Red Don, Russian mobsters and Putin's Playground

[Tracy Riddle]

David is not comparing JFK with Trump in any way other than that they both opposed globalist power. JFK did it many ways including stopping the imperialist agendas, limiting the power of the Fed, tearing up the CIA into a thousand pieces, etc. All this you know. David is suggesting that Trump could get himself offed by even his relatively mild opposition to the Octopus.

Me? I think the power struggle in Washington is more like an episode of The Sopranos. Trump wants to muscle in and get a bigger slice of the pie establishing the Trump family as one of the "great" American families. The CIA/FBI are centrally dedicated to maintaining and advancing the global agenda.

Frankly, I gave him a small chance for being a true nationalist. Not any longer. He's just a thug. It's just that some thugs speak Russia, many more do not.

Finally, I hope you watch the video I listed above in that it is a glimpse into other tentacles of The Octopus.

JFK was more of a globalist than many people realize. He didn't oppose the UN or free trade. He never talked about "America First." He didn't antagonize our best allies. JFK's relationship with the Federal Reserve is widely exaggerated and misunderstood by many. What has Trump done or said that suggests he will challenge the Fed? Trump is really a globalist in his family's business dealings:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/...marks.html
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-r...udi-arabia
http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/donald-tru...er-anbang/
http://time.com/4629308/donald-trump-bus...world-map/

[Lauren Johnson]

David is not comparing JFK with Trump in any way other than that they both opposed globalist power. JFK did it many ways including stopping the imperialist agendas, limiting the power of the Fed, tearing up the CIA into a thousand pieces, etc. All this you know. David is suggesting that Trump could get himself offed by even his relatively mild opposition to the Octopus.

Me? I think the power struggle in Washington is more like an episode of The Sopranos. Trump wants to muscle in and get a bigger slice of the pie establishing the Trump family as one of the "great" American families. The CIA/FBI are centrally dedicated to maintaining and advancing the global agenda.

Frankly, I gave him a small chance for being a true nationalist. Not any longer. He's just a thug. It's just that some thugs speak Russia, many more do not.

Finally, I hope you watch the video I listed above in that it is a glimpse into other tentacles of The Octopus.

JFK was more of a globalist than many people realize. He didn't oppose the UN or free trade. He never talked about "America First." He didn't antagonize our best allies. JFK's relationship with the Federal Reserve is widely exaggerated and misunderstood by many. What has Trump done or said that suggests he will challenge the Fed? Trump is really a globalist in his family's business dealings:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/...marks.html
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-r...udi-arabia
http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/donald-tru...er-anbang/
http://time.com/4629308/donald-trump-bus...world-map/

Actually, Tracy, I might just agree with you, at least on Trump. What a con-artist.

On JFK, you know more than I do for sure. BUT I will say that JFK was not a Rockefeller globalist which certainly was about economic imperialism. According to the logic of the times, he was a "commie lover," and a man to be mistrusted, hated, and eventually killed.


I ran into this tweet by a Putin critic, which has become true of our country under the Republicrats, but especially under Trump:

Vladimir Suchan Retweeted

Коля Лукойлов‏ @KolyaLukoilov 8h8 hours agoMore



"Производство миллиардеров - это единственная отрасль в РФ, в которой рост очевидный и стабильный."

Translated from Russian by BingWrong translation?
"Production of billionaires is the only industry in the RUSSIAN FEDERATION, in which the apparent growth and stable."

[David Guyatt]

Another FB post from PDS which he typifies as a "sane corrective to the Russia bashing we see everywhere" --- here included:

"[B]Peter Dale Scott[/B]

This is an important and informative article in its own right, a sane corrective to the Putin-bashing we see everywhere. It's also encouraging that it appeared in Foreign Affairs, the often very stuffy publication of the Council on Foreign Relations."

Russia, Trump, and a New Détente
Author: us-russia Comments: 0 Category: Expert's opinion, TopStories
012345
Russia, Trump, and a New Détente
Published 15-03-2017, 00:00
Robert David English


Robert David English is Associate Professor of International Relations, Slavic Languages & Literature, and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California.
In his first press conference as president of the United States, Donald Trump said no fewer than seven times that it would be "positive," "good," even "great" if "we could get along with Russia." In fact, for all the confusion of his policies toward China, Europe, and the Middle East, Trump has enunciated a clear three-part position on Russia, which contrasts strongly with that of most of the U.S. political elite. First, Trump seeks Moscow's cooperation on global issues; second, he believes that Washington shares the blame for soured relations; and third, he acknowledges "the right of all nations to put their own interests first," adding that the United States does "not seek to impose our way of life on anyone."


The last of these is an essentially realist position, and if coherently implemented could prove a tonic. For 25 years, Republicans and Democrats have acted in ways that look much the same to Moscow. Washington has pursued policies that have ignored Russian interests (and sometimes international law as well) in order to encircle Moscow with military alliances and trade blocs conducive to U.S. interests. It is no wonder that Russia pushes back. The wonder is that the U.S. policy elite doesn't get this, even as foreign-affairs neophyte Trump apparently does.


MEMORY LOSS


Most Americans appreciate the weight of past grievances upon present-day politics, including that of the United States' own interference in Iran in the 1950s, or in Latin America repeatedly from the 1960s through the 1980s. Yet there is a blind spot when it comes to U.S. interference in Russian politics in the 1990s. Many Americans remember former President Bill Clinton as a great benefactor to Russia as the country attempted to build a market democracy under then President Boris Yeltsin. But most Russians see the United States as having abetted a decade of degradation under Yeltsin's scandal-ridden bumbling. Washington, they believe, not only took advantage of Moscow's weakness for geopolitical gain but also repeatedly interfered in Russia's domestic politics to back the person-Yeltsin-who best suited U.S. interests. Americans' ignorance of this perception creates a highly distorted picture of Russia's first postcommunist decade.


Russia's misery during the 1990s is difficult for outsiders to comprehend. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia's economy entered a sharp slide that would continue for over eight years. Although this decline is rarely is referred to as a depression in Western media, in fact it was much worse than the Great Depression in the United States-between 1929 and 1932, U.S. GDP fell by some 25 percent, whereas Russia's fell by over 40 percent between 1990 and 1998. Compared with the Great Depression, Russia's collapse of the 1990s was nearly twice as sharp, lasted three times as long, and caused far more severe health and mortality crises. The public health disaster reflected Russia's prolonged agony: stress-aggravated pathologies (suicide, disease caused by increased alcohol and tobacco use) and economically induced woes (poor nutrition, violent crime, a crumbling public health system) combined to cause at least three million "excess deaths" in the 1990s.


Faith in free markets, and admiration for the United States, fell sharply in Russia in the 1990s. The failures of "shock therapy," or the rapid transition to a market economy, made such alienation inevitable, as the rush toward privatization and slashing of the state led not to self-regulating growth and broad prosperity but to a pillaging of national wealth by rapacious oligarchs, who flourished under Yeltsin. Worse, American talk of a Marshall Plan for Russia proved empty, and U.S. aid-particularly in the critical first years of transition-was a paltry $ 7 billion. Much of that was in the form of credits that came attached with strings requiring the purchase of U.S. goods or the hiring of U.S. consultants. Also hurting America's image were much-publicized cases of corruption on the part of some Americans, involving insider trading, money laundering, and similar scandals.


In 1993, hyperinflation and poverty led to protests, and the Russian parliament passed legislation attempting to block Yeltsin's reforms. Yeltsin responded by deciding to close the legislature and redesign the political system to concentrate power in his hands. This, however, was blatantly unconstitutional, and many deputies refused to disband. Some turned to violent resistance and were crushed by the army. The Clinton administration regretted the bloodshed but blamed it on the opposition, while ignoring the illegality of Yeltsin's power grab. And the United States supported Yeltsin again two months later, when a referendum on a "super-presidential" constitution passed in a rigged vote.


In 1996, there was more U.S.-assisted mischief on the part of Yeltsin. The worst incident was the "loans for shares" scandal, a crooked privatization scheme in which Yeltsin sold Russia's most valuable natural-resource firms to oligarchs by way of fraudulent auctions-a fraud that was matched by that of the 1996 election, when Yeltsin won his second term. The United States was again tarred by complicity, by winking at such electoral violations as state media working to elect Yeltsin or the gross violations of campaign spending limits, and even by sending U.S. advisers to help Yeltsin's stumbling campaign.


The Clinton administration tolerated Yeltsin's regime in part to gain Russia's compliance on global issues, including NATO expansion. But even this was shortsighted as well as hypocritical. George Kennan, author of the Cold War containment policy, warned that pushing NATO toward Russia's borders was "a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions," which was likely to provoke an anti-Western backlash. Other experts, such as intelligence veteran Fritz Ermarth, issued warnings at the time over the United States' complicity in Russia's domestic corruption. "We have largely lost the admiration and respect of the Russian people," Ermarth wrote. "Think how [U.S. policy] must look to Russians: you support the regime's corruption of our country on the inside so it supports you in your humiliation of our country on the outside. One could not concoct a better propaganda line for Russia's extreme nationalists."


ALTERNATIVE REALITY ABOUT RUSSIA


Few Russians who endured this corruption and humiliation have much sympathy with U.S. anger over Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And with any perspective on the 1990s, it is hard to fault them. Yet such perspective among Americans is rare, in part because the Western media often adopted the Clinton administration's cheery narrative, downplaying negative phenomena as bumps in the road toward a democratic Russia. And despite subsequent revelation of so many scandals from the 1990s, Putin's "autocracy" is still contrasted with Yeltsin's "golden era of democracy," ignoring the fact that it was Yeltsin's team who perfected such tactics as 110 percent turnout in remote precincts, and whose oligarchs used their media empires as lobbying firms while brazenly buying parliamentary votes (to create personal tax loopholes). Many myths about the Yeltsin years persist. A recent National Geographic article by Julia Ioffe, for instance, attributes Russian growth under Putin to "tough economic reforms adopted by Boris Yeltsin" and describes Putin as "coasting on historically high oil prices and economic reforms implemented in the Nineties."


High oil prices, yes. But had Putin merely coasted on the policies of Yeltsin, there would have been little tax collected on the oligarchs' profits to pay for pensions, rebuild infrastructure, and create reserve funds. And there would have been no agricultural revival, because private land tenure would have remained illegal. In his first few years in office, Putin passed tax and banking reform, bankruptcy laws, and other pro-market policies that Yeltsin hadn't managed in a decade. Denying Putin credit in this way is typical. Paul Krugman recently argued in The New York Times, for instance, that growth under Putin "can be explained with just one word: oil." But note that in 2000, when Putin became president, oil stood at $30 per barrel and petroleum accounted for 20 percent of Russia's GDP. But in 2010, after a decade's rise pushed oil over $100 per barrel, petroleum had nevertheless fallen to just 11 percent of GDP, according to the World Bank. Thus as oil boomed, Russian agriculture, manufacturing, and services grew even faster.


Krugman's fellow columnist Thomas Friedman similarly decried Russia's low life expectancy over a period "that coincides almost exactly with Putin's leadership of the country ... the period of 1990-2013," while blaming Putin for "slow gains in the life expectancy of an entire nation." In fact, the first half of this period coincides almost exactly with Yeltsin's leadership, when male life expectancy fell by over six years-unprecedented for a modern country in peacetime. Under Putin, both male and female life expectancy have made rapid gains, and their combined average recently reached 70 years for the first time in Russian history.


VLADIMIR THE TERRIBLE


Distaste for many aspects of Putin's harsh rule is understandable. But demonization that veers into delusion by denying him credit for major progress (and blaming him for all problems) is foolish. Foolish because it widens the gulf between U.S. and Russian perceptions of what is going on in their country, with Russians rating Putin highly because they value the stability and pride he has revived. Foolish because it encourages the illusion that everything bad in Russia flows from Putin, so that if only Putin were removed then Russians would elect another liberal like Yeltsin. And foolish simply because that is how American leaders look when they mock Russia's prospects, as former U.S. President Barack Obama did when he said, "Russia doesn't make anything. Immigrants aren't rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The population is shrinking."


In fact, Russia's population has been growingsince 2010, and the country has one of the higher birth rates in Europe. Russia is the world's third-largest immigrant destination in the world, behind only America and Germany. And Russian products include the rockets that ferry U.S. astronauts into space. Both Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were given to careless quips about Russia. Both mocked Putin, and Clinton compared him to Adolf Hitler-a comparison that would be laughable were they not so offensive to Russians, who lost 26 million countrymen in World War II. It was also reckless, given Putin's broad popularity in Russia. But when confronted with this popularity, Obama replied, "Saddam Hussein had a 90 percent poll rating." He explained, "If you control the media and you've taken away everybody's civil liberties, and you jail dissidents, that's what happens." This view is deeply mistaken.


There is, of course, much to fault in Putin's Russia, and both Obama and Clinton were subject to nastiness from Moscow. But it is undignified and unwise for a U.S. president to disparage not just a foreign leader but his entire country in the way that Obama did. The urge to answer taunts in kind cannot overpower regard for Russian public opinion, and so confirm the Russian media's portrayal of America as ignorant and arrogant. It seemed clever when Hillary Clinton pounced on Trump as "Putin's puppet." But apparently it didn't resonate much with ordinary Americans, who elected Trump, and neither does the pettiness and demonization of Putin resonate with ordinary Russians.


These ordinary Russians are the forgotten people-the hard-working teachers, doctors, and mechanics whose savings, careers, even health were destroyed by the catastrophe of the 1990s. They are the fledgling voters who saw their new democracy bought and sold by Yeltsin and his cronies, and the onetime admirers of the United States who longed for a leader to restore their pride in Russia after a decade of humiliation. Under Clinton, the United States treated Russia like a defeated enemy and capitalized on its weakness to expand NATO. Claims that this was merely a defensive expansion were belied by NATO's bombing of Serbia, a Russian ally, in 1999. Under President George W. Bush, the United States further intimidated Russia by abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, imposing punitive tariffs, launching a reckless invasion of Iraq, continuing to expand NATO, and further encircling Russia by cozying up to Georgia and Ukraine.


It is thus unsurprising that in 2008, Russia hit back, answering a Georgian strike in the disputed region of South Ossetia (which killed some Russian peacekeepers) with a crushing counterblow. For finally pushing back, Putin's approval rating soared to nearly 85 percent-the highest it would reach until Crimea's annexation in 2014.


HOW NOT TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY


This is the Russia that Obama inherited in 2009: prideful, angry, and in no mood for the sanctimony that came with the new administration's stress on democracy promotion. They had seen Bill Clinton ally with a corrupt Yeltsin to make a mockery of their new democracy. They had fumed as Vice President Dick Cheney faulted Russian democracy while praising that of Kazakhstan. And they heard their country criticized for interfering in the affairs of weaker neighbors, even as NATO was expanding right up to Russia's borders, and the United States was launching an invasion of Iraq in the name of democracy promotion that would set the Middle East aflame. Not surprisingly, the Russian media ever more frequently paired the term "double standard" with America.


Thus it may have been unwise for the Obama administration to pursue democracy promotion as brashly as it did, criticizing Russian elections and encouraging Putin's opposition. This carried a whiff not only of hypocrisy but of danger, too, appearing, as it did to many within Russia, as a threat to destabilize Putin's rule. Democracy promoters may draw a distinction between policies aimed at advancing NATO and those aimed at advancing political liberalization in Russia and other former Soviet states-emphasizing that Obama enacted the latter but not the former. But Putin's skepticism was easy to understand given the West's record of undermining Moscow's allies, as in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, and then seeking to anchor their new regimes in the Western political and military blocs. As a senator, too, Obama was an early supporter of Ukraine joining NATO, and preparations for Ukraine's integration with NATO continued throughout his presidency. Hillary Clinton also advocated a NATO "open door" for Ukraine, and then incurred Putin's wrath by pushing humanitarian intervention (which soon turned into regime change) in Libya. So her demand for "a full investigation of all reports of fraud and intimidation" in Russia's 2011 elections was most unwelcome. Michael McFaul, an expert on democracy promotion and longtime critic of Putin, was a particularly provocative choice for new Obama's ambassador to Russia in 2012.


Neither should righteous indignation at Putin's post-election crackdown prevent rethinking of the targets as well as the tools of American public diplomacy. Some fault the focus on Russia's liberal opposition, a small number of Moscow-centered activists who best reflect U.S. values. Many of them are discredited in the eyes of the Russian majority: for their earlier support of Yeltsin's regime, for their disparaging of the widely admired Putin, and for their reflexive backing of U.S. policies-such as NATO expansion-even when they clash with Russian interests. They appear, in a word, unpatriotic. They are earnest, articulate, and highly admirable. But even if they weren't stigmatized by Putin-or tarred by identification with the 1990s-they embody liberal-cosmopolitan values alien to most conservative-national Russians. And while this makes them appealing to the West, it also makes them a poor bet as the focus of democracy-promotion.


Consider the case of Pussy Riot, the feminist-protest rock group, some of whose members were convicted of hooliganism in 2012 for staging a protest in Moscow's Church of Christ the Savior-profanely mocking not only Putin but also the Russian Orthodox Church and its believers. Both activists and state officials in the United States praised Pussy Riot and demanded their release. Yet basic decency-and regard for the values and traditions of others-would suggest that hailing Pussy Riot as champions of free speech was disrespectful of Russia. It was also insensible if the United States is interested in cultivating sympathy among Russians, some 70 percent of whom identify as Orthodox believers. Russia is a conservative society that viewed the years of Yeltsin's rule, and its onslaught of pornography and promiscuity, with horror. In polls, only seven percent of Russians said that political protest was permissible in a church, and only five percent agreed that Pussy Riot should be released without serious punishment. Surely the sensibilities of ordinary Russians deserve as much regard as those of a minority of cosmopolitan liberals. And hectoring by the West will hardly ease traditional Russian homophobia. Indeed, the outcry on behalf of Pussy Riot likely strengthened popular support for the notorious 2013 law against "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations."


Russians see a double standard in U.S. judgments about their country-a prosecutorial stance that criticizes Russia for behaviors that go unnoticed in other countries. For example, The Washington Post has closely covered Russia's anti-LGBT policies but has paid scant attention to the same in countries such as Lithuania, Georgia, and Ukraine, and when it has it has suggested that Russia is to blame for exporting its anti-gay beliefs. Since 2014, the Western media has similarly reported on Moscow's alleged propaganda onslaught, while largely ignoring the brazen purchase of positive publicity by countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. This is not the usual lobbying or public relations but the funding of ostensibly independent research on a country by that country itself-paying for upbeat election reports and other assessments by such groups as the Parliamentary Association of the Council of Europe.


Americans rarely hear of such activity, even as alarm over Moscow's subversion nears hysteria. A recent U.S. intelligence report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election warned of "a Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest." Yet a key culprit is the news channel RT (which has a miniscule share of the U.S. audience), on the grounds that it runs "anti-fracking programming highlighting environmental issues" and "a documentary about the Occupy Wall Street movement [that] described the current U.S. political system as corrupt." In fact, unlike the 2014 Maidan occupation in Ukraine, which was actively supported by some U.S. and EU officials, Russian diplomats carefully kept their distance from the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests.


DEMOCRACY PROMOTION


Another double standard, ignored by the U.S. media but noted overseas, was Obama's denunciation in 2014 of the Crimea secession referendum that preceded the peninsula's annexation by Russia. Rejecting parallels between Crimea's secession from Ukraine and Kosovo's 2008 secession from Serbia-which the West supported but Russia, along with Serbia, rejected as illegitimate-Obama said that Kosovo only seceded "after a referendum was organized ... in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo's neighbors. None of that even came close to happening in Crimea." In fact, none of that even came close to happening in Kosovo. There was no referendum at all-just a vote by Kosovo's Albanian-majority parliament. As for cooperation with the neighbors, Serbia desperately opposed Kosovo secession; Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, and Slovakia still have not recognized Kosovo; and others, such as Bulgaria, Croatia, and Hungary, only agreed under Western pressure.


Such a factual error-belief in things that never occurred, yet are cited as legal justification to dismember a country-is worrisome regardless. It also highlights an illusion about the free, democratic choice facing countries in central and eastern Europe as they are tugged between Washington and Moscow. In fact, the freedom of their choice belies the powerful political and economic levers employed to pry these countries away from Russia. As noted above in the case of the Kosovo referendum, Kosovo's neighbors were pressured by the United States and NATO to recognize the region's secession from Serbia. In fact, carrots and sticks have been continually applied to the countries of eastern Europe to encourage the policies desired in Brussels, Berlin, and Washington, D.C. When eastern Europeans grew concerned about the higher than expected costs of joining the EU-or about the backlash that NATO expansion was provoking in Russia-accession was sweetened for political and business elites while the masses were sometimes sidestepped with popular referenda replaced by simple parliamentary votes. Occasionally Brussels and Washington pulled in opposite directions, as with the International Criminal Court-backed by the EU but opposed by the Administration of George W. Bush. In this, as in other cases, the countries of central Europe exercised their supposedly free choice under enormous political and economic pressure.


Nobody argues that joining the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union would benefit most countries more than the EU. (NATO is another matter, as the costs of Russian backlash now rival any security benefits from further expansion.) The point is simply to grasp the legitimacy in Moscow's perspective-that expansion of the Western blocs is not an organic, democratic process but, rather, one engineered by the United States and its allies, and motivated as much by power as by principle. The West must also see the costs to the countries involved (and to its own alliances) in a payoff-driven, elite-centered process that shortchanges the concerns of majorities and is in key ways undemocratic. Long before the Syrian refugees crisis soured them even further, support for the EU in central Europe had already fallen because the costs were much higher than expected, whereas the benefits seemed mainly to reward a wealthy business elite.


As an example of this dynamic, consider the case of Moldova, where the EU has supported local pro-European parties to help this desperately poor country toward accession. Few in the West read much about the country until a spate of headlines last November, such as the Telegraph's announcement: "Pro-Russia Candidate Wins Moldova Election." Spinning this result in terms of geopolitics was misleading. The election had turned largely on domestic issues, such as corruption and the economy. Ordinary Moldovans worried that EU accession would mainly benefit elites, and Moldova's pro-EU Liberal Democratic Party was reeling from a scandal in which party leaders funneled $1 billion-half the reserves of the Moldovan National Bank-into private bank accounts. But just as in the cases of similar elections in Bulgaria and Montenegro, U.S. media focused on the struggle for influence with Moscow. Indeed, Montenegro casts all of these issues into sharp relief. This is a country whose secession from Serbia the United States encouraged-for geopolitical goals, to weaken the Serbian leader Milosevic-by backing the epically corrupt boss Milo Djukanovic. Now, a decade later, Djukanovic's Democratic-Socialist party exploits similar geopolitical tensions to engineer Montenegro's accession to NATO-a step of doubtful benefit to either the alliance or Montenegro, provocative to Russia, and one that buttresses a deeply corrupt, patronage-based regime. This focus on geopolitical threats, however, obscures the bigger socioeconomic one: pluralities or even majorities in many eastern European countries now believe that life was better under communism. Such alienation drives anti-EU sentiment in those countries and empowers demagogues like Hungary's President Viktor Orban-not some nefarious influence from Vladimir Putin but deep economic inequality and the manifest failings of European integration.


Western understandings of the conflict in Ukraine show a similar bias. Recall that the crisis erupted in 2013 when President Viktor Yanukovych balked at the EU's harsh accession terms and opted instead to align with Russia. And he was ousted in a revolt that America and the EU openly cheered. No matter how corrupt his rule was, he was elected democratically and had acted constitutionally in making his decision. (In fact, he was elected in 2010 because the previous pro-EU government had proved both corrupt and incompetent.) But in 2014, as the protests in Ukraine grew, the United States decided to abandon a power-transition deal that it had agreed upon with Russia, and instead supported the protests calling for Yanukovych's ouster, which essentially turned into a coup. But this quickly boomeranged, as the Russians concluded that if the West could support an unconstitutional seizure of power in Kiev, then they could hold an unconstitutional referendum in Crimea or support an unconstitutional seizure of power in Donbas. There was a compromise path, but treating Ukraine as something to be yanked from Russia's orbit-which raised the specter of NATO again as well as loss of their centuries-old Crimean naval base-made Putin's choice to hit back an easy one.


Of course this hardly justifies the savagery that Russia has abetted in fighting over the Donbas. But U.S. and EU actions helped spark the conflict by treating Ukraine as a prize to be grabbed, rather than as a linguistically and ethnically divided country in which Russia has legitimate interests. Western policies recklessly ignored these interests and needlessly raised the stakes. As seen, some officials stressed a NATO "open door" for Ukraine while the likelihood of rapid EU accession was exaggerated as well. Before the war, Ukraine had an annual income-per-capita of $4,000, on par with Albania and Kosovo, and in corruption surveys it ranked below Russia and on the same level as Nigeria. Today, after an Association agreement, billions in aid, and three years of EU-mandated reforms, Ukraine is still a corrupt, bankrupt mess-highlighting how unprepared it was for EU accession, how heavily it depended on Russian trade and subsidies that are now lost, and how unwise it was for Western leaders to push an either-or choice on Kiev.


THE ART OF THE DEAL?


In the latest corruption surveys, Ukraine still ranks below Russia. Scandals erupt daily, with an economic drain greater than the conflict in Donbas. Ukraine's pro-EU President Petro Poroshenko has a 17 percent approval rating, lower than the pro-Russian Yanukovych's 28 percent on the eve of his ouster in 2014. Ironically, this means that the pro-Russian Yanukovych was the most popular Ukrainian president of this century. And in the latest poll finding, only 41 percent of Ukrainians still support the EU Association Agreement, the rejection of which sparked the Maidan revolution in the first place. It is trends like these, along with a right-wing turn in Western European states that erodes their patience and generosity with troubled eastern neighbors, that should trouble EU leaders. Instead, across the region, Europeans are on high alert for Russians spreading anti-Western news, supporting anti-Western politicians, and deploying an army of anti-Western internet trolls.


Yet for all the paranoia about Russian subversion, crisis is more likely to come from elsewhere, such as an unraveling of fragile Bosnia leading to a clash between Serbia and NATO. Or it could be Moldova, with the nationalist majority renewing a push to unite with their Romanian kin, thereby reviving conflict with the Russian minority. Hungary could leave the EU, delivering a critical blow to European unity. Or Ukraine could simply collapse of its own corrupt, bankrupt weight.


Yet Ukraine could also be where America and Russia begin repairing ties. The Russian economy is weak-incomes are down a third since 2013-and relief from Western sanctions is sorely needed. Europe, too, cries for the revival of normal trade with Russia. A deal between Russia and the West would build upon the stalled Minsk Accords. Moscow would withdraw from the Donbass and restore Ukraine's eastern border, and Kiev would grant local self-rule to this Russian-speaking region. Russia would, in turn, get a commitment from NATO not to incorporate Ukraine, and Ukraine would get a treaty guaranteeing its territorial integrity as well as military aid. Kiev would also gain major Western investments, while benefitting enormously from restoration of trade with Russia.


Purists will call such a deal a betrayal, as it would be a de facto recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea. But the best is the enemy of the good. Moscow will not allow Crimea to be snatched away again, as it was in 1954, after nearly 200 years as part of Russia. And by democratic rights, it shouldn't-the fact is that a large majority of Crimeans want to remain with Russia. Ukraine, moreover, would benefit from peace and investment, instead of diverting more resources into conflict. Normal political and trade ties with Russia would also benefit Europe as a whole, helping to slow and maybe to reverse the current slide toward dissolution. Continuation of the status quo, by contrast, only exacerbates crisis.


WILL THE REAL VLADIMIR PUTIN PLEASE STAND UP?


A diplomatic breakthrough between Russia and the West on Ukraine-or on Syria, or other major issues-will also require firm agreement on non-interference in each other's domestic affairs. Such diplomacy would test the mettle of the Trump administration's foreign-affairs neophytes, but the greater unknown is Putin. A majority of the U.S. political elite believes that no deals are possible because Putin is irremediably hostile. Whether they attribute that hostility to ideology (an ingrained KGB worldview) or corruption (an illegitimate regime that needs a foreign enemy to distract its people from domestic woes), many American policymakers believe that Putin simply has no interest in peace with the West. In their view, he is bent on expansion and will gladly endure sanctions as the price of fomenting discord in the West.


Another group of policymakers is also skeptical of Putin, but do not blame him alone for the deterioration of relations. Many of these analysts opposed NATO expansion from the outset, for the same reasons that Kennan did-because it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. These experts also criticize the United States' misadventures in Iraq and Libya, failure to respect Russia's red lines on expansion into Georgia and Ukraine, and petty demonization of Putin. Yet they mainly stand with the first group now in believing that containment, not cooperation, is what the West must practice, because Putin's recent actions threaten the postwar liberal order.


A third group of analysts-the realists, who make up a minority of the foreign-policy establishment-reply that Putin does not threaten the entire postwar liberal order but only challenges the post-Cold War U.S.-dominated order that consistently ignores Russia's interests. They wonder how some can admit the folly of NATO's continual expansion and fault the many double standards in U.S. policy but not agree that America must meet Russia halfway. Like realists such as Kennan or Hans Morgenthau, who early warned against the folly of Vietnam, they are sometimes derided as weak (or Putin apologists) for cautioning against inflating foreign threats while ignoring the United States' domestic weaknesses.


These realists argue that the early Putin prioritized market economic reforms and good relations with the West, yet saw his open hand met by the clenched fist of the George W. Bush-era neoconservatives. And Obama, reset or no, continued efforts to expand the Western economic and military blocs that had started under Clinton in the 1990s. In other words, for over two decades, whether motivated by residual Cold War mistrust or post-Cold War liberal hegemonism, America has steadily pushed Western military and political-economic power deeper into Russia's backyard. If history teaches anything it is that any great power will, when facing the continued advance of a rival, eventually push back. And much as Obama-Clinton defenders dislike being reminded of it, any chance of America's post-Cold War power being seen as uniquely benign ended in Serbia, Iraq, and Libya.


It may be that both sides are correct-that two decades of ignoring Russia's interests have abetted Putin's embrace of a deep-seated anti-Americanism and that a new détente is impossible. Or it may be that Putin is not innately hostile, but rather a typical strongman: proud and spiteful, but not uniquely corrupt or cruel, and capable of embracing a cooperative position if he finds a partner skilled enough to forge a deal respecting both U.S. and Russian vital interests. The only thing not in doubt is that both America and Russia-indeed, Europe and the wider world-badly need that détente.

Source

[Cliff Varnell]

I'm waiting to see a think piece that acknowledges the following:

1) The 2010 nuclear arms reduction pact
2) The 2013-4 removal of chemical weapons from Syria
3) The 2015 Iran nuke pact

These Putin/Obama achievements are never acknowledged.

There's a reason for that -- the American Deep State opposed (2) and (3).

All this talk about "new Cold War" and "new McCarthyism" is vastly overblown.

[Tracy Riddle]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017...l-timeline


The Long, Twisted, and Bizarre History of the Trump-Russia Scandal

Here's the timeline you need to keep track of the controversy.

HANNAH LEVINTOVAMAR. 24, 2017 10:34 AM

The Trump-Russia scandalwith all its bizarre and troubling twists and turnshas become a controversy that is defining the Trump presidency. The FBI recently disclosed that since July it has been conducting a counterintelligence investigation into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russia, as part of its probe of Moscow's meddling in the 2016 election. Citing "US officials," CNN reported that the bureau has gathered information suggesting coordination between Trump campaign officials and suspected Russian operatives. Each day seems to bring a new revelationand a new Trump administration denial or deflection. It's tough to keep track of all the relevant events, pertinent ties, key statements, and unraveling claims. So we've compiled what we know so far into the timeline below, which covers Trump's 30-year history with Russia. We will continue to update the timeline regularly as events unfold. (Click here to go directly to the most recent entry.) Please email us at scoop@motherjones.com if you have a tip or we've left anything out.
1986: Donald Trump is seated next to Russian Ambassador Yuri Dubinin at a lunch organized by Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics scion Este Lauder, who at the time is running her cosmetics business. "One thing led to another, and now I'm talking about building a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin" in partnership with the Soviet government, Trump later writes in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal.
January 1987: Intourist, the Soviet agency for international tourism, expresses interest in meeting with Trump.

July 1987: Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, fly to Moscow to tour potential hotel sites. Trump spokesman Dan Klores later tells the Washington Post that during the trip, Trump "met with a lot of the economic and financial advisers in the Politburo" but did not see Mikhail Gorbachev, then the USSR's leader.
December 1, 1988: The Soviet Mission to the United Nations announces that Gorbachev is tentatively scheduled to tour Trump Tower while the Soviet leader is visiting New York and that Trump plans to show him a swimming pool inside a $19 million apartment.
December 7, 1988: Trump welcomes the wrong Gorbachev to New Yorkshaking hands with a renowned Gorbachev impersonator outside his hotel.
December 8, 1988: President Ronald Reagan invites Donald and Ivana Trump to a state dinner, where Trump meets the real Gorbachev. According to Trump's spokesman, the real estate mogul had a lengthy discussion with the Soviet president about economics and hotels.
January 1989: For $200,000, Trump signs a group of Soviet cyclists for the Albany-to-Atlantic City road race, dubbed the Tour de Trump, that will take place that May.
November 5, 1996: Media reports note that Trump is trying to partner with US tobacco company Brooke Group to build a hotel in Moscow.
January 23, 1997: Trump meets with Alexander Lebed, a retired Soviet general then running to be president of Russia, at Trump Tower. Trump says they discussed his plans to build "something major" in Moscow. Lebed reportedly expressed his support, joking that his only objection would be that "the highest skyscraper in the world cannot be built next to the Kremlin. We cannot allow anyone spitting from the roof of the skyscraper on the Kremlin."
2000: Michael Caputo, who later runs Trump's primary campaign in New York during the 2016 race, secures a PR contract with the Russian conglomerateGazprom Media to burnish Russian President Vladimir Putin's image in the United States.
2005: Trump reportedly signs a development deal with Bayrock Group, a real estate firm founded by a former Soviet official from Kazakhstan, to develop a hotel in Moscow and agrees to partner on a hotel tower in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Trump works on the projects with Bayrock managing partner Felix Sater, a Russian American businessman. The New York Times will later publish a story revealing Sater's criminal record, which includes charges of racketeering and assault.
2007

September 19: Sater and the former Soviet official who founded Bayrock, Tevfik Arif, stand next to Trump at the launch party for Trump SoHo, a hotel-condominium project co-financed by Bayrock.
November 22: Trump Vodka debuts in Russia, at the Moscow Millionaire's Fair. As part of its new marketing campaign, Trump Vodka also unveils an ad featuring Trump, tigers, the Kremlin, and Vladimir Lenin.At the Millionaires' Fair, Trump meets Sergey Millian, an American citizen from Belarus who is the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA (RACC). Subsequently, Millian later recounted, "We met at his office in New York, where he introduced me to his right-hand manMichael Cohen. He is Trump's main lawyer, all contracts go through him. Subsequently, a contract was signed with me to promote one of their real estate projects in Russia and the CIS. You can say I was their exclusive broker." According to Millian, he helped Trump "study the Moscow market" for potential real estate investments.
December 17: The New York Times publishes a story about Felix Sater's controversial past, which includes prison time for stabbing a man with a margarita glass stem during a bar fight and a guilty plea in a Mafia-linked racketeering case. The article characterizes Sater as a Trump business associate who is promoting several potential projects in partnership with Trump.
December 19: In a deposition, Trump is asked about his plans to build a hotel in Moscow. He says, "It was a Trump International Hotel and Tower. It would be a nonexclusive deal, so it would not have precluded me from doing other deals in Moscow, which was very important to me."
2008

April: Trump announces he is partnering with Russian oligarch Pavel Fuks to license his name for luxury high-rises in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sochi,the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics. But Fuks ultimately balks at Trump's price, which the Russian business newspaper Kommersant estimated could have been $200 million or more.
July: Billionaire Dmitri Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch, buys a Palm Beach mansion owned by Trump for $95 million, despite Florida's crashing real estate market and an appraisal on the house for much less. Trump bought the property for $41.35 million four years earlier. Rybolovlev goes on to give conflicting explanations for why he bought the property.
September 15: Donald Trump Jr. speaks at a real estate conference in Manhattan, where he says "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets…We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
Date unknown: Trump's team reportedly invites Sergei Millian to meet Trump at a horse race in Florida, where, according to Millian, they sit in Trump's private suite at the Gulfstream race track in Miami. "Trump team, they realized that we have a lot of connection with Russian investors. And they noticed that we bring a lot of investors from Russia," Millian told ABC News in a 2016 interview. "And they needed my assistance, yes, to sell properties and sell some of the assets to Russian investors." Millian says that following this meeting with Trump, he works as a broker for the Trump Hollywood condominium project in Miami, selling a "nice percentage" of the building's 200 units to Russian investors.
2010

May 10: Jody Kriss, a former finance director at Bayrock, files a lawsuit against the company. The suit alleges that Bayrock financed Trump SoHo with mysterious cash from Kazhakstan and Russia and calls the building "a Russian mob project." (The complaint notes that "there is no evidence that Trump took any part in" Bayrock's interactions with questionable Russian financing sources.)
Date unknown: Bayrock's Sater becomes a senior adviser to Trump, according to his LinkedIn profile. Though Trump later claims he would not recognize Sater, Sater has a Trump Organization email address, phone number, and business cards.
2013

May 29: Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star and the son of billionaire real estate developer Aras Agalarov, releases a music video for his song "Amor." In the video, he pursues Miss Universe 2012, Olivia Culpo, through dark, empty alleys with a flashlight. Following the video's release, representatives of Miss Universe, which Trump at the time owns, discuss with the Agalarovs holding the next pageant in Moscow. The Agalarovs persuade them to host Miss Universe at a concert hall they own on the outskirts of Moscow.
June 18: Following the Miss USA contest in Las Vegas, Trump announces that he will bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow.

[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]
Follow[/URL]
[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump[/URL]

The Miss Universe Pageant will be broadcast live from MOSCOW, RUSSIA on November 9th. A big deal that will bring our countries together!
8:00 PM - 18 Jun 2013

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He also wonders if Putin will attend the pageant, and if Putin might "become my new best friend?"

[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]
Follow[/URL]
[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump[/URL]

Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?
8:17 PM - 18 Jun 2013

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June 21: Vladimir Putin awards Rex Tillerson, now Trump's secretary of state, with Russia's Order of Friendship. As the CEO of Exxon Mobil, Tillerson had developed a long-standing relationship with the head of Russia's state-owned oil company, Rosneft, dating back to 1998.
October 17: In an interview with David Letterman, Trump says, "I've done a lot of business with the Russians," noting that he once met Putin.
November 5: In a deposition, Trump is asked about a 2007 New York Times story outlining the controversial past of Felix Sater. Trump replies that he barely knows Sater and would have trouble recognizing him if they were in the same room.
"Putin even sent me a present, a beautiful present," Trump boasted.
November 8: Trump, in Russia for the Miss Universe pageant, meets with more than a dozen of Russia's top businessmen at Nobu, a restaurant 15 minutes from the Kremlin. The group includes Herman Gref, the CEO of the state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, Russia's biggest bank. The meeting at Nobu is organized by Grefwho regularly meets with Putinand Aras Agalarov, who owns the Nobu franchise in Moscow.
- According to a source connected to the Agalarovs, Putin asks his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, to call Trump in advance of the Miss Universe show to set up an in-person meeting for the Russian president and Trump. Peskov reportedly passes on the message and expresses Putin's admiration for Trump. Their plans to meet never come to fruition because of scheduling changes for both Trump and Putin.
November 9:Trump spends the morning shooting a music video with Emin Agalarov.
-The Miss Universe pageant takes place near Moscow. A notorious Russian mobster, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, attends the event as a VIP, strolling down the event's red carpet within minutes of Trump. At the time, Tokhtakhounov was under federal indictment in the United States for his alleged participation in an illegal gambling ring once run out of Trump Tower. Emin Agalarov performs two songs at the pageant.
- MSNBC's Thomas Roberts asks Trump if he has a relationship with Putin. Trump replies, "I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he's very interested in what we're doing here today."

November 11: Trump tweets his appreciation to Aras Agalarov, the Russian billionaire with whom he partnered to host Miss Universe, also complimenting Emin's performance at the pageant and declaring plans for a Trump tower in Moscow.

[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]
Follow[/URL]
[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump[/URL]

@AgalarovAras I had a great weekend with you and your family. You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next. EMIN was WOW!
8:39 AM - 11 Nov 2013

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November 12: Trump tells Real Estate Weekly that Miss Universe Russia provided a networking opportunity: "Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room," he says. The same day, two developers who helped build the luxury Trump SoHo hotel meet with the Agalarovs to discuss replicating the hotel in Moscow. Aras Agalarov, whose real estate company secured multiple contracts from the Kremlin and who once received a medal of honor from Putin, later claims he and Trump signed a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow following the pageant. (The deal never moved past preliminary discussions.)
November 20: Emin Agalarov releases a new music video featuring Trump and the 2013 Miss Universe contestants.

2014
March 6: Trump gives a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and boasts of getting a gift from Putin when he was in Russia for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. "You know, I was in Moscow a couple months ago, I own the Miss Universe pageant, and they treated me so great," Trump said. "Putin even sent me a present, beautiful present, with a beautiful note."
May 27: At a National Press Club luncheon, Trump says, "I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer."
2015

September: FBI special agent Adrian Hawkins contacts the Democratic National Committee, saying that one of its computer systems has been compromised by a cyberespionage group linked to the Russian government. He speaks to a help desk technician who does a quick check of the DNC systems for evidence of a cyber intrusion. In the next several weeks, Hawkins calls the DNC back repeatedly, but his calls are not returned, in part because the tech support contractor who took Hawkins' call does not know whether he is a real agent. The FBI does not dispatch an agent to visit the DNC in person and does not make efforts to contact more senior DNC officials.
September 21: On a conservative radio show, Trump says, "I was in Moscow not so long ago for an event that we had, a big event, and many of [Putin's] people were there…I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people. I can't go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary."
September 29: Trump praises Putin during an interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly: "I will tell you, in terms of leadership he is getting an 'A,' and our president is not doing so well."
November 10: At a Republican presidential primary debate, Trump says of Putin that he "got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stablemates."
November 11: The Associated Press, Time, and other media outlets report that Trump and Putin were never in the same studio. Trump was interviewed in New York, and Putin was interviewed in Moscow.
December 10: Retired General Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was reportedly forced out in 2014, attends and is paid $30,000 to speak at Russia Today's 10th anniversary dinner in Moscow, where he is seated next to Putin.
December 17: Putin praises Trump in his year-end press conference, saying that he is "very talented" and that "he is an absolute leader of the presidential race, as we see it today. He says that he wants to move to another level relations, a deeper level of relations with Russia…How can we not welcome that? Of course, we welcome it." Trump calls the praise "a great honor" from "a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond." He adds, "I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other toward defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect."
2016

February 17: At a rally in South Carolina, Trump says of Putin, "I have no relationship with him, other than that he called me a genius."
March 21: In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump identifies Carter Page as one of his foreign policy advisers.
March 30: Bloomberg Businessweek reports on Page's past advising of Gazprom, Russia's state-owned gas company. Page tells Bloomberg Businessweek that after Trump named him as an adviser, positive notes from his Russian contacts filled his inbox. "There's a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation" in terms of easing US sanctions on Russia, Page explained.
April 26: The Washington Post reports that Paul Manafort, then Trump's convention manager (who would later be promoted to campaign chairman), has long-standing ties to pro-Putin Ukrainian officials. Between 2007 and 2012, Manafort worked as a political consultant to Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russia part. He helped Yanukovych remake his image following the Orange Revolution and mount a successful bid for the Ukrainian presidency.
April and May: The DNC's IT department contacts the FBI about unusual computer activity and hires cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to investigate. In May, Crowdstrike determines that hackers affiliated with Russian intelligence infiltrated the DNC's network.
June 14: The Washington Post reports that Russian hackers penetrated the DNC's computer network.
June 15: Guccifer 2.0, an online persona that US intelligence officials link to Russia's military intelligence service, takes credit for the DNC hack and posts hacked DNC documents. Guccifer will go on to post additional hacked documentsfrom the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and purportedly from the Clinton Foundationat least nine more times in the months leading up to the election. (Some reports contest that the documents came from the Clinton Foundation itself.)
July 7: Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page criticizes US sanctions against Russia during a speech at the New Economic School in Moscow. Politicolater reports that Page asked for and received permission from Trump's then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to speak at the Moscow event.
July 18: The Washington Post reports that the Trump campaign worked with members of the Republican Party platform committee in advance of the Republican National Convention to soften the platform's position related to Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The platform reportedly included a provision that promised to provide arms to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, but Trump campaign staffers encouraged the committee to jettison this language.
- Trump surrogate Sen. Jeff Sessions meets with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, on the sidelines of a Republican National Convention event put on by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
July 18-2[B]1: [/B]Trump campaign staffers Carter Page and J.D. Gordon, the campaign's director of national security, also meet with the Russian ambassador during the convention.
July 22: WikiLeaks publishes nearly 20,000 hacked DNC emails, in advance of the Democratic National Convention. Some of the emails indicate that DNC officials favored Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders.
July 24: Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, appears on ABC's This Week, where he is asked whether there are connections between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime. Manafort says, "No, there are not. And you know, there's no basis to it."
July 25: Trump tweets about the hacked DNC emails:

[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]
Follow[/URL]
[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump[/URL]

The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me
4:31 AM - 25 Jul 2016

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July 26: US intelligence agencies tell the White House they now have "high confidence" that the Russian government was behind the DNC hack. This is reported by media outlets but not publicly confirmed by intelligence agencies.
- In an interview with NBC News, Obama says hacks are being investigated by the FBI, but that "experts have attributed this to the Russians." He notes, "What we do know is that the Russians hack our systems. Not just government systems, but private systems. But you know, what the motives were in terms of the leaks, all thatI can't say directly. What I do know is that Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin."
July 27: Trump encourages Russia to hack Clinton's emails, saying during a news conference, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you'll probably be rewarded mightily by our press." At the same event, he declares, "I never met Putin. I don't know who Putin is."
July 31: On ABC's This Week, Trump again denies knowing Putin, saying, "I have no relationship with him." Trump also denies that his campaign played any role in getting the Republican Party to soften its platform on arming Ukraine.
- On Meet the Press, Manafort denies that he or anyone within the Trump campaign worked to change the platform.
- Sen. Jeff Sessions defends Trump's efforts to cultivate a friendship with Russia during an appearance on CNN: "Donald Trump is right. We need to figure out a way to end this cycle of hostility that's putting this country at risk, costing us billions of dollars in defense, and creating hostilities."
Late July: The FBI launches a counterintelligence investigation into contacts between Trump associates and Russia. There is no public confirmation of this investigation at the time, but FBI Director James Comey later confirms the investigation in a March 2017 hearing before the House intelligence committee.
August 5: Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks, asked by the Washington Post about Carter Page's July speech in Moscow, downplays his role as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, saying he "does not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign."
- Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone writes an article for Breitbart in which he denies that Russia was behind the DNC hack. He argues that Guccifer 2.0 has no ties to Russia.
August 6: NPR confirms the Trump campaign's involvement in encouraging the Republican Party to soften its platform's pro-Ukraine position on Russia's annexation of Crimea.
August 14: The New York Times reports that Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau has discovered Manafort's name on a list of "black accounts" compiled by ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally. The tallies show undisclosed payments designated for Manafort totaling $12.7 million between 2007 and 2012, the years that Manafort worked for Yanukovych as a political consultant. (Manafort denies receiving any illicit payments.)
August 17: Trump receives his first classified intelligence briefing as the GOP nominee for president. He brings Michael Flynn with him to the meeting, which includes discussion of the intelligence community's assessment that Russia was interfering in the US election.
August 19: Manafort resigns from the Trump campaign.
August 21: Roger Stone tweets:

[URL="https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr"]
Follow[/URL]
Roger Stone @RogerJStoneJr

Trust me, it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary
7:24 AM - 21 Aug 2016

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August 29: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pens a letter to the FBI, asking the bureau to investigate the possibility of election-tampering by Russia in the upcoming presidential election."I have recently become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election is more extensive than widely known," Reid writes. "The prospect of a hostile government actively seeking to undermine our free and fair elections represents one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War and it is critical for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use every resource available to investigate this matter thoroughly."
August 29: Yahoo Newsreports that the FBI has found evidence that the state voter systems in Arizona and Illinois were breached by hackers possibly linked to the Russian government.
August 30: House Democrats send a letter to FBI Director James Comey calling on the bureau to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and any impact these ties may have had on the hacking of the DNC and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
September 5: The Washington Post reports that US intelligence agencies, including the FBI, are investigating possible plans by Russia to disrupt the presidential election.
-Putin and Obama have a tense meeting at the G20 summit in China, where they discuss Syria, Ukraine, and cybersecurity. In December, Obama will tell reporters that he confronted Putin about Russia's alleged interference in the election and told him to "cut it out."
September 7: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggests publicly for the first time that Russia may be responsible for the DNC hack, pointing to Obama's July statement that "experts have attributed this to the Russians." Clapper adds that "the Russians hack our systems all the time."
September 8: Trump responds to Clapper's comments in an interview with RT, the English language arm of a Russian state-controlled media conglomerate, casting doubt on whether Russian hackers were responsible for the DNC hack. "I think maybe the Democrats are putting that out," Trump says. "Who knows, but I think it's pretty unlikely."
- Jeff Sessions meets with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in his Senate office. He is the only one of the Senate armed services committee's 26 members to meet with the ambassador in 2016. The meeting occurs days after Putin and Obama's tense G20 meeting.
September 22: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, release a statement about Russia's interference in the US election. "Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election," they said. "We believe that orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to conduct such actions could come only from the very senior levels of the Russian government."
September 23: Yahoo News reports that US intelligence officials are investigating whether Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page discussed the possible lifting of US sanctions on Russia and other topics during private communications with top Russian officials, including a Putin aide and the current executive chairman of Rosneft, who is on the Treasury Department's US sanctions list. Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller claims that Page "has no role" in the Trump campaign and says that "we are not aware of any of his activities, past or present."
September 25: In a CNN interview, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway denies that Page is affiliated with the Trump campaign. "He's certainly not part of the campaign that I'm running," she said.
In response to a question about Page's possible connections to Russian officials, Conway says, "If he's doing that, he's certainly not doing it with the permission or knowledge of the campaign," She adds, "He is certainly not authorized to do that."
September 26: Page takes a leave from the campaign.
- During the first presidential debate, Clinton brings up the allegations that Russia orchestrated the DNC hack. Trump responds: "I don't think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?"
October 1: Roger Stone tweets:

[URL="https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr"]
Follow[/URL]
Roger Stone @RogerJStoneJr

Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.
9:52 PM - 1 Oct 2016

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October 3: Roger Stone tweets:

[URL="https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr"]
Follow[/URL]
Roger Stone @RogerJStoneJr

I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp
10:24 AM - 3 Oct 2016

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[size=12]






October 7: US intelligence agencies issue a joint release saying they are "confident" the Russian government interfered in the US election, in part by directing the leaking of hacked emails belonging to political institutions like the DNC. This is the first official government confirmation that Russia orchestrated the hacking and leaks during the election.
-Late on Friday afternoon, a leaked video of Trump boasting of groping and kissing women without their consent is published by the Washington Post. Half an hourlater, WikiLeaks begins to release several thousand hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
October 9: During the second presidential debate, Clinton accuses Trump of benefiting from Russian hacking and other interference in the election. Trump responds, "I don't know Putin. I think it would be great if we got along with Russia because we could fight ISIS together, as an example. But I don't know Putin."
Referring to Trump campaign staffers Russia's deputy foreign minister, said the day after the election: "A number of them maintained contacts with Russian representatives. There were contacts. We continue to do this and have been doing this work during the election campaign."
October 11: The Obama White House promises a "proportional" response following the US intelligence community's conclusion that Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC and other groups.
October 12: Sources briefed on the FBI examination of Russian hacking say the agency suspects that Russian intelligence agencies are behind the hacking of the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and a Florida election systems vendor.
- Roger Stone says he has "back-channel communications" with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, through a mutual friend.
October 19: During the final presidential debate, Trump casts doubt on the US intelligence community's conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the election. He also denies having ever met or spoken to Putin, despite his previous statements to the contrary. "I never met Putin," Trump says. " I have nothing to do with Putin. I've never spoken to him."
October 30: The plane belonging to Dmitri Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who purchased Trump's Florida mansion in 2008, is in Las Vegas the same day Trump holds a rally there.
- Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sends a letter to FBI Director James Comey calling on him to release what Reid calls "explosive" information about Trump's Russia ties. "In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government," Reid writes. "The public has a right to know this information."
October 31: Mother Jones reports that a veteran of a Western intelligence service has given the FBI memos saying that Russia had mounted a yearslong operation to co-opt or cultivate Trump and that the Kremlin had gathered compromising information on Trump during his visits to Moscow that could be used for blackmail. The story notes that the FBI has requested more information from this source.
Date unknown: Prior to Election Day, Flynn contacts Kislyak. It's unknown how often the pair communicated or what they talked about.
November 1: NBC News reports that the FBI is conducting a preliminary inquiry into Paul Manafort's business ties to Russia and Ukraine. Manafort tells NBC, "None of it is true." He denies having dealings with Putin or the Russian government and says any allegations to the contrary are "Democratic propaganda."
November 3: Dmitri Rybolovlev's plane lands in Charlotte, North Carolina, about 90 minutes before Trump's plane lands at the same airport in advance of a Trump rally to be held that day in nearby Concord.
November 9: Trump wins the presidential election.
November 10: Interfax news agency reports that the Russian government had contact with the Trump campaign during the campaign. Referring to Trump campaign staffers, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia's deputy foreign minister, says, "A number of them maintained contacts with Russian representatives" in the Russian Foreign Ministry. And he adds, "There were contacts. We continue to do this and have been doing this work during the election campaign."
- Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tells the Associated Press that Russian foreign policy experts have been in contact with the Trump campaign. "And our experts, our specialists on the U.S., on international affairs…Of course they are constantly speaking to their counterparts here, including those from Mr. Trump's group," Peskov said.
November 11: Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks tells the Associated Press that the allegations of contact between the Trump campaign and Russian officials are false. "It never happened," she says. "There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign."
November 16: The director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, implies that he believes Russia interfered in the US election. In response to a question about WikiLeaks hacks during the election, Rogers says, "This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect."
November 17: Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, sends a letter to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the committee's top Republican, calling for an investigation into Russia's interference in the election.
November 23: The Wall Street Journal reports that in October 2016, Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a meeting of a French think tank run by a couple, Fabien Baussart and Randa Kassis, who have "worked closely with Russia to try to end the conflict" in Syria. Kassis is the leader of a Syrian group endorsed by the Kremlin that seeks to cooperate with Moscow ally President Bashar al-Assad.
November 29: Seven members of the Senate intelligence committee write a letterto Obama asking him to declassify relevant intelligence on Russia's role in the election.
Early December: Two Russian intelligence officers who worked on cyber operations and a Russian computer security expert are arrested in Moscow and charged with treason for providing information to the United States. (There is no indication of whether the arrests are related to the Russian hacking of the 2016 campaign.)
December 8: Carter Page, no longer a foreign policy adviser to Trump, visits Moscow, where he tells a state-run news agency that he plans to meet with "business leaders and thought leaders."
December 9: The Washington Post reports that a secret CIA assessment concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win the presidency. In response, the Trump transition team issues a statement attempting to discredit the CIA's conclusion: "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago…It's now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again.'"
[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Calluna]December 11: In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Trump again casts doubt on the US intelligence community's findings on Russia's interference in the election. "They have no idea if it's Russia or China or somebody," Trump says of the CIA...

[Tracy Riddle]

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/27/who-...d-kushner/
Questions about the relationship between the Trump administration and Russia continue to swirl ahead of a closed-door session at the House Intelligence Committee. On Monday, newspapers reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee will interview Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's advisor and son-in-law, over meetings he took after the election with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and a prominent Russian banker, Sergei Gorkov.
Kushner met with Kislyak he was a member of the Trump transition team and still a private citizen. After that meeting, which took place in early December, Kislyak requested a second, to which Kushner sent a deputy, to whom Kislyak conveyed he wanted Kushner and Gorkov to meet. Kushner and Gorkov met at a later date.

Gorkov is the head of the Moscow-based Vnesheconombank, a government owned development bank that is sanctioned by the United States for Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. Vnesheconombank describes itself as funding "major investment projects" like Russian President Vladimir Putin's pet project, the 2014 Sochi Olympics and "provid[ing] support" for Russian enterprises.
It is also the bank at which Evgeny Buryakov worked under "non-official cover" as a banker while actually working for Russian intelligence (the U.S. attorney who announced he pled guilty back in March 2016 was Preet Bharara, whom the White House fired earlier this month).
Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, whose recently exposed alleged corruption was the impetus for massive protests across Russia on Sunday, sits on the bank's supervisory board.
Previously, Gorkov was the deputy chairman of the executive board of Sberbank, Russia's largest state bank, most recently in the news for hiring Trump's longtime lawyer to defend it in court. Gorkov graduated from Russia's Academy of the Federal Security Service that is, of the FSB in 1994, and is also a recipient of the Medal of the Order of Merit for Services to the Fatherland, second class.
White House spokesperson Hope Hicks told the New York Times that the meeting, which lasted 30 minutes, "really wasn't much of a conversation," but that Gorkov communicated his interest in maintaining an open dialogue.
"Mr. Kushner will certainly not be the last person the committee calls to give testimony, but we expect him to be able to provide answers to key questions that have arisen in our inquiry," Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chair of the same committee, said in a statement.
Indeed, Kushner is not the only current or former member of the Trump team to face an interview from Congress. Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, as well as former advisors Carter Page and Roger Stone, have all said they would testify before the House Intelligence Committee.
But that committee is itself in the crosshairs. The chair of the panel, Rep. Devin Nunes (R.-Calif.), said Monday that he went to the White House last week just before he held a controversial news conference to reveal that Trump associates had been caught up in incidental intelligence collection, fueling speculation that the White House may have fed him that information. Last Friday, Nunes cancelled an open hearing scheduled for Tuesday, replacing it with a closed hearing in which FBI chief James Comey and NSA director Mike Rogers will testify again.
House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D.-Calif.) has called for an independent investigation. Some other committee members are more forceful Rep. Donald Payne, Jr. (D.-N.J.) said on Thursday that Nunes, himself a former member of the Trump transition team, should step down.
"It's clear that Chairman Nunes, a member of the Trump transition, is still playing for the president's team at the expense of properly performing his job," he said.
On Monday evening, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) issued a statement saying he, too, felt Nunes should recuse himself. "After much consideration, and in light of the Chairman's admission that he met with his source of information at the White House, I believe that the Chairman should recuse himself from any further involvement in the Russia investigation, as well as any involvement in oversight of matters pertaining to any incidental collection of the Trump transition, as he was also a key member of the transition team," the statement read.
Nunes said he would not recuse himself, as "everything is politics here."
The White House also weighed in, in its way. At a briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer would not say with whom Nunes met with or from where he got his sources, and referred those who asked back to Nunes's public comments. Asked if Nunes's sources could have come from within the White House, Spicer said, "anything is possible."

[Dawn Meredith]

Seriously, David?? These attempts to link JFK and Trump are pathetic and fantastically absurd. Trump is a narcissistic, sociopathic, pathological liar, an ignoramus who doesn't read books and gets his information about the world from Fox News. JFK was one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, well-read men ever to occupy the Oval Office. The man had class and dignity, a real education, experience in combat, and a depth of character (aside from his weakness for women). JFK's interviews and speeches are still models of how a President should act. He did not like war, as Trump has said he does. He did not want to surround himself with generals and oilmen and Wall Street cronies as Trump does. He did not admire authoritarian rulers. He was not a bully and a thug.

Kennedy passed around copies of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August for everyone to read. Do you think Trump even fucking knows who Tuchman is?

Trump is interested in beauty queens and real estate, being famous, hanging around with professional wrestlers, boxers, rappers and other bottom-feeding celebrities. His education was limited to business school. He talks about himself constantly. He stayed out of Vietnam because of a bad foot which has never bothered him since. He is a piece of crap, and those who compare him favorably to John F. Kennedy have completely discredited themselves in my eyes.

No one is saying Trump is another JFK The sole points being made are that, like JKF, Trump seeks peace with Russian and like JFK Trump and the intel agencies are at odds. Period. End of story. The insane MSM and Democratic party in their hatred of Trump repeats the Russian hack lies non stop. I am NOT a Trump supporter. I do have a theory as to why this lie arose to begin with: to distract people from the real story (one of them) Pizzagate. MSM will not ever go there.

[Tracy Riddle]

Pizzagate, Dawn? Have you seen how even Alex Jones has backed away from that (probably after being threatened with a libel/slander suit)? Your timeline is also way off. The "Pizzagate" thing first popped into social media at the end of October 2016. The DNC hacking was in the news months before that. The first attempt was actually in September 2015

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/....bt2RVeDk7

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017...l-timeline
2015

September: FBI special agent Adrian Hawkins contacts the Democratic National Committee, saying that one of its computer systems has been compromised by a cyberespionage group linked to the Russian government. He speaks to a help desk technician who does a quick check of the DNC systems for evidence of a cyber intrusion. In the next several weeks, Hawkins calls the DNC back repeatedly, but his calls are not returned, in part because the tech support contractor who took Hawkins' call does not know whether he is a real agent. The FBI does not dispatch an agent to visit the DNC in person and does not make efforts to contact more senior DNC officials.

[Tracy Riddle]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/...3a16533ff6

Who is Source D'? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier's most salacious claim.

By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger March 29 at 6:32 PM

In June, a Belarusan American businessman who goes by the name Sergei Millian shared some tantalizing claims about Donald Trump.
Trump had a long-standing relationship with Russian officials, Millian told an associate, and those officials were now feeding Trump damaging information about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Millian said that the information provided to Trump had been "very helpful."
Unbeknownst to Millian, however, his conversation was not confidential. His associate passed on what he had heard to a former British intelligence officer who had been hired by Trump's political opponents to gather information about the Republican's ties to Russia.
The allegations by Millian whose role was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and has been confirmed by The Washington Post were central to the dossier compiled by the former spy, Christopher Steele. While the dossier has not been verified and its claims have been denied by Trump, Steele's document said that Millian's assertions had been corroborated by other sources, including in the Russian government and former intelligence sources.
The most explosive allegation that the dossier says originally came from Millian is the claim that Trump had hired prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton and that the Kremlin has kept evidence of the encounter.
By his own evolving statements, Sergei Millian is either a shrewd businessman with high-level access to both Trump's inner circle and the Kremlin, or a bystander unwittingly caught up in a global controversy.
An examination of Millian's career shows he is a little of both. His case lays bare the challenge facing the FBI as it investigates Russia's alleged attempts to manipulate the American political system and whether Trump associates participated.
It also illustrates why the Trump administration remains unable to shake the Russia story. While some of the unproven claims attributed in the dossier to Millian are bizarre and outlandish, there are also indications that he had contacts with Trump's circle.
Millian told several people that during the campaign and presidential transition he was in touch with George Papadopoulos, a campaign foreign policy adviser, according to a person familiar with the matter. Millian is among Papadopoulos's nearly 240 Facebook friends.
Trump aides vehemently reject Millian's claims to have had close contact with Trump or high-level access to the president's company.
Millian did not answer a list of detailed questions about his interactions with Trump and his role in the Steele dossier, instead responding by email with lengthy general defenses of Trump's election as "God's will" and complaining that inquiries about his role are evidence of a "witch hunt" and "McCarthyism."
"Any falsifications, deceit and baseless allegations directed against any US President is damaging to the national security interests of the United States," he wrote in one email. "Publishing slanderous stories about the President's decency and offensive material about the first family is malicious propaganda and a threat to the national security in order to destabilize the integrity of the United States of America and stir civil disorder aiming at reducing its political influence in the world."
In late January, Millian appeared on Russian television, where he denied knowing information that could be damaging to Trump. "I want to say that I don't have any compromising information, neither in Russia nor in the United States, nor could I have," he said, speaking in Russian. "Without a doubt it is a blatant lie and an effort of some people it's definitely a group of people to portray our president in a bad light using my name."
The dossier, decried by Trump as "phony stuff" and "fake news" and derided by Russian President Vladi*mir Putin as "rubbish," consists of a series of reports compiled by Steele over the course of several months before the election.
Millian, identified in different portions of the dossier as "Source D" and "Source E," is described as a "close associate of Trump."
In addition to the salacious allegations that gained widespread attention, the dossier attributed other claims to Millian. For instance, Steele wrote that Millian asserted that there was a "well developed conspiracy of cooperation between [Trump] and Russian leadership," claiming the relationship was managed for Trump by former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. A Manafort spokesman said "every word in the dossier about Paul Manafort is a lie."
Some of those who know Millian described him as more of a big-talking schmoozer than a globe-trotting interlocutor. They say he's a self-promoter with a knack for getting himself on television like the time he appeared on a 2013 episode of the Bravo reality show "Million Dollar Listing," where he attempted to broker a sale with a Russian-speaking client who agreed to pay $7 million in cash for a luxury New York unit.
"He's an opportunist. If he sees an opportunity, he would go after it," said Tatiana Osipova, who was a neighbor of Millian's when he lived in Atlanta and who in 2006 helped him found a trade group, the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA. Osipova now lives in St. Petersburg but has remained in touch with Millian. "He's a fun guy, a smart guy. But always talking. He talks so much s---."
Millian's original name was Siarhei Kukuts, but those who know him say he changed it because he wanted something that sounded more elegant. He told ABC News in July that he changed his name to honor his grandmother, whose last name he said was Millianovich. He has also at times gone by the name Sergio Millian.
"My general impression of him was that he just wanted to be important. Nobody really knew what he or the chamber were doing, but he presented himself with grandeur," said Nadia Diskavets, a New York photographer who was also a founding member of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce but has not been in touch with Millian recently. "So I always took everything he said with a grain of salt."
Another acquaintance referred to him in a similar way, saying he exaggerated his connections with Trump and with the Russians. "He's too small of a fish to deal with Russian people," she said. "They will smell his smallness from miles away."
Born in Belarus, Millian, 38, attended a university in Minsk. A Russian-language version of his biography that was posted on the Russian American Chamber of Commerce's website says he studied to be a military translator.
He arrived in the early 2000s as a young, single professional in Atlanta, which has a large *Russian-speaking community. Friends there said he worked in real estate, and, according to one résumé posted online, he opened a translating business whose clients included the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Friends said that Millian founded the Russian American Chamber of Commerce as a way to forge business ties between the United States and Russia and as a personal networking opportunity.
Millian's affiliation with the group also appears to have boosted his profile in Russia. He hosted events in the United States and abroad on the chamber's behalf and, after moving to New York, began being interviewed repeatedly by Russian-language news outlets as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations. He traveled to Moscow in 2011 courtesy of a Russian government cultural group later investigated by the FBI for allegedly recruiting spies, though there is no evidence that the inquiry involved Millian.
Millian's account of his relationship with Trump has shifted over time. As the Republican candidate was rising in the spring of 2016, a time before there was close scrutiny of Trump's ties to Russia, Millian used his media appearances to describe deep connections with the New York real estate mogul.
He told the Russian state-operated news agency RIA Novosti last April, for instance, that he met Trump at a Miami horse-racing track after "mutual associates" had organized a trip for Trump to Moscow in 2007.
From there, Millian said, he entered into a business arrangement in which he says he helped market a Trump-branded condominium complex in Hollywood, Fla., to international investors, including Russians.
Millian's description of the Miami event appears to match up with a picture he posted on Facebook that appears to show him posing with Trump and the project's developer, Jorge Pérez the only evidence that Millian ever met Trump.
A spokesman for Pérez said his company has no record of paying Millian in connection with the project, and Pérez declined to comment further.
A White House spokeswoman said, "Sergei Millian is one of hundreds of thousands of people the president has had his picture made with, but they do not know one another."
Millian, however, promoted ties he claimed to hold with Trump's company.
A 2009 newsletter posted to the website of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce reported that the group had "signed formal agreements" with the Trump Organization and Pérez's company "to jointly service the Russian clients' commercial, residential and industrial real estate needs."
In the interview with RIA Novosti, Millian boasted that when he was in New York, Trump introduced him to his "right-hand man," Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump adviser a claim that Cohen has denied.
"He is the chief attorney of Trump, through whom all contracts have to go," Millian told the Russian news outlet, adding, "I was involved in the signing of a contract" to promote Trump's real estate projects in Russia.
"You can say that I was their exclusive broker," Millian continued in Russian. "Back then, in 2007-2008, Russians by the dozens were buying apartments in Trump's buildings in the U.S.A."
Asked in the April interview how often he spoke to Trump or his associates, Millian responded: "The last time was several days ago."
Millian told people last year that he was in touch with Papadopoulos, whom Trump had described in a March 2016 Washington Post editorial board interview as a member of his foreign policy team and an "excellent guy."
Papadopoulos received attention during the campaign largely because of reports that he had exaggerated his résumé and cited among his accomplishments that he had participated in a Model United Nations program for college and graduate students.
But, according to foreign news reports and officials, he conducted a number of high-level meetings last year and presented himself as a representative of the Trump campaign. He told a group of researchers in Israel that Trump saw Putin as "a responsible actor and potential partner," according to a column in the Jerusalem Post, while later he met with a British Foreign Office representative in London, an embassy spokesman said. He also criticized U.S. sanctions on Russia in an interview with the Russian news outlet Interfax.
Papadopoulos did not respond to questions about contacts with Millian. But Papadopoulos said by email that his public comments during the campaign reflected his own opinions and that some of his energy policy views run counter to Russian interests. "No one from the campaign ever directed me to discuss talking points,' " he said. In a separate email, he accused The Post of relying on "innuendo" and "unsubstantiated claims by irrelevant sources."
Neither Millian nor a White House spokeswoman responded to questions about Papadopoulos. The person familiar with the contacts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not provide details.
Over the summer, as Trump prepared to accept the Republican presidential nomination, Millian traveled to Russia. He posted pictures on his Facebook page showing that he attended a *Russian government-sponsored summit in St. Petersburg in June. One photograph shows him with Russia's minister for energy. Another shows him chatting with Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Putin. A spokeswoman for Deripaska declined to comment. A spokesman for the Russian Embassy did not respond to questions about Millian.
Later in the summer, Millian continued boasting of his Trump connections.
He told ABC News that he had been the "official broker" for the Trump-branded condo building and described Trump's affinity for working with Russians. He pointed to "hundreds of millions of dollars that [Trump] received from interactions with Russian businessmen."
Millian added that Trump "likes Russia because he likes beautiful Russian ladies talking to them, of course. And he likes to be able to make lots of money with Russians."
Millian told ABC that he was "absolutely not" involved with Russian intelligence. But when asked whether he had heard rumors to that effect, Millian replied, "Yes, of course."
Millian also said that, at times, he talked about U.S. politics with top Russian officials. "Usually if I meet top people in the Russian government, they invite me, say, to the Kremlin for the reception, of course I have a chance to talk to some presidential advisers and some top people," Millian said.
While Cohen has said he has never met Millian, the two did interact last year over Twitter. Millian was, for a time, one of about 100 people that Cohen followed and they tweeted at each other on one occasion in August after Cohen appeared on television.
[URL="https://twitter.com/SergeiMillian/status/766466820089925632"]
18 Aug[/URL]
Sergei Millian @SergeiMillian
Trump's lawyer asks 'says who' when told Trump is losing https://lnkd.in/ejK9Weh
Follow
[URL="https://twitter.com/MichaelCohen212"]
Michael Cohen [/URL]
@MichaelCohen212
.@SergeiMillian have you seen the polls that were announced formally today?
8:09 PM - 18 Aug 2016 · Manhattan, NY

Cohen later unfollowed Millian, telling The Post that he had mistakenly thought Millian was related to a Trump Organization employee with a similar last name.
"He is a total phony," Cohen said in an interview. "Anything coming out of this individual's mouth is inaccurate and purely part of some deranged interest in having his name in the newspaper."
Cohen said he did not believe Trump was in Russia in 2007, as Millian claimed in April.
Cohen said it was possible that, like other brokers in Florida, Millian might have attempted to sell units at Trump Hollywood. But, he said, Millian never held an exclusive deal at the project or any contract with the Trump Organization.
Speaking with The Post over the phone from his New York office in a January interview, Cohen also read aloud from a lengthy email he said Millian had sent him shortly before the election that contradicted his earlier public statements.
"I met Mr. Trump once, long time ago, in 2008, pretty much for a photo opportunity and a brief talk as part of my marketing work for Trump Hollywood, after my brokering service was signed. Now, to say that I have substantial ties is total nonsense," Cohen said, reading from an email he said Millian wrote after media coverage that mentioned him.
In the email, Millian suggested holding a news conference to clear up the matter, Cohen said. Cohen said he rejected the idea, accusing Millian via email of "seeking media attention off of this false narrative of a Trump-Russia alliance" despite having met Trump only one time, "for a 10 second photo op."
Cohen, who left his job at the Trump Organization in January to become Trump's personal attorney, said this month that he could not release a copy of Millian's email because he no longer has access to the company's email system.
In South Florida, where Millian claimed to have had a contract to sell units at Trump Hollywood, there is little evidence that he played a major role.
Daniel Lebensohn, whose company BH3 took over for the Related Group in 2010 after Pérez's company struggled to complete the project, said his company's records show no sign that Millian sold any units in the building.
Two Florida-based real estate brokers who specialize in the Russian market and have sold units in Trump Hollywood were equally mystified.
"I've never heard of him," said Olga Mirer, who has traveled back and forth to Russia over the past decade brokering deals at Trump Hollywood and other Florida buildings.

Despite the Trump team's efforts to distance the president from Millian, the dossier source nevertheless attended Trump's inauguration in January.
He posted photos of himself on Facebook attending VIP events for supporters, including one in which he posed in front of the podium at a reception for Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus at Trump's Washington hotel. A White House official did not address a question about Millian's attendance.

[Tracy Riddle]

So, as I was attempting to explain earlier, I think we're watching Russia's Deep State at war with America's Deep State, with a hapless reality TV star in the middle. Trump foolishly got involved with dirty Russian money many years ago, laundering it through his real estate operations.

"…a series of very deep studies published in the [Financial Times] that examined the structure and history of several major Trump real estate projects from the last decadethe period after his seventh bankruptcy and the cancellation of all his bank lines of credit. ...The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources. He was their man."
https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/d...ime-bosses

"And then there is Felix Sater, a key to Trump's alleged Russian money train. A criminal with connections to Russian and American organised crime, a man who has already been a federal informant in the past is now once again helping the authorities. Sater is believed to be providing information about a money laundering operation based in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan which involved Trump properties."
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/paul...29636.html

"Records show that more than 1,300 Trump condominiums were bought not by people but by shell companies, and that the purchases were made without a mortgage, avoiding inquiries from lenders. Those two characteristics signal that a buyer may be laundering money, the Treasury Department has said in a series of statements since 2016….Hundreds of the secretive Trump condo sales contain additional characteristics that FinCEN and experts warn may be indicative of money laundering."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/thomasfrank/sec....aoPp76dWa

Some sectors of the conservative movement and GOP have climbed into bed with Putin's style of gangster capitalism.
[FONT=&amp]
"The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy. FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia's central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said."
[/FONT][FONT=&amp]http://amp.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article195231139.html?__twitter_impression=true[/FONT]


"Perhaps it's a coincidence that so much of the information in question was republished on a website called HelloFLA by a Florida Republican and former congressional staffer named Aaron Nevins, who was connected to Trump associate and longtime political operative Roger Stone. It could be completely random that among the core group of Mueller antagonists, those calling the probe a "coup d'état" and demanding purges of members of the "deep state" are Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who proposed that Mueller's funding be cut off, and the aforementioned Rep. Francis Rooney, who's been all over TV talking about purging the FBI. Indeed, as journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out a while back, one of the ringleaders of the movement to discredit the Department of Justice and Robert Mueller, Rep. DeSantis, directly benefited from Guccifer 2.0's leak to Nevins after the latter published five documents regarding the DCCC's recruitment of DeSantis' Democratic opponent, George Pappas. According to The Wall Street Journal, Guccifer 2.0 even sent a link with a HelloFLA article directly to Roger Stone, who told reporters he didn't forward the hacked material to anyone -- the answer to a question nobody asked. If Mueller's team is looking into the digital operation and Roger Stone's interactions with Guccifer 2.0, as one would expect them to do, then these shenanigans in Florida are also coming into view. That may explain why this little circle of Sunshine State GOP congressmen are so anxious to shut him down."
https://www.salon.com/2017/12/28/why-are...b-mueller/

"Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank."
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comme...-campaigns

"There's two people I think Putin pays: [California Congressman Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump." House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, June 2016 in meeting with fellow GOP lawmakers.
[FONT=&amp]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-report/house-leader-mccarthy-suggested-trump-on-putin-payroll-washington-post-idUSKCN18D2YO[/FONT]