Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Susan Rice calls out Trump's approach to intel: Crazy" video.

  1. Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out. They took him from being $4 billion in debt to becoming a multibillionaire again, and they fueled his political ambitions, starting more than 30 years ago. This means Trump was in bed with the Kremlin as well, whether he knew it or not.. On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement. “Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate you on this.” Nikonov is a leader in the pro-Putin United Russia Party and, incidentally, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov — after whom the “Molotov cocktail” was named. His announcement that day was a clear signal that Trump’s victory was, in fact, a victory for Putin’s Russia. Trump's inauguration was celebrated jubilantly in Moscow, where Putin supporter Konstantin Rykov hosted an all-night party. Champagne flowed as an interpreter narrated the new U.S. president's speech. In Washington, the Russian Embassy tweeted, "Happy #InaugurationDay2017!" with a photo of people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The optimism was part of a larger embrace by Russia of Trump's "America First" outlook, which emphasizes U.S. business interests and national security over promoting freedom and democracy,  said Ilya Zaslavskiy, a researcher who has worked with the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Initiative. Amid a busy schedule in Washington, Boris Titov — who was appointed by Putin to serve as a business ombudsman — told a Russian television station that new investment was likely to flow to Russia once the Obama era U.S. sanctions were lifted. Businesses "are waiting for this signal, and they believe it will soon come," he said... It’s well known that Trump likes doing business with gangsters, in part because they pay top dollar and loan money when American banks stopped loaning Trump money. It was a win-win for both sides. In an interview, Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who is a former head of counterintelligence in the KGB and had been Putin’s boss at one point, was asked about the Russain mafia. He said, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government. The Russian mafia is totally different than the American mafia. In Russia, the mafia is essentially a state actor."
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  2. 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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