Trump dossier

[Drew Phipps]

Here is a Washington Post article researching Trump's ties to and financial interest in Russia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/...?tid=a_inl

(It's rather wordy, so I'm not going to reprint it here.) Summary: Trumps's been attempting to build high end real estate in Moscow since 1996 (co-incidentally that's when Putin rose to power). Trump Campaign chairman Paul Manafort has done multimillion-dollar business deals with pro-Russian oligarchs and was a longtime adviser to the Russia-aligned Ukrainian president whose 2014 ouster triggered Russia's intervention in Ukraine. An adviser who helped run Trump's efforts in the New York primary, Michael Caputo, lived in Russia in the 1990s, and also had a contract for several months in 2000 with the Russian conglomerate Gazprom Media to improve Putin's image in the United States. Carter Page, also a Trump foreign policy adviser, once ran the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch, including advising the Russian energy giant Gazprom, according to his biography posted on his employer's website.


Now, what I heard this morning (on NPR radio) is not in the above article, and so I have no MSM confirmation, but it was said this morning that none of the major New York banks wanted to loan Trump money when he took over his father's company (1974), so he had to borrow money from Russians. By 1990, Trump was somewhere between 5 billion and 8 billion in debt, and got bailed out by a conglomeration of 70 (?) banks, a list of which might prove instructive, (and so might a list of his creditors at that time) but I don't have it.


Casinos have also traditionally been a center for money laundering operations by organized crime, so there is also that. Between 1991 and 2003, organized crime garnered control over the choicest 10% of the Russian economy. Money laundering is always the backbone of organized crime.


Here's an article on the rise of post-Soviet organized crime in Russia:

http://www.focusfeatures.com/article/bus...n_promises