RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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Cross the Secretary of State and CIA brehs 
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.
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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.
This is what Lanny Davis was trying to avoid by making Cohn testify on trump crimes alone..
:ALERTRED:
Mueller got a bunch of cases
Mueller got a bunch of cases
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
I have to agree
She said this herself.
She’d rather let the idiot impeach himself, than try to force it.
threadreaderapp.com
Thread by @justinamash: "Mueller’s report describes a consistent effort by the president to use his office to obstruct or otherwise corruptly impede the Russian elec […]"
5-6 minutes
Mueller’s report describes a consistent effort by the president to use his office to obstruct or otherwise corruptly impede the Russian election interference investigation because it put his interests at risk.
The president has an obligation not to violate the public trust, including using official powers for corrupt purposes. For instance, presidents have the authority to nominate judges, but a president couldn’t select someone to nominate because they’d promised the president money.
This principle extends to all the president’s powers, including the authority over federal investigations, federal officials, and pardons.
President Trump had an incentive to undermine the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which included investigating contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The investigation threatened to uncover information, including criminal activity, that could put Trump’s interests at risk. Ultimately, the investigation did uncover very unflattering information about the president, his family, his associates, his campaign, and his business.
It also revealed criminal activities, some of which were committed by people in Trump’s orbit and, in the case of Michael Cohen’s campaign finance violation, on Trump’s behalf.
The investigation began before the president was elected and inaugurated. After Trump assumed the powers of the presidency, Mueller’s report shows that he used those powers to try to obstruct and impede the investigation.
Some excuse Trump’s conduct based on allegations of issues with the investigation, but no one disputes the appropriateness of investigating election interference, which included investigating contacts between the Trump campaign and people connected to the Russian government.
Some examples in Mueller’s report of the president’s obstructing and impeding the investigation include:
1. Trump asked the FBI director to stop investigating Michael Flynn, who had been his campaign adviser and national security adviser, and who had already committed a crime by lying to the FBI.
2. After AG Sessions recused himself from the Russian investigation on the advice of DoJ ethics lawyers, Trump directly asked Sessions to reverse his recusal so that he could retain control over the investigation and help the president.
3. Trump directed the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to have Special Counsel Mueller removed on the basis of pretextual conflicts of interest that Trump’s advisers had already told him were “ridiculous” and could not justify removing the special counsel.
4. When that event was publicly reported, Trump asked that McGahn make a public statement and create a false internal record stating that Trump had not asked him to fire the special counsel, and suggested that McGahn would be fired if he did not comply.
5. Trump asked Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, to tell AG Sessions to limit the special counsel’s investigation only to future election interference. Trump said Lewandowski should tell Sessions he was fired if he would not meet with him.
6. Trump used his pardon power to influence his associates, including Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, not to fully cooperate with the investigation.
Trump, through his own statements—such as complaining about people who "flip" and talk to investigators—and through communications between his personal counsel and Manafort/Cohen, gave the impression that they would be pardoned if they did not fully cooperate with investigators.
Manafort ultimately breached an agreement to cooperate with investigators, and Cohen offered false testimony to Congress, including denying that the Trump Tower Moscow project had extended to June 2016 and that he and Trump had discussed traveling to Russia during the campaign.
Both men have been convicted for offering false information, and Manafort’s lack of cooperation left open some significant questions, such as why exactly he provided an associate in Ukraine with campaign polling data, which he expected to be shared with a Russian oligarch.
Some of the president’s actions were inherently corrupt. Other actions were corrupt—and therefore impeachable—because the president took them to serve his own interests.
The president has authority to fire federal officials, direct his subordinates, and grant pardons, but he cannot do so for corrupt purposes; otherwise, he would always be allowed to shut down any investigation into himself or his associates, which would put him above the law.