Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "TIME: Ex-spy pressured Manafort over debts" video.

  1. Oleg Deripaska hired Manafort for $10 million a year, and Manafort worked to advance Russian interests in Ukraine, Georgia, and Montenegro. The question now is why would Manafort continue to lie for Trump? Why would Manafort, who has a law degree from Georgetown and years of experience around white-collar crime, behave like this?  What incentive does he have to spend most or all of his remaining years in prison rather than betray Trump? One way to make sense of his behavior is the possibility that Manafort is keeping his mouth shut because he’s afraid of being killed. That speculation might sound hyperbolic, but there is plenty of evidence to support it. In February, a video appeared on YouTube showing Manafort’s Russian employer, Deripaska, on his yacht with a Belarusian escort named Anastasia Vashukevich. In the video, from August 2016, Deripaska could be seen speaking with a high-ranking Kremlin official. The video was such a source of embarrassment to Moscow that it fought to have it removed from YouTube. Vashukevich, who was then in a Thai jail after having been arrested there for prostitution, announced that she had heard Deripaska describe a plot to interfere in the election and that she has 16 hours’ worth of audio recordings from the yacht to support her charges. In a letter to America authorities, her associate wrote, “We risk our lives very much.” Vashukevich’s name has disappeared from the news media. In all probability, either the FBI or Russian intelligence has gotten to her. Whatever has happened to her, her testimony suggests both that Russia is still hiding secrets about its role in Trump’s election and that someone who knows Deripaska well believes he would and could kill her for violating his confidence. Russia murders people routinely, at home and abroad. In the nine months after Trump’s election, nine Russian officials were murdered or died mysteriously. At least one was suspected to have been a likely source of information for the British agent Steele. The attorney for the firm that hired Steele told the Senate last August, “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of the Steele dossier.”.
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  2. Several wealthy Russians were “granted unusual access” to Trump inauguration parties back in January 2017 — and Mueller is seeking to find out why. The tycoons were given “unprecedented access to Trump’s inner circle”—and investigators in special council Robert Mueller’s probe are interested in their attendance at the parties. Rick Gates was heavily involved in planning the inauguration, with a Yahoo News report in 2016calling him the “shadow chair” of the event. There have long been serious questions about the money behind Trump’s inauguration — and where, exactly, it all went. Trump’s inaugural committee raised an astonishing $106.7 million, double the previous record set by Obama’s 2009 inaugural. But what they did with it isn’t so clear. The chair of GW Bush’s 2nd inauguration, Greg Jenkins, said he was baffled. “Trump had a third of the staff and a quarter of the events that we had,  and yet they raise at least twice as much as we did,” he said. “So there’s the obvious question: Where did it go? I don’t know.” The inauguration caught law enforcement’s attention back while it was happening. Counterintelligence officials at the FBI were concerned  by an unusual presence of politically connected Russians in DC during the event — including some of the exact people who “had surfaced in the agency’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.” Back in June ABC News reported that Mueller’s investigators wanted to know why several billionaires with “deep ties to Russia” got access to “exclusive, invitation-only receptions” during the inauguration. It is against the law for foreign nationals to donate to a presidential inaugural committee. Mueller is exploring whether wealthy Russians used “straw donors” with American citizenship to steer money into the inauguration. Sometime around March of this year, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg flew in to a NY on a private plane — and was met there by Mueller’s investigators, who questioned him and searched his electronic devices. Vekselberg is the owner of the Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate with aluminum and oil interests, and is one of the richest people in Russia. His cousin, Andrew Intrater, an American citizen who runs a US company tied to Vekselberg’s company, donated $250,000. Intrater had also kicked in $35,000 to the Trump Victory Committee. Vekselberg and Intrater attended Trump’s inauguration together, and at the January 19 candlelight dinner, they were seated with Trump’s lawyer, Cohen.. Later that year, that company run by Intrater paid Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants LLC, $500,000 — for, they claimed, real estate advice. A 1million inaugural donation came from Leonard Blavatnik, who runs a company called Access Industries. Blavatnik was on the guest list for the January 19 candlelight dinner too. Blavatnik is a Soviet-born, UK-based billionaire who is a US citizen. He is also partnered with Vekselberg, in Russia’s aluminum industry. Together, they built the largest aluminum company in Russia by merging with Oleg Deripaska’s Rusal. Deripaska is also a player in Mueller's  investigation — he employed Manafort, and Manafort tried to get in touch with him during 2016. Alexander Mashkevitch, a Kazakh mining billionaire, was on the guest list for the “candlelight dinner,” and happens to have been in the Seychelles around the same time as Erik Prince. And Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, who attended Don Jr’s infamous Trump Tower meeting, were in town too — they attended an inauguration night party thrown by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who’s widely viewed as the biggest supporter of Putin’s regime in Congress. Several people involved in previous inaugurations were quoted expressing puzzlement over how Trump’s team could have possibly spent over $100 million for what they got. But if there is anyone who might know where much of the money went, it is Rick Gates, who is now working with Mueller's investigation. So whatever Rick Gates knows, Robert Mueller now knows too.
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