 14, 2017, the two exchanged over 230 phone calls and 950 text messages, according to one of the search warrants. Another search warrant said the contacts continued until at least November 2017.
"They were working together so of course texted and called each other," a Columbus Nova spokesperson said in a statement. "This was all known and investigated, and wasn't even deemed worthy of being included in the special counsel's report.”
Cohen told lawmakers earlier this year that he signed a $1 million contract — of which he only got about $416,000 — with Columbus Nova, whose largest client is Vekselberg’s Renova Group. The plan was to “put together an infrastructure fund” that would be financed by overseas investors, Cohen testified. But he downplayed Vekselberg’s interest in the deal, telling Congress that the Russian oligarch was only a “minimal” investor in Columbus Nova when they started working together in January 2017.
Emails obtained by the FBI and described in the search warrant for the first time, however, show that Vekselberg met with Cohen and Intrater 11 days before Trump’s inauguration. At that gathering, the three discussed a lobbying group based in Moscow that promotes Russian business interests, called the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.
And according to the court documents, Cohen also remained in touch with Vekselberg and scheduled a meeting with him in March 2017 at Renova headquarters — while Columbus Nova was still paying Cohen.
The meeting was of interest to lawmakers because Cohen had met in late January of that year with his longtime acquaintance Felix Sater and the Ukrainian lawmaker Andrei Artemenko to discuss a Russia-Ukraine “peace plan” that would involve lifting sanctions on Russia. The FBI wanted to know whether Vekselberg was paying Cohen to promote the sanctions-lifting plan, which would have benefited the Russian oligarch. Vekselberg has been doing business in the United States since at least 1990, when he co-founded the conglomerate Renova Group as a joint U.S.-Russian venture.
No evidence has emerged of such a quid-pro-quo, and Columbus Nova has denied participating in anything related to a Ukranian peace plan. But the FBI did reveal some new details about the episode in the search warrants unsealed on Wednesday.
According to phone records investigators reviewed, “a call was exchanged” between Cohen and soon-to-be White House national security adviser Michael Flynn on Jan. 11, 2017, just days before Trump's inauguration. A New York Times report said Cohen had delivered the sanctions-lifting plan to Flynn, but Cohen later told lawmakers that he threw the plan in the trash and never delivered it to the White House.
The FBI also found that Cohen continued speaking to Sater, a Russian-born businessman who helped Cohen negotiate a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the election, well after the peace plan meeting. Records they obtained showed approximately 20 calls exchanged between them from Jan. 5, 2017 to Feb. 20, 2017.
Sater on Wednesday told POLITICO he couldn't remember the exact substance of the calls but said they likely had to do with the New York Times’ story about the “peace plan” meeting, which was published on Feb. 19.
Deutsche Bank said 
Anyone who didn't believe Nancy wasn't going to finesse Trump is a fukking idiot. Of course she wants to impeach this guy.
She's just letting it happen naturally.
It seems even The left is falling for the kayfabe and not seeing the bigger picture.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@DonKnock @dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @Cali_livin @NY's #1 Draft Pick
She's just letting it happen naturally.
It seems even The left is falling for the kayfabe and not seeing the bigger picture.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@DonKnock @dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @Cali_livin @NY's #1 Draft Pick
spectator.us
Is China the new Russia? | Spectator USA
Cockburn
6-8 minutes
Cockburn
A rapper, a Republican fundraiser, and a missing $1 billion – inside the mysteries of Chinese influence over American politics
Pras of The Fugees in 2015
The Fugees were, according to MTV, the ninth greatest hip-hop band of all time. Who can forget the immortal lyrics to their hit Ready or Not – number one in both the UK and Iceland? ‘I’ll be Nina Simone…defecating on your microphone.’ That song also has a sobering warning about the unpleasantness of prison: ‘Jail bars ain’t golden gates. Those who fake, they break. When they meet their 400-pound mate.’ (Perhaps this is the same ‘400lb person’ that Donald Trump blamed for Russia’s hacking during the US presidential election.) All this might be a bit too close to home for one of the band’s former members, Prakazrel Michel, known as ‘Pras’: He has been charged with making illegal political donations using foreign money.
Prosecutors have outlined a case that reaches into the 2016 election, though the charges against Pras go back to 2012. He is accused of giving $865,000 of overseas money to 20 ‘straw donors’ to hand on to Barack Obama’s presidential fundraising committee. He is also accused of sending more than $1 million to a different, independent campaign committee, a PAC. This money was allegedly part of $21 million illegally laundered into the US that was, in turn, a small slice of $1 billion missing from a Malaysian investment fund called 1MDB. Pras denies the charges, saying outside court in Washington DC: ‘I feel I’m totally innocent.’ The Washington Post said he was going to protest his innocence in a new rap album that will be released next month. Cockburn has his Walkman at the ready.
How does this connect to 2016 – and to China? 1MDB was run by a financier from Singapore known as Jho Low. He had a yacht with a gold plated interior, a Monet, a private jet (natch), and although he looked like a Chinese Billy Bunter – short, pudgy and bespectacled – he was seen with several Hollywood beauties. It’s claimed he gave a $9 million diamond to a model, Miranda Kerr, and tried to win the heart of Paris Hilton, the heiress. This attempt involved what newspaper reports at the time called a ‘champagne duel’ with her ex-boyfriend, a baseball player named Doug Reinhardt. The duel was supposedly fought in a Saint-Tropez nightclub, Les Caves Du Roy. Reinhart ordered four magnums of Cristal for Hilton. Not to be outdone, Low summoned a waiter and ordered the nightclub’s entire remaining stock, eight magnums. Reinhart left, humiliated.
Prosecutors in the US and Malaysia say this parade of bad taste was paid for with stolen money. The total embezzled is said to be $4.5 billion and the DoJ has brought what it says is the biggest ever action under its Kleptocracy Act Recovery Initiative. Enter Elliott Broidy, once a deputy finance chair of the RNC – and best know for having secretly paid a former Playboy model $1.6 million to have an abortion. (This financial arrangement was made by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, so there was scurrilous gossip about who the father was.) Prosecutors says Broidy was given $8 million by Low to make the DoJ case go away – he was, allegedly, offered another $75 million if he managed to do this. It’s claimed that the middle man for this deal was Pras, the rapper.
Along with Jho Low, the former Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, is also accused of stealing the 1MDB money. Broidy reportedly helped Razak when he was Malyasian prime minister and visited Washington in 2017. He provided talking points for a meeting with Trump and even managed to get him a round of golf with the president. Broidy himself seemed to enjoy extraordinary access to Trump in the Oval Office. Cockburn is told that this caused unease to some in the US ‘intelligence community’ – because of the connection to Jho Low. One source now places Low in Beijing, a sign that he had the support of the Chinese state all along. There’s no confirmation that he is being helped by Beijing – and no doubt Low would deny it – though reports in the Asian media say he is in China.
The intelligence types imagine Beijing covertly pulling on strings that pass through Low, to American citizens like Broidy and Pras, and onto the body politic or the media. They would not think it a coincidence, for instance, that quite out of the blue, Pras sent a proposal for a pro-Chinese piece to the US magazine Mother Jones. In what Mother Jones called ‘an unusual pitch’, Pras proposed writing a feature calling for the US to extradite a prominent Chinese dissident living in New York, Guo Wengui. He called him ‘a Chinese illegal immigrant who lied on his US visa application’. The news organization ProPublica says it has obtained details of a sealed search warrant obtained by the FBI to raid Broidy’s office in LA last summer — it says the Feds were looking for ‘records related to China and Guo Wengui’. Broidy has always denied being an unregistered foreign lobbyist. His lawyer told the Washington Post: ‘Elliott Broidy has never agreed to work for, been retained by nor been compensated by any foreign government for any interaction with the United States Government, ever. Any implication to the contrary is a lie.’
Cockburn has written about allegations of Chinese interference in US politics before. There were claims that the Chinese mounted an ‘influence operation’ against the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, by trying to buy up the debt on 666 Fifth Avenue, his family’s disastrous real estate investment. A former aide to Trump told Cockburn that the Chinese official who had attempted to make the deal was jailed by the authorities in Beijing for his failure. The influence operations have continued, with the Chinese owner of a string of massage parlors in Florida selling access to Trump’s home and club there, Mar-a-Lago. Trump himself used to boast on the campaign trail about getting millions of dollars in rent from a Chinese state owned bank – a huge conflict of interest, according to the president’s critics. Beijing’s influence may be more sustained, pervasive and pernicious than Moscow’s. For those looking for another Trump conspiracy, China is the new Russia.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@DonKnock @dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @Cali_livin @NY's #1 Draft Pick