Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Barr offers no specifics after saying spying against Trump occurred" video.
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Trump and his people were warned by Obama, Sally Yates, and the FBI, that Russia was actively trying to infiltrate Trump's inner circle. And what does Trump do? He fired Comey, and Sally Yates, the very people who had warned him about what the Russians were up to. Even after Trump had been warned, his people were still holding secret meetings with the Russians, and they all lied about it......every single person lied about their meetings with the Russians. And then on the day after Trump fired Comey, the guy who was in charge of the FBI, the agency charged with catching Russian spies, Trump invites the Russian foreign minister, and Russia's Ambassador to the Oval Office, and brags about firing the head of the FBI. Let all of that sink in for a minute.
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Wyoming Horseman
One of the key questions that congressional investigators have for Kushner is why he ignored the intelligence community’s warnings about Russia. “Once it became public that they were interfering in our election, which was in June, why did you continue to have contacts with them?”
Former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said the plan by Jared Kushner, who discussed plans with the Russan Ambassador, to establish a secret communication channel with the Kremlin — using Russian facilities — without any monitoring by the U.S. was “off the map” and like nothing he has seen in his lifetime. “What manner of ignorance, chaos, hubris, suspicion, contempt would you have to have to think that doing this with the Russian ambassador was a good or an appropriate idea?” Hayden stated.
What Kushner tried to do is exactly what American traitors have done in the past when they've decided to start working for the Russian government. It's basically what Aldrich Ames did in 1985, when he walked into the Soviet Union Embassy in DC, and turned over highly classified information to the Russians.
In fact, Kushner never raised Russia’s meddling during his two post-election meetings with Russians, according to his own accounts. Kislyak contacted Kushner on November 16th, and they met on December 1st. Once again, the Russians seemed to have a level of access to the Trump campaign that other countries, including Western allies, could only dream of. In his testimony, Kushner confirmed that at this meeting, which took place in Trump Tower, he and Kislyak and Michael Flynn, the incoming national-security adviser, who also attended, discussed using communications equipment at the Russian Embassy.
Former CIA Director Gen.Hayden explained that the Russians would have learned several things from the approach. “Would they take the meeting?” he said. “So, then you get the willingness. No. 2, would they report the meeting?” Hayden suggested that Russian intelligence was sophisticated enough to know whether the Trump campaign reported the meeting to the F.B.I., which it didn’t. So, while Kushner claimed that the meeting was irrelevant, from a Russian intelligence perspective it would have been seen as a clear signal. “At the end, they have established that these guys are willing,” Hayden said, pausing. “How do I put this? They did not reject a relationship.”
The Kushner-Kislyak relationship continued. On December 13th, at Kislyak’s urging, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, a Russian banker who is close to Putin. Again, what jumps out from Kushner’s account of the meeting is the easy access that the Russians had—“I agreed to meet Mr. Gorkov because the Ambassador has been so insistent,” and “said he had a direct relationship with” Putin, Kushner noted—and the obvious attempts to soften up Trump’s closest aides and family members. Gorkov, whose bank, Vnesheconombank, was affected by the Obama Administration’s sanctions against Russia..
The reason why Trump never went through with the Moscow hotel was because Obama placed economic sanctions on the Russian bank that Trump needed to finance the hotel. Once that happened, the deal was officially dead. The sanctions were placed on the bank after the Russian hacking was discovered. Trump never had enough money to finance the building of such a massive hotel. The sanctions Obama placed on the Russian bank prevented any Americans from doing business with it. True story. Trump conveniently left all of that out. The Russian VTB bank is partially owned by the Kremlin, and remains under US sanctions.
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Wyoming Horseman
So why should we believe anything that Trump says, when he can't even tell the truth as to whether or not he ever met Putin before the election.?
Trump's 2015 interview with host Michael Savage, Trump was asked again point-blank whether he'd ever met Putin.
"Yes," Trump said. "One time, yes. Long time ago."
"Got along with him great, by the way," Trump added.
"I got to know so many of the Russian leaders and the top, top people in Russia," he said.
At a July, 2016 press conference, at the height of the general election campaign, Trump denied ever having met the Russian leader.
"I never met Putin, I don't know who Putin is," he told reporters in Florida. "He said one nice thing about me. He said I'm a genius. I said, 'Thank you very much' to the newspaper, and that was the end of it. I never met Putin. Never spoken to him. I don't know anything about him other than he will respect me."
David Letterman asked Trump in 2013 interview if had ever met Putin.
Trump: "Well I've done a lot of business with the Russians," Trump said. "He's a tough guy. I met him once," said Trump.
Feb. 17, 2016: At rally, Trump insists he has no relationship with Putin. “I have no relationship with him other than he called me a genius,” Trump says. “He said, ‘Donald Trump is a genius, and he is going to be the leader of the party, and he’s going to be the leader of the world or something.’”
Trump's July 2016 interview with George Stephanopoulos
STEPHANOPOULOS: "Yet you said for three years, '13, '14 and '15, that you did have a relationship with Putin."
TRUMP: "No, look, what — what do you call a relationship? I mean he treats me..."
STEPHANOPOULOS: "I'm asking you."
TRUMP: "with great respect. I have no relationship with Putin. I don't think I've ever met him. I never met him. I don't think I've ever met him."
STEPHANOPOULOS: "You would know if you did."
TRUMP: "I think so."
STEPHANOPOULOS: "I mean if he..."
TRUMP: "Yes, I think so. So I've — I don't think I've ever met him. I mean if he's in the same room or something. But I don't think so."
Trump tells lies that only a 5 year old would tell.
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Wyoming Horseman
For two years, ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of Trump Tower. In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called “the world’s largest sports book,” was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States.
The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment and arrest of at least 29 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “Little Taiwanese,” he was the only target to slip away. Tokhtakhounov, who had been indicted a decade earlier for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only suspect to elude arrest during the FBI raid on Trump Tower. Today, he remains a fugitive from American justice.
Tokhtakhounov's whereabouts remained unknown for the next seven months after the raid on Trump Tower. The Russian crime boss fell off the radar of Interpol, which had issued a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he suddenly appeared live on international television—sitting in the audience at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, just a few seats away from the pageant owner, Donald Trump...
“He is a major player,” said Mike Gaeta, the agent who led the 2013 FBI investigation of Tokhtakhounov and his alleged mafia money-laundering and gambling ring, in a 2014 interview with ABC News..
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Wyoming Horseman
In a 2016 BBC interview, Trump lied when he had no business dealings with Felix Sater, a felon with ties to the Russian mob, and the Trump Soho real estate debacle. When the interviewer pressed Trump about his connections to Sater, Trump became frustrated and walked out of the interview by making a lame excuse about having a bunch of people waiting for him downstairs.😂 He looked like a caged rat.
The video is on YouTube. It's titled: Donald Trump's Business Links to the Mob-BBC News Night.
According to Felix Sater, who built the Trump Soho condominium tower in Lower Manhattan and partnered with Trump on several other projects, Trump didn’t lose sleep over where the money to build his branded properties came from.
“I would show him a deal and he’d say ‘let’s go,’” recalled Sater, who once occupied an office down the hall from the future president in Trump Tower. “The due diligence part was kind of light.”
At a panel hosted by The New Yorker magazine where he shared the stage with journalists Adam Davidson, Ruth Marcus and David Barstow, Sater shared some insights into the president’s relationship with Russia.
Sater acknowledged that Trump has an affinity for Russian investors, but according to him the reason is mundane. “Donald Trump loved Russian buyers for one very simple reason: their checks cleared, and quickly,” Sater said.
Asked if money was laundered through Trump properties, Sater replied “yes and no,” pointing to his Trump Soho co-developer Tamir Sapir as an example. “He made his money, when the Soviet Union collapsed, in the oil business. Rightly, wrongly, stole it, deserved it, didn’t deserve it… he took all that money and invested it in New York real estate,” Sater said of the late Sapir.
Sater’s Bayrock Group built Trump Soho in partnership with the Sapir Organization and leased the Trump name for the property. Trump hired him as a “senior adviser” in 2010 and gave him a Trump Organization business card. That year, the three companies were sued for allegedly lying about sales at trump SoHo. Sater tried to broker a Trump-branded real estate development in Moscow in 2015, while he was running for president.
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Wyoming Horseman
A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.
Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part.
Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. Trump was 4 billion dollars in debt, and American banks had stopped loaning him money after multiple bankruptcies. Trump was financially ruined until the Russians bailed him out. "They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s....
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Wyoming Horseman
Trump's interest in doing business in Russia was first piqued in 1986, when he met the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin and they began discussing building a "large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government," as Trump recounted in his 1987 book, "The Art of the Deal."
Trump traveled to Russia in 1987 to survey potential locations for his hotel as landmark policies like perestroika and glasnost made the Soviet Union more open to foreign investments. Trump went back to Russia in 1996 and announced a plan to invest $250 million in Russian real estate and slap his name on two luxury residential buildings.Trump boasted about his plan when he met the Russian politician Aleksandr Lebed in New York in 1997, telling Lebed, "We are actually looking at something in Moscow right now ... Only quality stuff. And we're working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow, and the mayor's people. So far, they've been very responsive
Trump began seeing significant returns from Russian investments in US properties bearing the Trump name in the 2000s. A Reuters investigation last in 2017 found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, for instance.Reuters noted that its tally of Russian investors may be conservative. At least 703 — or about one-third — of the owners of the 2,044 units in the seven Trump buildings are limited liability companies, or LLCs, which have the ability to hide the identity of a property's true owner.
In the mid-2000s, the Trump Organization partnered with a company called the Bayrock Group, contracting it to pursue a development deal in Moscow. This effort was led by the Russian-born businessman Felix Sater, a man Trump lied about even knowing, and who's become a key figure in Mueller's investigation and Cohen's plea deal. At a 2008 conference, Trump Jr. also said, "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." In the 18 months prior to the conference, Trump Jr. made six trips to Russia.
In 2013, Trump traveled to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. During the visit, he said, "I have plans for the establishment of business in Russia. Now, I am in talks with several Russian companies to establish this skyscraper."In 2015 and 2016, Cohen and Sater teamed up in an attempt to put up a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen said discussions on the plan lasted until June 2016, which was after Trump had clinched the GOP nomination for president.Cohen was in touch with the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary over the matter, which reportedly included a plan to offer Putin a $50 million penthouse in the tower.
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Wyoming Horseman
Congress is furious over Trump’s secret efforts to secure a nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia. Congress was rightfully furious when they discovered that the Saudis refused to accept limits preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon.
It was revealed that Trump gave approval for companies to share certain nuclear energy technology with the kingdom without a broader nuclear deal in place.
House Democrats began investigating the administration’s nuclear talks with Saudi after the Oversight and Reform Committee announced in February it was launching a probe to “determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump administration are in the national security interests of the United States or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U.S. foreign policy.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry approved seven authorizations that let U.S. companies share certain nuclear energy technology with Saudi Arabia.
lawmakers were outraged when they found out they were not told about the approvals, saying the secrecy violates the Atomic Energy Act, which requires that Congress be kept “fully and currently informed” of 123 agreement negotiations.
"Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally on Aug. 21, 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
Trump, Kushner, and Ivanka have been running their own criminal organization out of the white house. The Saudis have invested a lot of money into Trump's criminal organization, and they expect a return on their investment..... protection being one of the things the Saudis expect in return.
In 1991, as Trump was teetering on bankruptcy yet AGAIN, and scrambling to raise cash, he sold his 282-foot Trump yacht “Princess” to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal for $20 million.
Four years later, the prince came to his rescue again, joining other investors in a $325 million deal for Trump’s money-losing Plaza Hotel....Which eventually went under anyway.
In 2001, Trump sold the entire 45th floor of the Trump World Tower across from the UN for $12 million, the biggest purchase in that building to that point, according to the brokerage site Streeteasy. The buyer: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Since Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and lobbying groups for it have been lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels.
A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging at his Washington hotel through March of last year, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Attorneys general for Maryland and the District of Columbia cited the payments by the Saudi lobbying firm as an example of foreign gifts to Trump that could violate the Constitution’s ban on such “emoluments” from foreign interests.
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