Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Speaker refuses vote on Boris Johnson's Brexit deal" video.
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On Aug. 19, 2016, Arron Banks had just scored a huge win. From relative obscurity, he had become the largest political donor in British history by pouring millions into Brexit. Now he had something else that bolstered his standing as he sat down with his new Russian friend, Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko: his team’s deepening ties to Trump’s insurgent presidential bid in the US. A major Brexit supporter, Steve Bannon, had just been installed as chief executive of Trump’s campaign. And Banks and his fellow Brexiteers had been invited to attend a fundraiser with Trump in Mississippi.
Less than a week after the meeting with the Russian envoy, Banks and firebrand Brexit politician Nigel Farage — by then a cult hero among some anti-establishment Trump supporters — were huddling privately with the Republican nominee in Jackson, Miss., where Farage wowed a foot-stomping crowd at a Trump rally.
Banks’s journey from a lavish meal with a Russian diplomat in London to the raucous heart of Trump country was part of an unusual intercontinental charm offensive by the wealthy British donor and his associates, who dubbed themselves the “Bad Boys of Brexit.” Their efforts to simultaneously cultivate ties to Russian officials and Trump’s campaign captured the interest of investigators in the UK and the US.
Both inquiries center on questions of Russia’s involvement in seismic political events that have shaken the world order, with the European Union losing a key member and U.S. voters electing a president critical of Washington’s traditional alliances. In Britain, revelations about Banks’s Russian contacts triggered scrutiny of whether the Russians sought to bolster the Brexit effort.
In the fall of 2015, during UKIP’s annual convention at the Doncaster racecourse several hours north of London, Wigmore, a Farage confidant, met a Russian diplomat named Alexander Udod, who then helped arrange a lunch for the UKIP leaders with the Russian ambassador, Yakovenko. (Udod was one of 23 suspected Russian intelligence officers ejected from Britain after the nerve agent attack against Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent, and his adult daughter, in Salisbury in south England.)
Banks and Wigmore said they were interested not only in briefing the Russians on Brexit, but also in seeking possible Russian backers for their various offshore investments, including banana plantations in Belize..
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