Businesses full of dirty Russian money

[struggle4progress]

By Craig Unger
Craig Unger is the author of "House of Trump, House of Putin" and a former contributing editor of Vanity Fair.
March 29 at 1:15 PM

... for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. I mean that many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money by buying multimillion-dollar condos through anonymous shell companies. I mean that the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.

Yet Trump’s relationship with the Russian underworld, a de facto state actor, has barely surfaced in the uproar surrounding Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. That oversight may be explained in part by journalist Michael Kinsley’s long-held maxim: The real scandal isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what is legal.

Robert S. Mueller III, of course, is a prosecutor. His job as special counsel, now complete, was to decide whether to indict. But what if some of the most egregious and corrupt offenses are not illegal? Russian President Vladimir Putin has long insisted that American democracy itself is corrupt. Under his aegis, the Russians have methodically studied various components of the American body politic — campaign finance, our legal system, social media and perhaps especially the real estate industry — and exploited every loophole they could find.

As Oleg Kalugin, a former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, told me in an interview for my book “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia,” the Mafia amounts to “one of the branches of the Russian government today.” Where Americans cracked down on the Italian American Mafia, Putin dealt with the Russian mob very differently. He co-opted it. He made it an integral part of his Mafia state. Russian gangsters became, in effect, Putin’s enforcers. They had long and deep relationships. According to a tape recording made by former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko a year before he was fatally poisoned in London, Putin had close ties to Semion Mogilevich, a top mobster, that dated to the early 1990s ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-businesses-are-full-of-dirty-russian-money-the-scandal-is-thats-legal/2019/03/29/11b812da-5171-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html?utm_term=.d26b48c309ec

[struggle4progress]

1. Mueller report describes election interference

by Eli Sanders • Mar 27, 2019 at 11:06 am

... President Trump has repeatedly ignored the findings of his own intelligence agencies and suggested that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when Putin claims that no interference ever happened.

But according to Attorney General William Barr, the Mueller report makes clear—once again—that Russia did interfere in the 2016 US presidential election. (And, as other government reports have made clear, that interference was intended to help Trump.) ...

"The Special Counsel's investigation determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election," Barr wrote in his short summary of the Mueller report. "The first involved attempts by a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), to conduct disinformation and social media operations in the United States designed to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election.

"The second element," Barr continued, "involved the Russian government's efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks" ...

https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2019/03/27/26223575/another-reason-to-want-the-whole-mueller-report-it-describes-russias-2016-election-interference

[struggle4progress]

2. Maria Butina, U.S. prosecutors ask judge to deport Russia gun activist

By Spencer S. Hsu March 29 at 4:39 PM

Attorneys for Maria Butina and U.S. prosecutors jointly asked a federal judge Friday to order the gun rights activist deported to her native Russia after she is sentenced on April 26 for conspiring with a senior Russian official to infiltrate conservative American groups as an undeclared agent for the Kremlin ...

Butina, 30, earlier in the case admitted to working at the direction of Alexander Torshin, a Russian former government official, and with an American political operative to forge connections with NRA officials, conservative leaders and 2016 presidential candidates, including Donald Trump.

In her plea deal, Butina said she began to act on behalf of the Russian government in 2015 and continued her work after moving to the United States to attend graduate school at American University in 2016 ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/maria-butina-us-prosecutors-ask-judge-to-deport-russia-gun-activistrussian-who-conspired-to-infiltrate-nra-to-be-sentenced-april-26/2019/03/29/9b9b01be-525d-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html?utm_term=.e984481d2a41

[struggle4progress]

3. Ukraine's war on Russian disinformation: a lesson for America

By GEOFFREY CAIN
March 29, 2019

... Long before Russian fake news and troll farms roiled American politics, Ukraine was Russia’s testing ground, a guinea pig in the bigger disinformation wars to come. Classroom education like this is one of the ways Ukrainians are fighting back. The education group IREX, working with the Ukrainian government, rolled out the pilot project Learn to Discern in 50 schools in four cities across the country in September 2018. Compared to students who didn’t get these lessons, the group’s report released last Friday declared, those receiving Learn to Discern training were twice as likely to detect hate speech, 18 percent better at identifying fake news stories, 16 percent better at sorting out fact from opinion, and 14 percent more knowledgeable about the role of the news media industry. IREX plans to expand its pilot curriculum to the U.S.

With Ukraine’s national elections approaching on Sunday, and American elections approaching next year, Ukraine’s story can be the U.S.’s biggest lesson for how to prepare for more Russian disinformation and cyber-warfare. Despite the now ample body of evidence that Russian internet campaigns were a significant force in the 2016 presidential election, the story began well before Trump’s presidency, when Russian trolls and commentators began drumming up the idea of ethnic unity with the Crimea, the strategic land jutting out into the Black Sea. After protesters ousted the Russia-friendly president of Ukraine in February 2014, militias claiming to be acting in the name of the Russian majority of the Crimea seized the peninsula. The Crimea was annexed into Russia a few weeks later. The ongoing and little-covered civil war in eastern Ukraine has since amassed a death toll of more than 13,000.

The Crimean annexation was an early masterstroke of fake news and pseudo-history that set the tone for what was to come—a Russian hybrid playbook of geopolitical and military advances into strategic regions alongside a propaganda war. Fake news plunged parts of Ukraine into a post-truth, alternate reality. President Vladimir Putin’s disinformation machine convinced his supporters that fascists and enemies lurked everywhere, and that only Russia could protect its supposed brethren against the hysterical mobs in the capital, Kiev, agitating for Western imperialism.

But if anything, Putin underestimated the resolve of Ukrainians, whose national identity—as a country founded only in 1991, with large regions historically a part of Poland, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire—turned out far stronger and more resilient than many thought. “Most Ukrainians recognize exactly what Russia is doing, and they don’t like it,” James Appathurai, the NATO Secretary General’s Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, told me. Russian disinformation “is not succeeding,” he said ...

https://newrepublic.com/article/153415/ukraines-war-russian-disinformation-lesson-america

[struggle4progress]

4. Trump defenders and lefty Russiagate skeptics claim there is no scandal.

DAVID CORN
MARCH 29, 2019 11:25 AM

There has been much crowing from Trumpsters on the right and Russiagate skeptics on the left about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. That is, the three-and-a-half-page letter Attorney General Bill Barr sent to Congress summarizing Mueller’s work. (The report itself remains secret and is reportedly over 300 pages.) Pointing to Barr’s citation of a single, partial sentence from the report (“<T>he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”), Trump and his partisans, as well as the small number of lefty Russiagate deniers, have declared that because Mueller found no direct collaboration, the Trump-Russia scandal is kaput. Some have even declared it was a hoax — and a gargantuan media con job — from the start ...

Two fundamental facts were established long before Mueller completed his investigation. First, the Russians attacked an American election in order to sow chaos, hurt Hillary Clinton, and help Donald Trump. Second, Trump and his top advisers during the campaign repeatedly denied this attack was underway, echoing and amplifying Moscow disinformation (the false claim that Russia was not attacking). Whether or not the Trumpers were directly in cahoots with the Russian government, they ran interference for Vladimir Putin’s assault on the United States, and they even did so after the intelligence community had briefed Trump on Russia’s culpability ...

The Russian attack on the 2016 election was an attempt to subvert the foundation of American society: the democratic process. How can Americans have faith in their government, if elections are undermined by secret schemers, including a foreign government? It is certainly arguable that the Russian intervention—particularly the stealing and drip-drip-drip dumping of the John Podesta emails across the final four weeks of the election—was one of several decisive factors in a contest that had a narrow and tight finish. Consequently, there is a strong case that Moscow helped shift the course of US history by contributing to the election of Trump. (And recognizing this is not the same as defending Hillary Clinton or concocting an excuse for the Democrats’ embarrassing loss to Trump) ...

For many of these scandal skeptics, it hasn’t seemed to matter that the charge against Moscow has been publicly confirmed by the Obama administration, the US intelligence community (which concluded that Putin’s operation intended to help Trump), both Republicans and Democrats on the congressional intelligence committees, and Robert Mueller, who indicted a mess of Russians for participating in this covert operation. True, there often is cause to question officialdom and government sources. Yet anyone citing the Mueller report, as it is narrowly capsulized by Barr, must also accept his key finding: Russia attacked the United States and intervened in the election. (They must also accept that, as the Barr letter disclosed, Mueller found evidence suggesting Trump obstructed justice but did not reach a final judgment on this question) ...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/03/heres-the-real-trump-russia-hoax/

[struggle4progress]

5. Russia still the big takeaway

By Ginnie Graham
Editorial Writer 15 hrs ago

Russia remains a threat to U.S. elections through campaigns of online misinformation and old-fashioned computer hacking.

That is the takeaway from Attorney General William Barr’s summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. It ought to be an awakening for Americans.

President Trump’s supporters are cheering that his campaign hasn’t been linked to any conspiracy or coordination with the Russian government’s election meddling.

Do not lose sight of this: The summary also confirms what U.S. intelligence agencies and a congressional committee earlier established, Russians tampered with the 2016 presidential election ...

https://www.tulsaworld.com/opinion/ginnie-graham-russia-still-the-big-takeaway-from-the-mueller/article_78e6407d-22d8-55f9-9147-2c4dd3dcd3de.html

[octoberlib]

6. Great OP. I've read that the US and UK are the only countries that allow people to hide behind

LLCs when they buy property. My question is why? Who thought this was a good idea? It's seems tailor-made for money launderers.

[Wounded Bear]

7. Yeah, that is one thing I'd like to see outlawed...

Any company operating in the public sphere needs to show where its money comes from and where it goes.

Money laundering and tax evasion are the two biggest reasons for these sham companies.