A curious facet of the upcoming US elections is that quite a few voters need to re-register before they can take part. Simple enough if you're a householder with a passport or similar i.d.
Less so for a student, whose student i.d. would be insufficient and might need to find something like a gun-owner licence to be able to register. Last time the mid-term turn-out was around 37%. Perhaps this time a Russian presence in some key areas might tip the numbers upwards a little?
I've been working out the Russian leverage. It has to be money. Sleaze won't cut it for the so-called President. Power might, but Putin doesn't play that game.
It'll be about the US sanctions against Russia and the leverage will be the loans and business model offered to Trump's companies. The 2016 Trump Tower 'adoption' talks were really about sanctions removal, as well as possible dirt-dishing.
Drawing a diagram doesn't really work. It's too complicated. That's the accidental brilliance of cutting everything into 140 character bursts.
Instead, let's look at a few events.
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told a real estate conference: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia. There’s indeed a lot of money coming for new-builds and resale reflecting a trend in the Russian economy and, of course, the weak dollar versus the ruble.”
Where that money comes from exactly could be a moot point. How it gets cleansed as part of the process could be another interesting discussion.
A quick example of funding comes from a Putin controlled bank which helped out Toronto Tower. The Russian-Canadian developer of the project sold a Ukrainian steel mill and received $850 million. A Ukrainian industrial group bought the mill through five offshore companies, funded with money from Russia’s state-owned Putin-chaired bank (VEB). The developer thereafter put $15 million into Trump Toronto.
Then there's the May 2017 story of a reporter Dodson asking Donald Trump, "'What are you using to pay for these (golf) courses?' And he just sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million... So when I got in the cart with Eric, as we were setting off, I said, 'Eric, who's funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, ... have touched a golf course?~' Eric said, 'Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.' I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they're really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.' Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting."
But oh, then Eric denies it all two days later.
However, Trump in Moscow: “The Russian market is attracted to me,” he tells Real Estate Weekly, describing his Moscow meetings. “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”
As for the organisation of it all. A quick example is the link to the Bayrock Group. Founded in 2001 by Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet official from Kazakhstan. Arif hired Russian businessman Felix Sater as MD then COO of Bayrock. As COO, Sater assisted with several projects, including the Trump SoHo project. But Sater left Bayrock in 2008 after a New York Times article revealed that in 1998, Sater had pled guilty to stock racketeering and fraud as part of a US and Russian mafia-connected $40 million stock pump and dump scheme.
Answering deposition questions in a case involving a Fort Lauderdale project, Trump says he had only "limited involvement" with Bayrock Group, which was a Trump tenant. Trump testifies that he spoke with Felix Sater “for a period of time” when he was an executive with Bayrock.
Now here's the thing. Allegedly, after leaving Bayrock, Felix Sater becomes "senior adviser to Donald Trump," according to his Trump Organization business card. He also had a Trump Organization email address and office. The phone number listed on the card had belonged previously to a lawyer in Trump’s general counsel’s office.
But then after a BBC reporter questions Trump about Felix Sater’s alleged prior connections to organized crime, Trump ended the interview.
Fast forward to this year. The White House were forced to correct the Putin/Trump Helsinki meeting transcript. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported that the White House had deliberately omitted key language from the official transcript of Vladimir Putin’s answer to a question from Reuters reporter Jeff Mason. Eventually the White House revises the transcript to include the missing question and answer:
“Q: President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election? And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
“PRESIDENT PUTIN: (As interpreted.) Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the US-Russia relationship back to normal.”
Vladimir Putin also told Russian diplomats that he proposed a “Peace Plan” to Trump in Helsinki. According to Bloomberg, Putin’s proposal calls “for a vote conducted under international auspices by the residents of the separatist territories on their status,” including eastern Ukraine. Some eighteen months earlier – in January 2017 – Michael Cohen had met with Felix Sater and Andrey Artemenko to provide a proposed ‘Peace Plan’ that Cohen said he would deliver to then national security adviser Michael Flynn. The Sater-Artemenko plan reportedly provided that Ukrainian voters would decide in a referendum whether Crimea would be leased to Russia for a term of 50 or 100 years and, eventually, to lift US sanctions against Russia.
Okay, a slightly simpler diagram:
Still, a lot of information. Let's net it down.
- Trump's organisation brags that it gets lots of money from Russia.
- It's hard to tell where it all came from or how clean it is.
- Much seems to flow from the demise of the Soviet Union, when the Russian 'wild east' opened shop.
- There's an intertwining of tarnished advisors in the mix too. Felix Sater and Paul Manafort have some challenged back-stories.
- An as yet unexercised 'Peace Plan' is hatched to give new Russia and Putin tactical gains as well as better access to the global economy.
- As for the leverage: "Do our bidding or we'll call in all the loaned money and fire off some of the kompromat."
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